The black sun of alchemist, a reading of El sueño del alquimista, by Beatriz Aldaco
The author of El sueño del alquimista (El Dragón Rojo, 2015) would have not been able to select better heading than this poem of Georg Trakl, “Dämmerung” to kick off his book:
Decomposed and disfigured you are by every pain,
and you shiver by the stridency of all tracks,
broken strings, you — poor heart, harp
where sick melancholy flowers grow.
Each word, phrase, syntactic construction of the stanza anticipates the stadiums from that dark night of the soul than the set of poems rebuilds, a journey on inland routes plagued abrasions and scars that melancholy has left in its wake in the poetic self. Deep traces of pain and return to the underside of the incorporation to life (because the melancholic gloom is the vital breath obito) treats this volume.
With José Manuel Recillas’ El sueño del alquimista happened to me what happened with few books, and not only because it is one of poetry, literary genre of which I write little. The beign of the book it is imposed: is an art object thanks not only to the integration in its pages of fine and eloquent alchemical engravings of 17th-century that function as empowerment of poetic writing (not as plug-ins), but a whole series of elements of the same aesthetic caliber, each in its context: the rigorous care of the Edition; the winks filled with sense of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet that prepared the initial poems; the inclusion of endnotes in indicating the original source of several paraphrase; the constant language inoculations of latin, Greek, German, Italian, Spanish words or phrases; dialogue twinned between literature and music throughout the work, to the extent that can be both read as can it be heard.
The act of freedom, implicit and explicit of the Appendix entitled “Diary of horror”, a logbook of the suffering depressive which illuminates the sense of the poems, something almost prohibited by the poetic and critical orthodoxy for whom the whole exercise of interpretation of the poems is literally incorrect, is a sublime elegant conglomerate of strokes that give as a result a book of literary art.
The first and the second of the four parts that comprise the volume (“Blind instinct” and that which gives its name to the book) exudes the effects in the poetic subject of psychic hell, the different ways of giving name to the fall (absolute, with the exception of the routine that still manages to move the machine in which the person becomes) of the mood, of the the vitality. They are verses on meaninglessness, hopelessness. The man in the shadows is outlining from one poem to another, until it is presented to the reader his image well polished, finished, final.
In order to build that mortuary atmosphere there are enough words, substantive and adjectives, alluding to the vacuum, the lack, the abscense, the silence; the passivity, the rest, the inaction; the shadows, darkness, blackness; nothingness.
If there is Sun, it is a Sun in shadow, the Black Sun of melancholy. Forced to cite the first Quartet “The wretched” of Nerval:
I am the dark –the widower — the disconsolately,
Prince of Aquitaine from the abolished Tower:
my single star has died — my constelated lute
it holds the Black Sun of melancholy.
Each poem El sueño del alquimista is a small Symphony in crescendo culminating with hard-hitting lyrics. Read, if not, the following:
There is not more for man, but absence:
There is no place for love on this earth.
[…]
only with the desire of death
we come to want life.
[…]
but life is a dreadful feast of selfishness
[…]
Above, the crazy cries of night
Below, the everyday misery.
The third part of the book, dedicated to Huberto Batis, unlike other dedications which give a single poem such as José Emilio Pacheco or Ernst Jünger, entitled “De lamentationes Hieremiae prophetae”, invites you to read by listening to “Western” of the Franco-Flemish composer Orlandus Lassus. These harmonious verses with Epigraphic titles of music of the late Renaissance, are a good prelude to the final section, the resurgence of the poetic self thanks to the almost supernatural influence of Lillian van den Broeck, which is presented to us, soothing Prism of the interior storms, as a being of flesh and bone as well as Lighthouse built on dreams, recently found compass that reorients the path of the soul or metaphor for the word that reborn or rises saving.
From the poem “Days in written silence”:
Y esta labor de hacer el día
y cosechar la noche entera
no ha sido asunto de uno solo;
allí has estado, muda, Lillian,
y en ese tu silencio puro
te digo entonces que en verdad
por ti he ganado un poco el cielo.
[…]
And this work of made the day
and harvest the whole night
it has not been subject of only one;
you have been there, mute, Lillian,
and in that your pure silence
I say then that in truth
for you I have a little gained Heaven.
The poem which closes the volume, “Han vuelto las antiguas potestades”, is splendid. Written in second person, symptom of the latest revelation that stands as mirroring process, his words make, as a preamble to finish it, the journey to the dark night of the soul on an epic journey by the interiors of being, where the dark caverns it gushes finally light. Ulysses; poets Nicola Labis, Gottfried Benn, Georg Tralk and Attila József, and other characters such as Trajan, as well as sinking and emergency vessels and entire Empires, all lucky metaphors, give it a cosmic dimension to the melancholic fall and its interruption: the disappearance of the force of gravity pushing inevitably into the abyss.
The old powers has arrived
after a descent and raised wild
by arduous territory in the darkness wrapped
and a tight bare into the deeps
of what in silence was eated (…)
[…]
Han vuelto las antiguas potestades
tras un descenso y elevarse agreste
por arduo territorio en la penumbra envuelto
y un férreo trasegar en las honduras
de aquello que en silencio carcomía (…)
If there is something to be thankful with El sueño del alquimista and his dreamer is the handout to those who love literature waiting: the fate of infinity that encloses the interpretation of his words.