J.M.Calleja

Homage, from omenatge in the old Occitan language

(rather than from Catalan homenatge), from ome

“man” in the sense of vassal or “subject”.

Nine times nine make eighty-one, and eight and one make nine; nine times three make twenty-seven, and seven and two make nine; three times three make nine, and nine is always nine. (According to the author’s calculations). If you haven’t had enough with numbers, with their (never) coincidental combinations, there are letters, every possible letter, with their always coincidental alloys. Numbers and letters, numbers behind the letters, letters numbered in the letters; signs of shapes that are signs, signs that form signs and shapes. No silence is more expressive than when the lexemes of two (apparently) contradictory orders are superimposed and challenged due to their location, for words take up too much space and refuse to stop suggesting, monolithic in their black intransigence, always slow in their parallel journeys.

Sorry I was wandering from the plot from which they stem or upon which they are projected, their own grateful multi-polychromatic sky.

Everyone, everyone who learns the game or not, shall pay the price of one poem; it may be twofold, a game and a poem. (That is why I began by multiplying with this (so) old table in which I have deleted all the xxxxxxxxxxx; there are too many, we have enough mercury in our memory for this book).

H (1) o (2) m (3) e (4) n (5) a (6) j (7) e (8) s (9) says the good vassal, and then continues playing at playing with his honoured leaders. These are his debts. He is so eager to regain his commitments and settle the debts of so much controlled amnesia. How? He only has a page which tries to lengthen itself horizontally to fill itself and hit us in its longitudinal trajectory (and needs twenty-seven seas of silence expressively sketched for this new writing).

Each recollection will be a flash of light from the cellular flash of a name, the sequential fault of one’s own personal realm where a meteorite germinates that feeling in our memory. And it provides a closed multiple alphabet which will have to compete with the image of an imaginary macle, with references to the name of a man (and two women) which raises enigmas. In a disciplined fashion the combinations of a typographical morphosynthesis are revealed and evoke the textures of a silence that becomes plastic consistency for his blank material, unfurled by its telluric grammar in the cartography of the page.

Twenty-seven emblems whose motto is the name of their own performance, each clearly resembling nothing, we immerse ourselves into the seas of poetry whose pictura (also) their names are (re)converted into aged without commento. A pure braqui-graphical epigraphy replete with meaningful cavities and icons finally expressed, never random; nominal hieroglyphs, static logo-glyphs that are doomed to remain permanent, a notary’s poetical document. Letters plus shapes, letters on shapes, shapes against letters, shapes between letters organized with all possible pre(o)sitions; a conjunction of silences equalling surprise, gathered under the previous number of an order. Newborn. The author has paid his debts, free him, we cannot return him these used materials They have forever been impregnated with his poetry.

Foreword to the Book Homenajes. Ediciones Tansonville. Valladolid 2007