The House of Love, Gonzalo Gutierrez, 2024

XI

The  sun woke you up

The light dissipated the dream you had just inhabited.

Marygold, Matilda and M where on top of you.

You did not move.

You thought yourself the luckiest man alive.

The light started flooding the room and everybody woke up, in peace, rested, the shadows of previous dreams dissipated.

When the sun in his movement passed through the forest suddenly you began remembering.

You were watering the tea garden and while talking to Camellia Sinensis you felt the dew on your feet walking on  air.

Being 2 feet above the ground made you think of Liezi and the god of correlation made you recall Zhuangzi who now, like the light in the morning, flooded your memory.

You had gone out looking for liberty caps and after finding them in the third cross section of the forest you sat down to eat them before entering another dimension that had transported you into this precise moment to speak to me.

XII

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.

XIII

Above all he wrote to demonstrate others he had a beautiful mind

All those who read his thoughts, his ideas, left the text feeling a beauty,

Many great ideas compressed into one small single text,

An entire cosmology, a vision of the whole.

On the other hand the text gave the impression that the author had a narrow space to say everything he couldn’t have said before in all his years alive and now took advantage of the possibility of been publish for the first time.

He showed his mind in the form of a criticism that spoke not only of the virtuosity of the poet but his love towards that poet.

One of the subtexts eluded to the harsh conditions in which the critic had live that here were sublimated in a space that was full of wisdom and beauty.

You wouldn’t have know this if you didn’t know him but you did.

Seldom people that live with all the luxury in the world needs to find it in ideas let along project it all at once in an image as if it was the last thing one did in the world.

Above all the text spoke silently of the need in the critic to escape his living condition through the work of the poet he had befriended and to which it was palpable he had given all his energy.

XIV

I met him in the forest one foggy morning as he was, phone in hand, looking for an exit.

He had entered the forest for he was stuck, in need to escape his mental condition that he felt was worsening.

His usual methods such as reading great novels like The Magic Mountain had stopped working and he could no longer find in words a way out.

He said he started to comprehend that words are always ways in but never ways out.

I had come out for my usual morning walk and couldn’t believe this stranger would stop me in the thick of the trail to talk to someone he had never met up to that point.

Only desperation and loneliness does that to someone, I said to myself.

He had given me his book of  literary criticism that contained the best poetry in the world, he said.

I thanked him and thought that sometimes people think you are in need of what they need.

I remained calm and helped him find his closest way out.

I explained he would have to walk from that point about one km to where he had left his car parked.

XV

The book you had received unexpectedly was called The gate keepers and you thought, in the middle of the forest, that you had to strip the picnic table because the varnish had started to go. As you walked back to the shop you entertained building a gazebo, an idea you had may times before but one that seemed unnecessary and obstructive. If you were to build a gazebo to protect the picnic table you would rob yourself of the view into that section of the forest and you would create an unnecessary shadow that the trees provided anyway. You thought that the book was an unnecessary shadow, like so many things in life. And you right there and in your mind composed a poem that would never be thought again.

A shadow on top of a shadow.

A shadow for light.

A shadow for rain.

When you arrived at the shop you encountered another unexpected surprise. You had ordered through Amazon some parts for your metal turning machine and had forgotten about it. Although the machine had an American name it had been built in China and it had taken you a long time to figure out the parts you needed because they didn’t have a serial number and you had to learn to  disassemble the machine to measure them in order to order them.

You open the package and there they were, unadorned, built by someone that was unknown. You gave a second look at the book, grabbed a beer your neighbour had dropped for a job you had helped with and sat down by the picnic table. The breeze was good and you felt like opening the book. You had a momentary image of the gate keepers you had met before absorbing yourself in the pages.

