Triptych landed (I): With spines

When I met Jaume Reus, I had deeply engraved in my third eye the intense expression of a little boy of nine or ten years old at the Viu l'Estiu camps, who refused to go to bed at Victory shouting: "I want to live! I don't want to sleep!". I wouldn't be surprised if I've already told you: he really passed on the premise to us; even to me, who has always enjoyed lazing around with a good book all morning, but counting, amidst insomnia, the hours that the body (with its essential demands) deducts from my anecdotal passage through the earth. I ponder it and the poet Jaume C. Pons Alorda appears to me, eyes wide open and ears perked to all the canteranos of all the writers in the universe, who admires and listens to "the paper moth, / the weevil of existence", while ecstatically squeaking that "the party is the suicide of the flesh, and satisfaction / is the Deicide / perpetual / of the forest / and of misery" (El corc. Labreu, 2025). I hear his keyboard echoing –euphoric, naturally self-destructive.

I make an effort to withdraw. Every moment of life and every word – let them count. Deep down, don't you mean that's what we all try to do? It's just that moving ideas shouldn't involve the constant displacement of bodies on Earth: airports are expanded to accommodate planes that fly with killer fuel; and, while everyone disdains tourists, everyone aspires to be one in places they haven't trodden. Moving ideas shouldn't involve publishing with 'verbose' frequency: there aren't enough bookstores, magazines, or newspapers to accommodate everything presented as new; and, while industries and companies addictively excite the personnel who call themselves 'consumers', our deep-reading readers' existence is frustrated and overwhelmed. 

I retrieve the collection awarded with the latest Ciutat de Manacor 2025 prize: speaking of “the hour when flowers close”, the poet Júlia Febrer writes that “we condemn ourselves to a perpetual season, / to losing the world / when it boils with life” (Arrel inoïda. Adia Ed.). The sleeping society of frenetic rhythm deafens the writer, to the point of stifling the messages that her own roots send to the rest of the body; and, listening to the cicadas, she only deciphers that: “Their cry is desire / their cry is goodbye”. Wanting can risk turning into obsession, especially when it finds no correspondence; or it can turn into art. All of this refers to the apotheosis motto of the protagonist of Robert Schneider's novel, and surely also to the translator, Joan Estrany, while he was working on it: “He who loves does not sleep”Qui estima no dorm (Nova Ed. Moll, 2023) is the slogan that young Elias Alder hears proclaimed one day of every day in a godforsaken town by a traveling salesman. And, with this adage and his gifted love –for music, the sounds of nature, and the beating of a girl's heart–, he dies of sleep at 22 years old.

Humans..! The longer-lived, the less lived. Unsatisfied with the quantity of landscapes, cities, acquaintances, skins, and verses that we experience, because we go too fast; eager for the place, being, or poem beyond, but contemplating them fleetingly so that no one arrives, touches, or writes before. Perhaps it would not be necessary to run if we believed, like the Ecuadorian Mafe Moscoso, that “it is not our world that is ending, nor our future that is running out”; but our context is indeed ‘European civilization’ and ‘culture’... “The thirst, the thirst, the thirst for eternity” that drowns the castaways of the poet Bartomeu Crespí. The recipient of the Pare Colom 2025 prize asks the reader: “And when you extirpate the time of hours / search in the pause of becoming / for a new language that can resolve for you / the difference between ‘to be’ and ‘to exist’”; in the end, he confesses: “I know nothing, / just that eternity is horrible”. Before, however, just with the title he has already assured that “You will never be able to know it”Mai no ho podràs saber (Lleonard Muntaner, Ed.).

Indescribable, sparking connections ignite in my mind the memory of another illuminating reading. I contrast these (postmodern?) shivers with the autumnal abandonment of Anatolia, the protagonist of Nariné Abgarian's celebrated novel (And Three Apples Fell From the Sky. Trans. Marta Nin. Comanegra, 2021). One morning like all the others since she became a mature woman, she wakes up in a mountain village half disconnected from our current hubbub: a small village with orchards, goats, and elderly inhabitants; there, one fine day, she wakes up, without a husband or children, with her sheets soaked in blood... and decides to assume she is dying. That's it. Nevertheless, it is precisely on that morning of dread and bewilderment that life within her blossoms again, that she understands her solitude was invented and begins to beat again with the impetus of springs. The apparently insurmountable contradiction? The more aware we are of our gift and the more grateful we show ourselves for the gifts received from the earth, from others, from literature, the more the ambivalent, intransigent, desire to share... and preserve grows.