I’d like to think these notes are part of a bad dream
to Rafael Cadenas
*
Silences, small contritions?
*
They say it’s always outside
but some days it shoots closer each time
exile —now— is here
*
In order to understand the functioning of Evil and its resorts.
“A system that can only function in a state of emergency must maintain that emergency at any cost.” (Giorgio Agamben)
*
Petition.
The country to come: plural, lay, austere.
*
What’s the animal of transitions?
The monkey and its sunset clouds through the branches.
*
Homeland
exile isn’t a promised land
only this voice speaking of peace with a war tongue
the razor with the owner’s name
while the jugulars are threatened
Country
there is nothing more
save this instant
the desire to be alive
even when there’s no place
*
The induced misery of these years: the broken streets, the food lines, the fanaticism, the cult of power and its irrational penetration, the murky operations, the aversions, the corruption, the misery, the waste, the insults, the slander, everything bitter, the elusions, the erosions, the accusations, so many mouths dedicated to confusion.
*
The government won’t try to resolve the crisis, nor the food lines, nor the shortages, nor any of the evils it might be attributed with. On the contrary: it will systematize and refine its procedures. It will be not only State policy but a method of social control and just another form of the burden trying to attenuate the already galloping and unstoppable discomfort.
*
There are no saviors, ideologies are a cage.
*
Avoid becoming what you critique.
*
Thinking in transit: from the hero to the despot, from the despot to the martyr, from the martyr crowned to his image duplicated by official printers, a long and tedious echo.
*
The terrible merit of turning democracy into a rhetorical figure.
*
Evil maneuvers to twist the past.
*
Simone Weil, Essential Ideas for a New Constitution.
“It doesn’t matter how the government leader is chosen but rather how his power is limited, how his exercise of power is controlled, how he is punished, if that were to be the case.”
*
Sycophants in their labyrinth.
*
Compassion —and moderation— in exile.
*
Dialectics.
“Victory is ours
comrades
victory is ours
while the Empire
invents
the theories
that will justify
our ruins!”
*
Does compassion have an ideology?
*
Chronology of the Abyss (1999-?).
The revolution is yet to come
the revolution is yet to com
the r volution is yet to co
the r olution is yet to c
the r lution is yet to
the r lution is yet t
the r ion t
the r n
the r n
the r
the
th
*
Where did I hear it?
“Maybe we need the basement”
“The sun makes us too happy”
*
Months ago.
At the Bicentenario supermarket in Plaza Venezuela I saw a huge line of people (it reached the Zona Rental metro stop and extended even further, almost to the hotel district). In order to enter the supermarket you had to pass through a very narrow fence, almost a corral. Meanwhile, soldiers were checking IDs. A legacy of humiliation.
*
A true “current” for change can’t be founded on hate.
*
Fragments of country that stab the body.
Splinters, pulverized glass.
Long, painful uncertainty.
What’s coming?
*
To think of these years through the fable of Midas in reverse.
*
The tribe without a chief, nor a fable, its stubborn prayers to the void.
*
For so many years, he said: I, I, I, I am you, I am all of you, I am us, you and I, the great one and its shut down echo, stubborn ashes that don’t say goodbye.
*
Cadenas, Anotaciones:
“A people without awareness of language end up repeating the swindlers’ slogans; in other words, they die as a people.”
*
Francisco Andrade, quickly:
“It’s not class struggle. It’s society vs. the State.”
*
Freedom, Sancho!
“The democrat, after all, is he who admits that his adversary might be right, who, therefore, lets him express himself and who is prepared to reflect upon his arguments. When parties or men are persuaded enough by their own reasons to shut their opponents’ mouths with violence, democracy ceases to exist.” (Camus, Combat, February 1947)
*
Abyss project: a state of tutelage and lowered heads, frightened and meek, repeating and uniformed. Here, thus, the universities —and freedom itself— play a role that’s anything but minor and by all means inconvenient.
*
Fine! I won’t say “dictatorship”! No, it’s not! Venezuela suffers, actually, a pathological presidentialism, the deferred repetition —infinite— of Chávez’s Aló, Presidente TV show: marimbas, whistles, threats, insults, scoldings, promises, bad jokes, classes of invented history, geography, baseball, math, cosmology, Marxism, linguistics, sociology, the mise en scène of that Ego.
{ Alejandro Sebastiani Verlezza, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 29 November 2015 }
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