Angel Villanueva » Impressions

The Rose

Angel Villanueva — Sun, 08 May 2011 21:07:36 +0000

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I remember her smile, her hands, her long fingers as they delicately removed the outer petals of an overgrown rose in our garden, granting it the gift of temporary perfection. Had I not remembered it, trimming that rose would have been a gesture lost in the immensity of space, in the eternity of time, gone with the unknown lives of countless generations who haven’t understood their mortality and the ephemeral quality of their every thought. But the whole of her expression told me that this wasn’t a meaningless event; the very essence of our nature was contained in that simple gesture, and it was my duty to understand it, to remember it, to pass it on. The pursuit of meaning and fulfillment in our lives, and its seeming lack of consequence when faced with the inevitability of our departures, were symbolized by that one rose, standing there perfect once again for a tiny fragment of time. A trivial achievement when placed in context with the rest of reality, yet a superb example of our spirit, of our willingness to make things better, to bring the world around us in line with our visions. The rose was that desired life, a state of balance that couldn’t last, but in the meantime, it could be perfect: a paradoxical mix of natural and creative input.

That is how she was herself: a living, breathing, walking paradox. The depth of her mind a wellspring of revelations, a vast library whose true content I never had an opportunity to explore completely, but from which my own creativity stemmed and flourished. She placed my early mind in an almost mystical environment, in a world of her own making, always full of sensory experiences: music of birds, air perfumed by flowers and fruits and lush vegetation, nights under the stars, a feeling of peaceful solitude permeating our everyday life. Life was a rose garden, an oasis in the middle of the desert. That metaphor continues to live in me, and I will bear its mark until the day I dissolve back into the universe.

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone.

Pomona, California
May 2001

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Divinations

Angel Villanueva — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 06:55:54 +0000

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Long before any of us began wandering into the treacherous realm of prejudice, a story that we should all have listened to was told at one of the gatherings.

In the center of the garden is a small fountain, and crowning it, a talking skull. Normally no one pays attention to it, but that night, awash in the dazzle of strange spells, I struggled between reading someone’s lips and threading together filaments of the ancient voice that streamed between the gaps in our conversation. It was all over the garden, infused into the crisp air of the night, present and immaterial like the smoke, though no one seemed to hear it.

We would all be reminded in time.

“The hearts,” it said, “are made of clay, and clay can only be molded in the wet. The hearts will dry, they will crack against each other if one waits too long, if one waits for that perfect day, that perfect moment when the hearts are dry as bones, brittle and bitter. Hearts lose their power to become one with another, they become rocks and skulls. I know. I know.”

I held my smile. Sparks flew about. I felt the skull was leaving something out. At that moment, it didn’t matter. It was the song of the dead, and we were very much living. We were wild birds in the jungle, each trying to outsing and outdisplay the other, ourselves, the last one and the next one.

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Window open to the cool winter air, I hear a call. An owl. And an owl calls back. Together they are hunting in the night, roosting at the edges of their reign.

I remember someone.

I have not looked into the book of souls for ages. That book filled with blank pages, each belonging to one. I hold it once again, find a page, sit in the dark, and wait.

Soon it comes, the image of a man making his way across a vast plain, that same abject infinity that once plagued my nightmares. But this is not my nightmare. It is what I feared I would become, happening to someone else: a lone slave dragging a giant heart of stone across the desert. The pathos of lost hope, the weight of apathy, a cruel, self-imposed sentence.

There are two ways out of it. I know them both.

I wanted to help. I tried. I am not meant to. Let go.

Something within splits in two, and one half falls away. I close the book, and my eyes. Hold my head hard against the wall. Take a deep breath. Above me, far above this roof, there are many, many stars shivering in the night.

The half that remains is gratitude.

And, lurking beneath, invisible for now, the razor’s edge of fear, held at a distance.

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Farewell to a Dear Friend

Angel Villanueva — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:53:01 +0000

“There is no limit to the extent to which we can imagine ourselves into the being of another.”
~J.M. Coetzee, “The Lives of Animals”

On September 9^th 2010, Rose, my Labrador Retriever, passed away. She was five years old.

In a way, it was good to be in a distant city when I got the news. Not surrounded by the familiar, I could go about my day bearing the standard of grief without having to explain myself. I could walk the streets at night under a light drizzle, letting the fresh water from above mix on my cheeks with the salt water from within as others hurried past me busy with their lives. I could, as I do, turn inside for answers and not worry about the external world being an encumbrance to the process.

Weighing heaviest on my heart was not being there. Rose was sick before I left for Europe, but we did not know what it was or how bad it was. The different vets who saw her were stumped by her symptoms, which seemed to respond favorably to treatment for an allergic reaction. The cancer diagnosis came too late, at a moment when I had no way of being in touch. Steve, my partner, had to go through it alone, watching Rose quickly fading and helping her to fight in every way he could think of. I know she was well taken care of, yet a part of me wonders if she felt abandoned, if she waited for me as long as she could. I wish I had at least been able to say goodbye.

