Journal 06.05.10

“Love and education represent relative identities between lack of identities in which intuition dominates the concept (love), and the concept dominates intuition (education)”. –Hegel´s System der Sittlichkeit

The Master-Slave relation arises when there are no other channels of mediation between people, and Hegel refused to objectify this, that is, to make bourgeois private property the proper mediation.

Rose on Hegel: How can there be any reference to absolute ethical life in a society based on bourgeois private property, on lack of identity, on relative ethical life, where the real totality can only appear to these isolated individuals as abstract and unreal?

Hegel on Art: “Art in bourgeois society, whether it represents love, romantic adventures or divine comedy, denies the present and is an absolute, impotent longing for the past of for the future” –S.d.S.

Rose on Hegel: Instead of uniting concept and intuition religion debases real social relations even more than art. For art remains in the contradiction between intuition and concept. Religion, however, reconciles concept and intuition in another world, and thus makes our relation to both the world beyond and the real existence one of impotent longing. Religion, unlike art, maintains the image of intuition, the promise of a real transformation, but at the same time, prevents its actual development.

Rose: As long as the absolute is represented as God, it is inconceivable as the absolute.

A common notion of God = Un-freedom, inconceivability of the Absolute. Does then God reveal himself through private revelation (as in Christianity) or in public discourse (as in Judaism) in order to constitute himself as an un-common place, a stumbling block; God as an object in itself or a phenomenal thing that can be subsumed under the same standards we apply to the criticism of art and literature… Sometimes I have this perception that people who allegedly don´t believe in God, have believed at some point in their lives, and that their struggle with non believing is a strife so paralyzing as the sleep inducing effect of modern theology to step out of the natural boundaries of dogmatics without actually shattering the whole world and the way we live in it. In thought, to depart metaphysically from the idea of God is necessarily tantamount to throwing oneself into the bucket of freedom´s waters without knowing actually how to swim – by this I don´t mean people shouldn´t do it, it is perhaps necessary to drown. For those who are able to think systematically, it could be true that emptying the seat of God in the hierarchy of the absolute and in the metaphysical superstructure of the universe is equated to something like completely de-centering the world and expect each of the fragmentary pieces thereafter to function like autonomous centers in full awareness of their condition as “second-hand” capitals of faraway counties. Thus the center of the world isn´t completely dissolved, it just happens that the place for the absolute, for the metaphysical center, remains void. The question remains whether it is possible to live a life under the conditions of seamless freedom while being aware of the void at the very center. Modernity has been all about examples of how this experiment is possible: Paris in the 19^th century and New York in the 20^th century – yet their claims for the de-centeredness of the world have been so much vain as they have been narcissistic, for they as geographical aggregates of forms of absolute and relative aspects of life have stood themselves in lieu of imperial Rome. The cultural anxiety over the temporal nature of these surrogate metaphysical centers of the world understood geographically, culturally and politically, is very intense because palliative care is offered in a two-fold manner to the denizens of this world: They apply the intensity of time to the claim of eternity and also suffer from the tenselessness of eternity in the course of the experience of time. Precisely because the absolute can´t be reached in the traditional orientations of man in flat historical space, the movement has begun upwards and downwards: Babel and Atlantis. That´s the history of modern architecture; to break out of the two-fold tension of man within the circumscription of his limited physical capability, he is ought to head upwards not into heaven but into the outer space and downwards not into hell but into the depths of the Ocean and closer to the center of the earth which is not the center of the world neither the metaphysical place left absent.

More Gillian Rose: The cost of keeping religion within the bounds of reason is that rationality becomes inexplicable, and God or the infinite well unknowable. (Criticism leveled by Hegel at Kant and Fichte in the divide between theoretical and practical reason)

G.R. on Aufhebung: Aufhebung is usually understood to refer to a consecutive and higher state in a developmental sequence, for the experience of difference or negation, of reality identity, of a contradiction between consciousness´ definition of itself and its real existence which is mis-cognized ad re-cognized at the same time. The philosophy of history is thus the speculative reading of how substance became subject, or, how absolute ethical life became religious representation, or, how the state and religion became divorced. It is especially concerned with the religion which forced that divorce on representation, and which, read speculatively, is the idea of absolute freedom, the speculative Good Friday. Christianity is this religion, “the absolute religion”. It is the religion in which the absolute is represented as subject.

From Hegel´s Philosophy of Religion: The religious freedom from the real world cannot be maintained. If the real world is denied, then God can only be represented as a negative, in opposition to the finite world. The basic Christian experience is not of Christ, the mediator, of freedom, but of spiritual bondage to a dead God. Christ´s resurrection and Christian love should restore the unity and freedom of human and divine nature, but they can do so only if God is known as trinity. However, reconciliation in religion always remains implicit and abstract, because it is only achieved as religion, as a spiritual and not as a worldly community. Christianity thus cannot realize the reconciliation between the human and the divine which would be freedom. It can only repeat the dreadful experience that God has died, God is dead – this is the most frightful of all thoughts, that all that is true is not, the negation itself is found in God; the deepest sorrow, the feeling of something completely irretrievable, the renunciation of everything of a higher kind, are connected with this.

Note: When Christians discovered the nothingness together with the disruption of time in medieval philosophy, they found a way to make the Infinite relative and subject to matters of personality and thus not a concern of politics or culture. They found shelter in this nothingness and therefore freedom; as a consequence they sent political freedom “home to roost” and began their witch hunting all over the place. Subjectivity is a symptom of finitude, not of the infinite.

Question: Does Judaism NOT have a concept of freedom?

“The Phenomenology is not a success. It is a gamble”

About the death of God (G.R.): Absolute ethical life (…) is first presented according to its relation as the unhappy consciousness. This consciousness results from the loss of substance, and is characteristic of the pre- and post- Christian as well as of the Christian epochs. It is a dualistic consciousness for which God is dead. The death of the God may refer to the death of the Greek Gods, or to the characterless and hence and hence unknowable modern God, or to a God who is imagined (represented) and imaginable (representable), but who dwells beyond concrete existence and is therefore absent… The unhappy consciousness arose out of the experience of the death of the Greek Gods. This death does not have the significance of the death of Christ, of a particular individual become universal, nor does it have the significance of the death of Christianity, of the end of religious representation. It means the death of life as divine and gives rise to the denial of existence and of transformative activity and hence of actuality. Life is experienced as the grave.

G.R.: …Yet, the more these activities are debased, the greater the importance which is in effect granted them as isolated acts. Before thanks are rendered, they are unsanctified. Life if worse than a grave; it is hell, a perpetual agony: Consciousness of life, of its existence and activity, is only an agonizing over this existence and activity, for therein it is conscious that its essence is only its opposite, is conscious only of its own nothingness. (Quotations from P.d.G.)

Journal 05.05.10

From David Barr: Far from being a fantasy of what will never be, the Apocalypse represents a reality that already existed, creating a social world that provided both community and individual identity to its audience.

Some texts invite the participation of the reader in the production of its meaning

Writing: At this point the internet is my only contact with the outside world; the limited geography of my entanglements and movements has ceased to resemble a world in any possible version of the world that there might be and now it seems more of a theatre stage – the lines rehearsed are the same day after day as if we had run out of all creative impulse needed to participate actively in life. Writing has become a surrogate for living thus the writing gains in unpremeditated intensity and the living surrenders into a permanent state of slumber; there´s no possible way to write as good or as bad as any other person – people can only write the way they´ve written. I´m wondering about the particular details of my attraction toward Fridirik; it has to do perhaps only with the fact that all my associations with life are so loose at present that the faintest clue of approximation to another human being might stand in lieu of the whole world, of all possible seamlessness of experience through which writing, reading and life come under the spell of the same rubric. I think the beauty of his countenance as such and in itself shall suffice for more than a mediation exercise; there´s a certain scarcity of speech by means of which the trap of anxiety reveals more secrets and more urgency than what the distance of silence wants to conceal.

