NAGUAL

 I'm no longer a writer; I'm merely speaking in writing, as I would in a bar among journalists, art critics, and imaginary characters from my short stories, with that same fluidity hampered by circuits of disputes and opaque reviews. Some innocuous books, indeed, have just been read in recent months, but with enormous subliminal benefit—with uncodable parallels abounding, while successful poetic deterritorializations made the panorama of the clouds of global influence quite complex. With Machiavelli cowering in the hollow of my lecture, I delivered the "Alliance of All Themes" and quoted the "Correspondences with the Little Demon." The immediate level of the masquerade: the level of so many aborted projects, hastily replaced, rearranged within something more functional, without offenses blocked by telepathy, there where all republican advancement seems impossible and is frequently supplanted by softer forms of communication. A truncated mentality, derived from this, precipitated the poet, his characters, and his audience between headlines and corridors of photomontages, in search of the "negative certainty" of New Knowledge. In a sudden "flagrant surprise" of the turbulent and conflicting Thaumázein, voices of disparate contributions appeared, armed to the teeth, at the beginning of each thought.

A kind of tact with many ramifications in Carmen and Beatriz's desire, another web of momentary concerns, was giving that dimly lit room an unhealthy air of forbidden amorous conspiracy. The habit of lust is often paralyzing, making us reserved and alert to the smallest details, and the nascent verbal intimacy between them and me was in no way satisfying. The furniture was beautifully harmonized in that room, where wicker and orange velvet predominated, a room impossible to be scandalized by a double-take, on the sofa, sexual and furtive at the same time, and on top of that reminiscent, or moving enough to convince us to let our guard down. Carmen left her clothes and gathered them on the rug, as I predicted. Winter would now crush all those conjectures about the future and drag us into a sea where there would be a series of humans just like us, whether on the beach or in the home office, typing from the helicopter or leaving through the door of a nightclub in the wee hours. Through the apartment window, all these possibilities included us like a string of colorful beads—mirrored on the hallway wall, in the compact cones of the building's ornamental plants. Carmen had a slight sunburn on the right side of her forehead and ventured out at three in the afternoon wearing a wide-brimmed hat. She bought cigarettes and a cold beer, "my dear friend!" She jumped in the shower as soon as she returned, soaked and panting.

"Beatriz called and said she won't be back until later," I said.

At eleven o'clock at night, the Arrow, the most elegant of the constellations, flew motionless in the sky between the Swan and the Eagle, gigantic planes of precious stones piloted by Deneb and Altair. The Milky Way wandered like a clothesline in the sky whitened by the heat. "The money of gambling burns the hands" and drinks the shadow of the profligate soul, the heat of gambling consecrates it to gambling, and a constellation lands on the page of the Milky Way, promised to copulation" (Drag-Drukpa). Thousands of scattered parties sprang up simultaneously in the scorching night of Salvador, organized with difficulty, tumult, and top-notch usury, the timetables whitening faces in Rio Vermelho, with all those couples in short circuits, half-sunburned, stirring steaming sauces in their Italian dishes at the sidewalk tables, amid the smells of marinated seafood and lipstick, amid the speedometers of home-cooked pizzas and insults, on the street of electric forgetfulness and flirtation, of headphones and cell phones with the psychology and sociology of thirty-real cardboard box games. Everything reduced to a and possibilities that were once a human being, a general of the armies of his cells, God of his body-universe. The Vortex didn't stop there. The winds of the whirlwind—God's rotation, again?—were charging with abrupt consequences—they sank into dialogue or attempted vectors and self-explanatory self-disappearances, while, in the center of me, clear as the icy Eye of Horus, there was a point of non-judgment against the chaos filled with objects of other people's egos.

In that cramped room, the reptilian espionage was thirty meters deep, and simply looking at the surveillance of the art objects, the absence of gestures, was enough for extrasensory curiosity to become multiple and simultaneously singular; and above all between the curious "trouvaille" of the conversation and the intent of the arts of the eye, of the pointed camera, its refined sense of light and color, as an intellectual element of apocalyptic-informative pleasure—its shifting projections on the Scales. In Poetry, for example, there are the Drukpas-Soothsayers, the Irish Kennings, the acrostics, the verbal plots of multiple quotations, their traumatizing rhetorical power; so too do the madcap games of Virgil of Bigorre and Isidore of Seville, which so recall Joyce (who knew this in his epiphany), and the exercises in temporal compositions in poetic treatises, such as Heidegger's, which seem like a program for Goddard, but above all Benjamin's taste for "collections" and "inventories." O mystical living almanac "of metamorphosis, of mutation and change that is linked to all human existence and to the poetic creation of the author. The possibility of being other, of becoming overwhelmed, of becoming extrañarse, I put it that I write from a place of dislocation, as the author points out in the essay 'Del sentimiento de no estar del todo'" (Julio Cortázar).

"[...] reject the fetishism of the book, as a product of an activity that escapes at the same time all aesthetic luxury and all deliberate teaching, an instrument of man's integral self-manifestation, of self-construction, vehicle and thirst for values that, ultimately, are not literary. The book is the product of a practice never dissociated from it hombre-author-lector [...]”