Good, now go backwards. In Buenos Aires it’s raining and so it must be time to go to the library. Rain and rainclouds dark of daytime make night. I am a student at university, and so don’t have much to do. Classes Tuesdays and Thursdays, another on Monday evening, on Wednesdays long lectures. But it’s Friday and it’s raining. I stay inside.
The library is just the one I use for school on days like this, inside one of the several large “halls” that together make up the urban campus of Universitaria de Buenos Aires, “UBA”, where I’ve come to study literature. It could’ve been anywhere, but here I am in the Southern Hemisphere, a world away from home. I’m walking the campus path to Pabellón II … there it is, the same way I see so many buildings — massive spacecraft punched into the ground.
Here, they have an Instagram:
When the world blows up and the spacecraft has to take off, it might be helpful to have a sense of the inside space before the refugees pack in. I have forgotten all the Spanish I used to speak there and so I asked Google to translate portions of an architectural description for you:
Spatial Concept: A central courtyard at the ground floor level, large, multiple heights, and overhead lighting, is used for the congregation of students and temporary exhibitions; the floor of the patio forms the roof of the auditorium that is located in the basement. The horizontal circulation is organized around said central courtyard and balconies over it. Two vertical circulation cores are located on both sides of the patio in the longitudinal direction. The floor plan, symmetrical in both directions, is structured and organized on a 2m x 2m module defined by the dimension of the beams. Open floor plans with distant support points allow for flexibility in layout and compartmentalization, and are naturally lit from the perimeter.
That is concept, here is quality:
Spatial quality: The exposed concrete, used as a structural and expressive element, is made with artisanal formwork in some points, and with metal molds in others, which will be reused throughout the work. Other characteristics of the work are: balconies, natural lighting and ventilation, open views, solar control through parasols, flexible spaces, wide circulations.
I like this alien aping gestured out by the machine to tell you about a place I really went to and could have made a better telling of at the time, if we had had the chance to talk or I to write it down (neither happened).
To tell it alien is to say it as it is in my head right now: an episode from another life, where I myself was an alien crashed in a spacecraft city, on the coast of another planet. From another world, another time, one that now can only be constructed via interceded language, whose open spatial quality has to tell how it was open, yes, but also says the other thing we both know — the presence of a gap. This gap says what I really am now: an intercession myself, a living veto of another man on whose behalf I have come into the realm of sound to tell you about him. That man being me, who I once was, the man I was when I attended the University of Buenos Aires.
That man was a young man, from the New England coast, amiable average American brat from loving parents middle class. Home circulates as cycles of work and money and loving, couches and rugs are purchased at intervals and television is viewed. The young man goes to school to get his education, and in other parts of the world bombs are dropped. Maybe the place he lives lives only through the spirits of ancestors; maybe they share the same nature with the rocks and trees; maybe churches are prayer power stations that lose charges when the praying stops; maybe shopping malls have their ancestor-spirits drained out of them when the populace loses taste for fast-cooked chicken and rice in the American Asian shopping mall style. Maybe there are average amiable children who no longer get fruit smoothies at Orange Julius after going to Hot Topic and GameStop and the “anchor store” sized Barnes & Noble. Maybe they’ve never heard of Nintendo, whose name is supposed to mean “in the hands of heaven” (but no, that’s wrong). Maybe it doesn’t mean what you think it does, maybe it never did.
These now are about to be dynamic detritus, as the ancestors in the form of plutonic rocks unloose themselves from their volcanic crypts to surge and bury the spatial concept and quality of our present beneath their burning magma. This solidifies and we flee across the ground of a new world. So I went to Buenos Aires.
But Earth is just a spherical volcano anyhow, and, like the “vertical circulation cores” of the library floor plan, the magma erupts from all points at the same time. Hemispherical jaunts only enforce our faith in the longitudinal symmetry of any attempt to get away. Fleeing from is fleeing towards.
They call it an “urban” campus, the cluster of buildings that make up the part of UBA where I was a student, but if you Google Earth it it turns out to be just some long Disney World style roads you need to take shuttle buses to get to. There’s a kids’ playground, there are sidewalks with signs. Far from everything.
Colleges are bubbled places in the United States and the same is true in Argentina. It helps if you yourself are a bubbled person, or in place of a person are actually just a wavering phantasm, like me. Ghosts don’t have girlfriends and they don’t go dancing. They’re only themselves when it’s raining and they can go to the library where they read books, and when they read those books they become someone else.
The day that I’m thinking of, the one when it was raining and I went to the library out of habit but with no goal in mind — only to drift into other selves — I wandered the shelves in a section I hadn’t been to before. Call numbers like home, same old —
— you search a term on the computer and write the numbers down with the little pencil on the scrap paper provided, and after you write them down you forget which titles they’re for. Then if you know where the section is, well, just head there, if not then go to a directory or map, or look at a floor plan.
Exposed concrete is made with artisanal formwork, which will be reused throughout the work. There were titles I recognized, but in the other language. Auto-Confianza by Ralph Waldo Emerson, I knew it well — or was it La autoconfianza, or maybe La Confianza En Uno Mismo …
“La confianza en uno mismo” (1841) es uno de los ensayos más significativos de su autor, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) … Recordado gracias a Oliver Wendell Holmes como “la declaración de independencia cultural” de Estados Unidos
Declaration of independence cognitive-cultural-spiritual — now I was gulf-shooting multiplicative plural, now the hushed voices of volumes rose to shouting sound.
Each book was a raindrop that day in Buenos Aires, falling quickly and loud. I’d stack them and haul across the open floor plan to the rain-drenched window, naturally lit from the perimeter, and my mind was like the rhythm of the architecture in the language used to describe the building I’d find on the website a decade later to software-translate to you to tell you about this now — my mind was a flexible space, with wide circulation.
Edicion Especial del Centenario, nueva, La Tierra Baldia por T. S. Eliot, una obra esencial para entender nuestro tiempo.
Phantasms trace and double back and then drop out. They do not obey, but are the living book whose knowledge once finished will finish us if we are obedient, at which point only then will we be alive again. If I am not obedient then this tectonic temperature seethes, according to a strictness of laws.
If I do not obey then books at that time are not living at all — songs are made into taxidermy and then shelved. They were once written by a living person and then read by living people. Maybe those people were afraid or the book made them afraid, maybe it knew them better than they knew themselves. Maybe they became phantasms after their reading and never really came back.
But the point is there was something human there to know and something to take away, which in the case of taxidermy is not possible. Taxidermy says: “We like it better once it’s been formaldehyded against any tissue decay. It looks better to us dead.”
When this ceases to speak with a living voice, technofied to speak to you where you actually are, now, then eat it up in lava-hunger, bury it underground in a magmic rage. I’ve never been to Buenos Aires.
Borges, The Book of Sand. Precursor and inspiration. Prove me wrong.
You would like this:
Fiat lux, fiat latebra: a celebration of historical library functions.
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/4041