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The Argentine writer proposes an essay that invites us on a journey to recover the gestures prohibited during the coronavirus pandemic. Recall sensations such as those caused by kisses, hugs and breath. And he does it through his literary, musical, artistic and cinematographic references. A way to enter the universe of this prolific writer based in France.
‘Contact. A collage of lost gestures’ (Ediciones Godot, 2021) is the eighth book by Edgardo Scott (Lanús, 1978). He has published novels, stories and essays, including ‘El Exceso’, ‘Luto’, ‘Caminantes’ and ‘Cassette Virgen’, the latter also published at the end of 2021.
“To all of us, the pandemic and its effects, at some point reached us personally and in my case it was very immediate, it was during the first confinement, because I felt like a caged lion,” explains the writer who at that time had just finished translate the latest Spanish version of ‘Dubliners’ by James Joyce.
The translation “was a monumental job and the need to download and the completely unprecedented conditions in which we were living, a certain confusion and fear were combined; and since for those of us who write literature it is the antidote to all the ills of this world, I I put in,” says Scott.
The result of this antidote is a brutal reconnection with those lost, forbidden gestures during the pandemic. An essay on those gestures that lead him to make unlikely connections and at the same time very well found.
For example, when Scott talks about the kiss, he jumps from one of the most famous photos in history, Robert Doisneau’s ‘Le baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville’, to landing on the cover of the group’s ‘Think Tank’ album. British Blur, a cover made by Banksy in which two people with diving suits kissing appear.
And while Scott does not like to be called scholar, but rather curious, the truth is that during those jumps we are learning many things about everything. “I suppose it will be the fatality of free association, as you know I am a psychoanalyst too, so there is something of that kind of random musical aesthetic that I always have in mind. A boy who recently read the book told me that I always swerved, who went one way and suddenly went the other”, affirms the author of ‘Contacto’.
And those “swerves” are exquisite, as when in the chapter on saliva he refers to ‘The death of an official’ by Chekhov. A precise sneeze at the wrong moment and the world turns upside down. “Toys of jouissance”, said Lacan. Or ‘We are accidents waiting to happen’, which Radiohead sings. It does not matter. Would Tcherviakof have had any other luck with the mask on?” Scott writes.
When Scott talks about touch, about the hands, he begins with the lost caress of the Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni, he goes through The Doors song ‘Touch me’, just the song that the band was playing in Miami when they took Jim Morrison as obscene, to end up in the Parisian Père-Lachaise cemetery, where the singer is buried, in a place where the tombs are practically piled up, where they touch.
From the romantic kiss to the last kiss to the deceased
The most important kiss may not be the kiss of the lover, but the kiss of the loved one who is leaving. “Perhaps the infamy, the greatest shame of this epidemic, has been not dismissing its dead properly. ‘Do not leave my body without crying or burying it,’ says the Odyssey and it is not wrong.
We have lived for two years without kisses and without hugs. Hugs like those in the painting ‘Two women embracing’ by the Austrian artist Egon Schiele who, as the Argentine writer recalls, died in 1918 of the other great global pandemic, the misnamed Spanish flu.
Some hugs that take us to a boxing ring in Kinshasa in 1974, the one of the mythical battle between Ali and Foreman, a fight in which the boxers spend long moments embracing, and which was recorded in Norman Mailer’s book. “In some way, the epidemic has given us back the epic, a vital genre that has been neglected and mistreated in recent years,” reflects Scott.
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