18.10.06
THE TRUE LENGTH OF NEO-EMOTIONALISM (A SHORT STORY)
Right now I’m studying a master’s degree in psychotherapy. The first book I reread before getting into that was The Myth of Psychotheraphy by Thomas Szasz, so I won’t say I believe in what I’m doing. But who cares? I don’t believe in writing either.
I pursue both activities anyway—without believing in them—because from a very young age I learned any praxis is better than actual reality. We act because we want to escape from our current conditions. And to do that praxis is even better than fantasy.
I was the son of a sofa. Which means I had to learn doing anything is better than staying in the first position the world puts you in. One day my mother told me—she was happily stoned—she made herself into a sofa in order to escape from her family, which was even worst than being a sofa. That’s the reason most sofas ended up in the streets: the Family is an institution which makes you feel even worst than being burned up in the street.
In fact I can only take into practice things in which I don’t believe, because at the end we act because we want to change our current conditions but in doing that we only get worst. We want money, and what do we get? A boss. We feel alone, and what do we get ourselves into? Marriage. We go to therapy, and what happens? We find out we are mentally ill. Something wrong with What’s Right.
Escaping from one’s current conditions makes us fall into a bigger pit. That’s why wu-wei and other Taoism or Zen myths were so popular some decades ago. Not-acting is best. But not acting is impossible. Even people who would do anything in order to escape from their real lives, like actors, have to act.
I perfectly know practice ruins things. So I don’t take into practice something I don’t want to fuck up.
I try, for example, not to love anybody. I don’t think people deserve to be destroyed by me. And I don’t want to be destroyed by them. Love should remain just an interesting theory.
I like Thomas Szasz. I think him and Feyerabend are the real followers of Nietzsche, not Cioran, Baudrillard or even Foucault. I make this philosophical observation because I think preserving the philosophical is important.
If philosophy didn’t exist, how we would be allowed to love other males? In Christian countries like Mexico or the U.S. loving authors is one of the few alternatives gay men have to not reveal they are gay and not ‘men’.
Philosophy is crucial. Even if tradition is a hoax, for the sake of male-to-male love let’s leave philosophy alone.
The same goes for literature.
Psychotherapy students are the worst. At least in Mexico. They think they are either Sigmund Freud or Carlos Castaneda. I already know in some months I’m going to take a sexuality course in which I am going to have to dance salsa with somebody of the opposite sex. I hate salsa. Not even to put my penis close to some girl’s vagina I would dance salsa. Salsa castrates fear. You lose fear if you dance. I don’t want to. Those who are afraid, think they have it all. They are afraid of losing it ALL. So I don’t want to lose ALL. I must remain afraid.
I don’t belong in that class. That class gives me nightmares. But as I said I never am in places I should be. What happens is I like to play dead. Writing I play dead too. That’s what I like about theory, by the way. In theory one does not have to do anything. In theory-world the body isn’t needed. In theory-world dying does not happen. In theory-world writing and sex fulfill you.
In theory-world if I ask a girl if she wants to fuck with me, she says she needs to think about it.
And so we both think about sex and that’s it.
In reality things work very differently. There sex sometimes happens. And if sex happens, sometimes other things also happen, like kids, love, family, hate or orgasms. Sex has consequences. In theory-world there are no consequences / just hypothesis.
Theory-world may or may not exist.
Theory-world is subjective. It’s a very personal experience. We don’t need to share theory-world with anybody else. Theory-world is just like anarchism but without having to read Stirner, Bakunin, Matthai or the Unabomber. Anarchism takes too much activity. Theory-world is wholly depolitized.
Reality is very different. Sex is more difficult. In reality the same girl that said she would think about having sex with me, may now say Yes. And if she says Yes we need to do it, because in reality two people that want to have sex do it anyway. But she may also say No. That may mean we both want to live in theory-world and have sex there, or simply may mean she really doesn’t want to have sex with me. That’s fine with me, because if I ask somebody to have sex with me that means I don’t want to do it. If I ask somebody to have sex with me what I’m looking for is not a Yes or a No, but a Why?
Saying Yes or No to Sex is nothing but quotes. I hate quotes. Sex is referential, and references don’t let us be truly us or truly free. I want to live in a newly born world, just like Adam and Eve.
So as soon as I finish my master’s I am going to go some place else. I’m thinking about Chiapas. I want to join the Zapatistas. Die there. Fighting globalization. I want to become a famous Mexican writer who left literature to die in a horrible jungle. That’s even better than the hoax of Rimbaud. That myth about Africa and so on. I think I am going to be remembered as the next hip thing after magical realism. I’m pure gold. My two Mexico City agents are right. Spain is welcoming me. The government is looking for me. My Mexican female readers love me. I’m going to achieve Glory. Mighty Glory. In my dreams I see myself as a very just man. I see myself very close to Benito Juárez and Martin Luther King. I am almost morally perfect. That’s why I want to kill myself with a black mask in my face, and a wood rifle in my hand. I want that photo in the Sunday newspaper I now write for.
