It is a strange world, yes. You must learn that you are alone, even when followed by multitudes. Perhaps, by the grace of Leibniz, there exists some other possible world where you wouldn’t need me. Who knows? Not even Leibniz. Maybe in that other world, your theory and your words and the single arrow that is time would together have been sufficient; you could have pushed forward without my help, conquering spaces and times and it wouldn’t have mattered to me in the slightest because given the rules in such a world, you wouldn’t need me. But that possible world could never really exist; it would be self-contradictory. My new activities have nothing in common with the things I was doing before, which were themselves docile copies of the things I thought I would be doing back when I first entered our house of higher learning, and thus entered your theory, Augustus—your doctrine. Your doctrine, which has changed everything. If you only knew the wild paths my investigations have taken! The seditious spin of the steering wheel of my research! I was focused on baneful things, my dear. Perhaps baneful is not exactly the term I’m looking for, but it’s an adjective that brings to mind the image of an eagle bearing down on its prey. I would love to bombard you with details. If you knew them—and it’s unclear whether or not you’re ever going to find out, still unclear—I know you would be proud of me. Don’t ask me how, but I know. Would you like to know what this is all about? Of course you would. But I’m not going to tell you. Ha-ha, not yet. Don’t get upset. Soon I will see to it that you know entirely too much—soon I will illuminate the dark side of your philosophy.
What were we talking about? Ah yes, that the world-without-me could never exist in any form whatsoever, because my presence is a necessary condition for your theory. It is true, of course, that I can’t have been its efficient cause: you were able to formulate the initial phase of your doctrine all on your own, with no need for me to act directly upon you or it—or perhaps I did, but only in the world of dreams, my dear, where Cinderella theories dance alongside their fairy godmothers! In the world of things, however, things have changed a great deal. You must face this fact, Augustus. Because in the world where your theory exists, where it truly exists, in its purest, most revolutionary form, there too exists The Act—the act that converts your theory into action. The act is thus intrinsic to the doctrine; it is part of it. And if you were to ask how I know this, well, I would answer that I owe it all to you, because I read it in your theory, and in reading it I consummated a rite of initiation at once wondrous and absolute. You have given me a lever with which to move the world, and the only thing that matters to me is learning how to move that lever. I know perfectly well that you love us all equally—but I also know that some of us are more dear to you than others. Some of us understand what is drawing near, ravenous and blood-stained, the vertiginous tiger, and we fear nothing.
The greatest leaders perished precisely when they no longer knew how to revolutionize the revolution they had begun. And you don’t want that to happen, now, do you, my dear? You want your name raised up above the supralunar clouds, where reign the perfect forms of thought, isn’t that so? The change must come from within—from within you. You don’t need much. You only need me. My eyes are closed, and the bubbles are up to my chin. His big gray hand rests on my tawny belly, while his other hand pushes my hair back, his fingers unable to let go. In your mouth I am the plaything of a monster. I let my thoughts swim in the darkness until I can’t hear them any more.
In the afternoon I took position outside a bar called Platón, named for your favorite Greek, and waited for you there. My plan was to allow time to slide past in its usual fashion: faculty members would soon start to arrive individually, each in his or her own form, and sooner or later you too would appear. Every so often, someone who wasn’t watching their step would slip on the sidewalk, their foot now smeared with dog shit. Two hours passed this way.
