Anywhere out of this world:
On Cecilia Pavón’s Little Joy: Selected Stories (Semiotext(e), 2021)
Cecilia Pavón’s collection of selected stories, Little Joy, is concerned with the nature of language, and art, politics, and fashion, all seen through her perceptive lens that locates temporary utopias in the quotidian. Her narrative “I” is multiple, changeable, inconsistent, and thus open to various new experiences which are often revelatory. Identity politics is just the residue of colonialism, and simply another form of political subjugation. She surrenders herself to the world, to that which cannot be measured, that exists outside time, changeable, like the shape of clouds; she is interested in those spaces which contain all things as if in a potential state and she attempts to give form to these states in language. Her utopias are also constantly in motion, without fixed boundaries; everything is possible in multiplicity but not marred by being fully actualized. Her writing is not programmatic. Whether speaking of clothing, or art, or the nature of language, she does not accept that which is regularized, predictable, as if confined in an intellectual box. Her prose is improvisatory; her words are imbued with a mind constantly testing the boundaries of its thought. The trajectory of her ideas is not toward a finite real but toward the infinite, that which exists in a space that cannot be so much seen as apprehended or felt.
In the story, “Fat Cat Records, or a Cloud with the Color and Shape of a Bruise” the narrator speaks of a “music without an edge: monotonous, instrumental, bodiless, faceless, and genderless…it’s the future, even if most people don’t get it.” She has a poet’s love of music. The sounds she prefers are noisy, and are compared to “hot, sticky wax”; she imagines people “lying in the dark, without drinking or moving” and just listening to this music; this constitutes a utopic space, where one would “listen, listen, listen,”; which reminds me that Pavón is essentially a poet. Reading this story I thought of Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music which was for me a useful examination of “noise” as a political tool. As a matter of fact, musicians like Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, who practiced free improvisation in the 60s and 70s, were even against recording a performance on record. There would be no documentation, no trace, the music would vanish in the air. The musicians belonged to a secret utopia. In the story “Congreso, 1994,” the narrator writes: “After incorporating the arrangement of the unfamiliar music they play there into my system of perception, the sounds of the street become like music to me.” This is the transformative nature of sound and it reminds me of the words of John Cage: “When you hear sounds that have microtonal relations that are unfamiliar, you tend to think away from law toward nature. We’ve had the habits and proclivities and tastes of imperialists, so we’ve colonized what we’ve thought of as the ‘strong sounds’ in nature, while leaving a whole spectrum unnoticed.”
In “Autopoiesis (1999),” the narrator writes, “What I mean to say is that in those dance circles, what really happened was we all stopped being people and became objects. We erased our biography (our flesh), and for 120 minutes, which were always infinite, music let us be blank sheets floating around an apartment in Retiro…” I remember late at night before “last call,” (this was the club scene during the 90s) when everyone would fill the dancefloor, and I’d see all those arms and faces and legs, all together forming a colorful mass of sweating flesh, in which I joined eventually, all of us in unison silently hoping the night would never end. It was solidarity in the night, the “I” became “we,” the singular, plural, on the dancefloor. If only the energy of these bodies could be harnessed for political purposes.
In Pavón’s temporary utopias, art should not be bound by the four walls of a museum or mansion, but “fly freely through the atmosphere and leave a trail in the air that surrounds our planet.” Art’s essence would be like a sound one heard that eventually was lost, except for the way it affected one deep inside oneself. Art would not be seen in an artificial space, like a museum, gazed upon by discerning critics. This has a political dimension; for Pavón,
In the story, “Fat Cat Records, or a Cloud with the Color and Shape of a Bruise” the narrator speaks of a “music without an edge: monotonous, instrumental, bodiless, faceless, and genderless…it’s the future, even if most people don’t get it.” She has a poet’s love of music. The sounds she prefers are noisy, and are compared to “hot, sticky wax”; she imagines people “lying in the dark, without drinking or moving” and just listening to this music; this constitutes a utopic space, where one would “listen, listen, listen,”; which reminds me that Pavón is essentially a poet. Reading this story I thought of Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music which was for me a useful examination of “noise” as a political tool. As a matter of fact, musicians like Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, who practiced free improvisation in the 60s and 70s, were even against recording a performance on record. There would be no documentation, no trace, the music would vanish in the air. The musicians belonged to a secret utopia. In the story “Congreso, 1994,” the narrator writes: “After incorporating the arrangement of the unfamiliar music they play there into my system of perception, the sounds of the street become like music to me.” This is the transformative nature of sound and it reminds me of the words of John Cage: “When you hear sounds that have microtonal relations that are unfamiliar, you tend to think away from law toward nature. We’ve had the habits and proclivities and tastes of imperialists, so we’ve colonized what we’ve thought of as the ‘strong sounds’ in nature, while leaving a whole spectrum unnoticed.”
