tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-44245604762161573142024-03-14T01:41:48.523-07:00IndecidiblesNi acá ni allá, ni en la izquierda ni en la derecha, extranjeros en todas partes, confundidos, melancólicos, románticos y cínicos a un tiempo; en una palabra: insoportables.
Que quede claro que nada de lo que se lea aquí tiene similaridad alguna con lo que el autor tenía en mente.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger49125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-92072621808184449912011-11-24T18:36:00.001-08:002011-11-24T18:36:54.000-08:00The Blog is Dead. Long live the Blog!http://losttrainsofthought.tumblr.com/Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-39448545210094004452011-08-22T16:45:00.000-07:002011-08-31T11:14:52.870-07:00Disco Barcelona<span style="font-style:italic;">“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. ”
<br />
<br />Michel Houellebecq</span>
<br />
<br />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.
<br />
<br />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.
<br />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.
<br />
<br />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.
<br />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.
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<br />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.
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<br />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.
<br />
<br />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.
<br />
<br />Otra vez, Houllebecq lo ilustra muy bien:
<br />
<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">“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).”</span>
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<br />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.
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<br />Por ultimo, el mejor consejo de Michel Houellebecq:
<br />
<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">“Una buena fiesta es una fiesta breve”.</span>
<br />
<br />Sinceramente,
<br />
<br />SEMV
<br />
<br />http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2tMV96xULk
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<br />SEMVhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10220600345794749285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-79798004318118497892011-07-31T13:21:00.000-07:002011-07-31T13:30:15.629-07:00The world is coming to an endUS --about to default; public sphere in shatters; fundamentalist-christian-tea-party-bastards imposing intolerant notions; xenophobia; shit-ass-mediocre-centrist-democrats.<br /><br />Europe --immigration tensions; failure of the welfare state; high unemployment (Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal); riots in the UK over educational costs; fascists in Norway.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />China --censorship up the ceiling; media block on train accident; dissent silenced.<br /><br />Japan --still recovering from the earthquake, nuclear disaster waiting to happen.<br /><br />Latin America --40 000 dead from drug war, and more to come.<br /><br />East Africa --10 million in famine; ethnic strife in South Sudan; more than half young Ugandians have AIDS.<br /><br />Add GLOBAL WARMING to the mix.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Need I say more?</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-7543288828583735712011-07-21T15:27:00.000-07:002011-07-21T15:29:09.948-07:00MuralMe fui a meter a las cloacas<br />Había reptiles que me miraban<br />Al fondo risas huecas<br /><br />Los muros temblaban<br />Del techo caía un liquido marrón<br />En el suelo brillaban huesos<br /><br />Me quede sordo y ciego<br />Sólo se podía gritar<br /><br />Alguien estaba ahí riendo a solas<br />Mordiéndose las uñas<br />Sudando por los ojos<br /><br />En el cuerpo tenía heridas de navaja<br />Todo enlodado y desnudo<br />Se burlaba de nosotros.<br /><br />No se puede hablar con el<br />Se confiesa ajeno cascarón<br />Amigo de los insectos<br />Ovíparo humano de nulo color.<br /><br />Sentado a un lado de la ventana<br />Nada lo saca de su jaula.<br /><br />Sinceramente,<br /><br />SEMVSEMVhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10220600345794749285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-12023656281599642522011-06-29T18:20:00.000-07:002011-06-29T18:25:12.535-07:00Talkin' 'Bout My GenerationHabemos 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.<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/7ikQ_t4JWko" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" width="425"></iframe>SEMVhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10220600345794749285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-81786055855423700532011-05-25T16:33:00.000-07:002011-05-25T16:49:12.283-07:00Sobre los Miopes Indignados<div style="text-align: justify;">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?<br /><br />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?<br /><br />Sinceramente,<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">NMMP</span><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-78080476326830388472011-04-25T18:38:00.000-07:002011-04-25T18:40:43.188-07:00Machine<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;">I ran the first few lines of Whitman's </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: times new roman;">Song of Myself </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">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:</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;" id="result_box" class="long_text" lang="en"><span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps"></span></span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;" id="result_box" class="long_text" lang="en"><span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps"></span><span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">I am this song</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;" id="result_box" class="long_text" lang="en"> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">Therefore</span><span class="" title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones">,</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;" id="result_box" class="long_text" lang="en"> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">You</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">are</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">very good</span><span class="" title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones">,</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">you can</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">hear</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">me.</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;" id="result_box" class="long_text" lang="en"></span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;" id="result_box" class="long_text" lang="en"> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">Welcome to</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">spiritual</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">food</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;" id="result_box" class="long_text" lang="en"> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">In summer</span><span class="" title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones">,</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">the grass</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">on the basis</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">that</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">I</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">sit</span><span class="" title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones"></span></span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;" id="result_box" class="long_text" lang="en"></span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;" id="result_box" class="long_text" lang="en"> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">My language</span><span class="" title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones">,</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">my blood</span><span class="" title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones">, plastic</span><span class="" title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones">,</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">earth, air</span><span class="" title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones">,</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">all the atoms</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;" id="result_box" class="long_text" lang="en"> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">After</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">their parents or</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">grandparents</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">were born</span><span class="" title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones">,</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">born</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;" id="result_box" class="long_text" lang="en"> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">Parents</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;" id="result_box" class="long_text" lang="en"> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">A</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">healthy</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">start</span> <span title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones" class="hps">37 years ago</span><span class="" title="Haz clic para obtener otras posibles traducciones">,</span></span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Sinceramente,</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: times new roman;">NMMP</span></span><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-42230705613018967062011-04-25T13:44:00.000-07:002011-04-25T13:47:26.373-07:00Holes (Guest Post by Haider Shahbaz)<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: times new roman;">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</span></span><br /><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: times new roman;">HOLES</span></span><br /></div><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: times new roman;"></span></span></div><p style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;">“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, <em>Chronicle of a Death Foretold.</em></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span></span></div><p style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;">“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, <em>For Whom the Bell Tolls.</em></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span></span></div><p style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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?</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span></span></div><p style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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. </span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span></span> </div><p style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span></span></div><p style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span></span></div><p style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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. <em>Breathe.</em> 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 <em>my connection to the world</em>: 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.</span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Sinceramente,</span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Haider Syed Shahbaz</span><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-78868345947567213962011-04-17T06:03:00.000-07:002011-04-17T06:08:15.911-07:00El Mal En La Semilla<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;">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,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> 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.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;">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.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;">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. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"> <span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;">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).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;">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.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;">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 </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> 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.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;">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.<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Sinceramente,</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">SEMV</span></span><br /></p>SEMVhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10220600345794749285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-22258075271071593492011-04-13T13:01:00.001-07:002011-04-13T18:44:03.990-07:00And yet, Not Even (An Afterword to the Epilogue to Fear and Trembling).