(y la tarea que tengo pendiente, snif)
Esto no regresará en un buen rato. Simplemente ya no lo siento más. Lo Siento.
viernes, diciembre 07, 2007
update
(y la tarea que tengo pendiente, snif)
Esto no regresará en un buen rato. Simplemente ya no lo siento más. Lo Siento.
lunes, octubre 22, 2007
miércoles, octubre 17, 2007
A song about...
Si tuviera la capacidad suficiente
para invertir el tiempo a voluntad
¿cambiaria en algo las cosas?
¿seria capaz al fin de sentir?
Quisiera comprar un millon de rosas
y una garrafa de querosén
para poder hacerte una pira,
inventar un globo de cristal
que se la lleve hasta el cielo
hasta el invisible tentáculo de dios.
Si fuera de nuevo un niño
o un adolescente quizás
¿dejaría de atormentarme?
¿aceptaría de nuevo madurar?
He encontrado un nuevo respeto
por la añeja figura de Peter Pan
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Escrito al ritmo de: Radiohead - Jigsaw Falling Into Place
via FoxyTunes
para invertir el tiempo a voluntad
¿cambiaria en algo las cosas?
¿seria capaz al fin de sentir?
Quisiera comprar un millon de rosas
y una garrafa de querosén
para poder hacerte una pira,
inventar un globo de cristal
que se la lleve hasta el cielo
hasta el invisible tentáculo de dios.
Si fuera de nuevo un niño
o un adolescente quizás
¿dejaría de atormentarme?
¿aceptaría de nuevo madurar?
He encontrado un nuevo respeto
por la añeja figura de Peter Pan
----------------
Escrito al ritmo de: Radiohead - Jigsaw Falling Into Place
via FoxyTunes
miércoles, octubre 03, 2007
Retazos
Hay ciertos eventos que lo empujan a uno por el borde, como un jarrón de porcelana mal acomodado el cual termina por caerse con el beso de una leve brisa. Algunos son como la proverbial gota de agua cuya lenta pero constante acumulación acabó por desbordar el vaso, otros, epifánicos, te toman por sorpresa.
Dice una de las leyes de la física que no existe acción la cual no sea seguida de una reacción, ergo, no hay un evento sin una razón primordial para su existencia.
Siempre he pensado que los psicólogos son una especie de detectives de la mente, desenmarañando los oscuros lazos tras una conspiración cerebral, por ello siempre he tenido respeto hacia esa profesión (la cual en alguna ocasión quise estudiar).
La apatía es un pequeño duende gris en mi cabeza, pasa mucho tiempo dormido pero cuando despierta hace un desorden con todo. Hace tiempo disfrutaba cuando aparecía, pero ahora lo detesto.
P.D. Entre las líneas de cada uno de estos párrafos hay una conexión, a bigger picture si así se quiere. No espero que la encuentren, solo quiero que lo sepan.
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Escrito al ritmo de: Radiohead - I Might Be Wrong
via FoxyTunes
Dice una de las leyes de la física que no existe acción la cual no sea seguida de una reacción, ergo, no hay un evento sin una razón primordial para su existencia.
Siempre he pensado que los psicólogos son una especie de detectives de la mente, desenmarañando los oscuros lazos tras una conspiración cerebral, por ello siempre he tenido respeto hacia esa profesión (la cual en alguna ocasión quise estudiar).
La apatía es un pequeño duende gris en mi cabeza, pasa mucho tiempo dormido pero cuando despierta hace un desorden con todo. Hace tiempo disfrutaba cuando aparecía, pero ahora lo detesto.
P.D. Entre las líneas de cada uno de estos párrafos hay una conexión, a bigger picture si así se quiere. No espero que la encuentren, solo quiero que lo sepan.
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Escrito al ritmo de: Radiohead - I Might Be Wrong
via FoxyTunes
martes, octubre 02, 2007
viernes, septiembre 14, 2007
untitled
Hay pocos sentimientos que ofrezcan una sensación de falsa seguridad como la tristeza. No hablo de aquella surgida como resultado de un evento desafortunado sino de la patológica y constante, esa que fundamenta la actitud de los goths y los emokids, más cercana a la depresión que al luto o al dolor físico. Aquella que aparece sin motivo aparente como una aguja en el corazón, similar a un perro cuya fuerte mordida atora la quijada en el pecho sin soltarlo.
Antes era mas común que me sintiera asi. Pero ahora con cada vez mas frecuencia descubro al temor reemplazando aquel lugar antes destinado a la tristeza. Es menos peligroso, sí, pero no trae consigo esa calma inherente de la congoja de dia lluvioso. El miedo es, por decirlo así, más real, capaz de trascender la barrera de los sentimientos y volverse casi tangible, un poco como el amor, un amor frío, duro y pesado, pero poco a poco desaparece, quizás sólo sea una etapa de transición... ¿Me pregunto qué lo reemplazará?
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Escrito al ritmo de: King Crimson - In The Court Of The Crimson King
via FoxyTunes
Antes era mas común que me sintiera asi. Pero ahora con cada vez mas frecuencia descubro al temor reemplazando aquel lugar antes destinado a la tristeza. Es menos peligroso, sí, pero no trae consigo esa calma inherente de la congoja de dia lluvioso. El miedo es, por decirlo así, más real, capaz de trascender la barrera de los sentimientos y volverse casi tangible, un poco como el amor, un amor frío, duro y pesado, pero poco a poco desaparece, quizás sólo sea una etapa de transición... ¿Me pregunto qué lo reemplazará?
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Escrito al ritmo de: King Crimson - In The Court Of The Crimson King
via FoxyTunes
jueves, septiembre 13, 2007
miércoles, septiembre 12, 2007
0
Por siglos se ha alabado la visión de las culturas antiguas, fundadoras de hitos de la vida moderna, como el fuego y el cero. Fuera del concepto absurdo de haber descubierto la nada y la inspirada idea de la representacion numérica de la vacuidad es innegable que el cero es un pilar de nuestro avance tecnológico. Sin embargo, el origen del mismo puede ser mucho mas esotérico de lo que se nos ha hecho creer: según la investigación realizada por el renombrado profeta y alquimista Nabor Veer, el número asignado al vacío inicialmente fue usado para representar lo opuesto. El círculo perfecto ha sido reconocido como la única forma geométrica verdaderamente infinita (la espiral es un caso distinto, del cual ya se han escrito numerosos tratados, así que es inutil abundar al respecto), y se dice que los primeros iniciados de la sagrada orden de los piromantes primero debian mostrar su aptitud al caminar sin descanso durante siete días a lo largo de un estrecho corredor de siete codos de amplitud, este pasillo giraba sobre sí mismo para formar una circunferencia de cuarenta y nueve brazos de diámetro cuyas paredes de hierro eran calentadas al rojo vivo. No se sabe con certeza en cual punto de la historia el circulo o cero dejó de asociarse con lo inmensurable, pero se sospecha que fue después del descubrimiento del Número Infinito.
Mucho se ha escrito ya sobre la figura proporcional que resta al tratar de utilizar el diámetro del círculo como una herramienta para medir al mismo. Ésta ha sido llamada el Número Infinito, y ha causado quebraderos de cabeza en más de un mortal.
La hipótesis de Veer dice que las cifras son el lenguaje nativo del universo, y el Número Infinito es en realidad el nombre secreto de Dios, mientras uno lo recite se convierte en inmortal. Una escuela de Praga sostiene que en realidad el número no es infinito, es solo el resultado de un sistema matemático inadecuado para representarlo, y tan pronto como éste sea creado y demostrado entonces el velo de la necesidad de las explicaciones teocéntricas será destruido para siempre.
La realidad actual es que el círculo, el cero o el Numero Infinito son solo algunas de las cifras significativas (mágicas, habrían escrito algunos) cuyos secretos nuestra mente aun no ha sido capaz de desentrañar.
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Escrito al ritmo de: The Breeders - Cannonball
via FoxyTunes
Mucho se ha escrito ya sobre la figura proporcional que resta al tratar de utilizar el diámetro del círculo como una herramienta para medir al mismo. Ésta ha sido llamada el Número Infinito, y ha causado quebraderos de cabeza en más de un mortal.
La hipótesis de Veer dice que las cifras son el lenguaje nativo del universo, y el Número Infinito es en realidad el nombre secreto de Dios, mientras uno lo recite se convierte en inmortal. Una escuela de Praga sostiene que en realidad el número no es infinito, es solo el resultado de un sistema matemático inadecuado para representarlo, y tan pronto como éste sea creado y demostrado entonces el velo de la necesidad de las explicaciones teocéntricas será destruido para siempre.
La realidad actual es que el círculo, el cero o el Numero Infinito son solo algunas de las cifras significativas (mágicas, habrían escrito algunos) cuyos secretos nuestra mente aun no ha sido capaz de desentrañar.
----------------
Escrito al ritmo de: The Breeders - Cannonball
via FoxyTunes
miércoles, agosto 29, 2007
About Kubrick
Tomado de The Guardian via Mental Floss. Disfruten:
In 1996 I received what was - and probably remains - the most exciting telephone call I have ever had. It was from a man calling himself Tony. "I'm phoning on behalf of Stanley Kubrick," he said.
"I'm sorry?" I said.
"Stanley would like you to send him a radio documentary you made called Hotel Auschwitz," said this man. This was a programme for Radio 4 about the marketing of the concentration camp.
"Stanley Kubrick?" I said.
"Let me give you the address," said the man. He sounded posh. It seemed that he didn't want to say any more about this than he had to. I sent the tape to a PO box in St Albans and waited. What might happen next? Whatever it was, it was going to be amazing. My mind started going crazy. Perhaps Kubrick would ask me to collaborate on something. (Oddly, in this daydream, I reluctantly turned him down because I didn't think I'd make a good screenwriter.)
At the time I received that telephone call, nine years had passed since Kubrick's last film, Full Metal Jacket. All anyone outside his circle knew about him was that he was living in a vast country house somewhere near St Albans - or a "secret lair", according to a Sunday Times article of that year - behaving presumably like some kind of mad hermit genius. Nobody even knew what he looked like. It had been 16 years since a photograph of him had been published.
