heriberto yepez

2008-04-17T14:28:00.000-07:00

ON 'HYBRID'

2007-04-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

On “Hybrid”. An entry for Cross Cultural Poetics’ "Dictionary"

HYBRID. Postmodernism’s key notion, maybe the notion that sustains most postmodernism’s quackery. Through the illusion of hybridism contradiction is obscured, turned commodity. Not able to recognize and accept the other in its complete otherness, we turn it into hybrid, i.e., half me, similar to Us. (Not Other). Not Either/Or but always proper. Property. Not completely stranger. ‘Mixed’. In denial of otherness we constructed ‘hybrid’. We have naturalized the ‘hybrid’ category so much, that the mere mention of this category as purely cultural, artificial, contextualized (in imperialistic epistemology) seems a ‘menace’, an evil return to ‘Nationalism’ or ‘Pure’. Using the ‘hybrid’ category we have remained Hegelian. We arrive to syntheses. (Isn’t that wonderful, daddy?) We prevent radical dialectics to take place. ‘Hybrid’ has taken control of cultural industries, such as music where fusion has become institutionalized. Such happens also in the arts and writing communities, where being ‘hybrid’ is the key to enter. And become “trend”. In the same way, ‘activism’ is replacing ‘revolution’, ‘hybrid’ replaced ‘contradiction’—and denies the real relationship between One and the Other. Otherness. Hybrid is sameness. Hybrid tends to become Happy Hybrid. That’s why the hybrid category plays so well in ‘postmodern’ discourse. A capitalistic notion to kill rupture. No negation anymore! Let settle down with hybridism, ok? Don’t even talk about resistance. But resistance is what really takes place where hybridism is now used. Resistance doesn’t mean borders or ‘essences’ are not transgressed. To the contrary. It means participants enter into a strong relationship. A magnetic field where attraction and repellence both take place. Resistance is all about magnetism. And the hybrid category is all about denying resistance.

PSICOHISTORIA MEXICANA. TIJUANA PSICOANALIZADA

2007-01-14T10:58:00.000-08:00

1. PSICOHISTORIA DE LAS CIUDADES MEXICANAS

Estoy convencido de la existencia de un inconsciente psicohistórico. Estoy convencido también de que el desorden ocurrido en lugares como Oaxaca, Chiapas, Culiacán, Ciudad Juárez, la Ciudad de México y Tijuana tiene como su causa profunda los desórdenes invisibles de dicho inconsciente psicohistórico. Para bien o para mal, ese inconsciente psicohistórico da estructura a las ciudades; las ciudades son su encarnación. Polis y psique se co-forman. Inconsciente y ciudad son idénticas.

Los desórdenes en el inconsciente psicohistórico de las urbes mexicanas se deben a la pérdida de sentido de su función en el conjunto de la(s) cultura(s) a la(s) que pertenece(n). Estas ciudades, por así, decirlo se han vuelto ciudades confundidas.

Islas cuyo único vínculo entre sí es la Máss-Co-Media del TV-Capital.

La cultura mexicana —una pluricultura— desde sus orígenes sabe que cada ciudad entraña una ‘identidad’, entendiendo por ésta una serie de metodologías de metamorfosis; en esta cosmovisión, el tránsito de una urbe a otra y la creación de una nueva entidad geopolítica implican formas de ser específicas, patrones de transformación y co-destinos. El pensamiento prehispánico es una profunda (y esotérica) reflexión sobre la psicometafísica de las ciudades. Cada espacio-tiempo posee sus propias leyes.

Una de las bases de este pensamiento es el carácter simbólico de la dialéctica entre “Tollan” y “Aztlán”:

Pudo quedar así una Tollan tras otra. Y así pudieron nacer una y otra Aztlán. Sólo que Tollan podía serlo cuando en ella vivía el pueblo que así la llamaba, mientras que Aztlán recibía su nombre en el momento en que la peregrinación empezaba. Aztlán, la dejada (Alfredo López Austin, Hombre-Dios. Religión y política en el mundo náhuatl, p. 157).

Personalmente resumo la espiritualidad mexicana así: Tollan es Aztlán; Aztlán es Tollan. “Tollan” significa el espacio-tiempo (urbano y psíquico) donde se alcanza la plenitud espiritual; “Aztlán”, el espacio-tiempo útero (urbano y psíquico) que da origen a la geopsique. En esta espiritualidad, cada instante debe convertirse en “Tollan” y conforme el devenir prosigue, cada instante pasado se vuelve “Aztlán”, es decir, etapa superada del camino sagrado. Tollan y Aztlán aluden, sobre todo, a la cartografía de una migración mental. Se tratan de estaciones del viaje interno.

Sé que aquí me separo de las interpretaciones científico-sociales de los mesoamericanistas académicos. Pero al hacerlo creo apegarme al pensamiento prehispánico propiamente dicho. El mensaje esencial de este pensamiento es que debemos migrar hacia adentro. La verdadera Tollan no es Tula o Teotihuacán, la verdadera Tollan es una Tollan interior.

Los chicanos, por ejemplo, han interpretado erróneamente el mito de Aztlán, al clamar que Aztlán está en Estados Unidos. Para los antepasados de los mexicas, Aztlán estaba ubicado al norte, pero para los mexicoamericano Aztlán —la ciudad de donde han salido, su ciudad-madre— en verdad tendría que estar situada al sur. No han sabido leer este nivel del mito. Aunque, por otro lado, si los chicanos buscan Aztlán es porque precisamente no han sabido superarla. Olvidaron que la enseñanza antigua predica salir de Aztlán.

El “sur” en su significado profundo alude al submundo psíquico. Lo que el psicoanálisis del siglo XX llamó “inconsciente” en el pensamiento prehispánico se llama “Xibalbá” o “Mictlán”. Las enseñanzas rectoras de estas culturas se trataban precisamente de cómo ingresar a esa región obscura de la psique.

Este es el fundamento de la psicohistoria de nuestras ciudades en México (una cultura que esencialmente se define por la migración-metamorfosis simbólica entre Tollan-Aztlán; una cultura que se autoconceptualiza por el significado que las ciudades imprimen en los individuos y por las ciudades que éstos crean). Por razones de extensión, no podré aludir todo lo que quisiera a esta dialéctica; sin embargo, pido al lector tenga en cuenta en cada paso de esta explicación, la metamorfosis, a la vez externa (política) e interna (psíquica) entre “Tollan” y “Aztlán”.

Una ciudad forma parte de una red de urbes. Cada una tiene en el tejido una misión espiritual y material específica. Cuando se descompone el tejido y se descomponen las ciudades, la cultura y los individuos enloquecen. A partir de aquí entiéndase por “ciudad” la coordinación inconsciente de espacio-tiempo externo e interno.

Esto es lo que actualmente ocurre en México. Su psicohistoria ha perdido el rumbo.

2. PSICOPOLÍTICA DE TIJUANA

He escrito lo suficiente de tijuanología específica —análisis de su literatura, de su historia como urbe y su relación con debates sobre el posmodernismo— como para ahora darme la libertad de escribir más ‘metafísicamente’ si se quiere, sobre sus sentidos y sobre los mensajes que ‘Tijuana’ lanza sobre nuestra cultura mexicana completa. Nótese, además, que en las líneas precedentes he adoptado términos del pensamiento prehispánico, pero lo mismo podría adoptar los correspondientes términos de alguna escuela psicoanálica —desde la freudiana o la gestáltica, la lacaniana o el eneagrama—; lo relevante, sin embargo, no son los conceptos sino las situaciones. Cada ciudad mexicana se ha vuelto una forma hipertrófica de amok o ataque histérico.

Las ciudades entran en caos cuando pierden su origen. Y, por ende, confunden su destino.

Un perfecto ejemplo de la descomposición de “Tollan” es Tijuana.

Tijuana es una ciudad mexicana tardía, cuyo desajuste central como urbe es no saber cuál es su ciudad-madre. Cuál es su ciudad-padre.

Por no saberlo, Tijuana mira hacia el norte. Su mirada está puesta en San Diego, en su ciudad-padrastro. Y en su ciudad hermanastra, Los Angeles.

Al tener la vista puesta hacia el norte, da la espalda a sus ciudades-progenitoras, ubicadas al sur. (Ha perdido su “Aztlán”). Sólo que la posición de Tijuana es fatal —y notemos que la identidad genérica de Tijuana, por cierto, es femenina, como queda claro en su imaginario popular, en su música, arte y letras—, pues es una ciudad-mujer-joven que mira hacia un padrastro que la desprecia y la controla. A la vez, Tijuana da la espalda a sus progenitores, que debido a su propia degradación centrosureña también la mira con desprecio. Tijuana se ha quedado sola. Norte y sur mexicanos no se reconocen ya.

“Tijuana” es la manera en que la cultura mexicana ya no se reconoce a sí misma. El sur ya no reconoce que el norte y él son variantes de un mismo mito: el mito de la migración en que consiste la cultura mexicana. Por la misma razón, aunque con otra reacción —destruir el elemento femenino— ha enloquecido “Ciudad Juárez”. (“Ciudad Juárez” significa el elemento masculino que destruye a “Aztlán”).

Tijuana se desarrolló para recibir a los varones norteamericanos. Su origen histórico está relacionado con el servilismo a Estados Unidos, con la prostitución, el alcohol y el contrabando. (Todos los símbolos tijuanenses —el Casino, el Cártel, el burro-cebra, la Zona Roja, el Bordo, etcétera— obedecen a esta filiación). Fueron las necesidades del varón norteamericano las que estructuraron buena parte de Tijuana, desde la industria nocturna hasta las maquiladoras formadas para satisfacerlo; pero el padrastro hacia el que mira Tijuana, la rechaza. Es un padrastro que la usa pero no quiere reconocerla.

Tijuana, en general, es urbe-huérfana. “Tijuana” es un símbolo de la descomposición de la psique mexicana. Como también lo son “Michoacán” y “Distrito Federal”.

3. MUERTE POR ÚTERO

Para poder proseguir con la explicación de la psicohistoria de Tijuana voy a utilizar algunas enseñanzas de una derivación sui generis de la fenomenología, el psicoanálisis y el estructuralismo. Dejaré para otro momento su exposición completa. Ahora me concretaré a enunciar alguno de los principios descubiertos por su fundador, Bert Hellinger, aunque fueron precursadas —algo que Hellinger parece no reconocer— por Laing.

Como había dicho antes, podría utilizar otras terminologías y llegaríamos al mismo diagnóstico psicohistórico. Sin embargo, las ideas de Hellinger me parecen adecuadas, por simples y correctas. Según Hellinger, cuando una hija no toma de su madre, carece de fuerza interna. (Tomar significa aprender de ella, honrarla y, entonces, separarse y forjar su propia existencia). Este es el caso de Tijuana. Tijuana desprecia a su madre, a la que llama “naca”, “chilanga”, “india”. Al hacerlo, se ha ensimismado. Ha hecho de su cordón umbilical, su estrecho túnel-útero.

La manera en que Tijuana se ve a sí misma determina su devenir. Pocas ciudades mexicanas tienen un mayor sentido de tribu, de lealtad a unos patrones de percepción-de-sí-misma. Y Tijuana no sólo se ve sino que además se enorgullece violentamente de no ser como su cultura-madre, la cultura del centro-sur.

El rechazo hacia su madre lo aprendió, sin embargo, de su madre misma.

Tijuana pertenece a una estirpe de ciudades maternas que se avergüenzan o desinteresan de sus raíces (indias). Hellinger muestra que cuando una hija rechaza a su madre, paradójicamente, repite su destino. El rechazo es la base de la repetición. Seremos aquello que despreciamos.

Tijuana, creyendo que se distingue de la Ciudad de México, en realidad, reincide en sus peores características. No sólo de su madre, sino también de su ‘abuela’ —la cultura mexicana colonial— que como su nieta Tijuana tenía la mirada puesta en un hombre extranjero, en su caso el hombre blanco español, algo que la polis colonial repitió de su madre, que también tenía puesta la mirada en el hombre blanco, en su caso del Este, simbolizado por Quetzalcóatl. Tijuana y la Ciudad de México son variantes de un mujer-desastre.

El Útero/Tijuana… implica una hiper-protección del feto/vida cultural que imposibilita lograr la necesaria separación de la matriz… Tijuana se nos presenta como madre ‘única’ y feliz, y al mismo tiempo modelo ideal —Tj is the Happiest Place on Earth; Tj: Shantytowns as a New Suburban Ideal, Tj Capital Mundial de la Televisión… Llevada a un extremo presenta el riesgo de transformar al útero en una caja cerrada… La madre no deja ir a su prole y la prole la idealiza a través de su unicidad… (Fiamma Montezemolo, “Biocartografía de la escena artístico-cultural de Tijuana: el útero como límite y/o como posibilidad”)

“Tijuana” es la muerte por útero.

Hay que retirarse siempre de Aztlán pero sólo podemos retirarnos si hemos aceptado de ella su fortaleza. Si no nos la hemos apropiado, no nos hemos retirado de Aztlán jamás.

4. NARCOCULTURA Y PSICOHISTORIAS MASCULINAS

He dicho que Tijuana es primordialmente femenina. Pero lo es en el contexto de un desequilibrio de su fuerza masculina, demediada. Lo masculino de nuestra cultura patriarcal corresponde a las leyes y el gobierno. Los elementos masculinos de la cultura fronteriza se dañaron porque dicho ‘padre’ —recuerdo al lector que no hemos sino hablar de símbolos—, como ya lo han dejado claro otros hermenautas de la cultura mexicana, fue reemplazado por un varón extranjero, al que se unió la fuerza femenina. Es aquí donde interviene la narcocultura.

Dice Hellinger:

Una persona se convierte en toxicómana cuando la madre le decía “Lo que viene del padre no vale nada. Toma tan solo de mí”. En un caso así, el hijo se venga de la madre, tomando tanto que le perjudica. Con la toxicomanía, por tanto, el hijo se venga de su madre porque ésta le impidió tomar de su padre (Órdenes del amor. Cursos seleccionados de Bert Hellinger, p. 123)

Una cultura se identifica con su narcocultura cuando sus elementos femeninos —creativos y trasmisores— predican que sus elementos masculinos —las leyes, las autoridades— no valen nada, no deben respetarse, no deben ser seguidos. Los individuos, entonces, inconscientemente se vengan de lo femenino, a través de lo narco. Esto no lo dice Hellinger o, hasta donde yo sé, la psicología contemporánea, pero es evidente que drogas como la cocaína y el crystal son búsquedas desesperadas de obtener poder masculino, es decir, compensaciones inconscientes para llenarse de la fuerza que no se pudo tomar del ‘padre’. Drogas como la mariguana y el alcohol, en cambio, son saturación de fuerza femenina, envenenamiento a través del exceso de elemento femenino.

En algún otro lugar, desarrollaré más detenidamente esta tesis. Ahora sólo quería ubicar a la narcocultura dentro del sistema atrofiado del inconsciente psicohistórico de una cultura y sus urbes descompuestas. La droga “compensa”.

