"All Saints, Day of the Dead"
The Mexican solitaire loves parties and public gatherings. Everything is an occasion to meet. Any pretext is good to interrupt the march of time and celebrate with festivities and ceremonies men and events. We are a ritual people. And this trend benefits our imagination as well as our sensibility, always tuned and awake. The art of the feast, degraded almost everywhere, remains intact among us. Few places in the world can experience a spectacle similar to that of the great religious festivals of Mexico, with their violent, sour and pure colors and their dances, ceremonies, fireworks, unusual costumes and the inexhaustible cascade of surprises of fruits, sweets and objects that are sold those days in plazas and markets.
Our calendar is full of festivities. On certain days, the same in the most remote places as in the big cities, the whole country prays, shouts, eats, gets drunk and kills in honour of the Virgin of Guadalupe or general Zaragoza. Every year, on September 15 at eleven o'clock in the evening, in all the squares of Mexico we celebrate the feast of the Scream; and an excited crowd effectively shouts for an hour, perhaps to better shut up the rest of the year. During the days that precede and follow December 12, time suspends his career, makes a stop and instead of pushing us towards an always unattainable and lying tomorrow, he offers us a round and perfect present, of dance and spree, of communion and feasting with the oldest and most secret of Mexico. Time ceases to be succession and returns to be what it was, and is, originally: a present in which past and future are finally reconciled.
But the festivals offered to the whole country by the Church and the Republic are not enough. The life of each city and of each town is governed by a saint, who is celebrated with devotion and regularity. The neighbourhoods and guilds also have their annual festivities, ceremonies and fairs. And, finally, each one of us - atheists, Catholics or indifferent - has our saint, whom we honor every year. The festivities we celebrate and the resources and time we spend celebrating are incalculable. I remember years ago when I asked a municipal president of a town near Mitla: "How much does the municipality receive from contributions? "About three thousand pesos a year. We are very poor. That's why the governor and the Federation help us every year to complete our expenses." "And what do they use those three thousand pesos for?" "Well, almost everything in parties, sir. As you can see, the town has two Patron Saints."
That answer is not surprising. Our poverty can be measured by the number and sumptuousness of the popular festivities. There are few rich countries: there is no time, no humor. And they are not necessary; people have other things to do and when they have fun they do it in small groups. The modern masses are agglomerations of loners. On great occasions, in Paris or New York, when the public congregates in squares or stadiums, the absence of people is remarkable: you see couples and groups, never a living community where the human person is simultaneously dissolved and rescued. But a poor Mexican, how could he live without that two or three annual festivities that compensate him for his narrowness and misery? The festivals are our only luxury; they replace, perhaps with advantage, the theater and the vacations, the week end and the cocktail party of the Saxons, the receptions of the bourgeoisie and the coffee of the Mediterranean.
In these ceremonies - national, local, guild or family - the Mexican opens up to the outside world. All of them give him the opportunity to reveal himself and dialogue with the divinity, the homeland, friends or relatives. During those days the silent Mexican whistles, shouts, sings, throws firecrackers, discharges his pistol into the air. He discharges his soul. And his cry, like the rockets we love so much, rises to the sky, explodes in a green, red, blue and white explosion and falls vertiginously leaving a cauda of golden sparks. That night the friends, who for months pronounced no more words than those prescribed by the indispensable courtesy, get drunk together, make confidences, cry the same sorrows, discover each other's brothers and sometimes, to prove themselves, they kill each other. The night is filled with songs and howls. The lovers wake up the girls with orchestras. There are dialogues and mockeries from balcony to balcony, from sidewalk to sidewalk. No one speaks quietly. Hats are thrown into the air. Bad words and jokes fall like heavyweight waterfalls. Guitars sprout. Sometimes, it's true, the joy is bad: there are quarrels, insults, bullets, stabbings. This is also part of the party. Because the Mexican doesn't enjoy himself: he wants to surpass himself, to jump over the wall of loneliness that the rest of the year makes him incommunicado. Everyone is possessed by violence and frenzy. Souls explode like colors, voices, feelings, forget themselves, show their true face? Nobody knows. The important thing is to get out, to open the way, to get drunk on noise, on people, on color. Mexico is celebrating. And that feast, crossed by lightning and delirium, is like the brilliant reverse of our silence and apathy, of our reserve and harshness.
