PERONIST COINS
(1941 – 2001)
By
Andrés Dapuez
Translation by Andrés Ginzo
To the critics, professors, and researchers of Argentine Literature
Prologue
It is probable that there may have been several Perón. The best known, the controversial army officer, leader and, finally, President of Argentina may have also been many different people. But I do not mean him exclusively. After the finding and publication of these texts the possibility of numerous Peróns grows.[1]
A literary Perón, not just a speech writer but also concerned about poetic truth, emerges here linking, in an apparently contradictory way, some of the teachings by his alleged friend and mentor Martin Heidegger with certain aspects of economic knowledge. It is undoubtedly an eccentric literary theory about money, the apparent aims of which would be to elucidate through a new genre the poetic mystery of a people; yet how many things are not eccentric or sinister in Perón, one of the most Argentine of characters?
Bearing in mind the accuracy of the interpretations offered by the most recent research,[2] these documents could have been the result of studies and obligations the young Perón had been entrusted with as candidate to the rank of Gran Maese in the Italian Masonic lodge P2. However, and beside the fact that some doubts remain about the dates, both the origin and the nature of his relationship with modern philosophy as well as the economic dimension upon which he tried to ground these writings still remain in the dark.[3]
Faced with such enigmas we can only hazard a few theories that are more or less plausible.
The first one links the then future President to the economic and political theories of Ezra Pound, who conceived money as a germinal form of credit. That is to say, as one of the most important interpersonal relationships for the development of social life. Pound, perhaps obsessed by the object that always gave it its name, offers the following warning about money: “It has not been sufficiently understood yet that every healthy economic system, every form of economic behaviour, depends on justice.”
Hence his support for the Scottish Social Credit Movement (it might as well have been called “Scottish Social Justice Movement”), which at the end of the nineteenth century saw money as a means to rectify the economic systems and through them the different western societies that seemed to have lost their way in the capitalist modernity.
It is from money then, from the rectification and rewriting of a mere sign, that Ezra Pound and his acolytes attempted to modify the customary relations between people, and between people and things. “Tangible money is a notice or notification about the amount the public owes the bearer of the note not because of nature but custom, hence the word nomisma. Like any other title, the paper or metallic piece upon which the number is engraved testifies to a relation between men in which, just as in every human relation, a sense of justice and not of personal gain should prevail.”
According to this kind of parallel economic thought, justice should inexplicably come from the same juncture where it was lost: from money itself, transformed through a series of procedures (some of them literary, always socially) into an element of trust and social cohesion. Hidden behind speculation and usury, it is in the true nature of money that we should find man’s mutual faith and credibility. Previously, though, that true nature ought to be released from such alienating practices.
For Pound, like many others, once money became a completely autonomous mediator, independent from men, it began to work against them. Power transferred into money then became the enemy of those who produced it as a symbol of justice or reason among all things. In this way, for example, one hundred pounds of wheat would be worth four litres of oil. After representing this proportion with a third item (100 pounds of wheat/4 litres of oil; 100 pounds of wheat = $10, 4 litres of oil = $10), “money” would have become detached not only from things and their exchange proportions but also from the very actions of the social institution that originated it.
Also, the intermediary object became not only the subject but master of men as well. Like a Golem born to serve, as an act of dominance and imposition over things, it broke free from its creators to spread confusion and injustice in the world.
Therefore, and according to Pound’s Fidelist thought, the task of leading money back to its alleged original nature would not be a lesser one.[4] From a tautological currency, or a sign of power, literature should restore money to the realm of language so that it can later be reconverted into an object that would represent social justice among all things.
As for ourselves we wonder if it has not been obvious to everyone that the authorities of a god, a sovereign, an animal or a fruit occupy one side of the nomisma. The prevalence of beautiful forms, always related in thousands of ways with the unattainable deities of the monetary sema, could only be considered as independent from power by a few all too imaginative or well-intentioned minds.
Coining, as a very precise task of striking metal with a coinage stamp, reminds us of a kind of imprint that has a lot of violence in it. Out of the deceptive reverse, the illusory cipher of the maker’s name, a form of dominance and tyranny seems to emerge.
Isn’t this transfer process a constant factor in the life of mankind? Doesn’t the father transfer a part of himself and his family into his newly born child? Doesn’t he trust that the little one will develop some skills of their own? Don’t parents expect somehow to live on through their offspring? Don’t they hope to keep their name alive in this way? Do these processes have nothing to do with the equivalent exchanges?
If the answers are affirmative, then we could talk here about a logic of alienation (both in the sense of expropriation, that is to say losing exclusive ownership rights, and that of mental derangement) that would prevail as a form of metaphysical interpretation in numerous human orders.
Were writing and language born with a similar aim? Was not the first person ever to transfer a sound into an imprint on a coin a bit mad? Would not all writing necessarily imply something beyond inscription that rescues the alienated letters from the cold that preserved them through time and space? Is this cold nothing but a kind of time arrest, a pause, a dormant condition that could last for all eternity? Is it towards that mystery that Peron’s texts are aimed for?
Let’s suppose we have prepared a text and a seed to resist humidity, vermin and the future. We put them in a closed cubicle, a tube or some kind of tightly sealed box and, dedicating it to the god Hermes, we bury it or remove it from the reach of men and beasts alike. Could the text and the seed be eternal?
Being addressed to no one, set aside from time, are they not eternally powerful? Are they not real impossible objects?
No, they are not. This perfect alienation does not exist either. Nobody can be that insane to the point of not being able to accept a different possibility. Everything alienated is liable to be appropriated and re-appropriated. Everything that has been expropriated has the possibility of returning to the world from which it was removed. The same happens with the alienation of the texts or these so-called Peronist coins.
It was perhaps from these economic proto-theories that the then Lieutenant Colonel Perón may have attempted his literary efforts. Perón would have assimilated economics and literature into a new literary genre, essentially social rather than political, with the aim of revealing
That is to say that, in our opinion, Perón the writer, beyond the average literary qualities of this work, reflected carefully and intensely up to the very last word with the apparent will to submit a few “metallic” pieces under the order of literature. Such a task might have been undertaken in order to modify the course of social events, that is to extract from a present marked by exploitation the new era of a fairer country. Otherwise it might have been just for the simple spiritual pleasure of producing an interpretation about the world around him that was more consistent with the newly emerging embryonic philosophy of social justice.
However, the fact that such efforts could have been due to rituals or mystical duties through which the initiate would attempt to open himself to a true reality, or, as Perón himself says in these texts, to question “the true motherland of all truths”, adds countless dimensions to this venture, so peculiar and so mysterious.
The literal traces that give credence to these weak arguments can be read in the first stories, apparently unconnected from the rest of the series, where the narrator expresses a kind of horror about the terrible helplessness of his situation. Beyond the fact that many researchers claim this to be a form of personal expression, in my opinion this should be understood as a long-term omen. Just as Moses was only allowed to have a vision of the Promised Land, so the future president of Argentina would have had at the time a premonition about the decline and destruction of his own people. Perhaps this is why he hid his manuscripts in the already famous vault in the city of
Andres Dapuez
PERONIST COINS
If no one brought you here, then no one will stop you from fleeing this damp house where we, an indeterminate number of acquaintances, have been left amicably isolated. In spite of everything, the evidence that we will never return to the same place, not even in our memories or repeated dreams, makes me want to go on. Breathing itself decides the fracturing of any eternity. The first breath, when the child fills his lungs to empty them, ends with a final exhalation after an enormous series of inhalations and exhalations. The air is finally returned to the atmosphere, leaving an exhausted body that refuses to let it circulate endlessly; being the very proof of its precariousness, any economy fails in its determination to circulate for all eternity.
