RITA, Salvador, October 2022
Meeting K again that late afternoon was a reluctant development of a very strange story, very different from what I expected. I was stunned again—I must say—by the amount of beer I had consumed, while K struggled to describe (like a phenomenology manual) the genesis of his book (LUMPEMPANFLETARIADO) that I had just read
"Consider for a moment, Rita," K said, "the thousands of masterpieces stranded on so many shelves around the world, like the wreckage of an extinct culture, transformed into museology. An incalculable quantity, which no one reads: tombs of luminous signs, walled forever in the silence of indifference, in a world of people with no time, no interest, and no money to devote to reading. Well, the role I took on, of 'recycling' them, so to speak, was an honor. If everything has already been written, why start over? Why look for new ideas? Simply cut, merge, transubstantiate, in a word: 'use yourself'.
(he also told me about aesthetic self-absorption achieved through delirium in an empty room and early morning coffee, the fleeting moment of a certain landscape through the window; when speaking about the decisive incompatibility between society and artist, he briefly mentioned the country's electoral process, saying it had nothing to do with it; and that while society was aging, culture had been dead for a long time and that there was, on its part, a permanent demand for alchemical rejuvenation of the body, the efforts of which involved health risks, and that as I understood this, I would become more master of my own time; more beautiful and happy, he said, guarding me, holding me back on the paths of saying and doing and interacting, etc. As I look at his face, because it's beautiful, you know?, a reason for me to remain still for a while, watching him speak --- mirrorism in the desert? --- inside the dark well of a dream; a serpent flirting, sweet time returning and memory of what never happened --- the entire subconscious of my story appearing, appearing in italics in the text, with all the woodiness of notes full of anxiety)
We talked about this part in my car, after meeting near the Christ of Barra statue, while he played with the black and white pug of a girl who looked like the Indian Pocahontas. There was also a husband, it seemed to me, but K didn't care about him. The twilight seemed to melt us together, as soon as we recognized each other, and bind us by the spidery thread of an endless conversation.
"In any case," I suggested, "a writer risks degrading himself by transforming his work into a series of literary and philosophical patches. He risks foolish squeamishness at the slightest censure, or even vague objections, from some suspicious reader."
One minute
ResponderExcluir
ResponderExcluir"In any case, just scratches made by a cat's hand, a pin of subliminal reading; defended by an energetic spell, true literary alchemy escapes and disdains such ambushes. Certainly, there were attempts to point out impediments to the book's publication. In the mainstream press, Gurovitz, former editor of Época magazine, pointed out books by Phillip Roth and Norman Mailler, in the swampy depths of some of my pages; a blunderbuss fixed to the fork of the ambush, he disappeared, evaporating soon after, incapable of a convincing demonstration. Installed for some time on the surface of the book, like an expert, as he delved into the radioactive depths of the work, he experienced painful variations of the same inability. At a microscopic level, the fraud cannot be detected. I admit, however, that in the particular case of this book, LUMPEMPANFLETARIADO, I did make use of a good supply of metaphors and scenes from others; yes, I did." I separated the materials by themes, according to the editorial line of the newspaper I was parasitizing: at first, it was the French left-wing ones, Le Monde, La Liberation, where politics is made based on a fixed and bankrupt demagogic heritage; until I ended up at Le Figaro, which for three hundred years has defended the minimal State for a moldy and unproductive bourgeoisie.
My social media and blogs had been attacked by American newspapers with whom I'd had recent political friction stemming from the ongoing 2016 election, so Yankee literature was actually very present in the first chapters: a very modern and outrageous medley from which I drew harmonies far better than the originals, free of the crude Irish burden and the brutal, superficial way American writers view their own politics; it relied somewhat on that, however, to lend a credible edge to the character's rhetorical diatribes. No inconvenience --- after a certain point, plagiarism becomes an art far more complex than literature itself, a tonality, a stimmung, full of the shocks and abrupt distortions that citations inflict on the subjects that generated so much resentment in outdated criticism while being published online. By lending literary writing a heightened, law-defying tone, I simultaneously became a mimetic glutton, a polyglot archangel capable of countering every chant to extract the supreme synthesis from my own throat. Each author, a step. Not the entire plantation, just a few fruits.
