Discourse of the Contemplative One
I love peace and solitude; I aspire to live in a spacious and ancient house with no noise besides that of a fountain, when I choose to hear its abundant stream. It will occupy the center of the patio, amid trees that, to save the dream of its waters from the sun and wind, will thread their moaning tops together. I will receive the single visit from the birds who will find respite in my silent refuge. They will entertain my serenity with arbitrary flight and natural song; their simplicity of innocent creatures will dissipate within my spirit the exasperating anxiety of anger, oblivion’s relief soothing my forehead.
Devotion and study will help me cultivate austerity like an ascetic, so that neither human interest nor earthly longing will disturb the wings of my meditation, which will rest from sustained flight on the solemn peak of ecstasy; and from there my spirit will distinguish the ambiguous glare of unattainable truth.
The novelties and variations of the world will arrive mitigated to the place of my withdrawal, as though a heavy atmosphere had muffled them. I will not accept tedious thoughts nor violent impressions: light will reach me after losing its flame in the thick web of the trees; noise will end in the distance before it invades my soothing enclosure; darkness will serve as protection for my stillness; the curtains of shade will circle the diaphanous and imperturbable lake of silence.
I will oppose against the varied course of time the serenity of the sphinx facing the sea of African sands. My equilibrium will not be shaken by the splendid days of sun, that communicate their fortune of blonde and festive squires, nor by the opaque days of rain that display the ash of penitence. In that impartial disposition I will await the moment and I will confront the mystery of death.
She will come, at the quietest instant one night, to surprise me beside the mute fountain. So as to increase the sanctity of my final hour, a beatific rumor will vibrate through the air, as if from winged seraphs, and a transparent effluvium of consolation will descend from the altar of the lit sky. The attention paid to my cadaver by men will be excessive due to lateness; before them, the best rite of my simple funeral will have been carried out by the dawn and the fluttering of friendly birds.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
3.27.2010
El episodio del nostálgico / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Episode of the Nostalgic One
I feel, leaning out the window, the assiduous image of the homeland.
The snow glazes the foreign city.
The moon pins a beacon on top of each tower.
The tempest birds repose from the ocean, dressed in eiderdown.
I protect, since yesterday, the orphan from the taciturn gentleman, of unknown origin.
She recounts frights and dangers, unexpected escapes on fearful horses and in shipwrecked boats. She adds singular observations, indication of an intelligence accelerated by calamity.
She doubts whether the deceased gentleman was her father.
She never saw him smile.
He would pull out, at times, an empty medallion.
He would look anxiously at the ancient-style clock, with a punctual chime.
No one can manage to understand the mechanism.
I have startled, from her bosom, the portent’s black butterflies.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I feel, leaning out the window, the assiduous image of the homeland.
The snow glazes the foreign city.
The moon pins a beacon on top of each tower.
The tempest birds repose from the ocean, dressed in eiderdown.
I protect, since yesterday, the orphan from the taciturn gentleman, of unknown origin.
She recounts frights and dangers, unexpected escapes on fearful horses and in shipwrecked boats. She adds singular observations, indication of an intelligence accelerated by calamity.
She doubts whether the deceased gentleman was her father.
She never saw him smile.
He would pull out, at times, an empty medallion.
He would look anxiously at the ancient-style clock, with a punctual chime.
No one can manage to understand the mechanism.
I have startled, from her bosom, the portent’s black butterflies.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
3.26.2010
En el patio / Ramón Palomares
In the Patio
So there I was amid the patio flowers
with the cayennes
enjoying the leaves and the rays from the sky.
This is where I make my bed and lie down
and bathe myself in flowers.
And then I’ll go out to tell the snakes and chickens
and all the trees.
I was on the betulias and on the rose tiles
conversing, dining, listening to the wind.
Tomorrow I’ll tell the elder I’m leaving
far away, over where the men are singing,
where the dead run and bury themselves.
I was walking near some trees, near some golden leaves
and I was eating the stars, and I sat down
and I listened to the tall grass and I saw a woman’s eyes
that were shining like a tooth
then I tossed a big orange tree branch
and everything went dark.
Paisano (1964)
Translator’s Note: Ramón Palomares (Escuque, 1935) has just been awarded the Premio Fray Luis de León de Poesía Iberoamericana given by La Sociedad de Estudios Literarios y Humanísticos de Salamanca in Spain.
{ Ramón Palomares, Vuelta a casa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2006 }
So there I was amid the patio flowers
with the cayennes
enjoying the leaves and the rays from the sky.
This is where I make my bed and lie down
and bathe myself in flowers.
And then I’ll go out to tell the snakes and chickens
and all the trees.
I was on the betulias and on the rose tiles
conversing, dining, listening to the wind.
Tomorrow I’ll tell the elder I’m leaving
far away, over where the men are singing,
where the dead run and bury themselves.
I was walking near some trees, near some golden leaves
and I was eating the stars, and I sat down
and I listened to the tall grass and I saw a woman’s eyes
that were shining like a tooth
then I tossed a big orange tree branch
and everything went dark.
Paisano (1964)
Translator’s Note: Ramón Palomares (Escuque, 1935) has just been awarded the Premio Fray Luis de León de Poesía Iberoamericana given by La Sociedad de Estudios Literarios y Humanísticos de Salamanca in Spain.
