Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

I would have liked this novel to have something of a daydream about it, the most subtle kind. I dreamed in 1928 ( dating dreams, these can be dated by their concomitance with the series of wakefulness, and also by reference to other dreams which came before or afterwards): ‘I found myself in a house where the floor was in shadow or covered with a curtain, either dark or half-opened, as it appeared to me alternatively. And there was a woman whose face I could not distinguish, only the vague contours of feminine dress; and I knew who it was, I felt she was someone I knew without really seeing her; I felt her cordiality, her company, that her soul was not my enemy; also at moments I wasn’t sure whether or not I saw and recognized her. Upon my subsequent awaking, or the state that we call awake, referring to the idea or concept, I could not remember her face.’ I use quotation marks for dreams, and I’ll use them for everything I write specifically about them, so that if I, who am a dream for others, at one time appear in the reader's mind, I'll have the quotation marks to distinguish me as such. All art could be set in quotation marks, and everything I wrote, my three books: Not All Consciousness is Wakefulness, Newcomer's Papers, and Museum of Eterna’s Novel, in each I wanted to evoke or feature the state of recent wakefulness, when we are not yet fully free of our dreams. It’s the state that we should conserve to confront pain, and the presentiments of passion, since the ideal of passion is that we create for ourselves a hyper-wakefulness, even though passion is already such a state.

It seems to me that this dream, which I only had once, has a certain divinity, or mysticism, a sense of auto-existence: a certain slippage of personal identity, the eternal escape of individual continuity and its recognition, confirmation.

Outside the state of passion (only passion is altruistic), which is always a state of certainty, the only state of reality for dreams in which both lovers converge and in which everything must be risked, everything must be promised in full awareness, all happiness, all pain — outside of this, we must live in half light, and with half-actions,

half-awake, without entirely knowing events and states, since outside of passion the probability is that suffering will prevail; the dream I remember here is the formula of the state of half denial of all certainty and effectivity.

This novel is not content to be separate from eternity; it wants to feel the breeze of the eternal on its face; its metaphysics have not abandoned it, and they are as follows: 1

Exceptions: First. Only about one million “civilized people” have experienced an instant of Radical Unfamiliarity, which is total unfamiliarity: therefore the metaphysical explanation in these pages will be of little importance to them.

Second. Moreover, man is a very small thing, he has very little time and energies for thought; and even the rare man who can dedicate some space to think, the man we call a sage and a genius, is overwhelmed with small or large distractions which demand thirty percent of the muscular and attentive energies of even a man favored with large amounts of free time, not to mention that his patience is drained by this suffering. That’s why “sages” and “geniuses” are only condescendingly compared with the very muscular, who for their part are not obligated to think. There’s also the sum of mental but automatic things (History, Languages) and apart from that, the irritating task of preparing pages, composition, etc. In summary: all those we call sages have lived and expired in darkness and they are only remembered by their specialties, which surprise us when we compare them with muscular or common men; of themselves, they only know that they’ve managed to clarify about ten percent of what they hoped. Let’s be modest, those of us who are called intellectuals: in any trade or muscular life there’s a healthy coincidece of net intellectual energies.

Having frankly stated the facts, I now invite myself to offer opinions.

Materialism is a metaphysics; it’s not science; its concern is the same as that of Idealism, the essential metaphysical quandary: the astonishing inexplicability that anything “exists.”

Science is a pastime that describes Being, with practical ambitions, and without the astonishment-of-being. Materialism, like idealism, and like all clearly-defined metaphysics, concludes by declaring the complete intelligibility of being, its absolute knowability. In this it differs from positivism and science, which attend to the how of the world, of being, and declare the how of how being is possible inaccessible to Intelligence, how being is given and not nothing, whether it is given in the first place, how something can happen, be, or feel. It’s equivalent to a belief, to conceive that there could be a non-being, that one morning, space, things, and sensations could stop, or that one day they began, out of nothing.

When physicists constructed their visual-tactile world out of atoms, they believed that they could say something, understand something, with the invisible and the impalpable. In the same way they unconcernedly invented the apparition of the consciousness in*the heart of these precious recombinations of the insensible and the unconscious: matter. It’s not that such unintelligible verbiage calms them; it’s that they weren’t worried, there was not yet any astonishment: Metaphysics had not so easily been born in them as consciousness was born out of the Unconscious. On the other hand, they found it senseless that idealism should deny Time, Space, the Self, Matter; that it should affirm the sensible state, my current sensory state, as its Only knowability, it’s only object of intellection; this is how I name and define being: eternally auto-existing, the eternal, mystical in the intellection; which is to say the category ‘‘being” is not fleeting, and cannot be lost.

I don’t conceive of an instant of my not-being, of my not-sensing; what I am, which is to say my sensibility, didn’t begin, nor will it end, nor will it be interrupted for even an instant, nor will individual identity ever be discontinued in my memory. A time without world, a not-being of being, is an impossible notion.

What is this Mystery, this Happiness and Pain, this existence from which we never escape, this inexorable, mnemonic personal eternity, this Pain towards what we would like not-to-be, and which will always wound us, this Happiness which comes and goes, this inseparable always-existing, this blissful hope, which is not of the moment, for what we would want to be in the moment?

There’s only one man who asked himself, Can I not be? He’s the man: he existed. When someone leaves, when another conceals himself, the man who exists is the one who asks himself, Does death exist?

As shocking as this utterance may be, it must be repeated: Is the one who exists the one who believes or who asks himself, Was I born today, did I not exist before? I can say this myself and yet it won’t appear to be an utterance: When I want to think of nothing, does some image arise in my mind that can capture this thought? If an image arises, then I am thinking of something and not nothing; if there isn’t an image, I’m not thinking. It’s true that we have the word nothing, which alludes to something: it’s a conditioned negation, or a partial, conditioned existence — that such-and-such a thing is not there, or felt in such-and-such a time or place — which is to say that it is combined with the determinations of other things: there’s not anything on this table; or for there not to be in perception what there is in images: the sweets I’m thinking of are not in the house. Nothing has no other meaning.