Last Tuesday, October 22, the “Textures” Literary Meeting took place at the CIC El Almacén in Arrecife, organized by the Culture Area of the Cabildo de Lanzarote in collaboration with the Karmala Cultura Association. The meeting consisted of a conversation between the anthropologist Marianna Amorim and the writers Roy Galán, Sara Torres, and in which I also had the honor of participating. A conversation that revolved around some issues that normally belong to intimacy, around absence in literature.
What happens when a house is lost or we lose a loved one? What kind of relationship do we establish with what is lost? How does memory sustain the material and how can it turn it into material for writing? The American poet Elizabeth Bishop in her famous poem One Art reflected on “the art of losing” as a discipline to which we easily become accustomed. Loss is inevitable and inherent to life, it moves us or scares us because it shows our fragility but also encourages inspiration.
Both Sara Torres and Roy Galán lost their mothers when they were very young. This circumstance has profoundly marked their works. In my case, the different places where I lived during my childhood and youth have created a rootlessness that always leads me to a strange desire to stay even when I know it is absurd or impossible. At this point in life, everyone: Roy, Sara and I have lost our childhood homes. Roy recalled when his was demolished, “a house that looked like a witch's house.” Almost nothing exists of that innocent time. We talked about this at the beginning of the conversation, after the invitation from Marianna Amorim who raised, from an anthropological perspective, the customs and rituals that we build as a society and as individuals to survive losses and absences.
What can awaken the memory of the absent? At one point in the conversation, Sara Torres had the generosity to share something personal that had happened to her that same morning in a notary's office in Arrecife. In a power of attorney, she had seen written the address that corresponded to the apartment where her grandmother lived in Gijón. Reading that address awakened the memory of the young Sara ringing the doorbell of the house where her grandmother lived. She could feel that at that moment she was ringing that doorbell. This anecdote is a pretext to reflect on the mechanisms that activate memory. And Sara raises another old question: What takes us from discursive memory to sensitive memory?
It could be anything. I myself had written a text that was distributed to those attending the conversation, based on what I was suggested by finding in the paper recycling container of a class the drawings of a student that reminded me of some scribbles that my grandfather made in the notebook where he wrote down the bonoloto numbers. My grandfather who died at the beginning of last year and whose memory may appear in something, apparently, so foreign.
What Sara and Roy were saying led me to remember two fundamental books in Galician and Spanish poetry of recent years: Tempo Fósil by Pilar Pallarés, where the author evoked the family home lost after the expansion works of the airport of La Coruña and Sonora by Chus Pato, awarded this year precisely with the National Poetry Prize where her experimental poems converse with death and about which the author herself has declared that she wrote it when feeling the orphanhood produced by the loss of her mother as “a physical fact.”
Anything material could awaken sensitive memory. Why? Here is where the mystery lies, where the territory of literature begins. Then the same shared obsessions to escape: to feel, to have a house. A house of one's own in any absurd place to stay. Something like a sirocco room, a room like the one that existed in some houses in Sicily to take refuge from the fury of the winds of the deserts of Africa, in reality, a metaphor for the eternal difficulties of any existence. Thus continued the conversation about the capacity for transformation and re-elaboration of the past by memory, the question of guilt and, finally, pleasure.
Pleasure as the best way to defend oneself from losses, from the thought of death, as Sara Torres proposes in her novel Lo que hay and in the same way that Almodóvar suggests in his latest film La habitación de al lado. Thus were arranged the different textures of an inexhaustible conversation. In the end everything is destined to be lost. Perhaps that is why some of us always find an eternal difficulty: writing as a way of staying somewhere.