PROse
_ report on an experience
(project, version January 23)
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Congratulations, you have been awarded a prize. You will remain in the game. Or not.
To access the prize, click the link. Register on the digital application. Set the password. Menus, contacts, a machine for entry by case number, time, code. Screens with letters and numbers indicating order and offices. Voices off and on. Glass doors, transparent, opaque, automatic. You bring your hand close and they open effortlessly. A faint sound. You enter. And you pass through. Everything is passage, in the gentle and imperceptible horror of the metamorphosis underway. G partout, quotation marks and ellipses.
New pw: (in)patientia.
Return to the main menu. Reset.
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The question: Another thing; different from what you expect; it lives in everything; it likes drawers, flees from paints, barely allows itself to be photographed and puts words to the test; a thing that places you in the position of the apprentice (self-taught? traveller?); that tells you: come; and you go; towards it.
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Hypothesis(es):
I; you; the others; everyone. Discomfort: you apologize, you want to promise never again, but you don’t know.
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It begins without you or anyone else noticing. Then it gives itself away in a malaise that appears to you in images before intermittent disturbances in the body. And then you hear the heavy word, finding yourself on unfamiliar ground, really messed up, you know that. It isn’t quite just the shock started by a ?, and even if you tremble inside, you don’t panic. As if you had long been expecting something like this, you quickly realize that fear invents plots and that you must prepare for everything. You imagine that everything, a formless thing without exact coordinates despite warnings about general definitions or possible stages. Research follows. You try to find out more, you ask questions, you gather data to analyse that unstable everything, that fixed nothing. You look a little more each time, alternating closeness and distance, the unexpectedly calm zoom and the natural choreography of emotions focused on the tasks ahead. You hold on with tweezers. You place the world on a slide, make lists and tables.
At the same time, it is as if there were a shadow over truth and you ask: is this happening? Is it me, here? What place is this? And what language is being spoken? Some mistake? It can only be yours, you think, mea culpa, which one? Or is it the world?
At dusk, you listen to the grinder’s melody. And you enter the twilight, beneath the planes passing overhead.
_are you still here? 2
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In this experience you are a test piece, a guinea pig. You don’t really know what you’re doing. Do you expect that from someone?
To others, you’ve become a ghost of yourself. Another shadow, then, in the laboratory and in the archive drawer, in the museum display case, a bracelet-wearing rat expelled from its burrow, a still life.
And, by happy chance or God writing straight with crooked lines, on a decisive day there happens to be on the adjacent wall a somewhat naïve painting in which a pair of ballerina shoes hanging from a tree against a blue, starry background accompany a pouring teapot and the sentence: “don’t forget to remember.” The Red Shoes, there. And tea for you.
You think again: this wasn’t me, nor is it, but it could be, it could have been me, but no. And again: no, this is not me.
Then: can someone stop being who they think they are, stop being at all?
And further: to be and, at the same time, to step outside oneself. To split into another, into something else. Are you still you? Is one of them saved?
You rehearse peeling away from yourself the shadow of the student traveling around the world turned into a single country, from the Chapel of Bones near Prague to the one in Évora, returning to Lisbon. You speak alone with yourself, trying to clear between beliefs imposed by AI and by the corner specialist. To go beyond the limits of the body, the mind, of place and time, seems to be the problem under investigation. Ideally there would be a grant, a proper manual. Politics in everything.
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Yes, you have the essentials: water in a glass or bottle, paper tissues, glasses, etc., a mobile phone and a black-covered notebook to fill time and discreetly fix whatever you decide. That, nothing more, doubles shadows and reflections: mirrors of handwritten and typed notes, raw and banal images, sounds — some like crude records of anatomies and dissections, specimens, descriptions of appearances, structures, conditions, propathies, prescriptions, treatments, and protocols; others, silly inventions of the moment or simply because. Memories and fantasies. Fragments without glue. Evidently, collage.
In that state of the art there will be excesses, omissions, fragilities. Do you avoid them? Perhaps you’ll understand better later, or forget, since you also need to learn how to forget. There are places not to return to—or yes. You’ll see, in this case. Questionnaire in progress.
Save and back up. You might just make it.
Without thinking, you choose to you must live the necessary moment, take care of balances. You observe everything and everyone, you learn humbly in the precarious dilution as one case among many: code, bed number, room and file, so many; pronouns instead of names, these changed or erased later, preserving the most stubborn side of identity which, though suspended, persists. Because that’s how it is: the pair of slippers, the adjective or verbal expression, the simple tone of voice, are as eloquent as the magazine someone flips through there instead of the Sontag and Kafka books left at home, or the computer meant to keep work up to date. Everything traces differences within a similar condition, never identical.
Essentials: mirrors that are rarely neutral; more slides in the analytical laboratory; threads to cling to in the global swamp; and more drawers.
_still around? 3
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Rehearsals of you succeed one another in others. They are part of the research. Theses.
