Odilia Rivera-Santos
I take a romantic stroll in the drizzle down a lonely street in NYC with a bag of laundry; a man across the street, one of the undocumented immigrants waiting to hop on the back of a pickup truck, yells out "¡Mulata! ¡Mulatita! ¡Míreme!"
He demands my attention, and I proceed on this romantic walk with my laundry; a raindrop glides from my hair, down my forehead and comes to rest at the tip of my nose, as if wondering whether to jump off or remain there on the dent of the tip.
I've been thinking about Kafka a lot lately and his meticulous diaries, which he had asked his friend Max Brod to burn along with his fiction. According to an article in The New York Times, Kafka burned 90 percent of his work. As much as I love Kafka, there is no grief over his having destroyed stories, words, journals; it's his prerogative to share or not share details illumined and made grand by a brilliant mind. Kafka was being a fastidious editor, erasing and undoing until there was barely anything left.
In his diaries, he is a man struggling with familial pressures and life with a father whose admiration he could never get and work at something other than art -- work at tedium and repetition, which may have steadied his nerves or provided emotional equilibrium. The struggle with identity and feelings of marginalization -- he was a Yiddish-speaking Jew and proving one's self to a dominant figure in life -- made him a great writer.
Friction seems to be necessary to create... unless it cripples or kills the creative spirit.
I am listening to details and watching glances, gestures, the color of the sky, rain and the sleepy mood of fellow travelers on trains, in cars, by foot through this thing called life.
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