The Beast That Shouted "I Love You" to An Empty Room
Read the original Portuguese here.
Original title: The New Flesh.
At this point, the roar of the monster some might mistake for a city outside only dims when night starts being called morning. For those from afar or from without, from somewhere smaller, the sporadic sound of a distant automobile sounds like a drill on the side of their skull, but you're used to it. You're from here, and this monster is as much a part of you as you are of it.
Out there, under the yellow lampposts that make the streets seem to burn, you see silhouettes. "Marginal" implies that there is a "margin" for these people to have been pushed towards, but all of the street has been a margin for years, and you've never known anything else.
Every so often, someone ambles inside. Every so often, they don't come back.
Also in the lampposts and the wires of the megalopolis wander a different kind of marginal silhouette: the synapses from a thousand computers climbing desperately in search of something real. Together they build an even bigger and even more extensive megalopolis that crosses states, provinces, and countries. But it's not a city, for a city assumes continued habitation. No, this is a neon Hyakki Yagyô - the night march of a thousand demons wandering through a space built entirely of dreams and electricity. You are one of these marginal silhouettes, one of the ghosts in the machine.
Every night and in most days you follow the march as a cloud of locusts the likes of which the biblical writers could not picture even if they had been born one thousand years later. The tiniest point of authenticity and truth is detected, digested, and processed appropriately by the thousand hungry jaws. A judgement must be made.
But you're not alone, phantom, because you discover others like you. Something real and true and firm that needs to be protected bodily from the world out there and from each of the worlds in here that make up this group. These worlds are other people, made of flesh and bones and hormones and medicine and dreams and electricity, just like you.
Words are exchanged. Interests are expressed and discovered, and in less time than you might ever expect, you learn that despite everything, you are not alone. It should have been obvious, but to think of the Grande Marche Électrique as a huddle of individuals is like thinking of the ocean as an aggregation of waterdrops: deep down you know it's true, but you still call the ocean by the singular.
Something inside of you changes. Your ghost, initially a kind of ill-shaped tulpa that served only for you to walk along the Grande Marche, ends up gaining a life of its own; "you" starts to mean two different things. "You" as Flesh and "you" as Ghost; "you" as Matter and "you" as Form.
Would the Ghost be of lesser substance than the Flesh? Reformulating: is the Holy Ghost less of God than Christ on the cross? Did He not sacrificed Himself in the same way?
Your universe of electricity is so fragile, phantom, as your universe of flesh, and for alike reasons. The worlds that inhabit you cannot be simplified in the instinctive forms that appear so natural to your simian brains. Humans never evolved to fit more than one person in their heads; they barely evolved to fit themselves. A small change in electricity, a brief wave of dangerous gravity, and you have a supernova in your hands, or perhaps a black hole.
But you persist because one part of you knows this is all you have, phantom. Oh yes, you met those other ghosts in l ife, in a world of flesh, but be sincere and do the math: sum up all of the interactions between you, did you interact with them for longer through the ghost or the flesh? How long did it take until your flesh "talk" lost steam because your ghosts had already said all that there was to be said previously?
Time passes. Your persistency damages some bonds and exhaust others, ghosts come and go, but the ones that stay are as real as the acid rain outside or the police sirens your mind registers en passant.
Maybe, just maybe, you can even find that most sublime of all experiences and sentiments; that which can only be expressed in song, the art of arts, whose name is referenced in the first of tones La. A feeling that comes in a Dionysian whirlwind and that must be grasped before it can be left to go. A feeling for another person, somewhere else out there.
In case you reach this point, phantom, you are apt to discover secrets revealed only to the Hermes Trismegistos and the Camões of history; the first and prime among them being the revelation that the suffering that follows the La is amplified by the environment of the megalopolises you inhabit.
You tried running away, phantom. You forged bonds, you expressed yourself, you made art, and at some point along the path you convinced yourself that the electricity would be enough, at least for a while. But when your chest burns with a disease so wild and primeval that there is barely any space in your lungs; when you feel the television static in the stomach that the ancients wrongly called "butterflies", harder to ignore becomes the Flesh and the megalopolis of matter.
Some changes in your behaviour reveal the alchemical process boiling inside of you. Make no mistake, phantom, it is a disease, and its symptoms are terrible.
Every so often you wake up earlier than usual and spend hours thinking and thinking, as if trying to conjure through the electricity of your synapses those of that other creature out there. Your chest drums harder in flesh at the mere suggestion of the Other; you don't eat as you did anymore - either more or less - and a severe lack in good judgement downs upon you like a Loa, pushing you towards increasingly irrational behaviour. Simply to subject yourself to such a disease reveals the latent irrationality in this whole process; who would ever want to come down with something so powerful of their own volition?
You grasp at any shard of reality that you can with all your might, only to find out that your fingers go right through electricity, or find only cold and dead glass and plastic, your medium in the Grande Marche. Photos and videos don't lay by your side and run their hands through your hair, the conjured voices of the medium sound increasingly metallic.
