Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Sweetheart: “Nothing… nothing.”

“Oh, these were birth pangs, but we’re stillborn. Let me rest a bit, later I’ll tell you that story.”

“Better not to try anything more today; this suffocation is horrible. Better to know nothing of life!”

“Have faith in Maybegenius, don’t despair so soon.”

The author, rushed and curt in his speech: “How difficult is to write on one’s own account something that one has thought so much about.”

Maybegenius: “I’m a good man, Sweetheart — and maybe a genius— but, before all of my goodness, you must have patience with what you know to be my weakness, which is to appear not as a character but ruled by the author’s formulas. I beg of you, consent that I present you with the story I promised, that’s on its way now, as if the reader had sent it my way, and with these introductory parentheses, although the only thing that matters to me is to be with you, even when you listen to me only distractedly.”

Sweetheart: “This is the first time, Maybegenius, that I’ve ever noticed even a drop of acrimony in you.”

“Forgive me, I didn’t even notice. Consider that I have accepted a life without hope; sometimes this gets to me.”

(Pardon, if you will, a versifier who wants to switch to storytelling and, like all men of letters, will end up procuring for himself some theatrical failure — a ruinous finale, like the one met by musicians in the musical tonnage of “opera,” punishing themselves with those clamorous denunciations of their little faith, for not having always been conscientious artists of powerful arts with instrumental purity like Prose or the Sonata, with their printed letters, modest and discolored, or with frugal octaves that any throat can muster — allow me to warn you that all of my stories lose their thread just as quickly as they brush up against some truth or scientific mystery, forcing the author, who cannot vanquish its scientific delicacy to — what did I tell you! — when, as you see here, the author bumps up against two problems: Integral Automatism, or the development of the Consciousness by the Automatism of Longevity, the only imperative in life whose final outcome is to supplant the anarchic, fatiguing vital pluralism with a singular Cosmos-Personage, the monad-being at last liberated from its subjection to the perfidious relation of Externality, and, to come to the other problem, that of Longevity’s return game which makes it the eternal anti-eternalizing Evasion Reflex (self-destruction), guessing each fault in longevity’s plan, thus making it the Monad-Consciousness of Negative Affect, that is, the instant of a singular consciousness occupied by a single mental state which is pain, over which instance of monad-consciousness the Evasion Reflex reigns, omnipotent and instantaneous…

“If this is really about something so tremendous, the reader will surely say that he accepts the story’s digression.”

“Very well — here it is.”

“Although Science appears to me ever more pedantic and sterile— since it reflects the horrible state of humanity — neither does the Story appear to me to be such a serious thing as a literary genre; it’s juvenile, and proscriptive. But here comes the story, come what may.”

“You offend me, taking this as resignation.”

“Then I won’t wait any more, I’ll go.”

“No, no, it all goes at once. A reader’s a reader. Although I once had a back-talker who was certainly unacquainted with a single form of applause.)

SUICIDE

Any state of pleasure or pain that occupies the whole consciousness at any given moment (to say it in turgid language) has at its disposition the full automatism of action (to again put it with little rigor, since the psyche does not casually determine automatism, rather it is at the disposition of the latter and of its sensory peripheralism or centripedalism).

This automatism is instantaneous and always the same: fleeing from pain, clinging to pleasure, conservationist with pleasure, destructivist with pain.

If this happens, therefore, in a child, who has lived enough to know from experience 3that an organism is destructible, and by what means, that is, a pain that violently seizes the psyche — from here automatism must proceed instantaneously to bodily destruction. Or it’s refuted that there can be moments of a singular state in the psyche, which I don’t think has been alleged here, or that from the first bad headache a being will proceed to its self-destruction, with the same interior coercion that would lead him to flee a burning building. Would anyone be surprised by this frightened and immediate flight from the flames? Then no one should be surprised that at the first headache a human being with experience of corporeal destructibility, and the means by which it is obtained, would immediately eliminate himself. What’s more, whoever affirms this does not believe that there’s a hedonistic law in life, which is to say that life has a hedonistic value because of the mere fact of existence, which is of course more hedonistic than not-being. These pages are not made for conventionalisms: we’ve all known many moments and even long years of total misery, and we’ve done so because of our slavery to Automatic longevity without which Consciousness would have some power to tyrannize this automatism and order the act of annihilation. I must speak coarsely here, where I relate the death of Suicide.

Let’s see. Life has no more value than not feeling. In life there’s pain as well as pleasure. Consciousness or Sensibility has no power over the living body, but it senses, inevitably, certain changes in this body, although not all. And Consciousness experiences states coinciding with the beginnings of many actions, and their consequences. The physiological body has an ineluctable power over consciousness. The body dedicates itself exclusively to persisting in its corporeal organization; whether or not the consciousness that is annexed to it dies is of no concern. In any complicated series of actions, the body will never take the path towards its own destruction. Would it proceed towards its own destruction in the first moment of a series of actions corresponding to a pain in the consciousness, that is, the fundamental, congenital reflex to flee from pain would be the only possible self-destructive movement possible, under automatic longevity? What’s the response to all this? That if Consciousness is susceptible for even an instant to being totally and exclusively occupied by pain, it’s because there’s a moment in the physiological processes of automatism in which its ultimate drive towards longevity fails. There is, therefore, salvation: to die with opportunistic hedonism, when life is worth nothing, despite Automatism’s tyranny.

I think of all this when I evoke the details of the death of Suicide. It will already be supposed that I’m aware that 10 % of all mortality is suicide-related, without counting the 50 % of tentative suicides that failed, but which are, if viewed intelligently, clearly authentic expressions of a wish to not exist. But I believe, as many do, that a man doesn’t succeed at suicide unless he’s in a demented state, even if it’s only a momentary, but total dementia. These successful suicides are not the result of an immediate pain, probably also not an adverse hedonic imbalance in the past. They are, undoubtedly, the result of a malfunction in longevity’s empire, which we call life. How could Automatism consent to a mental illness such as suicidal mania? Automatism cannot wish for any death, neither of mutual extermination, illness, or suicide arising from mental chaos. The push towards longevity operates out of certain congenital appetites, which are never mistaken, and by means of action which is always automatic, whether or not the consciousness is aware of it. If the individual dies, it’s never because of a mistake in appetites but because the Cosmos, Externality, allows or disallows the satisfaction of that appetite. So it is that Automatism must resign itself to the fact of death, and demented longing for death. These dementias and devastating instants of monad-consciousness of negative affect are, in a certain way, triumphs of hedonism over automatism, of the desire for happiness (even the negative happiness of not suffering) over mere, irrational longevity, which is the business of automatism, and which does not profit the consciousness.