Next to me a beautiful man has nightmares. Does he dream of monsters? Does he dream of an abyss into which he falls? When he is about to reach the depths of his sleep, when his long, bony body, covered in tattoos, is about to fall on the final rocks of the precipice that I imagine, he wakes with a start and the fear is so close that I can smell it. The look out of itself, the eyes in a spectral brightness, the moist temples. He is a boy. I hug him, I reassure him, I tell him that everything is fine, that there is nothing to fear, that he sleep, sleep, sleep. And he does, he goes back to the dream of him. After days, after weeks the fear returns similar. I usually see him from time to time, we meet at some point during the night, on electronic tracks, at perreo parties, on street corners, at after hours. He is my friend, we love each other. And sometimes he stays at my house and sometimes he is scared and I protect him.
My friend found out that he was beautiful very late, after a tough adolescence living in occupied houses and tenements, going to schools where he was discriminated against for being black, for being poor, for dancing like no other, for curly hair, for his clothes. But thanks to pop he knew about himself not only that he was beautiful, in a disturbing way, but that he knew about music, rhythm, beats, incredible lyrics. And he learned to dance, to move like no one else with those steps in which the body is governed before the mind, and to play, to sing, to rhyme the prose of the dub, the poetry of the last century that then ended. And when he found out that he was disturbing with his shy silence and with his artistic power, he became a model and posed for artists, and had his band, and one day he fell in love and everything went to hell.
My friend has memories and during the sleepless nights of the quarantine, which by chance finally takes place in my house, he tells me some scenes of that life as a pop star, and as a worker, of immense effort to have his own, and of losses and emptiness, confusion and errors. And of his dreams, of those who daydream to think about the future. But it seems that I don't know how to listen to him enough and I don't really understand what he wants, what he dreams of. It seems like a thousand years will pass before he can meet my friend. Maybe never. Maybe tomorrow. My friend has memories and a present on pause. And in this viral present he is afraid. So, when there were no pandemics and we could get together in the night full of dancing and noise, he was afraid of the ghosts of his childhood. He was afraid of what he could come back from that dark area. It's normal, I try to tell him. We tend to fear the past. To what we can't even remember from our past.
Now, in these days of pandemic, my friend is afraid of the future.
How to build a possible future in the face of global uncertainty, the most intangible and complex pending to disarm the pandemic? We have no other alternative than to think about the elaboration of the future in multiple devices born in the recent past, which will be revisited again and again to capture what is essential. The essential as a new order of politics in our lives: struggling for the essential, appreciating the essential, sharing the essential. A kind of map of global curatorship with intimate and local roots, where those who produced culture, ideas, metaphors and interpretations of reality revisit them, now with the awareness of massive finitude. We are going to die. Many are going to die. Some of us are going to die. The awareness of the enormous vulnerability of the human.
My friend, for example, could have stayed in the house of his parents, who had to leave the one they occupied in a neighborhood to move to a relative's. That is why that meeting was providential, days before the announcement of the quarantine, and then that night that now seems so far away, when we saw the president together asking us to stay in our homes. It was not long before twelve, and we said why not until Sunday. And it's been a month and my friend at home and I without knowing him. In that difficulty of mine, maybe I misread, maybe I'm still wrong, but I thought of my friend in that other house with ten others, and I thought that I needed to be calm and my house is big, and in my family's house there was always room for travelers, for friends. Then later I believed that the only reason for him to put up with an impossible coexistence was to put the machines to work, his machines, his precious capital. With them he has manufactured and maintained a clothing brand in recent years. I've seen how the habitués of a club in Palermo fought over these garments. I have seen newborn stars fight over these garments at night in Buenos Aires. I have bought these amazing clothes for my son, for his friends, I have given away what my friend makes with the pride that a friend makes it. My friend is one of those people with multiple talents and he has gone in and out of those talents, but he always returns to two that have given him brilliance and money: music and design. Of course, who throws a party, a recital, a festival, a pogo these days.
And who is going to make clothes in the days that run, in the days that follow. My friend does not doubt it: he must then ask for emergency help. It is logical. It is what corresponds. Like millions of other entrepreneurs there is no way to get income, there is no way to move or sell anything.
The future is suddenly those ten thousand pesos that could be fuel for the machines, to return to productivity. But recently, right now, in this holy present, that minimal breath of air is suspended and does not reach his lungs, and my friend, from the other end of our confinement tells me with a message that I read, like everything, damn, on the screen: your request has been denied.
How can my friend not be afraid of the future?
Even so, he and millions of informal workers who have already endured four years of losses and recession, and who went through 2001 on the streets and gassed, on the streets and in debt, on the streets and dancing Thriller, despite everything, he has to his credit the dream that goes beyond the nightmare: design and make the clothes he likes, play the music he loves, organize the parties he knows, compose songs, write lyrics, dance. It's just about resisting this quarantine, crossing the threshold of extemporaneous time that it proposes, and starting again. Founding it all again? Perhaps it is about taking care of the partialities that we rebuild and make survive in the midst of the collapse without regretting how the chips that fall as a result of an invisible slap fall. The future as a more arbitrary set-up than what was originally offered by a promising capitalism in which they swore to you that you were the one who chose.
If there is a way to imagine the future, it is with an awareness in which the waste of energy in general will be the key to a refounding of any kind. We will have to choose between affections and loves, jobs and pleasures, be much less pretentious, while being efficient in what gives us survival. How will we learn the amount of energy we spend in material and symbolic terms. Money. Objects. Enjoy. Weather. Look. Listens. Our disposition towards others. Probably in the end we will have to stay with some, as my friend says, not for altruism but for survival.
Suddenly the spaces of being with others, of being social, on stage, disappear during quarantine. They fade in the near future. At the same time that the agora of the social scene contracts or implodes, the fictional agora of the networks fails because it lacks fuel: with what to feed the morbidity of the other, how much time can we spend posting chinstraps, home cooking, memories, how many alive could we withstand in the coming months. In the face of the pandemic, the networks that would supposedly guarantee human contact in their factual function fail: the non-existence of the bond makes them obviously liars and toxic. More and more there is a withdrawal, and an ironic use takes control of what was happiness built. Between the nascent modesty and the distance before the non-performative experience of the other, irony is all that remains. Except for the literal ones, which will always have a place to express themselves.
Those of us who, until now, by class mandate, have gone through university or have had minimal artistic, intellectual, or professional careers, emancipatory trajectories, holistic desires, aspirational ambitions -in short, good intentions-- it has been difficult for us to escape from a proto-capitalist and binary imperative: exist or survive. The imperative of existence, in our desire –from the most psychoanalytic claim--, in our identity –to give us an ego blow in the idea of the singular from the obvious difference of the contemporary human--, in our urban neurosis made of gestures and scenes. Or the imperative of survival: "do" to win and pay. Is there something wrong with it?
Thanks to the virus, that false moral dilemma of the merchandise subject will be removed from us. Let us be ready for a dilemma that will summon us like no other crisis has summoned us before. Not even the dictatorships, because then there was nothing else to do but escape, hide, endure torture and confinement, survive. Not even the attempted hits. Nor the cyclical crises of our economies. Not natural catastrophes. Not all the neoliberalism on the planet producing poverty and plundering the wealth of each nation. Neither the worst of music, nor the most frightening of theaters, nor the series ruined in their endless seasons, nor bad poetry, nor packaged literature, nor lack of sexual desire. What will put us back against the wall and from which we will have no escape will be the other and the body. Alone or with others? Alone safe, or all at risk? Matter, body or mind? Body and thought. In a single movement made of all movements: massive, universal, national and revolutionary.
In the small town in the south where I come from, there was a day when many believed that the world was ending. It happened to my grandmother Aura. To make matters worse, in those times, and just to take refuge from the usual drunkenness and the slaps from my grandfather Isaías, the socialist worker, Aura had become a Jehovah's Witness: what better for a witness than the end of the world? At the bottom of the town, beyond the peasant village of my ancestors, by the river, a flax factory was actually burning. The fire devastated machines and fabrics, threads and gasoline. The chemicals in the lab, the engines, the warehouse exploded as if programmed by the devil. And in her little wooden house my grandmother would line up hers and almost ten of her children to pray loudly in a last attempt to earn eternal life before Armageddon.
