Entidades/Entities

 

 

Entidades

Los Ángeles, California. Enero 24, 2015.

No entiendo mi vida, ni la vida. Y menos la muerte. La distancia. El tiempo. La proximidad. La velocidad. (Todas estas ideas son aburridísimas—o sea, el sentir en sí tiene algo de lugar común—pero no dejan de ser poderosas por ser aburridas.) Supongo que vivir no se trata de entender. A veces mientras transito la ciudad veo el movimiento de la gente en sus máquinas o el maquinario de los sistemas de industria y comercio o los engranes de interrelación y conexión humana (o animal) y no entiendo cómo es que funciona el mundo, cómo es que sigue funcionando entre tanto no funcionar. Alguien inventó todo lo que existe—metralletas, arandelas, conejitos de peluche, controles remoto—y, ¿cómo puede ser? ¿A quién se le ocurrió que esta red de violencias podría servir como mundo? ¿Cómo llegamos a este punto? O no es que a alguien se le ocurriera, o que lleguemos, sino que hubo necesidad de algo que sirviera como metralleta, de algo que sirviera como arandela, como conejito de peluche, como control remoto, y acabamos aquí donde estamos. O no acabamos. Seguimos, queriendo este mundo o no. Todo es demasiado efímero. Todo es demasiado pesado. No hay realidad. No hay más que realidad.

¿Cuáles son y dónde están las líneas entre el dolor de la víctima y el dolor dxl compasivx, el dolor dxl auto-determinadx? Si vamos a aproximarnos a la vida (o meramente habitarla, experimentarla—¿y cuál otra opción hay?) de manera consciente y atenta, tenemos que tomar en cuenta los varios dolores que existen y las estructuras de poder que los fabrican, aún si no queremos pensar en términos de “víctima” y “agresor”. ¿En qué términos queremos pensar? Si no vamos a producir, ¿qué hacemos? ¿Reproducir? ¿Proliferar? ¿Hacer?

Cuando dices que el amo “(n)o puede hacer nada ante un mismo y repetido rostro”, pienso en las piernas de las minas en Estilo. Una hilera de niñas con una hilera de piernas donde rostros no hay, identidad no hay, salvo la colectividad de ser minas, explotadas, explosivas. ¿Hacia dónde caminan esas piernas? ¿Qué se puede construir en los cráteres que crean esas explosiones? Estamos en un vórtice. ¿Existe relación alguna que el amo no haya estructurado? Todo es demasiado y nada es suficiente y quizá no se trata de identidades, sino de entidades e identificaciones.

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Entities

Los Angeles, California. January 24, 2015.

I don’t understand my life, nor life itself. And death even less. Distance. Time. Proximity. Velocity. (All these ideas are hugely boring—that is, feeling in itself is something of a cliché—but they don’t cease to be powerful because they're boring.) I don’t suppose living is about understanding. Sometimes as I’m traversing the city I see the movement of people in their machines or the machinery of the systems of industry and commerce or the gears of human (or animal) connection and interrelation and I don’t understand how exactly the world works, how exactly it keeps working in the midst of so much that doesn’t work. Someone invented everything that exists—machine guns, washers, stuffed bunnies, remote controls—and how can that be? Who ever thought this network of violences could function as a world? How did we get to this place? Or perhaps it’s not that someone thought, or that we got somewhere, but rather that there was the necessity for something that might function as a machine gun, something that might function as a washer, as a stuffed bunny, as a remote control, and we’ve ended up here where we are. Or we haven’t ended up. We continue on, wanting this world or not. Everything is too ephemeral. Everything is too weighty. There is no reality. There is nothing but reality.

What and where are the lines between the pain of the victim and the pain of the compassionate, the pain of the self-determined? If we’re going to approach life (or merely inhabit it, experience it—and what other option is there?) in a conscious and attentive way, we have to take into account the myriad pains that exist and the structures of power that manufacture them, even if we don’t want to think in terms of “victim” and “aggressor.” In which terms do we want to think? If we’re not going to produce, what do we do? Reproduce?¹ Proliferate? Make?

When you say that the owner “can’t do anything in the face of a face that’s always the same and repeating,”² I think of the legs of the girls in Estilo.³ A line of girls with a line of legs where there are no faces, there is no identity, other than the collectivity of being minas,⁴ exploited and exploded, explosive. Where do those legs walk? What can be constructed in the craters those explosions create? We are in a vortex. Does any relationship exist that is not structured by the owner? Everything is too much and nothing is enough and perhaps it’s not a question of identities, but rather of entities and identifications.

Translated by Jen Hofer.

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^{1. I’ve been thinking about translation as a form of reproduction—reproduction with inherent mutation, migration, transposition. The reproduction is utterly different from the thing reproduced, but inhabits its body in some way, or is inhabited by its body. Shares a contour, a circulatory system, a series of points plotted on an unmapped terrain traversed by multiple animals not yet imagined. [back]}

^{2. And of course “you” didn’t “say” that—I did, in my translation.[back]}

^{3. http://actionyes.org/issue18/dorantes/dorantes.html[back]}

^{4. The word “mina” in Spanish, which appears in Estilo more than once, functions as a hinge, a portal, a cleft. “Mina” means both “mine” (as in mining or land mines, not the first-person possessive) and, colloquially, “girl.” There is, to my knowledge, no simple and straightforward term in English that can contain this hinge. Girls and mines: synonyms. Sit with that for a moment. [back]}