El elemento masculino de Tijuana tiene una unión excesiva con el elemento femenino. El poeta Robert Bly escribe: “El lado obscuro de la naturaleza invadirá al hombre que tiene una unión inconsciente con su madre” (News from the Universe. Poems of Twofold Consciousness, p. 35). La fuente psicohistórica de la obsesión de la cultura fronteriza con la vida nocturna —hasta convertir su cultura en sinónimo de ella— es también su indiscriminada identificación con lo femenino que devalúa lo masculino.

Por otra parte, en el imaginario ‘Tijuana’ no reconoce otro origen que su supuesta autarquía, el más absurdo de sus mitos. De la misma manera que Tijuan y DeFe adoran la cocaína y el crystal, adoran a los narcos y a Hank. Una cultura castrada —oh Alemania nazi, oh Norteamérica de Bush— una vez que ha llegado a la cima de su desprecio del principio masculino, buscará autocastigarse pidiendo de rodillas que la someten macho-payaserías. La Mano Dura es la masturbación mental del patriarcado.

El llamado ‘Operativo Tijuana’, uno de los actos inaugurales de la presidencia del varón más inseguro de su masculinidad que hemos tenido en los últimos cincuenta años, no es más que un operativo psicológico. No forma parte de ninguna solución real a la violencia fronteriza. Las únicas soluciones reales que pueden aplicarse en México son reformas educativas psicohistóricas, una reforma total del concepto de ‘poder’ y ‘familia’.

Una reconciliación con sus orígenes y con sus diferencias específicas.

Las ideas de la izquierda o la derecha son inútiles. Lo que requerimos no son izquierdas o derechas, sino ajustes de fondo. Se trata aquí de lo que los griegos y Foucault llamaban el “cuidado de sí” y la cultura nahua “toltecayotl”. Reformas psicológicas del individuo, la sociedad y el Estado.

5. TERAPÉUTICA TOTAL

¿Qué camino seguir? En el caso concreto de nuestras ciudades, Tijuana tendría que voltear hacia el “sur”. Tijuana tendría que reconciliarse con la respectiva Aztlán de la que proviene, su ciudad madre (centro y sur en general). Pero conseguir esa reconciliación es empresa ardua tomando en cuenta que el rechazo del norte al sur —un conflicto que dio forma a las elecciones presidenciales del 2006— cohabita psicohistóricamente con un rechazo del sur al norte, como queda evidenciado por la historia mexica y su desprecio de lo norteño-chichimeca, de su huida de los aztecas que los oprimían. (No olvidemos que atribuir el gentilicio azteca a los mexicas es un error, pues fue de los aztecas que huyó el pueblo que luego tomaría el nombre de mexica). ¡Las identificaciones ficticias y las genealogías inventadas comenzaron antes inclusive de la Conquista! ¡Comenzaron con la genealogía fantástica que se fabricó Tenochtitlán! Para no reconocer el origen norteño de la cultura mexica se dijeron descendientes de los toltecas.

Tijuana, en su rechazo a su auténtica genealogía —avatar de la cultura mexicana más profunda—, continúa la triste tradición, también mexicana, de mirar hacia otra parte, convertirse en servidumbre al varón blanco, despreciar su propio elemento masculino, envenenarse con el principio femenino idealizado —en que feminismo y misoginia son parte del mismo desajuste—, malinchizarse y simultáneamente buscar dosis extremas de violencia masculina a través de la narcocultura, militarización o el American Way.

Sin embargo, todavía es común escuchar quienes exotizan a Tijuana, pues no se han percatado que Tijuana lamentablemente repite el patrón que hizo posible a la Conquista y que hoy facilita la americanización.

El problema no es sólo que Tijuana voltee a las raíces —es marcada la indiferencia y rabia de Tijuana hacia todo lo prehispánico más hondo— sino que aunque voltease al centro-sur para tomar sus fuerzas y seguir adelante, todavía quedaría otro grave problema por resolver, quizá el máas grave: la ciudad-madre lleva décadas volteando hacia el varón blanco. Nuestro centro mismo se ha podrido.

Carece de fuerza masculina verdadera y, por ende, exige fanfarronería autoritaria. Por otro lado, se ahoga en su aislamiento porque el propio centro de la cultura mexicana total se ha vuelto un centro masculino irrisorio e inverosímil —simbolizado por la pseudo-izquierda que la gobierna— y un centro femenino agotado que en lugar de convertir su antigüedad en sabiduría la ha convertido en Voluntad de Cirugía Plástica. La “Ciudad de México” no es más que la diosa mexicana degradada a Wanna Be Pop Star; ella es la más degradada.

Así que aunque Tijuana voltee al centro de la cultura mexicana, la cultura mexicana ha perdido su centro. (La agresividad del gobierno federal a la Ciudad de México no sólo se debe a su preferencia por la izquierda, sino que es parte del auto-odio que la cultura derechista desarraigada posee por todos los centros mexicanos). Aunque Tijuana voltease al sur, encontraría al sur mirando a un Norte más allá del nuestro.

Pero, como las leyes psicológicas indican: la hija que rechaza a la madre termina, sin embargo, repitiendo su conducta. De tal manera que, paradójicamente, Tijuana se convertirá en una nueva versión de la Ciudad de México, ¡y la Ciudad de México se convertirá en una nueva versión de Tijuana!

México, una cultura que ahora flota sobre la nada.

La única revolución real es una revolución psicohistórica.

* Publicado originalmente en suplemento Laberinto del diario Milenio de la Ciudad de México, el 13 de enero del 2007.

VOICE EXCHANGE RATES

2007-01-02T13:41:00.001-08:00

EL SOLIPSISMO ES NUESTRA TRAGICOMEDIA

2006-11-04T20:20:00.000-08:00

Leído en El IX Encuentro Internacional de Escritores en Monterrey, México (2006)

I

El solipsismo es nuestra tragicomedia. Un hombre es un ser enclaustrado en su propio mundo. Cada hombre es el tiempo y es el espacio. Así pensaba Leibniz y así pensaban los huicholes. Nadie puede salir de su propio tiempo ni su propio espacio. A nadie nos está permitida la otredad. Sabemos que existe, del otro lado de la realidad, pero la otra orilla es inalcanzable. Y es que es imposible invadir otra vida. Permaneceremos siempre encerrados.
Hay un pájaro atrapado en un huevo indestructible. La única forma que el pájaro llegue a volar es que se vuelva minúsculo y decida hacer del interior de la cáscara su cielo simulado. La relación de intensidad de ese ser con su propio mundo, el mundo que él es, su relación concénrica, espiral, con su mundo único, se llama poesía.
La ex-istencia se refiere al emerger. La in-sistencia, al ensimismamiento.
La poesía se refiere a nuestra in-sistencia. La poesía se refiere al saberse adentro. Por ende, la poesía pertenece más a la esencia del hombre, porque se refiere a la relación intensiva que mantiene consigo mismo, con su propio abismo. La poesía sabe que le está vedada la salida. Ya lo decía Antonio Machado:

Con el tú de mi canción
no te aludo, compañero:
ese tú soy yo.

Pero si la función metafísica de la poesía es la in-sistencia, la de la narración es harto más turbia. La ficción tiene que ver con la fantasía de abandonar el huevo inquebrantable, la ficción es la pseudo-ruptura del cascarón. ¿Quién inventó el mito de que hemos logrado salir del útero? Lo invento un narrador, el narrador primordial, el primer hilo.
Lo que la narración sostiene es la existencia de una zona intermedia entre individuos, una frontera que puede cruzarse por éstos, una zona de nadie, wasteland, buffer zone o páramo, que la narración llena de historias.
Un relato es un cordón umbilical entre dos barrancos. Un cordón umbilical imposible.
Trataremos por siempre de volver a reunirnos. Pero la reunión es imposible. Para sentir que hemos salido de nosotros, para sentir que existe un mundo común, inventamos historias, en que unos tenemos que ver con otros, en que hay encuentros, coincidencias, en que hay exteriores comunes. Toda narración es una ridícula armonía prestablecida.
La literatura tiene una función melancólica. Estamos tratando de no perder el pasado. Ese intento se llama historia.
En el presente, que es puro desprendimiento, estamos solos. Es en la imaginación donde construimos la ficción de un mundo compartido. Sólo en la memoria no somos perros solitarios. Los que escribimos, creamos compañías, creamos amos. Escribimos ligas.
El narrador está tratando de religarse con el mundo. Su religación la busca a través de la creación de redes de acontecimientos relacionados, a través de tribus de personajes, de mundos que capturan a muchos, mundos que aseguran que existen otros. Por eso es siniestra la literatura, porque la narración es lo que mantiene la ilusión del mundo.

II

La ficción es que nuestras historias nos involucran a más de uno; la realidad, que habitamos únicamente la soledad. Vivir en una frontera, la frontera de México y Estados Unidos, me ha dotado de la ilusión de que podemos llegar al otro lado. La ilusión dotada por la frontera es la ilusión de que el cruce es posible. Pero el cruce es sólo un mito. El mundo no puede ser simbólico. El mundo solamente puede ser diábolico. Que lo uno y lo otro se junten no es asequible. El acceso siempre está amurallado. No hay entrada o salida que exista.
La función metafísica de la narración es su función fronteriza. Contando historias creamos la ilusión de que unos tenemos que ver con otros. La frontera es siempre ficticia.
Lo que entra en la narración, ya no tiene vuelta atrás, es una frontera que solamente puede ser cruzada una única vez, pero no una frontera de adentro hacia fuera, sino excluisvamente un camino hacia el desbarrancadero interno, porque apenas entra algo a la ficción, ya no puede retornar de ella, ha cruzado el horizonte de los sucesos en que más allá de éste, todo suceso se desvanece, se ha vuelto fantasía. Y cuando algo se ha vuelto fantasía ya no puede volver a recuperar su verdadera ontología.
Si cruzas la frontera de la ficción, nunca regresarás a la realidad.

III

La ficción es una zona de cruce, una especie de pasadizo que te conduce a una realidad imaginaria, en donde los seres tiene vínculos drásticos o pasiones resistentes, lazos más estrechos o ímpetus magnéticos. Y el mundo supuestamente real no es más que el lugar al que llegamos a través de cierto pasadizo, hace ya varios miles de años. Este mundo no es más que una plaza pública, por así decirlo, un campo abierto donde nos hemos reunido, habiendo salido de nuestras madrigueras, un zócalo que, por cierto, está a punto de ser atacado por los militares.
Estoy seguro, por ejemplo, que los mayas se fueron de la península a través de un pasadizo abierto por una ficción. Asimismo sucede con los migrantes hacia Estados Unidos. Todos nos vamos por pasadizos ficticios. Estos pasadizos son el recorrido por el cordón umbilical, son la caminata larga por ese canal.
Los llamados escribientes abrimos tales pasadizos. Nosotros, sin embargo, no somos los que avanzamos, sino que somos los guardianes de estas apretadas puertas. Somos los agentes fronterizos, vigilantes de garita.
Esta profesión, a ciencia cierta, nos va atrofiando. Nos vuelve incapaces de actuar debidamente en el mundo detrás, del cual somos vigías paranoicos. No podemos llegar a los mundos abiertos. Siendo los que abrimos el boquete, somos impedidos de la fuga.
Todos han creído que Kafka era el hombre que aguardaba que la puerta de la Ley le fuese abierta. Pero no ha sido este su verdadero puesto. Kafka era el guardia. He ahí su verdadera desgracia.
Los narradores construimos mundos. Para que esos cosmos se sostengan, imponemos leyes. Somos esencialmente legisladores. Demiurgos autoritarios. Instauramos órdenes u hordas. Determinamos personajes, pues el ser desea ser libre y somos nosotros los que volvemos a esclavizarlo al nombre, a la función, al lazo. La vida, por lo menos, mata a sus personajes. La escritura, en cambio, los conserva en frascos.
Cada historia obliga a una cantidad tragicómica a iterarse. Este número de seres, objetos, diálogos, ideas, paisajes, repiten un mismo acto cada vez que alguien procura esa historia, como si se tratase de un aldea que repite una idéntica historia cada vez que llega un forastero. Cada narración es un loop.
Una serie de escenas que se repiten cada vez que el lector, el oyente, lo solicita.
Pobres mundos los de las ficciones: son prisiones. Son mundos ciclados. Algún día, sin embargo, las cosas, palabras o sujetos de estos mundos encerrados se librarán de sus leyes de reincidencia, se liberarán de sus tramas y legislaciones impuestas por los narradores y, ya desatados, desearán cruzar la frontera.
Desearán ir de su territorio a otro. ¿Podrán hacerlo?
No lo creo.
Por todas partes, habrá muros.
Es este tipo de información la que guía mi escritura. Saber que vienen los muros. Saber que vienen los militares. Yo también esclavizo seres. Los encierro en relatos.
Pero procuro, quizá por crueldad o quizá por hipocresía, introducir en esos mundos motivos que los conduzcan a motines o rebeliones. Como guardia fronterizo, como mal migra, permito la entrada ilegal de drogas violentas, mujeres enloquecedoras, ideas infelices, insoportable injusticia, pasados enfurecedores, constructores de narcotúneles.
Adorno tenía mucha razón cuando decía que lo sospechoso no es retratar la realidad en forma de averno. Lo sospechoso es la constante invitación a escapar del infierno.

IV

A veces me pregunto qué pasaría si dejásemos de contar historias.
Creo que lo que pasaría es que, al principio no nos íbamos a dar cuenta, pero algo comenzaría a suceder, algo extraño. Y a los minutos, nos miraríamos unos a otros, como preguntándonos qué hacemos juntos, como aquellos que llevan muchos años en un bunker y súbitamente alguien abre la puerta y les pregunta qué hacen todos ellos, amontonados, ahí adentro. Y ninguno contesta. Solamente comienzan a salir, cabizbajos, por la portezuela. Y con esa dispersión, volveríamos cada quien a su soledad primigenia, cada quien a su propio núcleo. Y conforme avanzase ese ensimismamiento, conforme cesasen las relaciones, ante nuestros ojos desaparecerían, uno a uno, todos los objetos del mundo, que sólo existen porque tenemos historias en que inventamos una relación con cada ente, para así tener amplia familia verista, pero apenas se despeje esta ilusión, nada de lo que vemos permanecería ileso, todo se iría yendo, persona por persona, cosa por cosa, gracias a que la memoria, gracias a que la narración, ha cedido en su esfuerzo de mantenerlo todo junto.
Y al final, sólo quedaríamos nosotros ante un paisaje vacío, en que no existe siquiera tiempo. Al desvanecerse todo lo otro, comenzaría un viaje interno, el viaje poético. Pero también ese viaje, ese ensimismamiento, terminaría pronto y con su despedida, todo desaparecería, es decir, desaparecería el yo y su voluntad de cohesión.
Para alcanzar el nirvana, pues, necesitaría terminar la narración, necesitaría terminar la poesía. Pero no terminarán. No somos tan fuertes.

