Mexico City February 2009
Kelly and I lay on the floor surrounded by books.
“What question should we ask next?” Kelly asked, aware of the absurdity of her question, as though asking a question can only ever be preceded and followed by an infinite loop of questions about the question itself: “What is the question?” “What was the question?” “What is the answer to the question?” “What does the question mean?”
We had been asking questions about God, and existence, the nature of nature, the mind-body connection, problems of philosophical methodology, reflection, and language. But our limbs had fallen slowly to the ground like petals. I had not found the post office. We were becoming younger.
“Should I go back to the Marxist?”
“No…”
“No, I’m not asking you, I’m answering your question.”
She opened a book.
“Shall we ask Freud? Or perhaps Pessoa?”
“Pessoa,” I answered.
She leafed through the book
“To think about God is to disobey God,/Since God wanted us not to know him,/Which is why he didn’t reveal himself to us.”
“What does that mean?” Kelly and myself elegantly and imperceptibly becoming of one mind, a woman talking or thinking to herself.
“It means you are conflicted. That you are caught between two impossible halves of a division—like a Chinese finger trap. You cannot know God without betraying God, but you cannot know not to know God without first knowing him. Therefore you are in constant betrayal. There is no option that does not lead to betrayal.”
“Did I not know that already?”
“You can’t ask Pessoa these things. You want answers, you must go to someone who gives answers.”
“Who, like God?”
Kelly made a chiasmic facial gesture, raising her eyebrows and lowering, cocking her chin, her face splitting, breaking open, apart, like the earth, over time. An expression that indicates both possibility and direction.
She reached over to my copy of the English bible laid out next to the Spanish one on the coffee table amidst my drafts of translation.
“Dear God, please give this poor young woman the strength to make a choice in this most infuriating dilemma. Please guide her by giving her quick and easy answers so that she will not have to take responsibility for her own decisions.”
I grabbed the Spanish version off the table and threw it at her mouth, where her words had come out. She raised the English version just in time to block her face and the Spanish one collided with it mid-air, and fell to the floor, open faced, it’s onion skin pages curling and bending. Kelly laughing, the books scattered around us like the rests of a Bacchanal.
“Old Testament or New Testament?”
“Who cares, god is God, right?” Jubilation.
“And Joshua gave their land to the tribes of Israel as a possession according to their allotments.”
“What is that supposed to mean.?”
“No idea. Joshua sounds like a dick, though. Try the Spanish version.”
“El cadaver de Jezabel sera como un abono que se esparce y ni siquiera se podra decir: “Esta es Jezebal.”
“You opened to the part about Jezebel? Unbelievable.”
“Let’s see…” I rifled through my papers. “The cadaver of Jezebel will be like a dispersed interest payment and not even the most insignificant shit will be able to say, ‘this credit card statement is Jezebal’”
“Your Spanish is really crap, you know. How are you going to translate the bible if you don’t even speak Spanish?”
“Shut up, I’m working on it. Besides, it’s the language of God I’m translating, and God speaks directly to me.”
“You’re fucked up, you know?”
“What’s it to you? What does the New Standard Revised have?”
“Oh here it is, The English version says, ‘the corpse of Jezebel shall be like dung on the field in the territory of Jezreel, so that no one can say, This is Jezebel.”
“What are yout talking about? It’s practically the same as my translation.”
“Joshua and Jezebal sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g!”
“Oh shut up. I’m asking Bolano.”
“Bolano!”
“Bolano! Our saviour!”
“Oh shit, I opened to Cesaria Tinajera’s poem.”
“You know, sometimes I think 2666 is actually based on the bible. Like the Satanic Verses is based on the Koran. The Satanic Verses of Mexico.”
“There is no doubt that Mexico needs its copy of the Satanic Verses. There is also no doubt that we must do more to expose the tyranny of biblical dissemination in Mexico. That it was the most heinous of the weapons of the Conquest, and remains to this day the principal instrument of oppression, never ceases to astound me.”
“Perhaps Bolano was trying to do that.”
“Perhaps… but Bolano has his own dialectic—or his own dialogue, I suppose. Don’t you think? He would never construct such a simple allegory without destabilizing its structures of correspondance…”
“To think about God is to disobey God.”
“Don’t think about God!”
“Ah! I’m thining about him, I’m thinking about him!”
“Sinner! Sinner!”
And at that I lunged across the room and began to wrestle with Kelly the two of us sisters, locked in a linguistic battle over the truth of God. Our arms moving through each other’s, around each other’s bodys, our hands holding onto each other’s hair, our mouths in flight, two angels, the wandering interpretation of texts.
“Oh what’s this? This book of fairy tales opened all by itself! Let’s see what it says”
They unraveled and laid flat on their bellies on the cold tile floor.
“Close your eyes and point.”
“ ‘Go West in a week,’”
“Now that’s some advice I can follow.”
- transcribed (loosely based on reality) and posted by Lily.
(originally published in: http://greenlanternpress.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/a-conversation-between-kelly-a-k-and-myself/#comment-1880 )
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