My Harvard Stuffs… by Jaime García Pulido

100 white candles: he is the oldest poet of this world. The youngest librarian ever, working from 9 to 7, monday to sunday. Once upon a time, he set up the City Lights Bookstore to publish and promote the Beatnik Generation. Gingsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs and Corso are poets because of him. Self-service dead poets society. The old Lawrence (New York, 24th march 1919) is the last survivor of this bizarre gang. San Francisco wouldn`t be S.F. without all of their scandals. America wouldn`t be America without their amendment to The Constitution. Simple as that.

100 black candles: he is the oldest demon of this movement, made up of free verses, flammable flags and human rights fights. However, he is an angel smiling, when he speaks about his new novel Little Boy. This is supposed to be an autobiographical book. His golden memories in the land of the Golden Gate Park. He stopped smoking weed, as a matter of fact. In the meantime, he sells books, speaks about books, reorders books on the shelves, has lunch with spaguetti… The Millennials and the Microchip Generation are their customers. 

Long live The Poet & Librarian, to coin the expression!

100 red candles, now you know why.

Making love with a blonde braided-black-woman on a white-grand-piano, in the light of four-red-candles of celta enchantment, just in the time of a Mazurka in G minor by Chopin. 

Laughing boost the spiritual system, burns calories and reduces stress hormones, making it a celestial activity, other than corporal. When a pretty woman smiles, the whole hell, the whole heaven smiles with her. A woman lost in the forest has the power to domesticate a  gang of monkeys with a single smile. If you don`t believe so, ask this stuff to the portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Or Madonna or Teresa of Calcutta, whoever. Actually, you can´t kill yourself by singing along with Louis Amstrong, the fat folk of the black and white smile:  

When you’re smilin’, when you’re smilin’
The whole world smiles with you
When you’re laughin’, oh when you’re laughin’
The whole world smiles with you.

Every time I enter or leave a library, always remember a suggestive quote by Bella Barthust: you can tell a lot of people by the kind of books they steal. This sentence could be used by a good attorney, during the Final Judgement Day. Thousand of souls would touch the heaven, along with the good attorney and his whole family.

Reading and writing demand talent for seclusion. You must catch your breath and drink a cup of coffee. In these two tasks, as well as in love, you must have enough courage to give yourself prison, you must have enough guts to risk yourself with restricted visits. Vivian Ward is a completely different storie.

Suddenly, I was bullyed by some classmate. She is a young, talented, inteligent english teacher of a public school. I was speaking about the influence of Shakespeare in Whitman. As the woman started to move her face in a negative way, the teacher Gillian Osborne asked me to explain my statement. Her face had changed. It looked like made of uncolourful marble. It took me a long time to take a deep breath and begin again. The entire class was waiting for an answer. The young, talented, inteligent english teacher was at the point to laugh out loud.

I spoke about the love of Whitman for the opera and the theather. I spoke about the way Robin Williams recites Whitman´s verses in a shakespearean style. I just forgot the name of the film. I also spoke about the way the poet used to carry something in his pockets. Those papers were not bills. Those papers were not pieces of the Daily Eagle. They were The Sonnets broken into pieces. He used to read them, like learning every verse at heart. Later on, the new yorker poet recognized it publicly.

I had noticed I was the only man in a group of wise women. They were looking at me. My voice was at the point to break down, my hands were sweating. In the end, I did not speak, but my pocket memory. In my own, trembling words, I quoted this sentence: “If I had not stood before those poems with uncover’d head, fully aware of their colossal grandeur and beauty of form and spirit, I could not have written ‘Leaves of Grass'” (Prose Works 2:721). Finally, Gillian Osborne smiled. The most pretty smile ever. After class, I went directly to the Irish Pub to drink beer until I fall drunk.  Certainly, I am south american, my surname is not american or english, but I have been reading poetry all my life long. Poetry is poetry, regardless of the language in which its demons are invoked. The rest is literature.

SCENE 1. MORNING.

Centenars of tourists rub the famously shiny foot of John Harvard statue. They smile, looking at the cámara for a couple of eternal seconds. Teens rub that foot, parents rub that foot. According to legend they will come back, sooner or later. This is how they pay tribute to the American Dream. As they leave with tears in their eyes, someone is smiling around. They will die in peace with the fairies and gnomes of higher education. This happens under the sunlight, here, in this remarkable place of my university.

SCENE 2. NIGHT.

Dozens of male Harvard students pee on the statue in spite of its significance. Urinating on the monument is a pristine attempt at self-affirmation. It says: “Not only do I am in Harvard, but I pee my warm, glorious, golden water on its abdomen, leg and foot as well.” According to legend some drunk girls pee on John.

SCENE 3. DAY AND NIGHT.

John Harvard’s stern gaze tells us he is a just bit tired. The clicks of the flashbulbs are not too much, but the smell of urine is too much for a statue committed to inspire profound emotions in many generations. He urgently asks to leave this monument. Nobody listens to silence. The golden, glorious, light green statue is here to stay. I write this looking for a bathroom.

The itineraries of the cats are divided, as they advance or retreat. They are not like other animals, who live a single existence with no other possibilities, not to mention the helpless humans. Cats need to go further, to risk, to play scratching their faces in mirrors, and suffering other deaths, many others, like theirs. Every time an old maid dies her cat survives. The kitten tells the gossip to the ghosts of the opposite sex, assuring her passage to the next life.

¡The dashes in Emily Dickinson! Actually they are rivers of ink, a bunch of common places in the voice of critics. Perhaps, we must look for aesthetic reasons, given the fact that ethical, rational reasons are exhausted. It is also said that she used these dashes in the writing of her recipes. It is not a part of an equation, a sort of whim, but something normal for her. At first, she developed it as a tool, given the fact that words were incapable to achieve her objective. The way she lived and wrote was needing some particular slant at writing, to sublime herself, to add a particular visual effect.

Time went on, in the garden. The art of pressed flowers moved to the blank page. As she was looking for a certain enigma, as she could not touch it with her fingertips, she decided to illustrate it in the verse. As a result, they look much more than dashes. In every poem, she assembled, dash by dash, some veils. These veils can cover, and, at the same time, reveal. They can be compare, in a certain sense, with the sfumatto used by Leonardo in his paintings. That technique consists of adding delicate veils, layer by layer, pretending to dilute the edges, to blur the contours… The result is real and surreal, at the same time. It is not a joke to state that Dickinson is a master of ambiguity. These dashes are part of her personal, poetic recipe…

They are widely connotative. These dashes are primarily mistic. Then, they are lustful. They are fleshy. They are not supposed to mean, but to evoke. They don’t depend on the meaning of every verse. They are call to sublimate the page, in the very eyes of the reader, adding a new ending to the end. This is why I consider every dash is pictorial, in addition to musical. In this point, it is fair to say that Emily Dickinson is a painter, a draftswoman for poets, just as Leonardo is a poet for painters.