Chekhov’s Mistess

September 05, 2008

I’m Here

I rarely ever mention my absences here, which, after five years of blogging are not uncommon with me, but I do so now because I thought I’d mention that I’m Twittering (for god sakes!). I only recently got sucked into it because I was working on developing a “Human Rights Twitter Network” for a client (see the first of that on this site: Estado de Miedo about which I’m very proud to have taken part in). After a couple of days I said to myself that I can’t do it, I can’t just twitter my work day away, but now I’m hooked. I’ve also been fooling around with tumbler just because I like the interface, so not sure what I’m going to do with that.

At any rate I will soon have something to say about Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow and I’m bound to have something to say about Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselesness, which I’m reading now, because so far, it’s devastating.

So, if you twitter (a far nicer word than ‘blog’ isn’t it), follow me and I’ll follow you and then we’ll all be following each other.

Here’s an excerpt from Senselessness (which I lifted from TEV where you can find the entire first chapter):

I am not complete in the mind, said the sentence I highlighted with the yellow marker and even copied into my personal notebook, because this wasn’t just any old sentence, much less some wisecrack, not by any means, but rather the sentence that astonished me more than any other sentence I read that first day on the job, the sentence that most dumbfounded me during my first incursion into those one thousand one hundred almost single-spaced printed pages dropped on what would be my desk by my friend Erick so I could get some idea of the task that awaited me. I am not complete in the mind, I repeated to myself, stunned by the extent of mental perturbation experienced by this Cakchiquel man who had witnessed his family’s murder, by the fact that this indigenous man was aware of the breakdown of his own psychic apparatus as a result of having watched, albeit wounded and powerless, as soldiers of his country’s army scornfully and in cold blood chopped each of his four small children to pieces with machetes, then turned on his wife, the poor woman already in shock because she too had been forced to watch as the soldiers turned her small children into palpitating pieces of human flesh.

Nobody can be complete in the mind after having survived such an ordeal, I said to myself, morbidly mulling it over, trying to imagine what waking up must have been like for this indigenous man, whom they had left for dead among chunks of the flesh of his wife and children and who then, many years later, had the opportunity to give his testimony so that I could read it and make stylistic corrections, a testimony that began, in fact, with the sentence I am not complete in the mind that so moved me because it summed up in the most concise manner possible the mental state tens of thousands of people who have suffered experiences similar to the ones recounted by this Cakchiquel man found themselves in, and also summed up the mental state of thousands of soldiers and paramilitary men who had with relish cut to pieces their so-called compatriots, though I must admit that it’s not the same to be incomplete in the mind after watching your own children drawn and quartered as after drawing and quartering other peoples’ children, I told myself before reaching the overwhelming conclusion that it was the entire population of this country that was not complete in the mind, which led me to an even worse conclusion, even more perturbing, and this was that only somebody completely out of his mind would be willing to move to a foreign country whose population was not complete in the mind to perform a task that consisted precisely of copyediting an extensive report of one thousand one hundred pages that documents the hundreds of massacres and proves the general perturbation.

• posted by Bud Parr
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