On “The Nostalgia of Disaster” by Constanza Michelson

1. One more tragedy

This book could be a family novel. Another one, like so many. One more story that is recovered in the roughness of a memory that is not known for sure if it was that or a formation of the unconscious so that the drives are distributed throughout a life, thus fulfilling the psychic scheme that must face “the real” and reality (which are not the same); a scheme that puts a face to the minute by minute of an existence that frantically searches for the angle to get into the jugular and that inflicts stab wounds, many times, deeper than that memory that is never original, nor completely true nor absolutely clear, but is founding.

The origin of a memory is untraceable, but we do know that it is the breath of the time of the self, patience and despair. Memory is the fury of the gods that is not exhausted, is not consumed; it does not reproduce itself as a cellular mechanism, but persists, lives there, continues, metabolizes and mutates, adhering with incredible capacity to each moment of life; memory becomes a spectre and a Smith & Wesson 40 caliber; glory and ruin, form and supplement, nomadism or fixation: an attempt at permanent dismissal of the beast that, however, embraces us.

So this book is not just another family novel, it is not just another tragedy, nor is it the story of a pain that does not have to be more intense than others. This book puts the writer on stage and exposes him; it is a (re)revelation; “dispossession of the self” (as Judith Butler would say) that shakes and makes one tremble from its first letter. It is the narration of the unspeakable, the representation of the unrepresentable; the color of trauma or the texture of a symptom; the journey along the edges of a world that seemed sutured by the sublimity and horror that archives childhood and records –however, but records– memory. It is the sequel without a prequel of a writer-character who humanizes her nostalgia and her disaster, not to canonize them or wave the flag of a fracture, at least not only, but to confront us that life begins with an interlude, with a fabulous fissure (in the sense of fable), temporarily bizarre and in which the metaphysics of presence, of the logos-memory, is unbalanced giving way to that, to “the thing” that stomps and continues.

This is the story of a scream that didn’t come because it got stuck in the throat of “the girl,” of a gun whose joyful and pale echoes wander around the operating room of a fear that is both persecutory and security-based; a pain that haunts us, but to which we cling in order to continue. It is, above all, a confession and a crazy manual on how to look into the eyes of the monster.

2. Vibrato.

The word vibrato appears twice in the book. At the beginning, in the part called “Seeing,” it says: “That ‘thing’ – which is also the sister’s gaze – is the detail that is missing from the memory, its vibrato”. And towards the end, in what may be the epilogue called “Hearing”, we read: “Forced to see, can you then close your ears? Thus you archive the scene, but without the vibrato. So you take away the body. But then the sound gets lost or goes somewhere? Does horror have its own timbre?

Vibrato, from Latin vibrateis a musical term that accounts for the alterations of sound, its sharpness or its gravity. But at the same time it is an addition to the sound itself. The vibrato is added, adheres and is distributed as a supplementary force in whatever is expressed. In this sense, Michelson gives the word such an intensity that, like almost the entire book, it stirs. The unrepresentable, “the thing” that rests desperately in the sister’s gaze, we can understand it as the point that cut-the-tongue; we vibrate where there is no language, we tremble where there is no reason that processes an indecipherable and uncontrolled stimulus. The tongue is cut and the look speaks.

It would be an unknown, mute, incredibly mute speech, unstructured in terms of hierarchy and word order; speech that is neither heard nor sounded, but vibrates, is incorporated and emerges from the unfathomable pits of the self when it does not find the thread, the thread or the plot of what is seen, unleashing then through its eyes a wave of horrors; amorphous, psychedelic, unreasonable people that become the graft of the sense that was fissured by violence and that, from then on, will vibrate from the spectral shore of an unclassifiable pain.

And I think that Constanza’s question about whether pain has its own timbre can be answered, signed, yes, it has one, but it is a residue diluted in the ether of a memory as sadistic as it is masochistic; the timbre of pain is not heard, it was fossilized in the eyes of “the girl” and the look of the sister. There is no language, only eyes.

