We are rats, and we are blue. Yet we dream every night.

Amanecer en Manhattan. Con las primeras luces, muy inciertas,

cruza las últimas calles una prostituta negra que vuelve a su cuarto

después de una noche de trabajo. Despeinada, ojerosa, el frío de la

hora transfigura su borrachera en una estúpida lucidez,

un ajado apartamiento del mundo.

Cesar Aira

What do the rats dream of? Food mainly. A small couch where to sit and watch TV. Not too much. Since our reason is not really developed, since our world does not lives completely there, we don’t dream too much. I would risk even to say that we don’t even have an unconscious yet.

We dream with the roofs of Paris, and once there, we dream with the real Paris, that where there was life in the cafes, where people used to get laid, where you could actually live there. And we look at the roofs of paris, from the eight floor of a building just in the border of Paris, and we don’t give a shit about it. (We don’t give a shit about the dead museums, the overpriced food, the void-looking perfect french girls with their cute accent and their empty souls.)

Because what we really dream about is the abyss. Since 15 or so, we trow ourselves into the abyss without a lamp, a parachute, or life insurance. We still don’t have insurance, we don’t get the idea of it. We fall, and we try to see. It is dark, the abyss. You don’t really know, until you hit the bottom, if you are or not in the abyss. There is always the not so small chance that you are not falling but just standing in the dark. There is no way to distinguish between accelerated movement and resting without the expensive experimental set-ups that exists in Europe or America. You are just becoming more and more alone, getting old as they call it. Somewhere in the fall you realize something: the place from where you think is real. Real in what sense? In the sense that is not necessary to approach reason in the way is done in Europe, in America. Quoting Foncea once again, “Pues que en Hispanoamérica no hay tal cosa como una imaginación desbocada, nosotros realmente fabricamos pistas de hielo por amor, realmente llenamos trenes de muertos sólo por miedo ¿Por miedo a qué? por miedo a todo y a todos.” The secret of latinamerican literature is that we fill trains with corpses just because of fear, and that the corpses are real. As real as the evangelic priest singing to a god to come soon a saturday morning, next to a guy called “Elvis” who plays drums made of empty painting cans. As real as the political reality that fucks latinamerica without any remorse, that kills, that rapes, that lies, with a smile so fake that becomes real. You realize that there is a way to think that is not completely related to reason, and in despite of that, or maybe exactly because of that, it lets you understand the world in a different, way. That is what I mean when I say that is not casual that the definition of life from a scientific point of view came to light in Chile, in the 70’s. That is why Bolaño is one of the great writers of the 21st century. That is why we have Parra and we have Borges, and Europe is just starting to read them, leave aside understanding. Because sometimes, the only way, the proper way to understand Kafka, for example, or Wittgenstein, is when you read them first in cheap translations in the library of your high school, that for most unbeknownst reasons, has pedophiles priest as directors and one of the most beautiful libraries I ever seen. And then you read Wittgenstein while trying to learn english, to find somewhere hidden in his notebooks something like a “roughly speaking, understand a sentence means to understand a language.” And that must happen when you are 19, and while you walk the streets of this latinamerican city, you repeat, like praying, y me sera permitido poseer la verdad, en un alma y un cuerpo. En un alma y un cuerpo. Because it is there, and I would even say that is just there, that poetry reveals herself in all her magic, as the one that can keep you alive, like the one that assures you that that is not all, that we, very very deep in our souls, are angels. That is equivalent to say that art affirms the dignity of life and resists death, but only formally equivalent. There is a world between one formulation and the other, the same world that separates life from suicide.

Let’s take for example the quote that opens this chapter. It is from a short story from Cesar Aira, called Cecil Taylor. It starts with the black prostitute that will be the victim of an act of violence, because she saved a rat from being eat by a cat. Here a piece from the middle of the story:

Por supuesto, sabía que era preciso descartar la idea de un reconocimiento súbito, y hasta de un triunfo gradual, a la manera de círculos concéntricos; no era tan ingenuo. Pero sí esperaba, y tenía todo el derecho a hacerlo, que tarde o temprano su talento llegaría a ser celebrado. (Aquí hay una verdad y un error: es cierto que hoy se lo aprecia en todo el mundo, y quienes hemos escuchado sus discos durante años con amor y una admiración sin límites seríamos los últimos en ponerlo en duda; pero también hay un error, un error de tipo lógico, y esta historia intentará mostrar, sin énfasis, la propiedad del error. Claro que nada confirma la necesidad de esta historia, que no es más que un capricho literario. Sucede que una vez imaginada, se vuelve en cierto modo necesaria. La historia de la prostituta que espantó a la rata no es necesaria tampoco, lo que no quiere decir que la gran serie virtual de las historias sea innecesaria en su conjunto; y sin embargo lo es. La de Cecil Taylor es una vieja fábula: le conviene el modo de la aplicación. La atmósfera no es necesaria... ¿Pero cómo oír la música fuera de una atmósfera?)

