You don’t need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Don’t even listen, simply wait.
Don’t even wait.
Just be quiet, solitary and still:
The world will freely offer itself to you
To become unmasked, it has no choice,
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.-F. Kafka
Tagged with Words …
BECKETT’S WARTIME MANUSCRIPTS
Manuscripts of Samuel Beckett’s novel, Watt.
“Although popularly thought of as a rather dour and ascetic writer, there is a wonderfully playful aspect to Samuel Beckett’s creative output: the pictorial array of raggle-taggle characters and baroque broidery that scampers through his notebooks and manuscripts. Continuously—from decorating 1930s exercise books to embellishing the scraps of paper bearing his 1970s “Mirlitonnades”—doodling provided an amiable outlet when, yet again, he found himself up against the obduracy of words.
(v @ A piece of monologue)
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 055: OTHER LANDS
“This moment yearning and thoughtful, sitting alone,
It seems to me there are other men in other lands, yearning and thoughtful;
It seems to me I can look over and behold them, in Germany, Italy, France, Spain—or far, far away, in China, or in Russia or India—talking other dialects;
And it seems to me if I could know those men, I should become attached to them, as I do to men in my own lands;
O I know we should be brethren and lovers,
I know I should be happy with them.”
           -W. Whitman-
(They say Whitman was very fond of yearning, using forms of the word 64 times in his poems, according to the LION index.)
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 054: INTERSTICIOS DE SINRAZÓN
+
“El mayor hechicero (escribe memorablemente Novalis) serÃa el que hechizara hasta el punto de tomar sus propias fantasmagorÃas por apariciones autónomas. ¿No serÃa ese nuestro caso?†yo conjeturo que es asÃ. Nosotros (la indivisa divinidad que opera en nosotros) hemos soñado el mundo. Lo hemos soñado resistente, misterioso, visible, ubicuo en el espacio y firme en el tiempo; pero hemos consentido en su arquitectura tenues y eternos intersticios de sinrazón para saber que es falso.
-JL Borges-
+
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 054: MEAT’S DREAM
+
+
“They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”
“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”
“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”
“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”
“Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take long. Do you have any idea what’s the life span of meat?”
“Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”
“Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They’re meat all the way through.”
“No brain?”
“Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
    “So … what does the thinking?”
“You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”
“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”
“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?”
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 051: FEVERS AND UNAPPOINTED BOUNDARIES
.
“When I think about it now, I can’t help but being astonished that I always managed to completely return from the world of these fevers and was able to adjust to that social existence where everybody wanted to be assured that they were among familiar objects and people, where they all conspired to remain in the realm of the intelligible. If you looked forward to something, it either came or it didn’t come, there was no third possibility. There were things that were sad, once and for all, and there were pleasant things, and a great number of incidental ones. And if a joy was arranged for you, it was in fact a joy, and you had to behave accordingly. All this was basically very simple, and once got the knack of it, it took care of itself. For everything entered into these appointed boundaries…”
.-Rainer MarÃa Rilke-
EE CUMMINGS DIXIT
.
“am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely
to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean:
entirely having in my careful how
careful arms created this at length
inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasure-you go from several
persons: believe me that strangers arrive
when i have kissed you into a memory
slowly, oh seriously
-that since and if you disappear
solemnly
myselves
ask “life, the question how do i drink dream smile
and how do i prefer this face to another and
why do i weep eat sleep-what does the whole intend”
they wonder. oh and they cry “to be, being, that i am alive
this absurd fraction in its lowest terms
with everything cancelled
but shadows
-what does it all come down to? love? Love
if you like and i like, for the reason that i
hate people and lean out of this window is love,love
and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason
that i do not fall into this street is love.”
.
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 048: CIRCLING AROUND
*
“Con el cine uno quiere mostrar con imágenes lo que las imágenes no pueden mostrar. Y con las palabras tratamos de decir lo que las palabras no pueden decir”.
Claudio Caldini
*
(gracias barbarie doméstica)
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 037: UNCERTAINTY
.
