Since I quit drinking alcohol and smoking pot or tobacco to avoid running out of steam and finish sentences skidding at the top of the gravel voice, my journaling has regained the life it once had, which is a pleasant surprise and a valuable benefit. When I did thick spirals of smoke, my quiet thoughts were lost forever. Or worse, if possible, from the deep buzz only reached to the edge of awareness such bland trifles as "I smoke. And I draw the leak from my breath." Of course, with that trivialities, I missed out on the precious foam of the days and the hours that shape fiction in all its forms. Now, the only thing left for me is to read between the lines, to find out what I deliberately omitted because there is always more in what is quiet than in what is said.
Before presbyopia and those bad habits took their toll on me, I wrote both correspondence and journals by hand, allowing myself be carried away fearlessly by the stream of consciousness, listening intently to the graze of the nib on the paper, as if someone were riding the waves with the intense fury and spontaneous imagination of a runaway horse.
Unlike the great authors whose calligraphy is sheer shorthand, mine was so affected that frills became psychedelic a bit out of my control, a reflection of the sensuality that overcame me, the secrets and whispers of dangerous writing. Kundera rightly said that youth was the quintessential lyrical age.
So, one day, I stopped writing by hand. The combative Japanese pen became a sort of Excalibur, the sword in the rock, waiting for the return of the true king. There was an old correspondent who complained bitterly and who, after much begging, managed to convince me to go back to paper and ink. But I felt a bit ridiculous feigning the frills that once effortlessly came out of me. It was like forging the signature of someone who wasn't me. And of course, from the carnality that overcame me, I only have the deep relief of not waking up every morning with that irritated cobra looking for trouble while it hisses the music of the blood.
All of which brings me to the gastronomic dichotomy that I intend to deal with.
On the one hand, I present a raw piece of fish with a strong odor and a sticky texture. However, marinated beforehand and seasoned with dill and juniper berries, it is as appetizing as, say, that marvelous salmon I ate in Bergen, Norway, day in and day out.
On the other hand, the same piece of fish, since in Norway salmon is not farmed but a national treasure, which, for a change, I also learned to make between fjords while listening to Edvard Grieg in a log cabin, always with a stopwatch in hand, using a bamboo steamer basket seasoned with ginger, leeks, and butter sauce.
The first is the dictatorship of pleasure, and the second is perpetual frigidity. Apologies for this perverse logomachy, but it’s crucial to manage the dosed thought so as not to frighten away members of the audience from the outset.
OK now, let's get down to business.
To go through the rocky lyrical age, one needed bold authors like Henry Miller, who wiped their asses with the censorship laws of their time and didn’t mince words. Like so many other readers, I had a great time with Tropic of Cancer. Bored with implied and unnecessary complexities and debatable meanders, reading with no-holds-barred of any kind was quite refreshing, to say the least. What would have happened if Gustave Flaubert hadn’t held back narrating the same vicissitudes in Madame Bovary? Why didn’t he do it in his heyday?
The answer is somewhat disappointing. No publisher would have dared to publish it, not for lack of courage, but because in Flaubert's time, there were laws that restricted the freedom of creation under the pretext of obscenity. In fact, the poor b*****d had to face a trial for morality and decency simply for daring to write on the subject of adultery in 1856.
Henry Miller had to endure nearly two decades of censorship before his work was finally published in America, once the outdated censorship laws were repealed. On the other hand, Gustave Flaubert had to witness his sexual fantasies being confined to the private realm, specifically his correspondence with his lover, Louise Colet.
It’s hard for me to grasp how we’ve transitioned from raw fish to steamed fish in such a short span, considering all the reasons explained earlier and right after the Golden Age of Porn. I know that, at the end of the day, it’s just sex, and our sexual habits are largely anecdotal and private. But we are back to a new era of sexual repression, where misguided Western countries tolerate Gender Apartheid, and women walk in public covered with burkas, chadors, and hijabs, akin to second-class citizens, under the foreboding threat of their male partners, families, and Salafist imams. Patriarchy at its best!
The French-Lebanese filmmaker and writer Audrey Diwan, who has dared to film a remake of the classic of the 70s Emmanuelle, made some public utterances to which I felt personally alluded, perhaps because in writing I feel sometimes slamming into the same wall.
She said, "Regarding pleasure, I think we're not so interested in sex anymore. We are not interested in touching each other. Even for my generation, despite AIDS in the 80s, sex was very important. Despite the risk, the attraction was still there. Now I'm not saying it's gone, but it's completely different, and it's something I've tried to understand. What's going on? I have realized that the way we look at each other is in a very critical way, like scoring each other. It's not easy, because we are subject to people's eyes, but most of the time it's to like or dislike, and so it's very difficult to leave room for desire if that's the way we look at ourselves. I have found myself with a lot of loneliness and I have tried to portray it in this film." End of quote
Not trying to be funny, but I think dentists and cosmetic surgeons are the sole guilds who benefit from this hypercritical way of scoring at each other with a magnifying glass, looking by default for imperfections and losing along the way, almost irrevocably, the desire to eat fish, thinking that perhaps a worm will enter our brains if we do not cook it thoroughly first.