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Ricardo Federico Morin Tortolero
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Editor Billy Bussell Thompson
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In memoriam Eva Lowenberger
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“The allure of success
forces truth under pressure
and loses it in its own entanglement.”
Ricardo F Morin – April 2021
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INTRODUCTION
Book of Changes arose from working through memory in the act of writing. The process determined the direction and nature of the story. Real memories, chance events, and the shifting conditions of daily life were brought together in search of unity, despite their many possible forms. What emerged was a collage stripped of what was superficial and directed toward its own realism.
Inauthenticity had to be dismissed. Excess also had to be removed. In that process, the story revealed the course it had to take. Yet what was left out remains part of its nature and bears its own mark on the whole.
For me, the process was not unlike creating an abstract painting. What occurs in the solitude of the studio through construction and reconstruction took place instead through language. Each word had to become essential to the balance of the narrative, much as each brushstroke must justify itself within a painting.
Book of Changes seeks to formulate memory and the shifts in perception that occur over time. Though the work draws on lived experience, the personal and particular are not its principal end. What matters more is how one’s truth changes, and how one’s humanity remains difficult to grasp.
Ricardo F Morin
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Chapter 1
Ignis Fatuus: the whole world could collapse; to live, we need false hopes.
Chapter 2
Your paternal grandfather hardly ever spoke. Lying next to him, you suffered his snores. One Sunday morning you sat quietly on the bench with him while he played the organ at the Church of Bella Vista in Caracas. One Sunday afternoon, he took you to feed pigeons at the Plaza Bolívar in Puerto La Guaira. One early Monday, he sat at a carved desk and sipped hot coffee from a demitasse saucer. For a time, he moved his thumbs and whistled. Suddenly he chases you from the house in the belief that you had broken something of his. Fearfully, you ran across the street and were almost hit by a car. You joined older children playing marbles.
Chapter 3
We ignore so much that humility becomes a necessity, not a choice. Nothing is conclusive.
Chapter 4
Your maternal grandmother never engaged in small talk. To dissuade you from sucking your thumb, she applied hot sauce to your left hand before bed. You simply switched to your right thumb.
Chapter 5
Man does not control who he is, nor how he thinks, nor how he perceives himself. You do not control who you are, how you think, or how you perceive yourself. Asking why you exist, or observing how you change over time, does not confer control.
Chapter 6
In his cell, Father Manuel, the math teacher, talked to himself. His murmurs were barely audible. He pressed on us what makes a man great and what makes him small. The principal, Father Lisandro, replied that there was no explanation for evil in the world.
Chapter 7
Can one dispel fears of the existence of God and the devil? It cannot be done. Does culture, like tradition and belief, arise from the imagination?
Chapter 8
As a friend, Rogelio was considerate and attentive. Your mother warned you not to grow too close to him: he is poor and black. You replied: poverty is not shameful and, besides, your father’s skin is only slightly lighter.
Chapter 9
Do you seek meaning in imaginative worlds and daydreams?
Chapter 10
During lunch, Uncle Calixto sat across from you at the end of the table. Casually, he announced the suicide of a couple he had introduced you to only a month earlier. Your consternation was obvious; Uncle Calixto insisted that you inquire no further. Years later, in the same truculent tone, he accused you of evil thoughts: You have the devil in you, for being gay.
Chapter 11
You asked how moral a person can be if one believes in the devil, hell, and eternal damnation. For you, this morality was defective. For you, religion is no different from astrology.
Chapter 12
Fifteen years ago, Francis died of cancer. His brother grieved as if one of his own limbs had been amputated. Years later, his brother set his home ablaze before drinking antifreeze. The family was not surprised. Neighbors blamed you for not expunging his pain. Alarmed, one of them called the next day to accuse you of exposing forty-five stories to conflagration.
Chapter 13
Suicide is no different from murder. To kill oneself is no different from killing another. Both are acts of cowardice. Consciousness belongs only to the living. To end one’s life is to turn against one’s nature. Madness may be named, but it does not relieve the agony. The memory of love is the only consolation.
