baal > Recent Status Updates

It is always at the moment of change, when we raise up out of the everyday and get a clear of the blinkers of habit, and stand naked into existence, to the moment of choice, vast, dark, windy. The world is huge in these moments. Too big to bear. Visible to all the ghosts in the world, the center of the universe.

The story will move from long house to long house, to everywhere people are enslaved by their rulers, they will speak to each other of the Hodenosaunee, and of a way things could be, all things shared, all people given the right to be a part of the running of things, no slaves, no emperors, no conquest and no submission, people like birds in the sky.

Evolution, like descent, is a metaphor: the question is whether it is a useful metaphor in the context of culture. That question cannot fairly be pre-empted by misrepresenting a figure of speech as a fact.

The colonial era was the last period of “peace” that Europe can be said to have deserved. […] The very Nation being invoked had lost its romantic prestige: the flag protected the interests of the State, not the passions or honour of the best elements in the body social. And the office of the State was now no more than the honorific one of a board of directors […]

La apariencia era una fuerza de ocupación de la realidad, incluso de la más extrema y limítrofe. Vivía en las almas de la gente y también en sus gestos, en la voluntad y en el dolor, en la forma en que uno ordena los recuerdos y ordena las prioridades. […] Dictaba normas, se revolvía contra sus propias normas (en revueltas que podían ser sangrientas, pero que no por eso dejaban de ser aparentes) […]

Sopas, dijo Sergio. Eso, sí, sopas, mucho sopas por aquí y sopas por allá, mucho híjole, mucho chale, mucho sácatelas, pero a la hora de la verdad aquí nadie tiene memoria de nada. Sergio miró el suelo y luego miró la cara cansada de Yolanda Palacio.

There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration.

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The Stare recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again […] and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity.

Don Giovanni is the demon of unalloyed immanence, a prisoner of worldly appearances, and the martyr of a more and more deceptive and despicable sensation, whereas Tristan is the prisoner of a realm lying beyond night and day and the martyr of a rapture which is transformed at death into unalloyed bliss.

Si un monstruo, dispuesto a hacerlo todo por ti, te persiguiera, no dudarías ni por un instante en eliminarlo, ¿no es cierto?

[E]l salvajismo es parte de toda civilización. Sea éste como mero objeto de exotismo observado e interpretado. Sea como espejo en el que los hombres más decentes y evolucionados buscan descifrar su misterio atávico. Pero […] De Bry se refiere a un salvajismo de otra índole: el que caracterizó a los conquistadores españoles.

Después de las matanzas queda una pausa detrás de la cual se adivina nuestro deseo secreto de saborear otras fronteras del horror.

[C]headboard alternations of the light, the steel and steam of the twentieth century, the running man with the history of the continent on his face.

[I]f it’s worth having, the red man shall not be allowed to keep it.

Todavía me volví, ojeando. Siempre quería ver a Diadorín. El bienquerer de uno despidiéndose como una risa y sollozo, en este en medio de la vida.

«Olereré
Bahiana…
Yo me iba
y ya no voy…
Yo hago
que voy
allá dentro, oh bahiana:
¡y me vuelvo
de enmedio
p’atrás!»

El sertón no tiene ventanas ni puertas. Y la regla es así: o usted gobierna bendito el sertón, o el sertón maldito le gobierna… ¿Rechacé aquello?

La miseria en mi mano […] Entonces ¿no sé si vendí? Le digo a usted: mi miedo es éste. ¿No venden todos? Le digo a usted: el diablo no existe, ni hay, y a él le vendí yo el alma… Mi miedo es éste. ¿A quién he vendido? Mi miedo es éste, señor mío: entonces, el alma, la vende uno solo y sin ningún comprador.

I swallowed hard against a wave of nausea, of nausea and something else, they were indistinguishable, seven years, I thought, seven years undone, a betrayal of vocation. But I rejected this even as I thought it, it wasn’t my vocation, it was just something I had done, a way I had passed the time; don’t be so pious, something said in me, and something else cringed away.

Sex had never been joyful for me, or almost never, it has always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did. He had given me so much, I thought, for all that he couldn't give, [...]

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective, to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.

What a curiosity it was to hold a pen—nothing but a small pointed stick, after all, oozing hieroglyphic puddles: a pen that speaks, miraculously, Polish. A lock removed from the tongue. Otherwise the tongue is chained to the teeth and the palate. An immersion into the living language: all at once this cleanliness, this capacity, this power to make a history, to tell, to explain.
To retrieve, to reprieve!
To lie.

To “come along” meant that he would change his ways and consent to be the husband she had traveled so far to find. It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive. For ten years he came along, but when he left her he was the same man she had married.

He remembered the people he had seen in the city, whose eyes held no love for him. And he thought of their feet so swift and brutal, and the dark gray clothes they wore, and how when they passed they did not see him, or, if they saw him, they smirked. And how their lights, unceasing, crashed on and off above him, and how he was a stranger there.

At times abandon meaning to impulse. Let the words be the facts. This was the nature of our walks—to register what was out there, all the scattered rhythms of circumstance and occurrence, and to reconstruct it as human voice.

If you know you’re worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

Ah, para no tener miedo es para lo que se recurre a la rabia.

The guest seems not only to have taken away with him the lives of those who live there, but seems to have to divide them from each other, leaving each one alone with the pain of loss and a no less painful sense of waiting.