It is a form of desertion, forsaking universal ideas and committing to an adventure to the limits of the mind.
Unbelieving in order to assume the condition of survivor.
Unbelieving so that writing will wash ashore, like a gift.
A survivor is the person who can tell the story. In the Odyssey, the protagonist is the only one who outlives the journey’s trials. Odysseus manages to end his exile because before that, in the city of the Phaeacians, at the outer reaches of the Hellenic world (beyond it there were only the last Ethiopians), the hero recounts his story of survival. And with this, in a distant time and place, the first-person account is born. From then on, so long ago, the personal adventure is reduced to a tale of loss, which only ends once there is a story where one has become a character.
I see an ad: “30-day supply.” It’s referring to a bottle of pills. This text could follow the same dosage: a supply of words for a certain number of days, words that will alter the homeostasis of the world.
A text was at one time an empty notebook.
In a copy of the only newspaper published on Sundays in this society, there is a six- or seven-page article about several of the secretaries in the new government’s cabinet. There are photos of them with their arms crossed, smiling and well-dressed, before a backdrop of drab colors. The questions are the same for all of them. How did you get your start in government? What does your spouse mean to you? What do you think about poverty? Each and every interview (without fail) can’t be more than some fifteen lines long.
Unbelieve, unbelieve, unbelieve. This magazine, a supplement to the Sunday edition of one of the three Puerto Rican newspapers, no longer has anything: no interviews, no news, no cabinet members. Only an imposed written silence. A conceptual void for a public that not only doesn’t expect more but is also satisfied with it.
Suffering without fighting, this is the new awful state of widespread and self-complacent conformity. The Sunday newspaper was conceived with this end in mind while keeping its readers in a state of comfort. The press’s words no longer alert them to imminent danger. Within a few months these very same cabinet members will be part of a catastrophic continuation whose roots and those responsible for them will have faded into the background. By then the causes and names of the guilty parties will have disappeared.
When facing the annihilation of almost every cultural form, carry out an ethnological study of the victors.
Notebook in hand, I wander through plastic deserts where all zest for life has been sacrificed.
In a culture so highly determined by expressions of Christianity, renounce faith. Live without family, without creed, without party, without society, but don’t reject or aspire to anything other than this. But in order to see, to access a dense view of reality, to think, and also to transcend thought, I must stop believing. Neither church, nor market. Neither God, nor Brands. Cease using countless words.
At one time in my life I was very far away from here, and I thought I’d never return. But years later, I’m now what they call a quedado, one who has stayed behind. I’ve experienced extremes. I’ve gotten to know so well the illuminating vastness of distant horizons and homelands. Both are expressions of emptiness.
Who are we when, without ever having left, we are faraway? Who is there around me when I say, “I don’t belong”?
Write as if the act were a burst of laughter or a declaration armed with silence. I know that absolutely nothing will change apart from this page that I will make increasingly darker. This is a type of freedom.
Resist, resist, resist. Life is the constant definition of a defeat that gradually takes on the features of one’s own voice and one’s own face. But resist, resist, resist, in order to construct the useless legacy of my passage through this world.
My sadness announces the end of death. My happiness is a failed escape.
Imagining one’s own death causes both pain and relief. Pain because of what my temporal end will do to others—or to that upsetting presence of others that I carry inside me; relief because there will be no more suffering. The hollowness that is at times my life will then merely be a walled-up hollowness. It’s a normal process: I move from agonizing hopefulness caused by factors beyond my control (parents, countries, genes, habits, impulses) to complete absence, empty of any content whatsoever.
“Destiny is a sort of poet who creates multiple characters: the castaway, the beggar, the exile, the celebrity, the outcast” (Léonce Paquet, Les cyniques grecs, p. 160).
The feeling of being untraceable even in the heart of the city. Sitting next to empty swings, I lose myself in a world of urban primitivity. A short break in a place that has the same impact as a wasteland or a stretch of forest. I feel myself hidden and lost at the same time.
Waiting for the text to arrive, like always.
I copy down three passages from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Movements of Thought: Diaries, 1930-1932, 1936-1937:
“The joy I have in my thoughts (philosophical thoughts) is joy in my own strange life. Is that the joy of life?” (p. 117).
“Perhaps I have a self only insofar as I feel actually reprobate” (p. 113).
“In the metropolitan civilization the spirit can only huddle in some corner” (p. 55).
Live in the street like the Greek Cynics did: in public spaces that supposedly belong to everyone and with which almost no one wants to be associated. Sitting for too long on a park bench is a kind of self-abasement: the living image of poverty and solitude. Even so, this has become my world. This is my life out in the elements.
