El ave infló el pecho emuplumado y emitió su visceral graznido, el que tanto le envidio. Me vió ahí parada, batió fuertemente las alas, una, dos, tres veces, y se avalanzó hacia las alturas su deseo.
Me subí al auto, conduje diez kilómetros, y estacioné bajo la ventana de él. Me quedé contemplando las alturas de su terraza, y hubiera deseado ser lo suficientemente audaz para dar el temido salto. O al menos emitir un llamado audible.
No se adonde habrá llegado aquél pájaro que me inspiró. Pero se que yo morí en la orilla.

STRANGER SONG - LEONARD COHEN

www.quedeletras.com

(white whale)

It was not just the whiteness of the whale's skin but what was written on it.

The hereditary scars.

The way they appeared of their own accord more and more forming a network of incomprehensible commandments.


*

She knew that the metaphor of the whale continued to patrol the coastal waters of her national imagination like a restless lover.

And that the hunt for it seemed to be repetitive, and compulsive.

And that each hunt ended up bound to the whale by the difficult rope of its own discursive harpoon and that grievous human suffering was usually involved.


*


She knew that one likely referent for the whale was the leviathan obsessions of the entire metaphorical body of her nation.

With its vast apparatus of conquest and its high-frequency cries of longing.

Into which the figures of individual speech were continually being swallowed like an encyclopedic series of phosphorescent microscopic organisms or Biblical prophets.

*

But that at the same time the whale was also in reference to some alternate and dreadfully impinging state of things.

That it was not just exhaustive and inexhaustible but possessed of some mute and terrible reality that was the object of infinite national desire.

So that the figure of Ishmael alone in the water became more and more important to her.

*

As though Ishmael were a kind of reduction of the whale to some secular remnant.

As though by clinging to Ishmael she might have some kind of reduced hope for the release of her nation, or at least for the salvage of a traumatized but serviceable discourse of relative sanity.

As though relative sanity were what her nation actually wanted, or ever had.

Ann Killough

ALIENACIÓN

"Proceso mediante el cual el hombre o una colectividad transforman su conciencia hasta hacerla contradictoria con lo que debía esperarse de su condición. Estado de ánimo, individual o colectivo, en que el hombre se siente ajeno a su trabajo o a su vida auténtica."

Cuando Elisa se encontró con Mauro, escaneó su imagen e infirió a partir de ella las definiciones básicas. Puede llegar a servir para una suplencia, pero no para un cargo efectivo. Un tabique nasal que evidenciaba antigua rotura, puños cerrados y mirada evasiva, fueron las pruebas que relevaron el interrogatorio.
Mauro se sometió al examen no sin quejarse. "No me juzgues por eso..." Se supo bajo la lupa de Elisa y sintió cierta inquietud, responsable de la tensión de sus músculos, de esos puños cerrados que dan cuenta que el observador indefectiblemente altera lo observado.
Fue fácil encontrar los adjetivos y sustantivos con que enmarcar el pretendido encuentro. Al menos ambos utilizaban el mismo sistema operativo, haciendo verosímil la fantasía de vasos comunicantes. Bin/bash, línea de comandos. Donde Bash es caparazón, propiamente concha re-editada -Bourn Again Shell- una forma de habitar y de encarar los vínculos. Donde bin/bash precede a toda acción, y procede de la arcaica dialéctica entre miedo y deseo. El lenguaje impone economía, y una forma expeditiva y tipificada de razonar. La vida impone dinamismo, porque el tiempo es el mayor de nuestros tesoros, y el deseo manda.


Bin/bash bicho, aventura, affaire. Con cada encuentro, Mauro y Elisa se iban conociendo menos. Resultó que Elisa era una utilidad creada en JAVA, Just Another Vague Acronym, popular lenguage de programación que en su pueblo se traducía A.M.O.R: Antiguo Modo de Ordenar la Reproducción. Atrás de ese bin/bash, comando... estaba la creencia de que el sexo es un encuentro trascendente. Recién a los treinta y pico, y tras tres divorcios, descubre que amor y sexo no son una y la misma cosa. Descubre que el sexo también puede ser una sofisticada manera de alienarse. De impedir la invasión emocional del otro.
Y resultó también, que Mauro se desarrolló en GeneXus, de género somos, herramienta basada en conocimiento básicamente visual, sobre el que se generan rápida y económicamente adaptaciones y homoestasis. Sexo es pene y vagina, porque cuando tenía 14 años su tío lo llevó a debutar con una puta, vieja y fea, pero paciente y comprensiva. Tras varios años de matrimonio, llegó a vislumbrar que el sexo era también una forma de encuentro, un campo de despliegue de afecto e intimidad. Luego su mujer lo dejó, porque no quería un perrito faldero, sino un alto nivel de adrenalina en sangre, y una vida rodeada de lujo: infinita capacidad de consumo cuanto más indiscriminado, mejor.

