What the Twilight Saga means to me

More than a year ago I watched the first of the Twilight films; it was a lousy copy with a bad translation but it somehow managed to catch my attention. Rob Pattinson's white face and stiff smile were so enticing, that I wasn't able to tell if it was the actor or the character I was attracted to (time showed me that it was, in fact, the character).  I promised myself that I would watch it again as soon as I could lay my hands on a decent copy in the original language. I forgot about it during a while.
Then, at a time when my feelings where all messed up I remembered about the saga; I dismissed my interest as foolish and naïve; I had spent several weeks doing barely more than watching films in search of whatever it was that eluded me, so it would be no surprise that this, too, was an escape. But nonetheless some of it still crept occasionally in my imagination; at the same time I was aware that the films had been an enormous success, drawing fans all over the world. Being it so I began to think that there had to be a reason for this, that the story must somehow speak to an unconscious craving of the spirit; it made me curious enough as to try to decipher what it might be.
I searched for the films -I was decided to postpone watching until I had the complete saga- and then I remembered that it was based on a novel; so I got the four novels AND the partial draft of Midnight Sun. As the character that interested me the most was Edward and I had a rough idea of the events in Twilight proper, I began reading Midnight Sun. It literally blew my mind as I took in the tangle of feelings that twisted Edward, I felt so identified! Of course, with its 264 pages it was not enough, I needed more; I wasn't much for reading Bella's point of view after having been so thoroughly moved by Edwards cogitations but on the other hand I really, really needed to see how it went on, step by step.
This way I spent about a week immersed in my reading, wanting nothing else than going further into the novels, paying as little attention to everyday matters as I could without letting my surroundings collapse, forgetting sometimes even to eat (those who know me will fully understand what this amounts to).
When I was done with the four and a half novels I had to begin again; I didn't seem able to set aside the world of Edward Cullen and his freaky, wonderful family. I was undoubtedly disturbed by this, it didn't seem at all normal to be in such a trance by a teenager-oriented novel or collection of novels; I loathed myself somewhat. But then I remembered what my motivations had been in the first place and found exactly what I was looking for. All the while I was aware of the intense feelings that accompanied each piece of reading, feelings that arouse from far in the past, from a time when I had experienced precisely those same feelings. Feelings that were so overcoming that I had buried most of them in a hollow chest.
They resurfaced with incredible force making me feel alive again. A sudden surge of creativity swept over my whole being, I felt full of energy -even if I spent the most of it on reading until crazy hours-, I had a couple of significant dreams pointing me in an altogether different direction as the one I had been heading to, I felt an urgent need to write about my feelings, about those emotions and events that had led to my present state; I began to practice again the piano excercises that I had long, long ago tried with the deepest pleasure and where as profoundly forgotten as the emotions that where resurfacing...
And then I knew that the value of Twilight does not lie on the story itself but on the way it expresses and manipulates feelings. The plain story might be construed as a rather shabby description of an abusive relationship; but there is more, much more to it; but the most important contribution of the novel can only be acquired -as far as I conceive it- when one sees it as a description of internal processes, of an eternal struggle between opposing poles, between the forces of nature and of the intellect, all pursuing a higher conscience. With that in view, the human girl might represent the barely conscious everyday mind that tries to blend in all the archaic elements of nature (the sun, the beach, the heat) with the distant elements construed by the intellect (the cold, the overthinking, the restraint), making an unbeatable whole where body, soul and mind are all one.
So, summing up, I am really grateful to the novels and their author for giving me one more chance to rethink my life. Finally, I would like to comment that I found at least one other person that made a similar reading raid, who finished all the four books in a week and had to start again as soon as she finished. Her account is here; she justified her second pass telling herself that she was analyzing the writing technique; I told myself that I was improving my English. But all in all, we seem to have fared quite similarly in that respect ;)

Interleaved alternate futures - 2nd. part

In the previous post I toyed with the idea of imagining an alternate future where I stayed in Buenos Aires instead of moving to Bariloche, trying to figure out what would have happened if I had decided differently. To do this I tried to sum up the state of mind I was in at that time.

In this post I will go on from that point, assuming that I decided against relocating...

“No, I don't want to leave. My mom needs me, my son needs my mom”, would have been the responsible attitude. I still struggled to find a job; I still recoiled at the idea of working at a lawyer's office. I wanted to be an artist; or rather, an artist with scissors, although anything graphical suited me; I wanted to design clothes, I even designed a rather funny looking raincoat, which I obviously was unable to sell. Being this so, relocating to some distant place where there would be apparently more opportunities and also a loose family web as my would be husband suggested didn't seem to be such a bad idea, which is why -among other reasons- in the real world I moved.

