ABOUT CARMEN 1
According to Carmen, after those three years of mystical, poetic idyll with us on that island, she returned to her parents' home in Salvador and became a doctor. Susana (her cousin), she said, had been instrumental in making her lean toward the non-bookish dimension of life. ---Books (Carmen said, in the bar where we met) dragged me to the edge of a dubious and risky commitment to life, which I didn't have the mental strength to fulfill. Austerity, deprivation, displeasure, and irritability had sapped my original adolescent drive, and in the end, all that remained was that insignificant decision: to see a psychiatrist (recommended by Susana to my parents), which forced me to follow that social decree so common in people's lives: "BE SOMEONE --- study, work, get married, and have a child." This then branched out into a series of side projects, derived from the accumulation of money in the bank and the gradual increase in my income and that of my husband, until there was nothing left but what everyone does, when they can afford it. The simplification of my relationship with the world and people was so gross and brutal that perhaps it went unnoticed. The end of the impasse with the mysteries and powers of the library familiarized me with a world of familiar faces, who smiled whenever possible and spoke only harmless banalities about everything: through what reached us through newspapers, television, and the internet, the sense of despair acquired with modern literature and the precipices of poetic existence was replaced by the rapid, undifferentiated accumulation of data and facts that were lost in an unconscious darkness never visited by my thoughts, with absolutely no contact with the collective anguish of the world and its horror; through the corridors of ostentatious social selection, of bourgeoisification, I shaped my passage to maturity, dodging rebellion, delinquency, vagrancy, defying death, and storming heaven, until I became what society conventionally called a "woman" (here, Beatriz and I started laughing).
The security afforded by money, the satisfaction of being able to control a series of variables (the price of new apartments, the exclusive location of upscale neighborhoods, the expensive clothing brands, the parties and restaurants best suited to the ascending social ladder, the schools for the children of the rich, and the latest TV shows) filled the evident emptiness of my bourgeois life with an utterly reassuring poverty of feelings. My life project was enough for me, at that moment—no longing for poetry, for the horrific sufferings of poets and writers who had revolutionized art and society without receiving anything in return, or for life on the road, in the open air, or for those mystical silences where there's no sound but breathing, or for the captivating wait for the rare flash of sudden enlightenment beneath some bodhi tree lost in the mountains, or for nights on deserted beaches under the stars, when life, lying on the sand, seemed to be decided by the slightest movement of my eyelids; I no longer remembered anything I had read about Hui Neng, the Sixth Zen Patriarch --- and I had read almost everything about him, to the point of correcting someone once during an argument in a temple.
ResponderExcluirThe access to consumer goods that my life situation then afforded me did not compel me to those dramatic circumstances of asceticism and initiation in which it is crucial to give a narrative foundation to the ritualization of life---and I no longer tolerated flitting from one model of life to another, like someone switching TV channels: family, television narratives, morning cartoons with my son (here, Carmen lit a cigarette and ordered a gin), the lives of celebrities in fashion magazines, upper-middle-class society, in which we imitated them, were for me, then, the stake in the heart of the vampire who had haunted me with Rimbauds and Mallarmés, trying to drag me along the path that leads to clairvoyance and enlightenment through the cross. All of this now seemed crushed by my recent choices and sterilizing determination... until (Beatriz and I were still laughing, even then, and began to bother the other customers at the bar) I discovered Proust, and began reading him voraciously, for the past few months. At a time when my life had become unbearably repetitive --- which weighed me down and oppressed me with the internal and external monotony of everyday life ---
ResponderExcluir
ResponderExcluirI began to resign myself, even in the office where I saw my patients (a prosperous endocrinology office), to a certain "laziness", to an increasingly recurrent need to "stop", to make abrupt "cuts" in the uninterrupted network of practical inertia of my day-to-day life, where an unusual, unintelligible tension subsisted and accumulated, as if demanding more of those "privileged moments", or as K used to say, of those "minutes freed from time" (apud Proust) --- Carmen said.