“Properly speaking, there is no certainty; there are only people who are certain”
-Charles Renouvier, Essais de critique générale
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 036: BONE SHOPS
.
“Now that my ladder is gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”
-WB Yeats-
.
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 034: NONSENSE
.
“It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
Mark Twain
.
CÓMO
.
“¿Cómo se podrÃa llamar a esa acción imposible de pedirle a otro su cuerpo prestado?”
(Mario Bellatin, pregunta desde Facebook)
GOETHE DIXIT
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back– Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”
.
(Gracias dear Joshua Ray)
.
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 033: IMAGINE TARGETS IN ZIG-ZAGS
.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit, while genius hits a target that no one else can see.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
.
A VERY SHORT STORY BY KAFKA
*
“Oh to be a red Indian, instantly prepared, and astride one´s galloping mount, leaning into wind, to skim with each fleeting quivering touch over the quivering ground, till one shed the spurs for there where no spurs, till one flung off the reins, for there where no reins and could barely see the land unfurl as a smooth-shorn heath before one, now that the horse´s neck and the horse´s head were gone.”
*
BORDERS
*
“A border is mainly and first of all a word that can be used in all directions–painful and essential, beautiful or disastrous, sane or hysterical. Borders are our definitions, helpful in retrospect–in hunting: memory, frustration, trespassing, seduction, violence, beauty, politics and religion… in a way– borders are the “skin” of places and also a rough skin to most ideas.”
-Sigalit Landau–
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 024: GHOST-ING
*
I sometimes feel that every sentence contains a ghostly commentary on its own processes.
- Ian McEwan-
*
ONLY AT TIMES, AND IS GONE
*
“Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly–. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke-
*
ORDINARY AFFECTS
*
“They [ordinary affects] work not through “meanings” per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds. Their significance lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible. The question they beg is not what they might mean in an order of representations, or whether they are good or bad in an overarching scheme of things, but where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance.”
-Kathleen Stewart-
*
(Gracias Niki N.)
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW DIXIT
*
“You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”
*
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 018: DIGGING DEEPER
*
“Dig into your sensation. Look at what there is within. Don’t analyze it with words. Translate it into sister images, into equivalent sounds. The clearer it is, the more your style affirms itself. Style: all that is not technique”
-Robert Bresson-
*
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 17: AND AGAIN
*
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
-S. Beckett-
*
GRAY ROOM
*
“Although you sit in a room that is gray,
Except for the silver
Of the straw-paper,
And pick
At your pale white gown;
Or lift one of the green beads
Of your necklace,
To let it fall;
Or gaze at your green fan
Printed with the red branches of a red willow;
Or, with one finger,
Move the leaf in the bowl–
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia
Beside you…
What is all this?
I know how furiously your heart is beating”
-Wallace Stevens-
*
(gracias benjamÃn z.)
BUENOS AIRES DIARIES No. 002: FACES
*
“Un hombre se propone la tarea de dibujar el mundo. A lo largo de los años puebla un espacio con imágenes de provincias, de reinos, de montañas, de bahÃas, de naves, de islas, de peces, de habitaciones, de instrumentos, de astros, de caballos y de personas. Poco antes de morir, descubre que ese paciente laberinto de lÃneas traza la imagen de su cara.”
-Jorge Luis Borges-
*
D.H. LAWRENCE DIXIT
*
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me
*
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 14: BARE FAITH AND OTHER HUNGRY FRAGMENTS
“I see things that are impossible to believe and experience people and situations that permanently misplace my previous knowledge constructs. And losing my conceptual frameworks and assumptions is not unlike losing the backpacks upon immigrating to Israel. I possess nothing more than a temporary understanding. And I’m unexpectedly grateful.
If I tried to control reality by making sense of it, by needing certainties and truths, I would miss all that is invisible and obscure and overlook the fluid places where magic lies. I gather my knowledge in fragments, and when they begin to form into a solid, singular piece, I break them apart by the introduction of another fragment. When the fragments crash, it sounds like heavy metal played by forest creatures in leather dunce caps and frayed silk wings. It’s haunting.
