Category Archives: Art

Of Cerulean and Cyan and Vermilion Too

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A young man wonders about colors, specifically two, although perhaps three.  He’s been named after one of them, although little of anything concerning the color seems to apply to him.  He wonders what his parents had been thinking when they chose that name for him, and he reflects that he’s never actually been christened, so perhaps the name has not yet been as impactful as his parents had hoped.

He might have elected to study art, but he studied language instead, as had his mother.  His father, a florist, wondered why.  Sometimes he did too.  His mother was pleased though, and his two sisters didn’t seem to have ever considered why he studied what he did, or why his name often seemed so blue.  At first blush theirs seemed a bit more traditional, but that wasn’t quite true.  Hmmm.

Cerulean leans more towards blue than does the more balanced cyan.  And cerulean, although a light variant of blue, is darker than cyan.  Of course, that means that cyan leans more towards green than does cerulean, which just shares green’s echoes and smiles, and perhaps its similes, and that cyan is darker, but not much.

The young man thinks they’re friends, and that perhaps, at one time or another, they’ve been lovers, or perhaps just kissing cousins.  In imperial Byzantium they might have had an awkward relationship, with cerulean angry at cyan’s flirtation with green, but he wonders how they got along in subsequent Muslim caliphates, perhaps in Istanbul?

He wonders how cyan and cerulean feel about azure.  Or how cerulean feels about vermilion, either cyan’s complement or antithesis, depending on perspectives.  Or how vermilion feels about cyan, a complex relationship.  And whether their feelings are reciprocal or complimentary or constant or true, or just passing fancies.

He wonders if his parents had been high when they’d selected his name.  It could have been true, they were free spirits of sorts, floating along life’s byways and sometimes stumbling along a highway or two.  It didn’t matter though.  He loved his name, and he wondered whether he’d ever find its mate, and what she would be like, and whether she’d love her name too.

Cerulean and cyan, and vermilion as well.  Perhaps, in addition to colors, they were places and times in which to lose oneself, or perhaps to find oneself, were one lost.  Like somehow lost quantum paired electrons, or just sundered hearts, or misplaced halves of the same fruit, or rainbows that had lost their colors and now dressed only in shades of grey.

He might have elected to study art, but he studied language instead, as had his mother.  His father, a florist, wondered why.  Sometimes he did too.  His mother was pleased though, and his two sisters didn’t seem to have ever considered why he studied what he did, or why his name often seemed so blue.  At first blush theirs seemed a bit more traditional, but that wasn’t quite true.  Hmmm.

A young man wonders about colors, specifically two, although perhaps three.  He’s been named after one of them, although little of anything concerning the color seems to apply to him.  He wonders what his parents had been thinking when they chose that name for him, and he reflects that he’s never actually been christened, so perhaps the name has not yet been as impactful as his parents had hoped.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Black Listed Gifts

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I was watching the “Black List” last night, “binging” on the latest season available on Netflix, an obvious US propaganda piece as is most of what comes out of Hollywood and its clones (the reality as far back as Woodrow Wilson’s epoch).  But amazingly, in that episode something resonated in a humanistically positive manner. 

Imagine that. 

For some unfathomable reason, I enjoy the program.  Perhaps it’s the acting, especially by James Spader.  And it provides insights into the manner in which US propaganda has culturally conquered much of the world with brazen distortions.  But I rarely find the really useful human element that permits us to better understand ourselves, and improve who we are.  The element essential in great works of art.

I did last night, and it involved a gift, the gift being a very used old portable radio.

Economically, today, I am not well off.  But like most among my current peers, I am living well enough, largely because I became an expatriate of sorts, living in a beautiful albeit affordable place, a beautiful city high in the central range of the Colombian Andes.  Beautiful mountains, snowcapped peaks, thermal springs, perpetual spring, but no oceans or beaches.  A place where social security is a bit more than enough to get by.  But where friends and family are a long way off.

I’ve been much better off, wealthy even, in a past where limousines were not an occasional luxury but a normal tool, where the making of an expensive gift was “no big deal”.  But I’ve also been much less well off than I am now, and it’s that time in my life that resonated with the “Black List” episode I viewed last night.  And it dealt with the character I find least interesting, least credible, most boring: Diego Klattenhoff as agent Donald Ressler.

The resonance involved the realization that the most important gifts I ever made where those that involved something I already owned, something I had to sacrifice under the circumstances of the moment because I lacked the wherewithal to merely “buy something appropriate”.  Usually it was a book, but sometimes a keepsake I’d picked up somewhere or other.  It involved a sacrifice of something for which I really cared, something I’d miss, but which to me, at the time, seemed important to pass on.  I’ve also received gifts like that and last night I realized that I’d not appreciated their worth at the time.  I do now.

