Marginalia

Texto escrito a finales de 2005. La realidad ha superado con creces, como siempre, la escritura. Nuevos eventos, nuevas lecturas me confirman en la tesitura ética que dieron lugar a esta escritura; otras lecturas, otros hechos, me llevan a matizar ciertas perspectivas, el demasiado arrojo. De todas formas prefiero que quede como está, como fue concebido.

 

[Prefacio]

 

[Viejas rencillas nos apartan de lo que nos constituye. El itinerario de nuestras vidas escinde el ser que siempre quisimos conservar intacto, impoluto. Las maneras de pensar se nutren del ayer y se definen por lo que hoy perciben. La tarea de sistematizar se hace agobiante cuando se descubren los fragmentos que moldean nuestra memoria. La lectura se hace edificante cuando permite construir unas referencias que se quedan para siempre. No obstante, nos asedia el deseo (y el goce) de reconstruir una día en nuestras vidas. ¡Cuán felices somos cuando podemos recordar la secuencia de un día cualquiera! Las idas y venidas, los amores y los odios, los paisajes y sus gentes, los libros y las lecturas. Así se hizo este ¿ensayo?, con lecturas, autores, patrocinios, momentos, recuerdos, insomnios. Estas son escrituras que han nacido de lecturas, algunas de ellas imprescindibles para entrar en paz conmigo mismo, con el destino de ser en otra tierra una rama movida por el viento pero no quebrada. Es la intención de quien escribe hacer participar a los posibles lectores con esas lecturas que prodigaron gracia y sacrificio sobre el lector que soy. No siempre ellas (las lecturas) perduran inalterables frente a las exigencias del lector-escritor pero están ahí, prodigándose, "tierra que mana leche y miel", para los arriesgan la pulcra tranquilidad de no saber.]

 

Uno

 

[Texto de Marx, Manuscritos de economía y filosofía. Tercer manuscrito. El dilema de la muerte del individuo real concreto se ha manipulado para que ésta aparezca como estímulo a la no-acción social y a la deificación de la búsqueda del placer como bien último y definitivo. Así, ese individuo real concreto que el pensamiento posmoderno arropa y descaracteriza privándolo de su verdadera esencia, ser comunitario, ser con una decidida vocación social, entendiendo ésta como proyección de la individualidad hacia el colectivo buscando satisfacer las necesidades del otro, muere en cuanto individuo real y se transforma en cosa, se cosifica y pasa ser parte de la abultada oferta del mercado. En las condiciones actuales en que la realidad misma se ve superada por el efecto virtual de lo que Marx llamó industria, y el reclamo de los derechos inalienables del individuo se parapetan tras la defensa de "nuestro modo de vida" (entiéndase o léase, vida de confort y placer), el individuo adocenado, sin otras disidencias que aquellas que lo llevan a elegir una marca comercial sobre otra, es televisado (impuesto como patrón) como un individuo de perenne juventud y lozanía, felicísimo de no saber nada sino de dietas y píldoras, que va dejando una estela de descompromisos para subsumirse en su oscura y patológica mismidad. Ser aislado, desconectado, sin participación real en la vida social, destruido como sujeto, objetivado en producto intercambiable, objeto que cree haber superado "la dura victoria del género sobre la especie", convertido en individuo no real ni concreto, imagen holográfica, sumatoria despersonalizada de la especie.

 

Dos

 

[Un mundo de fantasía, toneladas de plástico, un servicio irreductible a la eficiencia y la limpieza, unas diluidas sonrisas en agua coloreada, unas imágenes de vivísimos colores y esos animados animales que nos recuerdan la triste condición de los humanos que no sabemos ser tan simpáticos e inmortales. Ese es el mundo de Disney. Ese es el mundo que vende el centro de la Florida, además de sus naranjas. Las espaciosas vías de comunicación que enlazan los distintos parques temáticos del complejo Disney con las urbanizaciones colindantes funcionan como las arterias que irrigan el vigoroso corazón de la más exitosa industria del entretenimiento de los últimos tiempos: Disney's World at Florida. Fabulosas autopistas que empastan los colores de la felicidad prefabricada en esos parques con la precariedad de las vidas que se acercan a ese templo pagano de la Sempiterna Sonrisa, donde la más común de las jaculatorias es "al menos vamos a olvidarnos de la realidad por unas horas" o cosas parecidas, cosas que apuntan a un cansino vacío, a una resignación a flor de alma, a una sed que se abreva con una coca-cola de dieta, si es posible, por favor, dice alguien con una sonrisa cómplice que se mira en el espejo de otra. ]

 

Tres

 

