The other side of the hours
Alberto Villarreal
（Mexico）
It is said in Spanish that: “We will all reach our hour”. The hour it refers to, which is meant to be ours, is the hour of our death. For the person who says so, – at least when said in Mexico, whether Mexican or foreigner– death is not a painful or unfortunate end, but the celebration hidden behind this hasty and brief dream of being alive. Upon reaching our hour, we reach our end, since nobody withstands a piece of time which is only his or hers; and it does not mean that he reaches eternity, but just his hour, because eternity itself enslaves its believers. Upon reaching his time, he can no longer continue being a person and his time starts after words, on the other side of the hours. In the same way we were given a word to be our own – this balance of sound we call our own name – the experience of being a person, opened; when we are given “Our hour”, being a person must come to an end and something of which we cannot even write about, but of which we can only make a gesture begins. It is said that the only certainty we can have will come with “Our hour” and such as a meteorological phenomenon, such as rain or a day without clouds, it will pass us through, transitory and adjusted; it will be our last skin to grow and we will be the bones and veins of the hours. One will be the body of the other, inside or outside. It will complete us as bird migration completes summer, and we will complete it as having weight completes a body. Just as the word for a name makes us a person, our death makes them hours precisely. We are their names. Long names of thousands of people to whom hours belongs to as well.
There is a popular celebration in Mexico called: Day of the Dead. It means that all who have reached their hour and have stopped being persons will come back for one night to celebrate in the style of those who are still alive. The large timeless community of the death will come back for a couple of drinks from live hours, for a sweet bit of which among them is already ancient and we do not know if forgotten. The live offer food, celebration and all the night hours to share the dishes and flavors they enjoyed, in order to calm the nostalgia for the body. The tradition says that on the eve of the celebration, every living friend must receive a sugar skull with their names written with icing on the forehead. An edible, white and appointed skull, only ours, which anticipates not only the hour of our death, but all the hours when we will be back from it to share with our own people. Those hours are a theatre of the celebration out of time.
I would like to insert a demographic fact here. It is said, without being able to prove – since the story of humanity, is not only the story of its wars and progress, but above all, the story of its fiction – that we are now the same amount of human beings alive as the total amount of human beings that lived in the past. This means that for the first time, the dead equal the live in number. I believe that for those of us who have experienced this balance between life and death, unique, irreplaceable, urgent and above all non performable, this is a new relationship with time, those hours that weigh on us and which are precisely weightless on the dead. Due to this fact, our following celebrations with them will be equal in number on both sides of the hours, and that celebration will be held, exactly by the end of this year.
But now, at this hour that we can be together, we can only know about the hour of the alive. We can compare them to know if by changing a language, where our names change, the hours are different as well; these hours which are not ours while we are alive. Being alive is to be using something that always belongs to someone else. The strength of plant and animal life with which we nourish ourselves; the architecture built by others which allows us to survive; machines dreamt by others which allow us to travel to the other side of the world; we live always receiving something that belongs to others. The humility to admit it opens the eyes of the two traditions which have gathered us: Literature and Theatre.
Elias Canetti appoints that Literature is a great conversation between two masses; the dead and the unborn; and this leads us to admitting that the Theatre is precisely the art of having a conversation with the large mass of the alive; the consecration of hours which are not ours trying to transcend all our names; evocation to create a centre, a resonator that vibrates with the dead, the alive and the unborn simultaneously; common space for those who talk; for those who listen but cannot answer and for those who still do not know they listen but who are already the answer in the future.
It is from these mysteries that I celebrate our meeting in the theatre of life, right now, in these seconds where we share the mystery of being a person next to others. I appreciate your time, your life making mine more livable, without time or schedule, but just in the simple present of this instant; the celebration of our words, the calligraphy of being on this side of the hours.