That was how trusted this perfidious animal had become by the time I uncovered his perfidy and put an end to his food and kind treatment.
Exercises
January 2, 1991
I’m still suffering from various illnesses, or from one illness that’s showing itself in various ways—in particular, through some persistent eczema that’s sticking around for longer than it usually does. I’m also having digestive trouble, most likely related to my liver. There must be something psychological behind all this. Today I had a dream it seemed important to retain, but not long after waking up I’d forgotten what it was. A curtain’s been set up in my mind, a blockade in the form of an obsessive melody, and the more I try to remember the dream, the louder and faster the music becomes. This obstruction seems like a maneuver on the part of what Freud calls the superego, since it’s the consciousness that’s struggling to remember the dream and the id must be what produced it. Why this repression? Why is something it tried to do and, to some extent, achieved (becoming conscious) then rudely pushed under once again? (Come to think of it, I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I’ve learned to interpret my dreams; the superego now knows about this skill of mine, and although it begrudgingly allows its contents to be seen in dreams by means of symbols, it doesn’t want me to remember those symbols afterwards because it knows I may well be able to decipher them.) (But, again, what possible interest can the superego have in keeping the ego in the dark?) I’m not entirely convinced by that explanation, I have to admit. There must be more to it. Perhaps my conscious self has something to do with the repressive maneuvers after all. It could be that the self feels overloaded with responsibilities coming from the outside world, and so I myself don’t feel like taking care of things in the inner world, which is certainly what happens, for example, when it comes to literature. Every time I feel the urge to write a story or a novel, I repress it, thinking: “If I make a start on this, who knows if I’ll be allowed to finish it. I’ll be interrupted and the beautiful impulse will be left incomplete, frustrated, and ruined.”
The Discourse
January 2
If I’m still writing so patiently and in so much detail about these essentially very mundane things, it’s probably out of inertia: the abstract discourse is still AWOL for now, and the music’s still there in its place, sometimes louder and more insistent, sometimes so soft and subtle I’m barely aware of it. The tune seems to come from a kind of mechanism for erasing dreams. I fear it all traces back to a divided self: on one side, the me who wants to recover the dream, and on the other, the me who doesn’t want to hand it over. The first, inquisitive me is my old self, the one I’ve known all my life and who got used to recording dreams, savoring them, writing about them, and even trying to interpret them. I have countless pieces of paper with dreams from different periods of my life written down on them. But now there’s a new me (much more influenced by the superego, yes, but me at the end of the day) that’s more focused on external, practical matters (which I’ve called “mundane,” maybe unfairly but definitely angrily). This new self has seized possession of my being, it’s taken root decisively in my life, and all without me accepting it (and when I say “me” now, I’m talking about the old me). It has too much control and there’s no getting rid of it, and I’ve yet to find a way of reconciling both selves into a single unique and powerful self. It all seems to come back to the problem of time—whether the lack of it, or the inability to situate both selves harmoniously within it.
I’ve just remembered a dream I was in fact able to retain, at least partially, and perhaps this dream expresses the problem I’m talking about. I’ve forgotten large swathes of the plot, but I can remember some of the ending.
In the bit I can remember, I was walking down the street with a man who seemed very friendly, agreeable, and somehow protective. I felt comfortable with him. And yet he was a policeman who appeared to have caught me, and he was taking me to the station to fill out a form. The purpose of the form wasn’t clear, and I was afraid that once we got to the police station they’d arrest me or lock me up and I’d have to stay there for a very long time. The agreeable policeman advised me to introduce myself calmly to the people in the police station, hiding the fact that I had any reason to be concerned or defensive. He pointed me toward a door and said he’d wait outside; for some reason, he couldn’t go in himself. His mission ended there. So I went in alone, edging through a narrow gap with the wall to my left and a pool table to my right. There were also a few people there playing pool. At the far end of the large room I found myself in was a booth with a little window on one side, covered by vertical bars. I approached it nervously, but when I got closer I realized there was no one inside it and I’d have to wait patiently to be attended to. At that moment, I woke up.
I feel like I’m going round in circles. If I’m not mistaken, these pages began with me talking about almost exactly the same thing, namely the inability of my consciousness to take charge of certain unconscious contents that are struggling to surface. I definitely need help—someone who, just like in the dream, will lead me obligingly toward the ordeal of the prison cell or the complicated form, to a place where I’ll somehow be judged or critically examined. Unfortunately, there are no therapists in this town who could help me. The only suitable person (apart from Alicia, who should be ruled out for obvious reasons) is someone I know well enough to invalidate any therapeutic ties. I’ve thought about healers, and people have suggested homeopathy. I’m happy to give anything a go. But what I really need is a psychotherapist, and there aren’t any nearby, and for various reasons I’m stuck here and can’t easily travel.
