- Man needs to take a look at himself and say: I am an instrument. Let us banish from our souls the familiar feeling of silent labour and give our admiration to the beauty of the world. We are but a means, but the end is great. We are the stray sparks from a prodigious conflagration. The majesty of the Universe shines above us and makes our humble exertions sacred. Little though we may be, we shall be all, provided we give ourselves completely. We have stepped out of the shadows in order to warm ourselves at the fire; we were born to spread our substance around and ennoble things. Our mission is to broadcast our body parts and our intellect; to open up our insides until our genius and our blood spill on to the earth. We exist only insofar as we give; for us to deny ourselves is to fade away in ignominy. We are a promise; the vehicle of unfathomable intentions. We live for our fruits; the only crime is sterility.
Our exertions link up with the countless exertions of space and time and blend with the efforts of the universe. Our cry echoes through the infinite vastness. When we move, we make the stars tremble. Not an atom, not a single idea is lost in eternity. We are the siblings of the stones in our huts, of the sensitive trees and the speeding insects. We are siblings even of the imbeciles and criminals, failed experiments, the bankrupted children of our common mother. We are the siblings even of the fatalism that kills us. By fighting and winning we do our bit for the grand endeavour, and we do our bit when we are defeated too. Pain and annihilation have their uses too. From behind the endless, savage warfare comes the song of a vast harmony. Slowly our nerves strain, binding us to the unknown. Slowly our reason spreads its laws into unknown territory. Slowly science marshals phenomena into a higher unity, the inkling of which is essentially religious, because it is not religion that science destroys but religions. Queer notions cross our minds. A muddled and grandiose dream settles over humanity. The horizon is dense with shadows and in our hearts dawn smiles.
We do not yet understand. We are merely afforded the right to love. Driven on by supreme determinations welling up within us, we tumble into the bottomless enigma. We heed the wordless voice rising in our consciousness and tentatively we toil and fight. Our heroism consists of our ignorance. We are on the move, we know not where and we will not be stopped. The tragic encouragement of the irreparable caresses our sweating breasts.
Rafael Barret – from Moralidades Actuales (in Spanish only)
One of the greatest iconic figures in the American Mythology is the Noble Farmer (a close second to the Homicidally Psychotic Cowboy/Outlaw). We know him well: a selfless paragon of good Christian virtue, the only thing he values more than God, family and flag is his tireless quest to bring forth nourishing yummies from the Earth herself and deliver them fresh to your dinner table. He has no vices. Not for him the bars and whoremarkets of decadent urbanism. He toils from dusk til dawn in his sunlit fields and then collapses into the chaste embrace of his broodmaker, sleeping the deep, black sleep of the righteous, only to wake at dawn and start again. He is all that is Good and Right in us. He is the backbone of blahdie blah blah….