Just like an engine, any machine will inevitably stop moving and working somewhere along the route of time, bringing a chain of events to a close. Although a machine can be more predictable than the workings of men, when they stop their exchanges to become part of oblivion, then the true motherland of truths will be able to be sung. Once the series of sounds and breaths is over the interpretation of the body’s music and poetry will come from the posthumous past and the hazardous future.
When their voices fall silent, because I am in a sense a strange kind of father willingly subordinated to each child, those who did not leave the spiral of words will regret it. Yet the circle will not close. What has been gained does not come back to my hands. The nation falls apart while the fate of its children becomes more infantile. My alms, even if spent by them and in them, will describe a terminal journey. Not only will they be left poor and destitute but also they will end up vanishing and multiplying themselves. By paying what I owe them they will not become any richer and they will manage it conspicuously. Only after they have extinguished all my monies they will be able to understand each exchange and be prosperous again.
I, who make my own coins, exist in each and every one of them.
*
If one looks at them for a long time one gets used to their ill-fitting clothes. They have the appearance of country folk disguised as city people. Every stone, every island, suffers in its place the disorientation of the buildings that should have never, never, risen.
The day they arrived in the small capital they got lost. There was something anachronistic in their faces, highlighted by the strange combinations of modern clothes they were wearing. Almost everyone was short, close to the black water, so close together that the view became a load on their backs as they were walking. First the Italians, the Arabs...and the sky that should have been seen from the courtyards around the sweet wells fenced by the slaves’ lust. Where to go if the waves of immigrants eroded the pride of the old hamlets? What remains now is a river with no stones and the colonial replicas of our own typical bad taste. Buildings, imitations of other cities...
*
Just like an ocean within which you can do something with the only thing there is: water. The crystalline way of fleeing by the fish talking in the water, making the water crystallise miraculously, changing, even if for a few moments “that” is strange, cold, bright, ice. To speak water, about water and with water. Shapeless within and without; like a squid or a jellyfish, being just a transparent invagination, made of water, liquid and moving in the water. An ocean where there are not even fish, only invertebrates. Single cell organisms and their breathing: water. Flowing back and forth in primitive mouths. They are not even something less than the whole animal. Saliva and breathing are nothing else but that, a sea. Transparent, made of transparencies, that whole contains water in the water. As if you said, “A name written on water.” The viscous surface of the frozen body, an ice continent within the sea. Volumes lost in the flowing waters. A scattered continent, ice cubes in the vessel of a water god.
*
Just like looking at a goat’s brains: the skull is impressive. Its diabolical features are highlighted by its own delicate proportions: inside and in the open, the small super-impositions and twists of the narrow encephalic paths. The frail plane flying over the goat’s brains. Shaking like a shell before the abrasion caused by a god blowing air. Precariously supported, like the vain tubular flower lifted by a warm air current. Down below, outside, the incredible green in great detail. Uniform surfaces from which all imperfection is missing. The grass is emerald. The waters and mountains are death’s vanity revealing itself as assuredly as their height. The cities are the brains of goats, cows, dogs, people. Everything happens in them and nothing can be really seen. Killings, embarrassments, beauties inside a goat’s head. One cannot fly over it forever. One cannot even enjoy it like insects do on the warm brains, flying over and over, back and forth, until they land, or brainland, like flies do and suck a bit of the goat’s city, always slightly demonic, and then return to the air and brainland again. Temptation over a few moist and exposed brains. Flying over all the kingdoms, seeing every single copulation, every crime and every action. And having it all: Every thought in every being, every feeling, every fly and every fly’s egg.
*
The vast expanse of land is like an insulator that both condenses and separates the different germs of life. It works like an accumulator. A huge desert marked only by somewhat green shrubs. Between them, hundreds of kilometres, or metres. (Any time measure would also be fine). Impossibility condenses energy before its walls just like the desert forms oases. Strokes of life have accumulated along so much barrenness. The cactus collects water, impossible amounts for its environment. A rotting watermelon ensures that its seeds will have the necessary moisture to grow. Its dripping inside feeds future fruits. A regular and constant flow of blood. Time is vast in the desert of men. Vastness and desert rather than an insurmountable river. Inside, the dryness and the flora of mushrooms and candid plants specked by solar designs. The moon that causes red tidal floods also prepares the flow of white and acid waters. In the vastness, which might also be time itself, the spots are scattered and separated by a will gone mad. The randomness of disease and the terrible certainty of death have darkened the place with something like a fluid unique to negation. Like a blood mark on a small victim or a bird, the cyst on the mountain landscape propels the words largely condensed into gestures, fears, and premonitions. Two bronze wires separated by a thin insulating layer and all conceivable diseases are unleashed like a plague above our heads: asphyxia, and its unpronounceable “x”, prone to death; tumours here and there that make us dribble and sweat in fear, and the most diverse forms of pestilence.
*
All these mornings a bird has been beating itself repeatedly against one of the windows in the house. Traces of its beak, its aerial saliva or some other kind of fluid, have left their mark on the transparent surface. The bird has hit the glass with unusual force. You will be waiting for it the following morning. In order to keep sleeping he thinks the bird is catching insects. By adding the persistent beating sounds to the dreamer’s imagery, this unacceptable proposition allows him to solve his sleeping difficulties and settle his violent desire to go outside and climb up to the roof to kill the bird. The insects on this side of the glass become excited in the dance of decomposition, like moving seeds that feed its own species. They reproduce like flies, dancing like boiling bubbles that cook the air with filth and decay. They are endless. Like the sky filled with dust or humidity particles, he rests and drinks some water from a puddle by the swimming pool. Absent-mindedly he sunbathes on a chair. He is aware of the day’s possibilities and the countless tasks that have been left undone. He senses the flight of the larvae and reminds you that the infinite number of words scattered over the papers are like endless amounts of money or seeds. Each represents hundreds, thousands of thousands. Their dance has been the same since the beginning of time. Their ways and their movements in the air are as varied as they are precise. Every gesture ends there, in the flexing of their breath where gravity makes it impossible. Perhaps it is that same impossibility the bird finds in the glass that makes him beat itself against it to enjoy the mysterious limit to its flight. He believed that the marks on the glass would make it stop at some point, but the same thing awaits him the next morning.
*
The project would be filed in the Ministry, in the huge filing cabinets that make up the endless corridors of empty rooms. Walking among them at night could be compared to flying by instruments, blindly, above a clouded night sky. So one had to follow the paths marked in the void, with the same delicate precision a plane unavoidably flies through the first few metres after taking off and remaining in the air. Down below the roof of low cloud, up above that kind of mist that either turns grey or swallows all visibility.
Walking resolutely through a darkened building also gave him back the echoing of footsteps and unsuspected certainties. He knew he had to take a turn, but he could not imagine why or picture the floor plan in his mind. He knew that in the next step he would have to lift his left foot, and yet he could not give the steps a number. Were there seven, nine? He would not count them, yet his legs knew precisely where they had to stop climbing.