Some French sociologists consider the party as a ritual expense. Thanks to wastefulness, the community puts on the coat of celestial and human envy. Sacrifices and offerings calm down or buy from gods and patron saints; gifts and festivities, from the people. Overspending and contempt for energies affirm the opulence of the collectivity. This luxury is a test of health, an exhibition of abundance and power. Or a magic trap. Because with waste one hopes to attract, by contagion, true abundance. Money calls money. The life that is watered, gives more life: the orgy, sexual expenditure, is also a ceremony of genetic regeneration; and waste, strengthens. Year-end ceremonies, in all cultures, mean more than the commemoration of a date. That day is a pause; indeed time is running out, it is extinguished. The rites that celebrate their extinction are destined to provoke their rebirth: the New Year's Day is also the New Year's Day, that of the time that begins. Everything attracts its opposite. In short, the function of the festival is more utilitarian than one thinks; waste attracts or arouses abundance and is an investment like any other. Only here profit is not measured, nor does it count. It is a question of acquiring power, life, health. In this sense the feast is one of the oldest economic forms, like the gift and the offering.
This interpretation has always seemed incomplete to me. Inscribed in the orbit of the sacred, the feast is first and foremost the advent of the unusual. It is governed by special, privative rules that isolate it and make it an exceptional day. And with them is introduced a logic, a morality, and even an economy that often contradict those of everyday life. Everything happens in an enchanted world: time is another time (situated in a mythical past or in a pure present); the space in which it is verified changes its aspect, separates itself from the rest of the earth, decorates itself and becomes a "place of celebration" (in general special or rarely frequented places are chosen); the characters who intervene abandon their human or social trait and become living, although ephemeral, representations. And everything happens as if it were not true, as in dreams. Whatever happens, our actions have greater lightness, a different gravity: they assume different meanings and we contract with them singular responsibilities. We lighten our burden of time and reason.
In certain festivals the very notion of order disappears. Chaos returns and license reigns. Everything is allowed: the usual hierarchies, social distinctions, sexes, classes, guilds disappear. Men disguise themselves as women, lords as slaves, poor as rich. The army, the clergy, the magistracy are ridiculed. Children or madmen rule. Ritual profanations, obligatory sacrileges are committed. Love becomes promiscuous. Sometimes the feast becomes a black mass. Regulations, habits, customs are violated. The respectable individual throws away his mask of flesh and the dark clothes that isolate him and, dressed in colors, he hides in a mask that liberates him from himself.
Thus, the feast is not only an excess, a ritual waste of the goods painfully accumulated during the year; it is also a revolt, a sudden immersion in the formless, in pure life. Through the feast, society frees itself from the rules it has imposed on itself. It mocks its gods, its principles and its laws: it denies itself.
The party is a Revolt, in the literal sense of the word. In the confusion it engenders, society dissolves, suffocates, as an organism governed by certain rules and principles. But it drowns in itself, in its original chaos or freedom. Everything is communicated; good is mixed with evil, day with night, holy with cursed. Every cohabitant loses form, singularity and returns to the primordial mix. The celebration is a cosmic operation: the experience of disorder, the reunion of elements and contrary principles to provoke the rebirth of life. Ritual death gives rise to rebirth; vomiting, appetite; orgy, sterile in itself, the fecundity of mothers or of the earth. The feast is a return to a remote or undifferentiated state, prenatal or presocial, so to speak. Return is also a beginning, according to the dialectic inherent in social events.
