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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
To celebrate the Year of Mexico in the UK and the Year of the UK in Mexico in 2015, Hay Festival, the British Council and Conaculta have joined forces to bring twenty young Mexican writers under the age of forty, paired with twenty British translators, to an international readership. Broken families, a man in a birdcage, a lone swimmer these stories betray a quest for the self when the feeling of loss pervades. Pushkin Press is proud to present these vibrant and moving narratives from modern Mexico. Adding to the already vast literary tradition of their country with brave new styles, the writers capture an era of shifting boundaries and growing violence, where Mexico s rapid modernization is often felt to be at the cost of its artistic heritage. Contributors are: Juan Pablo Anaya Gerardo Arana Nicolás Cabral Verónica Gerber Pergentino José Laia Jufresa Luis Felipe Lomelí Brenda Lozano Valeria Luiselli Fernanda Melchor Emiliano Monge Eduardo Montagner Anguiano Antonio Ortuño Eduardo Rabasa Antonio Ramos Revillas Eduardo Ruiz Sosa Daniel Saldaña Ximena Sánchez Echenique Carlos Velázquez Nadia Villafuerte
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MÉXICO20
NEW VOICES, OLD TRADITIONS
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Stepping into a party or onto a battlefield, we first scan the crowd for friends. On the battlefield the test of rapport is truth. At a party we have the privilege of choice and adventure, and seek out peers and confidants of equal temperature.
Step into the current day and the place feels like both a party and a battlefield; and I can’t help noticing that we scan the crowd more intently than before.
I’m invited to write here because whichever of the two our time mostly is, it’s also a homogeneous backdrop against which real literature grows more energizing, sparkling out—and from which it behoves us to look beyond our setting for new ideas, invention and beauty. By real literature I mean writing that knowingly splashes through this last honest forum, uninfluenced and for its own sake: that is, art that doesn’t hide itself. In this it’s not from a sense of personal connection that I look first to Mexico, nor for the rapport Mexico and the UK have long shared—after all, they are fellow veterans of empire and conquest, as well as parallel harbours of radical thought—but rather I look to it because its literature takes and wins risks that all writing should, but which our markets by their nature are killing. The pieces that follow are by twenty of Mexico’s outstanding writers under forty, as selected by three of its most celebrated authors: Juan Villoro, Guadalupe Nettel and Cristina Rivera Garza. This debut México20 anthology needs no introduction save to say: hold on to your hat, but do note as you read: the Mexican book market differs from ours, if not necessarily in ways we could recreate—still, from somewhere in the extent of that difference, together with the odds facing new voices, an exceptional level of art emerges. Before you dive in, all I can do is set our scene: it’s the first quarter of the twenty-first century. A battle and a party are under way as this book finds your hands. The battle grows harsher, the party gets wilder, and we watch from the foot of a vertical curve of change. Looking around we’re reminded that as far back as 1930 writers like Walter Lippmann foretold the collapse of the nation state as a viable model of human organization. In his own words, writing between last century’s world wars: “The inexorable pressure of the machines man has invented, of the liberties he has achieved, and of the methods by which he gets his living compel him to forge unity out of the anarchy of separate states.” Today we can see for ourselves that our borders didn’t contain us for long, we can breach them at light speed.
So I say all that remains is to scan this crowd for friends. For someone of our same time watching things unfold from a different point on the spectrum. For comrades, peers and confidants of equal rapport and adventure.
And voilà: here are a damn good few.