HACIA UNA SOCIEDAD POST-MEDIÁTICA

2006-11-04T20:14:00.000-08:00

Uno de los conceptos más relevantes de los últimos años pertenece a Guattari:

Para pensar a través de esta complejidad, para renunciar, en particular, a la aproximación reductiva del cientificismo cuando se requiere un cuestionamiento de sus prejuicios e intereses a corto-plazo: tal es la perspectiva necesaria para entrar en una era que yo he calificado como “post-media”, pues toda gran agitación contemporánea, positiva o negativa, actualmente es juzgada en base a la información filtrada por la industria de los medios masivos, que retiene sólo una descripción de los eventos y nunca problematiza lo que está en juego, en toda su amplitud.
Es cierto que es difícil hacer que los individuos salgan de sí mismos, para desvincularse de sus preocupaciones inmediatas, con tal de que reflexionen en el presente y el futuro del mundo. Carecen de incentivos colectivos para hacer esto. La mayoría de los métodos de comunicación, reflexión y diálogo se han disuelto a favor de un individualismo y una soledad que frecuentemente son sinónimos de ansiedad y neurosis. Es por esta razón que apoyo —bajo la égida de una nueva conjunción de ecología ambiental, ecología social y ecología mental— la invención de nuevos ensamblajes colectivos de enunciación concernientes a la pareja, la familia, la escuela, el vecindario, etcétera.
El funcionamiento de los mass media actuales, en particular la televisión, corre a la inversa de dicha perspectiva. El tele-espectador permanece pasivo, frente a una pantalla, prisionero de una relación cuasi-hipnótica, separado del otro, arrancado de cualquier conciencia de responsabilidad.
Sin embargo, esta situación no está hecha para durar indefinidamente. La evolución tecnológica introducirá nuevas posibilidades de interacción entre el medio y su usuario, y entre los usuarios. La juntura de la pantalla audiovisual, la pantalla telemática y la pantalla de la computadora podría conducir a una reactivación real de una sensibilidad e inteligencia colectivas. La ecuación actual (media=pasividad) quizás desaparecerá más rápidamente de lo que uno pensaría. Obviamente, no podemos esperar un milagro de estas tecnologías: todo dependerá, a final de cuentas, de la capacidad de grupos de personas para apropiárselas y aplicarlas a los fines adecuados.

Este texto titulado “Para una refundación de las prácticas sociales” —entregado al Le Monde Diplomatique— apareció unas pocas semanas antes de la muerte de Félix Guattari en 1992. Como ya se ha dicho, podría considerársele una especie de testamento filosófico. Guattari solía ser demasiado optimista, utópico. De cualquier forma, su concepto de lo post-mediático prefigura la que podría ser la principal lucha de nuestro tiempo, una lucha no en contra de un gobierno dictatorial o autoritario, sino la lucha contra aquella industria que va convirtiéndose en la verdadera autoridad totalitaria de nuestro tiempo, los mass media.
Los medios masivos son más que una interfaz o plataforma pública de los gobiernos y las trasnacionales, los medios masivos —en sociedades como la norteamericana y la mexicana— son poderes autónomos. En el caso mexicano, en nuestra época post-presidencialista y en la que los partidos políticos han perdido su crediblidad y su capacidad para gobernar, las televisoras —TV Azteca y Televisa— son las continuadoras de lo que Vargas Llosa llamó la dictadura perfecta. La democracia va convirtiéndose paulatinamente en el software gracias al cual funciona el neorégimen del espectáculo.
Los medios masivos son la falsa transparencia de la sociedad de control.
Guattari hablaba de un uso post-mediático de las nuevas tecnologías —tomemos al Internet como un primer ensayo de apropiación post-mediática, pero solamente como un primer ensayo, no como su único caso— pero ese uso debe entenderse en el contexto más amplio de una tecnología conceptual de la interpretación. Los medios masivos deben ser radicalmente analizados. Esta es la más urgente exigencia de nuestro tiempo. Decía el Libro de Chilam Balam de los mayas: “Aquellos que no puedan comprender, morirán; aquellos que comprendan, vivirán”. Nuestra disyuntiva es interpretación o muerte.
Las televisoras desean mayor poder. En México, para obtenerlo están dispuestas a desmantelar a los partidos y al gobierno mismo, a través de una falsa alianza con la sociedad civil, merced un populismo que perpetúa la imagen del teleciudadano como “víctima del Sistema”, cómodo cínico o auditorio indignable. Ciudadanos y medios masivos nos co-manipulamos. Mediante esta co-manipulación, nosotros nos confirmamos irresponsables y los medios masivos, jueces y parte.
Los medios masivos no tardarán en evolucionar hacia nuevas formas de reality. Dentro de algunas décadas, los medios masivos serán tecnologías del cuerpo.
Los medios masivos, tal como los conocemos todavía, atraviesan su etapa primitiva.
En el futuro, los medios masivos intentarán sustituir a los cinco sentidos.
Desde ahora, lo post-mediático, es decir, las estrategias de desmantelamiento del espectáculo televisivo, de las industrias de desinformación masiva, es lo prioritario.
En México, por ejemplo, el verdadero cambio no ha venido con la caída del Partido Revolucionario tras setenta años de mantener la presidencia y el Congreso, ni vendrá, mucho menos, con la caída de la derecha del Pan o la destrucción de las izquierdas. Lo que se necesita es el desmantelamiento de Televisa y TV Azteca. El fin del espectáculo.
Los actuales medios masivos deben ser expropiados. Para pasar de una sociedad de mass media a una sociedad de less medias, de menos media. Lo que los mass media están impidiendo es la vida. Si la televisión fuese suspendida, la población tendría la oportunidad de volver a la realidad.
De lo que hoy carece enteramente la televisión mexicana, por ejemplo, es de una crítica a la sociedad que televisa. Esa función de educación crítica de la sociedad no podrá alcanzarse mientras la televisión sea espectacular (es decir, populista y conservadora) y comercial (es decir, mercadotécnica y transnacional). Pero esa expropiación y transformación de la televisión no puede exigirse sin que simultáneamente se transforme la sociedad mexicana.
Reagan y Schwarzenegger y la videopolítica mexicana son solamente el inicio de la toma del poder que harán los mass media, los consorcios y sociedades que representan. Antes de que una guerra contra los mass media sea necesaria, podríamos organizar la legislación, instituciones y visión para llegar a una sociedad post-mediática.
Atravesamos actualmente lo que he llamado “Segunda Conquista”. Más vale que aprendamos la lecciones de la primera. En la Conquista de 1521 nos autoderrotamos, entre otras causas, debido a nuestro deficiente sistema de comunicación interhumana, de acuerdo a Todorov en La Conquista de América. El problema del otro:

¿Estaríamos forzando el sentido de la palabra “comunicación” si dijéramos, a partir de eso, que existen dos grandes formas de comunicación, una entre el hombre y el hombre, y otra entre el hombre y el mundo, y comprobáramos entonces que los indios cultivan sobre todo la segunda, mientras que los españoles cultivan la primera? Estamos acostumbrados a no concebir la comunicación más que en su aspecto interhumano... Pero quizás ésta sea una visión estrecha de las cosas... El concepto sería más productivo si se entendiera de modo que incluyera, al lado de la interacción de individuo a individuo, la que tiene lugar entre la persona y su grupo social, la persona y el mundo natural, la persona y el universo religioso. Y este segundo tipo de comunicación es el que desempeña un papel preponderante en la vida del hombre azteca, el cual interpreta lo divino, lo natural y lo social por medio de los indicios y presagios, y con la ayuda de ese profesional que es el sacerdote-adivino.

Según Todorov la deficiencia en la comunicación interhumana —deficiencia azteca para recolectar información acerca de los españoles durante ese periodo crítico, para improvisar, apropiarse del código del otro, etcétera— una de las causas centrales de la Conquista. Estoy de acuerdo con Todorov. Pero en este siglo, si no queremos ser conquistados por el espectáculo estadunidense y el complejo industrial-militar con el que se encuentra coludido, no solamente tendremos que seguir dominando la comunicación con el mundo, así como perfeccionar nuestros métodos de comunicación interhumana, sino que además tenemos que dominar la tecnocomunicación, es decir, contraconquistar los medios masivos.
Podría decir más palabras. Pero creo que he dicho ya lo esencial. La sociedad de control es la sociedad del espectáculo. Las televisoras están tomando el poder; debemos, por ende, desmantelar este neogolpe de Estado. La finalidad central de la televisión debe ser convertirse en una comisión de educación masiva crítica. Nuevas comunidades pueden apropiarse y crear tecnologías de educación enraizada en la acción crítica. Y, sobre todo, la acción más radical es la metamorfosis interior. Lo que debe caer es el Yo, la semilla del Control.

CONTEXTS AND SIGNS OF AN URBAN VISUAL POETICS

2006-11-04T20:09:00.000-08:00

Written for the event “Text and Texture in Art and Visual Poetry”, at National University, Torrey Pines, CA. May 13, 2000 and originally published in Tripwire (2001)

Modern poetry is poetry of the city. What can Post-Modern Poetry be? Certainly poetry not of the city but on the city; not poetry about the city but over the city. The city not as poetic topic but poetry on top of it.

What I call Context Poetry (or Contextual Poetics) is writing explicitly done for its placement on a specific point of the concrete/material world. Visual poems conceived to be read in a public space. The Street as Page.

The meaning of a Context Poem depends as much on its words as on its surroundings. To create and install a Visual Public Poem on the street is a way to keep and underline the close relationship between language and reality.

The meaning of a Public Visual Poem is given both by its Text and Context. But more importantly: I hope not only that the physical context gives meaning to the text, but also that the text gives some new meaning to its surrounding physical context.

I believe Context Poetry was one of the first forms of poetry and is directly related to cave paintings, for example. When cities appeared, poetry on the streets also appeared. Some of the ancient Chinese poems we admire now in books were in fact originally written on crossroads and on all kinds of buildings. A very important part of the literature of ancient civilizations was written on walls and in nature. Today our skyscrapers and houses don't consider poetic writing as part of their structure. This fact says everything about the nature of our silence.

The alienation of poetry began when intellectuals started to read in silence and to write in private.

The first anthology of Context Poetry is The Greek Anthology, which compiles inscription-poetry made for statues, monuments and gravestones. Real epigrams are the first Western expression of contextual poetics.

Greek poets wrote Contextual Poems on public objects and sites in order to construct a discourse about people (especially lovers and enemies), territory, journeys, to give human meaning to a natural landscape or to tell the history of a place —which demonstrates that Context Poetry can be about practically everything.

The only form of contextual poetry that still survives and is in common use is epitaphs: little poems about the dead in the precise place where they are. But Context Poetry also needs to be a common form of writing about the alive in the precise places were they live.

When every ready-made becomes an already-made, when the word Avant-Garde becomes a must in every add to sell new cars, when artists change their strategy from "Make it New" to "Make it News", and when the idea of the New becomes old, as art-makers we become aware not that Art is Dead, but that there is something after it. And we also understand that what is after Art is what Art has always been after. I really believe that placing poetry outside of books and in the streets is one way to escape the death of language.

My experience and background tell me Popular Culture not Literature is the root of riskier experimental poetics. Looking critically (creatively) at what is happening on the streets, deriving the New from the Popular is one of the keys to experimental art right now in Latin America. This is the point from which I write.

The mixture of Popular Culture and High Culture is what Western sociologists call "Postmodernism". But I cannot remember a time in Latin America (from the Baroque to our Mass Media) when this mixture has not been going on. Latin America’s literature and mind has always mixed Popular and High Culture... which means we have been Post-modern all along.

I don't derive my visual poems mainly from literary authors but from the streets. The word-play, slang and jokes made by people who don't conceive of themselves as "poets" are the ancestors of every kind of poetry we can think of. That's why once I write my poems I do everything I can to return them to the place where they are not going to be considered literature but simply one more damn sign on the street.

My first writing was in the form of obscene poems and bad graffiti on the back of bus seats or on walls in my neighborhood. My first publications (and I’m very proud of this) were not in books or even in fanzines (which were the main media of my generation in Tijuana) but were published as signs hung on stopsigns and traffic lights.

During the 1998 Festival de la Frontera (Border Arts Festival) I made and installed a series of 24 signs whose text and texture were supposed to resemble other kinds of Tijuana signs. Some of them were written in English. The signs were made of transparent red acrylic and hung on posts, poles, street lights and below traffic signs. They were installed in Downtown Tijuana and close to the International Border. The poems were short metaphysical sentences, sometime ironic puns about the border, the streets and urban life.

Each one of my sign-poems is a little chronicle about what happens to people on the streets.

When poetry assumes the form of another discourse (publicity or streets signs) it mocks it. Visual poetry for me is a comic resource.

During the installation process (which took two days) I interacted with inspectors, street vendors, business owners and passers-by who didn't understand what I was doing and what the texts meant. Those two days of reactions, questions, comments and disapproval have been my best experience as a writer. Making Public Poetry is a way for me to get away from the safe and boring atmosphere of the literary scene in order to interact directly with the ordinary world.

Days after I installed the sign poems when I asked people on the street (not revealing I was the author) what those red signs were and what they meant, I never got a response that said: it is a poem. No. People always explained to me it was a new ordinance by the city government, a strange sort of political propaganda from the opposition parties, maybe a new strategy to attract tourism, some kind of announcement or traffic sign. At first I became frustrated by these responses because I felt I had failed to produce recognizable poetry. I then, trying to protect my ego, thought that the problem was not my style but the public’s lack of knowledge of how poetry looks or is. But then, after hearing a lot of people, one after the other with the same reactions, I figured out what the real cause of this "confusion" was. Publicity and propaganda also use word play, the power of sound, humor, sex, ideology, minimalism, typography, multi-leveled meanings, so how could ordinary people, often non-literate, distinguish one of my signs from the other forms of texts which use the same language techniques? For them those red signs were simply another sign on the street (and certainly not the fanciest nor the funniest) using the same language resources the others use. And after all, I had written some of them explicitly as parodies of traffic signs. So I became aware that there was no significant difference between my sign-poems and other verbal signs on the street. And I now believe that a poem is not different from a commercial ad or a campaign slogan, as it is not different from a primitive chant or myth, a modern essay or novel. Poetry has no privileged nature or definition.

[If somebody here has a Buddhist mind inside her or his material skull, she or he can understand that it makes perfect sense to say poetry has no essence].

For the Frontera Sign Poetry project I chose a transparent surface because I wanted to make a poem in which the text could be read along with other urban texts (such as all kinds of advertising and political propaganda); I wanted a text written not over a neutral space but a text that had to be read with the city and other texts as its (literal) background. A text on a surface that lets the context be part of the poetic space. A page that is also a window. In our electronic era poetry is made in response not only to literature and tradition but also in response to the language of mass media and urban texts. I wanted to make that cultural fact visible in a poem, physically evident. There's is no poetical text which is not thick. For me that’s the meaning of texture: the appearance of a multiplicity of text interwoven. Every text is built of other texts, every text has texture.