Gillian Rose: Scientific sociology is only possible as a form of Neo-Kantianism that bars access to the philosophy of Hegel. That´s how the sociology of Durkheim and Weber has been misunderstood by ignoring or overlooking the transcendental structure

About Rose´s mother: Gillian Rose describes her own mother as faithless. The Holocaust claimed the lives of fifty of her mother´s relatives, yet her mother lives in denial. Her mother claims that the loss caused no suffering, yet this only masks the depth of the suffering which has been left unresolved. Her mother´s refusal to “live in hell” results in melancholia, in an entrenched despair which will not budge because it is denied. Her mother appears content, she wears a smile, yet she has an “all-jovial” unhappiness. The trauma is not worked, in Rose´s idiom, because it remains unthought.

About the importance of objects: The production of objects may equally well be said to be the production of their reality, not of their appearance. (Rose)

…If the thing in itself in unknowable how can it be called a thing?

Kant postulates God, since without this hypothesis morality is unintelligible

Phenomenological reduction brackets out the question of existence

Simmel´s definition of culture: The content or forms of life (art, law, religion, technology) which are created in historical time, but which attain an independent validity once created which may render them inaccessible to their creators.

Rose on Hegel: “But the absolute is not an optional extra, as it were. As we shall see, Hegel´s philosophy has no social import if the absolute is banished or suppressed, if the absolute cannot be thought”

Our concept of the infinite is our concept of ourselves and our possibilities

Thinking must make the transition from identity to speculation

Journal 05.05.10

I woke up less tired and pained than it is usually the case; the headaches seem to recede a little bit before the plain sight of my inability to surrender to them. Still my sleep is very thin, almost deprived from the cessation of brain activity while my body is at rest; I spend almost all of my sleep hours concentrating even more upon the activities of the day and also the lack thereof. All night long I insist on all my incomplete dreams, on the daytime preoccupation to release myself from exile, the endless letters I write and the dreams I plow and sow but can´t harvest, the great places I might want to see, the kind of life I could have – at least any one life different from this which is not a life but a mediocre biological circle of sleeping, eating and complaining with limited ingestion of food and sexual gratification and no entertainment at all. I had dreamt with being something of a Hebrew scholar, perhaps at some American university. Not that this one of my actual life dreams, but something that lapse in between sequences of truncated fulfillment…

This time none of my letters were answered, which means that perhaps the world is growing tired of them; the problem of personal letters is that they address people and not just fulfill criteria demanded by application forms. This afternoon I am going to send a letter to Nigel Tubbs, who is a professor at the University of Winchester, a former pupil of Gillian Rose and someone who writes very interesting philosophy. I am drawn to it not only because I am desperate (I checked out what it would take to study theology in Ireland, or to take a 3-semester long Swedish course or Arctic biology in Norway!) but because he builds on an idea that I´ve held for a long time… That the education of the university, or even before that, of the “arts-college” is based on a relationship between the pupil and the teacher and not on research, not on results, which is an untimely consequence of the newfound practice of science understood as primary methods and ultimate results. I wonder if someone like Mr. Tubbs would ever be interested in my ideas, person and accomplishments; at least he seemed to be so years ago when I contacted him.

Gillian Rose´s reading of Kierkegaard: According to Rose, a relationship with God is one that we can never fully achieve but must ever fail towards (“The Broken Middle”), “failing towards form”; this form goes from the aesthetic (his style and writing form) to the ethical (the implications of writing) and then ultimately to an absolute that must entail a failure in worldly matters and a leap to love or God. I guess one now makes sense of what she means with “the absolute is not an optional extra”. Our only resource then is to react to this “broken middle” with nothing but anxiety. Rose´s demand: To engage critically with the world as it is, not to accept it or seek to escape it. What then would Taubes say to this? A question on Rose: Can we speak of a secular faith grounded in social practice?

From Lloyd: To master a language is to be able to say things which have not been said before, to combine words in new ways which, despite their novelty, will not result in reprimands by one´s community. Only then can it be said that an individual is a competent language user: freedom consists in the possibility for new performances enabled by the mastery of a framework of norms… For Rose, writing shows the fecundity of the tension between social practice and norms.

Gillian Rose´s description of writing: “mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond our control”, “if I knew who I were or what I were, I would not write; I write out of those moments of anguish which are nameless and I am able to write only where the tradition can offer me a discipline, a means, to articulate and explore that anguish” (I had read this years ago but somehow I had mingled it with something that Arendt said, or perhaps did I think that Arendt herself wrote this).

…For Rose modern Christian and Jewish thought is trying to mend the world, which in turn has the effect of betraying the hard work of living. They lack faith, so that they opt for easy ways out. I would that they not only try to mend the world, but they also do it with mendacity.

Lloyd on Rose: Anxiety is experienced any time one truly grapples with the law. To live life without anxiety would be to shut oneself off from a central feature of the world; it would be to live in delusion. Living life without anxiety is like living life without freedom; possible, perhaps, but only when one understands social norms to be absolutely rigid and static.

“Keep your mind in hell and despair not” (Silhoan)

Rose: Despite the similar phenomenologies of writing and love, writing is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and agony of loving… Love involves temporary suspension of the law. Gillian Rose: “Do you believe in eternity? Definitely. It´s the only thing I believe in. If there´s eternity, then it´s Now… Time is devastation. You can´t believe in time. Time is going to destroy you. So you have to believe in eternity”.

Richard Hull: We must say radical, not critical – this is too much associated with Kant

Journal 05.05.10

Today I sent more letters… Despite my stubbornness it seems that it will take a lot more than nice letters to get out of this imprisonment; my hunch is that I might have to do some otherworldly kind of physical word. I sent a letter to Harvard Divinity School which is supposed to recruit the most outstanding minds in so far as the Kingdom of God, or the lack thereof, is concerned. I am all for a kingdom of God, a bit anarchist both in the political sense and in the sense of what it could mean to be without “founding principle” in philosophy; the kingdom of God would be certainly universal but without that modern universality, without theology, without philosophical assumptions, certainly without church. How to think about God without theology? It is like thinking about truth without philosophy; it is certainly possibly but it is steadily risky… You may be completely right, so you might be then also completely wrong. If you are right, it might just be a very difficult movement to make, and if you´re wrong, then it´s hell and it smells of Auschwitz. If I were an atheist or a humanist, I don´t know of what kind I would be because even if my faith is not wrong, it is still dialectically powerful and undialectically harsh. The other difficult point is that I certainly have too little faith in mankind and my imprecations about the stature of man are more humorous than they´re serious preoccupations; so humorous that my preoccupations are just too important to care about saying them out loud, to care about turning them into political mantras, to care about selling them as truths. I share Jesus point of view – morally pessimistic and culturally optimistic at the same time. No matter what I do, whom I write about or what the object of my grumpiness or else bad feeling is, I am always oriented toward the Kingdom of God. But I don´t think I want a simple kingdom… My idea of the kingdom is at once bloody, physical, religious and technologically secular. It could be that I will have to agree with Kierkegaard that there are no Christians yet, no Christians of Jesus; there´re only Christians of imperial Christianity. I am not sure whether I am able to utter a similar statement for the truths of Jews that I´ve so blatantly decried with avowed intensity over the course of my adult life; I´ve certainly lived up to the prophetic and rather apocalyptic idea of living in the world without a world at all but yet profiting sensually from the world in so far it has been possible.