The drawings, his plans and calculations, were not based on anything more accurate and true than his nightly wanderings. Obviously, they had been requested at the behest of the Minister, but the will that had resulted in that request was unknown in its reach. He had been charged with designing a new machine, the first of its kind to be planned and built immediately afterwards in
*
There was no chance they would be unnoticed. Their brand new clothes showed them to be obscenely different from the rest of the guests at the party. Many greeted them profusely, bowing their heads as they wished them happiness and shook their hands. Some were talking to themselves, as if praying aloud. The musicians, four or five of them, were playing strange-looking instruments: a kind of embroidered box that released a shrill sound when stroked with what might be a comb; a coloured tube beaten by a glove; also, a shell upon which two men, one on either side, rested their ears while letting out piercing shrieks. The resulting music resembled the ancient dirges that later on would be given an Andalusian name. Two or three motifs repeated themselves and combined with one another endlessly. The women were dancing in groups, the children watched them. There were over a hundred people under the old trees; several more people in the surroundings increased that number. The newly-weds had come down the ruined dirt road in a white car, an extravagant vehicle that at some point in time must have carried high-ranking dignitaries or someone famous. Almost everybody applauded and cheered them when they came out of the car. They did not know more than twenty or thirty people there. They had arrived there having agreed to a suggestion by the bride’s father who proposed that the party took place in the open, by the entrance to the home chapel. They would never have thought that a part of their own land would appear so alien to them, even if one of them had been born to an aboriginal mother. They could understand some of the words in the chorus. Sounds similar to “problem”, “money”, “hours”, and other measurements or concepts that originally did not exist in the native language were heard in the indefinite articulation of the story. Neither of them, however, would understand hardly anything of what they were singing about. The songs would go on throughout the night, as if the very existence of the whole world depended on that continuity.
*
Nearly two days of complete fasting went by. The glasses filled with rainwater on the grass would remind the man and the woman dressed in white (who were still asleep and dreaming about repeated scenes from their respective jobs) that the party had come to an end. That form of suffering somehow redeemed them with the oxidation or combustion of their bodies in the open. Meanwhile, that suffering, the representation of their daily, unbearable, painful labour tended not only to release them from themselves but also, and momentarily, from the insignificant nets that other people’s wretched dreams were weaving over them.
Carlos, the man who used to work in a factory making small plastic containers until his leg was burned in an accident, arrived at the garden of the summer house and through a corridor of bushes and green windows he headed towards the back. He noticed the two exhausted bodies, barely covered with crumpled white clothes begging for him to look at them. The smallness of that scene, its eventuality and incidental nature, as well as the sharp curved edge of his tool, could have frightened him. After having grabbed the tool by the blade, the concave type of steel plank curved to cut with the speed of a pendulum, he felt the cold rust on the palm of his hand like any special dirty death.
Not even his maimed leg had betrayed the usual silence; birds, cicadas, frogs, and insects did not stop singing. Perhaps it was just his look, the awkward urging in his eyes that woke them up. When he saw that she was opening her eyes, he greeted her with a bow, as he believed real gardeners ought to have done. He always imagined them closer to the earth and the soil than the humblest of farm workers could ever be. She immediately let out a terrified scream.
*
Once he was left alone (she had gone to the city to be with one of her sisters in hospital) he became uneasy when he suspected that he had to cook the pasties that his partner had left ready for him on the table. They were wrapped in a white cloth, probably a remnant of an old bed sheet. After putting off the task for as long as he could, when hunger was making him move, he slowly walked back to the partly covered wooden board in order to find, in the middle of the room, lumps of pastry as white and moist as enormous maggots. After looking at them with disgust for a moment, he went to the grey and rough concrete worktop to get a box of matches. The rubbing of one of his fingernails against the black surface on the side of the box was enough to spark the oppressive feeling of a persistent reflex in his memory. Like a murky fog being torn, a group of figures appeared that made sense at the very moment the incandescent liquid was spilling over his leg. When he looked at it he could only see no more than one of the long and dirty tongs resting against his hip; they were the tools with which he took the cooking pots from the furnace. White fires went out, then blinded him again. That moment of unreality with his leg seemed to have lessened his confusion. The screams were silenced once again by the constant hammering. Hours later, the pain of the flesh that was no longer there would also remind him of it, like a paradox. He smiled. The epiphany of the lit match brought him back to a present that was as empty as it was far away. He abruptly turned the key to the burner that lit up as his obsession with fire made a knot in his throat. He grabbed a blackened pot with his big dry hands and put it on the flame. He watched the blue of the flame as it spread around the edges, then filled the receptacle with oil and put his food into the boiling liquid.
*
Her breathing was tired, wrapped in a hospital gown that was faded by the stains thousands of times mitigated in the laundry. Although one of her biggest flaws, according to her friends, was her inability to remain silent for any length of time, the very fact she had been left momentarily unable to speak did surprise her. Her secrets assaulted her memory with the same violence as in the giving of the least expected news. The confidences that she might have encouraged, perhaps just for the sake of flirting, and the comments that later on began to mention a kind of interest about some alleged affairs with her brother-in-law, or with a neighbour’s husband, or with a factory worker who on his lunch hour had sat down to eat by the gate to her house, now turned on her like stories told by other people’s voices. That is why, when she saw her elder sister was coming, she smiled as only those who are seriously ill can. She had considered that gesture so many times that she never believed the time for it to form in her mouth would arrive. Then, for the first time, she felt important; she tried to stammer a greeting but all that came out from the hollow of her mouth was a kind of spasm. All her words had turned into the sound of a laboured cough. Her sister kissed her on her forehead (perhaps she was afraid of some form of contagion by inhaling the patient’s breath). She caressed her face and, with her forefinger across her lips, made the obvious gesture of silence. That surprising gesture and the physical contact moved her. The wound was still pulling at her flesh. She could hardly move for fear of being in terrible pain. Now her body held her like an anchor, stopping her from living away from her bed. Prostrate and bound, she watched time go by in the hope that her recovery would come any time soon. The uninterrupted flow of the hours and the days had forced her to think about the people she loved and hated. A thousand times she had gone over and over the same idea; a thousand times with different results. Now that her sister was here, that she could touch and even squeeze her hand, she put it to her lips and kissed it without saying a single word.
*
The orange-coloured jewels, Ivana (the younger sister), vanish. Their rationality changes. Once the day opens and she is left alone, she dresses up in her new lingerie set, the same that has just appeared in the fashion magazines. The very idea she had rejected through the night, that of being unfaithful to her husband and polluting her body with other bodies and fluids, that of subjecting her affections to the mechanics of sexual pleasure, changes immediately thanks to the special economy of love. All the rules she knows give way to ones newly invented or perhaps randomly made with remnants from others. Yet control over her feelings and her body does not recede, it increases. All her exhibitionism, her exquisite flaunting of the new lingerie has as its single purpose the admiration of the young caretaker in her building (who is married to a poorer woman deprived of those luxuries). It fills her with joy, like a way into disorder, a minute form of chaos from which she can rearrange her confusion. She is doing it because she cannot find what she is looking for in words: that which slips through her hands and cannot even hold with the most sacred parts of her body. So her own awareness of her beauty stops her from refusing the two men who love her in their different ways. This is why she thinks of this display as a rehearsal for the one she will offer to her husband that same night, after having a bath and put scent on like a beautiful young girl. It is something that she herself does not know and that does not appear in the magazines, something taught only by those few moments going by: a strange knowledge about the skin and the flesh that takes her away from all the misery she has experienced. Away from the same people who love her figure, the figure repeated by everybody like a cliché, like a vain obsession about normality or what is obvious to see. Otherwise, why so many words on the street, so many looks time and time again on the same corners? It is as if the serial desire of men could be minted like a coin by beating it repeatedly. From thousands of blows that by their own repetition will forever mark a paltry language of love: no more than four or ten expressions repeated ad nauseam. Meanwhile they imagine themselves to be desirous all the time, although what they would like is not a body but desire itself: “they are terrified of not desiring”. A precarious way to tame what is most uncertain.
*
The caretaker takes a nap after having eaten the lunch that his wife regularly cooks for him. He would be able to rest if he did not keep having the same dream over and over, day after day. Every time he lays his head on the pillow and closes his eyes a series of frightening images appear with precise violence. Yet he could not describe them. Perhaps it is the fact of not being able to remember what happened that is so terrifying, because everything happens again with its inevitably repetitive logic. This is why the monstrosities that disturb him so much seem like true logical impossibilities. Even though he knows that nothing can happen again, nothing can repeat itself, at least not exactly and identically, he feels harmed, maimed, and dispossessed. The same job, his job (which means remembering the faces of the people who live in the building, the work and its brutal reproduction sweeping and meeting all the occupants in the building that he must scour like a map of hatreds and affections, sympathies and resentments), also increases his periodical and renewed torment when it becomes momentarily embodied in some of his employers. “My wife and Ivana – the neighbour who dances for him some days of the week – do they save me?”
