Being In-Between

César Aira: Ghosts

André Aciman, Editor: Letters of Transit

Adam Zagajewski: A Defense of Ardor - Essays

César Aira is an Argentine author, perhaps better known for An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter due to its favorable mention by John Leonard in Harper's Magazine. Ghosts, published in 1990 but not translated until 2008, is one of the most peculiar books I've ever read. Essentially it is the story of Patri, a teenage girl whose stepfather is the security guard for a partially constructed condominium. Together with the girl's mother and her four step-brothers and sisters, they live atop the building in a makeshift apartment, and the book describes the events of the afternoon and evening of the last day of the year.

Aira's book is about the in-between. The building is skeletal and still open to the air - there and not there. The tenants own their apartments, but do not live there yet. The construction force is made up of Chilean temporary workers who are from Chile but no longer live there, and who reside for the moment in Argentina but aren't from there. The girl, Patri, is 15 - not a child and not an adult. She is not the security guard's real daughter, and so she is part of the family, yet apart also. The family does not really live in the building, but on top of it. On the afternoon and the evening the book describes, the family is hosting relatives for a New Year's Eve party - the one moment of the year that is in-between time. Of the relatives that come, one is the sister of Patri's mother, who is not single and not married, but engaged. She has no children, but is pregnant.

And presented matter-of-factly throughout the book are the ghosts that populate the building's upper floors, creatures completely made up of the In-Between, whose motives are un-guessable, but who invite Patri to a party that will last eternity. Aria has a plain, unvarnished style which suggests a bit of irony then within the context of the story, where it seems as though each element is a symbol of the in-between, although the author uses few if any similes or metaphors or other literary tricks. I'm afraid I haven't yet grasped the purpose behind Aira's description of this middle state (evidently I'm in-between myself), other than as a reflection of our continual state of becoming.

Letters of Transit (which was selected at random right after I finished Ghosts) is also about becoming, as each essay is from an exiled author, exiled from his or her birth country and who has had to make their way in foreign lands and foreign languages. With Aira's ghostly ruminations about the transitory nature of even daily life, Letters of Transit illuminates lives that are defined by their in-between character.

These related aspects must have only been simmering, because I didn't make the connections - truly didn't even recognize the links within Aira's book - until the next random selection, which was Adam Zagajewski's collection, A Defense of Ardor. Though Zagajewski's intentions are slightly different, the experience of reading these three books was like cinching up the drawstrings of a leather bag when he broached the subject of metaxu. Metaxu is the summation of the human condition that is perpetually 'in-between' - one that is reaching for beauty and transcendence, yet also required to perform the necessities of daily existence. For instance, it is difficult to concentrate on the sublime when changing a flat tire or washing the dishes. Likewise, while in the presence of great beauty, or perhaps on the verge of a spiritual revelation, no one would want to stop and take out the garbage. Zagajewski defines the human then as "a being who is incurably 'en route'". (page 9)

It is interesting that I habitually assign a value judgment to the ends of this spectrum - that I equate transcendence and beauty with Good, and the quotidian as Bad. One may certainly be more pleasurable than the other, but neither are intrinsically Good or Bad. Actually, the transcendental and the everyday seem to have the seeds of one another planted firmly in the middle of each others opposite - if they can even be considered opposites. This would lend them a yin/yang appearance. A stable flux? A contained transubstantiation? Hmm, perhaps too complicated, but from experience, it seems to me that there is merit in the idea that these mundane requirements for daily living are fundamentally necessary to experience beauty as beauty. Otherwise, beauty is the new mundane. Hence, the mundane, instead of a necessary evil is a necessary good. Perhaps an apt analogy would be the canvases that Monet used to paint on. Or the foundation stones at Monticello. Our daily drudgery is the bony interior that allows beauty to stand up and walk around.

To think that the everyday, the sublime, and the 'in-between' are laid out like a straight line map route seems limiting, and it reminds me of Edwin Abbott's characters from Flatland, who were un-equipped to conceive of any other dimension.