Susana Soca

Susana Soca

With lingering love she gazed at the dispersed Colors of dusk. It pleased her utterly To lose herself in the complex melody Or in the cunous life to be found in verse. lt was not the primal red but rather grays That spun the fine thread of her destiny, For the nicest distinctions and all spent In waverings, ambiguities, delays. Lacking the nerve to tread this treacherous Labyrinth, she looked in on, whom without, The shapes, the turbulence, the striving rout, (Like the other lady of the looking glass.) The gods that dwell too far away for prayer Abandoned her to the final tiger, Fire.

– Jorge Luis Borges

“[F]or most of my life I felt a strange gravitational pull toward an undisclosed traumatic event, that could only be described as a dreadful yearning, and I found it eventually in my son’s death – something that both destroyed me and ultimately defined me. It feels that the unformed yearning that followed me through my days, manifested in the death of my son. […] My son’s death brought me to the essence of my formed self. I mention this, because it could be that the unformed yearning […] may turn out to be something that eventually obliterates you, but also brings you back to life, transforming you into something beyond yourself.”

— Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files, June 2019

Alain Delon as Tom Ripley in Plein Soleil (1960)

“[…] the idea of perfection which art pursues, the wisdom accumulated in writing, the dream of satisfying every desire that is expressed in the luxury of ornaments, all these point towards one single meaning, celebrate one foundational principle, entail one single final object. And this is an object which does not exist. Its sole quality is that of not being there. One cannot even give it a name.”

— Italo Calvino, tr. Martin McLaughlin, from “The Mihrab,” Collection of Sand (Mariner Books, 2013; orig. pub. in Italian, 1984)