Bewildering Stories welcomes...

Pedro Blas González

Señor González says he doesn’t think his bio will be very exciting because he’s a philosophy professor in Miami, Florida. Ha! It has to win a prize of some sort for one of our most personable and entertaining. It also contains some interesting background to the Santería cult in his first contribution, “Iwayu.”

And Pedro is an active fiction writer, with a novel (“Time’s Message”) in the running for a prize in a competiton. He’s also published books on Ortega y Gasset (Radical Reality) and on the philosophy of literature (Fragments: Essays in Subjectivity, Individuality and Autonomy).

When I teased Prof. González about his sniffing at French philosophy and literary theory, he came back with some favorites: Marcel, Sartre, Camus, Houellebecq, and Jules Ferry, whom he rates as a “sleeper” who stands to become increasingly popular. Pedro reserves a special place for Poles, especially Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz.

But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised at Pedro’s viewpoint, judging by “Iwayu.” It comes from deep in the Romantic tradition: a story about magic, belief and subjective world views. The story turns on ‘believing’ versus ‘knowing’ and is underscored by the shaman Santos’ falling back on the Spanish word creer (from the Latin credere, a common ancestor of the French croire).

When I first saw creer, I knew what it was and what it meant but couldn’t help reanalyzing it as the French créer, ‘to create’. And thereby must hang a tale. Are believing and creating not related in philosophy as well as in Romance etymology?

And cultural world views come into play: would “Iwayu” go over well in France? I rather doubt it: ever since the Middle Ages, the French have cultivated realism and rationalism while looking askance at mysticism as a kind of Celtic joke. In return they’d make one of their own, a semi-pun: Il croit quoi ? ‘He believes what ?’ And that is ultmately the question implied in “Iwayu”: what is the effect of ‘believing’?

As I always say, philosophy may be the science that tells you there are no answers to your questions, but it does say why and raises even more along the way. So, Professor González, maybe we could hold a philosophical round table discussion with yourself and any other philosophers in our midst. We’ll look into it.

Welcome to Bewildering Stories, Pedro! We hope to hear from you again soon and often.

Sr González’ bio sketch can be accessed here.