[Texto Espectros de Marx, J. Derrida. ¿Qué es lo que se espectraliza? A saber, y cito: "lo que no está vivo ni muerto, ni presente ni ausente", el elemento que redunda en la vacuidad del ciudadano frente a sus responsabilidades con la polis, con el entramado de lo que gustan llamar, con descaro hoy, sociedad civil. Elemento que pretende neutralizar al ser y convertirlo en zombie-consumidor, en paseante de las interminables vitrinas de los malls, en objeto del objeto de la media, en advertisement en estado puro. El espectro que desea y por el cual se ocupa el capital, ese espectro cuya relación con la realidad se reduce a lo sensorial, a lo instintivo. La mentira, como reflejo de lo cierto: lo sucesivo (la concatenación de generaciones humanas con ideales, motivaciones, angustias) se esquiva en virtud de la permanencia de lo efímero: una especie de fuente de lo nuevo y de lo joven que no se agota, sino que intenta reciclar la individualidad, real, concreta e intransferible del ser humano. La globalización de la más enajenada forma de relación social, el mercado, como alternativa a la tesis marxista de "Proletarios de todos los países, uníos". En la globalización de la forma desenfrenada de consumir se esconde el deseo de uniformar, de controlar, de dirigir, sin disidencias, el género humano para degradarlo a la categoría de cosa, mercancía, y en esa "granja" medrar, reproducir espectros que se parezcan cada vez más. La alternativa a esa estrategia tiene que ser radical: pensar sin disimulo, no tener escrúpulos en denunciar, desde unos hábitos existenciales cada vez más conscientes, la falsedad de la moneda con la que se quiere anular la capacidad humana de ser reales, concretos e individuales, a la vez que solidarios. Esta "forma de guerra inédita" que se ha planteado hoy necesita de una liturgia de exorcismo en la que se expulse de la subjetividad y la racionalidad humana a ese "elemento" que quiere suplantar la palabra vivida y sentida por aquella otra que tuerce el sentido por lo cual fue dicha. "…en estos tiempos, un nuevo ‹‹orden mundial›› intenta estabilizar un desarreglo nuevo […] instalado en forma de hegemonía sin precedentes": este tiempo, en que la misma noción de él se escamotea para que el ser deje su casa y repita los lugares comunes que se le dictan desde los "templos" bursátiles, es un tiempo para andar desnudos y sin ataduras el camino exiguo de la virtud. Economía de palabras y de gestos para retar la hegemonía, el sueño de hacer añicos la persona y su capacidad para relacionarse con lo verdadero, con lo otro, en lo cual encuentra su plenitud.]

 

Cuatro

 

[Un pasaje grotesco. El imperialismo y la democracia. "We got him", dijo Bremer y la prensa libre aplaudió a rabiar. Esa es una imagen para no olvidar: la democracia, el estilo americano de democracia, con su prepotencia y chabacanería proverbial, anunció que el ex-dictador, ex-presidente, ex-líder de una nación independiente, ahora ocupada, "fue agarrado" como se hace con un perro rabioso que amenaza a toda la población de un lugar. Y esa es la imagen que ha creado el gobierno de los EE.UU. y su prensa libre. Esa es la imagen que los periodistas del mundo libre se afanan en lubricar para que quepa mejor en la mente de los ciudadanos del mundo libre. "We got him", dijo Bremer y alguien descorchó una botella de añejo para celebrar la caída de otro dictador. La cuestión no está en beber ni aplaudir rabiosamente, sino en cómo un funcionario de un gobierno que quiere ser el Gobierno se refiere a un ex-dictador, ex-presidente, ex-líder de una nación independiente, ahora ocupada. Es preocupante cómo esta gente improvisa esa manera chapucera de tratar al resto del mundo: nombra gobiernos, da absoluciones, reparte contratos, demoniza, miente, pone cara de contrito creyente y converso penitente, y después, como el que si quiere las cosas, mete un chiste al estilo de Rumsfeld cuando refiere que la decisión sobre quién interrogaría a Sadamm fue "a three-minute decisión, the first two were for the coffee". Así, con la ramplona simpleza de un comedian que se gana la vida frente a un público dispuesto a pasarla bien a cualquier precio. Rumsfeld ha sido un bromista desde que ganó sus prolongados quince minutos de fama a raíz de los atentados terroristas del 11 de septiembre del 2001. Recuerdo su cara desprovista incluso de la seriedad de circunstancia pautada por las agencias de relaciones públicas cuando se presentaba en las conferencias de prensa a propósito de aquellos tristes eventos. Ese es el equipo que gobierna al país que parece ser el más rico y poderoso del planeta: Mickey declarándole su amor a Minnie en patético remedo del drama shakesperiano. Mickey con sus tremendas orejas y su ilimitado poder para resolver todas las situaciones, su heroica condición ahistórica y posmoderna. En el mundo libre los Mickeys abundan. Ladies and gentlemen "We got him", dijo Bremen. Y Mickey saltó, todos los vimos, sonriendo, alzándo su bracitos y enseñando una sonrisita comedida, como con pudor. Es tremendo que el destino del planeta y de la humanidad pendan de la imprudencia con que se manejan asuntos tan serios como es la sobrevivencia de la humanidad.]

 

Cinco

 

