Flammable, Leonel Juracan, Editorial Cultura, Guatemala, 2008

it's time for stone to flower,

time to pity unrest

time for time to be time,

time for time  

Paul Celan

On this planet, in this country, and city, it is harder everyday to stay alive.  I don't say that it's physically difficult or comes of injustice, lack of health, or the violence to which we are already accustomed.  It's another type of pain, the insatiable want of collective tragedy, the immense desire between vices, and the moral absurdity of talk shows to undo consciousness; let it all be taken away by media including the end of the world, and destroy life forever.
     An afternoon walk, surrounded by fruit trees, rusty machinery, gray skies, desolate people, a heavy sensation, like a clear road to death, underlying the actions of hundreds of thousands of people on earth sinks in.  It's like it was already programmed, like every action were part of an execution without appeals. As though someone had filmed in detail the last days of humanity and we are only ghosts in its celluloid, transpiring through the inertia of a machine: from the quartered remains of a cadaver in the morning news, to the competition for a million quetzals on a flyer, then the insane detonation of a combustible and a new cadaver maimed on the television. Life's been mixed with death in the eyes of agony.

     Maybe it's the late arrival of the sensation that fed the strange dreams of Europe at the end of the 19th Century, the somber decadence, the premonition of the graveyard wrapped in Symbolism, then onto Postromanticism and  Expressionism, an ill-defined scent of death over each and every thing.
     Taken lightly it can't be seen, but each day of reality is more horrendous.  There's people walking along the street, business activity, diners in all the restaurants, patients in weight loss clinics, and tourists in recreation every weekend. However people die daily for the most banal reasons that can be imagined, people religiously seeking any pretext for violence.  At night there are burglars in humble neighborhoods, beggars in parks and church atriums. Any would readily agree that this is normal for cities, for what should be seen as a clear sign something is off.  Putting aside the particulars, visible signs don't abound.
        There are lonely men, anorexic women, people in love who pity themselves, for whom it's impossible  to have sincere friendships.  Said "serious persons" are "enterprising" solely for turning resentment they have for others into an inspiration for monotonous and thoughtless work the machinery offers. They break into tears by coincidence or when the evangelical pastor "moves" them and they remember how alone they are.
      It can be seen  in the young, a myriad of students and adolescents without a future, not because they're committed to survival, but because they'll never even know what it was they would've wanted.  Aware of this departure, they waste time at corners, discos, bars.  Shouldn't this be taken as the "unconcern of the immortal" characteristic of youth?  Now even fun is part of inertia.  All are sure they throw their lives away, yet that doesn't make them happy, for the moment they're destroyed they were closest to tasting freedom. 
     There are lonely wives and husbands who jack off, people tuned to a screen for more than ten hours a day, and if not at a screen than at anything at all: a radio, an exercise apparatus, whatever machine blowing inevitable contact on its victim, who is in this case, is oneself.
     Art has become a perpetual scream, put down on paper, over scenery or multimedia supports.  To scream is the only form of evoking some spirituality.  There are also parasitic priests of ignorance, who seeing themselves at a crime that ritual hides would like to have the faith of those they take advantage of.  And there's no road out.  Concepts of the past century that have sustained us so well have been replaced by a practical application that's been made of them.  Dignity is no longer a state of moral probity, but instead a state of indolence to pain and crime.  Honor is no longer a model of frankness and psychic stability, but an excuse that permits us to harm others while preserving a clean conscience. Respect is not what we owe each other, but a taboo that is penalized or prized for the power acquired. Honorability is not a principle that deliver to each what they're owed, but a disguised resentment for justice.  On top of everything else, sensibility is an inherited right, a responsibility among bothers and knowledge in simple Machiavellian craft. 
     Something grave has happened to what was once known as love: now it's an agreement to focus on patently mutual aggression: weddings that devolve into cruel histories of familiar tragedies.  Young couple remain happy no more than five years, porn addiction, psychological sadism, pride without dignity, evasion even of collective placebos for individual frustrations. Farce suits this purpose, all of a constellation of superstars not missed by anyone.  For each known vice there is a "star" fighting to fulfill the image that has been commercialized through them.
     In the midst of this, there are the inevitable biological cycles: daily hundreds of children are born, thousands.  And there remains nothing to support life. Today children are a box wherein the echo of the conscious frustration of the parents resonates. "Better would it have been to never be born.  I never wished to give birth to you.  The entire time you grew I prayed to God that you would die, then we would've avoided pains, as much for you as for me."  In school it's raised against them, where they are told that they're alive solely to function; that life has been programmed and the slightest fault leads to prison or death.  In case any thinks of escaping, there will always be a use for you.  Singing out defeat, demise is glorified.  With empty stomachs applauding gluttony. To stop martyring ourselves, we are contented with being indifferent to unknown pain.
     It's always been this way, but to say it now is necessary.  It is necessary to raise people resented so that humanity may self-destruct.