Differentiate between a violent rejection of the world and simply rejecting it. This is fundamental since violence exposes the absence of true rejection.
Do not cope with my own solitude by rejecting everyone else. This is a manifestation of the violence frequently found hiding behind austerity, but also behind intelligence. Such an approach fails to address the unavoidable question: What must we discard in the world? Certainly, what it means is to leave behind the relationships that we have formed with it, and particularly, the reasons we put forth in favor of its abandonment.
Abandoning the world means no longer needing the relationships that we have formed with it. The world itself is not deniable because nothing exists beyond its limits, but the relationships that position and define us within it are (that is, they can be questioned). Abandonment is only possible by beginning with oneself, or more precisely, with discarded forms of oneself.
In an online library, I found an autobiography of an American who was a Buddhist monk. Notably titled Getting Off, its author takes his rejection of identity to the extreme, signing with only one letter: V. And even then, the monk recounts his struggle to free himself from books: “Anyway, books are a harder habit to give up than opium ever was. And it’s so easy to get lost in them. By now, though, I was able to manage with only the sort of books that recommended giving up books (as well as other addictions)” (p. 201). Later, he adds: “Each step on the path of renunciation had left me with the question: Now what can I do to fill my hours? And, each time, the prospect of giving up another form of time-structuring had left me with a feeling of bleakness, of emptiness; and each renunciation had been followed by a search for some alternative form of activity. From sensuality to study, from study to meditation, from meditation to joy, from joy to frustration, from frustration to intellectualization, from intellectualization to talk, from talk to writing . . .” (p. 251).
I map the course of my wandering, assigning names to space: the park with the bees, the one with the rats, the one with the cockroaches . . .
I’m sitting in the Sagrado Corazón train station. When night falls, I see the Puerto Rico Coliseum and the mountains and clouds that hang behind it. I can discern an almost shocking beauty, accompanied by the feeling that this has nothing to do with me. I am a foreigner observing those clouds and mountains, that universe which manages just fine without me. It will never be my home, but this is home.
I’m sitting in a parking lot on a concrete block, just a few centimeters from the ground, under a tree, in front of a condemned park, on the outskirts of the San Juan metropolitan area. It’s seven in the morning. Commuters are driving by me on their way to work. I inhabit the most fundamental part of the city: the ground. There is nowhere for me to hide, there is nothing I can move that could obstruct everyone’s view of me, and perhaps this is the most effective way to make myself invisible.
Walking along the port in Old San Juan, I notice an inexplicable feeling of well-being. I can’t explain it because I don’t know how to put it into words. It’s a state beyond their capabilities. How then can I transform this joy into text?
I skirt around San Patricio Forest and then head for the park on Escorial Street with its three majestic trees, under which I have sought refuge many a time. Being here stirs up memories of Sunday afternoons spent in other cities, along with a similar feeling of loss and anxiety, of distance and solitude. I can guess the reason for this memory’s emergence given that I’m a universal immigrant or foreigner. Is this all I’m left with after so many years of residence in San Juan or faraway cities? Or is it, in both cases, the reemergence of an experience of fundamental deprivation, with no memory of it or way of accessing it, anticipating the almost never-ending stream of precarious places I’ve visited?
The three great trees on Escorial Street. I run my hand over their immense bark, which is almost sprouting from the wood of the trunk. Neither one of us can escape ourselves. And still, I sense a crack in the contact with that skin that hasn’t traveled anywhere. This reminds me of a sentence I’ve written down, so I look for it in my notebook. It’s from Aryadeva, one of Nagarjuna’s disciples from the third century CE: “It is said that he who sees one thing sees all things. The emptiness of one is precisely the emptiness of all” (p. 83).
Depression is actually the opposite of the word’s meaning. It is not the release of pressure; on the contrary, what occurs is a hyperpressuring of the self. Freeing oneself from the subjugation of emotions and repetitive mental processes is a de-pression; a healthy loss of conditioning, of a “thinking” bound to cycles of unconsciousness. In this sense, an individual’s freedom would be the constant practice of de-pressuring. Being depressed, in the common psychological sense of the term, is to be bound to the ego, hyperpressured by its illusory character. “Depression” arises out of this frenzied intensity.
Consider non-writing. The act of writing substituted with sitting, walking, running, breathing, going to the bathroom, lying down.
How to get past the awareness, experienced since early childhood, that the world is foreign, that a certain distance always lies between reality and the self, in order to reach the peaceful acceptance of my being in the world? This is precisely the experience of the elements, of being outside. This is also the intention of this text: to write upon the very surface of objects.
