Alberto Ruiz Samaniego /// Victor Hugo. Fxing the vertigos.

"In order to paint a battle one needs one of those powerful painters who have something of chaos in their brushes."
Victor Hugo

In Victor Hugo meditation is always liquid. In him, being located in the wake of Nerval, the dream does no more than spill over as an erupting fluid over certain or visible life. 'Beneath some violent breaths from the depths of the soul', writes Hugo, 'thought is convulsed and elevated, and from it comes something like the dull roar of the wave' (L'Homme qui rit, IV, 1). Whether ocean or chaos, the wild oscillations of nature appear here as states of the greatest depths of consciousness, in that sort of universal analogy that characterised the romantic concept of poetry since the Germans. For this reason the contemplation and observation of a landscape, for example, always becomes abandonment or sinking into an unfathomable interior condition of man, which naturally no longer belongs to him.