A work can show its achievement, well occupying a juicy space in the individual island that expels it: crisis of consciousness results in the paradisiacal state of the forms, hidden from the ineffable before the exact representation, the fall of the manteo diestro, the banderillazo gesture. The good intuition of historical verticality, of enlightened and magical rooting, even though it is paid for in a good coin of technical indecision, and the first formal ones that are prayed for by the invitation to historical dialogue or the empowerment of the transcendent, unique circumstantial. Nourishing plurality and despite univocal, incomparable formal expression.
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It is true and indisputable that in recent years the artist has enjoyed inhabiting the thread in which the excessively enlarged ego is confused with nothingness, a thread that has been destroyed to the point of taking art to a sadistic problematism.
Many formally dressed gentlemen, being keen observers, tend to accept my word as conclusive on various matters, even in the highest political decision-making bodies. But for me, losing one's own conscience is losing little. And mentioning my name publicly is a surefire way to start a violent argument with oneself. Perhaps they have attacked me more than once, resorting to endless anecdotes to prove both my miraculous efficiency and my absolute uselessness. "For little guys like you," (they said), "It's all very easy. It can be hidden under the table. But we have a reputation to protect. A political legacy to defend. An opposition to defeat. This will create problems for us (.)" Well, that wouldn't have been noticed, but they would have known I was always laughing.
ResponderExcluirThe opposite would have been less surprising. I always rise slowly on these occasions, preparing my imitation of an English aristocrat ready to teach the world a lesson. For example: that the key to the sensibility of our time, in the 21st century, still lies in a handful of literary and philosophical works written between 1915 and 1930. For neither Surrealism nor French existentialism added anything to the Heideggerian characterizations present in Sein und Zeit. The definitive image of our social and cultural misery still belongs to the description of everyday life in Being and Time and to Walter Benjamin's feverish commentaries in "Journey Through the German Inflation." As for love, Proust exhausted the theme like a maniacal butcher, forever fixing his Facies Hippocratica. And what can we say about Kafka and James Joyce (?)? They robbed us of any possibility of discovery.
ResponderExcluirThe literature that followed was limited to revisiting past psychological atmospheres and recording minute variations on those themes. The explanation for this is that the extreme experiences of the intellectual elite of the 1930s gave way to the experience of the masses. At the inaccessible heights of thought, where nothingness and mute mysticism buckle their expressionless masks with flaming eyes, the avant-garde philosopher and poet now found themselves in the company of an endless and noisy mass without spiritual authority, whose sensitivity never promised anything more than grunts.
ResponderExcluirFrom my book LUMPEMPANFLETARIAT
ExcluirPoetic justice contained everything necessary for the opified god who watches the stream flow by. He sat presidently, forgetting Time. The red cloud, or like this one we now contemplate, temporal, perhaps left him beyond his nap, his seat, or his murmur.
ResponderExcluirBy Lezama Lima in the book quoted above
His wonder always led him to ecstasy. It was, for him, the form of his transition to the illuminating life. And at the same time, an exacerbation of his lucidity. This momentary suspension in transparency was not the demonic lucidity of the intelligere, of the forms of knowledge, but a total swiftness for essences, which at times became for him like the halo of the moon, which prolongs the light of a body in the irreconcilable darkness that covers the dimension of words between the two stars. It was the darkness in the total drowning that mediates between wonder and ecstasy, in the loving contour of the two stars.
ExcluirIdem
.........passed from ecstasy to rapture, through the open breach intertwined its derived prolongation and the angels who came to offer its support, to avoid the terrible glimpse and prolong the transparent glimpse. Ecstasy without rapture hardly succeeds in representing the fruitive vision. Juan Ramón passed from ecstasy to the suspension that the Hellenistic world also knew.
ExcluirIdem
The reverse of his ecstasy was lucidity in resentment.
ExcluirIdem
"I speak to all those who have made me mute." His resentment was born from that wall of muteness, his own, due to forced siege, another's, due to the denial of grace. In that siege, Góngora had twisted and lost his face, thanks to the fruit of the fog. Góngora's eyes gained more spears to pierce that fog. The candle in Don Luis's eyes, piercing the foggy mesh, formed metallic sheets from which his puppets leaped, their feet burned. His rage was a sour gold factory in the fog. For Juan Ramón, resentment was the demonic fragment of his contemplation; it sprang from the same root as his approach to the tree, from Pascal's fear of the concupiscible. Exercising his lucidity, he always carried his spear to the place where the curse hurts the most, because we all shudder when the truthful discover the dark region in which our silence was deserved.
ExcluirHis astonishment drove him mad when he retreated from the Orphic chamber, life and resurrection girded together, song and hell, woman and tragic descents, to the incomplete glow of rancor. In his later years, his face was surpassing the staleness of Góngora's. It was the rapture of one who, having glimpsed it, had to retreat, unable to pass on its secret in the existence guarded by its suspension. There, the unearthly becoming, snow from above pricked by the halcyon, and again the unsupported becoming, ready to continue in an intermittent flow of lambs, diamonds, axes of whiteness, bone of sand on the last cliffs, where the echo was defeated by the inexorable dispatches of the succession whitening in ash.
Excluir........can now taste, drop by drop in its gold, the water of Genesis and the water of uncreated light!
ExcluirIdem