The first week of classes has passed. We are here, once again, entertaining possibilities after the curve of summer. The days have already begun to shorten as newcomers take up the baton from those who have not returned, whose paths now lead somewhere new, this place looming on the horizon of their minds, with the taste of a fresh memory. They have taken up the baton, now irrevocably, solemnly turning the bedrooms and common rooms into their very own. Perhaps, anytime now, they will feel the trace, the echo of the thousands of minds and souls that, sometime throughout the piles of decades that preceded our time here, also hammered the stake into the ground, assuming the blessing and curse of endless possibilities.
The campus fills with returning bodies. Familiar faces to these libraries and halls. Each of us bears the trace of the last few months: stories waiting to be told at the event of re-encounter. The inevitable debrief, the long-awaited catch-up. Flows of recent experiences waiting to be arrested, delicately or abruptly, consciously or unconsciously, completely or incompletely, in order to be articulated and turned into stories. So many stories are waiting, too, to be forgotten, lost beneath the grasp of sensibility, fugitive from the hopes of absolute self-knowledge. How many memories have, without our consent, already begun to leave us?
What we do is carry a trace. A trace that envelops us unpromptedly, and often resists our willful apprehension. If I’m allowed some dramatism, what we do is an archaeology of our past depths—carving into the attics of time and bringing a moment back. Isn’t this what we do? We bring from the depths what is worth sharing for the sake of conversation.
The archaeology, however, is never perfect. We relive our memories, now transfigured through words, spoken or written. Words have that quality—they lend themselves transparently to the purpose of remembering, re-membering the experience that once left an impression, the experience in which we were once fully immersed. Yet, the remembrance takes hold through the words, and we forget, as in so many other cases, that a medium facilitates it: that before us lies a surface marked with a series of signs.
But I want to be careful of falling into this fertile cynicism. At the exact time that we can become aware of the opacity of words as a medium, the memory begins to take shape—the summer is there, a trace evoked by a constellation of words. As I speak of this, I can’t help but think, in all their vividness, of the times of summer: the first time I hugged my mother, an electric blue melting over distant city lights, a walk around the Recoleta Cemetery. They are there, these memories, somewhere in time, evoked, brought back to me, through the words I use to remember them. What we taste is an absence, an appearance. One could even say, a phantasm.
Something similar is happening now, as you read these words that flow through the page… The writer, the incarnated person to whom these words may be attributed, is nowhere to be found. This text is not the transparent pronouncement of a thought, but a composition, a careful arrangement of words, brought about through various iterations and utterances. I, the writer, have sat in my chair almost five times across three days to wrap up this column—the first sentence was written three weeks ago.
Where throughout the text does the writer hide? I am in none of these words, yet at the same time, a part of me might be evoked by the totality that they form. Displayed here, there is nothing more than a trace of my being—yet at times, I believe this trace contains more of myself than I can consciously hold.
Writing never absolutely captures or possesses its subject. On the other hand, it anchors the writer, producing a platform over which to visualize—like a phantasm—that which is not present, the collection of absences that we carry with us or identify with. It is the written word, in this sense, which grants consistency. It is through writing that, without ever being fully present on a page, I affirm myself in it, in a magazine table of a dining hall or the digital interface of a computer screen.
This column aims to crystallize an opening, to demonstrate that there can be beauty and power in naming a mystery. After all, this column is not about answers, but about questions. It is inspired by Roland Barthes’s Mythologies—an effort to unveil the structures of myth hidden in the banalities of postwar French life: wrestling matches, wine, milk—but where Barthes sought to reveal myth as ideology, this column, engined by the undisciplined yet ambitious wandering mind of a young student, is more interested in suggesting mystery: the old and perhaps unanswerable questions that lie beneath everyday occurrences. In that sense, it is not a project of demystifying, but of re-mystifying: of returning awe and attentiveness to what has been naturalized.
I believe that recognizing tensions is, above all, an edifying practice, and that the most pleasurable conversations often arise from tensions. And what is writing if not an attempt at conversation? At finding ways of transfiguring ourselves, together?
The everyday is always on the verge of mystery—and we are, just like I am here, always on the verge of merely scratching the surface.
