Ideas under sail, propelled by the primordial wind blowing from underneath (but underneath is only a physical location). All that’s needed is a change in the breeze (but what is it that changes its quadrant?) and right off, here are the happy little boats, with their colored sails. “After all, there’s no reason to complain, man,” like that.
I woke up and I saw the light of dawn through the cracks in the Venetian blinds. It came from so deep in the night that I had a feeling like that of vomiting up myself, the terror of coming into a new day with its same presentation, its mechanical indifference of everytime: consciousness, a sensation of light, opening my eyes, blinds, dawn.
In that second, with that omniscience of half-sleep, I measured the horror of what astounds and enchants religions so much: the eternal perfection of the cosmos, the unending rotation of the globe on its axis. Nausea, the unbearable feeling of coaction. I am obliged to bear the daily rising of the sun. It’s monstrous. It’s inhuman.
Before going back to sleep I imagined (I saw) a plastic universe, changeable, full of wondrous chance, an elastic sky, a sun that suddenly is missing or remains fixed or changes its shape.
I was anxious for the dispersal of the fixed constellations, that dirty luminous propaganda put out by the Divine Watchmakers’ Trust.
(–83)
68
AS soon as he began to amalate the noeme, the clemise began to smother her and they fell into hydromuries, into savage ambonies, into exasperating sustales. Each time that he tried to relamate the hairincops, he became entangled in a whining grimate and had to face up to envulsioning the novalisk, feeling how little by little the arnees would spejune, were becoming peltronated, redoblated, until they were stretched out like the ergomanine trimalciate which drops a few filures of cariaconce. And it was still only the beginning, because right away she tordled her hurgales, allowing him gently to bring up his orfelunes. No sooner had they cofeathered than something like a ulucord encrestored them, extrajuxted them, and paramoved them, suddenly it was the clinon, the sterfurous convulcant of matericks, the slobberdigging raimouth of the orgumion, the sproemes of the merpasm in one superhumitic agopause. Evohé! Evohé! Volposited on the crest of a murelium, they felt themselves being balparammed, perline and marulous. The trock was trembling, the mariplumes were overcome, and everything became resolvirated into a profound pinex, into niolames of argutentic gauzes, into almost cruel cariniers which ordopained them to the limit of their gumphies.
(–9)
69
(Renovigo, No. 5: translated from the Ispamerikan)
ANUTHER SUISIDE
It waz a sad surprize to rede in the “Orthografik” the newz ov the demize in San Luis Potosí on march furst last of lootenant kernel (promoted to kernel on leving the surviss) Adolfo Abila Sanhes. It waz a surprize bekuz we had no newz of hiz having bin il. Furthermor, for sum time now we hav kept a katalog ov owr frends hoo wur suisides, and on won okayzhun “Renovigo” made referens too serten simtums in thoze obzervd. It iz just that Abila Sanhes did not chuze a reevolvr like the anteyklerikl riter Giyermo Delora, nor the nooss like the French esperantist Eujene Lanti.
Abila Sanhes waz a man wurthi of atenshun and apreshiayshun. An onorabl soljer, he brawt onor too hiz profeshun in theeoree and in praktiss. He had a hie ideea ov loyaltee and eevn went onto the feeld ov batl. A man ov kulchur, he tawt seyens to yung peepl and adults. A thinkr, he rote meni thingz for magazeenz and he left a fue unpublishd werks, amung them “Baraks Maxims.” A poet, he versifeyed with grate fasilitee in difrent forms. An artist with pen and pensil, he ofen entertaned us with hiz kreayshuns. A lingwist, he likd too tranzlate his own produkshuns intoo Inglish, Esperanto, and uther tungs.
Basikly, Abila Sanhes waz a man ov thawt and akshun, ov moralitee and ov kulchur. This is wat made up hiz being.
In the uther colum ther ar sevral entrees, and it iz nachural to hezitate befor lifting the vale on hiz prievt life. But sinse a publik man haz nun and Abila Sanhes waz just that, we wood not be tru too owrselvz if we did not sho the uther side ov the medl. In owr role as biografrz and historiunz we must abandn skruplz.
We met Abila Sanhes pursonalee arownd 1936 in Linares, N.L., and then in Monteray we vizitd him in hiz home, wich seemd prosperus and happee. Yers later wen we vizitd him in Samora the impreshun was compleetlee difrent, we realizd that hiz home waz braking up, and then wekes later, wel, it waz hiz wife hoo dezertd him and hiz childrn skatrd. Finely, in San Luis Potosí, he met a kined yung gerl hoo liked him and she agrede too maree him: that iz how he had a sekund famlee, wich waz mor tolerunt than the ferst won and nevr kame to abandn him.
