What does spring do with the cherry trees?
It makes them flourish. That’s what love does with us.
What is the power of love?
It floods you with exuberance, color and magic, just like spring does with the cherry trees.
Alludes to the verses of Neruda.
“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees”: poem 14 of the beautiful collection of poems Twenty love poems…
…and a desperate song.
Neruda was a poetic genius and a bad person.
So much?
He abandoned his daughter, despised his women, raped women…
Did you pay for it?
No, and he should have been jailed.
And canceled his work?
No, but we could have deprived you of rights to your work. Let us condemn the author without depriving ourselves of the beauty of his work.
The human being is not perfect.
See Picasso: brilliant as an artist and perverse as a man with successive women. He put out cigarettes on the skin of a…
But we admire his work.
Like that of Oscar Wilde, in his day canceled for his homosexuality: they imprisoned him and prevented him from publishing.
His work, however, persists today.
Also Lewis Carroll’s Alice, photographer of prepubescent girls… He didn’t touch them.
We talked about love…
Let’s talk about beauty like Phryne’s. A beautiful woman from Athens in the 4th century BC, model of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite.
How much beauty!
Accused of being impious for assuming herself to be more beautiful than the goddesses, Phryné was judged by the Areopagus, the supreme court. And she was saved…
As?
He dropped his robe. Her naked body, so beautiful, could only be the work of the gods: to execute her would be to insult them! She was cleared.
Very good taste, the areopagus.
We identify the beautiful with the good. The handsome man has a lot of cattle, then.
Aesthetics can.
And we understand love today as Sappho of Lesbos postulated it in the 6th century BC.
Does Sappho come from the sapphic?
Woman and poet, she created the house of the servants of the muses: she taught her disciples literature, song and dance. And she loved them. And the beautiful Faón. Sappho loved the person, male or female. Her wish did not discriminate against people based on their sex.
Fluid sexuality, we say today.
She was also the matriarch of lesbianism.
The opposite of Hemingway, right?
Prototype of a classic macho, fan of boxing, hunting, fishing, bullfighting, wars… and women. Hemingway tested his manhood with a string of women.
Did he test? Did he need to test it?
His mother, as a child, dressed him as a girl. Being hypermacho was her way of overcoming the anxiety of feeling feminine at times… Deaborn, her great biographer, maintains it that way.
Promiscuous for insecure, I understand.
Even more promiscuous were before Lope de Vega, Pérez Galdós, D’Annunzio… and Hedy Lamarr, actress and engineer.
And Simenon, as I have read…
He was with 10,000 women, he kept awake… All because he was not loved by his mother. Simenon was looking for that love in prostitutes.
And he wrote with the same fury.
It was a need for approval, in both cases. He sees the writer Philip K. Dick, with one woman after another: he tried to dominate them… and they always abandoned him.
He wrote, meanwhile, brilliant texts.
Prodigious and delirious, between panics, agoraphobia, paranoia… and pills.
At least he didn’t murder his own wife, as William Burroughs would.
By accident: drugged, he shot William Tell and killed her. Burroughs loved her. She got upset: that made him a writer.
What writer’s love do you fall in love with the most?
The connection between James Joyce and Norah Barnacle, always so passionate. “You are my portable Ireland!†he would say of her.
There will also have been some misogynistic writers…
We have Quevedo, the great poet. He loved love, but not women. And that he wrote the most sublime love sonnet!
“Love more powerful than death.”
“…Dust they will be, more dust in loveâ€. I suspect that Quevedo didn’t even have sex… Quite the opposite of Lope de Vega, who had eleven successive wives.
Which pair of writers do you think has been the most liberal of all?
Allen Ginsberg, a homosexual poet, and Peter Orlovsky, a heterosexual nurse: even though each had their respective sexual encounters, the two of them loved each other deeply until the last day.
Admirable…
It seems unusual to me so much frankness and understanding, so much love.
