Category Archives: Poetry

Or So They Say

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Alabaster and indigo, or is it, … “or” indigo.  Negative entropy blues, anyway.

It’s said, albeit in an all too unreliable source, that “for everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven”.  Perhaps there’s a bit of truth there.  Perhaps not.

It’s approaching the Ides of December in an odd-numbered year, a year preceding one in which February will be a day longer.  An illusion of course, as are all months in a solar year.  But, at any rate, it’s at least a metaphorical season, a season for memories as another galactic solstice approaches.

A season for melancholy and nostalgia, for yule logs and the revels of Saturnalia and little drummer boys not yet blasted to shreds; a season for wistful bagpipes and for sanguine guitars, Arabic music melding with Keltic.  A season for reflecting on the pasts we’ve lived and on those we might have lived, for good or ill.  A season for introspection and for reflection on feelings of love we’ve shared and for speculation on loves we should have shared but let slip away, and perhaps, for regretting some that might best have been avoided. 

A season, perhaps, for discarding enmities and hatreds, although that’s all too often much too hard to do.  A season for remembering friends who’ve passed beyond the veil and for regretting the time not found to spend with them.  Perhaps a season for wondering whether there’s a state of unity that might make everything worthwhile (if, in fact, “for everything there [really] is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven”) or, a season for lamenting that the purported prince of Peace was an illusion.

Introspective reflection is as dangerous as it is beneficent.  Perhaps more so.

Reflections are all too often more bitter than sweet.  So many regrets, so many mistakes, so many paths not taken.  So many twists and turns into obscure shadows, flashing echoes drawing us further and further into a dark abyss where terror dwells as others, thundering, warn us away.  Cherished memories more and more quickly fading; more and more tarnished with each passing day as things in which we once took pride turn out to all too often have been mere delusions.

Here and there, barely noticed and all too often ignored, unexpected rainbows play with fireflies and tiny birds buzz in place sipping sweet nectar from flowers blooming in myriad tones and hues.  Clouds form shifting tapestries on azure fields above swirling waves of peaks changing from greens to greys then from blues to purples and, every once in a while, tipped with gleaming cones of winter’s bright white; peaks interspersed with golden fields and silvered river valleys, all doing their best to ignore intrusive asphalt roads and cement cities.  Transient monuments to imagined triumphs slowly but surely returning to the dust from whence, like us, they came.

The Ides of December are upon us, … again.  Then the solstice will arrive, winter in half the globe, summer in the rest.  Cycles continue.  Divergent rites of passage form myriad wakes woven into strange tapestries by disinterested fates, one a crone, another a mother and the third barely a lass.  All the while, Alekto, Megaera and Tisiphone, the Eumenides, curious but patient, continue to watch, certain that all things, good or ill, will come to those who wait.

Or so, the ubiquitous “they”, say.

Alabaster and indigo, or is it, … “or” indigo.  Negative entropy blues, … anyway.
_______

© 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, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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/.

Vincent, an Ode to Van Gogh

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If this is not the most beautiful song ever, there are none more beautiful: Don McLean’s Vincent, an Ode to Van Gogh.  More beautiful as poetry than as music and, set to prose it might read like this:

Starry, starry night, paint your palette blue and gray, look out on a summer’s day with eyes that know the darkness in my soul.

Shadows on the hills, sketch the trees and the daffodils, catch the breeze and the winter chills in colors on the snowy, linen land.

Now, I understand what you tried to say to me and how you suffered for your sanity, and how you tried to set them free.  They would not listen, they did not know how; perhaps they’ll listen now.

Starry, starry night, flaming flowers that brightly blaze, swirling clouds in violet haze reflect in Vincent’s eyes of china blue; colors changing hue, morning fields of amber grain, weathered faces lined in pain are soothed beneath the artist’s loving hand.

Now, I understand, what you tried to say to me, how you suffered for your sanity, how you tried to set them free.  They would not listen, they did not know how, perhaps they’ll listen now.

For they could not love you, but still your love was true and when no hope was left inside on that starry, starry night, you took your life as lovers often do.  But I could have told you, Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

Starry, starry night, portraits hung in empty halls, frameless heads on nameless walls with eyes that watch the world and can’t forget, like the strangers that you’ve met; the ragged men in ragged clothes, the silver thorn of bloody rose lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

Now, I think I know what you tried to say to me, how you suffered for your sanity, how you tried to set them free.  They would not listen, they’re not listening still, perhaps they never will.
_______

Lyrics set to prose copyrighted by Don McLean.  Observations and commentary, © 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, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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/.