He'd gone from making a film a year in the 1950s (including the brilliant, horrific Paths Of Glory), to a film every couple of years in the 1960s (Lolita, Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey all came out within a six-year period), to two films a decade in the 1970s and 1980s (there had been a seven-year gap between The Shining and Full Metal Jacket), and now, in the 1990s, absolutely nothing. What the hell was he doing in there? According to rumours, he was passing his time being terrified of germs and refusing to let his chauffeur drive over 30mph. But now I knew what he was doing. He was listening to my BBC Radio 4 documentary, Hotel Auschwitz.
"The good news," wrote Nicholas Wapshott in the Times in 1997, bemoaning the ever-lengthening gaps between his films, "is that Kubrick is a hoarder ... There is an extensive archive of material at his home in Childwick Bury. When that is eventually opened, we may get close to understanding the tangled brain which brought to life HAL, the [Clockwork Orange] Droogs and Jack Torrance."
The thing is, once I sent the tape to the PO box, nothing happened next. I never heard anything again. Not a word. My cassette disappeared into the mysterious world of Stanley Kubrick. And then, three years later, Kubrick was dead.
Two years after that, in 2001, I got another phone call out of the blue from the man called Tony. "Do you want to get some lunch?" he asked. "Why don't you come up to Childwick?"
The journey to the Kubrick house starts normally. You drive through rural Hertfordshire, passing ordinary-sized postwar houses and opticians and vets. Then you turn right at an electric gate with a "Do Not Trespass" sign. Drive through that, and through some woods, and past a long, white fence with the paint peeling off, and then another electric gate, and then another electric gate, and then another electric gate, and you're in the middle of an estate full of boxes.
There are boxes everywhere - shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen portable cabins, each packed with boxes. These are the boxes that contain the legendary Kubrick archive.
Was the Times right? Would the stuff inside the boxes offer an understanding of his "tangled brain"? I notice that many of the boxes are sealed. Some have, in fact, remained unopened for decades.
Tony turns out to be Tony Frewin. He started working as an office boy for Kubrick in 1965, when he was 17. One day, apropos of nothing, Kubrick said to him, "You have that office outside my office if I need you." That was 36 years ago and Tony is still here, two years after Kubrick died and was buried in the grounds behind the house. There may be no more Kubrick movies to make, but there are DVDs to remaster and reissue in special editions. There are box sets and retrospective books to oversee. There is paperwork.
Tony gives me a guided tour of the house. We walk past boxes and more boxes and filing cabinets and past a grand staircase. Childwick was once home to a family of horse-breeders called the Joels. Back then there were, presumably, busts or floral displays on either side at the bottom of this staircase. Here, instead, is a photocopier on one side and another photocopier on the other.
"Is this ... ?" I ask.
"Yes," says Tony. "This is how Stanley left it."
Stanley Kubrick's house looks as if the Inland Revenue took it over long ago.
Tony takes me into a large room painted blue and filled with books. "This used to be the cinema," he says.
"Is it the library now?" I ask.
"Look closer at the books," says Tony.
I do. "Bloody hell," I say. "Every book in this room is about Napoleon!"
"Look in the drawers," says Tony.
I do.
"It's all about Napoleon, too!" I say. "Everything in here is about Napoleon!"
I feel a little like Shelley Duvall in The Shining, chancing upon her husband's novel and finding it is comprised entirely of the line "All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy" typed over and over again. John Baxter wrote, in his unauthorised biography of Kubrick, "Most people attributed the purchase of Childwick to Kubrick's passion for privacy, and drew parallels with Jack Torrance in The Shining."
This room full of Napoleon stuff seems to bear out that comparison. "Somewhere else in this house," Tony says, "is a cabinet full of 25,000 library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon's inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July 23 17-whatever, you go to that card and it'll tell you."
"Who made up the cards?" I ask.
"Stanley," says Tony. "With some assistants."
"How long did it take?" I ask.
"Years," says Tony. "The late 1960s."
Kubrick never made his film about Napoleon. During the years it took him to compile this research, a Rod Steiger movie called Waterloo was written, produced and released. It was a box-office failure, so MGM abandoned Napoleon and Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange instead.
"Did you do this kind of massive research for all the movies?" I ask Tony.
"More or less," he says.
"OK," I say. "I understand how you might do this for Napoleon, but what about, say, The Shining?"
"Somewhere here," says Tony, "is just about every ghost book ever written, and there'll be a box containing photographs of the exteriors of maybe every mountain hotel in the world."
There is a silence.
"Tony," I say, "can I look through the boxes?"
I've been coming to the Kubrick house a couple of times a month ever since.
I start, chronologically, in a portable cabin behind the stable block, with a box marked Lolita. I open it, noting the ease with which the lid comes off. "These are excellent, well-designed boxes," I think to myself. I flick through the paperwork inside, pausing randomly at a letter that reads as if it has come straight from a Jane Austen novel:
Dear Mr Kubrick,
Just a line to express to you and to Mrs Kubrick my husband's and my own deep appreciation of your kindness in arranging for Dimitri's introduction to your uncle, Mr Günther Rennert.
Sincerely,
Mrs Vladimir Nabokov
I later learn that Dimitri was a budding opera singer and Rennert was a famous opera director, in charge of the Munich Opera House. This letter was written in 1962, back in the days when Kubrick was still producing a film every year or so. This box is full of fascinating correspondence between Kubrick and the Nabokovs but - unlike the fabulously otherworldly Napoleon room, which was accrued six years later - it is the kind of stuff you would probably find in any director's archive.
The unusual stuff - the stuff that elucidates the ever-lengthening gaps between productions - can be found in the boxes that were compiled from 1968 onwards. In a box next to the Lolita box in the cabin, I find an unusually terse letter, written by Kubrick to someone called Pat, on January 10 1968: "Dear Pat, Although you are apparently too busy to personally return my phone calls, perhaps you will find time in the near future to reply to this letter?"
(Later, when I show Tony this letter, he says he's surprised by the brusqueness. Kubrick must have been at the end of his tether, he says, because on a number of occasions he said to Tony, "Before you send an angry letter, imagine how it would look if it got into the hands of Time Out.") The reason for Kubrick's annoyance in this particular letter was because he'd heard that the Beatles were going to use a landscape shot from Dr Strangelove in one of their movies: "The Beatle film will be very widely seen," Kubrick writes, "and it will make it appear that the material in Dr Strangelove is stock footage. I feel this harms the film."
There is a similar batch of telexes from 1975: "It would appear," Kubrick writes in one, "that Space 1999 may very well become a long-running and important television series. There seems nothing left now but to seek the highest possible damages ... The deliberate choice of a date only two years away from 2001 is not accidental and harms us." This telex was written seven years after the release of 2001.
But you can see why Kubrick sometimes felt compelled to wage war to protect the honour of his work. A 1975 telex, from a picture publicity man at Warner Bros called Mark Kauffman, regards publicity stills for Kubrick's sombre reworking of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon. It reads: "Received additional material. Is there any material with humour or zaniness that you could send?"
Kubrick replies, clearly through gritted teeth: "The style of the picture is reflected by the stills you have already received. The film is based on William Makepeace Thackeray's novel which, though it has irony and wit, could not be well described as zany."
I take a break from the boxes to wander over to Tony's office. As I walk in, I notice something pinned to his letterbox. "POSTMAN," it reads. "Please put all mail in the white box under the colonnade across the courtyard to your right."
It is not a remarkable note except for one thing. The typeface Tony used to print it is exactly the same typeface Kubrick used for the posters and title sequences of Eyes Wide Shut and 2001. "It's Futura Extra Bold," explains Tony. "It was Stanley's favourite typeface. It's sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers, too. Clean and elegant."
"Is this the kind of thing you and Kubrick used to discuss?" I ask.
"God, yes," says Tony. "Sometimes late into the night. I was always trying to persuade him to turn away from them. But he was wedded to his sans serifs."
Tony goes to his bookshelf and brings down a number of volumes full of examples of typefaces, the kind of volumes he and Kubrick used to study, and he shows them to me. "I did once get him to admit the beauty of Bembo," he adds, "a serif."
"So is that note to the postman a sort of private tribute from you to Kubrick?" I ask.
"Yeah," says Tony. He smiles to himself. "Yeah, yeah."
For a moment I also smile at the unlikely image of the two men discussing the relative merits of typefaces late into the night, but then I remember the first time I saw the trailer for Eyes Wide Shut, the way the words "CRUISE, KIDMAN, KUBRICK" flashed dramatically on to the screen in large red, yellow and white colours, to the song Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing. Had the words not been in Futura Extra Bold, I realise now, they wouldn't have sent such a chill up the spine. Kubrick and Tony obviously became, at some point during their relationship, tireless amateur sleuths, wanting to amass and consume and understand all information. Tony obviously misses Kubrick terribly.
But this attention to detail becomes so amazingly evident and seemingly all-consuming in the later boxes, I begin to wonder whether it was worth it. In one portable cabin, for example, there are hundreds and hundreds of boxes related to Eyes Wide Shut, marked EWS - Portman Square, EWS - Kensington & Chelsea, etc, etc. I choose the one marked EWS - Islington because that's where I live. Inside are hundreds of photographs of doorways. The doorway of my local video shop, Century Video, is here, as is the doorway of my dry cleaner's, Spots Suede Services on Upper Street. Then, as I continue to flick through the photographs, I find, to my astonishment, pictures of the doorways of the houses in my own street. Handwritten at the top of these photographs are the words, "Hooker doorway?"
"Huh," I think. So somebody within the Kubrick organisation (it was, in fact, his nephew) once walked up my street, on Kubrick's orders, hoping to find a suitable doorway for a hooker in Eyes Wide Shut. It is both an extremely interesting find and a bit of a kick in the teeth.
