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| The self-absorbed particle accelerator Francesc Torres
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Every racetrack has the few fatal spots which give it its character. They are usually no more than two or three. Many enough but plentyt, one-of-a-kind and non-interchangeable. Professional drivers know this, and before each race they walk the course observing with great care the condition of the asphalt, the differences in texture, the badly repaired cracks and the amount of dust driven by the wind. Everyone has branded into their head which death belongs to what turn. In the life of each human being there are a few fatal moments of its own. Never more than two or three. Not many but enough, one-of-a-kind and non-transferable. Those which make our life unique to our selves. Existance slaps us in the face by not allowing us to recognize them until the end, when there is nothing to be done about it and they have already cost us our life. |
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| [ i ] Die and resuscitate backwards, in 1924. I don’t know how one does something like this, but there has got to be a way for anything is supposed to be possible in the twentieth century. I have been told that in your homeland there is an abandoned speedway built in 1924, the year I am suggesting for your time-warped revival. The land has to exist —always— before the pavement, but you can skip the eons spaning from the Big Bang to the moment of the racetrack inauguration, three years before Lindbergh’s flight across the ocean, twelve years before Lorca’s flight out of this world. The trick here is to be able to witness with innocent eyes the reveries of a young era that has found a reason for modernity even in a Mediterranean country that loved the opposite. An extraordinary sight. This ring of an allucinated, asleep, silent and suspended engineering, built for absolute speed on a distant day of wondering, long before your time got going and the century earned special seating arrangements for senior citizens in history’s brakeless train. The speedway, like a coral reef left behind by a receading sea, a monument to Marinetti erected in a domain of sun and donkeys, has a kidney shape to better process the fluids of impatience. The banking of the turns is so steep that it rises like an assassin launching pad, almost vertically on its outer edge, pointing to the indifferent sky above. The cicadas in their trees drowned the sound of racing engines —before the war abandoned the boundaries of the symbolic to embrace the region of the litteral, before the revolutions abandoned the track and took over the street, before the merry-go-round became a unidirectional vector aimed at the heart of the enemy. Picture yourself at the wheel of a Hispano-Suiza prepared for sublime stupidity in the early hours of a sun-drenched day, when life proscribes questioning its purposes. Definitely a better deal, in spite of the madness than being fifty at the end of any century knowing full well that you won’t live to see the first half of the next. But now, before I go on and just for the sake of argument, I have to ask you something: What’s the point in going around in circles, at diabolical speeds, knowing from the start that you will never leave that particular spot under the sun? Can any one explain the exalted beauty of a fast car designed to exist only as a dog in pursuit of its own tail? Is there a fundamental truth about the accident of life contained within the rings drawn by a race car run at full throttle, or are we dealing only with the pedestrian platitude of being born a man? Visit that skeleton of swiftness, if you cannot pull back the revival back jump number, when you go back to the wearhouse of frozen time where you were born. As tradition dictates, choose a sunny, hot day, a day of penance. As soon as you hear the dogs barking in the distance, shed your clothes and climb the steep banking that held flesh and metal from spinning out of the ring of locked teeth and burning fossil fuel. Once up there, look at the sea shining in the distance and relieve your bladder. Watch your golden liquid slide down and percolate into the petrified tire marks. Face the fact that in life you are only interested in the absolute nature of your own accident, untransferable and awaited. After your death without possibility of appeal, the receading sea will swell back and claim all its lost ground again turning to the hallucinations of your age, a century of brightness without pity and final numbness to living coral. |
[ ii ] Knowing the speed and the co-efficient of adhesion between tires and road, we can calculate the stopping distance for any car by means of a simple formula; S =V2/64f where S is the stopping distance in feet V is the speed of the vehicle in feet per second f is the co-efficient of adhesion between tires and road 64 is an approximation to 64.4 = 2 ¥ 32.2 = 2 ¥ g (g being the accelleration due to gravity in feet per second per second) Now, here is the million dollar question: Can this beautiful and elegant concrete poem be applied to calculate the stopping distance of a life going flat-out downhill on a slick and irresponsable road, full of twisty emotional hairpins, up in the high ranges of carnal craving with no railing, no signals warning you of treacherous slippery-when-wet sections in the highway of desire? Can it? Given the lack of reliable data you gotta find out by yourself, starting the engine of danger, putting the skin machine in motion, kissing goodbye to the good boy inside your body who says hello to everyone from the inner side of your smile looking out the twin windows of the room behind your face. But, of course, you are scared shitless. You have to do this because self preservation has nothing to do with living. So this is why we need possessed race driversto help us drool while masturbating: because most of us are feeble souls, and we cling to life so desperately and we love life so clumsily that we don’t live it. |
