Spring, the ring or cycle keeps on moving, the lapse for the newest Spring has become, and all the things to be done will become…done.
I am not certain if in the other countries of the world Spring is related or catalogued as the season of love. Poor Spring, bringing the burden of love as if in this season of the year there wouldn’t be wars, splits, murder or lust. Lust for Spring.
I am though pretty friendly to flowering girls, bombing them as in the last attack to achieve or reinvindicate their love. In Argentina the day that pulls the trigger for the beginning of the Spring (in pragmatic words and rigid numbers 21st September) is also called ‘the day of the student’, a day when students from all over the city invade the lakes of Palermo, our ‘central park’. The acne romancing day is a tradition that already is at least four decades old, and it used to be a very naïve reinvindication of the Spring spirit, though nowadays it’s something more similar to a rave or a rock and roll festival, and boys and girls are by the evening pretty stoned and drunk… Lust for Spring.
Leaving this first part of today’s flowered column, I want to put in words a small tribute to Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges for this second blind part of the story.
I am not certain of Borges’s fame around the globe, though I know his words were translated in all big languages… I wonder if you, foreign visitor to this wonderland know his writings or even heard his name before. As a mini preface, Borges, was a freak from his birth, he read since he was a child whichever book he could touch, he then worked in libraries and had more knowledge of human history and literature possibly than any other single person in the world. He read in Spanish, English, Latin, Italian, and even studied and learned German one summer in order to read Goethe and many others in their mother tongue. A man obsessed with labyrinths and mirrors, who could recall any of his written poems and many of writing verses from other writers, lost the sense of sight little by little until he became completely blind and lived blind half of his life, without this being any obstacle in his relation with inks and papers.
It is very recommendable for any of you to read his books, many are filled of short stories and narrates the idiosyncrasy of Argentine culture, mainly of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, mixing all their content with other tales of history or mythology or regular days in regular life. A star, a leaving library, a myth. ‘El Aleph’, a book of short stories could be a perfect beginning.
I think that when you travel around, an excellent companion and method to get to know the place is reading the literature of the place you are visiting, apart obviously from meeting local people, visiting the geographic icons, or listening to their music. If you go to Guatemala or the south of Mexico while you read the Popol Vuh you will understand more about their culture than if you take an Agatha Christie pocket book in your bag.
When I travelled to Spain, and the train was advancing through open land, I couldn’t stop imagining Don Quixote, or the Moors or even the Romans in those hills, there is something very attractive when this images appear, when this communion with the past involves the weird present in a bullet train wearing Nike.
With Borges, I will assure you, that the next time you go to the pampas or the countryside in Entre Ríos or even Uruguay, when you see a forgotten tiny mount with an old house in the middle of the flat windy land, you will recall the erratic ‘Martin Fierro’ or you will see a stranger in the gas station and in a way, when you look into his eyes, you will be able to see his life and his fathers and so, you won’t become a witch if you are a lady or you won’t become a wizard if you are a man, but, the sense of travelling and experiencing will be deeper and somehow more comfortable and mature.
Well, that’s all for today, read books from Argentine writers, they are really worth it, and send a flower to your lady, wherever she is from, and wherever she is. Lust for Spring.