SMALL BOOK FOR UNBECOMING / PEQUEÑO LIBRO PARA DESDIBUJARSE
- Jul 5
- 16 min read
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Intro
Imagine that someday you are going to die. In the following pages, I propose an 'alphabet' of words, concepts and actions to follow with the mind, and preferably with the body and experience, as a way of unbecoming oneself. It works like a little hopscotch game, where each step offers a path, a leap, a fall and a getting up. Sometimes clearly, other times hidden in allegories, poems, and songs; the instructions are a way of parodying those lists of “A thousand things to do before dying,” or “100 films to watch before kicking the bucket.”
This is an imperfect invitation to crumble reality before your senses. It's not a “check list” or something you have to do as an obligation or as a conquest before dying. It's more of a game (individual or collective if you invite another being) of dislocated reality and real fictionality. A defibrillator to revive the heart by erasing lines and boundaries. An invitation to fuse and transcend the limited possibilities of one life.
If this small book has reached you it's because we probably know each other and I esteem you greatly. I wish you the best in your life and have a good game!
“Life is just a blast
Movin very fast
Better stay on top
or life will kick you in the ass.”
Limp Bizkit
A TREE
A subterranean extension of the struggle to survive, connected to a mast that rises into the air in a desperate attempt to live. Size depends on the external and physical conditions that annihilate this vegetable. Sometimes a bonsai can have a sequoia complex. But, as a rule, trees photosynthesize, the supreme quality of living beings to decompose light and extract all its colours, nuances, shadows and pigments. The colour is due to chloroplasts, green cellular batteries that yield to red and warm tones in seasons that mimic death.
You are going to plant a tree in a place you can visit or that is accessible according to your will. Yes, it's a classic activity. But you will preferably choose a native tree. If you have already done this action in the past, or as an option, on your next walk, try to collect a fallen leaf from a tree and look for information about that species, growth, origin, etc. Botany is underrated these days. Inform yourself a bit about different types of trees and their ways of life. You can repeat the exercise if you are traveling in a distant land.
Wise philosophers say the shrub and rhizomatic format is immanent, always growing sideways and never quite reaching in any particular direction. Meanwhile, children and madmen know pines and oaks format is transcendent. They always project themselves toward the sky, like a ladder of leaves toward the intangible.
By effect of the wind, branches and flowers are like tightrope walkers.
However, due to old age and consistency, trunks have vertical tendencies.
For them, the journey is always from the bottom up,
from the seed to the sky full of...
CLOUDS
Summer sky, with giant cumulonimbus, heights of radiant vapours, filtering an entire life into heavy rains.
In Hanoi, in Luanda, in Cartagena, in your belly. Cats, dogs, and entire seasons fall in seconds clouds loaded with grey rage echo of thunders and flashes of lightning.
'Yellowish', 'reddish' of blood, dark-orange and violent violet. Sunsets reveal the entrails of the sky in sunrays that resemble stage spotlights, like celestial cathedrals projected upon the Earth.
A rainbow breaks through cutting the air and enveloping the streets, flooded grounds with cracks and grass everywhere.
Southern clouds of the meridional constellation Orion stars celestial vault most isolated part of the planet hemisphere of creation and non-redemption.
Like a bird
Travel to the south, as one who always returns to love. Carry the South, as a destiny of the heart. When you come back, bring the South with you.
DINNER
In the movie My Dinner with Andrey, two old friends working in the theatre industry, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, meet for dinner at a luxury restaurant in New York after several years without seeing each other. Wallace is a pragmatic playwright struggling to pay his bills, while André is a director who has spent years traveling the world in search of spiritual and mystical experiences. In the conversation throughout the dinner, they maintain a profound dialogue that ranges from surrealist anecdotes to philosophical reflections on art, politics, and the meaning of living with authenticity. The core of the story lies in the clash of visions: André's search for the extraordinary versus Wallace's appreciation of mundane and simple pleasures. It is a foundational work of conversation cinema that invites the viewer to question whether they are truly "awake" or simply living like a sleepwalker in daily routine. There are no cuts or grand scene changes. It is just a conversation.