My idea of the world is fully charged with apocalyptic images bereft of saintliness, so that my whole experience of the world is an eschatological conundrum; with much deference to historical events but completely unconcerned with the results as if viewed from the ultimate perspective of an unredeemed and yet final momentum of history. This eschatological image is not only a historical situatedness but also a full-fledged spiritual fuel with an ultimately future orientation. What I thought yesterday when in the company of Mario is that my ideal of beauty in human beings is not only riddled by morbid physical and aesthetic beauty but also irreversibly coupled with a demonic intelligence that in practice is very, very unhappy. The unhappiness of the infinite that endlessly aims at finding a home in a legitimate present that the spiritual attitude itself is so bent on destroying, qualifying it as untrue and overtly complacent. Kierkegaard said that the most pure form of love is to love the person who made you unhappy. I want to turn myself to love the world with an attachment so passionate that it borders on burdensome deflection; as if one were to love only the world that has been ultimately destroyed to begin with, as if the whole purpose of bourgeois beauty were precisely to be shattered when confronted with the facts of this ever so future orientation. The practical implications of this spiritual attitude are very obvious: the mere wait, deprived of anything to hand on to the next generation as if it were the very last. It seems to be an impractical spiritual exercise pursued only in order to prove beyond rationale that this same world to which we attach ourselves in the praxis of love is none to be attached to, a dearth of place and a dearth of silence even, over which one is to claim only the power of abandonment. I want to aim at the concretion of philosophy and theology, of thought in general, to define the concrete objects of reality, to deprive discourse from intellectual exercises but yet so completely trapped and defined by traditions of speculation and of imagination written over centuries of constant relentless and powerless aesthetic contemplation. I want to walk out on abstraction all the time, but the safe shelter of if not metaphysics, then of speculation, seems to be the only safe alternative to remain lucid in sight of the crushing madness of a reality on which one has drawn himself as an actor, even if fulfilling the role of an agent provocateur, of an inciter, of a witch hunter. This lucidity is supposed to mean at last to encounter the world without sorceries and ultimately the spiritual fuel of this enterprise is completely burnt when the actor finds it by himself completely impossible to live with the map of navigation through reality without consolations that he has himself drawn. To speak for a godless secular world driven by science and progress seems an alternative yet too easy, an alternative sober sorcery in which the thrust is thrown back at the actor as if he himself were to play the good God again and thus, ride the horses of the apocalypse with the flag of perpetual peace and social consensus – it is but another shelter from unmediated being in the world “as it is”; as if there were ever a world “as it is” for anyone or at any given point in history.

I can´t deny that there´s a lot of laziness and who not accept it, mental illness, in my whole project of thinking and of a life; but there´s also this component of contempt, this lustful drive to astray from the whole idea of representation, from the production of symbolic thought as an hierarchical array of representations. As if to refrain from reading and writing at all could mean something like an spiritual attitude in which remaining silent would be constituted into a more masterful and accurate discourse than what “words” about “things” could reflect. But how important things are! Everyday objects stand as a masterfully-handcrafted icon against the illusions of mourning and trauma, of illness and disappointment, because in so far as they stand within the most elementary correlations of the world proper, they are meant to avoid any possible way to circumvent the radical indeterminate nature of human experience. The everyday objects of fine arts and of literature stand against the very course of human life and as works they represent a step forward from cosmogonies and delve already into the life of the present as temporalities inside which there is already contained the mortal wish to not let biology follow its course unmolested. Abandoning the production of objects and the settings of representation is an unlawful Rimbaudean movement – we go to Abyssinia or else we enter the cloisters or choose to spend our lifetime days without any deference to world time, serving as advocates in a notary or as nurses in the war. Intellectual life however, does everything in order to avoid these movements or silence and when silence is appropriated by a creator, this silence is not absolute; it is not the cosmic silence of the universe where the lack of oxygen precludes any physical interaction in between particles of sound, but rather the mortified silence of patience. The silence of Rimbaud is not indifferent to life or the world but it is rather so consumed by it that it can no longer utter a word, it is suffocated by everything that needed to be said at once and the world of representation in its figurate speech of sequences and orderly thoughts or symbolic associations, precludes the authoring from. This silence is too desperate, in need of ailments and a proper burial that in being so much alive for itself, can never demand from the spectators that have also been blinded and deafened from the experience of the spectacle so that they prefer to witness in the same fashion of silence the slow and painful death of the artist, than lend him a hand to dig a proper grave. He has to be conformed with being watched digging down his own grave while his nails fall off from the flesh and as he loses the sensibility in his fingertips; the earth and the mud and the life and the death and the stone and the art and the world and the sound and the sight become one: perpetual silence. The world ah! This ultimately invisible arena of performing arts!

Hugo was thrown out of home by his father because of his homosexuality; to some extent I wish that the same would have happened to me, but after my own likings, I´ve been punished only with silence and in my obvious spiritual mediocrity I´ve offered him sound advice on how to properly deal with adult life. I very hope he won´t take one single opinion from me. Today I´ve seen the face of Fridirik, and I think his countenance has unparalleled beauty, so much as his soul showcases a complete lack thereof and I´m rather elated at the prospect of turning my loyalties over to his morbid beauty and life sense of unwholesomeness, to his complete lack of virtue. Love appears to me (dokei moi) as a distant island perfectly fit for an eventual shipwreck and then followed by the rescue efforts of teams from all over the world that stand in awe before the captive´s reluctance to be saved. They would rather burn their own books instead of letting go. It is not only that they would rather; they have already burnt their own books. I can´t make up my mind about the country where I want to live when I “grow up”; the only internal consensus is that I won´t live in mine, even if that can only mean to have my ashes transferred and spread over the Judean desert. That will be good enough. Just not here! I remember Agnes Heller now: the place we choose is free; the place not chosen is not free. But don´t we always get to the point in which we get the impression that we don´t choose our destinies or their geographies? It seems a natural state of affairs that I should be deprived of sexual gratification. Just a blank statement.

לקיארטן, בני

מותר לי לכתוב זמרת

בשפתיי הנוזלות

בדם תחושתי

שיסלח לי אבל

הבדתי את העט

עת שחלמתי בשפות רחוקות

מחוץ מכנען

במהלך מסע

בלתי נבחר

לארץ תואה

החוסרת גוף מגע

קיארטן, אחיו הליינור

גיבור קטן ורזה

עניים של זכוכית

עובד אלילים

בני, הערל

בית יפת, אוהל שינר

בגופו צלב

חזה רחב שרוף

מתחת חושך האיי

אל תוך בית נייר

בלי גדר

סביב אויביו

Journal 03.05.10

Yet another letter: My decision is final, I´m kissing good-bye to the crutches of philosophy under which I´ve suffered myself through all these years. I don´t want to get away from thinking, only from academic philosophy. Another symptom of my imminent illness: Excruciating chest pain around the heart zone and mild chest pain after running; this is perhaps the worst symptom of all. I had this last night and this morning for the first time in quite a while. Symptoms of old: I no longer experience seizures as I did when I was a teenager; then everything went blurry white for a couple of seconds and only slowly I regained full consciousness of the world, then I also heard these strange continuous beep-beep inside my head from my left ear. I also felt this pulsating neuralgic pain in the back of my head that didn´t last too long but quite impaired my activities; this kind of pains I still feel.

