This Cortázarian ideal of a day-book, a “day-to-day” book, a “night-book, it should be called” swells up in me when I sit right here, in front of the same empty page, in front of the same ideas that have chased each other in my mind since time immemorial, in front of these same people, (or obscured from them, in the sideways way of being obscured, carried by the axiom that anybody I write about will never truly experience what was written), attempting endlessly to write something “worthwhile” every day and I wondering if my first line was a lie, if it really is just an ideal, or can be a pure reality.

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Ideals, other things that chase each other, that have chased each other, that will chase each other “since time immemorial,” flood everything, even this essay. The thick, impossible separation of reality from ideal that seems so facile is the very root of the ideal, the concept on which it is predicated. Ideals untied from reality are something like nothingness, something like the empty space between two train cars.

(Grammatical games save my point: it is not that ideals are already or always a part of reality, but that they might be, have the ability to be. Without reality, or at least the concept of reality, these ideals would grow amorphous, shrink into a devalued conversational fog. As our dollar inflates itself into oblivion, we see a living example of this untying.)

I am not making the mistake of comparing myself and that of which I write to that separation of train car and space, or even comparing myself and the ideal to the separation. The meaning of the initial metaphor: everything is part of this reality. 

Thus, I have stated enough obvious truths that this piece has become a lie. Am I really so afraid to answer my initial question that I have danced this essay (essay?) down three paragraphs of metaphysical evasions, just to turn around and walk back to myself, or the double of me that is so close to myself but, really, is detached from me by ten minutes (of metaphysical evasions), to give the answer of the poet or of the philosopher or of the girl sitting alone at a desk writing a piece about ideals, or of anyone but the essayist wanting nothing more than a tangible answer, the answer that “everything is part of reality, that is what defines it as real.”

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Through all of these tangled words and concepts that eat each other alive, my double looks down from her seat at the top of the page, ready to scream from desperation, and in one final gesture of understanding, looks to me and asks “if reality is reality, always touching itself, always being created by itself, if A is A and also everything else, then aren’t those distinctions, those nothingness and somethingnesses, those two train cars and the spaces between them, still worthwhile distinctions, that now just happen to share the label of reality?”

It is obvious now, to my double and me, that the two of us have corralled between us Hegelian Dialectics, reverse-engineered them, run at them from either side and pulled them into this convoluted dialogue, or monologue, on reality (that was originally a convoluted monologue on ideals). According to Hegel, the two infinite contradictions, the total opposites that are thesis and antithesis, A and B, can both be rendered entirely true when faced with the mother of all that is tangible, all that is part of this world and not part of it, the synthesis, the everything. Again, to bring up Cortázar, this time as if he were Hegel, with an exemplary lyric moment of Hegelian Dialectics: “everything I’d want from you/is finally so little/because finally it’s everything.”

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After my double and I read that quote, find ourselves drowned in that great beauty of words so misaligned that they align again, we find the answer to our question: This Cortázarian ideal of a day-book, a “day-to-day” book, a “night-book, it should be called” is actually not an ideal, it is something entirely part of tangible reality, we simply are not Julio Cortázar, are not this mountainous Argentine who shattered and rebuilt the written word.