D.B.C. PIERRE
JUDGE’S INTRODUCTION
A collection of texts is not always, or not necessarily, a machine designed to produce the past—the confirmation of one or several careers when we turn to look back. Nor need it be the opposite kind of machine—a future generator, whirring into motion as predictions and bets are made. It’s better perhaps to conceive of that same collection as a way of raising windows, from which it’s possible to see—to catch a glimpse of—some of the diverse ways in which certain writers have decided to approach their work in the here and now. In the fiction-reality that characterizes the collective imagination of our times, can a collection of texts participate in what the Argentinian critic Josefina Ludmer called—in reference to her concept of post-autonomous literatures, in which reality is fiction and fiction is reality—the production of the present? Why not? Rather than the creation of a literary corpus or the delineation of strict national borders, this collection is porous and varied. It is founded on the strength and strangeness of the texts themselves: the way in which they question our reading habits and guide our eye to unexpected sites along today’s bloody neoliberal panorama. It’s worth noting here that, although a good number of these authors hold fast to what we recognize as fiction—novels or stories with characters and plots that bring about an “unfolding of meaning over time”—many others look to transgress established notions, juxtaposing forms and mixing up devices in texts that are almost impossible to classify. It’s clear, too, that although Spanish is the dominant language, we’re in multilingual territory—and the texts written in a combination of (at least) two languages might just as well be understood as original works in translation. The very notion of territory, in particular any territory described as national, calls for extensive revision in an era of both forced and sought migrations. Perhaps, as John Berger suggested of Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet’s work, “the here of [these texts] is elsewhere”; perhaps these written works rely, from the outset, on “readers who [are] further and further away”, on that other language towards which they move.
To bring together twenty narrative texts written by authors under the age of forty at the time of selection, to be translated into English: this was the job in hand, entrusted to three of us—all professional readers, yes, but with markedly different reading practices. And, of course, twenty texts cannot be plucked from a pile without conversations, rereadings, differences, debates, disgruntlements, more readings, and, finally, agreements. It must be said that having access from the outset to PDFs of all of the texts under consideration afforded a conversation as rich in textual nuance as in empirical examples. It’s normal, advisable even, to start any search by defining its field of interest. It’s also true that, once the search has begun, the definition of the field, and the field itself, will undergo a constant process of transformation. Narrative is, after all, a living practice—not a lesson set in stone. If we acknowledge that every aesthetic decision inevitably implies an ethics, we must also accept that what is being played out in these authors’ different ways of narrating are different ways of being in the world and of constructing that fiction-reality currently dominated by a state in crisis and a galvanized civil society.
Some of the texts in this anthology have enjoyed the dynamic support of transnational publishing groups—from Mondadori to Planeta, as well as Alfaguara, Anagrama or Tusquets, to mention but five—and their support has helped shape a group of well-known authors, recognized within the national—and in some cases international—arena. Other texts here were first published by indie publishers—Sexto Piso and Almadía are two of the most established; Ditoria is a more recent example—and you will also find authors whose first publications came to be thanks to the resources of state publishers, such as Tierra Adentro. And perhaps this shows us that in the full throes of the globalization of the publishing industry, there is still room—there are still points of entry—for glocal reconsiderations, in some cases even with the assistance of the state, which, not for lack of trying, still hasn’t entirely relinquished its responsibility in matters of cultural production.
What is clear from this selection is that there are Mexican authors who write from abroad (Eduardo Ruiz Sosa, Brenda Lozano, Valeria Luiselli), and authors whose Spanish is the product of a constant rubbing-up against other languages: Zapotec, an indigenous language from the south-east of Mexico (Pergentino José) or Venetian (Eduardo Montagner), for example. Some of the texts take leaps of faith with narratives that blend fiction or autofiction with literary criticism (Juan Pablo Anaya, Verónica Gerber Bicecci), or journalism and literature (Fernanda Melchor). There are authors here rooted in Mexico’s centres of cultural production, in both Mexico City and Guadalajara, but there are also those who have opted to write from less hegemonic positions (Antonio Ramos Revillas, Carlos Manuel Velázquez, Fernanda Melchor, Luis Felipe Lomelí). The argument that this is a collection of texts (and not necessarily authors) is also supported by the inclusion of a chapter from Gerardo Arana’s posthumous novel. Indeed, it’s less important to whom the text belongs than who makes it their own from the experience of another language and from another perspective of fiction-reality, which, shaking off the old passage from Spain to Latin America (or vice versa), is now established from south to north, or north to south, passing—and imperatively so—through the process of translation. Anthologies should not confirm any kind of hierarchy, but rather contain—returning to Berger—a space, ample space, and with this cargo on board set out across the ocean. The crossing, then, lies ahead of us. If we’re lucky, this will be a voyage—which is to say, a conversation.
