La noche que el conocimiento llegó a casa

No sé qué edad tenía yo, pero eran menos de 4 años. No recuerdo toda la velada, sólo los colores claros de las paredes de la pequeña casa donde vivíamos, incluso recuerdo su tamaño original antes de que fuera ampliada.
Había una mesa en el comedor sobre la cual puso mi padre una caja (quizás fuesen varias) de esas de plástico que eran populares en las oficinas de los 80’s, que tienen pequeños paneles entre sus paredes, vaya que podrían parecer hechas de popotes cuadrados, translucidos.
Mamá me tenía en brazos mientras supervisaba que la caja fuese colocada con cuidado sobre su mesa, yo veía atento la escena sobre su hombro a través de un espejo que teníamos en la pared del comedor.
Casi podría afirmar que él usaba una camisa celeste, de un tono casi blanco o gris y unos pantalones obscuros y cafés; de los zapatos ni me pregunten porque los hombres no nos fijamos en esas cosas y menos cuando somos infantes.
“¡Tres enciclopedias gorda! Dos para él y la otra para nosotros” – no estoy seguro de que hayan sido sus palabras exactas, abogaré por la licencia literaria de inventar un poco. La enciclopedia de ellos la he visto en muchos lugares, como si fuera muy popular en esa década, una de tomos grises con un sello rojo. A mí me tocaron 2 colecciones de libros plagados de conocimientos, todos ilustrados por Disney: “Los tesoros del saber” y “Mi primera enciclopedia”. Es curioso que a mí me prometieron llevarme a disneylandia cuando tenía 8 años; esa promesa jamás se cumplió pero ahora que trabajo para Disney pude visitar el lugar más feliz sobre el planeta (20 años después).
Al abrir la caja me pusieron de pie sobre la mesa, para admirar esas pastas coloridas con personajes amigables sonrientes que guiarían mi camino hacia el saber. En tiempos en que el internet y las comunicaciones inmediatas no eran populares/accesibles en el país, previo al boom de los celulares, aprendí del mundo a través de esos libros. Primero por deberes escolares y después en su mayoría por ocio. Algo de culpa tenía Disney con esas fotos e ilustraciones en sus enciclopedias.
Estudiar e invertir en aprender algo es siempre bueno, positivo y de provecho - Era la idea que le pasara doña maría a sus 10 hijos, incluída la tía chayo quien esa noche comenzó a presionarme para aprender cuanto pudiera.