I don’t think the Lacandona is a beautiful jungle. I think it’s a horrible place. Ecology lovers romanticize nature. Nature is not nice. Nature doesn’t deserve to be loved. Cave men were afraid of it. To love nature is not natural. Nature is dangerous, and that’s the way it should remain so humans don’t get close to it and ruin it. We should understand nature is death.
People think the Zapatistas are people full of hope and shit like that. But that’s not the case. Zapatistas are Mexicans —Indian or not— who know our culture is falling because of our own government = corruption and American companies = YOU. We don’t know which was first, if Mexican corruption or American Companies, the same way we don’t know the solution for that game about the chicken or the egg. History doesn’t help. But we do know we are close to our end. And instead of keeping ourselves alive when the country becomes completely Americanized (aka, is dead) we prefer to fight until that dead end comes.
So I want to find death in Chiapas and not in the Chia Pets. I just told a friend there, an Indian poet in San Cristobal de las Casas, if she can help me find a quick way to join the guerrilla. She is hesitant of giving me the info. In her last email she said most people that suddenly want to join the Zapatista guerrilla are either in hunger of sex or in hunger of death.
“People come to Chiapas saying they want to see how the Indians are living. Yeah right [‘Sí cómo no…’ her exacts words]. What they really want is to meet a European tourist to fuck with him or her”.
She’s right. The Mexican middle or upper class mostly travels to the South to find out if they are bisexual or to attend a swinger’s party.
SOUTH = HOTELS
“And if your purpose is to find death in Chiapas, then you are not a true Zapatista but a suicidal person”, she wrote. Haven’t heard from her since. So I think I am not going to live in Chiapas, and I will need to go to San Francisco when I finish my master’s.
In San Francisco I would join the experimental lit scene. My English isn’t that bad. I can handle conversations. I could go to the parties, readings, workshops, make them believe I am the mexperimentalism guy from the South. I think that could be attractive to that community, right? I could do the same in NYC but I don’t understand their accent. People from NYC speak English as I it was a foreign language. I think people in NYC speak that way because they slowly want to develop different dialects, so in the near future they won’t have to understand each other, or have to learn another real language to achieve the same results.
In San Francisco I would meet a young fiction writer like me. I would translate her or his work into Spanish, or make him or her believe I’m doing that in order to make him or her fall in love with me. That never fails. I once did that with a girl in L.A. I said I was translating her into Spanish, a language in which her work didn’t sucked. And she loved me that entire weekend.
I am going to meet there a fiction experimental writer and not an experimental poet because I find experimental poetry very conservative. After the LangPo and other literary strategies, a foreign reader like tends to think younger American poetry writing must certainly be stupendous. I have found that’s not the case. Most American poetry is just like their Mexican counterpart, dull. We are two countries united by one same boring verse.
Experimentalism is a structural function whose purpose is to open the way to the emergence of new emotions through language. That’s what Stein, Spicer and Hejinian did. So if new emotions don’t come after experimentalism, something went wrong. And American contemporary poets didn’t find new emotions. They only found new careers.
But don’t pay any attention to me. I don’t even try to be experimental. I trust old lady irony. I still believe in desire. I fall in boredom very frequently. Everything I do is conventional. I wanted to change Spanish, and what did I do? Switch into English, just like our latest presidents have recommended.
That’s why I want to meet an experimental fiction writer in San Francisco. I don’t care if it’s a girl or a boy, because my proposal would be to have a relationship in which we won’t have to have sex, because sex is the root of all conventional emotions.
I have chosen San Francisco because San Francisco is a better place to live than Tijuana. Tijuana, like the rest of Mexico is soon going to be fully Americanized, so if I am going to leave in ‘America’ anyway I prefer to be in San Francisco and not in this awful maquila-place. The only reason I live in Tijuana is that is part of Mexico. I wouldn’t leave in Tijuana just because. Tijuana is a horrible city. Only drug lords or writers can stand it.
The only way one can survive in a city like Tijuana is to be an alcohol or marijuana user or be in some kind of psychotherapy program. I’ve tried both, but no real results. So in theory-world I already live either in Chiapas or in San Francisco, depending if that day I feel leftist or I feel cynical.
In this piece I think I feel cynical.
But if the reader thinks otherwise, he or she can put a mark where he or she feels the author is really coming from.
