fateful day... we shall see...

Seven years today he’s gone









So, I’m phoning the baroness, listen, seven years today since he left us... I mean... after Reig’s death, and not a peep from anybody; nobody caring a fig; the sites, the newspapers... never acknowledging his immense contributions to the culture; ignored by one and all; neither Agathon nor I getting a single (good or bad) reaction to our efforts...



The baroness too dignified, as ever, to chastise my abruptness... The truth will out, she says, never you worry, O’Donovan. We all die as mayflies but the reflection of a few of them lingers and rebounds in the recesses of the vast dark matter... Why would Carles’ brilliancy have to irrupt now and not later...? His time will come sooner than the end is due, and by a long long stretch, and we, the proper props properly relaying his shining, will also be remembered as rays of his very own light... Don’t feel bamboozled, O’D... Don’t feel, tout court; and, instead, do; feeling is for crickets and other disgusting beings whose feelers feel... spread along and hither and thither... but never go anywhere the clean ideas of their absent brains... And anyway, all good things are slow in coming... Tell me about Catalonian Independence... Why should Carles’ glory come before his country’s...? An artist, a talented artist, a genius, has to be epigonous to the group, no doubt... What would Shakespeare be without the English Independence behind him...? Do you imagine Shakespeare and his works recognized even as extant nowadays if his country had been still under the thrall of some fascist concern...?



Ah, the baroness, she cracks me... she’s so well versed in things Reigian! I see her stately face in my mind while we are talking on the phone... Notice her face’s windows: very much as a face made of hidden cards, only that instead of cards, it’s all open dark windows... Very suggestive of the intimate wishing of the empty bodies... They all long to be replenished in a single being, where everyone has ITS place... A face of nothings... or rather... a faith of nothings, of souls, of emptinesses, but a faith nonetheless, where what’s contained is the being that otherwise would have escaped us... She contains the uncontainable...



And she’s got amazing insight... She was very ironic, it appears; when she said “fascist,” she was playing with the red-neck / charred-neck dichotomy, I surmised... For there is that enigmatic, very controversial bit, in the texts: the strange exclusion of what Reig calls the “charred-necks” (who must be much worse than red-necks, no doubt,) whom biased, fed-up Catalonians, after almost three centuries of “sap-niard” misrule, thirsting for freedom, want to identify with what other freedom-fighters facetiously call “spics,” meaning: the sappy sap-niards, whom they pretend (quite untruly no doubt!) that Reig wants (at least in his more offensive writings) already non-extant anymore, or at the very least converted to something that is not so awful-sounding as that... for who in his right mind wants to be still, after all those decades and decades of opprobrium and ridicule, a fascist, a charred-neck, a spic, a sap-niard...?



But notice that all the pawns are red-necked. With a bit of imagination we could see them with charred necks... and that would go totally smoothly on the way of what Reig’s “religion” aims at: total inclusion...



It’s been widely known for ages that Reig was very fond of pulling your leg... He was also a jocose fellow... He had his morose and depressive moons, moods... but also his high, victorious, overreaching... spans.



That’s why there are pundits who believe this “charred-necks” business might be just a joke. Jocose in the jacuzzi, you know, inventing denunciatory epithets just for the sake of it... for fun, in a word, while wallowing in the healing mud, against boredom... Even when pretty wizened and loaded with years, he was known to feign having lain for days rotting on the ground to the despair of his scant followers – never more than two or three, for he would discourage them to follow anybody but themselves in self-realization, which after all is the realization of an ultimate “all-there”… In those occasions, as the youngsters would plow into what they thought to be a stinking carrion, Carles Reig would arise as if from the sulfurous pool in a cool spa: refreshed, always ready to teach the too-sticky a lesson in detachment.



I wont despair then... I’ll keep at it a while longer too... Even... until my own December 18th maybe...



I told the baroness, I’m sure you are right, baroness; I’m with you also here... Your approximation has got to be the most inspired... I’ll sign under... When Reig, in his marvelous novel “the Sky Assumes the Value,” depicts the truest death of a wife perhaps ever depicted in writing... and in such a gut-wrenching truthful manner, and so nakedly... that you feel yourself reduced to bones and entrails... and you see yourself as the dead wife... and then the husband enters into that desolate panoramic view of a world of worming souls... where the cruelty of children toward their own mirror selves... reduced to the size of insects... with feelers instead of brains... lost in the desert... myriads upon myriads of grains of sameness... what a striking allegory... how the Sun itself is the witless magnifying-glass that sooner or later will finish by roasting each of us... and then he shakes himself... he has no patience for the Sun to finish him... and finishes himself it such a way as to leave a lasting impression... In a burst of flames... We are still warmed by his pluck... He’s indeed one the shiniest bricks for the ulterior construction of a god who shall outshine the Sun... I mark your wise prophetic words, baroness...



My pledge must have pleased the baroness... She chirped...



And then nothing... A few sparse leaves that the wind brought down from the roof rapped on the glass... Sparse leaves, eh...? Questioning their being... “Here...” “here...” say their knuckles on the glass... sounding the glass... There is the never-ending quandary again: is the end god constructed as if by itself, in a self-understood manner...? or… is it constructed at the end of time by the mass alive…? Nothing is sure, nothing is mechanical… The mass of life... either succeeds... or... fails... ok…?



The striving... indeed... only the striving’s what matters for the while.