I daydream often about specific streets in Tel Aviv; the memories are really vivid in my head. I applied to Ruskin College for creative writing… I kind of suppose that the intellectual experience could be quite disappointing, but it might be very rewarding in the personal level. Absence of thoughts = day time. Ruskin is at least a step closer to Iceland.

… It seems I am not charming enough, for I didn´t succeed in seducing the 63-years-old guy so that he would worship my body and so that I could ever feel so good about myself. Yet I can´t say I didn’t enjoy it, his gift for conversation was delightful, champagne and whiskey but no snacks and no passion either, or at least nothing more passionate than discussing Susan Sontag and New York. So very petty is my situation! After I left the sumptuous hotel I could only count enough coins which I had borrowed from my 13-years-old brother and then there was only barely enough to buy one singled-out cigarette and for the bus ride, keeping in mind that I was a few coins short of the bus fare. He wouldn´t be seduced either for my conversation or my youth or my seamless smooth body. I was completely deceived, so that he wouldn´t even try to approach me minimally or lure me to bed. Whiskey poured but only thrice, and that was not about enough to fill my spirits; there seems to be a lot of chemistry but yet not enough to turn my body into an object of abuse; it´s not only that I completely fail in seducing youth, but also old people. I guess that just after one glass more, I would have taken the approach myself, but yet I couldn´t and he didn´t seize the moment at all. I have to look at the positive side; I had just barely enough whiskey for a good night sleep which I haven´t had for so many months, or not really so many, but for as long as I´ve been in this house, unless I´ve been contemptuously drunk, there hasn´t been one night of peace in my life. Only resentment… Today I discovered for myself that I hate Doña Georgina, I hate her not because she´s a bad person but because she´s got no guts, no back bone, everything is gossipy behind-the-back talk, murmurs and generalized whispered imprecations. Everyone is completely incapable of facing reality. Then, since I didn´t open my legs, it is obvious that no one is taking me to Rome. Perhaps I should try prostitution again, everything so that I could get away from this place; I don´t need to be admired or loved as much as I´m compelled to be wanted by someone specific, to be wanted every single day, to be wanted both in contempt and lustfulness. Odds are that all the electronic addresses at Ruskin are out of order… So I am right back at the beginning without any prospects. I still insisted and Mario was yet not taken aback, impressed or even anything willing to surrender. Should I begin counting the days? Will I be dead by then?

Journal 03.05.10

It´s helpless to return to the journal at nights when I´m delivered from the imminent pressure of having to face other people, I´m free from the abjection of the familiar picture, as if I were obliged to watch myself all day long through the stuttering eyes of other people, as if the simple biological chains of being bound peri passu to the desires of my father to rule and of his wife to subject, were universal principles to which my life is compelled to adjust to. I can´t go anymore writing this endless letters coated in both self-pity and self-praise in order to find myself an even newer destination in life but I must insist and not give up. I will continue writing letters, knocking on all the doors even at the sight of their permanent closure, even after facing their damnation and their lock-up before me. I felt today for some brief moments the nauseating feeling that I was obliging other people to surrender to my intellectual charm in terms of pity; but the abhorrence itself of my present situation, of the fact that I can´t by any means lead the life I want or be intimate with the kind of people I would want to find; is exerting too much pressure over me and I have to admit to the fact that personally I´m already too desperate and on the verge of a newfound madness that goes under the rubric of indifference to my own condition. Yet I refuse to let the symptoms settle in and I fight against the ease with which they come with all my physical and mental strength, as if someone were battling against the prejudice involved in socializing through the image of a mortal disease. I will write more and more letters, so many of them, until I will be completely assured that I´ve knocked all the doors – open, half-open and closed, in the vastness of this world. I won´t give up until I´m one hundred percent assured that there´s absolutely no possibility for me to rise through the mud of this biological existence and enter the world of a more certain destination in life; I don´t care if I die while trying a hand at this, I shall die merrily then in the plain sight of not having allowed myself to be choked by the circumstances until the very last breath. I´ll follow less inspiration and drives than I´ll seize upon opportunities; I´ll jump at the first train and will let myself be driven iffily. The reminders of my adamant refusal to symptomatize the present and digest it are clear: I never make my bed and hardly ever wash my clothes or try to procure myself new ones and I am in constant awareness of the rags they´ve been turned into, I´m in constant awareness of the filth and the unkemptness they stand for. I have only two pairs of shoes both of which I dislike and quality as preposterously ugly and uncomfortable and certainly unfit for my personality; they signal something of the attitude that I have when I wear them, “these are not my shoes but I am patient, I will walk through life until I am able to find shoes that suit me”. I seldom ever wear clean socks and if any, I wear always disjointed pairs that not even closely resemble one another; I shower at nights, sleep in the mornings and complain. I behave as if this weren´t a life on its own right but a circumstantially temporal cluster of situations that must be synchronized and overcome and nullified in order to enter my real life. I am also fully aware that this is my real life and no other, everything else has been a lie: I´m not a social activist, I´m not a spoiled rich boy under Patricia´s command, I´m not a reckless drug addict, I´m not a publicist, I´m not a synagogue boy, I´m not a Franciscan spirit. I´m not speaking of course from a position of freedom but I´m certainly speaking from a position in the world into which I am built and from which I´ve sprung. Sleeping under stairways, masturbating in toilets, stealing in order to buy cigarettes, writing at nights, feeling screeching bouts of physical and emotional pain, traumatic silences encoded into empty conversations, tasteless repetitive meals, constant diremption and even more constant change of plans… This is the life I have, I can´t turn a blind eye to this, and either I step out into the big world in order to accomplish my demoniac plans to stand out from most human beings and become what I´ve envisioned for so long or I just surrender and die. There´re no middle terms, there´s no broken middle as every middle shall be broken and thus, inefficient, presumptuous, ignorantly learnt and useless. The only part of this “life I have” I´m still unwilling to determine as of itself is the whole idea of illness; I refuse to tackle with illness and sometimes I try to whisper in my own ear that it could really happen, that it could really be that my body is just keeping together in order to survive the endless storm of my struggle to rise from this life only in order to break down and fail and punish me for my arrogance right at the twilight or rising. This frightens me and I can´t deny it but I´m even going as far as being willing to accept it and expect the punishment rather than simply resign to the gesticulations of thislifeness. Everything is valid in order to accomplish it, except writing in Spanish, that´s not allowed. That language is dead, it is the language of beatings and poverty and cocaine and nothing else. Every possible effort must be summoned in order to bury that language deep down and murder it, indict it, bury it. Writing in Spanish would mean to un-learn the world acquired far away and to humbly accept the tragic decrees of the present tense and that´s something I´m not willing to do. I´ll write in a language which isn´t my mother tongue even if I don´t write well, even if I fail, even if I can´t write anything worth looking at, even if I stumble. The sole movement of keeping the writing on and on and not resort to Spanish is a tremendous and humongous victory. Perhaps my only

