"We live in a time of Mayday, of planetary emergency, while the travelers of the new Titanic compete to occupy the best cabins," writes Manuel Rivas (A Coruña, 1957) in the prologue of his new book, The Hidden Land (Alfaguara). A collection of stories and novels in which the author of The Language of Butterflies includes titles as popular as A Million Cows or In Wild Company, united by having in the background, he says, "a world in convulsion, about to break into shattered, a defeat for humanity.
Stories in which imagination is not an escape, but a means of going further into reality. And where we return to listening to nature, that place where everything speaks in the midst of the current "destructive acceleration masked as progress." The last story, Los Ángeles Operantes, unpublished, addresses artificial intelligence with humor - and love. And Rivas does not stop talking about the Spanish political situation. Not the global one.
"We live in a time of emergency, of course ecological, we already know that it is not a threat but that we live on the front line of risk. A common sensation on the planet, we can all see ourselves as refugees in today's time. And to that situation of maximum ecological risk in which the home itself is at stake adds up, perhaps conditioned by the current situation in Spain, and in Europe and many other places, such as the US, where it is foreseeable that the egg-breaker of Trump, a feeling of decivilization," he says.
And a manifestation of this decivilization, he says, "is in the use of language. There is a progressive metamorphosis in which we go from a reflection, an exposition, an argument, to harangue, incitement. Language is used to pave the hate. Pave with hate. It is very difficult to escape that state of permanent anger. And it has to do with a kind of formula that would define the system in which we live: impatient capitalism is equal to the sum of greed plus speed. There is an acceleration "And the ship is going to sink because first class is too heavy. There is a lot of inequality, at the expense of the planet, among other things."
He believes that what could compensate for this situation "is another policy and above all another culture, but he sees the counterweight as very weak. The great confrontation is between creative and destructive excitement, what Freud called eros and thanatos. It occurs within us. , because when I write, desire and death are coming together, but also in life. And that translates into more or less a sense of community. I think about situations like the amnesty that have us all agitated. It has to do with decivilization. And with more or less community. If you believe in an inclusive Spain, that Spain as a community is stronger, richer, with more well-being, it cannot be an expulsive Spain, that punishes, penalizes, paved by hatred. It is an evil business".
For this reason, he assures, "it is important in the face of impatience and this destructive excitement, this thanatos that wants to reach the streets, that the creative excitement be stronger. The other day I thought that these people in the chamber, but also those who are coming out these days with more prominence on the screens, those who have already moved on to the harangue, have one thing in common: they look like they have not read Don Quixote. I was thinking, how is this influencer, one of those who summons, similar to that of Desokupa, to Feijóo? Clearly you have not read Don Quixote. Because it is Santiago's speech and it closes Spain. Of the wonderful moments of Don Quixote, there are two in which Sancho talks about that topic. Ask Don Quixote: Tell me, your grace, why these They incite the battle by invoking the matamoros saying Santiago and close Spain. Is Spain so open that it has to be closed? Damn, it's not that open. Let it open a little. But the word amnesty causes destructive excitement in certain fanatical or fanatical people. that is spreading. You look at the political landscape and wonder where the moderate right is, where the Christian Democrats are. "Everyone hates the Pope."
And he reflects that "the amnesty should be an agreement not only of those who want to govern today." "In terms of democratic normality and community interest, the first who should join this consensus would be the right. I am not saying this as science fiction. Feijóo should have been the one to promote this amnesty. I would place him as what he does not exercise, a statesman. And as a person who not only thinks about exercising power but also about what it is for. The amnesty would be a positive revolution, a strengthening of the community, inclusive, the opposite of that historical fatality of Santiago and closes Spain. An amnesty unites Spain , is what could unite it the most right now. Those who are not comfortable in that Spain for whatever reason would not see hostility on the other side, we would end it for them. We are going to live together. An effective democracy has to have at its foundations an affective democracy."
That is why he believes that in these moments of decivilization, imagination is needed. "There is a kind of fracture between what we call reality and imagination. In literature, imagination itself is associated with fantasy compared to a more realistic view, of naturalism, dirty realism. What I understand by imagination is possibly the best way to reach reality. Because reality is not well seen. Literature is very useful to expand the circle of reality. Imagination allows us to see what is not well seen, covered, hidden, that is uncomfortable. We can imagine another landscape that perhaps is there and is not totally visible. It opens paths in the fog."
He says, he writes from the shore, from which other shores can be seen. "Orillero realism - as he defines his texts - contemplates the nuance, the unforeseeable, you are at a point where adventure is possible. If you cut off literature, you turn it into a discourse of order. And the same with the condition human." And he says that he has been writing a single book but in concentric circles.
"In my last story, the one about the killer robot, about artificial intelligence, the concerns of point zero are already present. When talking about AI, I talk about what happens with us and nature, about a process of impersonation. The process of creating a conscience. And that affects us all. Impatient capitalism, decivilization, occur when there is a suspension of consciences, they go on vacation. And when I write A Million Cows, I had already written Negra Terra, the first poem of which I have a conscience and where I say: 'If I speak, I will speak with the earth.'
There, he points out, the vision of nature "was no longer one of contemplation, bucolic, but a battlefield. And today the destruction is accelerating and we have barely moved beyond the discourses. And although there is an increasingly broad awareness, destruction is faster. In the face of that heavy machinery that is going to crush us, that technopower, we must preserve a decisive bit of humanity, which is to reserve our consent, think that we can live other lives and look in hell for what is not hell, as Italo Calvino said. Resist and create emancipated spaces that are not hell."
And he concludes by pointing out that if when A Million Cows appeared they called it European-style magical realism, he prefers a friend's definition: "Magical punkism, with what punk has a hint of imbalance and of shaking consciences even when they say that there is no future. It is an irony, they are the only ones who claim the future."
