• ‘CXXIX’, from El Pez de Oro: Retablos del Laykhakuy (La Paz: Editorial Canata, 1957), pp. 139–140.

El Pez de Oro (The Golden Fish) is the major work of Gamaliel Churata, the pen name of Arturo Peralta Miranda (1897–1969), Bolivian writer, editor, and the animating intelligence behind the Boletín Titikaka (Puno, 1926–1930). The book is a sprawling, genre-defying essay-manifesto structured as numbered retablos (altarpieces), weaving together European philosophy (Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger) with Andean cosmovision, myth, and Aymara and Quechua thought. Its central argument is for what Churata called an Indo-American philosophy grounded in the vitalism native to the Americas, one in which an indigenous metaphysics of permanence supersedes the European dialectics of return and recurrence. Laykhakuy is an Aymara term for enchantment. The golden fish is the symbol of the American spirit: creative, submerged, and enduring. Section CXXIX moves from the biology of an ant colony to a critique of Nietzsche’s eternal return, arriving at Churata’s concept of naya: an Aymara term for selfhood that is non-transferable, non-optional, and eternal.

CXXIX. Let us look to Nature for the style of permanence. In a certain family of ants, the male lives only to procreate, and therefore his entire portion is sheer pain, since no sooner has he fertilised the female than she devours him. Do you grasp the transcendence of the norm? The father has a different destiny than the son, in the same way as the seed: he surrenders his nature in insemination, as his own nature was once surrendered to him; or, put otherwise, he renders unto the son his plastic materials, giving up his soul in the same act. I understand that the nitrogenous, calcic, albuminoid plastic matter ends up being digested, becomes vital juice, and goes to complete its formation in the ovum. The “ego” of the father will constitute a generative cell in the son, which the son must in turn transmit under the same conditions that his progenitor fulfilled with him. Nothing of the father has remained. Who is the son, then? He is the father, the grandfather, the great-grandfather, the great-great-grandfather: he is vital permanence, within an “ego” that is non-transferable and non-optional. Here, no one has died.

Apply this principle to history, or to that which is called history; let us speak afterwards of new peoples and new ideas. Let us apply it to cosmogeny and the result will be the same. There is only one history, within a cavern, in circular lived-experience, although there are many pseudo-histories. There is not even the “eternal return”. For that which is eternally returning has nowhere to return from: it has not left. That is an empty metaphor. The Stagirite1 was not lacking in intuition, though the stout jaw of his logic gave up at half a bite when he said that “we are only what we do repeatedly”; we do not live by habit, since we could quite easily break the habit of living and then we would no longer live. We do not live in reiterations but in permanence.

That miserable little ant, still savouring in the afterglow of ejaculation, goes to sleep—or rather, to his dissolution—in the belly of its wife, would reject, if he could, such an endlessly repetitive arrangement, one at such cost to his very flesh. One sees that the little ant does not exist because it repeats, but because it is permanent—either that, or it is not at all. Life takes no account of the free will of its creatures: it is this free will, and to remain within it one need not return or repeat, but simply stay still without budging, for otherwise life may drop us from its hand and then there are no eternal returns or possible reiterations. We exist in remaining, not in striving. One only lives alive. And one lives in a naya2 that is non-transferable, non-optional and eternal.

Time is Chronical3, the urban heartbeat of a Hellenic nature. All mythogeneses presuppose Chronos — in Iapetus, in decline, in the clepsydra4 — as if to make us understand that time is old and we are its childhood. Nothing could be more mistaken. Chronos, measure of time, is as old as whoever employs it; for whoever does not employ it, it does not exist. Time and Space draw their macabre parallel and in doing so, negate one other. As that enchanter of Mama Kuka5 says: the first cry—¡ingá!—of the newborn, that very first cry, is equivalent to the first second of its existence. It would be nothing less than outrageous to maintain that in that moment, in that second, the child has one second of existence. No. It is older than Iapetus, because it exists not in the chronometer but in the universe. Where is time? Child and corpse alike have no age, because they die of being born.