The group emerges purified from that bath of chaos. It has submerged itself, in the very entrails from which it came out. In other words, the party denies society as an organic set of differentiated forms and principles, but affirms it as a source of energy and creation. It is a true re-creation, contrary to what happens with modern vacations, which do not involve any rite or ceremony, individual and sterile like the world that invented them.
Society communes with itself at the party. All its members return to the original confusion and freedom. The social structure breaks down and new forms of relationship are created, unexpected rules, capricious hierarchies. In the general disorder, each one abandons himself and goes through situations and places that were habitually forbidden to him. The boundaries between spectators and actors, between officiants and assistants, are erased. All are part of the party, all dissolve in its whirlwind. Whatever its nature, its character, its meaning, the party is participation. This feature finally distinguishes it from other phenomena and ceremonies: secular or religious, orgy or saturnal, the party is a social fact based on the active participation of the attendees.
the Aztecs and Christians.
Thanks to the festivities, Mexicans open up, participate, commune with their peers and with the values that give meaning to their religious or political existence. And it is significant that a country as sad as ours has so many happy parties. Their frequency, the brightness they reach, the enthusiasm with which we all participate, seem to reveal that, without them, we would explode. They liberate us, even momentarily, from all those dead-end impulses and all those inflammable matters that we keep within us. But unlike what happens in other societies, the Mexican fiesta is nothing more than a return to an original state of indifference and freedom; the Mexican does not try to return, but to leave himself, to surpass himself. Among us, the party is an explosion, an explosion. Death and life, joy and lament, song and howl are allied in our festivities, not to recreate or recognize each other, but to devour each other. There is nothing happier than a Mexican party, but there is also nothing sadder. The night of celebration is also a night of mourning.
If in daily life we hide from ourselves, in the whirlpool of the party we shoot ourselves. Rather than open ourselves, we tear ourselves apart. Everything ends in shouting and tearing: singing, love, friendship. The violence of our festivities shows to what extent our hermeticism closes us off from the ways of communication with the world. We know delirium, song, howling, monologue, but not dialogue. Our festivals, like our confidences, our loves and our attempts to rearrange our society, are violent ruptures with the old or with the established. Every time we try to express ourselves, we need to break with ourselves. And the party is only one example, perhaps the most typical, of a violent rupture. It would not be difficult to enumerate others, equally revealing: the game, which is always a going to extremes, often deadly; our prodigality in spending, reverse of the timidity of our investments and economic enterprises; our confessions. The Mexican, being sullen, enclosed in himself, suddenly explodes, opens his chest and exhibits himself, with a certain complacency and stopping at the shameful or terrible retreats of his intimacy. We are not frank, but our sincerity can go to extremes that would horrify a European. The explosive and dramatic, sometimes suicidal, manner in which we undress and surrender, almost unarmed, reveals that something suffocates and inhibits us. Something prevents us from being. And because we don't dare or can't face our being, we resort to partying. She throws us into the void, intoxication that burns itself, shot into the air, firework.
Death is a mirror that reflects the vain gestures of life. All that variegated confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and attempts -works and leftovers- that is each life, find in death, since not sense or explanation, end. In front of it our life is drawn and immobilized. Before crumbling and sinking into nothingness, it is sculpted and becomes immutable form: we will no longer change but to disappear. Our death illuminates our life. If our death is meaningless, our life was meaningless. That is why when someone dies of a violent death, we usually say: "it was wanted". And it is true, each one has the death that is sought, the death that is made. Christian death or dog death are ways of dying that reflect ways of living. If death betrays us and we die in a bad way, everyone regrets: we have to die as we live. Death is non-transferable, like life. If we do not die as we live, it is because the life we live was not really ours: it did not belong to us as the bad luck that kills us does not belong to us. Tell me how you die and I will tell you who you are.
