The Knicks won and, suddenly, I’m back in NYC.

“You’re staying down there? No way!”, this guy says when I tell him I’m renting a place on East 3rd Street with Avenue B. Actually, it happened more than once, but I don’t remember all the faces mouthing that question. I see it like a scene in a musical movie: in the reception hall of our film-school at Union Square three guys more or less my age (early twenties, that is) slide Fred-Astairely into a group and sing: “Down there? No way! That area is insalubrious, infamous… dangerous!”

This was 96 and, sure, the Lower East Village was a very different place, but I never felt anything like danger. There were a lot of Mexican immigrants living there and some other Spanish-speaking nationalities from the Americas and that scared some of the folk, I guess. That part of the city was much poorer than it is now. It was not postcardable at all. I think the word gentrification didn’t even exist. There was garbage on the streets; impressive cockroaches lounged in my bathtub; you could glimpse rats so big they looked somewhat fantastical; and there was a lot of drug trafficking out in the open. But I never had any problems. Except for that one day.

This tall, action-man type Colombian guy — who wore sleeveless shirts to show off his muscles — would come to my ground apartment door once a week and collect the rent. It was very much like in a movie. (It felt like I was learning cinema inside a film.) One day I go to the cash machine and the stupid thing answers back: no. Apparently, I had spent all of my parents’ allowance, and this young man’s dream — being in NYC with some dollars to spend — turned into a nightmare. It’s not a metaphor: that night, after I eventually fell asleep, exhausted from my day-long odyssey through film-making theoretical principles and practical obstacles, I had this kind of abstract, cartoonish nightmare where I got beaten by the giant superman from Colombia. Perhaps “beaten” makes it look a bit too realistic. It was more like in those Popeye animations where a punch makes the victim fly into the ceiling, you know?

In the next day’s early hours, as I was in my small apartment strategizing, thinking that maybe I should come up with a good story about loosing the money or being robbed or something — because the truth didn’t feel very convincing —, the Colombian guy (sorry, man, I didn’t get your name) showed up at my door. Before I could make a decision about it, the no-money bank machine version slipped out (the truth, that is) and I just stood there subconsciously waiting for one big, ugly South American hook. The Colombian collector looked straight at me, said something like “no worries, next week you pay double”, greeted me goodbye with a formal but not too strong handshake and left. He didn’t even charge me for the delay, can you believe it? I guess we were characters from different movies and our meeting was made possible only through the wondrous cosmic misunderstanding known as NYC. Looks can be misleading, we tend to typecast people, right? This giant, old-school villain was, basically, a gentleman in disguise.

But — yeah, New York City. Those street-basket courts I would pass by everyday, all those very different people I’d meet in one single day, that energy, that spirit! It all came to mind the other day as I was having a conversation with the great Arthur Flowers in a Lisbon recording studio and we somehow got to the issue of memoirs and cities. Also, I’ve watched Mamdani’s inspired Knicks speech: loved the way he found a way to make the team’s achievement a collective prize, a people’s victory. I played basketball in Portugal as a kid and loved NBA players, namely Abdul-Jabbar, Magic, Bird and, of course, Jordan. It was after these very intense three months in New York, though, that I became a Knicks fan. Through the years, this fanhood has taught me a lot, I can tell you, about patience, solidarity and, yes, hope, hope, hope. That’s NYC for me.

An underground train! It’s a whimsical idea, is it not?, but down here, in the long Lisbon metro tunnel, no one cares about stuff like that. Expressionless faces, suspended lives.

Well, not counting this blind couple I see in the middle of the crowd. A man and a woman, both carrying canes; something musical glowing around them. The doors will be open for a couple of seconds, there’s too many people trying to enter the car, and the blind lovers say goodbye passing tender hands on each other’s face and hair and kissing each other’s lips. The man stays, the woman comes in, bye-bye, see you later. We all look at them and, immediately, we pretend we didn’t see any of it. The silence that comes after is made of our embarassment, our shame of not being brazen like that, true like these lovers to our hearts, our hands, our mouths.

The metro goes and goes under the earth. I guess this is where this city’s subtext can be read.

Three-fifths of the people are on their cells, and I mentally aplaud the two women reading books. Yes, good idea, I will take out the little book I have in my backpack. Time, time, time.

Almost everyone is anesthetized by a screen, so the the man wearing the striped shirt who does nothing but mumbling looks like a relic from the past. That time when we used to speak to ourselves. In Portuguese, we say “está a falar com os seus botões” — literally “he’s talking to his buttons”. Around this man, people speak to their phone buttons; he’s the only one who knows we’re our own smart technology.