I call on us to experience the joy of relinquishing the judgments we’ve made. Let’s fight when we want to surrender and surrender when we want to fight. Let’s live as a deranged creature, hungry for the unknown, repeatedly ripping up plans and blueprints to see what emerges from nothingness, from bare faith. ”
–Anita Doron, Filmmaker–
From her great TED Fellow talk, murmured from stage in a way that was deliciously transfixing, and did derange.
(Gracias Anita)
AND ALFRED GELL DIXIT
“‘Yes, yes,’ I said, cutting him off, ‘but did you actually see the ogre ?’ My informant looked at me in perplexity. ‘It was dark, I was running away, it was there on the path, going hu-hu-hu’ .. When, I wondered, was an Umeda going to admit to actually seeing one of these monsters ? But that, of course, was a misapprehension bred of a visually based notion of the real. For Umeda, hearing is believing, and the Umeda really do hear ogres.”
(Gell interview with an Umeda (indigenous group in Papua New Guinea) informant. who had been chased down a path by an ogre.)
(Thanks to Catherine Shteynberg, from the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, for sending quote in response to Bresson.)
THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN
“I was continuing to shrink, to become… what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world? So close — the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet — like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God’s silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man’s own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends in man’s conception, not nature’s. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too.”
-Jack Arnold-
(Via But Does It Float)
TÓXICO PROJECT RESEARCH No. 022: AND ALL THAT, BREATHING
“And all that each person is, and experiences, and shall never experience, in body and in mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical: and not one of these things or one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had a precedent; but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost as hardly killed as easily hurt: sustaining for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe:
So how can it be that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being; and how it is that a child can take on the burden of breathing; and how through so long a continuation and cumulation of the burden of each moment one on another, does any creature bear to exist, and not break utterly to fragments of nothing: these are matters too dreadful and fortitudes too gigantic to meditate and not forever worship.
-James Agee, In Praise of Famous Men-
ROBERT BRESSON DIXIT
*
Provoke the unexpected. Expect it.
*
TÓXICO PROJECT RESEARCH No. 021: LABERINTOS, CONFUSIÓN, MARAVILLA
Cuentan los hombres dignos de fe (pero Alá sabe más) que en los primeros dÃas hubo un rey de las islas de Babilonia que congregó a sus arquitectos y magos y les mandó construir un laberinto tan complejo y sutil que los varones más prudentes no se aventuraban a entrar, y los que entraban se perdÃan. Esa obra era un escándalo, porque la confusión y la maravilla son operaciones propias de Dios y no de los hombres. Con el andar del tiempo vino a su corte un rey de los árabes, y el rey de Babilonia (para hacer burla de la simplicidad de su huésped) lo hizo penetrar en el laberinto, donde vagó afrentado y confundido hasta la declinación de la tarde. Entonces imploró socorro divino y dió con la puerta. Sus labios no profirieron queja ninguna, pero le dijo al rey de Babilonia que él en Arabia tenÃa un laberinto mejor y que, si Dios era servido, se lo darÃa a conocer algún dÃa. Luego regresó a Arabia, junto con sus capitanes y sus alcaides y estragó los reinos de Babilonia con tan venturosa fortuna que derribo sus castillos, rompió sus gentes e hizo cautivo al mismo rey. Lo amarró encima de un camello veloz y lo llevó al desierto. Cabalgaron tres dÃas y le dijo: “¡Oh rey de tiempo y substancia y cifra del siglo!, en Babilonia me quisiste perder en un laberinto de bronce con muchas escaleras, puertas y muros; ahora el poderoso ha tenido a bien que te muestre el mÃo, donde no hay escaleras que subir, ni puertas que forzar, ni fatigosas galerÃas que recorrer, ni muros que te veden el paso.” Luego le desató las ligaduras y lo abandonó en mitad del desierto, donde murió de hambre y de sed.