Hiraeth

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Nostalgia for primordial places to which we can’t return;
for long lost times.  For things that might have stood but never were;
for lost loves and loves that might have been.

Echoes from long lost places in our souls for which we mourn.

Wind and rocks and waves.  Trees and cliffs, flowers and blades of grass.
Willows o’ the-wisp.
Omnipresent nowheres lying in wait.

Ubiquitously melancholic whispers yearning wistfully for a home that never was.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Inspiration thanks to Carl Butler of the Dark Poetry Society.  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, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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/.

Ennui

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Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty on the wall before he had a great fall, the Queen of Hearts seems heartless, at least as far as Alice is concerned and fair weather friends are best in the late Spring, definitely not in late Fall.

It was in 2005, as he remembered it, although it might have been in late 2004.  Approximately eighteen years had elapsed, enough time for someone to have been born and then attained majority.  One would think a great deal had happened during that interim, and it had, but still, he felt as though he’d stepped on a tread mill, and that there he’d stayed.

His marriage had failed through duplicity, perhaps self-induced, as so many marriages then tended to end.  Something which has not changed.  But ironically, that failure had led to liberation.  It had led to what, at first blush, seemed exhilarating freedom and new horizons.  Among other things, he’d finally felt that he’d become a poet: there’d been plenty of inspiration in superficial sorrow and contrived despondency, not because of his wife’s betrayal, not really, but because so much that he’d loved, especially his family, had to be surrendered if he was to move on, if he was to regain the momentum he’d foregone for so long.  There’s a price for most things under the sun and beyond the stars, perhaps for everything.  And it seems to bear compounded interest.

Of course, his experience was not unique, it had become commonplace, almost a rule.  Except, perhaps, for the bit about poetry.  But even that was not unusual.  And it was not his first experience at starting over after a failed relationship.  That too was no longer infrequent.  Transience now seemed the rule.

There was a melody he’d come across as his life was becoming undone, one he’d listen to constantly, one that seemed to translate what he felt and what he perceived he’d feel in the future, a melody more accurate and more complete than mere words.  It started out forlornly, then became reflective, perhaps introspective, and gradually, it became joyous, even festive.  It was an instrumental ballad, nouveaux flamenco played primarily on a Spanish guitar but accompanied by diverse forms of percussion, perhaps by violins as well.  He still payed it regularly.  Over time, it acquired additional meaning as different women passed through his life, a growing list of unsuccessful intimate relationships each of which he’d ended when he realized that, notwithstanding his aspirations, they were going nowhere and that he was impeding the ability of his paramours too find the truly meaningful long-term spouses they deserved.

His life seemed to parallel that special music: streaked with melancholy and nostalgia but also, unaccountably, because it had no rational justification, stained with tedium.  Too often his decisions seemed to become based on overcoming boredom rather than anything truly positive.  Monotony, bred, not by a lack of things to do, but by repetition. 

He was accomplishing interesting, even important things, he was writing and publishing a great deal, and his counsel was sought on a variety of issues by interesting people who took his opinions seriously, as a result of which, he’d attained the respect and affection of a new set of peers, but his life seemed to lack substance somehow, as though it was bereft of flavor and aroma, as though it were set in a colorless rainbow.  He was doing reasonably well, apparently growing, apparently happy, but those appearances lacked the dimensions he craved.  He felt that he just “was”.

Lumps comfortably resting on logs all too frequently came to mind.  Although sometimes, he’d imagine that the lumps might be enchanted princes in frog form.  Or even better, princesses. 

He missed his sons, who’d become estranged and were living their own lives in another continent, one that might just as well have been another planet, but that was not the problem.  He realized that they had their own lives to live, their own goals, their own aspirations and their own new families in which his role was, at best, minimal, but as long as they were happy, or at least satisfied, he was too. 

After a number of almost satisfying albeit unsuccessful intimate relationships he’d remarried, and his new wife embodied almost everything for which he’d ever hoped.  More than he could reasonable have expected really, more than he probably deserved.  Thus, his domestic life was tranquil and, to an extent, almost fulfilled.  But still, he felt hollow.  Hollow but ironically full of clamoring echoes calling for something he couldn’t divine, something that he couldn’t define.  

He’d hoped for hummingbirds and butterflies and dragon flies but had gotten flies and mosquitos instead.  They smelled of boredom, but then, what was boredom anyway?  Ennui perhaps.  Ennui is a bit more classy and complex than mere boredom.  And he wondered if he’d attained the point, as Fernando Pessoa had once supposed, where tedium had become his most reliable and constant companion?

Not a good trait for someone with expectations of immortality.

Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty on the wall before he had a great fall, the Queen of Hearts seems heartless, at least as far as Alice is concerned and fair weather friends are best in the late Spring, definitely not in late Fall.
_______

© 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, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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/.

Introspective Reflections, a haiku of sorts in e minor flat

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He wandered lost in his own shadow,
his thoughts drifting in repetitive infinity loops
from which escape seemed problematic,

… at best.

_______

© 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, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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/.

The Other Side of the Horizon

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He was as far from suicidal as a human being could be.  Indeed, he suspected that immortality was a distinct possibility for him, and not in a reincarnative sense but in his own body, a body to be kept permanently in decent repair.  Ironically, when he was thirteen or fourteen, he’d experimented with suicide, but not in order to terminate his life but rather, to assure himself that it had a transcendent meaning, that he was, as he was so often told by his grandmother’s esoteric colleagues in the Theosophical Society, destined to accomplish very transcendent things. 

That seemed a very heavy burden to him rather than a compliment, one he was not all that interested in bearing, but if bear it he must, he wanted to know it involved something real.  It seemed logical to him that if his experiment with suicide failed, then perhaps there was merit in the assertions of those arcane adults who to him, seemed as likely to be dangerously deluded as sagacious.  The experiment was either a success or a failure, as experiments are wont to be, depending on one’s perspectives.  He did not “disincarnate”, as his would be mentors might have phrased it, but he did become seriously ill, ill enough to be taken to a hospital where his stomach was pumped and he was placed on a short term diet of ice cubes (“food poisoning” having been suspected).  He did not disclose what had actually happened to anyone at the time, or anyone at all for many decades.

So, … he didn’t “pass away” but it turns out that didn’t really prove anything, although the converse would certainly have been definitive, and very final.  In consequence he lived his life with a sense that a permanent quest might always be on the horizon, but a very ill-defined quest and a very ill-defined horizon, both in distance and scope.  That permanent state of uncertainty and ambiguity led him to investigate diverse spiritual and religious traditions in depth, and to constantly reflect on the nature of divinity, and on whether or not divinity was merely an illusion.  And also to delve into psychology and parapsychology, into physics and metaphysics, into mathematics and astronomy, and then into history and cosmogony, poetry and literature and even political theory and science.   The latter led him to comparative philosophy albeit superficially, and then to empirical philosophy with himself as both the philosopher and the student.

Because he also had to eat and needed a place to live and a vehicle in which to travel, he studied law, at which he unfortunately excelled although he despised it for its ethical ambivalence.  But he practiced it anyway, at least for a while, and not unsuccessfully, at least for a time.  However, it was so contrary to his quest for practical verity, equity and justice that eventually, he ran afoul of the unwritten but binding rules pursuant to which that profession was practiced and took on foes much too powerful to defeat, and was consequently cast out of that profession, with a suggestion that he lead revolts elsewhere, which he henceforth did, although with the pen rather than the sword, and eventually, with the keyboard and the cell phone.

He gained some respect in the world at large, and perhaps helped more than a few people, and his students (he became an academic), at least most of them, both liked and admired him, and he them. 

Unfortunately, the former was not true with respect to his personal progeny, his greatest failure.  There were other areas he should have avoided as well, or at least dealt with in much better ways.  He had way too many intimate relationships in a quest for his perfect mate, many of whom didn’t thereafter care for him at all, although some remained friends and a few, very good friends, which was sometimes complex and frequently complicated.  Still, his writing and appearances on radio and television and in forums and seminars did succeed in making a bit of a difference in the way the world was perceived, if not in how it was run, although at least he tried, and more and more people came to respect his views, although not really enough to make a difference. 

As he matured, sort of, the boy in him was a permanent guest, essential to potential immortality of sorts, he came to realize that it only took helping mold a few very special people, perhaps even just one, who could attain the goals that, when he was very young, had been allocated to him, for him to fulfill the prophecies that had started him on his quixotic quests and that perhaps those well-meaning esoterics had merely misinterpreted his role, which was apparently to serve as a link in a long, long chain towards the eventual Kwisatz Haderach.  Whatever that was.

So, ….   As we noted at the start of this reflection, he was not really suicidal at all but it was yet too early to tell if he was immortal, after all, he was still alive and was aging in a manner somewhat slower than was usual for most.  His hair was still dark and abundant while that of his contemporaries, at least those who still had hair was snow white, and he was very active in diverse areas, including athletics which he loved, but he had lost a step or three and new aches tended to appear every now and then.  And immortality he’d realized, would not be all it was cracked up to be, which explained some of the contradictions and fallacies associated with divinity.  After all, if one were the last immortal, the last of the last, the final guardian, one would be destined to learn just how lonesome utter loneliness might be and thus, eventually, come to understand why divinity and sanity could not coexist in the same being.