Is Christianity a living religion? If I consider the institutional practices of the Vatican and the hierarchies of Orthodox, Protestant, and Evangelical Churches together with the actions of a vast majority of their followers, Christianity might be nothing more than a cult from ancient times that has powerfully secured its place in history. Without us even noticing because of the blinding force of our routines, the same thing that happened to the cult of Mithra or the cult of Serapis may have also happened to Christianity, the difference being that no persecutions or interdictions were needed to bring about its devitalization. Its decadence alone was sufficient. No one took it upon themselves to disable it as no one remembers at what moment it lost all substance.
The morning fog over San Juan Bay when the harbor is still free of people. I see two grackles bathing in a puddle of water and I’m reminded of the mouse who taught Diogenes of Sinope that fundamental lesson.
“Do not be concerned with the splendor of the words” (Dogen, “On the Endeavor of the Way” in Beyond Thinking, p. 19).
The mind is indefinitely immature. The “consciousness of reality,” acquired very early on together with the “use of reason” (my mother said that we discover this at age seven and after that a boy or a man has no excuse), is humanity’s supreme dogma. This is the moment when socialization is most deeply normalized. One should always be how one was at age seven: a being who believes what they are shown or what is explained to them. The so-called “maturity” of the majority of adults almost never questions this notion: the dogma of what is visible and evident, what is concrete within the image, the dictionary’s definition of the word. One is eternally a silly child if only engaging in the “use of reason.” Herein lies the cruelest explanation of politics: we play house from childhood until death. We are seven-year-olds with a leader and an ideology.
Rid myself of shyness in order to take possession of public benches, patches of grass, areas of shade under trees, paltry roofs to shelter me from the rain, of the very ground in the city where I eat, read, and write.
I walk disinterested in the world. This disinterest is another way in which the world oppresses and takes possession of me. One more thing to discard.
Protesting one’s suffering is a response to the aching self’s lack of reality. When threatened, it reinvents itself through indignation: How is it possible that there is nothing here when I have suffered so horribly? A long montage of punishment and screaming runs through my head, and I entertain it, grudgingly, out of routine, out of pure habit. And I’m left with a terrible feeling, its noise, its path, but I’ve lost the ability to believe in it.
I’ve become a regular presence in this part of town. I walk through it every day, coming and going to and from the train station, showing up in the park or at the small shopping center. Nothing out of the ordinary, except that practically nobody here does this on foot. Walking isn’t unusual for me, only that now I’m doing it in the neighborhood where I lived from age seven to seventeen. Three decades later, these streets and the avenue that crosses them have again become my place of residence and just like before, I’m alone again.
I’m sitting in the empty stands beside a basketball court. It’s Christmas. There’s nothing sad in this picture, maybe for the first time in my life.
I think back to Bashō’s travels on foot in Japan, centuries ago.
My pen and notebook, even the backpack and these shoes that have covered so much ground, are instruments in the same way as a flute or a violin. They’re another way of making the air vibrate, of filling space, here beside the empty basketball court that is the universe.
The last day of the year. From inside an empty car on the Urban Train, San Juan passes by the windows as if it were a tracking shot in a film. There’s no one around. I’m a character fading into space. No one gets on or off at the stations.
From a bench in Dársenas Square by the bay in Old San Juan, I see a dolphin’s fin pierce the surface of the water. It happens only a few meters away from me, between one of the docks and the Customs House. I’ve heard that they sometimes get lost if they’re separated from the others inside the bay, and then they struggle to find their way out. In my mind, he’s like a child discovering the ugliness and the dangers of the world.
A minimal text. A primordial whisper: something written from the ground. This is the desire held in these pages.
Build a text like a record of chess moves, not like the match itself. Document a strategy or a battle without the need for the spectacle of the fight.
Turn a bare, open space into a peaceful one where phenomena occur without additional fears and conventions. This comes to me late in a bus station. Even here the night can be beautiful. The garbage of the world is in my head, but there’s no reason why I should contaminate it. A miserable, desolate bus station as a lesson in philosophy.
