events

The strain of waiting in the desert. by Gerardo Muñoz

How to overcome the consummation of rhetorical force and the privation of language integrated to the transparency of the present? This is a question that weighs heavily on those that remain too attached and mesmerized by a present that ultimately remains unmoved, alien to any epochal breakthrough. Hence, the almost fetichistic fascination of seizing the “new”, even though the price to be paid is always on the side of an overachieving cynicism and hypocrisy mediated by discourses of all kinds. At one moment of his dialogue Eupalinos or the Architect, Paul Valéry claims that whenever deep reflection is pushed by raw force, this unnatural attitude almost always misses truth: “The truth, the discovery of the new is almost always the price of some antinatural attitude. The deep reflection is forced…we must do or suffer violence to see better or differently” [1]. The claim to see clearly beyond the immanent veils of the rhetorical commonplaces is still our question, although rarely posed. If our suspended epoch is that of formless rubble and extinction, one way in which this question could be reformulated today is to ask what does it mean to envision and live in the desert? Is not the desert condition, its suspended and dead temporality that gathers existence in the void, the only authentic event of posthistorical time? 

This is the problem that haunts Dino Buzzati’s novel Il deserto dei Tartari, (1940), in which the waiting for an invasion and hoarding armies is conflated to the event of a wait that is infinite and excruciating, very much like the video art of Douglas Gordon at the end of the century. The steppe is a form of deserted land without forestation and depth; it is the very triumph of the symbolization of time stretched into a unified surface that recalls the emptying momentum of every form. It is nothingness as an absolute event, as Buzzati writes:  “….the ramparts, the very landscape, breathed an inhospitable sinister air…At this moment Drogo was looking at the northern world – the uninhabited land across which, or so they said, no man had ever come. No enemy had ever out of it; there had been no battles; nothing had ever happened” [2]. How to account, and how to live, beyond mere survival, in a world nothing happens; that is, where the “nothingness” is the very schism between existence and world? When speaking hyperbolically of the Fortress in the steppe where the protagonist Drago is stationed, Buzzati will refer to this mundane condition as a “thankless world”. 

It goes without saying that a world beyond “thanking” is a world that is unworldly in its sensible and intelligible mediations, because it no longer appears to grasp the irreductibility of presence; it needs to repress what appears figuratively in its disclosure. This is why in the vast openness of the steppe, in its blinding clearing of legibility, there is only blindness and hallucinations that are always compensatory to the pain endured by the nihilism of a disjointed time. The waiting of the barbarians does not longer hold the concept of prefiguration once held by situated or concrete politics (Turgot’s high-modernist axiom comes to mind: “we always perceive events too late, and politics always needs to foresee, so to speak, the present”); it is rather the impossible, contingent and retroactive narration that fictive communities need to elaborate to endure the ongoing pain at the end of the social bond. This is the price to be paid to survive in the glacial habituation of nihilism.

It might be very well that what can be glimpsed in the temporal wreckage of the steppe is nothing but the mute language of pain that brings presence near without political translation, because it is always an excess to the stabilization of forms. In an interview published in Milan’s Il giorno in 1959, Buzzati referred to the landscape of the steppe as “Nothing better than a fortress at the extreme frontier…it seemed to me, could be found to express precisely this strain of waiting”. But this strain of waiting is the thrownness of existence and its absolute distance from the world. In fact, towards the end of the novel we read a condensation of this inconspicuous tonality: “It was at this period that Drogo realised how far apart men are from their affection for reach, that if you suffer the pain is yours and yours alone, no one else can take upon himself the least part of it; that if you suffer it does not mean that others feel pain even though their love is great: hence, the loneliness of life” [3]. 

What remains is language not because it can describe or narrate, but because only the voice can measure up to the tonality of pain. In his short prologue on the Spanish edition of the novel, Borges claimed that Buzzati’s desert is both real and symbolic of the void, although the symbol no longer transmits any legible sense of totality; it prefigures a certain exhaustion of symbolization. The truth of language in the absence of form can no longer adequate itself to events or situations; it is now the voice that gathers the turbulence of pain in the waiting of the coming of presence already inhabited. Whenever that voice fails to speak, as René Daumal observed in his unfinished Mount Analogue (1952), life amounts to an empty carcass and a restless cadaver of oblivion. As presence fails to materialize in the world of forms and events, the only realist position is the conjuration of life as a form of expressive self-exile refusing to participate in the hallucinatory social pressure that desperately masks the serenity of a static and inapparent landscape – it is the passive eye that contemplates the plain silence of the steppe while preparing the schism for a possible transfiguration [5]. It is perhaps this passive contemplation what Andrew Wyeth’s faceless Christina laying on the grass has always been yearning for.

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Notes 

1. Paul Valéry. “Eupalinos or The Architect”, in Dialogues (Princeton University Press, 1989), 75. 

2. Dino Buzzati. The Tartar Steppe (Canongate Books, 2018). 31. 

3. Ibid., 220-221.

4. Jorge Luis Borges. “El desierto de los tártaros”, in Biblioteca Personal: Prólogos (Alianza Editorial, 1988), 22.

5. Endnotes in the recent essay on Jacques Camatte, “Time is an invention of men incapable of love” (2025) express it in the following way: “But it is not enough to feel foreign to this whole; one must break with it, create an irreductible discontinuity and schism”, Endnotes, December 2025: https://www.endnotes.org.uk/dossiers/jacques-camatte/time-is-an-invention-of-men-incapable-of-love

The decaying sublime. On Gónzalez Sainz’s Por así decirlo (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

José González Sainz’s new collection of short stories, Por así decirlo (Anagrama, 2024) offers a magisterial elaboration of the ongoing nihilism that has absorbed humanity into an autonomous object of its own shipwreck. Throughout the stylistically intricate narratives, it is easy to see that for Sainz the problem is not just about the extinction of humanity – its decline and fall, but rather about stumbling into the spectacle as if nothing is taking place. The consummation of nothingness exerts itself into the very consciousness to the point that the death of the living becomes transactional for the ongoing fictions regulated by expectation and prevention. 

