74. The costumes

What am I doing? A princess dress and a prince suit. That I sew by hand. Layers of glittering ribbons, bows, plastic pearls, strands of beads, shiny frills and lace, it’s all there, accessories to prettification. Stitch by stitch, the movements of the needle waving their steady flow through the fabric. The thread with each millimeter holding the silk and the velvet together, juxtaposing colors, dream-like images for an enhanced unreal world. The glimmer on the edges of the costumes extending the flares of childish aspirations.

Haven’t been writing for a while, bent every evening on the sewing, my fingers pierced to their blood as if a new kind of ink was needed, a slow steady progression towards an extravagant accomplishment, a form of message made of luminescent textures: To offer you for Christmas the most outstanding clothes to play with. An opportunity to fully pretend. To dance barefoot while meters of satin and decorations float around you like the sails of a fancy ship. Like your own sphere of influence. Sparkling and ennobled by a game of make-believe.

Costumes to fully fantasize yourself, to simulate appearances, to fake your way through demands and life’s exigencies. For at age two and four, what better time to learn about ways to pervade atmospheres? Mastering the fine art of spectacles so to never become their innocent victim – lucid ones being ok I guess. Understanding the powerful nature of the theatre. Playing like dedicated actors, beyond the principles of fun, straight into roles molded after a dynamic textiled text recited with heart and ample gestures testing the seams.

Ornate fringes beaming with light to make you into funambulists able to cross dimensions of time still unheard of. A projection into a future better staged today in case later it never happens. Pulling towards immediacy all that can be, chiffon like vapors of visions adjusting their transparency to allow you to see everything you can conceive.

A gift with my hands. My ten fingers up and down rivers of ribbons, tracing with ornaments lines of whispers on the soft sands of fabric so that shimmering words, forever, remind you of the sound of water all around as you glide on the stage of youth. Swimming at the center of veils and streams of generous translucent jewels. Buoyant and confident. Fluid. Applauding yourself for the floatable spirit you choreograph amid skins of brocade imitation.

I am sewing night after night the allures of a new dramaturgy. The wide skirts and the gauze collars of new characters. The rhythm of new acts. The stellar apparition of untold stories for amphitheaters not yet built. For a public not yet born. For spotlights not yet switched on and for unpainted decors awaiting your steps. Your bodies clad in vertiginous offerings redrawing the meaning of performance. Always for others. Meters of lamé and precise needlepoint for the largesse of your souls. Bestowing on others your happiness. Costumes as a sign of vibrant donations. Abandoning yourself to the swing of attires blown by the breeze of a bright, merry audience. A gift so that in turn you may give. Luminosity for interpretations. Rays of enlightenment along rows of plissé golden strips. Songs for jazzy rainbows stitched on peau de soie, and the privilege to play a nonpareil part in this not-so-comical world. Just for the essence of kindness. And the many outfits it may disguise itself with.

Laolao

73. Copernican principle

To measure unknown structures. The properties of scattered frictions, looking for signs of extra-universal matter, what stands beyond one’s cosmological horizon. Pushing, pulling all that’s observable under Heavens. Ready to rewrite the geometry of personal space. As well as all the models used to predict the expansion rate of inner life.

To measure acceleration, evolution, fate. Theoretical predilections against expectations. Endless consistency checks to calculate the curvatures of thoughts, outstanding intensity and the mind’s temperature. Also, the afterglow of educated guesses when we head for history.

Complex equations morphed into ideas orbiting the validity of conclusions. Measuring implications, suggestive data, simplifying assumptions. Gravity exerting its strength onto unphysical problems. Always the wrong solutions, called spirals, called anything but isotropic phenomena.

A cosmic background made of fluid ripples, because thinking sloshes about in the distance, its oscillations distorting energy distribution. The acoustic matter of our voices exploiting the repeated motions of suspicion, recording sensitivity as a mad velocity. Creating the impression that assessments and their parochial meanings, if we're lucky, can never lead to seismic topologies. But only to a place where we would be at the exocenter of our own world, shaking and changing on a stably ever growing map of ourselves.

To measure progress, hoping to count on the absence of improbable substitutions never meant to surround us. Holding the heart as a yardstick to weight the night sky above, with results that do not hold up. Applying what’s unexplainable to our understanding of ourselves, regardless of how untested virtues and principles are. The logic behind beliefs contrary to our absolute faith in unimpeded, uncharged electrons one day to be assembled so to form a smooth mirror for the much cherished unborn cogency that awaits us.

Trying to measure an immovable dogma seated in the brain. Consistently describing one’s position with the help of gargantuan words and evidence to support the visible part of unlikely future directions. Inscribing variations within the denser regions of feelings. Always busy showing off the infinitely homogeneous reflections of dreams, bigger than voids, looking for ways to clearly distinguish the funnel of imagined outcomes from doctrines we’ll never dare condemn.

Measuring to create the impression we always present gravitational solutions to earthly dramas, figures that cannot be retracted, surviving tests, proposing refinements to the philosophical implications of our journey, untroubled. Sure to reappear. Shifting around obscure sources of light like splashes across our language, overwhelmed by how fast we race towards the point in the universe we think is home.

A hard look at phenomenal constructions, those that can be viewed from all locations, chunks of ethereal matter there to make us feel special as we advance our revolutionary hypotheses over ravines.

To measure so to confirm longstanding notions about the current conditions of our emotional magnets, those tugged on the longstanding models of creation we must always invoke when referring to ourselves.

Detecting movements. Clumps of organic matter in which mental probes travel to find a proof that we are part of something larger than ourselves, of something happening at the same time than ourselves, all our dark flow looking forward to being evacuated from the universe we know, behind the new space where we’ve extended our faculties. Waiting for future laws of physics for our newly founded research, in a nod to desires and a presence right outside the outskirts of cosmic orthodoxy.

Measuring all that is being silenced, the scope of doubts, the depth of their constant insistence, how faint we appear as we speed up our nature’s expansion, our surveys of the full picture and of the not-so-convincing factors underlying the dynamics enveloping schedules of hope. Expecting any day now crucial information to cool down our ever-changing bodies before we reach our own intense centers. Forever folding our imagination over multiple points in space to verify origins unproven by science or by batteries of negative terms.

