Count the present days until today arrives (ME)
(I knew very well that by infiltrating that milieu that pretended to be absolutely serious about literature, from the very first contacts my voice, cold as steel, would evoke, incessantly, the irreversible exhaustion of poetic and dramatic themes in the current era; and gently flirting with the possibility of a remote transfiguration of contemporary poetry, within a select, healthy family of middle-aged writers like myself, all possibly content within a certain simplicity of purposes, tastes, ambitions --- I would inevitably begin to probe their souls so deeply that I would soon convert the pleasant tropical landscape in which we had gathered into a hyper-intellectualized replica of Dr. Monreaux's Island --- "Everyday life," I thought, "the incognito of mystery!" --- the unconscious metaphysical wound of the race, disguised, long cultivated for centuries beneath faces, questions, shipwrecks in the shadow of undefined expectations --- what was this insistent fear about? (I feel it even now, contemplating this magnificent and abundant hotel fruit bowl in the morning light, against the sunny window that invites you to the beach of all unfinished dialogues --- fear of suddenly being naked, in the center of some unmasked dream, wondering WHY WRITE?, of preferring, to transfiguration, consciousness fading into nothingness, and even more so with a feeling of gratitude and relief for finding oneself free to live immersed in a beautiful, dense, and mysterious poem of one's own --- YES, appealing with one's whole body to a world of life populated by half-forgotten names, constantly drawing toward oneself only the immediate fruits of a subtle and gratuitous humor, unpretentious seasonings of a diaphanous, stagnant melancholy, which never evolves, which is always the same, the same centigrams of morphine or mental nitazene per day --- in any case, I hadn't plummeted to those beaches again just to stay in a perfumed room meditating on the last sonnet of A Rua dos Cataventos, by Mário Quintana:
"I will take with me some crooked poems
That I've been trying to straighten in go.
How beautiful Eternity is, dead friends,
For the slow tortures of expression.''
NO --- there was a hint of sensuality in my smile, I longed for the day outside, injecting into my eyes a limpid hunting luminosity, even while constantly policing myself so that the image of no beautiful Argentine bather would obscure the unity and balance I would be seeking in the whole --- I needed to avoid the excess of inspiration of the mystic in the wild --- speak to people in a free yet simple way, calculated to produce echoes and resonances, feign a rediscovered naturalness with calming and aggregating wonder, without that blind voluptuousness of the being apart from itself, asserting itself to the point of overflowing with intoxication with its own illusory self --- at nine-thirty in the morning, on the nearby beach, some guests from Spain were reinvigorating themselves from the hours of travel and sleep of the previous night in a bath of fruitful Atlantic greenery and marine silence, apparently 'naturalized' by the landscape in a complicity prior to the search for some occasional pleasure: --- ''Few critical works, nowadays, still have any effect in the literary market. That's why I'm always writing about everything, because specialized criticism has become a prop with no power of persuasion or promotion, it has become "journalized" to the point of completely losing its intellectual dignity ---, Juan said;
ResponderExcluirJuan said; a kind of voluptuous friendship seemed to unite him with his interlocutor, Fábregas, stretched out like a lizard on a beach chair in the sun: --- ''The love for the art of the great is a thing of the past. Still, I, who only write poetry, a genre practically dead from a commercial point of view, agree with what my friend Sonia said in her last interview on Radio Granada: "I live to intuit the face of the poem that scans itself in the diamond, in the cold fire of a desert where a rarefied point, where everything falls silent, where the loss of the world emptied of meaning is debated in the inexhaustible source of image associations, until it rediscovers BEING." ---- Juan laughed, as if he had just been transmitted an alien message, and upon discerning a pair of mules coming from the confines of the beach sand, laden with baskets of coconut and cocoa, he observed: --- "Perhaps THE most remote POINT that any explorer of the spirit can safely reach without war backpacks and muleteers, right?"
ResponderExcluir
ResponderExcluir--- and Fábregas said: --- ''There were also a series of questions that SHE asked in relation to a life dedicated to books, in relation to an almost static life, a universe often still, from a physical point of view, in which all kinds of immaterially syllabled savoring were allowed, of spectral anticipations of things in life that would never be fulfilled, including even the transitions of the world, and any and all provisional political simulation of countries large and small, strong or weak, all flocculating only virtually in the still anguish of a tired world time, tired of its own necrotic subsistence'')
ResponderExcluir(before going to greet them and meet them personally, however, I was invaded by a furious desire to go bathe in the violent waves that began to grow a hundred meters from the kiosk where we were, thinking of the famous "And for what poets in times of penury", by Heidegger --- an airy walk on the hot sand swept by the salty air improved my power of mental visualization with the aggravating credential of that corrosive debate --- even without exchanging a word with them, I imagined it as a typically European perplexity, since in Third World countries the ruin of culture no longer nurtured hopes of not being total, and adhered to industrial standardization openly to drag a survival of public financing of canned garbage and cocktails among journalists who posed as writers --- from Europe however certainly still survived that ghostly poetic resentment of an Americanized era, in which money was everything to be someone in the world of literature and art in general, already dead for decades --- that melancholic charm of such obscure perspectives, however, would not be able to subdue my spirit, since (LET'S BE REALISTIC) I didn't care about that.)