In this materialistic and polarized world, one where empathy is hard to generate and harder to find, where a touch of humanity seems a rare thing but is actually omnipresent, hidden in the quotidian, especially in the lives of the least well-off.  Hidden in plain sight amidst the most vulnerable among us.  Hidden among that silent majority where almost everything involves a sacrifice, but where such sacrifices are joyfully made and never regretted, but also, perhaps, as in my case, where such sacrifices are not quite fully appreciated by the recipients.  At least not until it’s much too late to express our gratitude.

It made me think, especially of my mother.  Eventually a single mom who made the best of what I’ve become and accomplished possible without ever stressing the many sacrifices she and the rest of my family had to make, things I just took for granted until she was gone. 

Her case and mine, unfortunately, are not unusual.  Especially today when the generational shift is so bitter, and where too many of the young consider themselves ethically and morally superior, while concurrently entitled, and view their parents and their parent’s generation as out of touch bigots.  A generation that has no idea what the adage “it’s better to give than to receive” means, or worse, that it even exists.  Where giving is something that’s done with the taxes other people pay, and mainly given to industries dedicated to legalized murder on a massive scale, in the name of liberty and peace and equality.

Amazingly, the episode made me think, rather than just react and enjoy the action and the acting.

Talk about finding pearls in a dung heap!
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

A Brief Rant in Support of Kurt Vonnegut’s Warning 62 Years Ago

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Can you imagine a system of quotas in sports because African American stars represent more than 12.8% of all players (12.8% being the African American percentage of the American population), and requiring that talented black athletes be excluded from participation in favor of less talented Caucasians? Latinos (I’m one), represent 18.7% of the United States population; should we be limited to that percentage of roles in athletics, art, politics, journalism, etc. Should any of us be passed over because of racial quotas, or religious quotas, or gender quotas or quotas based on national origin or political perspective.

The quota system, for example, the one now omnipresent in the entertainment industry (and others, e.g., politics, the military and commerce), the quota system now imposed on all of us by Cancel Culture-Identity Politics-“Woke” overseers not only utterly destroys meritocratic quality but is a huge insult to the groups it claims to defend, necessarily implying that they have no merit, artistic or otherwise, without patronizing interference from virtue signaling “moral superiors”.

Kurt Vonnegut warned against the world we now live in in his dystopian 1961 novel, Harrison Bergeron which featured an all-powerful, “handicapper general” whose task it was to impose equality by reducing everyone to a lowest common denominator. Not all minorities are so lacking in self-respect as to accept that premise.

Prejudice is not something that should be tolerated and being deprived of opportunity based on one’s inherent characteristics such as race, gender, nationality, religion or political perspectives is odious and should be rejected, but so should imposition of mediocrity in the name of equality.

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Indigo Dreams

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Lucidity. 

Transcendent in ethereal shades and hues of tenuous verity scented in primordial echoes from both the crystal past and fluid future, elusive memories of primeval music molding our bodies with dances we don’t quite understand but whose impact seems inexplicably profound.

Puppets on strings blowing in eternal winds, motes in infinite kaleidoscopes seeking paths towards illusory heavens; and then, ….

We wake to morning coffee and prophecies almost grasped quickly fade away.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution. Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently a strategic analyst employed by Qest Consulting Group, Inc.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.

The Legend of Will of Clan Wisp

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William was of clan Wisp, hence will-o’-the-wisp became a moniker with which he became associated, albeit long after his passing beyond the veil, although which veil seems hard to tell, in his case, both time and space being malleable.  And it fit. 

He’d been (or was or is) a contrarian, a libertarian, a thinker; here and there and in every case, quickly gone before the Deep State beasties could apprehend him.  Not the hero-type of which Marvel or DC Comics could make hay but then, their purpose was to distract, delay and obfuscate for the benefit of the unnamable, undisclosed masters.  Rather, he was a primordial architype of the kind Joseph Campbell might have been fond, as of course, was Joseph Campbell himself.  An architype that has become exceedingly rare although, of course, it’s always been rare.  He was (and perhaps still is) the perfect blend of his individual and collectivist natures (natures we all share).  Kind and generous but no one’s fool, charitable but seeking no charity for himself; always seeking to attain his better self rather than being critical of the failings of others.  He found ridicule as a form of comedy repugnant and praise irrelevant.  He tolerated mistakes, whether his or others, as long as they were used as tools from which to learn, knowing they made the best teachers, but he hated to make them.  He expressed his views openly and vigorously but had an open mind and was willing to change them if he became convinced they needed changing, and while he willingly shared his views, he never imposed them on others.  He led by example and, while he did not seek leadership roles, they somehow all too regularly found him, albeit always informally and never permanently, after all, he was (and perhaps still is) Will-o’-the-wisp.

