ESCAPE

In his sonnet The Albatross, Baudelaire spoke of the poet as a winged voyager exiled on the earth who was incarcerated within the physical constraints of a mere mortal’s ephemeral existence: his giant’s wings impede his every step. Man has been, is and will always be a damned, a pawn, a victim of his own condition, infinitely and eternally pitiable within the vastness of the Dream and the Imagination. We’re only masters of our own acts with no control over anything else. From the first moment we plunge into this world’s tentacular reality, we are incessantly flogged by Time into an unforgiving march, always forward until the final moment. Each day that passes is less a day that separates us of our inevitable embrace with Lady Death. We are at once its sons and its lovers. Therefore, all that's left to us is living, enjoying that gift called Life, because once we are trapped in the natural order of things, in an ageing body being slowly triturated by the eternal succession of moments, there’s nothing left but to break out of the shackles in which we suffocate in this infinite boredom that takes on the proportions of Eternity. That ardently desired escape will only be possible through Imagination, the pure spiritual journey through countless worlds, destroying chimeras and attaining utopias. But I also have to admit that on writing these words I am, beyond a dreamer, an insatiable corroded by a futile existence that succumbs to the days dragging on towards a future that crushes me with its uncertainties and deviations. On each of those days I ask questions that shall never be answered. In summary, I live in a world consumed by an infernal massacre where men perpetually bombard themselves in a flaming whirlwind of pain and torment. And what for? May I ask what I am doing here? Wanting things that I don’t even imagine to exist? I didn’t ask to be born! I didn’t ask to die! What it would be like if all of us were not circunscribed to these existential plagues that someone made us share with reality. We are cast into the iron bars of our own cage! Have we nothing left but to be satisfied with what Science is giving us? Swallow unshakeable truths of today that tomorrow will be nothing but pale mirages? No, that is not for me. Let me escape, shout, dream! Let my shadow fly throughout the clouds! Since I cannot exist in my world at least I live in it!To those who share this curse with me,I leave you with the mad words of Artaud: Nobody has ever written or painted, sculpted, modelled, built or invented except to escape Hell

Pedro De Kastro, Lisboa 1997