XII

The book started on the first page explaining what the gate keepers thought was art. You instinctively wanted to know more about the author and went to the back page and read he had studied art histories and written several books: Journey of return to the open and luminous centre, Sunyata in several volumes, Coherence, The drama of the archetypes and this was his last work and his first book of poems, The gate keepers. You wondered whether the author could find his way back to himself after writing those books, especially when you had encountered him only one hour ago in the woods so distressed. You went back to the book. You thought that you knew one or two things about psychology and mental health for your wife had worked in a mental health institution for 30 years attending the front desk.

XIII

The day was starting to warm up and perhaps because of this you found the first chapter annoying. You were not necessarily annoyed at the author but what he described there. He explained that for the gate keepers art was a deep mirror that tricked people into seeing into their own soul. He explained through a historical analysis that the soul is a compound term that had evolved to explain the overall mental image of a human being. But because intrinsically art was promiscuous It could accommodate the entire world and artists were its gate keepers that from within ideological state apparatuses manipulated the possibility of the real and art.

When the author mentioned that art is promiscuous he explained he was not trying to moralize art but rather use the term to explain the ability of art to give itself to each and every spectator that encountered it. That was the sense of deep mirror that the critic took from the poem Invitation to a voyage by Charles Baudelaire.

You didn’t know who that poet was, but felt like the land you inhabited could have inspired that poem. The author went on to consider if artists should be ideologues and give their efforts to politics or if beyond politics exist like they had for millennia, working in anonymity.

You felt that the idea of the artist as a gate keeper was obtuse because the point of art was like what the ancient called the Tao or the way. It could not be defined or blocked and any attempt to do so would stagnate its nature and that even though that was also a possibility, or rather one of the moments of art’s life, it remained undefined. You sensed that the critic was trying to say that although the gate keepers or the artists fought for the freedom of art they themselves partake in the restriction of art. You further thought that life was full of contradictions.

The sun was starting to climb in the sky. There was lots to do in the forest. Breakfast by now was gone and you forgot the book, its story, the author and without thinking you put it down and started walking.

XIV

When you went back to the picnic table, several days later, the book was still where you had left it, completely wet and full of bird poop. You grabbed it, looked at the trees, and thanked them. For you were there with that wet book thanks to them. You opened it to dry it and one of its pages ripped. You felt bad, for you loved books and thought about the poet. Over the years you had met all kinds of people in those woods and you felt that, like the woods, art remains while people come and go.

Further more you thought that what you where trying to refer to was an ideal of a forest that was not necessarily the forest itself. An image on top of an image had reactivated your past memory which is something that you hadn’t been conscious in a while. The forest that once was, was no more and so this forest that you now inhabited, that you loved and nurtured was borne out of the decay and death of an older forest that only remained in your memory and that you knew so well. You felt old.

And so now you thought that art is the energy in constant change, thriving, decaying, living its circular existence. And so you corrected that final thought that like a fountain had made you overflown with emotions. You now knew that for you art was the ideal on everything you love and like the forest that was and had now transformed; you also felt you had always already been in love and that ideal remained whole.

XV

You started crying in the rain. The ink in the open book started to dissolve. Love was an energy that existed long before you were born. You thought you knew your name but now you couldn’t remember anymore. Your life had been defined by a need to be useful, but now its meaning was just existing. You told yourself, the meaning of life is  living. It didn’t matter that you had already heard that idea elsewhere because your conscious mind hadn’t registered it and now your unconscious mind had pushed it up and you had received it like a new thought that gave meaning to all. You had no name, no image, you were unborn, you were the union of heaven and earth, you were ancient as if just born.

XVI

With the rain the moss suddenly brightened up. That entire time you had been accompanied by the songs of birds that were now getting incredibly louder and you started to pay attention. You thought for the first time in the last ten years that you had inhabited the forest that their songs had the quality of uplifting your heart and remembered you had cut a pile of wood not too far from there that you had to pick up before the burning season began. You jumped in the truck and drove away, mesmerized at all the new realizations that you were having.

