Friday, May 26, 2017
Puerto Rican in New York, Uprooted and rebellious
HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF – THE AVIGATOR – 2017
Porto Rican
and yet New Yorker. She lives in the City and no other city than the City. And
that urban music, those urban lyrics have the power of suffering, death at
every corner, surviving as a daily activity, solitude as both a life style and a curse that leads to a death
pyre but is yet the fuel of survival. Add to this the feeling that a colonized
person from a colonized people uprooted out of everything to survive in a
foreign environment that is no choice but a real curse then the experiential
existence you may have is going to be more situational than enthusing. But you
have to be ready for the world except if you prefer dying.
And in that
uprooted life there are few things and people that can keep you alive. The
bottle of course and you are always at the bottom of it, and a sugar daddy that
can provide with some solace but even these daddies are not eternal and then
from the bottom to the well there is a well tramped path that can only not be
trodden if somewhere you believe you may have a life to save. Your life?
Indeed, and yet that’s nothing but salvaging. The world is a salvage yard for
old models of human beings discarded like old rags.
And that rag
is the rag of a rag doll, of a rag girl that has gone and yet comes back,
unchanged and nevertheless totally locked up in that nothing that’s gonna
change that girl, and yet that simple rag accepts to be picked by some man and
she accepts to be the love object, the love rag of that man who has no other
identity than “you” but who is that “you”?
And to
think of tomorrow and what will or may happen is like living in a dream, like
locking oneself in a dream while real life is nothing but perdition,
abandonment and suffering. But why do people need some solace from a dream of
tomorrow, always tomorrow? Because life is always a trip along some road and
you have to follow that road the navigator points out to you. What a shame we
cannot go wherever we want, but just where the navigator tells you to go.
And if you
get out of the hands of that navigator you can walk in the street and everyone
around you will be the navigators of your life and they will of course tell
lies because navigators are liars, people are liars, and you can only let
yourself be taken over up and down and through by fake prayers on your knees as
if the world would change because you pray for it to.
And she can
only live the haunting curse of being a woman in a world she pretends was made
by men, which is at least unfair and vastly untrue. Railroads, records,
phonograph needles, and what else, who cares, never mind. And even those who do
nothing and produce nothing, politicians and cops, are the real masters of this
world and they all are men by definition, I guess especially when they are women.
There is nothing more manly than a woman who wants to be a man. And she has
only fighting as the end of this beginning that will lead to more ends and more
ends, till the end of that end.
In the old
neighborhoods of New York City fourteen floors are many though little to do
with skyscrapers. And yet she sees these fourteen floors as if they were the
fourteen steps to heaven in the sky. And strangely enough these fourteen floors
are some kind of bridge to her father, but a father that is nothing but a ghost
in the background. Sky, lie and cry all rhyme nicely. You can be up in the sky
lying on some cloud and yet all that is nothing but lying and crying. True life
is in the distance speaking Spanish and playing rhythmic percussions.
And imagine
her at night in this room on the fourteenth floor listening to the street. She
is like in a bubble up in the air with some kind of noise from the bottom. And
she has finally decided to settle in that bubble. And bubble it is in the sky
and then settling is fine but it is evanescent, it cannot last, she wonders how
long she will settle. In America, this country of settlers, you cannot stay
more than a short time in every settled place because you are a settler that
has to go on and settle somewhere else any time settling is getting slightly too
long.
To want, to
wish, to desire to be something, anything, provided it is something, is just
nothing at all and leads nowhere because you have lost your humanity in that
constant searching and looking for something. And she is there waiting for that
door to open, that road to lead somewhere, her feet to take her along to
something she could come to. To what some preaching from Puerto Rico. And there
is nothing left but some howling in the desert of this aimless world, Pa’lante
Please, Pa’lante again and again. But what is it? In Latin American and especially Puerto
Rican slang, it's a contraction of "para adelante" or
"forward."
But what is that call to move forward, forward
to what? But she is preaching to all those who hide, prideless in their
survival to stand up and move forward, but forward to where, to what, since she
does not know where to go.
And that’s the end of this improbable
journey to an improbable goal with an improbable navigator that does not even
know where the road leads. There is in that music some kind of sad aimlessness.
And that’s its charm because today to feel emotion and empathy you have to be
lost, uprooted, out of sorts. And off we go with the navigator in some Spanish
and yet so repetitive between the navigator and “oh, my girl!” and nothing but
the final voodoo rhythmic trance percussions that can maybe take us to the sky
on the seventh heaven of totally inward vision and contemplation.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:56 PM 