For the ancient Mexicans the opposition between death and life was not as absolute as for us. Life was prolonged in death. And vice versa. Death was not the natural end of life, but the phase of an infinite cycle. Life, death and resurrection were stages of a cosmic process, which was repeated insatiably. Life had no higher function than to end in death, its opposite and complement; and death, in turn, was not an end in itself; man fed with his death the voracity of life, always unsatisfied. Sacrifice had a double object: on the one hand, man accessed the creative process (paying the gods, simultaneously, the debt contracted by the species); on the other, he fed cosmic and social life, which was nourished by the former.
Possibly the most characteristic feature of this conception is the impersonal sense of sacrifice. Just as their life did not belong to them, their death lacked any personal purpose. The dead -even warriors killed in combat and women killed in childbirth, companions of Huitzilopochtli, the solar god- would disappear after some time, either to return to the country undifferentiated from shadows, or to melt into the air, the earth, the fire, the animating substance of the universe. Our indigenous ancestors did not believe that their death belonged to them, as they never thought that their life was really "their life", in the Christian sense of the word. Everything came together to determine, from the birth, life and death of each man: the social class, the year, the place, the day, the hour. The Aztec was as unresponsible for his actions as he was for his death.
Space and time were linked and formed an inseparable unity. To each space, to each of the cardinal points, and to the center in which they were immobilized, corresponded a particular "time". And this space-time complex possessed its own virtues and powers, which profoundly influenced and determined human life. To be born on any given day was to belong to a space, a time, a colour and a destiny. Everything was previously traced. While we dissociate space and time, mere scenarios that go through our lives, for them there were as many "space-times" as there were combinations in the priestly calendar. And each one was endowed with a particular qualitative significance, superior to the human will.
Religion and destiny ruled their lives, as morality and freedom preside over ours. While we live under the sign of freedom and everything -even Greek fatality and the grace of theologians- is choice and struggle, for the Aztecs the problem was reduced to investigating the not always clear will of the gods. Hence the importance of divinatory practices. The only free ones were the gods. They could choose and, therefore, in a deep sense, sin. The Aztec religion is full of great sinful gods -Quetzatcóatl, as a prime example-, gods who faint and can abandon their believers, just as Christians sometimes deny their God. The Conquest of Mexico would be inexplicable without the betrayal of the gods who deny their people.
The advent of Catholicism radically changes this situation. Sacrifice and the idea of salvation, which used to be collective, become personal. Freedom is humanized, incarnated in men. For the ancient Aztecs, the essential thing was to ensure the continuity of creation; sacrifice did not imply ultraterrestrial salvation, but cosmic health; the world, and not the individual, lived thanks to the blood and death of men. For Christians, it is the individual that counts. The world - history, society - is condemned beforehand. The death of Christ saves each individual human being. Each one of us is Man and in each one are placed the hopes and possibilities of the species. Redemption is a personal work.
Both attitudes, however opposed they may seem to us, have a common note: life, collective or individual, is open to the perspective of a death that is, in its own way, a new life. Life is only justified and transcends when it is realized in death. And this is also transcendence, beyond, since it consists of a new life. For Christians, death is a transit, a mortal leap between two lives, the temporal and the ultraterrestrial; for the Aztecs, the deepest way to participate in the continuous regeneration of creative forces, always in danger of extinction if they are not provided with blood, sacred food. In both life and death systems they lack autonomy; they are the two faces of the same reality. All their significance comes from other values, which govern them. They are references to invisible realities.
Modern death has no significance that transcends or refers to other values. In almost all cases it is simply the inevitable end of a natural process. In a world of facts, death is one more fact. But since it is an unpleasant fact, a fact that calls into question all our conceptions and the very meaning of our life, the philosophy of progress (progress where and from where?, Scheler asked) seeks to hide its presence from us. In the modern world everything works as if death did not exist. Nobody counts on it. Everything suppresses it: the preaching of politicians, the announcements of merchants, public morals, customs, joy at a low price and health within reach of all who offer us hospitals, pharmacies and sports fields. But death, no longer as a transit, but as a great empty mouth that satisfies nothing, inhabits everything we undertake. The century of health, hygiene, contraceptives, miracle drugs and synthetic foods is also the century of concentration camps, the police state, atomic extermination and the murder story. Nobody thinks about death, about their own death, as Rilke wanted, because nobody lives a personal life. Collective killing is only the fruit of collectivization.