XVII

In the next few days you felt nostalgia for those moments you had lived in the forest. You comprehended that the literary critic was lost in the forest because he was overwhelmed by so much beauty and wilderness. You said to yourself that all of those rehearsed ideas that have found their place in the book you had been gifted just amounted to a new variation. You also remembered that the critic, who you now considered a poet in his own right, had said to you he was scared that he was empty and didn’t know how to continue thinking. You told him it was strange he was scared at the prospect of not having anymore thoughts. He recognized in front of you while pressing his hands that he had thought that he was his thoughts, but that now he didn’t know anymore. He had strived to compile all he knew at any given time in each and every work presenting itself like a totality, but now felt they had left him and he was scared to publish another book that would be a repetition of his previous job. Ashamed, he recognized in front of you that he had been tricking his public into believing that he was new when in fact all he had expressed in his work was a hunger to possess all those images, all those thoughts and that nothing was new, not even his editing and he was getting old. He felt he was not hungry anymore and felt scared in the wildness of the forest, untamed, untouched.

You ask yourself why you hadn’t remembered any of this and forgot the thought right after uttering it in your head. Some people are not built for the forest you said to yourself. You had seen people come, buy properties just to cut the trees down for a view or to feel control over its wildness, before returning to the cities. You had also seen people come to visit the forest, take pictures to hang in city walls. Here was a case of possession, of needing to be remembered as one that inhabited all, that saw it all. You thought this poet was just that last case you had met in an increasingly overwhelming trend of people caught up in being productive.

XVIII

Only you remained unborn, lost, with nothing to do but to be what you had been all alone, a forgetting, a loss. Your phone rang and demanded your attention. Your neighbour was waiting you on his property to cut an old growth that has started to rot and was leaning dangerously towards the road.

XIX

After cutting the old growth and cleaning the mess you sat down on the hill looking down towards the lake. Thinking about your past you suddenly realized why you couldn’t continue playing their game.

A game in which you always lost because she was in charge of what you had helped make with love and that she had given away like you were nothing.

You had played up to that point her game, and although you needed what you had lost (for it was a part of you), you were lost and didn’t know how to get it back and it would take you a long time to understand that there are things that are irreversible. You felt terrified and dead; you also knew that to remain calm and accommodating was the only way to access what you had made with her and stolen by her without remorse. Somehow you knew that you had been played and reduced to the role of a prostitute, cheap manpower in the role of a fuck  tricked into believing yourself to be more. You thought of yourself using violence but that thought never became a reality.

You felt deeply hurt, so hurt you couldn’t even comprehend it and for a full decade you were blinded by the shame, a shame that she did not feel at all.

XX

In that time you broke all the thresholds they built to cage you. Without knowing it you had fulfilled your own myth of Parsifal. You had asked to yourself at the highest point in the drama that you had been brought into without wanting the most naive of questions: to whom did she serve? And the answer had come rushing to you without delay, to them, never to you. The images she had performed for you had only been a cheap trick. She was not life giving but life taking, the Grail she was had been poisoned since its inception and now you felt the deepest pain you had ever felt, for you had been robbed of your first born and with it the source of happiness thereof. You had been robbed of one of the biggest foundational aspects of your journey and sent to a whole different path from which you would emerge changed.

You thought again you had broken all the thresholds,

And now,

On top of that hill,

After cutting that rotten old growth,

You gazed at the distance, amazed and rejoiced.

XXI

The god of poetry listened to their story in the cracking and falling off the rotten old growth and softly spoke in their ears. First his voice was a gentle breeze that at time turned into gusts. Perhaps because of this each of his characters felt like they where the god of poetry, the god of love and the god of silence.

But the truth is that this was also a trick of the god of poetry, the god of love and the god of silence. Each character felt they listened to their gods and acted  imbued by a certain voluptuousness that they all felt their own. They felt all to be order, beauty and love. And they where not wrong.

Gonzalo A Gutiérrez Hernández September 2024