[Texto de Metz. Dios y tiempo. Es esta una época "en que políticamente están en juego la crisis y la destrucción del sujeto", así que todo extrañamiento del quehacer político en cuanto participación objetiva y solidaria en la lucha por reivindicar el sujeto humano frente al arrollador empuje del capitalismo como modelo último y único de convivencia social es decididamente un extrañamiento de Dios, el principio que históricamente ha estado presente en la formulación de la identidad humana. El vacío creado por la idea de un Dios ajeno al relato bíblico en el que se promete, cumple y realiza la salvación por la acción de la gracia, deja a la humanidad con una idea de Dios como ente de referencia y de invocación sin una dimensión salvadora verdadera, la anulación de la participación de Dios en la vida histórica de los hombres y mujeres concretos que sufren y padecen. La ciudad de Dios como otro lugar, distinto y distante, de la ciudad humana. La religión que se sustrae a "los seudónimos terrenales de Dios", verdad, amor, compasión, solidaridad, política en cuanto a responsabilidad con el otro, deber y derecho de ser sujeto en la construcción histórica de la identidad no enajenada del ser humano. La palabra de Dios como palabra incitadora a la acción revolucionaria, propiciadora de cambios que acerquen al humano más a Dios, a Él mismo. El olvido de Dios es precisamente el repliegue de su palabra misma a la condición de palabra que no dice, el mensaje religioso vaciado de su contexto social, político, alejado de los temas que realmente afectan al ser humano en su supervivencia y desarrollo. Así, señala Metz, que la "falta de compromiso político va unido al olvido de Dios" porque hace que nos desentendamos los unos de los otros, el deseo y la estrategia fundamental de la sociedad actual, diseñada y pensada para ese individuo que ni es real ni concreto, sino virtual imaginería, rastrojo de lo que pudo ser, objeto que se consume. La "cosa" en la que la media quiere convertir al ser humano concreto (no olvidar la denominación de las pérdidas de vidas humanas en las guerras preventivas de hoy: daños colaterales) es un individuo desentendido de su entorno existencial y de las responsabilidades con éste. Enseñar hoy día que no estamos solos, ni hechos para el disfrute genital de lo fugaz, ni somos dueños de una riqueza que no ha sido creada sino disimuladamente adquirida en transacciones que nada tienen que ver con el trabajo y con la realidad, es una enseñanza subversiva, una enseñanza en la que se acerca a Dios a su destino privilegiado, el ser humano. Ese joven de los advertisement es un fantasma del ser humano que estamos convocados a ser y ayudar a construir, vacío de Dios, frío, indolente. La religión que se pretende hoy, en este mundo en el que todo tiene un rol preasignado, es la religión de los que Metz llama "sujetos burgueses", sujetos muertos a la acción histórica de cambio porque están muy vivos para "fabricar" y acumular capital con el cual solazarse en este reino de acá, amparados en una "ética inmanente que nombra a Dios para alejarlo". Sujetos en los que la dimensión solidaria es el loan bancario con intereses: te presto, no te doy. La modernidad siempre quiso convertir la religión en un "asunto privado", desproveerla de su capacidad transformadora y sustanciadora, sacarla de la esencia constitutiva del ser humano para hacer a éste más maleable, manipulable. Hay que re-ligar la religión con la política, el hablar sobre Dios con el hablar sobre el mundo, hacer que cobre sentido lo que aparece cada vez más soso y aburrido, el compromiso de ser a plenitud la persona que piensa, siente, se emociona, padece, necesita, es indigente de los otros, del Otro. La "religión burguesa" escribe Metz "no entra en la lucha de los sujetos por su identidad", sino que da por descontado que la sociedad en que vivimos no puede ser cambiada, ajena y extraña al cambio social. Esta religión medra del "mito de la inalterabilidad de nuestra sociedad". Esta religión es ideología que se fundamenta en abstracciones de la verdad revelada en los textos sagrados, abstracciones desprovistas del carácter mesiánico que promete la salvación y se cumple en los dichos y hechos de Jesús. Metz advierte sobre la falacia de hablar que estamos en una ‹‹época de transición›› señalando que "el tiempo siempre está ‹‹en transición››", ésta, escribe, es una ‹‹época de rupturas››; transición en sentido inverso, hacia atrás, hacia las formas edulcoradas del pasado, una metafísica corrompida de la imagen histórica, una forma de paralizar el cambio que, necesariamente implica la ruptura del orden de cosas presente hacia otro en que los individuos sean artífices de su propia identidad. Leamos "…los miedos colectivos, que corroen el alma del ‹‹hombre moderno›› […] Atrapado entre la desesperación y el tímido compromiso, entre la apatía y un amor exiguo, entre un individualismo posesivo sin miramientos y una raquítica solidaridad, anda desorientado y sabe menos de sí mismo que sólo unas pocas generaciones antes; tan poco sabe de sí mismo, que no le gustaría ya ser su propia descendencia." Una radiografía de lo que vivimos hoy día no para cruzarnos de ideas, sino para empezar a pensar en lo que no se quiere que pensemos, en ser seres dialógicos con una dimensión espiritual explícita que no se conforma con los remedos de la new age, espiritualismos tranquilizantes, valiums religiosos. Hay que pensar la religión y la política como áreas del pensamiento y del quehacer social en que la administración de los bienes de "allá arriba" y de "acá abajo" no interfieran, sino que sean contingentes para esa sociedad poscapitalista que necesita emerger. Dios como una "idea de resistencia" para que todo sea distinto en oposición a las "políticas del orden". Esta idea de la resistencia se explicita, políticamente, para Metz en la "idea de la revolución" como acontecimiento social que no sólo provoca una "ruptura dramática" sino que se supera así misma hasta llegar a ser lo que denomina "revolución antropológica": no sólo propiciar y efectuar el cambio a niveles de las estructuras y los postulados sociales, sino penetrar el sujeto y operar con eficiencia un cambio en la mentalidad, en el sentir y el pensar, en las conciencias adormecidas por el sueño capitalista. Esta confluencia que atiende a cambiar el mundo exterior e interior del sujeto no nos sitúa en el paraíso, sino en camino hacia él.]