Your task is to go to one of your favourite restaurants alone and invite yourself to dinner. At the dinner, I propose you write on a paper a conversation with yourself. Answer questions like: What is or has been your professional career for you? What is art? and/or question your tastes in general. Ask yourself the mundane or silly questions you want, such as: Why do we see the colour red? How is this dish made? Why is Apple so expensive? What happened to the trade-unions’ power compared to the past? Should I start a volunteering activity or get a new hobby? Finally, ask yourself this question three times —like when Peter denied Jesus three times after the Last Supper: What is life? Let each answer to this last question be different, neither better nor worse, necessarily. Once you have finished dinner, on another occasion, invite someone close to you, perhaps someone you haven't seen in a while, to dinner at that same place to discuss your discoveries and establish a conversation about these and other topics. At the end, formulate the last question three times. No repeating answers allowed. It doesn’t need to be a smart or serious conversation, rather a dialogical one, of mutual and deep listening.
LEAVING ROOM
Dear electric octopus who is leaving (the) room; one day, touch the walls walking through hallways, and sit in the dinning or living room, in the silence… Observe yourself in other moments from the past, doing the same things, conjuring memories that draw themselves at the moment you invoke them. As if they sought a repetition in the future: a mimesis that will accomplish itself. Self-fulfilled daily prophecy. Hauntology.
Observe yourself resting in that armchair… you see yourself breathing the humid wind that enters through the window, you see yourself trying to capture the moment, the walls, the windows… even though they don't let themselves be fully apprehended.
There are fragments evoked in every corner of that small room that connects with the stairs, the table, the glassware, the dishes, the paintings and portraits.
When one truly wants, when one thinks deeply, we are capable of impregnating something of ourselves in the walls, in the building, in the space. Space 1.8.
Something lasting that can be collected by others or by yourself in future moments.
Like a perfume that fades very slowly, like the aroma of perennial fruit trees.
And when someone leaves, they are still there… in the objects.
When you depart, you are still in…
It is not necessary to invent time travel.
MIRROR
The mirror stage — like the moon's phases — is that mental moment when you recognize yourself. For Lacan, this stage is the original act where someone realizes “I'm here.” Back when humanity was still in its childhood, ancient civilizations looked into mirrors and handed down the very gaze we now use to study our wrinkles.
The mirror is the Proustian search for lost time. We're born into this world, we live in it, always searching for something missing — something we'll never find but have probably already done (even if we're kids). It's déjà vu in reverse. Rescuing a memory you can't quite locate because you're already inside it. A blind spot.
Maybe this chase after the impossible — after what can't be found — is what turns someone into an archaeologist of the multiple pasts. Digging through events. An archaeology that questions the future but also believes ashes and ruins still have things to tell us. A genealogy that goes beyond the shiny jewels or the glory of human efforts buried by time. It's about mapping things. Words. Floor tiles.
Finding a translucent metal disc in the rubble of some abandoned city, the mirror's reflection showed me:
[...] Among ancient tools, where millennia tick by like clock hours, I'm surrounded by voices, by eyes. But no one's there. The image is empty. Nights that go in circles.
The plate's surfaces, its decorations, whispered something I can't hold onto.
I know this stuff wasn't made for me. It shouldn't exist. So I fought to forget. To find the way out of that spiral that grabbed me, crushed me. Too much transgression... the Etruscan weight of time. Now I also have stones and glass instead of flesh and bones.
…
Stand in front of a mirror.
Look at your face, your body, for five minutes. Tell me — what do you see?
Repeat the exercise another day standing in front of a public mirror or a natural reflection.
.
Circular nights.
FIRE
Live short circuit of embers,
flames spread out purifying memory
everything melts before time’s march,
even words burn up in the light.
The zigzag of intense heat
sublimates liquids;
melted embrace of a wandering creature.
It is a rootless substance,
a drift into dejection,
a ritual that governs mouths,
ashes gathering up
tired bones.
