Mi no-existencia

Desde el segundo semestre del año pasado comencé a dar evidencias de no-existencia, las cuales se han visto severamente agravadas desde comienzos de este año: No entro al MSN, no entro a Facebook, tardo siglos en contestar correos, posteo poco en mi blog. 

Tenía que suceder, eventualmente. 

No he visto efectos positivos al grado soñado, pero sí los ha habido (creo).

La no-existencia, empero, ha tenido interrupciones breves e intermitentes, que espero suprímanse POR COMPLETO -al menos DEBIESEN- de aquí a Mayo, 2009. Entonces, quizá y sólo quizá, pueda volver a existir...

(Tal vez haga una excepción con el blog, but I'm not counting on it).

De Bach, Joshua Bell, y la ignorancia y la enajenación de las masas

...

Journalist Gene Weingarten was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for his outstanding and thought provoking analysis of the experiment. Weingarten discusses the ramifications of Bell's subway experience. What role does context play in our artistic perceptions? To what degree is our perception of beauty influenced by our mindset at the particular time we perceive it? He notes:

"It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?"

...

A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.
Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule.
A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk.
A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.
The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist.
Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.
In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.
No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the top musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written,with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.
Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100.
This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty?
Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?
One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?

Tomado de AQUI

Stanley G. Clarke 1939 - 2008

I was wishing to find words to praise Stan and express my grief for his loss without recurring to cliche but ended up concluding it was a futile desire. After all, Stan WAS great. And that's not an inertial affirmation of the kind people feel inclined to speak at the loss of a loved one. Stan WAS great and I know it in my heart, objectively and independently from how much I loved him (I'll spare the objective 'proof' of it though, because I am not writing his biography).Stan was THE MOST generous, objective, optimistic, positive and understanding person I have ever met, and one of the most pragmatic, honest, supportive, helpful, intelligent, open-minded, humble, caring and loving. He was sensitive, congruent, pleasant, funny, witty and simply charming.

His sense of morality was inexpressively enviable.
Put in the simplest sentence I can manage, Stan was the second person who influenced me the most and who I have admired the most so far in my life, only after my mother... (and those who know me well know that it would be utterly impossible for me to give anyone any higher praise).

I will never cease to wonder at how quickly Stan and I became friends. I met him by becoming his Spanish tutor during the year I spent as an exchange student in Canada (2005, at UBC, in Vancouver). He was 65 and I was 20, but in spite of our age difference and the short duration of our friendship (~3.5 years) I had never had so many things in common with anyone.
I loved Stan so greatly that I didn't even think one could feel so much love for a friend. He has left such a deep mark in my life that I regard him as the closest example I've had of what an 'ideal' friend would be like... [I can only hope I'll learn how to make new friends without always comparing them to him...]I used to nudge him to do exercise and take vitamins and would joke by demanding from him to live at least 'till he was 90, but now he has left way too soon... and I miss him SO much...

Stanley died of pneumonia the 13th of December, 2008, at the age of 69. I found out in January 2009 when I came back to Houston after spending the holidays in Mexico (Dec 13 - Jan 04). He had been in the hospital for about 3 months receiving radio and chemotherapy after loosing his ability to walk because of a gigantic tumor on soft tissue around his lower spine. The cancer had already metastasized to his liver and lungs. It might have been some remanent from when he had colon cancer in 2006, which was surgically removed -the post surgery screenings repeatedly showed everything was fine though; and he was so optimistic when talking to me on the phone that I was genuinely mislead to believe that he was on the road of recovery and would live at least a couple of years more (I knew his cancer was incurable, but not that it would kill him so fast).Throughout last year the only hint of his illness was an evermore intensifying discomfort and pain in his lower back; quite misleading given that he had had lower back discomfort for the last 10 years after some silly muscular injury, and his colon cancer follow-ups, as well as other screenings didn't reveal anything troubling...
[Ahora resulta que me puede doler el meñique izquierdo que me quebré bailando ballet a los 5 años y que, pese a que tengo 200 años y soy artrítico, el dolor NO es una secuela por traumatismo muscular, reumático, neurológico, neuropático; ni siquiera retraso mental; NO, es cáncer... que casualmente ya me invadió todo el cuerpo, subrepticiamente].

I saw Stan for the last time when he visited me in Houston in February 2009, and talked to him on the phone for the last time (for less than a minute!) on Dec 08 or so.

He was SO good to me and gave me so much. I'll miss him for the rest of my life.
:'(

I don't know whether there's a 'Heaven' or not. But if there were, I'm sure Stan would be there in spite of his agnosticism. He was simply too good, too kind, too unawarely 'Christian' through his acts for any 'God' to leave him out of Heaven.
One thing I do know though, is that for as long as I have a memory, I will remember him and cherish the friendship we shared.

"It is your theory of love that cuts you off from love" -quote from one of Stan's essays. [He had a PhD in philosophy and was a university professor for ~30 years].