Showing posts with label Monterroso. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Monterroso. Show all posts

#17 - MG - When she woke up the dinosaur was still there

While I was fabricating clay dinosaurs during daytime, I conducted another experiment at night. I convinced myself that, if dinosaurs were my primary concern when I was awake, I should certainly achieve to see them in my dreams as well. I was very excited about the prospect of my nocturnal encounters with these long-lost species, but each morning I woke up in disappointment, as I had not retrieved the slightest bit of prehistory from my subconscious. To this day, I never saw a single dinosaur in my dreams, which made me wonder: if my subconscious does not have the faintest interest in this prehistoric species, is it because it does not have a clue what I’m thinking about, when I think dinosaurs during my waking hours? Does it ignore this mind blabber, for the simple reason that dinosaurs are only part of our conscious existence? Etc? Etc? Any possible encounter with a prehistoric being provides us with an a-historical plot and is thus immediately subjected to the laws of fiction. Dreams are only fictional in the sense that they are reality in disguise (or in full exposure?).

I did dream other things. One night, I found myself without a head. I realized I didn’t screw it onto my neck in the morning. It was an awful routine to begin the day, it wasn’t painful or anything, just very uncomfortable and inhumane. Mechanic; machine-like. I couldn’t see what it looked like – the screw inside my neck – but when I explained my dream to a friend and demonstrated the motions of connecting body and head, it was clear to him that I had been photographing that day: my actions resembled those of a lens being fixed to a camera body.



#4 - MG


When she woke up the dinosaur was still there.

In Monterroso's short story (as brief as the blink of an eye), the promise of an action that is about to take place/the suggestion of an action that just took place (or both, since the two characters are seized in the moment and the reader is propelled into this story in medias res), proves to be sufficient for any reader to engage with this most mysterious encounter between a person and a dinosaur. It doesn't really matter whether the encounter between this human being (is it a human being?) and a long-extinct animal was brief, frightening, life-altering or absurd. Any encounter with a prehistoric being provides us with an a-historical plot, and is therefore immediately subjected to the laws of fiction - regardless of whether we face these laws (and this dinosaur) in reality or in a fictional realm.

There are two ways to tackle this fictitious dinosaur: either the first character woke up to realize that the dinosaur of his dreams was still there, or the dinosaur character is capable of a visionary thinking about its own evolution, straight into the future of Homo Sapiens. This Homo Sapiens sleeps and wakes and sleeps again, in the company of the dinosaur. And when he wakes up, the dinosaur is still there.

Indeed, in both cases the dinosaur is still and persistently there, and one is compelled to think: what would this dinosaur have thought when Homo Sapiens awoke - when it looked the awakened creature into the eyes and saw the future, staring back in disbelief?


#2 - MG


Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.
Augusto Monterroso