A strange life so far, but not one bereft of magic, at least as far as the most esoteric and farfetched hypotheses imaginable based quantum theories were concerned.

And who knows what might turn up on the other sides of the horizon.
_______

© 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, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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/.

Epiphanies on a Late Summer’s Day

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He’d been sitting in a garden, under a large tree, and he noticed the position of his arms and legs, somewhat uncomfortable but very balanced, and a flower came to mind, a lotus.

Not often, but also, not infrequently, he’d considered the possibility that he was in fact divine, and not just divine, but “the” divinity, the divinity often referred to as “god”, and that he’d incarnated and in incarnating, had voluntarily surrendered the powers popularly associated with divinity, and that consequently, he could not escape his mortality, nor could he put to right all the horrors, injustice and inequity he’d experienced or observed as a mortal.  Then, usually, he’d reject the possibility, realizing what he’d think of anyone else who made that sort of claim or posited that sort of possibility.  Then, on third thought, he wondered if divinity had in fact incarnated and been rejected, possibly confined to a sanatorium or worse.

What about Jesus he wondered?  Into which category did he belong?  The divine or the deluded or perhaps, merely the confused?

The something related came to mind, as though it had been planted there, perhaps planted an eternity ago in everyone that there had ever been.  What if the divine had in fact incarnated but in each and every one of us, in the good and the evil, the sane and the insane, in believers, non-believers and agnostics, in victims and victimizers?

And he realized just how likely that was.  A somewhat foolish and immature divinity, perhaps the only divinity.  Trapped in an evolutionary mass prison of his, her or its own making, unable to escape, unable to repent, unable to correct an infinity of errors.  Forced to trust that somehow or other things would, at the very least, improve instead of to worsen (as seemed the norm).

No more prescience, or omnipotence, or ubiquity.  Just regret for a very foolish but apparently irrevocable error.

He’d been sitting in a garden, under a large tree, and he noticed the position of his arms and legs, somewhat uncomfortable but very balanced, and a flower came to mind, a lotus.

And he dreamed of a state of being where all his errors might disappear, where everything might disappear, all emotions, all desires, all fears, all memories, perhaps even all mistakes.

Abnegation he thought, or would that merely be self-serving denial, a quest to avoid the consequences of primordial mistakes.

What if rather than dead, god was only so thoroughly dispersed among us that like Humpty Dumpty, neither all the King’s horses nor all the King’s men could ever put him (or her or it) back together again.

That might well explain a great many things, perhaps even everything.

But then again, perhaps not.
_______

© 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, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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/.

Remembering Marianne Bass

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Once upon a time, a long time ago, as single lives come and go, there was a little girl whose name was Marianne, Marianne Bass, although it might have been Mary Anne, or Maryanne.  Who knows, girls play a bit with the spelling of their names.  In a sense, she may have been a precursor to another Marianne about a decade later, one with whom I’m amazingly still in touch.

I was “Billy” then, recently arrived from my beloved Manizales into a strange new world, but my English had improved drastically from its non-existence a year earlier.  I wonder if I had an accent.  Friends my age who’d known me for about six months claimed it had disappeared.  And I’d made the great leap forward scholastically from the rear to the head of my class, a sudden linguistic epiphany had made that possible.  But there was still some confusion.  I was very good at drawing for my age, and I’d been asked to draw a turkey for Thanksgiving, but there were still some words that confused me: chicken and kitchen for example, and, … turkey and turtle.  So we wound up with my famous drawing of the first ever Thanksgiving turtle.  Turkeys may well have found the concept an improvement.

Marianne Bass in Mrs. Mary Dunn’s class.  I recall her new front teeth had already fully come in, mine probably had not.

It must have been, in Miami Beach, or Maybe Miami, probably in 1953-54.  My first serious crush.  I was seven and she might have been eight.  She never knew how I felt but I wonder whether she suspected.  We were not close, I was pretty timid (in the midst of confused childish immigrant syndrome) but after seven decades I still recall her from time to time.  Especially when I’m in the midst of melancholic nostalgia, in the midst of misty reflections and introspection.  Times sort of like today.  I do recall one special lunch we shared, albeit in the school cafeteria, where she told me quite a bit about herself, she’d been left back so was older than I was, and as young as we were, I grasped that she was more than just beautiful, that there was a depth to her, and intelligence as well, and that fascinated me.  Perhaps that’s why after so, so long, I still recall her so clearly.

