Category Archives: Spiritual

Minutes of a Strange Sort of Synod

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The sacred body of Yeshua (minus two) was called to order by the sacred foreskin as the senior member to have been separated from the sacred body, with the exception of the sacred umbilical cord (who had excused itself due to pressing personal business elsewhere) and, a quorum being present, the sacred foreskin of Yeshua declared the meeting duly convened.  The sacred heart, being the subject of the meeting, had neither been invited nor informed of its convocation, anyway, being too busy with all of its personal endevors and appearances at festivals, etc., which was the reason for the meeting as it was a sort of revolt directed at the heart’s vainglory with respect to sacred days, the “carnivals” dedicated to the sacred heart being repugnant to the rest of the sacred body. 

The sacred liver initiated the business part of the meeting by making a motion, seconded by the sacred spleen, to officially censure the sacred heart for pomposity.  The motion was carried unanimously but with abstentions for some unknown reason by the sacred stomach and the sacred intestines. 

The sacred prostrate, joined by the society of sacred twins comprised of the sacred lungs and the sacred kidneys, then asked the sacred brain to make a speech, to which the sacred larynx objected, feeling that role was best reserved for the sacred vocal cords.  The sacred foreskin called for a vote but everyone decided to abstain and the vote was postponed on a motion by the sacred testicles, one having made the motion and the other having seconded it. 

The sacred foreskin as the presiding organ (sort of) then noted that the business of the revolt had been concluded, and asked that a motion be offered to send a note of reprimand to the sacred heart and, upon motion duly made by the sacred penis, seconded by the sacred left tonsil (the more revolutionary of the two), and, being unanimously carried this time joined into by the sacred stomach and the sacred intestines which appeared to have urgent business elsewhere, the meeting of the sacred body minus two was duly adjourned.
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© 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/.

Reevaluating Genocide during and after the Second World War: a Critique of History and Historians

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On Tuesday, October 17, 2023, Jonathan Cook published an article in Consortium News (Volume 28, Number 284), entitled “Israel’s Official Ethnic Cleansing Program”.  He’s absolutely correct, but reacting to the long term consequences of root problems is inadequate without addressing the root causes.  In this case, we historians and journalists are the great facilitators, and the hypocrisy following the second war to end all wars, popularly referred to as the Second World War or World War II, is the root cause.

The second war to end all wars was followed by a series of trials based on application of promising ex post facto ius cogens that proclaimed that genocide was impermissible under any circumstances and that violators could be subjected to the death penalty, notwithstanding provisions of domestic law under which their actions were obligatory.  The trials were held in the cities of Nuremberg in Germany and Tokyo in Japan and purportedly established the framework on which future interstate belligerency would be judged.  A number of former Axis political and military leaders were executed and, in the ensuing decades, numerous lower level personnel were convicted and punished for following orders deemed violative of the new norms for armed conflicts, even though such norms did not exist at the time the conduct in question took place.  The repugnance with which such conduct was to be judged henceforth justified the violation of the prohibition of ex post facto penal law.

Subsequent history has demonstrated that the foregoing scenario was a fraud and that the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials were mere expressions of the vengeance of conquerors on the conquered, albeit packaged in beautiful and inspirational camouflage.  That should have been obvious given the reality that both sides in the second war to end all wars engaged in blatant genocidal actions: consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also the obliteration of German and Japanese cities from the sky and the utter absence of related accountability, so it ought to be no surprise that subsequent more neatly packaged and sold examples of genocidal conduct continue, not only unpunished, but as in the case of Israel and the Palestinians, even extolled.

The only real lasting consequence of the second war to end all wars seems to have been that the British quest for global political and economic hegemony was transferred to the United States and that hypocrisy continued its unabated bludgeoning of truth in what passed for journalism and history.  Genocide continues to be celebrated, most notably by adherents of the primordial Abrahamic faith during Hanukkah and Passover while the same cultural group constantly decries the genocide practiced on it (and others) by the Germans, incoherently using it as justification for its own long term campaign of genocide against Palestinians and other adherents of the junior branches of the Abrahamic faith.  One wonders if Abram realized the horrendous long term consequences of his sexual abuse of his wife, Sarai’s, handmaiden Hagar.

I have taught and researched international law at the university level and have sadly concluded that, as with so much that purports to involve moral, ethical and legal norms, it exists only as an aspiration, but an aspiration carefully kept at bay and pulled out only when it is convenient for those who wield sufficient control over the use of force to force their will on others, but who insist on being portrayed as morally and ethically justified.  We historians are largely at fault for being so inept and hypocritical in our chosen avocation, as are purported journalists for the same reason.  Indeed writers of acknowledged fiction, writers such as, for example, Gore Vidal, come much closer to the truth than we ever do, earning us a place in a Shakespearean hell alongside lawyers, clerics and politicians.  Rather than eulogized, we deserve disdain and worse because the genocidal murder of so many rests all too comfortably on what passes for our consciences.

Something to think about as we attend and participate in seminars and congresses and teach our classes and publish our articles and books and accept the compensation we are awarded for the foregoing, and perhaps, hope that there is neither a Heaven nor a Hell, other than the one we help create and perpetuate here on earth.
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© 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/.