El problema de este lenguage basado en la identificación de género con sus roles y estereotipos acerca de las agrupaciones de líneas de comando y sus jerarquías, es que genera conflictos con la información no visual. Lo que Mauro veía en Elisa no coincidía con lo que Elisa verbalizaba, ni con el olor de Elisa. Pero eligió ignorar estos detalles.
Las distracciones salen caro. El empecinamiento con que Mauro y Elisa se adherían a sus lenguages (por no tener alternativa) los obligó a ignorar los incidentes críticos que al irse acumulando en la sombra de su conciencia, en los márgenes de la experiencia, fueron elevando la temperatura de ciertos componentes básicos vitales, sus memorias, para desembocar finalmente en un error fatal: alienación, convertida en hábito, irreversible.

Mercedes Bocage

www.quedeletras.com

Mis amigos en casa

Cada uno en su lugar... que lindo es reunirse con amigos y encontrarlos cada cual donde uno pensaba. Anoche cambiamos el habitual juego de las escondidas por el siempre renovado de verdad o consecuencia. Donde a la luz de los foquitos y las velas, quien optó por momentos por la segunda, quedó en saludable evidencia. Más allá de nuestros ritornellos y nuestras fugas, de los cuentos en que nos enredamos para no se bien qué... el sentimiento siempre es como de reunión familiar. Lazos de referencia y de pertenencia, por los que me siento agradecidísima a la vida. Que la una loca, que la otra también, que el otro malvado y trucho, que el otro la pura bondad y transparencia. Constelamos siendo juntos, dando cuenta del tiempo que pasa sin cambiar lo que nos identifica, reconociendonos en nuestras viejas coordenadas, para la paz de mi alma.
Hay una parte olvidada de mi que resucita cada vez que nos reunimos. La parte más joven de mi, que celebra la amistad.

SCAVENGER

I have been where you are now. I've been eaten and digested, and evacuated painlessly. I sunk in the earth, I was reborn as a worm, and thus I became a part of the vulture I looked up to. Never a worm was as eager to be eaten as myself. I've always been such a creeper. I hid in the heart of the hyena my beloved vulture cherished. I know for certain, he would've never coveted me, for myself.

And thus I became a part of his bloodstream, and here I am now, cutting through the clouds, landing recklessly wherever some exciting odor carries us. I'm seeing through his eyes, I make his wings flap strongly. I'm not with him, i'm in him, and more accurately I can say I am him. I know all his secrets... which hasn't made me love him less. But... you know the way proximity breeds contempt.

Only today I saw you, with that lustful look on your face, right the moment you were struggling your way into that obscure rotten liver you were tunneling into, meaning to cheat on us. I can say, my fellow annelid, on the grounds of my wide experience and all my travelling, that destiny is not as far stretched as you now believe. That the sky is as humid and dark and uncertain as the earth that nests you, and perfect happiness doesn't blossom in the dry branches where we perch. I believe your home may well be a flower you yourself have nurtured. I firmly believe your soul mate is not the next link in the food chain, and rather your neighbor. So love thy neighbor, sister. Twist around each other, enjoy and reproduce the sheer delight of togetherness, being who you are, where you are, for the wellbeing of the world.

I can contain my beast now, so I part. Aware, and empty.

Mercedes Bocage

LEONARD COHEN - A THOUSAND KISSES DEEP

And sometimes when the night is slow,
The wretched and the meek,
We gather up our hearts and go,
A thousand kisses deep.

Confined to sex, we pressed against
The limits of the sea:
I saw there were no oceans left
For scavengers like me.
I made it to the forward deck.
I blessed our remnant fleet –
And then consented to be wrecked,
A thousand kisses deep.

I’m turning tricks, I’m getting fixed,
I’m back on Boogie Street.
I guess they won’t exchange the gifts
That you were meant to keep.
And quiet is the thought of you,
The file on you complete,
Except what we forgot to do,
A thousand kisses deep.

DESIRE

... TO extend oneself in desire, but to meet in a sacrament. It to draw body's tears in form of living water,

Gratitude and love.

To be given this and recognize it- is also to have an idea of what it means to be alone at noon.

And to hear from within

the echo from a round well

and in it-- to make out the trace

of a conversation,

like no other

sound

DESIRE, some kind of minor love, selfish, careless, childish, enchantingly beautiful. As love, an emotion, primary and our own... meant to share. To kiss, to taste, to bite, to be aroused by a smell. To lick, to taste, to bite your tongue and push you inside me fast, right now, and elevate in a white swirl of electricity, and shout, and laugh or whine... up there, where the wild you and the wildest me get assembled.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough

to make every minute holy.

I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough

just to lie before you like a thing,

shrewd and secretive.

I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,

as it goes toward action,

and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times

when something is coming near,

I want to be with those who know secret things

or else alone.

I want to be a mirror for your whole body,

and I never want to be blind, or to be too old

to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.

I want to unfold.

I don't want to stay folded anywhere,

because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

And I want my grasp of things true before you.

I want to describe myself like a painting that I looked at closely for a long time,

like a saying that I finally understood,

like the pitcher I use every day,

like the face of my mother,

like a ship that took me safely through the wildest storm of all.

THE JOURNEY - MARY OLIVER

love is the miracle

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver