STORM (a fragment)
There was everything: the only thing left to be seen was whether their new narrative anxieties would truly "attempt" the FUTURE or whether they would capitulate to the perpetual prison of commentary, with unoriginal satires about the "state of affairs." At best, they were untrustworthy, and when they were on bad days, they were nothing more than gamblers, bluffers, and news brokers. And we couldn't say that everyone had been equally affected by my narrative thus far. Only Carmen, that grown child, appeared floating toward me with the same purpose of critical thought, with the same quality as images of other beautiful women, which gradually culminated in a definitive association. "Great," I thought, "so I'm still at the center of the story." Whatever way things turn out, the clairvoyant foresight with which the story is told makes the players' dispositions grave; just as, for Joana, everything had begun when she agreed to break her silence in favor of Sabrina, making her a successful and preponderant character, not because of my monstrous adolescent passion, but by making her possible, and having written her with dedication, letting her pass from the pure impossibility of silence to the scandalous truth of her realization in the world, and in the world of the newspaper. – It takes years to reach this level of detail (Carmen temporized) the reward of the highest pessimism. There is, in every tragic writer, this need to find the BETWEEN of things, this movement toward the LIGHT of that which cannot be illuminated, the excess that only becomes a successful overcoming in the scandal of words... And what an incongruous little book! Yet, we all began to perceive, crushed, the true breadth of the PROJECT. A hero of a novel even further outside the system, the psychic law that governs the doors of consumer society. In this level of detail, where hopelessness reigns, lies hidden the unique universals, eternal duration, the Chikai Bardo, the inimitable barometer itself. – I concluded. I knew exactly what she was talking about: at the edges of my web of living words, I registered the slightest vibration, which extended to my body in waves of great intensity and made me, in a leap, reach the exact place where consciousness ignites. THE WEB OF THE APPROPRIATING EVENT. Six months ago, I had started that diary, in the form of a plastic-political exegesis, with a madcap collection of ideas and sketches for enormous and megalomaniacal projects in ART. I wrote a hundred thousand words in eight weeks, and more than once it had been twenty pages a day, in a style that came out hesitantly due to the cramp of the past and the persistent invitation of the beach; a jargon cluttered with sociology, analytical psychology, pharmacology, Egyptian hermeticism, quantum cyber-espionage, comic books, and show business. Between trips to and from the newspaper, the diary had acquired the outlines of more ideas than I will ever have again; ideas that came to me so quickly and so richly that sometimes I felt my brain numb with their passage. For six months, it was the frozen embryo of some inconceivably new theme. I even glimpsed what Flaubert must have felt because, as I continued to feed it, a pile of words would often coalesce to give me a small crisis of choice. The consequences of what I was doing began to penetrate my spirit. As I expected, my conversations with the Editorial staff were always a waste of time. They knew everything that was happening in Brazil and the world, but we couldn't find the appropriate meaning, talking to each other like politicians talk on the radio. I mean: always in self-defense. The notion that we should pass on what we knew consumed our nerves with a childish urgency that always frustrated us in the end. Dangerous heresies were committed in the name of arrivism and high-turnover protagonism. I used the good-humor, disturbing the firm bonds we had with one another, and allowing them to indulge in retaliation. “This is our world,” I told them, “completely lacerated, the offspring of Pomp and Dictatorship, which, from time to time, goes on vacation, fattening up to return to the fray; the offspring of the predominance of the ephemeral; of theories quickly exhausted; which, wishing to recover them, we silence and photomontage. The world where things, lacerated by the Sword of time or the Dictator, perhaps finally COLLECT.”—it was as if I were captive to the symptoms of suicidal excitement, prodigies of rapid work, and an absolute confidence that I could go on forever. But soon after, I found myself approaching a second stage, in which what had been quick was more like a fever, with a first wind of fatigue passing over me, and a knowledge that, at the end of the hallucinatory night, only a drugged cold awaited me.
