Before I knew thy face or name.
Or this:
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
APRIL
April 1. THE FIRST BISHOP
In 1553 the first bishop of Brazil, Pedro Fernandes Sardinha, set foot on these shores.
Three years later, south of Alagoas, the Caeté Indians ate him for lunch.
Some Brazilians are of the opinion that the meal was an invention of the colonial power, a pretext to steal the Caetés’ land and exterminate them in a prolonged “holy war.”
Other Brazilians believe the story occurred more or less as told, that Bishop Sardinha, who carried his fate in his fishy name, was the involuntary founder of the national cuisine.
April 2. MANUFACTURING PUBLIC OPINION
In 1917 President Woodrow Wilson announced that the United States would enter World War I.
Four and a half years earlier, Wilson had been elected as the peace candidate.
Public opinion embraced with the same enthusiasm his pacifist speeches and his declaration of war.
Edward Bernays was the principal author of this miracle.
When the war was over, Bernays acknowledged that he had used doctored photographs and made-up anecdotes to spark prowar sentiment.
This public relations success kicked off a brilliant career.
Bernays went on to advise several presidents and the world’s most powerful businessmen.
Reality is not what it is; it’s what I tell you it is. We can thank him, more than anyone else, for the modern techniques of mass manipulation that can convince people to buy anything from a brand of soap to a war.
April 3. GOOD GUYS
In 1882 a bullet pierced the neck of Jesse James. It was shot by his best friend, to collect the reward.
Before becoming the country’s most famous outlaw, Jesse had fought against President Lincoln for the pro-slavery army of the South. When his side lost, he had to change jobs, and Jesse James’s gang was born.
The gang started by pulling off what some say was the very first train robbery in the history of the United States. Wearing their Ku Klux Klan masks, they fleeced every passenger. Then they turned their hand to holding up banks and stagecoaches.
Legend has it that Jesse was something like a Robin Hood of the Wild West, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, only no one ever met a poor person who received a coin from his hands.
Yet there is no question about his generosity to Hollywood. The movie industry can thank him for forty films, nearly all of them successes, in which stars from Tyrone Power to Brad Pitt have gripped his smoking revolver.
April 4. THE GHOST
In 1846 Isidore Ducasse was born.
It was wartime in Montevideo and he was baptized by cannon fire.
As soon as he could, he went off to Paris, where he became the Comte de Lautréamont and his nightmares helped give rise to surrealism.
He only dropped into the world for a visit. During his brief life he set fire to language, burned brightly through his words and disappeared in a puff of smoke.
April 5. DAY OF LIGHT
It happened in Africa, in Ife, the sacred city of the Yoruba kingdom, maybe on a day like today or who knows when.
An old man, very ill, brought his three sons before him and announced: “My most cherished things will belong to the one who can fill this room completely.”
And he sat outside to wait while night fell.
One of his sons brought all the straw he could find, but it filled the room only halfway.
Another brought all the sand he could carry, but again half the room was left empty.
The third lit a candle.
And the room was filled.
April 6. NIGHT CROSSING
In certain towns lost in the mountains of Guatemala, anonymous hands sew tiny worry dolls.
A surefire remedy for anxiety, they calm stormy thoughts and come to the rescue when insomnia threatens.
These minuscule worry dolls don’t say a thing. They heal by listening. Huddled under the pillow, they absorb sorrows and regrets, doubts and debts, all the phantoms that undermine a peaceful sleep, and they carry them off, magically far off, to the secret place where night is never an enemy.
April 7. THE DOCTOR’S BILL
Three thousand seven hundred years ago the king of Babylonia, Hammurabi, set down in law the rates dictated by the gods for medical services:
If with his bronze lancet the physician cureth a man of a serious wound or an eye abscess, ten silver shekels shall he receive.
If the patient be a poor man, five silver shekels shall the physician receive.
If the patient be the slave of someone, two silver shekels shall his owner give the physician.
If a physician causeth the death of a free man or the loss of an eye, his hands shall be cut off.
If a physician causeth the death of the slave of a poor man, one of his own slaves shall the physician give him. If a physician causeth the loss of a slave’s eye, half the slave’s value shall he pay.April 10
April 8. THE MAN WHO WAS BORN MANY TIMES
On this day in 1973, Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruíz y Picasso, more commonly known as Pablo Picasso, passed away.
He was born in 1881. It seems he liked it, because he kept being born and reborn.
April 9. GOOD HEALTH
In the year 2011 the population of Iceland said no for the second time to the International Monetary Fund.
The Fund and the European Union had decided that Iceland’s three hundred twenty thousand inhabitants should be liable for the bankruptcy of its bankers, for which each and every Icelander owed a foreign debt of twelve thousand euros.
Such socialism in reverse was rejected in two plebiscites. “The debt is not our debt. Why should we pay it?”
In a world unhinged by the financial crisis, this small island lost in the waters of the North Atlantic offered us all a healthy lesson in common sense.
April 10. MANUFACTURING DISEASE
Healthy? Unhealthy? It all depends on your point of view. From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, bad health can be very good.
Take shyness, for example. This character trait used to be acceptable, even attractive. That is, until it became an illness. In the year 1980 the American Psychiatric Association decided that shyness was a psychological ailment and included it in its Manual of Mental Disorders, which is periodically updated by the high priests of Science.
Like all illnesses, shyness requires medication. Ever since the news broke, Big Pharma has made a fortune selling hope to patients plagued by this “social phobia,” “allergy to people,” “severe medical problem”.