insideout belĂŠn zahera ____________________
I am writing these lines because I have long hours of reading under my belt. For years, my eyes have captured all those hazy signs; I have reproduced accurately the gaps between words and unscrambled the intentions of some, who are always others. But what you need is a negative interpreter who can throw some shadow over this gleam of the possible. A writer who buries the visible forms and highlights those that remain hidden. A narrator with informed hands, capable of holding every spoken line. What you all need is a bait; a reader who anticipates the story, who builds it while reading it. What you need is a story that is written with speech. What you need is to begin by forgetting a few things.
Part I _________________ At that time, there was an army of scribes who were in charge of accurately reproducing the characters of their own language. Thus, through the detailed imitation of each stroke, they preserved the existence of the most distinguished literary works. Each of the scribes began this trade at a very early age, in such a way that they acquired speech at the same time that they learnt to master the art of copying. For years, their teachers instructed them on the correct handling of the brush and ink, on the proper pressure of the stroke, and the multiple positions to be taken by the hand according to the inclination of the figures. Since childhood, the scribes were surrounded by wonderful objects whose lines they should observe carefully, in order to acquire the necessary skills to understand appearances. Thus, they studied the weight of things, scale variations, temperature changes, balance, tension, the path of the bodies, the effects of light or the texture of the surfaces. Day after day, they applied this knowledge to the repetition of every letter, every contour, until, after many years, they managed to become the guardians of the most perfect forms of writing. However, there was an essential requirement. In order to perform their task, scribes had to give up on their ability to read. It was well known that no man would be able to dominate the world of forms while he knew its meaning beyond what is expressed in letters. That being the case, the necessary expertise to accurately copy would be jeopardised by the nuances of the text, and the activity of mimicking would be replaced by that of creating. Scribe scholars accepted this rule without any objection, knowing that the only way to preserve anything is by abandoning the possibility of interpretation. They were certain that their knowledge, albeit incomplete, could only be achieved if the truth of the representation came before the truth of meaning. Eventually, when the importance of spelling faded to the background and the abstract world replaced the concrete, some men began to suggest that the scribes had been victims of an atrocious and unjust imposition. They said that having stripped them of reading had been a strategy of domination for keeping them away from the content of the works, from the highest knowledge. There were many riots, and many insignia, and many arguments. Scribes finally learnt to read; some by force, others by conviction. Then, a boundless depth opened before them and they forgot the intimate relationship that they once had with the surface of things. But as they were not allowed to stop being scribes, because someone had to continue protecting the content of the texts, their beautiful craft became a stronghold of the clumsy and the frustrated. And all forms became extinct in favour of the transcendent.
Part II _________________ It is said that languages anticipate their death before disappearing completely, incarnating their agony in the figure of the last speaker, who, unable to communicate with others, experiences the closest thing to death; he is an unrelated being, a living remainder, a subject who is extinguishing. The last speaker makes the language’s corpse appear in its most perfect form. Driven by curiosity, a group of men undertook the task of finding the last speaker of an unknown language. To reach him, they should always move through the levels that made up the reality of their world, and never ever surround them. This inward journey was paramount. Anyone who were about to find something knew that it was required to penetrate the surface of representations. These were considered to be bearers of great secrets and, therefore, everything that deserved to be known was always in the depths. The men watched the figures in the foreground, with their tanned skins carefully arranged on solid cases made out of polyurethane, fiberglass or plaster. These structures were called "forms" and rose from the literal emptying of all content. Their poses had been modelled as the sentences of a story; whenever somebody returned to them, they always repeated the same. When they left the figures behind, the men watched the scenes of the middle ground and the hints of the background. They walked through ice caps, reddish deserts, forests, steppes and large lakes. The light trimmed off the silhouette of the trees and all vegetation shone as if it was soaked with a synthetic varnish. The ground was bonded with paste and all movement had been carved on methacrylate polymers. The granite stones were hollow, extremely light and soft. It was as if all nature was protected by the sense of sight. And the men felt safe, because in that place nothing could be deteriorated before their eyes. Upon arrival, the men discovered five objects they were unable to recognise. Desperate, they acted as they had always done, and instead of stopping they continued their quest. For months they tried to access the content of those bodies, but only found the cavities, holes and creases of a deformed surface that was always the same one. They then turned to the memory, trying to reconstruct a past that they had never known. They studied all the points that formed the faces of those amorphous creatures; their relationships, their peaks, crevices, their empty spaces. They stretched, compressed and altered all the meshes; they created countless prototypes, trying to read a story whose strata were condensed forever. But all to no avail. They knew then that all quests end up where the inner meets itself; there where the sharpest line hides the curvature of a cyclorama that unexpectedly changes the direction of the journey and takes us back to the surface. Exhausted, the men surrendered to the figure of the last speaker. Unable to communicate with him, they understood that no limit could be postponed forever; that not all surfaces could be traversed or all voids could be filled.
Before the corpse of the language only forms remained. And all the illiterate scribes took revenge in that way.