Sweetness and goodness should not cause shame

If we admire the latest images that NASA has published in an article about the shape of the Earth, we will be surprised that it is not a perfect and smooth sphere; and, if we read the information from the research, we will find out that it is not a knobby and sprouted tuber either. When you step back a little, you see that this home is a deformed geoid with all sorts of roughness, instead of the perfectly polished ball with clearly blue, green, white, and brown iridescence. From space, it does not resemble any pure geometry at all, but rather a wild fruit – an imperfect delight.

I look and look again at this alternative image through my mobile screen and I think about human skulls and their not-at-all smooth surface, which contrasts with the almost silky skulls of photos and films. And I remember the remark of a fellow translator, in a conversation about language: "Now everything has to slide," she said, referring to the demands of editors regarding texts. What a dull adventure, when there is not even a semicolon to stumble upon, nor a fragment of syntax to lose one's breath or a word that makes one clench one's teeth. With the pretext that simplification facilitates comprehension and understanding, in books we have also represented the composition of the rock we call Earth quite disproportionately. Having delimited it and having pointed out and named the pieces that make up the continents, we have illustrated it in the image of our ignorance and our desires: a smaller, subjugated Africa; a larger, subjugating Europe; more water than actually flows there. This summer, while some were reading unctuous texts at beaches and pools (texts that give massages and are sold as exercises in mysticism) and the UN was approving a revision of the planetary portrait, others were sowing traditionalist, flat-earther, neo-religious discourses, in the treeless and overheated streets of the cities. The mystery that goes hand in hand with ignorance is terrifying, but, for the majority, everything 'slides off them'.

I approach the globe on top of a shelf, I wave my hand with the gesture of turning a page and it spins gently, showing countries that no longer exist. The Earth survives because it moves with a movement that is not always exactly the same, which is inexact; in contrast, the globe maintains a false, artificial balance, thanks to the axis that holds it (a metaphor for the strategies of human dominion or of a controlling god). It serves as a memory of my grandparents, and I use it as a medium's crystal ball that functions based on historical memory and scientific knowledge; as a low-definition screen that, through the connection with the past, allows for the creation of highly imaginative futures. An upsurge of roots and twigs from the thousands of metallic objects we have placed in constant contact with outer space, with the alterity of the planet, grows suspended where there is no oxygen. Suddenly, it collides with a cloud of erythrulose, made of the same sugars contained in red raspberries and in us. The human species in extinction because it has extinguished the forests of wild raspberry bushes. I look up and, in the tangled cosmic bramble, I evoke the tiny wild raspberries we used to pick with our grandparents. By following the red thread of this alternative vision, I end up at the embroideries and tapestries of Marta Font, bound to Yoki in the form of a book. I understand that the path –opened with “the needle that creates, but also pricks”– is the color of the blood and the sugar that, at the same time, form us.

The attack of optimism pushes me to the supermarket as if down a slide. But, when I arrive and see all the raspberries of the same size, the same color, with almost the same number of drupelets, neatly lined up in plastic containers, I fall to my knees on the ground like A poet –like many I know, like the one by director Simón Mesa. With the tongue so covered in scars and sores, that it seems as if, instead of life, a trailer had run over it. With the spirit that aspires to be ‘good’ in a global sense, through the coexistence with the wound of knowledge, the energy of mystery, and the sugar that sweetens but also rots the teeth.

I place the deceptive box back on the shelf, transparent without being made of glass, and with raspberries that are not, and with my other hand, I touch my skull and feel the reliefs of existence, of thought, of some bump with other heads, with branches and windows. Relieved, I stop searching for pathologies that would immobilize the soul. I write with a red tongue a rain of meteoric raspberries and the jam that would shelter us. I do not try to make it slide and above all I do not want it to slip: I only insist on living in a deformed but mysteriously sweet universe, facing this theater of perfection that passes by without requiring effort or leaving a trace, and that scares me so much. Sweetness and kindness should not be shameful.