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Welcome to the Lab
Don'tf forget the slab
[Rocky Horror Picture Show]
El misterio es parte de lo divino, y aún de lo sobrenatural.
La solución es solo juego de manos.
[Mr B., aka the usual suspect]
1.A FAIT-DIVERS
Stories are pointless unless they are true. So here goes a true story: a few years ago (I could tell the precise date but won't for privacy matters) I shot a famous Portuguese writer. Not one of the many I disdain, envy, or utterly abhor, but one I admired a lot. And yes, I shot her, with a gun, aiming to kill. And, indeed, I killed her. I killed Ana Hatherly, who happened to be one of my country's noblest and soundest voices.
Ana Hatherly (1931-2016) was for a long time dismissed as a minor voice. No longer: at least in Portugal, death brings many gifts for those who await her. Old age does the trick too, people start loving you when you have one foot in the grave. For almost fifty years, Ana Hatherly was a resilient force, an experimental artist, a performance artist, one of the poets responsible for bringing 'concrete poetry' from Brazil to Portugal and, from here, to Europe. As it happens with unclassifiable artists, Ana wore the mantle of invisibility both to painters and writers, for she danced in-between both circles, and what she did was at the same time both and neither. That was one of the conundrums of 20th century art: the most challenging work usually questioned boundaries and, doing that, ended up fitting nowhere. She went through decades of loneliness and yet she strived. She also survived the worst personal tragedy, the loss of her only daughter, at 18, to a brutal and trivial car crash. Nonetheless, Ana kept working, writing, tinkering. A couple of her books are now considered classics in the Portuguese speaking world. Her work has been more and more the subject of important exhibitions and studies. She's part of the canon now-not as much as Bob Dylan after the Nobel, but close enough, at least for my country's...