Las transpiraciones del desgaste o la devaluacion aspirada


'César Martínez Silva César Martínez Silva

Air is life's oldest fuel. It was the first natural source of energy, essential to life for the first aerobic creatures which inhabited Earth amidst the existential loneliness at the inception of all life; the substance of the first breath, out of which ultimately developed that which we are today. But the air is being consumed by, among others, one of the most highly developed species on this planet. And the result is that air – a resource essential to life – is now becoming increasingly scarce and ever more virtual. It almost seems as if virtuality were one of our greatest virtues. This substantial human intrusion upon the Earth in general, and the neo-apocalyptic postmodern contra-civilization of life in particular, are confronting us with enormous dangers in our transition to transmodernity. For this reason, we must develop a new, alternative technology that has fewer destructive consequences. When we travel from one place to another, for example, and if we wish to release thereby a more environmentally-friendly form of energy, the electronic media could well constitute a superior alternative to fossil fuels. Our civilization of excess and its environmental consequences have made smog an executioner which threatens our entire existence by cutting us off from the very air we breathe. We can use the term "intelligence and its deterioration" to characterize this phenomenon. The deterioration of intelligence is not only the result, but also the great paradox, of this not-so-very-farfetched nightmare – a moment in time which constitutes simultaneously a phase within a developmental trend and a climactic high point. Calling this progress is rather less accurate than referring to it as the "expansion and intensification of disorder" which is inherent in the energetic absurdity of creative intelligence plotting a blueprint for destruction and implementing a plan of life like the duration of forgetting. And in spite of our being fully aware that the process of breathing is the way we go about regulating feelings such as fear, emotional harmony and various other emotional states, stress and anxiety, as well as our very mobility, we continue to work tirelessly toward our self-asphyxiation, so that we now stand – on the threshold of a new millennium – on the verge of drawing our last breath. The irritation of the lungs and the asphyxiating air quality now longer display only gradual, long-term affects. They are no longer limited to regulating the quality of our feelings; rather, they have also come to exert control over our emotional coefficients and/or the intellectual-affective complex of life in general, such that life itself now runs the risk of dozing off at any moment and losing its way in the fog of civilization. Smog is the stuff making up an incessantly ongoing moment; it seems as if our respiratory tract would merge with the expressways, as automobile traffic transforms itself into a traffic jam within the obstructed muscles of our heart, into an endless series of micro-infarcts. Without clean air, life itself will cease to be a latent force pinning its ultimate hope on a bioenergetic possibility which offers more than the senseless dependence upon petroleum, an obsession in which life is petrified into an explosive land mine and every living thing is transformed into a living fossil. Fossil fuel will make fossils of us all.

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