LEZAMIANS (de ANALECTA DEL RELOJ)
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Garcilaso is strange, strangeness in the non-Baroque. The Baroque, says Worringer, is the degeneration of the Gothic. It was born in Toledo and lacked theocentric concerns. It was purified in the Nordic feeling of the landscape, and adopted a Mediterranean shell architecture, or rather, it was gently fixed in Romanization. The Gothic does not even enter into it, exemplifying Castilian sobriety as much as anyone. It brings the Renaissance and the betrayal causes it to guess the best of what was to be born. Caramillos, Virgil and Petrarch, and from him comes the fiercest cultured ivory. And whenever he adopts a stance, he originates, in his secret divination, the best of opposites. If we contemplate in El Greco the resolute scandal of Venetian pulp and the Castilian line; in Garcilaso, the Roman canon infused with Castilian ardor, it produces a manufactured new sobriety; while the probable Gothic that can be derived from an exile on the Danube dictates a neoclassical landscape that allows itself to penetrate. Castilian linearity, Roman canon, between the Gothic that it dilutes and the Baroque that it subsequently compels, a tense line, imperial politics, court, courtesy, courtliness, and a poetry in which the elements that comprise it are presented without wounding barbs; which utilizes all the simple bodies of poetry with respect to a movable, but acquired, center; transforming the surrounding cosmos of pure empire into a poetry in which impression—any restlessness, malevolence, sharpness—is resolved in concave, adjusting expression. So how could a long, unsatisfied wave spring from there, Romanticism the living question of each generation?
The dominance, the impassivity of its architecture. Toledo dissolving without marking a work of vertical decomposition—alive in El Greco—and a simple exile in the Danube, without major consequences, without us being able to feel it imprisoned in the Gothic, nor does the abundance of humus provoke ornamental fervor; allied with these negations or resistances, so subtly rejected that the word "resistance" almost pains us, to the Roman canon, produces a graceful moment, effective in the decisiveness of its confluences.
This transcription of Analecta del Reloj, a book of essays by Lezama Lima (and with this we mark the first of our LEZAMIANS), is deliberately a specific procedure, the purpose of which is to introduce the reader to a reading method that should also be applied to 'COUNTING THE PRESENT DAYS UNTIL TODAY ARRIVES'. If you fail to detect it, abandon all hope.
ResponderExcluirInstead of interpreting great masterpieces in light of modern theories, we must criticize modern theories in light of those masterpieces once their theoretical voice has been made explicit. (...) We have more to learn from them than their authors can learn from us; we must be students in the most literal sense of the word. Our conceptual tools do not reach the level of these works; and, instead of "applying" our continually changing methodologies to them, we should try to shed our erroneous conceptions in order to reach the higher perspective that such works offer.
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René Girard, Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology
Anónimo9 de noviembre de 2015, 20:12
ResponderExcluirgracias me sirvio de mucho.....
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Respuestas
Jorge Fraga10 de noviembre de 2015, 7:19
De nada, pues
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Anónimo9 de noviembre de 2015, 20:13
a mi no me sirvio de nada
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Respuestas
Jorge Fraga10 de noviembre de 2015, 7:19
Pues a seguir buscando, ancho es el mundo
Responder
https://teoriadelentusiasmo.blogspot.com/2010/07/presentacion-de-balanceos-y-entusiasmos.html
ResponderExcluirPresentation: Of Swings and Enthusiasms
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Cortázar wrote Hopscotch possessed by swing, by that rhythmic swaying he speaks of in chapter 82; he even confesses there that his writing only made sense while that swinging lasted. Perhaps we should keep that in mind when reading his book. Perhaps we should also consider that swing as an altered state of consciousness, and ask ourselves if it is possible to fully understand the resulting work from an ordinary state of consciousness.
https://teoriadelentusiasmo.blogspot.com/2010/07/caso-1-las-dos-conciencias-en-castaneda.html
ResponderExcluirHopscotch is above all two books, says the Steering Board. Now I propose to understand this same thing, so familiar to readers of the book, in an unusual way, namely: the first of these books is read under an ordinary state of consciousness; the second, under an altered state. According to this idea, the 'rhythmic swaying' that animates Cortázar's creation (cf. chapter 82) would correspond, on the reader's level, and in order to achieve fully effective communication, to another non-ordinary state of consciousness: for example, enthusiasm. The true 'complicit reader' of Hopscotch, the desired likeness and brother of Cortázar, capable of accessing the work's unusual depths of meaning, must be an enthusiastic reader. In the abstract, the underlying idea would be this: the different states of consciousness function as differentiated cognitive registers.
