The Blog is Dead. Long live the Blog!

http://losttrainsofthought.tumblr.com/

Disco Barcelona

“El objetivo de la fiesta es hacernos olvidar que somos seres solitarios, miserables y condenados a morir; en otras palabras, evitar que nos convirtamos en animales. Por eso el hombre primitivo tenía un sentido festivo muy desarrollado (…) Por el contrario, el occidental medio solo llega a un éxtasis insuficiente después de interminables fiestas tecno de las que sale sordo y drogado: no tiene sentido festivo alguno. ”

Michel Houellebecq

Barcelona es una ciudad de Fiesta. En su corazón hay tal cantidad de bares y discotecas que el sistema por el que se rige la ciudad y que impide su total suicidio, se tiene que moldear y adaptar según el nivel festivo que ocurra en determinadas épocas del año.

Durante el verano Barcelona desempeña un rol muy importante para el equilibrio mental de Europa, sobre todo de las juventudes de Europa; Barcelona se convierte, muy al pesar de alcaldes e intelectuales catalanes, en una discoteca continental.
La ciudad tiene un diseño perfecto para este motivo. Una oferta total de ambientes, es decir, una variedad muy amplia en la apariencia superficial de sus bares y en la decoración física y textil de sus clientes. Evidentemente diferenciados por niveles económicos, Barcelona puede dar el hábitat necesario para tener experiencias a la Cristiano Ronaldo o Paris Hilton, Manu Chao e incluso, Arthur Rimbaud.

La mayoría del mercado esta tomada por la estética del glamour estadounidense. Mejor expresada en fotografías subidas a Facebook donde se puede apreciar a un grupo de mujeres con la piel asoleada, maquilladas, usando vestidos cortos, tacones altos y si son talentosas, con una copa de champagne en la mano. Suelen estar besándose las mejillas o sencillamente sonriendo, con una dentadura blanca, ordenada y perfecta.
El caso masculino puede repetirse de modo idéntico o suplirse con una apariencia de intención intimidante, como de “gangster”, con brazos fuertes, pectorales (que parecen senos) y una cadena que brille.

El joven Cristiano Ronaldo y su novia Paris Hilton vuelven de Barcelona a sus respectivas ciudades completamente satisfechos de un viaje que recordaran siempre dentro de la dorada etapa de la juventud, donde lo que vale es disfrutar al máximo y ser feliz, emborracharse de emociones de euforia y éxtasis. No importa nada mas, por eso hay que sonreír a esa cámara, algún día necesitaremos la fotografía, después de esta borrachera, incluso pasada la resaca, el estéril olor de nuestra vida y la piel flácida de nuestra pareja nos querrá hacer dudar de que sucedió.

El monopolio musical sobre la escena esta en manos de la llamada música electrónica. Una forma artística que expresa mejor que nada el espíritu de estos jóvenes y de estas fiestas, un deseo incesante de ir mas rápido, de nunca detenerse y estar siempre entorpecidos por una sensación de ascenso. Basta con ver la danza que estos ritmos despiertan, una especie de carrera inmóvil y altamente individual cuya descripción y consejo practico se puede resumir en una serie de saltos rápidos y dentro de un eje que no supera el metro cuadrado. Considerando que el baile es el método mas eficiente para conseguir el objetivo de estos espacios (cortejar y aparear) es tentador pensar en las parejas que así se asocian como abejas sin alas.

Es importante reparar sobre la dimensión sexual que hay en esta fiesta. Al final la gente sale de fiesta con un objetivo explicito y ambiguo llamado diversión, pero este objetivo no se consigue siempre y tampoco se consigue con la frecuencia necesaria para considerarlo como el verdadero origen del fenómeno. El arrepentimiento es una actividad muy común en los días posteriores, basta con ver la enorme población de personas solitarias y silenciosas que pueblan los rincones de las discotecas mirando y chupando de sus bebidas como quien va con un psicoanalista narcoléptico, todos estas personas son claro ejemplo del riesgo económico y emocional que significa una discoteca. La fiesta ya no es una celebración pero una apuesta, un reto. ¿Qué es entonces lo que hace a los hombres insistir, tercos e impacientes, en conseguir esta quimera? Muy fácil, un enorme deseo sexual y vanidad, necesitada del deseo ajeno para justificar la existencia publica del individuo.

Otra vez, Houllebecq lo ilustra muy bien:

“Salimos del ámbito de la fiesta para entrar en e de una feroz competencia narcisista, con o sin opción a penetración (se considera clásicamente que el hombre necesita de la penetración para obtener gratificación narcisista deseada (…) La mujer, casi siempre, se conforma con la certeza de que la quieren penetrar).”

Por las noches, el centro de Barcelona es un lujoso mercado donde la juventud occidental puede ir a exhibirse y evaluar su potencial en tanto a objeto de deseo sexual. El turismo de esta ciudad se pelea entre la explotación de una tendencia arquitectónica, un equipo de futbol y un ritmo de incesantes y plásticos beats que dictan, cual sargento militar, la marcha de una juventud que canta desafinada y ebria en la decadencia de su época.

Por ultimo, el mejor consejo de Michel Houellebecq:

“Una buena fiesta es una fiesta breve”.

Sinceramente,

SEMV

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2tMV96xULk

The world is coming to an end

US --about to default; public sphere in shatters; fundamentalist-christian-tea-party-bastards imposing intolerant notions; xenophobia; shit-ass-mediocre-centrist-democrats.

Europe --immigration tensions; failure of the welfare state; high unemployment (Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal); riots in the UK over educational costs; fascists in Norway.

Middle East/Central Asia --Syria just started shooting on protesters; Lybian stalemate; Egypt incapable of forming a gov.; Turkish islamists gaining power; Afghanistan transition paved with corpses.

China --censorship up the ceiling; media block on train accident; dissent silenced.

Japan --still recovering from the earthquake, nuclear disaster waiting to happen.

Latin America --40 000 dead from drug war, and more to come.

East Africa --10 million in famine; ethnic strife in South Sudan; more than half young Ugandians have AIDS.

Add GLOBAL WARMING to the mix.

Need I say more?

Mural

Me fui a meter a las cloacas
Había reptiles que me miraban
Al fondo risas huecas

Los muros temblaban
Del techo caía un liquido marrón
En el suelo brillaban huesos

Me quede sordo y ciego
Sólo se podía gritar

Alguien estaba ahí riendo a solas
Mordiéndose las uñas
Sudando por los ojos

En el cuerpo tenía heridas de navaja
Todo enlodado y desnudo
Se burlaba de nosotros.

No se puede hablar con el
Se confiesa ajeno cascarón
Amigo de los insectos
Ovíparo humano de nulo color.

Sentado a un lado de la ventana
Nada lo saca de su jaula.

Sinceramente,

SEMV

Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

Habemos muchos —y por nosotros quiero decir: aquellos cuyas madres vivieron su juventud en los años setentas, en paises hispanohablantes— que debemos nuestra existencia a una cierta obesión erótica generacional que tenía como principio y fin a un hombre llamado Joan Manuel Serrat.