<style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} p.MsoFootnoteText, li.MsoFootnoteText, div.MsoFootnoteText {mso-style-update:auto; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-link:"Texto nota pie Car"; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} p.MsoEndnoteText, li.MsoEndnoteText, div.MsoEndnoteText {mso-style-update:auto; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-link:"Texto nota al final Car"; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} span.TextonotaalfinalCar {mso-style-name:"Texto nota al final Car"; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-locked:yes; mso-style-link:"Texto nota al final"; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} span.TextonotapieCar {mso-style-name:"Texto nota pie Car"; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-locked:yes; mso-style-link:"Texto nota pie"; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} @page Section1 {size:595.0pt 842.0pt; margin:70.85pt 3.0cm 70.85pt 3.0cm; mso-header-margin:35.4pt; mso-footer-margin:35.4pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;font-family:times new roman;"><span><span style="font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica;font-size:-1;"></span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family:times new roman;"><blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;">"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"<br /><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>From the Epilogue to Kierkegaard's <span style="font-style: italic;">Fear and Trembling.</span><br /></div></span></blockquote></div><p style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 14.2pt;font-family:times new roman;" align="center"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;" align="center"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">1</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">And why add yet another word —is this not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">going further</i>? 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Fear and Trembling </i>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.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;" align="center"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">2</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">progress</i>! To unmask their dishonesty we need only picture the physiological effects that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">actual </i>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. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;" align="center"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">3</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">forwards, </i>the result of perishing to the temptation of providing a positive answer instead of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">further</i> question<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">. </i>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. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;" align="center"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">4</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">believe</i>! 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.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;" align="center"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">5</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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 style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">I cannot understan</i>d that runs through Johannes’ text.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;" align="center"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">6</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">and step in the river anyway. </i>That would have been faith. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But the next generation did not stay true to their task —which was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">to live</i>— 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. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;" align="center"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">7</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">that</i>, in such schematic fashion, may already be a foolish going further.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;"><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-size:78%;">Sinceramente,</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt; font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-weight: bold;">NMMP</span><br /></span></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-35476349762227766432011-04-12T22:25:00.000-07:002011-04-12T22:38:00.606-07:00On the Drug War (Oh mia patria sì bella e perduta)<dl style="font-style: italic; font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote><dd>Ve, pensamiento, con alas doradas,</dd><dd>pósate en las praderas y en las cimas</dd><dd>donde exhala su suave fragancia</dd><dd>el dulce aire de la tierra natal!</dd><dd>¡Saluda las orillas del Jordán</dd><dd>y las destruidas torres de Sión!</dd><dd>¡Oh, mi patria, tan bella y perdida!</dd><dd>¡Oh recuerdo tan caro y fatal!</dd><dd>Arpa de oro de fatídicos vates,</dd><dd>¿por qué cuelgas muda del sauce?</dd><dd>Revive en nuestros pechos el recuerdo,</dd><dd>¡Que hable del tiempo que fue!</dd><dd>Al igual que el destino de Sólima</dd><dd>Canta un aire de crudo lamento</dd><dd>que te inspire el Señor un aliento,</dd><dd>que al padecer infunda virtud,</dd><dd>que al padecer infunda virtud,</dd><dd>que al padecer infunda virtud,</dd><dd>al padecer, la virtud!.</dd></blockquote><dd><br /></dd></dl><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span><style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} @page Section1 {size:595.0pt 842.0pt; margin:70.85pt 3.0cm 70.85pt 3.0cm; mso-header-margin:35.4pt; mso-footer-margin:35.4pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> <p style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language:ES-TRAD">Esta es la traducción de Wikipedia del <i>Va Pensiero, </i>uno de los coros<i> </i>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.<br /><br />Una de las líneas, "<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Oh mia patria sì bella e perduta!" </i>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.<br /><br />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.</span></p> <br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/DzdDf9hKfJw" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" width="480"></iframe><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Sinceramente,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: times new roman;">NMMP</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-34984935430243350982011-04-10T11:08:00.000-07:002011-04-12T08:22:42.166-07:00Fragment (I can imagine another Odyssey)<div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:70.85pt 3.0cm 70.85pt 3.0cm; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> </div><p style="text-align: justify; font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">In the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Odyssey</i>, 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Odyssey, </i>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.<br /></span></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-42718751529554873742011-03-22T21:25:00.000-07:002011-03-23T10:11:22.126-07:00Eleven Theses on the Ideology of the Mexican Left<style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; </style> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" align="center"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;"> 1</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">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, <i style="">the only way to be an orthodox Marxist is not to be an orthodox Marxist</i>. 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. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" align="center"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">2</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">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. <i style="">Factual, historical Marxism is what Marxists do and have done. </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" align="center"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">3</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">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. <i style="">The question “Is Marxism ideological?” has a historical answer. </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" align="center"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">4</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span lang="EN-US">Whenever the left becomes dogmatic, it becomes an enemy for all progressive causes.</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;"> Is it not a paradox that “real-communism” vanished all <i style="">critical</i> 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: <i style="">ancilla —</i>the little helper. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span lang="EN-US"> </span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" align="center"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">5</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">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, <i style="">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. </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" align="center"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">6</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span lang="EN-US">This should not be taken to mean that we must abandon Marx</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">. 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. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" align="center"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">7</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">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 <i style="">attitude of constant suspicion, of permanent circumspection.</i> We should take from Marx a new conception of the task of thought: not the establishing of theories, but a never-ending <i style="">practice</i> of criticism. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" align="center"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">8</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">This circumspective attitude, this particular kind of attention to one’s surroundings is essential for change to take place. <i style="">If the followers of Marx do not pay close attention to the world around them, the strait gate may slip by them</i>. 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. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" align="center"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">9</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">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. <i style="">Waiting for the revolution is the best way to guarantee that the revolution will never come.</i> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" align="center"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" align="center"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">10</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">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. <i style="">Communism, like love, must be reinvented.</i> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" align="center"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" align="center"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">11</span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">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.<br /></span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">Sinceramente,</span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman; font-weight: bold;" class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;">NMMP</span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-76490785835378558992011-03-15T18:46:00.000-07:002011-03-29T17:36:54.581-07:00Death Without End (Gorostiza in English)<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Rival of Octavio Paz, this is a fragment of his major poem <i>Muerte Sin Fin. </i>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.</span></span><div style="font-family:times new roman;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="font-family:times new roman;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Death Without End</span></span></b></div><div style="font-family:times new roman;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span></b></div><div style="font-family:times new roman;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">1</span></span></b></div><div style="font-family:times new roman;"><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Full in myself, besieged in my skin<br />by an intangible god that suffocates me,<br />falsely announced perhaps<br />by a radiant atmosphere of lights<br />that hides my spilled consciousness,<br />my shattered wings into shards of air,<br /></span></span>my blind and graceless plodding through the mud;<br /><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">full in myself –glutted—I discover myself<br />in the bewildered image of water,<br />nothing but an unwithering stagger,<br />a collapse of fallen angels<br />into the intact delight of their own weight<br />that has nothing<br />but a blank face<br />half sunken already, like an agonizing laughter;<br />fallen into the tenuous muslin of the cloud<br />and in the ill omens of the singing sea<br />--more the aftertaste of salt or birth of cumulus<br />than the mere hurry of accosted sea-foam.