Terror Twilight


In the below zeros again, reading Alejandra Pizarnik's journals, Diarios (2003). Tonight's evening sky was a translucent dark blue after the sun had sunken behind buildings. This afternoon watched the Venezuelan film Adios, Miami (1983). While at times it was too reminiscent of a telenovela it reminded me that Venezuela's current crisis has been developing for more than two decades now. We moved to Florida in 1982, so the footage of Miami in the early 1980s cheese of shiny skyscrapers and manicured palm trees was semi-nostalgically amusing. And the thought of disappeareance into the United States, by way of Florida, was familiar. My siblings and I made that move twenty years ago, to inhabit two countries, sometimes simultaneously. Sometimes the episodes resemble fictions, a long novel that takes decades to write. This novel would include the cities of Boston, Caracas, Tampa, New York, Providence, Mexico D.F.

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A veces uno escribe para los abuelos, los familiares que han muerto y los que nos siguen acompañando.

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When we saw Pavement play in Boston for their 1999 Terror Twilight tour the theater was much too crowded with drunk frat boys. The band played masterfully, adding improvised changes to the songs, or mistakes left to adorn. Music can lose its aura over time. Or the aura fluctuates over the years. That projection of music is of the same impulse as poetry. As recently, I wonder why I hadn't listened to Belle and Sebastian's great album The Boy With the Arab Strap (1998) until now.

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"11 de abril, jueves [1963]

Imposibilidad de la poesía. (Apenas anoté esto hice un poema para demostrarme que no.)

Los problemas que me plantea el escribir. El primer, mi exilio del lenguaje. Dada mi espontaneidad y mis fuerzas debiera arrojarme sobre quinientas hojas en blanco y <<escribir como siento>>. Ahora bien: sucede que yo no siento mediante un lenguaje conceptual o poético sino con imágenes visuales acompañadas de unas pocas palabras sueltas. O sea que escribir, en mi caso, es traducir."

{Alejandra Pizarnik, Diarios, Editorial Lumen, 2003}