I am obsessed with stories because I am surrounded by them, but told in the most fantastically ironic ways. The melancholy is tinged with a humor that is self-deprecating, either to the nation, the city, the citizens. Arrogance and pride are juxtaposed with a self-critical introspection.
The art of storytelling is never lacking in Buenos Aires. Right now there are countless old cafes with booming voices that crescendo at the perfect booming moments of high drama. Thinking about all of the amazing stories being told in this very moment, in this haunted city filled with ghosts and cinematic scenes of characters so surreal, but are simply the woman who serves you coffee in her rundown cafe, an extra-ordinarily ordianrily extraoridinary individual, or the old man who patronizes to get drunk alone and will talk to anyone close enough for him to excitedly tap/hit on the shoulder when the most unbelievable or incredible moments of his narrative. People are extraordinary in their ordinary jobs, yet they are comical/tragic characters that will talk to you for hours and become more than just the person you are paying to give you food, but the giver of unsolicited advice and political and social commentary. Often, what are the results of the climatic narratives, these unbelievable moments, are perfectly delivered wrapped in a coating of brilliant irony that is regularly employed to indicate that what is the unbelievabilty of the unbelievable, is that it is to be expected. Afterall, as I remember often, this is a cynical wonderland (which Lewis Carroll´s certainly was for he himself was quite a craftsman of irony). I stepped through the looking glass, both transcending and self-reflecting, as the double allows for motion, and landed in this overy stimulating world of words that circulate as they did in pre-modern times. Marcel Mauss said that the magician derives his power from the doubling, through an emptiness of body and a motion. The stories are magical as they circulate, and the stories that intrigue me most are about the most magical of all modern ideas, so spectacular, and so theistic. The stories of economic crisis, the failure of capitalism, the failure of circulation, literally, which was so powerful in the moment and continues to be. It is made even more present by the stories of ransackings and kidnappings told in the present tense and circulating as stories, as things that move on their own. These are things circulating about a literal crisis in circulation. There was the trauma of the myth of neo-liberalism shattering after a guilded ´90s and the power of the storyteller, who, with the same power as the hysteric, is using a type of talking cure by constructing a narrative and mediating a story bigger than he or she is as an individual. It is a story about being Argentine, about being of Buenos Aires during 2001 and 2002 with so many presidents so quickly in and out, like a Lewis Carroll chapter that parodies the most ridiculous of theaters-politics, they are bigger than a person yet tinged with the personal as the universal tragedy is told in a dark cafe by one unforgettable drunk.
I have heard from many (of course Argentines) warning me about the lying ways of this country, as if speaking anything but the truth were not only a political game, but one that extends to intimate social settings. Everything is viewed as a game, how to live by the rules of breaking the offical rules (the laws), how to work, but en negro, which is so very widespread here. I know so many people here who refuse to work in a legal manner. The manner of telling stories, with the Italian intonation of Argentine castellano, the dramatic hand gestures and facial expressions, the aggressive directness of eye-to-eye contact and no attempt at gentleness, is a drama which is meant to convey a drama. In other words, there is the the theater which is performing a dramatic event (or at least it is being presented as dramatic). The narrator may begin the story in the past tense, but soon switches to the present, so that everything that is beign narrated about this past experience is now in the present. Stories do what Walter Benjamin calls ´blasting´moments out of the ´continuum of time´. This collapsing of time within the space of the story is so very powerful. Suddenly the words take on much more import, as they are no long a re-telling, but a simultaneous interpretation.
I have talked about fear before. Paranoia as form of talking about fear and using fear to place the unknown within the realm of the known, but never stripping the fear away. Is it a way of using terror-being terrificly terrifying--to cut through the terror that causes fear. I have heard endlessly scary things, but often in the "I know a friend" or even farther removed narrative, which allows an eery distance from the victim, a space that lacks explanation, and within what is unknown, as the ´friend of a friend´ is not there to ask, emerge visions of horror, of the outside world beyond this conversation as filled with situations and people waiting to do you harm.