ResponderExcluirItalic
ResponderExcluir(stupid, pretentious, and ridiculous mass of pseudo-intellectual conventions impeding the vibrant carnality of writing---what nature contains of hiddenness only appears in the subliminal intertext. It, hot and also dry, gaining speed, herding torpedo-sentences, despairing the media curia---towards the next clash, free, ecstatic—impulse followed by several abolitions; a sea of cold flows and unsuspected depths confronting the play of sensory causes and effects of literature regulated by Cartesian semicolons. Shattering the surface of reality with austral dialogues under the Southern Cross and smaller slivers of subconscious tropical paintings; a restless, disturbed, agitated world and an outlaw artist: led to the extravagant testimony of the past. "Do not open a book to worship it," he had written, "like a professional reviewer; or to be elevated by it, like a philosopher of newspaper. Rather, to box with the book. If the journalistic redemption of a book is a payment that equalizes and settles accounts, its liquidation by knockout is its transformation into liquid values. Its transfiguration. Transvaluation.)
There in Rio Vermelho, in that gourmet Spanish bar overlooking the sea, I wondered about the infinite spiral of recycling that K described as the origin of his creative process; that swirling of uncertain multiplicity, a radiance easily absorbed by my mind, and by my skin.
ResponderExcluir"Do you know that story about the chameleon that settles on the plaid blanket?" K asked me.
"No."
"The chameleon explodes, no longer knowing how to choose between colors."
"Hahaha."
"A work discovered in pieces that simply needed to be reunited, in a previously unthinkable unity, unique, vital, and illogical, that neither proscribed variety nor dried out during execution. Borgesian intertext à la Burroughs, theoretical matrix of the internet."
"And poetic terrorism."
"Exactly: did you read my blog yesterday?"
ResponderExcluir"I read: PIRATE. I never felt I was dedicating myself, throughout my life, to being what people call a 'writer,' and which today designates only a bourgeois and insignificant occupation in the lower ranks of established society. I have always been aware, since my earliest adolescence, that I was fulfilling the designs of what the great pirate scholar Hakim Bey (father of ontological anarchism) called 'POETIC TERRORISM.'"
"And who could guarantee that, while writing that book, I wasn't also engaging in dangerous conspiratorial exercises? I preferred to avoid responding to the avalanche of imprecise and cantankerous accusations, and thus forced the global public to discern in my work extremely original embryos of matter and form. Soon after, the Republican's victory in the elections clouded everything, a thick fog swallowed the buzz, and I, who until then had been only a suspicious writer, came to be seen as an authoritarian and arrogant political strategist.
"And victorious."
"No inconsideration, at least in this sense."
"All literary criticism reduced to a bunch of stigmatized bigots?"
In a country like the United States where a large portion of the population is undeniably fascist, I acquired a certain semblance of legality simply by being on the side of power, useful for propaganda—the same propaganda that was wrapped in my clandestine literature, by the way. I fed on spurious publicity until I no longer needed it to grow. In that childish game of portraying myself as monstrous, it was easy for me to peddle historical advice and utterly undefined threats, threats from science fiction, until the financial market began to glue its face to everything I wrote. In the forehead of the Bull of Wall Street, a vein began to swell recklessly. It didn't take long for everything to descend into the vulgarity and mediocrity we see today, including the American government that the Workers' Party intends to clone here, with inflation and all.
ResponderExcluir"Turkey literature, from this point on?"
"Without a doubt! Round and round the same point: the market. A little bit of a rodeo sometimes helps, huh? I already considered myself on vacation, for all intents and purposes. With an increasingly disdainful condescension, I returned to my roots: beaches, bars, and clubs, only now I was world famous. I tried to organize books with everything I had written on the internet. They turned out very well, by the way."
