Fireflies

Luis Sagasti, Fionn Petch

• Publisher: Charco Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781999722753
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

How do we even begin to narrate the history of the world? Where do we start, and where do we end? Fireflies is Sagasti's bold and original attempt to answer these questions. Roaming across time and geography, he lights on an eclectic array of characters and events that at first glance seem unrelated, and teases out their stories to reveal unexpected points of contact between them. Stanley Kubrick, Joseph Beuys, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Neil Armstrong, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Beatles, Japanese poets, Brazilian priests, Russian cosmonauts and many more cross these pages, and Sagasti finds common threads that weave them together into a single narrative.The fireflies themselves perhaps provide the key to understanding this book. They become a metaphor for the resistance of certain luminous moments, certain twinkling fragments of history, to the passing of time. They remind us that events do not always simply disappear neatly into the darkness, but rather remain, floating in the air, lighting up the night sky indefinitely. Sagasti shows us that the present moment, like this novel, is a tapestry woven of a multiplicity of times.Using his unique, poetic and keenly observant style, Sagasti transforms the accidents of history into a single, lyrical constellation, and for the reader it is an extraordinary sight.

Luis Sagasti

Fireflies

Translated by Fionn Petch

1. Fireflies

The world is a ball of wool.

A skein of yarn you can’t find the end of.

When you can’t, you pluck at the surface to bring up a strand and then break it with a sharp tug. Once you find the other end, you can tie the two threads of yarn together again. One of grandma’s little tricks.

Some people think the world is a ball of wool from a lamb that sacrificed itself long ago so everyone could stay warm.

And they find this idea comforting.

And there are others who think that, in fact, the world is held up by threads. As if the ball of yarn were elsewhere. So headlines appear that try to explain things like who pulls the strings of the world. Magazine covers: two threatening eyes against a black background. And there are writers who write whole books about this. Conspiracy theories. An explanation that arises from intellectual laziness: the idea that a shadowy group has chosen to weave the plots of all of our lives. Just like that. Because: a) they are pure and good; b) they want to keep hold of their wealth; c) they are evil, really evil; or d) they hold a secret that would be the end of all of us if we were to find it out – and of them too, of course. For those who see the world this way, any conspiracy – because there have always been conspiracies – is just the visible result of a greater conspiracy. And the smaller conspiracies are all interconnected. Man never reached the moon. Paul McCartney died in 1967 and was replaced by a lookalike. Christ descended from the cross and had twins with Mary Magdalene. Shakespeare’s works were actually written by Francis Bacon. The Lautaro Lodge was a branch of the Freemasons, who are a branch of the Rosicrucians, who are a branch of the Gnostics, and the tree proliferates so wildly that not only does it leave us unable to see the wood but it also fills everything with shadows, making way for those two threatening eyes that want us to understand that there’s something out there it’s better we don’t know about. Because – and this we do know – conspirators always leave clues, as if everything were one big game of hide and seek. For people who think like this, any secret is part of the plot because when people conspire they breathe low and in unison, as if whispering a secret.

We shouldn’t believe them, though it’s right to believe in secrets. After all, childhood is nothing but the progressive revelation of well-kept secrets. To reveal them all at the same time would be to reveal nothing. The darkest dark and the whitest light are equally blinding. Like discovering that your dad has already bought all your Santa presents for the next five years.

How do we know when there are no more secrets? When do we find that out? Or is there nothing to learn?

There are secrets that make the world work in a particular way. But they shouldn’t be called secrets. Omissions would be more prudent. For the machine to keep running, it’s better not to mention certain things. Every family holds a terrible secret that, as soon as we sense what it might be, is no longer mentioned.

And there are still others who believe that these threads in fact sustain the world from the inside, as if the world were the great ball of wool and we were insects, like ants or flies, crawling or flying around it. A ball of wool someone is using to knit something. Or perhaps no one is knitting anything at all. There’s just a great shroud with no Penelope, growing without purpose in the eternal silence of infinite space.

One thing we can be sure of is that, for hundreds of thousands of years, the ball of yarn has been revolving without pause.

This is something the earliest shamans knew, just by looking at the stars.

In all this, the knitting needles and the resulting scarf or pullover don’t look particularly great in the end. Who’d want to try them on? Some god freezing to death in the vastness of space, or some god who is space at 270 degrees below zero, immobile, frozen, who observes how every now and again phosphorescent insects – something like fireflies – appear on the revolving ball of yarn, on one side and then the other, as if they could move through it. Traverse it, yes. From side to side. Except these fireflies seem to flee ahead of the needles. Or perhaps they are the needles.

