The slow and deliberate destruction of the archives has been a process of dissolving tiny particulars, of chewing and serving up again before the eventual digestion, shredding every shared moment, gnawing at every social ligament.
It began subtly. Titles of some of the archive’s exhibitions and sections started disappearing. Without the title, it was as if the exhibit or section no longer existed. No one even knew to sift through and analyze the exhibit or section again in order to rename it. It was just gone.
Our memories died by palimpsest, files overwritten, a word scribbled out.
What was having it anyway? Not like a pebble in your palm, or a caress on the cheek. There is a reason old people routinely see dead folks. The disk has been overwritten into an absolute virtuality. Here associations short circuit the panoramic line. It may just be one name, bouncing off a pair of objects and a murky image. Shimmering around this silver ring for hours unending, closing in, burning away into silence, into isolation, not senility.
Senility, rather, is what is waiting outside. The civilization shows signs of dementia, is strangely senile.
Physical measurements become a matter of opinion and buildings become strangely shaped.
Accessories of living, like spoons and hairbrushes, drift into and out of reality, sometimes suddenly dissipating into nothingness.
Counterattacks are launched against the light of dawn.
Living has become a matter of diving to extreme depths. He can no longer survive walking the streets, much less the boulevards of his dreams, without having some apparatus attached to his face. It seems to feed on him, this bronchial buttress.
Extended cold wars are conducted against viruses that are repulsed as they attempt to invade the body.
Panic becomes a player in the daily world.
Bouts of sleep become campaigns around particular issues.
Every event in life is seen as a joint of the body.
To pass from trying to hum the melody of living to studying the counterpoint and harmonizing the entrance of simultaneous catastrophes.
The excessive amounts of rest it takes to cross the forest of indignities.
What exactly is the nature of the matter he has been coughing out every morning all these years? Why has it been steadfastly trying to asphyxiate him?
Clarity creates anxiety, as does its memory later on, in the blur.
Is there some pulpy essence, some stuff and consistency, to the contents of the archive? Whatever such marrow, such wisdom worth preserving is, it seems to be divided incidentally in almost random bursts and packaged with a sticky covering of congealed emotions, a sort of weave or meld of simultaneity.
Are the files something we all share, or does our housing them divide us?
The common crime of coddling has made us wildly argumentative.
Help me! Help me, love, please love me please. I have fallen down. I am lost. My contents are scattered on the floor.
Stupor, crawling on all fours blindly, playing out the spectacle out of focus. What to preserve of vomit, of emptying each cavity of memory.
But now the fires come, to erase place and any setting aside to later bequeath. Ember dusk and ashen dawn, an oscillation of slumber. I can feel my hands sleepily making sorting motions before the flames. After I am extinguished, not even the fleetest sensation from a dream is distinguishable in the sopping remains that seep outward in trails without direction. The desire for another’s presence will have been liberated up into the air.
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About the Author
The son of Colombian parents, George Mario Angel Quintero was born in 1964 in San Francisco, California, where he spent his first thirty years. He studied literature at the University of California, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Under the name George Angel, he has published poetry, fiction, and essays in English. Since 1995, he has lived in Medellin, Colombia, authoring seven books of poetry, and three books of theater plays all in Spanish under the name Mario Angel Quintero. He continues to write and publish in both English and Spanish. He is also a musician, a visual artist, and a theater director.
