Love, smile, and voice

(Conference originally given in Spanish on October 23, 2024, Bar Association, Moron, Buenos Aires Province, illustrated with songs sang by me and played with my guitar, Osvaldo Nan playing the keyboards, and Gabriel Vignoni the harmonica) 

 The ancient Greeks had three gods of time: Cronus, who continually devours us; Aion, the god of a life freed from Cronus, a time of pleasure and desire when we want the moment to last forever; and Kairos, fleeting, who determines that time of the instant, the god of opportunity linked to art. In order to temporarily detach ourselves from Cronus and be in Aion, we need events that make the eternal appear, so that we can anti-entropically resist Cronus. If today more than ever time appears to us Shakespeareanly torn, there are moments when we dance in the uncertainty of a beautiful contact with Kairos, moments of a life that seems never to die.

Borges also sang of the diversity and depth of any given instant, in which the elusive Kairos allows us to experience eternity while it lasts, from Aion to Vinicius de Moraes. In order to achieve this other relationship with time, it is necessary to achieve another relationship with the world and with death. Cronos is the opposite of love, and it is necessary to always be ready to resist this god and his entropy. Evolution is that resistance. Because if fleeing Cronos is ultimately impossible, temporarily escaping him and undergoing evaluative experiences that disorient or distract him is not.

In a world that has become a vast marketplace of priceless offerings, we desire everything, we want to experience everything, and in this detachment from longing, we are often unaware of the place and moment we inhabit and, therefore, we don't even experience it, because our minds are elsewhere: behind, because we don't understand what has quickly passed, or ahead, because we fear what will quickly come. And suspecting that we lack control over or understand ourselves, and unable to accept it, we often waste time, life, and its very meaning in the deserts of a cultivated anxiety.

That's where Altazor, that inspiring poem by Vicente Huidobro, arrives to remind us of the parachute journey of a being who breaks the shackles of reality, transforming it. He comes parachuting down, and in the process, he writes his poem. Altazor helps us remember the possibility of a more poetic and just life, filling it with meaning and value, until our brief journey in this world ends. I now remember that other poem by Borges:

Los justos

Un hombre que cultiva su jardín, como quería Voltaire.
El que agradece que en la tierra haya música.
El que descubre con placer una etimología.
Dos empleados que en un café del Sur juegan un silencioso ajedrez.
El ceramista que premedita un color y una forma.
Un tipógrafo que compone bien esta página, que tal vez no le agrada.
Una mujer y un hombre que leen los tercetos finales de cierto canto.
El que acaricia a un animal dormido.
El que justifica o quiere justificar un mal que le han hecho.
El que agradece que en la tierra haya Stevenson.
El que prefiere que los otros tengan razón.
Esas personas, que se ignoran, están salvando el mundo.

If we're falling, we can do it another way, poetically and valuably. Altazor falls with his eyes open, shaking nothingness, bringing the atmosphere of passion into his darkness, reminding us that we're all sewn to the same star, by the same music, under the same sky. Like Altazor, I propose here to remind you of the possibility of higher lives and I invite you to fall from high above.

To achieve this, it is essential to add value to our lives, to poetically fall into other spaces, with other conversations, other words, while we construct meaning.

And that requires warm spaces for encounter and reflection on what makes our lives more meaningful in the world. If the world still has the open possibility of encounter with a horizon of hope, it's good to remember why we live.

What I call values of poetic significance are values that are exercised on knowledge and practices, and I propose working with at least three dimensions of values closely linked to each other: a sensitive dimension , a cognitive dimension and a practical dimension, in order to promote through our lives a culture that is not indifferent, a culture that is capable of knowing what it is talking about (hence also the need for intercultural competences), and a culture committed to action and justice regarding those things to which it is sensitive and which it knows.

Sensitivity is an essential component of moral life: there is no moral conscience that is not moved, enthusiastic, or indignant. But this sensitivity must be nurtured and call upon reflection on these emotions and feelings, the elucidation of their motives or motivations, their identification, their expression, and their discussion. The formation of moral judgment must allow us to understand and discuss the moral choices we encounter in our lives.

It is at least partially the result of instruction in the different forms of moral reasoning, of being placed in a position to argue and deliberate on the complexity of these problems and to justify our moral choices. The development of moral judgment appeals primarily to the capacities for analysis, discussion, exchange, and the confrontation of points of view in problematic situations. And it demands a capacity for attention , particularly to the work of language in all written and oral expressions. However, we are doing little of all this in our education and in our cultural and political life, where those who cannot even express themselves orally or in writing are no exception. A world that cannot even express itself adequately and that mutilates its languages, a culture that does not know what it is talking about, is a guarantee of deterioration.