{ Ramón Palomares, Vuelta a casa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2006 }
3.25.2010
Saudade / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Saudade
The girl strolls the shady banks of the Tagus, lamenting the disappearance of the lasses and nymphs celebrated in more than one fable of Portuguese origin. Jorge de Montemayor, the bizarre gentleman, left behind the memory of those sensitive women and their love afflictions in the elegant paragraphs of his Diana, and perished, accused of indiscretion, by the effect of a nocturnal snare, directed from the circumspection of jealousy.
The engraving of a tense hand on the limestone wall and a cross mark the site of the turpitude.
The girl discovers, in the bark of an ash tree, the cipher of a fateful name.
An indolent aura sheds, over the flow of water, the leaves of a nostalgic jungle, at the beginning of the illusory morning.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The girl strolls the shady banks of the Tagus, lamenting the disappearance of the lasses and nymphs celebrated in more than one fable of Portuguese origin. Jorge de Montemayor, the bizarre gentleman, left behind the memory of those sensitive women and their love afflictions in the elegant paragraphs of his Diana, and perished, accused of indiscretion, by the effect of a nocturnal snare, directed from the circumspection of jealousy.
The engraving of a tense hand on the limestone wall and a cross mark the site of the turpitude.
The girl discovers, in the bark of an ash tree, the cipher of a fateful name.
An indolent aura sheds, over the flow of water, the leaves of a nostalgic jungle, at the beginning of the illusory morning.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
3.23.2010
Filosofía del lenguaje / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Philosophy of Language
Mr. Pedro Emilio Coll once again insists that the adjective provides language with a contribution of subjective value. This judgment demands a redress: the most qualified authors in the matter distinguish the adjective preceding and the adjective following the noun, they begin from the fundamental maxim that the order of words translates the order of ideas, and they understand that noun and adjective oppose each other like substance and phenomenon, a more intimate distinction than the superficial one between subject and object. They continue from consequence to consequence until they sustain that the entire phrase assumes emotional color when the adjective goes before the noun, and takes on an impersonal value in the opposite case, because they notice the discourse is characterized by whichever of the two words, adjective or noun, is written first. So then, the adjective only offers and communicates a subjective value when it governs the phrase somehow, coming before the noun. These principles have already been applied to the Romance languages, and more than one author has discussed the adjection of the oïl language and the adjection of Cervantes. It goes without saying that the brilliant herald of our race accommodated himself intuitively to the truths of arduous metaphysics that govern the science of language. As a gift to the reader, we omit the list of philologists who have hurried this matter, because they are teutonic professors, more or less bound and very wise, and all of them with rebellious and stony surnames.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
Mr. Pedro Emilio Coll once again insists that the adjective provides language with a contribution of subjective value. This judgment demands a redress: the most qualified authors in the matter distinguish the adjective preceding and the adjective following the noun, they begin from the fundamental maxim that the order of words translates the order of ideas, and they understand that noun and adjective oppose each other like substance and phenomenon, a more intimate distinction than the superficial one between subject and object. They continue from consequence to consequence until they sustain that the entire phrase assumes emotional color when the adjective goes before the noun, and takes on an impersonal value in the opposite case, because they notice the discourse is characterized by whichever of the two words, adjective or noun, is written first. So then, the adjective only offers and communicates a subjective value when it governs the phrase somehow, coming before the noun. These principles have already been applied to the Romance languages, and more than one author has discussed the adjection of the oïl language and the adjection of Cervantes. It goes without saying that the brilliant herald of our race accommodated himself intuitively to the truths of arduous metaphysics that govern the science of language. As a gift to the reader, we omit the list of philologists who have hurried this matter, because they are teutonic professors, more or less bound and very wise, and all of them with rebellious and stony surnames.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
3.22.2010
El político / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Politician
The carriage of the bloodthirsty caudillo stirs up the dust of the fire’s route. His guards have gathered the tents on the backs of some nefarious dogs.
The soot from the fire embosses the greasy complexion and the limp hair of the lean, Ephialtean, monstrous warriors, delirium of a bonze.
The mandarin, astute and lazy, sybarite cat, undermines the rise of the wild horde. His indirect discourse, uttered in a low voice during an interview with the invaders, entertains the ravages of a chimerical backdrop. His frivolous chisel refines the ivory corolla of a mechanical flower.
The mob of Sagittarians, a frenetic menace, engulfs itself in the wilds, confronts the resplendent sky, of violaceous edges. A treacherous numen looses the four-horse carriage of the whirlwinds and buries the racket of the riders under a monotonous tapestry.
The mandarin, childhood fate, received from his teacher, a wandering scoundrel, the apologist of the nihilist skeleton, at the site of the gale. On that day an astrologer pointed to the equilibrium of the elements.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The carriage of the bloodthirsty caudillo stirs up the dust of the fire’s route. His guards have gathered the tents on the backs of some nefarious dogs.
The soot from the fire embosses the greasy complexion and the limp hair of the lean, Ephialtean, monstrous warriors, delirium of a bonze.
The mandarin, astute and lazy, sybarite cat, undermines the rise of the wild horde. His indirect discourse, uttered in a low voice during an interview with the invaders, entertains the ravages of a chimerical backdrop. His frivolous chisel refines the ivory corolla of a mechanical flower.