On top of all this, there’s the imminent move to the new house. The house we’re selling is metaphorically falling to pieces (and physically, too, I could almost add). When you know you have to leave a place, never to return, it’s impossible to go on living there comfortably. You stop being where you are, so to speak, and instead spend your time projecting yourself more and more forcefully into the place where you’ll soon be living. If I look at my books it’s to think about tying them into tidy little packages, and that’s how it goes with everything. If something is lost or broken, it no longer gets replaced. If some furniture’s in the wrong position, it no longer gets put back. We’re living here temporarily, as if in a hotel, constantly counting and recounting the number of days and hours left before we move. The effort that moving will involve, however, has yet to fully sink in. I find it impossible to imagine moving day, when I’ll get out of bed in this house and then go to sleep in the same bed in a different house; in between the two there’s exertion, complications, work I don’t think I can face.
The thing is, I’ve accumulated too many moves lately. After more than thirty-five years in the same building, over the past six years I’ve moved three times, and this will be the fourth—and that’s not even counting all the stays in hotels and the houses of friends and relatives, or the month in a little house here in Colonia. It’s a lot of change for a man who generally gets extremely attached to places.
Exercises
January 3
It’s been pointed out to me, entirely fairly, that these exercises have lost all their calligraphical intent. My writing is now intelligible, though, so in a sense they’re still doing their job. Consequently, as I write this I’m trying to pay as much attention as I can to forming the letters. I shall devote today’s exercises to developing patience in my writing, focusing on the shapes I’m forming and not on what I’m trying to say. At this juncture, however, I’m going to risk something very difficult: I’m going to attempt to write about a dream I had recently without losing sight of my calligraphical duties.
Just before waking up, I had the third in a series of erotic dreams. The dreams in the series all have similar characteristics, and ever since the first one, I’ve had a sense of being subject to the machinations of witchcraft. The second dream, unlike the first, contained not a complete sexual act, but an erotic
scene that was repeated over and over throughout the night, while I was half-asleep, or half-awake, or in a kind of hypnotic trance. Today’s dream seemed like a continuation of the series, which is becoming subtler as it goes along. You could even say that today’s was a normal dream, and certainly nothing about it suggested spells or curses. However, it must belong to the series because, like the other dreams, it features downtrodden women. The woman in the second dream was attractive in many ways, but repellent in many others. And today’s was the same, though she would have been attractive a few years ago and you could have a great intellectual exchange with her. I think the series—witchcraft aside—shows a process taking place that relates to the anima (see Jung), and as it goes on I find myself feeling a little better, physically and spiritually.
January 6
The Three Kings brought me diddly-squat. I’ll have to do things myself from now on. (There’s a profound truth behind these lighthearted words.)
Last night I had another dream in what’s now undeniably a series: a series of dreams about groups of people I don’t know. I had the first one in Buenos Aires, and the others, two or three of them, here in Colonia. I think they all relate (among other things, of course) to my real-life existence among strangers, as if in exile.
The dream was about a journey. We were getting ready to set off from somewhere, and I was introduced to a young woman I didn’t know, whose name was Cristina. Then, along with some other people, we were driven away in a horsedrawn carriage. Of all the people traveling with me (at least seven or eight in total), the only one I knew was Jorge, who’s some kind of professional and a friend of Alicia’s. He seemed to be joining us as a special guest. From that point on I had a secondary role in the dream, as if I were part of the scenery. Everyone else seemed to be acting with a particular purpose in mind, but I didn’t know what it was.
(second page)
I stayed in the background, asking no questions, going with the flow, and looking after Cristina, who at times seemed very young, almost a child.
The group organized itself the way groups of men by themselves usually do: united by their common purpose, whatever it was, the men talked among themselves and ignored the women, who later, when we reached our destination, seemed like little more than servants. I acted as the link between the group of men and, by means of Cristina, the group of women.
Eventually we arrived at the gates of a country residence or farmhouse, and the owner met us at the door. He was an old man with the definite look of a local big shot, tyrant, or mafia boss. During the journey, the city of Colonia had been specifically discussed.
In the street, a few women were setting up long tables for a banquet in the evening light. We went into the house, which was big, old, and complicated to navigate. I soon lost sight of the group of men. And of Cristina. I walked around some more, and at last I found the men in a room that looked like a radio station or recording studio. They were all behind the glass making a news bulletin about Jorge, who seemed to be the “star” of the gathering. Cristina turned up outside the room and knocked very loudly on the glass of the outer door. I signaled to her not to make any noise because of the recording and then left, and the two of us went for a walk.
The Discourse
January 6
There are some pointless things the soul can’t do without. I could go further: it’s only pointless things that the soul can’t do without (though not all pointless things). But I won’t go that far, because I don’t want to make an extreme claim that I’ll later regret. These extreme claims are the product of my circumstances, of my rebellion against my circumstances. Since my life is shaped by ideas of what’s functional, I become too impassioned in my defense of pointless things. I lose my sense of balance and good judgment.
These reflections of mine must have been prompted by the fact that I’m home alone again (and it’s a Sunday). I love these weekends when I can be by myself, though I deplore how short-lived my solitude always is. It’s not that I’d like to live alone; what I really want is to live among people who respect my solitude and need for silence and digressions. Alicia is learning to do this, but it’s not enough; I wish she could accept this world ideologically, as it were, and eventually come to enjoy peace and silence the way I do.