Trickser hace este mundo

Compré el libro cuando trabajaba en Starby, lo pedí en línea para que mi amigo Alex lo trajera ya que él va seguido a Reynosa. El motivo de la compra fue que vi una plática en las TedTalks y me inspiró mucho a comprármelo. Hoy he terminado de leerlo gracias a un reto que salió de improvisto después de algunos tweets con una amiga de cuando estudiaba la carrera.
Trickster makes this world lo escribió Lewis Hyde y habla de los seres que han forjado al mundo, específicamente de la característica que tienen en común: no suelen ser personas sino mitos, no se les puede ubicar en los círculos sociales por lo general están en los bordes haciendo una de 3 cosas: entrando, saliendo o quedándose justo en medio.
Menciona ejemplos de los cuentos de culturas nativas de Estados Unidos y de África, un poco del Rey Mono de asia y mucho de Hermes de la cultura griega. Siendo un libro de buen tamaño toma muchísimos temas sobre el arte, las sociedades, culturas del hambre y la vergüenza y de cómo es que el mundo se mueve a partir de lo que la gente con características de trickster hace.
Me gustó mucho por aquello de la ruptura de paradigmas, de costumbres y de autocuestionamiento que podemos hacernos al leer las historias antiguas pero vigentes.
Lo recomiendo como lectura filosófica y la compra la dejo a sus criterios dependiendo de qué tan fanses sean de esos temas.
Aquí les dejo la lista de frases que me ganaron al leer el libro (pueden brincarse hasta el final, pa' dejar el comentario porque son muchísimas):
3 – The first story I have to tellis not exactly true, but it isn’t exactly false, either.
5 – I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses
6 – All tricksters are “on the road”
They are the lords of in-between
the one who steals from the gods the good things that humans need if they are to survive in this world
7 – In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser
Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce.
in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction
Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities
Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.
8- the god of the threshold in all its forms
9 – that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on
10 – trickster is amoral, not immoral
11 – “America” is his apotheosis; he’s pandemic
13 – manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that their boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly disturbed
art is a lie that tells the truth
14 – he is the archetype who attacks all archetypes
19 – Trickster is at once a culture hero and fool, clever predator and stupid prey
20 – The hunter is always slightly smarter, but the prey is always wising up
26 – eating and death are part of the world of change
27 – this world of endless hunger
39 – he has “the context of no context”
43 – seems to have no way, no nature, no knowledge
He has the ability to copy the others, but no ability of his own
What conceivable advantage might lie in a way of being that has no way?
46 – Each being in the world must find the set of opportunities fitted to its nature
49 – Aporia is the trap of bafflement, invented by a being whose hunger has made him or her more cunning than those who only think to travel forward through a transparent world
52 – Cleverness is more valuable than inflexibility
53 – Even those who feared and hated him felt a rare and winning charm in his society and presence
54 – It’s possible there are beings with no way of their own, only the many ways of their shifting skins and changing contexts
57 – the blood that lights the mind gets its sugars from the gut
60 – If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth
Only when there’s a possible Lying Worm can we begin to speak of a True Worm and only then does Worm become a sign.
65 – nothing is significant until it’s portable
69 – it’s easier to control one’s appetites if one controls food supply
71 – Trickster feels no anxiety when he deceives
he is the eternal child who cannot be significantly damaged and so may cleave to the pure and playful delight of floating fiction in the face of stern reality
75 – Language is a tool assembled by creatures with “no way” trying to make a world that will satisfy their needs
76 – Trickster speaks freshly where language has been blocked, gone dead, or lost its charm
77 – Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions
79 – Real literature has never told the truth. It has imposed lies as truths
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.
The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies
might we hope to have great liars at our dinner table rather than trivial pursuers of fact.
87 – The muses sing of the sufferings of men…
How they live witless and helpless and cannot
Find healing for death or defense against old age
89 – we live in Coyote’s world, where sexual impulse and mortality are one thing, not two.
95 – Sometimes a stomach is a stomach, but rarely
97 – Accidents are present by chance, essentials by design
Accidentals are changeable and shifting; essentials are stable
The real significance of a thing lies with its essences, not with its accidents
99 – whoever manages to change the  categories thus changes the shape
100 – accidents happen in time, essences reside in eternity
107 – There is no way to suppress change, the story says, not even in heaven
108 – when an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate
120 – Nothing new under the sun can happen without absolute chance
121 – “All religions,” Monod writes, “nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its own contigency”
127 – “Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and of necessity”
131 – Whoever the gods of fortune are, they will drop things in your path, but if you search for those things you will not find them
134 – If fate contains us, what lies outside fate?
accidents are no accident, they reveal the will of the gods
136 – what hides in the unconscious only “masquerades as a lucky chance”
“When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs. We love with our desires…”
“from errors one gets to know the personality.”
140 – with smart luck, the mind is prepared for what it isn’t prepared for
141 – the mind that has smart luck makes meaning from unlikely coincidences and juxtapositions
142 – “we are made perfect by what happens to us rather than by what we do”
145 – “magic is the total appreciation of chance”
