Sed is Spanish for thirst. Cyrano de Bergerac sat one day to write his tragedy, La Mort d’ Agrippine, for reasons no one will ever know or understand. He wrote, perhaps before midnight:

Ces beaux riens qu’on adore et sans savoir pourquoi….

Beautiful nothings that we adore without knowing why. He was referring to the gods. So there is thirst for absolutes, some people sense it and yet die athirst. For centuries mankind has looked for this totality through a window they’ve called the soul, which is rather unfortunate that today it has been reduced to myth. Not because the soul is an actuality, but because we need the image of the cosmic window. Alma is soul in Spanish. But I don’t want to say, tengo sed de alma (I am thirsty of soul). It is peculiar that in Spanish “to be thirsty” is expressed literally “to have thirst”, as if thirst were a possession, an accretion to one’s being. For this reason I prefer to express myself in a double language: I am sed of soul. That is to say that I AM the thirst of soul, I am the empty dark room desirous of an aperture, of the link between my personal darkness and total illumination; I am the emptiness craving a flood of light that will inundate the cavity of my cavernous being.

In the same play, Cyrano wrote:

Une heure après la mort, notre âme évanouie sera ce qu’elle était une heure avant la vie.

One hour after death our vanished soul will be that which it was an hour before life.

That is to say, the window will soon be shattered.

So quick, let’s raise the curtains of alma.

Contemporary Poetry