Basilio U., an oral confidence
2.
Felipe has grown too much. He’s become a lot like me. But I, on the other hand, have gotten younger, so I no longer look old enough to be his father: more like his older brother, according to Dos. So, [disregarding me] Dos gives the impression that Felipe only had a mother — despite his being fat enough to have been incorporated by several parents — and since Eiralis lacks both matter and memory, Felipe’s father is conceived as a mismatch of body and soul, or viceversa, the result being a kind of ghostly figure with an out-of-focus skeleton covered by a film of breath. As such, he talks like a ventriloquist. The most recent of such creations arrived without my noticing and without anyone telling me their ages at birth or how old they are now. It’s all a matter of perspective, in the space where chronologies are made but time is indiscernible, eloquent, but also cruel. Oliverio seems to mock him to Luini, who must be the one who warns the character of the joke as he ages more and more to resemble me. But the small age gap between Lester and Prosan remains the same and only becomes nil at Elena’s discretion. Hazlitt or Lamb spoke of the satellitic character of women; the kind who write the sort of servile, saturnine characters who in turn becomes the satellites of others.
Belisario confessed, smoothing his moustache, trying to be subtle but avoiding understatement, that I reminded him of a Hungarian consul in a movie by Molnar [Lubitsch]. He emphasized his resemblance to a small graceful animal whose tiny cage left him room enough to do little else than chew the bars and lick his claws. Belisario, who’s still five or six years older than me, belongs to another generation. When I first met him, he was wearing a chambergo, so I thought he was more like a century older than me. Who knows what the kids think of me, the ones eighteen or twenty years younger? It’s true that differences shrink between thirty and forty, and they shrink even more between forty and fifty. But sixty establishes its own law of gravity. And many fell away, like Belisario and me. While others continued gravitating: in the case of Lalo, without making much progress. I see him leaving, squeezing through Vidt’s narrow doorway, like a bony-ass coward. It helps to be of an age where one can be irresponsible without being accountable [backed by the myth about youth, which covers any misstep or error with the lie of singularity and potential]. How many excuses are made for mediocrity in the young! They said he lives in the Balearics, perhaps in Banyalbufar — where Elena and I once planned to elope — living his life immersed in the company of others, in better company than ours.
Nicasio Urlihrt, The X-Positions
Eiralis: Nurlihrt via Empson: Nerrida
3.
The collaborative writing at Agraphia required at least two pleasant adherencies. At least two simultaneous missions and a lack of purpose encouraged (and attenuated) by the lack of evidence for the anonymity. The act of writing therefore required confinement, indulgence, speed. Conditions ideal for lovers. Writing together will be: Elena and Nicasio, Inés and Nicasio, Elena and Lalo, Inés and Elena. But not Nicasio and Lalo, due to the lack of proof (although there are suspicions “The Mass” came to be on that inexplicable [clandestine] night Nicasio and Lalo colluded together). In a publication made possible by a bevy of accomplices / adversaries, it was inevitable and went with the job. Now, according to Agraphia’s presocratic numerology, two was not a number. Like good primitives, they needed a figure that lacked the balance of two, the unity of one. From this came “Agraphia’s principle of adultery,” which implies a number more than two, an interloper: a third wheel, an “intruder in the dust.”
The Cristóbal Niaras, Agraphia: Chance Laboratory
The three periods of Agraphia / Allusive can be classified before the conclusion. The predominance of Elena, with her luminous vocation of vanguard and error, her puerilities and idiolectal glossaries, (noninterventionism, errancy, contrerejet, renegations, freakatives, inindicial, inkhorn, lepro and graphorrhea, [naiserie], malapropism, oliguria, umbilicapedia, panxiety, titubiosis, xelexion, zeuxidia), her unyielding latticework [revision of final proofs from the editor, accounting for foreign words with a dictionary in hand] lasts until the first trip to Europe. Period of estrangement that led Sabatani to inaugurate a period of lapsing, the one corresponding with “Salon of Independents,” known later as “Diet of Worms.”
The period known as the Luiniad lasted as long as the Council of Trent (eighteen years), and according to Urlihrt, the period should’ve been called “Trent,” but, because of a lack of foresight and planning, the result was less ferocious, less feracious. But such foresight and planning culminates “by its own means and fears, in the atrocities of the worst of Argentine dictatorships,” alarumed Isabel [Teodelina] Teischer, “with remarkable boldness” in a literary pamphlet (Matilde Urbach publishers, s/f). Proof of this can be read in “Lycergical Glossary to Sircular Cymmetry,” “Ysir,” “The Dreadmist,” “Out of a Greek Gift,” and a great number of stories that aren’t seen in canonical anthologies of Argentine literature.” We can add every other anthology, including the lamest of those published in those lamest of years.
Eloy Armesto, The Sycophant’s Soliloquy, in Parts without Justification, for the Symposium on Invisibility (included with modifications in From Secret Zero to a Number Less. Biography of the Invisible)
#4
Going against Occam’s razor, the nominative entities of Agraphia are born to reproduce themselves, to proliferate, and after a short time, be discarded. Their life-cycle can be compared with that of the common cold virus. “Each syllable of their names, a germ, a potential pandemic.” Categorical proliferation, diametrical. The names function as algebraic permutations [that make no difference to the final result]. They gestate, accumulate, are collected, arrayed, and then spent (in the double sense). The metastasis occurs where fame is hierarchically [unevenly] distributed. A sectarian argot of terms: first, the “paludinal [glandular] glitterati” in Septic Midrash. Then, the “phalansterian demographic” constructed to “contradict the anecdote.” In the journal, “there is no hint of theory,” except what makes you rich. Theory, they proclaimed, plagiarizing Proust, is the price tag on a gift. Oliverio Lester proclaimed that admission into Agraphia relies not so much on intellectual common ground, but on the postulant’s mandatory baptism at the font. With regard to the oblivion of narrative, “no one who had anything to say dared to write [be a literary casualty].” It is Nicasio Urlihrt’s motto and blazon.