Page 15 - The Future Belongs to No One. Eugenio Ampudia

he set fire to it? Do they burn books here? In a world where ISIS demolishes age-old sculptures, setting fire to a few books suddenly seems a discreet action. Another discreet action: in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our images.‘Where there was fire, ashes remain’, the song goes. But this cold fire doesn’t burn, it’s like smoke, camouflage, signal, pure image that blends appearance and reality and causes us to reconsider their boundaries. There are no ashes here either.To reach the future, to touch it with his fingertips, a moustachioed man called Marinetti proposed burning the past, demolishing it, blowing up museums and libraries to reach the stars.Only a few years later, a chubby-faced poet called Apollinaire said of a skinny, big-nosed guy called Duchamp that he would finally succeed in Reconciling art and the people.Now we’re in their future, which is our present. Here we are, glued to the instant – for an instant then, we remain in the present. The future belongs to no one, but this instant here, with the soles of our shoes temporarily immobilised, this instant is ours. What are we doing? My knee senses an effort and thinks of letting itself go.I freeze. Or rather I am immobile. I, knee, make an effort to generate movement but think it would be best to keep still for a moment. I look around me.I am a shoulder, I am another shoulder: I rise and fall, breathe. One side says ‘I like it, it gets me all fired up’ while the other asks ‘What’s that? Are those books moving? Books on fire?’ Communication.The future is not ours or anyone’s – but the present here, is. A reconciliation is taking place.4. SubjunctiveHaving reconciled Art and the People, we may now quote precarious research resources. Dixit Wikipedia: ‘The subjunctive is a grammatical mood found in many languages. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred. [...]The subjunctive is an irrealis mood [...] – it is often contrasted with the indicative, which is a realis mood.2 In traditional grammar it is said to be the mood of the subordinate clause whose action, through the content of the main clause or the type of connection with it, takes on a subjective nature of possibility, likelihood, hypothesis, belief, desire, fear or necessity. However, in Spanish the subjunctive also expresses facts that are perfectly objective, real and proven (Me alegra que estés aquí [I’m glad you should be15 | EUGENIO AMPUDIA. THE FUTURE BELONGS TO NO ONE YET15 | EUGENIO AMPUDIA. THE FUTURE BELONGS TO NO ONE YET