If I had instead stayed in Buenos Aires, I would have surely begun to look for jobs in some branch related to my new interests to meet the need of a steady income. I had no experience whatsoever in the clothing industry, so I knew that at most I would only be able to get beginner's jobs at any workshop; and even those wouldn't be guaranteed, since there were many people more suited to them and more in need than I was.

Working as independent designer was out of the question, I knew no one in the industry and even if my designs where sellable -which they were not by a long shot-, nobody would have known; getting past those limitations would mean a great deal of time and investment, which at that time I couldn't afford. So maybe I would be able to get some job at a factory --ew-- and from there on get trained and eventually go to design. Not very realistic, it seemed... Better start looking another direction.

Would I have been strong enough to go through what made me happy but was really hard to do? I don't believe so; but let's suppose for a moment that I was. I wanted badly to go artistic. Designing clothes would be one possibility; designing theater clothing would rank first place in my list. After being shown that there existed something like costume design by a talk held by Roberto Oswald & Anibal Lapiz for the Graphical Design students -at that time a branch from the Architecture Faculty- explaining their respective jobs as scenographer and costume designer for the Teatro Colon opera theater, I liked to picture myself as an apprentice at its costume workshop, led by Mr. Lapiz himself. I still remember how the talk made me feel, it sent my heart thudding as if I were flying! The apprenticeship thing would mean no money and a lot of work but would have as an advantage that I would be swirling around so many fascinating materials – leather, plastic, an unbelievable amount of fancy cloth and designs and whatever Mr. Lapiz might come across!

I was deeply moved by the possibilities luring in that talk, feeling immediately that it was what I most wanted to do for a living. It's a pity that I never made it to the end with that student year nor tried earnestly to apply for an apprenticeship, it might have changed things...

Had I held my own then, things might have fared differently. But it was no easy thing to do. That must have been around 1986, the last year I worked at the Senate. I was getting more and more anxious about my next job; I was pretty sure that one wouldn't last past the end of the year and that I also didn't want to have much to do with politics (this seems to be a repetitive pattern, I'd say: trying to push myself off government affairs but at the same time being attracted to them like they were a magnet, as noted previously....)

Anyway, returning to that specific point in time... I had decided that failing the apprenticeship thing I had fantasized about I would like to make a living in some field related to visual arts; I had been attending an atelier, and I found I had some talent. That year I had begun the Graphical Design studies. It was not easy to keep up with it, since I still had to take care of my duties at the Senate, which weren't enormously complicated but involved strange working hours, and I wanted to take care of my son, too, who at the time was barely 3 years old; sometimes also of my mother, who was aging and not too healthy; on top of it all I didn't want to leave my Aikido practice...

Would I have been able to do it? Mmmmm, it's rather tricky to imagine the situation... Usually my fellow students got on my nerves - “I can't stand it any more, these barely-out-of-school teenagers!” -I was 31 at the time- was a recurrent resentful thought as I tried to complete my assignments in the first of our introductory courses. Remembering that I had so little time left over and that I didn't particularly like drawing squares, they really irritated me with their babbling and petty tensions that led nowhere. It was rather difficult to grasp exactly what was expected from us, why we should repeat once and again squares and rhomboids and triangles and figure thousands of different graphic textures – I wanted to paint!! Well, in fact the reason of the assignments was quite obvious, but still I rejected them.

The teacher wasn't very helpful either, she gave the assignments without much explaining nor giving us other material to compare. “I will stand it, I will make it to the end”, I repeated myself every time I lost my patience; as it turned out, I could not manage it. What if I had been able to put away all the non-essentials that bothered me so much and made it through that course?

It would be fairly reasonable to expect that I would limit my different activities somehow, not without feeling some guilt; for instance, as my distant possibilities at making my job at the Senate permanent steadily fade away, I would try to have a more normal schedule at work instead of the one from 8:00 a.m to 11:00 pm with breaks I had been doing up to then; maybe I would also try to content myself with doing just what was specifically asked for without trying to give much more. It would also be necessary to quit my Aikido practice or at least diminish a lot the time I devoted to it, since the assignments would become increasingly demanding; if I could make it through the whole of the 1^st year introductory courses I would be well on my way to start studying the real thing – or so I should believe.

