It is said that some film director, or some critic, used to say that Star Wars was a western with the setting changed: from the dusty plains we moved to the immensities of space, from the Indians to the Martians, and so on. There is in fact a genre called space western that places the cowboys of the West in … Read more →
The advance of artificial intelligence unsettles some people as if some unknown invader were drawing slowly closer through space. For them, AI is on the verge of waking up to take control of itself. This haloed horizon conceals the real reality of these technologies, which is their insertion into our structures of production. What I want to talk about is … Read more →
Mrs. Enríquez was born during one of the many post-war periods. Among briars and mud, she learned hunger and resilience before she learned to speak. Her genes, programmed to produce an athlete, had instead produced a slight, wiry little woman with sinewy limbs, defiant cheekbones, and light feet. She moved with the energy and steadiness of someone who has not … Read more →
We take the term “mass media” in its common sense: companies that produce and disseminate messages. Their product is presented as the news — not as just any information, but as the relevant events. These media outlets justify themselves, through their professionals, by means of the following myths: These myths conceal something further: the commodity character of the contents these … Read more →
One summer night, while everyone slept, the words began to escape through the window. They were tired of being used vulgarly, offensively, or wrongly — of being used to deceive, to lie, to insult. And so a few of them, the worst-treated, broke the chains that bind them to our tongue and set out on an adventure. The first to … Read more →
Traditionalism is an ideology that regards certain past institutions as the most perfect and effective and links them with truth. It is a modern ideology, first explicitly formulated in the political circles that, in nineteenth-century France, reacted against the ravages of the Revolution. The concrete forms to which they appealed were those of the Ancien Régime: throne and altar. Since … Read more →
Where is your saviour?
Where is the one who will destroy all books,
who will hoist you back upon the horse
and send you galloping?
Where is he?
Spiders weave their webs
among the dead beams
of old houses.
They do not weave them to hunt
but to keep those houses
from collapsing,
to hold upright
what abandonment would have
fall to the ground.
Hypotheses, p. 45
There are so many who would wish to keep silent,
but they live always being asked
about everything, by a voice
that is neither in them nor outside,
and they cannot help answering
in a tongue they do not understand
with words they do not understand.
Everything is in perpetual movement.
Nothing repeats itself.
Identity is a piece of sophistry
fit for stubborn spirits.
But listen to the footsteps of all
that moves. Be still — do you not hear
the ceaseless murmur of the void?
We have tiptoed
over the piled-up bodies.
None of them raised a hand
to grasp us by the ankle
and remind us of the mists
of their native shores.
The world goes on beyond words,
but words too go on beyond the world,
toward the clashing abyss of meaninglessness.
Can we tear through their spider’s web
and fly like the bird of prey whose gaze
pierces the distance?
To write for plain men,
for tacky women,
for people who are mad for the crockery
of the great department stores,
for scholars who flatter and buy
the philosopher Wojtyła
or any other humanist on the back cover.
Sometimes enthusiasm comes to our door
and sees the sombre ash of our breathing.
Then it does not know whether to enter or to let
us wither away into sleep.
There will be a tomorrow, it seems to think,
a tomorrow of hesitant footsteps
The idiots know many things.
Let us beg of them the nectar
that God, in his image and likeness,
presses for us.
Let us hear from them the law
that gathers all in sentences
perfect and complete.
I hold in the dawn of my half-light
your swollen light;
your mute eyes spill over
and tumble down the slope
of the void.
All that the body can love
is made of touches and vibrations.
All that can be the object of our desire
is a breaking murmur against the walls.
Light pierces them, and nothing in life
knows emptiness or stillness. Nothing denies us;
The mass is made of glyphs.The glyphs bore through air or earth,never through fire or water.The glyphs conceal fire or water,never air or earth.The poet, with the hammer of his hands,upon the forge of his chest,will beat the mass until the laymen say:That is a form that admits nourishment,a bowl, a jar, a chalice… We Are Wellspring, p. 47
The merchant came and saw
that nothing was left in the marketplace —
that the stalls were empty, that there were no
vases, flutes, carpets, or jewels;
that there were not even stalls, only desert.
They were all saying: it does not matter to us, we know no thirst.
But the merchant still knew it, so he took a shortcut
and brought the inner rain to a halt,
Look:
these peoples are used to being laid waste —
they pitch their tents across the plain, out to the horizon,
and they lie down under the sun to wait for the Tartar.
What are they doing in their prostration?
When I had a job I went to by bus
every morning,
one of my fantasies was to get off
at any of the intermediate stops
and never arrive —
How can we fail to feel the press of so many people
each morning. We feel them
in the belly
and at the crown
of the head
Between everything being free
and nothing being so
lies the whole of the ocean.
And if the extremes touch,
perhaps it is the same thing to spend
one’s existence peeling banknotes
off the body with every act
as to walk across the asphalt