Empty Words
Page 4
Exercises
November 27
Allow me to record, so it’s known in the centuries to come, that I’m writing this at eight thirty in the morning. If we take into account the clocks going forward (a maneuver on the part of the government that I still don’t understand, though I’m sure it leaves them better off and us worse off), it’s 7:30 a.m. I’ve already had breakfast and now I’m drinking a cup of coffee. But my handwriting isn’t very good. Now it is. If I want my handwriting to be good, I can write only about my handwriting, which becomes very monotonous. But writing only about my handwriting keeps my mind on what I’m doing and means I form the letters properly. Otherwise, my attention drifts toward the discourse, and my hand ends up writing automatically, without any will to guide it.
The will: this is the crux of my current problem. I seem to have lost my willpower—which, by the way, I never had much of. Let’s think about this. The self is defined as the conscious, volitional part of the being—it’s a complex modern invention, since for millennia there was nothing among living beings that bore the slightest resemblance to a self. In other words, for the being it takes real effort, a significant consumption of mental energy, to maintain the existence of this unnatural, antinatural artifice. Well, I’m doing a good job of identifying my current problem of apathy, but not such a good job of paying attention to my handwriting—I got too excited about these psychological reflections, and now my hand’s moving mechanically, automatically, without a will to control it.
The Discourse
November 27
In fact, the dog also predates me in this house, and in this family. I, like the cat, am a relative newcomer. My arrival meant a number of changes for the dog, some for the better and others less so, and I have no idea what the final balance is (though I’d like to think it’s worked out very well for him overall). The dog used to live permanently in our spacious back garden, which is enclosed by a high wall, a hedge, and a wire fence: escape was impossible. He spent most of the day with his paws resting on the fence, looking at the outside world and barking when he thought it necessary. On the street corner, separated from the back garden by the wire fence, there’s an empty lot surrounded by low, crumbling walls. This lot is often visited by children, adults, and animals, some of which would rouse the dog’s baser instincts and send him into fits of furious, insistent barking, and since barking alone wasn’t enough to use up all the energy his instincts unleashed, he’d also run around, sometimes in circles and sometimes in a straight line up and down the length of the fence. He reacted in a similar way to things that happened in the road or on the opposite pavement, a world he knew only by sight and, to a certain extent, but only to a certain extent, by smell. The sense of sight doesn’t mean much to dogs; I imagine the world looks to them like a sort of fuzzy black-and-white film, or the shadows in “The Allegory of the Cave” (see Plato). A dog needs to see things, but most of all he needs to smell things, and smell them up close, at that. Sometimes he even needs to touch them. Although dogs’ hearing is extremely sharp, its main purpose seems to be defensive, and I don’t suppose it adds a great deal to their vital, aesthetic perception of reality.
The dog, then, was a prisoner. At night he was chained up for shadowy reasons I never heard convincingly explained, and at night he also did a lot of barking, or dragged his chains around on the paving stones, or sent his bucket of water crashing over and then pushed it about with his nose.
Even before I installed myself in this house—which we’ll very soon be leaving—I was worried about the dark, restricted life the poor animal led. The first thing I did on moving in was restrict it even further, since the barking under the bedroom window at night, combined with the ghostly rattling of the chain and the overturned water bucket, was disturbing my sleep. We agreed to move the kennel to the outdoor courtyard at the center of the house, thus separating the dog from the goings-on in the street and the empty lot, and these days we put him there every night before bed. This has worked well. The dog now sleeps peacefully, except sometimes when there’s a full moon and choruses of dogs strike up in the small hours for mysterious reasons I wish I understood, and our dog joins in with his distinctive, familiar voice. But most of the time he sleeps peacefully at night, and so do I.
The next step was to take charge of his food. He used to be fed just once a day, which meant he was putting on a lot of weight. I started splitting his meals into smaller portions, which is proven to help with weight loss, and this forged a special bond between us: I became the person who feeds him, an extremely important role in the eyes of a dog, and worthy of the greatest respect and admiration—or at least, that’s what people say. I think it’s more that the dog sees me as one of his employees, and sometimes I even get the feeling he’s watching me closely and weighing how useful I really am.
I was still worried about his lack of freedom and the limited scope of his world, and one day I had the idea of gradually widening a gap in the wire fence, or rather a gap between the iron post holding up one end of the fence and the wall it was leaning against and attached to at various points. What I did was separate the post from the wall a little at a time: if the dog really wanted to get out, I thought, at some point he’d realize he could use that gap, and it wouldn’t take much effort to widen it enough to fit through. I didn’t want to take all the initiative; I thought he should win his freedom for himself, because, as I know all too well, the only true freedom is the kind you win for yourself. At the same time, granting the dog his freedom involved accepting some degree of responsibility for it. I didn’t want to be implicated in anything that might happen when the dog, so unfamiliar with the wider world, was first able to move freely within it. Often, at night, I’ve suffered in silence as visions of the dog under the wheels of a passing car danced before my eyes. I wanted him to share at least some of that responsibility with me by widening the gap in the fence himself. I’d given him the idea; he had to be the one to carry it out.