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br />Sinceramente,</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">NMMP</span></span></p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-44324796275199203922011-02-28T18:18:00.000-08:002011-03-24T20:38:40.637-07:00Emily Dickinson en Español: Noches Santas (Wild Nights)<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" ></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" >Wild Nights </span><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Wild nights! Wild nights! </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> Were I with thee, </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> Wild nights should be </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> Our luxury! </span></span></div><p style="text-align: left; font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Futile the winds<br />To a heart in port,<br />Done with the compass,<br />Done with the chart.</span></p><div style="text-align: left; font-style: italic;"> <span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Rowing in Eden! </span><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> Ah! the sea! </span><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> Might I but moor </span><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> To-night in thee!</span></span></div><div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;">—Ø—<br /></span></div><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" >Noches Santas<br /><br /></span></span> <style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">¡Noches santas! ¡Noches santas,<br />tendríamos tú y yo!</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">¡Lujosas, blancas, vastas,<br />vastas, vastas, noches santas!</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Fútil el viento al corazón<br />que ha hallado puerto,<br />fútil la brújula,<br />fútil la carta, ¡fútil el viento!</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">¡Navegar el edén!</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">¡Ah! ¡La mar!</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">¡Por una noche<br />atracar en tí!<br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Sinceramente,</span></span></p><p style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">NMMP<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-22423327892110288862011-02-18T20:41:00.000-08:002011-03-24T20:40:06.436-07:00The Room of the Poet<div style="text-align: justify;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF7W_RrgWE28ei4jkJt9tM86UfqP23DIB_t92gHVJvRNnmxj4E8l2wQKC6jzX4m_V4gcaZhaO-2P5hzy0RQDntgEbz9NlbSiWKVnKxLKOBoWs2pUbeeSruqKfLhUfFGMa8exHfXzlN8HxW/s1600/the_death_of-1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 448px; height: 332px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF7W_RrgWE28ei4jkJt9tM86UfqP23DIB_t92gHVJvRNnmxj4E8l2wQKC6jzX4m_V4gcaZhaO-2P5hzy0RQDntgEbz9NlbSiWKVnKxLKOBoWs2pUbeeSruqKfLhUfFGMa8exHfXzlN8HxW/s1600/the_death_of-1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"> <style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Cambria; }p.MsoFootnoteText, li.MsoFootnoteText, div.MsoFootnoteText { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-size: 10pt; font-family: Cambria; }p.MsoHeader, li.MsoHeader, div.MsoHeader { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Cambria; }span.MsoFootnoteReference { vertical-align: super; }span.MsoEndnoteReference { vertical-align: super; }p.MsoEndnoteText, li.MsoEndnoteText, div.MsoEndnoteText { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 10pt; font-family: Cambria; }span.TextonotaalfinalCar { }span.EncabezadoCar { }span.TextonotapieCar { }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> </div><div face="times new roman" style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><u><span lang="EN-US">1. Introduction: The Poet as Mental Refugee</span></u></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">For all their fame and renown as Parisian prowlers and pre-eminent practitioners of <i style="">flânerie, </i>Rainer Maria<i style=""> </i>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 <i style="">Remembrance of Things Past </i>with an elegiac description of the processes of waking up and falling asleep, the private room becomes an image of great importance:</span></span></p><div face="times new roman" style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;font-size:85%;"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn1" name="_ednref" title=""></a>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 <i style="">inner experience. </i>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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn2" name="_ednref" title=""></a></span><br /></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div face="times new roman" style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn3" name="_ednref" title=""></a>The “blasé attitude” that the father of social theory describes as a “protection of the inner life against the domination of the metropolis”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn4" name="_ednref" title=""></a> can be read as a description of interiority<i style="">. </i>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”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn5" name="_ednref" title=""></a>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”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn6" name="_ednref" title=""></a> the poet retreats into his room and into his subjectivity —and modern poetry is born.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div face="times new roman" style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn7" name="_ednref" title=""></a> The problem, of course, is that it is impossible to remain forever alone in one’s room.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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 <i style="">anguish </i>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.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div face="times new roman"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><u><span lang="EN-US">2. Becoming Interior I:<span style=""> </span>Death and Aristocracy in <i style="">Malte Laudris Brigge</i></span></u></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">The use of interiority as a defense from the de-individualizing tendencies of modern society is first apparent in Rilke’s <i style="">The Notebooks of Malte Laudris Brigge </i>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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn8" name="_ednref" title=""></a> 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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn9" name="_ednref" title=""></a> 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.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn10" name="_ednref" title=""></a><span style=""> </span>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:</span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><blockquote style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;font-size:85%;">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</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;font-size:85%;">.</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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:<span style=""> </span>“[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?” <a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn12" name="_ednref" title=""></a>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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn13" name="_ednref" title=""></a> The <i style="">Notebooks </i>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.<br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><u><span lang="EN-US">3. Becoming Interior II: Lies and the Odiousness of Society in <i style="">The Parisian Prowler</i></span></u></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">Throughout his “Little Prose Poems,” Baudelaire comes off as a dedicated misanthrope.<span style=""> </span>In the <i style="">Dog and the Scent-Bottle, </i>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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn14" name="_ednref" title=""></a>If Malte is afraid of the people of the city, Baudelaire is disgusted by them<span style=""> </span>—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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn15" name="_ednref" title=""></a> This hatred for the anonymous members of the metropolitan crowd sometimes takes the form of outright violence, as in <i style="">The Bad Glazier, </i>where the narrative voice describes his arbitrary attack on a poor craftsman whose only crime is not making life beautiful:</span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">“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!”</span></blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn16" name="_ednref" title=""></a>Indeed, Baudelaire’s main complaint of the inhabitants of the city seems to be an aesthetic one: they are both ugly <i style="">and</i> 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 <i style="">At One O’clock in the Morning: </i>“Here we are on the side of respectability.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn17" name="_ednref" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""> </span></span></a></span><span style="font-size:85%;">Elsewhere, the narrative voice spits out at another journalist: “I especially want my damned journalist to let me enjoy myself as I like.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn18" name="_ednref" title=""></a> 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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn19" name="_ednref" title=""></a></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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.<span style=""> </span>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.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">It is significant that Baudelaire should betray his turn toward interiority in <i style="">At One O’clock in the Morning. </i>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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn20" name="_ednref" title=""></a> 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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn21" name="_ednref" title=""></a>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, <i style="">above —</i>this last term understood with the dual meaning of the French word <i style="">supérieur. </i>His senseless act of violence, like his lie, is an expulsion of the other from his two interiorities: his room and his inner self.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">It then evident that the narrative voice of <i style="">The Parisian Prowler </i>and the titular protagonist of <i style="">The Notebooks of Malte Laudris Brigge </i>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.<br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><u><span lang="EN-US">4. The Anguish of Interiority I: Isolation in <i style="">The Parisian Prowler</i></span></u></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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:</span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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.</span></blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn22" name="_ednref" title=""></a>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 <i style="">The Eyes of the Poor, </i>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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn23" name="_ednref" title=""></a> 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:</span></div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> <span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><blockquote>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 <i style="">my </i>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?</blockquote><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn24" name="_ednref" title=""></a></span><span lang="EN-US">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: </span></span></div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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.</span></blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn25" name="_ednref" title=""></a>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!”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn26" name="_ednref" title=""></a> 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.