Capricious is a series of experimental scripts on the arbitrary disappearance of irrational objects
ca⋅pri・ci・ous, adj (kə'prɪʃəs) 2020 -
{
{impulsive; unpredictable; determined by chance or whim rather than by necessity or reason;
lacking firmness, purpose or devotion; implies an incapacity for steadiness and an inherent tendency to change "a capricious summer breeze"
given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behaviour.
changing according to no discernible rules;
“I don't believe in random occurrences or blind chance, though I know the patterns of this world are capricious and terribly complex. " — Leslie Marmon Silko, letter, 21 Aug. 1979”}
REMEDIAL LIGHTNESS, on the fleetingness of character
Fishing Nets/La atarraya, Raúl Corrales Fornos, ca. 1950. Gelatin silver print.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) presents the Buendia family chronicle in seven generations, from the founding of the village of Macondo, where they live, to the era of the gypsy visits, the civil war between Liberals and Conservatives, the arrival of the railway, the establishment of the banana plantations, to the abandonment of the village and its complete destruction. The book officially introduces the literary movement of Magical Realism, born in Latin America from the coexistence of the supernatural and superstition with the technology of the Western and European world, and the political, psychological consequences of this duality in the perception of reality.
Remedios Buendia, or Remedios the Beauty, of the fourth generation, is born during the war and grows up during the "banana epidemic". She is the daughter of Santa Sophia de la Piedad and Arcadio Buendia. A being of unique nature, due to her incompatibility with her surrounding world, she eventually ascends into the sky and is lost forever. Remedios Buendia is so light that she’s taken by the wind.
“...Actually, Remedios the Beauty was not a creature of this world. Until she was well along in puberty Santa Sofía de la. Piedad had to bathe and dress her, and even when she could take care of herself it was necessary to keep an eye on her so that she would not paint little animals on the walls with a stick daubed in her own excrement. She reached twenty without knowing how to read or write, unable to use the silver at the table, wandering naked through the house because her nature rejected all manner of convention…”
[Chapter 10, page 100]
“...When Úrsula succeeded in imposing the command that she eat with Amaranta in the kitchen so that the outsiders would not see her, she felt more comfortable, because, after all, she was beyond all discipline. In reality, it made no difference to her where she ate, and not at regular hours but according to the whims of her appetite. Sometimes she would get up to have lunch at three in the morning, sleep all day long, and she spent several months with her timetable all in disarray until some casual incident would bring her back into the order of things. When things were going better she would get up at eleven o’clock in the morning and shut herself up until two o’clock, completely nude, in the bathroom, killing scorpions as she came out of her dense and prolonged sleep. Then she would throw water from the cistern over herself with a gourd. It was an act so prolonged, so meticulous, so rich in ceremonial aspects that one who did not know her well would have thought that she was given over to the deserved adoration of her own body. For her, however, that solitary rite lacked all sensuality and was simply a way of passing the time until she was hungry…”
[Chapter 12, page 115-116]
The character of Remedios Buendia is a single creature. Even in a literary space that embraces the metaphysical as a simultaneous function of reality, the form of Remedios's existence, interactions and disposition is described as a triviality. She does not voluntarily influence the world around her and conversely she is effortlessly not affected by it. She ignores her capacity to influence. She appears abstinent and indifferent to everything. Her being is incompatible, its externalizations are automatic and instinctive.
She is disconnected from every social contract, imposed logic and law of thought, with an unpretentious, non-revolutionary lightness and simplistic instinct. Her noncompliance is thoughtless and unassuming. Remedios Buendia does not recall the past or predict the future, does not aspire, aim or proceed with expectations or due to causality. She is guided by spontaneity and basic survival needs, navigating the complexity of interaction, assumptions, history and collective trauma.
Remedios is not weighed down by fear, or the guilt of the past. Unable to identify with emotional causality, impervious to everyday life, events, environment, the violence of emotions, the emotions of others, she develops what is misunderstood as impulse or eccentricity, but in fact it is an originality of thought, a rudimentary kind of wisdom, a subtractive, lucid outlook.