 

Seis

 

[Where shopping is a pleasure. Como ir al templo, como la misa dominical, con la devoción derrotada no más se mira la arquitectura igual en todas partes, así se inicia la pequeña liturgia del consumo. Orden y asepsia, ausencia total de lo cálido, alegría, felicidad en todas partes, sonrisas y reclamaciones para ayudarte con una cortesía tan fría, tan cortante que te hace huir o entregarte, según el mood que te acompañe ese día. Los espacios (superficies) comerciales con su uniforme apariencia, su recta y empinada entrada, simulando entradas neoclásicas de gusto tardío y barato, son los lugares en que la gente suele dirimir sus problemas (muchas veces sin saberlo) con lo que nos constituye, la depresión, la tristeza, la duda, la incomprensión ante el signo que es todo, la incapacidad de leer ese signo, la amargura con que termina cada día, el despojo que hace el presente de lo que va quedando atrás. Como un rito desprovisto de sentido trascendental se camina a prisa, con la respiración contenida, la felicidad apretando el pecho ante la infinita dicha de poseer un pedazo de cualquier cosa, que haga sentir la capacidad casi anulada de ser reales dueños de algo de realidad. Ilusa, ilusoria la disposición de las cosas, la parca y recatada mano del vendedor que se llena de cupones para ahorrar y la boca te saluda a ti que vas a morir posiblemente de cualquier cosa menos de plenitud de ser. En esos espacios no puede habitar nada que apunte hacia el otro lado de lo tangible. Humanizar, hacer que el acto bruto de compra-venta se realice en lugares en los que la proximidad de la vida, sus alientos, sus desesperanzas no sean ajenos debe contemplarse en el diseño de la ciudad. Placer de comprar nada, de caminar en la nada, donde la experiencia del ser humano como autómata se constata y se hace efectiva. El placer en esos espacios blanquísimos y ordenados en los que se incurren con vulgar frecuencia es un acto de onanismo, vaciado de la experiencia y el contacto con lo otro para después seguir solos, sin hogar.]

 

Siete

 

[Texto de J. M. Coetzee sobre Walter Benjamín. Uno de los más interesantes y amables escritores del siglo pasado, una figura intelectual difícil de situar, un hombre de grandes pasiones y entregas, Walter Benjamín representa al intelectual lúcido, angustiado, que se pregunta por el mundo en el que vive y trata de significar algo en él, de distanciarse para a la vez estar más cerca, de no hacer un uso desatinado de la ironía o excesivo de lo mordaz. Al final de su largo ensayo sobre Benjamín, Coetzee se pregunta "¿Qué era Walter Benjamín?" y se responde citando a Hannah Arendt, "era uno de ‹‹de los inclasificables…cuya obra no encaja en el orden existente, pero tampoco introduce un género nuevo››". Ese puede ser uno de los destinos posibles de la escritura hoy: tratar de salirse de lo acordado previa y tácitamente con las estrategias del marketing para servir de alguien que inaugura un decir comprometido primero con la verdad del escritor mismo y con la verdad de los tiempos que se viven. No "encajar en el orden existente" tanto en el orden de la política como en el de la producción de ideas es una disidencia saludable, un negarse a ser parte de las estructuras corporativas que intentan desembarazarse de esa incómoda carga que es la ética, la actitud madura, seria y responsable de afrontar la vida. La sociedad está concebida de manera tal que apeste aquello que se salga de la normalidad; el alcance de un pensamiento alternativo serio es cada vez más ese lugar lejano que cuesta trabajo asir. Pensar desde la no conformidad, desde la perspectiva solidaria a la vez que solitaria de alguien que no quiere prestarse al juego confuso de la fama y la cita periodística es condición indispensable para producir una obra significante, que contribuya, que resista, que proponga salidas a este atolladero. Al final de su ensayo, Coetzee escribe de Benjamín, "…su llamada a una historia centrada en los sufrimientos de los derrotados, más que sobre los logros de los victoriosos, es profética de la forma en que el análisis histórico ha comenzado a pensar en sí mismo en nuestra época". Walter Benjamín apenas profetizó, más bien interiorizó lo que un paisano y predecesor suyo escribiera cuarenta, cincuenta años antes de su nacimiento acerca de desplazar el foco de atención historiográfico, la perspectiva de compresión histórica desde los que poseían los medios de producción hacia los despojados de la cualquier propiedad sobre esos medios pero que contribuían con su única posesión, su fuerza de trabajo, a crear la riqueza social. Los derrotados de Benjamín son los proletarios de Marx. El análisis marxista que pareciera destinado al olvido más perenne si nos entretenemos con las páginas de los súper-intelectuales modernos y posmodernos sigue siendo tan válido hoy como lo fue siempre. Benjamín tuvo la delicadeza de pensarlo con originalidad y sensibilidad, y ese puede ser otro de los destinos posibles para pensar a Marx hoy.

 

Ocho

 

