RE: El otro tigre. My collage for Let's Make a Collage - A Contest for All Creatives on Hive - Round 61
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My dear @abncabrera,
Thank you for the very enjoyable moments I just spent reading "The Other Tiger". It has been years since I read a poem by Borges. This may be one of the best--or maybe my memory is fading? :) I have found the poem in Spanish and will read that tonight on my iPad before I sleep (no pressure or distractions then).
As for the similarities between us:
reading has always been a defense
My one refuge in childhood.
As for Borges: In his entertainment of alternate truths/reality, I have always seen freedom. It is a stand against orthodoxy and rigidity. It is the possibility of a future, one not yet imagined. I think, for you in Venezuela today, such a writer is a necessity.
What a wonderful, outstanding collage. This elevates our LMAC contest to another level.
Very good luck with your extraordinary effort.
Warm regards, AG
Dear @agmoore, I learned to read very early and discovered reading late. Until the age of sixteen I was almost completely an inhabitant of the planet of orality. My grandmother told me about her life, mixing it with movies and books she had read in her youth. She was a kind of tropical Sherezade. And, although I became a reader late in life, I think my grandmother's stories had already made me a book addict. When I started reading literature, it was the most intense experience of love. At my university, I began to study literature and to specialize in Literary Theory, pushed by that love and such good teachers that never said "No" to me, always said "Prove it". Why am I telling you this? Perhaps for the same reason that my grandmother's story chose me from among her many grandchildren: I was paying attention.
That's also why your story of piss and hats is beautiful to me, because my grandmother taught me to see the details and to treasure them. There is a lot in the details, in the clues that are lost over time.
By the way, ox urine is traditionally used in the making of marbled paper, one of the most beautiful decorative papers there is.
A big hug, dear @agmoore and thank you very much for appreciating my little collage experiment.
Dear @abncabrera,
Thank you for letting me into the universe of your childhood, and for sharing the experience with you grandmother. I only had one living grandmother, and I was estranged from the other. But my mother would sit us down on the floor and tell us stories about her youth, so that I felt I knew her parents, and even the village in Sicily from which they had emigrated.
Reading came late to me. I was an atypical learner (I think I'm generally atypical 😄), but the skill and discovery came simultaneously. Once I had the ability to go beyond my physical world through books, I was hooked. I read anything I could get my hands on, from classroom texts to discarded comic books. There was no library.
My family moved to New York City when I was eleven, and then there was a library. It was my refuge in those transition years. I learned more from library books than I did from formal instruction.
I love this platform because it allows me to transcend borders as books allowed when I was a child. You and I live on different continents. The languages with which we are comfortable are different. And yet, we "know" each other.
Thank you for allowing me that privilege.
Warmest regards,
Your companion in reading and literature,
AG
Thank you, @agmoore, for your warm and beautiful words. The stories and the childhood, the literature, all those treasures that people can share here. And meet souls like yours. Today was a good day.
We will continue to meet!