How to locate or relate to the other? An awkward, pointless question because it disregards the unity of any human experience, even if the vast majority of us will disappear without having felt it. What is it that separates me from the teenagers who fall to the ground punching and kicking in Convalecencia Square? How to free myself from their yelling, their clumsy blows, from their cockiness that I witness like a spectator this Saturday afternoon, sitting beside the church? I sense that I am, that we all are, inside every other human being, and yet this union does me no good. I see it as trivial, terribly insufficient and showy. The journey through life—whether we are conscious of it or not—leads to this place, to witnessing this fight. Perhaps, at some exceptional and rare moment, it can be perceived as enlightenment, as transcendence, and we’ll understand why disunity is impossible. Today I am far away from this experience—from the power that I know it possesses—but still I know that I am inside those adolescents, that without the intervention of third parties and then the police, they could have seriously injured themselves. A bit of mysticism on this afternoon’s desolation in this square where nothing seemed to be mine and, nevertheless, everything possesses me. I’ll stay right here, in thick nothingness, waiting for adjectives to fall, wondering if one day there will be no more use for words.
The subversive act at my disposition: consume as little as possible. Add one more to this: unbelieve the West, the absolute and what passes itself off today as its imitation.
The West, like a philosophical amusement park. The canon: that museum or even Disney World of texts.
I wear a watch that I’ve had for twenty-seven years and that my father had for ten or fifteen years before me. I wear the shoes that I wore throughout Europe when I wrote Los países invisibles. My pen, purchased secondhand, is a Parker 51 from the 1950s. I’m in the train headed toward Bayamón to buy real food at a natural grocery.
“Oh, my God! God!” He repeats this over and over like a riddle. He is a burly man with a congested face crossing Convalecencia Square on his own.
I find myself temporarily beyond consoling: I can do without literature. For a brief moment, I don’t even have the luxury of that great tradition of defeat.
I examine, while meditating, the relentless movement of my mind. It is a structuring of digression: a constant obsession that refuses to accept or even tolerate empty space, that is, the no-illusion. This mental train sustains itself through the feigned importance of its author (and of his feelings, memories, curiosities), of this great canal brimming with noises whose existence (fictitious since, after all, I don’t recognize myself within it) stems precisely from the action of the same mental train.
Devise the philosophical proposal of a body walking.
Not wanting to write anymore. Not wanting to be so close to this opportunity again. Sensing that my days could come to an end and what’s already written is enough. Not having to wander through the sadness of the streets, of the messages scribbling love, hate or protest over their walls or on their lampposts. My life is enough; there’s nothing more I can do, there’s nothing more to hope for. Writing again means returning to the same places, continuing along the same path that won’t lead me out of this space, which is simultaneously geography and illusion. Resting, not having to remember, not having to look anymore. Happily silencing myself.
The meaning and value of Puerto Rican literature: writings about life lost in these streets. Consider the meanings—and the universal value of loss—and be willing to face the diverse forms of its tragedy. Create, alongside many others, a living lesson.
Feeling like now I am a survivor: of drugs, of alcohol, of love, of children, of work, of the impositions of a country, of all the deserts mistaken for paradise.
Traveling has ceased to have any importance. Américo Miranda Avenue, with all its ugliness and poverty, is just as good as the Champs-Élysées. I’m the same on either one. Whatever the destination, however celebrated it might be, I would still walk around in the same shoes and carry the same backpack.
I’m writing this sitting on a bench in front of Juan Ramón Loubriel Stadium. There is no one around me in this city filled with empty public spaces, but you can hear the passing train and the incessant traffic on the avenues bordering the park. I don’t feel any sort of loss or misfortune. This is what I have been able to achieve with my life; this is what I have devised. No prestige, almost no decoration, in order to find my strength.
There are two enormous limousines parked in front of Rubén Rodríguez Coliseum. Several people have stopped to take photos of them with their cellphones. It’s hard to imagine a more trivial photo. This sub-photography represents a deprived life. This text attempts the contrary: a life within this sub-life.
The fatigue of the smoker. No one knows which comes first, tobacco or exhaustion. No one knows which one they are looking for or which one is experienced with more delight.
The “wild” macaws in Garden Hills at sunset and the melancholy of their cries represent utter loss. An un-geographied planet. The macaws calling out at nightfall, searching for each other inside the wealthy neighborhoods that imported them and then let them escape. This is what “nature” has become.
The philosophical labor of a body that sits in a park and isn’t waiting.
Survive or succumb? These are actually two paths from the same question, and both are tempting, that is, both are regions of pleasure and meaning.
Feeling that I don’t belong in the parks. Thinking that at any moment the mothers of the children playing on the swings could object to my presence here on a bench. Seeing myself as redundant, too much of a castaway to establish any intelligible connection.
Find a life outside the dominant structures. I’m old enough to imagine the meager limits of this choice. But even so, find a life outside the dominant structures in order to live out in the elements.
“The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher” (Wittgenstein quoted in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 236).
