Skriuwer Patrícia Soley-Beltran út Barcelona wennet en wurket op útnûging fan Ljouwert City of Literature in moanne yn ‘e stêd. Hjoed it twadde diel fan har deiboek as writer in residence.
DAY NOT
I was going to start this blog with DAY 8 but I’m not because days are merging into one. This is success: attaining time/space compression in the process of writing. Ordinary material circumstances (partly) vanish. Time and space merge as I dive deep in my writing and I’m no longer in Noordvliet 404. I’m on a bright island out of time.
Love your prison
It’s snowing outside and I bought myself some winter lights. Every morning, I defy my fear of the cold and walk to dbieb, an amazing library located in a former prison. I have my favourite spots to sit, and I learnt how to walk while avoiding my boots making squeaky noises on the floor. I bought Christmas presents in the cute little cell shops, and a kind tattoo artist takes pictures clowning as a mad woman about to be locked up. Of course, ‘love your prison’ is both a paraphrasis of Lacan’s famous dictum “love your symptom” mixed with Foucauldian notion of limits enabling the subject. At home, I dance to Elvis Presley’s unbeatable Jailhouse Rock.
The river
Although we know we all flow in the river we never allow enough current for our fragility. By the water, Baukje and I discuss Camus, illness, fragility and the joie de vivre; we listen to river songs and we get on. I further my research on Ibiza’s Punic history reading online papers. To my surprise two old neighbours in Barcelona’s Gothic quarter reappear as spirits from the past: historians Rutta Rosenstingl and Mariano Planells. I learn that Rutta’s father-in-law sold antique idols to Sigmund Freud. (If you’ve ever been to any of the two Freud museums, Wien and London, you would have seen these enigmatic figures). I’m always bewildered by the amazing coincidences that creative process brings about. What is past? What is present? The river flows.
“The hour of the star”
I receive some sad news: at 101, my beloved teacher died. We had not seen each other for decades and two years ago she got back into my life. I was very low at the time. Meeting her again reminded me of my deep trust of her as a child and how she made me feel loved. Her words were powerful. Neus Salvat was a brave woman, a mathematician and an educational pioneer. She was twelve years old when General Franco made a coup d’etat against the Spanish II Republic and started the Spanish Civil War. She witnessed how “just when people started to gain rights, they crushed them”.
This week was the 50th anniversary of Franco’s death. I was highly fortunate to be brought up in a school with progressive ethical values instead of fascist ones. In the school she directed, they taught children to be free. Sometime ago, I named one of the novel’s characters after her: Neus Cirer, the sage mentor of the young protagonist.
It’s funny how, once dead, you must hold within the memories of the person that met her hour of the star, to use Lispector’s poetic title. You make conscious room for their river within yours.
At night, I’m sad and grateful for the flat’s pink tenderness and for all that Neus gave me.
Redemption
I finish reading all of Raoul Hausman’s Dadá manifestos. I read Hélène Cixous again and read Raymond Carver for the first time. Carver’s portraits of nothingness in daily life unsettle me. One night I felt so shattered I lost my sleep. The morning after, this blog helped me sorting out my uneasiness. One can find a future in Cixous and in Clarice Lispector. Is there in Carver? Is exploring the void the same as portraying emptiness? I don’t think so. Dadaists searched the void as an escape from WWI horror, the shared unability to spell it. And what was to come? 70 million dead and the Holocaust. I no longer read Carver at night. I don’t want to lose hope.
Explore the North
I attend Mary Lattimore’s harp concert in the Grote Kerk, a trippy experience that gets me in and out of the dark night. Explore the North Festival is full of interesting events, and I can’t attend all those I would like. I’m fortunate to commission a poem to laureate poet Marrit Jellema in De ZinnenFabriek at dbieb. It’s a gift for a friend. She reads it while I take pictures of my dessert because sometimes happiness is a piece of cake. Specifically, a baba au rhum and a good conversation with Baukje in the park while snow falls outside. And I wonder… Winter is seeing with your eyes closed.
Plunging
“Paradise is down below” in the “Somewhere Else” of our writing, Cixous writes. I charter the moon and the weather and the news and 1930s Ibiza comes to life. Frontiers between reality and imagination merge like time. The characters inhabit me; they live and move within. The writer is a “secret criminal” from a “strange and foreign country” continues Cixous. Immurement helps us to take our fire into the depths.
What’s my prisoner’s number?!