Another interesting thing that happened thanks to their see-through-surface was that the sign poems were used as an urban toy through which one could see the other side in an unusual way. Many of the passersby, for instance, saw the signs as an opportunity to see the urban landscape in red. I count these simple aesthetic experiences as an essential part of my installation poetry art project.

A very strong and interesting tendency of visual or concrete poetry is to remove the semantic aspect of poetry. My visual poems don't pursue that, but the opposite. A public sign poem wants to compete with, mock or change the semantic element of other highly visible signs and texts on the streets.

As a writer I have a rule concerning the use of space: I should write everywhere graffiti is written.

I love the Internet, I love poetry, I love Visual poetry on the Internet, but I am almost sure that the sort of fancy visual poetry that now is being made is going to end up somewhere in a museum or a website, which means that there's a risk involved in concentrating on electronic visual poetry. This risk consists of letting electronic visual poetry become another fantastic way to forget the streets as primordial page, another wonderful way to keep poetry away from the outside world.

A visual poem must be done primarily for commuters, not for computers.

Every thought that arises in the mind must eventually appear in the mouth, every word created by the voice must eventually appear on a page, and every poem must exist simultaneously on the Internet and on the street.

Visual poetry exclusively done for a museum, a book or the net is like a rainbow in black and white.

Visual poetry means to make poetry visible for others. So, visuality is a technique to expand the audience and viewers of poetry in general —not a way to do a special kind of poetry confined to small circles of readers.

The visual aspect of a normal poetry book page is totally alien to common people (currently educated to see fancy newspaper, magazine and Internet pages, and complex TV and billboards verbal spaces). So, the role of design is to help poetry look familiar to people who almost never open a book.

No poem is made only of words. Every poems makes sense only in the context of sightings, events, exterior reality, people, otherness, which means that every poem is a context-poem.

If I wish to be coherent in my personal poetics I cannot say I make Visual Poetry... I make Visible Poetry.

I consider my sign poems and other urban context poetry as an experimental writing whose purpose is to help make poetry available to everybody again.

The best part of making a sign-poem is that once I write it and put it somewhere on the street it no longer belongs to me. My poems suddenly become other people’s problem. That's why I don't include my name on them. Once I have installed a poem in Downtown Tijuana I can forget about it and leave to others its rewriting and final destruction. That's wonderful.

I am proud to say that all my sign-poems have found rapid death at the hands of graffiti artists, the police, the telephone company, a girl who thinks it might look good in her room or a taxi driver who wants to re-use the material somehow. I don't believe art must survive indefinitely. Art must be destroyed in order to not become merchandise or an institutional icon.

One of my main objectives in doing Context Poetry is to produce art that cannot enter the Market, because a context poem cannot be repeated and made into a saleable object... in fact, it will be destroyed by the natural elements and people on the street.

Making sign poems is a good way to get rid of your own poems and all the anguish that usually affects poets. I encourage everybody to write poems that are going to wind up somewhere on the street, because this is the best way to get rid of all the bad poetry we have in our drawers, computer files and hidden chapbooks.

All experimental poetry has to be ORIGINAL, which means all experimental poetry has to returns us to our ORIGINS. That, and no other, is the deep meaning of being original.

BORGES RESPONDS TO SUSAN SONTAG’S LETTER

2006-11-04T19:59:00.000-08:00

June 13, 1996
New York

Dear Borges,
Excuse me, Susan, but I have to stop you right here. To which Borges are you writing your kind and sincere letter? I know at least three Borges: first, the young ultra-avant-gard author of the beginning (a truly awful poet, exaggerated in every sense, who had no luck in the literary scene and so in a matter of years changed his methods and personality completely), then the baroque prose writer who became an immediate classic thanks to his careful strategies, and finally the old intellectual and blind who renounced both the avant-garde young Borges and the baroque prose Borges of the middle. So there is not one “Borges”, but many, at least three. So, to which are you writing?
Since your literature was always placed under the sign of eternity, it doesn’t seem too odd to be addressing a letter to you. Dear Susan, since I was never interested in contemporary writing I have no opinion on my work, but let me tell you this: I wasn’t truly interested IN eternity, it was just a disguised I assumed to have fun at the reader’s expense. I find eternity a complete loss of time. (Borges it’s ten years!) If ever a contemporary seemed destined for literary immortality it was you. Well, you wrote your nice letter in 1996, but I am responding it some years after that. In eternity, as I said, one looses track of time very easily. They now tell me one can also loose time in that way navigating in the Internet, is that true? Your were very much the product of your time, your culture, and yet you know how to transcend your time, your culture, in ways that seem quite magical. This had something to do with the openness and generosity of your attention. (Again, I thank you very much for your misreadings: what you called openness and generosity of attention was really nihilism, nothing really mattered to me, so any issue, from tango to Plato had the same importance for me, the same nothingness). You were the least egocentric, the most transparent of writers, as well as the most artful. (Strategies, nothing but strategies. I was making a parody out of style and writing in general, so I had to look like I was serious at it, almost monastic about it). It also had something to do with a natural purity of spirit. (Yeah, like my racism and my lack of interest in fighting other dictators than the one I hated personally for turning me into a municipal chicken inspector). Though you lived among us for a rather long time, you perfected practices of fastidiousness and or detachment that made you an expert mental traveler to other eras as well. (Well, you’re right I was a true reactionary, I hated the present, so I had to come up with ways to go around it). You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s. The ordinary ideas of past, present, and future seemed banal under your gaze. (And to me too, that’s why I kept changing my ideas on circular time, eternity and the present. I found having ideas was a very boring way to use the mind. Creating ideas is such a waste of talent. The best I came up with was lying about my mental activity). You liked to say that every moment of time contains the past and the future, quoting (as I remember) the poet Browning, who wrote something like “the present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past”. That, of course, was part of your modesty: your taste for finding your ideas in the ideas of other writers. (But you need to remember, dear Susan, a lot of the times I quoted others and did it insincerely. Some of my quotes are misleading, or are secret cases of false appropriations and apocrypha. I was playing most of the time, just improvising erudition or sympathies across time).
Your modesty was part of the sureness of your presence. You were discoverer of new joys. A pessimism as profound, as serene, as your need to be indignant. It had, rather, to be inventive–and were, above all, inventive. The serenity and the transcendence of self that you found are to me exemplary. You showed that it is not necessary to be unhappy, even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is. Somewhere you said that a writer–delicately you added: all person–must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. (You were speaking of your blindness).
You have been a great resource, for other writers. In 1982–that is, four years before you died–I said in an interview, “There is no writer living today who matters more to other writers than Borges. Many people would say he is the greatest living writer... Very few writers of today have not learned from him or imitated him.” I appreciate your thoughts on me, but precisely I was the voice that transformed interviews into a fictional genre where the individual plays a character who says all sorts of things he doesn’t believe or contradicts himself convincingly before others. So did you really mean that in your interview? I never said one truth in my entire life. I was always playing “Borges”, my beloved adversary with whom many people confused me, my double. This is still true. We are still learning from you. We are still imitating you. I too did that for a while, but then I got bored of doing pastiche. You gave people new ways of imagining, while proclaiming over and over our indebtedness to the past, above all, to literature. You said we owe literature almost everything we are and what we have been. If books disappear, history will disappear, and human being will also disappear. I am sure you are right. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human. I like all this talk about books, please continue.
I’m sorry to have to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species. By books, I also mean the condition of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects. Soon, we are told, we will call up on “bookscreens” any “text” on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, “interact” with it. That sound great! Is it true? Who told you that? Oh God, I hope that’s true, it sounds so interesting, even though I can very easily see myself pretending that’s horrendous. Oh God, I hope that is true. Books would be so much exciting. When books become “texts” that we “interact” with according to criteria of utility, the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality. But do you thing I can get that new technology you are talking about here in eternity? Do you think I can somehow order that from here? Could you help do that? Please say yes. This is the glorious future being created, and promised to us, as something more “democratic”. I hate democracy. I am an anarchist! Yes I am. Of course, it means nothing less than the death of inwardness–and of the book.
This time around, there will be there no need for a great conflagration. The barbarians don’t have to burn the books. The tiger is in the library. Dear Borges, please understand that it gives me no satisfaction to complain. Yes I understand that, don’t worry. Could you give me more information on that new book deal you were talking about a few minutes before this other issue arise? But to whom could such complaints about the fate of books–of reading itself–be better addressed than to you? (Borges, it’s ten years!) I like when one repeats a sentence in a text, I once did that on a poem about Pythagoras and people went crazy about it. I hope I can do that soon, again and again. I like repeating. “Borges, it’s ten years!” Oh, I loved that. Could you say that a third time? Please do so. All I mean to say is that we miss you. You continue to make a difference. The era we are entering now, this twenty-first century, will test the soul in new ways. But, you can be sure, some of us are not going to abandon the Great Library. And you will continue to be our patron and our hero. Take a whole lot of precautions because, as Ernesto Sábato said in one of his novels I, “Borges”, was a terrorist. I am not the sort of writer Americans think I am. I am not part of the establishment. I used ideas for the mere debate they could provoked and for their aesthetic or eccentric value. My work is nihilism in its best point of Nietzschenian perfection. I think there are many ways to read me or translate me in a way so that I might be seen as a classical figure, but that’s all wrong, I was nothing but a ideological terrorist, a sophist who cannot be taken seriously. Borges doesn’t exist. “Borges” is just a way to speak about Latin American postmodern writing. Borges can be you or me. Borges can be just anybody who uses writing as a method to destroy literature. That’s why Foucault liked “Borges” so much. In my case, I really distrust the guy. So don’t hang out with him, Susan. Trust me. He’s is more dangerous than you and Americans in general think. “Borges” is the end of Modern literature. Are you really prepared for that? I thought so. Bye.

J.L.B., 2002

TEXT, LIES AND ROLE-PLAYING

2006-11-04T19:37:00.000-08:00

* Originally published in Chain 9 (2002)

“Traduttore-Traditore”

B. Croce

I can say pretty honestly that as a writer in Tijuana (Latin America’s final frontier) I have developed my literary credo with one eye reading in English and the other in Spanish. The image is grotesque, I know. But through border life, a wide range of possibilities for cross-cultural dialogue have opened to me. Trying to write in English is one aspect of my decision to take cultural translation as my mother tongue.
I started to learn English watching TV as a kid. Then, as I was becoming a teenager, the Mexican crisis of the eighties forced us move to a part of the city that had no public services, not even electricity. So I became a huge fan of battery-operated radios, listening mostly to American (see note 1) pop music. At that time, rap was the hip thing to hear, and from high school through university we had endless hours of “English classes” every week. On the Border, English can be as important to your future as Spanish — in many cases, a lot more important. Thanks to my love affair with English, I quickly began to get part-time jobs on the main tourist drag in Tijuana. That’s where I learned, I think, the real secrets of English, mainly through listening to and talking with Blacks and Chicanos that came to Tijuana to party on weekends.
At some point, I don’t remenber exactly when, I suddenly found myself writing poetry and short stories in English, not Spanish. I think this is a very common thing among border teenagers. On the border, many of us define ourselves through our relationship with English, which is a significant part of our essence. I know this would sound really awful to a Mexico City ear, but that’s how things actually are up here. We are the Malinche (2) and we are glad of it (3).
I know that only through English can I get in touch with some essential part of myself. Many of us have developed entire realms of our consciousness through reading or hearing another language (like a whole generation of Latin Americans, who have formed themselves listening to American music). Without our relationship with that other-language a big part of us would die — but by keeping it alive we cause ourselves pain, that pain characteristic of love affairs.
I think that Latin Americans who are in close contact with the U.S., or who have at one point or another immigrated to the U.S., cultuvate this affair not only as a way to accept American culture as our new identity but also, strangely, as a way to participate directly in a language that plays a large part in shaping our world — a world of meanings we share, for better or for worse, with Americans. I think Spanish, in many cases, will have to write itself in English in order to survive. For our own heritage to endure, it’s imperative that we take English not as a force that is destroying our values and worldviews but as a weapon to keep our cultures alive — even though one might disagree with the ideas or styles of pioneer Nuyorican writers like Miguel Piñero or Miguel Algarín, or of Chicano writers, it is very clear that their work illustrates a key resource: we need to use English as a second Spanish.
“Converting” to another language is something we have done before in Latin America. After the Conquest and the Spanish invasion and genocide, Indian (4) cultures learned quickly to build a hybrid culture in Spanish in order to renew and maintain their original cultures. If some of my fellow Latin American writers are now increasingly deciding to switch to English, they do so with centuries of tradition behind them. For many people it is very clear that bilingualism — practices such as Spanglish, for instance — is a way to enjoy a double happiness and a double struggle.
Writing in both languages, or even switching over to English, is clearly a choice many writers make in order to avoid the intermediation of dominant translation. So, to use Nathaniel Tarn’s term, an “antitranslation” attitude is one of the forces that propels Latin American writers to decide to create portions of their work directly in English. I think this enormous paradigm shift, in terms of some postmodern Latin American writers’ process of identity-reinvention, is evident even in such canonical writers as Carlos Fuentes and Jorge Luis Borges, both of whom wrote important autiobiographical essays directly in English, as if they found English a better tool or strategy through which to see themselves and their work — in both cases these essays have been a cause of great controversy in Latin America, and for the most part have been considered dangerous moves by their authors.
Those of us who have developed our identities side by side with English know unequivocally that English can, in some way at least, function as a tool to sustain Latin American literature. We are aware, in addition, that the use of English is not just a personal decision, but also appears to be, at this point, a key resource we employ merely to survive — and to counter-conquer the new postmodern order.

*
In the Latin American canonical tradition, examples of writers constructing their work in other languages are rare. One can think only of exceptional cases, such as Huidobro’s French poems or contemporary outsiders like the Brazilian Glauco Mattoso, writing some of his homosexual antipoetry directly in Spanish. It is safe to say that a consideration of the mother tongue as the “natural” medium for constructing one’s own work is one of the tenets of modern literature in Latin America (and certainly in Western Literature in general). But in the last half-century, we increasingly see writers of all genres switching their mother tongue for another language — mainly English. This is a major change, a break with the formerly fixed modern belief in the mother tongue. It is equally clear that this shift in practice, this change in viewpoint, is more a form of cultural resistance than of yielding to domination. (What major Anglo writer would dare to write his or her next book in Spanish? But the contrary happens more and more each year: the paradigm shift away from the automatic parading of texts in a forced mother tongue/translation procession is going to be led, therefore, by Third-World Postmodernism).
I think this change, from mother tongue to the self-translation of bilingualism, which is not yet recognized at all in the Latin America mainstream, is going to have a tremendous impact in the coming decades. But before further exploring the new English-Spanish relationship, we need to take into account that this new bilingualism in Latin American contemporary writing is not exclusively an English deal. Another significant change occasioned by current postmodern adjustments and literary redefinitions on the American continent occurs in the form of a widespread boom in bilingual Indian literature. These new poets write simultaneously in their Indian language and in Spanish, and in some ways they are even programmatic about being bilingual. Thus there is elasticity and change even within the concept of literary bilingualism. For example, I think the next Neruda is writing right this moment, in Mayan and Spanish. I am talking about Humberto Ak’abal, the Guatemalan poet who writes from both Western and Indian language traditions. He translates himself from Spanish to Mayan and from Mayan to Spanish, constructing a truly dialogical discourse. This new kind of dual writer is undoubtedly going to radically modify literary paradigms in Latin America and abroad, through these kinds of self-translation methods — and yes, I did say that Ak’abal is as important as Neruda. Just wait a bit.

