May 9. BORN TO FIND HIM
Howard Carter was born on this morning in 1874, and half a century later he understood why he had come into the world.
The revelation came to him when he discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Carter located it through sheer stubbornness, after years of trying everywhere, battling discouragement and the fearmongering of his fellow Egyptologists.
On the day of the great find, he sat at the foot of the shortlived pharaoh, the boy surrounded by a thousand marvels, and spent long hours in silence.
He returned many times.
One of those times he saw what he had not seen before: there were seeds on the floor.
The seeds had spent three thousand two hundred years waiting for the hand that would plant them.
May 10. THE UNFORGIVABLE
The poet Roque Dalton wielded a defiant wit, he never learned to shut up or take orders, and he laughed and loved fearlessly.
On the eve of this day in the year 1975, his fellow guerrillas in El Salvador shot him dead while he slept.
Criminals: rebels who kill to punish disagreement are no less criminal than generals who kill to perpetuate injustice.
May 11. MR. EVERYTHING
Eugène François Vidocq died in Paris in 1857.
Beginning the moment he held up his father’s bakery at the age of fourteen, Eugène was a thief, a clown, a thug, a deserter, a smuggler, a schoolteacher chasing after little girls, the idol of the bordellos, a businessman, a stool pigeon, a spy, a criminologist, a ballistics expert, the director of the Sûreté Générale (the French FBI), and the founder of the very first private detective agency.
Twenty duels he fought. Five times he turned into a nun or a crippled veteran to escape from jail. He was a master of disguises, a criminal playing a policeman, a policeman playing a criminal, and he was the friend of his enemies and the enemy of his friends.
Sherlock Holmes and other notables of European detective literature owe many of their skills to the tricks Vidocq learned from his life of crime, which he later applied to fighting it.
May 12. LIVING SEISMOGRAPHS
In the year 2008 a terrible earthquake struck China.
The seismograph was invented in China nineteen centuries ago, but no machine warned what was coming.
What raised the alarm were the animals. Scientists paid them no heed, but starting a few days before the catastrophe, hordes of crazed toads took off in every direction, hopping wildly across the streets of Guiyang and other cities, while in the Wuhan zoo tigers roared, peacocks screeched and elephants and zebras threw themselves against the bars of their cages.
May 13. TO SING, TO SEE
To see the worlds of the world, shift your eyes.
To have the birds hear your song, shift your throat.
So say, so know, the ancient sages born at the source of the Orinoco River.
May 14. SOMEONE ELSE’S DEBT
On this day in 1948 the state of Israel was born.
Within a few months, more than eight hundred thousand Palestinians had been deported and more than five hundred of their villages had been turned to rubble.
Those villages, where olive, fig, almond and other fruit trees grew, now lie buried under highways, shopping malls and amusement parks. They are dead and unnamed on the map rechristened by the Government Names Committee.
Not much of Palestine is left. The two thousand years of persecution suffered by the Jewish people was invoked to justify this implacable gluttony, complete with property titles granted by the Bible.
Persecuting Jews had always been a European sport. Now the Palestinians are paying the bill.
May 15. MAY TOMORROW BE MORE THAN JUST ANOTHER NAME FOR TODAY
In 2011 thousands of homeless and jobless youth occupied the streets and squares of several Spanish cities.
Their outrage spread. Healthy outrage turned out to be more contagious than disease, and the voices of “the indignant” crossed the borders drawn on maps. Their words echoed around the world:
They put us in the fucking street and here we are.
Turn off the TV and turn on the street.
They call it a crisis but it’s a rip-off.
Not too little money, too many crooks.
Markets rule. I didn’t vote for them.
They decide for us without us.
Wage slave for rent.
I’m looking for my rights. Anyone seen them?
If they won’t let us dream, we won’t let them sleep.
May 16. OFF TO THE LOONY BIN
Groupers and other fish,
dolphins,
swans, flamingos, albatrosses,
penguins,
buffaloes,
ostriches,
koala bears,
orangutans and other monkeys,
butterflies and other insects
and many more of our relatives in the animal kingdom have homosexual relations, female to female, male to male, for an encounter or a lifetime.
Lucky for them they aren’t people or they’d be sent to the loony bin.
Until this day in the year 1990, homosexuality featured on the World Health Organization’s list of mental illnesses.
May 17. HOME
The twenty-first century has been walking through time for a few years now, and the number of people without adequate housing has reached one billion.
To solve this problem, experts are looking into the Christian example of Saint Simeon Stylites, who lived for thirty-seven years atop a column.
In the morning Saint Simeon would come down to pray and at night he would tie himself down, so he wouldn’t tumble off in his sleep.
May 18. MEMORY’S VOYAGE
In 1781 Túpac Amaru was quartered with an ax in the middle of the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco.
Two centuries later, a tourist asked a barefoot boy who shined shoes in that very spot if he had ever met Túpac Amaru. The little bootblack, without raising his head, said that yes, he knew him. While he continued working, he murmured, practically in secret, “He’s the wind.”
May 19. THE PROPHET MARK
Mark Twain proclaimed:
“I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year and I expect to go out with it. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”
The comet visited the earth around this time in 1910. Twain, impatient, died a month before.
May 20. A RARE ACT OF SANITY
In 1998 France passed a law that reduced the workweek to thirty-five hours.
Work less, live more: Thomas More dreamed of this in Utopia, but we had to wait five centuries before a country finally dared commit such an act of common sense.
After all, what are machines for if not to reduce the time we spend working and to lengthen our hours of freedom? Why does technological progress have to come bearing the gifts of anguish and unemployment?