The Saunterer

Octavio Paz on why Mexicans love their holidays

    Happy Cinco de Mayo. It’s tomorrow, and Octavio Paz tells why Mexicans love such holidays:

Our poverty can be measured by the frequency and luxuriousness of our holidays. Wealthy countries have very few: there is neither the time nor the desire for them, and they are not necessary. The people have other things to do, and when they amuse themselves they do so in small groups. The modern masses are agglomerations of solitary individuals. On great occasions in Paris or New York, when the populace gathers in the squares or stadiums, the absence of people, in the sense of a people, is remarkable: there are couples and small groups, but they never form a living community in which the individual is at once dissolved and redeemed. But how could a poor Mexican live without the two or three annual fiestas that make up for his poverty and misery? Fiestas are our only luxury. They replace, and are perhaps better than, the theater and vacations, Anglo-Saxon weekends and cocktail parties, the bourgeois reception, the Mediterranean café.
    In all of these ceremonies - national or local, trade or family - the Mexican opens out. They all give him a chance to reveal himself and to converse with God, country, friends or relations. During these days the silent Mexican whistles, shouts, sings, shoots off fireworks, discharges his pistol into the air. He discharges his soul. And his shout, like the rockets we love so much, ascends to the heavens, explodes into green, red, blue, and white lights, and falls dizzily to earth with a trail of golden sparks.

    (Quoted from page 48 of The Labyrinth of Solitude, by Octavio Paz. Translated by L. Kemp, et al. Grove Press, 1985.)
    For a brief biography of Octavio Paz, click here. For images of or relating to Octavio Paz, click here. For images relating to Cinco de Mayo, click here.

William Wharton on the natural joy of bird bathing

    On an evening last month at Palmer’s Restaurant Bar and Courtyard in San Marcos, Texas, I watched genuine unselfconscious joy – grackles taking baths in the courtyard’s raised spire birdbath.
    I think it interesting to compare a word picture of the behavior to a video picture of it. William Wharton writes the word picture:

Perta hops onto the side of the dish and puts her beak into the clear, cold water. She lets it run back down her throat, tipping her head back and thrusting her breast forward, stretching upward on her thin legs. She does this again. I watch. Then, she pushes her face into the water and splashes back under her wings. She flaps her wings to capture the cold water under the warmest part of her wings, inside where the down of softest feathers is. She does this two or three times before she lightly springs into the water, arches her back, tilts her head and starts throwing the clean water onto the feathers between her wings on her back.   

    For the videoed picture, click here.
 
    (I quote William Wharton from page 225 of Birds in Literature, by Leonard Lutwack. University Press of Florida, 1994. The original source is William Wharton’s novel, Birdy.)
    For a picture of the birdbath at Palmer’s, click here.
    For a brief biography of William Wharton, click here. For a brief biography of Leonard Lutwack, click here.