–Los dos reyes y los dos laberintos,
un cuento corto de de Jorge Luis Borges–
THE FISH. A SHORT STORY
She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes
she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone
with it. The fish is for her — there is no one else in the house. But
she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a
slab of marble? And yet the fish, too, motionless as it is, and
dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never
been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and
regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest
mistake of her day and done this to it.
-Lydia Davis
(Gracias Niki)
(Tóxico loves fishes. And one in particular)
TÓXICO PROJECT RESEARCH No. 019: THINGS TO BE FOUND ON THE WAY
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
-Mark Twain
*
RILKE DIXIT
“Have I told you? I am learning to see.”
*
T.S. ELIOT DIXIT
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow…
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 012: POCO MENOS QUE RAZÓN
“Casi razón. Poco menos que razón. Deslizamiento de algo que no quiere alcanzar la razón, para no quedar anclado en su acotada zona. La pretensión de querer tener razón, desvÃa el pensamiento y lo convierte en rÃgida estatuaria mental. Contenerse en algo menos que razón quizá permita, en cambio, atisbar otros territorios más libres de la creación humana, como la poesÃa o ciertos inesperados paisajes de la imaginación. Un poco menos que razón puede llevarnos a algo más que razón.”
-Roberto Juarroz-
MORE THUNDERSTORMS, MORE KAFKA, AND SOMETHING ABOUT TINY WONDERFUL ABSURD HEROIC ACTS
“When you seem finally to have made up your mind to spend the evening at home, when you have put on your smoking-jacket and settled down after supper with a light on the table to the piece of work or the game that usually occupies you till bedtime, when the weather outside is so unpleasant that it makes staying at home the obvious thing to do, when by now you have been sitting quiet at the table for so long that to go out would cause general astonishment,when the staircase is anyhow dark now and the front door locked, and when despite all this you get to your feet in a sudden fit of restlessness, change your jacket, promptly reappear dressed for the street, explain that you have to go out and after a brief word of goodbye actually do so, estimating the degree of irritation you may have left behind from the force with which you slam the flat door, when you then rediscover yourself down in the street, your limbs responding with particular agility to the unexpected freedom you have procured for them, when you feel all your decisiveness concentrated within you as a result of this one decisive act, when it strikes you with more than usual significance that your power to effect the swiftest of changes with ease and to cope with it outstrips your need to do so, and when in such mood you go striding down the long streets, – then for the space of that evening you have completely broken out of the ranks of your family, which veers off into the void, while you yourself, firm as can be, black with your sharpness of outline, slapping the back of your thighs, rise up to your true stature.
All this is intensified still further if at so late an hour of the evening you look up a friend to see how he is.”
-FRANZ KAFKA-
BUKOWSKI DIXIT
.
“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us”
.
SORCERY AND PLAY
“THE UNIVERSE WANTS TO PLAY. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed & choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity–those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance at divinity–those who mold themselves blind masks of Ideas & thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead men’s eyes.”
-Hakim Bey-
(Full text here)
OVERCOMING TOURISM
“… And now, something remains possible – aimless wandering, the sacred drift. Travel cannot be confined to the permissable (and deadening) gaze of the tourist, for whom the whole world is inert, a lump of picturesqueness, waiting to be consumed – because the whole question of permission is an illusion. We can issue our own travel permits. We can allow ourselves to participate, to experience the world as a living relation not as a theme park. We carry within ourselves the hearts of travelers, and we don’t need any experts to define and limit our moreÂthanÂfractal complexities, to «interpret» for us, to «guide» us, to mediate our experience for us, to sell us back the images of our desires.”