Here we are faced with another aspect of the Diary: the man without particularities, free of human form, intoxicated in the moonlight, while smoking at the hotel window, no longer recognizing himself in the person he is, for whom all the traces of particularism make him nothing particular; never close to what is closest to him, never foreign to what is external to him; choosing to be this way for a cosmic pirate ideal of Freedom: detached from himself, beyond the Threshold of Silence, disappearing ever deeper into the obscure depths of the force that sustains his body, without name or individuation. A force that, amplified, invades all of Nature, substantiating time and transporting myriads of beings, in a thousand forms instantly adopted—irresistible, wild, inexhaustible, tireless, and limitless, consumed by an eternal deprivation and insufficiency, in which particular facts are always on the verge of being lost in the impersonal set of relationships before being appropriated by DHARMA, which marks the momentary intersection. Still, I was a tree that endured the sap instead of feeling the falling leaves. My way of laughing, in fact, was being widely commented on in the newspaper. Good-natured people were amused; others were easily offended. “DON'T LAUGH!” Sabrina told me. “STOP IT! IT'S NOT A NORMAL SOUND!”
ResponderExcluirthen I tried to explain myself by saying that I was very susceptible to the influence of laughter on the things of people who looked at me
ExcluirThe Living Abstract Machine (it said) So specific and applicable to so many businesses: new lists of banking regulations, sudden political shifts, shaky stock markets, the moderate magnitude of fashion, the prediction of major events, and, of course, the "PRICE CASCADES": I mean, all the elements that make up the price of things, from the net margin achieved to the list price of each transaction. The fixed cost, the variable cost of production, taxes, the cost of serving, the cost of "promoting," and discounts—in every pricing decision. THE GRANULARITY OF MY UNTIMELY ANALYSES! But Sabrina, and especially Beatriz, rejected such analyses, claiming that I didn't know how to treat MONEY with "office formica deference" and that I was undervaluing myself, that I was avoiding the potential for common success in favor of a completely animalistic, thoughtless neural rhythm, loading and unloading, like a maniac with a shotgun, all the centers of the mind that were forced to make difficult decisions.
ResponderExcluirBy tearing apart conventional syntax, I attacked the habits of the domesticated subjectivity that lulled MONEY, as well as the subtle flesh that coated the consultants' nerves, so that the biochemicals that sustained the balance of daily operations disappeared suddenly, without warning, when my "charred horse attacked by the plague" erupted like a gunshot from the control panel. Since Sabrina was also an interior designer and the owner of several beach houses in the area, careful bourgeois elegance and ostentation were natural to her. Suddenly, the idea of sexualizing her again occurred to me. Like that period of marital betrayal. In other words, letting the Living Machine of Tantric Onanism deflower her at will, transforming itself into a living spectral extension of the crazy and vain part of my personality, while her offenses against me generalized into an incurable sadomasochistic orgy. And I actually did this a few times, and they were very fruitful moments of reaction. The consecration of time, in these circumstances, became impetuous, which allowed me to orchestrate daily and precise detoxes, and then return to breastfeeding with herbs the new cells, newly arrived into the world after five or six days of abstinence (handfuls of unknown alkaloids), oscillating between Sabrina's house and -------------------------------------------------------
ResponderExcluir-------------------------------------------------------------------the street of bars, across from Concha Beach. "I think Nature breaks the rules of Sparta and the anthill," Carmen said. "Is it worth circumventing them? How far do our prerogatives extend? Where does the forbidden zone begin for you, K? In opium?" But opium, for me, was not so null, nor so incidental, and I cared about its power to change the face of events. "In opium," I explained, "what brings a literary effort to its death is euphoric or heroic, which is why it arouses opposition. Most torture comes from a forced return to life, from a detoxification, which was not the case at the moment." The force of an entire summer had agitated my veins, had made my blood bubble, dragging within me blocks of ice and fire, which I transmuted into the dynamo of phrases after each night of tantric apocalypse in the retreat of the dark room. Working harder and harder through tricks, I smoked hashish the night before and then doped myself up with an overdose of anxiolytics to sleep. At dawn, I forced myself to self-propel: I felt agile with new perceptions, I could read new words within the words I already knew, and so I could continue at the pace of work, with the more scrupulous part of my brain too slow to interfere.
