The Seamstress and the Wind

17

IDLE DAYS IN Patagonia. .

Tourist days in Paris. .

Life carries people to all kinds of distant places, and generally takes them to the most far flung, to the extremes, since there’s no reason to slow its momentum before it’s done. Further, always further. . until there is no further anymore, and men rebound, and lie exposed to a climate, to a light. . A memory is a luminous miniature, like the hologram of the princess, in that movie, that the faithful robot carried in his circuits from galaxy to galaxy. The sadness inherent in any memory comes from the fact that its object is forgetting. All movement, the great horizon, the journey, is a spasm of forgetting, which bends in the bubble of memory. Memory is always portable, it is always in the hands of a wandering automaton.

The world, life, love, work: winds. Great crystalline trains that whistle through the sky. The world is wrapped in winds that come and go. . But it’s not so simple, so symmetrical. The actual winds, the air masses displaced between differences in pressure, always go toward the same place in the end, and they come together in the Argentinian skies; big winds and little winds, the cosmopolitan oceanic winds as much as the diminutive backyard breezes: a funnel of stars gathers them all together, adorned with their velocities and orientations like ribbons in their hair, and brings them to rest in that privileged region of the atmosphere called Patagonia. That’s why the clouds there are ephemera par excellence, as Leibniz said of objects (“objects are momentary minds”: a chair is exactly like a man who lives for a single instant). The Patagonian clouds welcome and accommodate all transformations within a single instant, every transformation without exception. That’s why the instant, which in any other place is as dry and fixed as a click, is fluid and mysterious in Patagonia, fantastic. Darwin called it: Evolution. Hudson: Attention.

I’m not talking in patriotic metaphors. This is real.

Traveling is real. Opening the door to all fears is real, even if what comes before and what comes after, the motives and the consequences, are not. To tell the truth I can’t figure out how it is that people can make the decision to travel. Maybe it would be helpful to study the work of those Japanese poets who trekked from landscape to landscape finding subjects for their somewhat incoherent compositions. Maybe the explanation lies there. “The next morning the sky was very clear, and just when the sun shone brightest, we rowed out into the bay.” (Bashō)

The skies of Patagonia are always clean. The winds meet there for a great carnival of invisible transformations. It’s as if to say that everything happens there, and the rest of the world dissolves in the distance, useless — China, Poland, Egypt. . Paris, the luminous miniature. Everything. All that remains is that radiant space, Argentina, beautiful as paradise.

How to travel? How to live in another place? Wouldn’t it be lunacy, self-annihilation? To not be Argentinian is to drop into nothingness, and no one likes that.

And in full transparency. . I want to make note of an idea, although it has nothing to do with all this, before I forget: might it be that the Chinese ideograms were originally conceived to be written on glass, so they could be read from the other side? Maybe that’s the source of the whole misunderstanding.

And in full transparency, I was saying. . a wedding dress. A cloud? No. A white dress, without the form of a dress, of course, or rather: without the form of a human, which it takes when placed on its owner or a mannequin, but instead its authentic form, the pure form of a dress, which no one ever has occasion to see, because it’s not simply a question of seeing it as a mountain of fabric thrown over a table or chair. That is formlessness. The form of a dress is a continuous transformation, limitless.

And it was the most beautiful and complicated wedding dress ever made, an unfolding of all the white folds, a soft model of a universe of whites. Flying at thirty thousand feet with what appeared to be majestic slowness, even though it must have been going very fast (there was no point of reference in the blue abyss of daylight), and changing shape ceaselessly, endlessly, giant swan, forever opening new wings, its tail forty-two feet long, hyperfoam, exquisite corpse, flag of my country.