Sobre los Miopes Indignados

Poco a poco, los ídolos se van muriendo. Hace cien años fue Dios. Hoy, la Revolución ha muerto; y nosotros, los jovenes, la hemos matado. Como dijera Kafka, lo único que nos queda por hacer es dejar caer nuestras cabezas llenas de odio sobre nuestros pechos llenos de asco. ¿Es esto lo que queda del socialismo? ¿El derecho de la clase media a perpétuas vacaciones pagadas?

No, hermanos míos, la revolución no la haremos nosotros. Al contrario: si la revolución ocurre, nos la harán a nosotros. Y no será una fiesta en la plaza, con vino y guitarras, sino un momento aterrador, violento, lleno de muerte y horror —y nosotros, hermanos, seremos los primeros contra la pared. Después de todo, ¿quién es capaz de mirar a los ojos al Mesías, quién puede sostenerle la mirada al Ángel Exterminador?

Sinceramente,
NMMP

Machine

I ran the first few lines of Whitman's Song of Myself through all the possible combinations of Google Translate. From English I went to French, from French to Spanish, from Spanish to Chinese, Corean, Japanese, Malayan, Hebrew, Arabic, etc. Then I translated it back to English. This is what turned out:

I am this song
Therefore,
You are very good, you can hear me.

Welcome to spiritual food
In summer, the grass on the basis that I sit

My language, my blood, plastic, earth, air, all the atoms
After their parents or grandparents were born, born
Parents
A healthy start 37 years ago,

Sinceramente,
NMMP

Holes (Guest Post by Haider Shahbaz)

For your reading pleasure, the writing of Haider Shahbaz, dear friend of both your hosts NMMP and SEMV. This was originally published in 3quarksdaily, and can be found here: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/04/holes.html#more

HOLES

“On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.” Gabriel Garcia Marques, Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

“Before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for everyone there should be someone to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valour that one could have one becomes very alone.” Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Our lives are but the chronicles of a death foretold. Day to day, from birth, there is only one certainty: we will die. And so, like Marquez’s narrative, begins our journey; from the first sentence we know the end – the certainty of our death. Yet, the narrative is gripping. Life is compelling – in its own many small and mysterious ways. And what, after all, is compelling? How does Marquez make us read when he has whispered the end into our ears, casually, like the news of our death?

There are some things in life that they do not talk about in the classroom. One of them is holes. Not just any holes – bodily holes: assholes, vaginas, noses, sweat pores, mouths, ears, penises. Because of my friends, I became obsessed with holes. They liked peering in their assholes. At least, Martin did. He tried to write a poem about his asshole. The poem, well enough, made him fall in love with his asshole. Its darkness, its depth, its wrinkles and curves, the small pieces of shit stuck all over it. How manly, he said, he thought. Whenever he came out to drink whiskey in his ill-fitted plaid shirts, ginger hair, armed with an accent and a childish smile, he talked of his asshole. We all knew his asshole intimately and adored it as intensely as him. It became his muse. And we all peered into our assholes. Deep down, and smiled, privately.

Then, Nadia and her sari. I woke up to her putting it on. Round and round and round. All six yards of it, as she told me. All six yards. All of it to hide two little holes? All the mysteries, answers, that lie there, waiting. Her vagina was tasty. It smelled, strongly. A little mole, to the side, a reward for the curious. Soft, powerful, sad, funny: wholly hers to give, whomever she wanted to connect with. Her way to connect. Her way to speak. But before I started becoming aware of these bodily holes, I had completely forgotten about them.

I hadn’t been aware of my holes for a long time. I must have been aware at some point, maybe in the lost memories of my childhood, but I only remembered forgetting them. Slowly but surely, forgetting completely that I had holes in my body. When I was twelve, I started praying the Islamic prayer five times a day. I did not want to go to hell. Later, I found mysticism. Hell was not transcendence, god himself was. Later still, I found anarchism. I rejected all messiahs, all transcendence. I only needed truth, and it was in the utopia. But, I never gave up Truth. And it never pointed me to life. Truth never pointed me to my holes. There was always something higher to achieve. My body could not be the end. This world, my existence, these all too heavy molecules: surely, this could not be all. I became alone; I wanted to get to my inside, to my soul, my heart, my consciousness that would join me to the consciousness of all existence and all history and to the Truth.

But, finally, it was the trick of light midnight springtime floating air that reminded me of my holes, the holes that connected me to all existence. My friend, Carmen, told me to lie down, to close my eyes, to breath. And breath I did, with a stupid smile. But she shook her head. Breathe. Breathe. BREATHE. She said. She told me to feel the air as it went inside and came out. She told me to imagine it filling up my lungs, filling up my body, to feel it beat against my skin. Little by little, I did. I realized I had forgotten to breathe, forgotten my connection to the world: the writing process itself, the life of the narrative, the narrative of life. The air was beating inside of me. And I realize, only now, how stupid to talk of an inside, of a boundary, a barrier. That air I shared with all life and the world. A connection, so physical, so material, so present, it cannot be refused. There is no beginning and end to my body, only porous holes, reaching out to all else that exists. I am part of the world, so meticulously connected and mutually constructed. I had it: I keep living and I keep reading because I want to feel these connections. The pleasure is that of existence itself, of the narrative, of the word. Never of the end. I want to feel the world around me, breathing it in and out, asserting my existence but only through those of others. I had nothing more to look for; who needs a soul? I shared the gentle caresses and hedonistic orgies of existence with the physical world itself. It was the trick of light midnight springtime floating air. And, it was, the most satisfying trick of them all: to know that there is no trick, not even a magician.

Sinceramente,

Haider Syed Shahbaz

El Mal En La Semilla

Barcelona, abril de 2011. En la plaza de Sant Jaume, un grupo de mexicanos se reúne para protestar la muerte de 40 000 personas en la Guerra contra el Narcotráfico. Se lee la carta escrita por Javier Sicilia, poeta y padre de una de las víctimas quien ha convocado esta y otras manifestaciones. Después se leen textos de los voluntarios presentes. Entre el ruido de los turistas y las obras en una tienda de ropa cercana, escuchar las lecturas es casi imposible. Los policías miran sin entender muy bien que esta pasando, los mexicanos siguen leyendo aunque casi nadie los pueda escuchar. En el suelo hay un intento de altar de muertos con un curioso diseño que incluye papel picado. Personas se saludan y hablan en voz baja, como para no interrumpir al inaudible declamador. Turistas variopintos se acercan a sacar fotografías. Cuando ya no hay mas textos que leer, alguien propone un minuto de silencio. Todos se sientan en el suelo, y aun cuando el silencio es imposible, ahí están cuarenta o sesenta mexicanos sentados con la boca cerrada. Al final alguien empieza a gritar “¡No mas muertes!” o “¡No mas sangre!” Los presentes corean unas cuantas veces, hasta que el canto común empieza a menguar y se produce un extraño momento de incomodidad. Es obligado dudar sobre la razón de ser de este tipo de eventos, especialmente en el extranjero. Al final siempre queda la dignidad del símbolo, pero la impotencia experimentada cuando el encuentro concluye es una representación elocuente de la experiencia del grueso de los mexicanos ante la Guerra: la impotencia, la incertidumbre, la espera.

