I am thinking about doing an interview with the philosopher, writer and friend Rafael Argullol (Barcelona, ??1949) on the occasion of the publication of his book Human Dance. Then I am forced to rectify and consider the format of conversation, realizing that we are not only facing a literary event, but rather a book of life. I pause and look in my library at twenty books published by Argullol (his work consists of more than thirty books, including novels, essays and poetry) that, as if they were a chorus from a play from ancient Greece, They urge me to dialogue, seeking another path that is at the same time an interview, a conversation and an encounter.
Argullol offers us the following teaching from his childhood to ensure that a boulder jumps as many times as possible over the surface of the sea: “Naturally, it was important that the sea was calm and that its surface was polished like a mirror. But the position of the body was also important, leaning to the right if one was right-handed, and the extension of the arm, parallel to the shore, which culminated in a dry movement when the fingers opened to release the stone.
Upon reading that the stone had to “be flat, moderately concave, about three fingers long, neither too heavy nor too light,” I then decide that the only way to face the dialogue with Rafael Argullol is to consider each of the ten books that they compose Human Dance like a stone that the author throws on the surface of life.
Each of the books is structured with a conversation/presence, both real and unreal, that places us in front of a mirror that returns an unprecedented image of ourselves. The book of truth, with which the journey and conversation begins, is carried out with Å, which is the place and at the same time the author. In The Book of Restitution we meet Elia, who “rescues my name from oblivion.” In The Book of Detachment it is the god Janus who appears. The book of enigma is dominated by black Ra, which is the color of depth. In The Book of Joviality, the comedian Marcello is invoked with the purpose of understanding the mask and revealing the face that he hides. In The Book of Divinity the fantastic elusive horse Sleipner, with his speed and power, crosses the border between life and death. In The Book of Antagonism we discover Gaspar, the gardener who takes care of the silence and a beautiful twenty-meter cypress that dominates the immense stillness of the cemetery. In The Book of Affinity we meet Miguel, the friend, the companion with whom we continue to dialogue. In The Book of Light we find Sara, the one who listens, the one who inspires, the one who consoles. The book of freedom closes the cycle of the ten books and we meet again with Å, which is at the same time a place, a stream, the one who writes and the one who reads.
In the entry ‘The Round Mirror’ you tell us about the work ‘Nuda Veritas’, by Gustav Klimt, and you notice that in one of the versions made by him you can read: “Truth is fire and speaking about the truth means illuminating and burn”. What is the truth?
R. Argullol: What I ask myself in Human Dance is if I have told myself the truth and if I tell myself the truth. Therefore, I am not so much looking for the truth in the abstract or the truth in capital letters, but rather whether I have been able to tell myself the truth. In fact, one of the most penetrating questions – I believe – in the entire history of our culture and our mythology is the one that Pontius Pilate asks Jesus when he told him: “I have come to bear witness to the truth.” Pontius Pilate says: “What is truth?” and disappears. Because, ultimately, the question about the truth is a decisive question, but it is a question that requires detours from us, that requires us to venture into unknown territories and there are moments – as in the case of my life – in which I am imbued with a truth from the outside that I more or less accept. For example, initially, through my Christian education, I accepted God’s truth; Later, in a revolutionary era, I accept the truth of history in capital letters, but from a certain moment in my life I realize that this is a solitary search that you can share with friends, with accomplices, throughout of life, but unfortunately it is a lonely path in which you build your approach to the truth as you yourself undergo your own metamorphoses.
In the entry ‘Nature and Action’ you observe: “We are too sick of the present to see ourselves as we really are.” What leads us to lose ourselves in the present and why does it prevent us from seeing who we are?
R. Argullol: Because I believe that we are subject to a mechanism of modern-day tyranny and at the same time, subsequently, to a mechanism of amnesia. Collective life is a continuous creation of amnesia under the mask of information that, at times, even seems excessive, of a saturation of information, but which leads us to amnesia. I think that one of the most important jobs in existence is the care of memory, the care that you take of memory. Memory is like a garden that must be watered, that must be fed, because memory is not only our relationship with the past, therefore with memories, but it is also our relationship with the future, with presentiments.
In the entry ‘Path of Salvation’ you indicate: “Compassion was sharing passion: pain, joy, knowledge, the strength of existence.” What does the adventure of sharing with others imply?
R. Argullol: Well, one of the great discoveries in life, I think, or at least in my case it has been like that and that can only happen over the years, is discovering the power, the strength, the importance of compassion, which is that possibility of sharing that passion with the other, with others. Regarding the idea of ??compassion, I first had a very rudimentary idea through Catholic education, then I refused that idea, I came to deny the virtue of compassion as if I saw it as something servile, but finally I have realized realize that compassion is what, in some way, offers us the possibility of sharing not only the passion but the lives of others, that is, without compassion there can be no collective life.
In the entry titled ‘Revolt’, you express the following purpose: “Life will never change if we do not change it.” What does it mean to change your life?
R. Argullol: Well, there, at a certain moment, I quote Rilke’s famous poem, whose last verse is “you have to change your life.” And when quoting, I discuss whether you have to change your life or you have to change your life. The decisive thing to change your life, even to change collective life, is to change your life; That is, being willing to change your life. That means recognizing the error, recognizing the diversity of points of view, the diversity of selves that exist beneath what we call the self, what in the book I call “polyphony of selves.” Therefore, it is about having a good coexistence with the enigma, it is very important, because, as the word itself etymologically indicates, enigma is that which is revealed and veiled at the same time, it is revealed and veiled, and I think that Our passage on earth, our passage through existence, is a succession of revelations and revelations.
In the entry ‘The origin of comedy’ you state: “Comedy rescues us from tragedy. Although perhaps it is more fair to say that it prepares us for new tragedies.” If in life tragedy and comedy overlap until the boundaries between one and the other disappear, how can we prepare for the worst?
R. Argullol: I, the worst, believe that it is better to approach it from the pessimism of the intelligence and from the optimism of the heart. And making a parallel simile, I believe that we have to prepare ourselves for the abysmal tension of tragedy through the very capacity for irony and self-irony that life offers. Therefore, it seemed to me, it seems to me entirely wise and logical, that in ancient times the tragic festivals, in which three tragedies were performed, always ended with a comedy; That is to say, after the catharsis had been carried out, after taking the spectator, the citizen – because the tragedy was for the citizen -, after taking him to the maximum tension through the catharsis and confronting him with all his demons, a piece came. comic that released that tension.
In the entry ‘Brief History of the Birth of a God’, you write: “You were running after time. / You wanted to cross the line. / You were looking for company. / One night you perceived a shadow. / Until then the nights had no shadows. / In the shadow you thought you saw someone. / You were that someone. / That someone was someone else. / Doubt made you ask. / The next day you filled the world with questions… What is left for man when he abandons the gods?
R. Argullol: I think that one of the richest relationships that I have had, have, in my life is the relationship with divinity, with the idea of ??divinity. In that sense, after being educated in Christian theism, I distanced myself from it; For a time, a few years, maybe a couple of years, I declared myself an atheist, but I quickly realized that the declaration of atheism was something very poor and ultimately very sterile, and that in reality the question about divinity is a question that would accompany me all my life. Reading a poet like Hölderlin was decisive for me in introducing me to the idea that the gods have not died, but that the gods have vanished, they are absent spectators of our actions and live in a kind of exile of silence. But those gods continue to question us, and everything that led man to create the concept of divinity continues to question us with perpetual questions.
In the entry ‘The antagonists’, you ask yourself: “What are we men without pain, without power, without war? Nothing, it seems.” And I ask you again: What are we men without pain, without power, without war?
R. Argullol: Well, we men have not known how to live without pain, without violence, without war. Life is violence. In any case, since life can also be compassion, there is a way, if not to domesticate, then to educate the violence that is life itself. But when we neglect ourselves, when we fall outside of that education through compassion, life becomes extremely violent. And that is why war has accompanied the history of humanity. War is, as Heraclitus said, the beginning of all things.
In the entry ‘Have you loved?’, you indicate: “Love does not move, we are the ones who move around it.” Should we sacrifice everything for love?
R. Argullol: I think so. Because love, as I sculpt it in the book, finally becomes the maximum utopia that man has to tell the consciousness of death and the consciousness of time. And in that sense, the maximum sensation of reuniting with things, with the Universe, with the Earth, is love. Love and friendship. Which are what make us get out of our skin to be able, in a certain way, to ask, to interrogate, to feel beyond it.
In the entry ‘Evocation’ you tell us, regarding defining the spirit: “The spirit is the impulse that pushes us to look within ourselves.” In a world governed by reason, what place does the spirit occupy?
R. Argullol: Everything that is not occupied by reason and everything that is not occupied by unreason, is occupied by the spirit; That is, the spirit is that which is beyond reason, but without falling into rationalism and unreason. The spirit is something like a dancer who dances at the limits of reason. And in that sense, when we are able to dance within these limits is when we connect with our intimacy and connect with our interiority. That is the spirit.
In the last entry of Danza Humana, with the title ‘El Baño’, we read: “Throughout life we ??sculpt ourselves, but the sculpture always remains unfinished.” What is the question that we should be able to answer in order to be able to say without a doubt that we have lived?
R. Argullol: At the end of the book the feeling that we have been sculpting ourselves throughout life is evoked. We have also been sculpting our idea of ??freedom, but in that sculpture, as in the sculptures of the last Michelangelo, the oldest Michelangelo, the sculptures remained unfinished. And in our lives, even though we can sculpt ourselves and we must sculpt ourselves, there is always a depth that remains unfinished. So, that bottom, that rock, that unfinished stone, is that which, returning to the theme of the enigma, is that which sometimes reveals itself to us as a kind of disguise for the great nothingness, of the nothingness that surrounds us, and other times It is revealed to us as if it were a fragment of eternity. So, I believe that the culmination of life is the moment in which we are able to contemplate our own sculpture, always unfinished and always subject to the vagaries of nothingness and eternity.
Rafael Argullol expresses his thoughts with the same intensity with which, as a child, he threw stones, pursuing the same goal of making “a boulder jump indefinitely across the surface of the water without ever sinking.”
