The Knight of the Sad Countenance

   

To live like the character of a book, by an inspiring myth, to die if needed. This narrative of domination which ties us to a foundational myth and is enacted socially as love for the Mother-Father Land, for the ancestors, prophets and messiahs of the group, becomes at once a critique of the social values when the totem is called Dulcinea del Toboso. Like a theorem proven from wrong assumptions, but reaching the right conclusion nonetheless, Alonso Quijano’s crusade against injustice, dullness and hypocrisy of life is still today a lesson on the value of ideals: to transform the world through love for the receding horizon. Dulcinea might be ugly and rude, with overnight onion-salad breath, but when surfing the sunset colors, as she constantly does in Don Quixote’s eyes, no other Queen or divine entity compares to her. Dulcinea is indifferent to us, and so it is with the rest of our ideals; they are simply our wonderful madness or innocent interpretation of the received myth. To realize this was the sadness of Alonso, my sadness, my joy; for only by realizing it we become free of the unreasonable weight that we put in our hearts by loving the non-existing ether. And yet, this craziness cannot be renounced, for it is how life surmounts itself and how another day can be worth living. The moment we don´t, we sink to the bottom of Sancho’s deluded dream of golden shitty Baratarias.