Giannina Braschi - United States of Banana

Diotima: You never know, society might abort them.

Giannina: They are so full of fear. Fear of the multiples — when they start multiplying their possibilities — they don’t know what to do. It’s morality, religion denying existence the possibility of being creative.

[In Central Park, watching a squirrel eating an acorn on top of a tree.]

Hasib: Didn’t Iris Pagán tell you: don’t waste your time with beginners. Well, I tell you: climb up that tree. Now, let them look up and say: that’s where I dream to be. Keep a distance. Be like a squirrel— escurridiza —run away from them — let them dream about you — but don’t allow them to lower you. They think: if she can make it, I can make it too. But they don’t know what it takes. Look at that madman laughing and cursing at the same time. He wasted too much time before — now he is enjoying himself.

Giannina: Do you know who that madman is? It’s Zarathustra. One of the sages of humanity — the greatest — in my opinion after Socrates. I agree with you — now he is enjoying himself — but not because he wasted too much time — the opposite — he hardly had time to enjoy himself. He burned himself out.

Hasib: One way or another, he burned himself out. Do you mind if I smoke a cigar?

Giannina: Go ahead. Wisdom is burned like experience exhumed — like calories are burned — through the exercise of life. It’s true, now he is in the here and now, enjoying the moment. Before he was in the work — in the development of his thoughts — and burned all the calories of his thoughts — until he burned out his brain. I am so happy to have met you — you have enriched my life — exhuming wisdom — as if it were the exhumation of bones.

Hasib: We met on the road. I was driving my cab. And I told you: don’t throw pearls before swine.

Giannina: But I am so accustomed to an audience of buffalos and cows. This is the kind of audience that you get in New York.

Hasib: Worse — because buffalos and cows don’t say: If she can do it, I can do it too!

Giannina: I raise the case against I can do it too! — when you can’t do it too.

Hasib: That’s why it’s best to climb the tree — and wait on top of the tree until the bad poets pass by — without confronting them — eating nuts on treetops — with your two little hands — and squirreling around the branches — getting away from them without confronting them.

Giannina: I rest my case. It is harder to recognize a poet than other artists. If a peacock spreads its tail — the buffalos and cows can’t see the difference between the peacock’s tail that fans the sky with its rainbow — and the cow’s tail that swats flies — and the buffalos looks deep — but understand nothing.

Hasib: What do these animals have in common?

Giannina: They belong to the rabble — the multitude of bananas and grapes. But, you know what, I can’t think this way. I tried — after walking with Zarathustra for such a long time — but I can’t think this way.

Hasib: You identify with them.

Giannina: True, I identify with the common feelings of the multitude. That’s why I write in a common language — with common feelings — and common animals — and yet — I know I am on top of that tree — and that neither the cows nor buffalos can catch me. And why would I want the common denominator? Because poetry is made of the common denominators — of oranges, bananas, and grapes. I want to connect with these common denominators and create a quality, a distinction — while all the dogs are howling. When I was a little girl, my grandmother sent me to the beauty salon across the street from her house — and while I was getting my hair washed — an old woman who was seated in front of the looking glass went deep into a trance — and started talking to spirits in tongues. I was so scared I ran out of the beauty salon with shampoo in my hair — all sopping and sudsy. And I think that’s the moment I became a medium of thoughts. That old woman who was looking inside the looking glass — when she went into a trance — transmitted to me the numbness of the trance. And I also went into the looking glass of the pupils of Diotima. I entered the dimension of mediums — the ones who are between fire and wind — the ones who mix copper and smith — the ones who wear hats to protect the fluidity of things. They gave me two chambers — the pupils of Diotima — they told me look inside and don’t blink an eye — as if to blink an eye were a sign of looking for an excuse to get out — because sometimes you start wondering — what am I doing here? They never asked me what I do for a living — so I never asked them what they do for a living — because they were never born — so they would never die — and they didn’t have to earn a beginning and an end. I was happy to lose track of my biology — to lose track of my age — to understand suffering as a biological constitution — and not as part of a physical body that is aging — and is dated. I was learning to live without an age — aging in wisdom — going forward in time. I knew I was doing something for a living — but I didn’t know what I was doing — I was just living — I had entered the chambers of the pupils of Diotima. I felt as if I were inside a lightbulb — there was so much appreciation inside that lightbulb — that even though people outside might think I was stuck — I never felt I wanted to get out of the luminosity of those pupils — even though electricity was running through my body.