Cinco años después de su toma de posesión Felipe Calderón puede firmar la etapa mas sangrienta de la historia reciente de México. Algunos lo acusan directamente, otros defienden su coraje. Una cosa es cierta: nuestro país está en Guerra. Ahora bien, si se esta haciendo de un modo inteligente o no, es otro tema. Si en ciertas partes de la republica el crimen organizado y el gobierno son parte de la misma institución, también es otro tema. Si el político es un narco que se esconde o el narco es un político que sale en la tele, todos podemos discutir, especular, pelear. El único hecho certero es que México esta en Guerra y hasta el momento 40 000 personas han fallecido en consecuencia. No se puede vivir en un estado en Guerra sin tener una posición política ante esta, pero esta posición inescapable no significa que necesariamente tengamos consciencia sobre la ubicación real de nuestras acciones en relación a la Guerra.

José López Portillo, nuestro trágico y particular Citizen Kane, fue muy atinado cuando dijo que México corría el riesgo de convertirse en un país de cínicos. Al hacer de su vida el máximo ejemplo de ese mismo cinismo, firmó una profecía terrible. El problema nacional de hoy reside precisamente en esto. Si el país está roto es por que todos pensamos que ante el desastre se podía mirar al otro lado y que no iba pasar nada. Durante décadas abusamos de este extraño privilegio y las consecuencias, tormentas de cadáveres encarrerados desde el pasado, empiezan a revolcarnos hoy. Y sin embargo, todos estamos indignados, como si el problema no fuera nuestro, como tuviera evidente solución.

Ser Presidente es un trabajo sucio, en México y en todo el mundo. Los políticos han de pagar un precio para llegar a cualquier sitio de poder, ellos lo saben, nosotros lo sabemos. El poder es necesario para intentar cualquier cambio de gran alcance. Cuando se elige a un candidato, se le concede –por las razones que sean- una posición de poder para enfrentar los problemas que afligen a las mismas personas que lo votaron (y muchas más).

Independientemente de las dudosas condiciones bajo las que se resolvieron las ultimas elecciones presidenciales, el crimen organizado era un mal que ya afligía a la sociedad civil, por lo tanto, era un mal que se tenía combatir. Perderse en argumentos que delegitimicen al actual gobierno por los probables fraudes electorales del 2006 es mirar a otro lado, peor aun, es politiqueo. La Guerra que se está peleando hoy es mucho mas que partidísimo, el mal que la originó es mucho más viejo que el auge de sus muertes, el daño que el enemigo puede causar es irreversible y amenaza con la destrucción del Estado. Ante un problema así, las soluciones no pueden ser sistematizadas con argumentos solamente políticos. La culpa no es sólo de Calderón. La culpa no es sólo de los narcos. La culpa no es sólo del PRI. La culpa no es solo del Chapo. Nosotros somos la culpa.

Si el problema ha de enfrentarse no sólo se puede hacer desde el flanco militar, de esto no cabe duda. Sin embargo, debemos preguntarnos que podemos aspirar a lograr con estas movilizaciones sociales, declamaciones, cánticos y minutos de silencio. Si bien las marchas no pueden hacer mucho contra las dinámicas económicas, históricas y sociales que son el fondo de este conflicto, es importante reconocer que pueden tener un impacto enorme sobre la mentalidad de nuestra sociedad. Este movimiento —llamémosle como queramos: hastalamadrismo, nomasangrismo— tiene la capacidad de iniciar un proceso mental que puede llevarnos a un consenso, a una cierta cohesión de la sociedad que es precisamente la costura necesaria para componer la rotura que desangra al país. Es esta falta de cohesión, que está detrás de la tradición de saqueo impresa en el genoma nacional. Es esta idea de “yo y ellos,” “nosotros y ustedes,” que tiene a dos razas separadas entre ricos y pobres —grupos radicalmente separados y autoexcluyentes que, por cierto, comparten y viven de un modo diferente e injusto la misma Guerra. Si el gobierno fuese inteligente colaboraría con un presupuesto inusitado en la historia del país destinado a la prevención y rehabilitación, así como el apoyo incondicional que merece cualquier iniciativa ciudadana para ayudar a resolver este problema.

Cada uno de nosotros debe asumir su responsabilidad ética —que es, al mismo tiempo, una responsabilidad política— ante la tormenta que vivimos, y actuar de manera congruente. Si no, los minutos de silencio son solamente un montón de personas sentadas en el suelo, con la boca cerrada, esperando —y así no se ganan las guerras.

Sinceramente,

SEMV

And yet, Not Even (An Afterword to the Epilogue to Fear and Trembling).

"One must go further, one must go further." This impulse to go further is an ancient thing in the world. Heraclitus the obscure, who deposited his thoughts in his writings and his writings in the Temple of Diana (for his thoughts had been his armor during his life, and therefore he hung them up in the temple of the goddess), Heraclitus the obscure said, "One cannot pass twice through the same stream." Heraclitus the obscure had a disciple who did not stop with that, he went further and added, "One cannot do it even once." Poor Heraclitus, to have such a disciple! By this amendment the thesis of Heraclitus was so improved that it became an Eleatic thesis which denies movement, and yet that disciple desired only to be a disciple of Heraclitus … and to go further–not back to the position Heraclitus had abandoned"

From the Epilogue to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling.

1

And why add yet another word —is this not going further? Why not let the text fall silent? Any explication would do violence to the text explained, especially in this case, when the text refuses and rejects explication, when obscurity is the essence of the text. And yet only a naïve interpretation would require silence from us —because that would imply that the text contains some esoteric truth that can only be reached through an individual encounter with its mystery, and that is not the case. The message of Fear and Trembling is not a positive assertion nor a secret, but a declaration of ignorance. It follows that an attempt at theoretical clarification is harmless, if not terribly useful: it will simply confirm the honest reader’s suspicion that he did not understand. The only understanding that can be taken from a theoretical assertion of ignorance —be it the text itself or its afterword— is a negative one: the humbling realization that we are not being honest when we say we have understood, and that if we wish to be honest the task that lies ahead of us is daunting.

2

So do not accuse me of going further, for I am only taking a step back. After all, every advance in understanding, if it is truly an advance, constitutes a recession. This conclusion should not surprise us, diligent readers of these beautiful cacophonies, for if Ethics are to collapse upon a paradox, why should Epistemology or any other branch of philosophy be spared? If our thoughts are honest —which is to say: if our thoughts are not merely thoughts but the very substance of our lives— then the only understanding we can ever hope to reach is that we cannot understand. And yet the philistines somehow believe they have made progress! To unmask their dishonesty we need only picture the physiological effects that actual radical doubt would have on someone unfortunate enough to be cursed with such a thought. If doubt is not merely a position assumed like an actor assumes a role, if it is something more than a mere a thought experiment conducted in the safety of an isolated laboratory, it could only result in paralyzing anxiety. Doubt that is something other than hypocrisy could only lead to fear and trembling —and no further. Not that I claim this from personal experience —I confess myself a hypocrite, and offer this afterword as evidence— but this I can say: to speak of doubt as if it were ground solid enough to support the crystal palace of reason implies either enormous naïveté or unfathomable perversity.