Cesar Aira is completely aware of the illogical nature of an art event, but nevertheless he tells us that Cecil Taylor was waiting, with justified reason, that some day his talent would be celebrated. Cecil tries to play, bot none listens: the indifference was the plane and the interest the point. The chief of the bar canceled the second presentation and Cecil didn’t see the point in arguing about music with him, “he limited himself to go back with the rats.”

The problem was, mainly, that everyone asked him if what he did was a joke. He asked himself why it was possible to ask him that, when he never would have imagined to ask to miss V., for example, if whatever was what she did, was a joke or not. The same with the owner of the bar. “There was something inherent in his work that provoked the interrogation.”

One night, coming back from a job in Brooklyn, he realize something. For his music to be recognized he must act in front of a public which coefficient of intelligence and sensibility is grater than a certain threshold X. Then if he starts playing for a public with X/100, he will have to “pass” by a public of X/50, and after that, by a public of X/25, and like that ad infinitum. “As long as the series continues, I will always fail, because I will never have the public with the minimum quality. It is so obvious.” The story ends one paragraph later, without him finding yet the proper public.

This is how the event is presented to us, the rats. A failure that has no visible end, but which sometimes, in a way that we only can define as magical, in spite of being aware of the causal nature of the world, makes it.

But the stories don’t ever tell that part, it belongs to the realm of silence.

Then eventually, something happens. Or not. In both cases you find again a certain poem, that talks about a man, that goes and try to work. A monster who martyred cat and rabbits. He was once your age, and you, the one reading it again, where once the age of the man in the first part of the poem, fearing that the poem one day will became truth. So you talk with your friends about it, about waking up one day with a wife, two kids, and a job that you hate, in a life that is not yours. But your friends are nothing more than paintings hanging on a wall in a museum. The portrait of Isabel Rawshore, scummed by the pencil of Francis Bacon. Not even the three studies at the edge of the cross can make you feel so bad, so alone, so part of a story. And then you keep falling.

Do you?

Copulation is just as much out of place in baroque as it is in human reality, to which it nevertheless provides sustenance with the fantasies by which that reality is constituted. That was a quote from Lacan if you didn’t know. Since words are always present in art, there is always a saying, copulation cannot be there. This brings us to the wordless nature of copulation. Is that all?

Love making is like to turn on a lamp, then, words are useless there and one should remain silent. Mais on parle, et en parlant, on cherche le silence. Concealing the fact that there is something more there where we cannot say anything. This misuse of poetry makes me feel disgraceful, almost worst than Heidegger. Where word breaks off, no thing may be. And then a fake turning back that just hides our pussyness.

We, rats, can fuck. Sometimes. Mostly when is cold and we are a bit sad and drunk. But what moves us is the moment of ecstasy. These moments, that are few in life but they are, are to be found in the most pilgrims places. A beautiful example is the one that Bolaño tells us, from the point of view of the a-bit-jealous boyfriend of the girl that will appear shortly. The story goes like this: Mexico DF, the 70’s. A group of poets in a bus, a latin american bus. You know how’s that, don’t you? The dirt, the virgins, the cheap and kitsch decoration of the bus. The driver, fat and sweaty, a lumpen. The bus travels the night, is empty besides the poets and the driver. Sitting together, Arturo Belano and a girl. The girl is the aforementioned girlfriend of the jealous boyfriend. She is pregnant, but nobody in the group knows it besides the father, who looks back from time to time to his girlfriend and the poet who talks to her as none ever before talked to her, so naturally, so desolated. She falls in love for a moment. Everyone in the bus remains silent. The boyfriend sees her profile, the profile in that special night. The girl falls in love with a sleepwalker. The bus arrives.

(Where does it arrive? For what purpose? Nobody knows. Nobody will ever tell us. In a certain way that doesn’t matter. But it does. Because we go nowhere, always. We are sleepwalkers who go somewhere in a dream that certainly smells as a nightmare. A dream, a nightmare, that we know for once and for ever lost, irremediably. But we don’t wake up. We keep on dreaming. That is the courage that some rats have: traverse the dream as it gets more and more real. More and more painful. The bet must be doubled each time. Love again, in despite of the flesh being sad. Read again when all the books are already read. See, for the third time, everything. And then, wake up in our own funeral.)

Everything for a moment of ecstasy.

Photo by Carabas