Not water, plasma, or air
earth and skin both need fire
to be reborn in their pores.
Burn something you need to forget,
so a new flame in your heart
may ignite.
LABOUR
Camus used to say that life is that thing you can never taste in the moment — a strange drink. He said that right when it's happening, life won't let you taste it. It's a kind of tension, at different degrees, between being there — the attempt to be present — and living through memory the moment that's already gone.
Even looking at your fingers in front of your face, or reading this message, it's all a memory journey — light takes microseconds or entire ages to reach consciousness. Even in those immediate experiences, life's already happened. We missed the train.
One memory after another traveling through a glass tunnel of identities across the years. A long movie take of a car moving down the road toward the horizon. Aerial shot of the vehicle. New shot, zoom in on the wheels rolling on asphalt. Metaphor for the fork in the path, like in Borges' gardens.
After reaching a certain age, knowing that labour has been or is a daily part of life — What is or what remains of work after all? Even if you're unemployed — what happens to work or to life projects in this productive society, in this burnout society?
What would you like to be doing right before you retire or get old? Even if you're not passionate about your job, do you think is important to leave behind some kind of path or legacy? Even a small one?
Years ago, while I was doing research in a small Canadian town, I posed these questions to a former professor, an eminent figure who had founded my field of study in the 1980s. He was about to retire and told me that it seemed to him that time sped up as he got older. The accumulation of experiences, of years, was like a uniform acceleration on the highway. Wheels rolling. Time after time. Time.
Despite your age, dear reader, I don't know if you can confirm that feeling throughout your life. What marked the speedometer of your temporality over the years?
This person was surprised to tell me that he had lived longer than his own father. At his age, his ancestor had already passed away, and that gave him a different perspective on life, but it also brought back memories and absences. At the same time, he also said he liked staying connected to religion — not necessarily looking for transcendent answers, just out of habit since he was a kid — and that even after retiring from the university, he'd keep writing, keep researching.
I don't know what the ideal formula to quit is... especially in a world where labour conditions keep getting more precarious. But someday it all ends.
I feel that nowadays everything is more accelerated. There is a Taylorism, but at the same time a medievalism, in many areas. We are required to do everything and be multitaskers with management, projects, funds, resources, regiments, attending social events… to be an electric octopus in the battery of chores. Caregiving tasks? forget about it. At the same time, a kind of artisanal skill is demanded, like that of a master craftsman, where one is supposedly required to produce with patience and meticulousness. Each output demands its time, but these two poles—the Taylorism side of frenetic production and the slow handmade work— they crash into each other and create all these quality-of-life derailments, time-use problems. Time. Time again.
(Jump to the entry “Time”)
GAME
Playing chess against death to put off the inevitable, facing down the end, the guy in Bergman's film Seventh Seal feels the weight of time and his own life fading. But at the same time he takes comfort — even if just for a second — in being aware that he can feel the blood moving through his veins, and he feels lucky to be playing against death itself.
Without falling too far into this existential black hole — but still: what is life? How do you love and how are you loved? What would you say to a reincarnated version of yourself, or to your past self, if you could visit them for ten minutes? And the other way around — what would that version say to you if they showed up in your timeline?
Have you been playing chess against death all these years? (Maybe now you've got time to actually play this game, or some other one, or to help someone or a community in need.)
As an option, answer one of those questions and send it to someone you haven't seen in a while. Have that person do the same with someone else, so the current keeps going.
Honestly, I'm interested in answers that go beyond the simple tautologies — because we're looking for happiness, because we want to contribute to family, to the general good, to society, etc.
Does the musician play music first for their audience? Or do they first listen and play for themselves, and then the audience gets to taste it? Even though the two are intimately connected, trumpeter Miles Davis used to say he did it for himself first. Healthy selfishness.
And you — who do you play for?
MUSIC
Speaking of music…
I propose you go looking for new music and, preferably, learn an instrument. It's a long-term endeavour. But playing helps to find some kind of centre in the space of days. I hope you can enjoy music, or play something, beyond simply mechanical learning. May you discover new passions in music. And if you already know how to play, I invite you to deconstruct technique. Can everything be music??