It is urgent to learn to converse as if we were dancing, recovering the magic of words and the art of listening.

What I call "poetic citizenship" entails a capacity for self-transformation that we tend to forget. It is built through its exercise; it implies a "power to do" within the contextual conditions in which we find ourselves immersed, within the framework of our relationships, our social capital, our values, and our participation in the construction of our home, city, country, planet: the place where we are, from our own language to our imagination. Multiple discourses traverse us, which is why it is important to generate an antidisciplinary space for different dialogues, the scope for the construction of a poetic awareness of citizenship itself and its labyrinths. Furthermore, in the case of today's adolescents and young people, it involves capturing the values that unfold in their unique ways of relating in the attempt to achieve meaning, a poetic value for their lives. It is about, as the avant-garde aspired, turning one's own life into a work of art or, in a nostalgic epic variant, becoming the heroes of our own lives. We can do more with them. Be fairer to others and to ourselves. Because there is another voice within us beyond the "sound and the fury" that Faulkner portrayed. Tomorrow burns us, and we find ourselves caged in old institutions. Values, then, are the support of a life that moves us toward another place, that excites us, that generates meaning.

We are imagination, desire, and memory, tears in the face of beauty, laughter in the face of nothingness itself, the courage of commitment, and the ability to dream of penetrating reality. If we are to die, let us leave behind poetic moments, valuable events. Let us be what we are to leave behind.

We need to have new meanings for the words and voices of the world. If we must fall, let us do so courageously in a poetic parachute, enriching the moment in which we are in this world.

The idea is that something is shaken and new possibilities for perception are created, leaving ourselves towards a beyond, to other lands, other skies, other truths sometimes distinguishable in what flees or sings, in an attempt to translate the sublime through a sacred rhythm.

Important figures have lived a clandestine and diminished life in a Cartesian world. Their exile grows more terrifying every day in a world that has lost its meaning and wanders aimlessly.

And these values are present within us as a longing for what we desire: another body beside our own, another being, another life. Beyond, outside of ourselves, among the trembling trees, something sings in a moment of heroism when time stops flowing, like when we freeze before a beautiful smile that makes us reborn.

For many today, values may not enlighten them, much less entertain them, in times when everything seems to be entertainment and values seem to have no value.

If meaning has ceased to illuminate the world, we circle around an absence. And as we face the future, isolated, we share a sense of uncertainty with all human beings and feel that an unformed future demands courage so that we won't give up so easily in the face of the darkness of time and ages. It demands a question about meaning, a search that will reunite what has been separated: ourselves.

In our days, a disenchanted and painful world of multitudes undergoing therapies in which they learn to protect themselves from others, to achieve personal fulfillment rather than commitment to a group or social institution, mortally threatens any possibility of resurrecting a convivial "we." It is therefore necessary to establish formats of conviviality, of life with others when we are most educated for life and happiness without others.

Day after day, we struggle to survive, alienated within an anomic society, with no sign of the customary abuses we suffer. Our society has long since entered a period of instability and threat, but since we cannot bear too much reality, we flee to the most relatable and legitimate fictions. Undoubtedly, the fiction of the autonomous "I" and its power is not the least among them.

Like never before, many people find themselves alone, isolated, even by their own choice, which not only does not contribute to the situation, but actually contributes to it. Loneliness in times of individualistic utopias is one of the great social problems of our time. Already in the 19th century, Emile Durkheim pointed out that some of the serious social problems we suffer are due to the deterioration of group life. French philosophers, he asserted, had exalted a "science of the self" instead of a philosophy of social man, of the "we." Without authority, without effective moral or legal controls, only an overflow of selfishness would have unfolded since then. Today, we see how cultural transformations have weakened an image of "we" that allows for the creation of bonds of trust and social cooperation, and we even see daily the difficulty of politics in generating shared meanings in this regard.

These are times when some of the most precious aspects of the human condition are at risk, heralding an inhospitable landscape. That's why it's so difficult to feel at home. And if we continue to be encouraged—as is the case—to empower ourselves individually and increase our personal capacity for influence as a privileged way of building our identity, while underestimating our condition and potential as social beings, it will not be possible to live without fear and at peace with ourselves and with others.

