Illustration for the book “La Fuerza de los Fuertes” (“The Strength of the Strong”) by Jack London, published by Ediciones Traspiés.

In “La Fuerza de los Fuertes” this creature is Split-Nose, the one who dredges up the truth. For me, since the beginning he was The Poet, the visionary, an ambiguous, delicate and lunar entity, igneous, terrible and symbolic at the same time. Its fate is not the best of fates, as it usually happens with all blazing and visionary entities.

The Poet as an Arcana sprinkles its presence throughout literature, you know that: you surely have met it at various times, inhabiting the body of a child, an artist, a maiden, devilish bodies, disparate whirlwind bodies. In relation to my own life, its apparition aroused in my young heart the disproportionate joy of recognition among species; and all along my adolescence I always wondered why in every story The Poet was stoned to death (and sometimes to several deaths).

Now I do not wonder anymore (human race is not complex, after all).
But my heart is no longer adolescent, and fire flourishes in my mouth and in my fingertips.