149 – there is no such thing as silence, there is only sound we intend and sound we do not intend.
150 – a readiness to let the mind change as contingency demands may be one prerequisite of a happy life
154 – That’s as it should be; shame should steal your voice.
157 – the telling of myth is the way in which a society affirms its own reality
158 – a sort of sacred lack of the sacred
162 – Shame itself may be universal, but its content is not fixed in heaven
166 – In shame society, no matter how many people are sleeping, at least two eyes are always watching you – or at least that’s the feeling you have if you’ve been properly raised
167 – he not only wrestles with shame, he remakes its territory, sanctifying what others have called profane
168 – Creative mobility in this world requires, at crucial moments, the strategic erasure of ethical boundaries
169 – “Shame is what you are, guilt is what you do”
172 – only after I have covered my privates am I allowed  to show my face to the world and have a public life
The rules of bodily decorum usually imply that the cosmos depends on the shame we feel about our bodies
sometimes the lesson is a lie
173 – it is best if the master be known as good and the servants be known as evil
175 – the line between the dirty and the clean is not fixed by nature
176 – “Dirt is matter out of place”
181 – “Mercurius consists of all conceivable opposites… He is the process by which the lower and material is transformed into the higher and spiritual, and vice versa. He is the devil, a redeeming psychopomp, an evasive trickster, and God’s reflection in physical nature”
183 – order often turns violent when threatened by its own exclusions
order can can become cruel in the name of its own imagined purity
188 – Beware the social system that cannot laugh at itself
192 – how does the mind recognize the real meaning of what the senses offer up?
195 – the work is art because it appeared in an art gallery and because experts can talk about it in art language
we draw the temenos, the sacred precinct, and what enters it becomes, willy-nilly, sacred; we create spaces for art and educate curators to watch the gates, and willy-nilly, what gets in is art
Picasso from what everybody tells me was an artist. It’s not my cup of tea. I don’t understand it. But if people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it
197 – traditional moral values are less important than the Platonic ideal of beauty
204 – a group doesn’t become a group until its members have an ongoing sense of mutual indebtedness, gratitude, obligation
if the others won’t give, you may have to steal
208 – Poised on the threshold, he is in his world, the crepuscular, shady, mottled, ambiguous, androgynous, neither/nor space of Hermetic operation, that thin layer of topsoil where all these things are not yet differentiated
209 – All cultures guard their essences
211 – “Shame” and “Justice,” the daughters of Themis, the ideal patterns of human behavior, exist only in heaven
213 – The hooks of shame can find no purchase on this lad with the trick shoes
217 – “Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not blaspheme. Do not gamble. Do not pick things up in the street. Behave yourself. You should be ashamed…”
218 – Story and song; these are two of the hypnotics by which social orders maintain their self enchantment
228 – Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world
From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom
the motion itself, the shift in context, creates the multiple meanings
230 – Slaves were thought that “a still tongue makes a wise head”
231 – It is only when he can speak across the color line, when he can break the rule of silence and contest the white world’s fictions about slavery, that he truly feels himself free.
232 – a fiction that will begin to seem real as soon as everyone forgets that human beings made it
235 – to indulge the appetites is to tame dissent; to remove that indulgence is to court rebellion
237 – because world and body are meant to pattern one another, when he reimagines his body he reimagines his world
244 – there are no human tricksters
247 – There are not one and not two
248 – which is the better fate, cannibalism or anthropemy, to be eaten by ideology or vomited into exile?
251 – The terms are contextual, and there is no end to context.
253 – the eternals are vulnerable at their joints. To kill a god or an ideal, go for the joints
260 – (translation and sacrifice) they are the creations of a trickster artus-worker, the hunger-artist who inhabits the cracks between languages or between heaven and earth.
261 – His achievement is to join by separating
264 – “to translate is to betray”
traduttore, traditore
265- “I’m the one, the one they call the seventh son ”
275 – contradiction cannot nourish without the waters of laughter
278 – “You have to make a way out of no-way”
human beings are created by their culture and yet that culture is also their creation.
The way we live exists apart from us, but does not exists unless we live it.
279 – The gods are above us, but they need us to protect them from hunger.
286 – Love should never be the basis of marriage.
Krishna will steal the heart of anyone who has been foolish enough to think her heart belong to her and not to god.
all structure – no matter how “good” – exists by excluding something
290 – There will be as many answers as there are human longings.
293 – what the eye will see is not heavenly purity but the fullness of this world before order demanded dirt’s exclusion
295 – if we thing the ideal is the real we are seriously mistaken and won’t see half of what isright in front of us
301 – “Everything that is human is Holy to me”
302 – “Tell your secrets” is a practice for loosening the boundaries of the self
303 – “the highest duty of the artist is to hide beauty”
306 – I force myself to contradict myself
307 – Individuals who never sense the contradictions of their cultural inheritance run the risk of becoming little more than host bodies for stale gestures
“Culture is something that is done to us. Art is something we do to culture”
314 – Nobody would repeat the stories in daylight, and at night whenever he struck a matcn to light a candle, the storyteller fell instantly silent.
331 – where Hades gives the ultimate gift and takes none in return
338 – one or two episodes do not make a trickster
341 – Tricksters do not make new life, they rearrange what is already at hand
352 – all categories of thought will, if observed carefully, reveal themselves to be fictions, and dissolve

