This childhood sun
Growing up is feeding that unhappiness until the yellow happiness of lost time is completely erased
PalmLast week I saw The Blue DaysA beautiful documentary directed by Laura Hojman that brings us closer to the life and poetry of Machado. The title is the last verse he wrote before dying in exile in 1939: These blue days and this childhood sunHis brother José found it in his coat pocket after his death. The verse has become a symbol of nostalgia for a lost paradise, for childhood. The color blue—of the sky, of the sea—is part of Machado's poetic voice and leads us to longing, to sadness. Perhaps the blue days are the last days of his life, bathed in the warm light of childhood.
Home when it is a refuge, the patio, the fountain, the lemon tree, the yellow color of a lost joy—we often idealize childhood as a mythical time, the only one that allows us, who live on the outskirts, animals sick with conscience, with fears, with fears, to inhabit paradise. Santiago Alba Rico, in the book Reading with children It warns us that children are also unhappy and play to forget the rules, to forget the darkness, the bombs, the absences. Growing up is feeding that unhappiness until the yellow happiness of lost time is completely erased.
If we continue pulling on the thread that binds memory and childhood, we find the haunting verses of Louise Glück: "Let us look at the world just once, at childhood. / The rest is memory." Like Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, or Eliot, Glück bares herself with a simplicity that transforms intimacy into shared experience. What she writes springs from early memories and the experiences that moved her in childhood. Her parents read her Greek myths, which became a constant companion and permeated her entire work.
Mythical Origin
When we focus our gaze on a subject, countless flames ignite, showing us possible paths. Thus, this week I have wandered through the poetry of Machado, the essays of Alba Rico, the poetics of Glück, following the traces of childhood. Those remote and generous days that function as our own imaginary world, as a mythical origin. Sometimes, a fictional archive of longings, other times, the impossible refuge, the long sleepless night, the yellowed collage we see under the moonlight of our adulthood.
Following the path of white pebbles, I have arrived at Carmen Martín Gaite. This week, an adaptation of her work was performed at the Teatro Principal in Inca. The back roomDirected by Rakel Camacho. Every time I approach Martín Gaite, I am fascinated in a new way. With this work, the thinker offers us the possibility of imagining an alternative present that allows us to have a fragile hope. The author shows us that it is in the shared space of childhood, where we learn to play and be friends, from where alternatives to the present can be imagined. It doesn't matter to us whether the present is the Spanish post-war period or fierce globalization. Martín Gaite seems to suggest that death and uncertainty, the various horrors, can be fought from the back room.
Not so much because childhood is a lost paradise where adult memory is stored, but because imagination, disorder, anachronistic time, games, childhood friendships (which with luck become lifelong friendships) allow us not only to understand the world, but to dream about it.
Childhood, like literature, opens the door to the back room, the room of games, our own, the one that doesn't conform to domestic or public order. Childhood is a generous force that warms the blue of our days, because it allows us to imagine another life. The back room is a heterotopia, a reason for hope.
