Razors, Devils, and Hearts

What do razors, devils, and hearts have to do with Brazil?  For that I have to go back to the beginning, which is a fairly short story.  I was born with tachycardia, rapid heartbeat, which has been fairly easy to treat.  I take a beta-blocker three times a day, and my heart rate usually stays within a normal range, at least until about ten months ago when I had my first bad episode.

My pulse jumped about seventy beats per minute in the span of seconds, and then it dropped back within a normal range, but it was startling.  My head pounded.  I realized I could feel my own heart in my toes, a weird sensation, and I thought I was having a heart attack.  It was the first sign of things to come over the past few months that have included many tests and few answers.  Technically, I still do not know precisely what is happening to me or why.  I only know I don't have heart disease, but I am constantly anemic and don't appear to absorb B-12 well.  My doctor tells me they'll figure it all out eventually, and perhaps this is true.  In the meantime, my heart is the catalyst to go to Brazil.  It's what reignited an old desire, just a small thought after pulling the poem I keep in my wallet out to read for the ten millionth upon millionth time.  The idea to go to Brazil and learn more was always there, steadily burning a hole in my brain, but now my heart is involved.  The episodes continue to happen, pulse skyrocketing and then plummeting, and I'm sure I'll have more tests to take over the next few months.  That is life.  Since I spoke to another doctor, I am not as panicked about all of this as I was in the beginning; that is also life.  Learning to cope better daily.

This brings to me to an old phrase, "Tell the truth and shame the devil."  My truth is I am a little scared this is going to end before I even get a chance to buy a plane ticket let alone discover more about the poetry of Adélia Prado and whether the translations I have are even close to accurate.

"The Dark of Night"

I'm singled out by flashes
embedded in half-sleep,
pre-dawn, Gethsemane hour.
These visions are raw and clear,
sometimes peaceful,
sometimes pure terror
without the bone structure
daylight provides.
The soul descends to hell,
death throws its banquet.
Until everyone else wakes up
and I can doze,
the devil eats his fill.
Not-God grazes on me.

Adélia Prado
translation by Elle Doré Watson


Late at night, all my thoughts drag me back to Occam's Razor.  The idea is that the simplest explanation is usually true, but not always.  I apply the razor to the problem of my heart, it leaves me to wonder if it's all in my head.  If I'm doing this to myself, which is a lot scarier than the medical complications of tachycardia.  Still, it's the heart-literally and figuratively-urging me to press forward. If the mind is soil, is the heart a watering can and the blood the flora?  No, that doesn't work.  I'll have to give that a bit more thought before committing to it.

Written in a garden, though certainly not at the "Gethsemane hour", but I imagine Brazil is as interesting a garden as the one we call the United States.

"Oblivious"

She sits, legs folded beneath her, staring into worn out pages
of a dog-eared tome the color of old wheat.
Slim fingers, unadorned and pale in sunlight, turn pages rapidly, 
nearby a man mutters he’d like to be the book.
She holds it gently, a curious quirk to her lips, gasping aloud,
oblivious to her admirer angling himself for a better view.
Once she stops to sip some water, pondering a lifetime, and
the man looks away, as though caught stealing.

Tara Saint-Clair

This is how razors, devils, and hearts can be related to one person's need to live and breathe words that aren't her own, in a place she's never seen outside of photographs and film, but she'd love to know it all better.

Stumbling in Words

Learning a new language can be fun, especially if your goal is to use it in conversation.  It opens an entire new world of words.  There are also people out there like me who love the grammar.  I want to understand the foundation because I want to write and read the language, as well as speak it, fluently.  To me, knowing terms like antecedent, anaphoric, subjunctive, and ligature is as much a part of learning the Portuguese as knowing “eu” is “I” and "livro" is “book”, masculine, by the way.  Thankfully, I have a patient instructor who understands I am as interested in the groundwork as the speaking.  I’m pretty sure sainthood is in my teacher’s future.

All that aside, my pronunciation is horrible!  I’ve taken diction courses for singing, but it’s like everything I remember is gone from my head.  Just gone.  I sit in front of my computer listening to word after word, repeating what I think I hear, and then boom, gone.  Most of the time I’m turning everything and anything into a diphthong, which I’m attributing to living most of my life in the Southern USA.  Nothing against our accents, but what can be a beautiful lyrical quality can also hinder us in learning a new language.  Again, patient listeners in my life,  woo and hoo!