ResponderExcluirItalic
ResponderExcluir(I laughed at him too, quickly closed my eyes, lit a summer never seen in my mind, wanted to attribute to himself with his macho arrogance a spontaneous, unstudied posture, and now I wanted to tear something from him, biting, piercing, prodding, and then enjoy the damned thing, he needed to be so alone, living a second, invisible life behind the first, a thousand fragments of his own life, just to vainly look in, forgotten, without knowing, then, why, through animal appetite, I arrived at the commonplace of questioning, and moving with words, I came across the chosen ones of Dante's castle against the bourgeoisie, the wrath of the Spirituals against the Lordship of commerce and banking, there in the mirrors of the hall, a few minutes to assimilate the supporters of Gioacchino of Fiore, men and Christians avant la lettre, agglutinated in the mystical, hallucinatory instant of Eternity without history, K himself declared: "To a certain extent, closer to Goethe's Urphanomenon than to the current idea of 'origin,' which simply multiplies the exchange of copies and simulacra between (e-)readers’’)
Perhaps he was trying to pique my curiosity about his work, which was so obscure and difficult to find in book form. There were those blogs, but everything was so fragmented. In books, the message could be visualized, so that the last shadow of it could gaze upon my being and recognize, in the throng of my aspirations, the pearly star of a nebulous occult science. I thought of Nietzsche. Perhaps I, too, could write something true and impactful when this repugnance for literary figures and their soft words reached an irresistible pitch.
ResponderExcluir"You must have unnerved some very sensitive nerves with this kind of anonymous worldwide fame; because I, for example, had never heard of you until I met you in person and began associating the media's subliminal message with someone real. Isn't that strange? And now I'm certain that everything you're saying is real, is happening, and has been happening for a long time. How perfidious would I be if I asked you what you intend to do with this?’’ I asked
ResponderExcluir"Well, I don't know! From a certain point of view, it's extremely intriguing today to know that, having turned my back on all this, the whole world continues to revolve around me, all the noise and lights glued to me, by the promptness of half a dozen workhorses who allowed themselves to be obsessed with the financial mirage I created alone. When, in truth, my initial struggle was simply to be able to write something new. I was blocked by ten years of Spartan Toltec practice and illegal mining, and suddenly I became famous before I could even write anything. I had to write everything under ever-increasing spotlights. Then, I found myself forced to recreate my social world (torn apart by fate) on Facebook. All those virtual friendships with beautiful girls from all over the world, even famous ones, meeting one or another only at the Rio airport, when I was flying from Salvador to Juiz de Fora. Then, I started trying to add only those from Salvador itself --- it wasn't very productive.
"So I finally returned to the living night. After completing my Herculean political work in the United States, I lost interest in the media spotlight, as I had already achieved the main effects of my notoriety. Once the riches were extracted from the mud, I had to abandon the forest's debris to the wind. Or even keep some idiot working for free to make me famous. That's what happened. A clever way to avoid becoming obsessed with things that have no reality in themselves, and to use them only for what they actually produce: a certain illusory sensation in the real world. Of course, the more suspicious might look for perverse intentions in my statement; perhaps they'll find something like: Lautreamont, we've never done anything like that! But if you don't apply this to real life, it's also good to prepare yourself for a life of successive disappointments, which will destroy your conscience down to its last vestiges.
Excluir"The danger here is the heart disturbed by the distance that never diminishes, the thick display window kept far away, and the repetition, the smiling conformity with such mediocre existential results, the sour toy of the internet and its greasy kitchen language. Curled up and lukewarm on the living room sofa, gliding like a shadow of sluggishness without a will of its own, shouting elusive notions about the leftovers of one's own life. I deeply believe I have escaped this," K said.
Excluir
ResponderExcluir"Come to think of it, life is too precious to be spent only virtually. Besides being simple, it's also short; time spent is irreversible; youth fades quickly, without any compensation. Small boredoms, small joys, and, according to you, a certain rewarding struggle to be or feel free, where nothing and no one can confuse or shape our ideas, because 'miracleism' has been shattered, and no specific interest can enslave us. A shower of esoteric confetti has never created anything new in the world; it has existed for millennia as a mere extra in history. And the petty reason of the world's ups and downs, when transposed to the foreground of life, infects the actions of eating, sleeping, loving; and above all, there is only the life of books and the political struggle for power. Using mass media to delude oneself by sniffing out small, nonexistent mysteries in what we do?
Soon, we would be reduced to spending our lives observing the damage in the world with discouragement and unconsciousness, with the permanent feeling that, with this, we have only managed to connect our small and deluded private egoism to the great egoisms of capital, delirious about nonexistent global prestige and without any real recognition --- a life of darkness and silence in the vacuum of the world, abandoned in a deserted school where lazy beings, in flip-flops, with curly hair on their asses, with big bellies and without a bath for days, impatiently polish their own yawning with limp eyelashes fallen in front of the internet" I said
ExcluirAfter we got the check, I felt a hint of optimism on his face, and I asked if he wanted to have coffee at my place.
