On the Sunny Beach
What validity remains in an act of writing if it does not arise from the creator’s growing mastery? It is not legitimate to write from the dictation of a voice that speaks aloud. But Carlos, too, can only create by listening to that voice… the voice of his Muse.
The Muse’s visit brings him inspiration — it is like a bolt of homogeneous and certain light illuminating a previous darkness. Then the dreamed-of story at last descends from an imaginative sky toward the page. The dreamed story, now real, is the one Carlos presents with satisfaction to his Muse.
But now the critics rebuke him for his slowness, for the affected intimacy of his writing. Carlos is pretentious, they say. He fancies himself a new Shakespeare, when his true purpose should be to entertain the public with a moment of easy pleasure.
Carlos will not accept it — he refuses those critics. He believes that everything he writes must revolve around what happens inside his own mind.
The punishment for the rebellious writer-artist is to be marginalized: to become an unaccepted subject, an individual with no place in sanctioned art, the art of popular imposition. The final punishment is exile — out of the competition.
But he, exhausted by all of it, will go toward another place… his place. The transition is carried out by a visual memory: a close-up of a great rock on the beach where the waves break. That image came before his arrival at the Hotel. The sea, the day, the sky — the expansive.
To reach that place one must first pass through the horrendous darkness of the sectarians. Carlos emerges from this nightmare, and now the rock and the sea are no longer an isolated reference but the beginning of the arrival at his place.
The proximity of the sea, of water, of the liquid — it is an ancestral reversion to an approach to the original, to something primary and unconscious. Before, inside his hotel room, the only painting on the wall had seemed to him a window open somewhere: it was the image of a beautiful young woman on the beach, gazing out at the distance where the rock broke the waves. Now the writer walks inside that image; the distance between the real and the fantasy is erased, between the dream and the possible. The artist who advances into a symbolic image no longer lives in what is represented, but in the experience close to something more authentic — a presence of radiant intensity.
Carlos walks inside the beach-image, suitcase in hand. He sees the rock, sits down in the sand, and waits.
Carlos admires the beauty of the woman who approaches, her graceful figure embraced by the clear warmth of the midday sun. The woman notices his presence — as witness, as visitor. Filled with wonder at this solitary walker on the beach, Carlos asks: “What is your name?” —Anna— Of course! —You are my Muse—.
—Is that your suitcase? — his Muse asks. —Yes! — Carlos answers. —What do you carry inside? — I don’t know.
—Anna, my Muse, please — tell me… what is our destiny?
The destiny of the presence of feminine beauty is not to feed entertainment. Its possible role is something else — to point to a place, a location. The woman examines, then contemplates the distance, the faraway, as a woman gazes out at the vast starry sky.
And then your new Muse looks toward the sea, toward the open, toward the rich and, at the same time, intimate vastness. Surely the place — the only place — where you, Carlos, the writer-artist, will be able to breathe and write in freedom.
CARLOS. 06/10/2019