</span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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 <i style="">On Nietzsche, </i>Georges Bataille, the great theorist of interiority and coiner of the terms <i style="">anguish </i>and <i style="">inner experience, </i>describes the danger that all acts of communication represent for the integrity of the individual:</span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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 <i style="">self</i> […] 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.</span></blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn27" name="_ednref" title=""></a></span></div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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 <i style="">be, </i>would it <i style="">be? </i>No, it <i style="">is </i>only at the price of solitude.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn28" name="_ednref" title=""></a> Isolation is the price of interiority, and as the language that Baudelaire uses in <i style="">The Eyes of the Poor </i>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.<br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><u><span lang="EN-US">5. The Anguish of Interiority II: Solitude in <i style="">The Notebooks of Malte Laudris Brigge</i></span></u></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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:</span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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</span><span style="text-decoration: underline;font-size:85%;" >.</span></blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn29" name="_ednref" title=""></a></span></div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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:</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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.</span></blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn30" name="_ednref" title=""></a></span></div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">Another similar episode serves to exemplify the connection between this longing for communion and the failing of language seen earlier in Baudelaire:</span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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.<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn31" name="_ednref" title=""></a></span></blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn31" name="_ednref" title=""></a></span></div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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, <i style="">At One O’clock in the Morning, </i>the author of <i style="">The Flowers of Evils </i>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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn32" name="_ednref" title=""></a> 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.<br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><u><span lang="EN-US">6. Writing: A Solution to the Problem of Interiority?</span></u></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">In <i style="">From Anguish to Language, </i>the introductory essay to <i style="">Faux Pas</i>, 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:</span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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.</span><span style=";font-size:85%;" > </span><span style="font-size:85%;">[…] 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.</span></blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn33" name="_ednref" title=""></a></span></div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">Blanchot was a close friend and collaborator of Bataille, and so the use of the word <i style="">anguish </i>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<i style="">. </i>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, <i style="">closeted exhibitionists: </i>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 <i style="">Notebooks of Malte Laudris Brigge</i>, which perhaps explains the almost voyeuristic pleasure one gets when reading them<i style="">. </i>Baudelaire’s great grievance against the impossibility of communication, <i style="">At One O’clock in the Morning, </i>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.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">The very texts in question seem to point towards this solution.<span style=""> </span>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,”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn34" name="_ednref" title=""></a> 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 <i style="">Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!</i><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">For Malte’s part, near the beginning of the <i style="">Notebooks, </i>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:</span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">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.</span></blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;"><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn36" name="_ednref" title=""></a></span></div><p style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -0.05pt; font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">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 <i style="">civic duty</i> 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" <a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn37" name="_ednref" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a>— 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.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4424560476216157314&postID=2242332789211028886#_edn38" name="_ednref" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a> That privilege, of course, is nothing else than the ability to be interior —that is, an individual— and exterior <i style="">at the same time.</i></span></span></p><div style="font-family: times new roman; text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify; font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;font-size:85%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;font-size:85%;">Sinceramente,<br /></span><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family:times new roman;font-size:85%;" >NMMP</span><br /></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-55580406154151740322011-02-16T21:55:00.000-08:002011-02-16T22:02:56.154-08:00Can Pasta (An Ode to Barcelona)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://davidgarriga.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/1212581637_0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 449px;" src="http://davidgarriga.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/1212581637_0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" ><br />Ingredients </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(preferably bought in an establishment owned by North African Immigrants)</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">-Pasta of any kind.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">-Canned seafood (clams, sardines, mussels, anchovies, tuna, etc.)<br /></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" >Procedure:</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Cook the pasta with the oil and juices from the canned seafood.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Mix the contents of the cans with the pasta.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Enjoy with the finest whiskey you can afford. </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:78%;">Sincerametne,<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">NMMP </span><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-21920321836507854192011-02-13T15:09:00.000-08:002011-02-13T15:14:57.918-08:00Carácter Nacional<style>@font-face { font-family: "Times"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> <p style="font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><br />"En España, todos son Católicos —hasta los ateos."<br />Unamuno (cito de memoria, es decir, parafraseo.)</span></span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0cm;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: times new roman;">“Todos los mexicanos queremos ser de izquierda, hasta los de derecha."<br />Pablo González (sociólogo mexicano, citado por Gabriel Zaid)<br /><br />De lo cual se extrae que no hay que sorprenderse del éxito de la teología de la liberación.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0cm;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0cm;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Sinceramente,</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.1pt 0cm;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">NMMP</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: times new roman;"></span></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-21329701773976655282011-02-09T21:43:00.000-08:002011-02-10T09:27:19.196-08:00The Critic as Philosopher and Poet: A Polemic against Secondary Literature<div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> <style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Cambria; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> </div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><blockquote>There are no Facts, only interpretations —and <span style="font-style: italic;">that </span>is an interpretation.<br />F. Nietzsche<br /></blockquote></span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><blockquote></blockquote></span></span></div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">Literary Criticism has often times been seen as a minor or subordinate endeavor. This is evinced by the inadvertently depressing term that academic lingo uses to describe it: <i style="">secondary literature. </i>The designation almost seems to hint towards a slightly modified version of that old adage hated by teachers everywhere:<i style=""> those who can’t write, criticize.</i> At best, the critic is seen as an illuminator: someone who sheds light on an obscure text, a “pointer out” of interesting details. At worst, he or she is seen as a vampire: someone who lives off the works of others, sucking on the genius-blood of great men and women —a pathetic surfer on the grand waves of Art, Beauty, and Truth. It is my contention, however, that this vision of criticism is unnecessarily narrow, and must be reevaluated. The critic’s business is interpretation —and interpretation <i style="">should </i>be more than mere elucidation. The critic must go <i style="">beyond </i>the studied text. His role, I believe, should be closer to that of the philosopher than to the one of the commentator.<br /></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">This is especially important today, when academic philosophy —especially in the English-speaking world— has become a technical discipline with little relation to <i style="">life.</i> The critic, if he is to fulfill the immense potential of his profession, must make the <i style="">interpretation of life through texts </i>his declared mission. He must search for answers to ethical, political, religious, epistemological, metaphysical, and ontological questions in literature, film, and art. The critic must transcend the meaningless distinctions of university disciplines and enlist the help of history, philology, and even the social sciences in his inquiry. If the understanding of philosophy as the examination of life is not to perish under the vain disputations of the new schoolmen, </span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">the critic must become the new philosopher</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">It should not suprise us that in our day and age philosophy should begin with interpretation: our cultural inheritance is so vast and intertwined that it would be foolish —impossible, even— to begin from scratch. The critic interrogates past writers —past artists, past humans— because art and writing have become <i style="">the stuff of life.</i> To say that the world is a text has become commonplace, but that detracts nothing from the fact that art shapes the way we live and think in unfathomable ways. The critic begins with tradition —and then proceeds to question it, champion it, tear it apart, defend it, discard it, or expand it. In a word: <i style="">make it new. </i>If this implies lifting a text from its context and killing the author, so be it. If this implies historicizing a text and carefully exploring the biographical and psychological circumstances of the author, so be it. The point, after all, is to extract all the possible meanings from a text: to liberate words, not pin them down.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">There is nothing too insignificant to escape the gaze of the critic. TV advertisements, Internet forum firestorms, misspelled blogs, madmen’s pamphlets, graffiti, technical manuals and scientific databases —everything is subject to interpretation, everything contains meaning just waiting to be revealed. The critic must have sharp eyes: he is an observer, a watcher, an endless note-taker. The critic notices what others do not notice, and he makes sense of what appears to be senseless.