Over and over I envisioned your arrival, a succession of silent films projected on the filthy white façade of the department building. My transcription:
Augusto García Roxler makes his way up the wet sidewalk, locked deep in conversation with his own thoughts. His gaze suddenly lifts, drawn to the presence of a very pretty gorgeous young woman sitting near the entrance to Casa del Saber. The Professor stops short. He recognizes her immediately: the enigmatic silhouette, modestly half-hidden, is that of none other than his destiny his nemesis his Significant Other his most deeply beloved student. Augustus clears his throat, thinks: Should I speak to her directly? He imagines that this exquisite young woman is probably furious because he hasn’t given her the time of day seems to have ears only for the sycophants that surround him even though he knows that she is the only one for him he owes the most lucid elements of his doctrine entirely to Her. Augustus wants to go to Her, but he’s nothing but an old chickenshit he fears being rejected because he’s such a chickenshit and deep down inside he’s secretly afraid of her and also because he’s nothing but an old chickenshit who’s lost his strength and lets himself be manipulated by the sinister sycophants around him. An unrecognizable voice resounds from off-stage—from within his brain—it shouts something that will determine the outcome of this nightmarish story. Augustus watches her eyes. She turns her swanlike neck, looks back at him. He roots around in one of his shadowy pockets, extracts a wrinkled copy of his notes on my comments in his class, whispers something that we can’t quite catch but its meaning is clear—there are admiring comments penciled in the margins. He looks at her overcome with passion he caresses her with his eyes lowers his glance and cries begging for forgiveness my love, I can’t take it any more, I belong to you as well with destiny in his eyes; he invites her back to his house, and she responds with a mischievous grin to join him at his regular table at Platón for croissants and a cup of tea.
I waited, and waited, and waited, and you never arrived. Was it possible you were wearing a cape that rendered you invisible? Were you already inside when I arrived? None of the beings who prowl the halls of Philosophy and Letters truly exists before nine in the morning. I myself once tried to break this natural law for a few hours, but was abducted by Berni Bleizik from the priory of Metaphysics, famed for his somniferous gifts. After waking from his spell, I saw that my fist had clenched around my crispy butter croissant, crushing it to bits.
I gathered my papers, my books in progress, and crossed the street with my mind made up: I was going to intercept you inside. I almost slipped as I penetrated the department building. Thank goodness I was wearing these army surplus boots, ideal for bad weather:
I threw myself up the stairs, and sniffed around the offices, the research units, the specialized libraries of the fourth floor. I circled through the main library, its reference area, the Periodicals section. I couldn’t rule anything out, even searched for you up on the fifth floor, which was still under construction, thinking that perhaps you were fed up with the pale imitations of Duchamp that populate the faculty bathrooms. I sought you sought you sought you, and found nothing. Which is when I decided to change strategies. I would go to the pay phone on the corner, call the Faculty Lounge, and explain that a bomb was about to go off.
As this wasn’t during midterms or finals, the threat would be taken seriously; it would create a true sense of danger, would foment panic, the building would empty, and you would come out of hiding. I would stay there at the window of your favorite bar, savoring a snack, trying out different Dostoyevskian facial expressions as I watched you escape out through the door to the right with your dear E.G., who’s now a B.M. (Blubbery Minion), the two of you holding hands as you ran, scared shitless. I so enjoyed imagining you vulnerable, frightened, overwhelmed by what had happened, caught in the sniper sights of moi, that I walked slowly to the corner and actually did it. Ha! Pay phones and philosophy have always been strong allies.
They exited the building a few at a time, much as they’d entered it: students, professors, and craft vendors abandoning the abode of the humanities, walking happily alon
g, chatting with whomever happened to be alongside, smiling and laughing. Only the most nubile among them seemed at all excited or scared. Then suddenly I couldn’t believe my eyes, and wanted to claw them out.
You were walking calmly, talking to that woman. B.M. was tucking a bunch of nerdy folders into their binders, and as he went to say goodbye, he likewise exchanged pleasantries with her. She smiled, and TOOK YOU BY THE ARM. The two of you had undoubtedly entered the building together through the parking lot, but had you come in the same car? She pressed a thin book (How to Knit? The dialogues of Foucault and Deleuze?) flat against her brown, knee-length skirt. She said a few words, and YOU APPEARED TO BE LISTENING. Instead of heading for Platón, your habitual watering hole, or Sócrates, your favorite redoubt for more elegant encounters, the two of you wandered over to the cafe on Directorio Avenue—one that isn’t even named after a philosopher. And I followed.