[Texto de George Bataille. On Nietzsche. Es este escritor de quien Roland Barthes prefirió decir que escribías textos sin estar alineado con un género determinado, uno de esos escritores que inauguran maneras de decir, percepciones de rigor y escrituras bellamente construidas. Sylvère Lotringer escribe en su introducción a esta obra de Bataille que "El fue tímido en cuanto a los conceptos, no muy dado a los sistemas y que sospechaba profundamente del lenguaje". He aquí a un escritor que reúne, o puede reunir tres de las características que echamos de menos en el pensamiento contemporáneo: timidez, resistencia y rigor. Esa sospecha del lenguaje no es más que una demostración de riguroso acercamiento a la patria única de los escritores y al fundamento mismo de la civilización humana. Su biografía no deja dudas de que fue un individuo visitado por todos esos extraños demonios que en personas de carácter funcionan como catalizadores de una mirada lúcida y serena, trasmutada en escritura. Bataille en esta obra escrita durante la ocupación alemana de París (un autor retirado del escenario, viviendo del magro salario que percibía de su puesto de bibliotecario en tiempos más que difíciles) hace un raro ejercicio intelectual, confesando que lo "que motivó [esos] textos fue el temor de [volverse] loco". Un escritor que no desea satisfacer sino sus "deseos insatisfechos" expresados en su "urgencia por reír, no muy diferente en su manifestación de las desastrosas pasiones de los héroes de Sade y muy cercanas de las tensiones de los mártires y los santos". ¿Reír? ¿En época tan convulsa? La risa que nos propone hoy la televisión es una que hubiera hecho palidecer a Nietzsche, es una risa privada de locura y contagio, una mueca que nos entristece y repugna, porque se pretende absoluta, sin derecho a ser ripostada. La risa de hoy, la que se proyecta en nuestros rostros como un reflejo digitalizado de la televisión no nace de ninguna cordialidad, de ningún afecto, es una afectación, no un afecto, un pujo estridente para acallar el ruido sordo que provoca el aire en una tubería de agua. Bataille que abandona a su padre, ciego y sifilítico, para entregarse al estudio de la teología, fervoroso católico, aspirante al presbiterado, enfrenta aterrado la pregunta sobre el significado de las cosas, de su ambigua presencia, y se rodea de Nietzsche por todas partes y escribe, en el París ocupado por los alemanes, unos diarios de lecturas y meditaciones de la obra nietzscheana que son conclusivos para entender la vitalidad de este alemán acosado por la hipocresía de la entonces vigorosa cultura burguesa. (Es curioso que Heidegger, en su retiro, también se dedicara a estudiar a Nietzsche). Uno de las ideas en las que insiste Bataille es que la libertad no debe ser considerada, prioritariamente, un valor político. La libertad es la condición existencial que un individuo real y concreto asume como lo que da balance y frescura a una vida, no viene desde afuera y no puede ser fabricada a fuerza de gritos y pataleos: se conoce, se ejerce, se predica desde la precariedad que las condiciones sociales y las limitaciones personales nos imponen. "La lucha por la libertad es la lucha para conquistar un bien", un bien que pudiera ser de carácter público, para uso de todos, como es el bien en sí mismo, lo bueno, lo que nos permite acceder a mayores cuotas de verdad y sosiego. En esa lucha lo frívolo queda relegado, el tratar de aparentar lo que no es, la frivolidad entendida como exaltación del individuo en cuanto ente sin responsabilidad cívica, trascendente. Bataille, el trasgresor, asiente "que lo que es libre, no puede ser definido" porque aún no existe, es un ansía, una utopía. Lo que necesitamos hoy cuando la libertad en manos y brazos y boca del mercado y de la estrategia de perpetuar lo inocuo se ha convertido en valor "indiscutible", instrumental para establecer que no podemos hacer sino estar quietos y tejer erudiciones extrañas. El ser humano de hoy necesita de esa libertad que Bataille, el atormentado, buscó incansable: ella (la libertad) no puede ser conculcada, controlada en nombre de este "modo de vida" que violenta y hace vulnerable hasta la desaparición al ser humano. La filiación primera religiosa de Bataille y su posterior enfrentamiento con lo religioso es síntoma y señalamiento para este hoy descolorido que vivimos, ¿en cuál esquina está lo que hará verdadero y duradero al ser que soy y se derrumbará mañana? En el lugar de la seriedad y en el entendimiento del vacío como los momentos definitorios de un pensar verdadero, que se relaciona con la realidad sin intermediarios y a pesar de los timos que nos tiende la propaganda, las escrituras oportunistas.]

 

Nueve

 

[Últimas noticias del deseo. La aseada habitación del capitalismo puritano y las directrices católicas sobre la moral han encontrado un territorio común: los homosexuales deben ser destinados a la soledad legal. Los hechos superados por la ley, la ley que hace convicto a los hechos. La carcajada de la realidad frente a las disposiciones de los sabios. El miedo. La epidemia. La desconfiguración de la realidad formulada desde los púlpitos laicos, la homosexualidad como remanente de la sociedad; afuera, los deseos oscurecen el entendimiento: a siglos de practicar por fuerza o deliberadamente el heterosexualismo ¿por qué ahora una medida legal puede convertirnos a todos en lo que no somos? ]

 

Diez

 

