Contain crowds

Since I finished school I think that the transition from one year to the next is somewhat an arbitrary matter that should not be given greater importance. I never felt it more evident than when I worked in offices; You leave on the 31st at noon or mid-afternoon and return on the 2nd in the morning with the feeling that you were warned that the world was ending but those who were in charge of the apocalypse forgot and everything remains the same, as happened in 2000 with the catastrophe Frustrated by Y2K. Now that I’m a little older I think that the end of the year has more of the structure of a metaphor: it is not always the moment in which I am most aware of the passage of time (my mother’s retirement, the closing of some bowling alley or school that I thought would always be part of the world, passing a university professor on the street and seeing him for the first time with a cane), but it is a moment when we can all think about it at the same time.

A few days ago I saw titanthe film by the French Julia Ducournau that everyone recommended to me during the pandemic and that for some reason I had forgotten to see. Friends had told me about it as “the one with the mine that he takes with a car”, and it is true that that happens, and the scene is barbaric, but I was more interested in what happens next: the protagonist, who has to escape from a couple of bad decisions, she cuts her hair, ties her breasts and injures her nose to pass herself off as a young boy who disappeared years ago, for whom his father is desperately searching. The father recognizes “his son,” prevents him from being subjected to a DNA test, and the girl sinks into silence with a post-traumatic excuse, probably to avoid making a mistake, and probably also to not show her feminine voice.

In recent weeks, I had also been rereading orlando by Virginia Woolf: I say rereading because it is factually true, I read this book for the first time when I was 17 or 18, but I have no idea what I may have understood. The best thing about the novel is the humor, definitely, and it doesn’t occur to me that in those times I could have caught the jokes about resentful writers and embarrassed aristocrats that today make me laugh out loud alone; but the second best thing, perhaps, is the treatment of time. And in fact, the most famous thing about the book, Orlando’s transition from man to woman, is as much a queer commentary as it is a commentary on the passage of time. If we wanted to speak as postmodern philosophers we would say that this gender change is a comment on what queer (using its old meaning of queer as “weird”) which is time.

The little I remembered about it was that Orlando became Lady Orlando without much explanation; There was no decision nor a search, nor an internal struggle nor a conquest; It was more like Kafka’s metamorphosis, but without the frustrations. Waking up as a woman, for Orlando, seemed to be like what it would be like for another person to wake up gray-haired or with ten kilos more or ten kilos less; one of those things that can happen, neither good nor bad, when you carry a body through the years. Orlando is man and woman because he lives for hundreds of years; He is a man and a woman because he lives several lives, just like the girl in titanjust like Don Draper, just like all of us.

I think that, in recent years, fluidity has gotten a bad press in general. When I explain Judith Butler’s concept of gender to my feminist philosophy students, I tell them that the notion of “gender identity” that we handle in everyday life is much more fixed than what Butler had in mind, at least in those early days. texts inspired by drag queens and their playful relationship with the possibility of being anything. It is logical, we live in a world with identity documents and prepaid cards, and then we need to maintain that subjectivities are more or less stable matters; But sometimes we forget that the fact that one never bathes in the same river twice is closer to the truth, and that the supposed certainty that that river is the same river is always closer to fiction.

I remember a professor once explained to me that the central difference between the left and the right was not that one valued equality and the other freedom, but that the fundamental value for the right was order, in the most literal sense of conservatism. : that things should remain more or less as they were. I think that professor was right when he explained it to me, but that today there are left-wing conservatives and right-wing conservatives; and the feeling is that what makes these people uncomfortable is the concept of accepting what changes; not being for or against certain transformations, but accepting them in an almost Zen sense, trying to accommodate what we really cannot avoid.

I think that one of the most interesting things that being alive in a reality that includes the dimension of time teaches us is that of involuntary fluidity, that which fascinates us in the character of a little girl who discovers that she can become a little boy just by shaving her head. head and breaking her nose, the one that Virginia thematizes in the character of a centenarian nobleman who one day becomes a woman without having decided (but without opposing it). When I was younger I thought that if you wanted to contain crowds you had to try; that if you wanted to live one of those interesting lives that are a thousand lives, you had to work for it. I wish it were that difficult.

#crowds