A Brief Reflection on Distressing Historical Realities

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How would Zionists have perceived of Adolf Hitler if instead of a final solution to the Jewish problem, he’d sought to implement a final solution to the Muslim problem?  Not using the same tactics but rather, a more subtle and gradual form of violent genocide with much better public relations?  How would the United States and the “Western Europeans” have perceived of him and his henchmen?

That seems worth considering as we see just that taking place in the tiny Gaza Strip, indeed, throughout Palestine, and in Lebanon and Syria too with Iran on the wish list; as we witness how Benjamin Netanyahu and his henchmen are perceived by Zionists, the United Kingdom and the countries that make up the NATO alliance.

The answer to the foregoing is deeply disturbing as we see the reflections of those we’ve characterized as history’s worst villains reflected in our own mirrors.  It says a great deal about the hypocrisy inherent in our purported value systems and in the history we are taught and then, in turn, teach.  Is it any wonder then that, not recognizing them, we seem utterly unable to learn from our past mistakes, to correct them, instead endlessly repeating them?

How would the “holocaust” be remembered had the foregoing scenario been the one that took place in the decade from 1936 through 1945? 

Probably a great deal like Hanukkah and Passover are celebrated today, and that is a terrible reflection on who we’ve become.
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© 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/.

Circuitous Introspection

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He wrote in the third person when he wanted to make it less obvious about whom he wrote.  Of course, that sometimes made it more, rather than less, obvious.

Anyway, ….

He was a closet introvert who spent a great deal of time on reflective introspection trying to understand himself and to fathom the realities involving good and evil, all too often, apparently, sides of the same coin as interpreted by those impacted, either by their own actions, or by the consequences they experienced as a result of the actions of others.  He very much wanted to be good, as long as it was not too inconvenient, and he hated hypocrisy, at least in others. 

He believed that truth was an absolute but an obfuscated absolute, too often artificially complicated and muddled by those for whom truth was inconvenient, and that, sadly, included him.  He speculated on the nature of mendacity and came to various conclusions.  First, on the one hand, it was a natural human impulse when an imbalance of power existed, resulting in insecurity, or even when such an imbalance was only an inaccurate perception; but on the other, it was a sadistic expression of hubris on the part of those who wanted to be perceived as in the right, knowing that was not the case.  The latter tended to need quite a bit of cake in order to eat it, but without exhausting the supply available to them.  He wondered concerning the long term consequences of mendacity and came to conclude that it prevented solution to real problems, although perhaps masking the problems for a time during which they tended to metastasize, creating a more and more complex web woven of materials apparently based on singularity theory and thus, all but inescapable.  The conclusion?  Well, formulation of any real conclusion would require a lot more than merely two hands.

He also reflected on the consequences of boredom which he came to believe led to overeating and depression (among other things), and to ill thought out actions whose consequences were rarely positive.  Boredom seemed avoidable but cognitive labyrinths inexplicably blocked positive solutions, creating self-perpetuating negative feedback loops which required a great deal of discipline to avoid. 

“Discipline” doing something that needed doing when was not disposed to do it.

As seems obvious from the foregoing, his introspection tended to wander from subject to subject, sometimes involving rational links, sometimes objective, but all too often seemingly without rhyme or reason, or at least apparently without rhyme or reason.  Further reflection sometimes turned up profound insights, or at least what appeared to be profound insights.

He liked writing, perceiving that it provided a means of communication between the diverse aspects of his personality and nature, both concurrently and temporally, and disclosed the unreliability of memory, evidently something heavily impacted by what he referred to as legis murphiatum.  Writing seemed an essential means to maximize the potential of his introversion while minimizing the existential threat of boredom.

And, of course, he wrote in the third person when he wanted to make it less obvious about whom he wrote although sometimes that made it more, rather than less, obvious, about whom he wrote.
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© 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/.

Introspection on a Sunday Morn

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Writing helps me to develop and understand concepts that come to mind intuitively or reflexibly, frequently providing unanticipated insights as I reread what I’ve written, a sort of communication mechanism connecting me to my subconscious perhaps, or perhaps just a means to add dimension to perceptions and introspections. 

Whatever the case, it’s an important cognitive tool.  

It led me recently, as I worked on a micro story, to reflect on the similarity between neoliberal and “woke” philosophies, in both cases, purportedly liberal but in fact, extreme in their exclusionary tendencies and refusal to tolerate dissent.  In each case, advocating censorship and demanding conformity in the name of liberty and thus, oxymoronic. 

Then, while writing this brief reflection, it brought to mind a similar phenomenon with reference to Christianity, how the Paulist revolution totally turned the original concept espoused by the Nazarene and his direct followers on its head, turning a positive doctrine of inclusion and tolerance into a negative exclusionary and restrictive means of control. 

Our minds, as Freud, Jung and others noted, are strange and complex instruments, capable of finding truth in the depths of deception while concurrently distorting reality to promote deceit.
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© 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.
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© 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/.