Of all the words with which I’m struggling, amanhã (tomorrow) and homem (man) are two of the most difficult for me to say.  If I sound like I feel, people must wonder if I’m storing marbles in my cheeks.  I keep expecting to bite my tongue at any moment, though family and friends are having a great deal of fun teasing.  I recall learning the guttural “r” in French, and it comes second nature to me now, but applying it to Portuguese has been interesting, especially when that “r” is smack dab next to a nasal “m” or “n”.  It’s probably not uncommon to worry you’re making any native speaker want to beg you to stop talking.  I have visions of causing peoples’ ears to spontaneously begin bleeding.  That being said, I have talked now with a few native speakers online (thank you, Skype), and I am finally getting the hang of the “r” and the “m and “n”, just not when they’re together.  

Along with all the books, notes, friendly people online, instructor, recordings, and basic determination, I use a lot of sources online as well as youtube videos to help me muddle my way through to being understood.

Wikipedia, a handy jumping off point for finding sources and references along with basic information, is especially helpful when trying to understand the diacritics, accent marks.  Learning those accent marks will take any new language learner further in their journey.  Some sites to get started include Portuguese Orthography, Basics to Get Started, and Games and Quizzes.  The last site is geared towards children, but I've found watching cartoons and playing games is a great deal more engaging for me than dry texts, flash cards, and constant grammar lessons.  Most of all, I am having fun learning, especially for the sake of the poetry.

Words like Water

My brain has turned to liquid, you see,
a lapse in things all elementary.

The commas I know are all undone.
Lost in hazes of vocabulary lessons.

Hoje is today and tomorrow I knew,
but eu esqueci is definitely true.

Apparently knowing comes round twice,
saber and conhecer, what about thrice?

Palavras in my head flooded right out,
if words are water let there never be drought!

Tara Saint-Clair

Beginnings Are Such Delicate Times*

Knowing I have always wanted to see two very different places in this world, France and Brazil, has always meant I would have to make a choice.  I cannot be a vagabond, after all, roaming about of my own free will while pretending I have no one else in this world to whom I answer.  In the end, poetry did the choosing.  It seems fitting I focus on one of the many reasons for my choice, as mentioned in my first post, the Brazilian Poet Cabrel de Melo Neeto.

João Cabrel de Melo Neeto was a diplomat, the 37th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (don’t get too excited Supernatural fans, I originally read it as Men of Letters, too), and his was a voice of pragmatism.  He is quoted as saying, “I try not to perfume the flower,” and as evidenced by his poetry, he succeeded.   His poems are proof poetry need not be a constant barrage of human emotion, even when touching upon a subject deeply.  In some ways, his work reminds me of haiku, not in form, but in the vivid pictures he painted.  

“The End of the World”

At the end of a melancholy world

men read the newspapers.

Indifferent men eating oranges

that flame like the sun.

They gave me an apple to remind me

of death. I know that cities telegraph

asking for kerosene.  The veil I saw flying

fell in the desert.

No one will write the final poem

about this private twelve o’clock world.

Instead of the last judgment, what worries me

is the final dream.

In three verses Cabrel de Melo Neeto takes on history, the state of human beings during his present, and what is coming down the pipeline.  His worries are valid today.  In this world, many suffer while others continue on indifferently, and I have no answers for those problems other than to say I can do small things to help one person here or one there.  The veil, for me, is a death shroud covering this world.  It hasn’t quite dropped over us, but this is because there are bright spots in our world.  There are people who get up daily and decide they will make a difference to someone, sometimes many someones.  I will say I find the last verse most relatable.  If we are all gone, there will be no more poems, no more music, no stories, no one left to empathize.   What will our final dreams be like?  Filled with fear?  Running on fumes?  Or will we hold out hope to one another?  

It it strange a poem about the world’s end would light a lamp on a journey forward, but life is funny sometimes.  

*Frank Herbert wrote in Dune  “A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.”