<br /></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">The critic, moreover, must also be a poet. To the critic, form is as important as content. Each interpretation becomes itself a text subject to interpretation, and as such is to be held to the same standards as the texts it interprets. Critical language must be beautiful: Immanuel Kant’s greatest failing and ultimate downfall is his style. A critic must take his reader for a dance, constructing his text with the elegance and artistry of a great architect. A critic must avoid academic conventionalities —those murderers of good writing— like the plague. He is entitled to an individual voice: his texts can be everything but the ascetic, aseptic, unthreatening pieces that academic factories mass-produces every day. The critic must rescue the first person singular —that mark of true authorship, the unashamed “I”— from the timid, frigid, vague “one” or the falsely modest “we.” Whether explicitly or implicitly, every work of art is an interpretation of its predecessors —and so it is only fitting that writing that acknowledges this interpretative function explicitly should recognize itself as art and hold itself to the appropriate standards.<br /></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">What I am putting forth is not new or revolutionary: today, the words “critic” and “philosopher” are often used interchangeably, if sometimes mediated by that vague third term that seeks to create a false separation between philosophy and interpretative writing: "Theory". Literary critics already do the most exiting philosophical work of our time, and the most important writers of our generation are informed by and in conversation with the work of these critics. After all, it is only fitting that Criticism should be the essential thought-mode of an age of crisis. My only request is that we do away with that idiotic term: <i style="">secondary literature. </i>The critic is the interpreter of the human condition. What the hell is secondary about that?</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">Sinceramente,</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">NMMP</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-61053670960332125382011-01-31T11:21:00.001-08:002011-03-24T20:41:43.691-07:00The Scary Thing about the End of Rationality<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.rogerboylan.com/resources/beckett.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 287px; height: 403px;" src="http://www.rogerboylan.com/resources/beckett.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeZcWWg8kKhBepDMMkYoAVE2YJXxfE8wLRmYEhdxGcBR5G_uZwE4Q9Qxcl6-1XEj9RBBjFwUoQoA9rkTi6cUOogAEGRLKyS2AUiP3x1BERDxJAUS9hAobWhUO8AnQ41xIH0rmQeFivPkGf/s1600/kant+face.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 288px; height: 326px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeZcWWg8kKhBepDMMkYoAVE2YJXxfE8wLRmYEhdxGcBR5G_uZwE4Q9Qxcl6-1XEj9RBBjFwUoQoA9rkTi6cUOogAEGRLKyS2AUiP3x1BERDxJAUS9hAobWhUO8AnQ41xIH0rmQeFivPkGf/s1600/kant+face.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /> <style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">"On the other side of Kantian metaphysics there is nothing but absurdity or insanity."<br />P. North<br /><br />So yeah, folks, either a frigid German dude who died a virgin figured it all out, or we are all in a Beckett play, or that stuff about I being the walrus is true.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://ny-image0.etsy.com/il_fullxfull.96153068.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 429px; height: 537px;" src="http://ny-image0.etsy.com/il_fullxfull.96153068.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >FML.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-size:78%;">Sinceramente,</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-weight: bold;">NMMP</span><br /></span></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-60219804019479639202011-01-30T11:23:00.000-08:002011-01-30T20:04:57.327-08:00Interiors<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/gogh/gogh.chambre-arles.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 315px; height: 239px;" src="http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/gogh/gogh.chambre-arles.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> <style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-weight: bold;">1. Introduction<br /></span></span></i></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><br /><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span></i></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span lang="EN-US">1.1 Politics and Ethics, Art and Attempt —</span></i><span lang="EN-US">If politics is the attempt to live with others, then ethics is the art of living with oneself. Perhaps it was not always like this —before, when there was faith, ethics was the art of attempting to live with God. Now that God has died, however, each has become his own judge. Although it might be that despite all that faith God never existed —in which case the art of living with God has always been the attempt at living with oneself, and the deity nothing but the name that we gave to that part of ourselves that we erected as judge.<br /></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span lang="EN-US">1.2 The Insidiousness of Politics —</span></i><span lang="EN-US">And yet the others insist in introducing themselves into our inner life, promoting themselves to corporals and generals in our secret army of private judges. Parents, friends, and lovers —all of them populate our interior solitude, looking, looking, approving and reproving, contradicting each other, fighting. And despite the death of God, the necessity to please, the desire not to hurt, the need to receive approval from the judge remains in us —burning desire and unending source of anguish.<span style=""> </span>This is our curse —or <i style="">my </i>curse, at least: formally, we are convinced immoralists, but the shadow of Buddha (c.f <i style="">Gay Science)</i> —the shadow of a multitude of Buddhas with familiar faces— remains in our inner caves, projecting itself imposing and frightful.<span style=""><br /></span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span lang="EN-US"><span style=""></span></span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span lang="EN-US">1.3 Lutzscher, Niether —</span></i><span lang="EN-US">Perhaps this was the shadow from which Luther was trying to liberate himself with <i style="">The Freedom of a Christian. </i>The pure interiority of the Lutherans, <i style="">sola fides, sola scriptura —</i>what is it but a theological getaway car from the weight of <i style="">political judgment, </i>the judgment of the others? The Christian alone before his God is nothing else than the Christian alone before himself. In this sense, Nietzsche is a direct descendent of Luther, and his solipsistic will-to-will the logical conclusion of that radical interiorism that seems to constitute the bottom line of the modern German rebellion against the tyranny of the others.<span style=""></span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span lang="EN-US"><span style=""></span></span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span lang="EN-US">1.4 Inner Dissatisfaction —</span></i><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">Were my constitution different</span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">, this total interiority could perhaps provide me with absolute solace.<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span></span>However there is in me an uncontrollable desire for the others, for the exterior. This is why Bataille and his ethics of risk, gamble and laceration are so attractive. It is not trivial that Bataille was so concerned with the bodily and the sexual: in the interior/exterior dichotomy the body belongs to the exterior. This might be the origin of Lutzscher’s complicated relationship to sex —marrying a nun and dying with guilt, getting syphilis from going to a prostitute “on doctor’s orders,” etc. Pure interiority, it turns out, also implies a totalizing spiritualization. It is an aspiration to be pure soul, to get rid of the body. Nietzsche, of course, would deny this —Luther was more honest— but a quick read of <i style="">Ecce Homo</i> will suffice to show the profound disembodiment of that insincere adorer of Dionysus: never mind the wine-and-nymphs, <i style="">he cannot tolerate coffee.</i></span><i style=""><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></i></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></i></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span lang="EN-US">1.5 The Dilemma of Interiority —</span></i><span lang="EN-US">This is, then, the kernel of the matter: how to live with oneself without renouncing the others, how to live-in-the-world without succumbing to guilt, to pain, to the infelicity inherited from centuries of cultural disease —Catholicism, etc? Happiness, one of Fellini’s characters says wisely, consists in being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone. This is easy if one has achieved pure interiority does not care at all about the others —hurting them becomes irrelevant. But the others matter, enormously, for good or ill. I and the others, interiority and exteriority —these are the two poles of the problem of the Good Life, and the question raised here is how to navigate these dangerous waters without falling apart.<br /></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-size:78%;">Sinceramente,</span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-weight: bold;">NMMP</span><br /></span></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-48548083979121325552011-01-21T17:27:00.000-08:002011-01-30T12:16:51.657-08:00Messiah<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Messiah —</span><span>Do not wait for him. It does not matter if the Messiah is the return of a lost lover, or the Proletarian Revolution, or Tenure, or Death, or even the Second Coming of Christ: </span><span style="font-style: italic;">do not wait for him</span>, for he will only come when you don't expect him. And when he does come, he won't be what you were hoping for. And, invariably, he will come too late. Do not wait for the Messiah —and who knows? Perhaps when you don't expect him anymore, when you don't need him anymore—he might just come.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Sinceramente,</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">NMMP</span></span><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-24522721002631265482010-12-17T14:46:00.001-08:002011-01-11T05:20:32.970-08:00The Passionate Teachings of John Cassavettes and their Perversion by False Prophets<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.rtve.es/imagenes/dias-cine-40-aniversario-husbands-john-cassavettes/1291976296222.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 465px; height: 348px;" src="http://www.rtve.es/imagenes/dias-cine-40-aniversario-husbands-john-cassavettes/1291976296222.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;"><blockquote></blockquote>“An immense thrust of passion coupled with formidable will-power, such was the man.”<br /><br />“In Spite of his admiration for the ardent Phenomena of life, never can Eugene Delacroix be confused with that mob of vulgar artists and writers whose myopic intelligence shelters behind that vague and obscure Word realism”<br /><br />CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</span><br /></blockquote></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">When John Cassavettes chose to shoot Faces in 16 mm film and using a hand-held camera, he was not thinking of an aesthetic proposal. Rather, what he had in mind was a different dynamic in the praxis of filmmaking; one that held acting as its priority —it was raw emotion that had to be found. Lighting was to be done in a way that left the most space for the free movement of the actors. This search for unencumbered feeling could not be done in an expensive production, both because Cassavettes did not have enough capital and because of the professional and legal obstacles that money imposes over cinema. The aesthetic trend that surged from these very mundane impediments was purely an accident.<br /><br />The film’s impact on the aesthetic of current cinema can be seen everywhere. In works as diverse as T<span style="font-style: italic;">he Bourne Identity</span>, the latest installment in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Harry Potte</span>r series, and Iñarritú’s <span style="font-style: italic;">21gram</span>s, the signature of Casssavettes appears in one form or another — dirty photography, use of a constantly moving hand-held camera, intense and emotional actoral performances and grainy images. What were originally practical limitations in the genesis of the work have become ends consciously sought after.<br /><br />Today more than ever, film seems to pursue an ideal of realism. The expressive use of light is limited to the representation of the space or situation of the scene as realistically as possible. Fiction films are oftentimes constructed to look like documentaries. Before video cameras were accessible for families to record birthdays and vacations, the practical limitations of films like <span style="font-style: italic;">Faces</span> had discovered the aesthetic of video “realism”. One could even define <span style="font-style: italic;">Faces</span> as a fictional documentary of private life.