About Carmen 4
Still, I still feel those old affinities with you, Beatriz: full of highly intellectualized tastes, full of a dark will to live, to stay young---I find in you both my strengths and my flaws. And you know, and you like to listen to me, for hours if necessary (reflections, smiles, absolutely Borgesian silences --- desires to tell, reveal, confess: today, I think I only pretend to work, thinking of reliving the impressions, sensations, and perceptions that those old moments gave me, when you urged me to become, before anything else, a being "perfectly accustomed to indispensable solitude," because (telepathic television vibration enveloping the room, silently: Beatriz says, looking at K: "You smoke like a demon," and he responds: "Silence, I'm just going my way"), because, as I was saying, "wisdom can only be obtained from the point of view of solitude." Encounters that in no way tired me, after which rich soliloquies, mild winds in the mind while I wait for my greasy sandwich, sitting like a princess at the sticky table of the trailer in front of Mundo Plaza, between Mundo Plaza and the sewage canal that carries our day's worth of feces to Costa Azul beach. (He looks at Beatriz with an intense and malignant rapture, now.) Me and my beautiful embroidered dresses, and suddenly, while I eat, everything goes silent, I hear myself chewing, swallowing, and then the immediate protests of my guts --- hard to feign silence, these times, huh? Right: then I feel my muscles under my skin, in the sun, the atomic world of my body, and after a moment things get complicated, and I feel like I'm swimming outside my body, so, it's because I meditate, I believe, and everything flows with me for a few minutes, in the sensation of the coming night, after the workday, and then, suddenly, I discover that I've been nowhere, all that time, except in my bed, in my room, sleeping the whole time: in five minutes the clock will wake up and it will be six in the morning. A fantastic, ghostly drowsiness hums with the sounds of traffic outside, and I think, "Oh, it's been so long since I've even scribbled in my diary!" And I continue to nurture my desire for mystical seclusion, until the day begins, like a slow, sensual provocation of my limbs, an unconscious challenge to everything that, beside me in bed, roars, snors, and vegetates aimlessly, and which in this case, in a sudden flash of my mind, I realize is the inert body of my sleeping husband. Then I stretch, stand, stretch vaguely, the rising sun, through the window, pierces my eyes like a harpoon, and the maid appears on the other side of the door asking something about my son's school uniform.
(Becoming an American-style housewife wasn't quite what Carmen had hoped for, perhaps not even a doctor.)
"A DOCTOR MUST HAVE A REFRIGERATOR"
Remember?
Read? Read? What an idea. I don't read the newspaper, the internet, or the gossip. I scan the pages of Proust's book, volume 3 of In Search of Lost Time, with a trembling, pseudo-intellectual impetus, hoping to find, at any moment, a phrase, a shock, a "Vintéil quote," capable of slapping away all the self-designating compulsion of my insipid morning grumpiness.
Continue in one minutr
ResponderExcluirBEATRIZ
ResponderExcluirStay if you want, but don't talk so much
(eyes refreshed by a sip of coffee; small flickering breakfast lights)
Of course, it's good to live anywhere, to drink and sleep and read and eat small meals and sleep again. There's no need to see these simple things as just the latest excrescences of a mind-boggling, objectifying plot. As you develop a heightened, empty sensoriality again, you'll discover in your own face eyes still interested in images, which is something.
Excluir(takes off his coat, rolls up his shirtsleeves, and there's his steaming tea on the porch)
A heavy drowsiness again, huh? Much like when you were still asleep, only now the proportions are reversed: it's not the dream that seems real, but rather the waking world of wakefulness that begins to seem like a loose collection of images, less and less connected to each other. Drowsiness, you think, nothing will happen. PERFECT! , another eyelash on the office sofa, then every kind of simple meditation known to man comes now, with the vivid sensation that all spiritual paths lead to the same thing: softness, drowsiness, there's no one in the command tower making the world solid, even though there is. And it doesn't matter that, soon, you'll be awakened by a hard, dry rumble ---
--- something like the sound of a dry twig snapping, or an electric current humming --- undoing your imaginary life and confronting you with the direct realization that the boundary between the dream world and the waking world has crumbled, and yet, nothing. A new silence will inevitably ensue, this time of an aristocratic, interior kind, a "skeleton," to use the term the English used in the past to describe the possession of a secret, a skeleton, and along with this, a mysterious and imperative reason to remain motionless, doing nothing, in a state of mute fascination.
