SAUDADE: A Sort of Home-Coming

by free agent .rez

i originally sent this to someone who pointed out that they had seen more of me from my eyes than i had ever volunteered. this was a piece of autobiographical prose which i wrote 2 years ago. i used to do a fair amount of strictly autobiographical writing, in fact. just because i no longer do doesn't mean i can't share what i've already done. this is a gift for all of you.

some reading tips: in order for my effect to [hopefully] work it has to be read straight through in one sitting [it's only 250 lines..]. it has to get a chance to congeal and "hit," as it were. if it works at all, that's the only way it will. don't comment on it, especially while reading it; try to just ingest it and react to it later.

i hope this isn't too self-indulgent. the whole reason i STOPPED doing autology was, in fact, that it felt self-indulgent. this is a gift. and remember that this is 2 fucking years old [with minimal re-drafting as i typed it in yesterday]. -- .rez, 1/94

"Memories crash on tireless waves"
-- Peter Gabriel

The sand is an ocean of black, with eddies of foaming beige.

Outside my ears, the rush [of blood?] is barely registered. Black sand. With pooling beige. I have never seen anything like it before, and from a distance the sand compells approach.

The cooling earth gets tired of staying where it is, the cooling earth is still too hot to be in one place at once. And there must come a time when the fear of birth [or death] clicks into balance with the need to alleviate the pain of containment and PHLOOOSH! Red and molten flesh is spilling forth, cooling and hardening into frozen clouds even as it forces the surface.

And much much more is already rushing out, spilling across the encrusted back of its early attempts; eventually some even makes it over the hump, above the waves; it is congealing even as more is sprawling forth, spilling into what it will soon find a way to NAME, as if some solace or leverage is gained there-by. Life will, one way or another, Know this plenum as OCEAN. And, in NAMING it, the world's processes doom themselves to spearation. LAVA. PUMICE. ROCK. Frozen motion. A semi-silent child, barely breathing, but certainly not as aborted as that-part-of-Mother-which-NAMES takes comfort in believing.

Island.

I don't believe a baby is truly born until it is conned into breathing by a slap from the delivering doctor.

So how were babies born before doctors? Who slapped them?

If one is so inclined, the strange disorientation inherent in simply /being/ in an utterly New place can be blamed for the impression of acting within a dream.

As if I had conjured it out of my sleep, awakened parts of myself which I did not know existed and allowed them to roam my mind for a period of two seconds minutes hours days weeks years lifetimes.

Two lifetimes. Perhaps that comes the closest. Before and After shots. The REALIZATION that my presence in that position of time and space represents a culmination which is to be the only moment of life still retaining vitality. Of course, both before and after, I have felt this presence time and again, and it has the peculiar property of becoming more and more intense as time buries its overwhelming details under layers of obscurity and distance. My mind is churning and seething constantly, and I cannot separate the water from the rock from the googly little living things fromt he motion of the whole.

I know a word for this feeling. It is a feeling which is definitely distinct from its similar fellows dispersed throughout the world's languages. The feeling of a sort of home-coming, of the sadness of joy. Instantaneous nostalgia. When you are so overwhelmed by the unbelieveable PRESENCE of an event [in time and space] that all of those emotions collapse into the perhaps premature realization that it will eventually be only a feeling. A moment of bliss which is aware of its own transcience. It happens in the present, echoing both past and future.

The portuguese word is saudade.

On June 1, 1991, an airplane carrying my self, my mother, and my aunt is taking off from the runway of Logan International Airport in Boston, Massachussetts. Many miles away, in an unimportant villiage on an unimportant island in the waters of the Atlantic, three women sit talking in a summer-kitchen. They are merely ruminating, mulling over Old Times like a tatterred quilt. For the first time in years they are speaking of the 20-year-ago husband and wife couple who used to live in the little clay house above the rise. The translation of the statement in question would run something like: "ahh. I'll never see senora Carmen again." The youngest, the Daughter in her 30's, speaks this to mother and mother's mother.

Grandmother gets a cold rush of goose-bumps as my stomach rises with the air-borne inertia of a zooming vessel

Zooming, zooming, zooming in on and over the finest details, frantic tranquility in the most beautiful place I've ever seen.

Brambles of green and brown, splotches of red like fires in the distance; and these woven together into a lattice-work of such chaotic intricacy and texture that it takes the stoic biological undergrowth of years to form them.

The Jardim, a garden, a most beautiful walking garden, with details beyond words and even experience, sits in the midst of the town called Angra do Heroismo, capital "city" on the island of Terciera, one of the Azores islands, about 700 miles off of the coast of portugal. I am ALIVE and I am rushing up to the top of the hill so that I don't miss anything.

I'm singing to myself, absently [so it would seem], a Joe Raposo song from Sesame Street:

It's a long hard climb, but I'm a'gonna git there..
It's a long hard climb, but I'm a'gonna git there..
It's a long hard climb, but I'm a'gonna git there,
YEAH!!!
I'm climbing to the mornin' sun!

My mind is consumed by saudade, my motion consumed with the attempt to swirl the feeling into waves of experience. But what do they crash AGAINST? Does the new crash against the old, or the old against the new? Roots above, branches below.

The details I /missed/ during that initial climb would only be intuited when I reached the monument at the top and looked out across the town, red roofs enclosing the little movements along white-washed mortar walls as trees do the grass beneath.

At the time, I couldn't help but have the vague impression that I was conducting my thoughts, shaping them into cohesive forms. As a conductor does with an orchestra or electricity, so I was conducting the currents of impression and memory and intuition into a vast and whole movement.

