1
Walking is the immemorial movement of curiosity. First and for thousands of years, nomadic peoples, then pilgrims, naturalists, or men and women of uncertain occupations and pasts, propelled by their own feet, turning their backs on the security of many things, travelled the space of the earth in search of experiences and knowledge. In their path, there were markings (that writing avant la lettre), which could be the tracks left by animals or other humans, stones piled in mounds or stacked like dolmens, or the cold ashes in the hearths that bore the organic material from which ink would emerge. The ancient walker’s indefinite succession of steps heralded the meandering line of future words written in sentences; for the owner of the feet sinking into those footprints, it was already a writing of the world on the world.
The importance that has been given to the hand is ill-judged and unjust when the foot is indeed the hand of our species. One stride after another, in this reiteration as apparently simple as breathing, open space becomes a furrow, a route. The footstep, that vital and respiratory repetition—for immobility begets the death of the nomad—leads man to discover the story, which is nothing more than the introduction of mental time into a succession of footsteps. Now, at night beside the fire, thousands of steps are encapsulated in one sentence while a dozen of them are described in such detail that they transcend the idea of movement and divulge an unsuspected profundity. There is no narration or human experience (which are perhaps one and the same) without editing and slow motion. These cinematographic techniques are much more than methods for a modern form of art. Probably since the first account of our species, they have existed as spatial and temporal formations that enable narration. So essential have they been that without them any series of statements would be nothing more than a list. For this reason, we can assert that the act of walking bears the act of narrating in potentia: the first (displacement) is only reproducible via the second (its reformulation) because otherwise the path would be inexpressible and divested of pleasure, as it would be exactly equivalent in length and unreconstructible in words. It would be purely factual content, an enumeration of incidents.
A footprint becomes a handprint when a man is seated among his companions at night and indicates what his mouth speaks by pointing at some place on the horizon with his finger. With this, the space of the world entered through our feet and left through our upper extremities and fit inside the bodies of our species.
This primordial experience is recoverable. Our body, however sedentary we may be, evolved to be nomadic. Today’s accounts, however banal the majority of them may be, still retain the techniques of editing and slow motion, the transformation of a route into a story that was present in the voices of the nomads. Our species’ culture can still be understood by allowing the world to enter through our feet and leave through our hands. But how can we do this when instead of undefined space and open adventure we have reiterated designer spaces, when there are no longer any lands to discover, only areas colonized by history’s catastrophes?
In ancient stories, and I am referring to those that are very ancient, those that predate civilizations, their characters vanquished immeasurable forces. Appearances to the contrary, mythical heroes do not truly know human defeat. Even in death they are victorious, since they grant their people a cultural legacy. In myth, the world’s time and space have no endpoint because they have not yet experienced their discovery-destruction (the striking through of their writing). On a limitless horizon, man’s foot can still encounter anything.
Stories permeated by civilized culture, that is, stories already set in writing, possess a different nature and different tensions, but perhaps they have been unable to rid themselves of the shadows of those that came before. In the inaugural text of this tradition, in The Epic of Gilgamesh from between the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BCE, its first clay tablet reads:
Therefore, a certain practice of writing, one that turns its back on the Temple and the State like the wandering nomad, brings us news of the Deluge and, what is more, preserves the shadows of what there was before. It is the endeavor to transform a path into a text, a route into a story, to build memory and knowledge.
The writers who interest me are the ones who bring news of the deluges; the ones who traversed the devastation as if it were a steppe or a forest.
2
I recall an extraordinary sentence: “Hoping that language will unearth a world, someone sings of the place where silence is formed” (Alejandra Pizarnik, “The Word That Heals.” My translation [SM]).Footnote2 I believe this line from a prose poem by the Argentinian writer describes like few others the regard for invisibility to which my books aspire. (It is not insignificant that three of them are visual projects as well as essays. The effort to render visible what one has not wanted or not been able to see does deserve contempt.) From the city of San Juan to the Caribbean I inhabit and which the world reduces to a handful of images, from what the inmates mark on prison walls to what the insane or ignorant scrawl throughout the streets, this entire disreputable legacy, uncanonized and hypercolonized, yet possessor of the same tragic potential as any culture or prestigious literature, has become the material for my writing and thought. And I have strived to make that enormous silence, which is nothing more than a fragment of the Deluge, sound like silence but also song. I have attempted an archaeology of the present, realized almost in real time, made from the footsteps of the walker who sometimes even writes (and photographs and draws) as he walks, because I could not wait, interpreting Pizarnik’s words, for my world to be unearthed by those who administer the languages of visibility. I have tried to demonstrate that “someone sings of the place where silence is formed.”
