Vagabond Multilingual Journal Spring 2014 | Page 25

The Unpredictable, The Earthquake, That

There is something in particular that belongs to my writings, that has always belonged to my
writings. There is something that has always been in my mind, in any spot of my subconscious. Something
that always appeared in my short stories. Dreams? Mystery? Linguistics? I don’t know. It went beyond my
essence. It was important because “We cannot get to know somebody but from his works”. Spinoza once
said that the world is composed by a substance that can be identified as either God or nature. Maybe this is
Spinoza, but with a turn of the screw. I am going to reflect upon my world, more precisely, upon a part of the
divine infinite substance that concerns me. I don’t know how the world of the rest works.

Sometimes, to imagine the existence of certain people propels expression. Those persons that
inhabit our subconscious are constructions that we create according to our experiences, according to who
we are, according to what we read and what we desire to read, according to our substance…

I used to have many constructions. But who would have thought that one day one of them would
come to me. Julien came into scene, as a physical manifestation of my substance, when I had already stopped
looking in my interior. I was in a stage of leisure and distractions. And had it not been that way, I wouldn’t
have met him. If I hadn’t gone out with my friend and her friends on a summer night and, otherwise, I
would have stayed at home as always, I wouldn’t have met him. And there was the contrast: I had to escape
myself to reencounter with my substance. To say that that night I had recognised what I had found would
be to exaggerate, it would be to fall in a strictly literary territory. Of course I didn’t recognise it that night!
I had always felt that there was nothing clear in my mind but, little by little, through different encounters,
I was able to observe with more clarity that construction. Everything about him was familiar to me, but,
at the same time, it didn’t resemble anything I knew. As I didn’t believe in past lives, that drove me to the
exhaustive quest for another possible explanation. Monism, maybe. Or determinism. Until, in a flash of
epiphany, everything made sense: it had always been there, in my mind. As the philosopher I am betraying
with my turn of the screw had once pointed out, “Out of our minds, nothing sacred or profane exists, but
only in relation to it”.

Often, the occult bids us company but we don’t pay attention to it because it drives us crazy not
being able to understand it. It drove me crazy not being able to understand Julien. We chatted and chatted
and I still failed to understand him. He retold his life and I still failed to understand him, to understand other
people was much easier. I observed his attitudes and in the same way a chemist observes a compound and
I still failed to understand him. Neither could I predict his reactions, something I was able to do with other
people. But it couldn’t be otherwise because being unpredictable was part of my substance.

An unpredictable person takes us by surprise in the same manner an unexpected earthquake does
it. Does the earthquake have a logical explanation? Yes, from the viewpoint of nature. The unpredictable
person? Yes, from the viewpoint of psychology. They never stop taking us by surprise. The person, in a
weaker way. But if we allow susceptibility to take place, the person becomes the earthquake with all what
that means. It no longer takes us by surprise in a weaker way. And I let Julien be the earthquake. Yes,