nuestro corresponsal en paris nos acerca un espacio de metaforas y paradojas (o quizas ya no son paradojas en el umbral, o tampoco son metaforas).
a veces ni nuestras pisadas sirven al otro dia para entender por donde hemos avanzado.
One day, during the night, I spotted this very beautiful cemetery. It was on placed on a hill and it also had a nice view of the sea. Perfect marriage of mountains and ocean that can be seen from a very different, or maybe not, dichotomy... the place where you have the death... there is this very big something about death. Sometimes I think that the only thing worth to write about is death.
So I was thinking about that when I jumped the fence and got into the empty (?) graveyard, it was a clear night because it was the night after the full-moon and there were also a lot of stars in a very clean sky. I was hoping that there were no guard dogs inside the place. I was looking for ghosts not for big guard dogs. Why was I looking for a ghost? Because of death of course. Because of love and because of traveling. Maybe ghosts know more than me about those things. Maybe they just know what we want them to know. Maybe they are just resonances of energy that are there deforming the layers of reality. Anyway, I was bored and I felt like walking in the graveyard. Not so surprisingly, I did not find any ghosts around the place, so I decided to continue my reflexions alone.
Then a shadow with the shape of a girl appears beneath the long shadows of the trees and says, without saying anything, “it is about death, but it is also about love and about traveling”. I look back at it suspiciously, and I think to myself: is this shadow of something-that-is-not-there really talking to me? Or is it just my vivid imagination? Or maybe just too many drugs or too much drinking?... or just magic, let’s invite magic to this special dinner in the moonlight. I sit down , and stare at the sky looking like wondering but not wondering at all, then I reply “is just about death”... the shadow move a little bit, like trying to hide a restless feeling, and says “what about love? What about traveling?” I smiled to the end of all cowards and start drawing something on the floor with my foot, maybe just to check if this was real at all, and knowing of the traitorous and hideous form that was my company, I said “love and traveling are only important cuz they are the things that can show you the shadow of death, by loosing, and loosing big, they show you something about death” what I don’t want to say is that by speaking about death you are only speaking about life, because let’s be honest, little we know about death.
One day, during the afternoon, I felt like something else. Not something that sits and reads “kafka in the shore”, I felt more like a bear. Not a particularly big bear, but a bear nevertheless. One that lives in the forest...
Maybe not a bear, something smaller, like a pixie! That’s it, a forest pixie. So i needed to be in the woods, perhaps to climb a tree, perhaps a to sleep, perhaps to dream like the english poet would say. I walked then, towards the trees, magnificent Eucalyptus, so far from your homeland you are! And jet you look so in place, so beautiful! Lets walk further, I bet there is some secret passage somewhere in here... I can smell it.
Then, there is some change, like if all the colors together have chose to change just a little bit of their tonalities. I knew there was a passage in here! I close my eyes, I feel the breeze, the gentle touch of the air, the sea air, a purifying kind of air. Perhaps is the years of just “being there” carried out by these molecules colliding in my body... the sea air. I look for a place now, a spot, I know is here I just need to pay attention. After walking for a while I find it, and is nice, at least nice. I lay down and close my eyes, then I start hearing the woods, the certain wind is now moving the trees and as they dance they also sing, they sing about the greenness, they sing about some big spirit, the noises of the woods are the voice of this spirit, and it is now singing, and as it sings I slowly drift to sleep. My dreams are colorful and warm, at some point too warm, I start to feel translated to some other language, like if I am suddenly move from one domain to another, my legs are too warm, they feel like burning... I wake up, my body is half protected by shadows and half exposed to a unmerciful sun, of course my legs are burning. I stand up, I said good bye and I came back.
To write with green is not a detail if you always do it with green.
Just like the thresholds or the liminal states
Just like there are goings and comings
An then of course, thresholds appear
Perhaps the seasoned free-thinker, always present among the lambs, might reply to us “And what thing it a going or a coming if not just an infinite succession of thresholds?”
Very clever sir! Very clever indeed!
But tell me sir: do you know the difference between to feel oneself wet as the imperturbable and sometimes cold rocks of a garden in an april morning, and to feel wet as an ancient and proud ship which is resting its glory, caress by the waves, in some lost harbor?
It is so certain that you know this difference as it is also certain that you cannot pose it. Mainly because you believe that the symbolisms of the sphinx are an artifice.
Let us tolerate that there are thresholds of many durations, which is just the same as many sizes. But there are also goings and there are also comings, and those are different from thresholds mainly because of the blood.
And what if this time we travel hanging from other’s words?
But what is “other’s words”?
It does not matter.
And what happens with words in the goings?
And what happens with words in the comings?
But even more important, if you allow me this digression, it is what happens with words in the thresholds.
Let us say for example:
Carlos felt strangely nostalgic, a disturbance, similar in subtleness and reach as the one that could be felt in front of a change of light, when suddenly this strange nostalgic feeling started to move in the woods of his internal forum not as a nostalgic feeling anymore but as a feeling of missing, but not any kind of missing, but as the missing of a leg that he did not ever have.
Why can’t Carlos describe in a less complicated way that unexpected but certain sensation?
Because in thresholds words hide themselves.
No!
They do not hide, they disappear. But they disappear in a way that little has to do with not being there anymore. Is more like if they were tools that for some strange reason, and from one moment to another, cannot be used anymore. Is not that the tools are broken, or that our hands are not made for using them. Is that when we are going to use them something happens between the tools and our hands that ends up as the most clumsy and catastrophic of the dances. An spectacle that, although could seem to be funny, lacks any amount of grace.
And there is Carlos,
in the threshold,
with his disappeared, or transfigured into functional but impossible tools, words.
However, in the same way that to light a lantern in the middle of the night can congregate a myriad of insects, thresholds can congregate symbols. Symbols which, just as in the case of insects, is not like they were not there before, but they become evident now. But be careful! In contrast with bugs, symbols can leave you more than a rash.
Let us go back to Carlos, the threshold and the unexpected jet as clear as ambiguous symbols.
The words are not.
The symbols are.
Can Carlos make use of the symbols, just as he used to with the previously useful words, to communicate his experience in the threshold?
Of course not.
Of course yes.
You tell me...
H
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