Calaveras 2020 (“No Country for Codgers” edition)

Some hoped it would be the ballot.
Others feared it could be the bullet.
But, one morning, they found him there
Midst-Twittling: “Witch hunt! Very unfai…”
Donald John, dead on the toilet.

Cheshire Joe, always the gent.
Did it surprise you how he went?
Two scoops of vanilla
But the cone was the killer
So, choking, to the hereafter, he was sent.

So little depends on Pale Mike:
Apologist for whateveryoulike.
Never actually alive, can he die?
This manure-wheelbarrow bedecked by a fly,
So closed the lid on them both, buried alike.
(Nevermore.)

The calavera (skull) is a typical Mexican satirical poetic mode. It may have originated as early as the 1500s, but grew in popularity in the late 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The calavera poem is traditionally associated with Day of the Dead, but it became a journalistic genre during the regime of Portfirio Diaz. (Fliers that circulated during those times included angry verses against the dictator Diaz and his cabinet members.) Throughout Mexico, calaveras were also dedicated to working class people, always with a tone sarcasm and humor at the inevitability of death. (Time to write a calavera or two about some folks you know!)

related: camote, calacas, calabazas

otros: medium, universal

Mitla 2016

“Mitla is the second-most important archeological site in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico, and the most important of the Zapotec culture.

“The name Mitla is derived from the Nahuatl name Mictlán, meaning the ‘place of the dead’ or ‘underworld.’ Its Zapotec name is Lyobaa, which means ‘place of rest.’ The name Mictlán was Hispanicized or transliterated to Mitla by the Spanish colonists. It was established as a sacred burial site by the Zapotec, but the architecture and designs also show the influence of the Mixtec, who had become prominent in the area during the peak of Mitla settlement.

“Mitla is one of the pre-Columbian sites that express the Mesoamerican belief that death was the most consequential part of life after birth. It was built as a gateway between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Nobles buried at Mitla were believed to be destined to become ‘cloud people,’ who would intercede on behalf of the population below.”

(Wikipedia)

 

Virus (2000)

One out of Three

. . . You are suffering from one of the most common afflictions of the human race: the need to communicate with your fellow man. Since attaining the power of speech, man has found nothing as agreeable as a friend who will listen with interest as he talks about his sorrows and joys. Not even love can equal this feeling. There are those who are content with one friend. For others, a thousand are not enough. You belong to the latter group, and this simple fact is the origin of your sorrow and my profession.

…And so—obviously—the inevitable moment has arrived: You became physically incapable of keeping your wide circle of acquaintances up-to-date. That moment is also my moment. For a modest monthly fee, I can offer you the perfect solution. If you accept—and I can assure you that you will because you have no other choice—you can forget forever your incessant traveling, your baggy trousers, the dust, your beard, the tedious phone messages. In short, I am prepared to offer you a first-rate specialized radio broadcast. …It would probably be excessive to enumerate in detail the advantages of my system, but I would like to outline some of them for you.

1. A soothing effect on your nervous system is guaranteed from the first day.

2. Discretion is guaranteed. Although your voice will be heard by any individual who owns a radio, I consider it highly unlikely that persons not your friends would wish to continue a confidence whose background they do not know. In this way, we can reject any possibility of morbid curiosity.

3. Many of your friends (who now listen unwillingly to the personal version) would take an active interest in the broadcast if you merely mentioned their names, either openly or indirectly.

4. All of your acquaintances would be informed at the same time of the same facts, thereby avoiding jealousy and subsequent recriminations, since only their carelessness, or a chance malfunction of their radios, would place them at a disadvantage with respect to any of the others. To eliminate this depressing possibility, each broadcast begins with a brief synopsis of what was narrated previously.

5. Whenever you think it appropriate, the story can be made more interesting and varied, and more entertaining, with illustrative excerpts from operatic arias (I will not insist on the sentimental richness of Italian opera) and selections from the great masters. The proper musical background is an absolute necessity, and an extra record collection containing the most astonishing sounds produced by man or nature is at the disposal of every subscriber.

6. The narrator does not see the listener’s face, thus bypassing all kinds of inhibitions for him as well as for those who hear him.

7. Since the program is aired once a day for fifteen minutes, the confidential narrator has an additional twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes to prepare his text and definitely avoid annoying contradictions and involuntary lapses of memory.

8. If your story is successful and a significant number of spontaneous listeners join your friends and acquaintances, it will not be difficult to find a sponsor, thus adding to the benefits I have already indicated a solid financial profit which, as it grows, would open the possibility of absorbing the entire twenty-four-hour day and turning a simple fifteen-minute broadcast into an ongoing, uninterrupted program. To be perfectly frank, this has not yet occurred, but it could with a man of your talent.

Mine is a message of hope. Have faith. For now, concentrate on this: The world is full of people like you. Tune your radio to 1373 kilocycles on the 720-meter band. At any hour of the day or night, winter or summer, rain or shine, you will hear the most diverse, surprising voices filed with a melancholy serenity.

Augusto Monterroso 1959

Obras completes (y otros cuentos) / Complete Works (and Other Stories), translated by Edith Grossman

Pizza Boat, all aboard

Because Fish w/o Faces' original namesake was itself a school lunch item of sorts, here seems an appropriate place to post this loving tribute:

Also, this one from last fall too:

wa(r)ning: "Upaklaklips"

Tom, after H. Bosch + H. Ramis

Christmas Freud I: You’ll shoot your eye out.

The inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and I return to my view that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization. At one point in the course of this enquiry I was led to the idea that civilization was a special process which mankind undergoes, and I am still under the influence of that idea. I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.

And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. 

My intention [is] to represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization and to show that the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.

That the education of young people at the present day conceals from them the part which sexuality will play in their lives is not the only reproach which we are obliged to make against it. Its other sin is that it does not prepare them for the aggressiveness of which they are destined to become the objects. In sending the young out into life with such a false psychological orientation, education is behaving as though one were to equip people starting on a Polar expedition with summer clothing and maps of the Italian Lakes. In this it becomes evident that a certain misuse is being made of ethical demands. The strictness of those demands would not do so much harm if education were to say: “This is how men ought to be, in order to be happy and to make others happy; but you have to reckon on their not being like that.” Instead of this the young are made to believe that everyone else fulfills those ethical demands - that is, that everyone else is virtuous. It is on this that the demand is based that the young, too, shall become virtuous.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930)