I wonder what her life has been like.  Hopefully full and meaningful.  Hopefully she married someone who appreciated her and had great kids and delightful grandkids.  Hopefully her life was secure and free of violence, physical and emotional and that the sorrow she inevitably suffered was shallow and superficial. 

I wonder if she remembered me at all, … ever. 

I of course moved on.  Moved on way too often but I recall her very fondly.  I wish she knew although I’m not sure why.  I wish she knew what I’d made of my life, at least with respect to its positive aspects. 

Marianne Bass in Mrs. Mary Dunn’s class, a pretty time, a very different time, one now, of course, in every sense, long, long gone.

_______

© 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, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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/.

Reflections on Melancholy, Boredom and Brandy

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How do my nostalgia and melancholy relate to bitterness?  Or are they more associated with boredom?  Or a combination of both?  

Actually, I’d guess, they’re related to the full panoply of emotions I’ve felt and to the spectrum of my personal experiences.  To all of my regrets and joys; a distillation of sorts, one perhaps diluted in the process, but perhaps, synergistically enhanced instead. 

A strange sort of brandy, part biological, part cognitive, part emotional and part spiritual. 

And what of that brandy’s residue?  The things seemingly forgotten but perhaps just hiding.  Hiding from me and from anyone and everyone, but perhaps, like a neurosis, rather than hiding are only in stasis, preparing to pounce unexpectedly, and to create an alternative version of the person I perceive as me.

Brandy, distilled wine, sometimes disguised as cognacs and armagnacs, but only when blended in France, albeit from grapes whose ancestors were once migrants in Chile.  Strange.  Sort of like my nostalgia and melancholy, all of them filtered through traces of bitterness, but spiced with joys and regrets.
_______

© 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, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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/.

Boredom, Love and Introspection

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Reflection and introspection at times clarified things for him.  His life had not been bad but it had been confusing, and despite its complexities and diversity, he was unfulfilled.  Fulfillment, he realized, at least in his case, had to come from within, and his attempts to obtain it through his diverse relationships had always been a mistake, a detour at best, a deliberate misdirection at worst.  But misdirection by whom, and for what purpose?  That seemed incomprehensible.  He was not usually prone to delusions of grandeur, or to despair.  He was just not important enough to merit that kind of attention, unless each and every one of us was.

We humans are gregarious he thought to himself, seeking to contradict instincts that hinted that introversion was not synonymous with temerity, and that at least in his case, accurate answers were more likely to be derived from inner reflection than from outward associations.  His truths lay within, something he’d always sensed, and perhaps it was boredom more than anything else that misled him.  Alleviation of boredom through intimacy with others was not love, although it often seemed that way, and when the boredom dissipated somewhat, what passed for love was gone as well.  Residues remained, affection, respect, gratitude, but nothing of the synergistic mutual resonance that he felt love should have involved, and those residues were always tinged with regret and self-recrimination because the residues included consequences to others, as if, vampire-like, he’d left the objects of his affection drained.

It was not love that he sought, although that’s what he frequently thought, but fulfillment of a very different kind, fulfillment that had no fear of loneliness nor need of external resources.  A sort of fulfillment crafted from inner echoes and infinite reflections in perfectly juxtaposed interior mirrors where, perhaps, his soul communed with his heart and with his mind seeking to grasp the eternal within and without.  And in that context, others would always be a distraction when the mists of passion lifted.  As they always did.

He was, he felt, a sort of tempest, a cyclone, a hurricane whose vortex needed to keep ascending fighting against emotional gravity wells lest he crash to earth and lose himself in drifts and eddies of rootless emotions, then be crushed in the grasp of history’s relentlessly chaotic tides.  But he’d always been drawn to chaos in whose inchoate depths everything remained possible and from whence he suspected he’d been cast adrift eons ago, before there existed time or space.  Cast adrift to find something, perhaps an antidote to relentless order, or perhaps something altogether intangible, perhaps an antidote to a divine inchoatesy, perhaps a counter balance to divinity itself, if divinity in fact existed.

What would that make him he wondered, as images of Hêlēl and Samael and Shaitan churned in his version of Jung’s universal unconscious, or was that subconscious, and any way, was there a difference there, or any relevance?  Did relevance in fact exist?  Was he utterly lost or on the verge of enlightenment, perhaps sitting in a lotus-like position, meditating under an immense primordial tree, perhaps somewhere near the intersection of Ragnarok and Eden, futilely seeking enlightenment?

Or was he just bored.  …. 

Again.
_______

© 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, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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/.