The mob of Sagittarians, a frenetic menace, engulfs itself in the wilds, confronts the resplendent sky, of violaceous edges. A treacherous numen looses the four-horse carriage of the whirlwinds and buries the racket of the riders under a monotonous tapestry.
The mandarin, childhood fate, received from his teacher, a wandering scoundrel, the apologist of the nihilist skeleton, at the site of the gale. On that day an astrologer pointed to the equilibrium of the elements.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
3.20.2010
Windsor / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Windsor
The King speaks in familiar terms with the Flemish painter about his latest art novelty and puts on a bedside table the bag of coins set aside for the procurance of sumptuous paintings. The sovereign and the artist have gathered in the large room overlooking the park with its silver poplars. They lean out a window so they might listen to the diaphanous voice of a fountain.
The nightingale intones its melody, a gift from a discontented poet, peer to visionaries and prophets, threatened by the blindness of the inspired.
The glimpse of an ambushed moon attempts a drawing of vain silhouettes.
The bird seduces the king’s will and suspends his attention, leaving space for the enunciation of a presentaneous threat.
An ascetic vociferates the loss of the sovereign and condemns his passion for beauty, adopting the accent of a hirsute apostle in the presence of Athens, city of idols.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The King speaks in familiar terms with the Flemish painter about his latest art novelty and puts on a bedside table the bag of coins set aside for the procurance of sumptuous paintings. The sovereign and the artist have gathered in the large room overlooking the park with its silver poplars. They lean out a window so they might listen to the diaphanous voice of a fountain.
The nightingale intones its melody, a gift from a discontented poet, peer to visionaries and prophets, threatened by the blindness of the inspired.
The glimpse of an ambushed moon attempts a drawing of vain silhouettes.
The bird seduces the king’s will and suspends his attention, leaving space for the enunciation of a presentaneous threat.
An ascetic vociferates the loss of the sovereign and condemns his passion for beauty, adopting the accent of a hirsute apostle in the presence of Athens, city of idols.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
3.14.2010
El canto anhelante / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Longing Canto
The castle surges at the edge of the shore. A wide space dominates, in the manner of the lion posed in front of the ambiguous desert. The pirate ship trembles at the foot of the wall with the rhythm of the wave.
The brusque and momentaneous flight of the breeze reminds me of drowsy birds. The moon rises, pale and solemn, like the victim of an ordeal.
With the late hour and the limpid landscape the captive’s nostalgia awakens and the soldier hurts himself. A strange and undulating music moves us to tears. It would be countered with rude accents, with the bitterness of irritated complaints by an anxious canticle that has the direct impetus of the arrow fired against an eagle.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The castle surges at the edge of the shore. A wide space dominates, in the manner of the lion posed in front of the ambiguous desert. The pirate ship trembles at the foot of the wall with the rhythm of the wave.
The brusque and momentaneous flight of the breeze reminds me of drowsy birds. The moon rises, pale and solemn, like the victim of an ordeal.
With the late hour and the limpid landscape the captive’s nostalgia awakens and the soldier hurts himself. A strange and undulating music moves us to tears. It would be countered with rude accents, with the bitterness of irritated complaints by an anxious canticle that has the direct impetus of the arrow fired against an eagle.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
3.12.2010
Elefantes y desapariciones: Una novela de Luis Enrique Belmonte / Gabriel Payares
Elephants and Disappearances: A Novel by Luis Enrique Belmonte
I began to work as an artist when I began to be an adult, when I understood that my childhood was finished, and was dead. I think we all have somebody who is dead inside of us. A dead child.
–Christian Boltanski
The phrase is almost a cliché, but that doesn’t make it false: the end of childhood is the beginning of the end of life, the first step toward aging and death. Only after we have overcome childhood do we gain an awareness of death: first in relation to our parents and, eventually, through this discovery, of our own. The task of art –and of literature in particular–, when facing such a rough panorama of life, is none other than to provide man with an instant of recuperation of that lost initial stage, of that dead child mentioned in our epigraph; this is why Bataille affirmed of literature that it is “childhood finally regained.” Art, then, is a constant search for the ontology of the human, which is presumed to be lost with childhood: whether it be to preserve it, to spread it, to question it, or even to unveil it, to find the human element in reality’s most unusual corners. This, along with the awareness of one’s own finitude, and above all the capacity to visualize one’s own absence, to prepare us for it and to leave a legacy, makes art a particular disposition of the individual toward the coming absence, that is, man’s preparation for death: his own and that of others.
Such a poetics of disappearance animates the pages of the first work of fiction by the poet Luis Enrique Belmonte, the novella Salvar los elefantes (Caracas: Equinoccio, 2006). In its pages, the hot Catalonian summer serves as the ideal stage to illustrate the gradual dissipation of the world, the slow melting of a humanity that is broken and tied to itself, symbolically summarized by the protagonist’s damaged refrigerator, and at the same time transmuted, by means of media deception and televised simulacra, into the poor little African elephants that the Sheldrick Foundation promises to save.
