Among the authors of this early 21st century who are transforming cultural analysis into a vehicle of mythological wisdom and symbolic initiations, perhaps Basilio Baltasar (Palma de Mallorca, 1956) is the most acutely aware of the need to do so. Unlike his more or less explicit referents, James Frazer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal or Joseph Cambell (although in the opinion of Anna Caballé in the prologue of this book, Claude Levi-Strauss should join him) Baltasar deals with transmitting a message sociological, political and, ultimately, mystagogical.
The director of the Formentor Foundation, former head of the Santillana Foundation and the Seix Barral publishing house, also the author of the novel Pastoral iraquí , collects in El intellectual rampante articles published in Claves and La Vanguardia to illuminate an elegant book in form, wise in the content, committed to the objectives, firm in the convictions: a whole lesson related to what, in the observations of the cosmos, is called parallax, the ability to perceive a thing in several planes, superficial and deep.
The characters around which his reflections revolve, in addition to Rabelais and Italo Calvino, are Coetzee, Lautréamont, Nooteboom, García Marques, Cervantes, Ulítskaya among others. These authors direct Baltasar’s work and days to the realm of truth, which ultimately means that they support him in his commitment to pragmatic rationality, audacity and individual efficacy as a resistance to the fantasy that today “feeds the fiction of the self invented to glorify our self-importance”. In “The Great Calassian Circle” he delves into the mind of the author of The Ruin of Cash knowing that in real life events are believed before they are understood, which forces us to think of things in a circular way, as a kind of eternal return on the sources of knowledge. This incessant circling through the labyrinth of life leads him from Knossos to Formentor, and back.
A Mallorcan with a strong character, Baltasar knows how to interpret the substratum of civilization at the moments when he reveals its mysteries, as he does when he defines Jocasta as “the weaver of misfortune, that terrible and perverse mother who pushes her son towards perdition”; or as he deduces, when reading Thomas Pynchon’s Contraluz, the “crucial dilemma of the tortuous modern path: either violence or the almost unspeakable mystery of the spirit that he always blows where he wants”.
Human destiny always reappears in the form of deep paradoxes like that where “the elected become select” without mediating training, only for having obtained more votes than the adversary; or like that other that is breathed in the story of Zópiro de Babylon, which teaches us how mercy makes people credulous and trusting. In the end, Baltasar, like Paul Claudel, is aware that it is useless to ask the swimmer trapped in the whirlpool what he knows and what he thinks. That whirlpool is what he alludes to in “The mutant decade”, the decade of video games and lies, so dark and destructive that chaos approaches: Moira was the name that the classical Greeks gave to the experience we are now living.
In short, reading this book is an initiation ritual where Hesiod acts as Homer to reach that intellectual maturity that allows knowing what is unknown.
Basilio Baltasar The rampant intellectual. KRK Editions 373 pages 23.70 euros
