Translation Rights TQE / About the Body

In 1988, Mauricio Ortiz lived in the city of Burlington.  He had obtained a post-doctorate degree in biophysics of ionic channels.  He was a researcher in one of the most important universities in North America and an important member of a circle of researchers on the vanguard of neurophysiology.  Mauricio Ortiz was not only gifted as a researcher and as an observer, but he also knew how to think of questions that could not obtain an answer in a controlled environment, amidst microscopes  oscilloscopes, microelectrodes, and polygraphs.  He also knew that the world was wider and more alien than what the disciplined laboratory work permitted to see.  He decided to abandon it all. 

He begun exploring the closest continent: the body, as it is, without having it go through the sieves of a taxonomy to tame it and reduce it to something calculable.  There came a time when the most sophisticated technology was a much less precise recourse than a simple pencil, a piece of paper, and the liberty of one who observes the risks of being in the world. 

Umberto Eco said that books talk about other books; however, when this is the general rule, literature can begin to come undone; it is necessary to count on the presence of the world and on the presence of the subject in the world, and, in the first place as an object:  the body is not an outgrowth of the will.  On one occasion, G. K. Chesterton wrote, «many men, in many different time periods, have served their own bodies.  I doubt, however, that many men, in many different time periods, have so feared their bodies.  We could represent, in a symbolic drama, a man that runs down the street chased by his own body.»

This contemporary fear constitutes Mauricio Ortiz’s naked fascination.  What is the body?  Is it something that belongs to us or an object that holds us hostage?  That which happens with sweat, ejaculation, thirst, desire, love, and fantasy, is the body.  But as Antonio Tabucchi says in the prologue: «what I mean to say is, it’s me, but it’s him.    It is not a tale by Borges.»

Mauricio Ortiz was born in Mexico in 1954.  He received his doctorate in medicine and dedicated himself to the investigation of biophysics of ionic channels.  He later abandoned the academic setting to dedicate himself to his literary career.  He is a columnist for the newspaper La Jornada, where he writes his column Zig-Zag.