hello, so here goes a silly realisation a got. i was scrolling to my dash, as one does at 3am, and so your icon. and i just smiled at the familiarity your blog brings me, "but wait, that's el ateneo!" your icon is the bookshop i visit all the time. in fact, i visited it just a few weeks ago. and in my last visit there, i was reading the book "lazarus rises (among other things)" by @icaruspendragon, book that thanks jack allen for being an inspiration.
and while i was there reading in one of the nooks of the former theatre, crying and grieving, i could not stop thinking about jack allen and his journey. about my own journey, about how i feel like I'm too old to give college a try again, about how I'm too old and too untalented to give my passion and my art a try. and i looked at all the books around me and thought, "were these authors as scared as i am? as lost and confused?"
and i looked at the former stage and thought about the days when i was a theatre kid, thought about the hundreds of people that have ever set a foot in that stage. "were they scared too? what was their call? would i recognise mine?"
I'm a film student, and an artist who doesn't draw, and a writer who doesn't write. but those are lies, because i you'll find me drawing in every corner of a piece of paper. you'll find me writing poetics about the stupidest, most important things in my friends group chat.
back to el ateneo, i know it is just a silly thought from my sleep deprived mind, but in a way, you and the art that you created and the art you influenced to create, and all the thoughts you helped ignite in my mind and in my soul, lived in that theatre turned bookstore. you haunt my mind, and for a couple of hours, you haunted that place. a place that hundreds of talented people haunt, too. "did these people know that to every art, there is a craft? did anyone ever tell them that?"
isn't it funny how far art can go, how far ideas and emotions can travel? did you ever think that someday, the words you wrote about the poet dean winchester would travel to argentina, and would make a person rethink the way they saw their own art, their own craft? that it would push them to write again, but more importantly, think that their writing is worth a shot?
last month was my birthday, and i gifted myself a copy of on the road and the howl facsimile. and i was so happy reading it because i could see what dean saw. and i understood what poetry can do, how it tastes, how it feels in my mouth, and veins. and i just wanted to say that jack allen changed me. you changed me. and seeing el ateneo in your icon felt like a sign, like finding my house in a strange land, recognising my name in a foreign tongue. it's silly, you know? a good kind of sille coincidence
This isn't silly at all. Aching and uncanny and unlooked-for, perhaps. Awesome--in the original sense.
My icon is indeed El Ateneo, which I've not visited (yet! hopefully!) but consider a potential holy place for me given that it's a temple of both theatre and books. I am sorry for your grief, but glad El Ateneo was there for you as a place where you could tuck yourself safely away and feel, surrounded by the ghosts of stories, the stories acted out long past and the stories still waiting to fulfill their potential, hidden yet in the leaves of the books.
Let any doubt you have about being an artist be put to rest. Anyone with the ability to write this ask has the sensitivity and insight of an artist, and as you pointed out, the doodles and chats of your daily life are crying a chorus of support. Only you know whether furthering your education formally is the right choice for you, but don't let societal ideas of what's the normal age or background or skill level stop you. Every future is uncertain, so why not take a chance on something that has the potential to be so beautiful?
Because this moment you describe, my friend, is beautiful. No, never did I think the fic I wrote would grow to reach so far. Never did I imagine that so many poets, like the one whose book you were reading, would tell me they how they unearthed their voice because of it. Never never had I imagined, before this ask, that I could visit a place I so dearly want to go without actually traveling there at all. That a lovely person like you could bring me there in your thoughts and in your heart. That I could haunt El Ateneo's storied aisles with all those other artists, so many of them brilliant, often incredible, but lost, too, and scared, and yes: doubting. The two of us with them, just as you are here with me now, an entire continent away, while I answer this ask with wonder and warmth in my breast. You've called it silly--
Yet it makes perfect, simple sense to me. It slots neatly into all the thoughts I've formed while working through the fic I'm writing now, how stories, and indeed art of all kinds, can cross time and space to bring us together. In the recognition of yourself in one of the symbols I've chosen for myself, I recognize you.
So here: come visit me anytime. And whenever you'd like my company, I'll be happy to visit you.
Take me to the bookstore again, won't you? Even if just once more.
Thank you. So much <3