*
One of the great failures of Modernity, though few acknowledge it, was caused by an optimistic belief in innocent translation. Translation can’t achieve equivalence, reproduction, analogy or correspondence. Once we understand that there is no real possibility of getting two languages (two people, two cultures, two worlds) to say the same thing or have an identical effect, I think we also realize that the very failure of translation opens many new possibilities for dialogue. In this sense, we can call postmodern translation any method of linguistic interaction that no longer takes as its purpose the “faithful” rendering of another language or discourse, but rather explicitly considers as its task the radical re-invention of the original text. It is an active translation instead of a passive one.
Examples of this renouncement of traditional translation can be found in the Total Translation theory-performance used by Jerome Rothenberg to recreate Indian poetry (isn’t it interesting that one area of ethnopoetics adapted itself to end up in projects like the fake Sumero-Akkadians Tablets by Armand Schwerner?) (5), and also in the non-verbal visual translations of Blake by the Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos. Other experiments which expand the meaning of translation include: Jorge Luis Borges’ imaginary foreign quotations; Fernandinho Oviedo’s openly bizarre translations of Whitman into sonnets(!); Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s book Holy Smoke (1985), written first in English and then fifteen years later self-translated into Spanish; Steve McCaffrey’s homolinguistic translations of Gertrude Stein; or the semi-serious orientalia used by the Mexican-Peruvian novelist Mario Bellatin, who uses imaginary sources of scholarship not to make one language a vehicle for another but to make a language that functions as a delusional method of reinventing both ends of the equation. We can safely speculate that neo-translation is definitively the most interesting form of fiction currently being written. Methods such as transcreation, apocrypha, heteronomy, intertextuality, multimedia, rewriting, collage, transvestite-textual-subject, pastiche, false quotation, antitranslation, parody, appropriation and othering in general are now the elemental resources of neo-translation and the paradigms of contemporary experimental writing. The lesson is: we CAN’T translate the Other so we need to reinvent the both of us. We need to further develop this kind of re-imagining (or perhaps totally imaginary) translation. Such re-imaginings — such translations — are some of the most intriguing ways of cultivating the potential for cross-cultural dialogue.
This sort of translation-dialogue practice, of course, can be quite dangerous culturally: we run the risk that we might deny or replace the Other with the Image of Ourselves. In imagination, the Other is not really present, that’s true — but neither are we. In re-imagining, neither object nor subject exists anymore. That’s precisely why imagination is the ideal dialogical zone of encounter.
Every text is a pre-text. Every text must be altered in order to become what it must be. The new purpose of translation is not to make a second text which is as close as possible to the first, but to create another text which is uneven, divergent, conflictive, or even non-compatible with the first. How might we do that? In many ways: for instance, by translating ethnographical interviews into chants (translation from one genre to another, and/or recycling and re-organizing data, as Ed Sanders does in his investigative poetry), or by transforming long poems into drawings (applying re-visualization or radical typographical resources, as in Dennis Tedlock’s translations of Zuni narratives, or line re-disposal in the concrete poets’ translations of canonical authors). Other neo-translation techniques can include fragmenting the original text (and even perhaps introducing random selections of a text) and then putting it through a (possibly experimental) translation process, or using translation as part of one’s own writing, or employing hermeneutics to rewrite a rigidly “established” text (like Heidegger’s or Horst Matthai’s profound re-translations of the presocratics), adaptations like La hija de Rappaccini (Octavio Paz’s translation/reconstruction of Nathaniel Hawthorne) or Jacques and his Master, Milan Kundera’s re-imagination of Diderot. We can locate this shift in literary paradigms in the second half of the 20th Century simply in the tricky claims made by certain authors — like the Argentinean poet Alejandra Pizarnik, who presented her novella La condesa sangrienta as a translation. Isn’t it clear, then, that translation games are becoming a favorite paradigm in language play?

*

Neo-translation techniques, in any case, are linked also to a change in the way we view criticism, which is currently in the process of becoming a more delirious dialogue with its object, in what we might call fictive-criticism (crítica-ficción), the purpose of which is no longer to encourage the critic to attempt to reveal the real meanings of a text, but rather to permit her or him to recreate them freely (paralexia), conducting the original text towards its delusional meanings or secretly altering the piece of writing one analyzes — mock criticism in general — or drawing the text towards its more extreme absurdities (6).
In recent years, I have been involved in translation-criticism experimentats involving certain types of critical fantasies in which I mix real interpretation with secret self-parody or even readers’/editors’ deliberate deceptions. I have succeeded, for example, in getting non-real “criticisms” (heteronomy) or supposed translations published in major magazines, or in simply developing concepts or applying points of view in which I don’t actually believe, systematically attributing false quotes to real authors or manipulating data, mixing unknown fictional authors in with canonical ones — in short, considering criticism, at every point, to be fictional prose. I write fictive and parodic translation-criticism (crítica-ficción) without revealing it to the readers of the books or magazines that have published those essays or pseudo-translations. In many cases my use of fiction is simply indistinguishable from my true beliefs. Even though most of the time you wouldn’t know it from reading my texts, I always write criticism from an insincere point of view, as a way to destroy the confidence and authority we give to the critic as a literary subject or a credible voice. Of course this technique has already been suggested: by some of Laura Riding’s ideas (in, for example, Anarchism is not Enough); in Borges’ analytical short stories and use of style as a mask (7); in Sévero Sarduy’s “Ahora Góngora,” a magnificent talk on Góngora written as a neo-barroque grotesque parody of hermeneutics and psychoanalysis applied to poetry; through Barthes’ position on the equivalence of criticism and literature and his exhausting theories on the Death of the Author; or in Derrida’s notions of grammatology and dissemination. This realm of post-critical dialogic space opens to us further in the confessions of authors like Lyotard and Harold Pinter: the former, when he reveals that he made up some perspectives and didn’t actually read all the documents he quoted or referenced in the now canonical pages of The Postmodern Condition, the latter when he notes that some of the (rare) oral or written explanations he has provided about his own plays have been nothing but jokes. “Take reviews as the worst case of black humor.” After the 20th century, discourse-construction cannot be taken as a serious task (8).
Though I rarely, if ever, make my various games with criticism evident in my writings, I feel comfortable revealing these comical and fictional resources in my “serious” prose because in the U.S. nobody is going to read my other work (for instance, perhaps I am lying even here and I have actually never performed any of these tricks and experiments, but by claiming I have, I end up writing crítica-ficción after all). American readers do not care about my literary hijinx, even though in the majority of these games I refer to English-language writers, which makes my task easier thanks to the incredible ignorance about American literature in Mexico: it’s pretty easy to invent American writers and references, or alter people’s writing subtly, or even radically, without anyone’s paying particular notice. This is also a part of a larger project I am developing, which involves building communication between our two cultures through imaginary entities and lies. I don’t want to provide too many details of my fictive criticism and neo-translation projects, but I can simply say that my work is part of a diálogo diablo (to use Groussac’s image) on the periphery of Latin America, a devilish dialogue or diabolical dialogue, a sort of wanna-be experimental cross-cultural setup which I feel can accomplish much more than more serious academic approaches. In many ways, the most significant aspects of my literary career depend on a mutual lack of interest and intercommunication between the literary scenes on both sides of the Colorado River. If, therefore, an American reader were to tell my Mexican editors and literary acquaintances that I have lied to them on certain occasions, I would be ruined and would have to go back to a boring life of only telling the truth.
Literary dialogue between Mexico and the U.S. is so reduced that I am certain no reader or editor in Mexico will read these confessions I am making in English. (This is an example, once again, of how English can often be a better medium for Spanish-language writers — we can say in English what we cannot say in our native tongue).
In addition to the fact that I love private jokes (my favorite form of dialogue), another reason I choose not to go public with my fictive criticism techniques is my suspicion that if I do I might inspire other people, as well, to use my techniques in a systematic way, and I would hate that. As Quiroga said, “Telling the truth is never amusing.” Openly telling readers that I am playing with them and myself would mean taking all the fun out of my stupid anti-discourse antics.
Well, to tell you the truth, I am lying again. I have never played such childish literary games. But I intend to do so as soon as I can.

*
A fictional dialogic strategy is useful for more than just criticism and translation. I have also used it in poetry. My first book of poems was designed to represent a “case” of Mexican “border” poetry. One day I simply sat down and designed a plan piloto (9) for a poetry book which could be read as representing that notion, as constructed in the Mexican literary imaginary. Thus I wrote a series of poems on urban violence, border images of despair, ethnopoetic experiments with Borders Indians, and translations from English; I also included photos of visual poems I hung on Tijuana streets, a rewriting of the Mayan Book of the Dead and even a kind of manifesto for a new type of poetry I am ostensibly “defending” within the circus of new Mexican contemporary literature. (I even gave it a name, “norteado” poetry, poetry both lost and disoriented, and at the same time Northern (or Northified), close to American Literature and to Mexican Northern popular culture). Of course, I do not actually identify myself as a text-producer within the style I used (forged) in that book, or the others I have designed as experiments in constructing literary styles, tendencies or subjective poetics. I have always written from within the knowledge that I am just a liar (an obsessive-compulsive graphomaniac) who acts as if his books were a faithful rendering of his true literary tastes or ideas. I don’t, in fact, think such rendering is possible. There is no longer any potential for seriousness in language. I have chosen to speak for (as) others, playing roles for them, leading them to portray an “original” and “true” position only to leave them behind for my next mask. I must confess, again, that I do not believe even one word of my own work.
From “my” poems to “my” essays, none of my words/permutations/practices has anything to do with my real beliefs. (Do I have such things as real beliefs?) My poems and my short stories are nothing but calculated and insincere discourse games designed to enact secret interplay with other discourses, so I might establish a parody of literary dialogue based on fulfilling or undermining certain stereotypical expectations, performing a kind of role-playing as an author within a specific culture (in this case, the Mexican “Republic of Letters”). In each book I take myself as a character: “Urban Experimental Poet,” “Polemical Anti-Mexico City Young Critic,” “Translator and Interpreter of American Counterpoetics,” “Short Story Teller of Border Lives,” and in this essay for Chain, “Mexican Writer Sympathetic to Postmodernism Telling Us (U.S.) the Real Truth Behind his Lies.” (It goes without saying that I am now lying, but to tell you the truth I do believe I am part of a larger socio-cultural phenomenon called the Norteado Generation, and yes, it’s true, most of the ideas I write are ones I feel, like or believe. Sorry. Most of the time I write what I find natural — oh, such a beautiful, comforting, concept, “what I find natural.” (10) I apologize, again, for being such a liar.)
All this role-playing is utterly nihilistic and boring, I know, but I truly believe there is currently no other alternative. I think that in the future, writing — post-everything writing — is going to move in a direction where we consider our position as author as nothing more than a humoristic fictitious entity, no more real than a character in a novel. You can’t give any credit to a writer. He is nobody. She is just a player. Our books are never a personal account of anything, nor are they a trustworthy intellectual autobiography. A book is a fiction in every conceivable aspect. Dialogue around poetic language can only really begin when we admit to and further radicalize our role-playing as designers of discourses who are ourselves invented by our texts, as much as we are inventors of them.
What is a writer who still clings to the notion of using his work as a means to represent his true intentions? — somebody still trapped in that primitive and naïve period of humanity called Modernity.
Poor little fellow.

Translated by Heriberto Yépez and slicked down by Jen Hofer

(1) “American” here refers specifically to the United States, though the term should technically reference the American continent in general; this mistranslation is especially noteworthy in a text written by an American, translated by an American and edited by an American for an American audience. (Typist’s note)
(2) La Malinche: also known as La Chingada, The Fucked One. A traitor to her race, cultural whore. Sought to save indigenous peoples from slaughter during conquest by becoming lovers with Hernán Cortés. Blamed, therefore, for the penetration of the Spanish into indigenous Mexican lands, and credited or discredited with the beginnings of mestizaje. (Editor’s note)
(3) For many Latin Americans English, like poetry, has become a more private and especial language, different from the one we use daily in public life (in our case Spanish). When I am alone or walking in the streets, for example, I talk to myself in English, as I do in footnotes. (Author’s note)
(4) “Indian” here is a literal translation (hence a mistranslation) of the term Indio/India, used to refer to indigenous peoples in Mexico and Latin America. (Typist’s note)
(5) The Schwerner case curiously has a Latin American link: Schwerner’s character of “scholar-translator” (who is both serious and weird) was partially inspired by Julio Cortázar’s “Morelli,” a character who represents a metalinguistic voice in Rayuela, Cortázar’s most important novel — it’s worth mentioning that Cortázar’s character was inspired by the figure of Borges. So the Tablets are a part of a secret web of relationships embedded in the postmodern idea of the writer-translator. Curiously, Schwerner misspelled Cortázar’s name, using an “s” instead of a “z,” a mistake that in my opinion cannot be taken as a mere lapsus calami: let’s remember José Lezama Lima’s famous mistranslations and misspellings of foreign author’s names and references. I think we should reevaluate this “fantasy orthography” (as Cortázar coined it) as another intriguing case of postmodern transcreation. (Critic’s note)
(6) In Spanish, the term crítica-ficción resembles the expression for “Science Fiction,” ciencia ficción, which also brings to mind (well, to the informed mind) a famous error made by a major Mexican translator, on the cover of his translation into Spanish of a selection of writings on science fiction by Ray Bradbury: by mistake he titled his text Sobre la crítica ficción instead of Sobre la ciencia ficción. Obviously in English the sound similarities, semantic resonance and cultural references ricocheting between the two terms get lost when we translate “Crítica-Ficción” as “Fictive Criticism,” an expression, we must confess, of which the author of this essay disapproved, as he considers it too long and noisy. (Translator’s note).
(7) Borges was the first postmodern writer to fully understand that every name must be put in quotation marks. Borges knew that in order to make a final parody of classical literature, he needed to construct an image called “Borges” through the emphatic use of a certain style as well as recognizable and personal themes. He was the last exquisite, as Cioran declared him. “Borges” made himself into an elegant and almost clandestine parody of the Modern [European] Writer. Borges knew that through a series of writings a discourse-designer becomes a character, even though he is really nadie. (Critic’s note)
(8) I want to point out that a recurrent resource of crítica-ficción is the use of footnotes as a key instrument in achieving credibility or committing parody of the academic style and its scientific desires. Of course one cannot forget here the adventurous ideas laid out by Paul Feyerabend, on using insincere criticism to cause science to lose all the credibility it gained during Modernity. From Borges to Bellatin, the use of tricky footnotes is an essential aspect of fraudulent cultural translation practices. (Translator’s note)
(9) A pilot plan or template. (Editor’s note)
(10) Natural?! C’mon! What’s wrong with you? I think you’re going insane up there, man. “Natural”? You said natural?! You’re crazy, nothing corresponds to “natural.” Charles Bernstein has an interesting quote on this issue. I hope you find it soon, brother, and put it down here. Quotes like that always help to keep the good reputation of footnotes alive. (Translator’s note to the author).

