Bosons

Like any other day, I was waiting to go to lunch. I looked at the time on my phone. I saw the number: “12:51”, and I was transported there:
I'm listening to that song by The Strokes, “12:51”. I’m with my first love on an improvised picnic in her backyard. She's holding one headphone and giving me the other. She’s saying “Here, here. Listen!"
She is so proud of herself. She has been learning English and finally translated a complete song by ear.
She pronounces slowly, “Oh really, your folks are away now? Alright, let's go, you convinced me”
She repeats in Spanish. “¿En serio? ¿Tus viejos no están en tu casa? Bueno, vamos, me convenciste.”
“Do you remember?” she asks me. “It’s like you told me that time, after our first kiss.” She smiles.
I never look for the number, nor seek for the song on my iPod. But when it happens, when the song appears in my ears, or when I encounter that number on my phone, I find myself in that backyard, in that improvised picnic under the sun, forever young and in love, holding a Coke bottle and her smile.

Years later I was living in Germany. I had not seen her for almost a decade.
I was reading about futurology when I got her E-Mail.
She sent me a link for the live streaming of a press conference in Switzerland. The news was that they had measured something moving faster than the speed of light.
She wanted to ask me something: “I remember once you told me that we would never be able to go back in time until we find the way of moving faster than the speed of light. What do you think? Will it be possible now?”
And I realized her 12:51 was that talk we had, one night, walking the streets, also in love, chatting about time, space, memories and how to prevail over them. She was collecting bosons from our shared past, like every time I found “12:51”.
It was the only time we wrote each other. I answered her: “We must wait for more studies in the field, but these are hopeful news.”
We haven’t written each other ever since.

Inflexion

Inflexion

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Albert Camus

It started like any other Sunday morning. I woke up, took a shower and went downstairs to McMurphy’s, a kind of Irish bar in the corner of my street named after One flew over the cuckoo’s nest protagonist. On Sundays I typically worked there in my novels, while reading, thinking, watching Germans in the wild and enjoying a big breakfast by myself. But that Sunday I thought she might be there. She was a waitress I knew since I moved to Braunschweig to do my PhD in Artificial Intelligence. I call her the magic blonde, because I still hadn’t had the courage to ask her for her name. No hurry, I think. It’s only been three years.

I like her eyes. I had put them (and her) in many micro-novels that I had written in McMurphy’s. I see her as some kind of guardian angel, who doesn’t know how much she’d helped me just by the mere act of existing.

When I arrived I noticed she wasn’t working that day, and that a bunch of old people were mingled around the school in front of the bar. School on a Sunday? I asked myself. Election day, I remember. That’s right. Europe needs an inflexion point, a before and after moment in time to believe that something new and better might happen in this already too old to care continent. Descendent from Italian and Spanish and raised in Argentina during its return to democracy I have an interesting perspective about the old and the new, politically and culturally speaking. I have unique insights, so I abstained from voting.

Magic Blonde was not there, so I got myself into a sloppy position over one table and started reading. I had three books in my bag that day. The first book to come out was my second novel, which I was rewriting after ten years. The second one was Macendonio Fernandez’s The Museum of Eterna's Novel. And the third one was Mr Gwyn, by Alessandro Baricco. I was checking on of the many prologues that constitute the eternal novel by Fernandez when I found such a clever quote that I had to take my phone out of my pocket and made a picture of the page. Digital conversion of analog literature, I laughed to myself, while feeling dumb because of the unexpected expression in my face. “Self-referenced jokes to entertain myself” sounds like an epitaph for my literary work. Looking up I found myself facing Magic Blonde in her civilian clothes, next to an older version of her that must have been her mother. She didn’t greet me and I froze with stupidity. Magic Blonde was introducing her mother to the waitress that was actually working that day, while I tried to avoid hearing her mysterious name by accident.  They were talking about a flea market, or something like that. My German skills were not as good as expected for someone living already three years in Braunschweig.

I closed Fernandez’s book and opened mine. I corrected some sentences and added footnotes, longer than the actual chapter, refusing to look up until Magic Blonde and her mother were not there anymore. I felt the shame of inventing a roll that I didn’t have. She said goodbye and I looked up wishing she were talking to me to witness her hugging the current waitress goodbye. She’s a hugger like me, I thought.

After finishing my breakfast I went for a walk. Sunny Braunschweig made me think of life as a time-variant function. I guessed that my life’s inflexion point would be the moment when Magic Blonde would finally admit that she was waiting for me to say, “Hello. I’m Fede and I’ll be here all your life”.

I have recurrent dreams of a woman covering my eyes from behind asking: “Guess who?” In my dreams I always answer “Finally!” knowing the long waiting is over.

