Puzzled (Canto 4)
collaged by and of perypatetik authors1
New York, USA and Munich, Germany
After exiting the bus, Yuri crossed Broadway and pushed through the door of a modern-day Café Baudequin. It paled in comparison. With the exception of an occasional freak, you no longer hashed out a literary or artistic vision with your friends as in nineteenth-century Paris: To paint what you feel – this was the aesthetic program of the open-air artists that Zolá reconstructed through the perception13 or amalgamation of Cezanne, Manet and Monet in Claude Lantier. Those subjects didn’t even cross your mind. If anyone in the café preserved an avant-garde spirit, they spoke the language of banality like Sartre’s representation of Mathieu in Chez Camus. Yuri just wanted a coffee and a seat to think, but not about ideals.
A nicely proportioned young mother in leggings pushed her stroller ambitiously to the door. She had a to-do list.
Most of the idling staff milled about bored, welcoming a customer not with a genuine interest in serving them, but to interrupt the tedium of standing around.
A dogwalker curbed their poodle outside the glass window.
Yuri sensed a disconnect.
Sensing as feeling was controversial in consciousness, even phenomenal consciousness. One always talked about perception, seeing red or green. At best, it was considered an offshoot of informational neural processes accounting for the thought or action.14 Pondering the to-do list, pushing the stroller, the psychology of boredom, curbing the dog – that is what we want to understand.
He plopped down on an outdoor chair and began to slurp his coffee-to-go. To do, to go, to mill about, to think – what was the point? His co-editor Angelika didn’t see any point either. He knew that. It was like walking your dog. But his other colleague in their underground project, Jasem, always had a response. Actually, he had more than one: When the system runs smoothly, you experience a subtle sensation of happiness, Jasem would explain. Or: A harmonized constitution accepts the to-do list, relishes the efficiency of to-go and acknowledges the tedium of to-mill-about or the routine of picking up dog-pooh as part of the vicissitudes of life or to-be. Then he would be attacked and accused of abandoning his roots. He knew the spiel.
Yuri would be sure to see Jasem before going through with his destructive plan. Angelika too. Seeing them was hard to imagine. Despite regular contact first by email, now by text, he hadn’t met Angelika in person for a quarter century or so. With Jasem he did sit down for a beer/coffee on occasion, since they were both in New York. Angelika and Jasem were perfect complements to Yuri – Jasem with his different perspective; Angelika for the exciting drama.
If he really had only a month left to live, Yuri had to organize more than just a final talk with his two friends. He had to get his whole life together. A smirk crossed his face. Even the misery of managing chronically lazy coders at his company, the frustration of being dumped yet again after another kerfuffle for not paying adequate attention to his girlfriend, the impending end – nothing could completely dampen his sense of irony. He was chronically chaotic in his personal life. So organizing meant – for one – that he would arrange matters like his will, terminate his lease, declare beneficiaries, and stuff of that ilk.
Most of all, however, he had to escape the echo chamber of city sophisticates. Not that he had much interaction with them. At least for his generation, socializing in bars, coffee shops like the Baudequin or Chez Camus, at picnics in parks and on riverbanks had dropped off in the late twenties with the first signs of ageing (like migraines), fell precipitously in the thirties with the arrival of children and the exodus of all middle-income young adults from the city, and completely collapsed in the forties when the remaining core was crushed by the triumvirate of decline: work stress, fractured family and physical deterioration. But when he did receive an invite or made an appearance at an event reception and strayed from merely meandering in circles through the room, the loud conversation was always either too intense or absurdly banal. His fault? Their fault? The fault of social practice? Culture? Habit? Exhaustion? Those were questions for Jasem.
In his last month, he would live. And he had the inkling of an idea about how that living would roll out.
His phone buzzed.
Angelika’s latest message read: “You know what I think, Yuri? I think about as much of what you told me as Hernández thinks of divine conception. Do you remember that scene from And Now, It Will All Go Downhill? Aunt Amalia was reincarnated as a dog that impregnated 47-year-old Luisa during sex with Edelmiro:
I’ve locked them in a room and…¡Look! ¡Oh my Holy God! They seem to be… yeah, you guessed it. Now is my chance… Saint Peter told me that at the right moment I had to baptize them with the holy water of God.
I carefully open the door….. I sneak into the room. ¡Wow! ¡My gosh! ¡What things people do nowadays! ¡Hush, hush! I need to approach without being noticed. Yes, the good thing about being a dog is that I can move about agilely and silently. Yeah, now I’m on the bed….I have to concentrate a little, just a little….¡Yeah! ¡What a relief! ¡I’d been holding it in all day! ¡There you go, waters of the holy Jordan river!! ¡Ow! ¡Ow! ¡Hey!! ¡There’s no need to get violent! ¡Don’t be angry at me! You’ve been blessed by the holy yellow waters of God and now you will procreate, ahh… ¡Help! ¡Help! ¡Saint Peter! Mission accomplished! ¡Mission accomplished!15
New York, USA
A crooked smile flitted over his lips – more at the presumably eccentric author who thought it up. Like the others in their samizdat project. It was probably the only reason he had made it this far. The core group fascinated him. He would have loved to meet them. A too intense conversation in a loud Café Boudequin or a too banal conversation in Chez Camus – that would be fine in this case. It would be intriguing to probe what aspect of consciousness unified them.
