Splendor

I read a phrase by John Cage and it stuck: "My

requires a certain sense of not-knowing."

I have seldom known less than in the last two years.

I coalesced around a hard core of hostility and anger, a bird with clenched jaws and a bleeding beak.

I don't know if that made a profit.

I bring to the surface thoughts more in keeping with this date.

I saw recently in Madrid

, by Jane Campion. The movie theater was packed and hot, and even though I thought I was going to distract myself by praying to my covid vaccine, I soon began to float. Director of

, by

, this is her first feature in years. Can you always be better? Alejandro Zambra wrote a great novel called

in 2006 and fourteen years later, in 2020, he published

, a Contemporary Classic, an expansive improvement of his work, unlike anything he had done before. There are people who can always be better, and we must assume that this is due to their talent and the courage to do the unexpected.

It does not resemble any Campion movie and yet it is identical in its DNA: characters without a past, although of enormous thickness;

eroticism inseminated like a voltaic discharge.

If in his previous works things happen all the time, in this one only the echoes of events that we are not allowed to see are recorded, parsimonious, incendiary, innervated by a disturbing and hidden substance.

When I came out, in the Plaza de España the bustle was atrocious, the lights an infection, but everything sordid was friendly and the city seemed about to fly away.

I thought that those lines by Louise Glück - "In its greatness and splendor, the world / was at last present" - had come true, and that the splendor of the world did not have to be temporary.

For many hours it was not.

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Jane Campion enthuses the Venice Film Festival with her tense western

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