El Puñal [1.]

 Posted by at 6:49 pm  Atelier
Dec 142009
 

Slit us up, like books, into two halves.

 

You ought to know it was a pointed steel instrument which did the cutting in half at the dead of night, not a doctor’s scalpel at all. Do you know that poem by Borges, which begins: En un cajón hay un puñal (a dagger rests in a drawer)?

 

Es más que una estructura hecha de metalles… the poem continues further on, like Posada’s stylus for his woodcuts – el metal que presiente en cada contacto al homicida para quien lo crearon los hombres.

 

Only, you don’t need a translation to know how, in the hand, the sharp instrument comes to life, or what the rest of its history has been – quiere matar, quiere derramar brusca sangre – alive…

 

… So that afterwards we hop, one eyed, one legged and all the rest, and pose in front of mirrors to wonder which is our better half, and which our worse.