Excluir
ResponderExcluirK
Perhaps it's funny to add: endowed with a sudden, wise serenity capable of "waiting, waiting, waiting," because something is actually happening in these moments, something is being processed, and it may be a long process, which won't be resolved in those few minutes.
CARMEN
ResponderExcluir(meek, sweet, almost inarticulate; in a rebound from magnetic somnambulism, a seemingly inexhaustible reserve of self-hypnosis)
Oh, no, maybe I wouldn't start all over again so easily --- three beers and boom, I disappear, dematerialize, vanish in a shimmering roar of photonic phosphorescence --- my husband and son never see me again. I have my husband, my son, my job, my apartment worth millions, my friends, and the monotonous norms of social routine, within which we interact in complete safety and scratch each other affectionately, until one or another suddenly disappears for a while, not as a specter, but because they suffered a severe loss of energy and had to be hospitalized for a while. While I behave in such a way that, in relation to them, I pride myself on having achieved a secret status as a "gentle city dreamer," without any of that noisy, smelly wood of the pirate ship sailing on the high seas, the turbulent fiery sea of nirvana, of which you boast
BEATRIZ
ResponderExcluir(herald of discredited mystical demonologies?, of concentrated introspection that leads to the Gothic --- and it would be easy for Beatriz to judge Carmen negatively here, as lacking refinement, including social refinement)
With all due respect, this attempt to portray the entirety of her own life leads us straight to the psychosocial aesthetic of a nine-o'clock soap opera; all that was missing was to present some documents and call the press to "register," prepare the next scenes, and announce the new sponsors.
K
ResponderExcluirThe sexual organs, the uterus, the lower abdomen are organs of perception --- the way the ardor of the first spark of accumulated energy spreads from the belly and transforms this point into a focus of projection refines the details of the mental struggle to the level of clarity sufficient to enter another world; which can occur through the practice of lucid or even waking dreaming, through the practice of intensive meditation in the dark, or even through the avid reading of novels (as long as certain conditions are met) --- an enormous visceral energy capable of expanding into distance and covering a considerable "avenue of possibilities" for action.
CARMEN
ResponderExcluir(relatively new to the city's social hierarchy, and already cultivating some unconfessable rivalry within it, a new era in the life of worldly experience, a time of private and thorny Bonapartisms and sexual fascination with the mystery of finance)
In the trembling vacuum of the entire world, my nerve endings teeter on the brink of evaporation with a barrage of society news, via WhatsApp—an excuse to gossip, skewer, belittle, intrigue, waste energy; cell phone conversations, ruminated in the darkness of my living room, my office, my car—not even in the toilet can I shake them off.
BEATRIZ
ResponderExcluirInvoking death in gradual levels.
K
Ibsen wrote: "We are all ghosts. Whenever I pick up a newspaper and read it, I think I see ghosts crawling between the lines." And in live footage, it's even worse. It's our parasitic relatives, those ghosts, cornering us, squeezing the images inside us, to extract from our interior the psychic bile that makes the body lose energy. There are only logistics and terrain: attack and defense, bluff and deception; above all, patience, a patience that is terrible, a constriction of resistance, from which arises the proper perspective, which is that of inflexible, long-term purpose, of full, constant alertness --- in the previous darkness, let's say, you can even risk a small change of position. It will be risky, anyway. Because the environment responds immediately, with a much greater strategic scope, to every small bold move you make outside the line of social segmentation, where the daily energy milking takes place. The flyers are masters. Only through erudite, athletic, and hyperactive paranoia can one drag oneself to the barbed-wire fences where their mockery fades into phlegmatic silence, where they literally turn to dust.
CARMEN
ResponderExcluir("Ah, yes," Carmen thought, "maybe I'm not as brilliant as them; and there are those in my circle of friends who think I'm not even "something")
Everything for me, at the moment, is hazy. I only have the sensation of my fists and a dark, hypocritical, monotonous, and insane domestic atmosphere; I live absorbed in the astonishing illusion that I'm becoming a teacher of life with every step, every time I add a new, shiny layer to the world of comfort of my daily life, and I judge the madness of people (my husband included) as stagnant water that hasn't reached the ideal boiling point: I see it in everyone: they betray themselves in their lapses of thought, their forgetfulness of commitments, their tongue-twisting when discussing relationships or denigrating someone; even friends' stuttering, abrupt changes of subject, blushes, mysterious and silent embarrassments, truncated mentions, which are lost in a confused thought far from what they really wanted to express. And all of these are inorganic elements controlling the images within them.