It is not, though, as incredible a coincidence as it may at first seem. Judging by the writing on the boxes, probably just about every doorway in London has been captured and placed inside this cabin. This solves one mystery for me - the one about why Kubrick, a native of the Bronx, chose the St Albans countryside, of all places, for his home. I realise now that it didn't matter. It could have been anywhere. It is as if the whole world is to be found somewhere within this estate.
But was it worth it? Was the hooker doorway eventually picked for Eyes Wide Shut the quintessential hooker doorway? Back at home, I watch Eyes Wide Shut again on DVD. The hooker doorway looks exactly like any doorway you would find in Lower Manhattan - maybe on Canal Street or in the East Village. It is a red door, up some brownstone steps, with the number 265 painted on the glass at the top. Tom Cruise is pulled through the door by the hooker. The scene is over in a few seconds. (It was eventually shot on a set at Pinewood.) I remember the Napoleon archive, the years it took Kubrick and some assistants to compile it, and I suggest to Jan Harlan, Kubrick's executive producer and brother-in-law, that had there not been all those years of attention to detail during the early planning of the movie, perhaps Napoleon would actually have been made.
"That's a completely theoretical and obsolete observation!" replies Jan, in a jolly way. "That's like saying had Vermeer painted in a different manner, he'd have done 100 more paintings."
"OK," I say.
Jan is right, of course. So why am I so keen to discover in the boxes some secret personality flaw to Kubrick, whose films I love so much? He was the greatest director of his generation. Jack Nicholson's "Here's Johnny!" Lolita's heart-shaped sunglasses. The Dr Strangelove cowboy riding the nuclear bomb like it's a bucking bronco. And on and on. So many images have implanted themselves into the public consciousness, surely because of the director's ever-burgeoning attention to detail.
"Why don't you just accept," says Jan, "that this was how he worked?"
"But if he hadn't allowed his tireless work ethic to take him to unproductive places, he'd have made more films," I say. "For instance, the Space 1999 lawsuit seems, with the benefit of hindsight, a little trivial."
"Of course I wish he had made more films," says Jan.
Jan and I are having this conversation inside the stable block, surrounded by hundreds of boxes. For the past few days I have been reading the contents of those marked "Fan Letters" and "Résumés". They are filled with pleas from hundreds of strangers, written over the decades. They say much the same thing: "I know I have the talent to be a big star. I know it's going to happen to me one day. I just need a break. Will you give me that break?"
All these letters are - every single one of them - written by people of whom I have never heard. Many of these young actors will be middle-aged by now. I want to go back in time and say to them, "You're not going to make it! It's best you know now rather than face years of having your dreams slowly erode." They are heartbreaking boxes.
"Stanley never wrote back to the fans," says Jan. "He never, never responded. It would have been too much. It would have driven him crazy. He didn't like to get engaged with strangers."
(In fact, I soon discover, Kubrick did write back to fans, on random, rare occasions. I find two replies in total. Maybe he only ever wrote back twice. One reads, "Your letter of 4th May was overwhelming. What can I say in reply? Sincerely, Stanley Kubrick." The other reads, "Dear Mr William, Thank you for writing. No comment about A Clockwork Orange. You will have to decide for yourself. Sincerely, Stanley Kubrick.")
"One time, in 1998," Jan says, "I was in the kitchen with Stanley and I mentioned that I'd just been to the optician's in St Albans to get a new pair of glasses. Stanley looked shocked. He said, 'Where exactly did you go?' I told him and he said, 'Oh, thank God! I was just in the other optician's in town getting some glasses and I used your name!'" Jan laughs. "He used my name in the optician's, everywhere."
"But even if he didn't reply to the fan letters," I say, "they've all been so scrupulously read and filed."
The fan letters are perfectly preserved. They are not in the least bit dusty or crushed. The system used to file them is, in fact, extraordinary. Each fan box contains perhaps 50 orange folders. Each folder has the name of a town or city typed on the front - Agincourt, Ontario; Alhambra, California; Cincinnati, Ohio; Daly City, California, and so on - and they are in alphabetical order inside the boxes. And inside each folder are all the fan letters that came from that particular place in any one year. Kubrick has handwritten "F-P" on the positive ones and "F-N" on the negative ones. The crazy ones have been marked "F-C".
"Look at this," I say to Jan.
I hand him a letter written by a fan and addressed to Arthur C Clarke. He forwarded it on to Kubrick and wrote on the top, "Stanley. See P3!! Arthur."
Jan turns to page 3, where Clarke had marked, with exclamation marks, the following paragraph:
"What is the meaning behind the epidemic? Does the pink furniture reveal anything about the 3rd monolith and it's emitting a pink colour when it first approaches the ship? Does this have anything to do with a shy expression? Does the alcohol offered by the Russians have anything to do with French kissing and saliva?"
"Why do you think Arthur C Clarke marked that particular paragraph for Kubrick to read?" I ask Jan.
"Because it is so bizarre and absurd," he says.
"I thought so," I say. "I just wanted to make sure."
In the back of my mind, I wondered whether this paragraph was marked because the writer of the fan letter - Mr Sam Laks of Alhambra, California - had actually worked out the secret of the monolith in 2001. I find myself empathising with Sam Laks. I am also looking for answers to the mysteries. So many conspiracy theories and wild rumours surrounded Kubrick - the one about him being responsible for faking the moon landings (untrue), the one about his terror of germs (this one can't be true, either - there's a lot of dust around here), the one about him refusing to fly and drive over 30mph. (The flying one is true - Tony says he wasn't scared of planes, he was scared of air traffic controllers - but the one about the 30mph is "bullshit", says Tony. "He had a Porsche.")
This is why my happiest times looking through the boxes are when things turn weird. For instance, at the end of one shelf inside the stable block is a box marked "Sniper head - scary". Inside, wrapped in newspaper, is an extremely lifelike and completely disgusting disembodied head of a young Vietnamese girl, the veins in her neck protruding horribly, her eyes staring out, her lips slightly open, her tongue just visible. I feel physically sick looking at it. As I hold it up by its blood-matted hair, Christiane, Kubrick's widow, walks past the window.
"I found a head!" I say.
"It's probably Ryan O'Neal's head," she replies.
Christiane has no idea who I am, nor what I'm doing in her house, but she accepts the moment with admirable calm.
"No," I say. "It's the head of the sniper from Full Metal Jacket."
"But she wasn't beheaded," calls back Christiane. "She was shot."
"I know!" I say.
Christiane shrugs and walks on. The sniper head would probably please Mr Sam Laks, on a superficial level, because it is so grotesque. But in general the most exotic things to be found here are generated from the outside, from the imaginations of fans like him.
"I was just talking to Tony about typefaces," I say to Jan.
"Ah yes," says Jan. "Stanley loved typefaces." Jan pauses. "I tell you what else he loved."
"What?" I ask.
"Stationery," says Jan.
I glance over at the boxes full of letters from people who felt about Kubrick the way Kubrick felt about stationery, and then back to Jan. "His great hobby was stationery," he says. "One time a package arrived with 100 bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, 'What are you going to do with all that ink?' He said, 'I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.' Stanley had a tremendous amount of ink." Jan pauses. "He loved stationery, pads, everything like that."
Tony wanders into the stable block.
"How's it going?" he asks.
"Still looking for Rosebud," I say.
"The closest I ever got to Rosebud," says Tony, "was finding a daisy gun that he had when he was a child."
As I look through the boxes over the months, I never find my Hotel Auschwitz tape. Nor do I get around to opening the two boxes that read Shadow On The Sun. But, one evening just before last Christmas, I decide to take a look. The boxes contain two volumes of what appears to be a cheesy sci-fi radio drama script. The story begins with a sick dog: "Can you run me over to Oxford with my dog?" says the dog's owner. "He's not very well. I'm a bit worried about him, John." This is typed.
Kubrick has handwritten below it: "THE DOG IS NOT WELL." It soon becomes clear - through speed-reading - that a virus has been carried to earth on a meteorite. This is why the dog is listless, and also why humans across the planet are no longer able to control their sexual appetites. It ends with a speech: "There's been so much killing - friend against friend, neighbour against neighbour, but we all know nobody on this earth is to blame, Mrs Brighton. We've all had the compulsions. We'll just have to forgive each other our trespasses. I'll do my part. I'll grant a general amnesty - wipe the slate clean. Then perhaps we can begin to live again, as ordinary decent human beings, and forget the horror of the past few months."
This, too, is typed. But all over the script I find notes handwritten by Kubrick. ("Establish Brighton's interest in extraterrestrial matters"; "Dog finds meteorite"; "John has got to have very powerful connections of the highest level"; "A Bill Murray line!") "Tony!" I say. "What the hell is this?"
I believe I have stumbled on a lost Kubrick radio play. Perhaps he did this in his spare time. But, if so, why?
"No, no," says Tony. "I know what this is."
Kubrick was always a keen listener to BBC Radio, Tony explains. When he first arrived in the UK, back in the early 1960s, he happened to hear this drama serial, Shadow On The Sun. Three decades later, in the early 1990s, after he had finished Full Metal Jacket, he was looking for a new project, so he asked Tony to track down the scripts. He spent a few years, on and off, thinking about Shadow On The Sun, reading and annotating the scripts, before he abandoned the idea and eventually - after working on and rejecting AI (which was filmed by Steven Spielberg after Kubrick's death) - made Eyes Wide Shut instead.
"But the original script seems so cheesy," I say.
"Ah," replies Tony, "but this is before Stanley worked his alchemy."
And I realise this is true. "Dog finds meteorite." It sounds so banal, but imagine how Kubrick might have directed it. Do the words, "Ape finds monolith" or, "Little boy turns the corner and sees twin girls" sound any less banal on the page?
All this time I have been looking in the boxes for some embodiment of the fantasies of the outsiders like Mr Sam Laks and me - but I never do find anything like that. I suppose that the closer you get to an enigma, the more explicable it becomes. Even the somewhat crazy-seeming stuff, like the filing of the fan letters by the town from which they came, begins to make sense after a while.