In spite of the sour meanness of his resentment that fills him with dark shadows, when he exchanges greetings with Mrs Ordoñez, the elderly lady from the fifth floor who, according to what is said, lives with several animals, he can see in those wrinkles, as if through the cracks on a grey, huge and dirty rock, a splendid world that will be forever barred to him. Constantly hating what is his own and envying the uniqueness of what others have provokes his callousness. He says it himself: “If I could be more generous with myself, if I could enjoy what little I have, then what I own would be much more than what the wealthy have. If I could feel pleasure with my wife when I am having her without thinking of Ivana, and without thinking about her when I am doing it with Ivana, then I’d be happier. But I also have no humility, nor the simplicity I need to be happy, me, who should not be a caretaker and can’t stop being it because I don’t appreciate what I have, that is to say because I can never forget what I am. So I am that which I haven’t got and I want to be what I will never be and what I am not. Shit.”
*
The decor in the old apartment in the centre of the city could not have been reproduced anywhere else, even after years of minute analyses. Antique furniture, sacks, small school handcrafts, two or three flower vases made from transparent glass jars, insect collections, false family symbols, and other eccentric objects competed to colonise any room left on the walls and crowded corners. Meanwhile, a cricket was singing harmoniously. Suspicious African masks, for example, hung from the ceiling and at an angle with the tortuous wall, presiding over the domestic life of three women and a man who from the very first moment had tried to leave their territorial mark in a home that would have hardly been big enough for a young married couple.
One after the other, the rooms subjected whoever dared enter them to an oppressive feeling. The variety and number of black objects (ceramics, wood, iron, leather, pictures, etc) would develop into a purifying, cathartic expectation in the occasional intruder’s perception. That density seemed to imply a promise that a kind of obscenely manifest violence would cease. Crowding every space available for display, all the occupants competed among themselves in the small apartment where many times black emerges as a condition for the sparkling of one or two golden details.
Briefly, the Mother and the three sisters had divided the two bedrooms according to their ages: Marina, the eldest of the three sisters, slept with Mother on the big bed. The twins slept in the other room. In between, in what was a kind of entrance hall close to the living room, there was Mariano’s couch. He had been hemiplegic since childhood and his condition worsened day by day. An Indian folding screen failed to keep him out sight completely on his unkempt hard old bed, where he confined himself to and did not allow any intrusions.
Once a week, on Mondays, he only let Mara change the sheets as a major concession. The rest of the time confusion prevailed over his minute world, decorated on one side, behind the old ebony and ivory framework (let us say it was the interior of the small makeshift bedroom), by a scene depicting a pair of runaway elephants racing in opposite directions in a poor representation of the jungle and joined with chains to a frail body condemned to be ripped apart.
Leaving aside the symbolism, and even if the folding screen had been chosen by Mariano as a present for his fifteenth birthday, that object gave him back an expressive dimension denied by each and every person he had met so far. (On the very day of his birthday, Mother and Mara had gone with him, or carried him, along the long pedestrian street in search of the object he would choose as a present. By eight in the morning he was already awake, greeting his sisters with his half tongue, who in their annoyance urged him to be quiet so they could get a few hours of extra sleep. As expected, Mara was the first one to get up and give him a kiss, wishing him “happy birthday”. He wanted to go out, to see which one of the objects in that street he could never have gone over in great detail would astonish him. That day, over ten years ago, he hardly had his breakfast with the aim of hastening the stroll along the street with the show windows full of different objects. Once they left the old elevator with folding doors, once they left the lobby with big floor tiles, he smiled all morning. The pale April sun seemed to fill his lungs and dried his mouth with admiring expressions. His thin hairs were blown by a breeze as clear as it was cold, as Mother and Mara pushed both sides of the wheelchair over the uneven grey cobblestones. Happy and excited, they visited one shop after the next. Tens of objects with the most diverse origins and uses followed before his cheerful or exasperated comments. A day of celebration deserved such careful attention about colours and novelties. After her mother fulfilled her duty in buying him new clothes, he led the expedition to the music instruments and antiques shops. Since he was completely disabled for some people, and musical instruments required certain co-ordinating skills from the player’s two hands, his mother and his sister encouraged him to look among charming antiques. Their unease was such when they saw the cruel folding screen that they actually alerted Mariano to it, not having noticed it before. Unwittingly they had showed him his birthday present. After he saw the image of suffering with which he would identify for the rest of his life there was no way to make him give up on his present.)
On the other side, like an inversion of the elephants carrying out the punishment, there were two slightly deformed faces joined by a single tongue. Playing with the representation of duality of certain Indian deities on the front and the back of the same folding screen while the landscape only related to unusual violence.
*
Mrs Ordoñez only thinks about herself. Yet in this case, like in many others, an invisible hand leads her to encourage an aim that was not among her original intentions. So every time she asks the caretaker to repair some of the cages, she opens the way for an extravagant experience. After hiding thoroughly the boxes with small black holes behind the curtains of the large balcony on her top floor apartment, and then exposing old gilded picture frames against the walls, she leaves the caretaker to do his work with metal and wood. As the owner of apartment “F” on the seventh floor talks on the phone in the next room or drinks her tea in the kitchen, the caretaker’s eyes wander over the gilded leaves entwined around a dark painting, as dark as the owner’s wide skirt.
Everything remains a secret, as if it was a storage room for old junk or, even better, an illegal business. (He has the feeling that she is an endangered species trafficker, specially wild or tropical birds. They must be worth a fortune and need specially reinforced cages because every time the males are in heat they fight with their huge beaks and smash their cages. Yet he never found a single feather, so maybe those cages that are too big for birds and even other animals have other uses: a human body could fit in them and be exposed to the violence of Mrs Ordoñez’s clients, who might want to hurt him). There was never an explanation, not even a hint about who or to what ends did she sell the animals he had never seen.
He loses himself into the golden grasses that twist over themselves. They are so beautiful that he imagines himself being embraced by them, as if by a triumphal crown that fills him with dignity because of something he has overcome recently. No one can take away the exotic glory that he carries on his chest: the hero’s golden laurels, the garland of joy, of imperial dignity.
Mrs Ordoñez calls him by his first name from the next. She asks him if he is nearly finished with the cages because she has to get back home. He tells her it will take a while, but the he corrects himself immediately to say that the cages will be ready in a few hours. Thanks to his delay he might see the Olympian golden leaves around the dark pictures once again.
*
“Mrs Ordoñez, shall I clean the barbecue now?” said Miriam, the girl who a few days ago had started working in the big house the back of which face the lake.
“Why don’t you start at the porch and finish at the barbecue? the woman answered, coming from behind the large window and covering with her shoulder the microphone of the phone she had been holding for nearly two hours.