These days I can't stop thinking about it. Aura was born in the Fabiana countryside, a mother who had the color, the body, the land of a Mapuche woman, but with a Spanish or Portuguese surname: Carballo. The genealogies of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people were lost in time because surnames mutated when, at the beginning of the 20th century, girls like her were given away to landlords, abandoned in diasporas due to land invasions, married to men they did not love. , like Don Julio Carrasco, my great-grandfather. Fabiana set foot in a city for the first time when she was already old and threatened by cancer. She was accompanied by my aunt Ivonne, Aura's youngest daughter, Iván's twin; She used to put on a comic number in which the grandmother looked at herself in front of the large mirrors of a metropolitan shopping arcade without knowing it, not knowing herself: come on, woman, come on, how stubborn this woman is for God's sake. She said to that unknown woman with the face of an Indian who imitated her in every movement on the other side, in that world in which the image of oneself was worth little, because she lived alone on her plot, surrounded by animals and trees, with the land.
I grew up with my mother repeating: this is the end of the world. Every tragic event in the family, the end of the world. A man abandons his wife, the end of the world. A woman to a man, the end of the world. His eldest son is gay. World's End. The Berlin Wall falls, the end of the world. Her youngest son is gay. World's End. She dies Aura of a stroke, too young, just when she stopped suffering. World's End. She divorces the only heterosexual son of hers. World's End. Two planes crash into the Twin Towers. World's End. A tsunami wipes out the fishing villages, the end of the world. She divorces her youngest son. World's End. Chile explodes and catches fire. World's End. She falls off a ladder and breaks her wrist, the end of the world. A virus locks down humanity and kills tens of thousands. That, the end of the world.
And the next instant, that heap of intelligence that has been and is my mother rebels. She always from the south she says: to begin with, after all, the virus is not such an idiot; it is logical that we old people are going to die first. Then: locking ourselves up and the world changing forever when we return is not a disgrace either. Let's not exaggerate. She says she. To resist, we have resisted and we know how to do it. She says. She was able to leave the town, the field, the hill, the river, the night. She was able to cross the mountain range and save herself. She was able to forget. She was able to remember from time to time. And at every step she was able to assume that the world does not end. That the future is the only inescapable thing.
My grandmother did not know when she knelt down to ask forgiveness for her sins – what sins a peasant woman could commit who spent the day in rain boots buried in the ground growing strawberries, currants, broad beans, potatoes and flowers, under the eternal rain of the south , perhaps hitting their children— that while she was doing it, while asking God to reserve her a place in paradise, she and all her children and my mother resisted. We do something similar in these days of confinement: we pray, although agnostic, although atheist, although worldly and apathetic, although depressed. Why is it if not to pray that internal journey that sooner or later the imminence of contagion forces us to do? What is rummaging through boxes of old photos, searching for us busily in the future that we were, but a sermon? What if not a prayer, that selective dialogue that we began with some and a few others, that suddenly discovering a book that made perfect sense, a movie that we should have seen at that time, a fictional clue of what we will do and be when this nightmare is it over?
The nightmare of the disappearance of the world is not what prevents us from sleeping some nights, like my friend. In our dreams things disappear, houses, cars, clothes, cell phones, trips, birthdays, vacations, televisions, objects. I don't know if people disappear, that would be a repeated dream, the real nightmare of the past. The tangible disappears. Parts. Pieces. It doesn't all go away. The whole becomes rather chaotic. On the horizon, the future threatens with its disappearance, but it is like the challenge of a permissive father: it never becomes true, it operates like a weak and inefficient ghost. That's the worst; we know that the future is on our heels and we don't know what it is like, what face it has, what it is called, how it will allow us to survive, how everything that we ignore will affect our risky existences.
These days the philosophers who risk more or less insurgent hypotheses about our future, almost always Europeans, usually quote Walter Benjamin, the German who wrote in the Paris of the resistance with an anti-gas mask close at hand. The philosophers, almost always men, debate about this historical moment: that it is like a war, that it is not a war at all. In those days in the midst of the world war, Benjamin was clear: “if the enemy wins, not even the dead will be safe. And it is that enemy that does not stop defeating. We are not in a war, we are far from it. But perhaps we should think that for the first time in two hundred years we are facing a clear enemy. And that enemy is not the coronavirus. But at the same time, confusion reigns as structures are just beginning to crumble to their foundations. Faced with this tremor from which we barely hear a first slight buzz, the buildings of the economic system prefigure the fracture of its pillars. Societies already know that democracy is not enough and creaks as the best system known to improve the lives of citizens. What can one think about the future when we only have a nebulous diagnosis that we deny as much as we can as do the dying whose pain is mitigated by the trade of morphine.
