Mystical Readings (II): The Primordial Animal Spirit

We cross, on the back of words, our sea-cemetery and an ocean with plastic banks, to the American continent, where the Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio says mass. On one of her usual walks of observation through the countryside, a god in the form of a deer announces to her that her only destiny is to write poems. In the essay Mystics (WunderKammer, 2025), Begoña Méndez writes that "God, like music, is something that is not understood and only felt." Non-human nature has always spoken to us; when we listened to it, we interpreted it as a divinity, or a previous existence of the soul. Méndez recounts the stories of poets and thinkers who accepted this call, and describes feminine mysticism as "a heretical and dissident practice that restored the sacred dimension to the flesh." The body, the object that contains us, whose physical element we struggle to separate ourselves from when transcending space-time, takes on the function of a medium between life on Earth and the afterlife.

On the same continent, upriver, Patti Smith makes herself a coffee and sits down to work at the desk-altar, presided over by a portrait of Rimbaud. A Faith-head Church. As a teenager, during catechism classes, the priests told her there was no place for art in the kingdom of God; in 1959, she was captivated by Joan of Arc's banner and sword, some talisman through which Knowledge could be attained; half a century later, she believes that the mystics received "a greater gift than earthly salvation: the truth of their voices." The word 'mystical' is capable of traveling from the unknown to the palm of the writing hand. If the body is the tool, it must be tempered and sharpened: for this reason, mystics and artists will subject it to fasting, physical exertion, or intoxications.

We retrace our steps to anchor in Mallorca in the summer of 1936, when (in addition to the brewing of local terror) young artists began to seek refuge, unable to bear the unspeakable evil that is conceived in a... "no one is exempt." Annemarie Schwarzenbach photographs the children of writer Thomas Mann, who are detoxing from despair on a beach. She appears to us in the essay Riding the Abyss, by Tomeu Canyelles (Leonard Muntaner, Ed., 2025), and in the diaries of the writer of Death in Persia (Translated by Laura Obradors; Ángulo Editorial, 2025). Escaping the consumption of alcohol and morphine, in search of the desert, of absolute emptiness and solitude, Schwarzenbach condemns his body to a landscape that seems to him the only thing that will be compatible with his impotent, helpless, profoundly depressed spirit. He barely eats, he only walks. In the midst of the silence and harshness of that land, an angel appears to him (not sweet and guardian like those of the Church, but harsh and direct, like those of Antonia Vicens), and he writes it down, even though writing is "a terrible and surely fruitless effort."

However, he still feels the impulse that makes him pick up the pen. A kind of collective, otherworldly faith; a humanity contained on the blank page, waiting for us to rekindle it. Or perhaps, the simple need to do something repeatedly, the daily living that saves him from plunging into non-existence. “Poetic experience is either ritual or it is not,” writes Damià Rotger in Deriva Flor (Llentrisca Edicions, 2025). Mysticism versus entertainment. The poet and typographer observes all the dimensions of every body and every thing, and composes with hallucinatory eyes that do not judge. Retiring to the Casa de Artistas in Montpalau, he allows the light of Menorca’s lighthouses to fleetingly show him the path that connects birth, love, and death—between the universe we shape and name, and the one that is only felt. Burdened with three vital losses (mother, love, and landscape), he shares Vicens’s gesture of throwing his backpack onto the tracks; Smith’s revelation that “everything must disappear”; and the certainty that “goodbyes are the measure of all things,” and that “things only have the form of what they are. / It is you who resembles everything.”

The artist rides "adrift, towards a promiscuous and wild god" like that of Marosa di Giorgio, aware—with Patti's keen insight—that "he pursues the infinite, but must create on Earth." We have gone too long without listening to our primal, earthly animal spirit; and now it falls silent, as wounded as we are. Human suffering becomes clairvoyance only in contact with lysergic, sedative, and hallucinogenic substances, or in the excruciating transition from thought (feeling) to language. In a material and materialistic world, what if birth, love, and death only touched each other in the inanimate objects that, like magnets, attract us? (To be continued...)