#agustín fernández mallo

[loneberry]

Ibn ʿArabi on water and divine lowness

Commentary on Ibn ʿArabi's The Bezels of Wisdom

I guess I just love this because I've been thinking about the directionality of the divine lately, feeling a bit of an aversion to the privileging of the heavenward direction above all else—which I associate with hierarchy, ascension, Plotinus. I've been thinking against Simone Weil's conception of grace as that which enables ascent against the force of gravity, a hoisting upward, which is often a kind of turning away from the created world, a disavowal of earthy existence. What can I say. I love the earth. I'll keep on loving the earth. I want to think with the low, the mineral, with water, which always finds the lowest point. Water is that which supports life from beneath.

How did I find my way to Islamic mysticism? In the Abrahamic traditions, it really does offer the most affirming view of creation. We're all the breath of God.

What would it mean to find God below?

If you let a rope fall down, it will fall on God.

As I wrote in my review of the experimental film Last Things by Deborah Stratman:

Why not found a religion based on fear and respect of the mineral kingdom? Death is not ascent but descent, a return to our mineral form, as Mallo and Cixous know. 

From Agustín Fernández Mallo's The Book of All Loves: “The fact that teeth and bones are all that remains of us after death is proof that our ultimate identity is mineral. We do not ascend, we are not on some track towards that which the ancients formulated as spiritual; on the contrary, we sink down into the most durable physical matter. A kind of periodic table of elements is what we are; more of the earth even than earth itself.”

From Hélène Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: “There is passage through the animal state, then through the vegetal state, and so we move away from humankind; from the vegetal we descend into the earth, by the stem, by the root, until we reach what doesn’t concern us, although it exists and inscribes itself, which is of the mineral order, although it doesn’t hold together since we are aiming toward disassembly, toward decomposition.”

*

Ibn ‘Arabī, speaking of divine intention, writes in the Futūhāt:

"It is like water. Its station is that it descends or flows on the earth."

[docesesentaysiete]

Para evitar una colisión hay que ir hacia el punto donde se esté desarrollando el accidente, hacia el mismísimo choque, porque todo choque es un evento móvil y cuando llegues allí el accidente ya se habrá desplazado a otro lugar.

Agustín Fernández Mallo, El libro de todos los amores

[amor-barato]

Há muito tempo [tanto que parecem séculos] houve um escritor muito importante e famoso chamado Italo Calvino, que nos convidou a pensar uma cidade muito bonita, constituída unicamente por seus encanamentos de água. Um emaranhado de tubos que [segundo Italo Calvino] partem do solo, sobem verticais pelo que seriam os edifícios e ramificam-se horizontalmente em cada andar onde se encontraria cada apartamento. No final dos tubos veem-se pias brancas, duchas e banheiras onde mulheres desfrutam inocentemente da água por simples capricho. A explicação [segundo Italo Calvino] é que essas mulheres são ninfas que encontraram nesses encanamentos o meio ideal para se deslocar e assim viver sem obstáculos em seu ambiente aquático natural. Mas ele não nos convidou a pensar que dentro de cada um de nós existe outra cidade ainda mais complexa, se é que isso é possível; o sistema de veias, vasos e artérias pelo qual circula a corrente sanguínea, uma cidade que não possui nem torneiras, nem aberturas, nem desaguadouros, só um canal sem fim, cuja circularidade e o constante retorno consolidam um “eu” que poderia nos salvar da fatal dispersão de nossa identidade no Universo. Carregamos dentro de nós um deserto que não avança, um tempo mineralizado e detido. Daí o “eu” consistir em uma hipótese inamovível que nos é atribuída no nascimento e que até o fim tentamos comprovar sem êxito.