In “Autopoiesis (1999),” the narrator writes, “What I mean to say is that in those dance circles, what really happened was we all stopped being people and became objects. We erased our biography (our flesh), and for 120 minutes, which were always infinite, music let us be blank sheets floating around an apartment in Retiro…” I remember late at night before “last call,” (this was the club scene during the 90s) when everyone would fill the dancefloor, and I’d see all those arms and faces and legs, all together forming a colorful mass of sweating flesh, in which I joined eventually, all of us in unison silently hoping the night would never end. It was solidarity in the night, the “I” became “we,” the singular, plural, on the dancefloor. If only the energy of these bodies could be harnessed for political purposes.
In Pavón’s temporary utopias, art should not be bound by the four walls of a museum or mansion, but “fly freely through the atmosphere and leave a trail in the air that surrounds our planet.” Art’s essence would be like a sound one heard that eventually was lost, except for the way it affected one deep inside oneself. Art would not be seen in an artificial space, like a museum, gazed upon by discerning critics. This has a political dimension; for Pavón,
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Contemplating art ends all class distinctions and personal insecurities. Further, spectators are as much a part of the work itself as the artists. At least I read that in a British sociology magazine, and I think it’s very true and very uplifting. It’s far more important being part of a work of art than being part of a society, because works of art are made of dreams, and dreams can’t be copyrighted.
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The underground filmmaker, Jack Smith once said that all the paintings seen in the museums are the worst paintings because the really good paintings were hidden in the museum’s basement or in the mansions of famous, or not so famous, collectors. Instead, he believed art should be hanging in houses or apartments, should be available to all, and not restricted to the few who could afford to buy the art. The story “Jeans,” where the narrator dreams of purchasing a pair of expensive jeans, is like a commentary on the art market: “The high price is part of the magic of owning something like that. It wouldn’t be the same if the jeans were cheap and easy to acquire, Flora thought, though she was embarrassed to have thought that.” She concludes that “the best thing wasn’t thought, but action.” And so she steals the jeans and hides them. But there is a fire and the jeans are destroyed. Art should be for the people. The old ideas about revolutionary action are no longer relevant and lead to eventual destruction. We live in a very different world now. The various temporary utopias Pavón locates in the world are unlike any previous idea of utopia, such as those that governed the revolutionary politics of the 70s, and where Marxist critiques of the State apparatus were prevalent. Hers is based on transformation and change, not some doctrine from the nineteenth century. There are no pamphlets to send out to party members. The narrator writes in “Jeans”: “And if some sufficiently strong revolutionary uprising coalesces to try to take power, it won’t work. The market rules that dictate our existence are set in stone in the system’s structure and unchangeable.” It’s a very different utopia that Pavon has in mind in these stories; it is fleeting, temporary, but nonetheless intense and meaningful.
The narrator in “A Post-Marxist Theory of Unhappiness” focuses on love in the contemporary world: “Is there any other topic of conversation that doesn’t lead back to love?” She continues: “Nobody wants to get married anymore. Or have kids either (And that’s why, like I said before, although I never got married, I’m not a rare species, just a completely average person.)” In “Nuns, the Utopia of a World without Men,” the narrator quotes a character in the story, Carolina: “Let’s be nuns. Let’s go live in a convent.” The narrator responds:
The narrator in “A Post-Marxist Theory of Unhappiness” focuses on love in the contemporary world: “Is there any other topic of conversation that doesn’t lead back to love?” She continues: “Nobody wants to get married anymore. Or have kids either (And that’s why, like I said before, although I never got married, I’m not a rare species, just a completely average person.)” In “Nuns, the Utopia of a World without Men,” the narrator quotes a character in the story, Carolina: “Let’s be nuns. Let’s go live in a convent.” The narrator responds:
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Yes. Nuns are strange. They’re like absentees. They live without men and don’t have any troubles in the world. And what’s more, I was in a nunnery once, and they always make jokes. They have a great sense of humor. They live in a kind of eternal bliss.
