Contemporânea

To keep listening. The day is hanging by a thread. It is not yet time to give up. It is not certain that during life events will grab us and that something will burst out of them. To wait. Maybe not, unless we remember that someone will be out of there, far away. The problems continue, always the same, without results, only weaknesses. We go up and down, which is basically the same. We run away so as not to hear anything, with our eyes closed so as not to see anything. Before being pushed. To believe in extraterrestrial life. Always that extramoral measure to refine the species. Fascism gesticulates. Dramatic. Without sobriety. Emphatic and repressive. Thus is woven the psychopathy of immortality. Control is exhausted in the faithful apologetics of the refinement of guilt. Hunger eludes the hustle and bustle of luxury in a world that mixes despair with reconciliatory serials. Between Troglodytes and Homer. Like Marcus Flaminius Rufus, we stumble into the river, drink the water of the Immortals, lose our language and contemplate eternity. Nothing more, nothing less. Just yesterday. As always. Tomorrow, perhaps, only intense fatigue and words that multiply failures and imitations. Millions of years disseminate noises. The first day was about trying not to fall into the hole. Bent over by the burden of answers that point to the abyss. No crystal-clear image to let the breathing stop for too long. To let ourselves be deceived. Violence, privileges, inequality. The language that builds our space of control and violence, of social strength and autonomy. Territory of escape and conflict — clandestinity. Writing and imagination, word by word, prodigious savagery, movement and risk. The ideal that stirs in collective representation, always singular, always a starting point. Nothing will be the same again, says the revolutionary as he calls for the collapse of the system. The attempt and subversion. The street and sovereignty. The world doesn’t matter if terror reigns in it, which, before each one of us, is returned in the form of ideological mystification. To believe or not to believe, the nameless immortal. Just like that. To keep going. The end of life, the end of history, the end of the revolution. The end. The radicality of the mystery. Nothing to point out in the long silence that returns whenever the voices move away. There is no reason to speak, to be silent. Perhaps listening is enough. We carry on as best we can, without much hope, without passionate fear. So-so. Prisoners of well-being, of masters, of darkness, of sadness, of others, of each other, of everything that was left behind, of everything that is yet to be discovered. No one knows where those who have already gone are and who those who are yet to come will be:

We become the men we are when we discover, I don't know when or how, that we would have to die; that our relatives, that the people we love, would have to die. In the week of the dead, let us enter our cemeteries, today. I notice that to a certain extent they resemble cities, with their streets, their squares, avenues, their family homes [...] with their neighborhoods for the rich and their neighborhoods for the poor. Metropolis, necropolis.1

Everything intends to signify, everything aspires to meaning — forced excess, too many things, or the same and the last that are monotonously repeated. Beckett's voice that does not disappear. A babbler smiling, closed in any brain whatsoever. The shadow in the text enunciates another place, it reveals fiction’s own movement. Lights fall on humanity that shelters belonging, like a garden that opens up to madness, a force that is disguised in the tension of desire. In the apparent immobility of disorder the restlessness of Salpêtrière's world opens up. The Same and the Other. Michel Foucault and the figures of finitude. Everything comes close to the will to transgress. Looking head on, between animality and domestication, distance and proximity, truth and healing — starting over from the moment in which the Logos becomes a strange, vulnerable path through which uncertainty and disappearance are accessed. Western metaphysics dissolves into the thickness of the old interiority and displaced meaning. Death becomes contestation and memory, a common space for fatigue. Lucretius, who rejected the immortality of the soul, already admitted that if we lose the infinite past, we can’t help losing also the infinite future. The nature of things. Borges wrote singularly, thus invoking the persuasive and useless character that immortality offers:

(I) Being immortal is insignificant; with the exception of man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; the divine, the terrible, the incomprehensible is to know oneself to be immortal.2

