Mediation is everywhere, dominating life and literature. At least until I open Spotify and put on “Varanda Suspensa.” My body begins to move, reaching a strange synchronicity with the rhythm of the music. My left arm extends upwards; the right one does the opposite. When the singer says “suspensa,” one of my legs draws a semicircle on the floor. During the four minutes and 48 seconds that the music is playing, I am not in the 150 square feet that contain my personal belongings and the bed where I sleep. I am in the middle of a beach, on a Brazilian desert island. Once silence reaches my ears, my movements are interrupted. I fall upon my bed, eyes closed. Now I am nowhere, time is suspended. The axiom of mediation no longer seems true. I am in my rawest form. Eventually, I look at the clock and start to get ready. 45 minutes later, I direct my glance at a full-length mirror one last time and place my hand on the cold door handle. A portal to a different world is opened, and my body completes its metamorphosis into its public version. One leg in front of the other, in an organically rigid motion, while I rush to get wherever I need to go next. Adding layers to what there is inside me as I leave my inner and physical dwelling is a part of my daily routine. It is also a constitutive part of the lives of those whom I see walking around campus, accompanying me in the mechanical movements that dominate the lower part of my body. Literature also mirrors this mediation of movement and speech. It requires a shaping of raw ideas and impulses into the worlds the writer builds on what was once a blank page. It is precisely this dimension that separates my unhinged journal entries from a short story, a novel, or, optimistically, this piece.
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“Por supuesto que estaba enojado, pero la ira no tiene lugar en un cuento.” / “I was obviously upset, but ire has no place in a short story.” Augusto Monterroso was not an advocate of a literature that displays anger, channeling the feeling into a sharp humor.
My cousin is a very serious person. With her pale suit and one-inch black high-heels, she goes straight to the point, no wishy-washiness. However, a slight smile invades her sober face when she hears someone has died. When she attends a funeral, the subtlety of her facial expression is lessened. As she approaches the dead body to pay her respects, a quick, but audible giggle can sometimes be heard. Many of those who witness the moment look at her in shock. I don’t. Humor is the tool she uses to process the realization that people who once were, no longer are. And that one day, this fate will eventually fall upon her. Algor mortis, rigor mortis, livor mortis. The bacteria that slowly gorge on the tissues of the dead body she now sees will eventually have a feast on her own body. Maggots in her eyelids and ears, collaboratively working to cement the impossibility of ever seeing or hearing again. And then, nothing. Or everything. The not knowing for her is absurd; it is a subversion of the control she believes she has over what happens around her. Traversing the alleys of death represents a territory whose exploration is unfeasible. The impossibility of knowing what happens after existence ceases unsettles her spirit. Laughing is the only thing she can do to reduce the anguish of death’s presence and its mysteries.
“We are not held up by some ‘revelation’ which reminds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed.” Virginia Woolf admired Shakespeare’s capacity to conceal his actual state of mind from his readers. For her, the text should prevail over the author.
I am on a plane to France. My eyes are fixated on an article about the extinction of the dodo bird while my mind fantasizes about the croissants I would eat and the bookstores I would visit. The doomed attempt to do my evolutionary biology work on an overnight flight is interrupted by the voice of the captain. “Ladies and gentlemen, please stay seated with your seatbelt fastened. We will be experiencing heavy turbulence.” The seatbelt sign turns on and minutes after the announcement, the plane starts to oscillate up and down. My brain does me the huge favor of reminding me that I am in a metallic box in the middle of the sky. How is that even allowed? I contemplate the feeling of death and think about how young I am, and that I really did not want to go with my last meal being an overpriced sketchy egg sandwich I bought at the airport. I wanted to cry, but I did not want the teenage boy sitting on my right or the middle-aged woman with stylish yellow glasses on my left to see me breaking down. I held back my tears during that endless turbulence. Those two random people would not be witnesses to my hardship.
“AAAAY, duele. Duele. Otra vasija y otra. Mamá me pone en el suelo….” / “AAAAY, it hurts. It hurts. Another tupperware and another one. Mommy puts me on the ground.” Diamela Ellit uses a fragmentary language, composed of repetition, onomatopoeia, and an exploring of what remains unsaid to mediate her work within an authoritarian regime.
Growing up, my mother and I had a pretty open relationship. Still, whenever we would fight, episodes motivated by the teenage classic “nobody understands me,” she would immediately activate silent mode. Not a word directed to me for a good couple of hours. Then, she would grant me a brief good night or good morning, depending on the moment of the day the conflict occurred. Eventually, she would knock at my door, and we would have a conversation on how we could move forward. The usual nonviolent communication stuff. “When you do X, I feel Y. Because of this, I need Z.” The moments of silence, however, started to bother me. Whenever I have a problem, I want to deal with it as efficiently and quickly as possible. I mean, I file my taxes in February. February. My mother’s approach to life tends to be the opposite. After I brought the issue up on a rainy morning while I ate my strawberry yogurt, she placed a cup containing an unpalatable green smoothie on the balcony. For a few seconds, the buzzing sound of the coffee machine was the only thing that could be heard. When her lips finally started moving, she told me that the silent treatment was motivated by a need to think. She needed to process her feelings on her own time. To better understand what she felt and not dump her raw emotions into the environment, she adopted a silent, fragmentary language.
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Mediation is in literature; mediation is in life. When I first read Woolf, I was not entirely sure whether I agreed with her. We need anger, love, sadness, and happiness to produce literature. If we try to mold the rawness of our feelings to an excessive degree, we end up with something flavorless, like unseasoned tofu. Worse than that, unseasoned silken tofu. Nevertheless, the more I live my life and the more I see others living around me, I realize how mediated our actions are. And that is not necessarily bad. I am not sure how feasible it would be to go around campus dancing to Varanda Suspensa. I would certainly be run over by a random kid’s bike. Although mediation can generate self-repression, it can sometimes simply be a way of coping, an attempt to protect those you care about, or to experiment with the forms your feelings take as you translate them into a literary work. Mediation is a prism.
Louise Sanches-Barbosa refracts the Nassau Weekly through the lens of mediation. It’s a footnote’s job to mediate, too, between you and the end of the piece. Bye!