Hasib: And what did you get from Socrates?

Giannina: I didn’t get knowledge — but opinions — and at the end I realized that even my opinions were all wrong. I got a vessel — and a trip — and I felt good. I understood that I had to follow my creative daemon — that I could not walk alone anymore. I have grown with Socrates. I see him when Parmenides is old and Zeno is middle aged — and Socrates is young and insolent, trying to refute Parmenides — and telling Zeno that his book is Parmenides’s theory upside down. I see him also talking to Protagoras — trying to pull his leg — to make a name for himself — to acquire wisdom — but also to show off that he knows more than Protagoras. And I see him later in life — I don’t know how old — but definitely older — becoming a midwife to Theaetetus who has bulging eyes like Socrates himself — also ugly — and I hear in the Republic that a young boy with a predisposition toward philosophy is a boy who feels drawn back — and his characteristic is that he yawns. The fact that he yawns because he is detached, or distanced, or abstracted from himself and others draws me back to the hiccups of Aristophanes and the headache of Charmides, which is cured by a leaf and a charm that is the incantation of a poem — the incantation of the charm of words said at the same time that a leaf is passed over the forehead to alleviate the headache. Socrates learns to be a midwife from his own midwife, Diotima of Mantineia. He says that if you follow him you will gain spiritual progress. You see how your life can improve through the progress of your thoughts. What you see is that the thoughts start moving with hiccups, yawning, headaches, leaves, incantations, tickles, and sneezes. In the process of seeing Socrates grow old, I see the portraits of Socrates as a young man as I see the self-portraits of Rembrandt as a young man — and throughout his life — with his son Titus — with his wife Saskia — and above all the portraits of his very old age — the same way I see the portraits of Socrates — and the progression of his thoughts — and his whole persona — until his death. I am even present the moment he dies — when he drinks the hemlock — and I say to myself in his defense — he doesn’t defend himself like a lawyer would have defended him — no, he defends himself as a philosopher — and he himself says that philosophers are not good when they appear in the court of law — because they are not trying to win at all costs — but to impart wisdom. The people he meets on the road — on the way to a party — the people he talks to — give him knowledge — but the knowledge is experience accumulated — and it’s never there when it leaves you — and it always leaves you — so again you retire — open your frontiers — draw back — and become empty — to fill the glass with water — fresh water — again. So, it is a never-ending tale until it ends. And the end is not the one he sets for himself — but the limit is set for him — and he chooses his destiny — to stay — when he could have gone into exile — but he didn’t — and he always was following the line of thought of the intuition — negating envy. He was against envy. Intuition is the positive energy that envy kills when it refuses to see the rainbow in the sky. He is a poet who doesn’t want to open the doors of the Republic to poets — he knows himself too well — and he doesn’t want to open the doors to people like himself — even though everybody opens his door for Socrates to enter his home — because when Socrates enters you know it will be an event — and who wouldn’t want to be a part of his legend. And Socrates is in himself — in simplicity — always using the same words like Alcibiades said — packasses, or blacksmiths, or cobblers, or tanners — always the same — simply and intuitively — without attacking a subject matter in a negative way — when it is done in a negative way — it gets stuck — and doesn’t progress. For progress to happen — spiritual progress — intuition is the driving force that is not drawn back by any bad feeling — intuition renews itself — not knowing the whereabouts of progress nor questioning the origin of progress — letting it be as it is in its simplicity — he stays there — rocking his thoughts — and never letting them get old — because they are never guilty of anything — they never have to hide — or do shameless things — everything is in the open — and when you come out of the cave — it is always progress — when the obscurity is brought to tears of shame — left behind — because spiritual progress depends on escalating degrees of light — of running into the light — of shining with the light inside — of reflecting back what has shined — and dawning — giving birth to puppies of light. They say Protagoras had a spellbinding voice — and that was half the attraction — the other half was his mesmerizing thoughts. I love when Socrates and Hippocrates go to visit Protagoras — and they knock on the door — Socrates and Hippocrates knock, knock, knock — and a eunuch opens the door — and exclaims with disdain: Sophists! — and shuts the door — right on their noses. It’s as if the eunuch were taking revenge against Socrates for the harm he did to Homer — and to me — and to all the poets through the ages — because he invented that we are descriptive — distanced from creation because we represent — imitate — and we don’t rise to the level of knowledge — we stay in the cave with manacles and fetters — looking at shadow puppets on the wall — but those shadows are not real — they are opinions, feelings — equivocal impressions that don’t rise to the level