[Texto de Louis Gill. Fundamento y límites del capitalismo. La mercancía como forma social, se infiere del prólogo a la edición española de este libro que extrañamente no tiene edición en los EE.UU. Detesto los absolutos por obvios pero esta es una interpretación y lectura del marxismo consistente. La mercancía como determinación histórica del capitalismo, pivote del análisis marxista del desarrollo histórico, está condenada al desprecio de los que impugnan el capitalismo como la "solución final" del problema de la humanidad. ¿Qué queda para la sociedad nueva? ¿Habrá que inventar un término como anti-mercancía? ¿Cómo sobreviviremos, como género, sin ella? La mercancía hoy no es la cosa de valor relativo producida por el trabajo asalariado sino la cosa virtual que no se produce pero se consume: esa "cosa" que nos invade y nos hace participar del festín, de la orgía de lo que no existe como si fuera real, tangible. Lo primero que se consume es la necesidad arbitrariamente creada y después el artefacto, la realización marginada de nuestros deseos convocados por la publicidad, las estrategias publicitarias como coartada de la necesidad. No es lo cíclico defendido por Vico, Nietzsche o Elíade, es el círculo vicioso engendrado en la conciencia última del ser humano por efecto especial: un fuego no es un fuego, el aire no es el aire, la tierra no es la tierra, el agua no es el agua: ni consume, ni transpira, ni germina, ni calma: el parapeto de los elementos, la mentira enarbolada como verdad indiscutible. El marxismo explicado para que entendamos que la teoría social de Marx, Engels, Lenin y todos los revolucionarios que nos precedieron es la adquisición más relevante en la resistencia al totalitarismo más conspicuo, el de la industria de la guerra y de la supresión del individuo como entidad portadora de verdades respetables. ¡Tránsito! Trabajar para la transitoriedad de lo que debe ser, del imperativo definitivo de ser y habitar en una casa respetable, digna, es lo que se aplaude, lo que actúa según la democracia. Se piden cuentas y se aplaudió la transición del socialismo irreal de la Europa del Este, y se desestima, según apunta Louis Gill, que "las medidas tomadas para la transición al socialismo han sido cuestionadas: gestión planificada de la economía, monopolio estatal del comercio exterior, propiedad estatal de los medios de producción, regímenes de protección social, control estatal de los precios de los bienes de primera necesidad, etc." No es concebible ni permisible que se transite hacia formas más humanas de convivencias; se cuestiona que se piense, se hable o se escriba sobre superar este modo de relacionarse socialmente que es el capitalismo; se invoca con total nocturnidad de ideas y de información la transición de los ex-países comunistas al sistema capitalista en desuso que se dejo atrás en los años setenta para convidar a los pobres a que se alineen con estos postulados noveccentistas de las medidas del FMI que resultaron en el gran fiasco de los pueblos y países latinoamericanos. La responsabilidad grande hoy es ser uno mismo a costa del repliegue y de la aparente inanición de los pueblos. Un escritor, un pensador hoy requiere de ser interpelado y de dejarse interpelar por las realidades que se conjuran hoy no para olvidar a Marx sino para atraerlo y hacerlo consustancial a la lucha de hoy por perseverar el ser individuos responsables los unos de los otros, aguafiestas del party neoliberal.]

 

Once

 

[Un cielo nuevo y una tierra nueva. Meditación para pensar mejor. Hay un cura en Nueva York que un día decidió no leer más que a Santo Tomás. Había sido de izquierdas. Otro en La Habana había sido fusilado por los maoístas siete veces y salvó la vida porque pudo recitar en chino algunos proverbios de Confucio. Fue de derechas. Ambos negociaron el cielo con sus vidas y lo que nos queda es el testimonio callado de sus vidas y la imprecación de lo que vivían. He aquí que las fuerzas del mal se disfrazaron de mil demonios y los dos curas, españoles por más señas, se unieron en oración para des-terrar lo oblicuo, para recrear la promesa en la tierra prometida, ésta de hoy que tenemos. Un cielo nuevo y una tierra nueva, liberada de los abusos, de la concupiscencia de lo que parece ser pero no es. Pensar, meditar, ser hoy es asumir a Pascal: saber estar a solas consigo mismo en el cuarto para salvarnos de la estulticia y del desencanto, construyendo, en gracia y sabiduría, lo que nos permita derrotar la amenaza muy poco virtual de desparecer como entes, individuales a la vez que solidarios.]

Litterae / Óbito

La muerte es el evento común a toda existencia, la inequívoca marca de lo humano, la vida que cesa, la desaparición física del cuerpo que la evidenció. La muerte primero es miedo, luego es dolor en audiencias diferentes. Lo más natural es morirse, lo sobrenatural es vivir por siempre. Hay ocasiones en que la muerte entra por la puerta de atrás –la vida acorta su camino usando el desgaste emocional, el sinsentido de la desesperanza, la acuciosa necesidad de respuestas que sabemos no existen. Quizás podamos entender la muerte natural de-manera-no-natural de David Foster Wallace el pasado doce de septiembre. Uno de sus libros de cuentos me enseñó la voz inglesa hideous; su padre nos habla de una depresión que duraba algún tiempo ya; hay noticias de varios ingresos en hospitales siquiátricos; pero nos queda sobre todo su novela "Infinite Jest" que él mismo describió como "something sad", un retrato de la sociedad norteamericana de finales del siglo pasado en la que el percibía algo triste, "a kind of lostness" para entrever algo del tormento que lo llevó a nos esperar por la naturaleza para escapar de esta farsa con pretensiones de obra seria. Entonces, recuerdo con gran tristeza literaria de lector contrito a nuestros modernos intelectuales y escritores, emblemáticos declamadores de las penurias y desventuras del pueblo cubano y comparándolos con escritores como el suicida D.F.W. me confirman en el asco atroz de ellos por su ausencia de total de honestidad y de ética intelectual, por su ventriloquismo político. La crítica del escritor D.F.W. es a los espacios soterrados de la sociedad donde se deciden el estilo y el aire de una cultura ("… something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness.), no a las estructuras e instituciones sociales, políticas y económicas, eso se lo deja a otros. ¿Tiene el escritor una palabra legítima sobre el acontecer político? Sí. Fuera del ámbito de la creación literaria. De la escritura. De la literatura. D.F.W. apuntala la tradición de escritores norteamericanos que no pueden llenar el vacío que tantas cosas dejan y se deciden por la enajenación (algo braudillalesco sucede: lo real pierde su propiedad de ser). De veras, hay algo triste, muy triste y podrido que sale de adentro y huele mal.

