Scarecrow & Other Anomalies Read Online Free Page A

eyes? A tenderness for that which we despise? I don’t know. The fact is that instead of deciding its cremation, we condescend to inter the manuscript in a drawer of our writing desk, until one fine day, when we can least prevent it, people come asking about the keyhole.
     
    Nationalistic reasons, he continues, do not persuade him to release his work to the public, for one’s country is as impersonal as a hotel room, and “it is hard to become attached to hotel rooms.” Then he declares:
     
Publish? Publish when even the best publish 1,071% more times than they ought? I do not have, nor do I wish to have, the blood of a statue. I do not lay claim to the humiliation of suffering the sparrows. I do not aspire to an ordinary tomb slobbered over by admirers, since the only really interesting thing is the mechanism of feeling and thinking. Proof of existence!
     
    The reason he releases Veinte poemas , he concludes, is simply a weakness for contrariness, which he takes to be synonymous with life. He tosses out his work like a stone, “smiling at the futility of my gesture.”
    Here, then, is the most likely explanation for Girondo’s scimpy output: profound literary ennui—at the age of 31! If it endured, then over the next forty-five years he would allow himself the joy and the vanity of completing a literary project and not stashing it permanently in a desk drawer only when the spirit of contradiction moved him. Most of the time, however, he would relinguish that occupation to others, and because he was rich and generous—indulge them in their pretensions and pleasures. For himself he would reserve the rarefied delight of fleeting and incommunicable thoughts, and accept the despair of their ephemerality, longing for the clean slate of the pure no.
    Does that mean that there might be a trunk somewhere brimming over with remarkable manuscripts, unpredictable and mind-boggling as Scarecrow on each and every page? Evidently not. A friend and witness of his last years, Lila Mora y Araujo, reports that Girondo systematically destroyed everything left in his desk that he deemed unworthy of publication. The scraps that remained and that since have been published are disappointing and negligible. However, one of his relatives, Susana Lange, has discovered his early play, La madrastra , and plans to publish it.
     
    Conclusion
     
    So Scarecrow stands alone as a sentinel of what might have been... No, wait, that’s what a critic would say, ignoring the individual accomplishment and evaluating a literary work on the basis of the historical fluke that enabled it to influence or generate other literary works. Rather than take that line, let us say that Scarecrow stands alone on the hill as a once-in-a-lifetime fabrication, within the reach of our senses and yet enigmatic, lit from behind by the glow of a strange Lunarlude , inspiring wonder, amusement and a degree of consternation. From the silhouette you can make out that the creature, indeed, does wear a suit and a tie, and his top hat is turned forward in the proper direction, but even so he appears to mock, not to honor a fashion. A slip has been tucked into his chest pocket—a ticket to eternity, or a parking violation?
    Consider yourself introduced. I’m done with the amenities. But still I can’t get over the fact that Girondo did not put together fifteen or twenty more ogres. Populated a whole countryside with bug-eyed constructions, each more outlandish than the next. I know that he had the talent to do so and am angry at him for not using it, whatever his ennui or distractions. After all, he didn’t have to get up and go to work every morning; he owned his own island—why didn’t he write there? Right now I am grabbing him by the throat, yanking him up out of his mouldy grave and shouting in his indifferent face: “You old lazybones! Why did you stop? You could have been the Gogol of the twentieth century! The world needs more scarecrows, more scarecrows!” But