RITA, Salvador, November 2021

Fuck! I look so exhausted! And no wonder. So much has happened since yesterday, and so much drinking last night. First, the last day of college, with Professor Elvira brilliantly concluding her NATURALIZING HEIDEGGER course. Anyway, I guess I'm on vacation now. Everything starts over, only differently, right? Burning in the contemplation of the Open, now? As K said last night (the guy I met at a nightclub in Rio Vermelho): "The quantum burn of open space. And his book? It's in my bag." What a strange name: LUMPEMPANFLETARIADO. But I better recap from the beginning, or I'll have a crisis again. What weird dreams tonight! Let's see: Professor Elvira said goodbye to the class, saying she was taking a leave of absence for a postdoctoral position at the State University of New York, where the acclaimed Austrian professor Carl Benamag would be teaching one of his sought-after courses. Despite being black, Prof. Elvira looks a bit like me (blonde and twenty years younger): She's clever, slightly acidic, and graceful even when she's frowning. She left us with the impression of a dizzying current of thought. Day and night, month after month, the difficult web of Heidegger's Fundamental Ontology—the New Beginning, whose excessive credulity irritated me—made me feel like a monkey staring at itself in the water on the first day of the world. Regarding the philosopher's embrace of Nazism, Professor Elvira remained silent, advising us to focus our efforts on elucidating philosophical questions and nothing else. Deep down, however, I assumed that old thinker, who so divided opinions around the world, was engaged in a "strong cabal" (not to be too darkly humorous) when he became rector of Freiburg in 1933, the same year Hitler became chancellor of Germany.

After briefly recapping this, incomplete images emerged from the tumult of my afternoon memories. I had gone to Barra Shopping Mall, strolling with Erika (my childhood friend) through the designer clothing boutiques. Hard to choose, huh? Erika, when suggesting a purchase, appealed to motivations completely different from my own. FOLLOW YOUR INTUITION! I repeated to myself, following the advice of a women's magazine, while feeling suspended between questions: "Who is Erika trying to imitate now, which soap opera or movie character, which singer or actress?" Yes, and because of that complicit gleam that sometimes lit up in her eyes, my intuition captured details, details of her temperament that escaped the self-image she offered me later, in the bookstore's gourmet café. A certain illusion of miraculous unexpectedness seemed to reign over her expectations of nightlife, for some time now. An illusion capable of moving to the center of intersection in a zone where thinking was futile. I was more or less familiar with the parties she attended, though I rarely went. In my opinion, most parties were abstract environments, where psychosocial phantasmagoria proliferated, where being a friendly presence to oneself was impossible, given the dilettante indeterminacy of hypothetical sexual contact. Agreeing to go out with her last night, I anticipated easily slipping into crazy fantasies, having been single for a while, studying hard, some cheap fantasy fueled by gin, deafening music, and swirling lights—who knows what unsatisfying residue of that would materialize?! A somewhat monotonous exercise in self, which unnerved me to the point of lighting one cigarette after another, hooked on a regressive and gibberish notion of time, whose countdown ended in the solitude of my bed, at home.