But why would I write in English after all? One could even say that writing in English is the moral equivalent of accepting that the world is based on universal principles and that all particularities and individualities are mere speculations based on an interpretation of oneself. It would be to accept the facts of the world as it is, and that´s why I need another language and that language can´t be allowed to be Spanish. The problem is that I´m 26 years old and I still don´t know that language and if at this point I haven´t managed at all to learn English after all the garbage I´ve written in this language, it is but uncertain at best and moronic at worst to think that I might ever learn another language to the level appropriate for writing. No one has… But even with this quite certain prospect of defeat I´m anything but willing to abandon the enterprise. Anything that will allow me to fight against Spanish and thus against my father and my aunt and my motherlessness, every bit of it will be worth each second of strife. As of today I somewhat harbor the childish idea that I´ve already bought for myself the proper intellectual insurance required for life; that I´ve even done something that will remain in the world after my death, that my “works” have found their way into the outer world. To be sure, I´m just being plain stupid, but yet I´ve done something, it is not precisely what I wanted to do, but I´ve thrown some pegs into the wind and am not expecting ever to retrieve them. At the same time I´m so convinced that they´re so much not enough that I need to make sure that I stay alive and lucid alive for as long as it takes to gather the courage to leave something in the world that is worthy of a name. I´m not good for many things, certainly I´m but dubiously fit for life but I can write and I can think; thinking is a priceless and timeless enterprise that can´t be bequeathed to anyone and that fortunately can´t be left unto the world, it is the mark of existence that itself that one is ought to bear alone, just like one´s death must be borne alone. Writing is the key… More than writing, I want to understand things while I write, I want to understand where are we in life and world when there´s unbearable personal and historical suffering, where are we when we love and hate, where are we when we face the constrictions of trauma, what are we doing when we experience all that bad stuff. Why is it that normally the writer of trauma almost never can write from the first person and the present tense without finding for himself an air of pretension and unauthenticity? I would really like to know the answer to that. How can people ever feel at home, how can people ever be in peace with themselves, how do they console themselves? I want to understand.

There´s definitely no academic path to pursue this and that´s why I´m so much against the pretentious knowledge of academic literature, of the “secondary literature” that might be as well called “second-hand writing”; I want to see secondary literature turned into literature at all, to read the reflections of other people in a way such as that it will stand for any kind of experience and not just for theft and plundering of corpses. I´m lazy enough to read primary works, then I really can´t bother about the writing about the writing about the writing about the writing about. How can that be called writing at all? Do people just sit peacefully at home and write books? Is that even possible? Isn´t diremption a prerogative for creation of works? I mean, this isn´t accounting books. Don´t people think about their deaths? Isn´t writing at the same time the illness, the cure and the death? I just don´t seem to get it right. But who knows, I might live long enough to become a writer and then I´ll find out how people do it, how do you get to write and live with yourself in the plain sight of so much mediocrity and passivity. That´s something I really would like to learn, then I would have no trouble in writing in plain day time, in waking up early to occupy my position at the institutionalized desk of “life writing” and fulfill my eight hours of ranting without determent whatsoever, about the follies of human life. I would take lunch breaks with other life writers and subscribe to a trade union. Then if I get lucky enough, I could open an academic department in life writing that grants undergraduate and graduate degrees with a board and everything before which candidates defend their doctorates. Maybe it´s only because I´m young that I don´t understand how people can write like that; or maybe it is because I´m afraid of death or because I´m psychotic and paradoxically sober and lucid about “the life I have”. I have to fight the battle for the minority language and wear off the crutches of this fucking English. Sure this is the language I´ve been the most free at, but I can only hold this freedom in contempt not only because it´s not original but because I´ve abandoned those claims to the universal. The minority language is a cane, with it you can walk and you can also make bruises in the legs and heads of the ignorant youth that hinders your way along. You can scorn them and then also beat them and bleed them. It´s not like the crutches of Spanish or the full-fledged and heavily armed troops of obstacles and cultural barriers of the English language in contrast to the whole world. Even if I have to stick to English as a by-product of my linguistic incompetence, I want to write the most un-English writing in the whole world. That kind of writing that will force publishers to laugh in my face. That could only hasten the way toward the grave. I need to master a small language so perfectly that people who speak that language will be sorry that they were born to read me. And no, I don´t want to degree myself in philosophy… To obtain a degree in philosophy is not the benchmark of a life but rather the plain acceptance of defeat. And for God´s sake, what is a degree in philosophy? Do you get a degree in philosophy? That´s just like a degree in life writing: You take some courses in logic, learn to master the mediocrity of second hand writing (see above) and then copycat them in order to receive their praises. From when does philosophy need to be praised by the mobs? Philosophy must stand for heterodoxy for as long as they bear philosophy upon themselves. I guess it did have to be praised by the mobs since that cunning modern momentum when its value for life dropped to below zero, below freezing. I must accept at this point that this might be just jealous writing, the kind of rants written by the Hitlers of philosophy: you don´t get into an architecture school? So you move on and proceed to build on your own an empire to destroy not only architectural schools but all schools and the entire world. Perhaps I´m only writing this because I´ve never been to any university, to one of those temples of knowledge. For sure I´d write differently then, wouldn´t I? My deference to academic study is only a consequence of my lack of scholastic abilities and proof thereof, necessary to join the ranks of the religion of knowledge. Enough

Again, another long list of personal miseries: The guy who was supposed to make love to me, well, he wouldn´t call, and that was more than expected. Worse yet: Tomorrow I am most likely going on a date with this fine gentleman 63-years old, which is really a lot older than me, that is like 37 years older and about 17 years older than my father. I can´t avoid the feeling of disgust as I write these lines. But I´m trying to see the positive aspect of this all, at this point in life I´m starting to allow myself to be disgusted about myself rather than just deny the whole affair and put a smiley face. What an honor and what maturity it is to be disgusted about oneself! Disgust that can´t be washed. He seems to be a charming character, businessman, intelligent, former professor of comparative literature at the University of Syracuse, promised champagne and jazz in the background and that can´t be any bad at all even at age 63, especially bearing in mind my current intellectual, emotional, sexual and financial stagnation. I am sure that he will be attracted to me (but I might be just as self-deceived as I was about this Sergio who never called) and I guess bearing in mind the fact that I won´t be any attracted to him, I will certainly allow him to worship my body. I would worship my own body if I were attracted to it, or well, sometimes I am, but I´m not the kind of person I would go on a date with: Too poor, too hypocritical, too intellectual. And anyway that would be a fair return payment for champagne, no? Some moments before I wrote this I fantasized about how he would offer me a job in Italy inclusive of flight-tickets that would give me a stamp out of this country in a passport and then I would save enough money to feel to Iceland; and the worst part is that I have all kinds of stupidities like that one in my head all the time, everyday. The funny part is that none of my stupidities is Romantic: They mostly consist of genius professors becoming aware of my unlimited talent for thought and for life and for survival; then being offered right on the spot a scholarship to a far away rich country with everything included, even a never-coming-back-to-Colombia agreement. And you might laugh, but I am expecting it to happen every single day; that I will open my mail and then my whole life will be resolved, and guess what, it never does. A much more likely scenario will be that we will meet at some fancy restaurant where I will be so out of place because of the rags that my irresponsibility and financial situation have led me to wear but he will not mind. We will have this amazing sumptuous meal with the champagne and the jazz as he promised; then he will take me to his hotel room and worship my body until both of us will ejaculate and as I leave, thinking that this senior prince of Egypt will take me on his first-class seat to Italy, he will clean my image from his memory as with a toothpick, get a different me each night, treat each one of them to champagne and then board his plane to the happy life of eternity. That´s at least what I would do! Then if there´s a case scenario in which I would be in any way compelled to worship his 63-years-old body, I must say I would feel really humiliated but I am really hoping that this man has enough common sense to follow the rules of nature. I only remember one time being intimate with someone his age, and I really don´t want to recall anything of it. But hell, that time I wasn´t treated to champagne so I couldn´t know how I would have reacted. I think my pessimism is really redeeming, it helps me navigate safely through both surprise and disappointment; it is more humorous than it is sad. I´m running out of spiritual resources though, so unless I´m evicted by life from this house and this country, I might be entering the sad phase of pessimism for the first time in years. Thinking about it, I could intimate with this nice gentleman if that would mean going to Rome, if that would mean leaving this life, if that would mean seeing Katherina again, but then I can´t be so delusional as to think that opening one´s legs opens also the gateways of salvation – we are living in scary times, I am convinced that it is not sex anymore but money what calls upon more money and since I don´t have it I have to grow used to the idea of living without sex and without money, in compliance with the most logical syllogism and truism that American street wisdom has coined to date: “no money, no honey”. This is such a preposterous thought for someone who has studied philosophy and who has decried the follies of academic life. This is the ultimately proof that philosophy amounts to nothing, it is of no use for life, even, it is detrimental for the whole enterprise of being alive. Now I understand that I have to stop thinking about opening my legs and should rather stick to dozens more of weepy letters to another dozen of foreign countries in whose language and literature I have to promise to become an expert and I am such a good guy that I´m willing to do it even not at the expense of a passport: A flight ticket, a residence permit and a small stipend shall suffice. But thinking about it twice, if I am so completely and frenzy mad attracted to this 45-years-old German gentleman whose name I still don´t know, why wouldn´t I be ever to someone who is only 18 years older (Ariel´s age)? I have to suppose that this statement is but a philosophical statement meant for invisible and inexistent readers to spot. Lying in love is very easy really, too easy… The problem is when you can´t do it, when you fall in, that´s when the real mess begins. But again, lying in love will not save me this time, only a miracle will. I still believe in those, I´m a closeted theist. Odds are that this 63-years-old gentleman will live longer than me and then I shouldn´t be too worried about who worships what. I´m not even sure that he´s a real person that I´ll meet. I should be so forward with conclusions.