The tongue is cut off

Just as an aside, it is disturbing that a book begins and ends by invoking two senses: sight and hearing, “Seeing” and “Hearing.” And the fact is that memory, as Constanza Michelson writes, is often not recorded as an image, but as a sound (even if it is a sound that never was, that remained in potential, suspended in the traumatic lethargy of the unspeakable, then terrible and significant). But we can also think of it the other way around, that is, memory is only an image that lacks any sound. Perhaps the ear also, and following Jacques Derrida in this line, speaks, complains from its language that only hears; perhaps, we insist on the “perhaps,” the ear is the one that keeps everything; an ear that does not listen, but rather receives, stores. The ear would not hear the sound, but rather it is the sound that is the mirror of the ear that manifests itself.

Whatever, vibrato: ghost, spectre, remainder, revenantgraft, supplement, “prosthesis of origin” … absence of sovereignty.

3. Ruin

“After an event – ​​boom! – a remnant remains: an active ruin,” writes the author in the section entitled “What remains: ruins, also trees” (a beautiful title).

And the first thing here is the way Constanza Michelson works with horror itself. It becomes a ruin, but not one that is there, motionless, without voltage, sterile or like a mere commemorative pickaxe of what once had its splendor. It is a dynamic ruin, in display, almost proud of being a ruin; a ruined and ruinous ruin that is seized from somewhere in the unconscious, just like a tree, a sea, children’s games, guns.

As Jacques Derrida finely writes in Memoirs of a blind man:

The ruin does not happen like an accident to a monument that was intact yesterday. At the beginning there is the ruin. Ruin is what happens here to the image from the first glance. Ruin is the self-portrait, this face looked at as a memory of itself, what remains or returns like a spectre since at the first glance at itself, a figuration is eclipsed.

The thought of ruin is related to the Nostalgia for disaster. It would be a matter of removing the ruin itself from the common sense that fetishizes it as a zone where what reigns is decay, ugliness, the ultimate and degraded expression of what once had form, that was outlined and whose possible manifestations were always coordinated. At the beginning there is ruin, and any consideration of the possibilities of a represented present occupying a space, starts from this sort of original and cracked disaster that is the ruin itself.

This has already been there, immemorially, as a spiritual, even alchemical antecedent (What is that strange alchemy that made the ruin a memory that shows itself in its form?); a ruin that colludes with the ghost that haunts the present of the image, pressuring it and making it feel that it was not always precision and expression.

4. Secret

“Like a scientific truth, but without the vanity of discovery. A zero-degree truth. The world, thus, lacks a secret, and like everything that sacrifices its secret, it becomes tedious, but in a morbid way.” Michelson also writes this at the beginning of the book. A world without a secret is a boring world (boring, boredom, the central theme of this work; the repetition of the same thing, the dead hours, the phobias and the excesses. Perhaps, thinking about what Cristina de Peretti defines as the iterablein her words: “the difference in repetition”. There, perhaps, would be a way out of the hell of the same thing that throws us into the wasteland of the purely sensorial.); the secret must then be kept, at all costs, because the secret is something much more than simple silence in the face of something. And the author of Nostalgia for disasterin telling the story of “the girl,” also makes public a secret, and this is the whole possibility of the secret, not being, precisely, a secret.

Now, this is not about wanting to distort or discover someone’s secret (or force its revelation). Or as Blanchot said in The unspeakable community “The secret is not found directly by searching in the forest where the sacrifice of a victim was to have been made.” In this sense, “The girl,” since she cannot be defined, impossible in her conceptualization, since she ultimately keeps a secret that cannot be revealed and which only she can protect, makes us ask: do we really want to discover this secret? Do we want to carry out a kind of voluntary archaeology so that, in the name of a certain hermeneutics (always arbitrary), we are allowed to delimit and enclose the memory? We think that there is no point in an enterprise like this. “The girl” is in itself a secret that must remain secret, far from any totalitarian attempt to snatch it away.

