some exhibitionism now, a wave of good feelings made him smile --- vaguely, of course

 K

(despite some exhibitionism now, a wave of good feelings made him smile --- vaguely, of course)

Killing time in a city full of fancy beaches. Why not write a new book?, make the images dance in the void again; it is inspiring, despite the Beckettian suspicion that “each word is nothing but an unnecessary stain on the silence and nothingness”: in fact, each new book of mine has turned out to be better than the last. And it is inspiring: to become the temporary center of a drugged Hindu semicircle; to put some cushions in the shade, for when the new interested parties arrive. And of course: to write in a calculated way, if you are gushing directly onto the internet, always speaking as if you are flirting with photographers before putting the last spit in the sentences. Or as Nietzsche said: “To consciously retain certain phases of evolution in the frame of one’s own soul, to draw a faithful image of them (a kind of pictorial art that only a few understand --- for this, it is necessary to artificially isolate such phases)”. Some interests can never be confessed, right?, when we write directly on the internet. I spent the whole time trying to keep my conscience clear about those Saturday nights, that phase of having fun. Many times (I know), my expression became deliberately empty, like here in Salvador, when the taste of ostracism invades me and life is nothing more than breathing over an old desk, full of old manuscripts, calculating the damage, picking up the pieces, until I look like an old soldier on the day of the armistice. Vague, and to a certain extent unreal, activity of erudition! You must have also noticed how the excess of erudition threatened several times in your life to turn you into a poor ruined noblewoman, trapped in an abyss of absorption, always writing in the language of old French romance. If there is any indispensable asset in erudition, it is Foucault, or rather Nietzsche again, who best explains its uses to us: “One is the parodic and destructive use of reality that opposes the theme of history – reminiscence, recognition; another is the dissociative and destructive use of identity that opposes history – continuity or tradition; the third is the sacrificial use of truth that opposes history knowledge ---- a use that frees it forever from the (...) metaphysical and anthropological model of memory’’ (Microphysics of Power, Genealogy). Remember? However, a true spiritual adventure in the realm of literature requires a certain willingness to spontaneously burn with wonder, to suddenly look like a fool at the crowd of rosy tourists in the sun and to be a little bit like everyone else, laughing, looking, taking pictures, shopping, eating acarajés, in short, perfectly camouflaged --- without, however, needing to follow them to the end of their march to the ends of the bourgeois existential pestilence. So, new blood, new banalities, a new static approach to what would be a life of copulations and baths, without much serious work, immersed in a studied indifference to the future. So, it's about going to the back of the closet and smelling those old sports clothes a little, to get a vague idea of ​​what and how much and how was lost, in a past that may or may not be recent. The last time we saw each other, and we talked eye to eye, I remember you telling me that because I was handsome I was exempt, and I didn't quite understand --- at this rate (I thought then) it will take me a long time to mature: floating until the next season, until the next summer, until the next lucid dream, until the next party, or the next shock with reality, without a destination, content that life is a chaotic succession of meaningless events. A PIRATE!, and soon after, seeing myself inspired comfortably in a big city, full of attractions that cost money, that aims to have a cultural appearance, to collaborate with the collective lie by sitting somewhere to plan a new book, that thrill of publishing scandalous things weekly on the internet, and going out to probe the impact on people --- what an adrenaline rush!, besides the crucial issue of also being able, on the other hand, to establish myself for some time on a solid foundation of research and alienation from the existential drama, and to make of sensory life, by means of literary and philosophical artifices, an ordered and purified whole by indisputable classical proportions. This is what all bourgeoisie are able to do whenever they want, and yet they do not do it because they lack an appetite for what is elevated in the world of the spirit, they prefer to drag themselves along in the monotony of herd life until they end up as drooling old men. And, after all, I don't know, Elvira, I really don't know how to explain it properly: the background noise of traffic, which in big cities is silence, suddenly gains the thickness of an eternal nebulousness of consciousness, against the vast, erased background of drowsiness and forgetfulness, then, then --- I don't know, it doesn't matter. The possibility of of some languid, endless conversation renewing itself in a tropical climate, perhaps, to justify the hallucinatory gratuitousness of stopping to write again. It was on one of these occasions that a woman, whom you may know (her name is Solange, and she also teaches at the university, here or in Rio, I don't even know anymore), summarized the situation in a terrible, yet extremely lucid way, since all the controversy surrounding me is about the old bourgeois love litany. She said: “The exaggerated emphasis on the possibility of loving or loving again (as in our case) inevitably tends towards evil, towards the narrowing of life absorbed in the affairs of the unbalanced ego, towards an unmistakable taste of energy badly applied to every novelty of life, every convulsive beginning of something new exhaling a cursed note of previous lamentation, for the simple fact that the ego has not been able to postpone certain attempts or occasions for a more propitious, less frustrating energetic moment, where greater forms of psychic organization give a definitive coherence to the sticky matters that keep the heart closed in its own absurd idea of ​​self, which madly includes others.” So I said to Solange: “Perhaps you thought I was bored with you at that time, and you are irritated now by any attempt of mine to praise you, because you consider it forced. You certainly still think about those photos of my little friends (nubile little friends, when I was young!) filling my afternoons on the beaches of southern Bahia with the reflections of a nudity full of hidden sexual life, while you studied the life of Fernando Pessoa in depth --- and honestly, not a single great lady among them, not even a Pessoan at all. And if now, faced with such memories, I shrug my shoulders and laugh, it is because I already admit that there are many other ways to spend an afternoon. Capiche?, of filling entire afternoons with the mental weight of other people's ideas and knowledge --- what nourishment! The totally unscrupulous anthropophagic incorporation, absorbing so perfectly, so flawlessly, as much as immediately claiming what, heated in a new crucible, becomes by right only yours, part of your Teatrum Alquimicum. How many spontaneous attacks disguised here on social instincts, all of Nietzsche seems disguised here, in this vampiric individualistic glory of the sedentary use of oneself, in the paralytic virility of an empty admiration for the empty room.’’ Finally, Solange retorted: ‘’I always accepted you for what you thought you were, K, even when you were so young. And every hour, you thought you were something different, until you decided on the current PIRATE. Never sure of any plan, always a teenage slut for company, even in the your texts --- first funny; then, a poor young man in some lost spot on a road; then married to a bitch; then, to a saint; then, to someone as common as the feminine beauty on television; then, accustomed to always spending more than he had, by dressing up with illegal gold money; then, an intense literary colloquium in a corner, with a lady of chlorotic pallor (in this case, me); --- then an essential emphasis on the lifestyle, normal life starting again, with cattle money being burned every day in the financial market. And again, eyes full of monotony, already announcing a new crisis, a rupture, an escape. That air of permanent expectation, which in you was always a symptom of imminent escape’’, she said, and left. I never saw her again.