Prologue

Leopoldo María Panero

Talking about Henri Michaux and the heroin smokes that come along with the work by Elba Martinez, life’s a hard drug, like the alcohol of life, and wisdom is also like that, as Bataille said, in this country where nobody reads, in this country which is as illiterate as life itself. And only death is clear, only death is not a drug and death alone is truth. And as Malraux said, only death converts the human condition into destiny, and that is Christ and the Anti-Christ: only death pacts with the devil of life, only death is not sin: even clearer, Goethe said mehr licht when he was dying, more light and that was how death was going to illuminate us, death, a single magician who turns a piece of bread into a jewel, and a chicken leg into treasure and that’s life, a chicken leg on the ground, a bird’s leg for ten shillings, as I once said in a poem I wrote about hashish, or, as Shelley said, a shiny stain on a muddy scene and poems are never finished, poems are the end of life.

Or as Bataille said, the peak of the human condition is on the Doctor Petiot’s periscope.

Leopoldo María Panero. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2006.