Una entrevista, un texto

David Foster Wallace*

By Laura Miller

David Foster Wallace's low-key, bookish appearance flatly contradicts the unshaven, bandanna-capped image advanced by his publicity photos. But then, even a hipster novelist would have to
be a serious, disciplined writer to produce a 1,079-page book in three years. "Infinite Jest," Wallace's mammoth second novel, juxtaposes life in an elite tennis academy with the struggles of the residents of a nearby halfway house, all against a near-future background in which the US, Canada and Mexico have merged, Northern New England has become a vast toxic waste dump and everything from private automobiles to the very years themselves are sponsored by corporate advertisers. Slangy, ambitious and occasionally over-enamored with the prodigious intellect of its author, "Infinite Jest" nevertheless has enough solid emotional ballast to keep
it from capsizing. And there's something rare and exhilarating about a contemporary author who aims to capture the spirit of his age. The 34-year-old Wallace, who teaches at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal and exhibits the careful modesty of a recovering smart aleck, discussed American life on the verge of the millennium, the pervasive influence of pop culture, the role of fiction writers in an entertainment-saturated society, teaching literature to freshmen, and his own maddening, inspired creation during a recent reading tour for "Infinite Jest."

Salon: What were you intending to do when you started this book?

DFW: I wanted to do something sad. I'd done some funny stuff and some heavy, intellectual stuff, but I'd never done anything sad. And I wanted it not to have a single main character. The other banality would be: I wanted to do something real American, about what it's
like to live in America around the millennium.

Salon: And what is that like?

DFW: There's smething particularly sad about it, something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whether it's unique to our generation I really don't
know.

Salon: Not much of the press about "Infinite Jest" addresses the role that Alcoholics Anonymous plays in the story. How does that connect with your overall theme?

DFW: The sadness that the book is about, and that I was going through, was a real American type of sadness. I was white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated, had had way more
career success than I could have legitimately hoped for and was sort of adrift. A lot of my friends were the same way. Some of them were deeply into drugs, others were unbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night. You could see it played out in 20 different ways, but it's the same thing.

Some of my friends got into AA. I didn't start out wanting to write a lot of AA stuff, but I knew I wanted to do drug addicts and I knew I wanted to have a halfway house. I went to a couple of
meetings with these guys and thought that it was tremendously powerful. That part of the book is supposed to be living enough to be realistic, but it's also supposed to stand for a response to
lostness and what you do when the things you thought were going to make you OK, don't. The bottoming out with drugs and the AA response to that was the starkest thing that I could find to talk about that.

I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early thirties, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values. Probably the AA model isn't the only way to do it, but it seems to me to be one of the more vigorous.

The characters have to struggle with the fact that the AA system is teaching them fairly deep things through these seemingly simplistic cliches.

It's hard for the ones with some education which, to be mercenary, is who this book is targeted at. I mean this is caviar for the general literary fiction reader. For me there was a real repulsion
at the beginning. "One Day at a Time," right? I'm thinking 1977, Norman Lear, starring Bonnie Franklin. Show me the needlepointed sampler this is written on. But apparently part of addiction is that you need the substance so bad that when they take it away from you, you want to die. And it's so awful that the only way to deal with it is to build a wall at midnight and not look over it. Something as banal and reductive as "One Day at a Time" enabled these people to walk through hell, which from what I could see the first six months of detox is. That struck me.

It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that's gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like "It's really important not to lie." Okay, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don't feel it. Until I get to be about thirty and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can't trust you. I feel that I'm in pain, I'm nervous, I'm lonely and I can't figure out why. Then I realize, "Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie." The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel.

Salon: Are you trying to find similar meanings in the pop cultural material you use? That sort of thing can be seen as merely clever, or shallow.

DFW: I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water a hundred years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in.

Salon: What's it like to be a young fiction writer today, in terms of getting started, building a career, and so on?

DFW: Personally, I think it's a really neat time. I've got friends who disagree. Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall
into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become
too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.

If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you're writing for other writers, so you don't worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you're communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, comercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way – essentially television on the page -- that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.

What's weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature's current
marginalization is the reader's fault. The project that's worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary
stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather tan ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it's also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.

Part of it has to do with living in an era when there's so much entertainment available, genuine entertainment, and figuring out how fiction is going to stake out its territory in that sort of
era. You can try to confront what it is that makes fiction magical in a way that other kinds of art and entertainment aren't. And to figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose
sensibility has been formed by pop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culture machine. It's unbelievably difficult and confusing and scary, but it's neat. There's so much mass commercial entertainment that's so good and so slick, this is something that I don't think any other generation has confronted. That's what it's like to be a writer now. I think it's the best time to be alive ever and it's probably the best time to be a writer. I'm not sure it's the easiest time.

Salon: What do you think is uniquely magical about fiction?

DFW: Oh, Lordy, that could take a whole day! Well, the first line of attack for that question, is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don't know what you're thinking or
what it's like inside you and you don't know what it's like inside me. In fiction I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way. But that's just the first level, because the idea of
mental or emotional intimacy with a character is a delusion or a contrivance that's set up through art by the writer. There's another level that a piece of fiction is a conversation. There's a relationship set up between the reader and the writer that's very strange and very complicated and hard to talk about. A really great piece of fiction for me may or may not take me away and make me forget that I'm sitting in a chair. There's real comercial stuff can do that, and a riveting plot can do that, but it doesn't make me feel less lonely.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone -- intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

Salon: Who are the writers who do this for you?