Chapter 14
Just before first Communion, your father brought up death. You replied that it is inevitable. Later you heard him tell your mother that your answer was quite unexpected. At Christmas time, you told your father that you knew all about Santa. He answered: What do you plan to do about it? You just shrugged your shoulders and asked for his blessing before going to bed.
Chapter 15
Do you suffer from not being innocent?
Chapter 16
The grocer said he knew your family, so you asked him for a ride home on the back of his pick-up. When you arrived there, you found your father in a state of panic. You had disappeared from him, and you thought he had forgotten you. Thereafter, you did not go to your art classes for ten years. Then, as a teenager, you wandered around your neighborhood. One day, in the early evening, you found an older boy studying. He was memorizing something when you interrupted him. He asked why you were offering him candy, and you said: Why not? Aren’t we neighbors? When you got home late, your parents were leaving to report you missing.
Chapter 17
Can anyone measure consciousness?
Chapter 18
Each time you came through the gate to your friend’s house, his German Shepherd lurched forward until he recognized your voice and scent. Your friend had stayed out of school that day, not feeling well. Without preamble, he volunteered that he was being sent off to military school. Then he said he was terribly upset and had to get rid of his stress. You sat quietly at the foot of his bed. The two of you exchanged monosyllables while he masturbated beneath the blanket. He tells you he has to beat and to come. These words were meaningless to you. With a friendly glance, you left, never to see him again.
Chapter 19
You did not ward off fear so much as reckon with its fleeting existence, as when waking from a dream.
Chapter 20
Vacationing with a classmate, your attention was on his older brother Francisco. Each time your bodies touched you trembled. You feared becoming overwhelmed. Long after his death, his appeal still rushes after you.
Chapter 21
From early childhood, innocence had already been lost to ache. You had long been fair game.
Chapter 22
At 18, you met Ennio Lombana after crossing into the neighbors’ house. You became his sexual victim. You went to university four thousand miles away.
Chapter 23
You tried never to think of fear, yet it becomes an obsession.
Chapter 24
Your father and your art tutor both encouraged education in North America, yet they feared its implications. Their memories stand in silence.
Chapter 25
Ignorance is the essential condition of existence. Arrogance obscures anxiety, loneliness, fear, and the absence of love. Rationality cannot be achieved through dogma.
Chapter 26
La Nena Pérez was a golden rebel for José Luis. Her beauty bewitched all who saw her. For his wife Antonieta, however, she was an interloper. Decades later, a letter from him arrived from Andalucía. In it, Antonieta was praised as toda una señora. In a self-deprecating tone, he lauded your father. You had mentioned that La Nena did not recognize you at a chance encounter in Caracas. He was beside himself on learning that your voice was no longer familiar to her. She seemed to have forgotten that you had once canoed across Tucacas Bay.
Chapter 27
How can there be love if one is empty? Ennui uncovers that emptiness. Self-importance aspires to enlightenment just as yearning does to sanctity and humility. To find pure love is a matter of luck.
Chapter 28
Before entering the university, you enrolled in a course in English as a second language. The professor made learning exciting. His patience disarmed you. At mealtime, you spoke on and on, forgetting to eat, and he smiled tenderly.
Chapter 29
Desperation cannot relieve suffering.
Chapter 30
Three Marys flew from South America to Niagara Falls for a visit. They rode the Ferris Wheel at the amusement park on the shores of Lake Ontario. Their visit was a complete mystery, except that they believed they were in contact with extraterrestrials. One of them realized she wasn’t the object of Ennio Lombana’s affections. Your mother’s resulting breakdown was immediate.
Chapter 31
In 1977, hungry and destitute, you came close to dying. You distracted yourself in discos. You met Donald Bossak and Paul Barret: the former insecure and the latter suicidal. You moved into the university dorms to face a group of rioters who had been egged on by your prospective roommate. They shout: Away with the foreigner, setting fire to your door. At graduation, you found out the university had assigned you a bodyguard. By then, you had come to know a student. This Polish dissident, Jurek Pystrak, comforted your misery. The summer before graduation, you studied together in Austria. After graduation, he went on to continue his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and you went on to Yale for the MFA. Jurek died in the mid-80s in Berlin. Only later did you hear it was AIDS.
Chapter 32
Technology extends our lives into preconceived worlds. Algorithmic archetypes impose order on bias, through which they control, sell, and manipulate you.