CRISTINA RIVERA-GARZA Translated by Sophie Hughes
LOVE SONG FOR AN ANDROID
JUAN PABLO ANAYA
One Sunday, to help ease the wretched wait for Monday morning, my parents decided we would go to the cinema. While my mother was keen to escape our emerging residential district in the north of Mexico City—with its empty plots, shanty towns and social-housing blocks—my father was tired. There was no time to pick a film: our destination was decided, it didn’t matter what was on. The Futurama was the neighbourhood giant and the penultimate screening of the night lived up to its name. A dystopia set in Los Angeles in 2019 became the scene of the first stirrings of my sexual life. As the days passed I realized I couldn’t get those images out of my head. I thought then that love was something like this.
—1—
On the screen Lieutenant Deckard is about to be killed by one of the replicants he is searching for, when Rachael—another replicant model—shoots the techno-organism of her own species to save his life. Cut. We’re in Deckard’s apartment. Rachael’s there too. She knows this is the hunter’s home and she’s one of the hunted. But he’s in her debt, so she tells him her plan and asks him a question. It’s about disappearing, running away. “What if I go north? Disappear. Would you come after me?” The debt establishes a contract between them. “No, I wouldn’t. But somebody would.”
With this truce in place, Rachael stays at Deckard’s apartment. The last time she was there, the lieutenant set out to show that her memories were lies, to point out the falseness of her photographs and prove that her recollections were implants: a prosthesis of other people’s stories that had shaped her personality. Convinced by now that she’s a product of biogenetic engineering, it’s her turn to ask the question: “Did you ever take that empathy test yourself?” This is like asking: “How can you be so sure you’re not just one more product of that corporation which makes human copies with artificial emotions?” A saxophone plays a slow phrase, sinuously, softly. A synthesizer offers a bed of harmonies; the music sounds like neon lights, the protocols for a romantic encounter. Lieutenant Deckard says nothing. He sits back in his armchair, drinking whiskey, a pensive look in his eyes.
Deckard is asleep, but the saxophone repeats the same phrase. Rachael is sitting at the piano, where the lieutenant’s family photos are obsessively on show. She plays the piano, he wakes up. “I dreamt music,” he says. But he might as easily have said: “I dreamt I was also a machine,” or: “I dreamt I was falling in love with an android whose accidental perfection was the exact copy of a human being.” Now they’re both awake, Rachael takes up the doubt game again. She says she remembers taking piano lessons, but how to be sure after discovering that this “know-how” we think of as such an important part of ourselves is not a lesson learnt by processing the data gathered by our own senses, but merely the functional result of an implant? If Rachael thinks she knows something, or has felt something, she is always left doubting who really lived it: her or the supposed owner of her memories.
In the middle of this dilemma, the romantic protocol accelerates. A kiss sitting at the piano. Rachael tries to leave the apartment. Deckard won’t let her and pushes her roughly against the wall. The beautiful android responds with stunning clarity: “I can’t rely on my memories.” Her last word is interrupted by the passionate lieutenant, who starts to carry out a type of programming exercise:
“Say ‘Kiss me’.”
“Kiss me…”
“I want you.”
“I want you.”
“Again.”
“I want you. Put your hands on me…”
At that point, my mother—who hadn’t come to terms with the idea that I was already a teenager—went to cover my eyes. Still, the images never left me.
Ten years later, in 1992, Blade Runner was re-edited in line with the director’s original instructions. While Deckard’s lesson to Rachael was clearly successful, it seemed just as fragile. This new version revealed that the detective also possessed a type of “know-how” resulting from implanted memories. We discover this at the end of the film when Lieutenant Gaff leaves an origami unicorn outside his door. The same unicorn he daydreamed about on a daily basis in this new version of the film. The same unicorn that ambushed the sunny dreams of many other replicants.
Over the years, this scene has now and then come back to haunt me. Little by little, a host of questions began to take shape in my head. What would it be like to copulate based on the knowledge formed by other people’s memories? How would you weave back together that abstract pattern of propositions and habits? How could you find in a prosthesis—and perhaps all of us are prostheses—the possibility of fornicating passionately?