[ iii ] The Sporting Component A stationary bed for a speeding mind out of control, no brakes. Hospital beds have four wheels, no roof. Rings a bell? You lay there tucked in with only your head and arms sticking out, hooked up to a wall of telemetry equipment. Bed and patient, racing car and racing pilot, same simple life and death thing. Anecdotic differences dressing the same wound at the root of the same certainty: sooner or later you’re gonna get the ride of a lifetime. You will go through some hair-raising shit travelling at the speed of life. When the fear of demise overcomes you, open your sphincters, the nurse will come and sponge your ass clean, smiling through a puff of talcum powder. Burn your fuel boy, piss it away, get intravenous high octane scorching chemistry with doctor’s permission. Remember, swift death, hallucinatory drugs and lethal sacramental oils can only be administered by the right shaman, by the proper authority. The Civilian Imperative It’s okay to die as long as you do it at legal speed. Suicide is not permitted. Sixty five miles an hour. Sixty five years a life. A crash at sixty five is quite a smacker. Irreversible retirement. Don’t be a burden to your country, abandon it in a state of bliss and a life insurance plan, invest in your future. Be grateful to the Welfare State that pays the nurse that wipes your ass but refuses to put your brain in neutral in that most charitable way because giving blow jobs to male patients is unethical and she can lose her job. The Fatal Epiphany Your hospital bed has four wheels and you are going around in circles, bip... bip... bip... bip... lapping around the bone —bleached— white high bankings of your inner skull, without ever leaving the pale garage where you’ve been parked —with nocturnal butterflies pinned alive in your stomach, your anxiety oozing out of your skin diguised as sea water without knowing for sure if you have lived your life or someone else’s, the life of the impostor you carry inside and how uses your blood, employs your viscera and steals your orgasms— hoping you don’t cross the finish line at the end of the line because you don’t want that trophy. |
[ iv ] For a brittle race, take your soul and melt it into a wheeled crystal vase, a transparent racing chariot, a shape barely defined against the summer sunlight, a crystalline lens that knows how to metamorphose light into color and project it against the gray bankings of an unforgiving trial, an accelerated journey that will chip away at the glassy ghost in which you are riding. Sooner than later a wheel will crack, making your diaphanous vehicle turn over and crash, breaking into a million pieces that will cut into your skin like the Chinese torture of legend and refinement you read about as small boy and made you dream you were the victim. But now you are the victim. The consummation will come about with sudden fury, after all this is not China, it is the West in its most gifted hundred years. All this will happen amidst the sounds of a falling cascade of ice and water, glass splinters, brand new shaving blades and sewing needles. You’ll come back to your senses laying on a tarmac of solid fossil life from a time when the earth was young and anything human wasn’t even the project of the accident we’ve been. Blood and diamonds will extend to the horizon, the breeze will enter, sweep clean and leave your chest like it would an abandoned house. And you’ll be wondering if you are witnessing the end of your life or its beginning. |
[ v ] Visit the abandoned speedway on the outskirts of town preferably on a sun drenched August day. It’s always empty. It’s a gray tongue. Hard. Dry. Threatening Wait for a while listening to the buzz and vibrating calls from the cloud of insects that populates its center. Keep an eye on the scorpion’s needle. Watch for the spider’s fangs. Be vigilant of the snake’s bite. In the quiet of the empty coliseum they’ve lost the memory of human madness and they’re not on the deffenside anymore. Their lethal innocence would make you quickly understand that you are just a stranger passing through this world. Under a welding sun you’ll soon start to sweat copiously. Take off your shirt, take off your shoes too and begin to visualize a woman on the tarmac running away from you, holding her skirt up to free her legs, showing you the roundness of her ass and the power of her thighs. And you’ll want to kiss what’s hidden between them because there is where everything which can heal your wound is because there is where everything which gives meaning to your life is Run after her before she turns to wind and you loose the warm scent of her breath forever This urgent race will make you draw the ring many times over sweating in the burning air like a wicker basket full of water as if you were a block of ice, in the desert as if you were made of wax, in a fire. You will be leaving on the asphalt a liquid wake where ants and centipedes will rush to drink from cicadas, fireflies and ants. Scorpions, spiders and snakes will begin to remember past human madness and will retreat swiftly to their borrows. Dripping like a drowned seaman being pulled out of the water, gasping for air like a buried miner, you will begin to gain ground on the running woman until you can hang from a handful of her hair. You will then be swallowed by the mouth of your desire, Until entering the entrails of an obsession a thousand times pursued For the of reptiles and insects peace, the speedway is again empty. but with the scent of evaporated sweat and dissipated breath a wind blown shirt and a pair of shoes deprived of owner. |
