The Museum of Eterna's Novel

METAPHYSICAL PROLOGUE

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.

Space is unreal, the world has no magnitude, given that what we can encounter with our widest gaze, the plains and the sky, fit in Our memories, that is, in an image. They fit totally and in all their detail in a point of my psyche, of my mind; this does not have extension, points, and it contains images. It’s sufficient that the material can make an image of itself without a position or extension, when I invoke it in my mind — it can represent itself totally and exactly, it can see itself (since only by this concept are we able to say that in this case we aren’t seeing, but recalling) and the proof is the fact that in a dream, or in a waking evocation that is very intense, the image is equally alive and gives rise to the same emotions, acts, words, and gestures. Thus it is shown that 1) the Exterior is not intrinsically extensive; 2) the mind, psyche, consciousness, soul, sensibility — all essentially synonyms for subjectivity — has no extension, position, or station anywhere; 3) that immensity, the Cosmos, is therefore a point, or better, the autonomous, involuntary Image, the contingent and spontaneous that we face with our will.

In other words, everything that exists is an image, some voluntary, others involuntary, dreams and reality intermingling and giving rise to the same emotions and acts when they are equally vivid.

Given all this, it may therefore be said that the world is inextensive. But sometimes an object presents a different size, depending on the position it takes relative to ourselves; the sounds emanating from it with an identical rhythm would vary in their intensity, and to get a different kind of feeling from it, a tactile feeling, we’d have to effect some kind of translation. We thus have the only thing that’s effective about Space: the effect. Distance, or given the perception of an object, sound, or perfume, we can make the size, the detail, or the intensity larger depending on the case and by means of our own work, which we would call getting closer, and in a certain moment of this task we could obtain a tactile sensation from this visual object. That translation is required, so that an object that we call distance can offer us a tactile sensation, is an effect of “space” and its only reality.

Likewise, with regard to Time, its reality resides in its effect, that a waiting is required, which is to say a series of events, so that there is a desired or feared outcome after one of those changes or states of things which we call the present, When something pleasurable is desired, it’s in the future; if pain is feared, it’s the future also; if something painful is not feared, it’s past, and the same for the pleasurable if it does not give rise to desire or joy; in each case there’s always present effects of the past or present states that would be in the future. A student, who is two or three months away from his exams might have alternative representations of the same scene: imagining himself in some classroom near a table where four professors are seated; this scene could correspond, with the same details, to the anatomy exam he sat for in March or the one coming up next November: Which one of these scenes is future, or past? The intellectual fringe is exactly the same: sometimes it gives rise to a feeling of fear, and sometimes a pleasant feeling. In the first case the event is future; in the second it’s past: the exam that I passed is pleasant for me to recall, the one I am about to take intimidates me.

Size (space) and duration (time) are not real, but inferences with respect to the effect of the muscular work of transposition or the mental work of hope, uncertainty, desire. Duration is merely the sum of the changes that must occur, that make themselves actual before another change happens; and this before and this make itself actual are not temporal implications, which would be tautological in this case, but psychological correlatives: so the actual is a state when the feeling — fear or desire — which is tied to it culminates in insensibility: the fear of something as fear is naturally always actual or present, but the represented or perceived scene is only real when the fear reaches its limit.

I’ve said all this to establish the nothingness of Time and Space. These are abstractions which only can tell us what happens in terms of representations of scenes or events which in perception or reality bring us pain or pleasure and which nevertheless are given in our minds several times, sometimes giving rise to emotion and drives and sometimes not. (In the first case the image is of a future reality;

in the second, of a past reality.) Such is the case with all that happens in our psyche with respect to Time. Distant and proximal (Space), in its turn, are differentiated because of the possibility of obtaining a better view of some object, or of other sensations of it, and in some cases, this demands a kind of work of translation: I see a flower and in order to obtain from it a tactile sensation and the sensation of aroma, I must initiate a muscular action, or another person must do it for me. This is all that matters about Space.

The nothingness of Time and Space, which is correlative to the nothingness of the Self (or personal identity) and of material Substance, situates us in an eternity without conceivable discontinuities. This is the metaphysical certainty of my novel.

1 This metaphysical doctrine is stated principally in No toda es Vigilia la de los Ojos Abiertos y Otros escritos (Not all Consciousness is Wakefulness and Other Writings) (Editor’s Note — Adolfo de Obieta)