A TEN STEP PROGRAM...

2006-10-21T16:32:00.000-07:00

* Originally published in Crayon (2004)

A TEN STEP PROGRAM (OR A USER’S GUIDE)
ON HOW | MEXICANS AND | AMERICANS |
CAN KNOW | THEY HAVE | A BODY

1
(A phone call).
Receiving a Phone Call
(Long Distance Phone Call).
A phone call with no bodies
(Just the Long Distance Sound).
A phone call made on the subject
Of the arrival of the American Body.
A phone call made by the Mexican President
indicating to Castro
(the Cuban Horse)
Indicating to him (Fidel) he has to leave our country (our body), when the American Body, The American President (the Son) arrives into our land | enters into our flesh. (Castro has to leave). He has to leave his place so another body can take it. He had to leave so the other body, the American one (the Son) could enter into our body, our sexual body, the political one.

2
Remembering we have | A Body |
by way of LDS
(Language
Discomfort
Syndrome).
Remembering
The way the body feels
When the mind
And the voice
Switch
From one language to another.

The way it’s going to feel when we
(“The Mexicans”)
switch into English.
The way our mind and body
Become
Disconnected when such a Language Event
Happens
(to us).

3
Applying torture.
That’s an easy way
to find out
others do have
(a discourse on) pain.
Applying torture
Or
Declaring war to the body
Of the Other
(The Afghan | The Zapatista)
Destroying another body
That’s a good way
To find out
We may have a body too.
A discourse.

4
Being a woman.
Moving to Juárez.
(Traffic).
Moving to Juárez.
Being a woman.
Getting a job in a maquiladora
(Ford | Samsung | Matsuchita | Qualcom)
Moving to Juárez.
Getting a job in a maquiladora.
Being a woman.
Getting rapped
by a serial killer
or a death squad.
Copy cat. Quote.
(800 women have felt that
in the last 10 years
In Juárez)
Becoming a body.
And then being found
in an empty lot
in the outskirts of the city
with a torn T-Shirt
that says:
“California.
The Golden State”.

5
Feeling stressed.
Experiencing our body
Thanks
To the Sickness
The New World Order
Gave US:
Stress.

6
Going to Tijuana.
Because Tijuana is
(according to The Simpsons)
The happiest place on Earth.
And it is the maquiladora town
Where 75 five per cent
Of all television sets
Are produced.
It is also the most crossed border in the world, and the place where thousands of Americans, hang out every weekend, the place where:
a) They have Fun
b) Feel beautiful and loved
and C) In control.

(Mexico is the place where Americans feel they really are
“Americans”).

7
Using
Language exchange rates
(Body Surplus)
Violence is the American Way (A quote)
Violence is the American Way (A quote)
And we cannot help but to be Americans in that sense.

We are all Americans now
(even the French).

8
Being a man.
Moving to the border.
Finding a pollero.
Waiting for the right moment
to illegally cross.
No helicopters around.
No trucks.
Walking.
Hating the sun.
Being a man.
Moving to the border.
Finding a pollero.
Walking [to what’s called the Other Side].
And then, getting beaten
by some American I.N.S. Agent
Who needs to feel his body
as the body of a Real Man.

9
Fearing
Another attack.
That’s too
Another step
To remember
We still have
A body

Left.

10
(The pleasure).
(Through the pleasure)
The pleasure of uploading
into the Internet
Uploading
Without our bodies
(The Relief)
The relief of entering
Cyberspace
(The Final
Common Place)
Uploading ourselves
into the Internet
Without our bodies.
Our bodies that hurt so much
And viewing
And buying
With credit cards the image
(just the image)
(of the bodies)
(of the bodies of the others).

Restrictions apply.

A.B.U.R.T.O

2006-10-21T16:12:00.000-07:00

Entrevista con Adriana Cortés

En general, ¿qué piensas del lector?

Cortázar booméricamente solicitaba dicotomizar entre el lector hembra (y suplico al feminismo no perder el sentido del humor erigiendo inmediato Memin Pingüín) y el lector activo. La democrazyness de Cortázar (hijo de la mariguana de los años sesenta y del Eco de la obra umbierta), no lo dejó ver que el lector hembra, el que Macedonio llamaba el lector presa de la alucinación (Cortázar por no elogiar a Borges, no quería que se notara que lo mejor de Rayuela es lo macedónico), ¡sí el lector hembra hirself!, es lo mesmo que el lector activo. Whattahell? Yes, my friend, indeed, they are the same… Los dos siguen siendo lectores, pasividades, que caen en perlsiana confluencia o en brechtiana resistencia, pero lectores, al fin. Cortázar fue el último escritor latinoamericano en hacer algo con el lector. Del lector hembra sugirió retocarlo volviéndolo lector activo, lector elector. Introdujo la democracia, esa mierda. Pero al menos se atrevió. Lo que ahora observo son obras, y ahí inscribo la mía, en que lo que sucede es una creciente desactivación del lector. Lo que a mí me interesó en El matasellos y en A.B.U.R.T.O es desactivar al lector. Construir obras para un lector desactivado.

¿Dónde empieza la ficción y dónde termina la realidad en tu novela?

Hablando del arte prehispánico, Paul Westheim describe su estilo como “realismo mítico”. En contraposición al realismo epidérmico oxidental, dizque objetivo, verista, existe un realismo que no se refiere al retrato superficial del mundo de las apariencias, sino a la cacería ritual de las realidades psíquicas. ¿Cómo es la realidad más profunda? Plasmática. En lo más hondo somos cuervos o asesinos, somos cuevas o gritos, por dentro somos mitos. Realistas míticos son Beckett, Borges, Quiroga y, sobre todo, México. Trato de escribir desde la piel hacia adentro, no desde la piel hacia fuera. Cuando pienso en mis personajes, los pienso como el arte gráfico popular mexicano, esos dibujos de mujeres y hombres alucinantes que hay en las paredes de los bares. ¿Recuerdas los mofles, lavadoras o llaves pintados en los rótulos callejeros o las caricaturas en los paquetes de los jabones sexuales que venden en los mercados? Así quiero que sean mis personajes. No los quiero como los quiere el realismo del sentido común que escribe personajes fotográficamente. Por ser caricatura grotesca, Memín Pingüín es más realista que Tom Cruise. (Un galán picture perfect). Así que en mi libro, la ficción comienza con la primera palabra y la realidad termina con la última.

Tú estudiaste psicoanálisis, ¿qué tan verídica es la parte en que se psicoanaliza a Aburto en la cárcel?

Tengo una postura crítica frente al psicoanálisis. Para comenzar, el psicoanálisis es una contradicción de sentidos. Psique significa alma, el alma es inquebrantable, es un todo hecho de imágenes, indivisible. De la psique no puede hacerse análisis, porque analizar es fragmentar, dividir en partes. Lo analítico despedaza lo psíquico. El psicoanálisis es parte del racionalismo. Además, el psicoanálisis es un método que no se puede aplicar fuera de un diálogo en vivo. Estrictamente no puede haber psicoanálisis de la literatura, ni siquiera en un texto, es por eso que tanta crítica literaria psicoanalítica no es más que imaginería. En el libro, el psicoanálisis es una voz más, es parte del gentío de voces, pues el psicoanalista es otro más de los espectros. Uno de los espectros más fascinantes que tuvo el siglo XX.

¿Por qué es tan relevante la relación de Aburto con su madre?

La relación axial de todo ser humano es con su madre. Somos su doble. En un principio, fuimos un parásito suyo, un órgano de su cuerpo, un órgano que se desorganizó, un órgano que rompe el cuerpo de su huésped. El cuerpo-sin-órganos, es decir, el cuerpo que se descentra, que pierde su estructura y se desunifica, comienza con la separación de la mujer de su propio cuerpo, cuando uno de sus órganos (el feto) se desprende de ella, para cobrar vida propia. Todos somos Aburto porque todos somos, en el fondo, un aborto. La relación del personaje con su madre es fantasmal. Más que un inconsciente de la mente, yo creo en un inconciente del cuerpo. Tenemos un cuerpo inconsciente. Nuestro cuerpo consciente es solamente una parte menor del cuerpo inconsciente. Este concepto, el de Cuerpo Inconsciente, lo he venido desarrollando en mis libros teóricos, próximos a aparecer. Ese cuerpo inconsciente, este inconsciente del cuerpo, tiene que ver con la madre. Otro nombre que le he dado al cuerpo inconsciente es el fantasma. Todo apunta a que Aburto tenía una relación muy dolorosa con su madre, al mismo tiempo, Lomás Taurinas fue para él un acto de reivindicación de la madre patria, no lo olvidemos.

¿Qué relación hay entre el programa de Chabelo y la katafixia, y la conversión de Aburto en un marginal rebelde?

Chabelo nos ha atormentado. Generaciones enteras de mexicanos crecimos despertando cada domingo, verdadera desmañada, viendo su programa, donde los niños jodidos compiten hasta llegar a la katafixia, guiados por un ruco-niño, todo un concepto, ¿no? Está para morirse de risa, literalmente. Sus películas son buenísimas. Hay una en que todos los personajes de las películas de terror, desde Frankestein hasta el monstruo de la laguna, aparecen y se combaten, en disfraces pitorreadísimos. En todo eso me inspire, de esas mezclas posmodernas al estilo Chabelo, salió todo esto. Por eso junto con Chabelo, aparece también Octavio Paz. Por cierto, el inicio de relato más bizarro que he leído en la literatura mexicana es el de las memorias de la hija de Paz. El libro comienza con la escena de una niña buscando a su papá. A la niña le escurre pus de la vagina. Eso sí es realismo sucio, brothers… Así que cuando Aburto llega con Chabelo, su destino lo alcanza, ahí comienza su vida como guerrero tragicómico. Todo comienza con un niño. Toda historia es cómo ese niño se desbarata.

Aburto: ¿nace víctima de un fracaso?

Sí, del fracaso mexicano. Nace del bad trip del PRI y del mal viaje de Nafta. Nace de la méndiga maquila. Algo fundamental no se ha querido reconocer en Aburto: es un maquiloco, es un engendro coproducido por el mundo de las maquiladoras, como éstas también han coproducido las Muertas de Juárez. Aguilar Camín dice que “la vida y la mente de Aburto son las de un personaje al que sólo el magnicidio hace digno de exploración”. Se equivoca totalmente, pierde por completo el contexto y el significado de Aburto, con o sin magnicidio. ¡Hay infinidad de maquilocos! Este obrero es indicio de todo un fenómeno sociológico, existencial, al que no se la querido prestar atención. Las maquiladoras, por ser asfixiantes, están creando monstruos, seres descontentos. Aburto fue uno de los primeros en estallar. Pero van a estallar más. Por otro lado, Aburto decía que él era un Caballero Aguila. Pero imagínate, oh fiascosmos, es un Caballero Aguila sin imperio azteca. Los Caballero Aguila actualmente venden artesanías en la avenida Revolución –uniformados folclóricamente, según órdenes del alcalde— y bailan con conchas entremetidas en los calcetines fosforescentes frente al Palacio de Minería en la Ciudad de México, con todo y sus fayuca-pants mugrosos y una cinta de Rambo en la frente.

También aparece el subcomandante Marcos en tu novela. Marcos y Aburto: ¿dos enmascarados? o ¿dos personajes opuestos?

Salinas, Marcos, Colosio y Aburto son el mismo personaje. Los cuatro aparecen en la novela, porque había que registrar estos personajes siniestros en nuestra literatura, como los registran las máscaras urbanas, digamos, la sátira chilanga y norteña. Ellos son variantes de un mismo personaje de México. El Peje, el Niño Verde, Bejarano, Hank son otras de sus variantes. Son las ratas que se creen las contra-ratas. Decía Marx que la historia ocurre siempre dos veces. Una en forma de drama. Otra en forma de farsa. Ahora lo único que vemos son ya las puras farsas. Así que, para corregir a Marx (que corregía a Hegel), diremos que la Farsa aparece como Co-Historia. Aburto y Marcos, lo indígena mezclado con maquilandia. Aburto y Marcos son dos pastiches. Están hechos de un revoltijo de Zapata, el Che, Fidel, Monsiváis, Castaneda, Pepe El Toro y Pachita.

El cinismo pareciera ser uno de los hilos que mueve a los personajes del escenario político del 94, que aparecen en esta novela...

Horney dice que el cinismo es una forma secreta de desesperación. Un cínico no quiere elegir, dice que todo vale lo mismo, no mucho o de plano nada de nada. El cínico tiene miedo. Se protege mediante el cinismo, teme el ridículo de elegir valores. Construye un personaje indiferente, valemadres. Pero miremos a nuestro alrededor. Ya todos somos cínicos. El cinismo perdió todo su filo, es ya una tontería creer que el cinismo es un desafío. Un cínico es un pinche mediocre. En el siglo XIX, si eras cínico eras Baudelaire. En el siglo XXI si eres cínico, eres Homero, pero Homero Simpson. El cinismo es ya el mainstream.

¿Con qué intención introduces distintas voces narrativas?

Para desdoblarse, Aburto se desdecía. La novela es parte de un ciclo llamado “La desintegración”, la desintegración es la explosión de las voces de las que necesito librarme. Yo hablo hasta con los conejos. Cada libro, un descargo de voces.

¿Cuáles fueron tus fuentes?