of wisdom — and this prejudice has subsisted for centuries against poets — like the black legend that the British invented about the Spaniards that has harmed for centuries the reputation of Latins. Against these two prejudices that are shadow puppets on the wall — I have had to struggle in this society. What is it that philosophers envy about poets? Definitely not our thoughts because they say we have no thoughts and we don’t create schools of followers like they do. So it is not respect they envy because they instill reverence and admiration and veneration. I think what they envy is that we are capable of love — that we have the power inside us — that we don’t have to analyze that power in order to seize it — that we are the makers of the happening that happens — and that we get the credit for making it happen — without understanding the happening. But we do understand the happening. We just don’t care to be recognized as the authors, the authorities, the shaman. We are voices, indistinguishable (distinguishable). You can distinguish our tones, our humors, our hiccups, our sneezes — and it is not our knowledge — but our wisdom that whistles. I am trying to get to the beginning of envy. I want to eradicate that envy that has harmed our sovereignty as poets — the disregard of intuition — the neglect — trying to make of that first intuition something that is irrelevant. I think it’s more relevant than their envy. Envy is opaque. It is the negation of sight — it doesn’t want to recognize. What recognizes is the sparkle in the eye — the in love of an empathetic eye — yes, the recognition of the sparkle, the flame, the love — even if it is dimming in the night — fragile — blinking — indecisive — shy — not secure — with low self-esteem — it shines — it blinks its eyes — and it affirms an inauguration — a rainbow — and a rainbow is the installation of an intuition — when an intuition is secure of itself — after it has rained and the gray sky turns violet and signs a rainbow — the signature of the triumph of an intuition that has installed an affirmation of life. I also think they envy our results that appear effortless. They would like to see us sweat through the hard labor of a system of reason that eliminates what we create, and they think we are not essential, but they are essential because they are radical thinkers even though they eradicate precisely that which is radical thinking — that intuition is the negation of envy — that when you feel somebody — because you believe in the intuition of a feeling — it’s because you are incapable of feeling envy — because envy denies intuition — and a poet lives with sparkles, blinks, intuitions — and not with the eradication of intuition — thoughts spread like butter on bread — and they spread viruses and plagues — and they are contaminated — and some are contagious — and you need to keep a distance from a thought that is dangerous — because it is blinking red alert — nervous twitches of c’mon, what’s going on? Information is going on — noses that sneeze are going on — false and redundant conclusions are going on — not conducive to thoughts — but to complements — and compliments — and they drag their legs and have to be carried — because they don’t carry themselves with ease — they don’t have the driving force — a direction — an intuition that is clueless because it has a clue and a cure and a remedy against the maladies of the spirit — the eradication of the philosopher’s envy of the poet’s intuition — the abrupt realization that a thinker can sneeze and blink an eye — and not set a terminology that is opaque — that doesn’t want to recognize — even though it blinks — blanks — the intuition — and it doesn’t fill in the blank — it runs and dives in the river — and it only sees the repetition but not the sparkles of light — blinky — blinky — blinky. And don’t forget that it was Diotima who taught Socrates that love is not a God — because it is a desire — never full, always needy — an intermediary residing between heaven and earth — between plenty and necessity. And it was Diotima who gave birth to his wisdom about begetting babies — she told him all humans want to beget — begetting is the secret of immortality — of the eternal recurrence of flesh, life, cries, babies — and that there are different ways of begetting — babies of the flesh but also babies of the brain — babies of knowledge — and that this is the highest way of begetting — lightning flashes of the brain — intuitions in rainbows — signatures of a celestial presence in the sky — signatures of poets in the sky. What I like most is the ticklish talk of the midwife — and how Socrates tells Diotima — begs her — impatiently — tell me, please — like a beggar — give me money — enlighten me — my spirit — free me of the shackles — let me see the sun — get me out of here — please — I beg you, Diotima, I don’t know how — teach me. What you see is that he also is a medium — like love that is needy — because he is the son of plenty and necessity — yes, Socrates is also needy — he needs Diotima the midwife to help him give birth to the knowledge he begets — he begets lightning, inspiration, love, light — and he gets out of the cave (womb) — while he is giving birth — with the help of Diotima. He is not only the one who begets but the one who is begotten. I care most about knowledge when knowledge is a process — when you see the process of begetting — the process of giving light to the baby in the stable or on a bed of straw — where the baby is born to lay eggs that will hatch into chickens — with sound inside — the