In the theater park I watch people enjoying themselves in small pedal boats through the Oker River. Three years here and I’ve never done that, I reflected. I would with her, I told myself. It’s not that I don’t want to live these things; it’s just that I don’t want to experience them alone. I opened Mr Gwyn and read about another lonely writer.

I’ve worked in Artificial Intelligence and studied psychoanalysis in my free time. And I’ve read books and watched as much TV and movies as possible. For me, all media conceive their own narrative principles. And by obsessively studying them I can find structures to help me create my own, while waiting for my inflexion point. To wait is to learn how to depend on others. Like Lacan’s big Other, fascinating as his “subject-supposed-to-Know” (SSS). I think of that mixture construction proposed by Lacan between patient and analyst as a kind of convergence between entities that can also occur in books, songs or films. And I look forward to my own SSS through my books.

I was thinking about all that when a sentence beautifully shouted at me. Holy shit, I reacted. Who is this writer? I had bought the book in an airport in Argentina after visiting family months ago but I didn’t remember why.

I checked the flap of the book.  Oh, sure, “Ocean Sea, Silk”. I’ve read him. I’ve felt the SSS. I kept reading. “...Holden School.” Funny, I thought, imagining a school filled with Holden Caulfields, calling each other phonies. I’d rather be in a Seymour Glass School, I joked. Thus that institution would not last long; at least not longer after “Banana Fish’s day”.

But what does this school teach? I took my phone and googled it. Turin, I read. Interesting. I’ve just been in there presenting my research in Instituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica a couple of week ago, during the 8^th Workshop on Analysis of Dynamic Measurements.

And then it happened. Just like it happens in movies before the climax (Studies had shown it tends to be in the 68 % of the whole progression of the narrated fiction) everything stopped. “A school for storytellers”, I read aloud and my eyes watered. I could still see the people pedaling away, only blurrier.

All my life I’ve lived waiting. I thought I waited for a woman. The myth of love, Plato’s Symposium and all that shit. But it wasn’t that.

I haven’t noticed it till today, May 25^th, 2014. I’ve been learning to live economically comfortable to find free time to actually study narrative and write. Over the last fifteen years I’ve written almost everyday. I’ve been written many novels; some unfinished, some personal, some bad, but all mine, and mostly for me. I’ve only self-published a couple, almost a decade ago. The rest has been private because I couldn’t find the place for me to tell these stories nor to have someone interested in reading them. I’m the definition of self-taught by default, not by choice.

Until now. Suddenly, I’ve found Holden School. I want to live in Turin and learn where it seems I can be myself. I’ve been between my hidden books and my scientific work. Now I’ve got a chance to show myself to the world.

That’s my story. It’s completely true; opened and honest. Fact-check it if you want. This text is about my triggering event, my inflexion point. Because the time-variant function that is my life found the point where the slope changed, making this numbed world feels special again.

This is the overwhelming truth. This is the story of my epiphany. I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Thank you for your attention and consideration.

Sincerely yours,

Federico Grasso Toro

"Nothing Gets Crossed Out"

The future has got me worried, such awful thoughts.

My head is a carousel of pictures. The spinning never stops.

I just want someone to walk in front and I'll follow the leader.

Like when I fell under the weight of a schoolboy crush.

I started carrying her books and doing lots of drugs.

I almost forgot who I was, but came to my senses.

Now I'm trying to be assertive. I'm making plans.

I wanna rise to the occasion, yeah, meet all of their demands.

But all I do is just lay in bed and hide under the covers.

I know I should be brave,

but I'm just too afraid of all this change.

And it's too hard to focus through all this doubt.

I keep making these To-Do lists but nothing gets crossed out.

Working on the record seems pointless now.

When the world ends, who's gonna hear it?

But I’m trying and take some comfort in written words.

“Yeah, Tim I heard your album and it's better than good.

When you get off tour I think we should hang and black out together.”

Cos I've been feeling sentimental for days gone by.

All those summers singing, drinking, laughing, wasting out time.

Remember all those songs and the way we smiled,

in those basements made of music.

But now I've got to crawl,

to get anywhere at all.

I'm not as strong as I thought.

So when I'm lost in a crowd,

I hope that you'll pick me out.

Oh, how I long to be found?

The grass grew high. I laid down.

Now I wait for a hand

to lift me up, help me stand.

I’ve been laying so low

Don't wanna lay here no more…

But if everything that happens is supposed to be,

and it’s all predetermined, you can't change your destiny.

I guess I'll just keep moving. Someday, maybe, I'll get to where I'm going.

Conor Oberst