Words&Dirt

“One can laugh, and think that it is not serious, but it is serious, laughter has dug more useful tunnels all by itself than all the tears on earth, even though it may barely be known to stiff-necked people, stubborn in their belief that Melpomene is more fruitful than Queen Mab.  Once and for all it would be good to arrive at a disagreement in this matter.  Perhaps there is one way out, but that exit ought to be an entrance.  Perhaps there is a millenary kingdom, but you don’t storm a fortress by running away from an enemy charge.  Until now this century has been running away from all sorts of things, it has been looking for doorways and sometimes it gets to the bottom of them.  What happens afterwards no one knows; some may have managed to see and have perished, instantly erased by great black forgetfulness, others will have conformed to the small escape, the little house in the suburbs, literary or scientific specialization, travel.  Escapes are planned, they become technologized, they are furnished with the Modulor or with the Nylon Law.  There are imbeciles who still believe that drunkenness is a way, or mescaline, or homosexuality, anything magnificent and inane per se but stupidly elevated into a system, into a key to the kingdom.  Maybe there is another world inside this one, but we will not find it cutting out its silhouette from the fabulous tumult of days and lives, we will not find it in either atrophy or hypertrophy.  That world does not exist, one has to create it like the phoenix.  That world exists in this one, but the way water exists in oxygen and hydrogen, or how pages 78, 457, 3, 271, 688, 75, and 456 of the dictionary of the Spanish Academy have all that is needed for the writing of a hendecasyllable by Garcilaso.  Let us say that the world is a figure, it has to be read.  By read let us understand generated.  Who cares about the dictionary as dictionary?  If from delicate alchemies, osmoses, and mixtures of simples there finally does arise a Beatrice on the riverbank, why not have a marvelous hint of what could be born of her in turn?  What a useless task is man’s, his own barber, repeating ad nauseam the biweekly trim, opening the same desk, doing the same thing over again, buying the same newspaper, applying the same principles to the same happenings.  Maybe there is a millenary kingdom, but if we ever reach it, if we are it, it probably will not be called that any more.  Until we take away from time its whip of history, until we prick the blister made of so any untils, we shall go on seeing beauty as an end, peace as a desideratum, always from this side of the door where it really is not always so bad, where many people find satisfactory lives, pleasant perfumes, good salaries, fine literature, stereophonic sound, and why then worry one’s self about whether the world most likely is finite, whether history is coming to its optimum, whether the human race is emerging from the Middle Ages and entering the era of cybernetics.”

––Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, pg. 379-80