—2—
The Nexus 6-model androids that star in the film Blade Runner were created in the image of human beings, but implanted with someone else’s memories. Their experiences are therefore always seen through the eyes of a stranger they confuse with themselves. It’s a situation that makes them incapable of living and, perhaps, also of writing their own story. A newspaper column I came across a few years after seeing the film, entitled ‘A Theory of Replicancy’, underlines this last point. I hardly understood it at the time. Not long ago I searched for the title online and saw it had been published in a book. Now I understand that this “theory of replicancy” interpreted the dystopian landscape of the film as a metaphor for the devastation of peripheral countries, which would be inhabited only by “copies”. According to the short article, in geopolitical terms this condition would be characterized by a system of corporations (located in various centres of power), which, through the flow of merchandise and the symbolic conquest of the collective imagination, would generate an international proletariat with a system of interchangeable values. This diatribe reread the film as an unconscious or veiled metaphor for the power relationships between the centre and the periphery, transforming its human copies into the heroes of this “liberation theory”.
As I write these lines, this reading feels somewhat shortsighted, as it attempts to categorize the birth of a new species as a simple metaphorical representation of reality. It dismisses the two central pledges entrusted to us by this science-fiction story to help us imagine a point in the future: the possibility of being an orphan without nostalgia, and a well-founded sense of suspicion towards our own counterfeit memories.
Any father who procreates using artificial insemination can generate a peculiar sense of absence, an orphan-like state. In the case of these humanoids, the man behind these actions, methods and knowledge is the high priest of biomechanics, who lives at the top of the pyramid-shaped tower belonging to the corporation that shares his name: Dr Tyrell. If a pyramid embodies the archetype of the world as a mountain and the mountain as the giver of life, the Tyrell Corporation building represents the dawn of a historic moment when the dream of machines has finally been realized, with the continuous production of human copies destined to carry out the lowest tasks in the division of labour. Children of a father incapable of engendering unique beings in his own image and likeness, the replicants cannot be considered individuals, as their experiences, knowledge and even the meanings of their memories were not generated naturally through their own bodies. This is the background to the ontological drama that sets the film’s actions in motion.
Descartes’ argument “I think, therefore I am” has caused these beings with superhuman levels of intelligence to question the limits and possibilities of their own identities. Meanwhile, the dangers implied by the Tyrell Corporation’s slogan “more human than human” have been reduced, as the replicants’ tragic flaw is their limited lifespan: just four years. With so little time, and in the knowledge that their memories are simply the haze of someone else’s existence, these androids have organized an uprising to demand just a little more time from their creator. Enough to let them have a past, to build a new set of memories and thereby conquer their own identities: something that Descartes’ theory has not been able to satisfy.
In response to his creatures’ request, Tyrell simply argues that all living beings are condemned to a finite lifespan and that once the wheels are set in motion it is impossible to alter the ageing process of an organic system, unless this ends immediately in death. Faced with this argument, Roy Batty, the leader of the insurrection, carries out a cold, furious act of revenge: he kisses his impotent father, takes his face in both hands, digs his thumbs into his eyes and twists his head until he hears his neck crack.
There is a contrast between this android’s attitude towards his creator and his behaviour to Lieutenant Deckard, the man who is hunting him and has “retired” the rest of his companions. With his father dead and the revolution overthrown, Roy has the look of a wounded animal enjoying his last moments of life by letting loose his most hostile instincts. The roles are reversed: the hunter becomes the hunted. During this chase, Deckard is unable to jump across the gap between two buildings and is left hanging from a ledge. What comes next is essentially a scene that could never have happened with Tyrell. Unlike the doctor, Deckard is no god of biomechanics: he’s a simple warrior fighting on an equal footing. And so, Roy saves Deckard just as he’s about to fall, perhaps because he recognizes the impersonal signs of a life spent dicing with death. You might argue that the experience of recognizing the limits of his own lifespan has led this techno-organism to show pity for all living things. But the concept of pity, when applied to a machine that has obliterated its own father and whose final lease of life is fuelled by a burning desire for revenge, doesn’t ring true. The last time I saw the film I noticed that Deckard never begs for mercy. In fact, he spits at the android, which is what sends him falling into the abyss. It seems, then, that the reason Roy grabs his arm just in time is rather a sense of admiration for the type of life demonstrated by the lieutenant: a life lived beyond the needs of the individual. As if by dicing with death he provides a glimpse of the pure experience of the living, liberated from all its accidents.