This one, they say — and you know it’s true — goes with painted eyes to the surgery room, where you enter through a window. That one chooses to listen, before anaesthesia, to heavy metal, occasionally. Another falls silent in a panic of dry throat. Yet another, in the white or black fade-out, says goodbye to the glassed gallery up above, where interns learn from cases. In the post-op recovery room, amid the constant beeping of machines, the head nurse instructs others while the man on the gurney in front, intubated and still confused, gropes a nurse’s breast and then slaps the assistant. In the women’s ward, after hours of fasting, you salivate listening to the one from Olivais describe at length how she makes bacalhau à lagareiro for the family, while the music teacher laments the absence of her favourite cereals and, arm in arm with the former, walks down the long corridor, from where the dreariest men’s wards can be glimpsed. On another day, an alpha woman from Alentejo offers coffee capsules to anyone who accompanies her to the nursing room to use the machine. And there’s the beta who stages a little porno skit with a banana prescribed to compensate salts. Another, slim and tiny, a Black woman of uncertain age, hides under the enormous pink speakers she wears and draws the curtains to, a restless silhouette behind them, speak quietly on the phone. She is the opposite of the one the ambulance brings every two weeks: the rarely silent, wan, androgynous Brazilian with downy hair to be reborn, whose dream of becoming an actress leads her, lying on her side, to rehearse endlessly on her phone, rewinding again and again the lines to memorize for the audition she will someday attend. From time to time, absurd, red-nosed clowns land, and kind ladies from the League with solicitous questions and cards. Exhausted nurses hurriedly stitch depleted little bags for chemical balloons. You will keep one of them as a relic, after use in the pocket of the shirt with flowers less colourful than the lights in which the profiles of things briefly atomize after a dose that’s a bit too fast. You won’t be able to drink water at room temperature. And white cotton gloves will dress your hands, for things as simple as touching a door handle or a fork, whose cold gives you near electric shocks. You will be Mickey Mouse, Minnie, Donald the first (the other one makes you sick),or a wand-wielding magician. And the aspiring actress won’t be the lover, the other woman, in the role assigned to her, but Cinderella at a Carnival ball. Long live the sewing mice. Let colours shine. And let the villains die.
No tears, moans, or screams — lucky you, in that. Beeps yes, constantly; forget it or call it Josefina in honour of the mice, Florence for the off-key ones. Television, little, and what’s on, muted. So, it’s impossible to know from which shabby transistor comes Attenborough’s voice speaking of the metamorphoses of caterpillars and butterflies, gorillas and humans. Or are they beetles? Those and other animals, plus the clumsy swamp bird, plof. A zoo in your head. You are an animal. The more prostheses and power you have, the more animal you are (is that why you’re more moved by them than by your own kind?). F*, you’re a dung beetle. Steal that.
And visitors: one woman’s husband; that one’s daughter; another one’s assistant who got the place wrong and swapped private for public; the minister, oh.
_how about if you leave? 4
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The little white pebbles to follow — then it turns out they’re neither white nor pebbles. They move. They require a method that isn’t so scientific, more organic, for creatures. Out of the norm, strange or foreign — that’s what you are here. The one who doesn’t belong to the group, the one who doesn’t even “be,” the “other.” It doesn’t matter where you come from, the ID card, the language, none of that truly distinguishes you or makes you speak any better when what counts are gestures, expressions of the body, the voice, whatever it is the soul uses. Forget the slippers and the faded sneakers.
Have you been pirated, or are you the pirate of the chewing-gums? Everything is odd, damn game. Avatar or alias instead of, rather outside your family, your blood, your land; outside your language, your culture; could being foreign be the condition of universality, as Kristeva asks? Or are you simply the one who doesn’t even recognize himself among others, like Camus’s, you the foreigner, you, or the others? Expatriate from which homeland, with borders on loan no matter how tightly you cling to the once-rich garden that’s no longer even suburban? Outside yourself, outside your interiority — is such stripping possible, and can one still be?
Subject to a condition of passage, between places, what you are and what you know are loads whose usefulness you don’t know as you grope across the ground you now tread. How about shuffling the timeline, stretching the present, swapping past and future?
Try the online tutorial. Block the unknown number.
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You return to it many times, in between hassles, nonsense, and little floralia[1]. You lose count. Order number this, number that, number the other: arrhythmic spiel and sound signals, numbing background of syncopated chatter layered over outside noises, roosters and birds, phones, cars and planes, always. People like you of every colour, age, gender, and condition constantly come and go, in groups arriving by transport, accompanied by a family member, or alone.
Wait for the appointment. Wait your turn for the analysis, the exam, the result, the corrupted file that takes forever to load, the dossier. Wait for life. Entertain[2] yourself. Read, observe, listen, talk. You get good news, but with small types between the lines. And then it’s less good. And then you don’t know. You don’t cry? But you scream in mute nightmares of alternative stories, or you’re more xutos chutos e pontapés/kicks[3] at stones, white or not, in rage at the multiplication of thugs with neither slate or ram memories?