Let us go back without knowing why to the wandering thought. It's not that it counts, but it always keeps us from feeling guilty and from finding exactly what we're looking for. It's not that we want to eliminate all the demons or threats to our lives. We're just motivated by a kind of belief. Nothing more. They all offer us the possibility of saving a few days from intense loneliness. Some efforts, but always abandoned in this camp of misfortune and dying that we call the world. Nothing different. Everything as usual. In any case, we can keep asking ourselves what we should be aiming for, without enthusiasm. There is always a part of us waiting for something to happen. We arrive late, we continue to arrive late. No history. Just chimeras. The Benjaminian aura that beckons in absent or deceased loves, the celebration of time in our memory. As in Sokurov's Mother and Child, during the day we are carried on the lap, we return home and then we die. Alone. A life that runs in the immanence of death. Separation. What would life have to tell us about? Loss. There is nothing else. Life as a way of killing time. Forgetfulness and the symptom of nostalgic denial, as Theodor Adorno would say. Sadness. The time of death, the sense of the real, a disturbance. Our double. A remnant of time, a remnant of mourning, the ruin:

The ruin does not survive as an accident of a monument that was intact yesterday. In the beginning there is the ruin. The ruin is what arrives here in the image from the first glance. (...) The ruin is not before us, neither a spectacle nor an object of love. It is the experience itself: neither the abandoned but still monumental fragment of a totality, nor merely, as Benjamin thought, a theme of baroque culture.3

We await new beginnings. This is it! An exclamation, Roland Barthes would say again. Time as the ultimate foundation of passage. We change with the light, we change with the sun. Death as the great humanization of time that shakes any ontology. The present that passes giving way to a new present or immortality in each new existence — the form of constitutive solidarity. Team spirit, as they call it. Present continuous tense, while we live: “It is not the arrival of death, it is the departure of life that is appalling. It is not about death attacking life; it is life resisting death injuriously.”4 Events follow one another, everything comes to a standstill. Infinite, strong, insistent repetitions. The illusion weakens and is confirmed in multiple signs, once again, at the end of everything, still. We don’t know what to do to keep from losing our heads. One day. We take advantage of the counterparts that we believe serve to put an end to boredom, lies, and dirt. Not everything is bad because life transforms us into a great fossil. Teeth and skeletons coexist with other animals and plants, shells, leaves, trunks, eggs, remains and marks that do not aspire to totality. They outline the sine qua non condition of the universe. Paleontology gives us back what has always existed, the deterioration and biodiversity without a break, time buried, in plain sight. So much work for something, to confuse us. The least we can do is the immortal precipice that they put us on the path to. Nothing will end, good manners and suspicious interests use the same codes, they continue without any upheaval, we just need to not lose hope. Sooner or later those charitable appeals make us realize that we must negotiate in the name of stability — the poor continue in the rudimentary state of rights and in the eternal obligation of duties. Hunger is not a possibility of choice, it has become a fiasco of democracy. Survival is the watchword. It is not worth blaming or seeking salvation. Social relations include the spectacular Debordian representation, the church perpetuates psychological dependence and art is an accomplice to systems of exploitation. Entertainment turned into laissez faire laissez passer. Everything works for the effectiveness of the regime. Cynicism, stupidity and opportunism combine to better serve the imprisonment of our lives. Komodo dragon venom would not do any better. It is said that the habitat of these animals is in danger, unlike the cynics, idiots and opportunists who reproduce, we say. Organized and regulated behaviors objectify the relationships of subjection. The network of interpersonal interests configures a real investment program. Mortality can assume hybrid forms despite our persistence in fixing meaning and converting it into taxonomy. We move away from where we are, we do not change, our place, our tone, our life. We can also say that from time to time we escape from what tires us, like someone who reduces himself to silence to convince himself that the extinction of the species will soon be declared. We will lose the end of the world. There will be many of us. The more, the better. For now, we are enough. We fall asleep. What matters is pale, silent, penitent, reconciled humanity. What does it matter what one desires, if absolution is the way? We travel through the places of fear for several days, repeating strange occupations without consolation. Indifference. Abandonment. We function like a body connected to a machine, caught dying every day and, with it, the entire world. The desire to be Moken, a nomad of the sea, to live off the marine fauna and flora, without rushing, simply inhabiting the sea, is quickly declared. They move away from it during the rains but always return to the same islands. It is said that they do not claim property rights because, above all, they believe that land and water should be shared by many people. We regress until we become incomprehensible to others. Between life and death, we wait to be able to write without condescension, to say it in other words, before closing ourselves off in the protection of disappearance. Raptured for the last time, we build another script without waiting for an empty boat to appear before us and transport us into the night, bigger than words, determined like the sea. We are no longer called suddenly. The greatness of the unknown has not yet arrived, unpredictable and rare. A few centuries have passed. People die and their lives continue after death. What they thought, did, destroyed, loved. To move forward in the same direction, but through another river. Marcus Flaminius Rufus transformed into the antiquarian Joseph Cartaphilus. He returns to drink water from another river. The only one in each thing. His hand is injured by a thorn. The blood returns and flows. Years later he dies, leaving his story in a manuscript inside a large and old encyclopedia. Mortality:

