The world for Enrique Molina will always be a delirium rather than a torment. As with Spinoza's substance,what happens in the world can only be linked to a "passion" (the perseverance of one's own existence) that is constantly revealed, but the poet is the only one who can see it and bear witness to it. He gives his own example: he had embarked on merchant ships to delight himself of the wonders of the real world and write poems that conveyed the spectacle. In other words, on board, Molina could only think of poetry, of composing verses with the grace of the journey; the other sailors, on the other hand, could only think of going back home, for them the only thing alive was the nostalgia for the lost homeland.
Molina, on the other hand, sought the aesthetic fact. His endeavor is to see the world in this way - as that high wakefulness that Borges attributes to Browning and Blake - and he sees it, he sees beauty over and over again, but where then to locate the evil and unpleasantness of the earth? Well, as another facet of delirium. For Molina, the world can never be unjust because it is indifferent. The unbearable heat of the tropics and the flies, the stench of death or blood, or extreme poverty, form an inseparable whole with the environment that surrounds them: nature. And nature is indifferent and of a tantalic nature. Molina discovers an optimistic vision that he will call "the tantalic sense of the world". That is why all cruelty has a designated place - like beauty and truth - to be transformed into poetry through the attributed "surrealism".
Surrealism, as the most vivid of realism, is the only possible one for Molina and exposes the delirium of planet Earth from a poetic subjectivity that encompasses everything or almost everything (hence Spinoza). Evil is necessary because it is an inseparable part of the whole. Molina demonstrates that even the most intimate torment will be delirium, and the world we know is nothing but constant delirium. All of this, understood by a person of extraordinary sensitivity and great poetic taste - I would say he is a great versifier - forms a revealing, romantic, adolescent, passionate, and liberating poetic work.
I don't believe in the things they can accuse Molina of: that his poems don't differ from one another, that he exaggerates, that he is a cheesy poet, almost popular, that his procedure is surrealistic or automatic and therefore incomplete; because Molina will never have an ineffective verse. If we delve deeply and fully into Molina's poetry - as one should with any poem - we find that there is not a word, a verse, that has not been polished and worked on like a jewel, even if it gives the exact opposite impression: that it emerged suddenly and without premeditation or subsequent correction. It's as if writing doesn't require any effort for the poet. Like a ship leaving its wake, Molina leaves poems where he uses the entire dictionary as if it were fire.
It is worth highlighting again some beginnings, such as that of "Los Hoteles Secretos" (The Secret Hotels):
The nomadic gleam of the world
Like a spark in the soul, a jewel of time
It only opens to the passage of certain tumultuous beds
Dragged by the current
To the stairs cut off by the sea
Or the beginning of "Amantes Vagabundos" (Wandering Lovers):
We never had a home, nor patience, nor oblivion
Or from "De la erosión de las nubes" (Of the Erosion of the Clouds):
The dark wine of the earth
Where you wet your lips as the hours go by
Or the beginning and ending of "La Gran Vida" (The Great Life):
Dark servant of the ocean
Chained to the sun of a ship
He cleaned the plate of the night
Scrubbed the floor of the masts (...)
My soul returned to old things
To the shadow of the banana trees
Warm beings surrounded me
Amidst the glory of the waves
And the last verse is a verse that carries the sea inside, it is a blue verse, which opens like this beginning:
From those altars of the ocean...
Or this lost verse:
Someone taking a train
His shirt woven by the waves...
Molina's verses always open, they never close:
Like an echo of things that have already burned in the salt of space
Or:
A nameless voice wanders, a deaf and invincible presence:
Your current, your tongue of a thousand skies!
Or:
They repeat once again in the shadow
The legend of love that never dies...
These are verses that have an echo, like a breeze of fresh air. Sometimes he achieves images like this:
His past is incomprehensible and is lost like the beggar
Left behind at the stormy bus stop
A blurry, terrible image, it is the hitchhiker left behind on the road, it is the abandoned dog in the rearview mirror at the end of the story "Comadrejas" by Valentín Trujillo.
Molina also shared with Argentinian poet Viel Temperley - an equally uncertain and wandering friend – the image of a curious razor blade, a symbol. Molina was about to embark for England at the port of New York, but upon disembarking from a Norwegian freighter - where "the terrible Norwegians made one feel invisible" - in New Orleans, he was stopped by a police checkpoint. He was carrying a raincoat and a razor blade in his shirt pocket. It was hot, a perfect sunny day. He was intercepted by a routine police check, Molina showed his belongings, and they sent him away. Both things were a sign that he was entering the country to stay, as he was heading to New York by land. They sent him back to the ship and prohibited him from disembarking until it sailed. That razor blade that would forever change his destiny was perhaps the same one Viel Temperley saw - as Stephen Dedalus also saw - one morning reflecting the beam of light in his long poem "Carta de Marear" (Sea Chart) that begins:
From the razor blade I saw it all.
With dried blood and a broken spell, hostel host to dried blood...
The splendors of the earth are nothing compared to the imagination, said Blake; much later, Molina would refute him while traveling the world on merchant ships, silenced by the grace of the planet and its seas, in the calamity of its pleasures, seeking poetry in the salt of birds and hallucinatory rains. Paradoxically, the last verses of "Por primera vez..." (For the First Time...) seem to approach Blake:
Proudly distant, I go all blue towards the sky.
Ah! But forever connected to this adorable planet...