Up there the sun is collapsing on sidewalks, on the ever unfinished puzzle of these city’s rooftops; up there the calendar is being ripped by the wind, burnt by the mad heat of these apocalyptical days; but, down here, it’s always the same zero hour, always the same parenthetical time. Blank faces, introverted words.

At every stop, this family — mother, father and two kids carrying enormous school bags — goes out and comes back in, alowing other passengers to leave the metro car. But, when they get to their destination, the man and his younger son get stuck in a mass of shoulders and elbows. The woman stands outside, on the platform, shouting desperately; the iminent separation adquires a tragic, universal, Greek dimension. And, when you’d least expect it, the small kid finds a way through hips, stomachs, knees and pulls his father out. In one second, we get the whole three acts of a proper story!

Up there the days go by, but I travel down here, in the dark, by this glass window where I see nothing but shadow walls, reflections, visions, ghosts. At Arroios station, some years ago, I saw one the saddest things I can remember: a failed suicide. A man jumped onto the tracks and did not die. He kept on walking towards the darkness of the tunnel, but nothing happened. The electrical system had been shut down, I guess. The man was not crying exactly — a recorder would not have registered any sound — but we could all hear his despair.

Descending under the ground, we walk into our minds. And, perhaps, that’s simply too much. To face our ghosts like that. Maybe that’s why we escape to our phones or to our books.

So here I am riding the metro, reading. Suddenly, we come out of the tunnel, the cars bathed by sunlight. On the glass, the city slides over my open book. On the page, Simone Weil says that blind people’s canes touch God.

André Jorge, editor of Cotovia — a man who never lectured and from whom I’ve learnt so much —, used to say you should be able to put any word in a book, of course, but, in a title, you should restrain yourself from using curse words or “love”. He thought of it as an inelegant, obscene almost, buy me wink at potential readers. I never forgot that. It’s a very simple, practical principle, but, under it, lies a complex map of not-so-well demarcated territories: love, money, language.

If Raymond Carver had first published his stories in Cotovia, What do we talk about when we talk about love would have a different title, most probably. Perhaps, So much water so close to home, or Popular mechanics. I love his stories, don’t get me wrong, but it would have been for the best, most probably.

The thing is: ain’t no cure for it. I hear Cohen singing it, from that future where he migrated to some years ago, and I read Longo answering from his 2nd or 3rd century A.D. past. There is a cure for it alright, he says: it involves kissing, hugging and lying naked next to the person you love and who loves you back. Which is the answer and which the question? Between Longo and Cohen, across centuries, lies a whole history of rooms and other secret places.

Europe is sweating, but that’s no excuse. It was a mistake trying to write about this. I can’t stop it, though. Writing is also about finding ways of sabotaging oneself, I guess. Fail again, etc.

Part of this L-word problem is that it came to mean so many different things. The ancient Greeks, apparently, had five words for what we would now call love, five different types of it. One of them, of course, is eros.

In his Minima Moralia, Adorno writes that you don’t need a dictionary to read Sade in French. That you will understand everything in a “state of somnambulism”. For some reason, this made me think about that famous Eve Arnold’s photograph of Marilyn Monroe, where she is sitting, wearing a bathing suit, reading Ulysses. It’s one of the most beautiful representations of love that I know of. A beautiful symbol of that translucent enigma. It portrays, in a wonderfully care-free fashion, the equation of body, spirit, precision and chance that this L-word, whatever it is exactly, demands. Also, Marylin seems to be sleeping or dreaming, or maybe just somnambuling, pardon the neologism, inside that mad book. But I don’t want to dwell on it. It’s hard to write about it without drifting into platitudes or invented languages. Also, as I’m now realizing, the discourse tends to shatter. This little L-word breaks one’s texts into bits of images and ideas, disconnected fragments.

(Does that tell us something about the subject at hand? A feeling of wholeness that tends to break everything into bits…)

Also, I realize now that, trying to talk about this love thing, I end up talking about books, reading, writing, language. And I think of Clarice Lispector, how she remembered being young and going around the house, pretending not to know where she had left the book in order to delay the pleasure of reading it. Putting herself in a third-person costume, Clarice wrote (pardon my literal translation): “She created the most false difficulties for that clandestine thing that was happiness.” But, excuse me, what were we talking about?