“Fine,” thought little Miriam, “but the whole corridor is going to get dirty again with the ashes from the barbecue. If I cleaned first then I could sweep the whole house and mop up so there wouldn’t be any dust left floating around.” They had been there for three days, her and Mrs Ordoñez, the two of them alone in that huge house where twenty people could live comfortably and that no one occupied for the rest of the year. To make things worse, the wind had picked up, the lake was beginning to get choppy and the adjoining dirt roads provided a kind of dirty talcum that ended up sticking everywhere and in her hair that had been so difficult to brush the previous cold night, without even a radio, after masturbating in the maid’s room. If she told her Peruvian friend they would laugh; if she told a man instead, he would despise her. Like that time when the American friends of Mrs Ordoñez’s son invited her to their bed. The girl, so blonde that clothes could have been embroidered with her hair as if it had been gold threads, first stroked her cheek with the back of her fingernails. Immediately she knew they wanted something with her, but could not turn them down. After a few words she did not understand there were more caresses. They kindly showed her that they would spend the whole night in her room, or at least that was what she understood at that moment. But it would not happen again to her. Never again would she be nice to depraved people like those gringos. She even believed they had children in
*
Darling,
That old man it’s me, the one on the photograph written like a little book, a mere reflection. This, my complaint. No matter how much I travel the world, visit friends or meet you again, nothing I may do will bring me the happiness of a few verses now denied to me or the lucidity of the pain of youth when the longing of the afternoons and my body preceded the future through poetry. I will no longer write the days to come that will be like last gifts. I will not project over time the meek figures of friends and lovers. Not even sweet
The fate of the poet, like that of the merchant who travels unknown lands in search of what he loved in his (the gold, the money and the fame that fascinated him since childhood), ends up closing on itself like a circular grave. And although I can’t believe in my death and not even represent it as anything more than a pathetic and feverish farce, I invoke it. Everything in the meticulous future, in the indisputable and punctual fate, will find its consummation and my end in a sudden advent at the same time. I know it will be regular like my widow’s expenses, miserable like a talisman, like a golden bug. Like the one that stupid black man sculpted on a root. Like the filthy town that bore me; a city with as many workers as inhabitants who in their new language insulted and hated those they never got to meet. A town of loathsome people who despised each other but would never dare destroy one another. One more phrase: I’m sick of all of you and myself. Tired of my art, my poor art. I suppose I’ll be dead someday. But I will never leave here, my little Southern land that, in the end, is as bad as any other, like Carlopaz, where I will never go back, where I’ll never hold you again.
Yours, Bob Mitter
*
Bob left, he vanished overnight. He told me he was going to pick me up at the hairdresser’s. He promised me he’d take me to tea at Happy Triggers, but he must have got fed up with this town full of rabble. Just imagine, coming from the
“You bitch, I wouldn’t have sat on this chair if you’d told me...!”
*
I don’t think Keko is going to come to pick me up. Walking is no big deal. In any case he should be coming down this road. What if his motorcycle broke down or had an accident? I don’t know why I’m always thinking the worst. But when I do, things do not happen. Except when I thought my grandmother was going to die and I got to the house and everybody was crying. I already could see her death from outside, as if it was a ribbon hanging from the door. Inside, the cold shrivelled body and the weeping becoming louder and louder. Isn’t this a premonition? Premonition of what, that bastard probably forgot and went to the houses to have something to eat. Perhaps he was too tired and forgot. Because he works too hard at the building site, getting up at four in the morning to shave and have breakfast. Well, that’s what he always tells me, and he does whenever he needs an excuse not to take me out for dinner or dancing. But Keko is good. That’s what everybody says. What a nice man you got...
“How are you? Bye.”
Good in bed, really. If those old women who say Enriquito is good saw him in action...they’d grab him all for themselves, that’s why they say he’s good. Good for keeping me waiting. Good to make me lose some weight walking. Because he was no good at going out with his girlfriend, no good at all. Even his motorcycle is still tied to a post. The foremen’s women perhaps go out every weekend. What for, I wonder, if they have their own house. In that case it’s better to stay in on Sunday, having something to drink in the fresh air, passing the time while the children play in the garden. My God, who are those men looking into the bottom of the well?
*
From the bottom of a well that slowly fills me with moisture, in the peat that my saliva and tears impregnate, I remember what I was and try hopelessly to speak to the living. Yet I can’t hear my own voice the way I used to, when it had a particular tone. Bitter flowers forgotten by contempt (so said the tango). Perhaps the surviving comrades are not the ones who are more alive? Small and fatuous sparks from my decomposing brain. Even though my muscles have no movement of their own, and are rocked by the slow hands of putrefaction, my numbed senses can see unimagined colours in the very threshold of perception. A grimy yellow and a shady silver hold me for a negligible moment in the bottom of my dear Peronist well. Then nothing remains but a faint buzzing that turns into a dull vibration. United. The imminent scent of the start of the spring envelops me. Karina will come to pick me up but she’ll never see my face or my hands again. Every word I speak appears different as if through immense processes. I also know that the person who conveys them to the ears and the brains of the people can say them better than me. And I know that my body will be moved by the men who worked close to me, the guys, yet will never be rescued. My death will be engraved in this damp hole from which I’ll never come out. Neither the men from the union nor the hymn they will sing next to my worker’s grave will be able to explain this faint voice, like an intimate prayer never spoken. Nobody will understand this peroration. No one cares about Keko, no one of those who were looking for me will ever speak to me. Those who used to sing with me keep singing now without me, without even caring that I may know this afternoon’s lottery winning numbers.
*
I am as much of a Peronist as You. The forger’s temptation to sign his own work gives him away. I could tell you in this solemn moment that we are all Peronists, that is why I can write these lines. But maybe I will not do that. I am Juan Domingo Perón, my own character. The story you just have read reached me because I approached the well where party member number 1,593,769 died. The last one. Therefore I thought one of these coins could me minted with his face. I do not think of this builder as a victim, one of society’s dead, but as a Peronist. I am also thinking of You. I, a feather carried by the wind, discovered a symptom of life, the drowning man’s last scream before the total disappearance of this we could call “fatherland”.
By minting each face I get closer to yours. Yet I am not trying to be too obscure, or, even less so, ironic. Now that no one can make anyone laugh, Enrique Bacia, also known as Keko, the last of the workers, the guy who had two or three happy thoughts before dying, is telling me to talk about You. Before dying the poor sod thought that this could not happen to anyone, dying just like that, a few steps away from Karina’s house, not knowing where the fuck Heaven was and with the earth everywhere.
But what do I know about what the party member who died in the well really thought? What do I know about You? About Bob Mitter’s grey and wrinkled face, about Karina, and about all the false reciprocities of these coins, the false words the hands wear out and legalise? I only know that all of us, including You, are Peronists.
*
Nineteen seventy-three. Hector smiles and, leaning against the branches of a weeping willow next to the stream, announces that the barbecue is ready and we can start eating. Under the cool shade there remain, besides the smoking barbecue, some white clothes around a pair of trainers, white too. A mysteriously familiar and clear happiness marks out these objects. Hector can’t stop making jokes, telling funny stories. Hector is tanned and stirs the embers with a stick Surely he must have been Peronist. If there was a party like that now, like my uncle Hector’s, I would have gone and joined it. It would give me white clothes, shorts, trainers, a v-neck tee shirt, all white. Also, a smile like his. A little branch to rearrange the embers under the barbecue and a huge willow tree with a golden river. That’s what being Peronist must have been really like.
My uncle says:
“I don’t know why but now that I can see all the dead Peronist around my little barbecue, I don’t think there’s going to be enough meat for everyone. I don’t know where they came from, perhaps they’re coming for another October Seventeenth[6], this time in the year two thousand. Now they are crossing the river, their clothes getting wet, sweaty, refreshed, and heading towards the smoke rising from under the beautiful willow tree. I say nothing though, because I’m dead too. I’d be lying to you if I remembered how I died. How many holidays by this river, and the beautiful afternoons that go on sweetly and endlessly. They are approaching the fire. The first one to arrive is a man wearing a grey suit and a white shirt. He greets me politely. He says two or three courteous words and starts stuffing himself with pieces of half barbecued meat. The others do the same but the meat never runs out; every time there is even more meat on the barbecue next to the willow tree on the sandy beach. They eat respectfully. One or two of them, however, come up to me and ask me why don’t I help myself and join them. I tell them I’m amazed. They laugh and one of them begins to tell a story.
