the sunset and the arrow
Julio would have liked to be a hunter of sunsets—and what he says he would film tells us a great deal about his own writing and why we might want to read it. “I know that a good sunset doesn’t last more than twenty minutes between climax and anti-climax, two things I would eliminate in order to leave only its slow internal play, its kaleidoscope of imperceptible mutations.”1
Like so much in his writing, what matters in his sunsets are not those things called “beginning” and “end”. It’s not that there aren’t those kinds of points (although with Julio’s work, as with a sunset, they can be much trickier to pinpoint than the meteorologist’s report in the newspaper would lead you to believe). Nor is it that those aren’t interesting points (indeed, in Julio’s universe, those are often interesting precisely because they lift the usual veil and reveal a blurry, shifting, less defined aspect).
The problem with the beginning and the end, the climax and the anticlimax, has to do with our conditioning; with our habit of drawing straight lines with arrows pointing in only one direction whenever someone hands us two dots. When the dots-turned-endpoints-of-line stretch and curve into parentheses enclosing something beautiful, or vital, or joyful, something whose closure marks the beginning of the rest of our workaday life. That’s when the habit of taking our sunsets or our art like medicine (whether we choke it down or lap it up) becomes life-threatening. That’s the sign that perhaps we need less medicine—and much more of what the medicine produces—spread not as exception, but as the very stuff of life.
Julio’s attention to the middle – like Deleuze’s (things only begin to live in the middle) or Serres’ (the middle is where you begin to learn [Ù73]) – helps to disable those habits of attention (or lack thereof).
Julio’s sunset finds its analogue in Marx’s understanding of communism as brought forward to our time and place by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt who quote him: “Communism is the real movement” – read it with emphasis on the words “real movement” – “that destroys the present state of things.”2
Like the sunset for Julio—perceived only in fleeting, shifting transformation—so too with the process Marx called ‘communism’: not a fixed destination but a real movement, irreducible to endpoint or ideology. Hence the stance of C. L. R. James (and Negri and others) who looked for it and invented (or discovered) it precisely in those places where it didn’t march triumphantly with banners and announcements.
“A chronicler,” Walter Benjamin believed, “who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past.”3
Julio liked chroniclers like this. He called them “polygraphs who cast their fishing poles in all directions, pretending at the same time to be half-asleep like Dr. Johnson, and who find a way to fulfill a task spread out over such themes as tea, the correction of bad taste in milk, and the court of Augustus, not to mention Scottish bishops.”4
With just about everything in Julio’s universe – erotic couplings, moonlight, visions of harmony, walking the streets, whatever – there is constant movement. They can only be glimpsed, never grasped whole (beginning to end), any more than the those entities we call “selves” or “others” can be grasped whole and analyzed. Simply glimpsed, a glimpse then registered and sagely passed on (communicated like a virus) in other terms like a twist in a spiral.
The kairos, in Greek, was “the right moment” or “the opportune”. In archery “an opening or opportunity . . . a long tunnel-like aperture through which the archer’s arrow has to pass.” This requires timing and force. In weaving it is “‘the critical time’ (the opening in time?) When the weaver must draw the yarn through a gap that momentarily opens in the warp of the cloth being woven.”5
Eric Charles White turns kairos into a guidepost for invention: “kairos therefore counsels thought to act always, as it were, on the spur of the moment. Such an activity of invention would renew itself and be transformed from moment to moment as it evolves and adapts itself to newly emergent contexts. The fluid and relative moments of the immediate situation would be constitutively involved in the invention process, which would be become an improvisational one, a more or less successful attempt to “make do” with whatever is conveniently at hand.
Kairos thus establishes the living present as point of departure or inspiration for a purely circumstantial activity of ‘invention.’” It’s the art of good jazz, of good comedy, of good boxing, of good life – hence, perhaps, Julio’s passion for these things. And it is, for Antonio Negri – for whom kairos is “the present, but a singular and open present” – it is the art of good revolution; hence, perhaps, Julio’s passion for that [Ù60].6
All of it, all this attention, and skill in glimpsing, dexterity in improvisation, say, with a sunset, is vital, I mean vital, not because it “recharges our batteries” so we can totter mindlessly along behind the Energizer Bunny, but because it is the creation of moments “when, perhaps, we see ourselves a little more naked . . . and it’s painful and useful; maybe others can make use of it too, you never know.”7
Down here in Oaxaca, I know the sun is setting, not by looking West, but by what happens to the light lying upon the mountains to the East. Blinding, washed-out brightness of overhead sun yields to aura, glow of dusty green somehow passing into golds and reds and browns, before turning finally, just after my birds rise and take flight and … “maybe others can make use of it too, you never know.”
“A true author,” Julio once observed, “is one who stretches his bow to its full extent while writing, and afterwards hangs it on a nail and goes to drink wine with his friends. The arrow speeds through the air and will hit the target or not, as the case may be, only imbeciles will try to alter its course and give it extra shoves.”8 Never try to grab a speeding arrow.
That’s good advice. But once the arrow has come to rest, once you come upon it, remember that for Nietzsche, a thinker is “an arrow shot by Nature that another thinker picks up where it has fallen so that he can shoot it somewhere else.”9 You can pick it up.
1 Julio Cortázar, “Sunset Hunter,” A Certain Lucas, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 101. In Spanish: “Cazador de crepúsculos,” Un tal Lucas [1979] Cuentos Completos/2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 284.
2 Karl Marx quoted in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Labor of Dionysus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 5.
3 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), p. 256.
4 Julio Cortázar, “What is Polygraphy?,” A Certain Lucas, Trans. Greogry Rabassa (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 76. In Spanish, “Qué es un polígrafo?” Un tal Lucas [1979] Cuentos Completos/2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 270.
5 Eric Charles White, Kaironomia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 13.
6 Antonio Negri, “Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo: Nine lessons to myself,” Time for Revolution, Tr.Matteo Mandarini (New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 152 ff.
7 Julio Cortázar, “Sunset Hunter,” A Certain Lucas, Trans. Gregory Rabassa) (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 102. In Spanish: “Cazador de crepúsculos,” Un tal Lucas [1979] Cuentos Completos/2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 285.
8 Julio Cortázar, “Julio Cortázar (1914-),” Seven Voices: Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert (New York: Knopf, 1973), p. 295.
9 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. ix.