The Museum of Eterna's Novel

A NEW PROLOGUE TO MY AUTHORIAL PERSONA

This is what I imagine here: non-death; also the artistic work involved in the transformation of the self, routing the stability of each person in his self.

I’m working with various persons here, which is to say, I’m tempted in every book to transformation: Ella, Eterna, William James, The Lover, and the Author. In my humorous writing, I attempted the irrationality of the author and of his identity.¹

“Ella” is the most radical decentering: here and in “La Eterna” I work in contradictions on her decentering: not the minor kind, to be one living being instead of another, or one dream figure instead of another, but the radical decentering, to be pure image, to be and to appear not to be real, and vice versa. Eterna is also fully decentered, because she is the one with the power to change others’ pasts (Sweetheart will come asking to change her past, since hers is the most unfortunate). She hasn’t the power to change her own past, before she met the President, as she wishes. The Lover is the suspension, the caesura of identity, and Sweetheart is the expectation of being. She suffers from that tendency, the poor girl.

I take credit for having lived to construct a metaphysics of the total-lover, without interesting myself in my own metaphysics: as I am, I don’t deserve either explanation or eternity; I don’t deserve Ella or a metaphysics; The Lover deserves both Ella and metaphysics.

It’s very subtle and patient work, getting quit of the self, disrupting interiors and identities. In all my writing I’ve only achieved eight or ten minutes in which two or three lines disrupted the stability, the unity of someone, even at times, I believe, disrupting the self-sameness of the reader. Nevertheless, I still believe that Literature does not exist, because it hasn’t dedicated itself solely to this Effect of dis-identification, the only thing that would justify its existence and that only Belarte can achieve. Perhaps Painting or Dance could also attempt it.

I don’t believe that Metaphysics is the direct pleasure of an exegesis: it’s a task that brings second-hand pleasure only gained from a position of power; it’s a power one seeks out: the direct power of love. If this power were a first cause (since if it were mediated, all virtue and aspiration would be frustrated because the intermediate links can also be frustrated) in the mechanical world, it would bring total presence (visual, tactile, audible, thermal) of the beloved to any present in time, to the same present in time, to the same present of this desire, and with it the details of an actual state of perception. The mechanical world is the world in which material appears: only the body of the beloved appears as a first cause, the sole apparition in a psyche of fervent hope, of desire.

If in each of my books I have two or three times achieved an instant of what I will call in homespun terms a “suffocation,” an “upset” in the certitude of personal continuity, a slippage of the reader’s own self, then that’s all I wanted as a means; the end towards which I’m working is liberation from the idea of death: evanescence, mutability, rotation, and spinning of the self make it immortal, which is to say, release its destiny from the body. (For others, this Body is no more than a complex of images in my sensory apparatus, which itself seems to be tied to this Body, or another sensory apparatus associated with another Body.) Just as I sometimes asked when I was corresponding with William James forty years ago, I ask for your consent, that you let me present a demonstration here of these extremely difficult attempts to confuse and immortalize the “I.” In a note to The Perception of Space in his “Psychology,” James says; “let us see whether we cannot push our theoretic insight a little farther. It seems to me we can” (Principles of Psychology I, Chapter 20, “The Perception of Space. Crude Extensivity,” note 28). I underline, and I leave underlined, James’s it seems to me, who will exist and be read even a hundred years hence; and I write at the foot of his page. This “it seems to me” is a pre-state that James felt forty years ago at a precise moment in his efforts to work at thinking and writing; he pre-felt that he was going to unravel the tangled argument that he was developing. And noticing this excites in me today — April of 1931, in Buenos Aires — the consciousness that for a short time now I’ve been irritated reading for a feeling of nonconformity, of expectation, trying to make out in what moment of those laborious lines James would give us a glimpse of the explanation of space by movement (transfer, muscularity, the evocation of either), and I held out hope that he had seen, as I had, the possible explanation of the localized “affliction” by muscular evocations.

But with some distance, I can now emphatically assert that nobody is stronger, more rigorous, more serious and specialized than I in non-discursive metaphysics, the metaphysics that Hegel forgot and which, I would argue, is given artistically. I don’t think that the genuine metaphysicians, nor the bibliographers, the historians, or the teachers of Metaphysics would disdain the force of the intellectual attitude here achieved. I don’t think that anyone who has felt the Mystery (the Mystery of feeling, I would say; James would say the mystery of feeling) has come up with anything clearer than the illumination I will have attained. The truth in these pages will not be resented even if they appeared in an edition of Kant or Hegel as a part of their work.

I think I resemble Poe, and even though I’ve begun to imitate him a bit, I believe I am Poe all over again. And it’s extraordinary that as an author and as a persona that it was a Peruvian poet, Mario Chabes, who discovered the resemblance. It’s not a resemblance, it’s. . who knows? A reapparation. In the poem “Elena Bellamuerte” I approached Poe in feeling, but I don’t think the text shows much similarity in literary style.

I wouldn’t make these assertions if it weren’t to encourage the young reader to maintain himself in a defensive stance against the impression that the I is a shipwreck on the isle of bodily death.

Follow me then, reader: I seek “one” eternity that has yet to be found, although others had the Desire as strongly as I, they lacked hope, and the notion of a way to proceed.

Many people, maybe all people, are certain of their personal eternity, their souls, but nobody believes that love could eternally retain one’s personal human being — his body. And without this corporeal permanence each person would only know his own personal eternal existence, an existence where neither the eternity nor the traveler matters, where a minute is indistinguishable from a million centuries.

You’ll see that I share with the anxious and mentally gifted William James an indefatigable exploration of what he held was death before truth (which will perhaps be what happens to me). He nevertheless reached the truth of the Act, without the foreknowledge and the felicity to “die” (bodily concealment) knowing it. Surely temptations and entanglements of circumstance will prevent him from always using all of his thought for this investigation. I am only confident in “knowing” before “being” if analogous circumstances don’t prevent it.

I dignify this quest with Passion, without which neither life nor quests are worthwhile.² And in the name of its dignity I have labored to arm myself with the maximum of information; no one, I think, has ever studied more thoroughly, been more calm in his preparation, or more self-critical. Only overwhelming reflection can impede me now, since I already possessed absolute certainty of personal eternity when I undertook this investigation, directed solely towards the search for corporeal eternity, without which Companionship ends: love and Memory are retained in both and, even more lacerating, the certainty of existing concealed from one another, without hope of Knowlege or Recognition.

I hope that the Man of Supreme Misfortune alone gives himself over to the certainty of the beloved’s eternal existence, that which we can only have by means of permanence, an eternity of the spiritual figure as much as of the personal, physical figure. But, also, I assume the responsibility to continue seeking this certainty for others.

1 This doctrine is included in “Towards a Theory of Art,” in “Theories,” and the exercises in Newcomer’s Papers and The Nothing Continues. (Editor’s Note — Adolfo de Obieta)

2 Not All Consciousness is Wakefulness presents itself precisely as a pro-passion discourse against exhausting intellectualism. (“Passion, the supreme suitability of Being!”) But in addition to the metaphysics of passion with its correlative issues of Being, Non-Being, Death, Persona Eternity, Body, etc. initially allude there to the being of a character of art and its metaphysical operation (“Solution,” “Fantasy is a formality”). (Editor’s Note — Adolfo de Obieta)