3

But do not accuse me, or Johannes, of going further, because the Greeks already understood. If one is good enough an archeologist to discern the Socratic ruins from among the Platonic restoration, the traces of a sublime and self-conscious mis-understanding begin to emerge. The story is well known: a group of beautiful young men kidnap the old teacher and sit him down in the beachfront condo of one of their fathers; for although the beloved begetter may have lost all traces of virility he still needs some kind of entertainment and the teacher is a famed conversationalist. Laughing, the teacher takes his revenge: one by one they try to go further —the theme at hand is Justice, but it could have been anything— and each time he gently pushes them back. The answer that comes at the end of the night, that ridiculous myth that the beautiful young men are to tell to the people, is plaster spread over the cracks of the ruins by the next generation —a sad attempt at going further forwards, the result of perishing to the temptation of providing a positive answer instead of a further question. More than two thousand years ago, the honest spirit of Socrates already knew that the only knowledge he could aspire to was non-knowledge. Such was his honesty that he refused to write anything down: irony could only be learnt through personal experience; it could only be lived.

4

And yet it is possible, even desirable, to take yet another step back, and in a sense go further than Socrates —for irony may be a high passion indeed, but it is not the highest. This is what Johannes de Silentio is describing, with enough courage to admit that he could not perform it. Knowing that we cannot know is still knowing, understanding that we cannot understand is still understanding —and perhaps, just perhaps, there are some spirits who are strong enough to renounce even that renunciation. But make no mistake: behind irony there is more than nothingness and nihilism. Behind irony there is faith, a miraculous reconciliation of the paradox. He who has gone further than Socrates can only live on the basis of faith, which amounts to living without any basis. And yet the crowds of philistines think they can believe! Faith, honest faith, is even more difficult than honest doubt —so difficult that it approaches the impossible. Understanding that contradiction is a step back, but in this paradoxical world that means a step forward.

5

As such, Johannes can only write about faith by pointing out its deficiency, and for that same reason I can add yet another word to the cacophony without contradicting the task. The text forces the reader to take a step back. This is what is meant with the dictum that no generation can learn what is essential from the previous one: no one, not Socrates, not Johannes —certainly not Hegel— can live in place of the individual, and the truly essential is to be lived, not only thought. Therefore the only honest philosopher is he who replies to every question with a “not even that” —which perhaps explains the constant repetition of I cannot understand that runs through Johannes’ text.

6

Heraclitus’ disciple was being honest when he tried to go further —and not back— to what his teacher had already abandoned. He understood the paradox that the only advance possible was a recession. As such, his twisting of the teacher’s sentence was an attempt at removing one more level from the crystal palace. The next step back —the next step forwards— would have been to go ahead and step in the river anyway. That would have been faith. But the next generation did not stay true to their task —which was to live— and tried to make the disciple’s taking-a-step back into a going-forwards Hence the Eleatic denial of motion. The fact that they went on walking around and talking and laughing is proof enough of their dishonesty.

7

So what is this task that we are to bring back to life and make beautiful for honest and earnest spirits? Perhaps it is the Examined Life, which cannot be taught but only learnt. If it is an honest examination, it will inevitably result in fear and trembling. A lucky few will go back further enough and reach the bittersweet laughter of irony. The blessed fewer will go back as far as it is possible and arrive at miracle of faith. Though stating it like that, in such schematic fashion, may already be a foolish going further.

Sinceramente,

NMMP

On the Drug War (Oh mia patria sì bella e perduta)

Ve, pensamiento, con alas doradas,

pósate en las praderas y en las cimas

donde exhala su suave fragancia

el dulce aire de la tierra natal!

¡Saluda las orillas del Jordán

y las destruidas torres de Sión!

¡Oh, mi patria, tan bella y perdida!

¡Oh recuerdo tan caro y fatal!

Arpa de oro de fatídicos vates,

¿por qué cuelgas muda del sauce?

Revive en nuestros pechos el recuerdo,

¡Que hable del tiempo que fue!

Al igual que el destino de Sólima

Canta un aire de crudo lamento

que te inspire el Señor un aliento,

que al padecer infunda virtud,

que al padecer infunda virtud,

que al padecer infunda virtud,

al padecer, la virtud!.

Esta es la traducción de Wikipedia del Va Pensiero, uno de los coros del Nabucco de Verdi. El coro está compuesto de esclavos Hebreos —la ópera toma su anécdota del Éxodo— y se convirtió en el himno de la reunificación Italiana en el siglo XIX.

Una de las líneas, "Oh mia patria sì bella e perduta!" me hace pensar en México. Habitualmente hago el intento de olvidarme de mi país y de su triste suerte —en parte por cobardía, en parte porque el asunto está completamente fuera de mis manos, y no vale la pena sufrir por lo que no podemos corregir. Sin embargo, al leer hoy sobre las fosas comunes en Tamaulipas, la memoria de mi país regresa insidiosa y terrible.

Que quede claro: no soy en modo alguno patriota. El discurso público mexicano me causa nauseas, tanto en el lado de la política oficial como en el de los activistas, y nuestra tendencia colectiva al resentimiento —en el sentido Nietzscheano del término— me desagrada de sobremanera. Esta noche, pese a todo, no puedo contenerme, y pienso en México y en sus muertos, y me parte el alma. Perdónenme el sentimentalismo, perdónenme la pusilanimidad que en vez de a la rabia y a la acción me empuja a una tristeza contemplativa —pero como bien decía Montaigne, ante las verdaderas tragedias la única reacción apropiada es el silencio. O tal vez, solo tal vez, la música.

Sinceramente,
NMMP

Fragment (I can imagine another Odyssey)

In the Odyssey, as things stand, Odysseus and Penelope could never again be happy together. Perhaps that explains the poem’s unsettling and unsatisfying ending. After years of waiting and anxious expectation, they would find themselves the same, and the paradox that made Odysseus leave home in the first place —because only a very naïve reader would think that he actually cared about the whole Helen affair— has remained unresolved. Odysseus leaves home because Ithaca had become impossible, but if he always planned to return, then Ithaca would never become possible again. I can imagine another Odyssey, however, in which Odysseus leaves without knowing what will happen. Penelope too shares this not knowing, and as such she picks among the suitors the one —or the ones— she likes best, and spends her days in happiness sometimes and in sadness others, as she sees fit; never forgetting Odysseus but not consumed by his memory either. Odysseus fights in Troy and when he leaves he does not try to guide home his vessel, but rather lets the ship run free, like Zhuangzi’s sage. He too, forgets Penelope but does not forget her, and lives his days in happiness and sadness as they come, visiting many foreign cities and meeting wise men and sea-nymphs. Then one day, after one of his countless shipwrecks, he finds himself on a desert shore. It takes him a while to recognize that it is his Ithaca. He walks up to the palace in a daze, unrecognized by everyone. When he enters the Great Hall he finds Penelope alone: she has lived out the loves that she built with the suitors of her choice and now she is once again free. As he approaches her she recognizes him immediately —the scenes of the bed and the scars, of course, remain intact— but she does not throw herself at him, nor he at her. They are mature enough to know that instead they should greet each other as friends. As such, Odysseus asks the Queen —for when he left for Troy he had, by necessity, to renounce his kingdom— permission to stay as her guest. Penelope grants him this wish. Over the next few months —or the next few years: my Greeks have medical science comparable to that of our age— they spend time with each other, they talk until late at night, they go on long walks on the beach, they listen to the bard sing. Perhaps they even share a night or two in their well-rooted bed. And then one day, when they have gotten to know each other again, one day, when least expected, they find themselves lovers again. Ithaca has once again become possible. At the bottom of their hearts, they both always hoped for this, but this was a hope that included in itself a certain kind of renunciation: it wouldn’t have mattered if things had been otherwise. Friendship would have been enough, and it is precisely this understanding of the contingency of their love what allows it to flourish again. Only then, I think, could Odysseus and Penelope live out their years together.