Nowadays so much in love with Copernican principles. Because it leaves us with an unknown about solitude, and with much explaining to do still, giving us time instead of space. Unceasingly recanting the finitude of a privileged position, thus keeping the door open to a flurry of soothing personal interpretations to better render our spiritual role as clever earthlings exerting communal influence over bright broad arguments that can color a few billion years of development.

Finding it impossible to remain undiscovered. Inadmissible to be precisely nowhere. Constantly needing coordinates to locate the particles of dust identity accumulates throughout epochs. Impossible to be an unfound entity, unacceptable this portion of a fraction dispersed in all directions. A depthless ocean for a ridicule cognitive anchor. Envisioning ways to visualize ourselves from a firm viewpoint. Concepts created to externalize how we may be regarded by stellar pollination.

Always looking for the pivot to all generational rotations, an elucidating middle point, an existence that would stand equidistant from all possible experiences, a compact core to our imponderable quest for a paradise other than the ones we relentlessly reinvent with every muscular contention about who we are.

Our intellectual ambitions would have been much simpler if the Sun had revolved around us.

Laolao

72. The water in the glass

I guess every family has its own pitfalls. Children struggling with relative traumas, short or long stories of deprivation, various intensities of shadows shed by guilt, or a need to identify culprits and assign blame. Putting on show well-anchored souvenirs to support and explain today’s shortcomings and hang-ups. Most of us attached to a discourse whose main purpose is to communicate the idea of a uniqueness about some past pain. Competing for the privilege of having suffered more or differently than others. Our narratives reinforced by an urgency to justify the current state of our selfhood.

Being taught it’s all about attitudes and perception. Having to decide once and for all if we’re on the side of those who see the glass as half empty, or on the side of those who’ll say it’s half full. As if determining the pessimistic/optimistic nature of our emotional foundation could introduce changes in the quantity of water contained in the glass. As if the accuracy of the information that’s processed by our senses could depend on the words we select to render these mental impressions. Trying to convince ourselves that modifying vocabulary will suffice, that adapting our values so that they can run along a scale of lexical appreciation will allow us to bear quality judgments about reality. Trained at confusing words with what they’re supposed to stand for. At not listening to what we’re saying and the way we’re saying it. Thinking that a particular enunciation of our awareness shapes how we should feel about it, even molds it. Decisions to confer degrees of qualitative characteristics to our experiences, recording them through a specific language that has the mission of defining for the world our temperamental inclinations.

It has nothing to do with the water in the glass. On the contrary, it’s just another form of creative accounting, banking on hypothetical future earnings, on what does not exist, at least not yet, and may not even ever be. Considering potentialities as the assets we can now rely on. The benefits of the correct phraseology ready to service us in the present. Completely oblivious to the real amount of water available to quench our thirst.

Of course, no one escapes subjectivity. We’re always caught in instinctive maneuvers to worsen or embellish the facts, because our priorities and goals fluctuate with each new context. This is not what I’m talking about. Don’t get me wrong. I’m referring here to the opinionated stance we are led to develop through our handling of terminology, so to meet expectations relative to the deployment of our personality.

For some the glass is half empty, for others it’s half full. Try to say, around the dinner table, it’s five ounces, and see what happens. Watch the faces. You’ve introduced imbalance. Created a vertiginous free fall. Inspired by a problematic glossary, you’ve positioned exchanges over an abyss. You’ve taken away from interlocutors the grounds conversations are built upon. They won’t know what to say next. Not because the data’s incorrect, but because it does not describe who you are in terms that can draw an image of your relationship to happiness or suffering. They’re not interested in evaluating the amount of water, they’re interested in evaluating you.

As they discuss their attitudes under the cover of the material world, they’re judging your politics. You’re readiness to accept the witchcraft befalling words, that which is able to transform your connection to people and things into a fictitious feature. The one you desire, positive or negative.

They cannot envision a relationship to the world that would be neither, outside this duality. That a link can materialize itself without your idiosyncrasy being dragged into it. Or, to be more exact, your idiosyncrasy being just that, a sustained effort at good diction.

I mean, if there’s one liter of water in the pitcher, the only evaluation that makes sense, the sole decision that has a purpose I can grasp and therefore can care about, both concern the question whether that quantity is sufficient for the number of guests present. Any statement about attitudes and perceptions, is the pitcher half empty or half full, is totally irrelevant.

This is why I’m awkward at conversations. Usually, I can’t stand their directions, the badly veiled hints aimed at revealing one’s condition without truly admitting doing so. Pretending to talk about this when in fact we’re talking about that. Predictable, limited, unsurprising, most of the time inevitable. And in the boredom I feel, the only light is the water begging to be measured. That is absolutely interesting. Like the entire day I spent as a child trying to count the number of drops that could fit inside a cup. Basically unable to count properly, but determined to solve the mystery. That’s something. Although hard to fit in a conversation.

If you have an expression about THE drop that makes the liquid overflow to refer to an incident that is just too much, THE thing that may catapult a situation into total disarray, you better know the precise number of drops that can lead you to this regrettable situation. And we should be talking about possible solutions, like getting in time a larger container. That’s a very stimulating discussion to have.

If one little drop can generate a catastrophe, isn’t it important to pick words appropriate to the nature of the danger?

I worked very hard at doing that, because I thought it was what needed to be done. And I went wrong. People rarely want to hear that. So, I guess, I’ll continue sounding like a fool. But I’ll keep on trying not to affirm the glass is half full or half empty. A serious matter of linguistics and ethics. And to those who may think that the approach sounds disincarnated, they reveal how little they know about poetry. A meaningful rhyme is like a geometry theorem. As beautiful, as logically structured and presented, as solid and eternal, as powerful and significant as a well-articulated demonstration.

Does that make any sense, have I erred beyond what's been said about me? My head so often described as half empty, therefore, I presume, half full?

But of what exactly, may I ask?
For I need the info to select the gauge.

