Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

But what is it that automatism mysteriously proposes that obligates us to live even when it isn’t to our advantage? I ask again: Is it that automatism cannot discount even a single life among billions, that it cannot allow a single one to be truncated because in each one of these is potentially encrypted the hope of achieving the Immortal Organism? This must be why every life matters to automatism.

I return to Suicide, and I remember that in her there was not even the slightest trace of mental instability. Thus I must ask whether the total occupation, however brief, of the Consciousness by a single, painful state was even possible in the “psychic person.” Her destiny kept this lapse in Automatism secret: it was victim of her consciousness’s aptitude for total occupation, at least for a moment, by a mental state. And when this mental state was one of pain, the reflex to avoid pain was cleverly triggered, and with it her life ended.

What one deplores is that she seemed to be a person who, apart from her many charms, seemed predestined for all possible human happiness. Life’s universal Automatism blew the life of her being through this blind alley, which was constituted by the combination of the evasive reflex to Pain and her Consciousness’s rare aptitude for being occupied exclusively by one mental state in the briefest of instants.

Bride, wife, mother, grandmother, four chapters of life both ancient and regulated; these will not live on in her: she was eighteen when the aforementioned congenital reflex and the Monad-Consciousness of a few seconds… it’s true she was named Suicide, but it’s also the case that she was happy, a contented person.

It’s certain that I’ve not made myself understood, and that I’ve failed to convince. But the reader must put himself in the position of this psychological case so as to conceive or represent to himself the moment in which a consciousness is nothing more than pain. If this consciousness in pain is intelligent, if it’s true that we are rational beings, then it should opt at once for the act of destruction.

This is axiomatic: to allege that there are future pleasures is futile, not only because it’s not certain nor even proximate most of the time, but also because the tyranny of the evasive reflex operates without reason. Moreover, the notion of a past pain must be at work in the future pleasures, if the claim is that in a present pain the notion of a future pleasure is at work. So it is that suicide occurs in the moment of pleasure. This could be a mistake, my only one: I could be wrong in affirming that when the personal, psycho-physical world, when the “person” is only two things — a Pain and a base automatism of pain evasion — the notion of a possible future Pleasure has no purchase, and thus there is no possibility to interpose between the instant of this painful monad-consciousness and the flaring of this Evasion Reflex. If this imposition were possible, we would already have another hypothesis; but since experience is not influenced by hypotheses, and my decency and passion for clarity make the notion of first principles repugnant — which fool no one but which confer celebrity and populate universities — I submit myself to the totalpossibility of Experience and I accept its petition for inclusion. In this case, suicide would occur in a moment of Pleasure, but this doesn’t make a difference: since what I’m claiming is that the base reflex only triumphs, inflexibly, over an affective monad-consciousness.

It appears I won’t find my way out of this thicket. But I know that I’m right in essence; only I won’t stray too far from the point because another theory of mine, Integral Automatism, which includes automatism of the intelligence, strips all interest from my clarifications about Suicide’s last earthly psychic state. In keeping with my systemization of Automatism, it is very likely that Suicide felt nothing, not before nor during this moment in which my narrative lingers, the moment of her self-destruction.

I believe that Hodgson’s perception, his investigation of automatism was one of the most lucid moments in human thought. But under the stimulus of this formidable lesson, I believe I was able to integrate its truth and the problem of an automatism that fully and independently dominates all of life’s action; the difficulty is: how can Activity have a longevistic orientation , without perception, which is the mental accumulation and selection of causal sequences (purified by Accident, that is, by non-causal immediate sequences that are masked by the apparent “accidental” quality of causal sequences once they are purified, and thus fixed). It’s certain that congenital appetites are not in error, but how and where they can be satisfied is a matter of totally experiential, phenotypical knowledge. How, without having seen the cat that scratched us, can we elude, again unseen, the scratch of another? Very well, we need not see nor hear psychic states; we only require that the neural trajectory of the auditory or visual signal to transmit the vibration of light or sound properly and that there has been an anterior association with pain (that is, physiological harm, not the pain of this harm, since we supposed that Consciousness, the psychic Sensorium, is abolished or not yet established) with the presence and attack of a howling cat (a present attack, and physical, not psychic howling). The alteration introduced in the optic and phonic field by the presence of a new but identical cat will provoke physical evasion, connecting the earlier harm with its associated cerebral imprint.

The difficulty was therefore nonexistent and the rigor and comprehensiveness of Longevistic Automatism is achieved. There’s no recourse to the alternative, declaring Consciousness a mere witness to all perceptive phenomena, since consciousness is affected only insofar as it’s not a cause of anything, no matter what life brings.

If I’ve finally convinced you by now, it won’t take much to add that each seed among a billion seeds is capable of absorbing the entire Cosmos, all Materiality, in the individual form that belongs to it alone, to the point of constituting the Cosmos-Persona. Like me, like a grape seed or a grain of wheat, suicide may be that seed which takes root and grows, which makes the cosmos of a person and overcomes odious plurality, externality — and with it, death — Automatism— that requires that neither I nor the seed dies — and which uses us to give itself some measure of Rest.

But even as Automatism is Total Truth, we can never know if the person we see living is also feeling. I saw Suicide live happily, but I don’t know if she felt anything.

If she felt anything, we don’t know it. And since the reader doesn’t like us to exhibit her as an “example,” wasting the well-known “readerly compassion,” on an unfeeling character, we won’t go on to find out, thus guaranteeing that Suicide suffers as much as the reader and author, since we’re all now living with the shame of having conceived of the hypothesis of her unfeeling nature.

Hodgson, who knew that all knowledge is phenotypic, was baffled, perhaps by a residual survival of the impression of Intelligence’s spirituality, which “remained” in his mind, resisting his radical “critique of consciousness,” perhaps because of a moment of confused synonymy in his mind between the words “automatic” and “unconscious;” in summary, our dear Hodgson felt it would be too much to affirm the total automatism of Knowledge or Understanding, which, nevertheless, is merely the automatic purgation of the accidental quality of invariable sequences, a purge that takes place for itself alone, only because what is frequently repeated leaves a deeper impression than mere coincidences of contiguity or succession. This unnecessary purge of the miraculous “reasoning” suffices…