“Do you also live in deep sadness? Are you melancholic?” the protagonist of Un poeta asks a student who writes poems.

Yesterday I watched the Colombian film. Yesterday I thought again that art is in the hands of the wretched:

Misfits write better scripts, alcoholics compose better songs, solitaries paint better pictures. We fill museums, cinemas, Spotify lists with twisted lives, and then we listen to them with a mysterious loyalty. As if one had to suffer to say something worthwhile.

But there's something suspicious. Do we need artists to be broken? Does that reassure us? They go down to the bottom, we look from above.

Sometimes I think the opposite. That art should be serene. That it should be like a Tuesday. Falling asleep early. Not getting into wars of being or abysses of the self. No definitive goodbyes or heads in ovens. Novels without conflict, films without deception, songs without drunkenness. Literature that doesn't hurt. That doesn't stir anything. That doesn't leave a hangover.

I don't know if art is born of sadness or if it manufactures it. If it exaggerates what happens or if it simply reveals it. I left his house and it was raining. I could leave it at that: it was raining, I walked wet. But if I stop for one more second, if I write it, the morning starts to cry with me, the rain stops being water and turns into something else, into the sky falling against the earth, against me.

Un poeta ends with a good poem:

"Here I am, a man / Outmoded dinosaur / Bearer of grievances / Deserving of condemnation / Fragile dreamer / But do not lose your faith / In this sad poet / Who is trying to write / A happy poem".

Everything is in that attempt.