11. Philosophy (omniscient narrator)
To Yuri, tentatively, their perception or consciousness was unified, perhaps unknowingly, by two or three levels. Without knowing it, he ascribed to Brown’s higher order representations of representations.16 First-order consciousness cleaved to the physical representation or appearance. The second- or higher-order consciousness was phenomenal. It was here that one experienced what it was like – the feeling, the sense, the inkling – to be in Johannesburg, Yerevan, Bogota, Saratov, the Canary Islands, Ulaanbaatar, London, Montevideo. What is individually phenomenal might or might not be shared by the writers, editors and outsiders, but what is collectively phenomenal – a third- or metaphysical-order is tapped into by virtue of producing or living (rather than consuming).17 You cannot produce or live without phenomenally sharing a given act with a larger community. A group is present in a collectively phenomenal experience, either by shaping, guiding or facilitating awareness of the details and the feeling evoked by them.
One might think of collective phenomenology like a Uruguayan tablado and romantic producers and livers like murguistas. A tablado is an improvised stage on which non-professional actors or murguistas…
…gift us a show of colors, dreams, vocals and memory. They make people laugh with satirical performances of politicians, and the ironies of life; they prompt us to reflect, and they motivate us to want to be better in this new year. For a few hours each night, they cause us to forget, and the entire neighborhood is at peace and harmony,” Chola explained to Cabeza.
That night, Alejandra Baccino Uberti writes, something changed in Cabeza. It gave him a sense of purpose, a dream that was attainable. He didn’t know how to sing, act, sew or do make-up. But he could learn. He knew, however, that he had something more valuable. He had the capacity to look misery in the face, and take her out to dance; to transform his own misfortunes into opportunities to make people laugh and feel. And what, above of all else, is murga, if not that?18
(…to be continued…)
Footnotes
1. Framework narrative composed by Angelika Friedrich and Henry Whittlesey; interwoven narrative written by Sarah-Leah Pimentel, Adriana Uribe, Veronika Groke, Lauren Voaden, Armine Asryan, Narantsogt (Natso) Baatarkhuu, Svetlana Molchanova, Jonay Quintero Hernández, Alejandra Baccino Uberti
2. All blue text indicates a hyperlink to the original story by a perypatetik contributor or to the theoretical treatise (Peripatetic Alterity). The stories are published in print as part of the transadaptation series (volumes 1-6) and are also available at the perypatetik.net website under Perception by Country.
13. Wahrnehmen á la Hegel, i.e., a combination of many properties observed in one object (Hegel: 101)
14. Integrated Information Theory (IIT)
15. For full text, see Hernandez, And Now It Will All Go Downhill.
16. See Brown, Consciousness as Representing One’s Mind
17. See Whittlesey Schroeder, “Higher-Order Collective Phenomenal Consciousness?”
18. For full text, see Baccino, Futuros Murguistas.
Transadaptation Volume 7 – Via Ellipsis – Continuation of Uncertainty, Instability and Extremes Transadapted
January: An Unexpected Trip Down Memory Lane – Sarah-Leah Pimentel (South Africa)
February: Blow-up – Veronika Groke (Austria)
March: Futuros Murguistas – Alejandra Baccino Uberti (Uruguay)
April: The Nomenclature Man – Paulius Limantas (Lithuania)
May: Amanecerá y veremos – Adriana Uribe (Colombia)
June: Finding Light in Yerevan – Armine Asryan (Armenia)
July: The Last Judgement – Nadia Silva Castro (Brazil)
August: Puzzled – a collaged nivola by and of perypatetik authors (International)
September: Second Steps – Jonay Quintero Hernandez (Spain)
October: New Normality – Svetlana Molchanova (Russia)
November: Beyond Comprehension – Rahaf Konbaz (Syria)
December: Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Worm? (Parts I and II) – Narantsogt (Natso) Baatarkhuu (Mongolia)
Background – Context
Transadaptation Volume 6: Meaning? – Uncertainty, Instability and Extremes Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2025)
Transadaptation Volume 5: Of Flowing Vicissitudes – Life Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2024)
Transadaptation Volume 4: Material Dissent – Adulthood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2023)
Transadaptation Volume 3: Evanescent – Young Adulthood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2022)
Transadaptation Volume 2: Conceived – Childhood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2021)
Transadaptation Volume 1: In the Middle – Prelude to a Contemporary Transadaptation, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2020)
Peripatetic Alterity: A Philosophical Treatise on the Spectrum of Being – Romantics and Pragmatists by Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)
La Syncrétion of Polarization and Extremes Transposée, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)
The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2018)
L’anthologie of Global Instability Transpuesta, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2017)
From Wahnsinnig to the Loony Bin: German and Russian Stories Transposed to Modern-day America, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2013)
Emblems and stories on the international community
Perception by country – Transposing emblems, articles, short stories and reports from around the world
Credits
Background photo: Munich, Germany – The street refracted – Jahanzeb Ahsan (Unsplash)
Inserted photos (top left clockwise): 1. Austria – The village – Sven D (Unsplash); 2. Goris, Armenia – Hung out to dry – KrimKate (Shutterstock)-2; 3. Montevideo, Uruguay – Ramirez Beach – DFLC Multimedia Designer (Shutterstock); 4. New York City, USA – Chinatown – Viktorija Demjanenko (Unsplash); 5. Karoo, South Africa – Roadside padstal – mehdi (Shutterstock); 6. New York City, USA – This is your god – Ludivine Indigo (Unsplash); 7. Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia – From the car – Keleny (Shutterstock); 8. Tenerife, Spain – Embedded in the mountains – Dynamoland (Shutterstock); 9. Saratov, Russia – Chernyshevsky Square – Fire-fly (Shutterstock); 10. Bogota, Columbia – Criss-crossing – Delaney Turner (Unsplash)