It turns out that Kubrick ordered this filing in case he ever wanted to have a local cinema checked out. If 2001, say, was being screened in Daly City, California, at a cinema unknown to Kubrick, he would get Tony or one of his secretaries to telephone a fan from that town to ask them to visit the cinema to ensure that, say, the screen wasn't ripped. Tony says that if I'm looking for something exotic or unexpected or extreme, if I'm looking for the solution to the mystery of Kubrick, I don't really need to look inside the boxes. I just need to watch the films.
"It's all there," he says. "Those films are Stanley."
Although the Kubricks have always closely guarded their privacy inside Childwick, I come to the end of my time at the house during something of a watershed moment. Christiane Kubrick and her daughter Katherine are soon to open the grounds and the stable block to the public for an art fair, displaying their work and the work of a number of local artists. The boxes are going to be moved somewhere else. Many, in fact, have now been shipped to Frankfurt. On March 31, the Deutsches Filmmuseum will launch a major Kubrick exhibition, including lenses, props, cameras and some of the stuff that I found in the boxes. This will tour across Europe and hopefully visit London, if the BFI can find a suitable exhibition space. And the German publisher Taschen is soon to bring out a book on Kubrick that will reproduce some of the Napoleon archive.
Towards the end of my time at the Kubrick house, Tony mentions something seemingly inconsequential, but as soon as he says it I realise that the Rosebud I was after - the quintessence of Kubrick - has been staring me in the face from the very first day. From the beginning, I had mentally noted how well constructed the boxes were, and now Tony tells me that this is because Kubrick designed them himself. He wasn't happy with the boxes that were on the market - their restrictive dimensions and the fact that it was sometimes difficult to get the tops off - so he set about designing a whole new type of box. He instructed a company of box manufacturers, G Ryder & Co, of Milton Keynes, to construct 400 of them to his specifications.
"When one batch arrived," says Tony, "we opened them up and found a note, written by someone at G Ryder & Co. The note said, 'Fussy customer. Make sure the tops slide off.'"
Tony laughs. I half expect him to say, "I suppose we were a bit fussy." But he doesn't. Instead, he says, "As opposed to non-fussy customers who don't care if they struggle all day to get the tops off."
The thing is, nobody outside the Kubrick house got to see the boxes
Enlace original.
In 1996 I received what was - and probably remains - the most exciting telephone call I have ever had. It was from a man calling himself Tony. "I'm phoning on behalf of Stanley Kubrick," he said.
"I'm sorry?" I said.
"Stanley would like you to send him a radio documentary you made called Hotel Auschwitz," said this man. This was a programme for Radio 4 about the marketing of the concentration camp.
"Stanley Kubrick?" I said.
"Let me give you the address," said the man. He sounded posh. It seemed that he didn't want to say any more about this than he had to. I sent the tape to a PO box in St Albans and waited. What might happen next? Whatever it was, it was going to be amazing. My mind started going crazy. Perhaps Kubrick would ask me to collaborate on something. (Oddly, in this daydream, I reluctantly turned him down because I didn't think I'd make a good screenwriter.)
At the time I received that telephone call, nine years had passed since Kubrick's last film, Full Metal Jacket. All anyone outside his circle knew about him was that he was living in a vast country house somewhere near St Albans - or a "secret lair", according to a Sunday Times article of that year - behaving presumably like some kind of mad hermit genius. Nobody even knew what he looked like. It had been 16 years since a photograph of him had been published.
He'd gone from making a film a year in the 1950s (including the brilliant, horrific Paths Of Glory), to a film every couple of years in the 1960s (Lolita, Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey all came out within a six-year period), to two films a decade in the 1970s and 1980s (there had been a seven-year gap between The Shining and Full Metal Jacket), and now, in the 1990s, absolutely nothing. What the hell was he doing in there? According to rumours, he was passing his time being terrified of germs and refusing to let his chauffeur drive over 30mph. But now I knew what he was doing. He was listening to my BBC Radio 4 documentary, Hotel Auschwitz.
"The good news," wrote Nicholas Wapshott in the Times in 1997, bemoaning the ever-lengthening gaps between his films, "is that Kubrick is a hoarder ... There is an extensive archive of material at his home in Childwick Bury. When that is eventually opened, we may get close to understanding the tangled brain which brought to life HAL, the [Clockwork Orange] Droogs and Jack Torrance."
The thing is, once I sent the tape to the PO box, nothing happened next. I never heard anything again. Not a word. My cassette disappeared into the mysterious world of Stanley Kubrick. And then, three years later, Kubrick was dead.
Two years after that, in 2001, I got another phone call out of the blue from the man called Tony. "Do you want to get some lunch?" he asked. "Why don't you come up to Childwick?"
The journey to the Kubrick house starts normally. You drive through rural Hertfordshire, passing ordinary-sized postwar houses and opticians and vets. Then you turn right at an electric gate with a "Do Not Trespass" sign. Drive through that, and through some woods, and past a long, white fence with the paint peeling off, and then another electric gate, and then another electric gate, and then another electric gate, and you're in the middle of an estate full of boxes.
There are boxes everywhere - shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen portable cabins, each packed with boxes. These are the boxes that contain the legendary Kubrick archive.
Was the Times right? Would the stuff inside the boxes offer an understanding of his "tangled brain"? I notice that many of the boxes are sealed. Some have, in fact, remained unopened for decades.
Tony turns out to be Tony Frewin. He started working as an office boy for Kubrick in 1965, when he was 17. One day, apropos of nothing, Kubrick said to him, "You have that office outside my office if I need you." That was 36 years ago and Tony is still here, two years after Kubrick died and was buried in the grounds behind the house. There may be no more Kubrick movies to make, but there are DVDs to remaster and reissue in special editions. There are box sets and retrospective books to oversee. There is paperwork.
Tony gives me a guided tour of the house. We walk past boxes and more boxes and filing cabinets and past a grand staircase. Childwick was once home to a family of horse-breeders called the Joels. Back then there were, presumably, busts or floral displays on either side at the bottom of this staircase. Here, instead, is a photocopier on one side and another photocopier on the other.
"Is this ... ?" I ask.
"Yes," says Tony. "This is how Stanley left it."
Stanley Kubrick's house looks as if the Inland Revenue took it over long ago.
Tony takes me into a large room painted blue and filled with books. "This used to be the cinema," he says.
"Is it the library now?" I ask.
"Look closer at the books," says Tony.
I do. "Bloody hell," I say. "Every book in this room is about Napoleon!"
"Look in the drawers," says Tony.
I do.
"It's all about Napoleon, too!" I say. "Everything in here is about Napoleon!"
I feel a little like Shelley Duvall in The Shining, chancing upon her husband's novel and finding it is comprised entirely of the line "All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy" typed over and over again. John Baxter wrote, in his unauthorised biography of Kubrick, "Most people attributed the purchase of Childwick to Kubrick's passion for privacy, and drew parallels with Jack Torrance in The Shining."
This room full of Napoleon stuff seems to bear out that comparison. "Somewhere else in this house," Tony says, "is a cabinet full of 25,000 library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon's inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July 23 17-whatever, you go to that card and it'll tell you."
"Who made up the cards?" I ask.
"Stanley," says Tony. "With some assistants."
"How long did it take?" I ask.
"Years," says Tony. "The late 1960s."
Kubrick never made his film about Napoleon. During the years it took him to compile this research, a Rod Steiger movie called Waterloo was written, produced and released. It was a box-office failure, so MGM abandoned Napoleon and Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange instead.
"Did you do this kind of massive research for all the movies?" I ask Tony.
"More or less," he says.
"OK," I say. "I understand how you might do this for Napoleon, but what about, say, The Shining?"
"Somewhere here," says Tony, "is just about every ghost book ever written, and there'll be a box containing photographs of the exteriors of maybe every mountain hotel in the world."
There is a silence.
"Tony," I say, "can I look through the boxes?"
I've been coming to the Kubrick house a couple of times a month ever since.
I start, chronologically, in a portable cabin behind the stable block, with a box marked Lolita. I open it, noting the ease with which the lid comes off. "These are excellent, well-designed boxes," I think to myself. I flick through the paperwork inside, pausing randomly at a letter that reads as if it has come straight from a Jane Austen novel:
Dear Mr Kubrick,
Just a line to express to you and to Mrs Kubrick my husband's and my own deep appreciation of your kindness in arranging for Dimitri's introduction to your uncle, Mr Günther Rennert.
Sincerely,
Mrs Vladimir Nabokov
I later learn that Dimitri was a budding opera singer and Rennert was a famous opera director, in charge of the Munich Opera House. This letter was written in 1962, back in the days when Kubrick was still producing a film every year or so. This box is full of fascinating correspondence between Kubrick and the Nabokovs but - unlike the fabulously otherworldly Napoleon room, which was accrued six years later - it is the kind of stuff you would probably find in any director's archive.
The unusual stuff - the stuff that elucidates the ever-lengthening gaps between productions - can be found in the boxes that were compiled from 1968 onwards. In a box next to the Lolita box in the cabin, I find an unusually terse letter, written by Kubrick to someone called Pat, on January 10 1968: "Dear Pat, Although you are apparently too busy to personally return my phone calls, perhaps you will find time in the near future to reply to this letter?"
(Later, when I show Tony this letter, he says he's surprised by the brusqueness. Kubrick must have been at the end of his tether, he says, because on a number of occasions he said to Tony, "Before you send an angry letter, imagine how it would look if it got into the hands of Time Out.") The reason for Kubrick's annoyance in this particular letter was because he'd heard that the Beatles were going to use a landscape shot from Dr Strangelove in one of their movies: "The Beatle film will be very widely seen," Kubrick writes, "and it will make it appear that the material in Dr Strangelove is stock footage. I feel this harms the film."
There is a similar batch of telexes from 1975: "It would appear," Kubrick writes in one, "that Space 1999 may very well become a long-running and important television series. There seems nothing left now but to seek the highest possible damages ... The deliberate choice of a date only two years away from 2001 is not accidental and harms us." This telex was written seven years after the release of 2001.