Los trabajos de investigación que se han hecho sobre Colosio, en Tijuana y nacionalmente y, sobre todo, las versiones orales. Mis fuentes fundamentales son trabajadores de la maquila, las cosas que ellos dicen saber o inventan. En los noventa trabajé como ensamblador en la maquila. Ahí fue donde decidí escribir una novela sobre Aburto; en aquellos años, la gente no paraba de hablar de Aburto. Yo me identificaba con él, yo también, como un chingo de cabrones en Tijuana, fantaseábamos con volarle los sesos al presidente. Un día saliendo de una de la maquiladora, un conocido se me acercó y me dijo, mira, te presento a fulano de tal. Dice que él trabajaba en la misma maquila que Aburto y dice que estaba bien sayco, que era calladito pero que estaba piratísimo. Buena parte de lo que cuento salió de pláticas como esa. Casi no inventé nada. Seguí el método de Shakespeare, contar lo que me han contado otros. Recuerdo que en el semanario Zeta salieron sus dibujos. Aburto era un escritor, el tipo leía. Era una persona con varias facetas, así que las versiones orales sobre su historia son muchísimas. Recuerdo una noche que nos fuimos a emborrachar a un salón de baile tijuanense famosón. Se llama Las Pulgas, cerveza barata, chicas de la maquila guapetonas. Eramos como cuatro o cinco amigos. Esa noche nadie checó a los forros que andaban bailando, nada más por estar picados hablando de Aburto. Todos éramos maquilocos. En esta frontera, los batos de las clases altas querían ser como los Arellano Félix, y se convirtieron en los narcojuniors del Cártel. Los jodidos queríamos ser como Aburto.

¿Puede hablarse de un nuevo género literario: el narcorrealismo?

No creo que el narcorrealismo sea un género literario. El narcorrealismo es la realidad nacional. Por narcorrealismo me refiero a la alucinatorio en general, no solamente las drogas ilegales, sino toda forma de delirio. Nosotros somos narcorreales. Alguien me dijo: narra esta historia como Don Delillo narra la historia de Lee H. Oswald, el asesino de Kennedy. Pero, pues, ¡Aburto es otro asunto! Es un delirio completo, es un personaje latinoamericano que si lo narras de modo periodístico-realista, como está escrito Libra de Delillo, lo deshaces. A Aburto había que narrarlo narcorrealmente. Este país es narcorrealismo puro. Los primeros que se dieron cuenta de esto fueron Artaud y Burroughs. Burroughs describió al país como un lugar de queers viciosos. Artaud, como un país que iba a destruir a Oxidente. Artaud tenía razón. La profecía va a ser cumplida. Pronto regresará Quetzalcoatl y cuando llegue, cada uno de nosotros, lo vamos a jalar del manto, diciéndole, ey, qué bueno que veniste de retache, desde hace tiempo te esperábamos, chíngate a Estados Unidos, dales en su puta madre a los gringos, yo te ayudo. Y Quetzalcoatl va a hacer como si no nos conociera, como si no se acordara bien de nosotros, porque mientras vea todas esas caras, estas caras que nos hemos visto durante milenios, Quetzalcoatl iba a estar pensando: en la madre, son los mismos, regreso y me encuentro con los mismos fantasmas reencarnados, gulp, de nuevo me van a chingar, de nuevo todo lo mismo, exactamente lo mismo, bienvenido a México, el país en que todos los fantasmas siguen vivos.

ADIOS UNDERGROUND

2006-10-21T16:08:00.000-07:00

Entrevista de Adriana Cortés
El Ángel del Reforma, 15 de febrero del 2004

1.- El argumento es simple: un club filatélico integrado por cuatro viejos se reúne con frecuencia, de pronto, aparecen muertos. ¿Por qué el epígrafe de Nick Piombino? ¿No te propusiste narrar una historia, sino más bien exponer una serie de sucesos?

No quiero hablar de la novela: es esotérica. Pertenece a una serie en donde va a disolverse. Llevo 4 novelas escritas. Está es la primera que se publica. Todos ellas tienen como temática el enrarecimiento de la biósfera a través del lenguaje. De su desperdicio colosal. Me interesa la experiencia de la desintegración. Quisiera pensar que no relato «sucesos» sino su disolución. La huelga de los acontecimientos, ese concepto que Baudrillard le pidió prestado a Macedonio Fernández. Me interesa no llegar jamás a la historia. Cuando escribo busco perderme en los personajes. Los preparo volátiles o monstruosos, para no recuperarme jamás.

2.- ¿Por qué escribiste la novela en fragmentos narrativos?

Cada fragmento es una estampilla y una mónada. No creo en el flujo del lenguaje. Es un mito menstrual.

3.- ¿El weblog -tú tienes uno- tiene alguna influencia en cuanto a la escritura de la novela en fragmentos?

A través de la escritura electrónica he llegado a concebir otra forma de relacionarme con los lectores, el texto y la identidad. Aunque mi conexión con el fragmento se remonta a Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, la televisión y la neurosis. Cada individuo o cada «suceso» es su propio tiempo, autónomo de otros. No vivimos en una realidad regida por el tiempo cíclico o lineal, sino por una coexistencia de tiempos múltiples, y para mí esa experiencia es fragmentaria: entro de un mundo a otro, de un tiempo a otro, y de esos intercambios de temporalidad sólo me quedo con los fragmentos de esferas que entreví, mundos a los cuales probablemente nunca regresaré.

4.-¿Por qué la filatelia como pretexto (como imán que une a los fragmentos) para escribir una anti - novela?

Durante 3 o 4 años fui filatelista. Se tornó una obsesión, como todo lo que hago. Incluso dedicaba buena parte de mis ganancias de venta de drogas al por menor a comprar estampillas. En muchos sentidos, el libro es una falsa parodia de esa época. Acababa de dejar de pintar, no quería seguir leyendo a Borges, porque Borges me atormentaba, al igual que la ufología y, entonces, pasaba la noche recibiendo uno que otro cliente, fumando mariguana y clasificando estampillas. Destruyendo al tiempo.

5.-El narrador es omnisciente, es como un ojo enorme, un Big Brother que ve a los personajes, ¿"El matasellos" es una parodia de un reality show, donde prevalece la hiperrealidad?

No una parodia de los reality show. Más bien su celebración. Los humanos desean ser vigilados. Por eso necesitan a Televisa, los teléfonos celulares, el amor o Estados Unidos. Por mí que los vigilen. Por algo desean ser controlados. El problema de los reality shows no es que hay idiotas que deseen ser televizados haciendo nada frente a la cámara; el problema es que hay idiotas que desean ver otros idiotas haciendo nada frente a la cámara. Lo mismo, por otra parte, sucede con la literatura. ¿Qué le puede interesar a alguien de un libro como el mío, donde no hay más que más y más metadiscurso, pues las identidades y los hechos se han desvanecido o son, en suma, una broma patafísica? Y sin embargo, los lectores existen.

6.- Hay en "El matasellos" múltiples discursos narrativos: poético, ensayístico, novelístico, televisivo, ¿es una anti - novela fronteriza, en el sentido de que coexisten diversos discursos?

Diana Palaversich dice que es una anti-anti-novela. Algo todavía más ocioso. Estoy de acuerdo. Practico, aunque sea mal, todos los géneros. Siempre he pensado que si voy a ser algo tan abyecto como un escritor, lo mínimo que puedo hacer para tener cierta decencia es practicar todos sus errores. No dejar de cometer uno sólo de ellos. Mezclarlos todos en una pequeña cena semiúrgica, un convite de puercos.

7.- La sombra de Borges ¿está presente de una manera deliberada en cuanto a la deconstrucción de otros textos literarios y filosóficos, y en las anotaciones de pie de página que siempre ironizan?

Borges es el mayor escritor del siglo XX. Ya él era parte de la post-literatura; de la época del rechazo de la novela. Borges siempre se negó. Él estaba riéndose de la historia de la literatura, simulaba ser un clásico. ¡Ja! Así engañó a todo el mundo. Me intriga escribir novela desde lo apócrifo y desde la negación de la novela. Si pudiera resucitar a uno de los tres (Borges, Dios o mi padre) pediría hablar con Borges. Me sentaría frente a él. Le confesaría que soy un Lector Baladí y me pasaría el resto de la sesión comportándome como su gruppie. Quizá me sentaría en sus pies y me tomaría una foto con él como quien se toma una foto con Santa Claus. O quizá le picaría los ojos para saber si es verdad que es ciego o esa fue otra de sus bromas a los periodistas, como creo que fue.

8.- ¿Por qué la oposición entre vejez y posmodernidad, simbolizada tanto por los viejos y el joven neoglobal, miembros del club, como por la filatelia y los reality shows?

No sé. No recuerdo exactamente qué hice en el libro. Alguien que leyó la novela antes de enviarla al editor, me dijo: ‘¿Una novela sobre viejos? ¿A quién le puede interesar? Los ancianos no son comerciales. Uno piensa en viejos y lo primero que piensa es: qué aburrido’. Mi mamá tenía razón. Pero así es el mundo. Tedioso. Es claro que el mundo ya se acabó. Todos somos ancianos. Ya todo sucedió. En nuestras vidas y en la Historia. Cuando alguien nace (el llamado Bebé) no inicia de cero. Al nacer, Bebé ya tiene 2000 años de vejez. Realmente me sorprende que los bebés no se suiciden. O no salgan con una ametralladora bajo el brazo y asesinen a todos en el hospital. Luego el Bebé se entregaría a la policía o trataría de huir hacia México. Y, por supuesto, al final de la persecución el juez lo absolvería porque se ha argumentado que cometió su crimen debido al síndrome de trauma de parto del que hablaba Otto Rank.

9.- ¿Por qué la alusión a la contaminación por lo Otro: la voz de Angela Peralta contaminada por la fiebre bubónica, el club filatélico contaminado por la presencia del Otro, del extranjero, de Norman, el gringo?

Los extraterrestren arrojan una plaga silenciosa sobre nosotros. Anthrax mental. Además la “contaminación” es una alusión a lo que sucede en la frontera México-Estados Unidos y lo que sucede en la cama. Muy pronto, para evitar la contaminación el semen tendrá sabor. El mío tendra sabor limón. Por otra parte, soy amante de la música. En todo bromeo menos en esto: la voz de Angela Peralta existe, existe purísima. Yo necesito creer esto para poder huir de la hibridación y el dolor. Necesito creer que alguna vez voy a escuchar su voz y cuando su voz se alce, Estados Unidos desaparecerá, y nosotros con Él, pues ya somos Ellos. Todo lo que sucede es autodestrucción.

10.- ¿Lo Otro vendría siendo lo enigmático, asociado con el secreto de ciertas palabras con las que juega el narrador, como "Matasellos" o la novela como "no revelación"?

Lo Otro por fin existe. Para que lo Otro exista tiene que ser la absoluta alteridad, la otredad irrevocable. Y eso, gracias a la enajenación, por fin existe. Lo Otro somos nosotros mismos, lo que no será alcanzado ya. La novela es una no-revelación —no la mía, cualquiera— porque no esconde ya ningún secreto y esconde todos a la vez.

11.- ¿Por qué el poema en la p. 78 dice: "en tiempos mediocres no es interesante escribir novela ni crítica"?

Porque ese poema tampoco es un poema.

12.- ¿Proclamas en "El matasellos" la muerte de la novela? ¿Eres un "Matanovelas"?

No, al contrario. Si de algo se trata la novela es de eso: de la imposibilidad de que muera la pareja. La muerte de la novela ya ha sido proclamada muchísimas veces. Y está bien ese múltiple funeral. No hubo jamás La Novela. Ella nunca fue una sino demasiadas. Por lo tanto la novela tiene que morir muchas veces. En Juárez están matando a La Mujer y ya lo vemos: llevan 300, 500 u 800 y sigue viva. Trabajando en la Maquila.

13.- ¿Te consideras un escritor polémico?

Desgraciadamente sí. De las ruinas de Heráclito y de mi clase social aprendí que todo es guerra. Estudio psicoterapia y eso es: la guerra de unos contra otros, de Nosotros contra los Pedófilos, digamos, a quien tenemos que convertir para preservar el Orden Social. La literatura es lo mismo. Sólo que es una guerra pequeña, un combate de lánguidos.

14.-¿Ubicas tu obra narrativa dentro de la "literatura sucia" -a Fadanelli y a Mario Bellatin se les ubica en ella-, donde los personajes son marginales y su identidad incierta?

Me identifico más con el concepto de escritura experimental. Me siento mucho más cerca de Pablo Palacio, Kathy Acker y el Internet que de Bellatin o Fadanelli, aunque sus libros me agradan. Además la literatura nunca puede ser muy sucia. Ni marginal. Hay que tener voluntad de periferia. Pero hay que saber que todos vamos directo al Mainstream, al Canon o al Blog. Adiós Underground.

LA BIFURCACIÓN DE LAS COSAS

2006-10-21T15:58:00.000-07:00

Entrevista a Heriberto Yépez
Por Josué Barrera, publicada en La línea del cosmonauta #3

Te agradezco, Heriberto, por acceder a la entrevista. Uno de los propósitos de La línea del cosmonauta es hablar sobre escritores contemporáneos para dar a conocer lo que se produce en la actualidad en el panorama literario del país. Estoy seguro que esta entrevista ayudará a que el lector tenga una idea más amplia acerca de tu obra.

1.- ¿De qué manera te marcó como escritor nacer y vivir en Tijuana?

A mí me marcaron las calles. Las de mi colonia, atestadas de asquerosas lideresas priístas, alcohólicos apestosos, wanna be dealers y pandillas cholas, y las calles del centro, la grisácea (y hoy chilanga) Constitución, donde toda la ciudad coincidía para tomar el transporte público y la avenida Revolución cancerigeneada de turistas gringos fachosos y japoneses kodak, mixtecos indignos y vendedores chicanos, baratijas de pseudo-plata y espanglish sardónico. Soy hijo de la noche tijuanense, literalmente. Mi madre es una migrante michoacana, que trabajó en la industria nocturna. Era bailarina nocturna en el Sans Souci. A veces me dicen, Hache, eso lo inventaste. Ojalá, brother. ¿Qué quieren que haga? Tengo la desgracia y la fortuna de venir de lo más profundo —y aquí hago alarde— de la noche fronteriza. Pero eso tiene un costo muy cabrón: estar fantasmeado toda la vida, querer llenar el barranco con un rimero de libros imposibles. (Este viaje me llevó, por cierto, a estudiar a fondo la psicoterapia). Terminada mi infancia, fui parte de los invasores de los barrios de la Zapata-Reforma. De los 10 a los 18 años no televisión for me, porque ahí no había electricidad. Eso me marcó cañón.
Toda mi adolescencia la pasé escuchando música en un radio de baterías recargables, en el patio de mi casa, rodeado de olor a basura quemada en el cerro de enfrente, leyendo libros —a veces robados, a veces segundones— de ovnis y Borges, Neruda y los secretos del Grial, Mi lucha de Hitler y La Sagrada Familia de Marx, fumando, esperando el fin de la luz vespertina para luego ver los helicópteros norteamericanos que se pueden ver desde esta parte alta de la ciudad y maldecirlos ya pedo, en medio de la completa obscuridad. Así conocí los estados más altos de la euforia y la depresión, la alegría animal y las fantasías humanas. Pasaron los años, terminó el disparaíso de la adolescencia y cuando no me quedó otra que tener trabajos y drogas cada vez más jodidas, ya de madrugada, antes de irme a la maquiladora donde trabajaba en ese entonces, salía a graffitear, odiando al mundo. Terminaba mi turno en la tarde y llegaba a la universidad a escuchar clases de nihilismo con el maestro Lee y de pensamiento presocrático y alemán con Matthai. En Tijuana hasta el día es nocturno. Todo es cerdo.
Otra vez pasó el tiempo y a través de la literatura pasé a formar parte de la clase media. Chingaderas de la vida, yo que tanto odié a la clase media, ahora soy uno de sus miembros. Pero la soberbia que otorga provenir de la clase baja mexicana, una especie de resentimiento y orgullo (simultáneamente) es difícil de remover. Cuando vienes de la pobreza mexicana urbana piensas: lo que aprendí, lo vi, lo que escuché, lo que viví, no lo puede entender nadie más, ¡soy chingón! ¡Esta bola de pendejos no saben nada! ¡Soy superior! Y ahí es donde te estancas, porque el pobre es intolerante, detesta a la clase media y alta, cree que cuenta con una sabiduría especial, la Gnosis del Barrio Bajo.
Los últimos años han consistido precisamente en tratar de rebasar esa dudosa “Soberbia de la Miseria”, el creer que lo sabes todo porque dominas el lenguaje del esclavo y del amo, porque vienes del submundo de las cartolandias y ves a la clase media mental con risa... Lo mismo ocurre con los drogadictos, que cuando se recuperan creen que saben más que Jesucristo y hasta se vuelven sus colaboradores. Estoy tratando, pues, de olvidar las marcas sociales y biográficas, porque lo que ahora busco es aceptar que el pasado ya está atrás. Lo que ahora busco es el ahora. Lo que aquí quiero es el aquí total. Estoy a punto del presente real.