When I woke up by myself in the house this morning, surrounded by immense silence, immense peace, I found myself thinking about a whole assortment of pointless things—the sort the soul appreciates. Over breakfast, I read a few of Dylan Thomas’s letters. In one of them, written when he was a young man, he said that nothing ephemeral could ever be beautiful to him, that beauty is about eternity. I disagreed, since I can’t think of anything that isn’t ephemeral. Even pure forms need an ephemeral mind in order to exist. Beauty is in the mind, not in things, and pure forms exist only in the mind.
Then I put on a cassette I’d chosen at random and the first thing I heard was a cover, by a group I didn’t know, of a song made popular a long time ago by Enrique Rodríguez’s tango orchestra (something like “Hungarian Nights” or “Love in Istanbul”). Listening to it felt wonderful, and I immediately recalled the image of a large warehouse or depot Alicia and I had seen a few days ago on a little beach by the racecourse; an old building covered in panes of glass. Looking at it, I’d wished I had a camera with me to capture that glass landscape (unbroken in some places, but cracked in many more) in the particular light of the sunset. And as well as the glass, there were pieces of disused machinery and metal coils in the fields, among the weeds. Wonderful: I derive an almost erotic pleasure from contemplating certain ruins—empty houses, demolished houses—especially when they’re overgrown with vegetation.
I remember a house I saw on Cerro Pan de Azúcar. It was abandoned or incomplete, almost the skeleton of a house; perhaps it had been abandoned before it was finished. There was a tree growing inside it, and one of its branches had wound its way through a window. Dylan Thomas can say what he likes; this is my idea of beauty. As, too, was a disused church I saw on the same road, which leads from Piriapolis to Pan de Azúcar. Contemplating it, I think, constituted my first genuine mystical-religious experience. The building was completely falling down, and there was a hideous wooden crucifix over the entrance (I was later told that this crucifix had turned up on the coast nearby, carried there by the waves).
Enrique Rodríguez’s orchestra is somewhat similar to all this. Once, when Alicia and I were driving home after a long trip, for much of the journey there was a program about Enrique Rodríguez on the radio. It was extraordinary, marred only by the fact that I couldn’t share it with Alicia—she was at the wheel, concentrating hard, and most unimpressed at having to listen to such a racket.
I can enjoy Bach and Vivaldi as much as she does, and I can tell the difference between Bach or Vivaldi and Enrique Rodríguez. But just then it seemed impossible to explain to her how that orchestra, for me, was like contemplating a ruin overgrown with vegetation. Not because the orchestra was around so long ago, though in a way that heightens the effect, but because, even at the time, Enrique Rodríguez’s original intention was always a ruin overgrown with vegetation. That’s what his music tells me, and it’s what, after breakfast today, was woven into my secret argument with Dylan Thomas and my memory of the sunset on the beach by the racecourse. And that’s how I recovered an essential part of myself, which I’d lost in the chaos of recent years.
*
People think, almost unanimously, that what interests me is writing. But what really interests me is remembering. In some languages, the word “remember” comes from the old word for awaken, and that’s how I like to think of it. I forget whether it relates to the word for heart as well, but I hope it does. After all, remembering things sometimes means knowing them by heart.
Often people even say: “There’s a plot for one of your novels,” as if I went around in search of plots for novels and not in search of myself. If I write it’s in order to remember, to awaken my sleeping soul, to stir up my mind an
d discover its secret pathways. Most of my stories are fragments of my soul’s memory, not inventions.
The soul has its own way of seeing things. It contains elements of our waking lives, but also elements that are particular and personal to it; the soul is part of a higher order of universal understanding that our consciousness can’t access directly. The soul’s conception of what happens in and around us, then, is much more complete than anything the narrow, limited self could ever perceive.
Today all those different kinds of ruins came back to me, and I knew it was my soul’s way of saying, “I am those ruins.” My semi-erotic contemplation of the ruins is really a narcissistic contemplation of myself. And although it comes at a price, and despite the sadness of what’s being contemplated, it feels good. When I look at myself in the mirror and see someone I don’t like, I think: at least it’s someone I can trust. The same thing happens with this inner contemplation. It doesn’t matter if I’m looking at an ugly picture as long as it’s authentic.
Of course, I don’t know to what extent my soul is really mine. It’s more that I belong to this soul, which is not, as more than one philosopher has said, necessarily even inside me. It’s simply something I don’t know about, and the self is only a part—shaped by a certain practical awareness—of a vast ocean that transcends me and in no way belongs to me, a specimen that has emerged, or is emerging, from an immense sea of nucleic acid. But what’s behind it, and what impulse is expressing itself by means of the acid? That desire, that curiosity, that greed latent in the material particles.
I’m not interested in finding answers anymore, not in the slightest. For now the questions are enough, and maybe I don’t even need them. The discourse has taken this form today precisely because of the things I lack, because for a few moments I glimpsed those fragments of memory, of the soul’s memory, and for a few moments I remembered myself. Meanwhile the rest of my life, outside those moments, grows ever more insubstantial.
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