Laolao

71. Poetical economy

To wear with extraordinary panache the cloth of heresy. To reveal that long ago an event, outside the ranges of probabilities, has indeed led to the exhumation of an apocalypse about ourselves we had always thought unearthable. Testifying to the fact that innocence has indeed recoiled from any paradigm that threatened to infiltrate the forecasts we had meant to redesign for our own personal use. Protecting history from unlawful premonitions. Branding it as part of an epic disaster best forgotten.

As we came to embrace pretensions, recoiling from the ghosts of misfortune, our soul’s defenestration chose to fully advertise itself. Contemplating the fundamental soundness of precipices. The depictions of delusions and the mightiest tombstones we could conceive, while no one exuded alarm.

Instead, tyrants echoed, with rapt attention, the exact dimensions of our foolishness. Their technical questions combined to wisdom ready to gather wildly significant epigrams to support the wide distribution of ignorance. An ocean of supine orators, singled out for their dreadful brilliance, blinding the mutes. Our urge to capture censorious omniscience totally at stake. Liquidating ourselves by the same occasion, caught in flattery and suppositions, as we presumed we strongly believed in something. Always inclined to resent poetical adversaries, from time to time ditching the champions of semantic crashes, their willful evocations warning us against the very lack of ego put forth by the pregnant teachings of efficient and overly sane regulators. Epochal failures occupying every corner of fervent populist dreams of ascension.

We often bespeak disgrace. Quite occupied at embarrassing ourselves, the habitués of immunized memory, and the vast, vacant territories it dutifully neglects.

Poetry against funny popping bubbles, circular parallels drawn between our delirious state of mental prosperity and the complete terms of our surrender. Unlearning the misspelling of transparent shiny spherical voids into collections of highly quotable lifelong mistakes. Providing intense heat to controversies and histories ruffled by feathers dipped in lemon juice to write in a land where flames have never been seen.

Laolao

70. Reddish autumn language

There’s something I’ve been wanting to convey, but I don’t seem to be doing it. I’ve looked at what I’ve written in the last two days. I agree with the facts and the way I’ve presented them in my two previous posts. I won’t argue with that. As I wrote, I cared about being accurate, circumscribed to the phases of my history as I think I experienced them. I tried to resist the temptation of looking at the past only from the point-of-view of affects, hoping for a balanced tone. A perspective made of more than one attempts at understanding events.

Yet, something’s missing. Like autumn leaves bound to fall, sentences eventually land on my screen. Not by choice, but because it is that time of the year.

On their way down to the text, they signify that their end is nearby, already started. They cascade to the ground where they’ll make a carpet of words to cover and hide the page and the soil. They’ll dress the shape of the earth, a blanket on the shoulders of matter.

Words descend, they don’t fly. They are the ephemeral part of the tree, the part able to detach, disconnect itself and tumble. Parts that can only have one direction: down. Leaves and words, piling up at our feet, able to disguise the land we must walk on. Obscuring a path maybe, or hiding the road from our view, covering landmarks, erasing footsteps. Even changing the landscape beyond recognition.

I can no more prevent words from separating themselves from their matrix or from falling, than the leaves of a tree can be stopped from throwing themselves downward.

As I look at the words now resting on the ground my page is, I wonder what’s under. What have I masked a leaf at a time? The panorama has changed. Amalgams of colored, textured words like an autumn tapestry concealing the territory that supports them. And I ask myself, what’s beneath? What could be rotting there, unseen? What is it that can decompose in the cold and damp darkness created by hundreds, thousands of fallen words? Would there be a stench, would I reach a gluey substrate if I shoveled my way beneath clusters of verbs and dead foliage? What kind of life form would be growing there, rising from the disintegration of flat, thin organic structures? From the quiet veins running through a collection of dead epidermis laid down, waiting to decay?

Once the words fall, their stem ruptured, loose, what other meanings appear, what kind of existence can develop from the molder, something the leaves do not control, do not even foresee?

What is it that I do not perceive and that could be happening below the surface of residues?

The writing stretches throughout the forest. Trees and branches depossessed of their most striking attributes, a quilt filled with words and on which I advance, walking on a duvet of fallen leaves, hearing as my promenade lasts the sounds, vowels and consonants, of crushed plant fragments marking my steps. Always deeper into shivering woods. The words carrying me, departed leaves finally put to rest as a floor for wanderings, cloaking the routes.

Peeling the many coats of leaves that cover the grounds of language, I must find what it is that germinates in the rich and humid murkiness created by what has left me, and has sank below myself.

Laolao

69. Humor and anger

I still have lots to say about how I dealt with dyslexia. Please, bear with me.

It has been a long, lonely crusade, the one aimed at familiarizing myself with the process of learning. Had to understand it, its components, how the parts fit in the process, their sequence, their relative importance, the steps that could be skipped, the others fundamental. I had to decorticate to the smallest elements the advent of learning, how it manifested itself and how it could be verified.

Up to the moment I was told about the condition, I thought among other things that I had an eye problem. Of course I had realized as a child that what I saw on a page didn’t correspond to reality. I knew that from feedback. I knew, in other instances, that I was much slower than other kids. I also knew the results of what I did often failed to match expectations.

When I was in grade one my father had spent a few minutes at the dining room table – the only time he ever looked at my homework – to question me about what I was studying. He had gotten so mad, insulting me, throwing the sheet of paper away with disdain. He had said I was stupid.

I was taken aback. It was the first time I was hearing that word to describe who I was. I considered the word from all its angles, trying to figure out what my father had meant. I was puzzled. Not so much by the possibility of being stupid, but by the fact that the sheet of paper had directly led to the conclusion. I was looking at it in a deep effort to understand the link between my father’s verdict and the paper’s content. I felt it was essential for me to find that answer.

And I can say that everything after that incident has always revolved around the effort to find an adequate explanation: How does the relationship between what I do and stupidity manifests itself? How can I intervene to change it? How can I disrupt or alter this connection? That is where my answers were, I thought.

With time – we’re talking here of decades, not months or years – I realized there were two major kinds of pitfalls I had to watch for.

One, the most obvious mainly to others, had indeed to do with my eye. I don’t see things the way I should. This leads to writing a sentence, for example, and seeing only my intention, not what I actually wrote. The use of the wrong letters, the frequent repetition of the same words, the absence of key ones or of some syllables, the inversion of letters to form syllables, or writing the wrong letters, confusion between nouns and adjectives, the wrong spacing between words, syllables or letters, the arbitrary use of upper and lower cases even within words themselves, all of this had led me to believe my eyes could never be trusted. That was not such a bad statement to start my exploration of the problem.

