We tell ourselves stories in order to live

Hace un ratito estaba cocinando y pensando algo que poner en el blog y me ha venido una idea que no es nueva, incluso es probable que ya lo haya dicho: escribo aquí para explicarme mi vida.

No creo que se me dé especialmente bien hacerlo, la verdad. Lo sé porque más de una vez me he pillado haciéndome trampas al solitario. Pero lo intento. Por eso me jode tanto cuando lo que me sale me suena falso, hueco. Aunque, siendo sincero, también sé que muchas veces no puedo aspirar a más :)

En fin, que volvía con esta idea en la kabeza y al meterme en Facebook me encuentro con una breve nota de la conversación que ayer mantuvo Joan Didion con Sloane Crosley en la New York Public Library, que dice así: "I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand."

Por cierto, el (magnífico) título de este post es precisamente el del libro que recopila toda la obra de no ficción de Didion, que lleva unas semanas cogiendo polvo en mi mesilla de noche (pero es taaan bonito y taaaan tentador y queda taaan bien ahí...).

En fin.

Live in the world

“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package,” she said. ”I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

Joan Didion

(Queda mucho más bonito en FuckYeahJoanDidion, donde lo encontré :-)

Blue Nights

In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue. This period of the blue nights does not occur in subtropical California, where I lived for much of the time I will be talking about here and where the end of daylight is fast and lost in the blaze of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I now live. You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming — in fact not at all a warming — yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. [The French called this time of day "l'heure bleue." To the English it was "the gloaming." The very word "gloaming" reverberates, echoes — the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour — carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone. This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.]

FuckYeahJoanDidion

Blue Nights

Tocando de oído

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know of grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object being photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in you mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. 

[Nota bene: It tells you. You don’t tell it.]

Joan Didion, en Why I Write (.doc)

El año del pensamiento mágico

Recuerdo haber visto el libro cuando salió, haber leído la contraportada, haber sentido a la vez curiosidad y cierta aprensión por lo que en él contaba la autora, Joan Didion.

Por algún motivo, ayer me bajé el podcast de una entrevista con ella en Radio Open Source, que acabo de descubrir.

Y esta mañana, cuando me ha dado el flux y he decidido que hoy, domingo gris, frío y lluvioso, era el día apropiado para volver a salir a correr, lo he escuchado.

Y me ha impresionado mucho su inteligencia, su capacidad para expresar lo que sintió y pensó cuando su marido, escritor como ella, murió de un ataque al corazón cuando se sentaban a cenar en su casa, unos días después de que su hija entrase en coma séptico del que saldría varias veces, sin recuperarse plenamente, para acabar también muriendo año y medio después.

Además de la entrevista, Didion lee varios pasajes del libro. El podcast termina con su lectura del final del libro (que yo transcribo, perdón por los posibles errores).

Au.

I realize as I write this that I do not want to finish this account. Nor did I want to finish the year. The crazyness is receding but no clarity is taking its place. I look for resolution and find none. I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February, and February becomes summer, certain things will happen.

My image of John at the instant of his death will become less immediate, less raw. It will become something that happened in another year. My sense of John himself, John alive, will become more remote, even mudgy (?), soft and transmuted into whatever best serves my life without him. In fact this is already beginning to happen.

All year I've been keeping time by last year's calendar. What were doing on this day last year, where did we have dinner, is it the day a year ago we flew to Honoloulou after Quintana's wedding, is it the day a year ago we flew back from Paris, is it the day... I realize today for the first time that my memory of this day a year ago is a memory that does not include John. This day a year ago was December 31 2003. John did not see this day a year ago, John was dead.

I was crossing Lexington Avenue when this occurred to me. I know why we try to keep the dead alive. We try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves, there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead, let them become the photograph on the table, let them become the name on the trust accounts, let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.


Joan Didion, The year of magical thinking