For the modern Mexican, too, death has no meaning. It has ceased to be transit, access to another life more life than ours. But the irrelevance of death does not lead us to eliminate it from our daily lives. For the inhabitant of New York, Paris or London, death is the word that is never spoken because it burns the lips. The Mexican, on the other hand, frequents it, makes fun of it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it, it is one of his favorite toys and his most permanent love. True, in her attitude there is perhaps as much fear as in that of others; but at least she doesn't hide or hide it; she contemplates it face to face with impatience, disdain or irony: "if they are going to kill me tomorrow, let them kill me once and for all".
The indifference of Mexicans to death is nourished by their indifference to life. The Mexican not only postulates the irrelevance of dying, but of living. Our songs, sayings, parties and popular reflections manifest in an unequivocal way that death does not frighten us because "life has healed us of frights". Dying is natural and even desirable; the sooner, the better. Our indifference to death is the other face of our indifference to life. We kill because life, ours and the life of others, is worthless. And it is natural for this to happen: life and death are inseparable and each time the first loses meaning, the second becomes unimportant. Mexican death is the mirror of the life of Mexicans. Before both, the Mexican closes himself, ignores them.
The contempt for death is not at odds with the cult we profess for it. It is present in our feasts, in our games, in our thoughts. Dying and killing are ideas that rarely leave us. Death seduces us. The fascination that it exerts on us perhaps springs from our hermeticism and the fury with which we break it. The pressure of our vitality, constrained to express itself in ways that betray it, explains the mortal, aggressive or suicidal character of our explosions. When we explode, moreover, we touch the highest point of tension, we touch the vibrant vertex of life. And there, at the height of the frenzy, we feel the vertigo: death attracts us.
On the other hand, death comes to us from life, the nakedness of all its vanities and pretensions and turns it into what it is: mondo bones and a frightening grimace. In a closed world with no way out, where everything is death, the only valuable thing is death. But we affirm something negative. Sugar or paper skulls from China, colorful skeletons of fireworks, our popular representations are always a mockery of life, an affirmation of the nothingness and insignificance of human existence. We decorate our houses with skulls, we eat bread on the day of the deceased that feigns bones and amuse us with songs and chascarrillos in which the hairy death laughs, but all that boastful familiarity does not dispense us from the question we all ask ourselves: what is death? We haven't invented a new answer. And every time we ask it, we shrug our shoulders: what do I care about death, if I don't care about life?
The Mexican, obstinately closed before the world and his fellow men, does death open? He flatters it, celebrates it, cultivates it, embraces it, definitively and forever, but does not surrender. Everything is far from the Mexican, everything is strange to him and, in the first place, death, the strange par excellence. The Mexican does not surrender to death, because surrender entails sacrifice. And sacrifice, in turn, requires someone to give and someone to receive. That is, that someone opens up and faces a reality that transcends it. In an insignificant world, closed in on itself, Mexican death neither gives nor receives; it consumes itself and satisfies itself. Thus, our relations with death are intimate - more intimate, perhaps, than those of any other people - but naked with meaning and devoid of eroticism. Mexican death is sterile, it does not beget like that of the Aztecs and Christians.