Before analyzing this issue in depth within Hopscotch and Cortazar's work, I will provide some testimonies in this blog to support this idea, and I will present them in the same order in which they were presented to me. I will therefore begin with the only case I was familiar with before formulating this hypothesis: the books of Carlos Castaneda, that is, the dozen volumes that comprise the cycle of "The Teachings of Don Juan," which recount how Castaneda trained as a sorcerer or shaman under the guidance of a Yaqui Indian.
ExcluirThese books describe a theme that bears some resemblance to our topic, which we will call "the two consciences" here. We will focus on this issue, setting aside any controversy over the real or fictional nature of these chronicles; even if they were purely fictional, the mere fact that the possibility of "the two consciences" was even conceived in them constitutes an interesting precedent for us.
ExcluirThe phenomenon of "the two consciousnesses" properly begins in the fifth book in the series, The Second Ring of Power, originally published in 1977. Here we discover that Castaneda's long apprenticeship with his teacher, don Juan, apparently already fully described in the first four books and spanning a period of 13 years, actually took place in the apprentice's different states of consciousness. From the moment he becomes aware of this, the apprentice is faced with an unavoidable challenge: to remember the unknown knowledge acquired in those other states of consciousness. This challenge largely constitutes the plot of the following books in the cycle.
ExcluirThe best way to understand this in these pages is to refer to the summaries of the learning that Castaneda himself provides as a preface to his successive books. Thus, to begin, we can read the Exordium of The Inner Fire, the seventh book in the cycle, published in 1984 (Spanish edition by Swan, Avantos & Hakeldama, 1987, 3rd edition):
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Over the last fifteen years, I have written extensive accounts of my apprenticeship with an Indian sorcerer, don Juan Matus. (...)
The entire organization of don Juan's teachings was based on the idea that humankind has two types of consciousness. He named them the right side and the left side, and accordingly, he divided his instruction into teachings for the right side and teachings for the left side.
He described the former as the normal state of consciousness for all of us, or the state of consciousness necessary to function in the everyday world. He said the second was something unusual, the mysterious side of man, the state of consciousness required to function as a sorcerer and seer.
The teachings for the right side were carried out in my normal state of consciousness. I have described these teachings in detail in all my accounts. (...)
It has taken me almost ten years to remember exactly what happened in the teachings for the left side.
In that same book, the summary continues as follows (italics mine):
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The teachings for the left side were given to me every time I entered a unique state of perceptual clarity that he called heightened awareness. Throughout my years of association with don Juan, he repeatedly brought me into such states by striking me with the palm of his hand on the upper part of my back.
Don Juan explained to me that, in a state of heightened awareness, the apprentices' behavior is as natural as in daily life. Their great advantage is that they can focus their minds on anything with extraordinary strength and clarity; but their disadvantage is the impossibility of recalling what happens to them into the field of normal memory. What happens to them in such states becomes part of their daily memories only through astonishing effort.
This extreme difficulty in remembering what happened in a heightened state of consciousness seems characteristic of these fluctuations of consciousness; we could compare it, on a level of things familiar to us, with how difficult it is to recover dreams from the waking state. Dreams in which, let us not forget, consciousness has an unusual freedom, as it is not subject to the spatio-temporal limitations of the waking state. Expanding on this same idea, Castaneda states the following in the introduction to Silent Knowledge, the eighth book in the cycle, from 1987 (in Spanish by Swan, 1988):
Excluir"In order to remember what you are perceiving and understanding right now, you will need a lifetime," he said, "because all of this is part of silent knowing. In a few moments, you will have forgotten everything. That is one of the unfathomable mysteries of the awareness of being."
