20 Years

It's been 20 years.

20 years

since Belano died,

20 years since he stopped working

on 2666, 

ignoring the advice

of his doctors
knowing it would get in his way,

that his feverish devotion

to this story

meant he had to obsess over it

the minor variations

that strummed among the words

that rattled inside him,

the way his stories always did

how they clouded his thoughts

and yet revealed themselves

so perfectly

in his stories

and never so well

as within the pages

of 2666.

20 years

and at the time

I didn't even know

he existed,

had never read anything by him,

and wouldn't for another six years?

Only six years?  Is that right?

Even in the ballpark,

even if a year or two more,

so close,

so close

to the living lifetime

to know this man was still alive,

still capable of understanding

what he had accomplished

from a deserved acclaim

and not the absurd backlash

that was to follow

in the jealous words

of those who were never going to understand him

much less appreciate him,

expecting their pet and petty favorites

were more relevant

than one of the best writers

humanity has ever produced.

20 years gone,

and sure,

20 years later

a lot has been published posthumously,

and there's yet prospects for more,

and some of us

still relish the thought

that there's more yet

we haven't read,

that will somehow

still be new.

For a writer like Belano,

who belonged to posterity

even when he was writing himself

away from it,

subsuming his life into

the last great manuscript of his life,

20 years is a small drop in the bucket.

But it is still a tragedy.

The Chilean

Because he became
a citizen of the world
it can almost

sometimes

be easy to forget,

although certainly

not if you'd been Belano,

that he was Chilean.

In the last years of his life
I was in college,

before I'd ever heard of him,

and I became immersed
in the poetry that suffused
certain elements of campus,

and in that process

I took a class

that explored new poetry,

and welcomed visiting poets,

one of which
was Chilean.

To this day

I will always define

the experiences of those days

by the results of that poet's visit

to the classroom one day.

This was in the aftermath of 9/11,

you understand,

the immediate days and years

in its wake.

You will often hear

college campuses 

explained as bastions

of liberal thought,

which was certainly true

in my experience too,

although maybe that's not really it

and it's really that so many students

come from different backgrounds

where they have not yet experienced

or learned or considered

wider ideas

than was in their home life

and don't know how to process

whether to embrace wholesale

or whatever the alternative,

what they learn

outside the classroom.

At any rate,

in this classroom

that day,

my classmates responded in horror

that a Chilean would compare

Chilean tragedy

in the form of a general in white

and the country he held in his gloved grip

to the American tragedy

of 9/11.

Later, 

I would have no problem

comprehending Belano's perspective,

since it defined him,
and why he traveled the world

in response,

and yet at the time
I found myself baffled
that the professor made no counterargument
that I alone understood
how little this classroom

understood the world
around it.

What else could possibly be the point?

And then there's Melville

Somewhat earlier than all of these
would be Melville,
a kind of patron saint for this tradition,
who wrote of the strange collaborations

amongst mankind

on the unforgiving scourges

of the sea,

reaching his impossible crescendo,

impossible since it broke his reputation,

his career, his ambition

but not his merit or future potential,

in the tale of Moby-Dick,

a Belano since the tragedy
of confinement at sea
omits everything
not aboard the Pequod,
which is to say,

as a later writer did,

Ahab's wife,

a Larrson since the result
was so unrelenting,

a Hemingway since this was a man

who understood the toil of the race,

the unrelenting hostility

one cannot simply redeem

on a whim

in order to solve

but rather face

with courage or otherwise,

one's terrible fate,
which brings us back
to Belano,

who sacrificed his future
in order to ensure it.

As these things go.

The Vagaries of Hemingway

If Belano and Larrson

wrote of the violence

inflicted by men

upon women,

then on the surface

it would be absurd

to conjure Hemingway

who was and has become

a problematic

embodiment 

of the masculine

into this conversation,

and yet if you lift the veil,

was not Hemingway

as concerned

as Belano or Larrson

in the mysterious distance

between a man and a woman?

These are writers 

vital

to our understanding

of the world.

They explore
in their mysterious ways

what it means to be a man

and what it means to be

a woman

and how these worlds

collapse amongst each other

and sometimes

come together

and not always

in tragedy.

That all three died

without a clear understanding

of their true place in the world

would be the tragedy,

and yet in their wake

we are more able to celebrate

the best we have to offer
for all our sorry experiences.

The Parallels in Larrson

When I think about it
the parallels with Stieg Larrson

are striking.

Think about it:
both Belano and Larrson
died before their masterworks
were published,
Belano with 2666,

Larrson before the Millennium Trilogy.

And when you really think about it,

Lisbeth Salander
would be that missing piece
of 2666,

although of course
her presence
would utterly change it,
the way her continuing story
changes each succeeding chapter

within hers.

These were writers ahead of their time
then and, alas,
now.

The Parts of 2666, Part 8

The only thing missing
as far as I'm concerned,
the only thing
Belano could really have included
had he time to finish 2666 himself,
would have been
a story
from the perspective
of a missing girl,
not the crime
but the tragedy,
the heart of the story,
really,
and as these days go
probably what would have been
the key to having the book celebrated

as it should be.

As it is, though,
the hole in things
is sometimes
necessary.

Which is also to say,
I never considered
2666 remotely incomplete.