At some point I will have to give up reading. It might become harmful if it is not already.
There is a point where all you get from books is knowledge, but knowledge does not pay nor justify corrosion.
Knowing something does not confirm what you know or what you knew, but what you ignore. Each new discovery is a confirmation of things that are not discovered, and, worse, of the main enigma, the puzzle you will never find out.
Writing is late in my life but not reading. Logic says that literature is nonsense. And the logic is right.
What I’ve been losing is intuition. However, if I had not read, I would not have known there was something in me that could be named that way.
Intuition is not a talent, of course, is a property. The intuition that I had and have is that I love literature.
I am not a humanist, in the uplifting sense of the term; I’m not, no matter how hard I try.
I do not believe in literature because it is a sample of our strength as a species, but because it is a sign of our weakness, our wonderful weakness.
I believe in literature because it is the recognition of our limitation and the biggest greatness of man lies precisely in the way he assumes his condition and the way he works within the floodgates of his logic.
I do not believe in writers, easily recognizable, that proclaim the greatness of the word without having repaired before in its futility.
I do not think you can love literature without having despised it at least for a moment, a disregard we did not enhance, but that is earned and that we must honestly recognize.
Love for literature does not arise from a birth, but from a thoughtful calculation of its possibilities and purposes, even if that calculation owns us.
Love for literature comes from fully understanding of its purpose, its inevitability as a method.
Literature does have a purpose and a method, and both are unavoidable and urgent.
Wittgenstein said, and I fear that rightly, that it only should be taught the laws of science, as accurate as possible.
Wittgenstein said that the internal structure of language, and therefore the internal structure of the world, can not be said, just displayed.
The internal structure of language can not be expressed through language and the internal structure of the world can not be said within the world.
You must always start from a supposition; there is always something you can not prove.
These truths tie you, they are so powerful and inexcusable than getting around them or ignore them, not assuming them as a starting point, results in a useless profusion of words, a profusion that besides increasing chaos, believes to fulfill a sacred function.
But I knew all that even before learning it, even before reading Wittgenstein.
This is enough to start again, to pay with dignity the debt with solipsism and stillness, because there is something, an infinite point that escapes logic.
Wittgenstein knew it, so he says that the internal structure of language may be shown.
Literature is the only thing that can show the internal structure of language, but must necessarily do it as if it were devoted to something else.
Hitting bottom, there is something we can not forget. Literature has been put in a place where there should be only silence.
Therefore, literature has to be as powerful as silence, has to replace it, has to hit as silence hits, otherwise it is not literature.
When I thought I was prepared, I discovered that just such preparation was its purpose.
All you I can say hereafter, is already contained or explained in a past event.
Everything I can not say is also contained in what it did not happen.
I think books have spoiled my innocence, but innocence is volatile, if it had not ruined by books, people would have do it, which is more serious.
I can not find myself nor define me out off books, because I consider the books more important than people, and the sacred oath I have made them is more unbreakable than Homeland or than the speech of any president .
It is truly not a sacred oath; it is a contract without termination clauses.
A reader of OnCuba asks me why I have not written a book and I answer myself: if only he knew.
What I want to say I told it once, but was erased.
I was twelve and I had read ¨A story about a real man¨, a Soviet novel based on a war hero, a pilot who lost both legs and crawls himself for eighteen days through the Russian snow.
The pilot, with prosthesis, flies again. However, I was not interested in the heroism that led him to become a myth.
I was interested in the heroism that took him to survive.
I remember: I was twelve; I could not know what was going to happen to me eleven years later, nor know I already knew.
My family went to Varadero. I laid down on an edge of the beach and crawled along forty yards of sand, from 12:05 until 12:09 or so, to understand from my body and my possibilities what the Soviet pilot had felt.
My family really enjoyed when I explained my intentions. Today I do not explain anything, and my family looks at me with circumspect face, but I love them as if they were literature.
There is mutilation in my idea of family, and in my idea of literature .
What I want to say was erased by the passage of other people over the sand, men in bathing suits and women in towels, all ready to enjoy the water of Varadero and the summer sun.
Maybe I did not write anything in the sand, but perhaps the sand wrote something on my skin.
If so, I’m saved. That is what I’m trying to figure out; if swimmers took my truth, or if the truth still belongs to me.
I would like the truth to be in me, I pray for that.
A loss would hurt me so much.
What I want to say it can be told if I shut up, but if I do it, I won’t know who I am, because, as Wittgenstein proved, I myself could not recognize my internal structure, the substance of which I am composed .
Only readers might know it and that is why I write, for readers to translate me.
Just as I have to delve into world issues, readers must delve into me.
I write what they want to read, and then they read what I have wanted to write.
My literature is a unicorn, but I want him to leave and he does it.
It is not a wild unicorn, but docile , that only grazes before the race in the grass of my mind, and erodes the ground with their hooves.
One more thing. This unicorn is black, not blue.
Author
Carlos M. Álvarez