The orphan-like state of these “living” beings can be seen in their unstable position within the natural order. One of Rachael’s memories, which Lieutenant Deckard sets out to expose as an implant, describes a cruel scene of matricide. According to Rachael, when she was little girl she had a disturbing recurring dream. In a bush outside her window, a spider had woven the silk web that would be its children’s home. When they were born, they ate their mother. This implant-memory seems to install the original unity myth of a phallic mother in the minds of the Nexus 6-models, in which any desire could be satisfied, and whose primitive body they became emancipated from through an act of violence. It is precisely this narrative of separation that marks them with a longing for a sense of unity with nature, a source of fulfilment, once upon a time, sacrificed in the name of a sinful freedom. But neither Rachael nor any of the other replicants has an original mother. Like them, she is simply a product of technology. Without this primordial connection, the replicants have no place within the order of creation to guarantee their identity as a species. Their ontology excludes them from such a longing.
Children of a techno-scientific bureaucracy, bastards of historical circumstance, the contract that ties these techno-organisms to any authority figure, that would legitimize the meaning of their memories, is not guaranteed by any foundation beyond the instrumental rationality of the living, realized by human inventiveness on a sophisticated production line. As Donna Haraway has said, you can see why these bastard children have no qualms in being unfaithful to their origins. Their parents, after all, are not essential.
The other pledge passed down to us by this story involves the Nexus 6 androids’ complex sensibility structure. This is what allows them to perceive and experience the world around them on the basis of false memories and what tethers them to their simulated personalities. A cruel trick that means they are still capable of establishing some relationship with the future. While all the characters in the film deal with this situation in different ways, only Rachael gives us a glimpse of the limits of such a condition. It’s true that she only appears in the background, as part of the love story experienced by a hired android assassin. Yet in this unnatural alliance between the hunter and the victim, between a man confident of belonging to the human race and his robot lover, they are the first to step beyond the conflict between species that the plot seems to present. Little by little, over the course of the film, Rachael discovers herself to be a perfect, synthetic doll. The watershed moment happens when she performs, through the act of coitus, an impersonal melody brought to the stage by her implanted memories with the precision of a robotic mime.
Rachael first met Deckard when he made her take the empathy test: a questionnaire aimed at evaluating her emotional responses to scenarios with varying levels of drama by observing the dilation of her pupils. This test was designed to prove whether the subject under examination came from the ranks of the production lines or whether he or she could claim to be unique. On that occasion Rachael asked Deckard the following question: “Have you ever retired a human by mistake?” Another question echoes clearly between the lines: “What is the difference between a replicant and a human?” The film suggests that identity is founded on a relatively fragile quality: memory. The hypothesis that gives Deckard’s test meaning is that human experiences create a singular set of memories over the course of time. This creates a type of fold in our being, different for each individual, which helps us curb the unlimited flow of images over time, establishing a brief interval where we can interpret any new event based on what has gone before. In other words, those yesterdays frozen in our memory enable us to approach and measure any new eventuality, activating a particular emotional response. Each individual, then, shapes a unique point of view. The experiences folded into his or her memory transform that person into a singular expression of reality.
Blade Runner’s replicants almost reach this level of individuation. In fact, Roy’s elegiac monologue in his last moments of life affects us so deeply precisely because it alludes to the value that mortals place on the memory folded into our bodies, which will be lost forever after his death:
“I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
Listening to this speech, I can’t help asking myself what will die with me when I die. Will my love for Rachael die? Is that why I’m writing these lines? The sense of optimism with which the rebel leader describes the wonder of his own experiences contrasts starkly with the level of distrust that the android’s phrase “I can’t rely on my memories” shows towards any record from the past.
Rachael’s scepticism echoes one of the first replicant theories ever put forward. In that thesis, Bertrand Russell argued that it is impossible to refute logically the hypothesis that the world was created five minutes ago with a population that “remembers” a completely imaginary past. Anything that seems to date back a little further, to the depths of time, could be an elaborate tableau put together by a corporation in the mind of a group of robots. The mechanism of these staged scenarios could be similar to that of writing horoscopes, in which the voice of destiny expresses itself through the random selection of groups of phrases from among a bank of thousands. In the same way, it is possible to imagine a company dedicated to mixing—with the intensity of an adventure novel and the continuity of a Bildungsroman—photo albums, film and TV images, as well as some more subjective shots (sometimes a little blurred), to generate real industrial personalities. A model that is no longer the copy of a human being: the Nexus 7 android. This simple idea forces us to distance ourselves from any hasty elegy and undermines the concept of the individual that gives us goosebumps when we hear the rebel android’s speech. In the end, with a memory like the one just described, his sense of self would be nothing more than a random pastiche.