But you can see why Kubrick sometimes felt compelled to wage war to protect the honour of his work. A 1975 telex, from a picture publicity man at Warner Bros called Mark Kauffman, regards publicity stills for Kubrick's sombre reworking of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon. It reads: "Received additional material. Is there any material with humour or zaniness that you could send?"
Kubrick replies, clearly through gritted teeth: "The style of the picture is reflected by the stills you have already received. The film is based on William Makepeace Thackeray's novel which, though it has irony and wit, could not be well described as zany."
I take a break from the boxes to wander over to Tony's office. As I walk in, I notice something pinned to his letterbox. "POSTMAN," it reads. "Please put all mail in the white box under the colonnade across the courtyard to your right."
It is not a remarkable note except for one thing. The typeface Tony used to print it is exactly the same typeface Kubrick used for the posters and title sequences of Eyes Wide Shut and 2001. "It's Futura Extra Bold," explains Tony. "It was Stanley's favourite typeface. It's sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers, too. Clean and elegant."
"Is this the kind of thing you and Kubrick used to discuss?" I ask.
"God, yes," says Tony. "Sometimes late into the night. I was always trying to persuade him to turn away from them. But he was wedded to his sans serifs."
Tony goes to his bookshelf and brings down a number of volumes full of examples of typefaces, the kind of volumes he and Kubrick used to study, and he shows them to me. "I did once get him to admit the beauty of Bembo," he adds, "a serif."
"So is that note to the postman a sort of private tribute from you to Kubrick?" I ask.
"Yeah," says Tony. He smiles to himself. "Yeah, yeah."
For a moment I also smile at the unlikely image of the two men discussing the relative merits of typefaces late into the night, but then I remember the first time I saw the trailer for Eyes Wide Shut, the way the words "CRUISE, KIDMAN, KUBRICK" flashed dramatically on to the screen in large red, yellow and white colours, to the song Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing. Had the words not been in Futura Extra Bold, I realise now, they wouldn't have sent such a chill up the spine. Kubrick and Tony obviously became, at some point during their relationship, tireless amateur sleuths, wanting to amass and consume and understand all information. Tony obviously misses Kubrick terribly.
But this attention to detail becomes so amazingly evident and seemingly all-consuming in the later boxes, I begin to wonder whether it was worth it. In one portable cabin, for example, there are hundreds and hundreds of boxes related to Eyes Wide Shut, marked EWS - Portman Square, EWS - Kensington & Chelsea, etc, etc. I choose the one marked EWS - Islington because that's where I live. Inside are hundreds of photographs of doorways. The doorway of my local video shop, Century Video, is here, as is the doorway of my dry cleaner's, Spots Suede Services on Upper Street. Then, as I continue to flick through the photographs, I find, to my astonishment, pictures of the doorways of the houses in my own street. Handwritten at the top of these photographs are the words, "Hooker doorway?"
"Huh," I think. So somebody within the Kubrick organisation (it was, in fact, his nephew) once walked up my street, on Kubrick's orders, hoping to find a suitable doorway for a hooker in Eyes Wide Shut. It is both an extremely interesting find and a bit of a kick in the teeth.
It is not, though, as incredible a coincidence as it may at first seem. Judging by the writing on the boxes, probably just about every doorway in London has been captured and placed inside this cabin. This solves one mystery for me - the one about why Kubrick, a native of the Bronx, chose the St Albans countryside, of all places, for his home. I realise now that it didn't matter. It could have been anywhere. It is as if the whole world is to be found somewhere within this estate.
But was it worth it? Was the hooker doorway eventually picked for Eyes Wide Shut the quintessential hooker doorway? Back at home, I watch Eyes Wide Shut again on DVD. The hooker doorway looks exactly like any doorway you would find in Lower Manhattan - maybe on Canal Street or in the East Village. It is a red door, up some brownstone steps, with the number 265 painted on the glass at the top. Tom Cruise is pulled through the door by the hooker. The scene is over in a few seconds. (It was eventually shot on a set at Pinewood.) I remember the Napoleon archive, the years it took Kubrick and some assistants to compile it, and I suggest to Jan Harlan, Kubrick's executive producer and brother-in-law, that had there not been all those years of attention to detail during the early planning of the movie, perhaps Napoleon would actually have been made.
"That's a completely theoretical and obsolete observation!" replies Jan, in a jolly way. "That's like saying had Vermeer painted in a different manner, he'd have done 100 more paintings."
"OK," I say.
Jan is right, of course. So why am I so keen to discover in the boxes some secret personality flaw to Kubrick, whose films I love so much? He was the greatest director of his generation. Jack Nicholson's "Here's Johnny!" Lolita's heart-shaped sunglasses. The Dr Strangelove cowboy riding the nuclear bomb like it's a bucking bronco. And on and on. So many images have implanted themselves into the public consciousness, surely because of the director's ever-burgeoning attention to detail.
"Why don't you just accept," says Jan, "that this was how he worked?"
"But if he hadn't allowed his tireless work ethic to take him to unproductive places, he'd have made more films," I say. "For instance, the Space 1999 lawsuit seems, with the benefit of hindsight, a little trivial."
"Of course I wish he had made more films," says Jan.
Jan and I are having this conversation inside the stable block, surrounded by hundreds of boxes. For the past few days I have been reading the contents of those marked "Fan Letters" and "Résumés". They are filled with pleas from hundreds of strangers, written over the decades. They say much the same thing: "I know I have the talent to be a big star. I know it's going to happen to me one day. I just need a break. Will you give me that break?"
All these letters are - every single one of them - written by people of whom I have never heard. Many of these young actors will be middle-aged by now. I want to go back in time and say to them, "You're not going to make it! It's best you know now rather than face years of having your dreams slowly erode." They are heartbreaking boxes.
"Stanley never wrote back to the fans," says Jan. "He never, never responded. It would have been too much. It would have driven him crazy. He didn't like to get engaged with strangers."
(In fact, I soon discover, Kubrick did write back to fans, on random, rare occasions. I find two replies in total. Maybe he only ever wrote back twice. One reads, "Your letter of 4th May was overwhelming. What can I say in reply? Sincerely, Stanley Kubrick." The other reads, "Dear Mr William, Thank you for writing. No comment about A Clockwork Orange. You will have to decide for yourself. Sincerely, Stanley Kubrick.")
"One time, in 1998," Jan says, "I was in the kitchen with Stanley and I mentioned that I'd just been to the optician's in St Albans to get a new pair of glasses. Stanley looked shocked. He said, 'Where exactly did you go?' I told him and he said, 'Oh, thank God! I was just in the other optician's in town getting some glasses and I used your name!'" Jan laughs. "He used my name in the optician's, everywhere."
"But even if he didn't reply to the fan letters," I say, "they've all been so scrupulously read and filed."
The fan letters are perfectly preserved. They are not in the least bit dusty or crushed. The system used to file them is, in fact, extraordinary. Each fan box contains perhaps 50 orange folders. Each folder has the name of a town or city typed on the front - Agincourt, Ontario; Alhambra, California; Cincinnati, Ohio; Daly City, California, and so on - and they are in alphabetical order inside the boxes. And inside each folder are all the fan letters that came from that particular place in any one year. Kubrick has handwritten "F-P" on the positive ones and "F-N" on the negative ones. The crazy ones have been marked "F-C".
"Look at this," I say to Jan.
I hand him a letter written by a fan and addressed to Arthur C Clarke. He forwarded it on to Kubrick and wrote on the top, "Stanley. See P3!! Arthur."
Jan turns to page 3, where Clarke had marked, with exclamation marks, the following paragraph:
"What is the meaning behind the epidemic? Does the pink furniture reveal anything about the 3rd monolith and it's emitting a pink colour when it first approaches the ship? Does this have anything to do with a shy expression? Does the alcohol offered by the Russians have anything to do with French kissing and saliva?"
"Why do you think Arthur C Clarke marked that particular paragraph for Kubrick to read?" I ask Jan.
"Because it is so bizarre and absurd," he says.
"I thought so," I say. "I just wanted to make sure."
In the back of my mind, I wondered whether this paragraph was marked because the writer of the fan letter - Mr Sam Laks of Alhambra, California - had actually worked out the secret of the monolith in 2001. I find myself empathising with Sam Laks. I am also looking for answers to the mysteries. So many conspiracy theories and wild rumours surrounded Kubrick - the one about him being responsible for faking the moon landings (untrue), the one about his terror of germs (this one can't be true, either - there's a lot of dust around here), the one about him refusing to fly and drive over 30mph. (The flying one is true - Tony says he wasn't scared of planes, he was scared of air traffic controllers - but the one about the 30mph is "bullshit", says Tony. "He had a Porsche.")
This is why my happiest times looking through the boxes are when things turn weird. For instance, at the end of one shelf inside the stable block is a box marked "Sniper head - scary". Inside, wrapped in newspaper, is an extremely lifelike and completely disgusting disembodied head of a young Vietnamese girl, the veins in her neck protruding horribly, her eyes staring out, her lips slightly open, her tongue just visible. I feel physically sick looking at it. As I hold it up by its blood-matted hair, Christiane, Kubrick's widow, walks past the window.
"I found a head!" I say.
"It's probably Ryan O'Neal's head," she replies.
Christiane has no idea who I am, nor what I'm doing in her house, but she accepts the moment with admirable calm.
"No," I say. "It's the head of the sniper from Full Metal Jacket."
"But she wasn't beheaded," calls back Christiane. "She was shot."
"I know!" I say.
Christiane shrugs and walks on. The sniper head would probably please Mr Sam Laks, on a superficial level, because it is so grotesque. But in general the most exotic things to be found here are generated from the outside, from the imaginations of fans like him.
"I was just talking to Tony about typefaces," I say to Jan.
"Ah yes," says Jan. "Stanley loved typefaces." Jan pauses. "I tell you what else he loved."
"What?" I ask.
"Stationery," says Jan.