(II) Everything among mortals has the warmth of the irretrievable and the fortuitous. Among Immortals, on the contrary, every act (and every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, without any visible beginning, or the faithful omen of others that will repeat it in the future to the point of vertigo. There is nothing that is not as if lost among tireless mirrors. Nothing can happen once, nothing is preciously precarious. The elegiac, the grave, the ceremonial, do not apply to the Immortals.5

The double and the illusory mechanism of immortality. To eliminate the double — to return to finitude, to mortality. The subject’s reencounter with itself. Not the unfolding of the One but rather the reduplication of the Other. The double as the unfolding of the subject — its Other, the one that each one finds within himself, the liberation as fear of the encounter. Each one the différance of the other, without a binary opposition between self and double but rather a supplement added to the model. One and the other always imminent, continually unexpected. Repetition of the Different. Without projection of the interior. Doubles without resemblance and not a copy that indicates a true other, a possible and unique other — there is no copy or replica, but rather a Double. The structure of fiction present in truth. Je est un autre. We read in the newspapers that the end of the universe may happen sooner than expected. The Earth may even become extinct much sooner. The world is a trap. We will write a memorandum, everything will begin and end with it. We will include rare events, metaphysical questions to be invented — as almost all of them are —, official stories and denials, aphorisms and enigmas, words and more words, insignificant facts resulting from in-depth research carried out in academia and, of course, special fashionable problematics, which consecrate all forms of transepistemic prestige, driving forces of the universal psychism. Violence will erase history. Without any political horizon, value or commitment. Permanent control replaces the critical function. We repeat all experiences. We do not leave the same place. In spring, young ducks remain in the water of the lake and bathe among countless water lilies. In a letter sent to Cézanne, Zola advised the painter that he should not believe in excessive admiration for his landscapes and that, above all, there would lie the abyss - never should we appreciate a painting because it was painted quickly. It is imperative to distance oneself from a commercial painter, one who, in the words of the writer, paints in the morning thinking about the afternoon bread. We survive the memories of hunger, escaping from what sinks us. Art is where you can grow old in the greatest abandonment. The years pass and take over the body that retreats. We admire the life we ​​did not have and thanks to which every day we remake hell. The dead come to us, captives of the lullaby. What can we do, other than suspect that imperfection is in store for us, right down to our bones? Everything is the same. Typical cases that are repeated. We depend on what matters, on what doesn’t, we make mistakes again. Close to the end that never comes, we remain isolated among rumors of suppositions. We stop believing that, wherever we are, the most important things change. Nothing ends our existence surrounded by promises, here and there, to better pretend that we want to win. Monotony becomes the rhythm that is inscribed in the unimportant destiny, a prodigious extension of immobility. Until the last moment, a certain degree of dizzying terror runs through us, like someone leaving a bad repertoire. It takes us time to understand that knowing where we are is useless. We only resist because any other effort would force us into a pale opportunity for disenchantment. Too much time, wasted time, hand in hand. We wait for who knows what to happen. Like Borges’ narrator, we will discover that we are not Marcus Flaminius Rufus and in a short time we will be Nobody:

(III) When the end approaches, there are no more images left of remembrance; only words remain. It is not strange that time has confused those that once represented with those that were symbols of the fate of whoever accompanied me for so many centuries. I was Homer; soon I will be Nobody, like Ulysses; soon I will be everyone: I will be dead.6

