I can't think of anyone who's been more humane, more capable, more loving, more obstinate, more primal Eva, than Eva Lloréns. Daughter of Spanish painter Franciso Lloréns, disciple of Joaquin Sorolla, Eva loved two things: Galicia and the person who kept her in the States, in Stratford, Connecticut, for as long as she did. I miss her terribly and want to keep her memory alive. She hated the web, posting her paintings, anything that made it easier to connect without really connecting on a human level. The irony now is in this medium, the mnemonic register that gives texture to my memories of her and everything she did to keep me from being less than she imagined.
We read Garcilaso's Soneto XXIII in a survey course on Peninsular literature. That is my first memory of her and so I find it appropriate to begin this technology of memory in her name with Garcilaso's brilliant symmetry of form and topos: death as regenerative life, and writing, say, a sonnet, as mnemonic memory. Proof of life beyond the brittle seams of heart and its limited beats.
Garcilaso de la Vega (1501-1536)
Soneto XXIII
En tanto que de rosa y azucena
se muestra la color en vuestro gesto,
y que vuestro mirar ardiente, honesto,
enciende al corazón y lo refrena;
y en tanto que el cabello, que en la vena
del oro se escogió, con vuelo presto,
por el hermoso cuello blanco, enhiesto,
el viento mueve, esparce y desordena:
coged de vuestra alegre primavera
el dulce fruto, antes que el tiempo airado
cubra de nieve la hermosa cumbre;
marchitará la rosa el viento helado.
Todo lo mudará la edad ligera
por no hacer mudanza en su costumbre.