Will seems gone today, when we most need him.  When blaring pseudo victims erase history with poorly structured creative narrative designed to avoid solving the problems reflected in the causes they claim to espouse.  After all, if the problems were solved, what would their roles be, roles for which they were richly rewarded with book deals and speaking fees by the unnamable, undisclosed masters.  Pithy ridicule rather than logic is their stock and trade, malleable tools facilitating hypocrisy, verisimilitude and deception; after all, the shell game is their favorite modus operandi and the naïve and gullible their stock-in-trade.

Then again, many-and-many were the times that foes thought Will gone for good (and good riddance) only to have him show up unexpectedly.  That was his stock-in-trade.  So, who knows? 

2021 was not his year, but 2022, it has a certain rhythmic quality he’s been known to favor.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2021; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution. Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently a strategic analyst employed by Qest Consulting Group, Inc.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.

Reflections on “Shalimar the Clown” during a Cold Day in Early Spring

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A quote from Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown seems to me to capture the political reality under which we live.  Perhaps the reality under which we’ve always lived; at least those of us deluded into thinking we’ve lived in a democracy:

“…in this occult soil the seeds of the future are being planted, and the time of the invisible world will come, the time of the altered dialectic, the time of the dialectic gone underground, when anonymous spectral armies will fight in secret over the fate of the earth.”

It involves an observation set in 1968, that magical year when everything seemed possible and we were set on changing the world for the better, when we profoundly believed that in our time, the phrase “idealistic utopian” would cease to be a pejorative; the time before the 70s and then the 80s when most of us were tamed by the traditional responsibilities of family life and children and all that that entails and we unexpectedly and suddenly became our parents and grandparents and other things less positive, the things against which we once thought we fought.

Perhaps, based on his own all too interesting life, Rushdie may have been reflecting on that unstructured structure that constantly strives, as do memeplexes of diverse flavors, to survive and grow and amalgamate everything around it, and, as around becomes grander, perhaps merely everything.  Perhaps, even unbeknown to himself, that is what he felt when he published Shalimar the Clown in 2006.  During that 2006 when a deep state within a state within many states, ironically already feeling itself all powerful, or at least more powerful than ever (after the convenient events of September 11, 2001), still concealed, was extending its tendrils through shadows and echoes and deep, dark smog. 

Shalimar the Clown focuses on a paradise gang raped and despoiled by rising powers but mirrored in other places today.  It tastes and smells of divided India invading the body of divided Kashmir and there planting its seed of mixed Jewish and French and American chromosomes in a metaphorically paradisiacal womb generating a disturbing progeny, kin to disturbing progenies planted in too many elsewheres.  Too many times.

As in all of Rushdie’s books, it is rife in sensorial splendor with sights and sounds mixed with flavors and aromas and caresses and blows in a stew of historical facts and philosophical speculations spiced with peppers and in this case, Himalayan salt.  A book in which to lose oneself and wake wiser.

A book certainly worth reading and rereading and rereading again, as I’ve done, as are all of Rushdie’s gifts to us.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2021; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently a strategic analyst employed by Qest Consulting Group, Inc.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.

A Once and Future Observation, a haiku of sorts in e flat minor

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Like the universe,

trees:

the beauty of asymmetrical symmetry

_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2021; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently a strategic analyst employed by Qest Consulting Group, Inc.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.

Christmas Eve, 2020, in the City in the Sky

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It dawns in this city nestled high in the middle range of the Colombian Andes, always beautiful in diverse ways, whether brightly lit in amber rays of light or covered in low lying clouds or drizzling amidst chilly breezes, but always a shade of spring.

Holidays and special days always seem melancholy and nostalgic for me. As always I miss my sons and friends back in my other homes, Ocala and Charleston and New York and Fort Lauderdale and Charlotte and Miami, but I’m grateful for my friends and family here in Manizales. Christmas Eve, once a day of delightful anticipation, no matter how poor we then were, now a day for memories and reflections. And gratitude for the life I’ve been privileged to live, regardless of how often I’ve wallowed in self-pity.

The world seems awful today but it almost always has, with evil (purportedly lesser) in charge, evil setting us against each other, dividing friends and families in fruitless fights over which party will abuse, deceive and steal from us least, driving us to expend energies better spent in savoring the delight of those around us, in helping each other cope, in creating a more equitable and happy world instead of expecting someone to hand it to us on a holiday platter.