So, invent exits that don’t inconvenience an already screwed world, nor the ones you love. Behave yourself. The usual. Stick to the predictable figure. Make a virtue of necessity[4]. Blah blah. And no.
Fill in the test again. Type the number. Rate from 1 to 10. Send the reply. You’ve exceeded the character limit, look, it’s gone, repeat, breathe. Idiot, get used to it, the machine is always smarter. Order it online. Ride the scooter on the sidewalk, take a tuk-tuk or recycle a mata-velhos[5]. Run the red light, a colour to be ignored even at traffic signals. Make faces at the candidates but vote. Don’t sulk. Smile at him at home and at the camera on the lamppost.
Who told you, freedom, to be fragile, essential (or overrated)?
_did you hold out? _or do you hold yourself? 5
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One of the waiting rooms has trompe-l'œil gray curtains on the walls, perhaps painted by the same hand that made the ballet shoes in the tree.
It is the stage where that middle-aged woman appears, dressed in white punctuated by garish colours: a short jacket over a full skirt, lace tights and also white sandals with thick straps and ankle buckles, doll-like, wedge soles and high heels; on her head, a hat with drooping flowers—because, clearly, appearance matters.
Beside her adult son, sallow and indifferent to his phone, she begins pulling dried linden leaves out of a plastic bag, inserting them one by one into the hollow tube of the umbrella handle, shredding them all the while as she talks to herself about “them.”
“Them” are you, who sleep and wake between what she says; or you, who follow stars on your phone; or who think you love the divine light of others and, pathetically, follow influencers; you who eat from an earthenware plate kneaded with the ashes of your parents or who dress yourself in your own regurgitated entrails; or you still, whose time is far too precious and who sends the fired secretary to write the minutes after hours. You, who happened into that vinyl chair that creaks like a fart. Or you again, a serious oyster as someone else once said, a mere translation error with nothing to do with this.
Because of your call, you never find out what the woman in white does afterward with the leaves and the gangsters. You exit the scene.
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In another room, a hapless adolescent afflicted by a dire syndrome drags himself behind his elderly mother, wearing yellow clogs and trousers sagging halfway down his buttocks. They keep changing seats to get closer to the entrance of the consulting rooms. When they call him, he wants to go to the loo, and his mother takes him into the women’s toilet. Then they enter the restricted area, and soon you hear his voice, out of control: “I want to eat I want to eat I don’t want no no I don’t want I want to die I want to die I don’t want I don’t want I don’t want to eat,” amid the impatient remarks of the mother, nurses, and assistants. It all calms only after a male voice, calmly asking:
“So, José, can I help?”
Can anyone? Yes, speaking helps. In catharsis, or at least in the report (wiretaps section). But speaking how? How do you speak about certain things at the zero degree of voice of the word, having the right pencil so that tone and idea form a naturalness the ears can tolerate?
While you don’t know, return to tidying cupboards and drawers, from cutlery to socks and the files on the computer that ought to delete themselves and, like the spy’s messages, escape from archives on another planet with water.
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You still hear that man on the phone, angrily asking his wife who, after bringing him in, has just broken an arm:
“So how did you manage to get me into this now?” Delete that.
Again, results are provisional, pending patent registration and testing.
_almost there 6
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Rare is the time when no one is sleeping in a chair. In that one, a urine sample container was left behind. That, and other hardcore or minor things, you erase. You detox. Or not. Above all, you cling to the ifs. If the monkey that thinks with its belly doesn’t eat the mouse. If the mouse survives the swim in the experiment. If it withstands the diva’s whistles as she rehearses. If the dear little mice make the dress for the unfinished story. Or not. After all, which ball?
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At last, let there be someone who decides for you the index of the final version of the project report. Or it stays as it is, forget it, since this isn’t you, nor them. Nor me, watching you. No hypothesis is confirmed. The research is inconclusive. The erratum remains undone, the typo silenced, corrected in the chat.
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Draft opinion and recommendations:
It will go well, even if it stops going. Do whatever is necessary. Use emojis but don’t make hearts with your hands. Do something else even if you don’t know what. Say no. Or yes. Behave yourself. Misbehave. Log in. Log out. Smile. If you can, avoid luminescent crabs, stages and dim-lamp genies, ruined prows; drop the verses and turn prose into a palette.
And even without an honour roll or a trophy, you can submit the project of the experience again. Or not.
Go get some air instead.
Go
so
_dive into the contour of shadow, swim in water that dries in a mirror
or not
[1] Floral games, poetry sessions.
[2] “Entertain” is “entreter” in Portuguese, literally “between+to have”; the writing with parenthesis emphasises a double meaning also referring as to have yourself, to keep having yourself.
[3] Xutos & pontapés, the name of a Portuguese rock band, mixes the double meaning of kicks and injections, in drugs slang.
[4] The literal Portuguese term means “turn tripes into heart”, referring to be patient and stand adversities.
[5] Nick name in Portuguese (literal translation: “old people killer”) for ancient electric vehicles for a single driver, which used to cause accidents with old people.
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