In one of his brilliant football crónicas, Nelson Rodrigues says Brazilians are “Narcissus in reverse, spitting in their own image”. For a long time, Portugal was also like that. It was only due to our excess of modesty, in fact, that the Magriços national team lead by the dreamlike football of the mythical Eusébio failed to bring home the trophy from the 1966 World Cup, in England. (Well, maybe not only due to that; I’m told the referees also played a part…) Anyway, that sort of anti-vanity was part of us; we were simply build like that.

Decades go by and, suddenly, José Mourinho pops up on the world benches with his mindgames and his galactic contract compensations; on the world pitches, we get Cristiano Ronaldo with his selfie-football and brand-like personality. (In the opposite direction of AI avatars, the Madeira-born athlete has even changed his name for a bot-sounding, patentable acronym, CR7.) But it all went downhill. If these two figures’ project was to somehow calibrate Portugal’s proverbial excess of modesty, they made a gross miscalculation and fell on the other extreme. Or somewhere worse, I guess. If one looks at it carefully, what these two football big shots arrived at has nothing to do with pride or even vanity. It’s no more than a bitter, sad, monetizable egomania. A media exercise that relates to the true wonder of football like the current financial hypercapitalism relates to the art of, say, producing a real good shoe. And that shows on the pitch, of course. The ball senses everything; that wise round magical thing just knows. Money signs slide on the world screens while, on the green, green grass, football becomes depressingly square.

That is the context of last Wednesday’s match between Portugal and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s the context, but it serves also as the match synopsis, kind of. Portugal has one of its best teams ever (João Neves, Bernardo Silva, Vitinha, Bruno Fernandes, João Cancelo, Nuno Mendes, Rafael Leão, Gonçalo Ramos…) and, yet, Roberto Martínez, Portugal’s coach, puts CR7 in, leaves him there for the whole 90 minutes and, what’s worse, designs the team strategy with Cristiano and Cristiano’s records in mind. Against DR Congo, the amazing João Neves got a great header: 1-0. And then what? Well, then we went back to managing the void that Cristiano Ronaldo embodies. (Paraphrasing Nelson Rodrigues, Cristiano has become his own equestrian statue.)

This Wednesday at Houston stadium left us with a miserable draw and a very uninspiring horizon. The Portuguese football fan cannot help but feel — not unlike the common citizen in these times of oligopolies and populist corruption — that the system is rigged against him. Against his childish joy towards football, his mad love for the game. Against the Portuguese futebol bonito DNA and — if we insist mistaking this CR7 enterprise for our national team — against our pride, our self-esteem, our sanity.

That was truly exceptional: the way how, through the mysterious clarity of her voice, the Catalan artist managed to give us back to ourselves, to our bodies, our thoughts and emotions. The way how her presence was able to emphasize the idea of the other, connecting to others, of the collective as a value, the idea that music and life become greater when we all come together.

There’s a lot of noise around Artificial Intelligence these days. But maybe we should consider taking a step back and ponder calmly what’s at stake here. Call me idealistic, old-school, quixotic, but I think AI represents a real danger of dehumanization and falsification of the human. The prospect of putting a know-it-all technology — which, by definition, has no conscience, no freedom, no desire, no blood, no heart — at the helm of our individual and collective destinies is terrifying at a nuclear level.

The human is not franchisable to any machine, no matter how sophisticated. If you have any doubts about that, watch a Sílvia Pérez Cruz show. In her voice, for instance, we feel time as a plus (not as a productivity issue). In her voice the present and the past, dream and presence, come together in a way that no super-computer will ever be able to decompose. It’s a fluid, complex, delicate mix of mortality and intensity, frankness and artifice, spirit and grace. An immense unnamable that no artificial “I” can get, let alone create.

Halfway through one her songs, when the drum was marking the tempo of I don’t know how many hundreds of hearts, Sílvia began improvising and put in a verse from Barco negro, Amália’s famous fado. Suddenly, all the wonder made sense. The AI billionaires think they know it all, but they have no clue. The heart of the matter is elsewhere. We saw the future at Tivoli: Sílvia Pérez Cruz beats AI any time.

Remember the diner scene in Groundhog Day? Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is sitting at a table full of cakes, milkshakes, a large coffee pot, all sort of sweets, eating and drinking like there’s no tomorrow. There isn’t one for him, of course — that’s why. Rita Hanson (Andie MacDowell) looks at him like he’s crazy. She’s intrigued and disgusted at the same time. She asks him if he’s not worried about his health, cholesterol and whatnot. He isn’t. Apparently, nothing can harm our anti-hero Phil, because he’s re-living the same day over and over again. That’s his tragedy, precisely: nothing can harm him, because nothing can touch him. Nothing is of consequence.