Probably in those days, the late fifties and early sixties, dyslexia was much less known than it is today. Teachers, at least those I had, weren’t on the look out for the symptoms. Or perhaps these weren’t identified as precisely as they now are.

These difficulties that were mine, I later learned, are categorized as graphic problems typical of a specific type of dyslexia. They’re not hopeless. With intense care, constant self-discipline, they can be repaired. Not completely, but sufficiently. So instinctively, with much concentration, that’s the path I undertook to follow. Always trials and errors. Using my fingers to block out words, isolate some, going very slowly, checking seven times. By the way, that was my magic number when I was a child. I don’t know why I picked it. It seemed a big number. I had to check everything seven times. It was an obligation I had imposed on myself. Verifying the universe seven times. It sounded safe.

The second type of dyslexia I seemed to suffer from is of a more complex nature. It has to do with meaning. Even today, I find it difficult to describe the characteristics of this major flaw. It’s more ethereal. This deeper kind of problem goes beyond the challenge of reading and writing. In this case, speech and thinking are also affected.

The superficial type of dyslexia, if I can call it that, the one impairing written language, I understand it as the result of wrong connections in the mind, but because there are connections, they can be rerouted.

The deeper type of dyslexia is one of no-connections. There’s nothing to work with. It just ain’t there.

The meaning’s gone.

I guess this is how my “house of thoughts” as a kid came to be. Miraculously, I had found a dimension in my mind where meanings could exult. But I couldn’t export these meanings into the real world. But I knew meanings were there, in a leak-proof environment shut tight on itself, uncommunicative with the outside world. But it was there. As time went by, I became aware I was getting better and better at accessing this bubble. I simply hadn’t found a way to translate its content in a way that would have been acceptable to others and conducive to proper actions.

To be honest, I never came up with a satisfying solution. I developed instead a wide range of compromises, never a definitive fix. Little things. Pieces of recipes. Scraps of ideas to implement. A tiny something here, a bit there, a crumb of solution over there, a drop of this or of that. All combined, I could reassemble a passable meaning. Always partial, with holes, never as grand and beautiful as it should have been.

That has always made me sad. Believe me. Very sad. In some strange fashion, I can emotionally compare what I have written with how it should have been written even though I can’t reproduce that, and feel the inadequacies. How poor it is, effect-wise, from a reading perspective.

I now think that the crises of physical paralysis that plagued my childhood were, possibly, a sort of parody of what was happening in my mind. Was I unconsciously mimicking with my body how I felt inside my head? A prisoner. Unable to get out. Caught. My thoughts buried alive. Unheard. An urge to shout without a sound, a word willing to lend its support. Forever locked in a dark cave. All marvels untouchable.

I knew so well this was who I was. I knew it, and in more than one ways this was the worst of it. The fact that I knew.

I can thank anger though. Seems quite awful, I understand, to view violence, rage, hyper-negativity as being beneficial tools, but I see no others with the strength and the kind of lasting ramifications capable of effectively face in-depth distorted traits like mine.

It is the power of my anger, my daily anger, the anger I was feeling every minute of my life, which carried me. I was given only one intact ability, a single faculty as a weapon-tool: the one to be totally angry. I had to use it. I had nothing else that was concrete enough to last throughout the years I was going to need if I wanted to function. My anger, and only my anger allowed this.

Yes, my anger was going to persist. My anger had endurance. It was able to renew itself every morning, without signs of weakness. Whenever I would falter, anger wouldn’t. If I became tired, anger would force me to stay awake. It would keep me up and standing. It would push me forward if I ever became tempted by retreat. It would never let go of me. My only trustworthy ally. If I ever gave up, anger would hurt me, and hurt me, and hurt me until I completely surrendered to its influence, picking up my bruises and despair to continue the march. That’s what anger was going to do for me. And in exchange, I would be nourishing it. That was the deal, I might say.

In other words, I’m telling you that I am, as a person, an ode to anger.

I represent one of its achievements. I’m its product. The result of its vigor and character. Its unceasing stamina.

I would not be your mother or grand-mother if it wasn’t for that icy-cold unrefined anger. You would not exist if it hadn’t been there, years ago, to torture me. And then to compel me. I would not be there to tell you the story if it wasn’t for the persistence and stubbornness of sublime anger. That rage, it was everything to me. Bad and good. What I could acquire through it, and what it would cost me to use it. It’s all there in one package, the person I became.

One meaning I had no problem with, as you can see: Crude anger.

My statement here is quite indicative. It’s not a light statement. It contains the very essence of my biggest difficulties at the time. I could relate in those days to the meaning of the word anger, but I couldn’t lace a pair of shoes. I had no sense of direction either. I was clumsy at arithmetic, confusing the digits 3 and 8, 4 and 5, 6 and 9. Unable to add, subtract, multiply with a pencil, but good at mental arithmetic as long as it’s the noble, uncontaminated idea of three I’m dealing with, not three chairs, not three glasses of water. That is extremely hard to count for a person like me.

Even today when, before a class I must count the number of students present for our records, I can’t. Luckily professors have assistants in our school, and she does the count at my request. If she says there are 27 students in the classroom, I understand what 27 represents, but if I tried to count them myself, I would utterly get confused and mix the digits. I can say 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in my head. But I cannot count real objects. Suddenly, I forget the order of the words signifying the digits. It becomes a real mess. My heartbeat goes wild. I sweat and panic. So, I use my fingers all the time for small quantities. And for larger ones, well… I’ll pretend it’s a waste of time or that I forgot to do the job.

Same goes for the alphabet. I would not even be able to tell you how many letters there are. I’ve learned it a million times. The info never stuck to me. I call these Teflon-data. They simply glide out of my brain as if they had never entered. I can now recite the alphabet correctly about once out of three or four trials. I almost always trip somewhere towards the end of the series of letters. Never at the beginning. But I know all my letters. I use them all the time. I just can’t remember their order that well. But that’s not so important anyway.