A few years back, this older person who played piano told me they'd like to learn to improvise when they retired. So I suggested to play with notes like they were colours in a painting. Some combine better than others. But even in abstract paintings, in abstract sounds, in the sounds one creates while learning an instrument, you can find so many combinations and qualities.
It's more about seeking the potential of those combinations than simply playing something that ‘sounds nice’ because someone already did it centuries ago, or to make it ‘look good.’ Here, modernism in music, while perhaps not the most harmonious or aesthetically pleasing, is often helpful from a pedagogical standpoint. If you don't play virtuously, at least find your own way of playing as a personal philosophy.
Deconstructing notes. Dislocating scales and progressions. The collapse of music. That's it. Try it. Again and again. I wish you the collapse of music. Wings to experiment. Let sounds fall like buildings imploding, but making way for new scenes. New worlds. Sacrifice the gods on Olympus. Start over. Listen to the wind and draw shapes, patterns, streets and avenues with your fingers. Try creating and thinking in visual/spatial patterns. Not so much from reason or ear or technique. Try also from emotion. Be the angel who knows the world but also dives into it for the first time. I wish you ashes that transform into sonorities and the spirit to create your own palette of chords. You've got to give yourself the right to be mediocre. Chopin's Raindrop Prelude. Einstein on the Beach. Knee Play 5.
If you don't try it with music, try it with another art or craft. Every now and then, close your eyes while you're at it. Find your style even if it's ‘despicable.’ Music, art or other habits are also ways of living or being, like breathing, walking, eating. They're not just trades or professions, even if those are respectable. Nobody asks permission to breathe well, to walk properly, or to eat. Close your eyes.
AQUATIC
Related to water. Alphabetically, this entry should be the first.
But water is mutation and movement. It has slipped into this part of the book, like a leak seeping through the roof. And at this point, you already know that alphabetical order is irrelevant.
It's raining heavily on you, you're suddenly getting wet, and you're soaked. Like in the aquatic scenes of Tarkovsky's films. Water is the subject, the active component, and the protagonist, while the rest of us are secondary characters. It's raining heavily here. It's raining heavily on you.
Drops are falling on you, now they're waves. Those waves have different textures. We need a physical and poetic study of hydrology. The shapes, undulations, movements, patterns of a liquid are tremendously complex — have you noticed?
I invite you to pay attention and slip into the interstices of water next time you're submerged in it or near a large body of it. 'Drown' yourself in its torrents. Even the shower can be a good place for this exercise. Let the water wrap around you.
...
While traveling on a boat off the coasts of Northern Europe for several days, I realized that water textures are like electromagnetic fields — a constant, rough oscillation creating patterns like a folded and crumpled sheet of paper. Sometimes rough, sometimes dissonant, a surface inviting the wind to make history.
Sometimes, regular vertices spread out in patterns flowing in all directions, but their overlap isn't enough to produce larger waves.
At sea, waves tend to be serious, with solid colours — a cold blue mixed with metallic greys. Everything is hypnotic and chaotic.
Not even the most advanced software or engineering systems can predict or emulate wave behaviour in water and clouds with total precision. It's a chaotic event mixed with uniformity. Seems like nature plays with infinite possibilities and realities, but then chooses one specific path.
Leaving a trail behind the boat, there was a path of foam that eventually faded into the distance. The white trail traced a gentle curve through the channel between mainland and the islands.
Thinking about that trail of past and future — I thought that just seconds ago I was there, where now there's only water. Just minutes ago I was passing by a point on the foam trail.
But it's like I'm still there, like I got left behind.
And I see myself, simultaneously from the other boat and on this one.
I can still encounter myself and live in that other temporality, but I'm on this side.
Heisenberg equations playing out at the macroscopic level of our own existence.
Our life paths aren't orderly events in a linear story — they're fields of indeterminate waves, clouds of ambivalence, currents running multiple directions that settle into specific patterns in a particular course.