Wat hapnd ferst with Abila Sanhes, hiz mentl ilness or alkoholism? We doo not no, but both thingz toogethr were the ruinayshun ov hiz life and the kauz ov hiz deth. A sik man in hiz last yers, we had expeld him noing that he waz a suiside hedding toards hiz inevitabl end. Won becumz fatalistik wen he obzervz peepl so clerelee hedding toards a ner and trajik deth.
The desseessed beleved in a fiucher life. If he fownd that, let him fynd happines ther, even tho with difrent karakteristiks awl ov us, awl hiumans seke it.
(–52)
70
“WHEN I was in my first cause, I did not have God…; I wanted myself and I did not want anything else; I was what I wanted, and I wanted what I was, and I was free of God and of everything … That is why we beseech God to free us from God, and to let us conceive the truth and to let us enjoy it eternally, there where the supreme angels, the fly, and the soul are all alike, there where I was and where I wanted that which I was and it was that which I wanted …”
MEISTER ECKARDT, sermon: Beati pauperes spiritu
(–147)
71
MORELLIANA
Basically, what is this story about finding a millenary kingdom, an Eden, another world? Everything written these days and worth reading is oriented towards nostalgia. An Arcadia complex, the return to the great uterus, back to Adam, le bon sauvage (and so it goes…), Paradise lost, lost because I searched for you in my eternal darkness…And so much for islands (cf. Musil) or gurus (if you have the cash for the Paris—Bombay flight) or simply picking up a coffee cup and looking at it all over, not like a coffee cup any more but like evidence of the immense asininity in which we all find ourselves, believing that this object is nothing but a coffee cup while even the most idiot among journalists is assigned to give us a précis of the quanta, Planck and Heisenberg, knocks himself out in three columns explaining that everything vibrates and trembles and is like a cat about to take an enormous hydrogen or cobalt leap which will leave us all with our feet sticking up in the air. An uncouth way of expressing one’s self, really.
The coffee cup is white, the noble savage is brown, Planck was a formidable German. Behind all that (it’s always behind, convince yourself that this is the key idea of modern thought) Paradise, the other world, trampled innocence which weeping darkly seeks the land of Hurqalyā. In one way or another everyone is looking for it, everyone wants to open the door that leads out to the playground. And not just for Eden, not so much for Eden as such, but just to leave jet planes behind, Nikita’s face or Dwight’s or Charles’s or Francisco’s, the waking up to bells, the adjustment to thermometer and weather vane, the retirement from kicks in the ass (forty years of rubbing one’s behind so that it won’t hurt so much, but it hurts just the same, the tip of the shoe digs in a little deeper every time just the same, and each kick dredges up for just one moment more the poor ass of the cashier or the second lieutenant or the professor of literature or the nurse), and we were saying that Homo sapiens is not seeking the door in order to enter the millenary kingdom (even though it would not be so bad, not really bad at all) but only so he can close it behind his back and wiggle his ass like a contented dog, knowing that the old whore’s shoe was left behind, breaking itself against the closed door, and that one can go ahead and unbutton his poor asshole with a sigh, straighten up, and start walking among the posies in the garden and si
t down to look at a cloud for five thousand years, no less, or twenty thousand if that is possible and if nobody gets upset and if he is lucky enough to stay in the garden looking at the posies.
From time to time among the legions of people going about with their asses exposed there is one who not only might want to shut the door for protection against the kicks of the three traditional dimensions, plus the ones supplied by the categories of understanding, by that more than rotten principle of sufficient reason and other infinite drivel, but furthermore, these types believe along with other madmen that we are not in the world, that our venerable parents have set us on a course in the wrong direction and we have to get off it if we do not want to end up as an equestrian statue or transformed into an exemplary grandparent, and that nothing is lost if one maintains as his end the value of proclaiming that everything is lost and that we have to start all over again, like the famous sandhogs in 1907 who realized one August morning that the tunnel under Monte Brasco was off course and that they would end up by coming out more than twenty yards away from the tunnel being dug by Yugoslav sandhogs coming from Dublivna. What did the famous sandhogs do? The famous sandhogs left their tunnel the way it was, came out on the surface, and after several days and nights of deliberation in various Piedmont bars, began to dig on their own and at their own risk in a different part of Monte Brasco, and they kept on going without worrying about the Yugoslav sandhogs, and after four months and five days they came out in the southern part of Dublivna, with no small surprise for a retired schoolteacher who saw them appear in his house at bathroom level. A praiseworthy example which the Dublivna sandhogs should have followed (although one must recognize that the famous sandhogs had not communicated their intentions) instead of obstinately connecting with a nonexistent tunnel, as is the case with so many poets leaning halfway out the living-room window late at night.
