CASA ARMIDA | art
the story
From the Isthmus of Panama to the shores of North America, Armida's journey was reflective--there was a new culture to absorb since life in the Panama Canal Zone (Pacific side) was not anything like life in Panama City or the United States.
A late bloomer to the fine arts scene since 2001, Armida creates to capture a silence that is experienced and remembered, a moment of consciousness that is purely aware and present. She asks, "can one witness that moment of silence, that moment of non-conceptualization when creating or when viewing a created work of art? Can art be viewed 'just as it is"?
Armida also writes, having been a career analyst and "ghost writer" for high-ranking Federal officials. She was the founding editor of Global Trade Talk, the trade journal for the U.S. Customs Service, and served as Program Advisor to the first Trade Ombudsman to the Service.
She prefers poetry in Haiku, short stories, and finished in 2012 a feature film screenplay, entitled Daughter of the Dance. Her poetry has been published as well, including a short story, entitled "Smoking Freud" which is reprinted below. "Smoking Freud" was first published in Reflections, an anthology sponsored by the University of South Florida, Tampa.
Armida received her degree in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin.
She has been active in various local art leagues and was a founding resident artist at ArtSouth in Homestead, Florida. She, moreover, taught two courses on Tibetan Buddhism at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Due to an environmental illness, however, she is not able to engage in public gatherings to promote her art. Consequently, her art has become a hobby. After all, she creates because she is an artist.
She actively hosts a web site on environmental illness: Masked Canaries.
A quick overview of chemical sensitivites, click here.
SMOKING FREUD | an imaginary piece
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," said Sigmund Schlomo Freud. He should know since he coined the quip and was himself an avid smoker of a good cigar.
In fact, he smoked all the time. He preferred his daily ration of 20 cigars, usually, Dutch Litiputanos, Don Pedros, and Reina Cubanas. The names alone allude to sex and cigars.
In attempting to define Freud today, what can we derive from such a self-described aficionado? Of himself, he wrote, "I am not at all a man of science, but an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker...but a conquistador--adventurer--with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort."
Cartoon of Freud by Rocky Sawyer (with permission)
Shame on you, Freud, hoodwinking people into thinking that you just smoked cigars because you—how do we say?—simply enjoyed them. Let’s face it, he rationalized that smoking helped him concentrate when, as we know today, he was seriously hooked. Neither painful, tobacco angina nor endless series of mouth and jaw surgeries to remove the cancer could bring him to stop smoking.
He supposedly said to his teenaged nephew Harry, “Boy, [it’s] just a cigar” when the youth declined the offer, apparently, apprehensive and confused as to how to react to his uncle’s famous phallic representation of cigars in dreams. Was there a hidden message in his uncle’s remark when Harry deprived himself of a good smoke? Freud carefully said to Harry, who could well have been a virgin at the time, “My boy, smoking [a cigar] is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life. If you decide not to smoke, I can only feel sorry for you.” At this point, there could well have been a double entendre.
What is the greatest and cheapest enjoyment in life? Imagine what poor persons consider the greatest and cheapest enjoyment in life when alternatives, even basic needs, are unavailable to them. Simply study the socio-economic and cultural history of oppressed populations for an answer; and wonder, too, why the poor will always be with us. Say it—it’s sex, no matter what the dysfunction.
In today’s culture, the quote is less refined: “sex and the cigar,” a college student’s term for “sex, booze, and a cheap cigar.” When facing midterms and their inability to delay gratification until spring break, students like those from West Virginia University or our U of F Gators are faced with the possibility of having messed up their grade point average. The smart ones delay the pleasures because spring break means hot, hot, hot Florida beaches and chicks waiting!
The hot cigar tip wasn’t always a light in Freud’s mind. Imagine that Freud smoked a cigar because it was his tool to go deep within. A smoke-filled atmosphere led him into the deep recesses of the subconscious mind. It was his probing stick as the smoke gave rise to the oracles who charted his way into the darkness of repression and confusion. Adventurer that he was, he followed; and smoky images of Trophonius (oracle to Zeus) came to him: Firstly, the phallic symbol (Shiva linga) of Lord Shiva surfaced. Too simple, he may have thought afterwards. His father, Jacob, was the primary cause, for, he, too, was an incessant cigar smoker, making it a tradition for young Sigmund. Secondly, a cigar is a cigar is a cigar when all is said and done. It makes for a handsome smoke.