ResponderExcluirMy logical faculties were growing weaker day by day, but the new phase of my book had its own logic, and so I discarded all prudent reasoning. It was the quick-fire of associations and synapses that mattered to lift it out of limbo, and in this I was unsurpassed: I could discover new experiences in the sentences of my text like a hermit savoring the Revelation of Scripture; I saw so much in a few sentences that I would gladly plunge entire paragraphs into the well of amateurism; deviations from form represented nothing more than attractions. And there was also all the waste of the fierce, yet unheard, discussion between the armies of the Ego and the ID: "I have seen fail (I thought to myself, in that suspended state) several attempts to conquer and manipulate the world. The world belongs to the Spirit, therefore, it should not be manipulated. Whoever manipulates it, corrupts it; whoever seeks to preserve it, loses it. Lao Tzu." Soon after, I expected Carmen to reappear and make me see things from a different perspective, if I didn't agree. But the characters now seemed stronger, the air had more warmth, and I had become more sensitive to the nuances of----------------------------------------------------------------
ResponderExcluir-------------------------------------------------------sexuality of every feminine gesture, word, or object, so that the book carried itself. Perhaps even more so, in a cold chisel of dialogues, valiantly penetrating the dull mortar of all objections. “I wonder (Carmen said) if these wise men, despite their good intuition, really knew what the words expressed. “LOSING THE WORLD sounds good.” But one would have to confront the author personally, as I did with Beatriz, or reread it so many times in a row that one began to see everything in phosphenes, something greater than the letter, perceived directly as energy, points of fluttering light, or as an inorganic intelligence clinging to the reading, like a burning club, which would reveal, in progress, in the world beyond the mind, a book more dangerous than it seemed. I experienced this in the asylum, reading Nietzsche, and they didn't even come to ask what I was writing at the bottom of the pages. Between the outside and the inside, no difference.
ResponderExcluirTo leave the hospital, all I had to do was show my willingness to return to behaving like a peaceful consumer, among others. Freud convinced the world's psychiatric police that it was possible to establish social contracts with the insane, allowing them to return to society, regulated by the conditional regime of the pharmaceutical industry listed on the stock exchanges; since then, the sector's working capital has circulated more rapidly, extraterritorially, at the speed of its own "illnesses." Commodities such as mental suffering and professional help have become highly profitable assets, hovering above the office sycophants, but with shadowy names and logos, all connected to the machinery of soul salvation through consumerism. Anorexia, psychotic episodes, depression-induced bouts of charity, and the vicious cycle of sexual presumption, a byproduct of competitive anxiety disorders, also converge on the industry in the form of fashion and false advertising. – she said. In my mind, I also now had a more dangerous book in progress than planned, and my drug-induced paranoia saw long strings in every line of dialogue.
ResponderExcluirContinue in one minute
ExcluirCertainly, with Carmen's arrival at the hotel, I was able to temporarily keep that ecstatic earthquake in place. "By deciding to write this last part, I think I saved the entire book from being a lesser work, but at the cost of a splendid disproportion," I said. The same anxiety, ---------------------------------------------------------
ResponderExcluir--------------‐---------------------------------------------obstinate in judging everything based on my own pace. “Well, K. Honestly, I don’t think you’re in a position to think about that book right now. From what you described to me yesterday, each week of working under these conditions costs you a bombardment, steeped and drugged by lust, hashish, prostitutes, Rivotril, alcohol, and coffee, working hyper-alert and exhausted to death,” she said. But I was past the point where I could stop. I didn’t know anything anymore; suddenly there was no hope, no one trustworthy, no open doors, no aura would shine in the world ever again. The world would continue to drag with it the esotericism of every romantic illusion, and its spawn of records and stadium shows, tourist tours, commercial hecceities, day-use in tropical hotels, conference rooms, newspaper editions, ministers in airports, and that blonde call girl I... In short, I no longer had that clear sense of how things work, which is what you need for the proportions of a long novel, the prose and sex as thick as reality. I would sit in a chair and watch a soccer game on television, or get up and go in the heat to one of those ice-cold coconut kiosks on the beach. That was my way out of the day.