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Eternal bliss is connected to being pure like Diana, the goddess of hunting in Greek mythology. The narrator and Sister Paula have an erotic encounter but they do not have sex. Nevertheless, the narrator experiences Paradise in this encounter. Elsewhere, a narrator writes about how a good conversation is better than sex. The fragmentation, and sense of lack inherent in the mirror stage in Lacan’s theory is old news. Pavón is a total woman. She reverses the problem of lack and turns it into a positive: “The fact is that he is distant and loves me like a ghost is what allows me to write. Because I am an abandoned woman, I can write. I can say “I” a million times. And by saying “me me me,” I can also say that a woman who is loved from a close proximity instead of from afar cannot write.” But she will not be bound to a fixed idea, but always tests her concepts and admits that this might only be a “byproduct of pain” and in an hour or so she might feel that it is wrong; but this lack, nevertheless, contains an abundance, albeit temporary, that reverses the typical romantic notion of poetry, and the fragmentation or chaos that is so much a part of everyday life.
In “I Want to Be Fat” the narrator writes, “The world is changing, and now is the time to invent new experiences. People have already tried every drug on the market, and they need to find new ones. Because the most important thing is to change.” She continues: “Furthermore, today we no longer consider ourselves at all similar to what in the past was called a subject. (Subject to what?). There is no longer anybody who feels isolated or stuck in their head, as many people felt in centuries past.” Subjectivation is the problem. As “individuals” with our own self-interests, we become alienated from each other, and the feeling of solidarity, for example, as suggested above, when speaking of the dancers on the dancefloor, is no longer possible. We are isolated in our own private worlds, like lonely, confused and rootless subjects that have emerged from the triumph of mass society, capitalism, technology, which has resulted in a disenchantment of the individual. For Pavón, these special links between people are possible if we avoid thinking of the world as something predicable, rational, a product of time; we must remain open to other constructs that allow for an experience of the infinite, for that which can’t be objectified:
In “I Want to Be Fat” the narrator writes, “The world is changing, and now is the time to invent new experiences. People have already tried every drug on the market, and they need to find new ones. Because the most important thing is to change.” She continues: “Furthermore, today we no longer consider ourselves at all similar to what in the past was called a subject. (Subject to what?). There is no longer anybody who feels isolated or stuck in their head, as many people felt in centuries past.” Subjectivation is the problem. As “individuals” with our own self-interests, we become alienated from each other, and the feeling of solidarity, for example, as suggested above, when speaking of the dancers on the dancefloor, is no longer possible. We are isolated in our own private worlds, like lonely, confused and rootless subjects that have emerged from the triumph of mass society, capitalism, technology, which has resulted in a disenchantment of the individual. For Pavón, these special links between people are possible if we avoid thinking of the world as something predicable, rational, a product of time; we must remain open to other constructs that allow for an experience of the infinite, for that which can’t be objectified:
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We are all connected by invisible links, because the second-most important thing after fashion is conversation. We believe that the infinite exists in language and that language, just like fashion, doesn’t belong to anybody; anyone can use it. It doesn’t matter what somebody says or who says something. What matters is the scintillating, musical shade that the words in a conversation cast upon space. That is, in this world, here and now, content no longer exists; only form matters.
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This is an ideal space, beyond the chaos and fragmentation of daily life. It is a space where communication is possible. The narrator continues: “My loving is based wholly on epistolary exchanges. Starting a monogamous relationship would make me feel like I’m betraying an ideal. Through letters, seduction is infinite. And this gives me peace of mind.”