—3—
The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a subsection of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.
GEORGE ORWELL
Being born into an atmosphere of collective dreams finally leads us to personify them, making our organisms ever more subtly organized. Little by little, an efficient body is formed over the course of our daily routines. With increasing levels of skill, we control our sphincters, our blushing faces and the length of our laughter, deftly managing our nervousness to hide or overcome it. In this sense, fiction sometimes does “the living” a favour, creating characters that go beyond any typology defined by a group of sociologists. Immersing myself in another possible world has helped me dislodge a certain character who was beginning to put down roots inside my body. That’s not to say that the process of invention carries out some kind of exorcism. It’s just that sometimes it can discover a wellspring where stereotypes become transformed. In search of that stream, I decided to write about Rachael and others of her species.
In 1984, two years after Blade Runner first appeared at the box office, a radio station was airing an apocalyptic promo that evoked the landscape of the film, but with an all-too-familiar setting: “Out of the rear-view mirror we see the Petróleos Mexicanos gas plant going up in flames.” The closing line was: “We are the dystopia Orwell imagined.” Various characteristics of the 1984 I lived through were similar to Orwell’s Oceania, but the one that stands out most for me is the industrial production of a certain media coolture. I remember how long it took my mother—just a few years after arriving in the city—to digest that extreme saturation of images, advertisements and sentimental soap operas, where the bad sister fought with the good sister over the same man—a crying shame, in my mother’s opinion. In fact, our media landscape was not unlike the one described in the novel:
There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.
I don’t know if the radio advert was referring to this type of industrial production. However, the dystopia I’m interested in is perfectly summed up by the image of the versificator: an efficient device that produces stereotypes in precisely the right way to stir the audience’s feelings. In the symmetry of the images it reproduced, this kaleidoscope vocalized precisely those forms of ready-made subjectivity that I eagerly began to take on myself. The world I saw around me became embedded in my body, always through the use of that versificator. I grew up with it and, like a backdrop to my life, it plays a relentless soundtrack that accompanies every moment of my days.
The implanted memory that shaped the feelings of BladeRunner’s most sophisticated replicants can be seen as an analogy for our own experience. The daily intake of TV series, breakfast cereals, songs, porn magazines and a long etcetera forms a complex framework of values and discourses that has shaped us more than any national myths, the catechism or the Boy Scout code of conduct. This implanted memory could be said to define our existence just as it did in the case of the replicants.
Acknowledging our relationship with the characters in the film allows us to distance ourselves from our own habits: a chance to accept our experiences as a series of events to which our possible reactions have been predetermined by an implant-memory. This is the first bond we share with the androids of the film: a set of feelings shaped by a memory that has formed our habits and left us with a type of enigma: a ghost in the machine. The anima that drives the machine forward. Our second link to the androids is their implanted personalities, which cause the past we remember to lose all authenticity. We then catch a glimpse of a system built around time-bound robots, always on the brink of reinterpreting nobody’s story (their implanted memory) based on the chance events that come their way.
Rachael becomes the protagonist of the first true post-replicant act. This consists of picking herself apart to observe her own mechanical processes, finding a personal strategy to allow her to experience life again. The phrase “I can’t rely on my memories” is the starting point for methodically observing the habits that make up who we are. Our habits don’t “shape” the spongy substance that makes up our organisms. Instead our body is formed as an organism through the daily exercise of that memory in which our habits put down roots.
As the author of these lines, I take every possible opportunity to investigate how my own sexual or erotic behaviour is shaped, firstly, by a set of romantic ideals, almost all of them based on the dramas found in hair-metal ballads, with a rebel who lives the passion and suffers the misfortune of finally “opening up his heart”. After these clichés have achieved their desired effects, we can see how the beginning, middle and climax of my sexual experiences have been adapted to fit the natural progression, in the eyes of any porn consumer, from soft to hard core. In short, I invite you to imagine the substance of your genitals and the rest of your body made up of water, protein, blood, tissue, romantic ballads and cheap porn… And give me something to believe in, yeah!