It’s been decades since I was comforted by our holiday myths, times when I believed that the Prince of Peace would soften our hearts and open our eyes, and his rotund emissary would bring the gifts I’d been promised while sitting in his lap in a crowded and happy shopping center, bills be damned. But still, hope that goodness is tangible and real survives somehow, just out of reach, as if we were in a nightmare from which we could not yet escape but already knew it for a dream and were fairly sure we’d soon wake.

A few friends will gather here tonight, seven of us, sharing food and drink and memories and aspirations. This will be a quite Christmas in the midst of a pandemic that may or may not be as serious as described but which is serious enough to require us all to take care. I’ll be thinking of Billy and Alex and Edward. I’ll be wondering what magic Candice and Paula have cooked up. And I’ll be imagining the delight that Rosey and Melissa will be feeling as they look at wrapped presents under beautifully decorated trees with mature Salome looking on indulgently; my sons, their wives and my grandchildren.

I’ll be remembering old Christmases when I was the child and my mother and stepfather and brother and sister reveled in that special day in small apartments in Miami, or Queens, or with my grandmother and aunts here in Manizales. Old Christmases when I was the father with my sons and their mother in Fort Lauderdale and Hendersonville and Belleview and Ocala, when Santa’s deer sometimes left hoof prints on our roofs, and when, whether we had plenty (usually) or very little (once) we were as happy as it was possible to be because we were together.

I’ll be wondering what the memories I make today will taste like in some future far away.

I’ve shared so much love with so many people across the years, my family and friends, lovers with whom I’ve lost touch and lovers who’ve always remained nearby (at least spiritually), my classmates and former students at the old Eastern Military Academy and my class mates and ever growing chain of brothers at the Citadel. My colleagues and former students at the several universities in Manizales with whom I’ve been involved during the past thirteen years as well as the civic leaders, journalists and artists with whom I’ve developed strong bonds. I’ve had and am having a wonderful life, one that even Jimmy Stewart and Satchmo, somewhere on the other side of the veil with many others I’ve loved and treasured, might find enviable.

I miss my mother and grandmother and Aunt Carola, who left too early, at least for my tastes, and Pop and my Uncle Pacho who were the first to go. And those of my classmates and friends who have gone on to join them. I’ll be thinking of them today too, and reliving memories, the best of presents when one stops to think about it, gifts that really keep on giving. Christmas, 2020, a terrible year in too many ways until we stop and remember those closest to us, and then, it really is a special time of year.

Merry Christmas to all, or Saturnalia, or Yule, or Chanukah or Festivus or Solstice (winter or spring depending on where you find yourself). May peace finally find a home among us, and equity and justice and tolerance and respect, and may honor and honesty prosper someday soon, at long last.

And may the legends and myths with which we seek comfort bring us together rather than split us apart.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2020; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He is currently a strategic analyst employed by Qest Consulting Group, Inc. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.

Still Life Watercolors on a Now Late Afternoon

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“It’s in the nature of immortality” he explained, “or more accurately, potential immortality”.

“One can still be killed by intervening incidents such as runaway trucks, bullets projected from firearms owned by jealous spouses, etc., but one doesn’t die from old age, or from most diseases, nor does one age beyond a point of full maturity, somewhat older than one might like but better than an awful lot of alternatives. But given the flows involved, it’s rather more like livestream than photographs. One tends to be unsatisfied with periodic meals, and periodic drinks, and periodic intimacy. One is sated only when they’re continuous, although sequentially. Not that being sated is essential, or even the norm, it’s just that satisfaction requires a bit more continuity, given the continuous nature of our existence.”

“Repetition is what really sucks”, he mumbled, a phrase seemingly coming from nowhere, although it’s one he interjected more and more as time streamed on.

Her look was odd, the expression hard to define; kind of like jaded incredulity faded by too many inexplicable realities. Nothing about him seemed to make sense, least of all his explanations (all too often couched in the plural or the indefinite person), but then again, they tended to be impossible to disprove. Only death would do that and it seemed he’d been around for a ludicrously long time. And he didn´t seem to age although he’d been verging on old for as long as she’d known him.

She seemed to be catching up to him and she’d been relatively young when they’d first met.

He was certainly far from infallible though, certainly as far as she was concerned. And omniscient? Forget about it. And certainly as far from omnipotent as everyone else.

“So” …, he sort of pleaded, “… can I have dessert now?”

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2020; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He is currently a strategic consultant employed by Qest Consulting Group, Inc. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.