Eleven Theses on the Ideology of the Mexican Left

1

Every appeal to orthodoxy takes the form of a call to a return to some lost origin, which is associated with “authentic” belief. When this kind of appeal is made in the context of a belief-system that has at its core the rejection of all myths of origin and of the notion of “authentic belief,” the results are bound to be paradoxical. As such, the only way to be an orthodox Marxist is not to be an orthodox Marxist. To keep Marxism from becoming itself an ideology, the followers of Marx must follow him in method rather than in content, and remain forever critical. They must take him not as a prophet but as a Zen master: after the ladder has been climbed, one must drop the ladder and kill the master.

2

In the same way that the attempt to redeem Christianity from the atrocities of the Catholic church by declaring that the Borgia Pope was “not a real Christian” stinks of sentimentality, the desire to redeem Marxism from the crimes of Stalin and Mao is not only a-historical, but also profoundly ideological. Marx was concerned with real men and women, as they appear in their activity. It then seems dishonest to excuse Marxism from the weight of the real world and judge it as if it was a product of pure reason, floating pristine in the ethereal regions of Platonic ideas. Factual, historical Marxism is what Marxists do and have done.

3

It is almost unbelievable that the followers of the most historicists of thinkers feel as though they can ignore history. The world has changed radically since 1848, and as the Chinese people learnt in the most bitter of ways, China is not Germany. The attempts at interpreting realities different from those of XIXth century Europe using Marxist categories were disastrous precisely because they failed to see this very basic fact —and they remained disastrous because such interpretations solidified as the ideology of the new ruling class. The question “Is Marxism ideological?” has a historical answer.

4

Whenever the left becomes dogmatic, it becomes an enemy for all progressive causes. Is it not a paradox that “real-communism” vanished all critical voices to Siberia? When every line of thought but the party line is rejected, when the yelled epithet “revisionist” or the inexplicable insult “neo-liberal” is considered the strongest of arguments and the most penetrative of analysis, the left begins to resemble the right —to the point that its relationship to reactionary forces becomes that which certain positivists think philosophy has to science: ancilla —the little helper.

5

This is extremely pernicious because liberation has not been achieved; on the contrary, the structures of oppression are more insidious than ever. Yet it is foolish and ill fated to attempt to attack the demons of post-industrial capitalism in a post-colonial world with the weapons of the industrial revolution. What is more, if all the energies of progressive politics are spent in a dogmatic refusal to acknowledge the real world, the real world is unlikely to change.

6

This should not be taken to mean that we must abandon Marx. On the contrary: we must bring him back to life —his specter has haunted us long enough. The followers of Marx must remember that they are revolutionaries: all that is solid must turn into thin air; no new ideology must be allowed to solidify. If this means finally letting Lenin rot in his grave, so be it.

7

Yet it is important to keep in mind that Marxism is not the ultimate, final theory. It is not the end of philosophy, but its redefinition: philosophy will no longer be the disciplined search for eternal, ultimate truths, but an attitude of constant suspicion, of permanent circumspection. We should take from Marx a new conception of the task of thought: not the establishing of theories, but a never-ending practice of criticism.

8

This circumspective attitude, this particular kind of attention to one’s surroundings is essential for change to take place. If the followers of Marx do not pay close attention to the world around them, the strait gate may slip by them. The philosophers of the future must have a keen pair of eyes, so that they may see the moment when everything is at stake and then act with decision.

9

The followers of Marx must also shed that beautiful illusion that the messiah will one day inevitably come. The XXth century has shown us that the messiah always arrives too late, and only when he is no longer needed. The followers of Marx must act, even if it is in small ways, in insignificant ways. Waiting for the revolution is the best way to guarantee that the revolution will never come.

10

That Communist Parties around the world are an endangered species bears witness to all of this: Marxism has been unsuccessful, to the point that it resembles a dying animal that cannot feed itself. Communism, like love, must be reinvented.

11

If the followers of Marx truly desire to change the world, they must reinterpret it constantly —lest they begin to resemble their enemies.We must create a new Marx every day and kill him every night.

Sinceramente,

NMMP

Death Without End (Gorostiza in English)

Rival of Octavio Paz, this is a fragment of his major poem Muerte Sin Fin. SEMV likes him, and hated me for expressing a certain dismissal of his poetry. As penance for what I now recognize as a childish mistake, I present my version of the beginning of the work.

Death Without End

1

Full in myself, besieged in my skin
by an intangible god that suffocates me,
falsely announced perhaps
by a radiant atmosphere of lights
that hides my spilled consciousness,
my shattered wings into shards of air,
my blind and graceless plodding through the mud;
full in myself –glutted—I discover myself
in the bewildered image of water,
nothing but an unwithering stagger,
a collapse of fallen angels
into the intact delight of their own weight
that has nothing
but a blank face
half sunken already, like an agonizing laughter;
fallen into the tenuous muslin of the cloud
and in the ill omens of the singing sea
--more the aftertaste of salt or birth of cumulus
than the mere hurry of accosted sea-foam.

Sinceramente,

NMMP

Emily Dickinson en Español: Noches Santas (Wild Nights)

Wild Nights

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!

—Ø—

Noches Santas

¡Noches santas! ¡Noches santas,
tendríamos tú y yo!

¡Lujosas, blancas, vastas,
vastas, vastas, noches santas!

Fútil el viento al corazón
que ha hallado puerto,
fútil la brújula,
fútil la carta, ¡fútil el viento!

¡Navegar el edén!

¡Ah! ¡La mar!

¡Por una noche
atracar en tí!

Sinceramente,

NMMP

The Room of the Poet

1. Introduction: The Poet as Mental Refugee

For all their fame and renown as Parisian prowlers and pre-eminent practitioners of flânerie, Rainer Maria Rilke and Charles Baudelaire —or at least their narrative voices— spend a remarkable amount of time indoors, to the point that it would seem that the private room is as privileged a setting for their literature as the busy city-street. The love of interiors is not exclusive of these two writers; on the contrary, it appears to be one of the common threads of modern literature. One recalls, for example, that when Proust opens Remembrance of Things Past with an elegiac description of the processes of waking up and falling asleep, the private room becomes an image of great importance:

I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: […] rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world.

