Padaria Novel Writers

 

Men sit with steaming cups of coffee in their hands. Mostly older men. Sitting 'round knowingly talking ‘bout the world. Immigrants all, they have lived in the world’s four corners. They have lived with passion and drive. Whether they know it or not, all of them are frustrated writers. Some have come with notebooks and pens to this place, to this country specifically to write. These masters of the word are trying to grab into the ether and find today's one true sentence. They have come to find tomorrow’s one true sentence and the true sentences that form each day after. 

Others have become writers simply by being here. They all want to be seen, to be heard. Today these older men craft their chapters in tales of a distant country’s unpaved roads and corrupt or inept government officials recounted over milky coffees. These tales are interrupted by laughter and introductions of new people pulling up to the table. Taking a bit of a chocolate pastry in one hand they detail glorious coastlines and epic human failures they have seen with their own two eyes. Pictures of life’s joys are painted and lingering doubts are expressed. But turn your head in to the left or to the right and you find yourself in a conversation a world apart from what you were just immersed in.

Dummies? Not any. Slow folks don’t end up here. Being an immigrant is kind of like getting admitted to grad school. You fought your wars.  You made your money. You walked the labyrinth of immigration officialdom. You weighed your options and pulled the ripcord. Your words may flow out lazily or in staccato bursts. But you have words aplenty and words to spare and even words in your new language.

At this long table not far from a main thoroughfare the men greet each other, sip their warm beverages, laugh, regale and listen. A generation earlier in another land they would have had cigarettes resting between their fingers. A forty something waitress in a white apron would have been asking, “Hon, do you need a warm up?" But not a single one of them seems to feel regret at being half a world away from that on this beautiful sunny September morning. They are writers of a new narrative where the world isn’t confined to diners along interstate highways. 

Pigeons sit on a bench near the table. They are waiting for any moment of inattention or absence to grab a peck of a croissant or a nata and fly off.

Creatures Roaming Lisbon's Downtown

 

I haven’t written anything for the New Plague Journal in a couple of weeks. I feel guilt about not creating updated content. But I have written other things. Spurred on by a poet friend I have been writing fiction. Now mind you it is fiction that will probably never see the light of day except when I pass it off to him to critique. But crafting those words takes a couple of hours each day. Me, I personally think it is good to create worlds out of memories and ether, keeps my mind active. But like I said I have neglected other things. I apologize.

Yesterday morning I walked to my weekly 10 am LAGS session. LAGS stands for Lisbon Area Gentlemen's Society. We meet Saturday mornings and I get there at about 9:40. Most meetings have about 25-30 cantankerous and prickly older immigrants whose first language is English. We drink coffee, bitch about life’s irritants, we offer guidance. We stare at the joggers in their spandex outfits who have obviously spent time doing up their hair before heading out. Insert sarcastic conversation about hair care before running seems at cross-purposes with real exercise. Insert hands pounding on the tableand gents yelling, “Aye, Aye, Aye.”

I arrive there early to grab a large enough table for the lot of us. The manager of the place puts a number of the bistrotables together in an uninterrupted row to accommodate us. However, if I don’t get there and drop my notebook, hat, water bottle and purse at various points on that table there is a significant chance other patrons will simply pick up spots in the middle denying us our dominion of curmudgeon-ness. After staking my claim I grab my milky coffee, muffin and agua fresca to see me through the morning.

At some point yesterday the conversation turned to the festival and parade of Iberian masks downtown in the afternoon. LAGS is an excellent place to pick up information on such cultural events. Lisboa is a great place to experience such events.  One week it is lunatics trying to hang glide over the Rio Tejo and the next it is grown assed men and women dressed as woodland trolls parading through the center of the city dressed as woodland trolls and other weirdo creatures. The parade lasted for 45 minutes and was a hoot. Friends you gotta get out and experience life I am telling you.

The pictures accompanying this post are NOT the LAGS members. They are from the parade except for one. That picture is of Mike Johnston a travel blogger who is heading back to the US to be closer to his grandkids. Travel safely Mike.  You will be missed on next Saturday morning and for many Saturdays to come. 

In Dreams

There is glory in internet messiness. The ‘web’ is sprawling, random, deep, diverse, beautiful and unsettling all at once. One moment I am reading someone’s memories of seeing The Who at Southfield High School in Detroit in the late 1960s. Another moment I read about Leibnitz and Spinoza and their meeting in 1676 in The Hague. Sometimes poetry drops into my lap and sometimes literary tidbits float by. 

This continuous serendipitous discovery of new information is like stumbling upon hidden treasures in a labyrinth. Each unexpected find makes me curious about what will come next. The internet can be an endless adventure.

I offer this caveat. Consider carefully the cute link name you are about to click on. It could be something you don't want to see (or keep in your browsing history). There are some discoveries I have come across that I wish I could have surgically removed from my brain. 

Today a blurb about Jorge Luis Borges popped up as I wandered the far fields of the internet. It was a rant about why Borges was never awarded a Nobel prize. The bit triggered a memory of one of my favorite stories, Borges' piece called Dreamtigers. 

