My Simón Bolívar

—Fragment—

Fernando González

1930

Translation by
Juan Fernando Hincapié & Eric Lackey *

Introduction

I am a friend of Lucas Ochoa. Somewhat like his disciple, even though sometimes I mock him. I am convinced that a certain dose of irony is necessary for intelligent admiration. I’ll explain myself: only the inferior admire with seriousness. Life is movement in its every phase. Everything vibrates. For example, density comes from the level of vibration of the molecules, or better, from the electrons. We can elaborate from there that pure feeling, pure admiration… What woman loves someone that adores her blindly? A passion like that lacks grace.

That’s too much philosophy to say that I’m a friend of Lucas Ochoa. Metaphysics are so juicy!

In any case, it is evident that Lucas and I both sustain as a first principle that man is the center of the universe, which is the meal for his conscience.

Emotional is what we call our method. To understand things is to be moved by them; until one reaches intense emotion, one hasn’t comprehended an object; while more unified with it, more will it be understood. That is why the definition of beauty is so vivid when it consists of the quality of the objects that incite us to possess them. Love is the tendency towards unification. The supreme mystical feeling is the concentration of God’s conscience: unification so complete that produces ecstasy.

Sage we call the one that has felt the universe living, and has lived with it. From there Lucas’ great transcendental idea about conscience. According to it, he divides men in the following categories: physiological, husband men, civic men, patriots, continentals and men of cosmic conscience. This last one is the Sage; he has unified with the universe and perceives this unification; he perceives himself as God. Are we not sons of God and, therefore, Gods?

The Sage, through the emotional method, has perceived the will of all beings and the anxieties of everything that exists. By means of this method, he has, so to speak, pushed forward the roots of his conscience, like an immense tree, throughout everything that exists, in order to nourish from them. “Nothing is strange for me.” In reality, the conscience is everything in a man and the secret of wisdom consists in living with all things. To understand the child you must have the infantile emotion. To understand the heavenly body you have to live with it…

Now follows the memory of a veterinarian: the horse did not let anyone place it in the trail and moved around vehemently. A tall, thin, scar-faced killer approached and with vibrant emotion laid a hand in its spine; blew and bit his ear; and rode… They were one will, one fervent animal: and the girlfriend beside me was in ecstasy.

We all remember our moments of love. One perceives the mutual understanding with the loved one without knowing how that evident perception arrived; it is then as if both lovers thought and wished in the same way, and both knew (how?) that they love each other and what they desire. It’s a superior law to the one of the electric waves.

And what happens to the Sage? In him, the concept of native country disappears. His conscience is cosmic.

Our ancestors that had even an inferior conscience, that were men of only powerful physiology, sons of the Balboas, Juanes de La Cosa and Pizarros, called, for example, trompa the lips of the slave. For the Sage, all these concepts are relative.

The native country is precise for the physiological man, against robbery and murder. But the Sage is not possessed by this passion: he is a mahatma.

In a low period of the conscience, men are brought to cohesiveness and sustained by the concept of the native country; but everything is artifice and the objective resides in the union with the infinite force. Energy expands through the emotional method.

What can the Sage care about praise and literary honor? He knows that being is different from appearing. They can say to him a thousand symbols, and what does he gain? The one that belongs to the emotional method knows that mirth is in the power of the conscience.

Lucas writes in one of his intimate diaries:

“It’s funny to think of so many people I know, imagining that all of a sudden they’ll be alone in the world. What would become of them, poor little vainly people, who publish all the identifications, all of the praise?

In the midst of ourselves, here we stand, the mahatmas. For us, loneliness is found in a state of company, for what we despise the most is marking boundaries. Nothing speaks, but the man. Trees are rooted and moved by the wind, but they remain silent. Animals and minerals don’t speak. But everything is conscious and emotional. There is no doubt that, in a certain sense, language has prevented man from ascending to cosmic conscience; language is limited and it separates individualities. That is why the great consciences that humanity has had, have perceived the emotive communication as a near stage for men, without the need of the articulated language.”

Our practical criterion for life has been as follows:

We are little ragged Gods that climb in the scale of conscience. Let’s sit in the doorstep of everything beautiful until we make it our own, through the emotional method. Let’s pursue the hero until unified with it, until he lives in us. Only through emotion can we embellish ourselves. But let’s not forget that the universe is the object and that we shouldn’t be possessed. What impoverishes is anxiety, anxiety that drowns the one that is submerging, anxiety that hastens the attrition of the sick. Anxiety is a nourishing object, it is bait. There is absorbent action and depressive action; the first one is emotion, the second one, passion. We contemplate, for example, a beautiful woman: if we get disordered, all of our energy will be absorbed by her and we will remain tremulous, anxious and sick. Let’s open our soul to the fluids of health and beauty of that woman and in such a manner we will tune harmoniously.

Being plethoric or euphoric means being filled, self-controlled and tranquil. Beauty is a kingdom and its slaves are the incontinent that ignore the method that leads to wisdom.

How do we absorb energy? A note from Lucas answers us:

“Considering the emotions and ideas and tasting them. Right now I’m tepid; I feel the landscape, all the sun, all the sound and all the silence circulate my organism. I am in the land and the land is in the cosmos. Nothing pulls in me:

You are the fruit of the Lifetree;
you are not my hunters:
my heart is not the fruit,
but the devourer.

The devourer of the beautiful things;
the hunter sitting
under the tree
of conformity.

Now the birds sing
humble.
For me the humble sing;
for the peaceful
hunter”.

* * *

Lucas Ochoa has lived the greatest part of his time among the purple people of Colombia. Here, the races have been blending incessantly until producing this peculiar, feeble, small; with violated nails and friend of Congresses that is the Colombian.

Lucas traveled towards north and noon, towards east and west, in useless search for human beauty. Then he went to the past and found that in Santiago de León de Caracas, at one in the morning of the twenty fourth of July of seventeen eighty-three, there had been born an indigenous Spaniard, heir of all the energy of the conquerors, and that in his short life of forty seven years, four months and twenty four days had achieved the following principles in which the actuation of the human energy can be abridged:

I. —To know exactly what one wants;

II. —To desire it as the person who is drowning desires air;

III. —To sacrifice towards the fulfillment of that desire.

That man was SIMÓN BOLÍVAR.

Having found human beauty, Lucas isolated himself from his fellow citizens and over years gave himself to the realization of the hero in his own person.

———
* Juan Fernando Hincapié – Estudiante de tercer año del MFA en Creación Literaria de UTEP. Es ferviente hincha de la obra del maestro Fernando González.

* Eric Lackey was born by the river in Atchison, Kansas, and attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence where he studied film and creative writing. For the past three years, he has been writing at the University of Texas at El Paso where he will complete his MFA in Creative Writing in May 2008.

Source:

Rio Grande Review, The University of Texas at El Paso, Proyecto de traducción del maestro Fernando González, Volume 31, Spring 2008, p.p. 145 – 148.