I remembered that while reading Hyperpolitics, by Anton Jäger. Hyperpolitics is how Jäger defines the present epoch, “marked by the erosion — or even accelerated disintegration — of social bonds”, with high levels of “politicization” but low levels of “civic affiliation and membership” or “institutionalization”. “In contrast to the ‘high’ politics of the years 1918 to 1989”, writes Jäger, “hyperpolitics is an abidingly ‘low’ form — low-commitment, low-cost, and all too often, low value.” It leaves us with the impression, he says, of “a Carrollian grin without a cat”.

Now, there’s a good way of describing Phil Connors/Bill Murray’s expression as he gorges on chantilly-filled cakes: “a grin without a cat”. There’s no danger of cholesterol or diabetes for him, but there isn’t any pleasure either, because he’s locked up in a time-bubble. He tries to convince Rita Hanson/Andie MacDowell he’s like a god, because he has re-lived that day so many times he knows how every little thing will turn out. But even if he feels godlike, he’s also fundamentally bored to death. And doesn’t that sound very much like our collective, scroll-induced, gimme-emoji-hearts-and-all-kind-of-virtual-love boredom?

The online world we’ve entered with high hopes of connecting to faraway others, of making better sense of everything with a couple of clicks, of building some kind of global digital democracy has become a prison of sorts. It’s like we’ve all become this TV weatherman stuck in Punxsutawney for an infinite repetition of Groundhog Day.

“Bored to death”, the expression goes. And Phil does try to kill himself, though he’s bound to fail. In the morning, the famous, banal alarm-clock will wake him up shouting I got you, babe once again. His tragedy is ours: the world repeating itself with no consequence.

How can we tear down this prison’s invisible walls?

Hyperpolitics has some ideas. “For the left to catch up with its rivals will require a philosophical reckoning with the historic decomposition of voluntary association”. We must return to harder, no-bullshit forms of social and political commitment (political parties, unions, structured social civic movements, etc.). What Jäger calls the “reinstitutionalization of political engagement”.

We must strengthen local communitarian bonds, rebuilding politics through bottom-up processes and weaving a democracy that is for everyone and that goes everywhere. This includes, of course, “the spheres of production and distribution”.

We need nothing less than a collective everyday revolution. We must resist the commodification of life, the nothing-but-the-market logic that supports this hyperpolitical state of things if we want to fight injustice, inequality and the dominant futurelessness. We must carry our attention through the streets like a flag and get together with others to better the world around us every single day — so that each day is actually a new one. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Connors?

All sort of things happen in that incredible city by two rivers, the Sava and the Danube.

It was there, for example, that I saw a lightning made by a man pressing a button in a living room. A long time before, another man had imagined it with amazing, crystal-clear precision. They say he saw these magical machines as tridimensional objects floating in the air and that he immediately knew all its intimate characteristics, down to each centimeter, each little screw. His name was Nikola Tesla. His ashes are kept inside a metallic sphere in a small room of the museum bearing his name. This room is a very theatrical cubicle with curtains and one light only. It’s filled with a tremendous amount of silence and it looks both from the future and from the past. I stared at it for a minute or so and, still, couldn’t decide how to feel about it. The show had ended, or was it about to start?

I had the same feeling about Belgrade, I guess. The city seemed to be balancing on that thrilling if dangerous line between old ways and a new, fresh energy.

This was two years ago, a bit less. It was my first time in Serbia. I was there for the WEDA Theater Festival, invited by Srebrno drvo (a theater company and publishing house). My play Sagrada família, along other European plays, was translated into Serbian and had a public reading at the Belgrade Drama Theater. Jovan Tatić’s translation was great, I can tell you that — I don’t know Serbian, but I heard how the audience laughed at all the awkwardly comic twists in my little text. There were after-the-show talks and we ended up discussing stories, History, politics.

It all came to my memory last Monday as I read about the major demonstration at Slavija Square in Belgrade. Almost two-hundred thousand people gathered there demanding early elections. The protest is against president Aleksandar Vučić and his authoritarian, corrupt regime. It’s also a cry for freedom of expression in a country where government controls the media nationwide. The students movement has been leading the protests since 2024 and, apparently, will create a political platform for the next general elections. Europe and the world — all of us — must stand with them in this fight for democracy and justice in Serbia.

I know they will make it. They are serious, obstinate and also (very important) they know how to hold on to their unique sense of humor. These two verses from Dejan Matić’s poem Before My Morning Cup Of Coffee (translated by Novica Petrović) explain it better:

	I watch a black cloud from my window.