Down the messy twisty tunnels of the internet, I travelled using my trusty search engine used as a broad sword. Ruthlessly, relentlessly, I cut through the ads for nutritional supplements and porn to find the story itself. Dreamtigers' actual copyrighted text was buried deep in the weeds of critical analyses and appreciations. But carrying my tiki torch I waded through the muck and found it. Once found I immediately posted it. 

Dreamtigers masterfully blends the essence of dreams, imagination, and the impact of aging on both of those with an elegance and profundity that few other works achieve. It is also damn short. Borges' ability to swirl together reality with the surreal in such a tiny piece of writing is both enlightening and mesmerizing to me. I mean I am pretty sure some others thought highly of his writing, even if he was not a Nobel Laureate. He was robbed. The story is brief but poetic, inviting endless reinterpretation.

Again, I reread the story. Then I reread it again. Each time I returned to a couple of lines in particular. They are these, “Childhood passed away, and the tigers and my passion for them grew old, but still they are in my dreams. At that submerged or chaotic level, they keep prevailing. And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: This is a dream, a pure exercise of my will; and now that my powers are limitless I am going to cause a tiger.” Ah, but that is such an adult thing to say.

I thought back on the things that populated my childhood dreams. Yeah, it wasn’t pretty. When I was eight or nine years old, I had no such power or control over my dreams. Floating in the night sky of slumberdom I had a dream, a horrific dream. In my sleep state I dreamt my father was driving his then newly acquired 1965 Ford Mustang with my mother in the passenger seat. In the dream they were involved in an accident with a semi-truck that crushed them to death. The dream was horrific, awful. I was shaking when I woke up. When my eyes opened and I shifted around in bed I knew it was a only bad dream. I mean I was warm and under the covers in my bed and I heard my mother downstairs making breakfast. Still, I was shaken to my core and could not put the dream out of my mind.

In retrospect I think that is the moment I knew I was a separate being, separate and distinct from all other life on this orb. I, at that instant, found myself alone and scared out of my wits about my soul's isolation. I was terrified over the next few years whenever my parents left the house together that they would not return. As the door closed I prayed fervently for their safe return.

My fear of separation from my parents, and from everyone else in the world, drew me to religion for a time. The Christian concept of reuniting with your loved ones in heaven was very attractive for a boy not yet in his teens who was troubled beyond belief by one dream about an accident. I was in the pew on Sunday morning. I sang the hymns to him, to them I guess, and I answered an altar call (or two). But eventually, the fear overtook the faith.

Back in the 1970s there were plenty of dystopian science fiction works. On any bookstore shelf there were plenty of novels by the authors of the day filled with existential angst and dread. I was a voracious reader and worked my way through novels filled with antiheroes and good people who died meaninglessly. I plowed through these tomes looking for something to assuage my troubled mind. I studied books tinged with Buddhist nonattachment thoughts. I read books by mystics and monks that were just as confusing as reading William Burroughs. The pot I smoked copiously back then did not erase the angst.

And so, when I got to university the very first course I signed up for was Philosophy 102, Introduction to Metaphysics and Epistemology. The catalog blurb stated that this course focused on the concept of human death as analyzed through the writings of Hegel, Heidegger and a whole raft of other heavyweights. I made it to class every day. I read the readings. I turned in the papers. However, if you asked me now what beret-wearing Prof. Wilkerson said as he chain-smoked in the classroom, scrawling key phrases on the blackboard I could not tell you.

What I can tell you is that around me in that class were 25 other students. They, I discovered over coffee at the MSU Union, were just as terrified of death and the prospect that nothing mattered as I was. We talked about our fears and anxieties over coffee. We shared book titles about secular humanism. We argued as neophytes in philosophy are wont to do. Yeah, how many angels are there on a pin's head in the meaningless cold void of nothingness?

It was learning how many of my fellow students were as afraid of the dark as I was that lifted me up. This common sense of angst moved me out of the fear that had straight-jacketed me for so many years. It was the sharing of distress filled stories that made me see that while I was alone I was not the only one casting about for meaning.

I know dreams are not reality. And I don’t agree with Borges that dreams are, “a pure exercise of my will…” I think dreams are more about our minds cobbling together bits and pieces of our experiences, our desires and our fears and then presenting them on an intercranial wide screen movie screen. What gets displayed on the back of our eyelids late at night helps us identify both hidden desires, and unresolved conflicts that we might not be aware of in our waking lives.

The concept of Borges' dream tigers—a term he used to describe the strong and recurring phantoms of his dreams—illustrates the power of our subconscious to bring forth vivid, meaningful symbols. Being aware of the value of dreams, as Borges implies he is with his dream tigers, allows us to uncover deeper truths. In dreams, even horrific ones like the one that followed me for years, we can find clarity to use in our waking lives.

Only do not forget, if I wake up crying it's only because in my dream I'm a lost child hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands. -Pablo Neruda