Want something even more ridiculous? At almost 56, if I need to tell a taxi driver to turn right or left, I must mentally ask myself which of my hands is the one used to hold a fork. That’s the right hand. The side not used for the fork, that’s the left one. But if I’m tired or preoccupied by something, I’ll say right when I mean left even if I use the trick. Shit. Do you know how much money and time I’ve wasted this way? I could hit myself whenever I realize, a fraction of a second too late, that the car’s heading in the wrong direction. But when I get it correctly, like a child I feel I’ve discovered an amazing thing. Every time. Beaming with pride.

I remember one afternoon when I was about six, I was late for the school bus that drove me back home everyday. It had left without me. My home was nearby. Only two streets away. Even though one can assume that I had done that itinerary many times by bus, I became petrified. I couldn’t get back home. I somehow know that I knew which way to go, but it wasn’t articulating itself. It wasn’t becoming an action. I couldn’t do it. There was a wall between the steps my legs could perform, and my knowledge of where I lived. I couldn’t send the information to my body and make it walk in any direction. I was lost. There was emptiness in the decision-making part of my mind. The needed data wasn’t arriving.

Understand what I’m saying. The information existed. But it was unmovable. It was refusing to circulate where it would have been useful to make a decision. I had a picture of my house in my mind. I knew what the street looked like. But the images didn’t not correspond to anything I could use to move. They were just floating in my mind, not linked to any practical process. I even had the name of my street in a corner of my head, but it was not plugged to anything workable in terms of solution. Least of all to the image of my street. You see, bits of information, it’s all there, but not linked. Not responding to each other.

I couldn’t either perform the steps to zip a coat. Instructions presented to me, which could be matched to something visible, that could be pictured for instance, were inoperative. But I was able to understand and phrase correctly abstract elements. Words that did not have an image attached to them. I was able to understand existential issues, philosophical concepts, mathematical ideas, because they did not require a physical representation as such. They had, so to give them an existence, an emotional or intellectual pattern I could easily recognize. Something abstract exists as a pure idea and that idea has a buzz to it that I can use to pinpoint it, differentiate it from another one. It’s an essence. It has an almost sentimental texture that defines it. I don’t need to picture it. It doesn’t have a body, a shape, a contour. You do not count an idea. It’s there as it is. I could live with that. I could understand. But if you showed me a book with pictures asking me to retrieve quickly the word for the object that’s depicted, most of the time I fucked up. My mind would go blank.

If you tried to teach me a series of steps to do something concrete, to act on substances, like an experiment in a lab, I became confused. I was unable to follow instructions that concerned tangible objects. There are things in the lab. Each of them unfortunately has a name I can’t access on the spot and all are accompanied by rules for their usage. So if I need to move these objects in a particular order, my mind becomes a mess. But the same experiment, at a strictly mental level, combining atoms into molecules from the point of view of their ideas, was an extremely easy task for me. I never made a mistake, as long as I kept the nomenclature abstract, in the realm of pure thoughts. Careful to never attach to it any form of visual representation. If I try to form an image of the molecule I’m juggling with in my mind, I’m as good as dead. My mental switch gets turned off. There’s nothing I can do.

Images are one thing. Words are another. Concepts go with words; images also go with words. But the three of them together, that’s a no-no. As long as I respect that, I’m fairly ok. But I didn’t figure that out in a day, let me tell you.

I can bring to the surface of my mind rather quickly a conceptual item, but I still struggle, even today, with simple stuff. I look at the banana in the fruit bowl on my table and I can feel the tension the exercise at recollecting its name requires. It’s just a little tension now. Not much, because of habits, of time. But I can still feel it crossing my mind, a slight pressure reminding me of the possibility, even if minimal, that I might screw up.

So, I used to get mixed up with words, writing the wrong ones for example. Or not knowing anymore after having said or written one what it meant. But if I kept it enclosed in my mind, it would do fine. Staring at something that I know I know, on the tip of my tongue it is, nothing coming. Even looking at something familiar, the syllables composing its name becoming unintelligible. Disconnected from the word itself. Just sounds with no meaning. And often not even the right sounds at that.

It is so scary, baby. So tragic. A profound fear. Because all that is known can thus be said to be absolutely unreliable. Terror when realizing nothing from your senses can be relied upon. Because the data, what you see, or don’t see, what you feel, understand, cannot be checked against reality. Even though it’s there, reality being in front of you, you don’t know what to do with it. You can’t sort it out. It’s there, but it’s the same as if it was absent.

One method I developed to compensate for my deficiencies was to fill the blanks with eclectic thoughts instead of fighting to try to get the word right.

If I can’t instantly put a word that I am sure of on an object, I’ll do literature around it. My guessing is quite good actually. I’ll embroider. I’m going to take these abstract notions I find easy to manipulate and pour them into the vacant spaces where something concrete and simple should have been. I can do that really fast. You’ll find me a bit weird true, or overly talkative, a fantasist maybe, a person with a colorful way of expressing herself, hard to follow perhaps, but you’ll get the general meaning (or not, it depends). But I don’t think you’ll conclude I’m sick. I’ll make sure that, together, we go around that peril. I’ll patch. I’ll take you high up in a swirl. I don’t think you’ll guess what I’m doing. You will not see, and that’s my priority, that an instant ago I was confronted with terrible huge blanks, and could not communicate something plain and concrete. So I take my sentences for the ride of their life. Up we go. Passing the time full blast until I’m sure you’ve lost track of what we’re supposed to be talking about. Because I for one do not know. So you’re coming with me.

It’s funny, really. Think of it as a good joke. No malice intended (or hardly none…).

I’m a good teacher. I want you to know that. I’m extremely careful, also patient with my students. I know more about how learning occurs than anyone I’ve ever met. I can identify obstacles and understand how these can be overcome. I not only teach my students the material to cover, but I also try to teach them how to learn it.

I guess you’re wondering how I manage my notes.