If I would ever have to find a man to make me happy, I think he should be someone like Gísli Gardarsson, the actor. A mature person, beautiful and tall, white European, friendly and amicable, soft but strong, talented, human but drunk… Although I don´t think he´s all that talented, at least spiritually, so it would have to be a blend between Gísli and Vikingur, the other Icelandic actor. Does this mean that I can really live with a non Jew? Has tolerance in the world advanced so much that even I have to join the spurious cause? I doubt it, but since I don´t have the money to afford a love relationship at the moment, leave alone in a foreign country, I shouldn´t even think about it. Somehow I think it goes beyond that: I am a little disgusted about sexual intercourse, or a lot disgusted… So often I feel I wanted it and chances have not really been all that lacking, but it seems to go ever so awry, to be some kind of mischief, to add coals to the bonfire of disappointments. The other day I thought that one day I would like to adopt children and I would name them Hlýnur and Kjártan. I would raise them on my own in a little house somewhere outside Reykjavik, on the basement of which I would print my own books and on the attic of which I would have a large studio filled with ashtrays, paintings from Katherina, thousands a books and an exotic assortment of alcoholic beverages from all over the world; I would teach them everything about Judaism without obliging them to choose the religion but this somehow seems difficult, Judaism is all about obligations and sacrifices which I am not expecting the rest of the world to understand or even myself to enforce. They would be very bright and partially home-school, from a young age they would learn the Classics, the Bible in the original classical Hebrew and a lot of alive and dead philosophers and writers (more dead than alive in all possible senses of the expression). We would speak Icelandic and English and perhaps Hebrew too but never Spanish! I would raise them in a sort of post-communist regime that would ban at the punishment of imprisonment any references to my own past or my home country or my mother tongue or my family. At that I would make a great Jewish immigrant father: Making every possible effort to bury the past and the tortured moments and the bitterness of life from the safe and peaceful newfound lives of my offspring. But they would learn to detect it when I´m up there in the attic or when Katherina comes around; they would see this immense pit hole of historical and homeless loneliness craving for an earthly Jerusalem with every fiber of my body. Eventually they would come to Jerusalem and stand before this abysmal godlessness and understand both my fear and my love, and hate me for precluding them from historical truths older than the Sagas… I would have to writhe in pain from my grave in the discomfort of that public toilet on the way to heaven which is the city of Jerusalem.

The dinner table will be very quiet and melancholic and also very noise and lively with meals that will last for many hours with many guests and much irony and laughter… I will hang in a shelf little souvenirs from Arab shops in the old city and perhaps a little carpet with Mt. Olive´s knit on it.

Journal 01.05.10

Another whole day avoiding the computer, avoiding to write and deliberately; I guess this is just another facet what it means to write in order to stay alive one day more, to write in order to keep oneself from death – this ability to write and be saved at the same time comes not without a certain price to be paid. At present it´s not difficult to figure why would I avoid writing at certain times… I don´t know at all what I would be able to find along the way. I am going through extremely lucid times and this vexes me somewhat; I am not living a life for rent in the shoes of whatever-academic or whatever-business fickle positions, I am not drunk as often as I could in order to forget whatever there´s to remember, I´m quite self-conscious: I know that my plan for the year is an absolutely impossible dream to fulfill and that unless a miracle is worked out, this shouldn´t come to fruition. And then one also knows that there´re no miracles of that sort in this world or any other – we wake up in the morning, piss in the loo, find ourselves remembering our names and those of people we love and loath, we can swallow our food, the world is still bad and unsafe, those are the kind of miracles that we humans are treated to everyday. I know that I am extremely needy of human intimacy and that I´m desperately craving for a love affair but that at present I don´t have anything to offer but myself and that in this world doesn´t seem to be enough at all: I don´t have enough money in my pocket to cut my hair, to buy alcohol, leave alone the fact that I don´t have any clothes and that all my trousers are two or three sizes bigger on me or instead, three sizes smaller. I can´t decide the kind of food I want to eat and it´s been weeks and weeks since I haven´t left home for more than a few hours; and yet I seem to have the arrogance to believe with all certainty that I´m going to leave the country in eight weeks. What worries me the most is not just the fact that I won´t be able to fulfill my plan as I wish (I´m all too used to this) but the fact that I´m not being delusional at all about it and even that I´m overtly prepared to face the most complete defeat. I´m so fully aware of my limitations and yet I refuse to accept it, to live with it. Every day I think of another source, I expected humanity from a different person, from a different organization, I send a couple of letters more, I await more replies and more replies. Soon I´ll have exhausted all the possible people and places I could contact. Then I agree that David Silva might be right – step by step; one thing I am sure of, the first possible emigration plan that will fall into place, anywhere from Antarctica to the Polar Circle, I will go without a single blink. Then after all, it does seem like I am expecting some kind of miracle and not just expecting it, but am absolutely sure that it will take place and furthermore, I am shameless enough to put myself aside and give a detailed description of my own delusional situation which seems at the moment more hopeless than delusional.