What remains secret, again, as a secret, but of which we can nevertheless bear witness, obeys a double operation of “concealment-unconcealment.” It is here where we think our bet on the thinking of the girl protagonist of The Nostalgia of Disaster as the guardian of a secret that is at the same time intimate and unrevealable, it is also absolutely public and political, and it is in this publicity that its subversive character is also expressed, legitimizing itself as a secret with deconstructive force that can dismantle what a certain tradition (heritage) has defined as “normal”, that is to say: the subordination of women, their call to silence. And I do not read this in a feminist key, necessarily, but as a simple historical observation. Women have been forced to remain silent. Thus, the secret allows us to move from subordination to subversion, precisely, it is insisted, because of its double bind: that of being absolutely intimate and closed to whoever wants to take possession of it and, with the same intensity, completely public, publicized, advertising and thrown into the world of politics.

5. Constance

“Whatever it expresses – even destruction and ruin – the artistic image is by definition an embodiment of hope, it is inspired by faith,” writes Andrei Tarkovsky in his diaries (Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986).

So how not to think – also vibrate and tremble, vibrato and tempo of the movement – ​​that in Constanza’s text, in which I do not see an attempt to try out the typical “catharsis” that, starting with the purest pain and fear, will end in the emancipation of all her chains and traumas, having completed a sort of folkloric, traditional therapeutic process, in which, discovering her ghosts and looking into the eyes of violence, she will reaffirm her selfhood and, thus, get rid of the paralysis that tied her self to the ominous. No, it is not going in that direction.

What Tarkovsky wants to say is that even if everything ends up worse than it began, creation will always be an act of faith, an impulse of life and not of death (or rather a breath that dares to cross death itself). It is not about the result, there is no synthesis or condensation here, but the courage of a girl who reads and feels herself from her current “woman” appealing to what she has at hand and to what is also her talent and her revolt: writing, art. Faith has nothing to do with the fact that we will be absolved, redeemed, atoned for or saved, but with the fact that we take the path of creation, even if it means our lives.

So Constanza could be a soldier of the Algerian resistance, a Mapuche warrior, a poem thrown into the storm without cardinal points when everything breaks down or perhaps a mirror hidden in a remote place that no one has yet discovered, a mirror in which no one yet sees themselves; a mirror waiting to be filled by the reflection of something, or someone. Or maybe in a good twist of fate she is the rehabilitated son of William Burrough who, in a lateral world, always counted on his father and did not get drunk on alcohol, dying at the age of 34, avoiding the box office but subordinate destiny of being the son of a star. beatnik; a father without a gun in his hand. And she could then be, the girl, Constanza, the golden bullet that he talks about as he closes the book and that reverberates through his unconscious and his routine, hammering away. Beyond whether or not there was a shot.

And isn’t this better? Perhaps a bullet actually fired and a truly deafening sound is less ominous than a gun that only threatened, cowardly, and that gathered around that non-shot all the undestined and irreverent of an existence that, in the anxiety of a silence or in the brutal writing of a book, still awaits the bomb that will redeem and drive away the hallucinations? And I ask myself, with fixed anguish, here, at this moment that I write and thinking that I can be a great scoundrel just by considering it, if perhaps it is not better to be a well-placed shot than a spent bullet.

But I stay with her; with the girl who is Constanza and who in the terrible wonder of a birth continues to look with the same eyes at the future of a world as real as it is extravagant. She, who began to write without writing at the exact moment when her childhood was set on fire with a shot that was or was not, opening herself from now on to her own intimate cold war. “How can I start something new with all the yesterday that is in me?” (Leonard Cohen wrote). A Jewish girl, an Anne Frank of our time, or a Violeta Parra or an anonymous child from Sename who survived to tell and remember that violence can be the midwife of history – as Marx said – and that today, here or there, shining in the public light or secretly vibrating the traumatic remainder that makes her cry, she lives, I don’t know if she dreams, but she lives, trembles and recovers again and again in the inextricable pulse of writing and love for her. words and thingsto life and is sustained, as Derrida would say, Drunk with uninterrupted pleasure…