Note to “The Eye”

“The Eye” is, in some sense, an autobiographic poem triggered by the adult memory of a childhood event. Curiously enough, events of an autobiographic nature have rarely a direct, explicit presence in what I write, being rather there in an indirect and elusive way, whenever the past allows for some enrichment of what is written.

My father was drafted to the army in the 60’s, when Portugal was involved in a colonial war and posted as a doctor in Mozambique. Some months later, my mother, my siblings and I joined him. We lived there for about 2 years.

I was 6/7 years old and one of the main interests was a playground where were made available for the children military transport vehicles too old for any other use.

I remember one day seeing an eye peeking through a hole, as I was climbing to the rear of a truck. I stood still for a while, not approaching it nor running away, fascinated by its emotionless, unblinking stare, till I moved away, called by some other game.

I heard shouts some minutes later and saw the caretakers running towards us with sharp sticks on their hands poking with them the hole where the eye had been. I saw moments later the dark body of the snake being taken away. It was a deadly snake, we were told. I felt, by then, fascination and curiosity.

Fear only came later as time made me realise the danger, however remote it might have really been, and time itself coloured memory, turning the unblinking eye into something else, something of an unnatural dimension that visited my childhood nightmares again and again. With them came an image of evil as a stare devoid of feeling and emotion that needs not doing anything to be what it is.

The Eye

The River Lethe

Hades, the land of the death for the ancient Greek, was crossed by 5 rivers. One of them, the River Lethe, was the river of forgetfulness and the dead, as they prepared to reincarnate and return to the realm of the living, drank from its waters, forgeting their previous life and experiences.

Alethea, the Greek word for truth, means the opposite of forgetfulness, something like unforgeting, bringing us to the platonic concept of knowledge as rememberance.

My personal Lethe takes often the shape of a narrow and shallow unamed Wiltshire river as seen by the faint light of a Winter morning, covered by that sort of low, thick fog that we can see from above and feels like something almost solid. The fog only covers the water and is a living creature, waiting for our consent to envelop us, guiding us through the memories we don't remember and then returning us to ourselves.

We look around with a vacant stare and the same feeling that we have when we try to remember and keep a dream that has already faded.