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Lucio Capece

On Concept and Examples

“Dream state is always dream state of concepts, not of examples”

Of the many dream states that one usually has with nature as a subject, a very frequent one, is the one that is internalised in the perfection of the mechanisms with which the living beings operate. Take the gills. When it swims, the fish passes the water through what i guess are a kind of aerodynamic valves, and it extracts the oxygen it needs. It does not matter how it does it. Somehow. Simplifying in the direction of the concept, as I did in the last two sentences, is relatively easy; You can imagine an apparatus, a still, in which the water is decomposed and the oxygen is stored while the hydrogen is discarded. The dream state also reserves something, and discards something; In this case what reserves is the size of the fish. Because there are very small fishes, of the dimension of a match, and in them that alembic becomes prodigious ….? Or not? To arm it and disarm it, we have to imagine with magnifying glasses, with microscopes, with screwdrivers and tweezers and hammers of the size of needle points, and that would be a feat of patience and dexterity. A feat that could be achieved, with much optimism, in a fish; But at sea there are billions … At this point we must surrender to the evidence and recognize that the reasoning behind the dream state contains an error. Two, actually. The first is the difference between making them and finding them done. No one has ever made gills for fish. They are already done. Constructivism is an idle illusion. The second has to do with size. Here the error is to take our human size as a rigid pattern. The demiurge actually chooses the dimension that best suits each case, or rather he has chosen, in the process of creating all sizes. It is a fluid, elastic workshop where you can always work at ease, with joy, with comfort, with your hands. I think that is why the concepts are so attractive, that is why man clings to them with such obstinacy, from childhood, and disdains all the denials of reality. The uncomfortable or unmanageable are the examples; For them we are never well proportioned, we are always either giants or dwarfs. Dream state is always dream state of concepts, not of examples. I would not want anything I wrote here to be taken as an example.

César Aira. Relatos Reunidos. El Infinito. Excerpt. Translated by Lucio Capece.