I glance over at the boxes full of letters from people who felt about Kubrick the way Kubrick felt about stationery, and then back to Jan. "His great hobby was stationery," he says. "One time a package arrived with 100 bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, 'What are you going to do with all that ink?' He said, 'I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.' Stanley had a tremendous amount of ink." Jan pauses. "He loved stationery, pads, everything like that."
Tony wanders into the stable block.
"How's it going?" he asks.
"Still looking for Rosebud," I say.
"The closest I ever got to Rosebud," says Tony, "was finding a daisy gun that he had when he was a child."
As I look through the boxes over the months, I never find my Hotel Auschwitz tape. Nor do I get around to opening the two boxes that read Shadow On The Sun. But, one evening just before last Christmas, I decide to take a look. The boxes contain two volumes of what appears to be a cheesy sci-fi radio drama script. The story begins with a sick dog: "Can you run me over to Oxford with my dog?" says the dog's owner. "He's not very well. I'm a bit worried about him, John." This is typed.
Kubrick has handwritten below it: "THE DOG IS NOT WELL." It soon becomes clear - through speed-reading - that a virus has been carried to earth on a meteorite. This is why the dog is listless, and also why humans across the planet are no longer able to control their sexual appetites. It ends with a speech: "There's been so much killing - friend against friend, neighbour against neighbour, but we all know nobody on this earth is to blame, Mrs Brighton. We've all had the compulsions. We'll just have to forgive each other our trespasses. I'll do my part. I'll grant a general amnesty - wipe the slate clean. Then perhaps we can begin to live again, as ordinary decent human beings, and forget the horror of the past few months."
This, too, is typed. But all over the script I find notes handwritten by Kubrick. ("Establish Brighton's interest in extraterrestrial matters"; "Dog finds meteorite"; "John has got to have very powerful connections of the highest level"; "A Bill Murray line!") "Tony!" I say. "What the hell is this?"
I believe I have stumbled on a lost Kubrick radio play. Perhaps he did this in his spare time. But, if so, why?
"No, no," says Tony. "I know what this is."
Kubrick was always a keen listener to BBC Radio, Tony explains. When he first arrived in the UK, back in the early 1960s, he happened to hear this drama serial, Shadow On The Sun. Three decades later, in the early 1990s, after he had finished Full Metal Jacket, he was looking for a new project, so he asked Tony to track down the scripts. He spent a few years, on and off, thinking about Shadow On The Sun, reading and annotating the scripts, before he abandoned the idea and eventually - after working on and rejecting AI (which was filmed by Steven Spielberg after Kubrick's death) - made Eyes Wide Shut instead.
"But the original script seems so cheesy," I say.
"Ah," replies Tony, "but this is before Stanley worked his alchemy."
And I realise this is true. "Dog finds meteorite." It sounds so banal, but imagine how Kubrick might have directed it. Do the words, "Ape finds monolith" or, "Little boy turns the corner and sees twin girls" sound any less banal on the page?
All this time I have been looking in the boxes for some embodiment of the fantasies of the outsiders like Mr Sam Laks and me - but I never do find anything like that. I suppose that the closer you get to an enigma, the more explicable it becomes. Even the somewhat crazy-seeming stuff, like the filing of the fan letters by the town from which they came, begins to make sense after a while.
It turns out that Kubrick ordered this filing in case he ever wanted to have a local cinema checked out. If 2001, say, was being screened in Daly City, California, at a cinema unknown to Kubrick, he would get Tony or one of his secretaries to telephone a fan from that town to ask them to visit the cinema to ensure that, say, the screen wasn't ripped. Tony says that if I'm looking for something exotic or unexpected or extreme, if I'm looking for the solution to the mystery of Kubrick, I don't really need to look inside the boxes. I just need to watch the films.
"It's all there," he says. "Those films are Stanley."
Although the Kubricks have always closely guarded their privacy inside Childwick, I come to the end of my time at the house during something of a watershed moment. Christiane Kubrick and her daughter Katherine are soon to open the grounds and the stable block to the public for an art fair, displaying their work and the work of a number of local artists. The boxes are going to be moved somewhere else. Many, in fact, have now been shipped to Frankfurt. On March 31, the Deutsches Filmmuseum will launch a major Kubrick exhibition, including lenses, props, cameras and some of the stuff that I found in the boxes. This will tour across Europe and hopefully visit London, if the BFI can find a suitable exhibition space. And the German publisher Taschen is soon to bring out a book on Kubrick that will reproduce some of the Napoleon archive.
Towards the end of my time at the Kubrick house, Tony mentions something seemingly inconsequential, but as soon as he says it I realise that the Rosebud I was after - the quintessence of Kubrick - has been staring me in the face from the very first day. From the beginning, I had mentally noted how well constructed the boxes were, and now Tony tells me that this is because Kubrick designed them himself. He wasn't happy with the boxes that were on the market - their restrictive dimensions and the fact that it was sometimes difficult to get the tops off - so he set about designing a whole new type of box. He instructed a company of box manufacturers, G Ryder & Co, of Milton Keynes, to construct 400 of them to his specifications.
"When one batch arrived," says Tony, "we opened them up and found a note, written by someone at G Ryder & Co. The note said, 'Fussy customer. Make sure the tops slide off.'"
Tony laughs. I half expect him to say, "I suppose we were a bit fussy." But he doesn't. Instead, he says, "As opposed to non-fussy customers who don't care if they struggle all day to get the tops off."
The thing is, nobody outside the Kubrick house got to see the boxes
Enlace original.
lunes, agosto 27, 2007
Addendum al post anterior
A veces pienso que alguna oscura compulsión te incita a fabricarte un(a) némesis.
viernes, agosto 24, 2007
El ejercicio de hoy en lógica inútil
Siempre he encontrado a la frase "en ocasiones" estadísticamente incoherente, realmente no proporciona una idea adecuada de la frecuencia en la que un evento sucede de la manera en que adverbios como "frecuentemente" o también "rara vez"lo hacen. Incluso decir "a veces" es vago e inexacto, entiendo su uso para describir algo que no sucede a menudo pero al mismo tiempo su ocurrencia tampoco es infrecuente, sin embargo si se le saca del contexto de una oración todo su sentido se pierde.
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Now playing: A Perfect Circle - Passive
via FoxyTunes
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Now playing: A Perfect Circle - Passive
via FoxyTunes
miércoles, agosto 15, 2007
Algo de azar, algo de reflexión, un poco de nada
Hoy llegué con ganas de postear algo... De hecho muchas veces he llegado con ganas de postear algo sólo para encontrar que los pendientes del día me lo hacen imposible. Les voy a ahorrar el post de cajón acerca de como el trabajo cambia la perspectiva de las cosas y de cómo uno tiene que empezar a dejar de lado algunas cosas por seguir haciendo que la cuenta bancaria resucite cada quince días, pero de lo que no se salvarán es de leer algunas cosas que han estado en mi cabeza por un rato:
Cada vez me parece más tentadora la idea de rentar un departamento y vivir solo, pero no me gusta la idea de rentar, quisiera un lugar que fuera completamente mío (rentar es como arrojar tu dinero a un pozo sin fondo cada mes), pero aún no aterrizo mi "master plan" de como hacerlo. A veces pienso que encuentro la comodidad demasiado atrayente como para dejarla, aunque la idea de la independencia aún me llama como el canto de una sirena en el horizonte.
La película de Los Simpson fue un ejercicio inútil, jamás habrían podido llenar las expectativas de millones de fanáticos que habíamos esperado un evento como este por algo así como diez años (¿o más?), dejando eso de lado la película tiene algunos momentos que hacen recordar aquellos Simpsons clásicos que conocimos, amamos y comenzamos a perder a partir de la temporada 16, y eso la salva de la mediocridad, más no de la intrascendencia. Según los actores de doblaje tienen un contrato por hasta tres películas, así que la segunda parte no puede sino mejorar, aunque yo hace mucho perdí la fe en esta familia amarilla, a pesar de la honda huella que han dejado en mí.
Guitar Hero 2 es la neta del planeta, tenía años que un videojuego no me capturaba de tal manera, probablemente sea el hecho de siempre haber querido aprender a tocar la lira, aderezado con la idea de sentirse todo un rockstar por un par de segundos lo que me ha hecho totalmente adicto, pero es indudable que ahorita ando totalmente traumado. Je (y ya puedo terminar algunas canciones en hard ^^).
Desde hace un rato he sentido un renovado amor por mi trabajo, quizás tenga en mí algo de masoquista...
Tanto tiempo resistiendo la tentación de una tarjeta de crédito y ahora repentinamente quiero una, el comercialismo finalmente me ha alcanzado... Snif
Por hoy creo que es suficiente.
Auf wiedersehen (ah, las memorias...)
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Now playing: Godsmack - Bad Magick
via FoxyTunes
Cada vez me parece más tentadora la idea de rentar un departamento y vivir solo, pero no me gusta la idea de rentar, quisiera un lugar que fuera completamente mío (rentar es como arrojar tu dinero a un pozo sin fondo cada mes), pero aún no aterrizo mi "master plan" de como hacerlo. A veces pienso que encuentro la comodidad demasiado atrayente como para dejarla, aunque la idea de la independencia aún me llama como el canto de una sirena en el horizonte.
La película de Los Simpson fue un ejercicio inútil, jamás habrían podido llenar las expectativas de millones de fanáticos que habíamos esperado un evento como este por algo así como diez años (¿o más?), dejando eso de lado la película tiene algunos momentos que hacen recordar aquellos Simpsons clásicos que conocimos, amamos y comenzamos a perder a partir de la temporada 16, y eso la salva de la mediocridad, más no de la intrascendencia. Según los actores de doblaje tienen un contrato por hasta tres películas, así que la segunda parte no puede sino mejorar, aunque yo hace mucho perdí la fe en esta familia amarilla, a pesar de la honda huella que han dejado en mí.
Guitar Hero 2 es la neta del planeta, tenía años que un videojuego no me capturaba de tal manera, probablemente sea el hecho de siempre haber querido aprender a tocar la lira, aderezado con la idea de sentirse todo un rockstar por un par de segundos lo que me ha hecho totalmente adicto, pero es indudable que ahorita ando totalmente traumado. Je (y ya puedo terminar algunas canciones en hard ^^).