Well, what about the yoni symbol (i.e., vagina lair or fountain) or the suckling at the mother’s breast? The breast, too, is cylindrical and could be viewed as tubular from the newborn’s perspective. He did not follow the smoky trail of Dodona [the oracle to Mother Goddess] to gain such insight.
Or did the cigar mean castration (e.g., removal of the foreskin) and/or being improperly weaned from breastfeeding? Anxiety galore! Pain and cold-turkey anything is traumatic. An infant does feel pain, and we still do not know when a child is ready to be properly weaned? Most, if not all, mammals need to be properly weaned. Did he know that?
Back to the cigar--a power symbol of privilege and prestige. “He who smokes cigars wants to capture that power,” Confucius says (all in jest, of course). “She who smokes gets that sense of freedom and a lot of moxy,” says Amazonian-like Angelina Jolie, “and I can become an independent thinker or a femme fatale.” Thus, the woman finds her masculinity, a taboo during Freud’s time. We must not forget the cackling crone of Al Capp’s character in Lil’l Abner, Nightmare Alice, a smoking “conjurin woman” as she puffs them away.
Freud discovered the tip of the iceberg and later the iceberg itself. He summarized the tip as any action symbol and the hidden iceberg as the unconscious aims of an action. To find satisfaction and express it in the world is nothing other than a streaming of thoughts, thoughts, and endless thoughts. It was the submerged metaphor of his stream of consciousness: the smoke, the habit, the thought, the dissatisfaction. How about the cigar, the cause; the rest of it, the effect? Would Freud say, “don’t confuse secondary causes as primary causes? I think he did not. I would. His premise had no integration, for the Shiva linga and the Shakti yoni united represent non-duality of reality and transcendental potentiality. The first cause was when the linga and yoni were divided.
Streaming is what a person does. Although we may see ourselves as a floating cork (or cigar!) in a stream, instead of being the flowing stream, not attaching to labels, concepts of labels and more of the same, we are a mind stream of veiled awareness. Just as the stream changes so do our bodies and our thoughts. If I am the cigar in the dream, I remain the floating cigar and not the flux, the flow, the change, the non-attachment. Perhaps a cigar isn’t a cigar after all; perhaps it is an awareness of a composite called a cigar.
“Things aren’t always what they seem,” is an expression that has become common. A favorite is “that which is apparent is not always real.” Our moment-to-moment consciousness gives the illusion of control over our thoughts and actions, but it is the unconscious that actually drives the schemes of the mind. We have not learned yet not to feed it. Freud had not met up with the Nechung oracle of Lhasa, Tibet, to explain who and why—creative father energy and creative mother energy coexist, for one cannot be without the other.
Wouldn’t a cigar resting in its crystalline ashtray make for a provocative painting? Ah, noted, the mind keeps streaming. Thoughts will always be with us.
“Well, what about the cigar box with its enticing symbols of exotic women and cornucopia?” you might ask. “What about it?” I might say, adding, “Just more symbols, my dear—meaningless, a diversion.”
Shakespeare’s Juliet was right about name and form when she spoke to her beloved Romeo about his feuding family’s name: “What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man. Doff thy name, and for that name which is no part of thee, take all of me.” And a wise man who walked over 2,600 years ago once said, “Name is without power of its own and cannot spring up of its own might, nor perform this or that action. Form also is without power of its own and cannot spring up of its own might, nor perform this or that action. Yet, when they mutually support one another, it is not impossible for them to spring up and go on.”
For once, let a cigar be a cigar to pleasantly enjoy, albeit infrequently. As for what it does, well, there is still cause and effect. Freud sought assisted suicide because his unbearable oral cancer was caused by smoking them cigars.