Agustín Fernández Mallo, in: Nocilla dream

[eva248]

Lecturas de julio. Tercera semana

El salvaje / Guillermo Arriaga. Editorial Alfaguara, 2017 A sus diecisiete años Juan Guillermo se ha quedado huérfano y completamente solo. Tres años atrás, Carlos, su hermano mayor, ha sido asesinado por unos fanáticos religiosos; abatidos por el pesar, sus padres y su abuela mueren. En el extremo de la rabia y la desesperación, Juan Guillermo jura vengarse. El problema es que los jóvenes…

[viecome]

Entrevista al escritor Agustín Fernández Mallo

El escritor Agustín Fernández Mallo, fotografiado en Barcelona. / JORDI COTRINA Entrevista al escritor Agustín Fernández Mallo: “Hace ya bastantes años que el argumento de autoridad es lo emocional” | El Periódico de España A raíz de la muerte de su padre, el autor se situó ante un abismo existencial que le llevó a escribir ‘Madre de corazón atómico’, un libro sobre la identidad, personal,…

[relecturas]

Después dijo evitar eso que comúnmente llamamos enamoramiento porque no quería sentirse atrapada en los sueños de otro, “enamorarse es dejar que otro te introduzca en su cabeza, y que ahí dentro, lugar del que ya nunca podrás salir, ficcione contigo”, dijo concretamente.

Trilogía de la guerra, Agustín Fernández Mallo.

[curioushabitforarivergod]

"There's a mausoleum inside our bodies. Our organs have something of both life and death in them, rubble of all we have left."

THE BOOK OF ALL LOVES, Agustín Fernández Mallo (trans. Thomas Bunstead)

[why-are-you-even-reading-this]

Nocilla Dream, Agustín Fernández Mallo

[ximo220550]

LA ANGUILA

Ahir de matinada, mentres passejava, em vaig asseure enfront del llit del riu Xúquer a descansar i allí vaig acabar de llegir:

LA ANGUILA

PAULA BONET

Sinopsis de LA ANGUILA

Un libro sorprendente, osado y de altísima calidad literaria.

Este es un libro sobre el cuerpo. Sobre un cuerpo que ama y es amado. Un cuerpo que también es abusado, violentado a través del sexo y el parto, del aborto y la sangre, de la mugre. Materiales no artísticos en manos de una pintora que escribe, de una escritora que mira. La anguila aborda la memoria y la herencia, habla sobre nacimientos y pérdidas, sobre el deseo que traspasa generaciones, los gestos aprendidos y truncados. Sobre rebeliones y huidas, sobre la amistad y sobre Chile. Es el retrato de una mujer que asume los riesgos de mirar atrás sin veladuras y se dirige hacia una vida nueva.

«Paula Bonet, sin compasión y sin autocomplacencia, escribe una novela de formación con final feliz: el mundo se empieza a transformar, y una mujer se autoretrata con la carne de la escritura, los ácidos y el óleo. Bonet construye su cuerpo con todos los lenguajes de la materia, fumigando los malos espíritus y el peligro de los preceptores, los pigmaliones, los hombres más cultos y admirables que ahorman nuestros deseos y los convierten en espina. Contra la violencia de las espadas incrustadas en la vagina-vaina, ahora Bonet habla de amor y de cómo unas mujeres aprendemos de otras» (Marta Sanz).

«Paula Bonet es una extraordinaria e intrépida artista, esculpe las palabras como si se tratara de un material rotundamente nuevo» (Nell Leyshon).

«La obra pictórica de Paula Bonet en muy pocos años ha pasado de necesaria a imprescindible. Con La anguila apunta el mismo camino en la literatura. Verdadero y minucioso estudio anatómico de las relaciones de poder que se dan entre los cuerpos, sus abusos, sus trampas y el esplendor que se eleva cuando es doblegada toda esa miseria. De fondo, la solidez de un emocionante relato que, como un homenaje a todo lo vital, funde a la autora con su más cercana arqueología familiar» (Agustín Fernández Mallo).

«Nos convienen ideas y una energía que sean diferentes. Y la renovadora obra de Paula Bonet, al desmarcarse de lo que venimos oyendo toda la vida, nos transporta a un arte ingenioso, complejo, sabio, que hace avanzar permanentemente nuestros límites» (Enrique Vila-Matas).

[getaferadio]

De Poesía por Getafe se celebrará del 18 al 28 de abril

#GETAFE De Poesía por Getafe se celebrará del 18 al 28 de abril ¡GETAFE RADIO te trae la programación completa para que nos te pierdas nada!