Desde hace un rato he sentido un renovado amor por mi trabajo, quizás tenga en mí algo de masoquista...
Tanto tiempo resistiendo la tentación de una tarjeta de crédito y ahora repentinamente quiero una, el comercialismo finalmente me ha alcanzado... Snif
Por hoy creo que es suficiente.
Auf wiedersehen (ah, las memorias...)
----------------
Now playing: Godsmack - Bad Magick
via FoxyTunes
viernes, agosto 03, 2007
The Diamond Sea
look into my eyes and you shall see
why everything is quiet and nothing's free
I wonder how I'm gonna make you smile
when love is running wild on the diamond sea
Bonus track:
El papel sanitario de la oficina tiene un estampado de delfines.
No sé que relación puedan tener dichos cetáceos con las labores destinadas a realizarse con este tipo de papel.
Ni tampoco que hayan hecho para merecer ese tipo de vejaciones diarias,
pero debió haber sido algo muy malo.
why everything is quiet and nothing's free
I wonder how I'm gonna make you smile
when love is running wild on the diamond sea
Bonus track:
El papel sanitario de la oficina tiene un estampado de delfines.
No sé que relación puedan tener dichos cetáceos con las labores destinadas a realizarse con este tipo de papel.
Ni tampoco que hayan hecho para merecer ese tipo de vejaciones diarias,
pero debió haber sido algo muy malo.
sábado, julio 14, 2007
tarea pendiente
Ps como por ahi parece que mi carnal Pax me mandó un mim (o sea un meme pues), en el que debo escribir ocho cosas que quizás no sepan de mí. Así que ahi va:
1. En mis tiempos de preparatoriano y estudiante de secundaria me rehusaba a escuchar cualquier cosa que no fuera rock alternativo (bien grungero yo). Ahora mis gustos musicales han variado mucho, e incluyen muchos placeres culpables para los cuales habría preferido insertar un alfiler en mis oidos.
2. Nunca he sido una persona social, de forma consciente o subconsciente siempre me siento fuera del círculo, sea cual sea este.
3. Me cuesta mucho trabajo mantener una conversación, ya sea en persona o a distancia, tengo una discapacidad innata para hacer lo que los gringos llaman small-talk, no se por qué.
4. Soy malo para sacar cuentas, nunca tuve problemas para resolver problemas de álgebra, electrónica y demás materias de ingeniería, pero no jamás me den dinero para pagar la cuenta y esperen que reparta el cambio de manera adecuada.
5. ODIO estar rodeado de gente, o como dicen aquí: me "engento" bien fácil.
6. Aborrezco esperar en una fila, va de la mano con lo anterior.
7. Siempre quise aprender a hablar un tercer idioma, intenté el alemán pero el profesor que lo imaprtía era pésimo.
8. Personas cuyo idioma nativo es el inglés se han mostrado sorprendidas de que no sea mi idioma natal, pues tengo buena pronunciación, también cuando estoy de buen humor hago una excelente imitación de acentos extranjeros.
1. En mis tiempos de preparatoriano y estudiante de secundaria me rehusaba a escuchar cualquier cosa que no fuera rock alternativo (bien grungero yo). Ahora mis gustos musicales han variado mucho, e incluyen muchos placeres culpables para los cuales habría preferido insertar un alfiler en mis oidos.
2. Nunca he sido una persona social, de forma consciente o subconsciente siempre me siento fuera del círculo, sea cual sea este.
3. Me cuesta mucho trabajo mantener una conversación, ya sea en persona o a distancia, tengo una discapacidad innata para hacer lo que los gringos llaman small-talk, no se por qué.
4. Soy malo para sacar cuentas, nunca tuve problemas para resolver problemas de álgebra, electrónica y demás materias de ingeniería, pero no jamás me den dinero para pagar la cuenta y esperen que reparta el cambio de manera adecuada.
5. ODIO estar rodeado de gente, o como dicen aquí: me "engento" bien fácil.
6. Aborrezco esperar en una fila, va de la mano con lo anterior.
7. Siempre quise aprender a hablar un tercer idioma, intenté el alemán pero el profesor que lo imaprtía era pésimo.
8. Personas cuyo idioma nativo es el inglés se han mostrado sorprendidas de que no sea mi idioma natal, pues tengo buena pronunciación, también cuando estoy de buen humor hago una excelente imitación de acentos extranjeros.
jueves, julio 12, 2007
A modo de previo
No se cómo hay gente capaz de situarse frente a la pantalla en blanco y escribir un post. Ya se ha dicho hasta el cansancio lo difícil del reto de la hoja en blanco pero quizás la pantalla en blanco es un reto mucho más difícil, la barra del procesador de palabras con sus continuos parpadeos es como una burla de la máquina frente a tu mente en blanco: blip, ¡estoy lista! blip ¡te estoy esperando! blip ¿para que me encendiste si no ibas a escribir nada? blip ¿no se te antoja chatear un ratito, en lo que te llega la inspiración? blip, blip, blip-ad-nauseam...
Para mí lo difícil no es escribir (una vez que empiezo es sencillo seguir el hilo del post), lo complicado es situarse en ese mood de posteo, si tan solo fuera tan fácil como tronar los dedos y decir [modo de blogueo encendido] (los corchetes son sólo por estética, realmente no los pronunciaría) esta bitácora tendría muchos más posts, y mis ausencias no serían tan duraderas =/
Algunos posts que tengo planeados y que de una vez enumero para no olvidarlos después son los siguientes:
1. Otra crónica del caos, esta vez sobre los aeropuertos.
2. Relato de un viaje a Anaheim.
3. Un bosquejo sobre la comida de la Ciudad de México.
4. Una hipótesis auto-refutada acerca de si escribir es como montar una bicicleta.
5. Un post relativamente aburrido y quejumbroso en el que escriba sobre las crecientes responsabilidades de mi trabajo y sus repercusiones en mi tiempo libre.
6. Algo insultante sobre los choferes del servicio público.
y ya (probablemente escriba una u otra pendejada que se me ocurra mientras escribo los seis posts anteriores) hasta ahi le pararé pues ya debería de acostarme a dormir... extraño los tiempos de estudiante y sus respectivas vacaciones de verano (snif).
Para mí lo difícil no es escribir (una vez que empiezo es sencillo seguir el hilo del post), lo complicado es situarse en ese mood de posteo, si tan solo fuera tan fácil como tronar los dedos y decir [modo de blogueo encendido] (los corchetes son sólo por estética, realmente no los pronunciaría) esta bitácora tendría muchos más posts, y mis ausencias no serían tan duraderas =/
Algunos posts que tengo planeados y que de una vez enumero para no olvidarlos después son los siguientes:
1. Otra crónica del caos, esta vez sobre los aeropuertos.
2. Relato de un viaje a Anaheim.
3. Un bosquejo sobre la comida de la Ciudad de México.
4. Una hipótesis auto-refutada acerca de si escribir es como montar una bicicleta.
5. Un post relativamente aburrido y quejumbroso en el que escriba sobre las crecientes responsabilidades de mi trabajo y sus repercusiones en mi tiempo libre.
6. Algo insultante sobre los choferes del servicio público.
y ya (probablemente escriba una u otra pendejada que se me ocurra mientras escribo los seis posts anteriores) hasta ahi le pararé pues ya debería de acostarme a dormir... extraño los tiempos de estudiante y sus respectivas vacaciones de verano (snif).
martes, julio 10, 2007
miércoles, julio 04, 2007
Stay Tuned
Tres meses de vacaciones ya fue demasiado tiempo. Pronto habra nuevos posts, ¡vaya que tengo cosas que contar!
viernes, marzo 30, 2007
Cronicas del caos: El pago de la tenencia
Ayer intenté pagar la tenencia de mi automóvil (atención al énfasis en el primer verbo). La verdad es que es un proceso tan desesperante, ineficiente y tedioso que ni en la peor pesadilla de Kafka podría un personaje sufrir penuria tan inclemente. Para todos aquellos quienes han tenido la foruna de jamás haber realizado un trámite similar déjenme darles los pormenores del proceso: primero acude uno con toda su documentación al módulo de entrega de tickets, donde te entregan un número con el turno en el cual le corresponde pagar, segundo se hace una calificación de los documentos y te indican el total que te corresponde entregar a las arcas gubernamentales, finalmente pasas a las cajas a realizar tu pago. ¿Sencillo, no es así? Quizás en un país donde la burocracia no esté arraigada en la mente del personal de gobierno, no en el nuestro.
En el colmo del cinismo en el módulo de entrega de fichas hay un cartel que indica que para un mejor servicio sólo se entregan 2000 turnos diarios, los cuales serán atendidos por cualquiera de las 20 cajas generales dispuestas para realizar la transacción. Mi turno era el 1736.
El horario oficial de trabajo es de 8 de la mañana a 3 de la tarde, es decir siete horas en total para atender el total de números entregados. Un rápido cálculo matemático indica que si tienes 7 horas para atender 2000 turnos en 20 cajas cada caja debe atender a 100 personas (14 personas por hora), y cada transacción debe durar en promedio 4 minutos. Recordemos que las cajas únicamente deben cobrar el total indicado, la evaluación de los documentos ya ha sido realizada, así que 4 minutos para realizar un simple intercambio monetario no es demasiado tiempo ¿no es así? De nuevo, quizás en un mundo ideal. Nuestros capaces y eficientes servidores públicos realizan el triple de minutos por transacción, eso quiere decir que despuès de llegar a las 8 de la mañana y perder la mitad de un día de trabajo de personas que acuden en tiempo y forma a pagar, al término de las 7 horas habrán sido atendidos alrededor de 600 contribuyentes. A ese paso mi número habría sido atendido alrededor de las 10 de la noche. Habría tenido que esperar 14 horas para poder realizar mi pago. ¿Luego como quieren que uno cumpla con sus obligaciones fiscales con esos tiempos de espera? Dicho sea de paso, no esperé y mandé a la chingada el trámite a las 3 de la tarde.