Exercises
November 28
Yesterday I began discussing an interesting topic, and now I can’t remember what it was, which can only be good news for these handwriting exercises. As I recall, I’d been writing away neatly and patiently until the interesting topic came up, and then any attempt to form the letters properly fell by the wayside. I hope nothing interesting comes up today. It seems unlikely that anything will. Although I got up later than I did yesterday I’m still half-asleep, as if I could have done with a few more hours, and I feel physically exhausted. Maybe I’m having some sort of hepatic or digestive crisis. I’m in that alert, irritable state that makes me oversensitive to sudden noises or movements; it’s a kind of half-awakeness, as if a part of me—and an important part, at that—is asleep and the small part that’s conscious is busy, among other things, protecting the part that’s still snoozing. As a result, I have a very short attention span and not much energy for practical tasks like this. And although no interesting topics have come up, my handwriting was getting progressively worse until four lines ago, when I realized and started trying to do a bit better, with some success. Thankfully, I’m now reaching the end of the page. I hope I’m feeling better when I come back to this work tomorrow.
The Discourse
November 28
The discourse, then, has been filling up with the story of the dog. It’s false content, or perhaps semi-false, since, like all things, it could easily be seen as symbolic of other, deeper things. In fact, I think it would be difficult for the content of anyone’s words—unless that person is a politician—for the content of any ordinary, honestly spoken words, to be false.
This doesn’t mean that the abstract form of my discourse, its rhythm and flow, is determined by the story of the dog. It’s more that the story of the dog could be a symbol of the real contents of the discourse, which for some reason it’s impossible to see directly.
For example, it could be that the gap in the wire fence I’m gradually widening in the story correspond
s to another, psychological gap, which I’m also gradually widening with some kind of freedom in mind, not the dog’s freedom this time but my own. In other words, something within me is working away, secretly and slowly, to penetrate defenses that have long been erected inside me, a wall built just as secretly and slowly to protect me from something—and that may be why I’m writing this now. Though of course, even if these walls are fairly useful at the time, they eventually end up imprisoning the spirit.
And now that I think, and write, about all this, I remember an example from a few years ago, a time when I put up a defensive wall not at all secretly or slowly, but rather entirely deliberately. Or at least I think it was deliberate. I was conscious of doing it, I mean, but perhaps I didn’t have a choice. Perhaps that thing hidden inside me gave the command, and the command reached my consciousness, which then acted upon it as if it had originated there. I’m thinking of the day—March 5, 1985, to be precise—when I left my old apartment in the center of Montevideo and got into the car of some friends, which was going to take me to Buenos Aires. I was moving there permanently, or so I thought. The permanence of the change may not have been definite or absolute when it came to Buenos Aires, but it was when it came to leaving my apartment, on which an eviction notice had been served. As I shut the door for the last time, I knew I would never live there again. And I’d lived there, for better or worse, for 80 percent of the forty-five years I’d been alive at the time I got into the car.
November 29
And so, by using the image of the dog to fill the empty, or seemingly empty, discourse, I’ve discovered that the apparent emptiness was hiding some painful content. It’s pain I chose not to feel at the time because I knew I couldn’t cope with it, or at least because I knew I was too busy to release it little by little in a way that would make it bearable. Because on March 5, 1985, in the early afternoon, I got into the car that was to take me to Buenos Aires “permanently,” and on March 6, 1985, at ten o’clock in the morning, I was due to start work in an office in Buenos Aires. And I was going to have to adjust to life in a different city, a different country. There was no time to feel the pain of all this, so I opted to anesthetize myself instead.
This anesthesia was a conscious psychological act. At the time I called it “pulling down the shutters,” and a little later “controlled psychosis”: a denial operation that essentially involved telling myself over and over, “I don’t mind about leaving all this,” “I’m quite happy to be leaving all this: this city that oppressed me and that I saw destroyed during the dictatorship years; this apartment where I’ve lived, suffered, and loved; these friends who used the apartment as a meeting place, and almost a place for therapy.” I didn’t use words to say it, but rather a mental process I don’t know how to describe; something like blocking channels, disconnecting wires, and erecting barricades between myself and every emotion that threatened to take shape. I knew it wasn’t true, that I did mind, that I wasn’t happy. What I was happy about, though, was the prospect of starting a new life and having new experiences at an age when I hadn’t been expecting a great deal to change.
Until then, I’d seen my life as a finished work—not finished to my satisfaction, perhaps, but without anything major on the horizon. I’d spent the year before carefully preparing myself for death. And although my clinical death didn’t come after all, the spiritual death that came in its place never really left, though I don’t like to say so, and will perhaps be hanging around until my clinical death, though I don’t like to say that either. But the possibility of change meant the possibility of life, and I had to be very brave, and to do that I had to be very desperate, since I thought I no longer had the energy for any kind of change at all. Making those particular changes seemed quite impossible, and it took real courage to embark on them. I needed all my reserves of psychological energy, as well as rigorous self-discipline and a steely resistance to fear. I couldn’t let myself be afraid, any more than I could let myself look over my shoulder at the things I was leaving behind.
