The Medallion Theory

– Are you sleepy?

– No, sir.

– Neither am I. Let’s talk for a while. Open the window. What time is it?

– Eleven o’clock.

– The last guest has left our modest dinner. You’ve just reached your twenty-first birthday, my little vitiate. Twenty-one years ago, on 5th August 1854, you came into being, a little brat with nothing, and now you’re a man, long moustaches, a few flings…

– Dad…

– Don’t get all snippy and let’s talk like two serious friends. Close that door; I’m going to tell you important things. Sit down and let’s talk. Twenty-one years old, a few apolices, a diploma, you can enter parliament, the judiciary, the press, farming, industry, commerce, literature or the arts. There are endless careers before you. Twenty-one years, my boy, is only the first syllable of our destiny. Pitt and Napoleon themselves, despite their precociousness, weren’t all gone by the age of twenty-one. But whatever profession you choose, my wish for you is that you become great and illustrious, or at least remarkable, that you rise above common obscurity. Life, Janjao, is an enormous lottery; the prizes are few, the mallogrades innumerable, and with the sighs of one generation the hopes of another are crushed. That’s life; there’s no complaining or imprecating, but accepting things in their entirety, with their burdens and pitfalls, glories and disappointments, and moving on.

– Yes, sir.

– However, just as it’s good economics to save a loaf of bread for old age, so it’s good social practice to safeguard a trade in case the others fail or don’t sufficiently compensate for the effort of our ambition. This is what I’m advising you today, your coming of age.

– Believe me, I thank you; but what trade, won’t you tell me?

– None seems more useful and fitting than that of a medallion. To be a medallion was the dream of my youth, but I lacked the instruction of a father, and I end up, as you see, with no other consolation or moral relief apart from the hopes I place in you. Listen to me, my dear son, listen to me and understand. You are young, you naturally have the ardour, the exuberance, the improvisations of age; don’t reject them, but moderate them so that at forty-five you can enter frankly into the regimen of poise and compass. The wise man who said: “Gravity is a mystery of the body”, defined the composure of the medallion. Don’t confuse this gravity with that other gravity which, although it resides in the appearance, is a pure reflection or emanation of the spirit; this is of the body, only of the body, a sign of nature or a way of life. As for the age of forty-five…

– That’s right, why forty-five years old?

– It’s not, as you might suppose, an arbitrary limit, the child of pure whim; it’s the normal date of the phenomenon. Generally, the real locket begins to manifest itself between the ages of 45 and 50, although some examples occur between the ages of 55 and 60, but these are rare. There are also those aged forty, and others earlier, aged thirty-five and thirty; however, they are not common. I’m not talking about the twenty-five year olds: that early age is the privilege of genius.

– I see.

– Let’s come to the main point. Once you’ve entered your career, you have to be very careful about the ideas you nurture for your own and others’ use. It’s best not to have them at all, which you’ll understand well if you imagine, for example, an actor who has been denied the use of an arm. He can, by some miracle of artifice, conceal the defect from the eyes of the audience; but it would be much better to have both. It’s the same with ideas; you can violently stifle them, hide them until you die; but neither is this skill common, nor would such constant effort suit the exercise of life.

– But who tells you that I…

– You, my son, if I’m not mistaken, seem to be endowed with the perfect mental indigence that befits the use of this noble office. I’m not referring so much to the fidelity with which you repeat in a room the opinions you’ve heard on a street corner, and vice versa, because that fact, although it indicates a certain lack of ideas, could still be nothing more than a betrayal of memory. No, I’m referring to the correct, straightforward gesture you use to frankly express your sympathies or antipathies about the colour of a waistcoat, the size of a hat, the squeak or clack of new boots. That’s an eloquent symptom, that’s a hope. However, it may happen that, with age, you’ll be afflicted with some ideas of your own, so it’s urgent to equip your spirit strongly. Ideas are by their nature spontaneous and sudden; no matter how much we suffer them, they erupt and rush in. Hence the certainty with which the vulgar, whose nose is extremely delicate, distinguishes the complete medallion from the incomplete medallion.

– I believe this to be the case, but such an obstacle is invincible.

– It’s not; there’s a way; it’s to use a debilitating regime, read rhetoric books, listen to certain speeches, etc. Volleyball, dominoes and whist are approved remedies. Whist even has the rare advantage of accustoming you to silence, which is the most accentuated form of circumspection. I can’t say the same for swimming, horse riding and gymnastics, although they do rest the brain; but because they rest it, they restore its lost strength and activity. Billiards is excellent.

– What do you mean, if it’s also a bodily exercise?

– I’m not saying it isn’t, but there are things where observation belies theory. If I’m recommending billiards exceptionally, it’s because the most scrupulous statistics show that three-quarters of cue players share the same opinion of the cue. Walking in the streets, especially in recreational and parade streets, is extremely useful, on the condition that you don’t walk unaccompanied, because solitude is the workshop of ideas, and the spirit left to itself, even in the midst of a crowd, can acquire this or that activity.