In this manner, the anonymous protagonist of Salvar los elefantes plays the role of audience to a cruel performance of disappearance: trapped between the warm agony of his refrigerator, which exudes the stench of its own decomposition onto everything around it –a strange smell “of fermented mayonnaise” (p. 10) sticks to the striped pajamas the protagonist wears–, and the prolonged academic trip of his girlfriend Evelyne, from whom he will barely receive a couple of postcards with increasingly terse phrases –as if she herself were slowly dissipating–, the narrator seems to become more and more linked to a group of absent characters, dead, or in a steep trance toward disappearance, leaving behind the more “alive” or palpitating dynamics of existence: beginning with his anodyne sleepiness, a type of renunciation of a vital posture in the face of life –maybe only interrupted by his brief attempt to exercise by swimming, which logically culminates with a near-drowning–, and later on with his constant reference to (and even his dialogue with) actual characters whose deaths occurred amid intriguing conditions of sudden dissipation.
Thus the objects of his continuous reflection include the celebrated disappearances of Chet Baker, who died under suspicious circumstances after falling from a window in Amsterdam, or Saint Exupéry, who disappeared without a trace in a Lightning P38 airplane flying over the coast of Marseilles; along with those of several neighbors in the Barcelona neighborhood where he lives: Mrs. Cremer, consumed by the heat, or the neighbor dressed in pajamas with little snakes and arabesques. Something similar happens with the character Dumont the antiques dealer, a sort of imaginary friend to the narrator –an homage or reference to the first known aviator, the Brazilian Alberto Salas Dumont, whose suicide by hanging remains clouded by uncertain details–; and with Dr. Boltanski, the narrator’s psychiatrist –whose surname references the Jewish artist Christian Boltanski, famous for his tireless exploration of the themes of death, memory and disappearance in his many works and performances.
The experience of absence, then, takes place in the very writing of the story, understood as a type of detective work in which the aforementioned clues point not to a restitution of memory or of legacy, as would be the case in Boltanski’s installations, but rather to the consummation of disappearance itself: as though the very act of writing were providing an account of forgotten details about and by the absent ones. Writing as a remainder, a retelling of what endures, but at the same time the story of the disappearance of the writer himself. This meta-discourse makes its appearance within Belmonte’s narrative, present in the photos the protagonist obtains from an abandoned roll of film, and which exhibit the sequence of a photographic calendar of a man’s disappearance. It is a trace, undoubtedly, because the photos are the testimony of something that existed, but a trace that leads to a definitive absence, and from whose reading the narrator extracts the conclusion that, the more perfect the disappearances, the fewer traces of themselves they leave behind, the more impossible will be the existence of magic, art and writing:
How many of us haven’t felt disappointed when, at the disappearance of a dove or a parrot, the magician has been incapable of hiding the feathers that remain at the bottom of his top hat? It’s true that it would be very difficult to disappear into thin air, and that without the traces that bodies in transit leave behind detective stories wouldn’t be possible. Auguste Dupin wouldn’t have invented the police genre had it not been for the carelessness, almost always involuntary, of the turncoats. To hide the tracks, or to erase them, is one of the greatest challenges for anyone with the intention –the vocation– of disappearing. (p. 80)
Listening to the narrator himself, the novella is followed by a brief “Report Regarding the Absent,” which offers the reader various additional clues regarding certain referents that could be considered “lost” within the story. However, these annexes in the form of short stories run the risk of being unnecessary details: weakening the whole with their lack of fluency and their tendency toward narrative dispersion, instead of reinforcing a global imaginary that, in the end, doesn’t really need additional pivots.
In the end, saving the elephants perhaps represents the act contrary to that ideal disappearance by which Belmonte seems to renounce the human. But the narrator asks himself: “Why save the little elephants and not the little crocodiles or the chiripas? Mrs. Sheldrick has the answer to this: elephants are humans.” (p. 11) Maybe the answer lies in finding the human where we least suspect it: in seduction, in the pure desire (to help the little elephants, in this case) that will hide the absences; a hopeful gesture, perhaps, the suggests the quintessence of the human in other regions of existence, such as mercy or nobility; but one subject to the laws of the society of the spectacle: Mrs. Sheldrick will turn out to be a marketing ploy to promote the protection of the poor little animals, and with this discovery a new disappearance will end the spell the elephants cast over the narrator. It would seem that the human, after all, is destined to vanish in any of its spheres of existence, just like it’s also destined to leave behind a long trace. Therefore, the perfect disappearance, the absolute erasure of man, resides, according to Belmonte’s poetics, in assuming the inevitability of death as a vocation, as a commandment, as an explicit desire for escape; like that pilot who climbs into his plane and midway through his journey cuts off communication with the control tower, so as to then mysteriously disappear into the air.
Illustration: “The Disorganized Life of Maxim Valletin,” Christian Boltanski
{ Gabriel Payares, 500 ejemplares, 2 February 2010 }
I began to work as an artist when I began to be an adult, when I understood that my childhood was finished, and was dead. I think we all have somebody who is dead inside of us. A dead child.