  1. Aristotle (384–322 BC), so called from his birthplace, Stagira. ↩︎

  2. Naya is an Aymara first-person term for selfhood, carrying collective and cosmic weight rather than the individualist connotations of the Western ego. Its use here closes the passage by grounding Churata’s argument in an indigenous metaphysics of permanent, non-transferable being. The scare quotes around ’ego’ throughout the preceding paragraphs prepare exactly this — holding the Western concept provisionally at arm’s length until naya can emerge as the positive term. ↩︎

  3. Churata’s coinage, derived from Cronos, the Greek personification of time. The word distinguishes the temporality he is describing from the merely chronological: to call time chronical is to mark it as a specifically Hellenic cultural construction — time as the Greeks experienced and named it, rather than time as such. ↩︎

  4. Three figures of Chronos in mythological dress. Iapetus is the Titan father of Prometheus, associated with mortality and the primordial violence of time’s passage. Declinación means waning, deterioration — the arc of things falling away. The clepsydra is the water clock: time as measurable depletion, something that empties out. Together they build Churata’s indictment: every mythological system reaches, through different images, toward the same Hellenic error. ↩︎

  5. Mama is an Aymara and Quechua honorific for a revered feminine figure; kuka is coca (Erythroxylum coca), the sacred Andean plant. The Spanish has ese enloquecedor de la Mama Kuka — literally ’that maddener of Mama Kuka’ — where enloquecedor is an active agent noun: this figure wields coca to drive others to vision or ecstasy, rather than being driven mad by the plant. The figure is unnamed and may be composite or fictional, or Churata’s way of invoking an oral tradition rather than citing a specific text. ↩︎

CXXIX. Miremos en la Naturaleza el estilo de la permanencia. En cierta familia de hormigas el macho vive sólo para procrear, y, por tanto, su espacio es igual dolor, ya que no bien ha fecundado a la hembra, ésta le devora. ¿Aprehende usted la trascendencia de la norma? El padre tiene otro destino que el hijo, de la misma manera que la semilla: dále su naturaleza en la inseminación, como él la recibió del suyo; o, de otro modo, le tributa sus materiales plásticos, con los cuales, además, le cede su alma. Entiendo que la materia plástica nitrogenada, cálcica, albuminoidea, acaba por ser digerida, se convierte en jugo vital, y va a completar su formación en el óvulo. El “ego” del padre constituirá en el hijo una célula genésica que éste deberá transmitir en las mismas condiciones que con él cumpliera su progenitor. Del padre nada ha quedado. ¿Quién es el hijo, pues? Es el padre, el abuelo, el bisabuelo, el tatarabuelo: es la permanencia vital, dentro de un “ego” intransferible e inoptativo. Aquí nadie ha muerto.

Aplique usted este principio a la historia, a eso que se llama historia; y hablemos después de pueblos nuevos y de nuevas ideas. Apliquémoslo a la cosmogenia y el resultado será el mismo. No hay sino una una historia, en caverna, en vivencia circular, aunque hay muchas pseudohistorias. No hay siquiera el “eterno retorno”; porque lo que está retornando eternamente, no tiene medios de retornar, puesto que no se ha ido. Se trata de una metáfora huera. No le faltó intuición al Estagirita, aunque el recio maxilar de su lógica se quedara a medio mordizco, cuando dijo, que “somos sólo lo que hacemos repetidamente”; si ciertamente no vivimos por hábito, puesto que bien podríamos deshabituarnos a vivir y ya no viviríamos. No vivimos en reiteraciones sino en permanencia.

Esa miserable hormiguita que no extinguidos todavía los regustos de la eyaculación va a dormir, o mejor dicho, a disolverse en el vientre de su mujer, rechazaría, de poder, tal sistema de insistencia a costa de sus riñones. Se ve que la hormiguita no es porque es repetidamente, sino que es porque es permanente, o no es. La vida no cuenta con el libre albedrío de sus creaturas: ella es el libre albedrío, y para estar dentro de ella no hay que retornar ni insistir, sino permanecer sin menearse, que de lo contrario ella puede echarnos de mano y entonces no hay eternos retornos ni reiteraciones posibles. Somos en estancia, no en insistencia. Sólo se vive vivos. Y se vive en naya intransferible, inoptativo y eterno.

El tiempo es cronical, latido urbano de naturaleza helénica. Todas las mitogénesis prefiguran al Cronos en Japeto, en declinación, en clepsidra, para hacernos entender que el tiempo es viejo, y nosotros la puericia. Nada más equivocado. El Cronos, medida del tiempo, tiene la edad de quien lo usa; para quien no lo usa no existe. El Tiempo y el Espacio hacen la paralela macabra, pues se niegan. Como dice ese enloquecedor de la Mama Kuka: el ¡ingá! del niño, el primer ¡ingá!, equivale al primer segundo de su existencia. Sería poco menos que desaforado sostener que en ese momento, en tal segundo, el niño ése tiene un segundo de existencia. No. Es más viejo que Japeto, porque no es en cronómetro, sí en universo. ¿Dónde está el tiempo? Niño como cadáver carecen de edad, porque mueren de nacer.