Pablo Neruda reminded me how to taste what you make. While visiting his house, I was moved by his life, his work, and his playfulness. He designed things, he was a brutal professionalist, and yet he wove his sensuality into all of these endeavors. Indeed, he knew it was critical to lust for life if you want your hands to shape it for others. His home was humbling in its open kitsch, its discrimination between social and meditative spaces, its fixed wide eyes to the sea.
You have to understand fictions to understand art, that spirit that design tries to dip its toes into. Neruda knew fiction as a friend. I heard he would often dress in several disguises throughout the nights of his parties. He never passed up the opportunity for a joke, though he reportedly was bad at telling them. He collected knick knacks next to heirlooms, christened his armchair “the cloud,” and collected out-of-date maps. I like to think it was for the humor, seeing them misspell and misrepresent Chile on an old English survey. He held all this deep giggle tight within him even as he designed chimneys, poems, worlds, and engaged with the global public as his country was falling apart.
Maybe it was the openness. There is something so front-facing about the man and the spaces he touched. He just held his hands and eyes open at all time, ready to shake a hand, pick up a pen, grab a waist to dance. He let things flow through him and become the wonderful creations we remember him by, he didn’t think too much, at least how we might normal imagine thinking to be. Just a clear-eyed man in a giggling house by the sea.
From “La Sebastiana”
ya no pensemos más: ésta es la casa:
ya todo lo que falta será azul,
lo que ya necesita es florecer.
Y eso es trabajo de la primavera.
En ingles:
Let’s not think any more: this is the house:
And all that is missing will be blue,
What you need is to bloom.
And that’s spring work.