03

Not long ago I glanced at someone’s back,







It is the pattern of the daydream for an image to be let loose into narrative and completed quickly in a number of unlikely ways. Time can be reversed, lives relived, facts remade and records erased for the sake of reality not obstructing the dreams’s ending.




you think you see

something                familiar,

someone                  familiar,




Your recognition is followed by denial,




Reason tries to grasp a hold of the mind, find the memory that makes a sight impossible. Yet, the willingness to revert time to allow for the impossibility of this moment to linger is strong.




You savor this recognition, of what you should have known was impossible, you soak in the sound of a voice that can’t have come from anywhere else but from your own head. You hear words in languages that they did not speak.




Once your heart settles, you reluctantly revisit, reason attempts to take power back. One feature at a time you attempt to find a match in your memory, even if things get off track from the start, your hunch is to pass it by, keep on believing, until the gaps are too wide, not one feature can be matched and the horror of reality settles, the horror of realizing one is being haunted.

The first image is one of a man in One hundred Years of Solitude, José Arcadio Buendia, who upon entering his house is shot, and although no weapon or wound is found, a string of blood originating from the house where the gunshot was heard begins casually traveling the streets, crossing doors and windows, and even climbing steps, heading back in the direction of the family home. Only when we take this string of blood as one most important actors in the narrative we might be able to grasp the tension between discontinuity and continuity that is presented through it. This string of blood is not simply exhausting Jose Arcadio’s being but allowing the world to continue by creating a physical line from the dead to his loved ones, a string to hold the past with. The smell that lingers from the corpse is so strong that the banana plantation officials come to cover and remove the body, leaving the crime unresolved and quickly forgotten. The smell and the blood however, defiantly refuse erasure becoming active subjects in straddling the past to the present.

Often I think of El Dorado, a supposedly lost city made of gold, as a thought of things lost, as a way of feeling lost, of embracing the uncertainty of its existence and comforting myself in the thought that those with feverish dreams of pillaging its wealth never found it. It is much more likely that El Dorado was not a city but a man, who periodically and ritualistically covered his body in powdered gold and carrying golden objects would dip himself in the center of a large lagoon, leaving all of the precious metal as an offering to the gods. Somewhere in the jungle either of our imagination or of the South American Cone it remains untouched, still providing a sense of longing, a myth illuminating a distant past in which humans and gods swam in the same lagoon. In this dreamlike state I imagine walking through the dense jungle with gold on my mind, gold as the one thing that remains familiar as all other familiar things fade away, I cling to this gold as I would to my deepest desire. As the vegetation thickens gold is certainty, knotting the past to the present, gold as the remainder, a remainder that I drag behind me as I walk. Instead of attempting to look for El Dorado my steps take me away and were not for this corpse that I carry there would be no evidence of the past taking place.

A landscape

    jet black hair of uncanny lengths waving like a snake upon the bed, invades the screen filling the viewer with a sense of foreboding.

Few parts of our bodies are left to permanence after our vital functions end.  Once our heart stops pumping, the decay of the body is quick and obvious.  Shortly after death, subject to bacteria and the elements, the body is no more than bones, fingernails, and hair.  Hair is of and from the body; it is waste and product. In a long, flowing stream of cells, hair, from the body, uncontrollably emanates. As a part of a process that, in our eyes, has no beginning and no end, hair survives the decay of the corpse as all other cells dry and wither and in its very structure it holds a time period. As all other cells are eaten away, in its dry, unchanging structure, hair holds their memory, hair is a witness.

When the She of all of my nightmares, Alejandra, my sister my best of best, died, or to be accurate and honest, when she killed herself one day after going back home to Bogota after three long months spent in my summer bedroom in Berkeley, dreaming, dealing with a sadness too obtuse to examine, when we thought depression and LSD were the cause for the events that were unraveling, the sudden announcement of death brought about the fragmentation of her image. This, the shattering, occurred to an image already visibly fragmented by distance (6000 miles that separated our existences). Even though our bodies had spent days, weeks, years in proximity, grown and learnt the other’s movements, after barely one day apart the clarity of her image was rapidly dissipating from my memory. The division caused by distance was so severe that once the announcement of death came it had to bring about reassurance of a renewed image for the type of fragmentation innate to death to take its course, a shattering of its own kind.  The reduction of a relationship to every individual piece of memory, in other words the atomization of a previously divided image, drew a clear line towards the inevitable future in which each fragment would, eventually, face disappearance either through oblivion or insincerity to its origin.  The geographical distance between my living body and her corpse was bridgeable. Once death became announced I was given the option to go see for myself, see the remnant of the event, go witness what they would have previously prepared for me to witness, I could have been witness. Only the option was granted, this alone, no images or descriptions were to be offered over the telephone; the voice on the other side of the line did not specify the how, with what, how come, and I couldn’t decide a language in which to ask.

The problem was not that I did not want to go to the funeral, I could not. I couldn't reunite her image, what was left of it, and the, until then bare idea of death, not yet birthed, possibly not yet conceived in my mind. In ways, this refusal was an emancipatory action, a pure attempt at separation, attempting to keep distinct what was disappearing and what was being born and what was being born was  a life fulfilled in having experienced death, and that life was my own, a life that never knew her, a life full of strangers who wouldn't know her name, they would know her by that name, Death. The physical distance set the stage in which this individual death would have to be acknowledged.

This distance, lack of a corpse, made it impossible to reconcile a body that had been moving/breathing, just a day prior to the event, and the idea of death.  An emotional landscape that had split into two distinct sections in which death and the latent image of her body arose as two separate signs, arose individually.  Here the subjects (her and death) became distinct from each other, separated physically, where they usually, held by time and location, would have arisen together. Death, for every practical purpose, had never existed prior to this day and she had stopped existing before, these subjects had not ever coexisted.

I know it must have been this death and what appeared to be the appearance of a trophy of sorts, a first death in which I felt true loss, which set something in motion.  This one instance unleashed not only disillusion or grief but the disintegration of a set of possible futures. It was a death that made me unrecognizable to myself. I knew that part of who I was meant to be was to be buried with this first death, that I having never know death before and in the absence of a corpse it would be impossible for me to remake the world anew without a burial.

There was only one way I found to address this. I had to host a funeral, in which I, being the only body whose body contained her, was to be buried.

I obtained the dimensions of the coffin. They were carefully measured out.

I read them out loud to myself as to call them into the world.

thirty inches wide five feet and seven inches long high inches high. I read them silently on my way to work. thirty inches wide five feet and seven inches long high inches high I recited them to myself in the shower. thirty inches wide five feet and seven inches long, I granted some extra room given the difficulty of taking accurate measures of myself given.

I imagined that, even though against my will, the padding would be plush fake velvet, mighty red resembling the red lips of the living. The coffin will be lower than I would have wanted, gifting an easy inside view, the irresistible effortless gaze over the dead, dead space, matter? I will lean over my empty coffin. Gaze from above, gaze with pity, gaze over a death that has not yet happened, that happened years ago, an unresolved death, a mound of hauntings that preyed on the unresolved. The gaze over the dead does not grant, it requests, it requests an answer that is and will remain unspoken, the body will resist any language. All those who attend will lean as well, some with wavering hesitation, some with arrogant determination, all faces hovering, for one second facing the absence of what they expected to see. Missing the blood-drained lips, missing the so-slightly-swollen cheeks,

if the corpse is not yet there can there be no mourning?

i will lean over my empty coffin and my hair will be witness