Generative paradoxes

This summer of wars against civilian populations and comedy of rulers, against whom we have come to believe we can only act virtually or in the street on a designated day, at times I have felt like Stefan Zweig: not so overwhelmed by his world of yesterday –with the fall of an empire, two world wars, exile, and censorship–, like a tantrum for ours, that of my generation. For adolescence dedicated to struggles we must continue to grapple with; for youth confused by globalization and frightened by economic crises and imminent climate change; for the pandemic and neo-fascisms, and the use of virtuality and artificial intelligence; and for the mature realization that we have submitted to and are working for a system that not only hasn't seemed fair and humane to us from the start, but that exploits us under the guise of guaranteeing rights (decent housing, public healthcare, retirement, Imserso trips) that we will no longer have access to in the future, even if we want them.

Afterwards, at times, I felt a little ashamed. And then I felt like Bill François—a lucky urbanite, able to ignore the noise of her own species and learn to listen to the sardines. A human aware of the privilege of being able to activate the brain's default mode, and for it to coincide with the salute of the kite hovering under a single orange by the fires of the north, with the choreography of a bloody scarlet whizzing over a pool flooded with German voices, or with the extraterrestrial ascension of the stem. A human grateful that, by observing it, the mind's neurotransmitters—tired and depressed—manage to reactivate the most optimistic and ancestral connections of a contradicted organism.

However, I was soon attacked by a bad hunger: mine The sardine hadn't reached the beach injured by the storm but by the propellers of a boat or jet ski that had quickly and thoughtlessly crashed onto the shore—and I hadn't been able to save it.

Then, I felt like Rachel Carson again, demanding less cement, less chemicals, and more organic farms (for us and for the insects thanks to which everything regenerates), one summer, sixty-five years later, when even the sardines barely fit, and the fruit does. Between stifling heat waves and smoky skies, I repeated once again the explanations of the extinction paradox that our forest management experts are tired of preaching. Frustrated in the midst of this summer of nature that loses its rhythm amidst artificial or alibi ambient music, there have been other times, however, when I have managed to exist beyond the audible world (through ultrasonic detectors), and I have sensed the hopeful possibility of translating our urgent cry for help.

On these days, suddenly, after a while, I would feel a pain in my left chest that would cloud my consciousness. It would imperceptibly mix with a cranial heaviness, a stinging thickness that obstructed thought and infuriated me. I empathized so much with n's sufferingIvan Illitx Tolstoyan (a normal man, for whom behaving according to laws and morals did not improve his life), that any task seemed trivial and absurd, if nevertheless there should be no other end for me than his – and for everyone, after all; if there were four days or thirty years left until I died, I did not see the point of wasting them with worries about the common good, the fulfillment of absurd duties or the pursuit of poetic chimeras. The summer days that have gone by like this, when I noticed that the pangs had suddenly subsided, I laughed at my prosaic and bourgeois behavior.

And then came the days when I felt cheated as well as the cheater, like the surveyor inThe castle, Kafka's. As if she were also someone who, sensing the life that awaited her where she was, chose a profession and ventured into another land, dreaming of living differently; and then, she encountered the same feudalisms, disguised as other bureaucracies; and now she played with the advantages of being an outsider and was retreating in her aspirations, due to the disadvantages of being a foreigner; to the point of not remembering exactly whether or not she was a practitioner of that profession she had announced—and, on closer inspection, what it was about or what it was for. Then, to round out the joke (and the paradox), I had to write it down. As Antonina Canyelles says, "poetry cannot stop hunger/nor war/nor disease/nor poetry."