With a world disturbed by the effects of the pandemic, war and inflation, and a country in anticipation of the eventual repercussions of the Haitian crisis, it is comforting that, during a weekend, including the last Las Mercedes holiday, a group of 19 people met in an austere place destined for spiritual retreats to maintain a literary dialogue.
The site was the San Juan de la Cruz Spirituality Center, a beautiful building located on a small hill on the edge of the Duarte highway, at the entrance to the Taveras Dam. The group belongs to the Interiorist Movement of the Insular Athenaeum.
According to the aura that kept vibrating, the subject was the book. The predicate is the progressive absence of readers and the difficulty faced by literary creators to develop, condemned to suffer hardship and hardship, instead of recognition and rewards. The corollary is the visible effects of the low quality of education on the population.
Why is the uplifting and regenerative obliterated, while its opposite is rewarded? Are we in the middle of a circular trap?
The program was divided into two parts. The presentation and comments of some of the books of the guest at this meeting, a privilege that I had the honor to receive. And the analysis of the poetry of Sappho of Mytilene, together with the exhibition of poems and stories by Sappho and some of the fellow members.
Intense program, carried out with strict adherence to the schedule. Otherwise there would be no way to contain the torn song of the poets and hold the overflowing soul of the storytellers.
About me, just a blurrer of pages in a perpetual learning process, things were said that made me blush and others that led me to introspection. The idea that I am an economist by mistake, a kind of cosmic carom, predestined to fall into the literary field, was let slip. And historian by inertia. And it is true. I have barely made furtive incursions into the future of historiography, always with the intention of seasoning it with magical touches of fiction.
The books mine subject to analysis of the participants were Trujillo executed; Moca, the old town; Vitriol and his characters; and Horace and Mon. All were the subject of in-depth observations by some of the participants such as Luis Quezada, Rita Díaz Blanco, Esteban Torres, Miguel Ángel Durán and Bruno Rosario Candelier.
Another of my books, At dawn, the mist, was pondered with extreme benevolence, especially by the creator of the Interiorist Movement. Perhaps because I deposited my purest feelings in its elaboration at an age when the word picks up what the soul dictates. There appear approximations to poems full of powerful waves. If I had to get used to sleeping with a book of mine under my pillow, I would be the chosen one.
listening to the analysis on poetry of Safo, performed first by Elidenia Velásquez and later by Bruno Rosario Candelier, I felt that I was once again experiencing the erotic tremors that used to shake my sensibility. A sense of spiritual renewal ran through my body, caught me off guard, and took me by surprise.
I felt absorbed by a strange perception that agglomerated my scattered emotions and expanded when at the end of the first session, already at night, a part of the group went out to talk on the terrace of the hill that faces the Cibao valley, in an explosion of lights .
There I spoke with a small group that was on the edge of the railing, made up of Carmen Comprés, Rafael Peralta Romero, Esteban Torres, Keyla González and Rita Blanco. The theme of the orange economy came up, a label with which cultural work is wanted to be redeemed by sleight of hand, as if marketing were enough to fill the content, but those are different accounts that slipped furtively into this gathering.
I have no way of thanking the distinction that the Interiorist Movement had with me. It was an unforgettable experience, despite the sobriety of those facilities intended for meditation and the development of religious spirituality.
Seeing the fervor of those group members and realizing that most of them are young, disciplined and motivated people, I thought that there is still time to cherish hope. I was reinforced in the conviction of the gigantic work carried out by the teacher Bruno Rosario Candelier. And that it’s not fair that the carriers of literary creativity have to go naked and naked.