Fire is a pencil that teaches geography. Thanks to the pedagogy of flames, many (not a few) Catalans have discovered that there is a region in Catalonia called La Segarra (we'll leave La Noguera for next year). This fire is a blood-colored phosphorescent that underlines the real Catalonia and the real world. Forgive me if it splashes: it's not ketchup.
Here is the pain of the earth. Tierra Firme menstruates. Everyone dies and is born here: drought, water, energy, depopulation, food... Emergency flashers. Warning. Beware, citizens of the plant world: no worlds are better than others. All worlds are within the world. All worlds are the world. My friend John Ford could have been born here, but, look, he wanted to be born in Cape Elizabeth, a small town in Maine (USA). The director of moving images, of a country in motion, told a young Steven Spielberg: "Everything is limited by where you place the horizon."
La Segarra is a horizon of western immense, infinite, colossal. An open-air cinema screen where the next global films will be shown. La Segarra is the mainstream, he blockbuster from the existence of Barcelona to New York via Maputo and Tehran. All the world's questions are stuck in this earth like a hoe with a red-hot handle. Here, unlike Ford's films and the American landscape, neither legend nor reality has been published. Segarra burns, but it was already bare. That's why many have never seen it or wanted to see it: they believe there's nothing here.
Segarra is one of the greatest tests of faith that exist. In the future. In tomorrow. On the horizon. Everything may seem lean, lackluster, invariable, undaunted. But Segarra is the skeleton, the outline, the chassis, the pole that holds everything together. Without it, it falls. Segarra is the naked truth that slaps. Grave widow of an eternal war that you don't know if it never ends or always begins. Dignity of words that only fit in your pocket. The word nailed like a nail, coiled like welded iron. The light without electricity. The dimness of a plate on the table. There's nothing else, that's why everything flew away from there.
From here come the Vall Companys, the Alsina (Bon Àrea), Sorigué, Llorens, Condal (Condis), Gabarró (Gas Natural)... But also Carme Balcells, agent of the planet's writers. The need, the hunger, the hands with more soil than skin. Of not crying and not laughing. From this land, a psychoanalytic couch: juggler, crazy, surrealist, hypnotic, magnetic, going from brown to green at the speed of life, of fire. Here is the balance of being and non-being. Segarra warns us that we can die burned. But there are also many dead in life. Many dead who don't know they're dead. Many ignorant, illiterate, unlettered people. Creatures who don't know the four rules for survival. The world is a tightrope walker who stakes everything on the Segarra towpath.
Now. Now we're really giving John Ford a pat on the back and a pip and a piñao, piñao. The man who shot Liberty Valance: The legend isn't published here. No. Reality is published here. The continuing story of people who want to live and cling to the flowered iron railings of houses that are lifeboats. Never let go. Never. Hold on. Like a time machine where everything runs fast, hot, painful. To suborbite is not to drown. The future is here.
