When it happens that I feel like writing, I have been sitting down and waiting for it to go away. Why is that? I feel everything I think is repetitive, is about myself; in fact, everything has been about the same aspects of myself.
I wish I had more money. I wish I were skinnier, stronger, taller, smarter, prettier, and funnier. I wish I had nicer clothes, better shoes. I wish my eyebrows were thinner, my arms were thinner, my breasts were bigger.
I wish my boyfriend loved me more.
I wish I were a better girlfriend, a better actress, a better daughter.
And now I’m reading more. And that’s miraculous remedy. For everything.
Reading is magical, powerful like nothing else I’ve had the chance to experience.
As I live in New York, I got partly used to witnessing bizarre episodes in the streets, the parks, the trains… Oh, the trains.
Today, coming back home from my first Stage Combat class, I sat reading in the subway car. The chosen piece (being read for the second time) is an amazing, highly recommended!, novel entitled Hallucinating Foucault. In the book, without getting into deeper details, an intense relationship is drawn between the (fictional) writer Paul Michel and the philosopher Michel Foucault. It’s an astonishing work of art.
At a certain point, we start reading letters from the fictional character addressed to the real philosopher. The letters touch on how much one learns from the other, on their styles of writing, their fear of death (or life).
Now that you got into the mood a little bit and you know where I was, imagine the sounds, voice and melody, of a 4-member mariachi group. Mexican intensity, color, and sounds, invaded, not the train, but my experience of… Foucault! And that moment (you might think I’m crazy now) would not have been the same if my idea, my experience of Foucault’s philosophy, hadn’t met Mexican music.
I thank the city of New York for being so unique.
I didn’t lift up my head to check them out. I didn’t question that fact -Is it good? Should they play in the train so loud like this? I just let it be. Because things… are. They don’t need us to be. But we do have the opportunity to choose a specific approach to them.
I let Foucault and mariachis become a magical encounter in the realms of my experience.
I’m glad.
And maybe I don’t need to be any skinnier now.
Anita Petry