[ vi ] One day Bring yourself to the place where the subparticles of your own dust become accelerated by the gale of history. There are sites like this perversely constructed for the purpose of desperate hallucination. They are harsh and furious speedways for disheveled tornadoes, insomniac twisters and lost souls. The voyeuristic grandstands are built to accommodate a multitude of narcoleptic human beings, comically assasinated world leaders, steel-gray clouds accompanied by electrical discharges and bodygards with guns, while the trees in the surrounding fields are stripped bare of leaves, even in the rare occasions in when the established power collapses and sane people walk around naked howling at the moon. One night If you are going to go there in an attempt to shake down whatever remains of your life, do it in style. Arrive at the wheel of the car that has the imprint of your desire on the engine block from the day you penetrated the rosey and moist darkness without instructions, a spell of sperm hair spray deodorant eau de something, in the dusk of a liquidated Sunday. Or take the one you drove on the wrong side of the road sliding on the glass of an empty bottle, with splintered and glossy eyes clenched teeth and your history engraved with burin on the rearview mirror of consciousness. At any rate you’ll be driving the ghost of your youth with a trunk full of disasters avoided by the skin of your teeth, success grasped with your nails and stale cigarette butt stench on the roof lining. That’s life boy, goes away and don’t come back. So, my friend, drive slowly into the cathedral of velocity. Stop at the front stretch with the engine running and wait for the storm to gather and start to roar. This will be the sign to start writing in reptile juices the short epilogue of the entelechy which has occupied the lived space of your life. |
[ vii ] 1 You were woken by the noise of your own dream, the noise of the side show you saw when you were a small child in a place that no longer exists, during a summer of the kind is used to make the gardens of earthly delights where we think we were happy. The side show was murderous, it looked like art, it looked Russian, it looked Constructivist, it looked revolutionary. An astrolabic sphere made of curved steel rods like the ribs of an unfinished planet, an spherical cage inside of which a man wrapped in leather was stradelling a between-the-wars motorcycle. When there were enough people, or rather, when there was enough money in the hat for a small child like yourself with eyes from another time was passing, the biker started his mount’s engine and began to rotate on his axis until the attained speed raised him slowly in the contraption’s penal interior, first up to the equator, reaching very soon the poles of the sphere, finally crossing the upper pole upside down. A black motorcycle doing the same a fly of the same color would. You witness the exploit with a dropped jaw and right then and there you had the intuition that whatever is extraordinary in life has o explanation and takes place while travelling nowhere always carrying a disaster in your suitcase. [ vii ] 2 Yes, once again. Reconstruct what took place one more time. What you said, what she said. What her lips kept silent, what her eyes were saying. The paleness of her face, the scisor nips on your side. Once again, reconstruct everything. The afternoon light, the scent of her hair, your fear, her tears. Again. When you are done with it start all over again from the beginning, build the bedroom walls, put the furniture where it belongs, undo the bed, leave the bathroom light on and the door agair so it lights dimly the bedroom. Place her where she had been, you in your corner and open the cage of runaway words once more. Again. And again one more time, repeating without relenting the reproaches, the expectant questions, the pleading, the dubious answers of either one of you just like a cop would do when searching for clues under the dust of truth that covers the sweetest lies. Repeat them as many times as necessary until you confess that you always play with unfair advantage. Now start again. One more time, come on. Don’t stop. Keep going over and over what you know so well. Don’t toss the towel, don’t give up, go on. As long as you continue running on the very edge of the same abbyss nothing would completely end and you will hold a fragment of her breath in your memory and a souvenir of her skin in the folds of the plam of your hand’. Go round and round over and around the same tile, against the same walls, over the same sidewalk, go past your door a thousand times until a neighbour stops you, asks you a question you can’t answer and stops your race. [ vii ] 3 Sooner or later you’ll be defeated by the gaze of the moon. When this happens you will swap an obsession for another and you will dream the loop of this dream: You are inside the cockpit of a red Ferrari F-40 running at the limit of its performance, hitting two hundred miles an hour with the accellerator pedal glued to the matt thanks to the weight of a toolbox full of stones, hand granades, ostrich eggs and unsent letters written to a lover you knew in another life. You don’t really drive, you don’t bother with double clutching when you shift gears, you don’t use the brakes, you don’t even look out. Instead you’re reading Lenin’s complete work, a mumnified visionary relatively well preserved. You cannot remember how this whole thing started or how you reach such extreme situation. When you begin your dream you’ve gotten as far as The State and The Revolution. You don’t have to worry about mantaining tha car on the road because there are no roads, the Earth has been a flat, empty and slippery asphalt ball for a long time. You don’t need to eat or drink either. Something that enters your system by means of a flesh-colored patch adhered to your chest keeps you alive. Your only fear is to cross paths with the errant trajectory of the cobalt blue Bugatti B-110, the only other car on the planet with another scared and distracted pilot like yourself in its interior, but relentlessly reading The Origin of the Work of Art by martin Heidegger, a fascist sympathizer who had a morally decent lover. This fear, the terror of aprehending only a shared of knowledge to continue living without knowing what life means, while under the threat of dying trapped inside the cockpit in flames of a destroyed automobile, will wake you up like a switchblade when the sun begins to rise behind the serrated line of inhabited teeth drawn by the rooves of the city to where you always go back and from where you always escape. |
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