Chapter 1.
O R D E R
T H E B E D
It took me twenty-seven steps to stop.
She said: “I wan to be part of a fiction, I want to be the main character of a life that I was not suppose to live, I want to belong to a body I never tried before. Do I matter?”, she made a long pause; I imagined her drinking in one of the 3 glasses of water she uses to have next to her bed always before going to sleep. Maybe she was breathing deep, once more as a strategy to confirm her thoughts, maybe looking at the window, once more as a strategy to avoid her thinking, maybe caressing one of the anorexic plants of her room, or making little and repetitive circles with the middle finger of her left hand in one of the sides of her red underwear.
I realized that my images of her were stronger than my actual knowledge about her. I knew her better in my fantasies than in the reality, and even although I could say I did a master in her patterns and gestures after 5 months of “intense observation”, then, while I was sharing this piece of real conversation, I felt clumsy and had to fight against my disappointment. I asked to my self to wait a little bit longer. It was 3 in the morning of a full moon evening, Madrid 3rd of June.
No, it was 4 in the morning of a rainy evening, somewhere in September, in a city I have never been before.
I love brown, it is a color that suits my skin and my eyes. My mother always used to say that I was the queen of the autumn and I forgot to ask her before she died what does she meant by that. Is funny how “a death” can magnify triviality, how a stupid and anecdotic comment can become the ultimate key of an existence. I am the queen of autumn, I don’t know why and it will be like this forever.
We spend one third of our lives on the bed. It is an individual place that, even although we may share, we use to consider “ours”. It is a place designed for resting, a space that should convince us to surrender, a invitation to enjoy one of this moments where we give up without resistances, a piece where to lean our trust. I like “my” bed; I got it 4 years ago. It is a big bed with rectangular shape and I only have shared with 3 other bodies at the same time, once, some months ago. There are different theories about which orientation to choose while placing a bed in a room. I heard that sleeping in front of a window could make your dreams too superficial, that sleeping in front of a door will make you travel all the time to east countries and places with deep jungles and that sleeping in the middle of a room is a sign of homosexual tendencies.
I like to lye down in my bed and stare at the ceiling. I like ceilings, their flatness and their whiteness. I like to imagine that I have especial glasses that can penetrate ceilings and that I can see in between the legs of my neighbor when she is crossing the room to go to the kitchen and enjoy the fact that she is not comfortable with underwear while being at home.
Actually I don’t need to place this story in the beginning of an autumn just to follow my need to talk about my mother’s death, just because I feel like doing a tribute to her absence and her poetic way of dealing with reality. I miss her, she should have not die. I would never forgive her. Fuck you dead mum. I have the tendency to use too many references from my private existence into my creative works, unable sometimes to separate them both, reality and creation, cross faded and feeding to each other in a dependency relation. Ok, it is true, personal things should not be the main reason of my writings but what can I do if I don’t have the gene of imagination.
I try again…
She made a long pause. I imagined her drinking in one of the 3 glasses of water she used to have near her bed always before going to sleep. Maybe she was breathing deep, once more as a strategy to confirm her thoughts, maybe looking at the window, once more as a strategy to avoid her thinking, maybe caressing one of the anorexic plants of her room, or making little and repetitive circles with the middle finger of her left hand in one of the sides of her blue underwear.
It was eight in the morning of a cold day in the beginning of February in Amsterdam.
She kept on talking: “I have dreamt today that the old city and the old church of Amsterdam were burning on fire and I was running around dripping an excess of saliva and asking myself if I had a liver cancer or a kidneys problem. I have dreamt you were driving me to a beach that ended going upwards and that we collected old broken objects to build our shantytown and we putted them into the car of one of your black friends. I dreamt that you said to me: “come to the airport and sleep into my arms, I will smuggle you to the sun” and then I took a long shower because I was afraid of flying while I repeated to myself singing: “ I am not an ant, I did not safe for the winter, I am not creeping into your life, stop lying to me, stop lying to me”. I dreamt you forgot my name just before coming into my face and then you screamed a strange sound similar to a guttural squawk when I was almost saying: “hey there, it is me, it is me”. I dreamt I was never able to kiss again. I dreamt with a room without doors”.
I could have an erection thinking in the possibility… of forgetting her name. I drink water.
THE ROOM
I keep on thinking in my neighbor walking without underwear and in my glasses that can penetrate ceilings. I answer to her: “I cannot hear you… could you talk louder, clearer, slower, simpler?”.
