There’s a monster in the lake and there’s a mystery behind that door and there’s a secret in the last paragraph of this column. What you discover if you look at the lake, if you open the door, or if you continue reading may be horrible or it may be splendid. If you don’t, you will feel safe and shut down. If curiosity prevails, more vulnerable but also more alive.
I’m going to leave this line, which is a firewall, for you to decide.
Laura Fernández has just published the essay There is a monster in the lake (In Debate), a gem where it explores the history of Nessie, that alleged plesiosaur that lives in the most famous loch Scottish. It goes back to the first sighting, in the year 565, and focuses on those who pursued its humps and diamond fins: dissidents from the mapped reality, tourists, journalists and even dolphins that were in Vietnam. She herself went to the lake a few months ago with her family. Her daughter Sofia did not go on the boat, because she was afraid that the monster would eat her. The scriptures say that God reveals to children what the wise men hide from us.
Monsters wait beyond the limits of the known. They are the creatures of here are dragons of medieval maps and also mental ones. And those who look for those monsters are heroes, so Fernández is a heroine, with a curiosity as contagious as her laughter and as brave as her gaze is profound. Brave because no one wants to discover that the sun does not revolve around the Earth, since that means that man is an insignificant mite who is not at the center of everything. Nor that he actually comes from the monkey or that, in fact, he is a clothed monkey (in a way, a monster like king kong). Nor do monsters exist, of all kinds. But if humans are different, it is because they have always had the gift of imagining what happens beyond what the rest accepts and tolerates. Some forget that the most famous scientist in history, in addition to sticking his tongue out in the photos, said that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” All knowledge is the grandchild of a fantastic hypothesis.
So Fernández chases a monster to save humanity. She is the explorer with pith cap, the harpooner of contemporary pride and the Atreyu of The endless story, who wants to defend the world of Fantasia, but will not be able to do so if Bastián stops reading. The ‘nessie hunters’ disappeared from the real world to look for that creature; the writer (and his dance partner, the reader) also disappears to search for what this monster represents.
But the water of Loch Ness is black, almost opaque. And people, today, are only interested in crystal clear water, a mirror that shows their face: We are Narcissus and we already know how that myth ends (the guy drowns from looking at himself too much in the river). That’s why Fernández feels sad for a while on the lake: the tourists on the boat seem bored, because they only see dark water (the world is a set for his selfie and not a jungle of possibilities where you can imagine wonder).
Everything, the author seems to tell us, who knows that literature is looked at, depends on how you look at it. And this book is a battle against the literality of the world, against life as a puzzle (once completed it is not only boring, but meaningless), against anthropocentric boasting, panxacontent egomania and cowardly consensus. In favor of the world as a literary and not literal place. In favor of past naivety as future wisdom. In favor of those who understand that the treasure does not matter as much as the treasure map. In favor of those who know, like Jack Londonthat telling life only from what our eyes have seen is like “trying to fly by pulling the tongues of our boots.”
There is a monster in that lake, because we haven’t stopped imagining it. Open the door, because there is a mystery there, although I have news: The enigmas are solved by reason, but the mysteries, if they are true, are unsolvable.The thing is that without trying you would not have reached the secret of this last paragraph: there is an essay in the bookstores that comes to save the world as we know it and, above all, as we do not know it. Without this monster, without this mystery, without this secret, without this book, which only Laura Fernández could have first imagined and then written, without her gaze, which is a unique lantern, the future is an indifferent and dark swamp.
