Leonora Carrington. “The Memory Tower”
One day I just quitted the humankind. I can remember it quite well. It was a sunny day (very often over here), a bit more than ten minutes to five o’clock in the afternoon. I was in my room. Even I made a vow. Or maybe not. The vows are too human, so typical in the species which I was quitted at that moment. No. Probably I didn’t, in strict sense, but it felt with the same magnificence of one. Just the magnificence, of course, exempt from the human silliness, which is part of the quitclaim itself.
Why? Reasons abound. I could write endless lists of causes to quit the human race; from the most prosaic ones, that involve hysterical obsessions, like having to comb your hair everyday (a true foolishness); going through the political and ethical ones, like wars, famine, environment destruction, lust of power, etc., etc.; till the most metaphysical ones, like the absurdity of life, the dust speck in the universe, the invention of life and society as a mere optical ilusion coming from some desperate animal facing the nothingness and none-a-thing, bla, bla, bla.
Mine lies between the last and the first one; a gem of outrage, speaking in strictly human logic (if there is something like this in that species). But if it is needed to be diligent about the facts, it was not a quitclaim made from one day to another, actually. Let me explain myself. The effective quitclaim (reach the ultimate awareness of the quitclaim) was from one day to another; but the vital quitclaim was not. This one started to grow for a long time through the years. You just don’t quit your own species and it’s done. It is much more complex than that. You begin by little quitclaims; the first ones are typical social obsessions, with no more meaning apart from the behavioral imitation of the mass: the mobile phone obsession, the football, so simple stupidities as linking sexuality to specific colors; or a specific sexuality, or sexual manners, to specific individuals, just because is claimed by the social “norm”. The last one is already a much more subversive (if I may use the word) level of quitclaim, at least to the common denominator, even though expected, if you claim be part of what is called a “modern society” for the species. The ones beyond understanding are those targeted to the foundation of the species itself: some human values, regarded as essentials to the survival and meaning of life. For instance, quitclaim to the procreation. Yes, procreation. The understanding that the idea of love and the pursuit of love, as the yearning for establishing a family (for love), is nothing but an elaborated substitute about what in differents species is known as instinct of procreation, this is to start quitting the essential elements of the human species, understood as such. Only starting to question them is nearly the equivalent to the blasphemy in a social sense; but quitting them, that is worthy of the social stake itself.
If after all of that comes the quitclaim to the idea of future, with all what is implied in it: savings, projects, long-term family planification; then the periplus is done. After it come the deepest quitclaims: the feelings. Horror of horrors. What kind of monster would renounce to feel? But is not the feelings what you leave behind, strictly speaking. Because, is not the very quitclaim a way of abdication?, and is there not inside every way of abdication the deepest feeling of breakdown facing the human events? It is an overabundance of feelings, you could say. There is no more room for the attachment to anything. Everything is relinquished. It is relinquished to the permanent flowing of time and fate. It is the only thing that remains when you realized that feelings are the equivalent to the fierce desire of owning to others, and just that. Owning them for not to loose them and, in this way, not to loose yourself. Then every hope about the others is overcome, and is overcome every disappointment. Nothing can be disappointing if nothing is expected. Because the hope and the deception (true heraclitean poles) fade away our human garments and we become simple martians, those from the classic stories written by Bradbury: non-existent for the human eyes but embodying the own desires of those who see them. Realize that we are this: the hope of our own desires embodied into others, and that every hope in others is their pain caught by the tyranny of our desires (and viceversa), and that the deception waits, distressing and unavoidable, behind of every one, ready to sink us down into the endless agony of fear and sorrow; that is the corollary for every ultimate quitclaim.
Because the quitclaim to the human species, is no other thing that the quitclaim to some species that of human only has a name hardly remembered for a few ones.
Or maybe I am just simply disappointed. Who knows…
Searing Words 