La cena de la boda de Diego.

Este post lo perdí en el trabajo, pero acá va de nuevo aunque ya pasó de moda que mi amigo Diego, a quien conozco desde agosto de 1999, se casó por la 3ra ley, la que le faltaba, a principios de este mes.

De la boda muchos han hablado ya, yo he ido a varias, no soy un experto en ellas, pero creo que tuvo lo que toda boda debe tener, música bailable, cumbias, disco, tejana, banda, un grupo en vivo y bailadores bien cumplidores; amigos de décadas, desde prepa, de carrera, de la infancia, simpáaticos, sangrones, bailadores, juguetones, risueños y fotografeables; familiares, elegidos por Ganesh, cercanos y lejanos, propios y por ley; regalos, discretos, blancos por fuera, viajantes y que llegarán a su casa por la mesa de regalos; elegancia, en las ropas, el lugar, el ambiente, la iglesia; romance, de los novios, de las parejas amigos de ambos o de uno de ellos, de quien comienza a hacer su lucha invitando a una pareja a este evento, también de las consolidadas, formales, y las que se adelantaron en este paso familiar y no nos invitaron a su unión :P.

Pero de los detalles específicos habrá quien se encargue de narrarlos, Diego es buen candidato para dar explicaciones, yo alabaré la selección del platillo fuerte de la noche. Sí, hablaré de comida.

Fui solo, sin acompañante, ahí estarían mis amigos a fin de cuentas, tal vez de haber llevado a alguien ella hubiera dejado más comida para mí y yo habría continuado mi idilio gastronómico.

El nombre del platillo es solomillo de filete o algo así, pero no es sólo el hecho de haber comido carne en un evento social (siempre me habían dado pollo), era EL corte de carne. Creo que jamás, y no estoy exagerando cuando digo, jamás había probado semejante manjar en un evento de alta importancia. Tal vez probé algo delicioso en el Black Dog de París, o en alguna carne asada en Allende, pero en eventos de este tipo, Diego, con su selección, puso más en alto la línea que la mismísima Isinbáyeva.

“Ahora sé a que he venido al mundo; Nací para estar en este momento en este lugar para probar este platillo”

“Me preocupa saber que ahora mi vida está completa y no me queda mucho que hacer”

Así estuvieron mis frases esa noche, el platillo constaba de crepas de huitlacoche y risotto con granos de maíz (elotito). Pero el corte, lo sigo saboreando y creo que hasta lo buscaré en restaurantes cuando salga a cenar algún premio que me autoregale. El corte era sin hueso, como Ganesh manda, conocía el término medio, pero esto era diferente, estaba cocido por fuera y algo crudón por dentro. El cortarlo daba ya un placer puesto que no era suave, ni demasiado duro, ofrecía una resistencia, como diciendo:

Hay que esforzarse por saborearme.
Tengo diferencia de los demás platillos, lento, con más esfuerzo, prometo retribuir el tiempo empeñado en degustarme.

Y así lo hizo.

La consistencia era propia de la carne, masticable, pero con ese batallar propio de lo que no ha sido enteramente transformado por el fuego, chicloso podría pensarse, elástico y ligeramente sangriento. Diría yo que fue un placer primitivo, pero con la finura de un evento matrimonial, la mezcla de ambos entornos me es imposible de superar, incluso a un mes haber probado el platillo aquél. Me imaginé así, trajeado hasta con corbata, con dos tenedores, sentado en una mesa de manteles largos; por fuera: un elegante y discreto comensal; por dentro, en la boca, un carnívoro ancestral sin más pensamientos que vencer y terminar el alimento postrado frente a mí.

Seguro me toparé con el platillo de nuevo, he memorizado su nombre, sólo espero que no sea un accidente y que sólo un chef sea capaz de prepararlo, pues me sentiría bastante desolado en el mundo de los manjares sabiendo que la cúspide ha sido dejada atrás.