*
Hector, since all dead people know each other, I know You are a good man. The very fact you invited us to eat demonstrates that. No one should be refused a piece of meat, some bread, and a drink of wine. Yet there are many among the living who do. I remember one, one in particular, who slighted me in such a way once. His name was Eduardo and he has a mark a made on his face so that everyone would know what kind of man he is. But because I was drunk, I couldn’t tell him what I thought of him nor what that cut really meant. Perhaps it was because I was drunk, but you can’t refuse anyone a plate of food. I said to him, “You can’t refuse a man a piece of meat.” And yet he just looked at me like he didn’t understand me. He mumbled some apologetic words. He said he was a scholar, an enologist, something like that. I don’t know about such things but I respect them; I didn’t get angry with him because he was different. Even if I was brought up in the country, I am aware that education is a good thing. When I learned to read I realised that all those stories about the gauchos were lies. I was happy to listen to them in the bar of that country town, I’m not going to lie to you. What lies, the stories by those peasants, from the terror of a gold cross in the middle of the open country to the wandering souls of the dead. But once they were over, the fear was over too. Because in the end horror is impossible to comprehend, isn’t it? I feared the wandering souls of the dead in the stories, never when I came across them for real; besides, the gauchos never existed. That’s why I disfigured that librarian, because I was afraid of his face. How can a big man be scared of another who’s more ignorant and poorer than him? The coward’s fate is a wretched one, because he shouts for death to come and help save him from itself. In those days I was going out unarmed, I didn’t even have a razor on me, so I picked up a tin from the floor and I traced the mark of shame on his face.
*
By calmly watching him, she realised the obvious effort he was making to think of the first phrase they would exchange. The impulse to make love in a library, without any words spoken, always took hold of him. Perhaps that is why he went there so often. On the sides, above, below, thousands, millions of silent words, dry like seeds and waiting for the moment to flourish. He thought he could contain the course of his perceptions somehow. Through happier paths, he noticed some colourful photographs that enabled him to talk about customs and festivities. So much brightness inside that house (it could have been anybody’s or the same girl in a costume) urged him to find a transparent way in her eyes, like an invitation that brings closer what had been as one already, while the continuity of their eyes revealed them a love of the strange.
She would visit him later on. They would laugh when they were trying to put his penis into the condom, and then into her vagina, inside the small red car where everything seemed minuscule as she moved desperately, as if the entire universe could disappear inside her.
“Shit, is not going in,” he said. Still, Eduardo laughed all the time, until he came, until her scent remained in his hand like the best of perfumes remained a memory. The absolute need that what was new and small appeared full of life. Walking by himself, he understood why he had isolated himself from such beauty for so long. He also realised that there was a tendency to ignore those events that marked the passage of time. Now that it had happened, after he had become aware of what it was, it had been.
Away from everybody else, bored with studying and reading their respective books, Eduardo and Isabel exchanged several glances. “May I turn the heater off? Because I don’t know whether it’s cold or hot in here,” he said as if he had known everything that would happen.
*
“It is worth pointing out that once again I am talking about the relations between Politics and literature. More specifically, I am referring to certain criticisms made about a small text of mine that attempted to distinguish between politics and literature in order to avoid a totalitarian point of view of one over the other, a fateful key to reading. Also, it explained the relative inconsistency in pursuing political ends through literary means, basically through the dissolution and masking of the violence in the former into the latter (from politics into literature, naturally). It is against the different interpretations of my text, but also against what I thought at the time, that I believe it necessary to write and argue once more that politics is inscribed in a differential way into literary matter. By being so malleable an element, the literary text immediately conceals any marks made on it and like a fluid surface, it always reconstitutes itself in its smooth forms. Literature is the realm of simulation, as Nietzsche might have said. Thus the acknowledgement of a polymorphous nature, a hermafrodite such as the subject literature, for example, does not imply the analytical sum of its parts or sexual organs. That extra meaning that literary analyses exclude almost constantly constitutes a different nature, as a different violence. Just as Aristophanes explained the nature of love through the paradox of missing completeness, from the promise of happiness being impossible, literature only made sense to this day as an excess of meaning. This excess is not insignificant yet in our cultures. Nor has its considerable violence been erased by an even greater violence that does not imply mutilation but closure, a gathering of meanings. An epitome that, contrary to the analytical one, generates violence in a different way, however, making unavoidable use of its force, its imprint, and its excess. This is how art distorts the world. After seeing what it has created, it is not possible to see the world in the same way. Plato would never approve, although after the act of reading it is no longer possible to think from the basis of the spoken discourse.” (Isabel was reading quietly, obviously).
*
Isabel is my name. When he went back to his place, leaving the small pattern of minute streets and its precise urbanisation, his memory gave way to some kind of faint image, a familiar ghost. Sometimes one can see him walking, late into the night, when we’re all high on hash, among the deserted houses on the edge. Beyond the barbed wire that unsuccessfully tries to enclose the suburbs, among the bushes into which the last buildings disappear, where indeterminate vagrants crawl to drink some toxic substance from whitish bottles. In the same end of the light, Eduardo fades away trembling just like pigeons do. Between the dead moments of meaningless conversations, his ambiguous smile revealed a strange pride. Perhaps his never-changing clothes, the aged black coat, or his incredibly white hands, help him surrender to the most difficult of lives, that of a ghost. The truth is that right now he could be living in that edge where vagrants, the shabbiest whores and pill poppers wander trying to convince themselves they are looking for something. Behind the oil tanks, undoubtedly lost to the open spaces where most men live, as precarious and fortuitous as a crowd, under a dirty sky without any good or bad omens, he will linger on until the new day when begging may no longer be possible.
*
Glowing, yellow, gilded by the sterilising unguent. She is wrapped in lipids. Isolated and immersed in the stillness of her own vacuum, protected from the pain of being part of a chain, a small link between the dead and the unborn, above the hollow personal silence, where lethargy as a substitute for eternity extended a bridge she would not finish crossing.
Hidden from the world and its constant reproductive obligations, its births, couplings, and deaths that followed one another in a geometry she could not even imagine. She only sensed the pulse of some of its traces in that calculated deformity, its abstract calligraphy, the lines of her hands. Generic representations of marks that were more subtle than the air and the sky, than that non-existent substance she called ether and appeared to be more delicate than the air. Portraits or autonomous prophecies. Assertions that were so simple and inaccessible, or a series of figures, curves, straight lines and segments that explained nothing more but for the details of the trajectories of certain beings who did not exist yet.
In that moment guilt managed to make her rise to her feet. She felt dirty, a fake. She could not stand carrying the semen inside her. She headed slowly towards the dark bathroom. She tried the light switches repeatedly, but to no avail. Once inside the blue haze she vaguely made out the white artefacts on the floor that lurked like fossils under fluorescent light. She turned on the tap and waited for a few seconds. A muffled noise echoed in the pipe and then the fluid finally appeared. She let it run for a moment and, feeling that the water was getting clearer and losing its brown colour, she sat on the cold liquid.
A mercury light illuminates under the skin that which cannot be abolished by transparent eyelids.
*
Who will witness this encounter? Will it be necessary to describe the scattering and the loss of a few lights in the countryside, when the car lowers its headlights towards the ground that now is as unreal as it is full of details, as some coloured wrappings, plastic items, bottles, and discarded pieces of bread come into view?
What remains is fertile because of the evidence that we shall never return to the same place.
Daybreak will surely leave the certainty of those remains, the only certainty granted to us. After ecstasy, the minute horror towards what we are will again mark with a scream the limits of what is disgusting, of our daily production of memories.
