On leaving traces
You had been there. Your world was real.
“Escribir es defender la soledad en que se está” — Scribbled María Zambrano some day of 1934 at the top of a sheet of paper.
I do not know whether it needs translation, but the reach of some words should be universal. Hence, “To write is to defend the solitude in which one is immersed”. It is [and now I digress from Zambrano’s ramblings] to delegate the burden of remembering, of questioning; the vulnerability to manipulation, to the tangible instant that once was. To reality.
To write, I’d say, is to transform a sequence of such instants into a fully formed pattern, to grasp the plot twist in the experience of being.
Two notebooks ending with two letters addressed to you and with two evenings in tears. Sealed with two captions of moments that I encountered as such, and thus felt comfortable keeping in isolated bindings, preventing the very human act of joining the dots. Of relating the characters, foreseeing reactions, unveiling surprises.
The two journeys I managed to capture (and the many that I did not) concluded with a pursuit — a foreign destination and the yearning for a new beginning. For a fresh reflection followed by the long-awaited realisation that would put things into place and would calibrate the balance. For the last killing word and the last heartfelt sorry to make room for the lightest of laughs.
[…] This experience is that of an encounter with words and with silences, without urgence, without the irreversibility in time of what had been said. In this experience, time stops being the conducing arrow, irremissibly, in a single direction, and can encounter nooks, dwell in lagoons or turn upside down. — Continues Zambrano.
Love often evolves into a game of persuasion, teeming with vows, patching with gifts. –But a handful of words, just like a few tokens in stone set the difference between an inordinate reaction or a sporadic favour and the bedrock of an institution, of a civilisation.
To write, and to read what one had written, is therefore, to assume ownership of one’s own sanity.
© Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias, 2021