Le tour du jour en quatre-vingts mondes

Clifford
“ when I want to know what the shaman feels in the highest tree on the path, face to face with a night apart from time, I listen once more the testament of Clifford Brown, a wing-beat that rends the continuum, that invents an island of the absolute within disorder."

Louis, super Cronopio, Louis amstrong concert Paris, November 1952
"Although I am lost in the perfect uproar of the crowd, which is swinging like a pendulum from Louis ’voice, for a moment I return to myself and think of 1930 when I met Louis through a first record, and of 1935 when I bought my first Louis, the “ Majogany Hall Stromp” from Polydor. And I open my ears and he is there, after twenty two years of South American love he is there singing, laughing with his whole unreformed child’s face, Cronopio Louis, Louis Super-Cronopio, Louis joy of those wo are worthy of him.

Around the Piano with Thelonious Monk
“ anything could happen in that moment when his without his prop, when he glides like a halcyon bird on the rhythm through which Charles Rouse is casting out the last, long, intense, wonderful swashes of violet and red, we feel the emptiness of Thelonious away from the shore of the piano, the interminable diastole of one enormous heart where all our blood is beating, and just at that moment his other hands falls from the piano, the bear teeters amiably and returns through the clouds of the keyboards, looks at it as if foot the first time, passes his indecisive fingers through the air, less then fall, and we are saved, it is Thelonious the captain …"

“ To Reach Lezama Lima”
These pages on José Lezama Lima’s novel Paradiso (Ediciones Union, 1966) are not intended as a study of Lezana’s novelistic technique, which would require a rigorous analysis of all his work as a poet and an essayist, informed by the most significant developments in the field of anthropology (Bachelard, Eliade, Gilbert Durand …); rather, they represent the sympathetic approach that Cronopios employ to establish commerce with each other. Why Lezama Lima ? because, as he says describing one of his characters : “ What I like about him, “ Cemi answered, “ is his way of putting himself at the umbilical center of issues”…. So are we both crazy ?....
Borges and Paz (I chose them to set our sights of our countries’ crowning achievements) have the advantage over Lezama of being writers of midday light, I would almost call them Apollonian in the sense that they possess perfectly composed styles and coherent organization of thought. Their difficulties and even obscurities ( Apollo also knew to be nocturnal, to descend into the abyss to kill the serpent Python) respond to a dialectic evoked by le Cimetière marin:
… Mais rendre la lumière
Suppose d’ombre une morne moitié.
Endpoints of a tradition of Mediterranean origin, Borges and Paz produce their best effects without first posing the three riddles that turn the reader of Lezama into an eternal Oedipus.

Tout ce qui suit participe autant que possible (on ne peut pas abandonner complètement un crustacé quotidien de cinquante ans) de cette respiration de l'éponge où vont et viennent perpétuellement les poissons du souvenir, des alliances foudroyantes de temps, d'états et de matières que le sérieux, ce monsieur trop écouté, trouverait inconciliables.

On the short story and its environs ...
Horacio Quiroga once attempted a “ten commandments for the perfect story teller”, whose mere title is a wink at the reader. If nine of this commandments may easily be dispensed with, the tenth seems to me perfectly lucid : “ Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, if which you may be one. There is no other way to put life onto the story. This concept of the “ small circle’ is what gives the dictum its deepest meaning, because it defines the closed form of ,the story, what I have elsewhere called its sphericity; but to this another, equally significant observation is added: the idea that the narrator can be one of the characters, which means that the narrative situation itself must be born and die within the sphere, working from the interior to the exterior, not from outside in as if you were modeling the sphere out of clay.
To put in another way, an awareness of the sphere must somehow precede the act of writing the story, as if the narrator, surrounding himself to the form ha has chosen, were implicitly inside of it, exerting the force that creates the spherical form in its perfection “

“ I will always be a child in many ways, but one of those children who from the beginning carries within him an adult, so when the little monster becomes an adult he carries in turn a child inside and, nel mezzo del camino, yields to the seldom peaceful coexistence of at least two outlooks onto the world. “