The garden is a space where we seed and plant for the recreation of the senses. The garden is conceived from and for the body, it is a bodily experience. A microcosm that allows us to explore, stretch, dilute, our sensory boundaries. It is pollination and exchange.

The garden is the ambit in which nature appears subdued, ordered, selected, fenced in. This constitutes a symbol of consciousness in front of the jungle that is the unconscious, like an island in front of the ocean.

It is associated as an emblem of the feminine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But for the Greeks, gardens were sacred spaces dedicated to Adonis, Aphrodite’s favorite lover. He was resurrected every spring to fall in love again with the goddess.

Gardens exist for the erotic spectator. The erotic spectator is always active. Eroticism cannot occur in a passive spectator. Eroticism activates the intelligent spectator. I see that and something is born in me. I am in active exchange.

The garden is also associated with the labyrinth. Specifically with the baroque labyrinth that was designed to play at getting lost and its real purpose was the love encounter. Unlike the classical initiatory labyrinth where you cannot get lost, there is only one path that leads you to the center. The only thing you can do in this labyrinth is to stop, but getting lost is impossible, the mystery of initiation is to go through it. It is a journey of return and departure.

The labyrinth is also the encounter with the abyss, with the irrational, the incommensurable: the infinite. It is to die in order to be reborn.

It is necessarily a wound that pushes us to enter the labyrinth. The wound sets us in motion, through it we enter the swirl. We go from being a point to being a spiral line. This is how we enter the unknown, which paradoxically is the only way to remember. And writing poetry is remembering something forgotten.

In language poetry is the labyrinth. Poetry is the abyss. Because poetry pushes language to the edge of rational sense.

The labyrinth is communion with mystery. Poetry is communion with mystery. Communion with mystery is communion with the other. Communion with the other is the mystery of eroticism. The continuity of my being in the other. In that instant I am-the-other. That is the gift that Eros gives us.

We have to know how to coexist and contemplate all that we cannot understand. For true mystery resists ” explication” because its very essence does not allow it to be solved in a rational way. Mystery can only be experienced.

For example, beauty is a bodily sensation, we can feel how its force passes through our whole body. In every encounter with beauty we are transformed into another self. An expanded self.

It is said that the alphabets of the world were born from the dance of men as an offering to beauty. With each movement of their bodies they traced the letters, one by one. Just like the cranes, which left their marks in the wet mud on the banks of the Nile.

The labyrinth of writing contains within itself an infinite number of senses, like the peacock’s iridescent plumage.

–I borrow this image from Borges who in turn borrows it from Scotus of Erigena. You know how I love reference matryoshkas–

But let us return to our subject…

Language is an aesthetic creation just as the garden is an aesthetic creation. With language we try to domesticate meaning, we construct what we think is reality, with the garden we try to domesticate the wild jungle of the unconscious.

Our ancestors with their spiral dance tuned their bodies to the open continuity of infinity. Because we are the living labyrinth.

And Eros is the sublime and fierce way to the infinite. Eros tears the subject out of itself, out and towards the other. It is Eros through desire that defies reason.

In the tension between the conscious and the unconscious, between the right and the left hemisphere, between linear and circular time, between the analog and the analytical, between the feminine and the masculine, between the inside and the outside, between desire and reason: there is the double spiral, there is the double labyrinth. 

And I am radically both. 

The journey into the abyss is the poet’s enterprise. 

And that transit is my Annotations on the Boredom.