One way of seeing
Timeslide is as a thought experiment about the ready
made construct we call human personality.
A deconstructive thought experiment.
Far from being
the true self of the individual, human personality screens it,
hides it behind a complex structure built with the elements of
gender, mother language, nationality, culture, individual and
collective memory... all of them crowned by ideology —raw
or sophisticated ideology— in a later phase of human development.
Now, what if you put in question all these elements that
we usually take as the lineaments of our personal definition?
If you set a group of men and women in irrational conditions,
change the roles of the sexes, even disrupt their biology, make
them speak a language not their own, highly bastardized by other
tongues, mangle their memories, and make them ask “Who are
we, who am I”?
As I see it, some
of them will desperately miss the narrative of the self and will
try by any means to find, or to re-create (at this point both
tasks are the same), the sure ground of the past lost. They’ll
trust to find their answers by a sort of blind archaeology of
the blind memory. But, is it possible also that at least one solitary
individual will see this destitution as an opportunity to find
answers above the mind, above time, beyond human constructs —as
a Buddha or Shankara seeking the Self beyond, or even the abolition
of the self and the Self? The paradox is that these great mystic
Terminators, these seekers of mind dissolution, have amply added
to the narrative of the human being, enlarging and fortifying
the collective construct in the wake of their rush into the Nihil
beyond.
The result of
this thought experiment, of course, is highly science-fictional.
But what is not science-fictional nowadays? Quantum physics, Mars
exploration, the ISS, the mobile internet... even the Iraq War
is science fictional.
And speaking of
the Iraq War, this story was completed two years before it began,
so one of its sub-plots, the sale of Spain to the USA by our present
caudillo, has been prophetic even in its hyperbolic form.
There is nothing strange about it: the Spanish caudillo
mentality is and has always been a hateful apotheosis of mediocrity,
and mediocre is always the lackey to more shamelessly powerful
leaders and führers.
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