Friday, December 25, 2009

Rabelais and My Status Quo

drawing by marguerita -While cleaning up my papers ,I found one,which I kept,when reading about Rabelais .

So being here alone, in silence with a broken heart,listening to WBGO,playing on the radio jazz and sentimental music, with a glass of hibiscus tea ,that I brew, to distract my mind from reality.
I wonder where I am going to live and what is in store for me.
All I want is our nest and carinho.Some lovin' as they say on the waterfront.
After all what is marriage about?
Here some thoughts:What is romance?
It is the spiritual side of marriage. It is the one thousand volts of electricity that give you the ecstatic "high", versus the 110 volts of electricity it takes to run the vacuum cleaner after the marriage in order to clean up after one another. Romance is the Divine Presence within each of us that reaches out to the other within a committed environment. Romance spawns spiritual ecstacy.
Carinho ,the word in Portuguese,sounds more appropriate to describe the feeling I desire,along the The Perfumed Garden and
some of the lyrics in Sentimental Journey.
So going back.....
Rabelais mixed in his books elements from different narrative forms_ chronicle.farce,dialogue,commentary etc, and peppered them with broad popular humor.With his flood of outrageous ideas and anecdotes Rabelais emphasized the physical joys of life-
food, drink,sex, and bodily functions connected to them
and mocked asceticism and oppressive religious and political forces.
" Drink always and you shall never die." he wrote in Gargantua.
Rabelais" work influenced a long line of writers frm Cervantes,Swift, and Laurence Sterne to James Joyce and Celine. Balzac once said " Hundreds of absurd stories have been made up about the author of Pantagruel, one of the finest books in French literature.Rabelais, a sober man who drank nothing but water, is thought of as a lover of food and drink and a confirmed tippler."
The author himself placed his books in the long line of heroic narratives, starting from Homer and Virgil. In Rabelais and His World (1968) the Russian theorist of literature, Mikhail M. Bakhtin ( 1895- 1975) introduced the term carnivalesque to describe those forms of unofficial culture that use laughter ,parody, and "grotesque realism" as weapon against official culture and totalitarian order- but the freedom of vision, feeling and thought which his perpetual playing with things produces, and which invites its wealth of phenomena.

from Wikipedia: François Rabelais (c. 1494 – April 9, 1553) was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor and Renaissance humanist. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, and both bawdy jokes and songs.

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