-Hakim Bey-
(Full text here)
THE THIRD WORLD
“But man’s achievement is to have created a world of the mind, of the intellect and imagination, which is as real in its way as any actual country on the map. Sir Karl Popper, in one of his most important papers, calls it ‘the third world.’ This third world is a place; it is there all the time, like China or the moon; and it ought to be possible for us to go there always, to visit it as one visits a city on a Holiday…”
-Colin Wilson-
E. CIORAN
“I am lured by faraway distances, the immense void I project upon the world. A feeling of emptiness grows in me; it infiltrates my body like a light and impalpable fluid. In its progress, like a dilation into infinity, I perceive the mysterious presence of the most contradictory feelings ever to inhabit a human soul. I am simultaneously happy and unhappy, exalted and depressed, overcome by both pleasure and despair in the most contradictory harmonies. I am so cheerful and yet so sad that my tears reflect at once both heaven and earth. If only for the joy of my sadness, I wish there were no death on this earth.”
WORDS AS OBJECTS
Tagged Erin Jane Nelson, Photography, Words
ON WRITING
.
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”
.
-Red Smith-
MATHIAS GOERITZ DIX IT
–
“Estoy harto de la pretenciosa imposición de la lógica y de la razón, del funcionalismo, del cálculo decorativo y, desde luego, de toda la pornografÃa caótica del individualismo, de la gloria del dÃa, de la moda del momento, de la vanidad y de la ambición, del bluff y de la broma artÃstica, del consciente y subconsciente egocentrismo, de los conceptos inflados, de la aburridÃsima propaganda de los ismos, figurativos o abstractos. Harto también del griterÃo de un arte de la deformación, de las manchas, de los trapos viejos y pedazos de basura; harto del preciosismo de una estética invertida que festeje la exteriorizada belleza de lo destruido y podrido; harto de todas estas texturas interesantes y de los juegos vacÃos de una educación puramente visual o táctil. No menos harto estoy de la abundante ausencia de la sensibilidad que, con dogmas oportunistas, sigue presumiendo, todavÃa, de ser capaz de sacar jugo a la copia o a la estilización de una realidad heroicamente vulgar. Estoy harto, sobre todo, de la atmósfera artificial e histérica del llamado mundo artÃstico, con sus placeres adulterados.â€
–
FUNDACIÓN ADOPTE UN ESCRITOR
fundación adopte a un escritor
manifiesto introducible
de rubén bonet*
la Fundación Adopte a un Escritor es una organización de carácter situacionista vital, rubeniana e irresoluble. desdeñamos lo binario. y un par de cosas más.
la Fundación Adopte se declara situacionista porque después de tantas y tantas posturas y actitudes ensayadas en la vida y después también de haberlo pensado mucho no hemos encontrado ninguna otra organización en el mundo a la que nos gustarÃa pertenecer. todas son un asco. de manera efervescente nos declaramos primordialmente situacionistas. y sabemos de antemano que esto no significa nada. nada que valga la pena me refiero.
nuestro eslogan: la lucidez espanta. la idiotez nos mata. sin embargo padecemos una flaqueza irresponsable por toda la parafernalia que rodea a los aperitivos y hacemos gala de un excelente sentido del humor. como muestra de esto último también nos tenemos preparado un magnÃfico prepitafio: gozamos de una mala salud de hierro. amén.
la Fundación Adopte es un enigma. este enigma goza de una gran ventaja sobre todos los demás: no tiene solución. con lo que para empezar nos ahorramos varias preguntas inútiles.
el objetivo de la Fundación Adopte es, como su nombre indica, buscar el mayor número de afiliaciones adoptantes para procurar el cobijo y la infraestructura mÃnima necesaria para que un Escritor pueda desarrollar su obra y su vida dedicado exclusivamente a la literatura -y otras actividades relacionadas, como la promoción, el performance etÃlico, etc.,- sin pasar penalidades económicas y el consiguiente desasosiego espiritual.
les informo seriamente que sin dinero en el bolsillo es imposible escribir de nada. amén.
no sé si esté de más decirlo pero el escritor a adoptar soy yo, Rubén Bonet, y queda excluÃda –por lo menos en esta Fundación- la posibilidad de cualquier tipo de ampliación a la adopción de otros escritores.
