Nunca se sabe nada / Francisco Pérez Perdomo

Nothing is ever known

Death,
like love,
is a recurring
theme in poetry.
The enigma
of the ignored,
or the unknown,
has touched the
most lucid and
wisest writers of
all the ages on earth.
For Novalis,
an enraptured mystic,
poetry would often
reveal itself through
sleep and the night.
Rimbaud, in his famous
letter of the seer,
sought poetry
in the atmosphere
of the unknown.
Sartre inverted, in his novel
Nausea and the short stories
of The Wall, the Cartesian
axiom of I think,
then I exist.
And Camus didn’t like
to think that death opened
another life. “For me
–he sustained–it’s a closed
door.” All
the religions
of humanity, for a long
time, have occupied themselves
with these insoluble
enigmas. Each sacred
book offers conceptions
of the most diverse sign,
which suggests
that none of them
have the absolute truth.
There are many discrepancies.
The fight against the ignored,
or the unknown,
in the end always
turns out to be perverse.
There are no possible exits.
No one is known
to have returned
from the other world to tell
the events of his death.
Life is a prospect
without return. No one
has been able to tell
its actual story.
All the religions
offer us dreamed
paradises, so sublime
as to never
believe in them.
Nothing is ever known.




{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Con los ojos muy largos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2006 }