In a world where self-interest had become the god of humanity, demanding the sacrifice of morality, it was the sociologist's responsibility—according to Durkheim—to study how the sanctification of these private interests was accompanied by a degradation of public morality. When only individual appetites remained, we found ourselves facing a society that would inevitably bring a high proportion of crimes, suicides, and divorces—he predicted—in its bourgeois pursuit of individual "happiness." Violent deaths were inevitable in a sickly acquisitive society tainted by individualism.

There is no prospect of overcoming the planet's weakness without encouraging the emergence of socio-value-based forces with sufficient power to move in this direction, and the conviction that only by generating solid alliances of poetic significance will it be possible to generate sufficient power to overcome social anomie.

From a culture of simulation to a culture of meaning and value, that would be the path to follow. And on that path, we must reenter history when it seems we can't take any more, that we're exhausted, that everything is a step toward the abyss. The parachute journey demands that we live as if the ideal were reality. Because a world without a moral compass and without cultivating values of poetic significance is the best guarantee of its destruction.

The narrative of our brains is incessantly searching for and creating meaning. In addition to being captive to old institutions, we are, in a way, prisoners of the cultural imprint stored within them, and we need to create another imprint, leave another imprint. Questions about truth, beauty, and goodness are tangled in our neural circuits and have to do with their history. Moral intuitions are already there, but learning modifies the synaptic connections between neurons and their intensity. And, contrary to what prejudice suggests, and beyond cultural prisons, neurobiology reveals that our brain is fundamentally what we make of it. And what are we making of it with AI?

More than ever, we need beings who experiment with superior and more just forms of life. Our history is filled with examples of those who felt like foreigners in their own land, idealists uneasy in the face of cynicism and resentment. The value of example is fundamental. There will be no other world if we fail to enrich our outlook, marginalize those who promote it, and unhealthily conform to those who servilely flatter and mistreat us, pay us and charge us, seduce us and reject us, accommodate us and inconvenience us, in times of moral harassment.

We live in an age of great corruption in political life, and cynicism about ethical idealism is an understandable reaction to the tragic way in which ideals have been shattered by many political leaders. But if Aristotle was right that we become virtuous by practicing virtue, we need societies in which people are encouraged to act virtuously. Unlike the Hobbesian view, in which violence becomes a culture upon which identities are constructed, the explanation of which is articulated on the recourse to conflict as its sole and constant source, we need to create a cooperative social setting with an emphasis on empathy as the driving force of social action. A caring attitude , with its limitations and weaknesses, can therefore be the way to embrace the responsibility for another way of being in the world, helping us see and hear ourselves as part of a shared identity and glimpse other possibilities for our planet.

We face the challenge of encouraging virtuous behavior. And to do so, we seek what Bateson called the pattern that connects the world. Kant believed we would be condemned to a solidarity of destinies, and the pandemic was no small sign of this. Very bad things can have very good consequences, and who knows, if we do something more and differently, our time in this world could become a more dignified and beautiful parachute journey. Everything remains possible if passion endures thanks to the oases or mirages of a smile, a voice, and love.

There is something and there is someone. We have hope even in the absurdity of our condition because we believe we can be saved by love. The law of the desert is the home of the impersonal, whose narrative must be denied. And we always precociously leap over that boundary. Each testimony of that leap is as precocious, risky, and unpredictable as love. We are what can transform that desert and what allows us to be transformed as long as we continue to suffer it. We struggle with the absurdity of the experience, and as an exit or entrance from or into that situation, we fall in love.

Suffering will bring transformation. And even when love is at risk, there is something that may be happening for the first time, or that we may be experiencing for the first time. But we don't understand it. We have created a space of uncertainty and suspicion, a space in which one cannot know who one is supposed to be while trying to overcome the pain with which we traverse the destinies of our time.

The desire we've been left with, the desire we've built, no longer serves us: normalized, it sinks into a banality that is sadness and silence. And then the world of illusions gives legitimacy to hatred. All hatred, they say, is frustrated love.

Love, under threat today, is a fundamental force in the universe, necessary for peace and beauty. Before it can ascend to heaven, the poet must first understand the depths of degradation to which we can sink.

We love against death. To love means to seek the unattainable; it is a fantasy, a hallucination in which what we love, above all, is love. In a universe that has lost its unity, those who love rarely know what they love, or why they love, or what it means to love. Especially if they want to understand, since understanding is to forget how to love.

In love, we encounter bursts of energy, shattered thoughts, incoherent rhythms, terrible hallucinatory storms, intellectual collapses, magical combustions. The lover waits and does not exile himself from his imaginary world of delirious energy. Because...without that energy, what? The entropy of someone who no longer recognizes us, and with it, helplessness, undoing, nourishment of twilight. Enthusiastic, the energetic, the sacred, and the erotic intertwine.