Hope wrote me today about Peter, a 17-years-old boy from Wisconsin (the same age that Ariel Levy had when I intimated with him, not anymore though, he is now 18 and I am, as he said, really old) who suffers from some kind of syndrome (well, Ariel has ADD and I think I do too, very strongly but I´ve never been diagnosed) and yet he comes from this hardcore atheist family (that could be a nice adjective to apply to my own family lest that they´re such nobodies that it would be an insult to any mediocre –ism to apply it to them) and has been homeschooled; he started teaching himself Icelandic and some weird language from the north of Japan since the age of 13 and now he translates Icelandic books for children into English. Hell! That´s what I call a way to find one´s throughway in life in spite of deteriorating mental and physical conditions; I´m so far from that because even at this point of my learning only now I´m starting to believe that I can accomplish anything without selling my soul to the devil and being bought off by the complacency of bourgeois attitudes. She thinks it would be terrific for me to meet him, and hey! I would wish so much for that. Am I really imagining a future never to come? Am I really supposed to follow through the demands of the good God in whichever monotheistic version they are offered to me in order to save my soul from ignorance? Look at my transmogrified Catholic intellectual Judaism: I´ve accomplish a lot of learning, my life is completely defined by the Jewish ethos, consciousness and humanity; I led Ivan out of the monastery into which I wanted myself to go in and then I led Pablo into the wonders of the Hebrew language and the Jewish religion; both of them found their ways after me and are now actual “Jews”. I am certainly much more mature intellectually and spiritually but yet in life I´m the same old failure and remain in a place as insecure as ever and what´s worse: I look upon them with despise, even with cynicism and laugh in their faces about their newfound human condition. Am I just jealous and trying to get back at them for achieving everything in which I failed or am I mocking the idea of finding oneself ever at home? I think it is a little bit of both. In short, I joined the lines of militant Jewish missionaries and yet haven´t been able to solve the simplest spiritual questions for myself. I am exactly in the same place where I was fucking eight years ago but my mind is at least ten years ahead of my own life and yet without any wisdom to claim for! Although on second thought, maybe wisdom is something that one would never have to claim.

I´m not even depressed in the romantic sense of the world but clearly preoccupied: I feel that my sight is not what it used to be and even though my body remains immaculate, soft, unbruised and desirable, my eyes sharper and brighter than ever, my sexual desire intact; I still feel that there´s something wrong with me all the time. The repetitive cycle of physical tiredness, bleeding gums, the lethal morning headaches, the devastating effects of alcohol in my body and in my psyche, the constant stomach trouble and the bleeding, the impossibility to enjoy sweets, the unsatisfied appetite all the time and especially at night, mood swings, all the time. Yet I look at my body and I seem to enjoy it quite narcissistically even when it´s not the type of bodily shape I would be most attracted to; I think of my own physical complexion as too small, too fragile, weak and unmanly, however that´s not what I thought of Santiago´s body, while his facial and chest hair growth only revealed the man in him more than it concealed it. To abhor one´s own body is a way to recognize oneself I think, to recognize oneself either as the other or as the one craving for the other. I am all too aware of my physical defects: My yellowing and unkempt teeth, the Jewish nose, the lack of muscular mass of any kind, the testes, and the little belly that stands out even in the particular beauty of my skin without any blemish at all. I´m conscious of it and of myself all the time, even when I´m having sex, it´s this inability to really let go and turn yourself over as the one to the other; to reject one´s body as the one that appears to the other is not only a psychological movement, it is a movement of abjection in which one is dispossessed of his own in order to conquer the other through the other and not as a natural movement from the one to the other. It is a way to become bereft of yourself and turn into the other and toward him as you love him and leave behind the whole of your own personhood; it is not about trading it but destroying it so completely in a way as such that the other doesn´t realize he´s loving himself through the one which you are. A most desperate craving for an intimacy that is not only sexual but yet that shouldn´t border in responsibility for the other as much as it dwells on an aesthetic representation of the act of love itself.

I guess I´m somewhat opposed to the whole idea of people seeing themselves naked before they are intimate. There is just so much beauty to the human body and so little thereof in the sexual organs. The time shall come when people will only see their sexual organs because they will have no time to gaze into their own eyes. Sometimes the moment of the orgasm is treacherous, because you can´t stand your own presence bare across the other and that´s why you´re obligated to leave. Beauty is extremely important to me and yet I should be too modest about it, too prude and all too concerned with the value of human relationships and conversations; but for the most part unless my demands for beauty are met, I´m certainly not concerned. This shouldn´t be so bad taking into account that my standards of beauty clearly deviate from the norm, what I am after is not necessarily beauty of spirit, as if there could be any such thing… My main preoccupation in the camp of beauty is whether I am able to interact with that person as an interlocutor as whether I can let go of myself in order to love physically that person; whenever I remain in a narcissistic closure around my own body throughout the intimate moments I know for sure that I should stay away from that body and from that person. The curious thing about intercourse is that it is at the same time the most disgusting and the most beautiful of all human activities. I think no book other than the Bible contains all what we need to know about it, when the nakedness of the father was coveted; the realization of the father´s sexuality is the pathway of abjection, it is a way to deny oneself as someone sexual and then to encounter oneself again in negating the father. That is what Abraham does when he shatters the idols. I will be meeting this older man, Sergio, tomorrow, and I am completely persuaded that there´s going to be something sexual about it, but then I might be quite wrong because I´m not sure whether I am attracted to him and I presuppose that he might be quite attracted to me, but this is just another delusion.

Another aspect of my depression: I refuse to ask people to help me, it is something that makes me too much nervous and I prefer to run all the risks and all the troubles and enter prolonged cycles of lying and deceiving in order to get what I want or need, rather than asking for help. It´s some kind of inwardness that runs so much counter to the outgoingness in which my life seems to dwell; from cocktail party to cocktail party, carefully thought out conversations and opinionated wholes of the world. I don´t understand it myself because it´s a huge contradiction.

Another aspect of writing: I agree that it is a very miser situation when one writes from the position of being superior in knowledge to the reader but still that´s exactly what I did for most of my adult life and it had to do not with the fact of being more intelligent than other people but with the psychological condition in which I had to destroy everything that my life stood for and build myself anew from scratch with my own two hands and without the help of anybody; that puts me in a position in which I always think I deserve much more than others and this is just too vain. That´s perhaps the reason why all my written thoughts have been just this false until now and why they haven´t been given a chance to stand on their own. I certainly don´t deserve more than anybody else because my actions in the world have been so entirely undeserving of praise and no matter how good my intentions have been, I´ve certainly been wrong and hurt more people that I can remember that have hurt me and yet I always aim to protect myself from my own misgivings arguing for the suffering inflicted on me by those friends who were and not are not; and as cynical as this might sound in too many cases my impression has been correct but my argument is still hypocritical.

Journal 01.05.10

I remember the first night I had been with Santiago (in total there were only three nights) and when he kissed me so gently and effusively at the corridor in Markos´ home, and how we then fled with the help of Maria Clara to my apartment late at night. We drank the remaining of the aguardiente bottle we had stolen from the party and we added to it the remnants of Campari from my birthday party – I´ve had only two memorable birthday parties, one in 2007 in Jerusalem when I assembled about two dozens of people at the apartment, offered them a succulent meal and received many presents and the second in 2009 with the help of Maria Clara, with so many new friends and old friends and in such extravagant fashion – which took place exactly a week after Veronica was found dead. He treated me to his favorite songs, sat on my lap as we sipped the alcohol turned into elixir, made so many promises and I lectured him on Western philosophy; I was too shocked to find out he actually knew who Hannah Arendt was and I also remember he asked me questions about the Torah whose response I promised to delay into a further meeting, I was so completely convinced that I would be seeing him for many days to come, for many hours, through many nights – deceit; we lingered into a rather strained conversation about being a pariah and then he fell asleep in my arms where he remained until the next late morning, the same morning when the screen of my computer broke for good. My cat had eaten most of his dope and refused to leave us alone, as if she were convinced deep inside her that he stood for a newfound foe. The skin in his back was soft as that of a child but his chin protruded with facial hair in full blown adulthood around his delicate thin lips that seemed as if drawn masterfully with a fountain pen and concealing much bitterness product of precocious intelligence blended in with failure in love and the personal immaturity worthy of being worshipped by Socratic illuminati in search of initiates and converts. His chest was still that of a child with a few scattered or splattered protruding hairs that made him look both childish and immaculate, as if not completely ripe. There´s nothing else I can remember with clarity and to continue describing him I would have to restore to clairvoyance and sorcery more than to memory. In size he might seem apparently tinier than I am but a lot more proportionate in the symmetrical relationship of lips, head, shoulders and hips. His arms might have shined with a delicate tan of which I am completely bereft and erratically scattered half-grown sun-dyed hairs.

