Aristophanes' birds

One can read in Aristophanes' birds that the lark was born before all other creatures, indeed before the Earth. Its father died of sickness, but since the Earth did not exist then, he remained unburied for five days. The bird then decided, for lack of a better place, to bury its father in its own head.

Marx, a few millennia later, will write: "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." It is not known if Marx makes a direct reference to Aristophanes or whether it's an invention of his own. In any case, the conclusion is clear: we are historical beings who inherited not only the genes of all dead generations but also their traditions, their world.

This perspective of the past as living in our brains implies, at the same time, an understanding of the future where we continue weighing in the brains of those who will come. I picture something like this when I read Wittgenstein insistence in living sub especie aeternitatis.:

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.

To finalise today, I  want to remember Jorge Teiller, the poet I read endlessly during my teenager nights in Santiago. His poetry talks about a world in the middle of a forgotten forest, about the secrets that the night belies in its darkness, about that day when we will find each other again, and there will be summer, for she and I. He died, alcoholic, in 1996. I remember his photo in the University Bookshop, in La Alameda, nearby my dad's office. My father saying another poet died while looking at the books. Few years later, the bookshop was closed, my dad stopped working, I moved to another country. Teillier wrote  his poetic: Poetry, or the place where I truly dwell. For him -- maybe for everyone -- the poem is something written by other in me. Borges says something similar somewhere; the history of literature without proper names. The corpse of our forefathers weighting in our brains, like nightmares, like dreams. Another poet died that April day of 1996, in a small town near the coast in Chile. But something remains. Teillier finished his poetics making echo of Paul Eluard's saying: Every caress every trust survives.  I agree. The full poem reads:  

I said it to you for the clouds
I said it to you for the tree of the sea
For each wave for the birds in the leaves
For the pebbles of sound
For familiar hands

For the eye that becomes landscape or face
And sleep returns it the heaven of its colour
For all that night drank
For the network of roads
For the open window for a bare forehead
I said it to you for your thoughts for your words

Every caress every trust survives.