Loving is a decision in the face of the desert, even the desert of love itself. Everything interesting in this world is born from passion. And, as with energy, nothing is lost in love; everything is transformed. The rest is desolation. This is what Chico Buarque's song, "Futuros Amantes" (Futuros Amantes) speaks about (interpretation of the song with my guitar, piano, and harmonica).

Entropy also seems to be concerned with evolution, which was once a source of resistance to the degradation of the universe. If the apocalypse has become trivial, it becomes essential for us to consider a new sentimental education that recovers visions of the good life that don't end in mockery and hilarity, but rather in the smile of the cat in Alice in Wonderland, or in others like those of Osvaldo Nan and Gabriel Vignoni, who just joined me in composing this song with me.

One waits for another beat, another glow in the darkness, troubadour and butterfly illuminating the night, the arch of promise always open, the imagination shaken, sweeping poems along the path of a voice.

If love is the origin of the new day, our journey is also an adventure worthwhile despite the horror, with trembling boats anchored but ready to depart, with the vertigo of not knowing what one is doing, the chimerical vertigo of renunciation, the vertigo of a dance that is a temporary relief from the need to flee thanks to the sacred smile of its rhythm.

Passion is resistance to the law, to the verdict: Aphrodite's infinite smile making us stutter. And we want that moment, our contemplation of that smile, to last forever. Contemplating a smile is like meditating on a Zen koan, observing a mandala, entering the realm of infinity and paradoxes with an energy that, when it acts, stops.

Camus said it was necessary to imagine Sisyphus happy. Those of us who work with the material of the impossible rehearse it, not without difficulty but with determination and Chaplin-esque aplomb, every day. The love that lifts and rocks his drunken ship carries out an eternal Sisyphean task, attempting again and again in every sea, on every coast where it is possible to bear witness to innocence, to catastrophe, but also to the deserts of love: the lost innocence of love and also the enchanted world we reinvent when we don't want to surrender so easily to the implacable order of what is given, accepted, indisputable.

Smile. A smile pushes and strains. As Charlie Chaplin, the author of this beautiful song, suggests (Interpretation of Smile).

And suddenly it seems there's only one voice in the world, a voice without windows, an illusion, an image that burns like fire and sleep, sheltering our desert words. Fragile, so fragile, that voice often takes refuge because it doesn't know what to reply, what to do with its confusion, with the fragments of broken worlds, vestiges of a god who can't find what to say before the sea.

So we beg for a melody, we stutter like a hammer, like an unfinished book, with a voice we don't have for the whirlwinds, to invent a place where words return to things, where harmonies are set in motion like a song after sacrifice.

But that voice calls us to glide among the flowers, to be a sailor in her garden, and we lose ourselves in the memory of a poem like that dead man who did not want to be considered dead, like incorrigible beasts, absent lights, flowers hidden on the other side of the star.

That's why I sing, I stumble, and I look for exceptions, and not having to sing, I sing with the harmonics of memory of that day that could have been possible. And I play the guitar with my mutilated hands... my eaten-away fingers won't stay still: an unfinished story drives them, lost opportunities drive them, and I stammer with my breath words made of air and I imagine their bodies as if they were part of an encyclopedia... like a daring guest in a hidden gem, I wait for the instant of a word in my voice, cooking my soul, my bones, like a divine gust seeking to bring forth an improbable song from nothingness. Perhaps a love is being made like a god who hasn't yet been born, and a multifarious language that hasn't yet been written for our sacred theater.

I believe in the voices of birds because I know their anguishing mystery, and I imagine then that I have already achieved it, that through them the mornings of the world have returned. I should fall silent like a garden in the city, I should stop writing and speaking with the sand of my voice, but I am a man who has reached such a level that he can do nothing but this, who searches for those lost books and the cipher of their voice, who thinks of the things that could have been and were not, in the world without the rose, to dream again what was dreamed, the sacred music, its revelation like an impossible sonata in frozen time.

And it turns out that I am and I see that we are often the ones who are afraid of the distance of the voice, of the stars that look at us, filling the air with more fears, and then I throw spears to the sky and wait in my delirium for the hope of the trapeze artist in the swamp of his solitude.

Reality is a nightmare, it seems unreal. We live in terror, listening to voices from the caves. There's a sadness inherent in thoughts and loves that leave scars. Life is so hard sometimes that if we didn't have this impulse to smile, it wouldn't be worth living.

