Gonzalo Barr

Metí todo en el visor (con el arbol, el pretil, el sol de las once) y tomé la foto. […]

Lo podría contar con mucho detalle pero no vale la pena. La mujer habló de que nadie tenía derecho a tomar una foto sin permiso, y exigió que le entregara el rollo de película. […] Por mi parte se me importaba muy poco darle o no el rollo de película, pero cualquiera que me conozca sabe que las cosas hay que pedírmelas por las buenas.

***

I framed it all in the viewfinder (the tree, the hand rail, the eleven o’clock sun) and snapped the photo. […]

I could relate this with a lot of detail, but it isn’t worth it. The woman said that no one had the right to take a picture without permission and she demanded that I give her the roll of film. […] As to me, I couldn’t have cared less whether or not to give her the roll of film, but anyone who knows me knows that you must ask nicely.

Entonces tengo que escribir. Uno de todos nosotros tiene que escibir, si es que esto va a ser contado. Mejor que sea yo que estoy muerto, que estoy menos comprometido que el resto; yo que no veo más que las nubes y puedo pensar sin distraerme, escribir sin distraerme (ahí pasa otra [nube], con un borde gris) y acordarme sin distaerme, yo que estoy muerto…

[…] Ahora pasa una gran nube blanca, como todos estos días, todo este tiempo incontable. Lo que queda por decir es siempre una nube, dos nubes, o largas horas de cielo perfectamente limpio, rectángulo purísimo clavado con alfileres en la pared de mi cuarto. […Y] a veces en cambio todo se pone gris, todo una enorme nube, y de pronto restallan las salpicaduras de la lluvia, largo rato se ve llover sobre la imagen, como un llanto al revés, y poco a poco el cuadro se clara, quizá sale el sol, y otra vez entran las nubes, de a dos, de a tres. Y las palomas, a veces, y uno que otro gorrión.

***

So I have to write. One of all of us has to write if this is going to be told. Better that it be me. I am dead and less compromised than the rest. I, who doesn’t see anything except the clouds and can think without distraction, write without distraction (there goes another [cloud], with a gray border) and remember without distraction. I, who am dead…

[…] A great white cloud passes now, as it has all these days, all this uncountable time. What is left to tell is always a cloud, two clouds, or long hours of a perfectly clean sky, a pristine rectangle held by pushpins on the wall of my room. […And] sometimes, in turn, everything becomes gray, everything is an enormous cloud. And suddenly the splashing raindrops snap and for a long time, you can see it rain over the image, like a tear in reverse, and little by little the picture becomes clearer, maybe the sun comes out, and again the clouds enter, in twos, in threes. And the pigeons sometimes, and one or more sparrows.

Sources: Excerpts from Julio Cortázar, “Las babas del diablo,” Las armas secretas (Ed. Sudamericana 1976, trans. from the Spanish by Gonzalo Barr), rearranged to tell a slightly different tale from the short story that inspired Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, Blow-Up (1966); Video clip by dorlec01, “‘6699′ BlowUp Remake (Longer Version)” (2008), juxtaposing in split screen the first park sequence from Antonioni’s Blow-Up with the same views of Maryon Park today; Still photo by Gonzalo Barr

Yes, and in that month when Proserpine comes back, and Ceres’ dead heart rekindles, when all the woods are a tender smoky blur, and birds no bigger than a budding leaf dart through the singing trees, and when odorous tar comes spongy in the streets, and boys roll balls of it upon their tongues, and they are lumpy with tops and agated marbles; and there is blasting thunder in the night, and the soaking millionfooted rain, and one looks out at morning on a stormy sky, a broken wrack of cloud; and when the mountain boy brings water to his kinsmen laying fence, and as the wind snakes through the grasses hears far in the valley below the long wail of the whistle, and the faint clangor of a bell; and the blue great cup of the hills seems closer, nearer, for he had heard an inarticulate promise: he has been pierced by Spring, that sharp knife.

Photo:  Gonzalo Barr; Source: Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (Modern Library 1929), at 95

In the US, Labor Day marks the end of summer and a time to return to work.  This is a formality for everyone except the full-time student.  The employed adult has a different story to tell, especially in a country where “workaholism” is a kind of virtue.  But there is still something about summer as a period of legitimate idleness that lingers into adulthood.

Writers don’t vacation.  They may travel or take a day off, but if they are in the middle of writing anything — and they usually are — the work continues in the unconscious.  Which explains why you can put something aside and come back to it later with fresh eyes.  You see problems that you did not see before.  The work has not changed.  You have.  And the reason you have changed is because you have continued to work on it, even if you did not do so consciously.

That is what happened to Ernest Hemingway with his first novel –

“I started ‘The Sun Also Rises’ on the 21st of July, my birthday, in Valencia,” he wrote.  Work on the first draft was continued through the last ten days of July and the month of August in Valencia, Madrid, St. Sebastian, and Hendaye, and a complete run-through was finished in Paris on September 21, 1925.

“There is only one thing to do with a novel,” he once told Fitzgerald, “and that is to go straight on through to the end of the damned thing.”  […]  The first draft of The Sun Also Rises was set down in approximately forty-eight writing days, but Hemingway nearly killed himself in the process.  “I knew nothing about writing a novel when I started it,” he realized in 1948, “and so wrote too fast and each day to the point of complete exhaustion.  So the first draft was very bad…I had to rewrite it completely.  But in the rewriting I learned much.”

Following a rest period…[to give] the first draft a chance to settle and objectify itself, he went down to Schruns in the Voralberg in mid-December.  Here he spent the period before Christmas in skiing and revising his book.  A trip to New York in mid-February provided a brief interlude in the concentrated labors of rewriting.  These filled January, part of February, and the month of March.  By April first the book was ready for the typist.  Heavy cuts in the original opening and elsewhere had now reduced a much longer novel to about 90,000 words.  The completed typescript was mailed to Maxwell Perkins on April 24, 1926. The total operation had covered nine months of extremely hard work.
– Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (1972), at 75-76 (emphasis mine)

The word, “objectify,” is not in quotation marks, but it might as well be.  It sounds like a word Hemingway would have used.  And it refers to what happens when you set aside your manuscript and give the unconscious a chance to work.

One day, I am certain neuroscientists will strip away the veneer of mystery surrounding the creation of art.  Until then, it is enough to know that we must make time and room for the unconscious and accommodate it as part of creating fiction.  Writers too need their vacations, even if they are still working.

Photo: Gonzalo Barr; Source: Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (1972), at 75-76