	Now I know, morning is an unexpected possibility

	Oh, and don’t worry. I’ve got my hat back. They mailed it to me some time after, inside this awkwardly comic box. It never fails to amuse me imagining my shy, Cohen-ish prop flying the European skies on its own, all the way from Belgrade to Lisbon.

If we want to be rigorous, a great novel like this one is not about anything. It is what it is, like a house, a road, a light bulb in the night. And yet there are some themes, ideas, some motifs, let’s call them, that run through it and may help us excavate this one-hundred-and-something pages monument. I thought of transcribing some lines from the novel and go with them.

“In my desperation to reach my daughter I was sprinting away from her.” The unnamed protagonist is on a train, “facing opposite the direction of travel”, what his young daughter once called “facing the past”. He’s going to interview Thomas, his ninety-years old mentor, and, as he is listening to a talk Thomas gave on translation in 1973, he falls asleep dreaming. In the dream there’s some kind of Covid-related urgency and he must pick her kid from school. But there’s an infinite line of people, parents, outside the school gate, waiting to get in, so, in order to get her daughter back, he must sprint “away from her”. A permanent instability of space and time is one of this novel’s motifs. If that’s the right word; perhaps materials would be a better choice here. (I guess that’s part of Lerner’s brilliance: that the what of his writing is always somehow confused with its how.) But — time. In Transcription, as in our mad world, there’s no easy way back to the past anymore (for starters, everyone’s memory seems to be failing) and, as Max, Thomas’s son, puts it when speaking about his daughter’s “food intake disorder” and his own guilt as a father, there’s also “a sense of futurelessness, catastrophe — fires, floods, fascism”. This being so, it’s only natural that the present feels very much like a breach, a crack between two impossibilities.

The smartphone is, in a way, the symbol of this cracked present. It’s, of course, the main motif of this novel. (And, at the same time, no more than its MacGuffin?)

“Again my hand reached for the corpse of my phone.” The protagonist’s phone falls into the hotel bathroom sink and stops working just before the interview. During the talk, Thomas insists on being recorded and the embarrassed interviewer pretends to record it on his damaged phone. What is to become this great artist-thinker’s last conversation ends being not exactly a transcription, but something else conjured by the protagonist’s memory and imagination.

(Some years ago, after The Topeka School, Lerner’s third novel, and before his coming to Disquiet in Lisbon, I interviewed him in Brooklyn for Expresso, a Portuguese newspaper. We had a great talk, wandering in the Ford Hamilton Cemetery, but I didn’t record it, just took some notes. Some days after, we continued it online, and on record, and for me it felt a bit like, sitting in front of our screens, “facing the past”, we were restaging the memory of that walk. But, no, this is getting dangerously close to self-fiction, let me close this parenthesis right now.)

“I was having an unusual experience of presence.” In our smartphone-a-thousand-screens-always-connected lives, being alive in the world risks feeling like that, precisely, “an unusual experience of presence”. And this raises questions about what literature should do with it. I don’t have a theory, I’m afraid. I’m just saying that an interesting aspect of Transcription is the way it subtly creates a territory of absence (with its recordings, FaceTime calls, text messages, disputed or constructed memories, etc.), where the magic of technology falls short. Or, as Thomas says in the book, from a slightly different angle: “The dream is opposed to your phone, where no dead or distances are able to appear”. By the way, is this book a novel, a fictional essay, several superimposed theater plays, what? That question is also part of it, I guess. One the materials this text is made of.

Our lives become a crossover between the online and the offline worlds and it seems like nothing much has changed. It’s just technological progress, we tell ourselves, a different tool, whatever. The truth is that a lot of fundamentals do change, are changing; like our relationship with time and space, our capacity to be there for the other, to accept the otherness of something or someone, or our ability to forge new political horizons, for example. Our world, as Max says of his father after he had a near-death experience, is “just a little different, but more different for only being a little different”. And Transcription shows this with the mysterious clarity of a black mirror.

On page 20 (I have the Granta edition), the protagonist visits the glass flowers in the National History Museum, Harvard. Two artists, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, have made them a century ago in Dresden: “thousands of anatomically perfect flowers in perpetual bloom”. And, on page 21, he tells us: “I was typically unmoved by ‘unspoiled’ mountain views; after the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful.” Then he calls this a “quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually”, he says, “I’d call this ‘fiction’.”

In a badly-scripted world where “reality” feels in between commas most of the time, this is what Ben Lerner’s Transcription does with words: it gives us back reality, penciled in a way that we cannot but recognize it — and, who knows, maybe recognize it as something we have to own up to.