–Christian Boltanski
The phrase is almost a cliché, but that doesn’t make it false: the end of childhood is the beginning of the end of life, the first step toward aging and death. Only after we have overcome childhood do we gain an awareness of death: first in relation to our parents and, eventually, through this discovery, of our own. The task of art –and of literature in particular–, when facing such a rough panorama of life, is none other than to provide man with an instant of recuperation of that lost initial stage, of that dead child mentioned in our epigraph; this is why Bataille affirmed of literature that it is “childhood finally regained.” Art, then, is a constant search for the ontology of the human, which is presumed to be lost with childhood: whether it be to preserve it, to spread it, to question it, or even to unveil it, to find the human element in reality’s most unusual corners. This, along with the awareness of one’s own finitude, and above all the capacity to visualize one’s own absence, to prepare us for it and to leave a legacy, makes art a particular disposition of the individual toward the coming absence, that is, man’s preparation for death: his own and that of others.
Such a poetics of disappearance animates the pages of the first work of fiction by the poet Luis Enrique Belmonte, the novella Salvar los elefantes (Caracas: Equinoccio, 2006). In its pages, the hot Catalonian summer serves as the ideal stage to illustrate the gradual dissipation of the world, the slow melting of a humanity that is broken and tied to itself, symbolically summarized by the protagonist’s damaged refrigerator, and at the same time transmuted, by means of media deception and televised simulacra, into the poor little African elephants that the Sheldrick Foundation promises to save.
In this manner, the anonymous protagonist of Salvar los elefantes plays the role of audience to a cruel performance of disappearance: trapped between the warm agony of his refrigerator, which exudes the stench of its own decomposition onto everything around it –a strange smell “of fermented mayonnaise” (p. 10) sticks to the striped pajamas the protagonist wears–, and the prolonged academic trip of his girlfriend Evelyne, from whom he will barely receive a couple of postcards with increasingly terse phrases –as if she herself were slowly dissipating–, the narrator seems to become more and more linked to a group of absent characters, dead, or in a steep trance toward disappearance, leaving behind the more “alive” or palpitating dynamics of existence: beginning with his anodyne sleepiness, a type of renunciation of a vital posture in the face of life –maybe only interrupted by his brief attempt to exercise by swimming, which logically culminates with a near-drowning–, and later on with his constant reference to (and even his dialogue with) actual characters whose deaths occurred amid intriguing conditions of sudden dissipation.
Thus the objects of his continuous reflection include the celebrated disappearances of Chet Baker, who died under suspicious circumstances after falling from a window in Amsterdam, or Saint Exupéry, who disappeared without a trace in a Lightning P38 airplane flying over the coast of Marseilles; along with those of several neighbors in the Barcelona neighborhood where he lives: Mrs. Cremer, consumed by the heat, or the neighbor dressed in pajamas with little snakes and arabesques. Something similar happens with the character Dumont the antiques dealer, a sort of imaginary friend to the narrator –an homage or reference to the first known aviator, the Brazilian Alberto Salas Dumont, whose suicide by hanging remains clouded by uncertain details–; and with Dr. Boltanski, the narrator’s psychiatrist –whose surname references the Jewish artist Christian Boltanski, famous for his tireless exploration of the themes of death, memory and disappearance in his many works and performances.
The experience of absence, then, takes place in the very writing of the story, understood as a type of detective work in which the aforementioned clues point not to a restitution of memory or of legacy, as would be the case in Boltanski’s installations, but rather to the consummation of disappearance itself: as though the very act of writing were providing an account of forgotten details about and by the absent ones. Writing as a remainder, a retelling of what endures, but at the same time the story of the disappearance of the writer himself. This meta-discourse makes its appearance within Belmonte’s narrative, present in the photos the protagonist obtains from an abandoned roll of film, and which exhibit the sequence of a photographic calendar of a man’s disappearance. It is a trace, undoubtedly, because the photos are the testimony of something that existed, but a trace that leads to a definitive absence, and from whose reading the narrator extracts the conclusion that, the more perfect the disappearances, the fewer traces of themselves they leave behind, the more impossible will be the existence of magic, art and writing:
How many of us haven’t felt disappointed when, at the disappearance of a dove or a parrot, the magician has been incapable of hiding the feathers that remain at the bottom of his top hat? It’s true that it would be very difficult to disappear into thin air, and that without the traces that bodies in transit leave behind detective stories wouldn’t be possible. Auguste Dupin wouldn’t have invented the police genre had it not been for the carelessness, almost always involuntary, of the turncoats. To hide the tracks, or to erase them, is one of the greatest challenges for anyone with the intention –the vocation– of disappearing. (p. 80)
Listening to the narrator himself, the novella is followed by a brief “Report Regarding the Absent,” which offers the reader various additional clues regarding certain referents that could be considered “lost” within the story. However, these annexes in the form of short stories run the risk of being unnecessary details: weakening the whole with their lack of fluency and their tendency toward narrative dispersion, instead of reinforcing a global imaginary that, in the end, doesn’t really need additional pivots.
In the end, saving the elephants perhaps represents the act contrary to that ideal disappearance by which Belmonte seems to renounce the human. But the narrator asks himself: “Why save the little elephants and not the little crocodiles or the chiripas? Mrs. Sheldrick has the answer to this: elephants are humans.” (p. 11) Maybe the answer lies in finding the human where we least suspect it: in seduction, in the pure desire (to help the little elephants, in this case) that will hide the absences; a hopeful gesture, perhaps, the suggests the quintessence of the human in other regions of existence, such as mercy or nobility; but one subject to the laws of the society of the spectacle: Mrs. Sheldrick will turn out to be a marketing ploy to promote the protection of the poor little animals, and with this discovery a new disappearance will end the spell the elephants cast over the narrator. It would seem that the human, after all, is destined to vanish in any of its spheres of existence, just like it’s also destined to leave behind a long trace. Therefore, the perfect disappearance, the absolute erasure of man, resides, according to Belmonte’s poetics, in assuming the inevitability of death as a vocation, as a commandment, as an explicit desire for escape; like that pilot who climbs into his plane and midway through his journey cuts off communication with the control tower, so as to then mysteriously disappear into the air.