ResponderExcluir"Here (I repeated to myself) is a man who seems to prefer death to the disfigurement of the perfect form of his own selfishness. But such a man is safe (I concluded)," seeing myself alone on the beach like someone immersed in a rarefied dream. More than once, my heart would be seized by the sudden desire to hear a human voice, while a fishing boat, in the distance, was barely distinguishable from the black water on which it floated under the night. Other times, the walk felt like a patrol under a tropical sun, and was only two blocks, from the hotel to the beach, no more. When I returned, I would lie down, my head shedding the outer coverings of sedation, and with the crumb of Rivotril, the first snake of thought would wriggle through my brain; and I would go and have some coffee (it was a trip to the kitchen, but when I returned, I was holding a notebook and pen). A few weeks later, I went to the kiosk on the beach and returned home with some mescaline. “PROGRESS,” I thought. “It will be good to give birth to the American fashion.” And maybe we really will die a little from the mescaline poison in our blood, but the nervous system, ------------------------------------------------------
ResponderExcluir--------------------------------------------------------neutralized by social convention and Doxa, it replaces the mere narrator with the Abstract Narrative Machine and subjectless arrangements. At the end of a long week of traveling along the region's beaches, from which we returned laden with photos of surfing and giant waves under stormy skies, the Unfinished Book (and its sequel) floated into Carmen's mind, and I sat bolt upright on the hostel couch across from her, the pipe cupped in my hand, and with my other, my left, I penetrated the membrane of static, light-filled pleasure that immobilized us in self-contemplation, to find her tiny, sniffling nose and her white, schoolgirl face, in which I saw the very LIGHT OF GOD emerging from some of my own matter that had become embedded in it during those weed-fueled walks in the rain. With the words emerging one by one, in separate ascents and descents, elegant in their curves, tranquil in their flights, like the touch of a being transformed into another being, the last 160 pages of the Book came to my head in a snap, like a block of concrete suddenly materialized among calcite microcrystals. – Morphine that becomes a ghost under the rain, a shadow that becomes a fuck, at the crossroads of the mirror.
ResponderExcluirYou can imagine the work of the alkaloids in your head, K. But now, you must overcome them. Legends recommend it: the expulsion of demons through Chinese breathing exercises. Your irony, in fact, will be very useful in this endeavor. Carmen said suddenly, and a buzzing in my head indicated that my mind was re-arming itself. "The term 'Prophet' (I said), taken from the Greek to designate a condition foreign to Greek culture, would deceive us if it invited us to make the 'Nabi' someone who merely 'tells the future.' It is a dimension of speech that commits it to relationships with time far more important than the simple discovery of certain future events." From time to time, I glanced at Carmen's evanescent outline, with the rain on the windowpane in the background, and little by little, she melted into the uniform texture of the night. Finally, before continuing, I saw nothing in her direction but a darkness like a solid wall. – Hearing THUNDER is difficult; hearing it and seeing it with its lightning, very difficult! And to say that in the past the troubadour was also called THUNDER, from trova... but I don't believe that the troubadours of old thundered like these THUNDER now.
