Christmas 2021 ends another year full of surprises. We had to revise and defer our priorities and choose new ones. The prevailing uncertainties and expectations force us to think about how we should be aware in the face of everyday reality. It is more than evident that uncertainties generate growing anxiety and cause the greatest worries. But adversity also forces you to go beyond routine and get out of the doldrums. It stimulates the energy to face fear, overcome insecurity and overcome indecision.
For each land its Christmas. It fits into local customs and traditions and has motivated, over the centuries, poets, writers, musicians and plastic artists from different countries. Miguel Torga, one of the Portuguese-speaking poets who wrote the most about Christmas, places almost all the texts in their original paradise: São Martinho da Anta, the land where he was born and where he wished to be buried.
He knew Portugal from end to end. He left us a record of the built and natural heritage, the open sea to the appeal of distance, the plain and the marshland, the towering cliffs, the snow-capped mountains, the golden brown of the chestnut trees, the burning purple of the vineyards on the slopes. But it had a visceral connection to Trás os Montes that is at the genesis of the early days of creation of the world and from successive pages of the daily. An anthology of poems, also written by Torga himself, covered “a long orphic path that began as an irrepressible vocation and ended up as an assumed penance”. He gathered what he judged to be most significant of "a work lit for many hours, many days, many years, the ever-incandescent iron and the haloed forger of the sparks that leap from the anvil."
In one of the many poems about Christmas he wrote: “It is in this same fireplace/ and heated to the same fire, / that I confess my envy/as a mortal / without remission/ for this natural gift, / or divine condition. / To be reborn each year, / naked, innocent and human/ as faith imagined you, / Baby Jesus just like/ like at Christmas/ that just passed».
Torga left Coimbra where he resided to take refuge in the small great universe of Trás-os-Montes: "leagues and leagues of angry, bristly ground, burned by a fiery sun or a cold snow". It was "the marvelous kingdom of whole men, gritty, tall, broad-shouldered, who look straight on and have the same wrinkles on their faces as the earth."
He resumed the theme: “It was all so punctual! / That I was amazed, / snow fell on the roof / and the same cattle gathered / in the corral; / not even the straws of poverty; / the mangedoira lacked, / frothy straw / that brooded over the greatness / of the foreseen miracle: / animals and nature / on the familiar stage. / But in the end, the scenario / wasn't enough / relying on the calendar, / man didn't even ask / if God was necessary…/ and God didn't act».
Christmas, in São Martinho da Anta, incorporated the Nativity Scene, the Magos and the Janeiras in the snow and bell landscape, to bring about the rebirth of the child. It was categorical: «the crib is any cradle/ where the nudity of the world / has warmth/ and love». The streams of imagination went further: «It was a dream I had! / It was a big paper star, / a string / and a boy with a bibe. / The boy had cast the star / with the air of one who sows an illusion. / And the rising star, blue and yellow, / caught by the string in your hand. / But she rose so high / that she was no longer the paper star. / And the boy, seeing her like that, smiled / and cut her string».
It all started when I saw the lights coming on in the streets and trees and the symbolic fire of Madeira. Burning, always burning, during the winter days, there is snow, there is rain, there is wind. It awakened his memory to deepen what we were, the reality of who we are and the struggle to achieve what we can be. The interrogations were repeated. What is missing to start life over? To overcome the doubt and anguish of the future? What will be the «day after» for each one of us? How can hope be illuminated and the setbacks that make us vulnerable can be overcome? In São Martinho da Anta the great interior debate was taking place around theological, political and social controversies.
The interpellation included in the The Other Book of Job one of his first books: “Lord: I conquer the Life and the Bread of each day. / I drink the sun when there is sun / and the night when there is night / and when the voice of your whip / splits my body in two and I leave it whole; / and when I kneel down by the wall, / the old custom breaks my legs, / of dreaming of you, at times, righteous». In this "regret" - and to quote the title of the poem - Torga unreservedly defined his cultural and civic convictions, the dimension of man in his universality and the "humanistic despair" that made him, forever, resistant to dogmatic impositions and to unique thinking.
But, regarding the celebration of Christmas, he still observed: «the evil that puts out the stars is not remembering that it is not with lamps that life is lit». To conclude in another poem: “Start over…/ If you can/without anguish without haste. /And whatever steps you take /on that hard path of the future / take them in freedom. / As long as you don't reach / don't rest. / Do not want only half of any fruit».
The small, obscure places – on the fringes of the conventional artifices of the organized staging of the party – keep the essence of Christmas alive. The feelings and concrete values of solidarity persist, the affective bonds that unite children, parents and grandparents. the new and the old. The living and the dead. The present and the absent. Those who live far away and who never cease to be close. Plowed land made up of inheritances and rebellion. Writing that unveils and perpetuates the primordial elements of the three kingdoms of nature. It concentrates “the irrepressible vocation”, “the assumed penance” for the discovery of the possible stars for each Christmas.
Author António Valdemar is a journalist (professional card number 1), member of the Academy of Sciences
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