Outside it’s cold; up there it’s cold. It’s true, the stars in the sky burn at hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius, but the voids drawn between them are at absolute zero. The straight line formed by the stars of Orion’s belt is an icy needle held at 270 degrees below zero. All the constellations are threaded by icy needles in the image of vast animals hidden somewhere on this planet-like ball of wool.

Among people, we should seek out only the fireflies; the rest are simply animals whose frost is reflected in the heavens.

Should we become fireflies?

Ever since people raised their heads for the first time to observe the stars and began telling them apart by nothing more than the invisible threads of frozen silver that link them, they also began to tell stories. About why the ball of wool revolves only to return to the same place each year; about who the great weaver is, the great animal, the great reindeer, the great bear, the great hare that knits its pullover with those icy needles in order to warm up those who pass that way once their skin has become as cold as their bones. Those who sleep a dreamless sleep and become, naturally, the dreams of others. Or at least provide source material for their insomnia.

Up there it’s so cold. Perhaps that’s why the people huddled around the fire tell the story of the great pullover. Time and again. And from up there, sitting on the edges of those icy needles running from star to star, is it possible to see the fire crackling? The light of the caves?

Insect-men, curled up in a ball, gathered around the firefly that illuminates the night with its tale.

It’s cold out there. It’s always a good idea to start where it’s cold, or where there’s liquid. That’s the point of the ball of wool. To be able to return, later in the story, to the warmth of the good earth.

Where to start, if we can’t find the end of the strand and we don’t want to break the yarn?

Start with the open mouths of those by the fire listening to the story of the ball of wool, for example. Or the open mouths of those who fall into the cold.

The mouth opens whenever it’s the first time. It imitates the frozen abyss that separates the stars.

In the beginning and in the end the breath stops. Always. The mouth opens wider. Or the eyes, those two mouths that swallow everything. The world fits into the body and once it occupies it completely, it explodes against the ground or emerges in a shout. Or a sigh.

One, two, three and the four that’s left unspoken, the band holds its breath, and there, the music of the spheres begins to play.

2. Haikus

In the winter of 1943, one of the cruellest in living memory, perhaps because no one had anything in their bellies, the Stuka being flown by the officer Joseph Beuys was hit by a Russian fighter plane after a brief combat in the skies above Crimea. Beneath them, the cold was turning the pine needles into crystals, transforming the trees into a translucent forest of blue mirrors that smash the aircraft into hundreds of pieces before it even reaches the ground. Beuys’ face, already shattered, streaks past the tiny mirrors of ice hanging from the branches. Mirrors of ice like perfect, diminutive haikus. Everything takes just a few hundred years that somehow fit into the blink of an eye. It has been snowing steadily for almost two days, scattering particles of silence over the branches and across the ground. The snow absorbs part of the noise of the plummeting aircraft, but the sound of thousands of breaking mirrors reaches the alert ears of the Tatars. The pilot’s skill or luck meant the plane didn’t land on its nose and explode. Officer Beuys, gravely wounded, unconscious and near-frozen, is rescued by a group of nomad Tatars who know nothing about the war. They’ve come to understand that when there’s thunder above but no storm, it’s best to take refuge beneath the biggest trees. The co-pilot has broken his neck. His name was Karl Vogts. His body is never found.

For a period of time Beuys cannot calculate, he is stalked by death, which is only kept at bay by the Tatar shaman who smears the pilot’s wounds with animal fat and wraps him in felt. Hare skins are the best choice when it comes to protecting someone from the cold. He recites the prayers he’s learnt on one of the three nights when the moon disappears. Days pass, and death leaves to maraud elsewhere. When he regains consciousness, the aviator starts to speak in an unintelligible language made up of words born of fever, inseparable one from the other, even for the shaman, who knows the tongue of the animals. The man who fell from the plane has blue eyes and full lips. He is too dazed for fear to express itself in his face. The Tatars keep him awake for most of the day, always wrapped tightly in the felt blanket, like a mummy. He lies trembling before a hearth where the fire is never allowed to go out. He is not sure when he is dreaming and when he is awake, if it is cold or if it is warm. He thinks he wakes up in the middle of the night. He sees things. Or perhaps he sees nothing. It is more likely he sees nothing. His mind is a burning pot. Neurons like thousands of still mirrors reflecting without judging – this is their fidelity. The Tatars pass in front of him, blurs of light. The faces come from above, ...

Table of contents

• Praise for Luis Sagasti
• Fireflies
• Appendix
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on the Text
• Copyright