Response to “Avenida Paulista”

by on February 21, 2013

Responses Takes

The archive is a ziggurat, always growing upwards, always closer to heaven. On top will sit the glassy-eyed medium through which the totality speaks, liberated from personality. It is erected everywhere, and every place becomes no place beneath its shadow. One thinks of the Borges story about the map the size of the world that threatens to cover it. Of course the recognition of its asphyxiating duplication, strangling you with you, is also registered in its ledgers.

But every person who enters to rifle through its lackluster bounty wears the pages thinner, and at times they turn to dust. Sometimes its satellites are razed to the ground. Yet its creation continues to outpace its destruction. Must it fall one day? If so, is the prediction of this fall too foreseen within its walls? And most importantly, what will bring it down? War? Love? Individual choice? Or the mercury of life that, though imaginary, cannot be neatly reproduced in “fiction”?