[Q]ue lo universal es lo local sin paredes

Manuel Rivas has an interesting take on the supposedly rigid dichotomy between the particular and the universal or the local and the global.  Riffing on Miguel Torga, Rivas asserts that the universal is simply the local without walls (read borderlines).  That readerly interest draws together a series of words and (hypothetical) worlds.

[Q]ue lo universal es lo local sin paredes; y cuando leemos a Rulfo, a Graciliano Ramos, a John Berger, al mundo de Onetti, o de Lezama Lima, o de todos los autores que nos interesan, y vemos precisamente que el lugar en el que escriben, es concreto, es el lugar donde viven, pero es también, es el lugar donde se posa la esfera.

I would also suggest that such a claim also re-evaluates precisely what we consider the borderlines of the local, that is, of a place.  Instead of remaining rigidly inscribed along ethnocentric or geographical lines, the local becomes connected across continents in new formations of alliances...

Re-reading a bit of Foucault

I really like this short essay, "Of Other Spaces."

Bachelard's monumental work and the descriptions of phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well. The space of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below, of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or a space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. Yet these analyses, while fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should like to speak now of exter-nal space.

It's interesting to see his work directly approach the phenomenological question of space/place.  I do wonder what he might mean by fantasmatic here.  How does a place become fantasmatic?  Ghostly?  Or uncanny?  On the one hand, this passage might suggest that it draws back to "our passions" -- which almost write themselves into a space (thereby making it a place?).  Or we might turn to the second of the passage which lingers on the phenomenological surface of things.  How might this external space also contain interior(s)?  

"El campo reconquista la ciudad"

I'm really enjoying this article in El País -- especially when they quote Enric Batlle.  For instance: "¿Qué ocurriría si fuera la vegetación [en lugar de la arquitectura] la que organizara la urbanización?"

The question points to some underlying issues with placing all of one's faith in human-based design.  Instead, Batlle seems to suggest that buildings should be placed in the gardens -- and not the other way around.

Humanism in M. Lowry

Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south-wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as the ploughs go to and fro from year to year.

And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts and the sea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils, he leads captive, man excellent in wit.  And he masters by his arts the beast whose lair is in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck, he tames the tireless mountain bull.

And speech, and wind-swift thought, and all the moods that mould a state, hath he taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost, when it is hard lodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing rain; yea, he hath resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come; only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escapes.
--Sophocles Antigone


I ran across this passage as an epigraph to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, a text that one critic details not as the drunk writing literature but "the drunk as literature".  (This description is certainly apt - the majority of the plot is immersed in some kind of bottle.)  The phrasing is interesting in relationship to the Sophocles text because it calls attention to an alliance (albeit full of discord) between the inebriation of texts and the inebriation of the bodies (including a minds).  This liquidated text seeps into the lines from Antigone.

Yet Sophocles here speculates about a humanist techne that always manages to salvage humans from the wreckage of the tired and weary god (Mother? Earth).  The resistance to death (or the drive to it) is a consequence of flying-machines, nets and yokes.  Animals also sway in and out as theoretical tools utilized by humans.  Horses fall into the cyclical patterns of agriculture and submission.  The result is not only an exaggerated claim to human greatness but also an excessive gesture at what defines humanism: other beings.

What does the drunk as literature tell us about the supposed masters of on top of the old god?  Lowry suggests a two-fold process in his novel.  First, there is a deficiency in the vision -- an inhibited blur of words, facts, faces and films.  These objects becomes multi-faceted and obscure.  On the other hand, this inhibition also works in the text to de-emphasize a world created for a hyperactive human awareness. In its place, the Mexican environment is vacant but also enchanting:

How continually, how startlingly, the landscape changed!  Now the fields were full of stones: there was a row of dead trees.  An abandoned plough, silhouetted against the sky, raised its arms to heaven in mute supplication; another planet, he reflected again, a strange planet where, if you looked a little further, beyond the Tres Marías, you would find every sort of landscape at once, the Cotswolds, Windermere, New Hampshire, the meadows of the Eure-et-Loire, even the grey dunes of Cheshire, even the Sahara, a planet upon which, in the twinkling of an eye, you could change climates, and, if you cared to think so, in the crossing of a highway, three civilizations; but beautiful, there was no denying its beauty, fatal or cleansing as it happened to be, the beauty of the Earthly Paradise itself.  (10)

The activities of one locality stray away from the observer.  Drunk literature has to pause, re-read and re-locate the writer in this entanglement.  Such a sentiment should be extended beyond the question of drunkenness to consider a variety literary modes and tools that link up any humanism explicitly to its milieu.  In this case, a de-emphasis on the uniqueness and (pure) activity of human consciousness draws our attention to other actants in the story (booze, for Lowry).