Transition House

I’m entering right now into a “transition house”, a term I read of in David Mack’s Kabuki (hint: consider the potential of the comic book as subversive media). It reminds me of the house that Descartes said one needs to be at, while destroying one’s old house –let’s say an inherited one- and building the new one (self determined). Right now, mine’s not a physical place, but mental (cognitive? intellectual?) one. But I am looking forward to make it real, that is: to have a place of my own. Not just a house; a life. I am still not sure what course should it take (Sartre says one doesn’t decide, one builds), and I am indeed afraid of being so isolated I am becoming a little dysfunctional (is it no good? would you rather be functional and exist for others?). The fact is that I no longer feel comfortable out there, trying to follow the course of events, keeping on the track. Also, I no longer feel able of achieving a role in society as a professional in any matter. This is something I didn’t see coming. I even thought I had done with my outsiderism. But as they say: wherever you’re standing at, you can’t even imagine what the bottom would be like. I’ve been feeling this for a while (a couple of years) but never as intense as I’m feeling at the moment. I have to find my relation to the world. And chances are it is something rather unfamiliar to me. Whatever I dream of becoming when I was a child, then a youngster, there’s nothing left from it. Many people I don’t want to see them again (they bring back an era of my life that I feel unreal). I used to explain it like this: Hay dos vías, la institucional y la del alma. Either I chose the second, or it chose me. The truth is whatever attempt to return to the institutional way of living would kill this sort of eloquence.

Currently, I spend a lot of time thinking of certain matters (genuinely own inquietudes) that I find it difficult to concentrate in anything else. The last thing I had was the aspiration of being a writer, because I thought it was a social role I could play. But now even that is endangered. And suddenly, I am not afraid of losing that too. I’ve met so many writers in the last two years that I wondered if anything that I was doing was necessary. (It obeyed to that recursive idea of being someone else’s repetition). Besides, I was often invaded by the feeling that whatever i was working on, someone had already done it (better) before. Also: I hated the idea of my work being understood as a piece of entertainment. Like Sartre would say: what is the point of finding new ways to say the old familiar ideas? Now I know that whether I achieve the social recognition as a writer, or not, I write as a means of relating to life. And whether people actually read my work or not, that's something else. I have the security of he who has nothing else to lose. You know, I am learning to lose. And I suspect that at the end, what there is to gain is better than whatever I was looking for, originally.