Connie’s Reviews > The Lost Steps > Status Update

“These reflections suggested to me that the jungle, with its resolute men, its chance encounters, its time that had not yet lapsed, had taught me much more about the essence of my art, the deep meaning of certain texts, the unhailed grandeur of certain paths, than the reading of all those books lying dead forever on my shelves. The Pathfinder made me realize the supreme labor a human being can carry out is that of forging a destiny. Because here, in the surrounding multitude that prowls wild and tame all at once, I see many faces but few destinies. And in these faces, every profound yearning, every rebellion, every impulse is inevitably cut short by fear. Fear of some reprimand, fear of the hour, fear of the news, fear of the collective that makes one a servant a hundred times over; fear of one's own body before the interpellations and tensed index fingers of advertising; fear of the womb that accepts the seed, fear of fruit and water; fear of dates, of laws, of slogans, of error, fear of the sealed envelope, fear of what might happen. This street has returned me to the world of Revelation where everyone seems to be waiting for the opening of the Sixth Seal—when the moon became as blood, the stars fell like figs, and the islands were moved out of their places. Everything foretells it: the covers of the magazines in the shop windows, the titles, the letters over the cornices, the phrases shot up into space. It's as if time in this labyrinth and in other, similar labyrinths were already weighed, counted, divvied up. And then I recall with relief the tavern in Puerto Anunciación where the jungle came to meet me in the person of the Pathfinder. Again I taste the flavor of the rustic hazelnut liquor with lime and salt, and the letters with their ornaments of shadow and garlands spelling out the bar's name compose themselves in my brain: Memories of the Future. My life here is a transit amid remembrances of the future, of the vast country of licit Utopias, possible Ikarias. My journey has shuffled the notions of preterit, present, and future. What will be yesterday before man has managed to live and contemplate it cannot be the present; this cold, insipid geometry where everything tires and ages a few hours after its birth cannot be the present. The only present I believe in now is the present of that which is intact; the future of that which is created with our face turned toward the glow Genesis. I refuse to be a Wasp-Man, a Nobody-Man, and the rhythm of my existence shall not be marked by a galley master's mallet.”