ExcluirImmediately, don Juan made me shift levels of consciousness with a sharp slap on my left side, near my ribs. Instantly, my mind returned to its normal state. I lost my mental clarity to such an extent that I couldn't even remember having it
In this same text, a little further on, Castaneda introduces a new element of great importance for us: the rational arguments that normal consciousness opposes, as strategies of resistance, to the reality of these other states of consciousness:
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It took me years to be able to make the crucial conversion of my memory from heightened consciousness to normal memory. My reason and common sense delayed this conversion by colliding with the absurd and unimaginable reality of heightened consciousness and direct knowledge. For years on end, the resulting tremendous cognitive imbalance forced me to seek relief in not thinking about it.
So, it's not just a matter of the difficulty of remembering; there's also the assessment and judgment that normal consciousness dispenses toward these other states: "absurd," "unimaginable," "unthinkable." In this way, the normal mind ends up liquidating the cognitive validity of these other states: its judgment is implacable. Above, to bring the matter back to familiar ground, we spoke about dreams; along the same lines, we could now talk, for example, about how normal consciousness tends to systematically disdain another type of non-ordinary state of consciousness: falling in love. Isn't there a tendency within us to smile condescendingly—that is, with superiority and skepticism—at someone swept away by love? And yet, falling in love brings about valuable changes in consciousness: suddenly, one becomes bold, witty, in tune with life, filled with light... That condescending smile, then, might not be a petty strategy of the ordinary mind to defend itself against a higher state of consciousness?
ExcluirLet us now return to Don Juan's teachings and address a crucial question for our pre-theoretical hypothesis: in a normal state of consciousness, from the "right side," it is extremely difficult for Castaneda to remember what happened on the "left side." However, the reverse is not true: from the "left side," with its heightened cognitive capacities, the subject is able to recall previous experiences, whether from one state of consciousness or the other. Thus, each level of consciousness seems to have its own cognitive regime and its own memory register; but the resources of normal consciousness are limited and diminished compared to those of heightened consciousness.
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In the "Author's Note" that introduces The Art of Dreaming (the ninth book in the cycle, published in 1993, Spanish edition by Seix Barral, 1997, 5th edition), Castaneda once again addresses all these issues. For practical purposes, we can consider the “second attention” we are talking about now as equivalent to the “heightened awareness” we have already seen before:
The second group of apprentices was extremely compact. It consisted of only three members (...).
ExcluirThese three people interacted with each other and with me exclusively in the second attention. In the world of everyday life, we had no idea about each other. (...) Toward the end, when don Juan was about to leave the world, the psychological pressure of his departure began to undermine, for the four of us, the rigid parameters of the second attention. The result was that our interaction broke into the world of everyday affairs, and we all met, apparently, for the first time.
None of us was aware of our deep and arduous interaction in the second attention. Since all four of us were involved in academic studies, we were more than a little shocked to discover that we had already met before. Of course, this was, and still is, intellectually inadmissible to us. Yet we know that it was entirely part of our experience. In the end, we are left with the disturbing certainty that the human psyche is infinitely more complex than our academic or worldly reasoning has led us to believe.
We once asked don Juan in unison to clarify our doubts. He said he had two possible explanations. One was to appease our wounded rationality by saying that the second attention is a state of consciousness as illusory as elephants flying in the sky, and that everything we thought we had experienced in that state was simply a product of hypnotic suggestions. The other possibility was not to explain, but rather to describe the second attention in the way it appears to dreaming sorcerers: as an incomprehensible energetic configuration of consciousness.