ResponderExcluir"Where do you live?"
"In Barra, in Princesa Isabel."
"Hehehe. Always Princesa Isabel. She's been somewhat missed in the world. After our conversation at the nightclub about the abolition of the slave trade, it almost seems like a joke."
Italic
ResponderExcluir(the inexperience of the world, the hasty, empty comparisons, the shaded halls of modern esotericism, the corrupt bars --- from Mexico came that Asia, Atlantis, translucent and reverberating, puffing before the mirror inside the cage, the pipe smelling supernaturally good, while K affirmed that it was not possible to "interpret Dante correctly without bringing the apocalyptic Gioacchino of Fiore closer to the theories of Sigieri --- history transposed into the eternal for the conquest of Christian perfectionist ends, little by little detached from the speaking esoteric night and its warlike and imperial efforts. Radically Ghibellines, they opposed a political system based on commerce and wanted a Christianity like that of the times of the apostles. A wandering conscience close to complete unity. First, however, a final vanity. Erudition!: documents, many, varied; proud and dramatic, constructing one's own mind, measuring history itself, the whole body spilling out of the screen, on Saturday night. A man is self-aware not because of his aspirations, but because of the intervention of memory. Petrarchical too --- all experience is past)
"A permanent smile seemed to eternally rejuvenate K's round face as he said yes and got into my car. On the passenger seat were some lingerie I'd bought at the mall, and as I drove, he examined them one by one. A strange sound now came from his throat, dry from smoking that pipe:
ResponderExcluir"There's enough stimulation here to overcome any prostration, huh?"
"There's a pool in my building."
"Really? And a sauna?"
"No sauna."
"Oh, what a shame."
For a moment, I feared he was going to ask me to stop the car and get out. My eyes wandered the road, as I felt the whiteness and softness of the double chin beneath my chin; and a remnant of my personality tumbled inside me, oozing in an internal boiling of emotional anticipation and physical desire. At that moment, K was to me nothing more than a sexual treasure that sparked in the darkness of my masturbatory solitude.
ResponderExcluirZealous, he seemed aware of my immediate need to be eaten. When we arrived at my apartment, we barely spoke. He fucked me until I was nothing more than a trembling thing beneath his body, which at the right moment was released to catch my breath and shower.
We spent the rest of the night drinking, smoking, and talking about money. After all, we had some. According to him, however, the drought had destroyed the farm he owned in Vitória da Conquista in less than two years:
ResponderExcluir"Starving cattle, little snow, foxtails, destruction, have made me cautious. A certain truce from the hallucinatory addiction to the simulacrum of strength and conquest is necessary now. Much economy and no comfort. Many signs of loss embittering me to the point of making me incessantly plot a series of harsh scams; the kind capable of scattering all thought in slippery schemes, born of a certain desperate policy of commercial behavior."
"Like what?"
"Like speeches in the Masonic lodge," laughter
Then he slapped his thigh and hammered:
"My face open in the Open, without taking my eyes off the point of projection. The rumor of a clearing transforming into words. Free of desires and fixed ideas. Elusive of common sense, averse to the petty, empty flattery of social life --- indifferently contemplating the sleeping city in the pale starlight. SEEING TIME arrive, not just passing it by in the form of repetitive events mentally degraded by stupid credulity’’
ResponderExcluir"Naive impressionability fueled by senseless sensationalism, and vice versa. Thoughts wrapped in insidious mutterings and crass advertising hoaxes just to endure the plight of a culturally empty world," I added.
"Pointing out the degradation, the resulting misery? Concocting phantoms just to adorn an improbable future that refuses to see the naked and dirty truth of the present? While all the world's accomplished sub-intellectuals remain unable to adapt to coexistence with humble people, fuming in an unhappy and sterile idleness, constantly flirting with a dangerous leveling fraught with cowardly consumerist escapes. Sometimes, lacking goals and power, it is these same classes that, lulled by a nauseating dizziness, become giddy with media frenzy, devoid of any practical utility, and summon the Wizard of Oz to dance his sabbath. An unfortunate mental game that, born of market stimuli, steals and suppresses the most decisive impulses for social and cultural development.
End RITA here!
ResponderExcluirhere ends an important and indigestible literary line that will allow us to open an even worse one