In this passage, as in the work of Proust at large, the physical setting of the room is intimately tied to a kind of mental activity that can be termed inner experience. Proust —and with him most modernist writers, including Rilke and Baudelaire— is primarily concerned with such experience; that which, like a room to which only one person has the key, is accessible only for the subject who experiences it. One could then posit that these elements are not independent from each other; and that, as Proust’s text suggests later on, the room is a metaphor for the mind: “I had succeeded in filling [the room] with my own personality until I thought no more of the room than of myself.”

This movement towards interiority, as a modern literary phenomenon, seems to have historical and sociological causes. It arises as a defense mechanism that the individual uses to protect himself from the growing social pressures of modernity. The mind and the private room become a refuge from the street and a safe heaven from what Georg Simmel called “the sovereign powers of society.”The “blasé attitude” that the father of social theory describes as a “protection of the inner life against the domination of the metropolis” can be read as a description of interiority. After all, in it is implicit a “turning inwards” of the subject. This description seems compatible with the anti-social nature of the works of Rilke and Baudelaire, for whom interiority seems to be a response to an exterior that threatens their very existence as individuals. The antagonism to other people and to exterior events described by Simmel as directly proportional to the “intensification of consciousness”coincides precisely with the privileging of inner experience seen in the work of modernist writers. Faced with the totalizing socialization of the modern city —what Baudelaire, greatest of all physiognomist, would call “the tyranny of the human face” the poet retreats into his room and into his subjectivity —and modern poetry is born.

With its many blessings and protections, however, interiority also brings isolation. The interior man begins to doubt if communication with an external other is at all possible. Indeed, as the narrative voices of Rilke and Baudelaire soon discover, locking oneself up in a room can provide protection from a threatening world and safeguard one’s individuality, but it also seems to preclude any chance of communion with others. This isolation becomes twice problematic when the narrative voices realize that they suffer from profound solitude, a burning desire for this apparently unfeasible communication. The narrative voices of Rilke and Baudelaire, for all their displays of disgust at social interaction, are constantly calling for someone —usually their mothers— to visit their rooms. Baudelaire’s paraphrasing of Pascal puts it extremely lucidly: “Almost all our woes come from not being capable of remaining in our rooms.” The problem, of course, is that it is impossible to remain forever alone in one’s room.

This tension between the desire to be a distinct, independent individual and yet also be an integral part of the world can be called the anguish of interiority. This essay will attempt to describe the use that Rilke and Baudelaire try to make of interiority as a means of preserving individuality, then point out the problems that this defense mechanism presents for them, and then sketch what appears a solution: writing, poetry itself.

2. Becoming Interior I: Death and Aristocracy in Malte Laudris Brigge

The use of interiority as a defense from the de-individualizing tendencies of modern society is first apparent in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laudris Brigge when the titular protagonist discusses the differences between dying in a hospital and dying at home. Rilke has his protagonist write: “In the Hôtel de Dieu, [people] die in five hundred and fifty nine beds. It is a factory production line. […] The wish for a death of one’s own is becoming ever more infrequent.” To die in a hospital is to die a public, indifferent death, identical to the deaths of hundreds of people. To die in a private room at home, however, is different; it is a distinctive, unique death, tailored precisely to the size of the individual. Malte exemplifies this with his narration of the death of his grandfather, Chamberlain Brigge: “The rambling old manor was too small for [Chamberlain Brigge’s] death. […] He was forever demanding to be carried to one room to the next. […] He would be borne upstairs [and] he would enter the room where his sainted mother has passed away twenty-three years ago. […] The dogs in particular seemed immensely excited to be in a room where everything had its smell.” The connection between spatial interiority and personal individuality is evinced by the dog’s reactions: a room where everything has its smell is a room that has been taken over by the particular smells of its occupants. Perhaps there is here an implicit contrast with the chemical, aseptic, de-humanized smell of public hospitals. In any case, when the Chamberlain finally expires in the same room where his beloved mother passed away, he dies a true individual.

In the same description of the death of his grandfather, Malte writes: “In sanatoriums […] you die one of the deaths available at the institution. […] If, however, you die at home, the natural choice is that courteous death the genteel classes die.” In what at first sight appears as mere snobbishness, Rilke’s character also links individuality and interiority to social class. For Malte, the aristocratic character seems to be a marker of individuality, opposed to the undifferentiated mode of being of the “common people.” His hatred —or rather his fear— of what he terms the cities’ “untouchables” responds less to reactionary politics than to a fear of becoming de-individualized. The true tragedy of poverty is the tragedy of the modern city: anonymity. This fear of the untouchables is stated most clearly later on, during Malte’s description of his visits to the Bibliotèque Nationale:

In the busiest of streets, a little man or an old woman will suddenly appear, nod, show me something and disappear again, as though all that was needed had now been attended too. It is possible that one day they will even venture as far as my room. […] But here [in the Bibliothèque Nationale], my dears, here I am safe from you. One needs a special card to have access to the reading room.

Malte is terrified that these “untouchables” will irrupt into his room, violating his interiority and thus destroying his individuality. The passage, moreover, serves to demonstrate a link between physical and mental interiority: the acts of reading and writing, pure mental activity, become associated with the reading room itself. The “untouchables” of the city are entirely exterior; they do not read and write. Since they do not have access to the reading room, it must follow, that they do not have the complex interior life of the aristocrat.

For Malte, then, aristocracy is synonymous with individuality; it is an objective and external system of distinction. As such, when modernity eats away at the old aristocratic order, it also threatens the existence of independent individuals. The death of Malte’s grandfather is by equal parts pre-modern and aristocratic, and these two characteristics are closely linked to each other. Here, again, individuality is linked to private spaces: “[Now] one has no one and nothing oneself, and one travels the world with a suitcase and a box of books, and when all’s said and done, no curiosity at all. What kind of life is it, with neither house nor inherited things nor dogs?” This is when the inward turn occurs for Malte: since he has lost his ancestral home, the only way left for him to differentiate himself from the crowd are his rented room, his thoughts, and his memories: “If only one had one’s memories at least. But then, who does? If only one had a childhood —but it is as if it were buried deep.” The Notebooks constitute precisely an attempt at unburying those memories, and in fact the physical notebook itself could be seen as a representation of private space and a substitute for the old manor house. After all, journals —like rooms— are fitted with locks to which only one person has the key. This is, then, how interiority is born: since the external order of differentiation that existed in the aristocratic age has disappeared, Malte must retreat into his subjectivity and create a private system that allows him to see himself as different from the people he sees in the street.