Rethinking the future thus implies an unthinkable effort of imagination and creation, cyclopean, collective. Rethinking and refounding the future is much more than getting out of this crisis that we already know will take at least two years to stop breathing and that heralds a world that is much more complicated and, to top it all, ravaged by the presence of microorganisms that show their intelligent power. Distinguishing between the smoke of sense bombs launched by the super powers disputing the natural resource, the markets, the possession of the data of millions of citizens, the routes, lithium, oil, water, is at least difficult. In this confusion, activists, political leaders, opinion leaders, fighters of all kinds, can get into swamps if they get carried away by first impressions. Perhaps the biggest confusion is around the function, mission and the dominant nature of technology. Its demonic condition, like that of the virus itself, does nothing but leave it in the hands of the corporations that hold the creation and use of algorithmic neural networks whose operation and logic we do not know as much as the infinitesimal world of bacteria and viruses.
The viral condition as a signifier of the times will continue to cross us. In a world dominated by humans, the end is felt at the hands of humans. The supremacy of the human can be the end of the human. In this cruel paradox, destiny is played out after the pandemic. The preservation of what remains, the environmental struggles fueled by the humanist vision of feminism and non-binary policies – even beyond the gender issue – come to give us today some food to start thinking: the only thing left to do is what construction can make that theory into dance and that activist praxis to stop the destruction of the planet with an economy that protects the weakest and puts a brake on pornographic accumulation and financial capital. For the first time in a long time, this thought requires intercontinental exchange, and must have the South as a crucial axis for true innovation: particular cases will give more and more meaning to international thought. It is unfortunate to read the Sopa of Wuhan engaged in a dispute over the philosophical blow by applying their theories with forceps on what has really happened to humanity.
The world, we have seen in lost news and in some fast documentaries, has suffered from pandemics in a cyclical way. The Black Death, which struck Europe between 1347 and 1353 until it decimated cities and fields, kingdoms and states, had only been preceded by one of equal virulence, in the time of Emperor Justinian, in the 6th century. That plague that was born in the black rats and moved through the fleas traveled by ship, and spread throughout the old world from east to west thanks to trade: it entered through the ports and mercilessly advanced on cities first, on hamlets later. . It produced a flow of dead that shudders: there is talk of 60 percent of the entire population of the Iberian Peninsula. Only in the 19th century did the first scientific researchers discover that it was a bacterium: it inflamed the groin and armpits, quickly attacked lymph nodes, and in some it became septicemic, that is, it entered the blood at full speed, rotting the organism. It had a second way of killing: pneumonic plague, more similar to our coronavirus, produced a cough that infected the air.
In Argentina, yellow fever attacked between 1852 and 1871 and in Buenos Aires alone it killed 8 percent of porteños, some 14,000 throughout the country. He arrived from Paraguay and then by ship from Brazil. He divided the city in two: the south for the poor, the north for the rich. Later the flu came from Europe in 1918 and hit in three waves until 1920 leaving about 20 thousand dead. Although at the beginning it did not distinguish between the poor and the rich, it ended up cornering the most unprotected, especially in the northern provinces, where it exposed a precarious and non-existent health system. Known as the Spanish flu, influenza was perhaps the engine of the first great concealment of the powers embarked on the First World War. Millions of dead hidden in military trucks and buried in mass graves. This pandemic inaugurates a notion of a global world. A historian of the time spoke of "the unification of the world by disease." He also made it clear that the industrial city implied death and disease. The coronavirus has reached our homes by plane, at a thousand kilometers per hour. Our virus fits into that modern pandemic lineage. Science has been facing them since then, that fight is a battle that the world has given, it knows. It is not a war.
Since we went into exile and took refuge in Argentina, my defenses went down and my body had almost no respite. I was a sick child. I was sick because I was too feminine a boy and that's why they treated me with hormones. But just in case, my body was in charge of confirming it: removed tonsils, hepatitis, measles, whooping cough, flu, unexplained fevers frequently took me to the hospital. As a child I wanted to be a doctor, it was the most romantic thing I could think of as an adult. During those long convalescences I became a writer. I listened helplessly to my mother recounting her life as a proletarian girl. Two scenes taught me what being poor was all about. Our social ascent thanks to my father's success as an inventor did not deprive me of the awareness of that vulnerability.
