We mourn the passing of a Leonard Norman Cohen: Canadian Singer, Songwriter, Poet and Novelist. Cohen died today on the 11th of November 2016, at the age of 82. For many years, Leonard Cohen has been revealing his soul to the world through his poetry and songwriting. Keep Reading
“The beautiful is always bizarre.”
― Charles Baudelaire
“An artist is a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness…an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting. The poet is like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man’s personality. For him alone everything is vacant…The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts to his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.”
Charles Baudelaire
At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death;
the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens;
the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments;
the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page;
the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses,
for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert;
the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self;
the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors;
the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in the
garden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl;
the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought;
the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands;
the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language;
the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.”
― Octavio Paz
TERESA WILMS MONTT POET FROM CHILE (Viña del Mar, 1893 – París 1921): She was born in a wealthy family, daughter of Federico Guillermo Wilms Montt and Brieba, and his wife Luz Victoria Montt and Montt. Given the social context of that time, her primary instruction was given to her by governesses and particular teachers.
When Teresa turned 17, she got married with Gustavo Balmaceda Valdés. In the following years (1911 y 1913) she gave birth to her daughters, Elisa and Silvia Luz. Almost right after the wedding, the problems between Gustavo and Teresa started, mainly due to how much the husband felt aggravated by his wife’s personality, who frequently attended to literary gatherings, and followed the anarchist ideals, and free masonry. Gustavo reacted sheltering himself in the gambling and alcohol; Teresa, on her side, sheltered herself in her friend and Gustavo’s cousin, Vicente Balmaceda Zañartu (whom she will refer on the future at her diaries as Jean).
After numerous marital conflicts, moving from one city to another and letters from Vicente Balmaceda addressed to Teresa, Gustavo Balmaceda convened a family trial, which contaminated her confinement in the convent of Preciosa Sangre, which she entered on October 18th of 1915, and escaped from it on June of 1916 setting off for Buenos Aires, helped by Vicente Huidobro. During her stay in the convent, she started a journal, in which she wrote her feelings about the loss of her daughters, being separated from Vicente Balmaceda and the motivations for her first suicide attempt on March 29th, 1916.
In Buenos Aires, she contributed to Nosotros magazines, in which also did contributed Gabriela Mistral and Ángel Cruchaga Santa María, among others. She also published her first work “Inquietudes Sentimentales”, a collection of fifty poems with surrealistic threads, that enjoyed an amazing success among the intellectual circles of Buenos Aires society. the same happened to “Los Tres Cantos”, work that explored eroticism and spirituality.
Two years after this work and after traveling to Barcelona and New York, she came back to Buenos Aires and published “Cuentos para Hombres que Todavía son Niños”. In it she evoked her childhood and some vital experiences, in tales of great originality and fantasy. “En la Inquietud del Mármol” was published in Barcelona and constituted a lyric toned elegy, made of 35 fragments, which central leitmotif was death. Written on first person, she focused her interest on the mediating role of love between life and death.
She continued traveling across Europe, visiting London and Paris, but always being a resident of Madrid. In 1920 she was reunited with her daughters in Paris; but after they were separated she become gravely ill. In this crisis, she consumed a large dose of Barbital , and she died on December 24th 1921.
In the last pages of her diary, she wrote: “To die, after feeling everything and being nothing…”.
Source count of the Moon