With colors. I use color pens and highlighters to make sure the words on the pages I use as a course plan stand out. I also use a panoply of different signs, codes, such as underlining, double underlining, circles around words, squares, or symbols like “x”, dots, slashes, dashes in different colors to separate various notions, words, groups of words. I write notes using different sizes of letters for different words so that they don’t overlap in my mind. To distinguish is the goal. My pages to anyone else but me look like incomprehensible drafts filled with scribbles and marks. But to me, it’s limpidity. It’s happiness, my dear.

And my notes are always as exhaustive as they can be. I can never take for granted that the simplest, most usual, casual word will appear in my mind all by itself, and exactly when it’s needed. It might, but it might not. Planning for the worst-case scenario, that’s me.

Any free time? For hours I recopy words, columns of words, hundreds of them. Practice. Practice. Copying attentively nouns, then verbs, then adjectives from a novel, any novel. Neat vertical rows of words, copied by hand, not on the computer, to strengthen the connection between gestures and lexical intention. For immediate proximity to the page. Endless practice. Everyday. Timelessness taking over. Tracing words, the mind empty, a bit zen I guess, focused on the movements of the hand, the trajectory of the pen, the lines drawn on the paper. An alphabetical yoga.

Oh, another thing, I make more mistakes, or mistakes with larger consequences, in my mother tongue than I do in English, I think. Perhaps because perfecting the language came consciously and at a more mature age, integrating as I worked at improving it the protection mechanisms I needed to safeguard the information. They’re part of the memorized sounds and words. They’re a parallel level activated as I speak or write, at least from the “meaning” perspective. I still do graphic mistakes, but much less about significance. Strange though.

Finaly, I'm an expert at a priori assumptions. To deduct. To infer. To postulate. That is so, so, so much better and safer than to observe... I hope somebody sees how hilarious this is for someone who invested so much in a scientific approach to problems, in the control of all imaginable variables, who believes something is sound only once it can be reproduced in an identical way with the same results. Preferably seven consecutive times before I think it's ok.

Laolao

68. The undisclosed

I think it’s time. I must tell you something about myself that nobody knows, something I’ve always been extremely ashamed of. Something I’ve kept secret. You can’t start to understand the meaning of the word secret until you can fathom how deep and absolute mine has been until today.

Of course, any secret, even as protected and hidden as the one I had, manages at times to leave hints, traces of itself on the surface of the world, showing how impossible it is to control it in its entirety.

It has happened. Moments when I would realize after the fact, and too late, that outside of my will the secret had manifested itself, printing an indelible mark that could give its substance away. A dangerous clue with the potential to lead people to that secret.

If they added one plus one, they would get to two. I knew that. And I watched, powerless, with a terrible, heavy anxiety to see if anyone would do the math and figure out what I thought had no right to be said and known about me.

But I’m also full of contradictions. Acutely aware of them as if a gambler by nature, perhaps a part of me wanting others to find out. Playing with fire. Gradually becoming bolder. Testing. Liking probably the extreme fear that came along the game I ended up designing.

In short, I did everything that was humanly possible to lock up the secret, but I also exposed myself to the very environments that had what it took to uncover what I worked so hard at camouflaging. Masochism? I guess. In part at least. The other part being a strategy. Understanding quite early on that absolute denial and pretense would fail. I needed in order to reach my goal a certain balance between suppressing the content of the secret and developing a familiarity with it. Only then would an efficient exercise at control be achieved.

So, as indications of my secret popped up here and there despite my constant efforts to tame them, I also ventured further into areas where the risks of being discovered were great, thus forcing me to reinforce my hideout. This is how, oh irony, step by step, very slowly, I ended up one day completely living in the environment I feared the most.

You recall that I was told, as a teenager, that I would never be able to study. During my first and second hospitalizations in a psychiatric ward, I was submitted to extensive tests, psychological as well as neurological. A combination of problems was identified. They were not all explained to me. But some were.

I remember a doctor calling me to his office one afternoon, and calmly laying out the facts.

He did not really elaborate on the various diagnoses. He was more concerned by the fact that my parents had rejected what he had tried to tell them, categorically refusing to hear him out.

He offered me a solution: The hospital would, if I accepted, represent me in a legal request, since I was a minor, to put myself under the protection of the state, asking to be placed in a specialized institution or foster home able to deal with my condition.

I refused.

How would my life have been, what kind of person would I have become, who would I be today if I had said yes? I have no idea. Would it all have been easier? Worst? I can’t tell. But there hasn’t been a day since where I haven’t wondered about the possible outcomes of a different decision. I’ll never know.

They did not find any neurological causes, I was told, to my problems. They had been worried, among other things, that the purpura I had suffered from as a child could have left scars in the brain, but apparently it didn’t. Even more extensive tests done later in my life confirmed this.

Family history did not support either the hypothesis that my condition was genetic. I seemed to be the only one stuck with the problem.

At that point there were no other causes known but a psychological one to explain what was going on. Nevertheless, the team of specialists had concluded that the problems were incurable, too deep and severe to be reversed. With proper care, I would perhaps be able to learn how to cope with some of them, but never to the extent of allowing me a normal life.

I had an IQ well over 130, I was informed. My intelligence not put into question. My impediments having nothing to do with my comprehension.

Of course, some of what was said to me on that day was no surprise. My behavioral peculiarities were obvious. I had figured that much by myself. But the doctor added to that awareness the name of a serious handicap I hadn’t seen coming.

Up to that moment, I had not considered the symptoms as separate. Instinctively, I had always approached them as another expression of my screwed-up personality, meaning not as a distinct issue. So the news came as a real blow. Totally unexpected, and painful.

I was so profoundly dyslexic, it was explained to me, that even with coping mechanisms I would never be able to study. Had to give up the idea of even finishing high school unless I went to a special one for people like me. But to go to such an institution, I would have to be extracted from my family via a request for new legal guardians.

Remember, I said no.

I disliked my family. I didn’t reject the proposal out of affection for my parents or a longing for my siblings. No. I did it mainly because the opinion I had, at that time, of a family was so negative that this one or another, in my mind, would still be a source of conflicts. I had so little trust in adults that I couldn’t imagine other people to be any better or helpful than those I already knew.

For me, survival was the key issue. How does one protect oneself from strangers? Difficult. Whereas on familiar grounds, I thought I could better manage, I answered the doctor.

