The complete video was available in this platform between 8:58 pm on the 5th of June and 6:12 am on the 6th of June 2020 (Lisbon Time)
«One Last Longing», 2020
HD video (b/w & colour, sound, 8’18’’)
Sound designed & composed by João Poppe Toulson
Supported by DGARTES - Direção Geral das Artes
Lying on a couch, I talk as if no one can hear me. I discuss with myself why most of my references are male. They are just a way to replace you; after all, you were never completely there. Were you? Maybe, as Clark Kent, or a character of some kind, and that was somehow enough. Your inaccessibility made me like you. A fictional replacement seemed to me the only possible way out. I vomit you in my creativity in many forms, building universes that you can inhabit, but you are never seen. I chase your footsteps in humid jungles, dark hotel rooms and ancient ruins; I like to be seen as you, as a character of a movie, that when seen through a screen will be my favourite – my speed-dating hero. As the film beams out of the projector everything fades away, and I am myself again, and my loneliness lasts and lasts. It is just me in an empty cinema – I use film reels to burn us away.
On my way to the Hotel, families slept on the bus and the curtains were all partially shut. Fractions of green, sound-tracked by laser swords and droids – the new Star Wars was blasting. Layers of time, light and colours hit the dark bus as a drummer hits his snare. The Death Star is piercing the old Mayan jungles. I recall the story of Matapalo that I learned from Pax that morning. Pax is a young Mayan who wears a Liverpool shirt, smokes Lucky Strikes and knows every living or dead thing in that jungle. Matapalo is a sick tree, who hugs a healthy one in her seductive arms, stopping him from growing, in order to survive.
Now, sitting in the restaurant of the Hotel as the sun sets, casting everything into a Blade Runner 2049-like colour, we are drunk and you tell me what happened to Hart Crane after he left Mexico. He jumped off the back of the boat into the propellers and was completely cut to ribbons. A trace of bloody foam formed a road in the sea, like the Calzada de los Muertos, delivering Crane’s soul to where he had lost it.
You said that you have to be very careful when you go to Mexico so that you are not caught up in this – in any of this kind of unconscious, dangerous violence that is really lurking in every patch of earth. It’s just there, everywhere trying to get you so you have to be on your guard at all times. You were right, Daniel also, there is something very heavy and strange in the air over here, the whole city is drowned in some kind of smog. You even see people wearing masks in the streets. This darkness really hits, and it hit me as it did with Hart Crane.
I am stuck between four rotting walls; every spin of the fan opens a crack in the ceiling. I watch Troublemakers on repeat and read aloud a chapter of 2666 every night. Outside the lions patrol the streets, so nobody can leave their own thoughts.
«I dropped Bolaño on the bedside table and turned the lights off.
In a few minutes I heard some voices, someone was in the balcony, it was 11 pm, and the fucker was listening to some kind of radio program about serial killers, what a lovely way to fall asleep. It went on for 5 minutes, the time of a slow smoke, then it vanished and I fell into darkness, really…»
I am having very strange dreams; I woke up 4 times in the middle of the night without being able to breathe. My eyeballs are full with tears that don’t come out, smog fills my nose up to my brain.
I am tired of you!
Don’t get me wrong, I am forever grateful; after all, you shaped me. You taught me how time can coexist - that the future is but the obsolete in reverse, how to see interest in gas stations and how Hotels can be compared to pyramids, but I am no man’s son and I learned I would never be.
Now, I feel stuck in a far cry, an immensity of tears, which flood old civilizations.
Well, flood them all, this is my last longing.
(This text was originally written in English near Vale de Russins, May 2020)