( ) Third World Writing
( ) Mexperimentalism
( ) Late Ironic School
( ) A new emotion
( ) Anti-Americanism
( ) Comedy
( ) Something Else
NORTH = NOTHINGNESS
Is the beginning or the end?
I pursue both activities anyway—without believing in them—because from a very young age I learned any praxis is better than actual reality. We act because we want to escape from our current conditions. And to do that praxis is even better than fantasy.
I was the son of a sofa. Which means I had to learn doing anything is better than staying in the first position the world puts you in. One day my mother told me—she was happily stoned—she made herself into a sofa in order to escape from her family, which was even worst than being a sofa. That’s the reason most sofas ended up in the streets: the Family is an institution which makes you feel even worst than being burned up in the street.
In fact I can only take into practice things in which I don’t believe, because at the end we act because we want to change our current conditions but in doing that we only get worst. We want money, and what do we get? A boss. We feel alone, and what do we get ourselves into? Marriage. We go to therapy, and what happens? We find out we are mentally ill. Something wrong with What’s Right.
Escaping from one’s current conditions makes us fall into a bigger pit. That’s why wu-wei and other Taoism or Zen myths were so popular some decades ago. Not-acting is best. But not acting is impossible. Even people who would do anything in order to escape from their real lives, like actors, have to act.
I perfectly know practice ruins things. So I don’t take into practice something I don’t want to fuck up.
I try, for example, not to love anybody. I don’t think people deserve to be destroyed by me. And I don’t want to be destroyed by them. Love should remain just an interesting theory.
I like Thomas Szasz. I think him and Feyerabend are the real followers of Nietzsche, not Cioran, Baudrillard or even Foucault. I make this philosophical observation because I think preserving the philosophical is important.
If philosophy didn’t exist, how we would be allowed to love other males? In Christian countries like Mexico or the U.S. loving authors is one of the few alternatives gay men have to not reveal they are gay and not ‘men’.
Philosophy is crucial. Even if tradition is a hoax, for the sake of male-to-male love let’s leave philosophy alone.
The same goes for literature.
Psychotherapy students are the worst. At least in Mexico. They think they are either Sigmund Freud or Carlos Castaneda. I already know in some months I’m going to take a sexuality course in which I am going to have to dance salsa with somebody of the opposite sex. I hate salsa. Not even to put my penis close to some girl’s vagina I would dance salsa. Salsa castrates fear. You lose fear if you dance. I don’t want to. Those who are afraid, think they have it all. They are afraid of losing it ALL. So I don’t want to lose ALL. I must remain afraid.
I don’t belong in that class. That class gives me nightmares. But as I said I never am in places I should be. What happens is I like to play dead. Writing I play dead too. That’s what I like about theory, by the way. In theory one does not have to do anything. In theory-world the body isn’t needed. In theory-world dying does not happen. In theory-world writing and sex fulfill you.
In theory-world if I ask a girl if she wants to fuck with me, she says she needs to think about it.
And so we both think about sex and that’s it.
In reality things work very differently. There sex sometimes happens. And if sex happens, sometimes other things also happen, like kids, love, family, hate or orgasms. Sex has consequences. In theory-world there are no consequences / just hypothesis.
Theory-world may or may not exist.
Theory-world is subjective. It’s a very personal experience. We don’t need to share theory-world with anybody else. Theory-world is just like anarchism but without having to read Stirner, Bakunin, Matthai or the Unabomber. Anarchism takes too much activity. Theory-world is wholly depolitized.
Reality is very different. Sex is more difficult. In reality the same girl that said she would think about having sex with me, may now say Yes. And if she says Yes we need to do it, because in reality two people that want to have sex do it anyway. But she may also say No. That may mean we both want to live in theory-world and have sex there, or simply may mean she really doesn’t want to have sex with me. That’s fine with me, because if I ask somebody to have sex with me that means I don’t want to do it. If I ask somebody to have sex with me what I’m looking for is not a Yes or a No, but a Why?
Saying Yes or No to Sex is nothing but quotes. I hate quotes. Sex is referential, and references don’t let us be truly us or truly free. I want to live in a newly born world, just like Adam and Eve.
So as soon as I finish my master’s I am going to go some place else. I’m thinking about Chiapas. I want to join the Zapatistas. Die there. Fighting globalization. I want to become a famous Mexican writer who left literature to die in a horrible jungle. That’s even better than the hoax of Rimbaud. That myth about Africa and so on. I think I am going to be remembered as the next hip thing after magical realism. I’m pure gold. My two Mexico City agents are right. Spain is welcoming me. The government is looking for me. My Mexican female readers love me. I’m going to achieve Glory. Mighty Glory. In my dreams I see myself as a very just man. I see myself very close to Benito Juárez and Martin Luther King. I am almost morally perfect. That’s why I want to kill myself with a black mask in my face, and a wood rifle in my hand. I want that photo in the Sunday newspaper I now write for.
