The soliloquy of the sources, who can think of it, but please, this is a newspaper! Anyway, it’s late, it shouldn’t be that serious either, after all, it’s the most placid headline of the day, a small town-planning stamp, bad business if the talking sources keep quiet.
I write in transit and from the cafeteria car. I travel at night across my country, I go towards the cold, at least towards September. Soon we will relight the laborious fire of the houses and we will barely go out to wake up the skin, the fluffy heart. It will be winter and I won’t write here anymore, I don’t think they’ll let me, in ordinary life thought isn’t necessary. Everyday life only requires electrical impulses, even in professions such as journalism, which originally, due to its link to language, was considered a task of the intellect. But these are all legends.
I try to travel light. My idea is to feel somewhat weightless on these trips, but wherever I go I buy books. It is, I have known for a long time, a pathology. Why do you buy more books if you have so many to read? A meme ran around: because I haven’t read the new ones either.
In one of Thomas Bernard that someone has given me (Wittgenstein’s nephew) reads the following: “And the truth is that only sitting in the carbetween the place I just left and the other I’m heading to, I’m happy, alone in the car and on the trip I am happy, I am the most unhappy of the newcomers that you can imagine, wherever I arrive, as soon as I arrive, I am unhappy. I am one of those people who, deep down, cannot stand anywhere in the world and are only happy between the places from where they leave or to those who go”.
Unknown and threatening forces
William Burroughs went to many places and came back from almost all of them, although he never came back intact. the author of the naked lunch He wrote, according to his friend Allen Ginsberg, “flapping his cape before the psychic danger of discovering some secret that could destroy him”, and from that honest understanding of the craft, which he arrived at after a long time considering the act of writing as something embarrassing, embarrassing and false, he explored his homosexuality, indulged in an unruly misogyny, tried to challenge all control systems and rose as a spokesman for the horror that is life in society. It was in his literature what it was in his life.
Literary outlaw. Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, is a high-profile biography in which Ted Morgan gives an account of an individual whom he defines as a “human litmus in whom the horrors and perplexities of his time found personal expression.” Someone who was sure that every man harbors a parasite inside him that does not act in any way for his benefit, and that corroborates the basic dualism that makes it difficult for human beings to communicate and exchange ideas, first of all with oneself. Because according to Burroughs, no one is one person, but two. And with conflicting purposes.
In times when no one seems to harbor abject fantasies, nothing should underlie and countless more or less well-intentioned rednecks claim to be keeping our nauseous nature at bay, obscenity insinuates itself not only as an artistic ideal and commitment but as the only way to express oneself absolutely . An attitude that led Burroughs to persecution and litigation that fortunately occurred in France, possibly “the only country in the world in which literary reputation was a mitigating factor in a criminal case.”
Served by Es Pop Ediciones in a heroic translation by Óscar Palmer, literary outlaw It is the detailed account of a life that, despite having the collaboration of its protagonist since he, an American, ate in the European style, “with the tines of the fork downwards”, passes without self-indulgence and lacking in vanities. More than seven hundred pages that unravel the existential adventures of someone who in 1930 took a shot of chloral hydrate, thus inaugurating a long relationship with drugs, but whose biography was going to be monopolized by a much more fearsome and harmful substance: language.
actions and intentions
It is never easy to make yourself understood. Less in this context. Somehow, however, these articles that I am writing here are bringing things to my mind, today for example Koko, an individual of the female gorilla to whom Barbet Schroeter dedicated a film in 1978, because it is known that the beast had learned to communicate in sign language. By incorporating at least a thousand human words, Koko learned to observe his feelings in the person, he was able to enunciate his own states of mind, humorous traits and perhaps even glimpsed a poetic sense of existence, pure animal abuse.
The ape died sleeping in 2018, at 46 years of age, I do not know if he was aware of his condition, if he was aware of the gorilla or not. Now my movie-matching neurosis leads me to associate his story with The country of silence and darkness (1971), another documentary, this one by Werner Herzog, where a group of deaf-blind people went hand in hand to the botanical garden to gently touch some cacti. “People believe that deafness is silence, but they are wrong, it is a constant noise,” said one of them. Blindness was defined as a black river with lush banks.
The characters in that film that struggled to break through to another dimension communicated through tactile translation, pressing the palms of their hands, tracing sigils. The restless or meditative hands of all those people who seemed to have been taken from Thomas Bernhard’s back pocket, from the glove compartment of Thomas Bernhard’s damaged car, and who spoke like this, touching their hands, which if you think about it is like looking at each other’s eyes or kissing the lips, a very proper and very corresponding thing, something that cannot be lost.
But August is over, now yes. To end the waffle, some good news no one was counting on, something I’ve discovered: ten-year-old girls are listening to Kate Bush, who once described herself as the world’s shyest megalomaniac. In 1983, Kate Bush, owner and lady, wrote Running Up That Hill, this song that was originally titled “A Pact with God” and that now jogs lightly and out of place —never out of place—, crying out in its lyrics that it cannot fully put itself in the other’s shoes, that it cannot feel and desire like the other, who does not understand, does not know and is not capable of listening to the other conclusively. Pop music that yearns for another way of life. Another way of being.
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