I still am, of course. I'm just much more aware that I'm doing it. So much so, in fact, that I sometimes lose track of that shivering seed of PRESENCE which, at that moment on that hill, washed up and over and around me so that I wondered if the sea, a mile away, truly ceased its motions at the shore.

My mother and I found, through a chain of synchronicity which I couldn't begin to relay without throwing the cooks out with the soup, the family which had lived down the hill whileo my father was in the air force on that island with my pregnant mother. Daughter, mother, mother's mother. I took pictures, at mother's request. *FLASH* A moment. Before and After shots. Like a single tear, drawn up from under, formed by forces beyond our comprehension into a liquid snap-shot, falling to the volchanic pebble street below. Splash. It all returns to the same source anyway.
The vines are fed on sun and rain, and yield to their picker grapes and past-time. Senhor Brum, family winer. He can place them in a huge cask, and they will sit and stew in their own slow dissolution and eventually a glass bottle will be the place to go. But the liquid yet remains unready. Time and dust? Is that all that's needed? Time, dust, and /opportunity/, perhaps; so that you don't even know it was time for the wine to be Opened until you're half-way through it? Well, in this pure state, one had better have a very good reason to Plan Ahead, to force synchronicity.
In 1981, the earth shakes as the volcanoes which serve as the island's womb remind the little lobsters that there is no such thign as menopause. White-washed walls crack and split, fragile structures strain against the crude glues of man in favor of more universal forms of chaos. Angra do Heroismo, suffering the bulk of the damage, is declared a Historical Momument. Restorations begin immediately. It is one of the last Renaissance cities on the planet, and dwells on an island of life, an impossible speck. A beautiful place to be born, a beautiful place to return to night.
I am in a darkness which I do not recall. The forces around me overwhelm, and I want only to escape, I want only for it to end. It ends in brilliant red light, staggerred with white veins of pain. SLAP! Tears of sorrow, tears of joy. It's all the same thing; every scream of birth foreshadows impending earthquakes.
"I do not deserve to have been born here." But even /this/ fear is eased by the town's continual lullaby. "Here you are. Orient yourself to your surroundings and make a cut, any direction, Do As You Will."

And with the sounds of an awakening evening, I walk along the stone-by-stone lattice of walkway up the hill towards the little courtyard coffee-shop. Mutterings echo softly about the settling air, too familiar to be nonsense, too vague to be interpretable. I would sometimes project my own dialogues into the portuguese murmers, but they would always stray, losing any believeability in the network of fascinated wonderings which my mind would eventually fall into.

Past the towering church, one of three in a five-block area. Up and past the street-corners, the shop-keepers sweeping out front to the echoes of distant birds and solitary cars. White-washed walls bathing in the orange glow of a not-so-distant star.

When there's so much constant saudade, it takes quite a slap to begin breathing. How many details were lost in the movement of emotions and forms? How many were taken in and added to the unconscious blueprint which shapes at least 75% of what is There? It takes a minor miracle to get a handle on magnitude.

Is it possible to get so close that you miss the details? And what other form of close-ness is necessary to jar the mind back into wonder?

I approached the sand because I wanted to see the details. The rushing returns to my mind, and for a few bewildering moments I look up at the towering and absurdly monstrous craggs of crystalline rock as though they are to Blame, or as though they are not. It is sometimes impossible to distinguish between the two sentiments.

Why? How could those silent black sponges be any part of the fury of sound coming from just beyond them? How could the watery fury beyond have anything to do with the crystallization of metamorphasis squatting silently and serenely [if serenity is possible of something lent form by such tides of chaos] on all sides?

At this, a sudden gellification of PRESENCE in my mind's motion yanks my vision to the ground.

Gestalt Psychology, of course, has Ways of explaining these sudden impressions. When you walk towards, for instance, a Red Car, there comes a point in your approach when the entire environment clues you in to the fact that it is, indeed, a Red Car you're seeing and not simply a Colored Blob. This point has less to do with distance than you think. Because, of course, /after/ you've "Seen" that it's a Red Car, you can back away, far past the vague location where you "Saw" the Car, and it stays a Car. It does not revert back into a Colored Blob. Because that gellification point, that snap-shot, is /not/ a location; it's an event within the framework of time and memory.
WHAM! Towering pumice and black sand. WHAM! A wave against the shore. WHAM! Bits of rock, formerly part of a One, return to water and again settle into a different stasis. The water drains from its loose matrix, and black textures remain.

But what then of the beige Details, the googly ble'dble'dble'dble'dble's which riddle the black structure?

Closer -- the rushing of waves to meet the shore. Closer -- the thrust of water carrying its weight against its birthstones. Closer -- and helplessly swept up within the water's flood? Alive, alone, biologically protected against almost anything but this -- secreted shell, immainence. I feel a crick in my skinny bones as stumbling brings me to my knees. WHAM! A wave against the shore.

The sand is an ocean of black, with eddies of foaming beige.

I could walk a million miles backwards, across the ocean's "surface," and the Googly Details would never fade from my sight.

The sand is breathing, and there is no such thing as dead. Just a sort of home-coming, locked into the structures of process.

That place does not exist any longer. Geographic locatability does /not/ ensure PRESENCE. /Only/ the mind can do that, gellify what it sees into a Here&Now, through processes which make Places bland impossibilities. There are only Events, and the persistence of vision which forms all experience once it's passed into memory.

I wouldn't want to go back there, anyway. Sour grapes make the sweetest wine, and the vintagefrom Brum's family winery will not be ready to drink until June 11th, 1995; my twenty-third birthday, when I will sit in the Jardim and raise a toast to absent friends.

Believe me, I would have shared my reasons with the whispering sand if they weren't already embedded in its ancient shapes.