The regime forged by depression (I thought: K) can only be reshuffled through an otherworldly vertigo --- usually, a vertigo that precedes an abolition, which can come in the form of a fire or a freezing, petrifying chill, a "cut," as she put it (perhaps of her own mind, and others). Beatriz, however, suggested: --- living somewhat coerced, huh, girl?, with a narrow margin of decision, now, while nourishing the illusion of "inventing her own life" with salary and goods, while charting her "path on earth" --- but only being crushed to fit a standard model. Time passes, indeed, safe from the pressure of history, to the point of forgetting the "outside world," all the suffering and horror lurking nearby, while the bourgeois anesthesia of the market forges pale hopes and illusions of success for established society that obliterate and minimize the real danger of life, of the simple fact of being alive and its existentialist implications. However, we are constantly adrift; any "existential invention" is laden with fear and guilt, and no matter how deeply we repress them, eventually these feelings resurface.
ResponderExcluirPerhaps you also read, in K's book, "Lumpempanfletariado," that study in which a Mexican psychoanalyst concluded that the media's praise of global consumerism serves only to psychologically shield transnational executives from their internal conflicts regarding their roles in society: "A top executive, for example, who piously believed in Mexico's development and thought his corporation was contributing to it, dreamed of 'infectious slums' and 'swollen-bellied children walking around naked and relieving themselves in an open sewer.' Under the relentless interrogation of that implacable Mexican señor, the executives admitted to being afraid of and disgusted by the poor."
ResponderExcluirThe immense glass-domed city, endlessly scratched by the throngs of poor, trying to force their way through. Then, you suddenly realize this, and every biological component of your body irresistibly yearns to rejoin the "spiritual race," which in your youth made life an archaic splendor full of vitality and creativity. Through the brain's endorphin system, the struggle is waged again, now on hostile and dangerous terrain, with double or triple the danger to your physical and mental health, due to the burden of commitments made to material reality. "We warned you when you were young, back then, but you decided to run away, back to your stable and appetizing little world," Beatriz said.
ResponderExcluir
ResponderExcluir--- Yes, yes, it's true (replied Carmen). But now I'm back to "working" a little like before; except that I don't know how to work anymore, and I don't want to just work with the material of the past. Or as Beckett wrote in The Unnamable: "The truth seems to be, if in my situation one can speak of facts, not only that I have to speak of things I cannot speak of, but also, what is more interesting, but also that I, and what is still more interesting, that I have to, I don't know, I've forgotten, that doesn't matter." ---
ResponderExcluir--- Do you remember that night in the kitchen of the island inn? (I asked Carmen) That "talking agglomeration," that "wandering of all desires" mixed with a certain "economy of prestige," in which we "assimilated the apprehension of the death of the soul" on the basis of "media capitalist subjectivity." That wasn't really a kitchen, or even an inn, it was a decisive, mortal encounter for each of us (including Juan's nagualists); and while Beatriz and I decided to take ontological anarchism to its ultimate consequences, often writing while trapped in a monastic life, or wandering like a ghost through bars and nightclubs, in possession of the "necklace of exile and discredit" and the "operative initiatory mystery,"
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ResponderExcluirfree from any fatal materialistic energetic error, tantric on a level unimaginable to our contemporaries, and even to some of our ancestors, you chose to alienate yourself in a false personality, which led you straight to the lukewarm infantilism of your current "incurable maladjustment," since you have all the claws of the entire world dug into your body. Remember that, in that kitchen, we had devised a way to escape from all this, and we fled, there was no turning back --- meanwhile, the media began to exercise an unprecedented hegemony over a widespread, increasingly weak market subjectivity --- I said
ResponderExcluirCARMEN
ResponderExcluir(eyes alert, searching for what?)
BEATRIZ
And the escape continues, it's endless.
K
No, I don't write in bars anymore—in fact, that never happened, it was just a literary device I used here and there to illustrate a meaningless situation.
BEATRIZ
At least, no new need has arisen since then. Or maybe you want to tell us now (looking at Carmen): "You write, you meditate, you're ghosts from another dimension; as for me, I've built a happy home, which is also good."
CARMEN
ResponderExcluirThis consolation, at the moment, is being denied me. Perhaps by circumstances. Perhaps I can, through the fluctuations of circumstances, make the feeling of self-reinvention constant, to the point where---
K
So, you don't even have a single certainty left, right? The only thing capable of making self-reinvention constant is an unyielding purpose, not the fluctuation of circumstances, waiting for the most appropriate moments. Such moments must be forged, manufactured, aggressively and territorially, until you have your own world "under control."