Illustration: “The Disorganized Life of Maxim Valletin,” Christian Boltanski
{ Gabriel Payares, 500 ejemplares, 2 February 2010 }
3.11.2010
Viniste a posarte sobre una hoja de mi cuerpo... / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen
You came to lean on a leaf from my body...
You came to lean on a leaf from my body
Sweet and heavy drop like the sun over our lives
You brought the scent of wood and the tenderness of a leaning
stalk
And high sea sail gathering in your glance
You brought the light step of dawn when it leaves
And scanned incense of tremulous groves in your hands
Step off a breeze in a breeze like a wave ascends the days
And in the end you were the abiding spring rolling the
flowers
Or the beaches heading to a pointless dispute
To say if your hand was harmonious in time
Or if your heart was fruit of the tree or of tenderness
Or the muffled roar of the pump
Or the quiet voice of happiness denying and affirming itself
In each diastole and systole of permanence and negation
You came to lean on my cup
Red star and complete trill
You came to lean like night calls the creatures
Or like the arm closes its circle and encompasses the entire
schedule
Or like the tempest removes the veils from its face
To look at the world and not mistake its oars
When the walls are raised and caves closed
You have come and I can’t reach what justice you mistake
So you can be without the levity of escape and planetary
gravitation
Edged by honeysuckle in the infantile astrology
So you can be like the rose sunk in the seas
Or the boat anchored in our consciousness
So you can be without stopping the minutes climbing the
rigging
And always falling before ringing the bell that summons death
So you can be besieged amid the sound of the harp and the
skirmish river
Amid aura serpent and rosemary of the ages
Amid solstice tongue and caressing lips of delayed slowness
You have come like death shall come to our lips
With the joyous transparency of the days without lantern
Of the concerts of autumn leaves and summer birds
With the contentment of saying I have arrived
Seen in springtime when it puts its first hands on things
And ties the mane of the cities
And gives free passage to the waters and free song to the
mouths
Of the girl when she awakens and of the countryside when it
gathers itself
You have come heavy like the dew on the flowers in the jar
You have come to erase your arrival
Banner of centuries nailed into our chest
You have come marble nose
You have come diamond eyes
You have come golden lips
Abolición de la muerte (1935)
{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen | Peru, 1911-2001 }
You came to lean on a leaf from my body
Sweet and heavy drop like the sun over our lives
You brought the scent of wood and the tenderness of a leaning
stalk
And high sea sail gathering in your glance
You brought the light step of dawn when it leaves
And scanned incense of tremulous groves in your hands
Step off a breeze in a breeze like a wave ascends the days
And in the end you were the abiding spring rolling the
flowers
Or the beaches heading to a pointless dispute
To say if your hand was harmonious in time
Or if your heart was fruit of the tree or of tenderness
Or the muffled roar of the pump
Or the quiet voice of happiness denying and affirming itself
In each diastole and systole of permanence and negation
You came to lean on my cup
Red star and complete trill
You came to lean like night calls the creatures
Or like the arm closes its circle and encompasses the entire
schedule
Or like the tempest removes the veils from its face
To look at the world and not mistake its oars
When the walls are raised and caves closed
You have come and I can’t reach what justice you mistake
So you can be without the levity of escape and planetary
gravitation
Edged by honeysuckle in the infantile astrology
So you can be like the rose sunk in the seas
Or the boat anchored in our consciousness
So you can be without stopping the minutes climbing the
rigging
And always falling before ringing the bell that summons death
So you can be besieged amid the sound of the harp and the
skirmish river
Amid aura serpent and rosemary of the ages
Amid solstice tongue and caressing lips of delayed slowness
You have come like death shall come to our lips
With the joyous transparency of the days without lantern
Of the concerts of autumn leaves and summer birds
With the contentment of saying I have arrived
Seen in springtime when it puts its first hands on things
And ties the mane of the cities
And gives free passage to the waters and free song to the
mouths
Of the girl when she awakens and of the countryside when it
gathers itself
You have come heavy like the dew on the flowers in the jar
You have come to erase your arrival
Banner of centuries nailed into our chest
You have come marble nose
You have come diamond eyes
You have come golden lips
Abolición de la muerte (1935)
{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen | Peru, 1911-2001 }
3.09.2010
El ídolo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Idol
The beauty threatened with her brow when she noticed my refusal to one of her whims. I backtracked from my decision adding complaisant and affectionate attentions. I feared accelerating the unraveling of her sorrows.
That very night she succumbed in a crisis of delirium. Once more she was narrating, in impassioned terms, the misfortunes of her childhood and adolescence. I awoke at the foot of her oaken bed.
I walk tirelessly through the chambers of my ancient house, demure in the elusiveness of a sierra. Only the roof of a vigilant tower remains.