Maybe I'm dispersing myself across different moments and spaces, where momentum (time) becomes unidentifiable — splitting my path into a flow visible from somewhere else. That other side that's unreachable, yet still interconnectable.
Two movements of time. The movement of molecules and currents in water. The movement of life, step by step. A subjective path, outside time and maybe timeless, but also inside it.
Life, mediated through the lenses of forgetting and the sedimentation of memories.
In the end, everything will be forgotten. At last, entropy will defeat autopoiesis.
Life, a rebellious pause in the landscape of nothingness.
Meanwhile: unbecoming.
UNBECOMING
What you haven't experienced and what you'll never experience. That's what defines you. No matter how much you illuminate the endless night, the darkness always shifts one step further, moves faster than the light. There is no such thing as a full life.
Draw a slightly inclined straight vertical line on the left side of the paper. Then trace a curved horizontal line that crosses the first line. Finally, make a third straight vertical line that mirrors the first. That is, an inclined straight line with the opposite angle on the right side, crossing the second line at the same height.
You've just drawn a Torii or tōri-iru (通り入る, to pass and enter), a kind of traditional Japanese gate that symbolizes the separation between the earthly world (the profane) and the intangible space. Inside the space of that arch, draw the centre of your mental labyrinth or the beak of the bird flying behind your shadow. At the centre of that labyrinth or bird, wet the paper with your tears. Then, embed a fragment of glass or make a hole in the paper to open a window.
HOME
I was asked what I felt or what the word “home” meant to me while participating in an art project in Rotterdam.
Of all people, me — immersed in the contemporary academic diaspora, having lived in six countries, with no idea where I'll be in 3 or 5 years? — I thought before I could string words together. I answered that I felt somewhat at home when I saw or was near water. Born in desert lands, I value water in a very special way, whether it's the sea, tropical rain, a lake, river, stream, and now the Dutch canals with their particular birds (see the funny Coots that clean plastic from the water and are very territorial. Ecological and individualistic: very Dutch).
When we leave, they say we'll turn into elements. We'll return to matter.
I'll return to water.
That's why I'm interested, even now, in ‘analysing’ water. (See the previous entry mentioned in this 'book' — you can read it in reverse order, or in a random order, if you want. Liquids have no beginning or end).
I'll return in spring to the Basque Country. Still in liquid modernity. Maybe home. With the splendid coast and sirimiri (sea drizzle).
...
For you who come and go, or for you who stay — what is “home”?
Draw the idea of home you've come up with, and bury it/sink it under your home or near it, in an organic time capsule so it can decompose.
...
When the last light warms the rocks and snakes unfurl themselves ghosts of wild cats will come searching for your bones.
No matter the final dignity you'll rise forever over the silent sand and the stars will be your eyes and the wind will be your hands.
What part of you will be the river that runs again through the place where you were born?
TIME
Which relates to or refers to windows. Films work with frames that enclose what is revealed or hidden in the plot. It's the zone of opening and the definition of limits in how we see things. You can live without walls, without a roof, without a floor. But you can't live without windows — because they're places of transition between the interior and the exterior. Even without eyes, you can't live outside the frame that places us between the tangible and the imagination. Windows are the constant that makes the world open or close. Through them, time seeps into the guts.
Break a window or mirror. Repairing it is optional. Keeping a fragment, too.
(Return to the entry “Game”)
FINAL CLEAR VISIONS
ENVISION
Each day
subtract yourself.
IMPROVISATIONS
[...]
This world is not mine.
This world belongs to travesty angels,
to wild children
and lame dogs.
[...]
No bus station is happy.
FRAGMENTS OF A SHADOW
The murky air mingles with the room’s dimming light.
Behind the curtain, listen to the morning traffic on Tuesday
and whistle a waltz like someone going mad on a very clean beach,
on a very bright street.
If you wish, send your responses/sensations or create a new entry to miranda.raziel@hotmail.com. With the exception of Final Clear Visions (with poems by Bruno Brum freely translated), the rest of the text is own authorship
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