César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

If only it were that simple! he silently exclaimed in the throes of a mental agony, and lifted his aching eyes to the sign that the world had used as an equivalent of “freedom”: the sky. A rainbow had appeared in its empty dome. He was seeing it aslant, diagonally, and that made it look more monumental and impressive. For him, it was charged with “poetic,” “philosophical,” “moral,” and “aesthetic” resonances (these are equivalents as well, but I trust they will serve to convey my meaning), while the humans, who were looking at it too, saw it for the simple meteorological phenomenon, the simple gift, that it was. Beyond: the pink splendor of the dusk.

Yes! (Now he was getting excited, poor thing.) Freedom! The immense freedom of flying over the world, over the various worlds. That was something humans didn’t have! The rigid blind of instinct came down in infancy, and all they did for the rest of their lives was automatically obey the dictates of their nature. The ovenbird, on the other hand, was progressing on the path of infinite possibilities.

But that path was too much like the void. His current state, which felt like premature old age, an exhaustion caused by the constantly draining struggle simply to stay alive, proved that freedom was inherently excessive. Freedom really had to be defined anew, and in that definition he would come off badly. Beings who lived in strict accordance with an uncontaminated nature, like humans, were free in a superior sense of the word. Slaves of instinct? Granted, but “instinct” had to be redefined as well; and if instinct was equivalent to infallibility and happiness, what greater freedom could there be? All the rest was illusory. They weren’t missing out on anything.

The humans there on the balcony were nearly finished with their maté because the water had gone cold, and the leaves had lost their flavor, and they’d had enough. . in short: because the magnificent Law that governed all the little causes had so decreed. The entire universe was manifest among the humble and the meek, and attended to them like a god, serving and obeying them. Time that destroys and dominates all things slowed to a standstill in the eternal present of simple existence. Calm and sensual, strangers to the torments of conscience and doubt, trusting to the gentle flow of life, mating, reproduction, and even death, they (unlike him) could truly say, “To die, to sleep — to sleep, perchance to dream.” They had no fears. . And yet they too had “resonances.” When, as now, they contemplated the pink and violet sky, the pristine countryside, and time frozen in the delicate whorls of the air, they too were sensitive to metaphysics, poetry, morality, and aesthetics — more sensitive than he was, because they saw reality without veils! Had he been tempted to imitate them, as he’d occasionally tried to do, it would have been futile: another whim of consciousness, another project doomed to fail, one of the many on which he wasted his energy over and over. .

Now they were talking. They had been talking the whole time, confidently, calmly, with their dry little words and whispers. That was another sore point for the ovenbird. Although it wasn’t an important part of life for him (it is for us humans, but not for him; which shows that one shouldn’t rush to translate back the other way: the equivalences, although complete, are not symmetrical), he found it especially galling. What came out of human throats was effective, simple, and practical; the ovenbird’s songs and chirps were a dreamlike tangle in which function and frill, sense and nonsense, truth and beauty were chaotically mixed. Humans didn’t have problems like that; Nature had made it easy for them: from birth, or shortly afterward (from the moment, in their first year of life, when the “blind” of instinct came down), they deposited all meaning in language, and whatever didn’t fit was considered marginal or insignificant. But for the ovenbird, meaning was dispersed in a thousand different telepathies, while song was an aesthetic without precise limits, which could be used for just about anything, or be of no use at all. He sang for love, or because he had the hiccups, or felt like it, or just because of the time of day. . And his song, like everything he did, was subject to the unpredictable fluctuations of consciousness, to excess freedom or the excessiveness of freedom itself.

Night was falling over the sacred pampa. The little bird, still and quiet like a curl of mud in front of his unfinished dwelling, went on wallowing in anxiety and nostalgia for real life, which he saw as the life of others in an inaccessible elsewhere. I don’t know if I’ve made myself clear, and even if I have, I might not have been convincing. The only aim of this piece is to offer some counterevidence, which I hope will be thought-provoking, although it’s hardly conclusive. The method itself could be challenged: after all, this was written by a human. But what does that prove, except that humans are equipped with an instinct that enables them to write? How else could they do it? Why don’t birds write? Precisely because they have too much freedom: they could write or not; there’s nothing in them to trigger the activity in a failsafe way; unlike humans, they don’t have a program that would allow them to write with perfect automatic facility. The action of writing these pages is itself written into the genetic endowment handed down to me from the dawn of time. That’s why I can do it just like that, without hesitations or corrections, like breathing or sleeping. From the ovenbird’s point of view, there’s a gulf between this magic facility and the deliberations that make all of his tasks so laborious.

MAY 8, 1994

A CART FROM A SUPERMARKET in my neighborhood was rolling along on its own, with no one pushing it. It was a cart just like all the others, made of thick wire, with four little rubber wheels (the front pair slightly closer together, which is what gives the vehicle its characteristic shape), and a bar coated with bright red plastic for steering it around. There was nothing to distinguish it from the two hundred other carts that belonged to that enormous supermarket, the biggest and busiest in the neighborhood. Except that the cart I’m referring to was the only one that moved on its own. It did this with infinite discretion: in the tumult that reigned on the premises from opening to closing time, to say nothing of the peak hours, its movement went unnoticed. It was used like all the other carts, filled with food, drink, and cleaning products, unloaded at the cash registers, pushed hurriedly from one aisle to the next, and if the shoppers let it go and saw it roll a fraction of an inch, they assumed that it was being carried along by momentum.

The wonder was only perceptible at night, when the frenzy gave way to an uncanny calm, but there was no one to admire it. Very occasionally, the shelf-stackers starting work at dawn would be surprised to find the cart astray down at the back, next to the deep-freeze cabinets, or between the dark shelves of wine. They naturally assumed that it had been left there by mistake the previous night. In such a large and labyrinthine establishment, oversights like that were only to be expected. If the cart was moving when they found it, and if they noticed the movement, which was as inconspicuous as the sweep of a watch’s minute hand, they presumed that it must have been the result of a slope in the floor or a draft of air.

In fact, the cart had spent the whole night going around and around, up and down the aisles, slow and quiet as a star, without ever hesitating or coming to a stop. It did the rounds of its domain, mysterious, inexplicable, its miraculous essence concealed by the banal appearance of a shopping cart like any other. The employees and the customers were too busy to detect this secret phenomenon, which made no difference, after all, to anyone or anything. I was the only one to notice it, I think. Actually, I’m sure: attention is scarce among human beings, and a great deal of it was required in this case. I didn’t tell anyone, because it was too much like the sort of fantasies I’m always coming up with, which have earned me a reputation for craziness. Over many years of shopping there, I learned to recognize my special cart by a little mark on the red bar; except that I didn’t have to see the mark, because even from a distance something told me that it was the one. A wave of joy and confidence swept through me each time I identified it. I thought of it as a kind of friend, a friendly object, perhaps because in this case the inertness of a thing had been leavened with that minimal tremor of life that is the starting point for all fantasies. Perhaps, in a corner of my subconscious, I was grateful to it for being different from all the other carts in the civilized world, and for having revealed that difference to me and no one else.