Writing that compels the heart to withdraw

Edmilson Panguana"

The idea of ​​thinking about a "Mandatory Gathering of the Heart" necessarily requires an exploration of the semantics of the Latin etymon "recolligo". According to the Priberam dictionary, the term refers to the act of gathering scattered things. In dialogue with this, the concept of "obligatorius" emerges, designating the indispensable and/or inevitable, that which is imposed and cannot be left unfulfilled. Together, the terms suggest a vital need to reorganize the inner self, transforming the gathering into an unavoidable commitment to one's own being.

In this line of thought, Álvaro Taruma, in his work "Recolher Obrigatório do Coração" (Obligatory Gathering of the Heart), leads us to a universe of intimate and confessional poems. Strongly marked by the presence of a lyrical subject confronted by the practical impossibility of his aspirations, thus compelled to retreat among the wreckage of his heart. Without, however, ceasing to explore the antinomies and absurdities that life imposes. And it is precisely in this sense that Marcelo Panguana identifies in this work a restless and rebellious poetic subject in the face of his time, excited by the idea of ​​violating new and virgin languages ​​and ways of being.

This tension between the impulse to expand and the need for withdrawal gains strength in the opening epigraph of the first part of the work, "Animals with Strings in their Hearts." This phrase carries a terrible metaphorical force, bringing to mind the image of an animal, a symbol of drive, freedom, and instinct bound by strings. In this context, these strings represent affective bonds and desires that bind the subject to love and the pursuit of satisfaction, or like the tensions of an instrument that, to emit sound, needs to be under pressure.

Thus, withdrawal is, above all, a necessary state so that these cords do not break in the face of merciless reality. In this painful sonority, between instinct and restriction, poetry presents itself as a "manifesto about and for love," as the author himself suggests in his dedication to an unknown reader. This duality between affective vibration and existential restraint takes shape in compositions such as "Poema" and "Sozinho."

“Poem” is the title of the text in which the recoil and tension of the strings become palpable, when the lyrical subject assumes the role of a worker of the impossible, attempting to “build heaven” (a task he himself describes as a “strange occupation”) with the “mortar of dreams.” An effort that recalls Arthur Schopenhauer's idea of ​​the primacy of the Will. For him, even if the world is a representation of the Self, it is driven by a blind and incessant desire that rarely finds satisfaction in material reality.

However, it is precisely in the clash between creative desire and the world's stubborn indifference that tragedy sets in. As matter's reluctance to submit to the poet's will results in the perception of the world as real, constraining, limiting, and disobedient. Consequently, the poetic subject watches, powerless, as the "blocks of clouds" collapse upon his own glass head, leaving him only with seclusion as a refuge for his wounded conscience.

While in the poem “Alone” the act of reflection reaches an almost surgical depth, the lyrical self acts with forensic skill to “decant the silence” and “reconstruct the final cry.” In this context, solitude functions as a space of exile where enchantment has been lost (“the birds sing without enchantment”), leaving only the longing that descends “rigidly in my cold veins.” However, the poet rescues the sonority, the music of those strings in the heart, by questioning “who resurrects the voice of the conch shells?”

This recovery occurs after he descends into the abyss, in a nocturnal boat that sails within himself, in a movement of introversion reminiscent of Byung-Chul Han's "contemplative life." In the sense that, for Han, silence signifies, above all, the necessary interruption of the world's hyperactivity. However, by distilling silence, the lyrical self exercises what Martin Heidegger would call listening to being, a state of recollection where the subject, stripped of external distractions, finally confronts the truth of his own existence. Therefore, the nocturnal boat does not flee from reality, but plunges into the only substance that time cannot: memory and the essence of feeling.

If the first part of the work confronted us with the vital imperative of gathering internal fragments, under the title "Gathering the Night Inward," the second part deepens the movement of introversion. It begins with the transmutation of the act of gathering, from a simple defensive action against the collapse of reality to a deliberate immersion in a metaphorical territory where the boundaries between the subject and the world dissolve into obscurity. While the day functions as an expression of the hyperactivity and constraining visibility of the "Performance Society" (Han), the night emerges as a nest where the lyrical self can finally inhabit its own unease.

At this stage of the work, Álvaro Taruma's writing seems to suggest that true "gathering" requires courage to confront the obscure and unspeakable. For it is at night that the strings in the heart vibrate most intensely, transfiguring the forensic solitude of the first part into an absolute immersion in the essence of shadow, where the search for other languages ​​becomes an ethical and aesthetic imperative. In this context of nocturnal immersion, the poem "Strings for Suicide and Violins" abbreviates the existential anguish of the poetic subject.

Here, the rope that once sustained the emotional tension resurfaces with a deadly ambiguity. That is, the object capable of interrupting life (the act of suicide) allows for the vibration of art (the chords of the violin). In this line of thought, the exhaustion of the performing subject, described by Byung-Chul Han, manifests itself in the weariness of someone who misses the train at the station and finds themselves trapped in a human garden of illusions. The poet, however, anchors this pain in the urban topography of Maputo through a devastating polysemic richness in the verse "I lost my love at the bus stop".

Literally, the expression refers to the sorrow the poetic subject feels for the loss of his beloved; however, its figurative and profoundly local meaning expresses the disillusionment of someone who loses the precarious open-box transport popularly known as "my love." This tragic homonymy merges the intimate with the social, turning the loss of transport at the bus stop into a definitive metaphor for existential immobility and the failure of modern promises. In this way, the act of getting back to the bus stop ceases to be merely poetic introspection and becomes a compulsory destination for those who, exhausted and helpless by the system, are left behind on the roadside. 

Furthermore, the forced immobility at the bus stop spills over into the poem "Suicide Plan," where withdrawal reaches its most pathological and somber state. And depression is metaphorically represented as "a dog that lodges itself inside the head," barking until it discovers its own hope. While the rope, in the previous analysis, represented the instrument of tension, here the subject becomes a collector of wood for the construction of the boat.

However, this is a boat, a vehicle of escape to the planet of death, not merely of contemplative salvation. With this image, Taruma radicalizes Byung-Chul Han's "Society of Fatigue," where, when the "power to do" runs out and my love departs without taking him, the poetic subject sees in the serene contemplation of an inert body his last form of resistance. From this perspective, the escape plan is the final response of someone who, in the secret craft of insomnia, understands that he was not born to be the builder of his own pain, choosing instead to devise a plan that transports him beyond the garden of illusions.  

Thus, "The Mandatory Gathering of the Heart," in the final analysis, reveals itself as a cartographic work of survival in times of collapse. In the sense that we see Taruma's writing transmuting the exhaustion of a performance-driven society into raw material for creation. Consequently, the gathering, which etymologically suggests a reunion of scattered things, ceases to be an imposition of failure and becomes an ethical imperative, inhabiting one's own shadow when the outside world becomes a desert of vaseline.

Furthermore, Taruma demonstrates through his writing that, although the lyrical subject loses the transport and the train of modernity, he recovers, through the strange craft of poetry, the capacity to transform failure into a poem. Therefore, the heart does not withdraw to die, but to decant the silence and prepare the nocturnal boat that, even alone, is capable of sailing against the merciless reality. Thus, this work cannot be considered merely a manifesto about love, for it is, above all, proof that beauty survives in the tension of the strings, between the silence of the violin and the cry of the last bird.

2025/12/3