Sometimes, when you finish reading a text that has impacted you in some way, just before putting down the copy, you close your eyelids for a moment.
It doesn’t matter if that moment lasts one or two seconds, if one clenches one’s jaw or leaves it loose, if one frowns or smiles: what is happening is that what has barely been read is seeking its corner within us, there where its own are, those other texts that, in their own way, also made what was virgin space habitable.
But to say virgin space may be a mistake, because what happens when you close your eyes after finishing a book like Lightness, Juan Cárdenas says that what we have just witnessed is about to turn into habitable territory that which, until then, had been more of a virgin space than a mere landscape: a vision, barely impenetrable, due to a lack of perspective; an image, perhaps, uninhabitable, due to a lack of points of view. This is something that great books have, regardless of whether they are essays disguised as stories or stories disguised as essays: they add dimensions to us.
From the interior to the exterior territories
“It was not so much a question of landscape as of territory, which is a very different thing. The landscape is a romantic invention and, therefore, a bucolic fantasy that sublimates and disguises a project of domination. The territory, on the other hand, is a sedimentation of experiences and knowledge within a specific geography. The territory is a collective creation; the landscape is the result of an individual perspective, even in purely technical and pictorial terms, the landscape is a single point of view. The territory, on the other hand, only happens thanks to the simultaneity of many perspectives,” writes Cárdenas in Parable of no return, the text with which it closes Lightness, a book that, before getting there, that is, before its author finishes breaking down that idea to the hilt—the idea that lightness is, in fact, the mark of valuable art—turns several other images that were previously two-dimensional into spaces that can be traversed.
“Following the path opened by the foxes, the literature of our time, a literature with faith, like the one Arguedas wanted, would then propose conjectures about the forms of life that are developing here, now, in the midst of the civilizational crisis, but no longer in the manner of a mere lucid and disenchanted diagnosis, but as an affirmation of the possible. A literature of the almost unfinished in which the light images of a pleasant life begin to appear right there, in the middle of the rubble and the pieces of the statues of the ancient dead gods,” asserts Cárdenas, to give another example, when he finishes giving depth, hand in hand with the writer of The fox above and the fox below either The deep rivers, that other territory that is formed after reading Around a crisis of faith, in which triumph is denied, precisely, to that literature of bitterness whose aesthetic and political defects confine it to a landscape dominated by cynicism and disenchantment.
Just as before, in Two jargons of authenticity, When he finishes dismantling the framework of that other landscape that showed us, as a rival of fashions, to longing, that is, nostalgia for a better past —when what is really necessary is to seek to make other forms of future desirable—, in order to, besieging it with other points of view —a defense of the baroque, for example, against those who see it as a mere pastiche that fuses the worst of the populace—, allow it to be another habitable space, Cárdenas asserts: “The motley is not the multicultural nor the mental mush of diversity that is stuffed into us today in so many ways. The motley is entering into a conflict zone where nothing is resolved, where the mixture never stabilizes in a reassuring harmony. In the motley, biology is not confused with a prophylactic idea of health. The biology of the motley is proliferation, waste, the hypertelic expenditure of the baroque.”
Writing lightness with lightness
Let us return to that moment I spoke of at the beginning of this installment. Or, better, to the moment after that moment, that is, to the moment when our eyelids open and everything that happened in one or two or three seconds is already part of us, it already forms our inner territories: it turns out that, in that other moment, one discovers oneself lighter, as if some part of us had taken flight momentarily. And that, inside, there is something new, a new weight, I mean, which, nevertheless, tries to lift us up: this also happens with certain books: by increasing our mass, they deform space and gravity, although it continues to push us, also tries to throw us down.
What happens after reading Lightness, Above all, the first text of the book, which bears the same name, is, then, the same thing that the text proposes — it is almost impossible to imagine a better and happier coincidence: to assume, as I said here, that one of the identifying marks of great art is, precisely, its condition of lightness, its being on the verge of lifting off the ground, its being on the verge of transforming everything into a mere blink, on the verge of releasing a first echo, of bursting, like a piñata, letting out fistfuls of pleasure.
“For social engineers, there is only one thing more dangerous than losing control of the stimulus-response duo, and that is the gratuitousness of the light, the hole around which the whirlpool of poetry revolves. Pleasure for pleasure’s sake, pleasure coiling around itself, looking for its own hole to enter and exit. What made birds evolve was not the struggle for survival, it was the urgency of song, its gratuitousness,” writes Cárdenas.
Coordinates
The lightness It is being published by Periférica.
#gratuitousness #singing