Living in Poems

My journey through life has been punctuated by poetry.  As a  young child, living was as much about Dr. Seuss as it was Halloween candy or Christmas morning in the US, but for me the words were a constant music, accompanying me into classrooms, playgroups, babysitters’ living rooms, and anywhere else.  I liked the sing-song nature of the speech, and my formative years were filled with constant rhymes and stories.  My mother encouraged the silliness, going along with me, making up her own lyrics to songs, and generally enjoying the fun.  

When scared, I turned to all that poetry.  The words comforted me.

At the beginning of third grade, my teacher, Mrs. G., introduced us to haiku.  It was early in the year, and I had just turned 8 years old.  After a few weeks of reading Basho to us each day, Mrs. G. finally explained the mechanics of haiku to us and asked us to write one of our own.  That, to me, was a defining moment.  Poems didn’t have to rhyme?  You didn’t have to sing them?  My curiosity grew.  

hummingbird pretty

wings buzzing so quickly

she eats from flowers

It wasn’t the greatest poem in the world, but it was mine.

Since we moved a lot, I often retreated to reading and writing.  Poems and stories didn’t pick at me for being different.  An afternoon in the library was simply heaven compared to being around my peers.  And at ten, I stumbled rather haphazardly into Walt Whitman; though I don’t remember much of his work, the words appealed to me.  My favorites were the poems in which Whitman painted vivid pictures, but on has stayed with me all through the years.

“A Leaf Hand in Hand”

A  Leaf for hand in hand!

You natural persons old and young!

You are on the Mississippi, and on all the branches and bayous of 

the

Mississippi!

You friendly boatmen and mechanics!  You roughs!

You twain!  And all processions moving along the streets!

I wish to infuse myself among you till I see it common for you 

to

walk hand in hand!

On the surface, the poem felt simple to me and was one that resonated.  People, regardless of lives and background, could come together in a common way.  Since Whitman was considered an everyman’s poet, it made sense to me.  Later I would wonder if the poem referred to something Whitman wanted desperately for his own, an intimacy from which he was cut off in daily life.

As I got older, I found more poetry, but none quite so startling as João Cabral de Melo Neto’s “Culling Beans”.  He spoke of words, of poems themselves, and it was lightning to me.  An awakening.  I had been at camp, lonely and homesick, when one of the priests approached me and asked me what I would really like to be doing because it was obvious to him I was not connecting to anyone.  I told him, “I want to read. Poems.  I want to go home and be in the library.”  He asked me to go with him to the office he was using, and he said to me he could give me poems if I wanted them, but they might not make much sense to me yet.  The book he handed me was in Portuguese, and that was the beginning of a friendship.  He spent his afternoon translating for a quiet kid who spent most of her time with books.  When he died, I was very sad.  I’d spent many afternoons during camp sessions tucked away in an office chair reading poetry he would bring to camp specifically for me, but “Culling Beans” was my first introduction to modernism, poetry that speaks plainly and directly to the heart and soul.  It was also my first introduction to a Brazilian author and would set in motion a desire to learn more that has lasted me decades.

“Culling Beans”

I.

Culling beans is not unlike writing:

You toss the kernels into the water of the clay pot

and the words into that of a sheet of paper;

then, you toss out the ones that float.

Indeed, all the words will float on the paper,

frozen water, its verb a lead sinker:

in order to cull that bean, blow on it,

and toss out the frivolous and hollow, the chaff and the echo.

II. 

Now, there is a risk in that bean-culling:

the risk that among those heavy seeds there

may be some any-old kernel, of stone or study-matter,

an unchewable grain, a tooth-breaker.

Not so, for culling words:

the stone gives the phrase its most vivid seed:

it obstructs flowing, floating reading,

it incites attention, luring it with risk.

To this day, I carry this poem in my wallet.  I have never shared it with my family or friends, but I alway know it’s there, as is my desire to know the poet and his homeland better.  To see what inspired him to write these words.  This is why, decades later, I have made the decision to go, to move, to see Brazil, to learn the language, get to know the people, find the poets I love best and learn to be the words I most love.  Where the path leads?  I don’t know, but I am going to enjoy the journey, and I am finding learning the language beautiful.  My own efforts at writing poetry are poor in comparison, but I intend to continue culling.

“Of Written Words”

say not, “I write only for myself.”

you devalue your words.

rather say, “I write to be heard!”

be like the tower bell.

the bell resounds.

it curries no favor.

it strokes no egos,

it cushions no blows.

it simply is.