She get confused and laugh nervously, her words are running to fast to build any logic sentence, disorganizing her speech, they jump into each other, piling up into each other, creating a mountain of confusion and mix of languages. She is the master of confusion, the queen of shifting statements, she invented the art of dialectics and is able to defense her thesis antithesis and mix of both with the same intensity. Unaware in her expertise, as all the genius, she is unable to take profit of her gift and she seams to be confronted and confused while confusing. In Latin “Genius” is the God to which we are given under protection when we are born. For Giorgio Agamben “Genius” is this God, personal and intimate, that we have inside of us, that defined us and push our choices, but that is at the same time the most impersonal of our characteristics, because we did not choose it, neither can controlled. “I want to write, but I will never be the author of my writings, genius was, genius is and genius will be. Genius is the impersonal potentiality of myself that push me to write” he wrote in his wonderful book “Profanaciones”. He wrote also that the meeting between our “self” and the “Genius” is terrible, we are afraid of being dominated, of being consumed by Genius. “ The way in which we try to escape from the Genius is our character”.
I come back to my narration dear readers. I was in a bed of a room, eight in the morning of a cold day in the beginning of February in Amsterdam
“Sheisthemasterofconfusion,thequeenofshiftingstatements,sheinventedtheartofdialect icsandisabletodefenseherthesisantithesisandmixofbothwith…………………………… ……………………………….”
I don’t believe her as with some of those women that are really good sewers and you wonder why are they taking a beginning class? I like to think it is because they have low self –esteem. They seams to be in total control and born to make the rest of us feel clumsy but they act as if they would not know. I don’t believe them.
I use this momentum of panic to keep on thinking about her, further away from our actual conversation of mess and misunderstandings.
I think: I have lost you my beautiful woman; there is not space in my room anymore for your confusions and games, neither space in my head for your escaping strategies, neither space in my vagina for your curiosity of beginner and you photoler excursions. My comprehension tools are sold out, and my ability to empathize is on a holidays break. I chose to have a table in each corner, my shoes close to the door and my books climbing up through the walls to feel again that I was the owner of my decisions. I hung only one picture at my wall knowing that having more images would remember me how much I miss a real body to observe me in silence for hours. I wanted to be modest and to moderate my pretensions and necessities.
She relaxes and decides to silence again, she waits for me to take over the conversation: “ I always hated pictures”, I try to explain her, “ a picture is always more than an image, it is a place of a division, a place for a sublime tear between the sensitive and the intelligible, between the copy and the reality, between the memory and the hope. I have hang only one picture at my wall to forget about the wall. I forget that there is a wall, I forget that there is an apartment because there are walls, I forget that this wall is what define and limited my space, that this wall separate my space from other people spaces. It is not a wall anymore but a support for a picture. But at the end I also forget about the picture and I don’t know how to look at it anymore.
I would like to write at my walls, a word everyday, a name, a statement, a wish, a question, an idea for a text”.
She is creative again and goes on in her speech, this time louder, slower and clearer: “ I already told you: could you rape my resistances? Could you undress my doubts? It will be just a matter of starting, just activate me and then I will bring you as far as you could have never imagined. Fuck you, fuck me, please don’t let me go now, it is too soon to finish when we have still not given us a chance to start.”
A room is a place that contains a bed, a living room is a place that contains a table and chairs, a kitchen is a place with a stove and an inlet, a bathroom a place with a wc and a shower and-or a bath, an entrance is a space where at least one door communicates with the “outside” of an apartment. Sometimes there are also children rooms, guest rooms, cleaning rooms, storage rooms or empty rooms.
Out of this list we can take two conclusions:
1. An apartment has different rooms. 2.Each room has a function.
THE APPARTMENT
“Nothing exist by itself always it is in relation with how you perceive them and use them”.
She looks like a door She taste like a door And when I kiss her I kiss a door. This is life, to fall seven times and go up eight.
“We have been talking the whole evening” I say, “ I need some rest now”. I hung up the telephone while she is still talking. It will take at least 10 more minutes for her to realize that there is no one listening at the other side. Maybe I will eat something quick and then come back to the telephone, she will probably still be there, talking, then I will catch the last sentence and start from there my “new intervention”. As we always do, starting from different and unconnected points, always starting.