Human silence, which is a form of invisibility, emerges from a disinterested or indifferent response, or even from the complete absence of a response, of an image. Contrary to popular belief, invisibility is the most universal human circumstance. Modern and postmodern societies have dominated relative to their ability to excite countless millions of people with vicarious experiences, offering them the sensation of inclusion and participation through their familiarity with a few images.
This is perhaps why one of humanity’s most common acts is not-seeing. The voluntary act of not-seeing, I should add. (This includes, of course, the most terrible variety of such blindness which is associated with multiple forms of servitude: not-seeing-that-we-are-not-seen.) It is remarkable that rather than luminosity or transparency, every centrality, every mainstream produces mottled eyes. Reality struggles to penetrate these eyes because they are already full. They are cities bound by walls. They are already Uruk, Ur, or Nineveh. They are already the Temple, the Law, the Empire.
I want to create a universal story and I cannot pinpoint exactly why universal stories involve silence. In the extreme south of the Americas, on both sides of the Chilean-Argentinian border, there existed until not long ago in Tierra del Fuego (and every country is, in more than one sense, a Tierra del Fuego) one of the world’s last nomadic peoples: the Selk’nam. In 1880 the big island was home to an estimated 3500 to 4000 members of this ethnic group. In only four years, between 1897 and 1901, 90% of their population disappeared. Like in the American Wild West, a bounty was paid for each murdered specimen: one pound sterling for testicles and breasts and half a pound for a child’s ear.
However, prior to their nearly complete disbandment in the early decades of the twentieth century, the Selk’nam found a friend. It was Martín Gusinde (1886-1969), the Chilean anthropologist originally from Austria. Almost everything we know about this group of guanaco hunters comes from the hundreds of pages that this man wrote about them and other exterminated Fuegian peoples like the Yaghan and the Kawésqar, after living among their last generations for several years. We know that the Selk’nam gave Martín Gusinde a name. They called him “Mankasen.” In their language “man” means shadow and “kasen” hunter. The anthropologist was a shadow hunter. The conceptual subtlety of the Selk’nam who, mid-genocide, were able to differentiate between the ways they were being hunted is poignant: the inhumanity of their assassins and the affection of the man who carried a pen, a notebook, and a camera. Mankasen would collect their remnants and testify to their extinction. He would bring us news of the Deluge.
I said before that I did not know how to pinpoint in what way universal stories involve silence.
Nomads, whose story is also universal, mark their discovery of the world with their feet. Sometimes they raise a stone mound, sometimes on a cave wall, using a warm piece of charred wood, they discover ink. At some moment their foot sank in a muddy riverbed and tens of thousands of years later, we discovered their fossilized footprint in a desert. We can read in silence or not, but silence is always read. Like in music, words frame what is impossible to say. This is, perhaps, a definition of tragedy: a story in which silence transforms into beauty.
Every universal story involves silence and invisibility. My aspiration cannot be to say or to show; words and images are fingers that point, parentheses that demarcate. Because I have traversed it many times, crushed by the silence of my society, made invisible by the din of the images that vanquished us, I attest that the Deluge is present in my texts and that this flood which may already be blinding my voice holds some understanding of their meaning. And so, I too can say that I saw the deep, the Country’s foundation, what was hidden, and also that “I have sung of the place where silence is formed.” My feet and my hands, the path and loss have been good for nothing else.
It seems appropriate to conclude with an absent voice, as unlocatable as my own can be in the kingdom of modern invisibility. A voice that first was voice and belatedly became writing. This song from the last of the Selk’nam recorded by Martín Gusinde is both testimony of the impossible and a manifestation of beauty, words that fracture the enormity of the silence:
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Eduardo Lalo
Eduardo Lalo, Puerto Rican writer, essayist, visual artist, photographer, and film producer, is the author of more than a dozen books, such as the novels La inutilidad (2004; Uselessness, 2017) and Simone (2011, winner of the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize; Simone, 2015). His essays include Los países invisibles (2008; The Invisible Countries), El deseo del lápiz: castigo, urbanismo, escritura (2010; The Pencil’s Desire: Punishment, Urbanism, Writing), and Intervenciones (2018; Interventions), from which “News of the Deluge” was taken. He is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico.
Sean Manning
Sean Manning is a literary translator as well as an assistant professor of instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. His translations include works by Ida Vitale, Carlos Pereda, Gabriela Polit Dueñas, Eduardo Lalo, and Ricardo Piglia.
Notes
1 Adapted from Andrew George’s translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh. London: Penguin Books, 1999. 1.
2 “Esperando que un mundo sea desenterrado por el lenguaje, alguien canta el lugar en que se forma el silencio.” Pizarnik, Alejandra. “La palabra que sana.” El infierno musical. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1971. 43.
3 My translation (SM).