Author Archives: Manuela Toro

The other day in class when we each drew  a cathedral I couldn’t help to think of a project that had been going on in my family for quite a while. “The Black Book of Colors” is a children’s book dedicated to blind people that describes how the different colors “look like” in terms of how they smell or feel like; it also has illustrations that blind children can touch, understand and appreciate.

I remember when it first started. Author Menena Cottin asked my aunt to illustrate a book that was made for those who couldn’t see, and since she is an illustrator, the only thing she could do was to draw anyways. The illustrations for this book had to be as figurative and simple as they can be, very related to the text. But how to make someone understand a drawing with their hands? That’s when the tests started, and so the house was filled with prints and examples of different textures that would make the dream possible.

The final result was this beautiful black book, in which the only thing to see are the grey letters on top of every page. The rest is left for us to touch: below the letters there are both the text in braille alphabet, and the illustrations made in this sort of black resin. Actually, the only way to see the drawings without touching is to cheat and discover them with a very bright light. I must say that it absolutely incredible, I remember how I cried when I saw the first complete version.

This book won the Bologna Ragazzi Award, which as far as I know is a price given in a very important book fair in Bologna. I hope I was able to describe it well for you, it was very hard to describe the images, their purpose and their meaning. In case I didn’t I am also posting a video made by the editor. Hope you enjoy it! And by the way, the soundtrack is played by my father 🙂

It doesn’t occur often that a person follow’s his/her own advice, but for this particular text Raymond Carver does. When I read “Cathedral” I felt absolutely threatened. More than a sense of suspense, the reading gave me a feeling that something was going on and I wasn’t able to pick it up at the moment. Something was going to go wrong, very wrong.

From the very first lines of the story he speaks of the blind man in a very mysterious way, somehow despising his condition. This strange hatred and fear towards him creates a lot of tension for the reader, who is not able to understand the source of his cold feelings. Personally, the way in which he detailed some scenes made me feel really tense, like waiting for something terrible to come. For example, all the times he repeated to describe how the blind man touched his beard and let it fall.

I am not certain if I picked up any of the things implied, but there certainly are many, for a story written so carefully and with such a confusing ending is meant for us to discover something about it. It probably has to do with the cathedral. What I am sure of is that the “sense of menace” of this text made me think a thousand things while reading it. I wondered about if the woman was in love with the bald man, if he was actually faking and was not blind at all, and even if the main character was actually the blind one and had been speaking about himself all the time. It definitely played with my perception of things, making the words mean three different things at a time.

As soon as I finished reading the first thing I did was looking at this picture I received yesterday in order to let go of all that tension. This are two of my sisters back home in Venezuela (I have five sisters in total). They told me the little one with the curly hair was behaving terribly, and so the older one said: “Let’s meditate like Manuela taught me a while ago”. This picture makes me HAPPY.

Manuela Toro.

Susan Sontag suggests that in modern times when reading we analyze the text, dig into it, separate in in little pieces for our better understanding. We analyze and analyze, separate and separate pieces until we find what we think is the “real” meaning of the text.

Today, when reading both Ehrenreich’s Chapter 6 and Hemingway’s “Hills Like While Elephants” I noted some other things about my reading. First of all, that when reading I have to be focused in order to understand it completely, I have to read fast so that I don’t have any chances of forgetting about my reading. After finishing my readings, the passages I was interested in seem to keep going around in my head, maybe I’m not thinking anything about them, but I am surely digesting the information and trying to make them mine, relating them it to my life.

However, I noted that when I read someone’s theory I apply Sontag’s technique. I analyze it, give opinions, read more closely and dig into the phrases I’m interested in and sort of leaving aside those I believe can be discarded. I struggle to find the real meaning of the theory, what the author is really trying to say; which could be translated to finding my own interpretation of his work. On the other hand, when I read a story I completely forget about my own thoughts and let the writer tell me whatever he wants to say at the moment, I’m just a listener; I give myself a chance to enjoy the text. Maybe I’ll dig into in later, but I let the story plant a first impression before I intervene.

Do we all read in the same way? obviously we don’t: some read while listening to music, some laying down, others in a writing desk with a nice light. But do we all apply the same techniques? and how do they affect our understanding of a text? Do authors mean that we intervene in their work in order to understand its meaning, or are we just being rude and abusive?

Manuela Toro.

After reading chapters one and two of Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” I couldn’t take off my mind the idea of the super-serious Sigmund Freud, adored by my entire family of psychologists, looking at a baby and evaluating him. I still can’t decide if its a funny or a creepy image; but, in any case, it is incredibly interesting.

Having five younger sisters I have played the “disappearance and return” game many times, but have never quite understood its meaning, more than it being a phase on a child’s growing process. Freud argues that the child can be punishing someone for leaving by showing strength or even dominance, proposing a challenge. This statement is hard to prove because to do so we must ask ourselves (or Freud) if human nature is as cruel as he says, and also we must think about how much a baby understands of the world that surrounds him/her, which by my own personal experience is much more than what we would think.

However, Freud concludes that first the child is playing to be a grown-up, and second, that every kid will play about those every-day-life things that made an impression on him/her. This observations have a great importance on Freud’s theory because they arouse issues of independence and security, for the child is learning to separate him/herself from the mother; and issues of desire and goals since there is a wish for being older and be able to do what others do, which could also be seen as a problem of identification. Moreover, Freud’s conclusions also speak about how we learn, understand, and respond to what happens around us.

This specific point, although we would not think so as easily because of the time difference between the authors and the scientific interests of Freud, has a lot to do with Plato’s theory, specially with that of the “Allegory of the Cave”. The first relation would be that of the child wanting to do what elders do; or in Plato’s words, what those on the outside do. In his allegory, those inside the cave wanted to do, or at least have the possibility to do the things those on the outside did, as the older people, the ones who could teach them. Another relation would be how the child’s way of understanding and dealing with the world around him/her is to try it by playing. We could say that this is the basis of Plato’s theory, for he marks a difference between the “idea of something” and that “something”, for example the idea of beauty and what is beautiful. In this case the child is impressed by an idea and tries to put it in practice on the “real” world.

Finally, is it possible that this has anything to do with happiness? Yes, indeed, and even relates to happiness in different levels. The first, is a simple happiness given by the pleasure the child gets from the game, to him/her it is definitely fun. The second level is more complex, its composed by the wish of the child of being older, or to have some kind of “revenge”, and being able to get it; as Freud explains. It also has a lot to do with what we want to learn about the world surrounding us, but more over, is this view of the infants way of processing the world still valid? what would have Plato said about it? how conscious was Freud about the implications of this theories? and finally, is his text really about pleasure, or about finding true happiness by achieving our goals, walking out from the cave?.

-Manuela Toro.