The car lowering its lights stubbornly towards the ground that is now as unreal as it its minutely detailed, exacerbates that omen. Daybreak will leave the certainty of the remains. The promise of a destiny: to introduce a metallic dialogue between men and women, more powerful than the gleaming weapons of war, more effective than death.
*
Far away, like a notch, some lights move wounding the landscape. The event is in the incomprehensible memory. It is not a distant spectacle. Nor it is about a remote time when men dressed differently. The event in itself also appears to be unexplainable.
As a beautiful woman looks at the small print on the piece of cardboard she is burning and burying in the countryside, she reads aloud a poem from the mouldy book as if it was a prayer. She thinks about what she left behind in the city. That is because the smoke has not yet twisted itself around the cypress trees. She has nothing to do but read at home and drink the liquor other hands prepared. Her nervous hands bring parts of rain and smoke on white papers. She managed to show them to us, and she stayed with us since then...[7]
Juan Domingo Perón
Letter on Justicialism
(Letter to Juan Domingo Perón, Paris 1945)
Martin Heidegger
It will be a long time before we can think about the true value of your literary coins. Like the effect of certain drinks or stimulating substances which also give the unexpected pleasure of the sexual act, the imposed task is to go outside and beyond the word, in order to explore the motherland of truth, the true motherland. Real unions caused by metaphor, couplings between persons and things, ties that sometimes become unbearable. Savage exchanges, sometimes sexual, sometimes alimentary, as precise as they are intense, weave a net that supports us well beyond any feelings of nostalgia.
However, it may be legitimate to imagine the origin of language by moving away from any utilitarian interpretation and acknowledging a huge pleasure in the first spoken sounds. Primitive men would have been ecstatic for days with an echo, coining it repeatedly in all possible tones. That first and unlikely phoneme would have said everything, since it contained within itself the world, as well as itself, and producing a true vortex through which something unpronounceable was bound to exist. However, the real origin of time would come later, when that first sound was answered with a completely different one.
Let us imagine that the first articulated sound was the vowel “a”. Hours or centuries after its first repetition, after one or several meanings had settled fatally and precariously on it, then “e” appeared.
Someone, after so much repeating of “a”, replied with “e”. (Perhaps the same subject invented it through repetition and the loss or change of meaning. Perhaps it was someone else, a polemist. Whoever may have been and why they did it is beyond our imagination. Nevertheless, the articulated language was able, in this or other way, not to prostrate itself under the idea usefulness but to rise above its enthusiasm.)
I also suspect that what we think of as magic did not exist in those moments. Enthusiasm, ecstasy, they did exist. By supposing that similar avatars befell language, we can agree that all ways of thinking lead, more or less perceptibly and in an unusual manner, through language. Admitting thus that language is not analogous with modern technique, we shall be able to ask ourselves about the essence of the technique.
Going in the opposite direction is impracticable. If we were to see the essence of modern technique in language, the most developed and amazing of all techniques in language, then we would never be able to enquire, through a technique, about its own essence or that of a similar technique. In plain and simple terms, because we would never be able to step outside the technical processes, in this case rhetorical ones, to go towards that (metaphysical) beyond defined as “essence”.
That is why language had to be open in order to account for our selves, and lose its way by nature to advance on what is indeterminate. Likewise, it is legitimate and vital to ask our selves about such a technical essence (which is not the same as the technique) and the veiling-unveiling functions performed by modern techniques.
However, perhaps the ways of concealing and un-concealing, that is to say the production of truth and making the world knowable in a particular way, were modified in their essence before the natural sciences appeared in the seventeenth century. There is at least one pro-voking technical object that has survived throughout man’s history until it refers to a mythical origin: money.
What is a coin in its beginnings but a sacred instrument that allows men a new way to veil and unveil? What is its history but a long and slow rationalising process through which what bound men and gods together on its two faces ends up being an even more precise cipher for constant concealment and revelation? Why should we not look in the Chremastistics, already denounced by Aristotle, the pro-voking that places the demand on nature that it releases its energies inasmuch as they can be exploited and accumulated? Has modern technique not followed a logic that is primarily economic?
Although I have expressed the essential logic of modern technique in an economic language, I have not mentioned the influence a tool like money can have in the history of truth, in the establishing of the constants in the pro-voking unveiling, in what is dis-posed. Thus I set aside, or, rather, I generalised about the possible relations a tecnē like money could have formed as an episteme.
I say this because what other “establishing behaviour” than the one implied by money can return to nature as a calculable connection of forces? That which money names, does it not begin to be part of a language in which the whole of the objects is connected in a significant and equivalent way?
I have to admit that the mathematisation of Physics could not have taken place in a vacuum, nor could it have been a forerunner of the established order without having previously coined very precise social relations through a particular symbol such as money.
The establishing of nature as a constant has used a perfectly unequivocal sign and hundreds of thousands or millions of practices, transactions that have established the equivalence between things. From Marx onwards, said constant seems obviously embodied by the political Economy. Even though said constant is often mistaken with the principles of Utilitarianism (maximising profits, good as an utilitarian instrument, etc), surely it is more than that and implies not only a form of knowledge, or a way to make the truth or an episteme, but also a way of becoming of what is real.
The mathematisation of commerce, which in itself precedes or is concurrent with any development of the natural sciences, happens with the establishment of measurements. It is the essential mathematisation, the rationalisation of what is sacred and natural. Its capitalist development constitutes one of its later stages where the ways of veiling and unveiling are modified and generalised. However, is it not in the very essence of money the true “annihilation of the thing”?[8]
Thus, by restoring the monetary element to the realm of ontology, an analysis could be completed. Not only about the technique but also about a time ruled by the forgetting of the technique’s essence, by the concealing of the revealing properties inherent in the technique: what since Marx has been equivocally called Capitalism. If our intention is to go beyond what has been established as “enframing” (Gestell), we must go on asking ourselves about the essence of the technique, because in it I see the impossibility of Marxism.
In this case, it is necessary to ask ourselves about the coverings and un-coverings implied in the ontology of money, since their way to create truth is completely technical.
Therefore, it seems indispensable to count with an ontological critique of the Economy that goes beyond Marx and his denouncing of the concealment or repression of work and production through merchandise and circulation.
I have gone even further, opening the way of the technical essence of Marxism and all critiques.
Just as Marxist analysis committed itself to the liberation of human work from exploitation (following Hegel it was considered the essence and realisation of being human), we find a pro-voking logic in work. It was in this sense that I replied to Jünger’s Worker: “The Will to Power manifests itself everywhere and in full as Work.” It so happens that work ought not to be liberated from exploitation by one class (by making a critique of work), but one should break free from the pro-vocation, the exploitation of energies in what is real, work being one of its forms. One of the forms of ontological oblivion. I quote extensively from my Letter on Humanism:
“Statelessness is becoming a world wide destiny. This is why we must think of this destiny from the point of view of the destiny of Being. What Marx – coming from Hegel – has recognised in an essential and meaningful sense as man’s alienation reaches in its foundations the statelessness of Modern Man. This is given rise – from the destiny of Being – into a Metaphysical figure, strengthened by it, and simultaneously covered by it in its condition of statelessness. As far as Marx is concerned, by experimenting with alienation he manages to introduce himself into an essential dimension of history and the Marxist vision of history goes beyond all the remaining historisation. (...) The essence of materialism does not lie in the claim that everything is matter but rather in a metaphysical determination according to which all entities appear as material for work. The modern-metaphysical essence of work has been pre-thought in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit as a process – a self-initiating one- of unconditioned production. That is to say, the objectification of the present by man experienced as subjectivity. The essence of materialism lies hidden in the essence of the technique, about which, it is true, a lot has been written but little reflected upon.”