BEATRIZ
ResponderExcluir(laughing---)
"A paranoid person is someone who knows a little about what's going on."
K
(laughing---)
To the point of picking at the food on their plate before eating, to make sure it's not alive or moving.
CARMEN
(now pale, focused, trying to become efficient)
Right, playing with the remains of some capacity I once had, and have lost: the capacity for neutral judgment, for inner glimpses, for anticipation, for clairvoyance, for nuanced embryos of situations to come, for oracle and prediction.
BEATRIZ
The right thing to do is to start coolly, from nothing, so as never to lose the ability to strive to the point of a seductive joviality in one's own actions.
CARMEN
ResponderExcluir(the gray, ponderous, and philistine order of the industrial middle and upper classes; accounting firm and assembly line, programming and innovation; the falsification of human relations and wholesale hypocrisy encouraging mass alienation; the bleak program of turning life into a reportage of the banal and the simple, elevated by the "touches of color" of television and the internet)
I realize that every song I hear on the radio is nothing more than propaganda from the social order designed to make us worry about our conformity to the current standards of sociability. So if I'm not busy trying to achieve the dream of love that the little singer huffed and puffed on stage last weekend, I start to feel forgotten, discredited, sidelined. If we resist, we leave with our brains damaged. We cannot overcome this inner death, which with its subliminal appeals generates in us an invisible tension that involves us in an instantaneous and inevitable complicity of non-resistance, of tacit acceptance that the messages produced by the cultural industry are the only thoughts we have to play the game --- the illusion that by changing from one style to another we free ourselves from something is also part of the system of coercion, co-optation and predictability in the production of the common.
K
ResponderExcluirBack then to the difficult immanent world of deception and dishonest tricks --- for now, all one can do is hope to emerge from this "passage" as uncorrupted or damaged as possible. You probably can't, so do your best, minimizing the damage. Testing one moment, then the next, desperate for greater ends. It's how one acquires the rhythm before entering the Corridor of Madness, of which the Shaolin Tunnel was once a deadly metaphor. Don't give in to the blind kick of the crybaby, that precarious and frantic accumulation of inflamed ego trifles that explodes at any moment.
CARMEN
(thinking: "Turn me over, brothers! I'm already quite burned on this side," D. H. Lawrence)
The best thing is to go home, it's getting late.
BEATRIZ
"Standing on a street corner doing nothing is Power," J. Kerouac. So, go home and start a full season of Dostoevsky, amidst the empty commercial atmosphere of the city.
K
TV Guide. Hundreds of parked cars. Coffee is bad unless it's strong! The indefinable urban smell of coffee and mall air conditioning. In the bookstore: girls, almost no meaningful meaning. Perfect time to start Ramadan, if I haven't already.
*
*
ResponderExcluir*
ResponderExcluirThey get into the car, many apparitions throughout the city, their breaths held. A succession of rain puddles amid the noisy onslaught of silence, the dance of silence in the mind is the dance among the noises of the mind, not among those of the city—the countless photons of emptiness everywhere, a marine city full of gas pumps (perhaps thinking of the coral gardens at the bottom of the fetid sea) and any number of points of light after we eat at São Paulo Vinte Graus and Carmen's paranoid hallucinations resume until she almost loses her speech, after saying:
--- I live up there (it was in Itaigara), full of my imaginary conceptions of everything ---
A BLANK LESSON
With the specter of broken-down cars and blasphemous, drenched people, impregnating our tongues and nostrils with a strong metropolitan smell. Finally, some small talk, she =looking at K and Beatriz. "Hardened," thought Carmen, "Thanks to daily practice against any trick." Last alien glimpse before the arduous and monotonous rush of mere living, eating, and working --- a second of regret. Carte blanche --- NIGHT --- K clearly able to see the outline of Carmen's face and the moon in her hair.
Something --- That --- he and she --- hitting their stride? --- fluency, grace, and a certain strangeness
Excluirspontaneity, certainty here is
ALARM
Nothing there was serene, however, and this
was being indicated by Carmen's face
a frenzied, predatory rictus
(where's my coffee?)
End here!
ResponderExcluir