ResponderExcluirWhen it appears, an unwanted, harsh guest, we all rush to the oratory, invoking Saint Barbara and Saint Jerome. Similia Similibus Curantur. Also hidden is the singing of the Magnificat, that other thunder, but of chamber music, and therefore lesser. Let us remember often! Let us not leave the joy of the thunderstorm solely to Marx, Lenin, and Mao. True THUNDER is like this: it pulls the cord of its electric discharges and then retreats into the bulging womb of GOD. There, every egg is a closed monument, a self-monument. There are figures armed only with ideas, and sometimes with just one idea, that explode entire eras, in which some, like Jesus, Buddha, or Mozart, are wrapped like mummies, so powerful they resurrect the dead; others steal from us unknowingly and cast a spell or curse that takes centuries to undo. And there are those, like me, who know the future: they don't want to impose anything; they want to assume, or give us solid support for our dreams.
ResponderExcluirThe world doesn't keep moving just because it's a payment proposition. Our military demand, THEN, let's temporarily call it "painting the prior shame"—one of the contemporary writer's main responsibilities. For he must acquire a bad conscience of his own time, before BEGINNING, because what is at stake "here," between these limits, what is inscribed, or PASSES, is SCANDALOUS. It is the truth of the narrative that shocks, disturbs, and insults us, through an evident scandal that we, however, cannot place. "I discovered a needle in the light of the STORM!" I said. She laughed with an euphoria beyond her health. I continued: "The STORM springs from the disorganized will: thunder, lightning, rain, panic. It seeks us out, envelops us, discharging the electricity it itself contained. The Storm, at the same time, reveals hidden reality. It is very much of this world, but it reveals to us a perspective of the other. WHO IS OF THIS WORLD? WHO IS? THE WORD DISARTICULATES, THE SOUND. IT IS DISTURBING TO THINK THAT THE INVISIBLE WARNS. WE WOULD LIKE TO BE ABLE TO BLAME WORDS... BUT NO! THEY HAVE NEVER BEEN STRICTER; THAT, OR THE CIRCUMSTANCES THEMSELVES, TO GIVE A PASSION TO ORTEGA Y GASSET... but that could well be comforting; or even certain details, which we must -------------------------------------------------------
ResponderExcluir------------------------------------------------------------recognize as obscene, stem from a necessity that ennobles them, making them inevitable not only for ART, but also for a perhaps moral, perhaps fundamental constraint. Contradiction certainly has great scandalous power. That very low things and gestures that it is not appropriate to mention here suddenly impose themselves on me, as a bearer of certain values, this statement, the moment it strikes us, with contradictory, contrasting, incontestable, and intolerable evidence, touches us SCANDALOUSLY, whatever our freedom in relation to what custom makes us consider too low or too high. No Dubuffet can paint the material of the THREATEN! Perhaps all things are "through it." The Temporal has never studied, it knows a thousand obscure points that we are happy to forget. The text of the -------------------------------------------------------
ResponderExcluir-------------------------------------------------------------------without elucidating its purposes. The darkness. The skirt. The effort we make to theoretically isolate the point at which the scandal strikes us (appealing, for example, to what we know of the sacred, the object of desire and horror) resembles the work of blood corpuscles to renew the wounded part of the scandalized, the EGO. Why THIS? IT GETS EXASPERATED! And, even if we respond to Him only with laughter, irony, discomfort, or indifference, there is in the situation He affirms before everyone a certainty so simple, yet completely uncertain, linked to a truth so exclusive and so extensive, that everyone feels that their attitudes, whatever they may be, are already part of Him and irresistibly confirm Him—I concluded. Carmen suggested she had listened attentively, but that was a lie. Soon after, she returned to the subject of "PROGRESS." "A rule or a lyricism?" (she wanted to know). You know very well that with THIS, you're sticking your spoon into the soft mush of young cells, disrupting the rational work of the brain. The word doesn't burn from this Fire alone. – An imperceptible, ironic smile made her eyelashes flutter as she contemplated the circle she was tracing on the carpet with the tip of her umbrella
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