Cesar Aira - Ghosts

But the Australians, what do the Australians do? How do they structure their landscape? For a start they postulate a primal builder, whose work they presume only to interpret: the mythical animal who was active in the “dreamtime,” that is, a primal era, beyond verification, as the name indicates. A time of sleep. The visible landscape is an effect of causes that are to be found in the dreamtime. For example the snake that dragged itself over this plain creating these undulations, etc., etc. These “intellectual dandies,” these “spinsters,” these curious Aborigines make sure their eyes are closed while events take place, which allows them to see places as records of events. But what they see is a kind of dream, and they wake into a reverie, since the real story (the snake, not the hills) happened while they were asleep.

The dreamtime, as giver of meaning or guarantor of the stability of meanings, is the equivalent of language. But why did the Australian Aborigines need an equivalent? Didn’t they already have languages? Maybe they also wanted a hieroglyphic script, like the Egyptians, and they made it from the ground under their feet.

The elements of Australian geography are as simple as they are effective: the point and the line, that’s it. As the Aborigines proceed over plains and through forests, the point and the line are represented by the halt and the journey. With a line and a point, a line that passes through many points in the course of a year, frequently changing direction, they trace out a vast drawing, the representation of destiny. But there is something very special going on here: via the point, the precise point in space, the nomads can pass through to the other side, like a dressmaker’s pin or needle, through to the side of dreaming, which changes the nature of the line: the hunting or gathering route becomes a mythic itinerary. Which adds a third dimension to the drawing of destiny. But the passage through the point is happening all the time, since no point is specially privileged (not even waterholes — contrary to the anthropologists’ initial assumptions — although they serve as models for the points of passage, which can, by rights, be found anywhere, at any point along the line), so the food-gathering route is always taking on a mythical significance and vice versa. There is something dreamlike about the points that provide a view of the other side, but they belong not so much to the dreamtime as to dream work. The nomads enter the dreamtime not by setting off on some extraordinary, dangerous voyage, but through their everyday, ambulatory movement.

To symbolize the point, the Australian Aborigines have a “sacred post” (a rough translation, of course, because it’s not sacred in the western sense), which they carry with them and drive into the ground when they camp each night, at a slight angle, like the tower of Pisa, to indicate the direction they will take the next day. This post is decorated with carvings, which allude to the mythic itinerary, and in this way it combines the two contrasting motifs of the halt (signaled by the place where the post has been driven into the ground) and the itinerary (doubly represented by its inclination and the carvings, since the itinerary has two aspects, relating to food-gathering and to myth, while the point is single in its nature — it is always a point of passage.)

But Patri’s dream went further, higher, taking in different systems, which were increasingly original and strange. In some cases the construction of the landscape, common to a great variety of carefree indigenous peoples, was simplified to the extreme. For example by certain Polynesian islanders, whose landscape consists entirely of those specks of earth or coral emerging from the sea, which seem to be adrift…. They have a simple fix for this, using two lines that are not so much imaginary as utilitarian: one from the island down to the bottom of the sea, like an anchor, the other up to a star at the zenith, to stop the island from sinking.

And even the Polynesian system is complicated compared to some others, especially virtual systems, which start from humanity and proceed toward thought — an itinerary which, in turn, is doubled with dreaming.

After non-building comes its logical antecedent, building. As a real practice, building is decoration. In architecture, decoration is always an expansion, expanding anything and everything, until only the process of expansion remains. In agricultural societies, the accumulation of goods and the management of social inequalities gives building the function of creating an “artificial world,” in which the privileged are confined by their status, whatever it may be (even the status of pariah). At which point architecture (paradoxically) becomes “real”; and if, until then, the world — the landscape or the territory — had been humanity’s artistic miniature, its little dream-lantern, now the opposite phase begins, the phase of expansion, which gives rise to decoration, which is everything.