I had always been alone while struggling. I couldn’t conceive letting others in as participants. Intuitively, I perceived such an inclusion as a possible annoyance, with the potential even to become a danger to me. I faced an extremely intimate situation. There was no room anyway in there for another person.

Might as well go back, I thought, to an environment where the sum of my experiences could be relied upon as guidelines to sustain myself. Where I had some knowledge, defective maybe, - but that was much more desirable than none at all. That's what I said. It made sense. Among other things I was dyslexic, yes, but not dumb.

I also figured that being told my family, if I wanted to, could be eliminated from my life was in itself sufficient information. It would allow me to see myself “officially” as not truly belonging there, a card up my sleeve in case later it would be needed. I would go back there on my own free will, not because I had to or was forced to. That fact introduced an important difference. It gave me some kind of leverage.

Up to the minute when my father died, when my mother died, I have been thoroughly aware that I stood next to them only because I was the one who had decided to. Not them. It took away all their powers. When in the last moments of my mother’s life, as an example, everybody ran away, busy doing something else, I stood all by myself watching her die, and I was able to go through with it, unlike the rest of the family members, because I had consciously decided to. Not because of guilt. Not because she had no one else. Not because she wanted to or asked me to. But because I had had a long, long practice at making such decisions. It had started almost 30 years earlier, the day I was informed of my dyslexia.

Now, you’ll ask. How can a deep dyslexic become an avid reader and nourish dreams of becoming a writer? How can such a person be fascinated by languages other than the one already said to be impossible to fully handle for that person? Well, lets call it for now the funny part.

The truth is: This mystery lends itself quite well to an explanation. Be patient. I’ll come to that later. But the one that remains has to do with the secrecy others have also unilaterally woven around my condition. True, I never discussed it. But neither did my parents. Not once. Not even pronouncing in my presence the word itself. Not the slightest allusion ever. As if it did not exist. I don’t even think my sisters or relatives were made aware of my handicap. It’s as if my parents had never been told or had never realized the nature of my plight. That’s quite an accomplishment…

But the doctor did confirm he had met them to discuss the issue. He clearly said so. And he added they had reacted quite negatively. They had stormed out. Left. The only explanation I can think of is that when my parents understood the direction the specialist was heading for, they got scared and simply ran away, not hearing the rest. They only had, therefore, partial information. They didn’t give sufficient time to the doctor to fully detail the situation. And afterwards, they succeeded in erasing the few bits thrown at them. They never had a full measure of the context. So it was relatively easy for them to forget about it. Or pretend to. Or convince themselves it was something else.

My father being a psychologist probably made that possible. He had enough theoretical knowledge to twist whatever he didn’t want to recognize into something unrecognizable. Using his authority in the field, I can well imagine how he instantly developed counter-arguments to undo the damage made to his pride. And my mother might have been happy to position herself behind the tone of expertise my father must have displayed. And I gather he did so with a sort of desperate energy killing in the bud all potential for disagreements.

We’ll never know for sure how they succeeded in obliterating such crucial information about their eldest child.

But lets go back again to that day I was told I would never be able to study. Here’s something we can deal with.

For now, what I need to say is how I felt. It’s not going to take long. My feeling was so monolithic. No ambiguity about it whatsoever. A massive, non-equivocal emotional reaction: It was an imperious, commanding anger.

The type of anger no one should ever get to experience. So overwhelming that the odds of recovering from it were almost nil. An anger beyond measurability. I did not scream. I did not move. I did not protest. I did not argue. Why? Because it was impossible to express even a tiny portion of how I felt. That door could not be opened. The destructiveness of my feeling could not even for a single instant be doubted. An anger intensely immediate and eternal. Infinity. No boundaries. No limits. No end to it. An interminable depth. Anger like you cannot imagine.

Raw hatred and anger.

So large, so powerful that it had no target. Everything the universe is and can be was in my feeling. It englobed it all. A magnitude that left nothing out.

It could have totally consumed me, kill me as it later almost did. Or with its amazing violence destroy the course of the prognosis. But on that very day, I didn’t know yet which way sheer hatred and anger would go.

I was in that hospital to get help. Not to be told none was available. Not to be made aware at 15 years old that my hopes, my desires, my entire future were absolutely nothing.

I’m sitting in front of the doctor, and I fully understand that this idea of sending me to a special place is a palliative solution. Not a remedy. It would not make the problems disappear. He said so. On the contrary. It would confirm, cement them. It makes no sense. This is essentially an unacceptable situation. Dyslexia is an utterly unfair state of my affairs. No fuckin’ way. If I go down, the world comes down with me. That’s a promise. I swear to it.

My parents may chose to forgo their responsibility to help me, they may relinquish their status as capable caregivers, surrender their aspirations to act as decent people, but I won’t. I’m not letting this be. I’m gonna piss them off forever. That’s my decision. And EVERYBODY is wrong about me. This family or another family, no difference. And I hate all of you. I’ll beat you. I’ll bulldoze you. My anger is so formidable that none of you will resist its impact. I’m standing my ground, imbued with this gigantic anger, and I’m not letting any shred of it go. My parents walked away? Fine. I know where they live and that’s where I’m heading. And no one will stop me. And I’ll prove, a 100% proof, that all of you, without a single exception, you’re absolute assholes. I’m even ready to die if I’m sure it punishes you the way you deserve. If it annihilates you, your stupidity and selfishness. I will not let you free for one second. I will not let you spread your ineptitudes and idiocy. I, me, the impaired, the doomed, I will get you. I will win. I will devote until my last breath the totality of my hatred, of my anger at ascertaining my point. You will not live a quiet life, none of you, in the land of I-can-pretend-there’s-no-problem. You will never be relieved of my presence. You will die, and I will be there. When everyone else will have abandoned you, I will still be there. And you will look into my eyes, the last thing you see, and you will know.

This is exactly how I’m thinking in silence in that doctor’s office. A placid composure like a magnificent, brilliant and crazy strategy. Not a gesture out of place. Not a movement of my eyelid to betray the incredible mass of my plan. Wait until it hits all of you. I’ll level your world. I’m the one who prevails. Not your attitudes, not your decisions, not your attempts at running away. Look. Cuckoo… it’s me. You, fuckers.

