. Spinning .

Well, I helped start a writers group and now I think I need to form a book club.  Or maybe just mosey on up to the library and join one.  I’m stuck on the rainfall of yellow flowers after the death of Jose, and keep coming back to it.  It’d be neat to hear what others have made of the multitude of meanings in 100 Years of Solitude, although it’s sort of nice just to run off at the mouth and command center stage I suppose, as I expound on my own personal theories.

As Neha has posted her thoughts on the branded Hester as character or symbol of women’s rights on Of Wanderings and Such, I muddle through on my own sans deadline of semester requirements.  Which means, I can take my own sweet time and Lord knows when I’ll move on.  (Two weeks, Neha?  Not bad at all!) 

As a former speedreader, I am almost embarrassed by the slow plodding I tend towards now.  But then, some books just require a bit more thought than others, and I’m learning a new depth of reading that hopefully I’ll become accustomed to implementing with some greater degree of alacrity and skill eventually. 

In the meantime, while I read beyond it, I will still sleep under a blanket of yellow flowers that cover my head with musing.

On the writing, as in most of my reviewing, I tend to post on a positive note–notwithstanding the fact that the books have been excellent overall–that it must appear I am fickle, even unreliable perhaps in falling in love with the work of whomever I am reading.  Not true. 

Something is starting to bug me with Marquez, and it started with the firing squad and was bolstered by the begonia, and is now including the word "solitude."  The words are being repeated at me until I am almost made painfully aware of them.  While I felt at first that the "firing squad" was to keep me in tune with the future of the characters while I read of their past (an amazing feat, telling the reader how the character will end up while maintaining interest in the story, not once, but many times), but Marquez did surprise with a twist:  Aureliano escapes death, but the single mention of Arcadio proves true. 

The begonia hit me right off the bat, mainly because of its placement with the sky and wall.  When it was repeated several times, I held it as a symbol of the home and endurance of life–and in a moment, returning to the wonder of Marquez, I shall use it to exemplify his skill at imagery. 

But now, it is almost as if I have to focus on the whole meaning of the book:  solitude.  As Marquez slips it in, slowly at first and then more often with a bit more depth, I am finding what it means to each character.  A general idea for me right now is that it is a separation each individual character feels from his world, despite the passion with which his or her life is lived.  More on this in another post, since it is obviously important to the story.

But it does seem just a tad overdone in the repetition of the single phrase or word.  For a while there, I would have marked the begonia as the leit motif of the novel.  It began to annoy, and in searching backwards for clues (‘fore I learned to remember, or at least mark the pages), I find it near impossible to research because of the variation in timelines:  was it mentioned in past or present or future, after which current event?

However, and here is where I stand back in awe, Marquez is a master of imagery while using his reader to supply the image.  The best way I can explain this is that his stark imagery provokes a reader to immediately furnish the detail.  It is almost as if what Marquez gives us is a coloring book and 24-pack of crayons. 

My begonia is hot pink.  What color did you make it?

Colonel Aureliano Buendia sends his mother Ursula a note:  Take good care of Papa because he is going to die.  Ursula trusts her son’s prescience and gets help bringing Jose Arcadio Buendia back into the house:

"A smell of tender mushrooms, of wood-flower fungus, of old and concentrated outdoors impregnated the air of the bedroom as it was breathed by the colossal old man weatherbeaten by the sun and the rain.  The next morning he was not in his bed.  In spite of his undiminished strength, Jose Arcadio Buendia was in no condition to resist.  It was all the same to him.  If he went back to the chestnut tree it was not because he wanted to but because of a habit of his body.  Ursula took care of him, fed him, brought him news of Aureliano.  But actually, the only person with whom he was able to have contact for a long time was Prudencio Aguilar.  Almost pulverized at the time by the decrepitude of death, Prudencio Aguilar would come twice a day to chat with him.  (…)  It was Prudencio Aguilar who cleaned him, fed him, and brought him splendid news of an unknown person called Aureliano who was a colonel of the war."

This is a lead in to the loss of a man we have come to know and care about.  He has dominated the first 150 pages of this story, and though we have been introduced to the characters of his children, Aureliano, Jose, Amaranta, as well as Rebeca, and the next generation of Arcadio, and young Aureliano, they have not caught my interest in the mystical, magical way of their father.

"When he was alone, Jose Arcadio Buendia consoled himself with the dream of the infinite rooms.  He dreamed that he was getting out of bed, opening the door and going into an identical room with the same bed with a wrought-iron head, the same wicker chair, and the same small picture of the Virgin of Help on the back wall.  From that room he would go into another that was just the same, the door of which would open into another that was just the same, the door of which would open into another one just the same, and then into another exactly alike, and so on to infinity.  He liked to go from room to room, as in a gallery of parallel mirrors, until Prudencio Aguilar would touch him on the shoulder.  Then he would go back from room to room, walking in reverse, going back over his trail, and he would find Prudencio Aguilar in the room of reality.  But one night, two weeks after they took him to his bed, Prudencio Aguilar touched his shoulder in an intermediate room and he stayed there forever, thinking that it was the real room."

