Fatima Gomes is a paradox...

...and that is neat.

She is always reading and thinking and writing. She is always thinking about stuff that is beyond me. Categories and conceptions that are too subtle and complex for me to understand. Stuff like figure/ground in philosophy. Stuff like semiotics in lingual analysis. She said something the other night that blew my mind, something about how language brings forth color and body to the thoughts we convey to another. She was quoting somebody famous or semi-famous. But the fact is she knew about it, knew it was significant.

Even if I don't know what in the world is going on, I like soaking up the atmosphere of these things. Fatima's mind can somehow slip in-between the skin layers of an idea...to probe implicit structures. She brings into my skull a certain resonance – her philosophical contemplations remind me, in form and subtlety, of Walter Benjamin's own silken movements through other disciplines and topics.

And yet......

Fatima is strangely grounded to the sensual, natural world in which her body is enveloped. Sounds, movements, aromas, textures...all these things are not mere unconscious background noise for her. Her invisible antennae purr in these precincts of matter and energy. The kaleidoscopic swirl of human existence and location and predicament are vital pieces of information for her. They register deeply. And when she writes casually about the night's curtain fluttering...or the music drifting in from the street...or the actuality of a chair in her room......one can see, hear, and sense it so clearly.

I think she is something like a poetical philosopher. Fatima's oblique, peculiar, eccentric, and elliptical way of looking at things and into things bodes well for an original contribution to thinking. Or maybe she is a philosophical-imagistic poet. Her poems seem like that.

Oh...and she is real funny. She makes me smile, and she makes me laugh. And she is real nice. She is very patient with my slow mind and with my forms of nonsense.

Anyway...Fatima is a paradox. And she is neat.