by Cesar Aira
The desolation of Pringles, especially in winter, makes it seem an abstract place. If I had the time and the inclination, I would go through all the philosophical systems, from Plato to Nietzsche, and submit them to the Pringles test, measuring their claims against the absoluteness of the town. “Essence precedes existence,” yes, all right, everywhere except in Pringles, where existence precedes essence, or the two go hand in hand. “To be is to be perceived”: true, as shown by observation in Pringles. Etc.
VI
Like all of my contemporaries, I could die at any moment. Today, tomorrow, yesterday. An accident, or a fatal illness (it wouldn’t be all that unusual, at my age) . . . It’s a lottery, but luckily it seems to be as difficult to win (or to lose, in this case) as a real lottery with tickets. What I would feel, if it happened to me, was that an injustice had been done, or even that some mistake had been made. How can I die if I haven’t even lived yet? Believers console themselves with the idea of “the life to come,” the happy life of the blessed, especially in cases of premature death. Naturally, that was how the girl at the Avenida thought about her brother. I would find it much harder to apply that idea to myself, because the very concept of a life “to come” presupposes a life “here and now.” If you haven’t lived even one life, what’s the point of starting over? You might say that everyone has a life, no matter how brief. But that kind of simplification implies that there is equal cause to lament the death of a five-year-old child and that of a man of ninety. It’s conventional sentimentalism. The lamenting is always done by other people, who don’t really care at all, at least compared to the way they would care about their own deaths. To lament, you have to be alive, which almost always means you’re waiting for life to begin.
In a way, you don’t have to be a believer to believe in the life to come, because the two lives are superimposed and blended in the present. “He who waits despairs,” as the proverb says. I would say: “He who waits deludes himself” because what you’re waiting for has already begun and sometimes it’s already over. That’s the nature of the present.
Last night before falling asleep, I was trying to clarify the question of the Last Judgment. According to my simplified version of Christian eschatology, the dead have to wait for the Last Judgment to be judged and assigned a definitive destiny in the life to come. You die, and then there’s a blank space, a nothing, until you wake up on Judgment Day. The living, that is, the survivors, might imagine that the dead go directly to Heaven or Hell, but it can’t be like that for the dead themselves, because there would have to be two times running simultaneously — Eternity and time in the world — and that is impossible. So we have to wait until the end of time, till Judgment; all the rest (simultaneity, Dante, the return of the living dead, spiritualism, and so on) falls into the category of fiction. There’s another reason too: people can’t be definitively judged at the moment of their death, because they go on affecting the present via the continuing reverberation of their deeds and works, or simply because of the weight they had in the system of the world, be it great or small, which means that they go on accumulating merits and demerits. Logic dictates that this action will continue for as long as there is time, so a just evaluation has to wait until time comes to an end.
But this leap from death to the Last Judgment poses a number of problems. Last night I got so tangled in my calculations I couldn’t get to sleep; I was tempted to get up and draw a diagram to see if I could set it out clearly. Maybe I can do that now.
Consider a man who dies on the fifth of June 1932 at ten minutes past ten in the morning; from that point on, there’s a blank, until the Last Judgment, whenever that happens to be. Since his consciousness has been extinguished by death, to him that blank can only be an instant, even if it lasts ten thousand centuries. If we were to think of it as a lapse of time, like a kind of dark waiting room, that would be another “life to come,” a third life, which seems a little excessive to me. As far as I know, no one has ever spoken of a third, intermediate life. I am familiar with the notion of “Limbo,” but I don’t think it’s accepted by serious theologians; it must be a fictional compromise, invented to make the ideas of immediate judgment and instantaneous Heaven and Hell fit with the requirements of dogma. And it’s a dangerous fiction, because it could lead evildoers to speculate about the time to be served.
An instant, then. You close your eyes, or they fall shut, and you open them again immediately on the day and at the very hour of time’s completion. In other words, for the man in our example, the Last Judgment took place on the fifth of July 1932 at ten past ten in the morning.
But a minute later, there was another death (I say a minute but it could be half a minute or two seconds: it depends on the mortality rate, which must vary anyway) and a minute before, there had been another, and so on, forwards and backwards, all through History. And with each death, the same thing happens, that is, there is the same kind of leap, whose duration is variable from an external perspective, but always the same — zero — from the point of view of the person concerned.
And that’s what makes this figure so hard to conceive. There is a set with multiple members (human beings) whose deaths progressively punctuate the full range of time, yet the end of the range is present at each one of those points. The end of time is contiguous with every one of its moments.
As I said, you don’t have to be a Christian, or hold particular beliefs, for these things to apply. They can be generalized to all situations that involve the individual and the collective. The bridge between those two registers is made of interruptions and leaps. You only have to think of all the people who are sleeping on the planet and those who are awake: there are millions of minuscule Last Judgments spread out to form an enormous, complicated figure. And it doesn’t even have to be an interruption of consciousness, because any kind of waiting performs the same function. While some people are waiting for things to happen, others are living, and then the roles are reversed, and this alternation is what time comes down to, in practice.
