...And Dreams Are Dreams

Space, as an element necessary for a wider garment, when one’s clothes are tossed onto mentally deranged chairs, expands. Space as time of joy. The joy of space makes time a tenant. “And yet you have still not sung of love.” Time, which is money for others, does not count for them. Money is for those who know how to make a profit, who know how to use it. For them, money is the dream.

She would sing arias for him, which, in the past, she had sung on stage; now she sang them only for him, and he enjoyed them, sole audience of a voice that once moved so many people. “When will she move those people again? Why does she no longer sing for them?” he asks himself, while she, searching for her voice, finds it growing increasingly stronger under the veils that almost suffocated her. “What is a voice,” muses Don Pacifico, “as it passes under the guillotine? A guillotine can cut a throat, but it can’t stop a song. Her voice could be a gold mine, and yet here I sit, despairing, struggling with words, while at my side this Pactolus keeps flowing, untapped.”

But it is difficult to get a mechanism back in motion. Public relations count more than private ones.

And that’s where things get complicated. The ancient canals would have to be rediscovered for the babbling water of Doña Rosita to flow through them again and irrigate the thirsty plains. Wherever they turned their gaze, they could see that the new irrigation was functioning perfectly, but that something was missing from the impetus of the water that carries off leaves and soil in its eddies. The new technology of the irrigation canals was definitely irreproachable. At no point was there a leak, at no point was there the slightest malfunction. Perfectly designed and constructed, all parts converged toward the final goal, without leaves or soil to impede the flow of the water, which was itself well protected in reservoirs. And yet something was lacking in this whole system: that which used to make the plain intoxicating. Technology had, to a certain extent, wiped out the art of irrigating, the art of singing, and television, which reproduces the irrigation of the plain on small screens, gave all the peasants the opportunity to participate in the process of irrigation, bur deprived them of the unique joy of only a certain number of them — and not all of them, as was now the case in their homes — being earwitnesses to the musical event, in a small room perhaps, but stripped of the technology that will inevitably weaken the torrent of a voice, the explosive presence of a personality whose errors are also inseparable parts of its makeup.

“We live in a time,” reflected Don Pacifico,

“where man is pitted against the perfection of his machines. And that turns him into a machine, depriving him of the possibility of remaining human.

Since voices need microphones and transformers, since a computer will soon be able to produce an aria impeccably, where is that element that, owing to its particularities, humanizes great art?”

Henceforth everything obeyed an initial nucleus whose message was increasingly altered each time it was reproduced. From that moment on, no one much cared about the origin of all this: a human being, a cry, a pain, an effort. And even if they came to reproduce this singularity, so many other singularities would come long afterward to annihilate it that the average viewer, listener, or reader began more and more to resemble someone who, remote control in hand, jumps from one channel to another (among the fifty or so available), creating a new film of his own composition that impoverishes him instead of enriching him, because it is incoherent, shapeless, fragmented, a mosaic that won’t hold together, and it is only in his sleep that he can, by renouncing everything, find his own truth, which is the dream, if indeed he dreams.

Because dreaming is our self-defense against the bombardment of counterinformation and updating that accomplishes nothing except to make us aware of the tragedies of the world upon which we are incapable of having the slightest effect, except by putting our hands in our pockets.

Because there are dreams that torture, on racks, there are dreams that are altars to the Thermidors of sleep, endless dreams made longer by expectation, guillotine dreams….

So she would have to start singing again. But how? How does one catch hold of threads that have been cut? Which one of all these threads that lie jumbled in your palm leads to the big hook? She worked alone, she prepared herself, she didn’t seem hurried.