I saw it for the very briefest moment, but I saw it. Then, suddenly, the scene vanished, and I continued on my way, quickening my pace, rushing to get back, to shut myself into the hotel room and start writing (the floor plan flashed vividly before my mind’s eye, with the table and chair, and even the notebook open on the table). That was when I said to myself for the first time: Literature. . Or rather I shouted it, inwardly. But there was no need to articulate the word: I could feel it in every fiber of my body. Such was my excitement that I really did get lost this time. I had to summon all my orientation skills to find the way, walking faster and faster. I was almost running. Even so, every few steps I reached into my pockets, took out the ballpoint pen and the papers that I happened to have on me (the bus ticket, the hotel card, a few other scraps), and, barely stopping, scribbled a note, then set off again more quickly than before.
And here I am, at last, writing like a man possessed. As well I might: not even a whole lifetime of adventures and study could have given me more reason to write. And now I come, with a natural ease, to the climax: the description of that back, hidden from the eyes of humanity until now.
But. . I don’t know if it’s my impatience, or the excess of energy that has taken hold of me since the ghost turned around, but there’s a sharp pain in the middle of my chest, and it keeps getting more and more intense, forcing me to grimace horribly. It’s becoming unbearable, climbing to a spasmodic peak, and when it seems about to relent, it doesn’t. I’m finding it hard to write. My vision is clouding over, my eyes are half closed, and I’m clamping my jaws so tightly to stop myself crying out that my molars feel like they’re going to explode.
At this very moment, as I persist in the effort to trace these increasingly distorted letters and words, I’m assailed by the idea that I could die right here, bent over my notebook, before I can describe what I saw. .
Is it possible? Could anyone be so unlucky? Now the pain has eased a little, but it’s worse: I can feel it tearing the chambers of my heart with “a sound of silk being slashed,” and the blood’s gushing inside me, getting all mixed up. My writing hand is shaking and starting to turn purple. . I don’t know how I’ve managed to keep the pen moving. .
My sight is blurred, I’m staring desperately at the lines my hand keeps tracing. . At the darkening edge of my field of vision, I can see the crumpled papers on which I made notes when I was out walking. . But they’re not even notes; they’re no more than cryptic reminders that nobody will be able to understand (because of my pernicious habit of using abbreviations). My death will condemn them to indecipherability forever. . unless someone very clever comes along and by means of meticulous inductive and deductive reasoning (over years or decades) is able to arrive at a plausible reconstruction. . But no, that kind of treatment is reserved for the papers of a great writer; no one will bother with mine. .
Maybe I could leave some kind of key. . but no, it’s impossible. I don’t have time. I can’t maintain the rhythm and the rigor of good prose, the kind of prose I would like to have written, the kind that would have made me a great writer, worthy of serious study. All I can do is use the last of my strength to scrawl a few disjointed, almost incoherent sentences. . I don’t have time because I’m dying. . Death is the exorbitant price that a failure like me has to pay for becoming literature. . The hardest thing for me is that I did, in fact, have time (once), and I wasted it shamefully. The lesson, if a lesson can in some small way redeem my wasted life, is this: you have to get straight to the point. . I should have begun with the crucial thing, which no one but I knew about. . I wouldn’t even have had to sacrifice the flow and the balance of a well-told story, because I could have written the introductory sections later and rearranged it all when preparing the final draft. . This stupid compulsion to narrate events in chronological order. .
DECEMBER 8, 2003
The Ovenbird
THE HYPOTHESIS UNDERLYING THIS STUDY is that human beings act in strict accordance with an instinctive program, which governs all of our actions, however unpredictable or freely chosen they may seem, and that our “cultural” free will is consequently no more than a kindly illusion with which we dupe ourselves, as much a part of our innate heritage as the rest. On the face of it, this proposal is extremely bold or outright preposterous: the idea that everything could be foreordained would seem to be refuted by the wild variety of human lives, beginning with the extravagant iridescence of thought, the unpredictability of our least reactions, and the ideas that come to mind willy-nilly; and if it’s unconvincing in an individual case, how could it explain the incalculable differences between one human being and another, no matter how closely related they are? But this impression of difference is precisely the illusion that the hypothesis aims to dispel, and all one has to do (I’m not saying this is easy) is accept that it is an illusion for the variations to become irrelevant and the veil that hid our essential instinctive uniformity to fall away. There’s no need to give up those variations, or sacrifice one’s “surface” differences to a “deep” essence, because, in fact, there’s no such essence; it’s all surface. And what’s to stop all the countless minutiae of our acts, thoughts, desires, dreams, and creations, everything that happens second by second between birth and death, being inscribed a priori in our genes, in the form of a program that’s identical for every member of the species? Science has accustomed us, by now, to greater wonders of computing. Humans have always been very sure that their actions are determined by a kind of causation that is free and superior, “cultural” rather than natural. . while the equally ancient hypothesis of instinctive programming has always been reserved for animals and applied to them with fanatical rigor.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to persuade anyone. The idea is too shocking and arbitrary; and in a way it’s self-defeating because if it’s not built into our program, how could we accept it? But maybe it is built into our program; after all it occurred to me (and I’m not the first). And it’s true that persuasion is one of our instinctive gifts, along with fiction.
What humans have traditionally believed about animals owes a great deal to fiction. I’m not saying it isn’t true. How could I? Let’s take it at face value, and turn it around. Let’s imagine, for the purposes of demonstration, how an animal of some kind might apply its reason to this issue. It might be objected that animals don’t have reason to apply. Very well, I’m quite prepared to use another word; in any case, it’s just a question of terminology (and I know I’m not expressing myself well). By the “reasoning” of an animal, then, I mean something different, for which we don’t have a word, precisely because we have always stayed on this side of the line. Let’s forget all the tales and the fables: the traveling ant, the grumbling bear, the fox and the crow. . Or, rather, let’s take them to their ultimate conclusions. Instead of “fiction,” let’s call it “translation,” and translate thoroughly. Now’s the time to do it, because only translation can get to the bottom of this nature/culture dialectic. I think it will be clearer if I give an example, but I should point out that it’s not an example in the conventional sense, that is, a particular extracted at random from the general by discursive means. What follows is all general, from start to finish, pure generality.
Let’s imagine an ovenbird, in the year 1895, in the province of Buenos Aires. And let’s stay with the human perspective for a moment, in order to make the contrast clearer.