La casa que sangra (autorretrato con mi hija y la presencia de un ahorcado) (The house that bleeds. Self-portrait with my daughter and the presence of a hanging man.), Yael Martínez V, Guerrero, Mexico, 2013
Fallen sheet, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, 1940s
“... Remedios the Beauty was the only one who was immune to the banana plague. She was becalmed in a magnificent adolescence, more and more impenetrable to formality, more and more indifferent to malice and suspicion, happy in her own world of simple realities…”
[Chapter 12, page 115]
“... It seemed as if some penetrating lucidity permitted her to see the reality of things beyond any formalism. That at least was the point of view of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, for whom Remedios the Beauty was in no way mentally retarded, as was generally believed, but quite the opposite. “It’s as if she’s come back from twenty years of war,” he would say.
[Chapter 10, page 100]
While the characters surrounding her have a share in collective memory, Remedios the Beauty lives with the simplicity of a kind of silent, lonely amnesia. Born in the midst of the civil war between Liberals and Conservatives, at the turn of events, when the violence of the battle reaches the village of Macondo, Remedios Buendia is hovering between a former reality that was annulled, and a present reality, with which it is impossible for her to identify.
Colonel Aureliano Buendia interprets Remedios's otherness as follows: War has been imprinted on her as a split with reality - like a collective split caused by an event of rupture. The girl bears the effects of this rupture without bearing its weight, or its threat. And, as if exposed to real battle scenes, as if she has returned from the misery of war, either because of trauma, or because of heightened awareness, she lives disassociated from the assigned cognitive functions, memory, sense of identity, consciousness, perception. Her character accumulates an incorrigible disconnection and the questioning of everything, caused by a violent event. She absteins from processing her reality, she sees it clearly and accepts it as it is. Remedios the Beauty is extremely light.
“... Fernanda did not even make any attempt to understand her. When she saw Remedios the Beauty dressed as a queen at the bloody carnival she thought that she was an extraordinary creature. But when she saw her eating with her hands, incapable of giving an answer that was not a miracle of simplemindedness, the only thing that she lamented was the fact that the idiots in the family lived so long. In spite of the fact that Colonel Aureliano Buendía kept on believing and repeating that Remedios the Beauty was in reality the most lucid being that he had ever known and that she showed it at every moment with her startling ability to put things over on everyone…”
[Chapter 12, page 118]
The woman is abandoned to her own devices. Her silences remain unmarked by contemplation, coherence, or recollection. The world stops at the surface of her skin. Her loneliness deepens, the separation that doesn’t allow her to identify with any person, act, temporality or place makes her all the more disconnected, unique, single. She is detached from her environment, already flying. A split made by oblivion causes her very existence to be forgotten:
“... They let her go her own way. Remedios the Beauty stayed there wandering through the desert of solitude, bearing no cross on her back, maturing in her dreams without nightmares, her interminable baths, her unscheduled meals, her deep and prolonged silences that had no memory until one afternoon in March, when Fernanda wanted to fold her brabant sheets in the garden and asked the women in the house for help. She had just begun when Amaranta noticed that Remedios the Beauty was covered all over by an intense paleness.
“Don’t you feel well?” she asked her.
Remedios the Beauty, who was clutching the sheet by the other end, gave a pitying smile.
“Quite the opposite,” she said, “I never felt better.”
She had just finished saying it when Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide. Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Úrsula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her…”
[Chapter 12, page 118]
Remedios’ vanishing is as capricious as her living has been: her ascension to the heavens seems like a solution to her paradoxical nature. Her disappearance is more rational, more probable than her existence, more feeble than fiction, even in a magical realism setting. Her nature is so transient, that there was nothing left for her but to be lost. She ascends, waves goodbye and disappears summarily. Her displacement is so sudden and so far away, that even memory can not reach her. The oblivion in her manner of existence surpasses nostalgia to such an extent that nothing keeps Remedios on earth. Her very lightness does not allow her to remain grounded and she is quickly forgotten.