CARMEN
ONLY. OH, WELL, IT'S ALL SO REPETITIVE, ACTUALLY!
BEATRIZ
Predictability is not synonymous with control. The very fact that everything is so repetitive often means that everything has gotten out of control. For example: We have pictures of us sitting around sunny pools. Embracing each other.
K
ResponderExcluirGreat poses! It's true (laughs) good-looking, me, my usual sinister expression, self-confident as a reptile --- only on the run again. A roadside hotel, in --- where was that again? Have you seen From Dusk Till Dawn? And now, with the affected air you're seeing, planning much smaller parties in much smaller towns. At least you've developed a "support for intensive memorial persistence," in Guattari's words. And reading Proust, as you confessed a moment ago, you'll realize that only through the phantasmatic narrative does the existential function access discourse (which is not a simple epiphenomenon, but rather the object of an ethical-political strategy against the stereotypical familial conception, a whole dynamic and topical machinery of REPRESSION governing the flows of libido, on this side where you find yourself trapped by the force of media-market compulsion,
while the ZONE OF CHAOTYUS ENUNCIATIVE FOCUSES erupts on the other side, threatening the unity of the false self varnished by agglutinating and stratifying sociability. Here, you will most likely encounter incredible difficulty in expanding your field of intervention beyond linguistic semiology, the axioms of everyday life (media), and you will need to make an effort to constantly rid yourself of the cultural dross that threatens to domesticate and paralyze mutant subjectivity, to extract its surplus value (the market).
ExcluirCARMEN
ResponderExcluirAbove all, I missed being heard by you.
BEATRIZ
THE SCHIZO-FRACTURE is the main access route to the EMERGING FRACTALITY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS, which leads to the "NARRATIVE" (the CORRIDOR OF MADNESS or surface of inscription and recording) that re-establishes in artifice a narrative and an existential otherness --- even if delirious.
CARMEN
I feel like, temporarily, time has stopped for me.
K
No, this is just the effect of the drink.
CARMEN
I mean, the PAST. Control yourself, K. For now, it is still from there that I project myself and try to transcend myself. I owe him the mechanisms that were set up in my body (the brain endorphins that atrophied and aged me prematurely), the cultural instruments that I use, my knowledge, my ignorance, my tastes, manias, vanities, whims, vices, habits, irritations, my interests, proclaimed and unconfessed physical desires, my perversions, inhibitions, fears, fatigue, regrets, remorse, guilt, my relationships with others, my obligations, my occupations, my everyday mirrorism, etc. (fear of old age and dirt, from my chin to my ankles.
K
ResponderExcluirSo it's not the listener who should worry about improving themselves here, huh? I KNEW IT!
CARMEN
Mentally, maybe there's still room for "animation" in me. Is there? That's why I came after you again.
BEATRIZ
Room, if there still is, is for RECAPITULATION, for the PRACTICE OF RECAPITULATION (what you have now is only your feeling of failure, of disconnection from the alchemical life principle, which accelerates the voltage of the chakras in the body and gives access to the condition in which one can directly visualize uncreated energies in a refined way (what Castaneda called "other worlds": we've always tried to clarify the terminology here, ever since Amy Wallace wrote that book of hers about Castaneda and demystified him).
ResponderExcluirK
According to Amy --- she was hot. As for you, Carmen, what else can I say? EYELIDS THAT OPEN AND CLOSE, HUH??? There's always the risk of stereotypical poverty in the evocation of the past when you read Proust and feel that desire to "tell your own life story to others" --- while dynamic recapitulation consists only of "reliving your own events completely alone," not to "tell them to yourself or someone else," but to autopsy them, very Freudian, if only it weren't for the fact that the autopsy doesn't take place on a couch, but "in locu," not in a psychic reconstruction of the event, but in the event itself, the living event, with everything it contained: people, objects, landscapes --- even the direction of the wind and the smell of a distant kitchen will serve to confirm what I say. Surely you were a child when they made that movie Back to the Future, and that's why you don't understand what I'm saying ---
no lasting feelings here, even less fixing them in words, which would only reinforce the cognitive tangle where your energy (emotions) were trapped in a cumulus of permanence and radioactive and carcinogenic psychological inertia, which prevents you today from capturing the passage of time live, if it is even true to say that it passes (time) ---what happens is something else ---
ExcluirCARMEN
ResponderExcluirWhat?