Self and other, Gonzalo Gutierrez 2024

Project what you know  into the image

Find what you don’t know  outside the image

I

The god of poetry had scattered the poem in too many fragments so as to make the work of putting the puzzle together all the more difficult.

The first sentence said that a poem is not a puzzle to be completed.

That first verse made every one that read it sleepy, dizzy in the head and in their heart overwhelmed

Here was the first puzzle

The second verse went like that, in silence, all the words scattered, yet to be invented by a self actualizing god of poetry different from the first one but the same none the less

Here are all my little words, he said

Find your own story

Leave mine alone

Dissolved.

But the god of poetry wanted to fulfil his poem despite the obstacles

That everything that didn’t let him fulfil his poem was an obstacle to be won or destroyed

A pragmatic goal masked by the veil of poetry

An unveiling to veil a goal. A twisting.

That the god of poetry was self and other he did not know

Or perhaps did know but masked the knowing with the urgency of his desire, masked as a need.

If neither self nor other chooses, who does?

That question was presented to him and further deferred to the horizon of his goal

The creation of an image to fulfil his idolatry for images, learnt in the land of dictators, in order not to end like a dictator.

They all wanted to meet him but none of them dared. First they had to be certain he had been won.

Some people con you with love

Some people extort you with love

They know you would never dare to betray what they betray nonetheless.

In a poem the story is not necessarily linear

The last verse doesn’t necessarily answer the preceding verse

And all the lines amount more to a feeling, an experience.

Who knows why the god of poetry speaks when he speaks.

They were so keen in listening to him that they forgot to hear their own voices

To the point that all voices melted together

In an ocean with its horizon only tied by a guest of reality.

To further complicate the story

So as to make it intractable

The god of poetry did gather all the fragments into one story

And launched it like a vessel to be inhabited

But the readers of his work

They had lost trust in themselves after realizing that they had been played by the god of poetry

The god of trickery

The god of magic

The god of the irrational

They realized that

If he had allowed them to take him down to the depth of psyche it was so that he could set up a book that each time it was read it was erased by every wave of emotion that emanated from its story

For the ocean was his story

And the waves acted as the unbounding of the story

A story that could not be written but experienced

That could not be possessed but set free

That could take only prisoners of those unwilling to dissolve themselves into the waters of the god of poetry.

For the ocean was the sky and the sky was the ocean

And because in it all was permitted

And all one needs to experience it was a heart

Because the heart was an ocean through which the god of poetry flowed

Made love

Slow, rushing, impetuous.

Why his unwillingness to write a story?

Because the story wrote itself

He had launched the story and was mesmerized by the forms it took

He let it spin out of control

Without goal other than the love of the story

To see it grow and decay

That no matter where it led the characters

They were always already free

Thinking of the best strategy

To exit a story that had gathered the entire history of humanity.

At some point they will stop,

He thought

They are waiting for a beneficent change

To their role in the story.

One does not pray to the god of poetry

To do so is to betray the god of poetry

That doesn’t exist

That was never a thing to begin

That can’t be contained

That can’t be spoken

That can’t be imagined

That can only be elusively drawn in the recognition that there are limits and that somewhere beyond those limits a non existing goddless god, a god after god, an emptiness that nonetheless speaks to you, and tricks you into believing that it is you, always you.

II

She was falling again into his trap

She thought

It was a tale she knew from before

Had the book ended?

To write and to publish a book would be to read a story that had ended

But was it?

Did he publish it?

Did he believe everything she said?

She felt once again she was falling into his trap or was it her own trap?

She had given the story a soundtrack she found in the past but now he had managed to enter into the poet’s mind and write a new chapter that she couldn’t foresee -

She had believed herself to be a seer but now with an overwhelming lucidity recognized that what she saw through those eyes was but a mirage that now presented itself for what it was

Overwhelmed, unable to breathe, she sat down on top of her body sitting down.

She had played with the past and with what she had in her control but never could have foreseen that he could reach, let  alone whisper, into the mind of the god of poetry his own words, his sense.

Was he in contact with the poet? Was he the poet? He had been waiting for the poet in the future. In order to communicate with her he had set free his words like so many birds that sang a song into the poet’s soul.

He could not have spoken to her, she had taken all the necessary precautions but now he had come back unexpected, mixing everything in her head and in her heart.

At first she repressed it and sank deep into a quiet desperation that would unwind itself going for increasingly longer walks until she thought she had seen him in a park telling another man that the trick was not minding to loose.

Lose it all

Love requires you to lose it all.