VII
In the fable of the Last Judgment, each person falls asleep separately and everyone wakes up together. The great event is a terminus ad quem from which the innumerable range of individuals can be viewed; when they come together in that knot, their individuality is revealed, and they must pay for it. But that event is unique, unrepeatable and maximally deferred; in fact, deferral as a secondary event is defined by reference to the Last Judgment, which is the model of all waiting.
Each individual life reproduces the model in miniature. Or rather, since the Last Judgment is actually a fiction, its purpose is to provide a model for our daily manipulation of time and to make it intelligible. In real life, we fall asleep separately (“Blessed are the sleepy ones, for they shall soon fall off”: Nietzsche) and we wake up separately too. That’s the catch: we wake up separately, according to our rhythms or necessities or whims . . . but we wake up to reality, which is a great collective event in which everyone participates.
I’m not referring only to literal sleeping, but to any kind of absence, like a vacation at the beach, or a term in jail, and I’m thinking especially of states of distraction or absorption or partial blindness . . . categories that cover almost everything: life is made of these absences.
We’re always coming back. And while we were away, things happened. We emerge from sleep to observe their effects, like Rip Van Winkle.
And that’s just it: I feel like Rip Van Winkle. That’s what I was trying to get to. Today, the fifth of July 1999, I wake and pick up the thread of my thoughts where I left it thirty years ago. This sounds like a metaphor, and perhaps it is, but it should also be understood literally. Suddenly it hits you: you’re not twenty; you’re not young any more . . . and in the meantime, while you were thinking about something else, the world has changed. The succession of my ideas was interrupted, and now it’s hard for me to resume it, because those ideas no longer correspond to anythi
ng objective, which means that they’re not really ideas. I want to be completely sincere about this, but to tell the truth I no longer know if I’m thinking or raving. I guess this is what always happens: the collective, world politics, is the hardest thing to grasp in thought, because it has so many facets. Nevertheless, one of the ideas that implanted itself in my young mind was the indignity of work in a capitalist society. Now I don’t know what to do with that idea, because the masses are clamoring precisely for work, and the right-minded, to whose ranks I thought I belonged, are praising it to the skies, as if it were a panacea. I was convinced that the oppressed had nothing to lose but their chains, and here they are demanding them desperately.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the world has been turned upside down; in fact, it has simply regressed to an earlier stage of the same situation. Which means that we, the bourgeoisie, have executed a clever maneuver and claimed a victory by making time run backwards, which gives us an extra century or two in which to come up with new maneuvers and secure new victories.
The whole idea of the Revolution, with which we were so taken up, was premised on the unspoken assumption that a century or two would have to pass. Deep down, we knew this. The contradictions could not be resolved in situ, in our lives. We were working for the future, not the present. The present fell into a gap.
When you committed yourself to the Revolution, you renounced your chronological autonomy and put yourself at the mercy of delays that were out of your control. You threw yourself into a temporal abyss. Your own personal death became the guarantee of the whole operation because it was required for the extinction of your class, your kind, your world.
The reason for my perplexity is this: the results that are plain to see were obtained in a few decades, within a single generation, and the people involved are the same, except that where they used to say white now they’re saying black. It’s a different world, a world turned upside down, but with the same inhabitants. While I was absent (where?), they went on living.
They are still my contemporaries. Humanity is still my exact contemporary. But they think the exact opposite of what they were thinking when I left them, thirty years or half an hour ago, and they don’t seem at all surprised by the change; they haven’t even noticed it. They behave in a perfectly natural way, magically adapted to the world. And that, I realize, is the key to effective thinking: naturalness, spontaneity. It doesn’t have to be thought out; it just happens by force of circumstance, like rain.
The transvaluation of work is one of the many things that amaze me. Another is the de-Machiavellization of state-level politics. Suddenly people have started judging the state by the norms of private virtue, honesty above all. The same honesty that is threatened when the proletariat is stripped of work. Public virtues (la virtù) have dissolved. This, I suppose, is due to the fact that public matters are now decided by corporations, and the only function left to the state is that of providing a model of ethical perfection, like the court in imperial China. But there’s no point in giving examples, because I’m talking about what actually happened, not what it might exemplify. “If you don’t believe me, go and see for yourself” (Lautréamont).
If it was a matter of giving examples, nothing more would be required. The other day I read in the paper that somewhere in Africa (the Sudan, I think), slavery has survived, and proletarians old enough to work are sold for fifty dollars. A Swiss humanitarian organization collected money, “bought” two thousand slaves and set them free. It didn’t cost them very much (a hundred thousand dollars) but it gave them a godlike status; there was a photo of the ex-slaves, sitting on the ground, looking disconcerted and not very happy. In some ways their situation is similar to ours today. “Slavery” is a word, which in this case seems to have been applied to an ancestral tradition. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that there is a kind of traditional contract by which people sell their work in return for board and lodging, and possibly clothes and other benefits. Is that so different from what our unemployed are demanding? If the African contract includes restrictions on movement or change of employment, those restrictions have their equivalents in our “civilized” contracts, or they are counterbalanced by stability. Or they simply don’t matter, if the alternative is starving to death.