ExcluirBy comparing these extraordinary phenomena that Castaneda describes in his chronicles with other phenomena familiar to us (dreams, falling in love; we could also add the effects of entheogenic substances), I merely intend to highlight some common denominators. It can be said that these states of heightened consciousness that Castaneda describes stand in an analogous relationship to ordinary consciousness, as do the other states of consciousness I have mentioned: dreams, falling in love, states induced by entheogens. I postulate an analogy, a similarity in the relationships, not an identity of terms; on the one hand, in all of them, the 'second state' always has cognitive characteristics distinct from those of the normal state of consciousness, with laws that are apparently less restrictive than those of the latter: that is, greater freedom. On the other hand, it is always difficult to 'recover'—whether quantitatively or qualitatively—the information in force in the 'second state' once one has returned to ordinary consciousness.
ExcluirThis irreducibility seems to indicate that the "container" of ordinary consciousness may be smaller than that of the "second states." Castaneda speaks of this in The Eagle's Gift (the sixth book in the cycle, published in 1984—1986 by Swan) in terms of a difference in intensity, greater in the second state, and also a difference between linear and nonlinear thought. Be that as it may, this second state seems to be pregnant with new cognitive possibilities.
ExcluirIn short: what Castaneda describes constitutes a paradigmatic case of "second consciousness." Under this premise, we could transfer the analogy to the case of Hopscotch, reformulating what was said at the beginning of the article: Cortázar's creative state (which he calls "swing" or "swinging") would be a state of "second consciousness," and to retrieve the information arranged under his particular regime of consciousness (that is, the second book recorded by the Steering Wheel), the reader should situate themselves at a similar level of consciousness: enthusiasm, so to speak.
With this requirement, the second book of Hopscotch appears as a repetition of an episode (see The Tell-Tale Letter); without it, the reader is faced with a sloppy, incongruous, "absurd" text. But these attributes of the text, which should serve as a stumbling block to suggest the reader's need for that other state of consciousness, have been reduced by critics and readers to mere components of an experimental novel. Cortázar's Zen slap, conceived as a mechanism to propitiate a "break in level," has remained a mere assault on norms. And so the unknown, the new light that Cortázar wanted to bring to the literary world, has been neutralized in favor of the known.
ExcluirThe Head of Baphomet must always remain a mystery or an amphibological enigma, enchantingly associated with the talking heads of medieval gossip. The laughing and crying heads of Ianus and the Juanes, which point to the past and the future; the soltiscial heads and the occult head of Hic et Nunc, are the most evident in Hopscotch, like that of Heracliteus as an eschatological plant. However, Baphomet, beyond etymological and occult speculation, is presumed to be the most apocryphal core of Hopscotch...
ResponderExcluirBe that as it may, "For a Theory of Enthusiasm" is a blog in which Jorge Fraga proposes some readings and uses of Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch, interpreting its magical, demiurgic, and poetic (redundancy intended) creative purposes that not only compete with the virtues of religion and esotericism but can even surpass them. Although neither his friend Fraga nor Cortázar himself postulated the autonomy of the poetic as a path to realization, this is evident in the work of the typographic shaman and in Fraga's glosses.
And just today an enlightened dreamer, Anabella (Bella Gracia Divina) has sent me this poem by KEROUAC that takes up our theme:
ResponderExcluirDaydreams for Ginsberg
Lying on my back at midnight
hearing the strange, wonderful ringing
of the bells, and I know it's midnight and in that instant the whole world
flows before my eyes
in the form of beautiful, stupid swarms of words...
everything is happening, shining
Buddha lands, bhuti
inflamed with faith, I know I'll always get it right & everything I have
to do (when I hear the everyday
living voices of ladies talking
in a kitchen at midnight
rubber cups of cocoa
cake sink drain...) I want
to write this, all the conversations
from all over the world,
this morning, letting spaces open in parentheses
to accompany my most intimate
thoughts—with roars from my whole
brain—the whole world
roaring—vibrating—I write it,
at full speed, 1,000 words
(of pages) compressed into a second
of time—I've been
dressed & combed in gold in
the famous Greek sunset
of some Greek city
Immortal Fame & they
have to find me where they find
the bandages of my
shroud flying
flag waving Lucien
Midnight back to their
mouths—Gore Vidal would be very
confused, bored—
my words will be written in gold
& stored in libraries like
Finnegans Wake & Visions of Neal