I go to the kitchen, through my corridor, it is long and cold and dark. I painted in brown. I love brown; I am the queen of autumn. At the end of the corridor you have three different options, my bathroom, my kitchen, and a little cupboard where I keep old gifts that I never really liked but I never dared to throw away, old letters that remember me, once in a while, that I have had a past and also that someone loved me beautifully, a broken record player with a Chet Baker’s single of “I fall in love to easily”, high hells from my mother, a 5000 pieces puzzle with all the world flags, a rocket, sorry, I mean a racket and collection of wine glasses. There are two elements in the distribution of the house that I personally never liked. 1. The bathroom and kitchen so close to each other, contaminating each other functions, smells and natures. Digestion and excretion with non-separation. Am I the only one that thinks it is a bad taste choice? 2.and the exit door at the other side of the corridor, fronting the door of the kitchen, as a contraposition, too far one from the other. I wonder what my mother would have said about it, my mother and her fentsui theories. What to cook?
Lasagna with layers of tofu pieces marinated in basil and honey, eggplant and wild spinach “crowned” with a bŽchamel of goat cheese and dried tomatoes. Risotto with artichokes, green asparagus and mushrooms aromatized with old red Porto. Stew of pumpkin, sweet potato, onions and carrots with rosemary and thyme and a soft alioli. A cream made of king prawns and Champaign. Or just plain rice with olive oil, salt and pepper?
Chapter 2.
R A N D O M
A. Sometimes this is not possible
B. What do you want?
C. am getting cold
B. I am getting old
A. He speaks in Spanish
C. I am not a trivial machine
M. Would you remember me?
A. si
B. He smokes like a German
C. Excess of sense
M. Would you remember me?
C. I want to sleep closer to the stove
B. Do you know that the places where you can find more sea life are the corals, there, where the land meets the sea?
M. A collaboration of differences
A. Nothing
B. Sometimes I feel nothing
C. I am looking for a place without things that crawl, fly or bite.
A. If I could forget you without loosing you
M. Would you remember me?
B. I faked orgasms before but this is the first time that I faked not having an orgasm.
A. Because love, by nature, always wish a future
M. I tremble when I have not
B. What keeps me with you is the guiltiness
A. I smoked
B. Taste is a form of discrimination
M. This is not the first time we have been here
B. Time is passing and I don’t have time anymore
C. Do you need a massage?
M. No, don’t touch me
B. I need a gesture full of destiny
A. I drunk till I fainted, till I vomited, I drunk till I forgot you
C. The non-satisfied is what will last forever
B. The woman of green blue eyes have stolen my notebook
A. What kind of pet do you suggest for me?
M. One that does not need to eat in 3 months
C. I have pain to make associations
M. I think about you
A. I dreamt about you
B. I spoke about you
M. Give me a fact
A. Give me a fuck
B. The first thing that children experience from the world is not than adults are stronger but their inability for magic.
M. I wish a more intense mode of existence
A. Secrets are my only intellectual property
C. Fuck you dead mother!
B. I always will come back
A. I am awake only in what I love and desire to the point of terror
M. Close the door
B. I don’t get answers on the radio
THE BUILDING
A. I fucked your dead mother, sorry
M. Sorry
A. Would you remember me?
M. Sorry
B. No
A. Isn’t your mom Norwegian?
B. No, she is dead
A. If something cannot be communicated this mean that it does not exist
B. No
M. Maybe I will
A. The sublime
B. I don’t see you moving.
A. I do
B. I do.
C. Chaos comes before all principles of order and entropy, it is neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass and define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers and phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.
M. An elephant is always drawn smaller than it is and a flea is always drawn bigger
A. I am awake only in what I love and desire to the point of terror- everything else is just furniture, quotidian anesthesia, shit- for- brains, sub reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship and useless pain.
B. What did you do?
M. I did not do anything, I did not do anything, I did not do anything
A. I wonder how much lamb would be needed to make a soup in the Seine River.
C. Explain it
A. Express it
B. Keep it
A. Listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good and evil, gave you distrust of your body and shame for your prophet hood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization and all its usurious emotions.
M. Words belong to those who used them only till someone else steals them back.
A. I do
B. I do
I eat my tasteless rice with olive oil and salt. When I am sad I always eat rice with olive oil and salt, as a tribute of my emptiness. Forcing myself to enjoy simplicity. When I am in love or confused I also eat rice with olive oil. Then my digestions are faster then I am not afraid of farting in front of people. I never eat with my lovers, I never cook for them. Eating and cooking are these intimate actions that remains un-shareable for me.
