Sooner or later someone is going to hurt you. It is unavoidable. You can feel it in the silences of a lover or in the aggressive, conceited or disdainful phrase of one of those beings who believe they are superior and know-it-alls. Always, in some corner, there is a wolf that enjoys seeing hurt people. When that happens, you want not to bite your tongue. It takes guts and a lot of joy to shut down anger when the pain is already there and it comes to you in an unexpected and disconcerting way. We are not prepared to see a knife in a child's pocket. We are so inexperienced in healing the wounds inflicted on us by others that words alone are not enough. Anger is relieved and made more bearable when it is transformed into laughter. We bite the dust, we laugh and move on with life.
Laugh and cry, like the little song by Kiko Veneno with which I taught my daughters to sleep curled up in my arms. Louise Bourgeois, who continued sculpting until weeks before her death at the age of 98, jovially accepted the lack of interest that her work aroused for so long, saying that at least that had allowed her to work wonderfully without being disturbed. And John Berryman believed that the best thing that can happen to a young poet is a disaster that doesn't actually kill him. He had a chaotic and self-destructive life, flooded with losses and alcohol, but if something never failed him it was his sense of humor. He used it to deal face to face with grief. Until one winter day in 1972 when he was seen loitering on a Minneapolis bridge, he climbed the railing and jumped. The old drunk had run out of jokes.
We all die, although not all of us do it in the same way. I envy artists. They have access to a creative way of life that can sustain them in dark times and transform the inexplicable into something human and understandable. Our eyes are red from seeing hundreds of dead people every day in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Israel, in Syria..., men, women and children who we will never know what they were like when they were alive and whom laughter could not have saved from a useless and avoidable ending. It wouldn't even have given them any respite. Nor would it have made the furious truth of realizing the extent to which we are capable of mistreating each other with unusual cruelty any more bearable.
I imagine them with fear and a tremor of rage. Silent in hell, which must be the pain that is impossible to appease in the midst of a merciless war. Paralyzed. Like that old typewriter from the enigmatic Rodney Graham movie, turned off by a white dust that clogs the keys and in front of which today I imagine myself blocked by the impossibility of putting into words a whirlwind of defeated thoughts.