I refuse to return to the world and I scorn the invitations of my friends. I wish to reconstruct the situation of that nefarious day’s mood and the sterile gesture of drawing her inert head to my chest.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The beauty threatened with her brow when she noticed my refusal to one of her whims. I backtracked from my decision adding complaisant and affectionate attentions. I feared accelerating the unraveling of her sorrows.
That very night she succumbed in a crisis of delirium. Once more she was narrating, in impassioned terms, the misfortunes of her childhood and adolescence. I awoke at the foot of her oaken bed.
I walk tirelessly through the chambers of my ancient house, demure in the elusiveness of a sierra. Only the roof of a vigilant tower remains.
I refuse to return to the world and I scorn the invitations of my friends. I wish to reconstruct the situation of that nefarious day’s mood and the sterile gesture of drawing her inert head to my chest.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
3.07.2010
Epopeya del Guaire / William Osuna
Epic of the Guaire
The Guaire river has bad manners, when it travels
in buses it never gives up its seat
to pregnant women, it sits down before the
ladies do, at funerals it screams louder than
the widows, disrespects the deceased, tells stories about
the other rivers.
He better not say anything about me, says the
Orinoco, he wasn’t even a cabin boy in La Invencible nor
was he able to mix his waters with the seven seas of China.
The Indians covered him with a totuma shell
so the Spanish wouldn’t drink him.
He doesn’t look like Don Jorge Manrique’s rivers.
The sea ocean can’t stand him; regarding him
he philosophizes like a Chinese sage: “A river that doesn’t
know how to die is a gulf.”
Who fucked him up?
He doesn’t carry doubloons, or change, or a pirate’s
chest in his domains.
Nor a tiger’s tail, his skin is hairy.
He doesn’t work, he doesn’t sing.
He climbs onto a milk tin or
onto the hood of a car to watch
the city’s colors: he’s a river
that contemplates, not one to be contemplated.
So poor: if the lovers’ moon
were to dare speak to him no bridge
would accept it; he better not glimpse
at the black lagoon’s eyes, the poet
Acevedo would probably lock him up in a sonnet.
Trouble between rivers and so-called brothers. I don’t
get involved in those family affairs. That’s what
they taught me in school. It’s not my problem.
On the road that leads to the jungle,
where a whirlwind of alligators gestates;
and the rubber tree shines like a
precious box of scalpels, Andrés Mejía tried
to put things from the Guaire into the Magdalena:
the Magdalena so smiley with its gold
teeth and emerald molars let him drink
rum for three days. Paid him no mind.
Got him drunk, whistled a cumbia, a bambuco for him.
And that’s how he sent him off to the Motatán, stuffed
in an apple crate to the house of
Hermes Vargas. Tall tales of Andrés. Andrés knows more
about Andrés than the Magdalena and its gems.
The fetid flower, the oil of the refineries, the
little urban heron and a chipped refrigerator
are figures that accompany him. In some cases the
sun is a blow of spurs against the
rough waters.
The Guaire river is my friend. I ask
for his blessing. He’s like an indomitable
donkey that crosses the city with a load of empty
bottles:
no river from the Frances or from the
Germanies can compare. He’s in love with the
Catuche stream. What loves
They exchange bedpans behind parking lots,
if you could only see them.
Dumbo Márquez doesn’t love him: his Harley Davidson
drowned in his waters. I do
love him, he’s not like the Orinoco who
feeds on musicians; who swallowed an entire orchestra,
and the love letters of Argenis Daza Guevara;
and if he didn’t want to sing and love, why did he do it?
What a waste. So pedantic.
In my childhood I loved the Orinoco.
At that crossing there was an araguaney tree, where
cats would hook up, who would look at you
with their golden eyes. The wind ran
through there: it spoke like tough cardboard. Thick fog
would descend through La Puerta de Caracas. All the
buses kept driving and would go into the movie theater.
My childhood with more colors than those
of a provincial poet in his province,
couldn’t distinguish the waters, they were all the same.
Translator’s note: Original Spanish version available online @ “Epopeya del Guaire”
{ William Osuna, Miré los muros de la patria mía, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2004 }
The Guaire river has bad manners, when it travels
in buses it never gives up its seat
to pregnant women, it sits down before the
ladies do, at funerals it screams louder than
the widows, disrespects the deceased, tells stories about
the other rivers.
He better not say anything about me, says the
Orinoco, he wasn’t even a cabin boy in La Invencible nor
was he able to mix his waters with the seven seas of China.
The Indians covered him with a totuma shell
so the Spanish wouldn’t drink him.
He doesn’t look like Don Jorge Manrique’s rivers.
The sea ocean can’t stand him; regarding him
he philosophizes like a Chinese sage: “A river that doesn’t
know how to die is a gulf.”
Who fucked him up?
He doesn’t carry doubloons, or change, or a pirate’s
chest in his domains.
Nor a tiger’s tail, his skin is hairy.
He doesn’t work, he doesn’t sing.
He climbs onto a milk tin or
onto the hood of a car to watch
the city’s colors: he’s a river
that contemplates, not one to be contemplated.
So poor: if the lovers’ moon
were to dare speak to him no bridge
would accept it; he better not glimpse
at the black lagoon’s eyes, the poet
Acevedo would probably lock him up in a sonnet.
