The Shape of a Pocket

the Garden of Earthly Delights, can be studied by torchlight in the dark … we need them.
    I would like to quote again the Argentinian poet, Juan Gelman. *
    death itself has come with its documentation/
we’re going to take up again
the struggle/again we’re going to begin
again we’re going to begin all of us
    against the great defeat of the world/
little
compañeros
who never end/or
who burn like fire in the memory
again/and again/and again.

    * One of the most original, even if contested, is the
Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch
by Wilhelm Franger (Faber & Faber).
* This letter was published in August 1997 throughout the world press, and notably in
Le Monde Diplomatique
, Paris.
* Juan Gelman,
Unthinkable Tenderness
, translated from the Spanish by Joan Lindgren (University of California Press, 1997).

23
Correspondence with Subcomandante Marcos

I. The Herons

    Spring is the awaited season. Some languages, like Spanish, make spring feminine; others, like Greek, masculine. Once arrived, the two of them stay for a weekend, hand over to a successor, and slip away.
    Yet from January onwards we gossip about them as though they were there in hiding. And under the earth’s skin they are there: the branches of elders already suffer burgeoning wounds, snowdrops already push with their heads, teeth clenched. When at last spring comes out into the open we have the impression of ‘no sooner come than gone’.
    Not a season at all but a longing. At my age it is natural to ask: how many more times shall I witness this waiting? The waiting is for a new beginning. It is not a question of the year being young but of the offer of choices again. In the winter of discontent, there are no choices.
    The first season comes desperately and hopefully which is another reason for its necessary clandestinity. And here I think of your letter, Marcos, where you write:
    We would like to offer you a flower, I say
a
flower because we don’t have enough for all of you, but one is enough if you share it and if each one of you keeps a tiny fragment so that when you are old you can tell the children of your country: At the end of the twentieth century I fought for Mexico and from here I gave support to those over there: of whom I knew only that they wanted what all human beings want if they haven’t forgotten that they’re human beings, that’s to say democracy, liberty and justice. I never saw their faces but their hearts were like ours.

    This year spring came out into the open on April 12th and I’ll tell you how. Your mountains are higher than ours but when you take one of the tracks down to the plain, you must come upon a somewhat similar place. At a certain altitude a rocky stream runs into a small lake and the vegetation turns a little greener. The lake seeps into the earth which is waterlogged and is difficult to cross. It’s easier to skirt round the place.
    In a month’s time, thousands of frogs will come to mate in the pool. At the moment it still freezes at night and in the morning some of the boulders glisten with frost. Over the years I’ve often seen a heron here. Sometimes he is perched near the top of one of the spruce firs. Sometimes he is standing in the marsh, his fishing beak at the ready. When a heron strikes, he does so with a rapidity which is faster than an eye blinking, and after a heron has prepared a nest and is calling for a female companion, he holds his head so that his beak points vertically into the sky like a steeple or like a Brancusi sculpture. Every winter the herons migrate from our rivers to North Africa.
    Yet every year it is the same heron who returns here. Herons can live for twenty years or more. I guess this one is no longer young and maybe that is why he is a loner who avoids the settlements where the others nest. I’ve never seen him with his companion but I’ve seen him flying regularly to a hidden nest to regurgitate the frog or fish he has just eaten as food for his fledglings.
    Apart from the heron, there’s nothing special about the place: a pool of water, a small bog, a steepish slope. It’s on the north side of the mountain and so gets little sunlight. One of nature’s backyards, not recommended for its flowers. And here, on Wednesday April 12th this year, spring came out into the open.
    I didn’t notice anything special at first. Then gradually I became aware, before I looked up, that something unusual was happening in the sky. Nothing alarming. Rather something measured and