César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

Is it possible? Could anyone be so unlucky? Now the pain has eased a little, but it’s worse: I can feel it tearing the chambers of my heart with “a sound of silk being slashed,” and the blood’s gushing inside me, getting all mixed up. My writing hand is shaking and starting to turn purple. . I don’t know how I’ve managed to keep the pen moving. .

My sight is blurred, I’m staring desperately at the lines my hand keeps tracing. . At the darkening edge of my field of vision, I can see the crumpled papers on which I made notes when I was out walking. . But they’re not even notes; they’re no more than cryptic reminders that nobody will be able to understand (because of my pernicious habit of using abbreviations). My death will condemn them to indecipherability forever. . unless someone very clever comes along and by means of meticulous inductive and deductive reasoning (over years or decades) is able to arrive at a plausible reconstruction. . But no, that kind of treatment is reserved for the papers of a great writer; no one will bother with mine. .

Maybe I could leave some kind of key. . but no, it’s impossible. I don’t have time. I can’t maintain the rhythm and the rigor of good prose, the kind of prose I would like to have written, the kind that would have made me a great writer, worthy of serious study. All I can do is use the last of my strength to scrawl a few disjointed, almost incoherent sentences. . I don’t have time because I’m dying. . Death is the exorbitant price that a failure like me has to pay for becoming literature. . The hardest thing for me is that I did, in fact, have time (once), and I wasted it shamefully. The lesson, if a lesson can in some small way redeem my wasted life, is this: you have to get straight to the point. . I should have begun with the crucial thing, which no one but I knew about. . I wouldn’t even have had to sacrifice the flow and the balance of a well-told story, because I could have written the introductory sections later and rearranged it all when preparing the final draft. . This stupid compulsion to narrate events in chronological order. .

DECEMBER 8, 2003

THE HYPOTHESIS UNDERLYING THIS STUDY is that human beings act in strict accordance with an instinctive program, which governs all of our actions, however unpredictable or freely chosen they may seem, and that our “cultural” free will is consequently no more than a kindly illusion with which we dupe ourselves, as much a part of our innate heritage as the rest. On the face of it, this proposal is extremely bold or outright preposterous: the idea that everything could be foreordained would seem to be refuted by the wild variety of human lives, beginning with the extravagant iridescence of thought, the unpredictability of our least reactions, and the ideas that come to mind willy-nilly; and if it’s unconvincing in an individual case, how could it explain the incalculable differences between one human being and another, no matter how closely related they are? But this impression of difference is precisely the illusion that the hypothesis aims to dispel, and all one has to do (I’m not saying this is easy) is accept that it is an illusion for the variations to become irrelevant and the veil that hid our essential instinctive uniformity to fall away. There’s no need to give up those variations, or sacrifice one’s “surface” differences to a “deep” essence, because, in fact, there’s no such essence; it’s all surface. And what’s to stop all the countless minutiae of our acts, thoughts, desires, dreams, and creations, everything that happens second by second between birth and death, being inscribed a priori in our genes, in the form of a program that’s identical for every member of the species? Science has accustomed us, by now, to greater wonders of computing. Humans have always been very sure that their actions are determined by a kind of causation that is free and superior, “cultural” rather than natural. . while the equally ancient hypothesis of instinctive programming has always been reserved for animals and applied to them with fanatical rigor.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to persuade anyone. The idea is too shocking and arbitrary; and in a way it’s self-defeating because if it’s not built into our program, how could we accept it? But maybe it is built into our program; after all it occurred to me (and I’m not the first). And it’s true that persuasion is one of our instinctive gifts, along with fiction.

What humans have traditionally believed about animals owes a great deal to fiction. I’m not saying it isn’t true. How could I? Let’s take it at face value, and turn it around. Let’s imagine, for the purposes of demonstration, how an animal of some kind might apply its reason to this issue. It might be objected that animals don’t have reason to apply. Very well, I’m quite prepared to use another word; in any case, it’s just a question of terminology (and I know I’m not expressing myself well). By the “reasoning” of an animal, then, I mean something different, for which we don’t have a word, precisely because we have always stayed on this side of the line. Let’s forget all the tales and the fables: the traveling ant, the grumbling bear, the fox and the crow. . Or, rather, let’s take them to their ultimate conclusions. Instead of “fiction,” let’s call it “translation,” and translate thoroughly. Now’s the time to do it, because only translation can get to the bottom of this nature/culture dialectic. I think it will be clearer if I give an example, but I should point out that it’s not an example in the conventional sense, that is, a particular extracted at random from the general by discursive means. What follows is all general, from start to finish, pure generality.

Let’s imagine an ovenbird, in the year 1895, in the province of Buenos Aires. And let’s stay with the human perspective for a moment, in order to make the contrast clearer.

The ovenbird begins to build in autumn. . while building its nest, the bird keeps an eye on its human neighbors. . when the construction has attained its spherical form. . the bird mates for life and gathers its food, which consists of larvae and worms, exclusively on the ground. . it struts around with a gravely serious air. . its strong, confident, clinking cry. .

That’s enough. The reader will have recognized the tone. It’s a human speaking, a naturalist. Like all styles, this one takes the eternal existence of its object for granted. We have turned the lives of the animals into a voyage through various styles, and in the process our lives have become a voyage through styles as well (which is what allows me to conduct this experiment).

The ovenbird was building his hut. Let’s say it was autumn, so as not to offend against plausibility, or just for fun. Enormous country afternoons. A shower at five. The sixteenth of April 1895. Let’s go back to a sentence from the naturalist’s paragraph: While building its nest, the bird keeps an eye on its human neighbors (in context, the point of this observation is to explain why the entrance to the bird’s hut always faces the nearest house or ranch, or the road). In his plentiful spare time, the ovenbird thought. .

But is this possible? Is it possible to go this way without straying into the world of Disney? Isn’t this taking translation too far? It might be acceptable to the use the verb “to think” as a translation, a way of communicating, when referring to what is going on in the animal’s brain, or its nervous system, or, more precisely, in its life and history. But what about the content of this thought? Even if it’s acceptable for me to say that the bird thinks, can I say what he thinks? I think I can. Because it’s the same thing.