I am thinking if you are angry now because I hung up the telephone. By now you should have realized I am not there with you. By now we both have realized it. I am not there with you. I wonder if I am just too insecure to live the life I would like to live. How would it be, the enjoyment of possibilities that utility doesn’t justify? What would it be, “life beyond utility”? Why do I consider duration first, employing the present time for the sake of the future? I wish to find this state when nothing counts but the moment itself. I wish a more intense mode of existence.
I go out of my kitchen, the exit door, in front, suggest me to go out and walk. Some fresh air and then I will keep on thinking.
I take the stairs
And IWalk downAnd IWalk downAnd IWalk downAnd IWalk down.THE NEIGHBORHOOD
I am not the kind of person who is interested in Britain’s royal family. I’ve visited computer chat rooms full of this type of person, and they are people with small worlds. They don’t consider the long term. They aren’t concerned about the home front but they are too busy thinking about the royal family of another country. The royal clothes, the royal gossips, the royal sad times, the royal weddings.
I walk out of my building and look at it with a relative distance. I try to imagine:
3 bathrooms, the third one is empty, in the second one a woman is taking a shower before going to work, in the first floor a man is brushing his teeth. 3 chimneys, none of them is working. 5 telephones, one is now being used for a discussion. A piano 10 adult men, one of them drinks in a glass, one is typing in the computer, one is reading the newspaper, 2 are sleeping, 1 is brushing his teeth, one is eating bread with butter, one is crossing a room where there is a black dog, one talks in the telephone. 7 women, one is happy, one is sitting, one is carrying a baby in her arms, one is reading the newspaper, one is taking a shower before going to work, one is drinking coffee, one is sleeping. 6 children, two of them for sure are girls. 2 dogs, one of them is black. 2 cats a horse with wheels a plastic train 37 ants (that are not creeping into my life) a black mask 29 lamps 10 beds 6 mousses 11 chairs 9 rooms with parquet 12 telephones 1 orange towel 3 clocks 6 computers A leather wallet
THE CITY ,THE COUNTRY
I keep on walking straight, I go out of my street, I cross a small boulevard, passing all the shops where I use to buy bread, tee, clothes pegs, condoms, aspirins, wood for the fire, socks, oranges, tofu, garbage bags, biological lamb meat, old red Porto, toilet paper, garlic and black pens. I cross a big avenue, I walk towards a park, I decide to enter, I pass the oldest tree of this park, he is famous to have survived 200 years and 2 wars, I think how many people will have pissed on it, how many people will have kissed under it, how many people will have hugged this tree, how many people will have asked for advise to this tree, how many ants will have died over one of it roots, how many women will have been raped against its trunk, how many leafs will it have lost. 200 hundred years, if I had so much time I would give you a new opportunity beautiful woman, I would think about having children, I would study 3 more languages, I would loose a year trying to learn how to be perfect in something, I would finish my philosophy studies and would start medicine, I would not feel stress not knowing what to do next.
I am in the middle of that forest. I see a rabbit running, I wish he could watch to his clock repeating “oh my god, oh my god, I am going to arrive late” and ask me to follow him inside of his burrow and then invite me to walk over a chessboard, and to cross mirrors, and to play croquet with playing cards and to become bigger and smaller by eating a mushroom, and to smoke with a caterpillar and to swim in the lake of my tears and to not know what my name means and to discover that the only way to “arrive” somewhere is to “go away” first.
In it origins the word “home” meant “ the center of the world”. “Home” was the center of the world because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal line. The vertical line was a line that towards up communicated with heaven and going down communicated with Hell. The horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, the rest of the pathways and movements in life. Home was the medium point that had the same distant to god and to the dead; it offered the security of an intersection, the productivity of a medium point.
The forest finished, a new big avenue to cross, a long street that finish in a square squatted by millions of pigeons, cars and people I have never seen before, smells that still remembers an unfinished evening, sounds that show that some people could sleep properly yesterday, soft sun light that tell me that I will not be tanned soon. What create a city? How would this city be if everything stopped?
I keep on walking and I imagine that everything around me has stopped. I imagine the silence and the possibility to slow down my steps without fear of loosing information or the fear to get kill by a car, a tram, a bike or a group of Chinese. I would like to have the time to observe the time freezing.