There is nothing more opposed to this attitude than that of Europeans and Americans. Laws, customs, public and private morals tend to preserve human life. This protection does not prevent ingenious and refined murderers, effective producers of perfect and serial crime, from appearing more and more frequently. The repeated interruption of professional criminals, who mature and calculate their murders with a precision inaccessible to any Mexican; the pleasure with which they relate their experiences, their joys and their procedures; the fascination with which the public and the newspapers gather their confessions; and, finally, the recognized ineffectiveness of the systems of repression with which they try to avoid new crimes, show that the respect for human life that makes Western civilization so proud is an incomplete or hypocritical notion. The cult of life, if truly profound and total, is also the cult of death. Both are inseparable. A civilization that denies death ends up denying life. The perfection of modern criminals is no longer a consequence of the progress of modern technology, but of the contempt for life inexorably implicit in any voluntary hiding of death. And it could be added that the perfection of modern technique and the popularity of the murder story are but the fruits (like concentration camps and the use of systems of collective extermination) of an optimistic and unilateral conception of existence. And so, it is useless to exclude death from our representations, from our words, from our ideas, because it will end up suppressing all of us and first and foremost those who live ignoring it or pretending to ignore it.
When the Mexican kills - out of shame, pleasure or caprice - he kills a person, a similar. Modern criminals and statesmen do not kill: they suppress. They experiment with beings who have already lost their human quality. In concentration camps, man is first degraded; once he has become an object, he is exterminated en masse. The typical criminal of the big city - beyond the concrete motives that drive him - does on a small scale what the modern warlord does on a large scale. He also experiments in his own way: he poisons, disintegrates corpses with acids, incinerates offal, turns his victim into an object. The old relationship between victim and victimizer, which is the only thing that humanizes crime, the only thing that makes it imaginable, has disappeared. As in Sade's novels, there are only executioners and objects, instruments of pleasure and destruction. And the existence of the victim makes the infinite solitude of the perpetrator more intolerable and total. For us, crime is still a relationship - and in this sense it has the same liberating meaning as celebration or confession. Hence its drama, its poetry and - why not say it - its greatness. Thanks to crime, we reach an ephemeral transcendence.
In the first verses of Duino's eighth elegy, Rilke says that the creature - the being in its animal innocence - contemplates the open, unlike us, who never see forward, towards the absolute. Fear makes us turn our faces, turn our backs on death. And by refusing to contemplate it, we fatally close ourselves to life, which is a totality that carries it in itself. What is open is the world where opposites reconcile and light and shadow merge. This conception tends to return death to its original meaning, which shows that the epoch has taken away from it: death and life are opposites that complement each other. Both are halves of a sphere that we, subject to time and space, can only glimpse. In the prenatal world, death and life are confused; in ours. They oppose each other; in the hereafter, they come together again, but no longer in animal blindness, prior to sin and conscience, but as reconquered innocence. Man can transcend the temporary opposition that divides them - and that does not reside in them, but in his conscience - and perceive them as a superior unity. This knowledge operates only through detachment: the creature must renounce its temporal life and the nostalgia of limbo, of the animal world. He must open himself to death if he wants to open himself to life; then "he will be like angels".
Thus, in the face of death there are two attitudes: one, towards the future, which conceives it as creation; the other, on the return, which expresses itself as fascination with nothing or as nostalgia for limbo. No Mexican or Hispanic-American poet, with the exception, perhaps, of César Vallejo, comes close to the first of these two conceptions. On the other hand, two Mexican poets, José Gorostiza and Xavier Villaurrutia, embody the second of these two directions. If for Gorostiza life is "an endless death", a continuous plunging into nothingness, for Villaurrutia life is nothing more than "nostalgia for death".
The fortunate image that gives title to Villaurrutia's book, Nostalgia for Death, is more than a verbal success. With it, its author wants to point out the ultimate significance of poetry. Death as nostalgia and not as the fruit or end of life, is equivalent to asserting that we do not come from life but from death. The ancient and original, the maternal womb, is the bone and not the nose. This assertion runs the risk of seeming a vain paradox or the reiteration of an old common place: we are all dust and we go to dust. I believe, then, that the poet wishes to find in death (which is, in fact, our origin) a revelation that temporal life has not given him: that of true life. By dying
the instantero needle
will run his quadrant
everything will fit in an instant
...
and it will be possible
to live, after they've died.
