Good Evening Cervantes,
Yes, we were born for each other. We had no choice. I, too, never had the courage to believe in nothing. I followed so many quests, yearning for that deep well that would finally yield the purity of a holy and true soul. The books, so many of them, guiding me on but in the end only admitting their kinship with my longing and vaguely pointing a haziness that may be the rising of an innocent horizon that just may, just may, fervently plead a pure new sky. All these people, greed pouring from the pupils of their ancient but beautiful eyes, the words, phrased and peppered with so much malice and self-adulation, and mingled with one sided truths so that personal glee could become base unquestioned stuck holiness. To declare our want God and immerse ourselves in the unearthly raw voices that can never be fully satisfied and that have but one intention and that is to disperse with the human soul in order for a beaten body to survive. At all costs.
No Cervantes, you could not do that. Me neither, ancient friend.
Yes Cervantes, the body surviving without its soul, is a carcass. The body without its compass is a shipwreck. Even if it still has to crash into its destiny.
They made a film of your book, naming it after me, Don Quixote. Man of La Mancha. That amazing actor, curse him for his talent, Peter O’Toole, played in it. Sophia Loren too. Dulcinea, Dulcinea, please leave my dreams, my longing, alone. They played beyond their provinciality and human kind could come to shivers and glimpses of life. .
Yes Cervantes, life is a cruel and dirty game. We must agree if we are honest. For most. But the enchanters still continue to play their deceiver’s game to the suffering masses and they still succeed in keeping them respectively at bay. What an accomplishment after all the centuries of ruthless scheming and base self- interest.
But you created me to say it. You inspired Peter O’Toole to spit it out, ‘…not to see life as it is but as it should be!”.
Yes, we need that rare nobility when no one will even be in the vicinity to hear. There is just one type of nobility for our kind. To never back off when kindness is required. To test the range of our integrity when anything, anyone on this earth, is suffering. To never, never allow our sensitivity to start blocking the pain of all those lost in the very fierce and more often, chillingly subtle ways of cruel currents.
Cervantes, you knew, that, we instinctively block. All of that, what would ask us to surrender hardly fought for personal territory. That, what will leave us in unchartered waters again. That, what will leave us vulnerable again. Open for unbearable pain. And so most of us would rather let the others suffer and endeavor to prevent our souls of realizing the devil in our cushioned rationality of life catering for a diminished self.
There never was an Inquisition grating hardened skin to expose this kind of shame.
Cervantes, there seem to be no other way. The innocent has to pay for the sins of the guilty. The calculating ones are winning. By far. Counted in dollars, euros, rupees, gold and bricks and mortar.
That leaves one struck with the impossible dream, with unbearable sorrow, saddened to the seat of the un-dogmatized soul, with no other choice than to fight the ‘unbeatable’ foe.
To make a world of iron, a plastic world, into one with a human heart.
My horse Pancho!
Goodbye Dulcinea!
Don Quixote.
Man of La Mancha.
Translated in Bellville