Let’s suppose that a Swiss humanitarian organization discovers that Argentine proletarians are working twelve or fourteen hours a day, for a salary that doesn’t even cover basic necessities, in conditions that they judge to be unfit for humans, etc. From their Swiss point of view, they could well call that “slavery” and, spurred by a feeling of just indignation, collect money to “buy out” the contracts of two thousand or twenty thousand exploited Argentines and give them back their “freedom.” There in Zurich, or in Basel, they wouldn’t know that those same Argentines had spent years marching and blocking traffic to demand “work” . . .
The moral is that each country still defines its words autonomously, as it did before globalization. And trying to impose a definition on others, even with the best intentions, can be catastrophic.
Of course I didn’t spend the last thirty years napping; I spent them writing my little novels and preparing my Encyclopedia. The fact that I was also reading the newspaper every day is immaterial, it seems. The whole purpose of writing was to dissolve the exemplary quality of my “impressions of Africa,” to make them historical, and articulate within them the two contradictory aspects of the world: identity and difference. By writing, I’ve managed to stay alive until now, to stay, that is, in the same world; the price I’ve had to pay is that it has turned upside down.
It’s true that I could be condemned for not having used my privileges as a bourgeois intellectual to do something more constructive, if only at the individual level, like becoming more learned or intelligent, or at least writing truly good books. But what’s the point of writing good books, or learning, or discovering new truths? Contributing to the construction and accumulation of knowledge means collaborating with power, since power will inevitably appropriate that knowledge and exploit it to dominate and subjugate. So what should you do? Keep the knowledge secret? Use it first, for revolutionary purposes? (But knowing what comes first and what comes after is no simple matter in this domain.) As a precautionary measure, I persisted in the most complete stupidity.
And anyway, I never believed that knowing things was worth the trouble. It never seemed worth the effort to me, in practical terms.
I have always let information flow through my head like water through a hose.
After all, I knew where the facts were and I could go and fetch them if I ever needed to, but frankly I never thought it would come to that. As I saw it, this was the only practical benefit of my favorite pastime, reading: it showed me how to find the facts should I ever be required to put them to some use, an event that this preparation rendered all the more unlikely.
What interested me was something else, something more aesthetic: the format of the information and how it was constructed. That was what stayed with me, without any exercise of memory on my part. All my attention was focused on the format; there was none left over for the rest. I don’t know if my memory withered away through lack of use or if it was always poor; what I do know is that my mind has remained pure of content. This explains why I’m so inept in conversations: I don’t have anything to say, I have lost touch with content.
VIII
I used to write with the sole aim of producing work of high quality: good novels, better than others, etc. The reasons for wanting to do this are psychological; in other words, they can be found somewhere in a vast and ill-defined jumble that offers something to satisfy every taste: ambition, adaptation, inferiority complex, megalomania, compensation . . . Good arguments could be found for each of these hypotheses, and I find them myself, in my meditations. But the only thing I know for sure is that my aim in writing was to do it well and become a good writer, which was all that mattered to me.
As opposed to most decisions in the life of an individual, which are determined by an innumerable variety of causes, this aim of mine was something of an idée fixe. Not that I think it was “mine” exclusively; the general idea must be common enough, though perhaps not universally shared. You want to do something well, so you sacrifice everything else to that objective, obscurely aware that once it is attained, everything else will be thrown in for free. Excuses will always be found for a good writer; for a bad one, no excuse is valid.
Anyway, at a certain point, having published about twenty books, I had to get down to some serious thinking. You can’t go on learning indefinitely, whatever people say. I mean, it’s true that you go on learning, but bad habits also become more deeply ingrained, and the bad offsets the good. Hoping starts to lose its pertinence: the true object of hope is always something new; even those who want to go back to the past are imagining a new past. In literature above all, the good is identified with the new; but I think that in my most lucid moments what I wanted to write was not so much something good as something new, something that had never been written before. And the new is subject to the law of diminishing returns, which I revere. What didn’t work out on a first attempt is less and less likely to work out.
Also, after the happy recklessness of youth, when things get done, if they do, in spite of the doer’s aspirations, it’s counterproductive to persist in striving for quality. I have always subscribed to the idea of High or Highbrow Culture, Art with a capital A. And art is not something that should be done well. If doing it well is what counts, it’s craft, production for sale, and therefore subject to the taste of the buyer, who will naturally want something good. But art creates its own paradigm. It isn’t “good” according to preexisting standards; rather, it sets the standard for what is to come (the crafts of the future). That’s the difference between creation and production.