<br /><br />Perhaps these notions of filmic realism began with Cassavettes. In his films, many of the formal signs of classical cinema —transparent framing, composition, camera movement— only found their meaning and strength after the moment of execution. Cassavettes was known for shooting ridiculous amount of film for scenes that could end up being very brief afterwards—something that the high cost of 35 mm film would have made impossible. Cassavettes is different from all his predecessors because his expressive priorities are inverted: “I never adjust the camera to the scenes, but the scenes to the camera”. Cassavettes is different from his present imitators because he had the privilege of accident.<br /><br />Despite the film’s outer appearance of realism, a close viewing of Faces will inevitably reveal many errors in continuity, unjustified uses of light, rapid changes in mood of the characters and a frequent descent towards abstraction. Objective reality does not exist in cinema. If the films of Cassavettes tell us much about his overflowing emotions and pain it is because he shows us the world through the filter of his subjective glance. The fact that we experience intense emotion from a believable source does not necessarily mean that we are being exposed to an objective portrait of human experience. The emotional impact of Cassavettes films stems not from the accuracy of their portrayal of reality —rather, it is the result of extreme sensibility and skill working together. This combination of acute perception and technical talent is nothing less than the true nature of artistic genius.<br /><br />¿What is it then that makes the films of this man seem so much like life? John Cassavettes was a passionate man. The shooting of <span style="font-style: italic;">Faces</span> began in 1963, but the film was not premiered until 1968. More than a creative adventure, the moviemaking process was a battle. Two of the actresses, including his wife, were pregnant. Financial difficulties forced the director to mortgage his home, do side jobs as an actor in films he despised, and relentlessly beg for money everywhere. He was forced to have the editor of the film move into his garage. Chronically unsatisfied, Cassavettes did many versions of the film, even inviting random people on the street to watch a scene and give their opinion. Cassavettes needed to be able to change everything from one moment to the next. All of these factors, among many others, contributed to make the production and post-production of Faces a creative process of five years. The emotions of Faces are fueled with the passion of a group of men and women who put blood, sweat, and tears throughout seemingly endless years to get the film made. The result of their hard work is tangible proof that, if cinema is to be different, the process by which it is made must also be different.<br /><br />The realism of the films of today is nothing more than a trend. With each day that passes, the art of cinema moves closer and closer to the unneutered entertainment of television. Personality and originality are disdained. In their stead, a cheap illusion of realism is fed to mindless audiences, who usually have a steep archive of cinematic references and will take nothing other than what they have learnt to expect.<br /><br />If film continues down this homogenizing road, if filmmakers continue to be feeble imitators of a non-existent concept, creativity will either disappear completely or be vanished to the realm of extreme intellectuality. If things continue as they are, the general audience will become progressively more intolerant to new ways, leaving the greatest invention of modernity —cinema, that beautiful mechanical art, filled with as many glorious flaws as the broken men and women who fathered it— dim and forgotten, or worse, transformed into mere moving images.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><br />Sincerely,<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">SEMV</span></span></span></div>SEMVhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10220600345794749285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-40062763901617260392010-12-15T16:17:00.000-08:002010-12-15T16:22:27.805-08:00Nostalgia<style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Vino una tarde a cenar conmigo,<br />vestida de azul, con los ojos cansados<br />de tanto escribir.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Le pregunte sobre su trabajo,<br />y por respuesta me habló<br />de los poetas hebreos de la España musulmana.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">“Se morían de nostalgia,” me dijo,<br />“algunos por el cuerpo de sus amantes,<br />otros por el polvo de levante,<br />y otros más<br />por una cierta unidad con el cosmos<br />perdida al momento de ser hombres.”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br />Con el café nos dijimos<br />que lo atroz de la nostalgia<br />es que el objecto añorado no se conoce<br />—que se trata más bien de una construcción<br />de nuestras mentes insatisfechas;<br />un deseo por un pasado que se proyecta<br />hacia el futuro, destruyendo a su paso el presente<br />y dejándonos fríos, con los ojos cansados<br />de tanto mirar a lo lejos.</span></span></p> <span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:12pt;" ><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />Al abrazarla al despedirnos<br />y sentir, por un instante,<br />su cuerpo contra al mío a través de la ropa,<br />no pude evitar sentir<br />una profunda nostalgia<br />por aquellos labios finos<br />que, sin duda, me pertenecieron una vez,<br />hace mucho, una noche perfumada de Granada.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">Sinceramente,<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">NMMP</span><br /></span></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4424560476216157314.post-38717311931034257542010-12-14T20:00:00.000-08:002010-12-14T20:08:28.169-08:00Martirio y Herejía: La Guerra Civil Española<style>@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoFootnoteText, li.MsoFootnoteText, div.MsoFootnoteText { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoHeader, li.MsoHeader, div.MsoHeader { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoFooter, li.MsoFooter, div.MsoFooter { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }span.MsoFootnoteReference { vertical-align: super; }p.MsoEndnoteText, li.MsoEndnoteText, div.MsoEndnoteText { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }span.TextonotaalfinalCar { }span.TextonotapieCar { }span.PiedepginaCar { }span.PiedepginaCar1 { }span.EncabezadoCar { }span.EncabezadoCar1 { }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; }</style> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman; font-weight: bold;" align="center"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Introducción Nietzscheana</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">“</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;" lang="EN-US">Where is God?” he cried, “I’ll tell you! <i style="">We have killed him! </i>[…] Is there still an up and a down?</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: small-caps;" lang="EN-US">Friedrich Nietzsche, <i style="">The Gay Science</i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: small-caps;" lang="EN-US"><i style=""><br /></i></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">En 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche publicaba <i style="">La Gaya Ciencia, </i><span style=""> </span>primera obra de su etapa madura<i style="">. </i>Aquí, el filósofo alemán haría su más famosa proclamación: Dios ha muerto, nosotros lo hemos matado. Esta idea de la “Muerte de Dios” debe entenderse en varios niveles. Se trata, a la vez, de una afirmación metafísica, ética e histórico/sociológica. En el nivel histórico/sociológico, la “Muerte de Dios” debe entenderse como una metáfora del progresivo desgaste de las certezas absolutas que la cultura occidental ha sufrido a partir del fin de la Edad Media. Estas certezas que se desvanecen incluyen, por supuesto, todo tipo de convicciones religiosas, pero también abarcan certidumbres políticas, sociales y culturales. Así, a partir del Renacimiento —y especialmente después de la Reforma protestante—<span style=""> </span>el Catolicismo fue perdiendo su posición de autoridad absoluta en temas de religión; el poder político —antes concentrado en las manos de poderosos monarcas— se fue fragmentando hasta culminar en las democracias modernas; y las clases sociales —que alguna vez fueron estructuras rígidas e inamovibles— se convirtieron en un medio fluido: los burgueses destronaron a la aristocracia. Todo lo que se daba por sentado ha resultado ser frágil y fluido.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Muchas de las consecuencias de la Muerte de Dios son positivas —al fin y al cabo, la modernidad ha traído consigo niveles de libertad y bienestar nunca antes vistos. Sin embargo, junto con este “progreso” ha desaparecido toda certeza ética. Sin Dios para juzgarnos, ¿cómo podremos distinguir entre el bien y el mal? Nietzsche iría aún más lejos: sin Dios para juzgarnos, las nociones de “bien” y “mal” pierden todo significado<a style="" href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a>. Tras la Muerte de Dios, todo juicio de valor se vuelve humano, y por lo tanto se relativiza. Lo terrible del asunto es que los seres humanos no sabemos vivir sin Dios: “</span><span lang="EN-US">God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow.”<a style="" href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a> </span><span style="">El hombre moderno se ha dedicado a construir nuevos ídolos, nuevos criterios que le permitan juzgar y comprender el mundo en términos absolutos: la Muerte de Dios es también el nacimiento de la Ideología<a style="" href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a>. Al encontrarse perdidos y sin dirección —“</span><span lang="EN-US">is there still any up or down?”<i style="">— </i></span><span style="">los hombres fundaron nuevos cultos. Capital, Nación, Proletariado —los nombres de los nuevos dioses son bien conocidos.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Cincuenta y cuatro años después de la publicación de <i style="">La</i> <i style="">Gaya Ciencia</i>, el estallido de la Guerra Civil Española serviría para demostrar lo certero de las predicciones de Nietzsche.</span><span style=""> La Guerra Civil puede considerarse un “estudio de caso” de esta tragedia moderna: en cuestión de décadas, tradiciones de siglos se vieron progresivamente erosionada hasta que las tensiones entres quienes veían esta erosión como una perdida y aquellos que la consideraban un triunfo estallaron en una espiral de violencia casi sin precedentes. El caos moral de la Guerra Civil y las atrocidades resultantes son conocidas por todos. Sin embargo, el discurso maniqueo de ambos bandos —que trataba a fuerza de radicalización y escándalo convencerse a sí mismos y a los otros de que su nuevo ídolo podía proveer un paradigma absoluto— ha obscurecido la ambigüedad moral subyacente en todas las acciones violentas de la guerra. Este ensayo pretende traer a la superficie dicha ambigüedad a partir de una exploración de las dudas y la culpa que se esconden detrás de estas acciones, mostrando las contradicciones y los huecos en las ideologías de ambos bandos. Partiendo de la descripción que Noël Valis ha hecho de la “Política del Martirio,” este ensayo analizará un episodio literario —el linchamiento de los Nacionalistas del pueblo de Pilar en </span><i style=""><span style="" lang="EN-US">For Whom the Bell Tolls— </span></i><span style="">y un hecho histórico</span><span style="" lang="EN-US"> —</span><span style="">la exhumación de cadáveres de religiosas en<span style=""> </span>la Barcelona de 1936— a la luz de la ambigüedad de la dicotomía Mártir/Hereje. Sin Dios para juzgar, esta dicotomía se descompone —y de allí que tanto Mosén Millán como los personajes de Hemingway y los civiles catalanes que presenciaron los hechos de la llamada “Furia Anticlerical,” pese a sus constantes manifestaciones de fe ciega en las causas que defienden, den muestras de culpa. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""> —Ø—</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman; font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Martirio y Herejía</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman; font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 155.95pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;" lang="EN-US">The atmosphere of terrorism is not what you think. At first it is like some gigantic misunderstanding, mixing everything up, inextricably entangling good and evil, innocent and guilty, enthusiasm and cruelty. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 155.95pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: small-caps;" lang="EN-US">Georges Bernanos</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: small-caps;"> </span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: small-caps;"><br /></span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">En “</span><span style="" lang="EN-US">The Politics of Martyrdom,”</span><span style=""> el último capitulo de </span><i style=""><span style="" lang="EN-US">Sacred Realism, </span></i><span style="" lang="EN-US">Noël Valis </span><span style="">ha demostrado las similitudes subyacentes de las prácticas violentas de Nacionalistas y Republicanos. A partir de un análisis de la obras de Sender y Carretero, ha llegado a la conclusión que, pese al anticlericarismo del bando republicano, el martirio y sus narrativas tradicionales constituyen una de las principales estructuras imaginativas con la que ambos bandos explican la violencia y miran a sus muertos. Así, pese a que “</span><span style="" lang="EN-US">the tradition of martyrdom is associated with the Nationalist side, which depicted its struggle as a holy war and crusade," <a style="" href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a><span style=""></span></span><span style="">los Republicanos</span><span style="" lang="EN-US">,</span><span style=""> “</span><span style="" lang="EN-US">sharing the same Catholic culture . . . also used the image of martyrdom.”<a style="" href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a> </span><span style="">Tanto los sacerdotes torturados durante la “Furia Anticlerical” como Paco, protagonista de <i style="">Réquiem por un Campesino Español </i>y sus equivalentes históricos —“</span><span style="" lang="EN-US">fictional deaths like Paco’s were historical realities during the civil war”<a style="" href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a></span><span style="">son considerados mártires por sus respectivos bandos, traicionando así el profundo impacto que la “sombra de Dios” aún ejerce sobre la mentalidad española.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Quizás sea posible aplicar este mismo razonamiento a la inversa. En la teología Católica tradicional, el opuesto del mártir es el hereje. Las muertes violentas de ambos tipos son, en muchos sentidos, equivalentes: tanto mártires como herejes sufren tormentos letales a causa de sus creencias. La única diferencia es el juicio de la Iglesia: el mártir muere en la hoguera por haber defendido la fe verdadera y por lo tanto va al cielo; el hereje es quemado por haber defendido una fe errónea y por lo tanto está condenado al infierno. De este modo, Paco es ejecutado por los Nacionalistas por haber cometido el crimen del heresaica: la enseñanza y promoción de una doctrina errónea. Así, para los Republicanos, Paco es un mártir; para los Nacionalistas, un hereje. Esta equivalencia no ha escapado al<span style=""> </span>análisis de Valis:</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">There was a patrimony of culture, values, and persecutory and purging needs, shared by that Church —which was, after all, the Church of the Inquisition, the Church most infamous for its persecutions of heretics— and its enemies. During the war Nationalists used a language of purification in identifying and killing Republicans as sources of pollution perceived as threatening to the community. Similarly, the church burnings in May 1931, shortly after the Second Republic was proclaimed, and in 1936 represented a peculiar form of auto de fe, purging of religious symbols and habitations, purification by fire: “</span><span style="">que el fuego todo lo purifica.</span><a style="" href="#_ftn7" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="" lang="EN-US"><span style=""></span></span></span></a><span style="" lang="EN-US"></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Sin embargo, tras la Muerte de Dios —que, como se ha visto, no debe entenderse como el fin de la fe religiosa sino como la erosión de los valores absolutos— la autoridad de la Iglesia y la de sus sustitutos ideológicos izquierdistas para determinar a cuál de estas categorías pertenece cada uno de los muertos se ha visto profundamente debilitada. Así, a nadie le queda claro si Paco y el resto de las victimas, tanto Nacionalistas como Republicanas, son mártires o herejes. Por supuesto, el discurso maniqueo de ambos bandos constituye un intento de legitimar la clasificación que hacen de sus muertos y de los del enemigo, pero la virulencia y radicalización de estos discursos de legitimación solo se explica si existe un subtexto de duda. Es por esto que, aunque es cierto que “</span><span style="" lang="EN-US">in civil war each side is convinced of the rightness, the moral significance, of its cause,”<a style="" href="#_ftn8" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a> </span><span style="">debajo de esta apariencia de certeza yace una profunda inseguridad. Del mismo modo que los movimientos de restauración religiosa solo surgen en momentos en los que la fe se encuentra amenazada, las ideologías absolutistas —sean de izquierdas o de derechas— aparecen únicamente cuando la gente siente la necesidad de <i style="">convencerse </i>de la justicia de sus acciones. “Todo lo sólido se desvanece en el aire,” escribe Marx en el <i style="">Manifiesto. </i>Lo mismo puede decirse de la dicotomía Mártir/Hereje, que pierde por completo su carácter absoluto.<br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span style=""></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1cm; text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">—Ø—</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1cm; text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p><div style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><div style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1cm; text-align: center; font-family: times new roman; font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">El Caso de las Monjas de Barcelona</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman; font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;" lang="EN-US">Do we not hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? —Gods, too, decompose!</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: small-caps;" lang="EN-US">Friedrich Nietzsche, <i style="">The Gay Science</i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: small-caps;" lang="EN-US"><i style=""><br /></i></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 7.1pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"> </span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">En </span><i style=""><span style="" lang="EN-US">The Spanish Civil War as Religious Tragedy, </span></i><span style="" lang="EN-US">José M. </span><span style="">Sánchez ofrece un pormenorizado relato de un hecho ocurrido</span><span style="" lang="EN-US"> en Barcelona en 1936:</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">Shortly after the uprising and the iconoclastic fury of church burnings, the cloistered </span><i style=""><span style="">conventos </span></i><span style="" lang="EN-US">were invaded . . . The mob desecrated the nun’s tombs. They disinterred the long-dead bodies . . . and carried the decomposing remains to the front of the churches and chapels and put them on public display. For days, lines of people formed to view the corpses of generations of nuns . . . People stuck cigarettes in the corpses’ mouths and mocked the mummies. Some even performed impromptu dances with the withered corpses.<a style="" href="#_ftn9" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">El incidente constituye un excelente ejemplo de la ambivalencia subyacente en los actos violentos de la Guerra Civil. Para exponer esta ambivalencia, es importante recordar que otra característica común de mártires y herejes es la importancia simbólica que se le otorga a sus restos mortales. Los cuerpos de los mártires se convierten en reliquias —“</span><span style="" lang="EN-US">the rhetoric of martyrdom converts bodies into sacred relics, into the bearers of symbolic significance”—<a style="" href="#_ftn10" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a>, </span><span style="">mientras que, a través de la tortura, los cuerpos de los herejes se convierten en representaciones<span style=""> </span>encarnadas de su error espiritual. En ambos casos, los restos son exhibidos en público: las reliquias en catedrales, los cuerpos de los herejes en las plazas de ejecución.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><a style="" href="#_ftn11" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Así pues, ¿cuál es el significado simbólico de los cadáveres de estas monjas, por qué ameritan ser exhibidas en público? ¿Se trata de mártires o herejes? La respuesta obvia —que se trata de herejes que han pecado contra el dogma republicano— se ve problematizada por las respuestas de los espectadores. Sánchez reporta que “</span><span style="" lang="EN-US">while the anticlericals appear jaunty in the photographs taken of these scenes, the faces of common people looking at the corpses appear haunted and betray a fear that suggests that such things are better kept out of sight and out of mind.”<a style="" href="#_ftn12" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a> </span><span style="">Más aún, la historia oral que reporta espectadores que “</span><span style="" lang="EN-US">reacted with amusement”<a style="" href="#_ftn13" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a></span><span style="">parece indicar un cierto nerviosismo —al fin y al cabo, la risa puede ser interpretada como una reacción ante algo amenazante, un intento de restarle importancia a algo terrible.<br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">La intención transgresiva de estos actos implica la existencia de reglas subyacentes que aún conservan su poder de interdicción. Al fin y al cabo, la blasfemia y el sacrilegio no tienen significado alguno si no existe algo sagrado que desacrar . Al respecto, Valis escribe:</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">The unearthing of dead religious, ostensibly meant to reveal the dirty secrets and scandals of the Church, also uncovers another layer of the sacred: the residue of power that same faith still exerted over the unbelievers. Had the Church been of little importance in the social fabric of Spanish life, none of these acts would have occurred.<a style="" href="#_ftn14" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Así, el acto mismo de exponer a las monjas traiciona la importancia que se les otorga y su estatus como símbolos de un poder superior. Las connotaciones rituales y religiosas de este episodio tampoco pueden ser ignoradas. De nuevo, Valis:</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">The killing of priests, the mutilations of sacred objects, the burlesque parodies of Church rites and practices, all these things were performed within a counter-ritualistic framework to destroy the power of the Church as an institution, as a class enemy, and as the bearer of community values.<a style="" href="#_ftn15" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">En su intento de destruir el poder de la religión, los anticlericales Republicanos terminan reproduciendo muchas de sus formas: Dios parece estar a la vez presente y ausente, la simple inversión de los ritos no altera su significado. Nietzsche habló de “el cadáver de Dios” y de su descomposición —pero también de la “sombra” o el “fantasma” de Dios, y de como este fantasma se rehúsa a desaparecer por completo. Al exponer a las monjas, los anticlericales parecen estar repitiendo la proclamación del Loco de <i style="">La Gaya Ciencia: </i>Dios ha muerto, nosotros lo hemos matado —mirad, he aquí su cadáver. Sin embargo, el miedo y el nerviosismo —¿la culpa, tal vez?— que los anticlericales demuestran ante su propio sacrilegio parece indicar la presencia del fantasma divino. Más aún, si Dios ha muerto y no existen criterios absolutos para determinar la moralidad de los actos, ¿cómo pueden los anticlericales estar seguros de que están exponiendo los restos de herejes, y no las reliquias de mártires? Ambas prácticas son tan similares en cuanto a forma que resulta difícil diferenciarlas.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span style=""></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span style=""></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">—Ø—</span></span></p><p style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p><div style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman; font-weight: bold;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">El Caso de Pablo y Pilar</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 4cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;" lang="EN-US">Destruction without mitigation and ruin as such assumed the dignity of supreme values. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 4cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: small-caps;" lang="EN-US">Hannah Arendt, <i style="">The Origins of Totalitarianism</i></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">En </span><i style=""><span style="" lang="EN-US">For Whom the Bell Tolls, </span></i><span style="">Ernst Hemingway presenta otro ejemplo de la ambigüedad moral de la guerra. Se trata del episodio, narrado por Pilar, en el que los habitantes Republicanos de un pueblo anónimo linchan a sus vecinos Nacionalistas. En este episodio la culpa y la duda de la validez de las acciones violentas están en la superficie. Pilar salpica su relato de expresiones de arrepentimiento: “</span><span style="" lang="EN-US">Much [happened]. And all of it ugly. Even that which was glorious.”