Desire or the thrill of seduction gives us access to these infinite spaces. So now is the time to generate new experiences and forget the old ones. the past, Pavón writes, time was a law and marriage was a way of organizing time; it was a pact organized around the fear of being alone and the fear of death. For the narrator, speaking of the letters of her friend’s grandmother, written to a lover who was not her husband, “infidelity was just a gateway to the infinite.”; for the narrator, our grandmothers “had to measure and keep watch over the days and hours, the weeks and months. And marriage was one of the most stable ways of organizing time.” So now is the time to generate new experiences that are “a gateway to the infinite.” This involves moving away from a concept of time, law, and habit and toward a concept of space, a larger field in which to transform ourselves, outside the boundaries of society; here we can explore a “lighter, more porous version” of ourselves. Less tragic or hurtful…” These are “emotions closer to the infinite – society’s new quest.” Pavon writes: “Because the most important thing is to change.”
In the final story in the collection, “Diary of a Cloud Watcher,” the narrator writes: “Music and everything else Earth has could also be compared to clouds. Waves and sounds that come and go. In reality the impulse to write was the desire to share that what I like about clouds is change. Transformation.” In such a world, where transformation is possible, the fear of death disappears, leading the narrator to observe that her brother’s bones “will be dust, and soon, my bones will be dust too. Will the color of our bones’ dust be the same as the clouds?” Furthermore, she writes: “Maybe thinking about clouds is the only way to avoid thinking of death.” The thought of our mortality governs most of our actions in the world and they are largely based on fearing the passage of time, and the future; and so we construct a narrative which we call our life, our biography; but this is a fiction. In fact, our identity is unstable, changeable, subject to reversals of thought, indecisive, nostalgic even, but hard to pin down; like the constantly shifting cloud shapes in the sky.
Pavón’s prose is heterodox; her subjects shift according to the train of her thought, not mediated by a fixed idea, and not bound by the demands of content. She locates the spiritual in the quotidian but this has nothing to do with a concept of God. Her temporary utopias exist in an alternate reality, and writing is like a key to that world, composed of “fragments of something much bigger or smaller that exists in another dimension.” Pavón’s temporary utopias can be found, as Baudelaire wrote, “anywhere out of this world.”
Desire or the thrill of seduction gives us access to these infinite spaces. So now is the time to generate new experiences and forget the old ones. the past, Pavón writes, time was a law and marriage was a way of organizing time; it was a pact organized around the fear of being alone and the fear of death. For the narrator, speaking of the letters of her friend’s grandmother, written to a lover who was not her husband, “infidelity was just a gateway to the infinite.”; for the narrator, our grandmothers “had to measure and keep watch over the days and hours, the weeks and months. And marriage was one of the most stable ways of organizing time.” So now is the time to generate new experiences that are “a gateway to the infinite.” This involves moving away from a concept of time, law, and habit and toward a concept of space, a larger field in which to transform ourselves, outside the boundaries of society; here we can explore a “lighter, more porous version” of ourselves. Less tragic or hurtful…” These are “emotions closer to the infinite – society’s new quest.” Pavon writes: “Because the most important thing is to change.”
In the final story in the collection, “Diary of a Cloud Watcher,” the narrator writes: “Music and everything else Earth has could also be compared to clouds. Waves and sounds that come and go. In reality the impulse to write was the desire to share that what I like about clouds is change. Transformation.” In such a world, where transformation is possible, the fear of death disappears, leading the narrator to observe that her brother’s bones “will be dust, and soon, my bones will be dust too. Will the color of our bones’ dust be the same as the clouds?” Furthermore, she writes: “Maybe thinking about clouds is the only way to avoid thinking of death.” The thought of our mortality governs most of our actions in the world and they are largely based on fearing the passage of time, and the future; and so we construct a narrative which we call our life, our biography; but this is a fiction. In fact, our identity is unstable, changeable, subject to reversals of thought, indecisive, nostalgic even, but hard to pin down; like the constantly shifting cloud shapes in the sky.
Pavón’s prose is heterodox; her subjects shift according to the train of her thought, not mediated by a fixed idea, and not bound by the demands of content. She locates the spiritual in the quotidian but this has nothing to do with a concept of God. Her temporary utopias exist in an alternate reality, and writing is like a key to that world, composed of “fragments of something much bigger or smaller that exists in another dimension.” Pavón’s temporary utopias can be found, as Baudelaire wrote, “anywhere out of this world.”