Trouble between rivers and so-called brothers. I don’t
get involved in those family affairs. That’s what
they taught me in school. It’s not my problem.
On the road that leads to the jungle,
where a whirlwind of alligators gestates;
and the rubber tree shines like a
precious box of scalpels, Andrés Mejía tried
to put things from the Guaire into the Magdalena:
the Magdalena so smiley with its gold
teeth and emerald molars let him drink
rum for three days. Paid him no mind.
Got him drunk, whistled a cumbia, a bambuco for him.
And that’s how he sent him off to the Motatán, stuffed
in an apple crate to the house of
Hermes Vargas. Tall tales of Andrés. Andrés knows more
about Andrés than the Magdalena and its gems.
The fetid flower, the oil of the refineries, the
little urban heron and a chipped refrigerator
are figures that accompany him. In some cases the
sun is a blow of spurs against the
rough waters.
The Guaire river is my friend. I ask
for his blessing. He’s like an indomitable
donkey that crosses the city with a load of empty
bottles:
no river from the Frances or from the
Germanies can compare. He’s in love with the
Catuche stream. What loves
They exchange bedpans behind parking lots,
if you could only see them.
Dumbo Márquez doesn’t love him: his Harley Davidson
drowned in his waters. I do
love him, he’s not like the Orinoco who
feeds on musicians; who swallowed an entire orchestra,
and the love letters of Argenis Daza Guevara;
and if he didn’t want to sing and love, why did he do it?
What a waste. So pedantic.
In my childhood I loved the Orinoco.
At that crossing there was an araguaney tree, where
cats would hook up, who would look at you
with their golden eyes. The wind ran
through there: it spoke like tough cardboard. Thick fog
would descend through La Puerta de Caracas. All the
buses kept driving and would go into the movie theater.
My childhood with more colors than those
of a provincial poet in his province,
couldn’t distinguish the waters, they were all the same.
Translator’s note: Original Spanish version available online @ “Epopeya del Guaire”
{ William Osuna, Miré los muros de la patria mía, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2004 }
3.05.2010
La venganza de Viviana / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Viviana’s Vengeance
I remain standing in the lady’s presence. I have imagined, for her iconic beauty, the Byzantine stole and the crown of emeralds and berilos.
The mourning suit improves her jasmine profile. I have seen, during my travels in Spain, the fine flower of the unfaithful.
The lady is seated at an oak chair and watches, through the window, the malignant forest. Caesar’s army feared crossing it, according to what an eloquent monk writes.
The gentleman disappeared on the first morning of his voyage and the horse returned alone, showing signs of affliction.
The north wind throws a fugitive crow onto the merlons.
The lady orders that it be sheltered and prohibits the archers from hunting it.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I remain standing in the lady’s presence. I have imagined, for her iconic beauty, the Byzantine stole and the crown of emeralds and berilos.
The mourning suit improves her jasmine profile. I have seen, during my travels in Spain, the fine flower of the unfaithful.
The lady is seated at an oak chair and watches, through the window, the malignant forest. Caesar’s army feared crossing it, according to what an eloquent monk writes.
The gentleman disappeared on the first morning of his voyage and the horse returned alone, showing signs of affliction.
The north wind throws a fugitive crow onto the merlons.
The lady orders that it be sheltered and prohibits the archers from hunting it.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
3.02.2010
Edad de plata / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Silver Age
I lived secluded in the countryside since the dissolution of my youth. Lucretius had transformed me into an aficionado of nature’s impartial treatment. I had conceived the resolution of voluntarily departing from life once I noted the symptoms of tedium, once I began to feel the impediments and chains of aging. I would have perished near the source of the dark river and a sob would have animated the invariable willows. My swan in mourning, symbol and memory of an eclipse, would have returned to its savage world.
I had stopped visiting the neighboring city where I was born. I was hurt by the continuous image of its decadence and I was consoled by the memory of having fought for its sovereignty.
My fellow citizens exercised affectionate feelings amidst the unhappiness and they called me out of retirement to participate in a general lamentation. They surrounded the family of a maiden who had died the morning of her wedding.
I attended the funeral rites and drew the circular movement of a dance on the incorruptible surface of the coffin. Meleagrus, the same one from the Anthology, wrote at my bequest, a single verse in which he tried to reconcile Destiny.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I lived secluded in the countryside since the dissolution of my youth. Lucretius had transformed me into an aficionado of nature’s impartial treatment. I had conceived the resolution of voluntarily departing from life once I noted the symptoms of tedium, once I began to feel the impediments and chains of aging. I would have perished near the source of the dark river and a sob would have animated the invariable willows. My swan in mourning, symbol and memory of an eclipse, would have returned to its savage world.
I had stopped visiting the neighboring city where I was born. I was hurt by the continuous image of its decadence and I was consoled by the memory of having fought for its sovereignty.
My fellow citizens exercised affectionate feelings amidst the unhappiness and they called me out of retirement to participate in a general lamentation. They surrounded the family of a maiden who had died the morning of her wedding.
I attended the funeral rites and drew the circular movement of a dance on the incorruptible surface of the coffin. Meleagrus, the same one from the Anthology, wrote at my bequest, a single verse in which he tried to reconcile Destiny.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
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