I definitely crave for being loved, both emotionally and physically and these both aspects encapsulated in the intellectual. I wonder how many people I know that I can truly feel to have a lasting bond; the numbers are increasingly small… My best interlocutors, the dead writers, are not the greatest lovers, they´re callous and arrogant and omit so much information that the gift of friendship demands.
Writing is not only a skill, I mean, if you know how to write then you can write anything, that´s a complete fallacy. There´s a wide gap between prose and poetry, and even when one can copycat the other or imitate, they stand for wholly different categories of experience and representation. In order to be a good writer, craft is not everything… One necessarily must read a lot of literature: Fernando told me once that writing has a history – that you need to read some things in order to understand others; perhaps his example was a little bit historicist because the wisdom of every age can be approached without the wisdom of another but yet there´s no wisdom of any historical period that can either become present wisdom or decipher the encoding of our present experience. My problem is that I´m not such a good reader precisely because of the great difficulties I have in focusing or concentrating when I read and somehow I believe to have made great progress but still not enough for mastering the art. My strength and weakness is that I can´t be too bothered about bad writing and the contrast it has with my own; I seem to judge myself by the standards of the great writers who read a lot, experienced a lot and took the time to master their craft through long years of practice. I´m not saying that I wouldn´t like to have all those years of practice, my concern is that I´m not sure that I will have them. It is diaporetic: The mediation between the apparent beauty and health of my body is contrasted with the fragile and rather mad condition of my mind and what my body feels from inside out; I can´t understand what exactly is wrong and whether it is just my imagination or not, and I just can´t find out unless I will be dead already. The fact of approaching the harbor of death so close in the everyday entanglements is a double bind, because I am so much alive on account of it but I can´t be alive enough to stand it. I guess now I begin to understand in a fuller sense what Diego meant by the mere awaiting of one´s death in the rabbinic experience of the world that is as otherworldly as Christianity but less grounded in fantasies than in the confusion of tongues in Babel. One´s not waiting death per se, but he´s just being patient – what Kafka demanded! The waiting is the same in the whole of the universe, the deadly discovery of the nothing in medieval thought against the background of the Greek infinitude: Death is only eavesdropping, informing us thereof, but it doesn´t constitute the reference; whenever we turn death into the reference we´ve lost the quality of subjects and as such the ability to stand as either ones or others in love and are instead turned into the subjects around objects and the objects around objects that take pleasure in the plain sight of sexual organs alone. But this human encounter is not without mediation, it couldn´t be, because then the mimesis aspect of beauty wouldn´t matter at all; we find this mediation in the world, in the experience of time and of contingency, in the experience of not having, of becoming, of being and then not being. Moments of non-being is what Virginia Woolf called this, but is then by chance the world nothing but the array of these moments of non-being? Does the world as the sum of the aggregates of all human relationships stand for no more than moments of non-being? I don´t think so, maybe the Christian world would but not this world. The idea of splitting the varieties of self and experience into non-being and being seems a rather imperialistic and bourgeois way to do philosophy and one that has to rely so completely on the truth of the absolute; isn´t precisely the whole idea of modern art and literature and deconstruction to hunt down and subject the absolute to the myriad of possible experiences? Then I guess what this is pointing toward is not that we reject the absolute but rather that we inevitable shift its position and place it outside the limits of experience, beauty and truth – we are then locating the absolute as an inevitable burden in the possible experience of concretion. If art thinks it has a task to silence the absolute and to annulate it (Aufheben) this could only mean that place of art stands much lower in the spiral scale of the absolute than the claims of the absolute itself. To cancel out the absolute from the categories of thought means to render invalid so much of the experience of thinking and living but yet reliance on the absolute meaning cancelling out just as much. Perhaps one could conclude that the absolute is there but that it is not reliable. Santiago Kovadloff (and Levinas) argues that the absolute is tantamount to anti-Semitism ever since Plato; I like the idea but I wish at that point I had more arguments to be able to agree. The absolute doesn´t admit of aporia and is thus at odds with the simple fact of human contradiction; the absolute is a numerical scale and as such unreliable even for the most abstract categories. What will I do in case I can´t travel? How will I live? How will I go on? How could I write? Should I let myself die of mere complacent procrastination? Will I be in the exact same situation a year from now? That would be so very stupid. Perhaps I should still apply for Nottingham. I must send all the letters tomorrow morning and then I can sit and try to work in the translation of the Ark. I don´t know him, but I only can wish that Sergio will want to make love to me. I need it desperately – I guess this is a bad way to put it, it definitely sounds wrong when having love made to one, is meant as a desperate movement, but I said it so this mean something for which I have to make myself responsible. At any rate I will be a second-hand dish in lieu of the Berlin boyfriend, with less fluent German, without a German passport, an invitation to Berlin and most probably without the beauty as well.
I´m wondering now if Þór is actually somebody that can be trusted for anything at all and not just another dilettante; he does seem like a nice guy, but I can no longer afford to build castles on sand. I want to die elsewhere, if at all... and what a lively statement this is! Whatever the situation with Sergio is, I just would like to think that next time a man is going to make love to me I´m not going to be disgusted. The nice part about that night when I was cruised in the street while drunk by that guy is that I don´t remember much, but for sure it was bad sex and he was quite a failure as a person both from his speech and his beauty. I wish I had been sober, at least for the sake of the spurious guilt. Changes I must effect in my life soon: the Internet is not a place to find sexual gratification or to dream, I must become a lot more practical about it. Another good reason to leave this place is that I´m dying to read real books again... To write essay from e-books is possible, I´ve done it, but it is too frustrating. I want huge libraries with a lot of elegant beautiful men strolling around, petit bars and nightly sights. I want to be elegant and beautiful myself, or to think of myself as such without this abjection-in-reverse that binds me to a mediocre father figure in order to write beautiful texts. I want to be able to write without having to hate every moment of my life in order to accomplish it. Is this too delusional? I wonder if there´s any way I could feel myself physically better... I guess I will, next time I will be in love and next time I will be free, and for sure it will improve as soon as I can find the three dollars I need to take my glasses from the optician. Funny how the present displays itself before us – we can´t make ends meet for three dollars but we want to unearth truths for the whole world.
Another thought: I don´t miss Maria Clara at all, but I do miss Patricia very badly, not because she was a nice person but because deep down we were so similar and because I had never had a mother figure, ever... I guess having this thought now can only help accentuate my loneliness. For sure I enjoyed living like a son of the privileged class and the black maid and the laundry wash-ups everyday, but more than anything I enjoyed the deference she had for me and more than anything the soirées and dinner parties, the family-like photographs and the socialite gossipy entanglements with people. But how could I have been so naive as to think that they would be like my family? I knew deep inside me perfectly well that in the moment I would fall out with Maria Clara, I would vanish from their lives so completely in one sole second and that´s exactly how it happened. I was a political underdog used only in order to monitor Maria Clara´s life and shape it after their good judgment and in turn I received free lodging and ocassional love. They can´t say I wasn´t successful at my job nevertheless.
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