I don’t know all the streets of this city but it would be difficult for me to get lost here. I would love to have time to walk through the city following other reasons or strategies such as entering only in streets that start by “C”, or looking for corners where no one have passed before, or following a stupid algorithm based on sexual desires (follow a blonde sexual attractive woman until a man that could be your husband crossed to you, then follow him until you see a couple you would like to propose a bdsm trio, after 3 minutes choose someone ugly and follow him until you find something you could like about him or her), I would also like to try to create an itinerary that would make me travel around the city using successively all the busses of the capital, or use one day to follow peoples indications when I ask them: sir, could you please tell me where to go next?
I would like to reset the memories I have accumulated of this city to be able to experience it again.
THE WORLD
You told me once that you agreed with John Berger when he wrote that “to emigrate will always be to clear up the center of the world, and consequently, to move towards one which is lost, disorientated and created by fragments…. emigrate is to destroy the proper meaning of the world, to give in to the unreality of the absurd”.
For some people home is not represented by a house but by a practice. For some people the raw material that builds “home” is the repetition, the customs, and a certain domestic morality. We construct by what we recognize.
I keep on walking. I want to walk forever, it seams I cannot stop now; it has turned to be my today’s “life motive”. I cross streets, neighborhoods. It is funny, all these little details than make each neighborhood different, the kind of people that lives there, the kind of stores, the prices of the apples, the number of H&Ms, the number of pharmacies, the number of free parking areas, the amount of garbage on the streets, the language of the window shops.
Borders or frontiers separate countries. They are thin imaginary lines with strong effects. It is the same land, the same air but everything is different in one side and the other of this line. You can spend one second crossing frontiers by plane, minutes by car and hours if you do it by feet and you don’t have a visa.
Chapter 3.
C H A O S
THE UNIVERSE
- Please, could you tell me how to go out of here? Alicia asked.- This depends where you want to go. The cat answered. - I don’t care, Alicia said. *Then, it does not matter the way you take. The cat affirmed. - I just need to arrive somewhere else. Alicia pointed.
- Then, it is easy; just walk a little bit longer.
The chaos theory describes the behavior of certain dynamical systems that may exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial and external conditions. AS a result of this sensitivity, which manifests itself as an exponential growth of perturbations, the beheabour of chaotic system appears to be random.
This phenomenon is also known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Just a small change in the initial conditions can drastically change the long-term behavior of a system.
Where is the butterfly? Where is the fucking butterfly? Do you have a camp of butterflies? Do you train them to flap their winds all together at the same time?
We use the eyes to see. When nothing is in front of us our gaze can reach really far. But if there is something in front then we do not see anything else that what it is in front. The space is what narrows the glance; the sight collides against the space and becomes limited. The visible exists because it has been seen. I wonder when, how and where the appearance meets the signification, when the shape meets the meaning, how do they cross fade into each other and become one.
You are always 10 minutes later than me, you are 2 hours walking distance from my home, you are 4 steps further than my professional development, you are 5 insecurities far from my needs, you are 2800 kilometers away from my cultural background and culinary understandings, you are 23 centimeters above my gaze and 3 sizes away from my shoes, you are 4 thoughts away of my narrations, you are 400 words distance from my need to communicate with you, there are 6 plus 6 plus 6 degrees of separation between us, you are 10 years older, you have 3 times darker hair, you desire twice more than I do having children, you have been closer to Korea, you have 3 more layers of muscles and other protective tissues, you jump 4 times faster in the future when I ask you to take a coffee now, you have 5 points more of patient, stamina and typing skills, you have 127 more experiences with planes, places and “plainness”, you make longer silences.
I have arrived to your place and I just realize that the door of your house is smaller than the one of my building, that the walls are more red, that there are 4 windows less than in my edifice, that you only have two neighbors, that your name has 4 letters less than mine, I also realize that today is the garbage day here, at your street.
THE SPACE
I would like to find stable places, immobile, untouched, and unchangeable. Places as references and as beginnings. They don’t exist, and then the space turns to be a question, a doubt. I need to mark spaces; they are never “of mine”, never given to me, never owned by me. My spaces are fragile, the time wear them out, nothing stays, my memories betrays me, the oblivion enters in my memory. Time wins the Space. Space is domesticated by Time. But time is just an imposed experience.
My mother said that writing is a way to make something living forever, that writing is to leave a trace, a mark and some signs. My mother also told me to be careful with what I would write because “you can erase words that have been said but never words that have been written”.
Mum, I miss you as the deserts miss the rain.
I look for your mailbox and leave you a note written with my black pen: “Look at my face: my name is Might Have Been, I am also called no more, too late, farewell”.
I turn around and keep on walking.