<a style="" href="#_ftn16" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a> </span><span style=""><span style=""></span>Interjecciones de ese tipo —</span><span style="" lang="EN-US">“it was a very ugly thing,” “this is shameful”— </span><span style="">aparecen una y otra vez, como si la guerrillera sazonada sintiera la necesidad de justificarse continuamente, admitiendo que ha participado en un acto terrible. Más aún, páginas antes Pablo expresa un<span style=""> </span>súbito arrebato de fe religiosa que solo puede interpretarse como producto de la duda existencial que ha sido descrita:</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">The he said, “May God aid thee, Pilar.”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">“What are you talking of God for?” I said to him. “What way is that to speak?”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">“Yes, “ he said, “God and the </span><i style=""><span style="">Virgen.</span></i><span style="">”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">“</span><i style=""><span style="" lang="EN-US">Qué va, </span></i><span style="" lang="EN-US">God and the <i style="">Virgen,</i>” I said to him, “Is that any way to talk?”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">“I am afraid to die, Pilar,” he said. “</span><i style=""><span style="">Tengo miedo de morir</span></i><i style=""><span style="" lang="EN-US">. </span></i><span style="" lang="EN-US">Dost thou understand?”<a style="" href="#_ftn17" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Pablo tiene miedo de morir, en efecto —pero su miedo va más allá del simple terror ante la muerte. ¿Es que acaso el guerrillero Republicano tiene miedo de morir <i style="">inconfeso</i>?<i style=""> </i>Esto explicaría su llamado a Dios y a la Virgen. De nuevo, el fantasma de Dios embruja los sueños de quienes han cometido atrocidades.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">La disolución de la dicotomía hereje/mártir también recibe un tratamiento explicito en el relato de Pilar. A lo largo del pasaje, las víctimas de la turba Republicana son representadas de rodillas:</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">“</span><span style="" lang="EN-US">Kneel down against the wall with your heads against the wall,” Pablo told them. The <i style="">civiles </i>looked at one another. “Kneel, I say,” Pablo said. “Get down and kneel.”<a style="" href="#_ftn18" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">The priest was standing, and those who were left were kneeling in half a circle around him and they were all praying.<a style="" href="#_ftn19" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Esta imagen tiene la intención obvia de mostrar a las víctimas como indefensas, así como de representar el poder total que Pablo y compañía ejercen sobre ellos. Sin embargo, parece también haber en ellas un subtexto religioso. Los santos son a menudo representados de rodillas, en actitud de alabanza a Dios; los mártires mueren arrodillados.<br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Por otro lado, el relato también contiene imágenes que asimilan a los linchados con el tipo del hereje. En primer lugar está el método de ejecución elegido por Paco, que recuerda a ciertas tradiciones católicas de violencia ritual: “</span><span style="" lang="EN-US">Pablo had them beaten to death with flails and thrown from the top of the cliff into the river.”<a style="" href="#_ftn20" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a> </span><span style="">El uso de “</span><span style="" lang="EN-US">heavy herdsman’s clubs, ox-goads . . . and wooden pitchforks” <a style="" href="#_ftn21" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a></span><span style="">remite a una escena de <i style="">Réquiem por un Campesino Español </i>en la que Sender describe un ritual antisemita celebrado en Semana Santa:</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">El Sábado de Gloria, por la mañana, los chicos iban a la iglesia llevando pequeños mazos de madera que tenían guardados todo el año para aquel fin. Iban —quién iba a suponerlo— a matar judíos. Para evitar que rompieran los bancos, Mosén Millán hacía poner el día anterior tres largos maderos derribados cerca del atrio. Se suponía que los judíos estaban dentro, lo que no era para las imaginaciones infantiles demasiado suponer. Los chicos se sentaban detrás y esperaban. Al decir el cura en los oficios la palabra <i style="">resurrexit, </i>comenzaban a golpear produciendo un fragor escandaloso. <a style="" href="#_ftn22" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Los judíos representaban el arquetipo del hereje en la España inquisitorial. En la matanza relatada por Pilar, los Nacionalistas toman el lugar de los judíos —y, por extensión, de los herejes. Esta no es la única conexión simbólica establecida entre los Nacionalistas linchados y la herejía. En otro momento del relato, Pilar describe los intentos farsicos de un anarquista borracho de prenderle fuego al enorme cadáver de Don Anastacio:</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">The drunkard got up and went over to Don Anastasio, and leaned over and poured out of the bottle onto the head of Don Anastasio and onto his clothes, and then he took a matchbox out of his pocket and lit several matches, trying to make a fire with Don Anastasio. <a style="" href="#_ftn23" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">La profunda conexión simbólica entre la hoguera y el castigo de la herejía no puede ser ignorada. Al intentar quemar el cuerpo derrotado de uno de los Nacionalistas, el anarquista de Hemingway está recreando —si bien en tono de burla— el <i style="">auto de fe</i>, uno de los rituales religiosos más poderosos del catolicismo inquisitorial.<br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Así pues, las victimas de la turba Republicana son representadas a un tiempo con imágenes que sugieren que son mártires y que son herejes. Esta ambigüedad se traslada al plano de lo moral, en el que los personajes expresan fuertes dudas acerca de la validez de sus acciones. La carencia de Dios juega un papel muy importante en estas dudas, como una conversación entre Robert Jordan y otro de los guerrilleros pone muy en claro:</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">“Yet you have killed.”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">“Yes. And I will kill again. But if I live later, I will try to live in such a way, doing no harm to any one, that it will be forgiven.”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">“By whom?”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">“Who knows? Since we do not have God here any more, neither His Son, or the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">“You have not God any more?”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. […] Clearly I miss him, having been brought up with religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">“The it is thyself who will forgive thee for thy killing.”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">“I believe so,” said Anselmo. <a style="" href="#_ftn24" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Sin Dios para juzgarlos, los personajes Republicanos de </span><i style=""><span style="" lang="EN-US">For Whom the Bell Tolls</span></i><i style=""><span style="" lang="EN-US"> </span></i><span style="">solo se tienen a si mismos para buscar el perdón de sus acciones. La pregunta es, ¿pueden perdonarse a si mismos?</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span style="" lang="EN-US"></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="" lang="EN-US">—Ø—</span></span></p><div style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: center; font-family: times new roman;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: center; font-family: times new roman; font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Conclusión</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><span style=""> </span></span><span style="font-size: 10pt;" lang="EN-US">God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? […] What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: small-caps;" lang="EN-US">Friedrich Nietzsche, <i style="">The Gay Science</i></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: small-caps;" lang="EN-US"> </span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: small-caps;" lang="EN-US"> </span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 5cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-variant: small-caps;" lang="EN-US"><br /></span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">En su discusión de <i style="">Réquiem por un Campesino Español, </i>Valis ha identificado dos intenciones textuales: la narrativa martiriológica y la confesión de culpa de Mosén Millán. La autora describe </span><span lang="EN-US">“the complex narrative turn, in which an account of the martyrdom (Paco’s) is at the same time a botched confession (Mosén Millán’s).”<a style="" href="#_ftn25" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a> </span><span style="">Sin embargo, Valis también ha identificado la incapacidad del personaje del sacerdote de presentar una confesión completa: “</span><span lang="EN-US">as a confession, [<i style="">Réquiem</i>] is . . . an incomplete plot of revelation. […] Mosén Millán’s anguish . . .<span style=""> </span>is filled with guilt. […] The horrible confusion [he] feels is above all a moral fog.”<a style="" href="#_ftn26" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a></span><span style=""> Esta “niebla moral” puede muy bien verse como la metáfora perfecta para los efectos contradictorios de la Muerte de Dios y la permanencia de su sombra. Mosén Millán está atrapado entre las dos versiones de Paco: la figura cristológica que ha sufrido el martirio a manos de las fuerzas del mal, y el heresaica que ha pecado al intentar esparcir una doctrina ponzoñosa entre los miembros de la comunidad. Pese a su fe en Dios, el cura es incapaz de declarar abiertamente su repudio de Paco. Al mismo tiempo, Mosén Millán no puede tampoco pronunciarse en contra de la ejecución. Por lo menos una parte de esta confusión puede ser atribuida a la indecidibilidad de la figura del titular Campesino Español: Paco es a un tiempo Cristo reencarnado y agitador social peligroso —¿merece ser premiado o castigado? Ante la imposibilidad de responder, Mosén Millán se ve reducido al silencio:</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US">If there is something unsayable in Réquiem, if betrayal and guilt lie barely repressed beneath the narrative surface, it is because there is something unspeakable about the Spanish Civil War itself.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><a style="" href="#_ftn27" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""></span></span></a></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2cm; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">¿Hay algo de este silencio, de esta “indecidibilidad indecible,” en el llamado “Pacto del Olvido” posterior al fin de la guerra? Es muy probable que sí. Hasta la fecha, los españoles han sido incapaces de decidir si los actos violentos cometidos durante la Guerra Civil —que muy bien pueden ser interpretados como los “</span><span lang="EN-US">festivals of atonement” </span><span style=""><span style=""> </span>que Nietzsche considera necesarios tras el asesinato de Dios— fueron ejecuciones de herejes o martirios de santos. Quizás la ambigüedad de esta dicotomía es equivalente a la que Javier Cercas explora en <i style="">Soldados de Salamina: </i>los protagonistas de la guerra, ¿son héroes o criminales?<span style=""> </span>Como en los episodios que hemos analizado, la vergüenza, la culpa, y la duda moral llenan la memoria de la Guerra Civil. Al final, solo queda el silencio.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">Las atrocidades de la Guerra Civil muestran lo penetrante del análisis de Nietzsche, quien comprendió<span style=""> </span>—a diferencia del triunfalismo de Voltaire y otros pensadores de la ilustración clásica— que la muerte de Dios es fundamentalmente una tragedia: un hecho doloroso cuyas consecuencias devastadoras resultan difíciles de comprender. La violencia de la Guerra Civil puede entonces entenderse al mismo tiempo como consecuencia y causa de la muerte de Dios, quien murió una y otra y otra vez a lo largo del conflicto. En <i style="">Réquiem, </i>Cristo muere a manos de los Nacionalistas; en la Cataluña de 1936, los “incontrolables” Republicanos crucifican sacerdotes. Parecería que los combatientes de ambos bandos necesitaban convencerse de que la deidad estaba verdaderamente muerta, y que nunca iba a volver —o que en realidad Dios no había muerto, y que nunca se había marchado. Dios ha muerto, proclama Nietzsche, y sin embargo su fantasma embruja a los españoles hasta la fecha. Tal vez está sea la última ambigüedad de la modernidad: Dios ha muerto, y sin embargo, su sombra permanece entre nosotros. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span></p> <span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">Sinceramente,<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">NMMP</span><br /></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0