Exercises
November 30
I went to bed late last night (at 4:00 a.m.) and woke up late today, aching all over. I have lots of work to do, and I’ve also managed to track down the LOGO handbook; because of all this, I’m not expecting much from today’s exercises. And I see my writing’s coming out very small, probably because I’m feeling guilty. Things aren’t going well. Whatever’s happening inside and around me seems to slide far too easily into chaos. It’s true, I know, that I should be more resilient and not get drawn into the madness of my surroundings, but it’s also true that I’m used to having more control over my surroundings than I do now. And I can never work out how to separate myself from the world around me, however much people talk about my “ivory tower.” I’m too aware of everything that’s going on. For one thing, I find it impossible to get into bed, close my eyes, and fall asleep if I know other people in the house are still up. This is because the other people in the house cannot be trusted. If Ignacio’s awake, for example, he’ll definitely fall asleep with both the TV and his bedroom light on. And I can’t rely on Alicia to switch off the television or the light while I’m asleep, especially if she’s already in bed, because she too has a tendency to doze off inadvertently, without the slightest concern for whatever else might be going on. It’s also unlikely she’ll remember to take out the trash, turn off the lights, close the windows and lower the blinds in her office, lock the front door with the key rather than the bolt and make sure the doormat is blocking the gap underneath it, put the food in the fridge, set her alarm, and, most importantly, refrain from making any noise once I’ve fallen asleep.
The Discourse
November 30
But I might as well go on with the story of the dog and the cat. I still don’t feel ready to delve too deeply into those painful episodes from my past, especially considering that my “voluntary psychosis” was taking root and becoming less and less voluntary as the months and years went by. These days I find returning to the past extremely hard work; I’m not even sure I can do it. Nor am I sure that this is what the discourse is really about; there could be plenty of other things still concealed within it, and in fact, I’d say there definitely are. But I have no great passion for psychoanalysis, and it would be enough to reveal a moderate amount of what’s behind the apparent emptiness without having to go back to the original causes of everything, which are almost certainly preverbal.
The dog, then, remained indifferent to the hole in his fence as I widened it gradually each day. Or perhaps it never occurred to him that he could escape through it, or it occurred to him but seemed too risky to attempt. About a month passed before he finally decided to wriggle into the space between the metal post and the wall and loosen the post a little more, just a little, so he could get out into the empty lot on the other side. It was being in heat that made him do it. (People have argued with me before about the matter of male dogs being in heat, and I don’t want to reopen that controversy now. It could be that what I call “heat” in my dog is a response to a female dog in the area actually being in heat. But whatever it is, it involves a radical change in a male dog’s behavior.)
When a dog is in heat, as I soon found out, his personality is completely different. He becomes euphoric, manic, and more aggressive and impulsive than usual. And so, one afternoon, the dog slipped through to the other side of the wire fence as if it were the easiest thing in the world. He sniffed around the empty lot for a while with a combination of delight and profound interest, like a true professional, uncovering who knows how many hidden stories—the kind of stories that can be revealed to dogs only by their scents and will be forever unknown to humans if we aren’t there to see them take place. I’m convinced the dog can interpret smells, translating them into a full understanding of the events that generated them. We humans are limited to very basic associations, for example when we open a drawer for the first time in ages and catch the fleeting aroma of an old perfume, which
had until then been clinging to the fabric of some clothes. The scent stimulates the memory, but it doesn’t tell us anything new.
On one of these days, I saw the dog step impulsively through the door into the back garden and use his sense of smell to reconstruct an entire scene that had played out between the cat and myself a few minutes before: the cat following me over the paving stones, rubbing against my legs; me retracing my steps back into the house with the cat at my side; me going out again with a few pieces of meat, and the cat nibbling on them serenely by the door. The dog followed each one of these movements, in the correct order and with absolute precision, and I could see from the expression on his face that he was drawing conclusions.
But I’m getting ahead of myself by introducing the cat. I was supposed to be telling the story of the dog’s first outing into the wider world, or at least his first independent outing. Before that, every now and then, though not very often, he’d been driven to the beach with his chain around his neck, the same one we used to chain him up at night when his kennel was still in the back garden.
December 3
I just read through everything I’ve written so far in one sitting, which gave rise to a flurry of associations and emotions—so many that now I feel stuck again, as if I’m standing at a crossroads and unsure which way to go. Even though I know that any direction would be much the same as any other, since my original aim hasn’t changed: I still want to capture the content hidden behind the apparent emptiness of the discourse. I’m not in a hurry to do this, or at least I shouldn’t be. But I can feel myself getting more anxious by the day, at a rate I could even represent graphically by means of a curve showing my daily intake of cigarettes. The root of this anxiety is probably the feeling that there’s never enough time. If I ask myself why I don’t have enough time at this point in my life, I’d have to give two reasons: firstly, that I’ve taken on too many responsibilities (to which I should add that I’ve also acquired many more distractions); and secondly, that my body has grown much more demanding with age (and, paradoxically, it’s largely the demands of my aging body that have obliged me to accept more responsibilities).