digital-otter

When the hands of two people meet, their emotions change and turn them into a pair of dahlias and small river stones. Lips and glances overlap. They succumb to everything that seems obvious. People scream when they see them kissing in public spaces, some with envy and others with suspicion.

Life was made for intense emotions, but crowds do not multiply emotions. All those heads, all those bodies watching at the same time a television, their cell phones and the news of the day, are not equivalent to an overflowing emotion. The eloquence of the sea, the terribleness of typhoid are nothing but weapons of mass propulsion to drive the seas away from the people. Dictatorships are the disease of today, of yesterday, and of the present.

The shy kiss, the kiss that is given in secret is a cure against fascism. The clouds that disperse and form with their swaying a mound of elemental individuals are the perfect photograph for those who feel lonely. Loneliness is not the opposite of the crowd, but the crowd imposes loneliness as an ordeal, as a punishment for being born a person.

When I walk the streets of my neighborhood you can feel the scent and the fear of the crowd of inflation, war, disease and all the new things that the future holds. Dystopias present themselves in the form of gossip among ladies, and among competition among males. The crowd is the idea and the whirlwind of the intersections that form between the sidewalk and the cracks made by the roots of the trees. Who would say that everything is an old symptom on the tip of the toe and with that we have for someone to decide to establish fascism.

The crowd and the people numb their ailments with small doses of stem cells. The clinics are full of people waiting for a transfusion. Camellias and jasmines are an irremediable cure against melancholy but people don't know it. No one knows how we came to know so much and how we came to ignore so much. Comets tear the sky and destroy everything in their path. Just yesterday the capacity for astonishment was destroyed, but today the toothache could well be destroyed. How many would go out to celebrate the death of a beetle looking at the sun? How many would roll with its body in the sewers of the city? And what about those who shout in the middle of the street announcing a future that seems almost impossible.

Bring a cup and break it on the walls of the nobles. Lynch the landowner and drink his blood, you angry crowds, walking scalps and sleeping beauties. Or do I mean walking beauties and sleeping knights?

I am a digital otter.

I can't help but think about what will become of the world, the things that will be lost and the things we will gain. When I think of the human obsession with finding universals, my skin crawls and I keep to much cooler thoughts: like breaking a pitcher in the middle of the night or the smell of a freshly sprung flower. This obsession would not be entirely unhealthy if the universalization of human terms and concepts did not find in it the collateral damage of excessive progress and many bodies being thrown into the void of history.

What happens to that which refuses to be universalized? I fear there is no space or place where it can be rescued. I have watched, with these same eyes that have watched the colors of dawn, people navigating in deep waters, seeking to save their culture and their languages; languages that are certainly not subject to the logical formalization of the Vienna Circle. I have felt firsthand the destruction of a few habitats in the Global South, and the untimely changes of the seasons.

The universal, as an abstraction, leaves no room for human feelings and pains. The universal is order, progress, abstraction and utilities, margins of error and what today is called “analytics”. Forgive the expression but I am tired of observing these games of language and abstraction at the cost of thousands of human and non-human lives. The network is vast and infinite, why shouldn't the concept of the universal be so?

Yesterday I went out to talk with my partner, the beaver. We walked a few meters together talking about the new human tendencies that would soon devastate our water, that is, if we don't act. I spoke to him about the universal, but he looked at me quizzically. What are you talking about, old otter,” he reproached me. This is the proof that we non-human animals are incapable of thinking of the universal. For us there is only that which is particular: that flower that blooms rejoicing in itself, that tree where we keep food for the coming season, the grass that caresses my paws and the dew that tickles my mustache at dawn.

Humanity is in trouble. This obsession with the universal has created forms of human organization that cry out: align yourself with the universal or die. And who will be the brave one who will dare to say: “Here I am, I have achieved all the traits of humanity and the universal. I am reasonable, calculating, utilitarian, morally unimpeachable, but at the same time sensitive, profound and if I may be permitted, even a philosopher of life you may call me.”

What an absurd ideal. So when I finish writing these lines I will go out to frolic on the banks of the river and let my hand rest gently in the water, changing, always fresh and renewed.