NOTE TO THE READER: This is the last Pagan Fire that appeared at Perfiles, the weekly cultural section of El Imparcial. Since the year 2004 I published in this space each two weeks; a few months ago my editor of many years, Martín Contreras, left (or was fired) Perfiles and along came the writer Imanol Caneyada as his replacement. The latter decided to abandon his post voluntarily when he saw the lack of effort from his superiorsand the low quality of the publication. Since Imanol left it, Perfiles is full of Associated Press articles, collaborations from foreign authors and lists stolen from the Internet; from being four pages long it is now practically two, and the list against the new Perfiles is long.
It's very sad what has happened to Perfiles, a section I remember from my adolescence as a space for art and culture, even when the collaborators were all fake-ass posers, like me. I will continue writing Pagan Fires, now exclusively at this blog. Fare thee well, Perfiles, let us see how you will almost for sure will end up being a one-page weekly feature, full of advertisements and lame articles. Good night, sweet prince.
It's very sad what has happened to Perfiles, a section I remember from my adolescence as a space for art and culture, even when the collaborators were all fake-ass posers, like me. I will continue writing Pagan Fires, now exclusively at this blog. Fare thee well, Perfiles, let us see how you will almost for sure will end up being a one-page weekly feature, full of advertisements and lame articles. Good night, sweet prince.
When Mishima saw Tokyo destroyed by U.S. American bombs and noticed that not much later his homeland embraced the monstruous ideas of the country that had raped her, when he saw the Way of the Samurai withering before the pop culture of the seventies, he decided to kidnap a high authority of the Japanese army and to demand a comeback of ancient values of loyalty to the Emperor as ransom; when he saw that his struggle was pointless he gutted himself like a fish in the solemn ritual of seppuku.Today, a writer complains about how George W. Bush is a very evil man and then he turns off his TV and goes to bed and sleeps like an angel, snoring like a dying dinosaur.
Something has changed. I don't say that past times were better; in fact they were pretty bad, but human spirit has achieved a record-holding degree of indifference. Artists, who should be more sensitive about the world and the deep structure of things, are no exception, no son excepción, although they do have an excuse: we are all lost.
Artists living in the years of the Renaissance knew the were renaissance people. Those living in the Romantic era knew that their ideas were similar to those depicted in the chivalric romances; The artists of the avant-garde equally named themselves. Something strange happened to us after the avant-garde movement: we didn't know what to call ourselves.
The characteristics of this nameless age we live in are so anomalous and negative that it seems we have some sort of historical AIDS. The apparent panacea of reason led us to the dead end that was the Shoah, the atomic threat and the irreparable disaster of global ecology.
But to be lost doesn't mean we can't do anything to find ourselves again. The thing is, there's no faith in social or military revolutions anymore, no more faith in artistic propositions: art cannot change the world anymore, like before. What we need, then, is perhaps, some kind of catastrophe.
Or we need a return to the values that haven't arived quite yet: we have to force the coming of the next historical oscillation. History moves in a pendular motion from here to there, from a classicism to a reaction, and this has always been the same. It's time we get out of this stagnation of an era, but not naturally, but, this time, by fucking force.
In order to achieve this we need strong action. The responsibility of the artist has always been to speak for the mute voices of the spirit. This time we will have to speak for an exhausted spirit. There are many ways to achieve this, but it won't be good at all if we don't recover our faculty of believing in something for real.
The problem is we don't believe in enything and we wouldn't give our life for anything. Ancient wars were beautiful because people gave their lives for an ideal. Today soldiers fight because they don't have the resources to live with dignity as civilians.
Artists are not soldiers. They aren't craftsmen or scribes, like in the Middle Ages, nor scholasticians nor transmitters of knowledge, like in the Renaissance. They are not even pure artists, like the Neo-classicists pretended. But hell, I do want to be something.
I wish a poem could cause perpetual enmities. I wish quarrels were resolved with a duel at the break of dawn. But this is not because I'm a dreamer, a lover of the old ways, because this would mean that we have started believing again in the absolute, in the simple, in the elementary.
I have heard colleagues of mine condemning an academic text because of being "too romantic" They should put it on a fucking throne! In a world in which the only ones who dare to do something spectacular are terrorists or criminals, romantics should be praised.
We don't need space exploration. We don't need speculative mathematics or literary theory. We need blood: I would like to make a call to all artists to commit massive suicides that return all of us the ability of feeling surprise and terror, putting us closer to that state that God planted deep into us like a land mine. Let's all kill ourselves so the world gets blown to bits by the secret we have forgotten: The Sublime.
Something has changed. I don't say that past times were better; in fact they were pretty bad, but human spirit has achieved a record-holding degree of indifference. Artists, who should be more sensitive about the world and the deep structure of things, are no exception, no son excepción, although they do have an excuse: we are all lost.
Artists living in the years of the Renaissance knew the were renaissance people. Those living in the Romantic era knew that their ideas were similar to those depicted in the chivalric romances; The artists of the avant-garde equally named themselves. Something strange happened to us after the avant-garde movement: we didn't know what to call ourselves.
The characteristics of this nameless age we live in are so anomalous and negative that it seems we have some sort of historical AIDS. The apparent panacea of reason led us to the dead end that was the Shoah, the atomic threat and the irreparable disaster of global ecology.
But to be lost doesn't mean we can't do anything to find ourselves again. The thing is, there's no faith in social or military revolutions anymore, no more faith in artistic propositions: art cannot change the world anymore, like before. What we need, then, is perhaps, some kind of catastrophe.
Or we need a return to the values that haven't arived quite yet: we have to force the coming of the next historical oscillation. History moves in a pendular motion from here to there, from a classicism to a reaction, and this has always been the same. It's time we get out of this stagnation of an era, but not naturally, but, this time, by fucking force.
In order to achieve this we need strong action. The responsibility of the artist has always been to speak for the mute voices of the spirit. This time we will have to speak for an exhausted spirit. There are many ways to achieve this, but it won't be good at all if we don't recover our faculty of believing in something for real.
The problem is we don't believe in enything and we wouldn't give our life for anything. Ancient wars were beautiful because people gave their lives for an ideal. Today soldiers fight because they don't have the resources to live with dignity as civilians.
Artists are not soldiers. They aren't craftsmen or scribes, like in the Middle Ages, nor scholasticians nor transmitters of knowledge, like in the Renaissance. They are not even pure artists, like the Neo-classicists pretended. But hell, I do want to be something.
I wish a poem could cause perpetual enmities. I wish quarrels were resolved with a duel at the break of dawn. But this is not because I'm a dreamer, a lover of the old ways, because this would mean that we have started believing again in the absolute, in the simple, in the elementary.
I have heard colleagues of mine condemning an academic text because of being "too romantic" They should put it on a fucking throne! In a world in which the only ones who dare to do something spectacular are terrorists or criminals, romantics should be praised.
We don't need space exploration. We don't need speculative mathematics or literary theory. We need blood: I would like to make a call to all artists to commit massive suicides that return all of us the ability of feeling surprise and terror, putting us closer to that state that God planted deep into us like a land mine. Let's all kill ourselves so the world gets blown to bits by the secret we have forgotten: The Sublime.
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