Obviously, these are broad strokes that say little of Sainz’s well-known narrative pointillism, in which not only every object but every distance is carved out and polished with striking vivacity (this opposition between style and worldliness underpins the sharp contrast of the process of absorption); but, there is a moment in the first story of the book that can arguably be elevated as an emblem of Sainz’s outlook towards a world that has ceased to be so. Without giving too much of the plot, the scene takes place in a plaza of a Spanish provincial town where a pseudo-conductor has taken over a classical music show and who will commit a horrifying act that day. The narrative will minimize the conductor’s act in order to focus on the mass of spectators who continue enjoying the spectacle with mounting euphoria. At the peak moment of the narrative event we read this elaboration on truth and music:

“Había leído alguna vez que la verdad es el auténtico principio de la música, y que está conmueve no es tanto porque complaza al odio como porque expresa las verdaderas tonalidades afectivas del alma. Eso es, porque su objeto es el alma. Pero si el alma está hoy desfigurada, se dejó continuar, si ya no es más que su propio espectáculo o su farce o bien ya no es nada y a lo mejor, puestos a pensar, no lo ha sido nunca, por qué no iba  a ser lo que oía la verdadera musica. Se convenció y no se convenció; es decir, se convenció de que no estaba convencido de nada” (Sainz 45-46). 

Reacting to his own bewildered reaction to the spectators’ absorption in the fictitious, the character of the pater familias realizes that perhaps even the musical redemptive quality – and that for this very reason that Plato wanted to regulate the distinct tonalities of the instruments in the Laws to charm the souls of the youth- now encompasses an immense rhetorical environment where elucidation of the sublime of art’s truth becomes impossible. As the irreducible communication between souls fades away, there is only a vicarious subject that echoes the resonances of the intruder conductor. For anyone that reads the story, it is quite obvious that Sainz is rewriting Elias Canetti’s figure of the orchestra conductor from Crowds and Power (1983). As a hypoerbolic figure of absolute power and the ‘illusion of persuasion’, for Canetti the gestural figure of the orchestra conductor embodies mastery of the objectivation of the world who cuts through the two sides of the moral predicament: what should take place, and what will never occur [1]. And very much in the vein of the kubernetes, the conductor exerts his power as the unifier of the events in the world. In other words, the dominion of the orchestra conductor is absolutely omniscient: he can not only order what comes out in every instrument, but he can also regulate the effects of the musical discharge into an enchanted uniform audience.

The orchestra conductor is the figure of an acoustic mastery where the price to be paid will be the collapse of the original sublime (hypsos) unto the autonomous form silencing the truth of the soul. This is why Gianni Carchia, reading Longine’s treatise of the sublime, defines the ancient conception of musical redemption a the condition of the communication between souls capable of repairing maladies while moving towards love (eros)” [2]. And the narrator asks rather naively: “But why can’t I not enjoy this as well? What do I see?” (Sainz 47). However, Sainz’s intruder conductor depersonalizes Canetti’s figure, since it is no longer about an illusionary act of generalized hysteria or collective hypnotism; the experience of the truth, granted by the by the sublime (hypnos), has become a matter of the steering of opinion, and the transference of brute force of decomposition. Ultimately, it is also the decomposition of language that turns the pseudo-sublime as a vessel of meaning. The movement of the tragic suspended produces a life without accidents, and the word of Lukács: “a flat and sterile, an endless plan without any elevations…dull repose in the lap of dry common sense” [3]. Through the orchestra conductor, the allure of animation becomes the last resort to bear the crushing weight of the flatness of fictitious living.

In the threshold of total integration of the spectacle, the dialectical force of absorption that once provided grounds for the aesthetic veneration of the work of art, unleashes the form of artificial sublime to endure the absence of beauty and truth once guarantee by the soul’s touch with the melodic. The fall of the sublime into a movable feast of a social attraction discloses the last stage of humanity’s errancy: living in the wordless night of endurance to merely survive.

It is no surprise that, in fact, the story ends with the pater familias retreating to his home to sleep. And from that from that day on – that is, after the conflagration with the orchestra conductor – he will become a sort vigil watchman for his son who, drenched in sweat, recounts sleepless nights haunted by nightmares of the traumatic afternoon. And he concludes: “Velar, que hermosa palabra” (Sainz 51). A trembling insistence of the pulsating hypnos in the psychotic night of a collapsed humanity? Or, on the contrary, a self-reflection on the kalos that has dissipated only to return as a reified word? Is this Sainz’s last attempt to hand out to offer the possibility of an enacted sublime through proximity – it is the proximity of fathers and sons, after all – that gathers the pain in a silent and defaced nocturnal vigil? We do know from Longinus that in some cases, silence can also be more sublime than any words [4]. It could very well be that, at least today, this answer remains veiled (velada) in the intimacy of its own untransmittable experience.

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Notes 

1. Elias Canetti. Masa y poder (Alianza editorial, 2013), 559.

2. Gianni Carchia. “De lo sublime de la poesía a la poesía de lo sublime: para una relectura del Pseudo-Longino”, en Retórica de lo sublime (Tecnos, 1994), 112.

3. Georg Lukács. “The metaphysics of tragedy”, in Soul and Form (Columbia University Press, 2010), 179.

4. Longinus. On the sublime (Clarendon Press, 1926), 14-15.