Although nobody’s forcing us to, the diarist Pla and this inhabitant of the Chinese wall coincide in one thing, and that is in our irrevocable — no longer for me worrying — our permanent state of literary-sickness.
On December 23, 1918, Pla noted down his concern for the sterility of his sentiment at Christmastide and ended by saying that he felt not the slightest impulse to adore anything and it seemed to him objectively disagreeable not to feel any excitement, either about women or about money or about becoming somebody in life, “just this secret, devilish obsession with writing (with poor results) to which I sacrifice everything, to which I shall probably sacrifice everything in life.”
It was a great relief to take momentary refuge in a great writer from my native land, but at around midnight I got lost again in my own home and thought I was in Switzerland when I saw wide mountain torrents gushing down, in huge waves, toward some dark, disturbing, almost invisible, foreign hills.
I realized that all this was of deep concern to me, but the fact is I suddenly felt an enormous aversion for everything that concerned me.
MARCH 6
It snowed, no one was expecting it, but snow always arrives like this, everybody knows. After the initial moments of amazement, I began to feel an urge to go out into the street and step on the snow. What did Robert Walser do when it didn’t snow? Where did that question come from? It seems strange to ask myself such things. I sat down in my favorite armchair and repressed the desire to step on the street and snow. For a long time I read Álvaro Pombo, a writer I admire. One of the concerns of his moral life is salvation, I would say the spirit’s salvation, which is not strictly a literary theme — this comes as a relief — but a universal one, human, which concerns us all. To create a reality distinct from the impoverished, meaningless reality of today’s world. To explore the countless, infinite meanings of the uncreated reality we shall only be able to invent from inside that reality. To be intelligent and kind. And to seek in others, as Mario Cesariny says, “a land of kindness and fog.” To see others. And not to carry out market research. To fight against the destructive mechanism of society’s Montano’s malady, to fight against the draining of the human figure brought about by the perversion of the selfsame humanist undertaking.
Outside, the snow fell as in a song by Adamo.
I read Pombo and then I switched armchairs and moved to one with wings, where I used to read novels in the past, I spent hours reading stupid love stories. I put down Pombo to read a book about the universe of consciousness, I’ve been wondering where certain strange questions I sometimes ask myself come from. I read that nobody currently doubts that mental activity requires cerebral activity, but there is disagreement when it comes to defining the type of relationship that is established between the mind and the brain. And who hasn’t asked himself this before, without reaching a decisive conclusion? It’s a question of knowing whether it’s simply cerebral activity that gives rise to the mind or, on the contrary, if there is a distinct, immaterial entity using the brain as an instrument to manifest itself, causing mental activity. Does spirit exist? Is mental activity the manifestation of spirit, or only of matter?
Outside, it continued to snow. What did Robert Walser do when it snowed? I felt an irrepressible desire to go out into the street and step on the snow I thought about the passage of time. I confirmed that man does not have the length of his body, but of his years. He must drag them with him when he moves, an increasingly onerous task that ends up defeating him. I went out into the street and stepped on the snow. “I step on time / railway line / under the snow,” says a poem by Carlos Pardo. I wondered if I wasn’t dead in my home. The home, the hearth, is a heavy chain that ties us and wishes to bind our feet until death. I walked a long way. Suddenly I was Walser and was on a byroad. And the snow kept on falling, as in a song by Adamo that reminded me of my tormented youth. I wanted to disappear back then as well.
MARCH 7
ON DISAPPEARING
Till when will we have to listen to commentaries by great writers saying that they write in order not to die completely? We already know what they’re pretentiously talking to us about, what sort of immortality they’re dealing with. Let us hear an example of such aspirations, let us listen to André Gide: “The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death’s reach” (Journal, 27 July 1922). It’s a question, therefore, of writing in order not to die, of entrusting oneself to the survival of one’s works, this may be what links the artist with his creation most strongly. The genius faces death, his work is death made vain or transfigured or, according to Proust’s evasive words, made “less bitter,” “worthier” and “maybe less probable.”
But is it possible to keep trusting or believing in an immortality of one’s own? I am more interested in the world of the writer Kafka, who did not wish to keep anything from death. What’s more, he addressed the ability to die through his work, which in fact means that Kafka’s work was already in itself an experience of death — Kafka was always a dead man in life — an experience that seemingly, if we hold to what Kafka suggests, we would have to know beforehand in order to fully experience the work, to reach death. It couldn’t be more Kafkaesque — or more lucid.
I prefer Kafka’s vision to that of Gide, our energies should be focused on the need to disappear in the work. If we look carefully at today’s world, which is undergoing such transformation, we’ll see that what’s needed is not to remain in “the lazy eternity of idols” (as Blanchot wrote), but to change, to disappear in order to cooperate in the transformation of the world: to act namelessly and not be just an idle name. You’re Girondo today, Walser tomorrow, and your real name is lost in the universe, you want to put paid to writers’ mean dreams of survival, you want to join your readers on a single anonymous horizon where you could finally establish a relationship of liberty with death.
MARCH 22
Light and shade, pleasant and discordant noises at home, the cheerful song of the woman Rosa’s hired to clean the house on Tuesdays and Fridays, the dull drone of the washing machine. I can hardly think and I end up taking refuge in the diary. I decide to relate Tuesday’s trip to Cuenca, where I gave a lecture, I read Theory of Budapest and asked those present to take my dramatic words seriously, corresponding as they did to a real drama experienced lately. I then stayed to listen to Ramón Costa Baena’s lecture. “We novelists are an unscrupulous bunch,” he started by saying. And I jotted down these words of his: “The novel is a hybrid genre and a large part of its charm arises from the alluvial nature of its materials. There is nothing that doesn’t suit a novelist in action, when he’s in the course of writing his novel.”
It’s only been three days since I returned from Cuenca, but I can hardly remember anything about the trip. I still have a scrap of paper with Costa Baena’s description, which I jotted down I think because of the adjective “alluvial” used alongside the noun “nature.” I spent the whole of the return journey from Cuenca turning the adjective “alluvial” over in my mind. I don’t remember much else. An agreeable conversation in depth with the writer Guelbenzu, the hanging houses, a young girl — who reminded me of the young Montano — on a bridge over a stream holding a sparkler, the supposedly poetic but in fact horrific dusk. I remember little else.