And so one can laugh, and think that it is not serious, but it is serious, laughter has dug more useful tunnels all by itself than all the tears on earth, even though it may barely be known to stiff-necked people, stubborn in their belief that Melpomene is more fruitful than Queen Mab. Once and for all it would be good to arrive at a disagreement in this matter. Perhaps there is one way out, but that exit ought to be an entrance. Perhaps there is a millenary kingdom, but you don’t storm a fortess by running away from an enemy charge. Until now this century has been running away from all sorts of things, it has been looking for doorways and sometimes it gets to the bottom of them. What happens afterwards no one knows; some may have managed to see and have perished, instantly erased by great black forgetfulness, others will have conformed to the small escape, the little house in the suburbs, literary or scientific specialization, travel. Escapes are planned, they become technologized, they are furnished with the Modulor or with the Nylon Law. There are imbeciles who still believe that drunkenness is a way, or mescaline, or homosexuality, anything magnificent and inane per se but stupidly elevated into a system, into a key to the kingdom. Maybe there is another world inside this one, but we will not find it cutting out its silhouette from the fabulous tumult of days and lives, we will not find it in either atrophy or hypertrophy. That world does not exist, one has to create it like the phoenix. That world exists in this one, but the way water exists in oxygen and hydrogen, or how pages 78, 457, 3, 271, 688, 75, and 456 of the dictionary of the Spanish Academy have all that is needed for the writing of a hendecasyllable by Garcilaso. Let us say that the world is a figure, it has to be read. By read let us understand generated. Who cares about a dictionary as dictionary? If from delicate alchemies, osmoses, and mixtures of simples there finally does arise a Beatrice on the riverbank, why not have a marvelous hint of what could be born of her in turn? What a useless task is man’s, his own barber, repeating ad nauseam the biweekly trim, opening the same desk, doing the same thing over again, buying the same newspaper, applying the same principles to the same happenings. Maybe there is a millenary kingdom, but if we ever reach it, if we are it, it probably will not be called that any more. Until we take away from time its whip of history, until we prick the blister made of so many untils, we shall go on seeing beauty as an end, peace as a desideratum, always from this side of the door where it really is not always so bad, where many people find satisfactory lives, pleasant perfumes, good salaries, fine literature, stereophonic sound, and why then worry one’s self about whether the world most likely is finite, whether history is coming to its optimum, whether the human race is emerging from the Middle Ages and entering the era of cybernetics. Tout va très bien, madame la Marquise, tout va très bien, tout va très bien.
As far as everything else is concerned, one must be an imbecile, one must be a poet, one must have a harvest moon in order to spend more than five minutes on those nostalgias that can be handled so perfectly in just a moment. Every meeting of international tycoons, of men-of-science, each new artificial satellite, hormone, or atomic reactor crushes these false hopes a little more. The kingdom will be made out of plastic material, that is a fact. And the world will not have to be converted into an Orwellian or Huxleyan nightmare; it will be much worse, it will be a delightful world, to the measure of its inhabitants, no mosquitoes, no illiterates, with enormous eighteen-footed hens most likely, each foot a thing of beauty, with tele-operated bathrooms, a different-colored water according to the days of the week, a nicety of the national hygiene service,
with television in every room, great tropical landscapes, for example, for the inhabitants of Reykjavik, scenes of igloos for people in Havana, subtle compensations that will reduce all rebellions to conformity,
and so forth.
That is to say, a satisfactory world for reasonable people.
And will any single person remain in it who is not reasonable?
In some corner, a vestige of the forgotten kingdom. In some violent death, the punishment for having remembered the kingdom. In some laugh, in some tear, the survival of the kingdom. Beneath it all, one does not feel that man will end up killing man. He will escape from it, he will grasp the rudder of the electronic machine, the astral rocket, he will trip up and then they can set a dog on him. Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks. Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
(–5)
72
“IT was wise of you to come home, love, if you were so tired.”
“There’s no place like home,” Oliveira said.
“Have another little mate, it’s fresh.”
“When you have your eyes closed it tastes even more bitter, amazing. Why don’t you let me sleep a little and read a magazine.”
“All right, love,” Gekrepten said, drying her tears and out of sheer obedience looking for Idilio, even though she was in no shape for reading.
“Gekrepten.”
“Yes, love.”
“Don’t worry about all this, old girl.”
“Of course not, sweet. Wait and I’ll put on another cold compress.”
“I’ll get up in a while and we’ll take a walk along Almagro. They may be showing some technicolor musical.”