When my mother was still a child, an outbreak of smallpox came to the village in the south. The last death rattle of an ancient plague, which disappeared from Latin America only in the 1980s. The plague attacked their parents and to protect them they had to distribute the boys among relatives and friends. They sent her to her grandmother's field. There she suffered the abuse of one of her relatives, her isolation broke her innocence and marked her for the rest of her life. When she was already twelve years old, my mother had to attend the birth of the twins that were born in her house. The boy, Ivan, was born without problems. The girl, Ivonne, came across. She was dying. My mother had to go out and catch a black hen with which the midwife performed a ceremony and saved the creature's life. Days later the largest earthquake in history shook all of Chile. In the south a huge tsunami carried away villages and sank cities. The family left the house, everyone ran to safety. But in the fascination with the girl, they forgot about the boy. My mother swayed into the house and came out with him in her arms. She was running desperately when the earth opened up under her feet like a hot cake that we just took out of the oven. My mother then knew how to survive: she opened her legs, like playing hopscotch until the earth closed again. All around her her neighbors died, swallowed by the enraged earth.
What was the future like for that surviving girl? What was the future of a girl who was saved from the end of the world made of? Can we think of this stage of global plague in a possible future? The question about the future that an economy in extreme crisis holds for us, the idea of a post-war period in which states once again enhance their ability to order and organize societies does not leave room for the question about the individual and his or her role. as a builder of the collective. We have not thought about that future together, it is for now a chimera. How to think about the future when we have not yet seen the dead? That will be what ends up confronting us with the structural, which is subjective and political in a way that we have never been able to embody before. The extreme vulnerability is that, the massive and capriciously selective death of the virus. Death is announced, illness is declaimed. The image of hundreds of beds in emergency hospitals, hundreds of empty beds waiting for us. We live the stress of what is to come, we are not owners of the future, we cannot become locked up in our intimate spaces.
After the yellow fever in Buenos Aires there was a painting by the Uruguayan painter Juan Manuel Blanes that said it all when photography did not exist. The journalist María Paula Zacharías describes it in an article in La Nación: “two men open a door and find in a gloomy room the corpse of a man on the bed, the already decomposed body of a beautiful woman on the floor and a baby trying to to feed on her." And she quotes art historian Laura Malosetti: “Blanes made viewers cry for that mother. And the ones behind the scenes with a handkerchief over their nose are the ones who are afraid and yet responsible. The effect is disturbing: Blanes opens the door and paints that woman, a fallen angel. Compassion, shock: a shared piety". The painting was exhibited in the old Teatro Colón and the people of Buenos Aires made long lines paying a solidarity ticket to see it. It was a collective funeral ritual.
How will we do to say goodbye to our future dead? As much as we responsibly assume isolation as the best way to resist the pandemic, it is difficult to imagine a gradual, slow, progressive return. In our Argentine imagination, honoring has always been a massive ceremony. Will we have a party at the end? Will there be ceremonies to celebrate the end of the pandemic? What will replace the Blanes painting?
Strange dead time this Easter that at least allows us to think about uncertainty. So we can hear that we are not victims of the lockdown. Because we are not victims of confinement. But neither can we settle for being just actors in isolation. What can make us victims is believing that all we have to do is stay home. The future lies in the strength and ability we have to rethink the world without nostalgia for the past, no matter how revolutionary it may have been. In the courage to look at the virus as an inherent part of a nature that speaks to us without metaphors of the end of an era in which the human has exceeded itself until the future explodes. If I can embrace anything tonight, it's the image of Aura cultivating the land. We will save ourselves from the virus. Of the world as it is, as it is governed by corporations and not finance capitalism. I keep that minimal portion of cultivated land, with the notion of space, geography, border, I keep the body that is not separated from technology, from garbage. The sea, the mountain, the desert are what remains. Almost the only thing we can look at and feel to seek calm these days is the sun that enters through our windows, reaches a corner of our confinements and fills our lungs with extreme vitality, distancing us from nightmares, taking away our fear. The resistance is just beginning. And in its DNA it is viral and revolutionary. The future is what is happening to us today and no one can prevent it from being our future.
Buenos Aires, April 12, 2020.
The text was originally published in Revista Anfibia.
AC