– But if I don’t have a friend at hand who’s ready and willing to go with me?

– That’s okay; you have the brave resource of mingling with the pasmatorios, in which all the dust of solitude dissipates. The bookshops, either because of the atmosphere of the place, or for some other reason that escapes me, are not favourable for our purpose; and yet there is great convenience in entering them from time to time, not by stealth, but wide open. You can solve the difficulty in a simple way: go and talk about the rumour of the day, the anecdote of the week, a contraband, a calumny, a comet, anything, when you don’t prefer to directly question the usual readers of Mazade’s fine chronicles: 75 per cent of these esteemed gentlemen will repeat the same opinions to you, and such monotony is very healthy. With this regime, for eight, ten, eighteen months – let’s say two years – you reduce the intellect, however prodigious it may be, to sobriety, discipline and common equilibrium. I don’t deal with vocabulary, because it’s implicit in the use of ideas; it should be naturally simple, subdued, sparse, without red notes, without clarion colours…

– This is the devil! Not being able to adorn the style from time to time…

– You can; you can use a few expressive figures, the hydra of Lerna, for example, the head of Medusa, the vat of the Danaids, the wings of Icarus, and others that romantics, classics and realists use without hesitation when they need them. Latin sentences, historical sayings, famous verses, legal brocards, maxims – it’s a good idea to bring them with you for dessert, congratulatory or thank-you speeches. Caveant, consules is an excellent closing to a political article; the same goes for Si vis pacem para bellum. Some people renew the flavour of a quotation by interspersing it with a new, original and beautiful phrase, but I don’t recommend this: it would denature its old graces. Better than all this, however, which in the end is no more than a mere adornment, are the tried and tested phrases, the conventionalised locutions, the formulas consecrated by the years, ingrained in individual and public memory. These formulas have the advantage of not obliging others to make a pointless effort. I won’t list them now, but I will tell you about them in writing. For the rest, the same job will teach you the elements of this difficult art of thinking the thought. As for the usefulness of such a system, just think of a hypothesis. A law is made, it is enforced, it has no effect, the evil remains. That’s a question that can whet stray curiosities, give rise to a pedantic enquiry, a tedious collection of documents and observations, an analysis of probable causes, certain causes, possible causes, an infinite study of the aptitudes of the reformed subject, the nature of the evil, the handling of the remedy, the circumstances of the application; in short, material for a whole scaffold of words, concepts and follies. You spare your fellow human beings all this immense rigmarole, you simply say: Before laws, let’s reform customs! – And this synthesised, transparent, clean phrase, taken from the commonplace, solves the problem more quickly and enters the mind like a sudden burst of sunshine.

– I see from this that you condemn any application of modern processes.

– Let’s understand each other. I condemn the application, I praise the name. I’ll say the same about all the recent scientific terminology; you should memorise it. Insofar as the medallion’s distinctive design is a certain attitude of the god Terminus, and the sciences are the work of human movement, as you have to be a medallion later on, you should take up the weapons of your time. And there are two options: either they will be used and publicised thirty years from now, or they will remain new: in the first case, they belong to you; in the second, you may have the coquetry to bring them along to show that you are also a painter. In fact, with time, you will learn what laws, cases and phenomena all this terminology responds to, because the method of interrogating the masters and officers of science themselves in their books, studies and memoirs, besides being tedious and tiresome, carries the danger of inoculating new ideas, and is radically false. What’s more, the day you got to grips with the spirit of those laws and formulas, you’d probably be led to use them with a certain amount of restraint, like the seamstress who, according to a classic poet, is clever and lazy,

The more panniers she has, the more she spares the colour,

The less the patchwork;

And this phenomenon, if it were a medallion, wouldn’t be scientific.

– Wow, this is a difficult job.

– And we haven’t reached the end yet.

– Let’s get to it.

– I haven’t told you about the benefits of publicity. Publicity is a laudable and lordly mistress, whom you must favour with small treats, confectionery, cushions, little things that express the constancy of affection rather than audacity and ambition. That Don Quixote solicits her favours through heroic or costly actions is a characteristic of this illustrious lunatic. The true medallion has a different policy. Far from inventing a scientific treatise on the breeding of rams, he buys a ram and gives it to his friends in the form of a dinner party, the news of which cannot go unnoticed by his fellow citizens. One piece of news brings another; five, ten, twenty times you put your name before the eyes of the world. Commissions or deputations to congratulate an honoured person, a benefactor, a stranger, have singular merits, and so do brotherhoods and various associations, whether mythological, cynegetic or choreographic. Successes of a certain order, however small, can be brought to light as long as they emphasise your person. Let me explain. If you fall out of a car, with no harm other than fright, it’s useful to tell the four winds, not for the fact itself, which is insignificant, but for the effect of reminding people of a name dear to their hearts. Got it?

