Flights

Que no, que no
Que el pensamiento no puede tomar asiento
Que el pensamiento es estar
Siempre de paso, de paso, de paso
(Luís Eduardo Aute)

“… descubrí que –pese a todos los peligros– siempre sería mejor lo que se movía que lo estático, que sería más noble el cambio que la quietud, que lo estático estaba condenado a desmoronarse, degenerar y acabar reducido a la nada; lo móvil, en cambio, duraría incluso toda la eternidad.”

"Contonéate, muévete, no dejes de moverte. Solo así lo despistarás. Quien rige los destinos del mundo no tiene poder sobre el movimiento y sabe que nuestro cuerpo al moverse es sagrado, solo escaparás de él mientras te estés moviendo. Ejerce su poder sobre lo inmóvil y petrificado, sobre lo inerte y quieto…Porque todo lo asentado en este mundo, sea Estado, Iglesia o gobierno humano, todo lo que en este infierno conserva su forma está a su servicio…Hacer planes, esperar resultados, consultar horarios, vigilar el orden… Quién se detenga quedará petrificado, quién se pare será disecado… Por eso los tiranos de cualquier calaña, servidores del infierno, llevan en su sangre el odio a los nómadas, por eso persiguen a gitanos y judíos, por eso obligan a toda persona libre a asentarse, la marcan con una dirección que es para nosotros una condena…Bienaventurado es quien camina.”

“de cintura para arriba está tranquilo, relajado y soñoliento; de cintura para abajo, imparable. A todas luces se compone de dos personas. Arriba anhela paz y justicia; abajo se muestra transgresor y quebranta todos los principios. Arriba tiene nombre, apellido, dirección y número de carnet de identidad; abajo no tiene nada que decir sobre su persona, en realidad está harto de sí mismo.”

“… nos inmortalizaremos mutuamente en hojas de papel, nos plastinaremos, nos sumergiremos en el formaldehído de frases”.

"No son pocos los que creen que el sistema de coordenadas del mundo determina un punto perfecto donde el tiempo y el espacio alcanzan un acuerdo. Debe de ser por eso por lo que se marchan de casa, creen que moviéndose, aunque sea de modo caótico, aumentarán las posibilidades de dar con ese punto. Hallarse en el momento y en el lugar adecuados, aprovechar la oportunidad, agarrar por el flequillo el instante, y entonces el código de la cerradura se desactivará, la combinación de cifras del premio gordo quedará al descubierto, la verdad, revelada. No pasarlo por alto, surfear sobre la casualidad, las coincidencias, los giros del destino. No se necesita nada más, basta con comparecer en esa configuración única de tiempo y espacio. Ahí se puede encontrar un gran amor, la felicidad, un décimo premiado de la lotería o la explicación de un misterio que todo el mundo lleva años buscando en vano, o la muerte. Algunas mañanas da la impresión de que tal momento está al caer, tal vez sea hoy mismo".

“…una promesa de que quizá volvamos a nacer y esta vez será en el momento y lugar adecuados.”

Am I doing the right thing be telling stories? Wouldn’t it be better to fasten the mind with a clip, tighten the reins and express myself not by means of stories and histories, but with the simplicity of a lecture, where in sentence after sentence a single though gets clarified, and then others are tacked onto it in the succeeding paragraphs. I could use quotes and foot notes …. I would be the mistress of my own text …. As it is I’m taking on the role of midwife, or of the tender of a garden whose only merit is at best sowing seeds and later to fight tediously against weeds. Tales have a kind of inherent inertia that is impossible to fully control. They require people like me – insecure, indecisive, easily led astray

I studied psychology in a big gloomy communist city … that part of the city had been built up on the ruins of the ghetto, which you could tell if you took a good look – that whole neighbourhood stood about three feet higher than the rest of the town. Three feet of rubble.

Sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death. But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different type of time for themselves, one that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress towards a goal, a destination … And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things

Whenever I set off on a journey I fall off the radar. No one knows where I am …………… [those like me] show up all of a sudden in the arrivals terminal and start to exist when the immigrations officers stamp their passpots, or where the polite receptionist at whatever hotel hands over their key”

She falls asleep too fast, exhausted from jetlag, like a lone card taken out of its deck and shuffled into another, strange one.

There are different kinds of looking. One kind of looking allows you to simply see objects, useful human things, honest and concrete, which you know right away how to use and what for. And then there’s panoramic viewing, a more general view, thanks to which you notice links between objects, their network of reflections. Things cease to be things, the fact that they serve a purpose is insignificant, just a surface. Now they’re signs, indicating something that isn’t in the photographs, referring beyond the frames of the pictures. You have to really concentrate to be able to maintain that gaze, as its essence it’s a gift, grace.

"Age all in your mind. Gender grammatical. I actually buy my books in paperback, so that I can leave them without remorse on the platform, for someone else to find. I don’t collect anything."

"Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that – in spite of all the risks involved – a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity. From then on, the river was like a needle inserted into my formerly safe and stable surroundings, the landscape comprised of the park, the greenhouses with their vegetables that grew in sad little rows, and the pavement with its concrete slabs where we would go to play hopscotch. This needle went all the way through, marking a vertical third dimension; so pierced, the landscape of my childhood world turned out to be nothing more than a toy made of rubber from which all the air was escaping, with a hiss."

"Without the bells and whistles, its description boils down to the insistence of one’s consciousness on returning to certain images, or even the compulsive search for them. It is a variant of the Mean World Syndrome, which has been described fairly exhaustively in neuropsychological studies as a particular type of infection caused by the media. It’s quite a bourgeois ailment, I suppose. Patients spend long hours in front of the TV, thumbing at their remote controls through all the channels till they find the ones with the most horrendous news: wars, epidemics and disasters. Then, fascinated by what they’re seeing, they can’t tear themselves away."

"They’d set up in the designated areas, at campsites where they were always in the company of others just like them, having lively conversations with their neighbours surrounded by socks drying on tent cords. The itineraries for these trips would be determined with the aid of guidebooks that painstakingly highlighted all the attractions. In the morning a swim in the sea or the lake, and in the afternoon an excursion into the city’s history, capped off by dinner, most often out of glass jars: goulash, meatballs in tomato sauce. You just had to cook the pasta or the rice. Costs were always being cut, the Polish zloty was weak – penny of the world. There was the search for a place where you could get electricity and then the reluctant decamping after, although all journeys remained within the same metaphysical orbit of home. They weren’t real travellers: they left in order to return. And they were relieved when they got back, with a sense of having fulfilled an obligation. They returned to collect the letters and bills that stacked up on the chest of drawers. To do a big wash. To bore their friends to death by showing pictures as everyone attempted to conceal their yawns. This is us in Carcassonne. Here’s my wife with the Acropolis in the background.""

"Here we were taught that the world could be described, and even explained, by means of simple answers to intelligent questions. That in its essence the world was inert and dead, governed by fairly simple laws that needed to be explained and made public – if possible with the aid of diagrams. We were required to do experiments. To formulate hypotheses. To verify. We were inducted into the mysteries of statistics, taught to believe that equipped with such a tool we would be able to perfectly describe all the workings of the world – that ninety per cent is more significant than five."

"Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows what an arduous task it is, undoubtedly one of the worst ways of occupying oneself. You have to remain within yourself all the time, in solitary confinement. It’s a controlled psychosis, an obsessive paranoia manacled to work, completely lacking in the feather pens and bustles and Venetian masks we would ordinarily associate with it, clothed instead in a butcher’s apron and rubber boots, eviscerating knife in hand. You can only barely see from that writerly cellar the feet of passers-by, hear the rapping of their heels. Every so often someone stops and bends down and glances in through the window, and then you get a glimpse of a human face, maybe even exchange a few words. But ultimately the mind is so occupied with its own act, a play staged by the self for the self in a hasty, makeshift cabinet of curiosities peopled by author and character, narrator and reader, the person describing and the person being described, that feet, shoes, heels, and faces become, sooner or later, mere components of that act. "

"As far as I can tell, this is mankind’s most honest cognitive project. It is frank about the fact that all the information we have about the world comes straight out of our own heads, like Athena out of Zeus’s. People bring to Wikipedia everything they know. If the project succeeds, then this encyclopaedia undergoing perpetual renewal will be the greatest wonder of the world. It has everything we know in it – every thing, definition, event, and problem our brains have worked on; we shall cite sources, provide links."

"An old friend of mine once told me how he hated travelling alone. His gripe was: when he sees something out of the ordinary, something new and beautiful, he so wants to share it with someone that he becomes deeply unhappy if there’s no one around.

I doubt he would make a good pilgrim."

"There is a certain well-known syndrome named after Stendhal in which one arrives in a place known from literature or art and experiences it so intensely that one grows weak or faints. There are those who boast they have discovered places totally unknown, and then we envy them for experiencing the truest reality even very fleetingly before that place, like all the rest, is absorbed by our minds."

"Obsession is, in any case, the premonition of the existence of an individual language, an irreproducible language through the attentive use of which we will be able to uncover the truth. We must follow this premonition into regions that to others might seem absurd and mad. I don’t know why this language of truth sounds angelic to some, while to others it changes into mathematical signs or notations. But there are also those to whose whim it speaks in a very strange way."

"I want to know, and not give in to logic. What do I care about a proof from the outside, framed as a geometric argument? It provides merely a semblance of logical consequence and of an order pleasing to the mind."

"Tales have a kind of inherent inertia that is never possible to fully control. They require people like me – insecure, indecisive, easily led astray. Naive."