27 November 2006
Natal works for me. Benign weather, mostly friendly people, making new friends. I am relaxed, not pressuring myself to perform.
There is new material in the first three sections. Take a moment, leave a comment; just click on the word "comment" at the end of this post and follow your nose.
3a) Odds & Ends
Poems are songs for people with bad singing voices.
There but for the grace of god, goes god. (think Bush)
Love might provoke kindness, gratify vanity, and clear the skin, but it is not guaranteed to be the high road to happiness.
The world's richest 500 individuals have the same income as the world's poorest 416 million people.
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3b) Sketches
My first two posts sketched the bare bones of Natal. These will be fleshed out over the next twenty or thirty years with intermittent descriptions of specific activities that have caught my attention. For example: traffic.
Natal is blessed with a major status symbol of our 21st century: cars and rush hour traffic. In addition, motorcycles (motos) are big here.
The favorite rush hour sport among those with snappy new cars cars is street racing. A challenge is offered by a driver waiting at a red light who guns his engine a few times (translated: I will beat you to the next red light!). If the the driver beside him responds by gunning his/her engine, the challenge is accepted. Other driver's become an endangered species.
GREEN LIGHT! Engines roaring they rip down the block, screeeech to a halt at the next red light. There they re-rev their horses, tires pawing the street. When the light turns green they re-roar down the road engines screaming, tires scorching, so that they can wait at the next red light. Some of them even try to race my antique Fiat. As in the US, many of the macho/macha drivers also bob and weave, tires kicking sand in your face, to the next red light simply because it's there.
More interesting are the motos. Thanks to the benign year around weather motos are everywhere; in your rear view mirror, in the side mirrors and up-your nose. They are manoeuvred by helmeted men, boys, women, girls. These are commuting and/or or working machines used to deliver spouses to work and deliver stuff ranging from love seats (takes a bit of skill) and LPG tanks to water bottles and take-out lunches. This morning I saw a Harley with two milk crates full of clucking chickens piled one-top-the other. I'd be clucking too.
My recent memory of the US is that nowadays a very large percentage of motorcycles are used for recreation. They are driven by sedate paunchies, usually in groups which used to be called gangs. But in Natal moto jockeys are individuals, with only an occasional pair in tandem.
Friend Fabiane, recently bought a Yamaha...here’s a picture of her about to give her aunt a ride. Fabiane is a member in good standing of the Policia Militara(State Police).
The only analogy that comes to mind about the motos amazing progress through the obstacle course of bulky automobiles is the trick horseback riding that awes you at a rodeo. They slip through traffic and at red lights they slither through jammed cars to the front of the pack, accelerate to freedom a split second before the green shows. It takes me half an hour to get from Nova Parnamirim to Tirol in rush hour, these trick riders make it in five, eight minutes at the outside. The macho car drivers don’t stand a chance against a skilled moto operator.
My contribution to this chaos is modest: I own a scratched and dented, 1996 royal blue Fiat. No power steering, no air conditioning, no radio. It runs, thank you, like a well wound grandfather’s clock. It shouts out to car thieves, “Not this one, it’s a mess, worth nothing.” I think it gorgeous, even though I lose every race.
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3c) poetry
Here are two short poems of mine. Grandfather my first published poem, fifteen years ago.
Grandfather drank
to dead Celts
Mother knew God
would cure her cancer
Father saluted the flag
on his coffin
Feed my corpse
to hungry crows
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Akiko
Tonight just now
my body bowed
to the god
within a petite
Japanese woman
who is taller
than she stands
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No foto essay this time.
posted by hal sutcliffe @ 6:27 AM
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