Comentario 4/14

I just want to correct myself on my commentary on Auster-Coetzee epistolarium on friendship and my feelings of disapproval. That comment is misleading; I highly appreciate both authors. Their correspondence seems to have a documentary value even though the publishing timing is not right. Usually private correspondence and papers are published when authors are deceased. This book of correspondence is an exception –both authors are alive and they comment on events that happened recently or are developing, or will happen in the nearby future-, because give us a glimpse on part of the daily routine of two of the finest writers’ nowadays and into their wise thoughts. Anyways, there is something unusual about this private epistolary –authors wrote as if they knew the letters will be published; there was an intentionality of publishing what had a private addressee. On the other side, these letters can work as a motivation to begin to write letters to our friends and family, even though the media has changed from regular mail to electronic mail, from the use of full language to simplified language most of the unintelligible to the non-initiated. I think that the time of written correspondence is gone forever…

 

Later on, I was at my studio and saw a Carver’s book of unpublished prose. I took it from the shelf and opened to check the table of content, and there was a piece on friendship. Carver’s reflection on friendship is more down to earth than Auster’s and Coetzee’s –there is less mannerism and sophistication. That was Carver’s style, simple and plain, no metaphysics; not even death conferring certain etat de grace, nothing. Carver goes directly and says something like after death everything is done, finito, terminado, se acabó. People in Carver’s fiction are depicted in its ordinary attire, without 'pomp and circumstance', a simple life even in its gestures and words. Carver’s characters express the secularity of the American religion: a god without divinity, transcendence within…

 

More on friendship -this time on the hand of the reading of Mandelstam’ Moscow Notebooks. There is this anecdote that goes like this: in a reading, Mandelstam was asked about his opinion on contemporary Russian poetry. He was just coming back from one of the force exiles he suffered. He knew his life was worthless, and to the question, he responded, “What answer do you want from me? I am the friend of my friends! I am contemporary of Akhmatova!” -such an answer, in the middle of one of the most horrendous times ever, a fragile poet vindicates the value of true friendship in front of an omnipotent and hideous state.