Do you have any idea of how many schools I had gone to, ending up not going to school at all? My parents always playing the prima donna, carried by an inflated view of their importance, constantly blaming others. Two educated, wealthy adults ready to sacrifice me so not to admit I had learning disabilities. Categorically refusing even to discuss these, preserving a chimera about their image and competencies. I was so pissed.

Don’t let any of what I’m saying fool you though. That’s the secret I’m revealing today. I am still highly dyslexic. Every second of my life. If you pay very close attention, you’ll spot the signs of what, at times, I fail to master, what escapes my obsessive techniques at countering dreadful deficiencies. Or you’ll notice my tiredness. Because it’s exhausting beyond description to constantly be on guard against the very essence of my own brain.

Since I have never told anyone about my dyslexia, my children have never known about it either. Of course, they made fun of my weird ways of doing things at times, argued or joked about peculiarities, my “forgetfulness,” perhaps my absent-mindedness to account for mistakes. But it was friendly, kind. Never hinting at the presence of a more severe condition. In fact, no one ever realized the extent of my misery.

But I must say now how all those years I have been terrified to somehow transmit the problem to my kids. How I’ve carefully watched over them, extremely attentive for any sign that would have indicated that my disability was shared. Whenever my children at school had periods where they were either difficult students or exhibited behavior considered troublesome, I spent sleepless nights worrying about the possibility that they might too be dyslexic. I consulted. Went over the various criteria. Talked to teachers. Examined their assignments until I was sure whatever issue was at stake had nothing to do with what I had. In the light of my own condition, I thought (mistakenly maybe) that anything else was preferable. And could somehow be remedied.

Looking back, I was wrong not to tell anyone of the cause of my fear. But believe me, I honestly didn’t think I had a choice.

My daughter recently introduced me to a friend of hers. She had told me just before he arrived that this engineer was dyslexic. And it dawned on me. What? This can be said, just like that?

Through this anonymous post today I apologize to my children. And to everyone. Unable still to do it face-to-face though. I know I’m a coward. Unable yet to untangle the past and all the barriers I’ve set up.

Even in old age, I continue to feel that if I went about revealing the truth any other way than obliquely, all the systems I’ve built to function in society would crumble. And they would do so for one reason: If I were ever to pronounce the words, I know with certainty that I would cry, and would never stop crying after that, possibly harming everything and all relationships I’ve been able to build over the years.

From the bottom of my heart, from the place in me that is not stained by any ordeal, that remains genuine and purely translucent, where my love for you is the only thing that exists, I ask for your forgiveness.

To help you understand and accept, know that every collage I ever did, just to name that, has been an effort at honesty. In them, I disclose how I proceed to subdue my dyslexia. They all are a meticulous representation of a fairly effective methodology to thrive and be with you.

And, ironically, I’ve learned to appreciate the mistakes they contain in spite of my dedication to preventing such clues from appearing. This way I’m not a complete lie. And I can smile, a truly happy smile.

That's what art is all about, baby. The imperfections that resist and outlast paramount battles, asserting their rightful and meaningful place.

Laolao

67. Obama for non-Americans

Haven’t written a lot in the past few weeks. We’ve seen each other often since the beginning of October, temporizing I guess the need to write. But I still want to mark today in a special way. You’ll tell me we’re not Americans and ask, maybe, why bother with the results of the US presidential election. Fair question.

Not only am I not an American, but I haven’t lived in North America for more than a decade. As for you, you were born in Asia and have a French father.

Nevertheless, I strongly feel we should celebrate Obama’s victory. At least, to make up for those who have no idea of what’s going on in this world.

None of my Chinese college students knew the election was today and when I mentioned the fact, none showed interest. As for my local colleagues, they went about their business and whenever they had free time, they shopped on the web. I tried to poke their curiosity and asked around for opinions. None came.

I’m at a Beijing Internet café right now. It’s almost empty. The girl at the table next to mine is chatting with friends on her computer. They’re discussing shopping, as far as I can see.

So, I’ll celebrate by myself writing to you, until later a few acquaintances join me to talk about politics.

You see, as a non-American, I am impressed by the ability of the US to produce deep transformations and to surprise us. At a time when criticism of that country’s policies – in foreign affairs as well as at the economic level – is raging, it manages to remind itself of the values it keeps saying it stands for despite actions and decisions that have highly contradicted that stand. It has the capacity, the flexibility to look at itself and to question its own trends. This is so rare.

For non-Americans, Obama doesn’t represent the final solution to the financial crisis, the war issue, or any major problem with consequences beyond that country’s borders. I don’t think anyone thinks that an election by itself can solve such complex issues. Obama inherits a chaotic situation and it might take years before stability is restored on so many fronts.

My amazement stands more on cultural grounds. Obama has an international identity. From a mixed Muslim-Christian background, with family roots in Africa, raised in Asia, educated in America, he reflects elements found in immigrants, in minorities. This polyvalence, this mirror image of so many communities channeled into one single man has succeeded in attracting a majority of American voters. This is where I’m astonished. There are not many places where this could happen.

When I look at you, my grandchildren, this is what I see. A globalization of the genes, of the cultures, of the origins and the places of belongings.

Your parents offered you a suitcase for your fourth birthday. Many would find it perhaps a ridiculous gift for such a small child. But you were so proud and happy, dragging the suitcase all over the house. Because you already know what it means to move, to change continents, to express yourself as you glide from one culture to another, adapting your behavior, and fitting in your values and beliefs inside a single suitcase in a way to lightly cross frontiers, bringing your ideas along to expose them to various settings, eventually bringing them back transformed wherever home is at a given time.

This man, this new American president, he’s a hint of what the future is becoming, more people like you embodying a multiplicity of emergences, blends and beginnings. An intelligence, in the sense of a sensitivity, woven from a diversity of threads. And we owe the Americans the pleasure of showing us such a person in a position of utter leadership.

This is a victory for you, my children and grandchildren. And the children after that. A recognition. The opposite of denial. It is a clear statement about who we are.

Whatever tomorrow holds, this has been done. It cannot be erased. And this is the day of our celebration. For all of us, fully alive strong entities made of nomadic fragments.

Laolao