To return to the original death will be to return to the life of before life, to the life of before death: to limbo, to the maternal womb.
Death without end, José Gorostiza's poem, is perhaps the highest testimony we Hispanic Americans have of a truly modern consciousness, inclined towards itself, imprisoned by itself, by its own blinding clarity. The poet, at the same time lucid and exasperated, wishes to tear his mask from existence, to contemplate it in its nakedness. The dialogue between the world and man, as old as poetry and love, is transformed into the dialogue of water and the glass that gathers it, the dialogue of thought and the way in which it is poured out and eventually corroded. Imprisoned in appearances - trees and thoughts, stones and emotions, days and nights, twilight, they are nothing but metaphors, ribbons of colours - the poet warns that the breath that inflates the substance, models it and erects it form, is the same as the one that eats it and wrinkles it and dethrones it. In this drama without characters, because they are all reflexes, disguises of a suicidal person who dialogues with himself in a language of mirrors and echoes, neither is intelligence another thing that reflects, form, and the purest, of death, a death in love with itself. Everything is carried out in its own clarity, everything is flooded in its radiance, everything is directed towards that transparent death: life is nothing but a metaphor, an invention with which death - also it! - wants to deceive itself. The poem is the tense development of Narcissus' old theme - which, on the other hand, is not alluded to only once in the text. And not only does consciousness contemplate itself in its transparent and empty waters, mirror and eye at the same time, as in Valéry's poem: nothingness, which lies in form and life, breath and chest, which fakes corruption and death, ends up naked and, now empty, leans over itself: it falls in love with itself, falls in itself, tireless death without end.
In short, if in the party, the drunkenness or the confidence we open ourselves, we do it with such violence that we tear ourselves and end up annulling ourselves, And before death, as before life, we raise our shoulders and oppose it with a silence or a scornful smile. The party and the passionate or gratuitous crime reveal that the balance of which we gala is only a mask, always in danger of being torn by a sudden explosion of our intimacy.
All these attitudes indicate that the Mexican feels, in himself and in the flesh of the country, the presence of a stain, not for being diffuse less alive, original and indelible. All our gestures tend to hide that sore, always fresh, always ready to light up and burn under the sun of the other's gaze.
Now, every detachment causes a wound. Subject to investigating how and at what moment this detachment occurred, I must point out that any rupture (with ourselves or with what surrounds us, with the past or with the present) engenders a feeling of loneliness. In extreme chaos - separation from parents, from the Matrix or from the homeland, death of the gods or acute self-awareness - loneliness is identified with orphanhood. And both are generally manifested as consciousness of sin. The hardships and shame that inflict the state of separation can be considered, thanks to the introduction of the notions of atonement and redemption, as necessary sacrifices, pledges or promises of a future communion that will put an end to exile. The guilt may disappear, the wound heal, the exile resolved in communion. Solitude thus acquires a purgatory, purifying character. The solitary or isolated person transcends his loneliness, he lives it as a trial and as a promise of communion.
The Mexican, as we have seen in the previous descriptions, transcends his loneliness. On the contrary, he locks himself in it. We inhabit our solitude as Filoctetes his island, not waiting, but fearing to return to the world. We do not support the presence of our companions. Enclosed in ourselves, when not torn and alienated, we hurry a solitude without references to a redeeming beyond or to a creator here. We oscillate between surrender and reserve, between scream and silence, between party and wake, without ever surrendering. Our impassivity covers life with the mask of death; our cry tears that most face and rises to heaven until it relaxes, breaks and falls like defeat and silence. By both ways the Mexican closes himself to the world: to life and death.
Translated using deepl.com
You might as well be talking about living in an illusion, not thinking, and taking some psychotropic drugs while you're at it.