“Tomorrow, love, it’s better for you to get some rest now. The look on your face when you came in …”
“It’s part of the profession, what can you do about it. No need for you to worry. Listen to Cien Pesos singing down there.”
“They must be cleaning out his cage, little dear,” Gekrepten said. “He’s showing his gratitude …”
“Gratitude,” Oliveira repeated. “It’s nice to show gratitude to the people who keep you caged up.”
“Animals don’t understand any of that.”
“Animals,” Oliveira repeated.
(–77)
73
YES, but who will cure us of the dull fire, the colorless fire that at nightfall runs along the Rue de la Huchette, emerging from the cru
mbling doorways, from the little entranceways, of the image-less fire that licks the stones and lies in wait in doorways, how shall we cleanse ourselves of the sweet burning that comes after, that nests in us forever allied with time and memory, with sticky things that hold us here on this side, and which will burn sweetly in us until we have been left in ashes. How much better, then, to make a pact with cats and mosses, strike up friendship right away with hoarse-voiced concierges, with the pale and suffering creatures who wait in windows and toy with a dry branch. To burn like this without surcease, to bear the inner burning coming on like fruit’s quick ripening, to be the pulse of a bonfire in this thicket of endless stone, walking through the nights of our life, obedient as our blood in its blind circuit.
How often I wonder whether this is only writing, in an age in which we run towards deception through infallible equations and conformity machines. But to ask one’s self if we will know how to find the other side of habit or if it is better to let one’s self be borne along by its happy cybernetics, is that not literature again? Rebellion, conformity, anguish, earthly sustenance, all the dichotomies: the Yin and the Yang, contemplation or the Tätigkeit, oatmeal or partridge faisandée, Lascaux or Mathieu, what a hammock of words, what purse-size dialectics with pajama storms and living-room cataclysms. The very fact that one asks one’s self about the possible choice vitiates and muddies up what can be chosen. Que sí, que no, que en ésta está…It would seem that a choice cannot be dialectical, that the fact of bringing it up impoverishes it, that is to say, falsifies it, that is to say, transforms it into something else. How many eons between the Yin and the Yang? How many, perhaps, between yes and no? Everything is writing, that is to say, a fable. But what good can we get from the truth that pacifies an honest property owner? Our possible truth must be an invention, that is to say, scripture, literature, picture, sculpture, agriculture, pisciculture, all the tures in this world. Values, tures, sainthood, a ture, society, a ture, love, pure ture, beauty, a ture of tures. In one of his books Morelli talks about a Neapolitan who spent years sitting in the doorway of his house looking at a screw on the ground. At night he would gather it up and put it under his mattress. The screw was at first a laugh, a jest, communal irritation, a neighborhood council, a mark of civic duties unfulfilled, finally a shrugging of shoulders, peace, the screw was peace, no one could go along the street without looking out of the corner of his eye at the screw and feeling that it was peace. The fellow dropped dead of a stroke and the screw disappeared as soon as the neighbors got there. One of them has it; perhaps he takes it out secretly and looks at it, puts it away again and goes off to the factory feeling something that he does not understand, an obscure reproval. He only calms down when he takes out the screw and looks at it, stays looking at it until he hears footsteps and has to put it away quickly. Morelli thought that the screw must have been something else, a god or something like that. Too easy a solution. Perhaps the error was in accepting the fact that the object was a screw simply because it was shaped like a screw. Picasso takes a toy car and turns it into the chin of a baboon. The Neapolitan was most likely an idiot, but he also might have been the inventor of a world. From the screw to an eye, from an eye to a star … Why surrender to Great Habit? One can choose his ture, his invention, that is to say, the screw or the toy car. That is how Paris destroys us slowly, delightfully, tearing us apart among old flowers and paper tablecloths stained with wine, with its colorless fire that comes running out of crumbling doorways at nightfall. An invented fire burns in us, an incandescent ture, a whatsis of the race, a city that is the Great Screw, the horrible needle with its night eye through which the Seine thread runs, a torture machine like a board of nails, agony in a cage crowded with infuriated swallows. We burn within our work, fabulous mortal honor, high challenge of the phoenix. No one will cure us of the dull fire, the colorless fire that at nightfall runs along the Rue de la Huchette. Incurable, perfectly incurable, we select the Great Screw as a ture, we lean towards it, we enter it, we invent it again every day, with every wine-stain on the tablecloth, with every kiss of mold in the dawns of the Cour de Rohan, we invent our conflagration, we burn outwardly from within, maybe that is the choice, maybe words envelop it the way a napkin does a loaf of bread and maybe the fragrance is inside, the flour puffing up, the yes without the no, or the no without the yes, the day without manes, without Ormuz or Ariman, once and for all and in peace and enough.
Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) Page 41