Ángel Escobar and the other shipwrecks

Abstract

These are some notes of introduction to the voice of a great poet. The poet is named Ángel Escobar, and he died in 1997. One afternoon when he was about to turn forty, he decided to sit on the rail of the balcony at his apartment, then let himself fall. The abyss received him, but Ángel’s abyss had a concrete horizon and his head struck hard against its surface. At last tranquility came, the rest that he had sought through valiant struggles and by pursuing hundreds of paths. Through his poetry Ángel seemed to arrive at some beneficial moments of relief; his poems served to unload furies and torments, and they gave him space to breathe. Mouthfuls of air and cigar smoke that he would inhale while his right leg kicked at the imagined pitch of a soccer field or the riot of grass on some unknown prairie. Some minutes before his death he spoke to his sister, Luz Marina, and urged her to prepare the savory rice of eastern Cuba; she went off to the kitchen smiling. He rose from the armchair where he was resting and placed a white, typewritten paper on top of the piano. There was his final poem, written one day earlier and directed to a friend —a painter along the lines of Picasso, a man of good faith and strong work ethic. In that poem Ángel attempts to explain the modern reasons for the continuity of images, be those pictorial or verbal: “each has a mode for comprehending himself.” Through that mode the privilege of colors and forms established over time asserts itself, although something else that can also result is the wreckage, always poorly understood and repudiated by viewers and readers: “A shipwrecked man is never calm. / He monitors not one, not two, not three, but all ocean waves, / their motions and oscillations —/ he holds only a timber in his grasp, / and doesn’t know if he’s coming or going: / doesn’t know where the coast might be / or what is better, or worse. / The shipwrecked man is simply that. Wrecked.”1