Marcelo Medone
A Stray Dog Seen from the Front and from the Side
Marcelo Medone (1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a fiction writer, poet, essayist and screenwriter. He has received numerous awards and has been published in more than 40 countries, including New Zealand and Australia.
He was awarded the First Prize in the 2021 international contest by the American Academy of the Spanish Language with his surreal short story La súbita impuntualidad del hombre del saco a rayas llamado Waldemar (The Sudden Unpunctuality of the Man in the Striped Jacket Named Waldemar).
His flash fiction story Last Train to Nowhere Town was nominated for the 2021 Pushcart Prize.
Facebook: Marcelo Medone / Instagram: @marcelomedone
I pour myself a steaming cup of coffee and look out the window: the sun begins to rise and makes its way between the buildings of the big city, in a game of light and shadow that changes minute by minute. I always loved autumn in Buenos Aires, with that air of melancholy and passion that tango and vernacular poetry know how to transmit so well. Because in these lands we are all a little crazy and a little poets.
My body, my time, my work, my country, my flag, my love, my life. The notion of possession appears everywhere. I suspect that it is something that comes from time immemorial, from our ancestral primate origin, when we began to be territorial mammals and competed for space, food, shelter and the possibilities of successfully mating and leaving offspring.
Somehow we became a society built around dominant and possessive males who with sheer muscle bridge their differences and mark the limits of their power. The strongest, the most bellicose, occupy the highest step, while the docile, the sick and the elderly are doomed to the vast lower underworld.
Needless to say, at present this disastrous attitude no longer admits gender limits, being exercised by both male and female leaders, equalling each other in their despotic mandates.
While having my coffee, I listen to the immortal and beloved Luis Alberto Spinetta start to sing: “Every road can work / everything can work” in his masterful bluesy Yellow Bridges Cantata, my private inspirational mantra of each morning. (It is inevitable that the limitations of language offer me no alternatives to express the idea of "my" personal mantra. From now on, I will use the word "my" shamelessly, but far from reaffirming its inexorable sense of possession.)
I know that there is still a long way to go before nations forget about struggles and wars, for the powerful to be forced out of this inertia of generating more power and more possessions at the expense of those who have less. Someday that ideal world will arrive that is not a zero-sum game, where total well-being grows and is not just a transfer of an asset from one sector to another. A world where the notion of possessing is irrelevant because we have learned to let go of our belongings and we are simple wise administrators.
I leave Spinetta behind and go for a walk. I look at the world again with my new eyes. Eyes without flags, without political leaders and without unquestionable loyalties. Very much in the style of what John Lennon proclaimed in his sublime Imagine. I am grateful to be able to feel the warmth of the sun's rays on my skin despite the cold wind and to inflate my lungs and feel how the air enters free. I probe the ground through the soles of my shoes, which confirms that in addition to thinking, imagining, feeling and dreaming, I also exist.
The streets are deserted, probably because of the cold. A stray dog searches for food in the garbage. I stop and look at him carefully, as in a slow motion movie. I photograph him imaginarily: from the front, in profile, with his head held high and ripping the black bag to reach a chicken carcass. Then, victorious, he begins to chew it with delight. Ten snapshots of the same stray dog in ten minutes. It reminds me of Borges's dog in his story Funes, the Memorious, in which the protagonist is unable to understand that the concept of dog could encompass “the dog at three fourteen seen in profile” and “the dog at three and fifteen seen from the front”. In some way, I feel like the memorious and memorable Ireneo Funes, with the difference that what for the character in the story was a defect in me becomes a virtue: to appreciate and value each moment of life, a succession of small moments of bliss.
Meanwhile, I have a humble and almost anonymous mission: to contribute a grain of sand towards global happiness, even if it is by writing a small collection of forgettable words from this far south corner of the world.
My body, my time, my work, my country, my flag, my love, my life. The notion of possession appears everywhere. I suspect that it is something that comes from time immemorial, from our ancestral primate origin, when we began to be territorial mammals and competed for space, food, shelter and the possibilities of successfully mating and leaving offspring.
Somehow we became a society built around dominant and possessive males who with sheer muscle bridge their differences and mark the limits of their power. The strongest, the most bellicose, occupy the highest step, while the docile, the sick and the elderly are doomed to the vast lower underworld.
Needless to say, at present this disastrous attitude no longer admits gender limits, being exercised by both male and female leaders, equalling each other in their despotic mandates.
While having my coffee, I listen to the immortal and beloved Luis Alberto Spinetta start to sing: “Every road can work / everything can work” in his masterful bluesy Yellow Bridges Cantata, my private inspirational mantra of each morning. (It is inevitable that the limitations of language offer me no alternatives to express the idea of "my" personal mantra. From now on, I will use the word "my" shamelessly, but far from reaffirming its inexorable sense of possession.)
I know that there is still a long way to go before nations forget about struggles and wars, for the powerful to be forced out of this inertia of generating more power and more possessions at the expense of those who have less. Someday that ideal world will arrive that is not a zero-sum game, where total well-being grows and is not just a transfer of an asset from one sector to another. A world where the notion of possessing is irrelevant because we have learned to let go of our belongings and we are simple wise administrators.
I leave Spinetta behind and go for a walk. I look at the world again with my new eyes. Eyes without flags, without political leaders and without unquestionable loyalties. Very much in the style of what John Lennon proclaimed in his sublime Imagine. I am grateful to be able to feel the warmth of the sun's rays on my skin despite the cold wind and to inflate my lungs and feel how the air enters free. I probe the ground through the soles of my shoes, which confirms that in addition to thinking, imagining, feeling and dreaming, I also exist.
The streets are deserted, probably because of the cold. A stray dog searches for food in the garbage. I stop and look at him carefully, as in a slow motion movie. I photograph him imaginarily: from the front, in profile, with his head held high and ripping the black bag to reach a chicken carcass. Then, victorious, he begins to chew it with delight. Ten snapshots of the same stray dog in ten minutes. It reminds me of Borges's dog in his story Funes, the Memorious, in which the protagonist is unable to understand that the concept of dog could encompass “the dog at three fourteen seen in profile” and “the dog at three and fifteen seen from the front”. In some way, I feel like the memorious and memorable Ireneo Funes, with the difference that what for the character in the story was a defect in me becomes a virtue: to appreciate and value each moment of life, a succession of small moments of bliss.
Meanwhile, I have a humble and almost anonymous mission: to contribute a grain of sand towards global happiness, even if it is by writing a small collection of forgettable words from this far south corner of the world.
Marcelo Medone (1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a fiction writer, poet, essayist and screenwriter. He has received numerous awards and has been published in more than 40 countries, including New Zealand and Australia.
He was awarded the First Prize in the 2021 international contest by the American Academy of the Spanish Language with his surreal short story La súbita impuntualidad del hombre del saco a rayas llamado Waldemar (The Sudden Unpunctuality of the Man in the Striped Jacket Named Waldemar).
His flash fiction story Last Train to Nowhere Town was nominated for the 2021 Pushcart Prize.
Facebook: Marcelo Medone / Instagram: @marcelomedone
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