Every once in a while, someone thinks to tell me that my best writing is the one where I’m screwed up, broken down, and covered in tons of self-pitying misery.
I’m back home for Christmas and what a bad name nostalgia has. My old room is a storage room. My titles, my literary awards, my blackboard, that old Raptors poster, the Castellón CD scarf that some kids gave me at Viñarock in 2014, an ambipur that I bought to hide (unsuccessfully) the smell are still hanging on the wall. marijuana that was pouring out of my nightstand—which moved with me—, a wall clock whose time of death was five past nine, and a photo with my grandparents. Everything I was, or what’s left of me, hangs on the wall. On the ground, however, everything seems foreign to me.
I came home for Christmas and my old life no longer exists. I look out on the balcony with a cigarette twisted between my fingers to contemplate the tired brick buildings, planted in the distance like sleeping stunners on the horizon. Then he passes in front of me, like a wayward angel, a feathered jazzman waiting for the right saxophone hit to plummet and rise again seconds later. I watch it fly with my head tilted, as if listening to the secrets of the wind; perhaps the birds fly because they know his name.
Down the street, people run like wild poems, and you can hear the conversation of two guys who, in the manner of Allen and Gregory and Bill—or Kerouac and his fucking mother—turn us all into strange pilgrims. The sun falls obliquely on the highway and the goldfinch, stiff in the air, looks like an old beatnik soaked to the skin from aimlessly flapping his wings: a tiny Dean Moriarty with a beak and wings, who doesn’t need to hitchhike or get into pickup trucks. unknown to travel; It is enough to jump into the void and hope that gravity has not changed since the last time.
I enter again with the strange feeling that something is missing somewhere. I sit down to write this column. I do what I always do: I stretch my back, lean my neck towards my left shoulder and write, avoiding my astigmatism with my eyes half closed; I bite my nails and dissociate until one or two words appear that help me start working. I light a cigarette and pretend to look through the smoke like an Amazonian shaman high on ayahuasca. I pretend, I pretend and I pretend, because that’s what fiction is for, and the problem is that today I can’t find any fiction.
“What good is a writer who doesn’t write?” I ask myself. And I write, like someone who quickens his step when he looks askance at the boss. “Why does a writer write?” I continue. And what a stupid question, I remember what Irene Vallejo said: “Writing is trying to discover what we would write if we wrote, this is how Marguerite Duras puts it, going from the infinitive to the conditional and then to the subjunctive, as if she felt the ground crack under her feet.” . That thing about Borges also comes to mind, that one does not write what one wants but what one can, but that one reads what one wants. We pretend that this job saves us, when in reality it is the most refined way to bleed our miseries with the public’s approval. And it seems that some of you love it: you turn us into your literary martyrs to justify your own existential reluctance.
Every once in a while, someone thinks to tell me that my best writing is the one where I’m shitty, broken down, and covered in tons of self-pitying misery. And it is you, junkie of other people’s melancholy, who romanticize a dysfunctional alcoholic like Bukowski, who idealize the miserable lives of Virginia Woolf or Edgar Allan Poe, who flock to the cynicism of Houellebecq and dip your greasy little fingers in the sadness that he took down Foster Wallace, Pizarnik or Sylvia Plath; It is to you that I dedicate this piece. You need our pain to dilute yours, you rejoice in the chords of our languor and you give yourself the luxury of calling a “cursed poet” or a “tormented writer” a simple handful of sad people who make art, people vomiting ink, greasing badly wounded pages. and perpetuating that artist pose with the bare wires that bothers you so much. In the end, we assume our role: crying ink while others, comfortably, read us with a slight gesture of approval or commiseration.
Eppur scriviamo, so that you continue looking at us with that morbid self-complacency, hoping that the next text will be an outpouring of trauma and scourges; You know that you have us trapped, that we are such good masochists that we cannot get away from words and you enjoy each emotional spasm with the fascination of someone watching a fire from the appropriate distance; You observe our crazy rituals like a tourist, hunting for the crumbs of self-esteem that spill out when you close the book or turn off the screen.
I have gotten up from the chair and it is enough to look out on the balcony to notice that shared fatigue that permeates the air: faces dulled by routine, buildings that persist due to inertia and a timid sun that seems to never finish rising. I’m back home for Christmas, I should do other things.
#sad #writer #turns #lot
