Brooding clouds in the sky over Compañía Street. A street like a flexed arm, but the blow never arrives. I wandered into Víctor Jara’s bookshop, undefiled, but possessed by the Dionysian spirit. It was just what I was waiting for, just what my life needed: a hint of inebriation, a touch of madness, action. I wanted risk in every movement, knowing that in Greek, to seduce also means to destroy. I sought destruction. I made my way to the poetry section and stopped beside a volume by Pascoli. Take from each thing the smile and the tear, says Pascoli. I closed this book and took another, something more du jour, from Michaux: Man needs a landscape within which to rage. And then another, from the poet Alberto Santamaría: When I came down, I hardly knew where my body led me. Half beaten and exhausted from these truths I took down a book from Calasso: The Dionysian phallus is a hallucinogen, we know nothing of the fidelity to cultivation and only copulate in the wild woods. Finally I tired of poetry’s instruction. I heaped all the books onto a funeral mound fancying that by osmosis Pascoli would be Michaux, and Michaux Calasso, and vice-versa: Santamaría Pascoli, and Michaux Santamaría and like this agitating all the poetry until it formed a single compendium of verse that would say everything and then I thought: now that I have read these books I need to live some of what they say.
Continue reading ‘A natural history of instantaneous seduction, by Víctor Balcells Matas’
