After his father died, he felt a shift within the family dynamic, in the balance of influence between his older brother and his elderly mother. He realized he wanted nothing more to do with them. Enough with their sadistic games, he no longer had time to play childish mind games, it was time to move on. He was as different from them as they were similar to him. For him, the idea family died long before his father became ashes and dust. It all began when he threw a water balloon at his third grade teacher and it landed squarely on her buttocks at a party for the last day of school and the beginning of summer, back in 1978. He knew he did something not entirely wrong but neither something exactly right. Such was his life, neither the devil, nor a saint.
His mother decided to give him a Portuguese name, as they came from Goa, a former colony in India. Casimiro, the destroyer of peace and the world in the blink of his two eyes. Perhaps he was born a scapegoat for a family in need of someone else to kick and beat their fears, anger, hatred, and misunderstandings into until the child absorbed their misguided message to use and abuse the other, be he son or brother. Such was the life of the young man known as Casimiro, the occult preacher of apocalyptic visions and nightmares, otherwise known as a poet. After high school, he attended college for just one year, then he went mad, slowly going stir crazy after his friends left their hometown of Surf City, USA. But after thirty years, Casimiro was no longer such a young man. Approaching fifty, he never thought he'd live past thirty. In fact, the old adage, don't trust anyone over thirty now became don't trust family or so-called friends outside of Surf City, because Casimiro moved to get away from the sun, the sea, the sky, the men and the women.
In Surf City, everyone lived in the desert but just acted like it was Hollywood, no big deal, no worries. "Hakuna matata." No trouble, son. The sun may just kill you, or burn your flesh year after year until you look eighty at sixty-five. Problems never seemed to bother people in Surf City, they would just drink their solutions away. Just like the stories from Kenya his father told his two sons at dinner every night they ate together with their mother. His father was a man who drank and could not help himself wherever he drank alcohol. He drank to solve his own problems but alcohol was his one great problem that alcoholism could not resolve. In Nairobi, they spoke Swahili, Konkani, and English because they were Goans at the Gymkhana. The stories his father told them were full of lies, not like tall tales, but blatant lies to hide his shame. See his father died when he was a boy, so his father lacked the knowledge and skills to act as a father or a parent. Maybe that was why he felt the need to drink to excess, or maybe he wanted to visit the palace of wisdom along the road of excess. He never understood success and excess were just rhymes, their roads never met, never crossed unless they sang the blues for the devil in the Delta. And that was where Casimiro went to college for his second attempt. In Memphis, Tennessee no one cared if you were coming or going as long as you were here now. Such was his life, back then.
And because Casimiro never met Robert Johnson in this lifetime, he only listened to the blues after his friend, Aram, mentioned in a phone call, "the blues will save your soul." So he listened to Chess Records artists since he moved to Hyde Park in Chicago, after a quick divorce, where his ex-wife kept their last name as if after five years that was all she ever really wanted from him. He broke her heart within a year, threatening to break the longest of marriage vows ever spoken in May, sweating in the Botanical Gardens in Birmingham, Alabama. Towards the end, she told him that she didn't want to have children with him because he had mental illness in his family background. A nice cop out but such is love, a waste of time at times. Certain people test our faith in humanity until we chuck out all the crap we learn from others about right and wrong and see the world through our own viewfinder, as the director of our own movie star lives. The wedding industry is like the credit industry, good for some, bad for others who have no control over their own habits. Character is decisive in a marriage, without a grip, a firm understanding of what is important in life, people tend to act as individuals and not as couples with separation and divorce as a concluding result. It took a strong woman for Casimiro to discover his character, otherwise known as backbone, or spine. Men who do not hurt others do not know there is strength in doing no harm if they truly live up to that principle in their behavior. Casimiro was a shy child, but late in life he bloomed into a fierce fighter for the rights of others.
He had studied philosophy in college along with French and Russian. Utterly useless subjects with no practical value in the real world unless he knew how to tie them all together. He read philosophy as he was a poet and thought it a good idea to apply such writings to his poetry, no matter how antithetical philosophy and poetry were towards each other since the time of Plato in the Republic. Chuck them all out! Poets were like children with bad parents and behaviors they learned that conditioned their minds to ill effect. Logic helped him to think clearly, to clear his mind of the clutter of a rotten childhood in paradise. Still it was better than growing up in poverty in his homeland of Goa, India. As legal immigrants in America things for him were not simple, nor straightforward, since he was a British citizen until his father was sworn in as an American citizen, then his family became accepted as part of the republic for which it stands. But for Casimiro, who saw the world through the lens of the big picture, citizenship was bourgeois politics until tested by some saber-rattling president who mistook borders for national boundaries to defend at the cost of the lives of the defenseless victims of power politics in our America, in our own day and age, for which we must fight for the people, for all people not to be harmed, but to treat them as we expect to be treated by security services here or abroad.
Casimiro had grown up Roman Catholic in a Franciscan Church because of the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa. Four hundred years before his birth, a Jesuit, Francis Xavier, proposed to persecute his ancestors to live as Roman Catholics in Europe did, to speak their tongue and worship in their faith. Rubbish to his mind, centuries later, when all records were destroyed and knowledge of his family before the colonial period is akin to Atlanta after Sherman's March to the Sea and Reconstruction, if not in scorched earth policies then in loss of historical records. Perhaps the Portuguese gave Sherman the will to campaign for brutal war tactics? These are the thoughts that float along the hamster wheel inside his head, since he did not complete his degree in philosophy at the graduate level and beyond. Pathetic, his focus impaired by conjecture, such was his life after college. But these were things he wanted to know, if his family were Brahmin as his mother suggests, or some other caste of Hindu, or maybe Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Jains, Jews, or any other religion, who knows, surely not our young friend. But dare we consider this man a friend? We hardly know his mind more so than his life at this stage, but he has not yet proved himself an unreliable narrator of his own story, for to let him take the reins may upend the cart before Christmas. But as a practitioner of zazen and Zen Buddhism, he seeks the greater good for all if in theory but not in practice. Poverty does not engender his mission to succeed in marathon running to the same fight for the rights of others, other than those of past victories in the battles for civil rights in America.
He remains confused as to the importance of words as a poet and writer and the question of First Amendment Rights in relation to the use of racial epithets in literature. A friend from art school and he had a falling out over such usage in a poem and a heated argument in messages online took place. What more could he do to save face but to let the friend go to process his own bigotry, discrimination, and hypocrisy in terms of ideological biases of a xenophobic nature. This was nothing new to Casimiro who grew up a foreigner in America as a child and was used to bullies of any class, creed, race, religion, sex, or gender. The melting pot called the United States was hardly ever actually united by principles but by leaders, by music, and in times of national crisis. After dipping his toes in African American Literature for a semester and visiting civil rights museums in Memphis and Birmingham, he thought he earned street cred enough to use the n-word in his poetry. But uppity, haughty bourgeois black people may find his usage disingenuous to say the least, or to accuse him of being seen as a racist. If the man who accused him of possibly being seen as a racist cannot face the mirror of language in speech acts, then he may want to learn to have a firmer handshake when making friends or to show newcomers he always carries the sword of animus. Such is his life, Casimiro the iconoclast.
No comments:
Post a Comment