Chapter 33
Every weekend, you and Jurek traveled between New Haven and Philadelphia. Before taking his Fulbright, he suggested it was okay to date another during his absence. You took this to be a lack of loyalty. From Berlin, he wrote he had met a film historian. After Jurek’s death, Karl visited your art studio. He found your geometrical canvases oddly formal. Was his conversation an echo of his own influence on Jurek and of his own vision of the freedom of artistic expression? He later wrote from Berlin he was dying. In his letter, he says your quests regarding treatments are futile missionary pretenses.
Chapter 34
But it is not a mission, it is compassion. Karl was filled with his own memories; you begged him to keep up hope.
Chapter 35
Never have you cried for someone as you did when Benjamin Ivry left to work in Paris in 1984. After he left, your old friend Carol Magar helped you negotiate American citizenship. Eighteen years later, she died of cervical cancer, and five years earlier, Benjamin had returned from France. Was it his stance of irony that broke you apart as friends? You last spoke to him at a bookstore on Park Avenue and 57th Street. There, on the occasion of promoting his book Maurice Ravel: His Life, you introduced him to your husband David. Benjamin excused himself and left abruptly to meet his agent. Later that year, Benjamin moved to Thailand. He became a biographer and translator of well-known 20th-century figures in the arts. Only thanks to the World Wide Web can you see his image as it ages, and his prose continues to provide you with his particular métier. He remains your provocateur.
Chapter 36
In 1987, you were diagnosed with AIDS. Before the diagnosis, you came to know an Episcopal clergyman and a TV soap actor. Both fought for your attention. For years one disapproved of the other. The actor was ironic and the clergyman was a libertine. The clergyman died of a heart attack in 2008. The actor is in his late 80s. His husband derides you.
Chapter 37
During the years of AIDS hysteria, your friends Philip Jung and Tom Bunny were not scared of death. You comforted them when they lay quietly on your lap.
Chapter 38
Nearly blind, Lyda saw herself as a patron of Latino culture in the United States. She enjoyed curating art shows in Midtown Manhattan. A provincial teacher turned diplomat imposed on her the idea that they had the opportunity to open up the American art establishment. Then a pseudo progressive Bolivarian revolution turns them into populists.
Chapter 39
You listened to grand stories. Their aspirations, akin to religious fervor, never materialized. They are grifters unable to give up their desire to dominate.
Chapter 40
Painting keeps you sane, said a friend who had come to your loft. Your paintings developed an abstract vocabulary. You painted at night and worked as a commercial designer during the day. When your health failed, you renounced everything and chose refuge with your family in South America.
Chapter 41
One learns to live with fear.
Chapter 42
You became unmoored in your native land. You ran into repugnance from both the medical establishment and your family.
Chapter 43
In 1994, the Venezuelan medical institutions were collapsing. A few doctors and several businesses were presented with a proposal for Fundación Metaguardia and countersigned it. It had been registered as a program for people with terminal diseases. The proposal went to the Venezuelan commissions of Health, Education, and Culture, and to the United Nations. It failed. The Venezuelan Ministry of the Family tries to turn the program into activities for the feebleminded. Nothing happened.
Chapter 44
In November 1995, you flew from Caracas to Los Angeles. You had been nominated for an Emmy for your work on In Search of Dr. Seuss. The morning after, you awoke to a fever of 108 degrees. From a hospital bed, you hallucinate making love to an angel descending upon you. To your nurse, you explained that death is an illusion. In your mind, you speak of Egyptian gods and goddesses, of Gestapo agents meandering inside your room, of Zapata fighting for Mexico’s freedom, and of an intergalactic journey on a spaceship hovering over the hospital. A nurse asked you to open your eyes. Your body had begun to slow down; your eyesight had become magnified. You pulled the intravenous line out of your arm and wanted to flee. You could not walk, but somehow you dance to music played on the nurses’ radio. You feel yourself in a different time. You see your home in Venezuela as you crawl on its floor. The grouts are like rivers. Then you open your eyes to the ocean. Your heart pulsates. You climb to your home’s roof and stare at the cloudless sky. Fractals of light vibrate like thousands of rainbows. Now you are awake; your ankles are weak. You stand up. You turn to the doctor and say: What does dignity mean to you? Are you a human being?