If there is some kind of enigma to be unravelled, it can be found precisely in what, for a long time, has seemed to demand no questions. We breathe air so naturally that we don’t even notice it. The same thing happens with the habits passed on to us by memory. A post-replicant act doesn’t seek to denounce the falseness of our implanted memories, or try to achieve some kind of ontological promotion (such as the one sought by Roy’s rebellion) by arbitrarily distinguishing between the real memories and the silicon ones. On the contrary, it aims to reuse and reorganize those implants. We can think of our set of memories as the collection of pieces that make up a jigsaw puzzle. The image that appears when we bring the different pieces together is what defines our identity. The legacy of this set of memories makes up the “know-how” of our habits. With the phrase “I can’t rely on my memories”, Rachael blurs the outline of the image shown on her jigsaw puzzle, offering us the possibility of a free collection of impersonal pieces and fragments that we can reshape and complete whenever the present requires a new set of memories in order to build an experience.
Knowing my body is shaped by an implanted memory has led me to conclude that, like Rachael, I need a strategy so I can experience again. So I can think again.
—4—
In nineteen-eighty-always, ah what times we had.
PAULO LEMINSKI
It’s the year 2009. For someone born almost four decades earlier, there’s something futuristic about this date. A few days ago I peeled the plastic cover off a new DVD that someone had given me the previous Christmas and that claims to be Blade Runner´s “definitive edition”. I watched the film again. The differences between this version and the 1996 “Director’s Cut” are minimal: a few complementary scenes, clearer images and a shade of blue that tints the whole film with the blurry quality of neon light. With these new tones, I relived my old love for Rachael. However, this time I knew there was nothing to remember. Questioning my memories to discover who I was now and how I had changed since that day in 1982 when I first saw the film was a cliché that would contradict the lesson those images had drilled into my body. Instead I decided to explore a different question: how can I make myself a stranger to my own memories?
Neurologists make a distinction between long-term and short-term memory. Long-term memory always relates to questions about who I am and what knowledge I have. It’s encyclopaedic and invites us to remember a long story that began in our childhoods. On the other hand, while short-term memory is based on long-term memory, it includes oblivion as part of its dynamic. It selects from a series of preconceived ideas and weaves them together with elements from the world of experience in a form of code-capture process. This mechanism allows us to act again, or write again, despite our own underdevelopment, and is always motivated by the constant movement of our desire. Short-term memory is not about constantly creating a tabula rasa, a clean slate to overturn the traps set for us by our implant-memories. This would make perception impossible, and would make the journey of writing an impossible process. Instead it always takes the implanted memory as its starting point, and weaves in and out of it, intermingling and celebrating its infinite variations in each new union with the world.
The post-replicant act I saw in Rachael takes place in the gap between my short- and long-term memory. In this interval I can build the foundation for a post-replicant practice, by following this new code of conduct:
I will avoid letting my experiences stagnate in a closed group that claims to give me certainties about my identity.I will accept the present as a constant roll of the dice. Any piece of information might help me reshape what I see as “knowledge”.I will prefer an eloquent lie to a handful of sterile truths. I will scorn anything that attempts to instruct me without increasing my vital force.I will transform my memory into a mutant animal, an open group, always on the brink of expansion, conquest and code capture. I will populate my memories with other people’s ghosts. I will turn them into flesh and blood by using them to give sense to my actions, just as if I’d once lived them myself.I will ingest any type of story and fragment of junk information, with the hunger of a bulimic girl afraid of such calorific content settling in her body.I will process data on a superficial level. Within the minutiae of my short-term memory, any piece of junk information could reappear and assert itself as a meaningful fragment that demands to be included in my long-term memory group.I will therefore reset what I consider to be my “knowledge” whenever chance hands me a media-based epiphany: the kind that causes some fragment of junk to appear on the surface of my memory.With great fanfare and with no apocalypse, I hope these strategies will help me access a universe of staged scenes, where everything starts unassumingly at the touch of a “play” button—although it seems that button is always being pressed by someone else. Having dismissed the possibility of feeling nostalgia, these are the only love songs I can sing to my favourite android.
Translated by Catherine Mansfield
From the essay collection Kant y los extraterrestres
METH Z
GERARDO ARANA
METH Z
The stone was rolled away
MARK 16:4
