Reasons of State Read Free Page A

stains of new paint on his breeches: “Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? The other senses corroborate themselves, but this is removed from any proof but its own and foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A single glance of it mocks all the investigations of man and books of the earth and all reasoning.”
    Carpentier’s Cuban-born art was prefigured in his youth by an obsession and scholarly leap into Afro-Cuban music, which he was one of the first to study seriously. A sincere grasp of music actually pulls him away from most writers who are tone-deaf enough to write either telephone lists of names and numbers or advertising copy. But the Cuban work came to loom over its time because Carpentier’s inner strength increased until it was aged wisdom, a condition known everywhere but perhaps most significant in the aesthetic context, and always aided by a sense of human recognition that escapes all of those snares, the intricate heaps of holes made by academics and meant for the capturing of imagination, its wind and breath, itself an Edenic force like the line in geometry that has no beginning and no end. Carpentier knew we have access to the part of the line that we pretend, together, has a start and a finish. Nothing not only comes from nothing, as the Greek said, but life emerges from and continues into oblivion, moving from mist to mist, impenetrably.
    The relationship between time and space always follows the rules of quicksilver on a board beneath feet that is also a floor through which we see moments disappear—now you see it; now you don’t.
    Bessie Jones speculated to a college audience that the only meaning clearly said by life was this:
Being born meant that one was going to die
. A perfect grasp of existentialism by a Georgia Sea Island singer at an age carved into later space by wisdom. Whitman, Melville, Twain, and Joyce were open to such a scope of communication between the learned and the not-too-literate, since the poetic was always available to take the giant steps necessitated by democracy and its central thoughts, with recognition of the grand mystery of personal importance or group significance seeming to rise from nowhere and going somewhere on engines of vitality.
    That is the roller coaster of international mulatto life, an inevitable that all human closeness brands as invincible. Alejo Carpentier believed and lived and danced and sang by it, if not to it. Happiness, sadness, or any variations on either are secondary to the vitality, the affirmation, of the breath itself, and to the wind that blows along or reveals the prints and footprints of the past.
    I was forlornly born in a bucket of butcher knives
    I been shot in the ass with two ice-cold Colt .45s
    So you got to be mighty goddam ignorant to mess with me
    When asked, I say, Whatever will be,
already
happened.
    Ice freezes red, you hear me?

ONE
    … it is not my design to teach the method that everyone must follow in order to use his reason properly, but only to show the way in which I have tried to use my own
.
    — DESCARTES,
DISCOURSE ON METHOD

1
    … BUT I’VE ONLY JUST GONE TO BED. AND THE alarm has gone off already. Half past six. It’s impossible. Quarter past seven, perhaps. More likely. Quarter past eight. This alarm clock would be a marvel of Swiss watchmaking, but its hands are so slim that one can hardly see them. Quarter past nine. That’s not right, either. My spectacles. Quarter past ten. That’s it. Besides, daylight is already shining through the yellow curtains with morning brilliance. And it’s always the same when I come back to this house: I open my eyes with the feeling of being
there
, because this same hammock accompanies me everywhere—house, hotel, English castle, our palace—because I’ve never been able to sleep in a rigid bed with a mattress and bolster. I have to curl up inside a rocking hammock, to be cradled in its corded network. Another swing and a yawn, and with another swing I