Chapter 45
A few months later, you were in your mother’s house. Your father came every week to visit. As you became stronger over the following months, he says you should return to the U.S.
Chapter 46
In November 1996, you flew from Caracas to New York. Your nine-month stay in Venezuela violated your residency status. I believe I was dying and unable to return, you answered. Sir, you may proceed, the agent finally said.
Chapter 47
Some weeks later, your father fell at home and suffered a concussion. After surgery, he died in the hospital. Your stepmother had locked him away as if he were a wild beast. In grief, you painted again. With no more success than before, galleries continued to reject your work. You traveled to Europe with your mother. She spoke incessantly, and nine years later she lost her voice to Alzheimer’s. Without parents, you have no bridge to your brothers and sisters. Throughout the years of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, you helped the family.
Chapter 48
In 2012, painting had become a liability to your health. You closed the studio, and digital technology turns into your medium. Your confidence returns.
Chapter 49
In 1997, you meet Nelson. Together you hiked the Amazon rainforest all the way to Angel Falls. You also swam together in Los Roques. With you he showed himself vulnerable. Was his suicide due to his brother’s death or to your leaving him?
Chapter 50
In August of 1999, you confessed to a Nicaraguan priest in the Vatican. He tells you to measure your responsibilities. You sobbed inconsolably over Nelson’s death. The priest’s response was: This is not the place. From the Vatican, you returned to the hotel, where you locked yourself up. Upon returning to the United States, you sought therapy. There you discussed a relationship with a married English teacher with children who tells you: You have killed me as well. Then you fell into a relationship with an alcoholic who tells you the same.
Chapter 51
Therapy became a crutch and constrained your freedom. When you left, the therapist was disappointed. He had grown accustomed to directing your thinking and actions. That was his empowerment, and much to his chagrin, you left him.
Chapter 52
When you and David meet, he fills a void in you, and you fill one in him. You find respite in an imperfect world.
Chapter 53
He awoke to an itching jaw with stubble. You rubbed against his face and breathed in his musky scent. His eyes had the expression of a loving child.
Chapter 54
His glowing eyes hold a timid wonder.
Chapter 55
Together you travel the world: the Atlantic, the Pacific, the South China Sea, the Mediterranean, and the North Sea.
Chapter 56
On December 27, 2000, a 39-year-old man jumped to his death from a Manhattan apartment building. The leap occurred in Hell’s Kitchen, near your home. He was your primary doctor, and you were both HIV-positive. The week before, you had told him that the medication he prescribed had left you sleep deprived.
Chapter 57
A few friends from my childhood remain in touch today. At 94, Herta is my oldest friend. I have known her for 46 years. She is my mentor and Platonic friend since college. She lost her memory to Alzheimer’s. From Yale graduate school are Angiolina Melchiori, now a news director at RAI in Rome; Ariel Fernández, an American-Argentinian physical chemist and pharmaceutical researcher; and Maider Dravasa, a French Basque with a Ph.D. in linguistics who lives in Paris. All three have been my friends for forty years. As with all my friends, we know the ebb and flow of our strengths.
Then there is Billy Bussell Thompson, once my collaborator. I believe he suffers what Job did not. I have known him since 1987. My true education begins when I meet him. Over the years, we coauthor often, including his editing of many of my WordPress blogs. When I write in Spanish, Italian, or French, Billy is there to guide and to order my thoughts across languages. Book of Changes evolves from a collage of reflections: memory, my tension with the social sciences, my love of history, an interest in meter and its rise and fall in American poetry, suicide prevention, and self-repair. Billy brings precision to my prose: he clears vagueness and scattered allusions and helps me overcome the limits of my bilingual fluency.
Most importantly, there is my husband of over twenty years, David Lowenberger, who exerts the most significant influence on who I am. His friends and relatives also matter deeply. Much to my good fortune, his mother, my mother-in-law Eva, gave me twenty years of friendship. Dignified in every respect, she is an inspiration as a mother and as a friend. She died during the COVID pandemic nearly five weeks before turning 98. I dedicate these stories to her memory.
Observations On Perception 