King David, it is told in the Talmud, that would not spend any hours of the day without studying the Torah, so that in the twilight between midnight and the thick deeper night he used to sit by his shtender studying the Psalms, half slumbered and half awoken, not quite able to drown into sleep and neither capable to standing up. That´s how I half-slumbered that night; my loneliness profiting from the warmth of his physicality and watching the hours slip by amidst half-conversations, half-murmurs and half-intimations. That´s as much as I can remember; however I need no clairvoyance of sorts in order to attest to what followed thereafter, the prolonged silence and each and every mistake I incurred in, one more gruesome than the other, all the more regrettably so. My only accomplishment is that I delivered to him the letter I wrote that day when I fought with Maria Clara over the dangerous Campari treasure hunt. Letter which I delivered to him at Maria´s birthday party, the same day I had been intimate with Ariel – Santiago´s first love, amidst a long night of eccentric alcohol consumption by which I avowed myself to take revenge upon the little bastard and when I found out more than what I could live with about him. However, I forgot to think of the obvious fact that Ariel´s opinions might have been a little biased. We might both have deceived ourselves the same day, or with a day of difference. That night after I had to take him home from Maria´s I was with him and Ariel in the same cab and as soon as we reached his building we sent Ariel home and spent some time together; which I thought would be just the beginning of something greater and sounder but only signaled the silent speechless end. That was the last time I saw him. For consolation I can state clearly that I received every possible apology in the world for everything that stood in between. But I am not in search of consolation. I wanted the no-consolation no-apology version of the Phoebus. The next days I spent long hours walking all the day from my apartment to his building back and forth and sitting in nearby cafés with the sole illusion of encountering him. I didn´t. The only change I might have had, I blew it of my own devise when I ran away to Mona´s country house with Maria Clara and didn´t show up at Ferney´s farewell party. Months later I found out from pictures on the internet that he had been one of the guests there, while I was trapped in the middle of nowhere crying out loud my loss with cheap vodka in the company of a stranger and ridiculing myself drunk with the whole crowd. Until the day I know for certain that he was flight-bound to France I didn´t give up on my hopes to find him anew. I tried every single trick from the usual phone calls to extraordinary manhunts through the city. Not long ago I found an article he wrote on the internet. Hegel says “Here is Rhodus; you can´t jump over Rhodus”. I guess that with or without article, I can´t jump over Rhodus. Rhodus doesn´t jump… It stays home, miserly crying his whole life situation with all possible bourgeois pathos and complacency and then flies to France. That´s as far as Rhodes can jump, and jumps quite well without me. Months later when I was already living with Maria Clara at Patricia´s home (this is a totally different story deserving of whole weeks of midnight writing and writhing) there was this dull evening soirée at Guadalupe´s home when they baked the pizzas and Giovanni, her senior lover from Marseilles came by in order to be introduced to all of us (that night I also met the charming Esteban, Guadalupe´s stepbrother and a very beautiful man) and this guy whose name I no longer recall told us about how wonderful he was faring in the far-away Poitiers and that he was with a guy from Honduras or Guatemala and I wasn´t ascertained by anyone whether as flat mates or as a couple. Whatever the case might have been, that night, that sober night, signaled my ultimate defeat. I am not sure if it was that night (I´m quite sure it wasn´t) that we went to this very large house a few blocks away from Maria´s to play a silly word game, when I met a guy whose I don´t recall either that spoke so nicely about Santiago and wondered about the boyfriend that he supposedly had. I jumped at the forefront and proclaimed myself as such with the cunning aid of Guadalupe and heard all kinds of funny stories about him, about his brother who apparently is very good-looking and also very stupid. I am obliged to laugh as I write this, because right now I am completely but completely convinced that such boyfriend was not me at all. But it felt good to deceive myself and to occupy such an honorable place in the gossip list of the Colombian upper middle class; by which I would be just as much gossiped only a few months later after my fall-out with Maria Clara but for totally different reasons: Deceiver, Pathologic Liar, Thief, Alcoholic, Run-Away. I wonder today what my life would have been like if I had stayed living with Patricia, would that have lasted this long? Would I have exploited from belittling myself with bourgeois lies up to here and now? I doubt it, but there´s no way I could know.

What Maria Clara doesn´t know about our fall-out is the reason of my sudden outburst; I wasn´t outraged by the fact that she would be getting laid in the sofa with a friend and wearing that hideous red underwear, that´s not the reason why I spat on her. Besides being extremely drunk, the truth is that I was savagely attracted to Mario Stefan, I fancied him in a radical sensual and lustful way. He stood for things that I decry – the whole bourgeois attitude of complacency and leisure (not even Marx would have been that extreme) but there was this attitude typical of the cultured man, this chivalrousness, this gentle physical and emotional sensibility to everything beautiful and educated. The point now is that I am sure that this wasn´t true because the bourgeois lazy attitude is fully incompatible with the spiritual attitudes to which I am alluding, and this is not a personal grudge because I spent with him no more than a few hours; it is an afterthought on people in general. The physical sensibility however remains crucial, I didn´t figure it out, maybe I just imagined it. We spent that wonderful evening making this elegant fondue with carrots and mushrooms, baguette and wine, then whiskey and vodka. Then spitting, fighting, crying, crawling, tearing, packing, swelling, leaving, leaving for good – in one night. Whoever said that I was unable to live up to the bohemian dictum that a night is not supposed to end well, they are certainly fooled; to my own detriment I can attest to the fact that I´ve exceedingly lived up to it. I seem to have taken that night a crash course on how to carry through a suicidal plan without actually dying while at it. I passed the course with excellent grades. Life´s never got back to normal since that night, and sorrows of personal and material nature have been piling up as laundry for months with no end; but hey! There is something you can learn from that: There are other countries too. Now I have mortal enemies in a long list of countries: Colombia, Israel, Germany, Italy, France and Iceland. I guess that becoming a star does require an international prestige, precisely because those are the same countries where I happen to have friends. Save the United States, I´m still not a criminal there, but it could happen soon enough. Furthermore, I have monetary debts with people in all of those countries, now it does include the United States. Odds are that my enemies will end getting acquainted with each other; it has happened before. But I guess it requires the stammering talent for unwillingness to accept defeat of Dr. Balke to accomplish that, and that talent is nowadays scarce. Will I succeed in writing about illness without quoting at all and not making it look like a journal entry? I guess that quoting is an integral part of the way in which I write.

I´ve just been reading old writings and I definitely think I write worse and worse as I get older, I become more and more lazy; I have to commit myself to write everyday for the whole of the present month, there´s no other way to stay alive. The most difficult feature in writing I think is irony, much more than sadness and seriousness.