We open our eyes and the narrative fixes us in circumstances that include everyone. We will be dead, like Ulysses. Nobody and the perversion of time, the forgetfulness of origin or the genealogical interrogation. Everything to construct and immortalize. Literature forms a discourse without the protection of truth, tunnels that lead to the indefiniteness of words and to language without guarantee, disguised — like the metaphysicians of Tlon, created by Borges, who seek wonder and project metaphysics into the domain of fantasy literature. We know nothing, we just want to go to the end, we fabulate so as not to prolong our impotence. There must be enough time to establish the hero's brilliance. A poem. The anguish of influence that prevents the vortex from saying it all. The text highlights the disorder attracted by the force that is inscribed in the archive — deposits and traces that shape the conditions of existence and the historical unconscious. Images that summon singularities that are rewritten and invented, circumscribed and diffuse territories, hatreds and affections, law and power, the becoming. Survival and exclusion are always possible. Moments, years, centuries that redeem us from the cycle of life and death, from the mysteries of the initiated. Ecofeminists, anti-capitalists, activists, post- and pre-humanists, futurologists, ists of this and that who never miss an art fair. A true “Chinese encyclopedia” of the art world, as Borges would say. Chic dystopia. Classifications and commonplaces, the order of knowledge and Las Meninas. Between Velázquez and Foucault, words and images, paintings and characters, sovereignty and artifice. We see and are seen. The model and the painter. The window, inside and outside representation — the visible and the invisible. The world by the minute. Victorious and weak. Meanwhile, we beg enough to continue the resurrection. Dictators warm up and aspire to exemplary figures, insecure in their style and confident in their inarticulate rage. Economic, political and social models, aligned in their inefficiency, establish the common environment for the masses. We must wait for the propagandistic, tactical and liturgical sense. The juggling happy end calls for the magical, oppressive and obsolete ritual. Dramatic messianism without an antagonist and epic constituent has its expressive dimension in the objectification of conformism and in the monopoly of contradiction that is played out between the promise of freedom and the repressive illusion of heroic action. Bankers and political careers, governments and business, make-up and compulsive capitalism. We start over without erasing what we were. We debit narratives that collapse one after the other. The ashes burn and wander. We give up. The eternal return that never ends. We keep insisting. Without knowing why. There are no mirages. The senses are not fooled. They recompose themselves so as not to lose their minds. They can’t possibly know how to disrespect the state of things, authority, power, opportunity, success. The crowd announces the gentle customs. It falls asleep in the failed plot of the show, it confesses that it is too late for an exit. To and fro, on the razor's edge, on the surface of the earth, deeper and deeper. It is possible that you do not know when oblivion begins. The doctor will be there to condemn you to overcoming. Aliens with futuristic artillery will transform into angels to check us out. The belief in progress has not vanished. It has become a platform at the service of technological advancement. Around us the world is increasingly uninhabitable, sunk in Cartesian meditations that trigger salvation and vigilance for body and soul. Everything is the same. Everything remains the same. The meaning wrapped up in theories that ensure us authentic, original and elevated personal experiences. Manuals of good neighbourhood, of the art of living well, of gratitude, of caring and enlightening, declare that our furies are nothing more than the imbalance of emotions. We need liberation, peace, serenity, to patrol the mind. Stillness. We seek the fiction that the screen offers us and thanks to which we mobilize the reverie between the Real and the Symbolic — Mother and Son gives us back hypnosis and suffering, the impossible verisimilitude and death:

Son — I know why you feel so sorry for me. You fear that I will end up alone. Don't worry, that's nonsense. You won't die, I'm with you. We're together. No, you won't die.
Mother — It's nothing like that. A person lives well on its own. It's no tragedy, no disaster.
It's so sad. On top of that, you have to go through everything I suffered. It's so unfair.
Son — Get some sleep, Mother, I'll be back soon.7
Herzog tells us in his autobiography that in Munich his mother made a friend who had come from Eastern Turkey. To be immortal is to learn Turkish in the last six years of one’s life.
Jorge Luis Borges — I. II. III. The Trinity. What is Immortal is Eternity. Which is coming back soon.