The next morning, Ursula is unable to wake him.  Jose Arcadio Buendia is dead. 

Jose Buendia has no doubt suffered from dementia for many years (living under a chestnut tree hasn’t helped, I’m sure), and it started from frustration and realization of the hopelessness of his dreams and inventions.  But what are the rooms?  What is the meaning of the final dream, remaining in the intermediate room, and thinking it is the "real" room?  What is the real room–the room of reality?  Is it where he is in a current frame of time?  Is it life and the others, fantasy?  From my own cultivated beliefs, I detect a hint of reincarnated lives within a larger space of time alloted to Jose Arcadio Buendia.  I see that he has come halfway perhaps to the eternity we are promised by religion and dedicated to by hope; the infinity of the rooms.

Or is it the past through which Jose has traveled?  Are the rooms the stages of his life, and reveal that for all his passionate effort, he has not changed his world?  Therefore, would it mean that it is useless to live on, and the mid-point in the train of rooms is where it can end because the future is the same as the past?  It could also represent a future, one which he will not live to see, but has provided for through the issue of his children, and which will live beyond him, while he remains behind.  Jose is comfortable with the room, consoled by them multiplied many times in exactitude, as if this is his personal space, movable in time as he moves through them.  The same but different. 

It is always Monday.

Last night, I read beyond the point of Jose Arcadio Buendia’s death, but I keep coming back to it.  There are things here that must be thought about.

And too, this morning I consider replacing the tub caulking, and try to read the label for the curing time, and find that I cannot.  No matter where I hold it, the tiny text eludes me.  Then I think:  If proof of existence is in the seeing is believing, does this exist?  I see the tube of caulk, and feel it–the empirical philosophy that says it does.  But then, the writing is currently (at this space in time) undecipherable.  So then, does it not exist?  At least for me?  Are there two cars in the garage in/on moonless nights?

As Jose Arcadio is dying, he sees Prudencio, who has haunted him since his murder, driving the Buendia family into leaving their village and starting their own community, a force more powerful dead then when alive, and who has become a friend of sorts, a harbinger perhaps of what is beyond what is not known or seen. 

I shall soon form some thoughts based on the dream Jose Arcadio Buendia has in his muddled mind after years of sitting out by the chestnut tree.  And of the explainable–seeing Ursula and yet believing it to be Prudencio–as well as the unexplainable–the rainfall of yellow flowers after Jose’s death.

It all means something, and as I squint and finally seek out a magnifying glass to read the writing on the tube of caulk, I will as well–and share here–seek out a magnifier in my mind to focus on the words Marquez has given us in puzzle. If Melquiades is the world outside our own earthly travels, is Prudencio the world of that beyond?  Just as Melquiades leaves and returns from all over the globe, does the dead Prudencio challenge it with his own appearances?  Does he confirm it? 

The old gypsy, Melquiades, is an important character to this story.  He brings the wonders of the outside world to Macondo, and to Jose Arcadio Buendia.  Because of this, Buendia holds him in the highest esteem, it seems to me, above his family and village.  With the telescope, the alchemy set, Buendia is rabid with determination to perform miracles.  Yet, he had passed on one of the most obvious miracles the gypsies bring.  Why?  I cannot get the flying carpet out of my mind:

"Unlike Melquiades’ tribe, they had shown very quickly that they were not heralds of progress but purveyors of amusement.  Even when they brought the ice they did not advertise it for its usefulness in the life of man but as a simple circus curiousity.  This time, along with many other artifices, they brought a flying carpet.  But they did not offer it as a fundamental contribution to the development of transport, rather as an object of recreation.

"(…)One afternoon, the boys grew enthusiastic over the flying carpet that went swiftly by the laboratory at window level carrying the gypsy who was driving it and several children from the village who were merrily waving their hands, but Jose Arcadio Buendia did not even look at it.  ‘Let them dream,’ he said, ‘We’ll do better flying than they are doing, and with more scientific resources than a miserable bedspread."

Is then Jose Arcadio Buendia a man who needs the spark to ignite his mind?  Is Melquiades the catalyst to his imagination, the key to Buendia’s sense of duty?  Does he spurn the fun things in life if they are presented as such, because of a need to instead take all seriously and important to mankind?  Is he this altruistic person who is willing to dedicate himself to a cause for the betterment of all? 

Or is he just confused?