3. Becoming Interior II: Lies and the Odiousness of Society in The Parisian Prowler

Throughout his “Little Prose Poems,” Baudelaire comes off as a dedicated misanthrope. In the Dog and the Scent-Bottle, for example, he compares the public to a dog who cannot differentiate the finest perfumes from excrement: “You, unworthy companion of my dreary life, you resemble the public, which must never be offered delicate perfumes that exasperate them, but only meticulously selected garbage.”If Malte is afraid of the people of the city, Baudelaire is disgusted by them —to the point that merely touching their skin is difficult: “Today I] greeted about twenty persons, fifteen of whom I didn’t know; distributed handshakes in the same proportion, and without eve the precaution of buying gloves.” This hatred for the anonymous members of the metropolitan crowd sometimes takes the form of outright violence, as in The Bad Glazier, where the narrative voice describes his arbitrary attack on a poor craftsman whose only crime is not making life beautiful:

“I went to the balcony and I grabbed a little pot of flowers, and when the man reappeared at the door entrance, I let my engine of war drop down perpendicularly on the back edge of his pack. […] Drunk with madness, I shouted at him furiously: “Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!”

Indeed, Baudelaire’s main complaint of the inhabitants of the city seems to be an aesthetic one: they are both ugly and incapable of perceiving beauty, completely useless as both producers and consumers of art. This aesthetic incapability is intrinsically tied to their hypocritical moralizing, exemplified by the odious dictum of the journal editor encountered in At One O’clock in the Morning: “Here we are on the side of respectability.” Elsewhere, the narrative voice spits out at another journalist: “I especially want my damned journalist to let me enjoy myself as I like.” The crowd, Baudelaire seems to uphold, is incapable of making life beautiful because they do not see past their moralities: they want everything and everyone to be the good, that is, exactly the same. This equation of all people and of all things by definition excludes beauty, which is always born from uniqueness and individuality. The poet’s “adoration of evil” is then an attempt at an aesthetic differentiation: Baudelaire separates himself from the disgusting inhabitants of the city by “boasting (why?) of several bad deeds [he] never committed, and cravenly denied some other wrongs [he] carried out with joy.”

The relation of this aesthetic-immoralist method of individuation to interiority lies in Baudelaire’s self-questioning: the “why?” of the last quote, brought to the reader’s attention by a set of parenthesis, is an invitation to reflection. Why, indeed, does the poet need to lie about his evil deeds, if his aim is solely to show to the philistines that he is not like them? Perhaps it is because, through insincerity, he achieves an even more profound kind of individuation. His lie creates interiority; it builds a dichotomy between his inner and outer self, providing him with the private joy of knowing that no one truly knows him. Lies are, after all, a preeminent example of inner experience.

It is significant that Baudelaire should betray his turn toward interiority in At One O’clock in the Morning. The action of the poem is very simple: the narrative voice returns to his room after a long day enduring a “dreadful life” in a “dreadful city.” As such, Baudelaire’s creation of psychological interiority through lies becomes closely associated with the very physical privacy offered to him by his room: “First, a double turn in the lock. I think this turn of the key will increase my solitude and fortify the barricades at present separating me from the world.”Baudelaire’s lie is, after all, a linguistic turn of a key, the creation of a metaphysical barricade separating him from the world. Returning to the incident of the flowerpot and the glazier, it is significant that Baudelaire should attack the poor man from his balcony; a space that is not only interior but also, in both a literal and figurative sense, above —this last term understood with the dual meaning of the French word supérieur. His senseless act of violence, like his lie, is an expulsion of the other from his two interiorities: his room and his inner self.

It then evident that the narrative voice of The Parisian Prowler and the titular protagonist of The Notebooks of Malte Laudris Brigge are trying to achieve the same feat: an assertion of their individuality in the face of a society that threatens it. Though the paths they traverse in order to achieve this are formally different, the content of their actions is the same: it constitutes a retreat into private interiors, both physical and psychological.

4. The Anguish of Interiority I: Isolation in The Parisian Prowler

Judging by how much anguish separation from the world causes Rilke and Baudelaire, it would almost seem that they have been too successful in their creation of a private interiority —as if, like madmen, they had immured themselves in their own rooms. The suffering brought forth by this excessive success in the defense of individuality becomes manifest as a fear of the impossibility of communication, exemplified by Malte’s reflection on an incident in his childhood:

I already felt that something had come into my life, mine and none other, that I alone would have to bear with me henceforth, forever and ever. I somehow vaguely [foresaw] that that was how life would be: full of special things that are intended for one person only and cannot be put into words. […] I pictured what it could be like to go through life filled with inner experience, in silence.

And indeed, the interior man is condemned to silence —or at least to an empty language that fails at communicating the true nature of his experience. This is what Baudelaire describes in The Eyes of the Poor, a bitter diatribe against a lover who is as incapable of understanding as the poet is of explaining himself “Ah, you want to know why I hate you today! It will probably be less easy for you to understand why than for me to explain; for you are, I believe, the most beautiful example of feminine impermeability anyone can meet.” Somewhat disingenuously, the poet projects his failings on his lover; it is actually he who is impermeable and impenetrable, and, by his own standards, feminine. His lover, as it turns out later, is in fact quite transparent, and openly expresses how she feels. When a family of poor people stares at the couple as they dine in an elegant café, Baudelaire describes the situation in the following manner:

Not only was I moved by that family of eyes, but I felt a little ashamed of our glasses and decanters, larger than our thirst. I turned my gaze towards you, dear love, in order to read my thoughts there. As I was plunging into your eyes […] you said, “I can’t stand those people with their eyes wide open like entrance gates! Can’t you ask the headwaiter to send them away?

The anguish here, however, comes from the fact that the experience expressed by his lover differs from that of Baudelaire. The same phenomenon —a family of poor people staring into a café— provokes in them diametrically different responses. Both Baudelaire and his lover are subjective and interior, they exist in separate rooms, so to speak, and this fact destroys the illusion of communion that is common to almost all Western conceptions of love. Baudelaire acknowledges this explicitly:

We had indeed promised each other that all our thoughts would be shared with each other, and that our two souls would henceforth be one. —Anyway, there is nothing original about this dream, except that, dreamed by everyone, no one has realized it.

The difference between Baudelaire and his lover is, of course, that the lover does not think twice and naively shares her thoughts, distasteful as they are, with the poet; whereas he remains silent and impermeable. “How difficult to understand each other,” Baudelaire complaints, “and how incommunicable thought is, even among people who love each other!” Taking into consideration the fact that Baudelaire’s lover does not seem to have much trouble communicating her thoughts to him, it seems that the problem is exclusively the poet’s. Baudelaire’s metaphysical barricades have turned against him.

Indeed, Baudelaire’s refusal to communicate his experience to his lover may very well respond to the extremely defensive stance that he takes in relation to his individuality. In On Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, the great theorist of interiority and coiner of the terms anguish and inner experience, describes the danger that all acts of communication represent for the integrity of the individual:

I only communicate outside of me by letting go or being pushed to this outside. Still, outside of me, I don’t exist. There’s no doubt in my mind that to let go of existence inside me and to look for it outside is to take a chance on ruining or annihilating precisely whatever it is without which the outer experience wouldn’t have appeared in the first place —the self […] We are crushed by twin pincers of nothingness. By not communicating, we’re annihilated into the emptiness of an isolated life. By communicating, we likewise risk being destroyed.