As enraged as Achilles in full Greek rhapsody, I pulled myself up to where I could see in through the window. That woman wiped the tip of her napkin along her rat-like jaw, pretending to listen attentively; her erect nipples aimed at you like bolts on a pair of crossbows; she stared at you, her gaze insane, her eyes made for pretense and lies. She nodded tritely at everything you said, and raised her pinkie as she sipped her tea. And Augustus’s lips moved—no, I’m not talking to you in Second Person any more, not now that you’ve distanced yourself from me—but I wasn’t quite able to make out what he said. My fury was swallowed by my astonishment, but promptly clawed its way back out.
Every battle plan includes a vague but finite number of expected casualties. Wars begin on the day least expected, and thus a Roman with a Greek nose makes his way along some creek on January 10, 49 B.C.; he crosses the Rubicon, and unleashes a civil war. So it goes. One day you make a bomb threat, and in less than an hour you see how you’ve been betrayed. One day you plant, for example, a very special type of bomb (a symbolic bomb), and soon your most substantial contributions (adjectival, metapolitical) sink to their deaths at the hands of an unacceptable triad. Because that woman is unacceptable. From her immoral appearance, you’d think she just stepped off the stage at a cabaret; from her wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly demeanor, you’d think she was some poorly educated housewife leeching off her husband for survival. She may well study Letters. I first noticed her existence one afternoon when I was wandering through the halls before my Special Problems in Ethics class. She had her hair up in a little bun, was wearing a little brown crochet jacket. She was sitting at a table in the bar on the first floor, surrounded by a scruffy little group of students and—I can hear her murmuring now—she was laying out a Tarot spread. At first glance that made perfect sense: with the consolidation of the internal market for handicrafts and bootleg videos, Tarot cards and Occultism wouldn’t be far behind. I walked up, looking as dismissive as possible, and that woman—incapable of resisting the aura of domination that my personality secretes—invited me to cut the deck. The card that appeared was the Tower.
She looked at me, her little rat-like eyes filled with alarm. In her schoolmarm-from-the-capital accent, she said, “The Tower reprezentsh the paradigmsh conshtructed by the Ego, which iz the shum of the shtructursh built by the mind to undershtand the universh.” Someone elbowed her, saying something about Kant, but she rambled on: the Tower represents those who are prone to visions and epiphanies, but when Reality doesn’t conform to their expectations, the Tower is destroyed by the lightning, and they go crazy, become aggressive, tend toward evil. If the Tower is pointing downward, it is digging its own grave; if it points up, perhaps it’s time for the Tower to change its attitude and ideology. (The table she was using was round, and it wasn’t really clear which way the card was pointing.) The Tower symbolizes the passage from the alpha state to the theta state; in the latter, the information produced by the Ego overwhelms all external stimuli, creating what is known as a hallucination. “Which alwaysh impliesh defeat, deshtruction, and catashtrophe,” she added, adjusting her bun.
I felt the same disdain for that woman that I’d felt for one of my first psychoanalysts, whom I’d held hostage in his office until he admitted that not a single one of the idiotic comments he’d made during our session was a properly formed sentence or meaningful proposition. What matters is welcoming each of the tests our fate has in store, facing them with strength and bravery. Here lies my own Rubicon, I said to myself; here between Puan Street and Pedro Goyena. The twenty-four kilometers between the spot where the Rubicon was crossed and the point where it empties into the Adriatic Sea are contained many times over in the immense asphalt skeleton that undergirds the city of Buenos Aires, home of my days, while the bit of world that stretches from Massachusetts to North Carolina corresponds to the Madrilenian lands that saw the first of the heroic deeds of Cervantes’s man of La Mancha: such was the distance, such the trifling creek that separates destiny from Valor. In political philosophy, such occurrences unleash the violence contained in man’s true nature. I looked down; there was water flowing along the gutter.