Rose came home as an eight-week old puppy one eventful afternoon in July of 2005 and immediately became part of a happy triad: Steve, Angel, and Rose. She was family, an integral part of daily life, complementing our existence in ways that only a friendly and loving animal can. For five years, raising and sharing a life with Rose gave Steve and I a joyful common purpose and brought us closer together. She was a gift: free-spirited, tirelessly playful and curious, always excited about new things, places and people, and possessing of a fixity of purpose (finding food!) I have yet to construct for myself about anything. She kept us company when we were away from each other, brightly colored our day-to-day activities and even helped to keep us healthy by having to walk her for miles every day lest she be restless at night and keep us awake. Rose was a living anchor to the good in life, and we were in turn happy to be responsible for the life of an animal friend.

To me, Rose also functioned as an expansion of my mind, extending my cognitive reach into the animal world. She was my experiential bridge to a realm of perception and living otherwise closed off; a constant reminder of the fact that the human experience is but a fragment of a larger reality. Rose showed me that as sentient beings, humans and animals share commonalities which can uphold a kind mutual understanding with surprising ease.

In April of 2007, I had a strange apocalyptic dream in which Rose, then two years old, came to me during a moment of tremendous duress which just happened to take place amidst the ruins of my college campus. Considering the pressure of school at the time, the dream reads like a metaphor for salvation, an act which, in more than one way, this singular creature in fact carried out for me.

There are brands of conviction that place animals on a value scale in which they are considered lesser creatures, different and separate from us, granting adherents the liberty to distance their self-concept from animal identity as far as they wish. I find this appalling. The insight into the fabric of nature we have so painstakingly obtained through scientific study indicates clearly that humans are not simply Masters of the Earth, alone in our comprehension and privileged in our superiority. Being the first species to acquire the power to change the biosphere at will while remaining dependent upon it places us squarely in charge of maintaining its delicate balance. In this sense, we are deeply indebted to the species who have chosen to become our friends, for they are a reminder of our intrinsic connection to the rest of life. To the extent that we separate ourselves in identity, thought, and action from the animals, we become less and less.

A Short Walk Down Memory Lane

Baby Rose, Sleepyhead…

Time out for a rambunctious little girl.

With Steve in the family room.

Growing up.

Graduating from puppy school.

Still thinking she’s a tiny puppy.

In the pool with Natasha.

Fun with friends at the lake.
(Click here for full photo essay.)

Survival instinct at work: taking to the water during the brush fires behind the house.
(Click here for the photo blog of that event!)

Full Winter Coat

One day I came home from work to find that Rose had been busy making art out of herself… and the house! She was about a year old here.

With me in the garden.

And so, dearest Rose, Steve and I bid you farewell. Though we will always wish you hadn’t left us so soon, we are grateful for the wonderful time we spent together and all the joy you brought us. Thank you. We hope you had a good life, that your needs were met, and that you were as happy with us as we were with you. We loved you. You will always be a star in our sky.

Paris, France
September 30, 2010

“We send our thanks to all the Animal life in the world.
They have many things to teach us as people.
We are glad they are still here, and we hope it will always be so.”
The Mohawk Thanksgiving Address

Never Mind the Fool

Angel Villanueva — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:28:04 +0000

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Senator Martin went in looking good. Her navy suit breathed power. She had put some starch on Gossage too.

Dr. Lecter sat alone in the middle of the room, in a stout oak armchair bolted to the floor. A blanket covered his straitjacket and leg restraints and concealed the fact that he was chained to the chair. But he still wore the hockey mask the kept him from biting.

Why? the Senator wondered. The idea had been to permit Dr. Lecter some dignity in an office setting. Senator Martin gave Chilton a look and turned to Gossage for papers.

Chilton went behind Dr. Lecter and, with a glance at the camera, undid the straps and removed the mask with a flourish.

“Senator Martin, meet Dr. Hannibal Lecter.”

Seeing what Dr. Chilton had done for showmanship frightened Senator Martin as much as anything that had happened since her daughter disappeared. Any confidence she might have had in Chilton’s judgment was replaced with the cold fear that he was a fool.

She’d have to wing it.

A lock of Dr. Lecter’s hair fell between his maroon eyes. He was as pale as the mask. Senator Martin and Hannibal Lecter considered each other: one extremely bright, the other not measurable by any means known to man.

The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris, 1988

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Who hasn’t had a fool in their lives? In their desperate search for validation, these characters will command all they can, which on occasion will include our presence. But never mind the fool: in and of himself he is inconsequential. Sure they meddle and complicate things, and make no mistake, they can be destructive, but chaos is order ineffable: in facilitating encounters of all sorts they act as the catalyst for change. Much can be gained from being drawn from time to time to places where rules—particularly ours—are being broken. There, a great experiment is carried out both on our behalf and in spite of our efforts to stop it. The mistake most often made when wandering into a fool’s reach is attempting to draw conclusions from the experience before it’s time.

As for the fool himself, not much can be said other than everyone’s fares to the chaos are charged on his account. In The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris does us a sinister, yet amusing service, delivered perhaps more satisfyingly by the film than the novel. Chilton’s ultimate fate is our guilt and pleasure, leaning to the latter as it hints at a tantalizing possibility: a particular life form may experience a great deal of injustice during its existence, but the universe, in the end, balances itself out quite nicely.

With that thought, I leave you. I’m having an old friend for dinner…

Ta,
Angel Villanueva

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Angel Villanueva — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 15:48:17 +0000

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