I don’t think the Lacandona is a beautiful jungle. I think it’s a horrible place. Ecology lovers romanticize nature. Nature is not nice. Nature doesn’t deserve to be loved. Cave men were afraid of it. To love nature is not natural. Nature is dangerous, and that’s the way it should remain so humans don’t get close to it and ruin it. We should understand nature is death.
People think the Zapatistas are people full of hope and shit like that. But that’s not the case. Zapatistas are Mexicans —Indian or not— who know our culture is falling because of our own government = corruption and American companies = YOU. We don’t know which was first, if Mexican corruption or American Companies, the same way we don’t know the solution for that game about the chicken or the egg. History doesn’t help. But we do know we are close to our end. And instead of keeping ourselves alive when the country becomes completely Americanized (aka, is dead) we prefer to fight until that dead end comes.
So I want to find death in Chiapas and not in the Chia Pets. I just told a friend there, an Indian poet in San Cristobal de las Casas, if she can help me find a quick way to join the guerrilla. She is hesitant of giving me the info. In her last email she said most people that suddenly want to join the Zapatista guerrilla are either in hunger of sex or in hunger of death.
“People come to Chiapas saying they want to see how the Indians are living. Yeah right [‘Sí cómo no…’ her exacts words]. What they really want is to meet a European tourist to fuck with him or her”.
She’s right. The Mexican middle or upper class mostly travels to the South to find out if they are bisexual or to attend a swinger’s party.
“And if your purpose is to find death in Chiapas, then you are not a true Zapatista but a suicidal person”, she wrote. Haven’t heard from her since. So I think I am not going to live in Chiapas, and I will need to go to San Francisco when I finish my master’s.
In San Francisco I would join the experimental lit scene. My English isn’t that bad. I can handle conversations. I could go to the parties, readings, workshops, make them believe I am the mexperimentalism guy from the South. I think that could be attractive to that community, right? I could do the same in NYC but I don’t understand their accent. People from NYC speak English as I it was a foreign language. I think people in NYC speak that way because they slowly want to develop different dialects, so in the near future they won’t have to understand each other, or have to learn another real language to achieve the same results.
In San Francisco I would meet a young fiction writer like me. I would translate her or his work into Spanish, or make him or her believe I’m doing that in order to make him or her fall in love with me. That never fails. I once did that with a girl in L.A. I said I was translating her into Spanish, a language in which her work didn’t sucked. And she loved me that entire weekend.
I am going to meet there a fiction experimental writer and not an experimental poet because I find experimental poetry very conservative. After the LangPo and other literary strategies, a foreign reader like tends to think younger American poetry writing must certainly be stupendous. I have found that’s not the case. Most American poetry is just like their Mexican counterpart, dull. We are two countries united by one same boring verse.
Experimentalism is a structural function whose purpose is to open the way to the emergence of new emotions through language. That’s what Stein, Spicer and Hejinian did. So if new emotions don’t come after experimentalism, something went wrong. And American contemporary poets didn’t find new emotions. They only found new careers.
But don’t pay any attention to me. I don’t even try to be experimental. I trust old lady irony. I still believe in desire. I fall in boredom very frequently. Everything I do is conventional. I wanted to change Spanish, and what did I do? Switch into English, just like our latest presidents have recommended.
That’s why I want to meet an experimental fiction writer in San Francisco. I don’t care if it’s a girl or a boy, because my proposal would be to have a relationship in which we won’t have to have sex, because sex is the root of all conventional emotions.
I have chosen San Francisco because San Francisco is a better place to live than Tijuana. Tijuana, like the rest of Mexico is soon going to be fully Americanized, so if I am going to leave in ‘America’ anyway I prefer to be in San Francisco and not in this awful maquila-place. The only reason I live in Tijuana is that is part of Mexico. I wouldn’t leave in Tijuana just because. Tijuana is a horrible city. Only drug lords or writers can stand it.
The only way one can survive in a city like Tijuana is to be an alcohol or marijuana user or be in some kind of psychotherapy program. I’ve tried both, but no real results. So in theory-world I already live either in Chiapas or in San Francisco, depending if that day I feel leftist or I feel cynical.
In this piece I think I feel cynical.
But if the reader thinks otherwise, he or she can put a mark where he or she feels the author is really coming from.
( ) Third World Writing
( ) Mexperimentalism
( ) Late Ironic School
( ) A new emotion
( ) Anti-Americanism
( ) Comedy
( ) Something Else
Is the beginning or the end?
H-Yepez 13:47 
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