– Got it.

– That’s constant, cheap, easy, everyday publicity; but there’s another. Whatever the theory of art, there’s no doubt that family sentiment, personal friendship and public esteem instigate the reproduction of the features of a beloved or meritorious man. There is nothing to prevent you from being the object of such a distinction, especially if the wit of your friends doesn’t find you repugnant. In such a case, not only do the rules of vulgar politeness dictate that the portrait or bust be accepted, but it would be unwise to prevent friends from displaying it in any public house. In this way, the name is linked to the person; those who have read your recent speech (let’s assume) at the inaugural session of the Hairdressers’ Union will recognise in the composure of your features the author of this serious work, in which the “lever of progress” and the “sweat of labour” overcome the “hovering fauces” of poverty. If a commission brings your portrait to your house, you should thank them with a speech full of gratitude and a glass of water: it’s an old, reasonable and honest custom. Then invite your best friends, relatives and, if possible, one or two representatives. What’s more. If that day is a day of glory or rejoicing, I don’t see how you can decently refuse newspaper reporters a place at the table. In any case, if the obligations of these citizens keep them elsewhere, you can help them in a certain way by writing the news of the feast yourself; and if, for some excusable reason, you don’t want to use your own hand to add to your name the qualifications worthy of it, you can entrust the news to a friend or relative.

– I’m telling you that what you’re teaching me isn’t easy at all.

– I won’t tell you any different. It’s difficult, it takes time, a lot of time, it takes years, patience, labour, and happy are those who make it to the promised land! Those who don’t make it, the darkness swallows them up. But those who triumph! And you will triumph, believe me. You will see the walls of Jericho fall to the sound of the sacred trumpets. Only then will you be able to say that you are fixed. On that day, your phase of indispensable ornament, of obligatory figure, of label, begins. No more need to sniff out occasions, commissions, brotherhoods; they’ll come to you, with their heavy, raw air of unadjectivised nouns, and you’ll be the adjective of those opaque prayers, the scent of flowers, the indigo of the skies, the helpful of citizens, the newsy and succulent of reports. And that’s the main thing, because the adjective is the soul of the language, its idealistic and metaphysical portion. The noun is the naked reality, the naturalism of the vocabulary.

– And does it seem to you that all this work is just a substitute for life’s deficits?

– Of course; no other activity is excluded.

– No politics?

– No politics. The whole point is not to break capital rules and obligations. You can belong to any party, liberal or conservative, republican or ultramontane, with the sole proviso that you don’t attach any special ideas to these words, and recognise only the usefulness of biblical scibboleth.

– If I go to parliament, can I take the rostrum?

– You can and you should; it’s a way of attracting public attention. As for the subject of your speeches, you have a choice: – either petty business or political metaphysics, but prefer metaphysics. Petty business, it must be said, is not without that good-natured boredom typical of a finished medallion; but if you can, go for metaphysics – it’s easier and more attractive. Suppose you want to know why the 7th infantry company was transferred from Uruguaiana to Canguçu; you’ll only hear from the Minister of War, who will explain the reasons for this act in ten minutes. Not so metaphysics. A speech on political metaphysics naturally enamours the parties and the public, calls for comments and responses. And then it doesn’t force you to think and discover. In this branch of human knowledge, everything has been found, formulated, labelled and boxed up; all you have to do is fill the saddlebags of your memory. In any case, don’t ever go beyond the limits of an enviable vulgarity.

– I’ll do what I can. No imagination?

– None at all; rather, spread the rumour that such a gift is minuscule.

– No philosophy?

– Let’s be clear: on paper and in language, nothing, in reality. “Philosophy of history”, for example, is a phrase you should use frequently, but I forbid you to reach any conclusions other than those already reached by others. Run away from anything that smacks of reflection, originality, etc., etc.

– Laughter too?

– What do you mean laughter?

– Get serious, very serious…

– Depending. You have a playful, pleasant temperament, you don’t have to suffer it or eliminate it; you can joke and laugh sometimes. Medallion doesn’t mean melancholy. A serious person can have their moments of joyful expansion. Only – and this is a delicate point…

– Say…

– You just shouldn’t use irony, that movement at the corner of the mouth, full of mysteries, invented by some Greek of the decadence, contracted by Luciano, passed on to Swift and Voltaire, a characteristic of the sceptical and disabused. No. Rather, use the chalaça, our good friendly chalaça, chubby, round, frank, without biocos or veils, which gets in other people’s faces, cracks like a slap, makes the blood jump in your veins and your braces burst with laughter. Use the chalaça. What’s this?

– Midnight.

– Midnight? You’re in your twenties, you big lug; you’re definitely older. Let’s go to bed, it’s late. Rummage through what I’ve told you, my son. All things considered, tonight’s conversation is worth Machiavelli’s Prince. Let’s go to bed.

 

 

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