Читать книгу All Love Letters Are Ridiculous - Diego Maenza, Diego Maenza - Страница 7

LETTER ONE

I draw you, as if outlining in the soft thicket of the rain an imaginary and perfect face whose precise dimples balance in parallel with the cheeks. I make you smile, making your pains and your customary obligations sleep. They handle your face like puppeteers of your destiny. I make you live a dreamed longing implanted in the depths of you.

Starting a love letter is as difficult as starting a story that does not contain some deficient element that could reveal the writer's full satisfaction with his work. Complacency that, in my opinion, will never be filled, in the same way that it will not be in this love letter.

Transcribing feelings sometimes becomes an almost insurmountable difficulty. Protect the task of the sculptor who must make the fine nose of the model and its beautiful testicles sprout from the hard marble. Heroic is the task of the painter who, mixing his varnishes, achieves on the canvas the perfection of an ideal jaw, striking small breasts that contrast with the splendor of a vulva made up of hair. No less arduous and complex, if not impossible, is the work of the poet who, perched on his platform of lucidity, must bring to the ungraspable what is palpably comfortable, and in a paradoxically analogous case, return the thanks that without his intervention would be inaccessible.

I find myself with this wall at this moment, not as a painter, sculptor or poet, that I do not have so many faculties. I collide with this wall not as an artist but as a human being. My soul (I name this way the set of my few qualities, do not think beyond that) is proud to belong to the side that praises the condition of being human above all artifice of the world, no matter how sublime it may be. First of all we are human beings and as a human I express myself.

Sometimes I ask myself why I waste time writing. The answer cannot be simple. To report the ills that concern society? No, definitely. To dismiss personal problems by turning literature into a great psychological masturbation? Neither. To achieve fame and wealth, or to rejuvenate the way we use language (not the organ but the verbal communication system)? No. And I explain: My role model in his attitude is the Shadow Writer. I only think about writing and the rest doesn't matter.

Perhaps the answers are less pragmatic than is generally believed. I try to answer: I write to understand better my surroundings. Perhaps the answer is the same one that I give myself every time I question why I am used to reading: To become more human.

Do I become more human by writing love letters to you? Does love grow because I write a letter? Can love grow as babies or toads or rivers grow? Or could it be that when I write a letter to you little by little I am detaching (as if it were an infinite fractal) the pieces that constitute whole love and in this way little by little you are running out of my love? Does love diminish as an old man or as roast meat or as rotten fruit? Perhaps the only valid answer is this: Writing raises questions, irresolutions, in the same sense that trying to describe the marked smell of your hair makes me so confused, opaque compared to what my head spits on me. Or in the same way that your face becomes at this moment the word that escapes me, or like the praise towards your eyes that slips down my throat with the perplexity of someone who is ecstatic and no longer has pleasure for stories or poems.

No, it´s not that either. I do not know. I'm not sure.

Yours, Abelard.