Notas para la antropología de un nuevo milenio (I)

En aquel Tiempo, la joven intelligentsia abandonó toda forma de comunicación elaborada, optando únicamente por mensajes cortos con indirectas sarcásticas y podcast que se referían a otros podcast que se referían a otros podcast que se referían a sus artículos, en una suerte de juego versallesco, de zarabanda rococó.

Ungaretti - Pellegrinaggio - Peregrinaje

Pellegrinaggio
(Giuseppe Ungaretti)

In agguato
in queste budella
di macerie
ore e ore
ho strascicato
la mia carcassa
usata dal fango
come una suola
o come un seme
di spinalba

Ungaretti
uomo di pena
ti basta un'illusione
per farti coraggio

Un riflettore
di là mette un mare nella nebbia

PEREGRINAJE

Al acecho
en este vientre
de escombros
horas y horas
he arrastrado
mi osamenta
gastada por el fango
como una suela
o como una semilla
de espino

Ungaretti
hombre de pena
te basta una ilusión
para darte coraje

Un reflector
del otro lado
pone un mar
en la niebla

What Work Is - Philip Levine

What Work Is
By Philip Levine
We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

Mending Wall - Robert Frost

MENDING WALL

Robert Frost

---

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Infinite Loops and Herring Sandwiches

[...]
Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes  of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks. 

Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something  else which thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest  way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same  stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a  loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (The  MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the  Surprisingly Obvious). 

A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring  sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the  whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to  believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was  placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, `Ah!  A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.' 

It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich  in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again.  Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that  the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip  straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor  in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, `Ah!  A herring sandwich..., etc., and repeated the same action over  and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business  and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was  that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between  a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was  going on than was the robot. 

The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving  force behind all change, development and innovation in life,  which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper  to this effect, which was widely criticised as being extremely  stupid. They checked their figures and realised that what they  had actually discovered was `boredom', or rather, the practical  function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went  on to discover other emotions, Like `irritability', `depression',  `reluctance', `ickiness' and so on. The next big breakthrough came  when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole  welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for  study, such as `relief', `joy', `friskiness', `appetite', `satisfaction',  and most important of all, the desire for `happiness'. 

This was the biggest breakthrough of all. 

Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behaviour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply.  All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or  happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order  to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out  for themselves.

[...]

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

Francisco Brines - Los Veranos

A Carmen Marí

¡Fueron largos y ardientes los veranos!
Estábamos desnudos junto al mar,
y el mar aún más desnudo. Con los ojos,
y en unos cuerpos ágiles, hacíamos
la más dichosa posesión del mundo.

Nos sonaban las voces encendidas de luna,
y era la vida cálida y violenta,
ingratos con el sueño transcurríamos.
El ritmo tan oscuro de las olas
nos abrasaba eternos, y éramos solo tiempo.
Se borraban los astros en el amanecer
y, con la luz que fría regresaba,
furioso y delicado se iniciaba el amor.

Hoy parece un engaño que fuésemos felices
al modo inmerecido de los dioses.
¡Qué extraña y breve fue la juventud!

Francisco Brines
(El otoño de las rosas, 1986)

Interview with David Simon

This weekend, David Simon, creator of The Wire, Generation Kill and Treme, has been visiting Avilés for the Celsius 232 fiction festival. Paloma Rando, from Vanity Fair Spain, honoured me to act as translator for her interview to this great modern creeator. 

Mi grabación #1.mp3