la Fundación Adopte a un Escritor está inspirada en la gloriosa Fundación Joe Gould, sujeto que nunca llegó a publicar su gran Historia Oral de Nuestros DÃas, pero que dio a conocer de manera selectiva el necesario ensayo de cómo el consumo indiscriminado de salsa de tomate incidÃa negativamente en el número de accidentes ferroviarios en Estados Unidos.
thanxs for all Joe.
la Fundación Adopte también se inspira en la constatación de hechos a primera vista inverosÃmiles como que algunos gringos se dediquen a adoptar pedazos de autopista. si existe ese espÃritu solidario hacia unos centenares de metros de concreto cómo no van a haber almas comprometidas con el desarrollo espiritual de un Escritor, sin contar con la ventaja afectiva de que yo soy mucho más simpático e interactivo que unos cuantos metros de cemento aplanados por el que nada más pasan coches a 65 millas por hora.
(Para más sobre la fundación click en “continued”.)
MORE THAN LUKEWARM PLEASE
“Now, when we live with the same fervor, the same temperature, the same extravagance, I am in bliss. This is the life, the talk, these are the emotions which belong to me. I breath freely now. I am at home. I am myself.”
-Anais Nin
(UN)(REAL)
(Photos by Corine Smith, Detroit-based Dutch artist, who will soon be coming down again to Mexico City so we can go rooftop and cow hunting.)
(And a little text from many many years back that I did for a project of hers, dusted off.)
—
(UN) (REAL)
At night my toes disappear, as if they were not mine. They are the first thing to go, and slowly the rest of the body follows, upward, until it dissolves and I am left floating in a place that floats also. At night one floats. At day one falls. It is a long stretch until home.
Across the ground it is too dark, spread deep in the shadows. Across the sky it is too bare, and a mind could sink upward, never to be found again. Across the heart it is both dark and bare: spread deep and red in some parts: shallow in others where the blood has run dry, with sounds still echoing of how moments squealed like pigs as they where shut in cells of forgetfulness. It is dried oblivion that has a quality like bone, like the bone of a human, or an avocado. It is this anatomy that they do not teach you, because they do not know: they do not know it is another. Anatomy is another. The world is another. You is another. Another to be pushed into your heart made red again.
But what if all is fiction? What if we have put too much trust in trees, and earth, and ocean. What if all is unreal…
I remember when I was about five years old, I would stand in the middle of the garden and look at the green, look at the blue, at the invisible movement of the wind, until reality would start to quiver softly, arrange itself in other densities, expand and deepen in color: reality so present, so heightened, it became absolutely unreal. And I would ask myself: what if this is a dream? Or is it that other? It was like drawing a door that I could suddenly walk into, and if maybe my reality is your unreality so what, let it be.
Because maybe it is this reality, this feeling of unreality, that we search for (yes, always the search: never no end; always the thirst), that we search for everywhere, in every place, and all the faces that we meet and suddenly start to care about. That moment where the world stands out and quivers, becoming what it hides, apparent, naked, strange: alive. So much more aware; the heart made red again, pumping strong, excited.
Yet what if all is only a fiction. Maybe the mistake then is of too-much-reality, of comfortable reality, of things forgotten or transformed into hollow symbols of what they are. Maybe the error is not including a dream in every production of the eye or the hand or the mouth or the brain. In a weird way, I feel at home in the dim light that reveals other structures, and the funny sound that two feet make walking down an empty street.
But there are two kinds of unrealities, and we have yet to invent a word to distinguish them—there is an unreality that deepens the body and the life it floats in, and then there is the unreality that kills it all and gives us only broken shells. Unreal = untrue. Unreal=too-true. One is timid and comfortable; the other is huge and dangerous and usually makes us feel tiny and awed, surrounded by a huge universe of revolving blackness and red suns. (But it is home anyway.)
So maybe we must trust in the trees, and the earth, and the ocean. And in us. In all our unreality. Maybe we should try not to hang on to anything; there is nothing to hang on to anyway.
Maybe we should fall willingly; falling forever.
I open my hands, and let myself be swept downward: suddenly.
Because to fall forever is to fly.
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