Ode On A Parisian Saxophone

Hiller had played it wrong. Somewhere between realizing his altruistic self and respecting his craft he had gone just too far down a narrow path, and, like a cod trap, the path just kept decreasing in diameter, foreshortening ahead of him. And there wasn’t enough room to get turned around. It’s times like these, he thought, that you have to be courageous to come out on the other end, or, more truthfully, you have to maintain a veneer of subscription to the heroic act, while secretly shitting your pants and furtively glimpsing at life’s map, wondering “where the fuck am I?” meanwhile supposing that in fact you should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

Hiller had laid down his tool years prior to first change himself so that, in turn, he could change the world. His great conceit was that he, in fact, was ruminating on his craft whilst changing himself, serving two masters and hastening himself closer to the cataract of egoic oblivion. He was certain his psychic world was flat and his mental perambulations of the past forty years had only reinforced this view. There was relief, but never quite lofty enough to glimpse the point at which he would have to leap to the other shore. Lofty enough only to delineate the circular horizon of what he believed he was capable. He pondered again his predicament. His relationship to his craft may change, but he would actually have to pick the tool up and try to use it again. What was now alien had once been a corporeal extension; it played him. Son-of-a-bitch.

Hiller listened intently for any tremor in the sound, cringing at the memory of the querulous tones he had made for so many years. Jesus! A single note: where was the core, where was the substance, where was the Creator? Now, it all sounded to him like one tedious sonic whinge and he simply could not stand it any longer. Somewhere on his path he had lost the beauty and he was now left to polish his profane bleat back into the halting prophecy he had once channeled. No Henry Higgins was going to polish this turd into something sublime, just Hiller. He thought he was losing his mind. Who thinks like this? He didn’t have time to sort it out, the psychosis of his impending mid-life crunch, because he had to remember how to hold the tool just so, that the truth would flow freely out and fill the air. He didn’t have time to think about the impossibility of it all, that art was a freight train, ever gaining momentum, and if you should falter trying to grasp a rung, your rung, to hoist yourself aboard, then you’d better drop your head and start sprinting for another try. Or stop.

Hiller picked up the saxophone, wet the reed and exhaled. He couldn’t do it. Not yet. He slumped in his chair, arms akimbo and saxophone balanced across his right thigh, just like his favorite photo of Hank Mobley. He contemplated another inhalation. Sisyphus would have played sax.

© 2008 Kenneth Hoffman

Where I live and where I teach

On Google Earth you can locate my house at

9º55'21.71" N, 84º13'04.71" W

and my classroom at

9º56'16.00" N, 84º10'48.75" W

That's me waving,

Ken

Hurricane Season

Note from Ken: I posted this 3 Sept/07 in my last, vain attempt to construct my former blog. One point: as a Canadian in Costa Rica, I receive an email every fall cautioning me about hurricanes.

Hola amigos!

I thought I would start my blog with an offering about hurricanes

Indeed, we were spared by hurricane Dean but it looks as though Felix will dump a lot of rain on Costa Rica, which I can assure you is a very wet place between the months of April and December. Paste the following link into your browser for the latest tracking information from the National Hurricane Center.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at1+shtml/205025.shtml?5day#contents

I suspect that central México will see buckets of rain. "Rain" in Spanish is lluvia (pronounced you-vee-ah) and "bucket", or more precisely "pitcher" is cantaro. This brings me to my favorite Spanish expression llueve a cantaros, which loosely translates as "raining buckets" or "raining cats and dog". I use this expression as much as I can. "Cat" in Spanish is gato and "dog" is perro. If the dog is a bitch, then it's a perra and if it's also small, you call it perrita. It's a bad time to be a small dog in Costa Rica.

For a country that receives so much rain, you'd think that Costa Rica would be a great place to by a good umbrella, cheap! Costa Rica is a great place to buy coffee, cheap, which you'd expect because so much of it grows here. You cannot buy a good umbrella, cheap or otherwise, in Costa Rica. I bought a fair umbrella once, but someone stole it when I was at a soccer game, which lends credence to my assessment of the Costa Rican umbrella industry. This will be the plot of my novel when I finally get around to writing it.

So, if you're coming to Costa Rica between April and December, bring a good umbrella, but keep your eye on it.

Next posting: Ark construction with native hardwoods

Fallen From the Sky

I have to remind myself that the driver of this bus loves his life as much as I mine. Perhaps more. And besides, no one wants to die on this Christmas Eve. There is too much joy and beauty in the eyes of the children this day, reflecting their blissful recess from school lessons or the longing that they had school lessons to recede from.

The driver is a madman, a demon, and his conductor a high-speed trapeze artist, dangling from the ladder to the roof of the bus, Technicolor baggage in one hand, his life in the other, delighting the passengers and distracting them from the diablo driving us, hurtling, into the ground from the highland sky at our backs. The ride is punishing, my organs and fascia rolfed back to youthful vitality by the seats of the erstwhile “Bluebird”. This bus may well have carried me to school-mandated swimming lessons.

We rocket past the roadside internment camps, scattering the bright-eyed inmates roadside, arms waving in frantic greeting and desperate plea to be taken from the Inter-Americana, anywhere. We couldn’t stop, not on Christmas Eve. For now, they must commend themselves back to the care of Frente Republicano Guatemalteco, back into the “blue fist”, sanguine and still warm from the killing. These people are too beautiful to live in this beautiful land.

The razor cut, in the rigors of pomade, the Alfred E. Newman ears, all lend an air of absurdity to the driver. In the rear-view mirror I face his upturned eyebrows, but not the mouth. I variously imagine the lips spread wide, Grinch-like, as we are conveyed, from on high to certain perdition below in Guatemala City. Or, stretched tight, dry, the lips are fixed in concentration on the correct balance of air, asbestos, gravity and friction. He is alien to me, as are the epicanthal folds and the burbling tongues that surround me that evoke an origin somewhere between Yupik and Athapaskan. These are the people who crossed the Bering Strait or landed from another star. They are gods and we are the extranjeros, the profane.

The chicos, capped with Nike and the gringos frocked with green-fatigued images of Ché, longing each for the other’s utopic myth, one the crisp, crystalline air of the highland, the other the climate control of a big-box mall. Sisters, a pair, beautifully strange and beatific, take the seat before mine. Priestesses of this outland, asserting their propriety in their bearing, regaled in the garish blues, purples, reds and pinks of their office, they banter openly a secret in a tongue 25,000 years old. My world has barely impinged upon them, a golden cross hanging about their necks and nothing more, until one reaches inside her tunic to answer her cell phone. The language has survived but the telepathy has not.

We stop for gas at the Esso station in Iximché, the “place of the maize tree”. The motor runs, sputters and then stops. The imp and the acrobat scramble to lay hands on the venerable Chev 350, V-8, that has carried us this far. Everyone says a silent prayer in his own tongue that we will be delivered safely and punctually to the city, most to family and me to the airport. Beneath the corporate branding, this place is sacred. These people resent being a tourist attraction. The high priestesses can’t bring down the placards promising “whiter whites” or effective representation, nor do they wish to topple the cell phone towers of Babel. The President of the United States too thought it necessary to pass this way only nine months ago. When they finish exorcising his profanity they will begin with mine.

© 2008 Kenneth Hoffman

What's Up?

Family and Friends:

I could never get my other Blog to work, so I've started another one. I will try to post regularly, providing some sort of insight into what I'm doing in Costa Rica and in life, in general.

To get things started I'm going to post something I wrote after traveling to the Guatemalan Highlands.

Ken