/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/larazon/6ZAESVD3ZFH35HMEOUY7VL3DBQ.jpg "«We men dream of being able to bear reality»")
A mother tells her two children every night stories that she has heard throughout her travels throughout much of the world. Stories where the dreamed things coexist naturally with the real ones, to the point that it is not easy to distinguish them from each other. With “The Tree of Dreams” (Gutenberg Galaxy), Gustavo Martín Garzo from Valladolid takes us to the world of dreams, a book that recovers that old magic of the art of counting and whose structure refers us to the book of books which is “The Thousand and One Nights”. “It was an old project that I dreamed of since I felt that I could write books, getting closer to the world of that total work is still the aspiration of every storyteller, a book that perhaps summarizes all my work, written with the feeling of wanting to do something as comprehensive as possible “.
– Does your title have to do with the myth of the tree of Paradise?
-Of course, it’s a rereading. We think that this forbidden tree is that of the knowledge of good and evil, but if you read the Bible carefully, it is not said which tree it is, it is mysterious why Yahweh prevents them from tasting its fruits. My book says it is the tree of dreams. Why do you prohibit it? Because it gives them the power to dream, that is, to create, to make what does not exist exist, it transforms them into something similar to God himself and Yahweh cannot admit this under any circumstances, that his creatures transform into something that is he same.
-How would you define “The Tree of Dreams”?
-The model is “One Thousand and One Nights”, therefore it is entering that world where telling is living, life as the never ending story, that world without explanations because all the enigmas posed by the stories have no answer, or the answers are another story from where you get to another and so on in an endless progression, giving shape to that phrase of “The Thousand and One Nights”, that “the truth does not fit in a single dream”, that is to say , no life, however insignificant, fits in a single story.
-We are forgetting the wonderful world of the story.
-I think so, our world, as Benjamin said, is very rich in information, but very poor in memorable stories and we need those stories because the information goes as far as it goes and there it stops, but there are latent stories that are telling us what that is really happening, that is the magic of the story, the one that has the power to go where mere information does not go.
-Literature began with orality. It is being lost?
– Clearly, even in towns that until now have conserved it, like the Bedouin, used to tell stories every night, it is disappearing. The last time I saw them they already had mobiles and all that was changing.
-Is it basically a book about love?
-Yes, I think that all literature and art have a lot to do with the world of love, love even at the cost of truth, as it is said in what for me is the key story of the book, when a rich woman asks an old woman to give him her granddaughter. She refuses and the woman angrily reproaches her that she is deceiving her with fantasies. You only tell him things that are not true, he says. So what if they are not true? -answers the old woman-. Does the truth know what love wants? That is my favorite phrase in the book because it is true, love wants things that the truth cannot give it.
-But pain and death are also present.
-Completely, because they are the limit and essential experiences of life. There are very dark and terrible stories in this book, but always looking for its beauty, because there is also a beauty in ugliness, in the imperfect, and I would even dare to say that there is even in evil. Beauty, which has a lot to do with imperfection, is a quality that has to die. The beautiful seems to you threatened, fragile, in danger, and the more beautiful it is, the more vulnerable it is and the more fear of losing it.
-What is the universality of “The Thousand and One Nights”?
-It is a compilation of stories that have been told since the dawn of time and transmitted from generation to generation by nomads, merchants, sailors … in them is the human being in all its dimension. If they have not forgotten, it is because they must tell something true and essential about the human condition. In almost all the cultures of the world essential affinities appear, they speak of the heart and what is in it, regardless of the culture and the time in which it lives, because the person is always the same.
-The world of reality and the world of dreams, are they compatible?
-They are completed, the dream vivifies the real and the real gives consistency to the dream, they need each other. A reality without dreams is a horror. If you think about it, we are constantly traveling to the dream world to endure reality. All the fantasies and crazy things that come to mind, we bring them from the world of dreams.
-What is it for you to narrate?
-It is perhaps the most essential human need. Narrating is trying to give meaning to life, the story tries to put order in the chaos, madness and nonsense of the world. When we tell a story to the child we are saving him from the night, from the darkness of the world, from the fear of being abandoned, and we give him a space of freedom and adventure.
-Are children better able to understand fantasy?
-They live in that world without having to think about it, the child is an amazing being who lives permanently in that fantasy, in a world that has not yet finished creating, as in Genesis. They do not distinguish between the real and the dream, that is why they live the fantasy of the stories as if they were part of it, the fantastic and the real is the same because they live the world as a possibility.
-He says that “Their stories are a summary of that endless wandering through other people’s lives and books.”
-Because I do not pretend that they are original, they are born from other stories that I have been told or have read, a kind of medley where I let myself go, my freedom in telling them has been absolute, when I started them I did not know where they were going to take me, I was going to story to story in endless succession. I have spent three years in this world without knowing when it would end, but as I found new things I was delighted and I realize that in all of them there are echoes of other stories.
-Why do we need literature?
-Why do we need to connect with this world of madness, fiction and fantasy? That is the question. Because it is the best way to get to know each other, the most resounding journey to the depths of ourselves. Reading and writing is wandering, the reader or writer is a vagabond, a traveler, someone who goes into the unknown, the good reader has to open a book without knowing where it will take him, he knows where the journey begins, but never where it ends. Literature does not take us away from reason, it transforms it into a haunted house, it makes room for more things than we imagine, that is the magic of literature. What Goya said is: “Fantasy, that is, the dream, unassisted by reason, produces impossible monsters, but united to it is the mother of all wonders”, therefore, that alliance between fantasy and reason is the desirable alliance entirely.
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