Do you like music? I bet there’s a ventricle of your Old Man’s heart that adores boleros. Perhaps a few Cuban classics will bring nearer some new variation on our theme:
Qué vale más, yo niña o tú orgulloso,
o vale más, tu débil hermosura.
Piensa bien, que en el fondo de la fosa
llevaremos la misma vestidura.v
And indeed, you will ask yourself, who is worth more? Darling: the answer is found in the extraordinarily delicate syntax that allows one to choose either an alliance between youth and power, or the solitude of the throne. Alone on the throne you will find yourself surrounded by inept fatsos; allied with the power of the novi, you can hold fast to me. The verse is repeated, emptying out into a subtle yet noteworthy conclusion: vestidura becomes sepultura. A very suggestive choice. (Note: there is cruelty in the sovereign nature of Veneration as well.) Who is worth more, a simple girl like me, or you so proud: you must accept the fact (¡piensa bien!) that your beauty is weak, that the grave is near. You must listen to me before it’s too late.
I understand that at your advanced age you might think it best to play your cards close to the chest, to safeguard your power within the department, to act like the Roman testudo as they defended against, and eventually laid waste to, the vast human hordes.
But this is a trap, my dear one, a trap! You cannot and must not trust anyone in those environs. And that woman . . . frankly, I don’t want to discuss her. Advanced age tends to give poor counsel—don’t listen to it. If you do, it will make you feel weak, when in truth you should know that you are strong because you can rely on me. You must have trust in my youth. You think that the presence of that woman and B.M. will protect you, as their brains are nothing more than boils growing on your own. But you are swimming in barracuda-filled waters. I, who have used my own flesh to incarnate each part of your theory, am willing to take the next step, and as many subsequent steps as might be necessary. Do you understand? I know what your theory requires.
We live in such a strange world, my dear, a world so immeasurably yours and mine. Terrible things are going to happen! I will have to do terrible things. Your words have set in motion a secret, inexorable process. I have exchanged the loftiest heights of intellectual speculation for the testing grounds of the abyss. And I must proceed in thusly, Augustus, must seek out the brutality that exists within me, in order to put myself at the service of the Theory-World to which we both pertain. It would surprise you to know that I have one of you in hand. (It would also surprise you to see yourself reflected in his gauche caviar ways.) How I treat the hostage will depend on every word you speak, do you see, my dear? When I’m with him, I’m speaking to you.
I’ll leave you for now with this syllogistic verse that I found myself composing out loud in English as I was putting on my boots to head out to meet my victim6:
All war is based in deception (Cf. Sun Tzu, The Ar
t of War).
Definition of deception: the practice of deliberately making somebody believe things that are not true. An act, a trick or device intended to deceive somebody.
Thus, all war is based in metaphor.
All war necessarily perfects itself in poetry.
Poetry (since indefinable) is the sense of seduction.
Therefore, all war is the storytelling of seduction
and seduction is the nature of war.
2.
“Friday, 10 o’clock, at Guido’s.” Perfect—and I had the good sense to arrive at 10:30 so as not to arouse suspicion. Collazo still wasn’t there.
I decided to wait for him posed daintily at the bar. I kept myself entertained by rereading certain passages—not particularly well-argumented ones—from Fetish, Fascism, and the Collective Imagination: the Masculine Myth of Nationalist Argentina. The lighting was terrible and the background noise was very distracting. The maître d’ kept looking at me with that cheekily depraved expression men reserve for single damsels. I grumblingly gathered myself up and turned my back on him. Then I realized: all of the men were looking at me, their verbs left half-conjugated in their mouths. Suddenly I feared that I was on the verge of bouncing out of my blouse in full view of everyone. Paying close heed to the little libertarian glimpses my outfit allowed, I slowly caressed my torso until my modesty was once again intact.
Savage Theories Page 10