Baudelaire treasures his individuality so much that communication becomes a very real problem from him. Malte echoes this concern when he writes: “My God, if only some of this could be shared. But would it then be, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude.” Isolation is the price of interiority, and as the language that Baudelaire uses in The Eyes of the Poor makes very clear, this is a source of great discomfort for the inner man. What he calls his “hatred” for his lover is in fact a kind of envy: she, simple as she is, is capable of expressing what she feels and is therefore not alone.

5. The Anguish of Interiority II: Solitude in The Notebooks of Malte Laudris Brigge

In one of the few times that Malte makes a definite attempt at communicating with another person, he writes a letter to his mother. The attempt is, of course, self-defeating: Malte’s mother has been dead for a long time. Despite that, the letter is telling: it betrays Malte’s profound solitude and his desire of communicating the very experiences that he deemed incommunicable. In a move typical of his style, the intended recipient of the letter remains unclear and indeterminate for more than half of the text, until the letter reaches an explosive emotional climax:

O insensible window on the world, O doors kept carefully shut, O the olden ways of living, adopted, approved, but never fully understood. O the silence on the staircase, the silence in the next room, the silence high under the ceiling, O Mother: O you, the only one who dealt with all that silence, back in my childhood; who took it upon herself, saying: Do not be afraid —it’s me.

Malte seems to be complaining of the irremediable divide that his interiority has created between himself and the rest of the world, and his very language —“insensible window on the world,” “doors kept carefully shut”— highlights his use of the physical room as a metaphor for metaphysical interiority. The invocative tone of the missive —“O Mother, O you, the only one…”— could very well be interpreted as a prayer or a request: Malte, alone in his rented room, is dying of solitude and is asking his mother to come back from the dead and pay him a visit. This reading is strengthened by the narration —eerily similar to one of the most famous passages in Proust— that Malte makes of an episode of his childhood:

Maman never came to me at night —or rather, she did come once. I had been screaming and screaming, […] At length they had sent the carriage for my parents, who were at a great ball given by the Crown Prince. […] Maman came [into my room], [and took] me in her bare arms. And I, with an astonishment and rapture I had never felt before, touched her hair and her small, immaculate face and the cold stones at her ears and the silk that fringed her bloom-fragrant shoulders.

This passage also further evinces the connection between psychological and physical interiority: the mother’s visit to Malte’s room is also a visit to his innermost self —a moment of communion and communication. Such a moment is valuable for Malte because of its rarity: there is nothing that indicates that ever since then —with the possible exception of a mysterious liaison with an older woman— has Rilke’s protagonist had a visitor to his room. His profound nostalgia for that moment is then indicative of the anguish of his present condition.

Another similar episode serves to exemplify the connection between this longing for communion and the failing of language seen earlier in Baudelaire:

The fever raged within me and dredged up from deep below experiences, images, facts I had known nothing of; I lay there, surfeited with myself, and waited for the moment when I would be commanded to layer it all back into me. […] I made a start, but it grew beneath my hands; it resisted; it was much too much. […] And then I screamed, half open as I was, I screamed and screamed. And when I began to look out of myself once again, they had been standing about my bed for a long time. […] And my father ordered me to say what the matter was. It was a friendly, muted order, but it was an order nonetheless. And he grew impatient when I made no answer.

Malte is unable to tell his father what is wrong with him because there are no words that could express his inner experience; very much in the same vein that Baudelaire is unable to communicate his feelings to his lover. Likewise, Baudelaire has his moment of invocation; at the end of his most interior of poems, At One O’clock in the Morning, the author of The Flowers of Evils calls out to the spirits of those who in the past have communed with him: “Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have sung, fortify me, sustain me, remove from me untruth and the world’s corrupting fumes.” Though it may be unfair to make reference to extra-textual sources, a basic knowledge of the highly oedipical biography of the poet could allow one to count Baudelaire’s mother as one of those “souls of those I have loved” that he calls out to, thus establishing a further parallelism between the two poet’s response to the anguish of a silent and solitary room.

6. Writing: A Solution to the Problem of Interiority?

In From Anguish to Language, the introductory essay to Faux Pas, Maurice Blanchot writes what amounts to an explanation of how writing itself could be seen as a solution to the isolation and solitude of interiority:

A writer who writes “I am alone” […] can seem a little ludicrous. It is comical to be aware of one’s solitude while addressing a reader, making use of means that keep one from being alone. […] The “I am alone” of the writer has a simple meaning (no one is near me) that the use of language only seems to conflict.

Blanchot was a close friend and collaborator of Bataille, and so the use of the word anguish in the title of his essay is far from innocent. His point is fascinating: writing is, fundamentally, an act of communication, and many of the complaints of Baudelaire and Rilke —“How difficult it is to communicate!”— are, in fact, self-cancelling. The poets complain of the impossibility of transmitting their inner experience to others, and yet their poetry beautifully and effectively performs precisely that action. The very act of writing is an exteriorization of experience: interiority, when written, ceases to be purely interior. Someone has remarked that all diarists are, to put it paradoxically, closeted exhibitionists: every private journal contains within itself an implicit invitation, perhaps even a desire, for someone to read it. The same can be said of the famous Notebooks of Malte Laudris Brigge, which perhaps explains the almost voyeuristic pleasure one gets when reading them. Baudelaire’s great grievance against the impossibility of communication, At One O’clock in the Morning, is in fact addressed to his lover, to whom he refers in the second person: “Do you want to know why I hate you today?” Baudelaire performs in writing what he did not do with speech, but the action remains the same: his thoughts, his experience, become public.

The very texts in question seem to point towards this solution. When Baudelaire writes: “Lord my God! Grant me the grace to produce a few beautiful verses to prove to myself that I am not the lowest of men, that I am not inferior to those I despise,” he implies that writing itself can also be a mode of differentiation from the crowd; a way of preserving one’s own individuality without isolating oneself completely from the world. On the contrary: writing engages the world directly through contact with the Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

For Malte’s part, near the beginning of the Notebooks, after what amounts to a succinct description of everything that is problematic in modernity, Rilke’s protagonist states that he considers writing a calling and a mission:

Anyone —anyone who has had these disquieting thoughts— must make a start on some of the things that we have omitted to do; anyone at all, no matter if he is no the aptest to the task: the fact is, there is no one else. This young foreigner of no consequence, Brigge, will have to sit himself down, five flights up, and write, day and night: yes, that is what it will come to —he will have to write.

Again, the room appears —“he will have to sit himself down, five flights up”— but the passage seems to imply that the poet has a public obligation, almost a civic duty to write. Writing, as an act of the mind, is private and interior —but, as an act of language, communication and exteriority are inscribed in its very essence. One is safe in assuming that Malte does most of his writing in his room —“Now I am sitting in my room, I can try to reflect calmly on what has happened" — and yet his writing is full of vivid descriptions of cityscapes and city people. When writing, Malte is at the same time in his room and out in the world. He has achieved what Baudelaire termed “incomparable privilege of the poet,” the ability to be, at will “himself and an other.” That privilege, of course, is nothing else than the ability to be interior —that is, an individual— and exterior at the same time.

Sinceramente,
NMMP