jingle-bell of the sound that knocks and knocks on the door to open — but the door shuts — and the sounds leave an impression in the brain. The important thing is the process of begetting — the begetting in itself — and how it happens — without the begotten — the begotten happens — as the begetting gets it — if it gets the process — the passage of one territory into another dimension where there is no space between the passages where the dwellers dwell — and they never realize they are dwelling inside the begetting of the begotten. If they realize they are passing by — like you lick an envelope to close the envelope — and lick the stamp to seal it with a kiss. Especially when the door shuts in front of the nose that breathes the knock and shut of the door. The presence gets closer — it misses the shutting of the door — by a hair — and the hair stands up and the nose releases a sneeze of relief. (I sneeze.) Yes, the knocking on the door of the Republic — knock knock knock — the eunuch shuts the door on Socrates who doesn’t learn the lesson. He shuts the door for poets never to enter the academic world of scholars — minds without furniture to furnish, without dislocations to dislocate, without inscriptions to inscribe — with formulas to fill — minds that run out of gas in the middle of the road — and that muffle — minds that stick around — but never stick — never pass the pathway of knowledge without inscriptions to learn. I wonder how he felt at that moment he was going to die — knowing the precise moment — and having said goodbye to his disciples — to his wife — to his children — how he decided to stay and drink the hemlock — instead of going into exile in another land — he decided against being a foreigner — even though he was a foreigner in his own land. I also wonder — how it must have felt to know the moment — to accept it — to say goodbye after knowing — and to die. Only a control freak — only someone with a big ego — only someone who knows — even the moment of his death — and his resignation upon death. Probably he was seeing the rainbow — the pastel colors after the rain — how his friends would cry — and he would express himself in the colors of the rainbow — as signatures in the sky of permanence — as a smile in the sky — after death — as the Milkmaid of Bordeaux after the black paintings of Goya — as the affirmation of the Yes to life — even after the hemlock — there is the affirmation of his legend — and the serenity whenever Socrates appears with the rainbow of his thoughts — with his smile of wisdom. Life is good — even without the protagonist of my life — even without my chatter — there is the cock on the roof — the rainbow in the sky — and the preceding life — the continuation — the passing of one generation to the other — there is the destiny of a man who can also decide when to die — though not how to die — it was decided for him — and the moment — but he had control even of his last moment — as a control freak — he could kiss today goodbye — and see the tears of his disciples and his wife. I think he was accepting the knowledge of knowing — of resignation — of life as it stays in permanence — in the eternal recurrence of what repeats itself — of the awakening of the sunsets and dawns — of the lightness of living in the intuition of life — as an affirmation of the triumph of intuition against envy — as life itself when it moves along — and comes back — without regrets — with waves of light. Why defend yourself at the end — when you didn’t defend yourself throughout the multiple stages — you saw the progression of yourself — your multiple beings in their multiple relations to other beings — why shut doors at the end — when all the multiple beings are there knocking on all the doors for the doors to open — to poets, philosophers, lovers. Even death has to be an open dialogue with life — it has to go on — to move along — not to enclose a body — but to open the body to the multiples and multitudes — like at the very end of The Symposium —when the crowd of revelers comes marching in — knocking on the door — from the beginning of The Symposium to the end — all those people entering the same house of wisdom and wine — all drunk on life — no doors closed — all in different degrees of light and life — in layers of colors and depths of soul — in progression into the limelight — all moving — knocking — and entering — all talking — drinking — sleeping — dancing — and leaving — entering and leaving — the passing of energy from the individual to the multitudes — from the multiples to the single-handed — to the elected — and the masses of revelers — they appear as packasses, as the hemlock appears, as the Sileni appear, as the flute girls appear, as multitudes singled out by their birth — by their existence — by the nature of the flock — by the birds of a feather that flock together — by the flow of humanity — they smell of sweat — and the repetition of the same words — always the same and always different — in simplicity but in multiplicity — in individuality — in Socrates — but in the packasses — in the single and the double — mark with itself and unique in its form — and in repeating the daily bread and the wine — the words that keep popping up in multiplicity of thoughts and single-handed to lend a hand and continue passing from one hand and one ear that hears to another pair of eyes — bulging eyes that see — capture — question — and the pupils of Diotima open up — like shelters in the sky — too much is never too much — as a signature of life from birth to hemlock — I take it as gratitude.