Not fair that individual people can have such huge effects on me. I guess there's nothing to do but choose carefully who I associate with.

Where's my tiger?

A friend posted this on facebook, tagging it as being from beatonna.livejournal.com

Back in the parlor

One of my classes actually assigns me books that are short enough to be read in the time that I have available to devote to them-- this is of course a huge advantage for everyone involved.





Recently we read Salon de Belleza, which is one of those books that upon finishing you immediately want to read again. What struck me most about it was how it cut right to the bone without really being aimed at my particular bones to begin with. By all rights I really shouldn't relate to the storyline at all, but the way that it's written and the points of life that it brings out really resound with me and unify me with the communities represented.





The book is about a man whose beauty salon has become a moridero, which basically means 'place to die', for men in the final stages of a disease (presumably AIDS). The treatment of life and death, isolation and community, repression and resistance is truly compelling. One scene in particular strikes me as encapsulating the whole novel:

The narrator has set up all of these fish tanks in his salon so that he women
can come out feeling rejuvenated, as if they've just stepped fresh from a pond.
As the moridero fills up and guests die, he becomes frustrated with the fish
that die for no reason and he doesn't have time to care for the other tanks
properly. At one point he stares at a tank completely clouded with algae,
such that he has no idea how many fish are in the tank, and imagines it as this
primordial habitat brimming with life. He puts his face to the surface of
the water, inhaling the air and the oxygen emanating from the algae, and
imagines himself filling with the essence of that life.

I don't know if I explain it well here, but the solitude and the yearning to be filled with life (youth, health, energy, all that) is really striking. Trust me...?

Sort of makes me wonder about what I can really gain from reading about people I don't understand (but then who do I really understand in the first place?), a similar feeling I get when I read Invisible Man; the authors seem to be referring to people who don't understand them or who are outside their part of reality, but for some reason I feel like that's not me? How can that be a good rhetorical mechanism? I suppose it makes you not want to be 'one of them' but rather 'one of us', but that doesn't change your mindset. In fact it's almost more dangerous because it makes you seem like you don't need to-- after all, you're already included, right?

So far it seems like the only answer is to keep "reading" in an effort to understand.