(Continuará...)
En el colmo del cinismo en el módulo de entrega de fichas hay un cartel que indica que para un mejor servicio sólo se entregan 2000 turnos diarios, los cuales serán atendidos por cualquiera de las 20 cajas generales dispuestas para realizar la transacción. Mi turno era el 1736.
El horario oficial de trabajo es de 8 de la mañana a 3 de la tarde, es decir siete horas en total para atender el total de números entregados. Un rápido cálculo matemático indica que si tienes 7 horas para atender 2000 turnos en 20 cajas cada caja debe atender a 100 personas (14 personas por hora), y cada transacción debe durar en promedio 4 minutos. Recordemos que las cajas únicamente deben cobrar el total indicado, la evaluación de los documentos ya ha sido realizada, así que 4 minutos para realizar un simple intercambio monetario no es demasiado tiempo ¿no es así? De nuevo, quizás en un mundo ideal. Nuestros capaces y eficientes servidores públicos realizan el triple de minutos por transacción, eso quiere decir que despuès de llegar a las 8 de la mañana y perder la mitad de un día de trabajo de personas que acuden en tiempo y forma a pagar, al término de las 7 horas habrán sido atendidos alrededor de 600 contribuyentes. A ese paso mi número habría sido atendido alrededor de las 10 de la noche. Habría tenido que esperar 14 horas para poder realizar mi pago. ¿Luego como quieren que uno cumpla con sus obligaciones fiscales con esos tiempos de espera? Dicho sea de paso, no esperé y mandé a la chingada el trámite a las 3 de la tarde.
(Continuará...)
sábado, marzo 24, 2007
It's been a while
Ya tiene rato. Lo sé ya veces me pesa, pero aún no descubro la razón. Tengo ganas de escribir un post introspectivo, quizàs algo demente o alguna de esas historias que a veces se me escurren entre los dedos. Hace rato de tantas cosas que ya he perdido la cuenta. A veces pienso conversaciones que nunca he tenido y me digo "debería postear esto" pero se me olvida o se me fuga el tiempo. El tiempo. Podría escribir tantas cosas acerca del tiempo pero probablemente ya han sido escritas (aquì caigo en la paráfrasis irónica de decir que no existen ideas originales y venimos reciclando los mismos conceptos desde hace quien sabe cuanto tiempo). A veces siento que se me ha acabado el idealismo (aquí recuerdo aquella frase de El idealismo es una enfermedad que se cura con el tiempo ¿o era la juventud? No importa el concepto es el mismo). Aquí me doy cuenta de lo antiestético que es terminar una oración con un paréntesis antes del punto. Quizás debería dejar cada frase en un párrafo. Ahora recuerdo que este tipo de escritura se llama stream of consciousness. La mayor parte del tiempo hago eso, simplemente dejar fluir mis ideas, sin importar lo inconexas que parezcan. Probablemente debería permitirles existir por más tiempo antes de pasar a la siguiente pero así es como funciona mi mente, no se si sea un defecto o una virtud. No se si me gusta la persona en quien me he estado convirtiendo, me digo a mi mismo que es parte del proceso de crecimiento personal, de madurez. Bullshit. La diferencia entre el 90% de los conductores de tabasco y los monos que manejan carritos en los actos circenses es que los monos debieron haber recibido algùn tipo de educación antes de ponerse tras el volante. Pense esto hace un par de días y aún no lo he olvidado. Debería reintegrarme a la chocósfera, he estado demasiado alejado. Tal vez algún día escriba alguna de esas conversaciones imaginarias que a veces tengo con gente que apenas conozco. Quizás debería detenerme ya.
viernes, febrero 16, 2007
jueves, febrero 01, 2007
viernes, enero 05, 2007
Acerca de las espirales
El problema principal con las espirales es nunca saber la dirección en la que uno transita. Una vez me encontré, cerca del cacto con siete bifurcaciones --es imposible medir la distancia en las espirales, los antiguos lo sabían y colocaron plantas en lugares determinados como punto de referencia: aquí un sauce llorón cuyo descuidado jardinero ha dejado crecer las ramas tanto que atravesar ese segmento de la espiral es como adentrarse en un mar de verde, allá un insignificante brote de eneldo, imperceptible para cualquiera quien no sepa donde mirar-- con un guerrero Otomano aún bañado en la sangre de una anónima batalla, algún demonio malicioso le había engañado para entrar aquí con la idea de llegar a su tierra natal más rápidamente que si cruzase el mediterráneo, pero había recorrido ya ochocientas cincuenta plantas y aún no llegaba a la salida. Me preguntó en el lenguaje de los antiguos si sabía cuantos árboles había recorrido hasta llegar allí, le respondí que no sabía, pero que ese era mi sexagésimo día de caminata. Él se molestó, luego se alejó murmurando en su lengua algo acerca de la imposibilidad de medir el tiempo en aquel lugar, también me pareció haberlo escuchado maldecir antes de perderse de vista.
A veces, cuando las arrugas en mis manos comienzan a indicarme que he pasado demasiado tiempo inmóvil surge en mi la idea dormir al pie de algún ciprés o un abedul hasta que mis huesos se pulvericen y sean dispersados por la espiral en las suelas de los zapatos de incontables caminantes, volverme uno con ella, pero un escalofrío recorre mi cuello ante la idea de dejar un suerpo insepulto y descarto tan ominoso pensamiento al al ritmo que vuelvo a andar, inseguro de mi destino, pero con la certeza de la inmortalidad siempre y cuando siga en mi búsqueda.
Hay momentos aciagos en los cuales la angustia pone sus manos broncíneas sobre mi corazón y aprieta con fuerza, entonces trato de recordar la historia que mi bisabuela solía contarme acerca de aquel guerrero que un día salió de la espiral para convertirse en emperador y extender los límites del reino más allá de los de las desconocidas tierras de oriente, fue dueño del palacio más grande y lujoso jamás visto, y tomó como esposa a una princesa árabe tan bella como el lucero matutino; la historia decía que en sus ojos podía verse la sabiduría infinita del Dios y que incluso los árboles se inclinaban ante su presencia, pero que ¡ay! su corazón albergaba una tristeza que ni el más exquisito jarabe de rosas podía curar. Un día, para desgracia de su reino y sus súbditos, el monarca desapareció, los hijos de su reino, presas de la confusión cayeron sin oponer mucha resistencia ante los barbáricos conquistadores del norte.
Yo no busco los conocimientos ilimitados de aquel antiguo emperador cuyo nombre ya nadie recuerda salvo ancianos chochos, que cuentan la historia como si fuera un cuento de hadas. Tampoco busco poder o riquezas, fui puesto aquí como un castigo, exiliado a una prisión eterna para mi cuerpo y mi alma, destinado a caminar en la espiral hasta purgar mis culpas, hasta que mi nombre sea olvidado y los cuerpas de todos aquellos a quienes amé se hayan convertido en polvo. Quizá en algún momento, cuando el miedo a la muerte sea sobrepasado por mi desesperación y mi esperanza se pierda por siempre en el pozo del olvido, me acueste a dormir en un corredor hasta que mi nombre sea borrado del libro de la vida. Quizás para entonces Dios mismo haya olvidado mis pecados y Azrael me invite a entrar al paraíso a bañarme en sus ríos de miel y a gozar de los placeres de setenta vírgenes solo para mí, pero esa idea aún me parece demasiado descabellada.
A veces, cuando las arrugas en mis manos comienzan a indicarme que he pasado demasiado tiempo inmóvil surge en mi la idea dormir al pie de algún ciprés o un abedul hasta que mis huesos se pulvericen y sean dispersados por la espiral en las suelas de los zapatos de incontables caminantes, volverme uno con ella, pero un escalofrío recorre mi cuello ante la idea de dejar un suerpo insepulto y descarto tan ominoso pensamiento al al ritmo que vuelvo a andar, inseguro de mi destino, pero con la certeza de la inmortalidad siempre y cuando siga en mi búsqueda.
Hay momentos aciagos en los cuales la angustia pone sus manos broncíneas sobre mi corazón y aprieta con fuerza, entonces trato de recordar la historia que mi bisabuela solía contarme acerca de aquel guerrero que un día salió de la espiral para convertirse en emperador y extender los límites del reino más allá de los de las desconocidas tierras de oriente, fue dueño del palacio más grande y lujoso jamás visto, y tomó como esposa a una princesa árabe tan bella como el lucero matutino; la historia decía que en sus ojos podía verse la sabiduría infinita del Dios y que incluso los árboles se inclinaban ante su presencia, pero que ¡ay! su corazón albergaba una tristeza que ni el más exquisito jarabe de rosas podía curar. Un día, para desgracia de su reino y sus súbditos, el monarca desapareció, los hijos de su reino, presas de la confusión cayeron sin oponer mucha resistencia ante los barbáricos conquistadores del norte.
Yo no busco los conocimientos ilimitados de aquel antiguo emperador cuyo nombre ya nadie recuerda salvo ancianos chochos, que cuentan la historia como si fuera un cuento de hadas. Tampoco busco poder o riquezas, fui puesto aquí como un castigo, exiliado a una prisión eterna para mi cuerpo y mi alma, destinado a caminar en la espiral hasta purgar mis culpas, hasta que mi nombre sea olvidado y los cuerpas de todos aquellos a quienes amé se hayan convertido en polvo. Quizá en algún momento, cuando el miedo a la muerte sea sobrepasado por mi desesperación y mi esperanza se pierda por siempre en el pozo del olvido, me acueste a dormir en un corredor hasta que mi nombre sea borrado del libro de la vida. Quizás para entonces Dios mismo haya olvidado mis pecados y Azrael me invite a entrar al paraíso a bañarme en sus ríos de miel y a gozar de los placeres de setenta vírgenes solo para mí, pero esa idea aún me parece demasiado descabellada.
Imagen cortesía de Lord-Chernobill.
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