Beware those who say they are love

Remember you have entered The House of Love

She needed to see the photos to remember. Without photos there was no memory. What was growing inside her belly was no memory enough. But truly the momentary lapse was just a strategy to gain time, to further the con. The decision had been taken long before and throwing a flipflop to your lover was not the same as planing to give away your lover’s firstborn without his consent, in spite of your lover, just because you dare.

She had said may times over, full of hate and arrogance, that one day people would remember her. He never knew that it would be at his expense. The need to entangle.

You went for a swim. Your path had brought you to this moment that you had repeated over and over again for over a decade.

You said no child no photos. If you forget the father I would forget the photos of you. You couldn’t give her your child and your photos for the child was yours and you had made the photos. If you did that you would have been left with nothing, feeling a complete rob. You never wanted to give the child away but it was not in your control. The only thing in your control was the photos of her that you would forget like they forgot you.

Over the next years they would make that the point of the story, the forgetting of the photos not the forgetting of you. In order to do that they would implement the next step in the con. They took as many photos of the child as possible to erase the original con by using a famous photographer. The point was not just to take the photos but to put them in galleries, museums, etc.

The god of poetry spoke thus:

If you give power to someone it might be used against you, in spite of you

Regrets start to pile up

No end in sight

III

What else could they betray now that they had betrayed it all to find themselves?

But they could only communicate through third parties

Never through themselves

They never lay claim anything other than their desires

Forfeit for the sake of liberty

Now they found themselves adrift

Prisoners of the god of poetry

Turned into the god of sleep

Turned into no god at all

IV

At that point he realized that those who call themselves poets were just people unable to stop their internal dialogue presenting itself as poetry.

He had transcended the realm of duality and unexpectedly gained the ability to enter different planes.

The water was just the prefect medium to propagate his voiceless voice.

V

And so when you returned the property seemed abandoned

You climbed the iron fence and jumped without thinking you were trespassing

As you crash landed into the abandoned garden you thought

That something old inhabited that place

And that all the clocks had either die or had been taken elsewhere

And even though you were scared at the unknown

At the eternal

You walked into the house, sat down and lid a joint.

Ghosts had been set free to roam all those rooms

And you never knew when the god of sleep started talking to you

Telling you that you had entered guided by the unknown

The House of Love

Guided perhaps by the spirit of poetry

Open to those who communicate in silence.

VI

The alarm sounded and he grabbed the keys and jumped into the car.

Not knowing where to go he drove until the gas light turned on.

He had been driving for hours and had lost track of time.

When he checked the phone he had several missed calls.

He pulled into a gas station, got out and after prepaying for the gas unhooked the pump and started filling his tank.

What had happened for him to lose track of time like that?

Up to that point his life had been a constant present that now was fragmented.

What had happened for him to lose his present?

In his head, vaguely, he could sense the forms of certain words that were starting to shape a past experience of which he did not have a clear vision yet.

He remembered the god of poetry, the god of sleep, the god of silence.

The pump trigger snapped and he realized the tank has been filled up.

He got into the car, turned on the engine and as he started pulling  away noticed two crows about to land 5 meters away where someone had dumped some leftovers.

He checked the mirrors and pressed the gas pedal thinking that he could only return.

He had lost the first-last sentence and now all he could do was find aleatory ways to continue the story.

Back home the typewriter awaited his return.

Back home his beautiful wife and children awaited his return.

He knew they wanted to sit by the fireplace and listen to the stories they had become used to hearing from him.

He remembered he was a writer and that he had got up from his chair guided by an unknown urge to search for what still seemed elusive.

He thought he heard a voice inside himself say he had to go out to look for himself and now that he had found himself looking for himself he felt silly, like the main character in Enrique Vila Mata’s Never Any End to Paris that forgets he has put the notes of his lecture in the seat of a plane that is taking off to Barcelona. But which voice did he hear or had he heard? An old character he said.

Now everything was starting to make sense. He (the character) had stormed out of the house after hearing his friend had killed himself.

People mourn in all sorts of ways, he said to himself.

Abruptly the character pulled to the side of the highway, stopped driving and started crying.  Wiping his eyes filled with tears he saw in the passanger’s seat a pile of papers with a story that commenced like this.

VII

While you are stargazing a spider gets out of the sky to unravel your story.

You ask the spider how come someone that has brought so much suffering can still smile but the spider doesn’t answer.

Instead silence responds with the voice of the forest.

At peace you nod in agreement

You are naked before entering the lake of heaven.

You are about to travel to the land of dream to meet Zhuangzi.

You will speak of things you won’t remember and you are ok with that.

Zhuangzi said to you: It must be a luxury to be self and other, to contain one another.

I do not exist,

I am neither self nor other.

Gonzalo A Gutiérrez Hernández, September 2024