The development of “real” architecture, that is, of the decorative elements, is directly linked to the possibility of accumulating provisions for the workers or the slaves who do the building, and don’t have time to go hunting or gathering food. Such accumulations result in inequalities. There is a mechanism for reducing excessive accumulation, and regulating wealth (without regulation there would be no wealth): potlatch , the festivity that involves squandering food and drink and other sorts of goods in a brief, crazy splurge, and so reducing the stocks to a satisfactory level. By staging a grand and brilliant spectacle, comparable to a temporary or perishable work of art, the festivity performs the function of attracting the greatest possible quantity of people. The size of the audience on the day is crucial, since this artistic manifestation will not endure in time. Art, in all its forms, has an inherent economy, and this case is no exception.

The potlatch , of course, belongs to the prehistory, or the genealogy, of festivities and partying, because with the passage of time, an alternative must arise at some point: instead of more and more people being present, a subtler form of sociability limits attendance to special people, the people that matter. The logical conclusion of this process is the single-person party, and the best model for that is dreaming.

In Patri’s dream the building on the Calle José Bonifacio was under construction. Standing still yet seized by an interior, interstitial movement. Suddenly a wind, a typical dream-wind, so typical that dreams might be said to consist of it, arose and blew the building apart, reducing it to little cubes the size of dice. This was the transition to the world of cartoons. The building was reconstructed somewhere else, in another form, its atoms recombined. Then it disintegrated again, the wind scattering its particles, one of which came to rest on Patri’s open eye, and in its microscopic interior, an entire house was visible, with all its rooms and furniture, its candelabras, carpets, glassware, and the little golden mill that spins in the wind from the stars.

Two hours after going down, Elisa Vicuña came back up the stairs, laden with bags full of shopping. The heat had not eased off in the least; on the contrary. It was the time of day when one suspects the climate of malevolence. She climbed the last flights of stairs on her own, because Juan Sebastián and Blanca Isabel went to get the toy cars they had left behind and resumed their games; not that they really wanted to go on playing, but they were still scared that their mother would put them to bed. There was no danger of that any more, because the hour of the siesta had passed, but just in case, and out of sheer willfulness, they ran away. They had been to an ice-cream shop with air conditioning, where they had stayed a fair while. The cool interlude had refreshed them a bit, but the contrast when they came out made the persistence of the heat all the more terrible. Elisa saw that her eldest daughter was asleep. She didn’t wake her up. She went to the kitchen, and took the shopping out of the bags, but didn’t put anything in the fridge, because they didn’t have a fridge. Then she started washing. They didn’t have a washing machine either, but that didn’t bother her too much, although she would have liked one. In fact she enjoyed washing, and spent quite a lot on soaps and special products, as well as the bleach. Oddly, for someone who was so fond of this pastime, her hands were not ruined. So what if those two brats didn’t want to sleep. She hadn’t taken a siesta today either; she didn’t feel like it. For various reasons, the washing had built up. She filled the two washbowls and the two plastic buckets, and began to make a mixture of various products, which she always finished off with a healthy squirt of bleach. She started scrubbing some of the kids’ little T-shirts. She felt depressed, because of the heat, because of all the work she had done already that day, and what remained to do, because of the end of the year, and her husband, and so on, and so on. It wasn’t a momentary low. She was going through a period of depression due mainly to the fact that they hadn’t moved, as she had hoped, or rather planned. Her husband had been tempted by the special bonus they had promised him if he stayed until the building was finished. By now, she thought, she should have been in the new place. Not that it was better, but she had got used to the idea, and no one likes having to give up an idea, even, or especially, if it doesn’t have have any intrinsic merit. She would buy something with the extra money, but it wouldn’t be the same: money and new things, they were explicable, whereas her idea of moving before the end of the year was beyond explanation; it belonged to the world of whim. Anyway, it was Raúl’s decision, and today he would get to hit the booze twice. He often scored a double: lunch and dinner. What a liver he must have! thought his wife. It’s incredible, it must be made of iron. Drunks were tougher all round, or in a different way from normal people; she liked the feeling of being protected by that superhuman vigor. What other protection did she have? She liked a lot of things about her husband and had no desire to complain about him, not even in the privacy of her ruminations. For example, she couldn’t imagine herself married to a sober man.