Agustín Fernández Mallo abrirá el Festival, y María Negroni, desde Argentina, recitará versos de su obra ganadora del VIII Premio Internacional de Poesía Margarita Hierro GETAFE/ 17 ABRIL 2024/. El Festival Poético ‘De Poesía por Getafe’ se celebrará del 18 al 28 de abril. Esta IX edición volverá a llenar las calles de la ciudad con poetas de todos los rincones del país y en todas las lenguas. El…

[actualidadliteratura]

Nocilla Dream: Agustín Fernández Mallo

Nocilla Dream es el primer libro de la trilogía Nocilla, la cual es precedida por los títulos Nocilla Experience y... http://dlvr.it/T18DC0

[loneberry]

Agustín Fernández Mallo on metaphor

“That we are in a time dominated by magical thinking is demonstrated by the incontestable fact that people increasingly make less of a distinction between metaphor and reality; the metaphor is assumed to be a truth, in its strict literalness. It is not that metaphors aren’t true, and far less that they aren’t real – they are at least as real as a theory – but rather that they have a different nature, the nature of analogies, figures that, while they relate to what we tend to call ‘reality’, bring something else into being: the maturity of an intellect that sees relations between things without confusing them as one and the same. In every period marked by magical thinking, it is more common than ever for love – the only thing that is not a metaphor for something else, the only thing that is raw material for the world, the only thing that, were it to become visible, would make us tremble in pure terror – to be subject to the fantasy-making of poems and made-for-TV films, of politics and markets. But there is more: if we consider it to be true (which it is) that only humans understand what a ‘representation of reality’ is (dogs do not distinguish between the rules governing a tree and a photo of a tree, they see both as occupying the same plane of reality), then only humans comprehend what a metaphor is, precisely the opposite as happens in periods marked by magical thinking, periods that therefore come to belong to animals. But there is even something else: if animals do not distinguish between the tree and the photo of the tree, it is only humans that detect what we can call a ‘lag’ in the perception of the two things, a difference, a kind of vertigo similar to that which exists between the magic number and its corresponding trick, between the character and the real-life actor. Hellenic physics knew this, and Newton did too, but it was not until Einstein’s arrival that cause and effect could be shown as not instantaneous, that between the effect and its cause there must always be an intermediate time of interaction, a ‘lag’, and that no line connecting whichever events can be faster than light. That human – only human – ‘lag’ enabling us to distinguish reality and metaphor, tree and photo of tree, is also a maximum line of light that submerges magical thinking in a cheap trick. Well, this very vertigo produced by the lag is love; but the love of the real. (Lag love)���

—Agustín Fernández Mallo, The Book of All Loves

Uncanny resonance with a post I made here on poetry/metaphors/gaps/psychosis. I said the lag was poetry, Mallo says the lag is love.

[docesesentaysiete]

El mejor sitio para esconder una cosa es el fuego.

Agustín Fernández Mallo, El libro de todos los amores

[citascelebres]

Nocilla Dream: Agustín Fernández Mallo

Nocilla Dream es el primer libro de la trilogía Nocilla, la cual es precedida por los títulos Nocilla Experience y... http://dlvr.it/T18D9z

[ancruzans-blog]

[jacobwren]

In my opinion, for an artist, and particularly for a writer of fiction, the documentation of real facts is a hindrance, a dead weight that will sink the artist or writer—it’s like a gigantic piece of cement being attached to your feet, dragging you to the bottom of the sea and stopping you from taking flight—it destroys the imagination. I think that, yes, you’ve got to have some notion of things, you can’t do without certain details, but the difficult part is then taking them to another place. And, of course, once this literary operation is complete, that the invented parts seem credible within the story itself. I’m talking about what we might call the “pact of verisimilitude” between the book and the reader, because a piece of fiction is never true or false, these terms aren’t applicable to the ambit of fiction. What fiction can have is verisimilitude. This is the way that all great novels have been built. In my case, and to answer your question more directly, I have been to almost all of the places you mention, I know the U.S. a little because I’ve driven around the country, but most of the things in my novel are invented in the moment when I’m typing, abiding only by creative and poetic—never historical-scientific—criteria. I even sometimes quote other authors and—after Borges—modify these quotations slightly, in order to create certain narrative-poetic effects. Which is all to say, what’s important about any real place you include in a novel is precisely what you don’t know about that place, what you’re obliged to invent in order to make it yours and yours alone. To be an artist is to create autonomous worlds of one’s own.

Agustín Fernández Mallo