But no one is saved with words. To speak of love is to lose it. This enigma refers us to the realm of sung and lived loves. I have sung here by invitation and because the form of life called love is enunciated by the minstrel, the troubadour. Love is an ethical, political, and religious crossroads. And today there is a fissure in love. Love as we understand it today is a song we inherited from courtly education, from troubadour ethics, the love of non-possession and non-contract, of gift and gratuitousness. The courtly love in which many of us were educated was a joyful knowledge, a jovial game, a literary and competitive spirit. It is part of medieval tournaments, of their festivals, of skill.

The art of the troubadour and courtly love are poetic constructions. And the human voice is, of all existing music, the closest to the divine secret. Its lyrics are part of a chant. The "elevation" of everyday speech to the realm of art, the musicalization of poetic forms, are part of a rhetorical ethic in which good speech and politeness in speaking are the axes of the virtues of the courtier. And there is a "nomadism" in the voice of the minstrel. For a long time, linguists condemned the privileging of the voice in the name of writing, when in reality there is an absolute proximity between the voice and being, between the voice and the meaning of being.

Here I begin to sing, to the rhythm of the vihuela, as Martín Fierro begins. But in the resonant sound of the poetic language, the repercussion of the song is, above all, a sacrificial resonant: the creator is sacrificed in and by his work. The courage of sacrifice IS the courage of the poet-singer. All the poet's courage is precisely a courage or spirit of sacrifice. And the song of sacrifice is like this, the clamor of the open-mouthed one who is about to be sacrificed, the clamor that is none other than the sacred song of life, the sacrificial vocalization that is the truth of the tragic and the poetic. The song, every song, what I would say is always the resistance of life itself, resistance to the fact that sacrifice must, again and again, necessarily take place. Many, and perhaps some of us, have lost their lives to give this song a chance, the song of a sacrificed life, a song that announces the necessary death, the parachute fall. Resonance of the sacrificial in song, when everything remains possible if passion endures, the constant passion to undermine the legitimacy of an original simplicity. A song that intertwines voices and comes from the tragedy of life, linked today with the profound relationship, as Gorgias liked, of the word, and my word now, with kairos, the present moment, circumstance, the grace, misfortune, and sincerity of a voice. But what is the voice? How is the voice constructed? The voice is one of the ways in which a body, a life, resonates, and expresses the intimacy of being, its beliefs, values, feelings, security, as well as its doubts, anguish, fear, its warmth, its rhythm, its tone, its timbre. How can we discover an intonation, a voice, a destiny? How can we give voice to the voiceless? Can it be taken away from those who have one? I think of Scheherazade and her voice, keeping it alive. And again of Martín Fierro. Nothing is lost if his passion for Song and the ability to continue making his voice heard persist. He understands that this ability comes from on High and that the happiness that this gift, with which he has been anointed, gives him comes from stripping away everything else: anything other than his power to continue speaking himself in Song. And he sings:

Gracias le doy a la virgen,

gracias le doy al Señor,

porque entre tanto rigor

y habiendo perdido tanto,

no perdí mi amor al canto

ni mi voz como cantor.

Those who reveal themselves to be enthusiastic always sing because they believe in a way out. The singer cannot remain without a voice, without hope. If nothing can be expected from words, then we must sing so that dead poetry may be reborn. But if we cannot be heard, why sing? Well, sometimes it is a matter of singing that which cannot be heard, that which cannot be called by its name. Today is the time to listen to the sounds of a voice that is still unformulated but present in memory. Words, today transformed into empty sonorities, need to sing of a new kind of love, a renewed sensitivity. We can no longer expect anything from words as they often circulate. Our language must be different because this use of words tempts us to abandon words, and today we are shipwrecked by voices. I continue searching for that lost, impossible, implacable voice, which is born from passions when we probably forget more than we know, when we want the moment to last forever in a life, in a voice. (I play on guitar Minha voz, minha vida , by Caetano Veloso ).

Martínez Estrada wrote:

“I believe that the writer has, de facto and de jure, as one of his pressing social duties, that of being an agitator, a remover of inert materials, an explorer, a prospector of gold-bearing lands, a Viking of unknown seas, a traveler who dreams of unknown continents, the most fertile supplier of leavening materials for philosophical culture; a man in rebellion, as Camus called him, a man who makes, in his entire person, the experiment of trying out other, higher and unprecedented forms of life” (On Kafka and Other Essays. EME).

That's what it's all about. Trying out higher and new ways of living. Because everything remains possible if passion endures, thanks to the oasis or mirage of a smile, a voice, and love. And that's why... I come to offer my heart (Interpretation of Fito Páez's song)