Although I would try to be accepted at the theater costume workshop, I can hardly imagine that it would be possible. But on the other hand I figure that if I managed to get through the whole introductory course at Graphical Design it would have given me some skills to use in order to look for a new job, probably in graphical advertising. I would have begun my search even before the end of the term, throwing CVs onto the prospective employers' desks. I would have to be extremely careful to hide some of my skills, since nobody wanted overly competent employees; as it has been and to some extent still is the norm, businesses want people with just enough skills to fulfill their duties, disregarding those with additional abilities. It might be okay to state that I could communicate both in English and German as well as my native Spanish, may be it would be also okay to hint at my most basic Japanese skills; but it would definitely be out of the question to state that I was a graduated lawyer. Would the fact that I was a mother of a three year old infant be a hindrance? Surely. But on the other hand, serious employers would be required to know in order to comply with the laws governing labor relations. Well, I would deal with that when I had to...

(next installment: Exploring new job possibilities)

Interleaved alternate futures

Presently I am a middle-aged jobless lawyer, living in a relatively small city in the South Cone, struggling to make a living with my private practice. Until recently I was working as counselor for some lawmakers and before that I was attorney and counselor for the city government, comprising all in all a time span of about nine years. And before that I worked for a union for several years. Never quite letting my private practice get a real start.
 My children, now between 20 and 30, aren't quite happy about my career choices. They have suffered the most, as money never flowed well into our home; since my divorce I have been struggling to support us the best I could think of, and in fact they did great: all finished high-school, learned languages and some other skills and they could live through their childhood without much thinking about it; but they resent the fact that there never was enough money to do fancy holidays or to buy us a house, o even a new car. One of them even resents the fact that I've moved to such a small city...
 Well, that got me thinking, what would my life have been like, hadn't I left the big city? Would I have been happier? More proficient in anything? More able to make money? I really doubt it, for a long time I held the feeling that, had I continued living in the capital, a car crash o some other likely accident would have killed me, since my soul was almost completely outside my body; considering that barely a month and a half since my arrival in Bariloche I almost got burned up, that feeling seems not to have been much far-fetched. I cannot be sure, of course; nobody knows what “would have happened if”, only what really happened is certain.
But nonetheless it might still be an interesting exercise, to spun other possible futures, trying to see how things would have developed if certain decisions had been different. So I feel I owe myself some thinking on it, starting from the most significant turning point, that is, my decision to move to Bariloche. Maybe I begin to intermix English and Spanish, I don't even know why I chose English now – maybe to detach myself enough as to be able to think other possibilities? Or would it be that my Spanish is too tainted by legalese that I can't write in a normal, colloquial style anymore? I don't know, let's see what comes out of this.

I'm not moving
How do you begin imagining other possible future? Most probably by bringing to your memory the events immediately surrounding the one you are not going to let be.
So maybe it helps to remember why I moved, why I was eager to relocate to Bariloche. I had recently, lost my job. A good job, with good pay, at the Legislative Branch; but it didn't make me happy, there were too many downsides to it, I didn't feel like making a political career and abiding by the intricacies and obscurities of political negotiation. So I dind't try to get it back, which might have been possible if I weren't so intent on being myself. (Maybe this would make another interesting turning point, and the question arises again, if a political career is that much not being myself...).
I began looking for other things to do. Beginner's work at some lawyer's office did not seem something suitable, most of the available posts required extended work hours, a considerable investment on bar fees and offered a very poor pay in exchange. As it would be the norm afterwards in the real future, I looked fervently for ways not to put my lawyer qualification to use. By that time I met the man who would eventually be my husband in the real future, and together we did some Shiatsu and distributed new age music. He had family in Bariloche and I wanted badly to move away from the hot and wet weather in Buenos Aires; I guess I wanted also to move away from some painful memories that I didn't seem to be able to get over, and away, away from my longing for Japan. It had been almost five years since I returned, but I missed everything Japanese so much that I wasn't even able to breathe without longing for the smells I had been immersed in for about a year. So many awkward feelings overwhelmed me during those five years! Like feeling that crossing the next street I would appear on some specific spot in Tokyo, or feeling I saw and heard some friend from overseas; all in all it was like living with one half of my body in Buenos Aires and the other half across the divide; or rather, more accurately, having my body in the present city and my soul in Japan; I never got to reunite both at that time; all the while I pictured myself standing across a rift, one leg on each side, hopelessly wishing to jump to the one side I felt my home. In many ways, my return from Japan left me in a much worse state than the broken love before the trip; at least, soon after it became apparent that my love project wasn't having any future, I had the stamina to think about journeying to Japan all by myself – not that I didn't suffer the loss while there, the leaking hole was there, but it somehow didn't engulf my whole being and I was able to enjoy life, too.
Things being so, I was more than happy to relocate to a remote place in the South, where summers where not humid and snow fell in winter; a place with woods surrounding it, where nature was a real presence. But things didn't turn out that well in the South, either. What if....? How would things have turned out if I'd stayed? To figure this out, it's important to remember that my mood was awful at that time, that I had no balance, I had lost my center...

(... to be continued...)