DFW: Here's the hard thing about talking about that: I don't mean to say my work is as good as theirs. I'm talking about stars you steer by.

Salon: Understood.

DFW: OK. Historically the stuff that's sort of rung my cherries: Socrates' funeral oration, the poetry of John Donne, the poetry of Richard Crashaw, every once in a while Shakespeare, although not all that often, Keats' shorter stuff, Schopenhauer, Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy" and "Discourse on Method," Kant's "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic," although the translations are all terrible, William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience," Wittgenstein's "Tractatus," Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Hemingway -- particularly the ital stuff in "In Our Time," where you just go oomph!, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, A.S. Byatt, Cynthia Ozick -- the stories, especially one called "Levitations," about 25% of the time Pynchon. Donald Barthelme, especially a story called "The
Balloon," which is the first story I ever read that made me want to be a writer, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver's best stuff – the really famous stuff. Steinbeck when he's not beating his drum, 35% of Stephen Crane, "Moby-Dick," "The Great Gatsby."

And, my God, there's poetry. Probably Phillip Larkin more tan anyone else, Louise Glück, Auden.

Salon: What about colleagues?

DFW: There's the whole "great white male" deal. I think there are about five of us under 40 who are white and over 6 feet and wear glasses. There's Richard Powers who lives only about 45 minutes away from me and who I've met all of once. William Vollman, Jonathan Franzen, Donald Antrim, Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody. The person I'm highest on right now is George Saunders, whose book "Civilwarland in Bad Decline" just came out, and is well worth a
great deal of attention. A.M. Homes: her longer stuff I don't think is perfect, but every few pages there's something that just doubles you over. Kathryn Harrison, Mary Karr, who's best known for "The Liar's Club" but is also a poet and I think the best female poet under 50. A woman named Cris Mazza. Rikki Ducornet, Carole Maso. Carole Maso's "Ava" is just -- a friend of mine read it and said it gave him an erection of the heart.

Salon: Tell me about your teaching.

DFW: I was hired to teach creative writing, which I don't like to teach.

There's two weeks of stuff you can teach someone who hasn't written 50 things yet and is still kind of learning. Then it becomes more a matter of managing various people's subjective
impressions about how to tell the truth vs. obliterating someone's ego.

I like to teach freshman lit because ISB gets a lot of rural students who aren't very well educated and don't like to read. They've grown up thinking that literature means dry, irrelevant, unfun stuff, like cod liver oil. Getting to show them some more contemporary stuff -- the one we always do the second week is a story called "A Real Doll," by A.M. Homes, from "The Safety of Objects," about a boy's affair with a Barbie doll. It's very smart, but on the surface, it's very twisted and sick and riveting and real relevant to people who are 18 and five or six years ago were either playing with dolls or being sadistic to their sisters. To watch these kids realize that reading literary stuff is sometimes hard work, but it's sometimes worth it and that Reading literary stuff can give you things that you can't get otherwise, to see them wake up to that is extremely cool.

Salon: How do you feel about the reaction to the length of your book? Did it just sort of wind up being that long, or do you feel that you're aiming for a particular effect or statement?

DFW: I know it's risky because it's part of this equation of making demands on the reader -- which start out financial. The other side of it is publishing houses hate it because they make less money. Paper is so expensive. If the length seems gratuitous, as it did to a very charming Japanese lady from the New York Times, then one arouses ire. And I'm aware of that. The manuscript that I delivered was 1700 manuscript pages, of which close to 500 were cut. So this editor didn't just buy the book and shepherd it. He line-edited it twice. I flew to New York, and all that. If it looks chaotic, good, but everything that's in there is in there on purpose. I'm in a good emotional position to take shit for the length because the length strikes people as ratuitous, then the book just fails. It's not gratuitous because I didn't feel like working on it or making the cuts.

It's a weird book. It doesn't move the way normal books do. It's got a whole bunch of characters. I think it makes at least an in-good-faith attempt to be fun and riveting enough on a
page-by-page level so I don't feel like I'm hitting the reader with a mallet, you know, "Hey, here's this really hard impossibly smart thing. Fuck you. See if you can read it." I know books like that and they piss me off.

Salon: What made you choose a tennis academy, which mirrors the halfway house in the book?

DFW: I wanted to do something with sport and the idea of dedication to a pursuit being kind of like an addiction.

Some of the characters wonder if it's worth it, the competitive obsession.

It's probably like this in anything. I see my students do this with me. You're a young writer. You admire an older writer, and you want to get to where that older writer is. You imagine that
all the energy that your envy is putting into it has somehow been transferred to him, that there's a flipside to it, a feeling of being envied that's a good feeling the way that envy is a hard
feeling. You can see it as the idea of being in things for some kind of imaginary goal involving prestige rather than for the pursuit itself. It's a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you -- I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out?

Tennis is the one sport I know enough about for it to be beautiful to me, for me to think that it means something. The nice thing about it is that I've got Tennis magazine wanting to do something about me. For me personally it's been great. I may get to hit with the pros some day. It has that advantage.

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

 

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http://www.badgerinternet.com/~bobkat/jest11.html

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http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html