The acknowledgement of Marxist “alienation” as a symptom of modern times is followed by a clearing of the metaphysical dimension that would have produced that notion. If it has been thought from work, from the Hegelian notion of work, then it is involved in a fundamental way in the essence of the technique, namely in its pro-voking unveiling. Perhaps this is why in the first book of Das Kapital an analysis of money is set aside in order to reduce the forms of value to merchandise and, subsequently, work. Although the technical mechanisms of alienation are pointed out and denounced, in Marx both money and merchandise – the technical instruments that enable alienation, meaning the communication of certain human qualities to other entities, mainly to things and from them to their owners – are not made clear except in their relation to work. A humanist perspective insists on the humanising and liberating nature of work (both functions are impeded by the exploitation of one social class over another), thus reducing and deducting any ontological complexity from it.
However, if it were possible to continue asking ourselves about the monetary ontology (that is the ontology implied in money), perhaps we might be able to understand more not only about the essence of technique but also about the world today, about Capitalism. By supposing that technique does not only rely on metaphysical mathematisation (just as capital does not rely on the exploitation of labour alone) but also it leads to a group of practices that become knowledge (for example, from a means of exchange to a fully formed Economy), it then seems vital to re-think what was and what is money. Is it a sign that gives objects equal value? Is it still possible to think of money as a thing? If so, might thinking of it as a thing help us continue asking ourselves about the essence of technique, enquiring into that nationalist (internationalist, Americanist, etc) dimension of what is constant?
That is why the “coins” imply a true justicialism. A restitution of the universal exchanger, the technical object par excellence, a taming, to the house of Being. However, the task of reconstructing what language there is in money still remains a kind of work, and, therefore, a pro-voking act of poetic forcing. Can the advent of justice be printed through literary coinage, meaning the inversion of pro-voking thought (inversion in both senses of the term, since you also hope to obtain a social benefit after the act of writing)?
The justice that breaks free from the monetary relation will return to the poetic word. Something that we might call “history” has also happened, and no form of archaist thought can ever correct it. Although your words seek to get lost in the indeterminate, tending to a previous stage in language where not even the rules of the game were quite thinkable, you have produced an amphibology. How to extract from yet another petty exchange all these words? Is it legitimate to tame the dry sound of money through poetry? The mathematical injustice of buying and selling, can it be unmasked with words, can it be tamed?
It seems to me. However, that I can hear you repeating that first prehistoric sound: that first undetermined exclamation of ecstasy or pain. Perón. Perón. What an entire people stammers from its mouth, perhaps, every time it shouts your name. I hope one day I can accept your invitation to go and meet it. Now I dream of the silent continuity of your past that, like a fine and invisible gold thread, uses poetry as the only means of clarifying the most intimate of transactions.
[1] Let us consider for a moment the political style in one of Juan Domingo Perón’s most interesting speeches:
“I am proud to have reached the highest office through a consensus of wills that have rejected foreign pressure; by the assent of so many who want justice to prevail over self-interest, and by the decision of those whose patriotism is a natural feeling devoid of any ulterior motives that flows from their hearts. Above all, I am proud to be part of this civic awakening that has been able to take up the defence of the social reforms so wanted by the men who, risking their freedom, their honour and their lives, were able to achieve the aims of the June Revolution.
In moments of doubt and despair I was seized by the fear that we would fail to grasp the opportunity to confront decisively the hidden forces that hindered the economic development of our country and denied the most basic concessions to our workers. It was then that I wondered where the redoubts of Argentine virility were, our very own manliness that perfectly harmonises pride and kindness. Yet I did not have to look too hard, because in every crumbling house, every plot of uncultivated land, in the hills and the ravines, in the Andean crags and the orchards of our plains, in the jungle and the crossroads of our pampas’ endless roads, and even in the dark alleyways of the most tortuous suburbs, I could first make out and then clearly see that the humblest of our factory workers and most forsaken of our ranch hands knew how to stand firm and proud, despite being numbed by years of neglect, when they realised that the Fatherland was not indifferent to their penury and that the time was approaching when the humiliations suffered and the wrongs done to them would be rectified.
This is why the triumph of the Argentine people is a jubilant street victory, with the flavour of celebration, with the communicative spirit of youth and the contagious joy of truth. It is so because the people burst through the narrow confines of the usual political structures to demonstrate the under the rain or the blazing sun, yet always in the open, with the sky as the only limit to its longing for redemption and freedom. Redemption celebrated by the workers, by those useful to our country; redemption of our Fatherland itself by becoming fully aware of its freedom and having a clear idea about its sovereignty.
This is why the victory achieved by the Argentine people has astonished those who lived in the shadow of vested interests and outside the wealth of feelings that bring joy to the spirit of our people. An atmosphere had been created by repeating over and over again that we were a rich country whilst saying nothing about the extraordinary poverty of our working masses. A false conception about life had been created by favouring the growth of political corruption and encouraging illegal activities. We seemed to live under the rule of law yet remained strangled by the hydra of privilege.
We can understand how when the stage for this ancient farce came crashing down, the entire cast was left in a state of shock when the naked truth was suddenly revealed. This has been the style that has shaken the working masses and spread to other social classes, that will end up prevailing once and for all as it happens with all the feelings nesting in the hearts of our people.”
(Excerpt from the speech given before the people by Brigadier General Juan Domingo Peron during the proclamation of his candidacy for President of Argentina on February 12, 1946)
[2] Identitary Fictions and Fictional Identities of Juan Domingo Perón, Alma María Zungri, Maryland University Press, Washington 2001, and “Perón Perón How Great You Are or one of the Cases of Emancipatory Discursivity in Latin American Populism” in the Literary Geopolice Journal, National University of Venado Tuerto, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
[3] In 1935 the then Major Perón published his dictionary, Patagonic Toponimy of Araucanian Etymology, in which he attempted to get linguistically closer to the aboriginal people he was descended from on his mother’s side.
[4] “...WITH USURA/wool comes not to market / sheep bringeth no gain with usura...” Canto XLV. Pound even added a Nota Bene to the poem to explain what he means by USURA: “NB: Usury: A charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to the possibilities of production (Hence the failure of the Medici bank). (Ezra Pound, The Cantos, Faber & Faber, 1987). See also Canto LI which is another version of the same subject and other similar poems that give an idea of the importance Pound attached to economics, to the point of bringing it from his purely economic writings into his own poems.
[5] Translator’s Note: On June 29, 1987, nearly 13 years after his death, the heavily reinforced crypt where Perón’s embalmed body lay was broken into. His hands were cut off, stolen and never recovered.
[6] A reference to October 17th, 1945, when the working masses marched to the Presidential Palace and succesfully obtained Perón’s release by the military government. It remains one of the most important events in the history of the Peronist movement, commemorated as the “Day of Loyalty”.
[8] Elsewhere I explained that at the same time – and this is the central point – a new experience of being opens, which replaces its modern determination as ob-jektum, Gegen-stand. The character of “ob-stance” (Gegenstandes) implies the representative mediation (through ob-) performed by the subject, which was completely absent in the Greek experience of being as antikeimenon, confrontation, or “what is pro-recumbent in the confrontation” (Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, Neske. Pfullingen, 1957).
However, as demonstrated we are barely entitled to talk about the objects. If we look hard enough we are already moving in a world where there are no ob-jects. But this lack of ob-ject does not mean a lack of consistency in itself; rather, in the absence of objects there emerges a stability of another kind (ibid). The annihilation (Vernichtung) of the thing has taken place “long before the atom bomb exploded. This explosion is no more than the crudest among all the crude manifestations that confirms the annihilation of the thing has already happened. It confirms that the thing as thing remains void (Nichtig).” (Martin Heidegger, “Das Ding”, in Vorträge und Aufsätze).
1 comment:
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