Eduardo Baltazar

Overview

To return to the sky, the god Ra descends into the underworld. Wrapping himself in the sea as though it were a cloak, he crosses the abyss in a solar barque toward another realm. Down below, where the songs of whales still echo, an inescapable serpent lies in wait to devour him. For countless dawns it has licked its lips in anticipation. One night, with the king finally inside its belly, the serpent unleashes the forces of chaos. An overwhelming void settles over time.

Darkness is the reverse side of certainty. It dissolves the horizon line and its dichotomies. There is no longer birth nor death, no rest nor exhaustion. From day to night, from warmth to cold, there is only risk. The bridge unfolds into a universe, a transitory state of possibilities. We must become children again in order to play between the sky and the ground—as a tightrope walker, to experience a suspended space.

Within it, two ancient trees, neighbors since time immemorial, finally stretch out their arms toward one another. Two old friends draw near to an embrace. What was stone could become cloud, and what was water could become air, dying from both fear and longing. Even though everything is now an island, on one of them a couple draws a pair of tarot cards. We still know that the sounds of the ocean are there. The remainder of doubt can only be crossed through passion.

There is no way to avoid this encounter, which increasingly becomes a confrontation. There is no escape, no way out of vertigo. Windows are no longer enough. Now we face portals, mirrors our own size. Some vibration or magnetism sustains this eternal suspension—a sargasso of dusk that, in equal measure, beckons and spits us out. Like a fisherman on the verge of enchant-ment, we long to pass with passing things.

At last, in a crackling instant, the serpent is taken by surprise. It had not anticipated the heartburn throbbing immediately after the swallow, the truest burning in its entrails. After all, a god writhed within its depths. The fury of his rays carved, fiercely and desperately, a way out. Regurgitated, Ra brings forth the light once again. The earth then experiences its first eclipse. The eye of day is not in the head—it springs from the stomach.

Thus the sun king extended his invitation: that at every sunset, as he plunges into the underworld, we might plunge with him. Between sleeping and waking, we encounter monsters from the depths, images of life and death, precipices and the barques that carry us across them. The sea is as abyssal as the unconscious, an unformed zone where all transformations take place.

We row, then, toward the root of the imagining force, toward that which hides before what reveals itself. We swim toward the essential destination—the depth of matter, the sensation behind thought. From the shore, the island, or the sandbank, we