When you least expect it, the disease has infected your ghost and is pressing your fleshheart. At any instant of delay for the mediums do send or receive synapses, the darkness that sieges your flesh becomes deeper and realer. You used to close the shutters and forget everything, but now the lighthouses on poles appear painfully real, so much realer than the world your ghost inhabits. An empty reality, untouched by Psyche.
In case your fortitude fails, only suffering awaits you in this road. Extra minutes when a synapsis is unrequited become a fertile ground for speculations about how "he must be haunted by another ghost" or "she must have irresistible appointments of the flesh". One of the most perverse sentiments of humanity disfigures your ghost and flesh in subtle but important ways. The world of there appears as excruciatingly real as the one of here, and doubts start to appear. What is the other ghost doing when you're not looking? When you're not watching? What is the flesh capable of without the gaze of your own eyes?
Insecurity lockjaws around your throat. The symptoms that were electrifying yesterday, today are distressing and disquieting. Your thoughts don't belong to you anymore, the disease has reached the brain. What if you're not enough? After all, you saw how many ghosts that one is haunted by, you yourself introduced some of them, and you are all ghosts, so are all of you equal and equivalent to Psyche? Only ghosts haunting a house that will not notice a difference between them?
What about other conversations? You thought that ghost was a part of your universe, but did I not tell you how fragile these things are? Suffices that another ghost says the right order of magic words, scribbles the right spell in magical glyphs, and a rend opens in the tapestry you previously thought unassailable. What if Psyche prefers someone else? And if she has to choose, would she choose you? Are you sure?
This becomes an Oroboros of sadness. Questions beget more questions beget more questions. What if you're thinking too much? Stop thinking. What if you're talking too much? What if Psyche is tired of you? What you just said was as cold as it seems or was it just a joke?
The future becomes a swamp where nothing good will ever escape from. To think in long term becomes a painful thing, every plan becomes uncertain, every incognita leaves a hole in your stomach through which your self bleeds out. What if Psyche gets tired? What if you do? What if you discover other ghosts, metamorphosed by time and convivence into something that does not please the other? What if you become too comfortable?
Your flesh shudders. What if this never goes away? Are you condemned to a chronic lack of air, to sleepless nights, to intrusive thoughts forever? And even worse: what if it goes away?
These are some of the questionings that the extremes of that feeling that starts with the La may generate. Each one of them is an open door to the abyss, to despair, to self-and-else hate, and to insecurity, mother of all evils.
But there is another secret even more profound contained in the verse "it's staying loyal to your killer". Phantom, the Grand Marche is made up of electricity, yes, but these are only molecules and atoms that the Democrituses of the world think to be the measure of everything and where it all begins, but it is important to remember that Hermes was not only the messenger of the gods - he was the god that describes the contact between the divine and the mundane, the supreme act of recognising that something remote to the "I".
Communication, ghost. This is the key more powerful than that of Solomon, for it has dominion not over the many earthly spirits that great king confined to jars, but to your own; to the spirit of the other.
Our brains were not made to hold a whole person, they were made (or, better saying, made themselves) to transmit information and to try and receive and interpret information in the best way possible. To try and create a Solomonic urn to hold the spirit of another with a magic seal and have it as "yours" is a futile effort - you don't even "have" yourself. We were not made to "have", ghost, we were made to transmit and to generate and to create, to mould the clay and be moulded in turn, to participate in the continuous and omnipresent process of the genesis of the world.
Armed with communication, the next step is to steel yourself with confidence, phantom. Hell may be others, but those others are all that any of us have. Any wild animal in its first moments of life can learn to be suspicious of those it doesn't know, it takes a human and his aggregates gifted with a soul (such as the dog) to be able to grasp the kind of serenity here described. It is not an armour like any other, and like Achilles', it has rifts where you least expect.
When Great Jupiter declares his power, telling to all gods of Olympus that they may tie a golden chain in the firmament and pull it together that it will never move, we forget that despite all of the power of that great god, were the chain not massif, of naught would be the entire strength of Olympus. That chain is named confidence, without which not even Jupiter or Hermes and not even the lesser or the greatest of gods is anything.
I won't deceive you, phantom: this creed isn't perfect. Delusions will happen, and every so often the roar of the monster will be too loud, and no confidence in the world will save you when that happens. But you must try - all that any of us can do is try. With dominion over both of these elements, you find yourself back where your journey began. Despite it all, you are still you, but that you isn't alone anymore. You have synthonised the same frequency as some other brain out there in a way most humans have been incapable to do for millennia. Your electricity is the same electricity of someone else, it doesn't matter what the beating of your heart says. That old flesh has died; long live to the new flesh and to the new ghost.
This is where that story ended, phantom, but now you know that it was all a dream. Wake up, phantom, and feel the sun on your flesh.