This goddamn rain
Lisbon in October is like this. One moment it’s warm and you walk around town entertaining solar thoughts and, the next moment, an excessive, furious, tropical rain pours down on you. It lasted only a few minutes (and I was in my Fernando Pessoa disguise, with a trenchcoat and a fedora), but I got home soaked from head to toe. Even Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry, that I had in my backpack, got rained on.
Taken by a certain poetic panic, I grabbed a hairdryer and tried to savage those poems from humidity. Watery shadows were gaining territory, trying to conquer entire pages. My situation was becoming less Pessoa-ish and more Groucho Marx-ist, but, well, that’s life.
During this words-drying job, some verses caught my eye (Pardon my English translation from a Portuguese one): “Nike is more beautiful in that moment/ when she hesitates/ her right hand beautiful as an order/ rests on the air/ but her wings tremble”.
That image — the goddess of victory hesitating, trembling — made me think about the actual moment of the left. All over the world, the right — and, increasingly, the far-right — is winning elections. (Even Milei, in Argentina…) And, though there are several countries with left-wing majorities, it looks like this turning-to-the right is a global tendency. But why? And why now?
Some talk about History, how it is structured in cycles or waves. Others add numbers and charts to this, putting the economy in the equation. There are those who prefer a sociological analysis, referring different forms of anxiety related to our societies’ atomization which has been powered by the use of technology; a general, diffuse fear pervading all generations; several types of insecurity for which the right’s discourse — a certain right, alas — seems more prepared as it plays with the concepts of order, closure, “us” against “them”, the return to an imaginary yesterday where everything was simple and good.
The great narratives of meaning, whether of a religious or an ideological nature, have lost its sparkle; the algorithms industry has locked us inside a totalitarian present where there is no place for memory or hope; and, what’s more, the planet is being consumed beyond its limits. Fear spreads in different levels, from the collective scale of war and hunger to the individual scale of depression and addiction.
This fear-of-fears creates fertile ground for the irrational in us, and some cultural guerrilla-fighters and political protagonists take advantage of that. It’s like these people synthesize our societies’ fear into language in order to give it back in grotesquely simplified ways. This gives many voters a sense of security. The type of security you get when you know your illness has a name and, eventually, some kind of treatment. The name is wrong and the treatment will make things worse — it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re less scared now.
No, the right’s structural pessimism will not save us. But, the way things are going, it risks being correct — making it impossible for the world to become a better place. It’s raining everywhere, goddamn. Kneeling on my bathroom’s floor, holding an out-of-tune hairdryer, I try to salvage the Polish master’s poetry. Some stains won’t go away, but the words resist.
In Zbigniew Herbert’s “Hesitating Nike”, the goddess wants to kiss the young mortal man, yet she also fears it. She hesitates “and, in the end, decides/ to stay in the position/ sculptors have taught her”. She knows that, “tomorrow, at dawn”, the young man must be found “with his chest slashed/ his eyes closed”.