A Body That Knows How to Listen

“Hemen maiz, hiltzen naiz.”

— Gabriel Aresti

I am finite¹. I locate my being in my utterance and my death in an infinite place, without space or time, in a fold of sense, in an unfolding of senselessness. I die, I am dying, many times. Once and a thousand times. Like a chorus of frogs in a filthy pond. I always die in the same place, within a temporality that defers, disagrees and differentiates me. Time, duration and horizon dissolve and lose perspective. Repetition² begins not by producing boredom but rather a strange relief, a consolation. Among vague dreams, never deep or fulfilled, I found consolation in horizontal listening. When rest hurts, horizontality becomes the field of knowledge³, the battlefield. This text speaks of that experience⁴.

Without respite, my aching body showed me the path of beauty⁵. There is no choreography more real⁶ and gratuitous than pain. Every body yields before pain, inclines, twists and does not forget. No body forgets the pain it suffers. As long as the body endures, there is memory and room for pain. There is no forgetting for the sufferer⁷, and only the body knows pain. Pain offers the possibility of perceiving space in all its splendour through an infinite temporal loop in which almost nothing changes, nothing varies. Everything seems to remain the same. Nothing is as it was. A body that neither sleeps, rests nor works. Every body dies, again and again, each day.

Gabriel Aresti’s poem locates in time and space a knowledge arising from experience, from living life, undergoing pain and death itself. The poem might be translated as “here I often die” or “here I die many times.” The question that arises is: who has not died at least once? Who does not die all the time? Perhaps life is a strange succession of small deaths located in both time and space. Memory therefore keeps what is remembered alive and, at the same time, also gives us life. The etymology of the Spanish word recordar bears this out: it literally means “to pass through the heart again.” This is why nobody dies only once.

Here I am, often dying. As I write this text, I die many times. I locate my death in an infinite place, without space or time. Death always remains at the margins, or my death lies at the edge of my imagination. Perhaps the death we imagine never takes place; it exists only within us, within our utterance. This is why it hurts. This pain and this writing can be shared only while they are happening. Writing is inscribed in a form of pain in the same way that choreography is inscribed in bodies that dance without rest or music.

“And those who could not hear the music thought those they saw dancing were mad.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche