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I
Humboldt, dear old
friend, for you
nature was not the counter-world,
you, as a European, authorized by your continent, came,
in the year 1799, to America, and
its landscape urged you to search for
the total impression of nature:
cosmos and you
interweaved science with aesthetics.
The menacing summit of the Chimborazo or the penetrating lava of
the Casiquiare did not represent for you the destructive force of the
natural, as
it happened years before with the earthquake of Lisbon to Voltaire.
But nature, as all
systems, transforms itself,
tends to catastrophe
("catastrophe" for us, not for nature which
cannot read)
it varies its inner balance,
it destroys, it destroys without choosing, it destroys itself,
and does not think about you.
II
You never went to
Patagonia, Humboldt, to read the glaciers,
the tongues of ice, of soil, of time.
Look at the crevices of the glacier,
its white thick tissue, turquoise holes and dirt.
This surface is not a language (language is something human),
neither a metaphor, it is a pre-human event
(for our purpose, so that we
may transform the event into language).
An event, and we see its
forces and counter-forces, weapons and dreams, axe and bandage
(for our own purpose).
But what does the
eye do? The eye
(and it is an eye as yours, an eye which comes from art and science)
the eye also tends to catastrophe, the eye feels and touches, to find
the weakness, the undetermined in the process,
the scream in the crevices, the moment, in which
physis is transformed
in a hu-man act. Because man
has its own forces, he has its
de(-sire)struction.
(Yes, come closer! Look at the eye of the artist, his scar,
as in the eye of each of us)
But also its counter-forces,
its desire-to-cure-itself. Because the image is always more:
possession and
warning and
solution.
III
(In the year 1799,
Humboldt,
you rounded off the world for the second time,
and you felt proud,
European discoverer,
but look, today, Humboldt,
it is this rounding off that
questions the world.)
Ralph Buchenhorst, Buenos Aires, January 18, 2003