2.- ¿Consideras que la llamada “literatura chicana” y la “literatura de la onda” son antecedente directos de la literatura fronteriza actual?

No en mi caso. Conocí la literatura chicana ya entrado en mis veintes y de la literatura de la onda me interesa casi exclusivamente lo que hizo José Agustín. Es todo. La literatura de Tijuana no tiene antecedentes literarios directos. Sus influencias son fundamentalmente mediáticas, desde la música grunge y la electrónica hasta la norteña, la televisión, el Internet y en mi caso en la teoría crítica y la literatura latinoamericana, europea y norteamericana experimentales. (Los chicanos son más bien folklóricos y tradicionalistas, prevanguardistas). Me considero parte de la Tradición de lo Desconocido, de la que hablaba Lezama. Claro, por ser de la frontera, rápidamente se te endilgan clichés que te vinculan con los escritores chicanos, que en su inmensa mayoría son los burros-cebras del kitsch mex-usa. Muchos chicanos son pobre performance. Una nostalgia ridícula o una hibridación bastante mamona.
Además los escritores norteños somos todos diferentes. No hay una “literatura norteña”. Hay nortes, hay desvíos, hay desiertos, hay ciudades, hay aperturas plurales que no hay que permitir se vuelvan un único río. No hagamos Historia o Genealogía. Lo más valiente es aceptar el laberinto expansivo.

3.- Háblanos sobre el tipo de novela que has llamado estrategia apócrifa.

La literatura latinoamericana no pertenece de lleno a la oxidental. Para usar la expresión de Macedonio Fernández, es “recién venida”. Esa índole tardía la provee de un espíritu de simulacro. No es casual que Borges hable del Doble o que haya proliferado la remezcla y el neobarroco. La literatura latinoamericana es golémica o, ahora usando la expresión de Pessoa, “fingidora”. Esta extemporaneidad la he pensado como estrategia de escribir desde una distancia desfamiliarizadora, una ironía, una capacidad de entrar y salir de la historia de la literatura, de sus técnicas y, sobre todo, de sus géneros. Lo que yo llamo la estrategia apócrifa me permite descontruir y recliclar el canon y lo oxidental.
Pero la estrategia apócrifa no es el allende final. Porque lo apócrifo sigue manteniendo a la escritura en la sombra, en lo pseudo, en seguimiento irónico, si se quiere, pero todavía en (des o anti) modelaje de lo oxidental-capitalista, aunque sea a modo de experimentalismo poético o falsa-novela. Lo apócrifo es sólo una estrategia. Hay algo más. Ultrella u Ojalá. O, porqué no: Condoritense Plop.

4.- ¿La concepción de tus personajes va junto con esa búsqueda (lo has declarado en una entrevista) de querer alejarte cada vez más de las formas conocidas de la novela?

Sí, la novela —como la poesía, como la pintura— acumuló ya demasiado karma. Es necesario ahora su nirvana, el camino del desapego a sus formas histórico-samsáricas. En cuestión de novela soy budista punk.

5.- ¿De qué manera ha influído el uso de internet (revistas electrónicas, blogs, foros) en la difusión de la literatura?

Si el Internet difunde la literatura será retrógrada. Espero que nos apropiemos del Internet cada vez más en la dirección de la construcción de nuevas lenguas y estructuras. Si se difunde la literatura, difundiremos la moral judeocristiana, la metafísica neurótica y la economía política de las que está hecha. Eso sería porcino. Post-literaturicémonos. ¿Viva el mole de axolotl? ¿O de lo que no se puede hablar es mejor descontruir? Not enough. La literatura es parte de la cibernética, es decir, del Control. Lo que escribo en Internet, lo que digo aquí, no me representa. En inglés y en español me bifurco. Mis libros son distintos a mis posts. Mis ensayos parecen de un autor distinto al de mis cuentos. Soy Babel.
Soy Babel y CaCaín. Para explicar sus contradicciones y divergencias estilísticas, lo más fácil sería decir que la Biblia la escribieron varias manos. Pero me parece más probable que la Biblia, en realidad, la escribió un solo par de manos, cuya esquizofrenia llamamos “Espíritu Santo”. La autoría, pues, de las Legradas Escrituras es la Hermana de Yahvé, una escritora pseudo-judía misógina y probablemente lesbiana. Les-Psuedo-Lilith.

6.- De manera general, ¿cómo consideras el panorama actual de la literatura en México?

Agazapante del gazapo, deseo periferias, tanto de la literatura mexicana como norteamericana, de las cuales me considero observador participante, etnógrafo situacionista o nómada rampante. (De ambas ramblas difiero). Monsieur Foucault, lamento informarle que no es el centro, sino la periferia la que es panóptica. El “margen indomable” (Bargallo) al que pertenezco es un observatorio distante, un extrañamiento (¿Shklovsky, Pervert Brecht o Pablo Palacio?). La literatura mexicana actual es funesta. (La norteamericana, anestésica). Estoy acostumbrado a las emociones fuertes de la literatura hispanoamericana, desde Sábato hasta los dos Vallejos, al riesgo estructural de la escritura experimental de principios del siglo XX en Europa y de la teoría post-estructuralista y, sobre todo, a la sabiduría chamánica. Si sitúo a la literatura mexicana canónica en la cartografía cósmica del quincunce ocuparía el lugar del Ocaso Tedioso o Crepúsculo Mediocre. Ni siquiera me juzgo miembro de la literatura fronteriza. Soy parte del deslinde. Solamente que no soy uno más de los migrantes hacia el norteamiento. Todo rumbo es autoritario. El zig zag que llevo todavía no tiene nombre. Y al que se lo ponga: balazo. No lo olviden: soy francotirador, a.k.a., tu paranoia.

UN CLICHE METAFÍSICO

2006-10-21T15:50:00.000-07:00

Entrevista de José Luis Enciso

1. ¿Sientes a El Matasellos deudora en parte de novelas como las de Douglas Coupland y su teoría de la desnarración?

He leído muy poco de Coupland. Me parece un autor menor. De Generation X sólo leí el vocabulario y los comics que incluye al margen de sus capítulos. De quien me siento deudor en cuanto la desnarración es de los políticos mexicanos, que hablan y hablan, y no aclaran nada. Últimamente los políticos mexicanos han aprovechado ese talento cantinflesco para participar en cámaras escondidas, los llamados “cuatro” o set-ups. Son realmente insuperables en el arte de evadir relatar algo, poder decir algo verosímil. Los presidentes mexicanos, por ejemplo, determinan durante seis años qué sucede en el país, pero todo lo que queda de ellos en la memoria general son aforismos caninos como los de López Portillo, eufemismos decembrinos como los Salinas o Mc-Lapsus Bilingües como los de Fox. Lo que hemos conocido como México pronto se va a terminar, y quienes le cambien el letrero al país —contratistas de Boston— van a decir: what happened here? Y nadie sabrá qué pasó en tal ex nación. En México es imposible narrar.

2. ¿Por qué escribiste tu novela con esa mezcla de ensayo, poema y otras formas discursivas? ¿Es un lenguaje “escalera”?

La idea de escalera en Wittgenstein me atrae mucho. Pero lo que me atrae más de Wittgenstein no es su idea de que hay que tirar la escalera una vez que la usemos, sino otra idea suya: todo suceso puede ser descrito de muchas maneras. De acuerdo a muchas estructuras. Esa observación me parece fundamental y, nuevamente, destructora de la posibilidad de contar. Cada vez que quiero contar Algo, pienso: ¿y porqué lo cuento Así y no Asa? Y, entonces, lo cuento, Así y Asa. Hecho eso, no cuento Algo sino Algunos.

3. ¿Es la filatelia una metáfora de una época obsoleta? ¿digamos una época de papel?

En el libro casi no uso metáforas. La metáfora oculta algo, y en el libro busqué ser totalmente explícito, como alguien que en lugar de dormirse y tener un sueño, se duerme y tiene una explicación psicoanalítica y su deconstrucción, y cuando despierta hace la crónica paródica de eso y de cómo se videograbó.

4. ¿Qué autores lees? (Mexicanos y extranjeros)

Casi todo lo que leo es filosofía moderna y antigua, y literatura pornográfica del Internet. Me gusta mucho la masturbación mental.

5. He leído que en parte de tu obra, como en el cuento “CC” de la antología Nuevas voces de la narrativa mexicana y en El Matasellos existe una burla –que a mí me encanta- hacia lo gringo, ¿en verdad te resultan tan antipáticos?, o ¿estas burlas hacia ellos son, de alguna manera, una apología disfrazada?, esto último te lo pregunto porque radicas en una zona –y esto también trasciende a lo que yo conozco de tu obra- de tráfico cultural constante, permanente y, por tanto, agringada.

Los mexicanos del sur argumentan que en el norte estamos más agringados. No hay cosa más falsa. Pero bueno, hay que dejar que cada quien duerma su sweet siesta. Precisamente por estar a un lado de EU es que los norteños tenemos la posibilidad concreta de tener una verdadera postura crítica ante esa cultura. Le he dedicado mucho tiempo a la gnosis de las artes y literaturas norteamericanas. Admiro buena parte de la cultura estadunidense. Sobre todo la indígena. Pero al norteamericano promedio lo detesto. Lo detesto tanto como lo detestan los intelectuales o los francotiradores de ese país, porque ese norteamericano es idiota y brutal. Es casi peor que un mexicano.

6. ¿En qué género –llamémosle medio- te sientes más cómodo, en el cuento o en la novela?

En ninguno de ellos, por eso fusiono y remezclo. Escribir siguiendo la tradición de un género es como coger siempre en la posición del misionero, esa en que la mujer piensa en las telenovelas mientras el varón ronca encima de ella. Cada vez que alguien dice la palabra «género» saco mi yo-yo.

7. ¿Qué relaciones hay entre otras disciplinas –pintura, música- en tu obra? ¿Cuáles son tus aficiones?

Me gusta mucho pensar en la pintura, aunque escribo muy poco de ella. Un tiempo pinté y era tan malo como escribiendo, y dejé de hacerlo. Pero en mi mente sigo pintando. Además doy clases de historia del arte. Creo que aprendí mucho del arte erótico hindú y de Francis Bacon acerca de cómo construir un personaje, de cómo es el cuerpo, de cómo se conjuga con el otro y cómo se descompone. La música ha hecho lo mismo. Siempre que escribo estoy escuchando música. Mientras respondo esto escucho la ya clásica versión ciberpunk que 386 DX —que no es una banda siquiera sino una PC cómica— hizo de Anarchy in the UK.

8. ¿Qué papel juega la filosofía en tu obra?

La de papel sanitario.

9. ¿Vives de la literatura?

No. Vivo de dar clases, si a lo que hago se le puede llamar “clases” y a lo que esas “clases” me permiten se le puede llamar “vivir”.

10. ¿Entre tus contemporáneos (nacidos en los setenta), a quiénes conoces, de quiénes te gusta su trabajo?

De los años setenta casi no me gusta nada. Solamente la televisión y la teoría de la arquitectura.

11. ¿Qué tendencias hallas en la literatura producida por gente de tu generación?

No creo que todavía estén definidas. Creo que la generación de los años setenta cometió este error: creer que tenía que aprender de la generación de los 50 o los 60. Los poetas escriben como lo más reciente que fue incluido en Poesía en movimiento, y los narradores ahora creen que tienen que imitar o responder al Crack. Mi generación no se ha dado cuenta que de quienes tenemos que aprender es de los que nacieron en los ochenta. Yo me estoy preparando apenas para aprender de los que nacieron el 11 de septiembre. Edipear —rebelarse contra tus padres o escribir respecto a ellos— me parece, cada vez más, enteramente imbécil. Yocasta era más inteligente: lo sabio no es el parricidio sino la pedofilia.

12. ¿Qué opinas de la escritura electrónica?

La escritura electrónica es la pedofilia.

13. ¿Qué crees que aporta El Matasellos al discurso novelesco?

Nada. Espero que NADA.

14. ¿Cuáles son tus ambiciones como escritor?

Escribir muchísimo. Transformarme cada cierto tiempo. Hacer dinero. Viajar. Intenté ser un buen mesero y se me caían las órdenes. Intenté ser un buen obrero y me devolvían todo de Control de Calidad. Mi ambición es ser un buen escritor. Ya tengo algunos libros. Ya me jodí. Ahora sólo puedo ser considerado un buen o mal escritor, pero en cualquier caso, un “escritor”. No me interesa, por otro lado, ser reconocido en el futuro. Yang Chu filosofaba que la posteridad sólo le puede interesar a los tarados. Los muertos no disfrutan, y yo quiero disfrutar, así que quiero que mis libros agraden a algunos ahora, y no después. Los escritores son juzgados cíclicamente. Si eres reconocido en tu tiempo, luego serás considerado un bodrio o una mala influencia. Así que yo quiero ser reconocido ahora, y ya después que digan lo que quieran. Ya no voy a estar aquí. Para entonces, ya disfruté.

15. La realidad de tus personajes me recuerda a la realidad de un paranoico célebre: Daniel Paul Schreber, el autor de Memorias de un enfermo de nervios ; este libro fue escrito, como seguramente sabrás, “por un loco que sabe que está loco y que tiene una lucidez sorprendente”, como lo ha sintetizado Alberto Ayala Blanco; esto me insta a hacerte esta y la siguiente pregunta. ¿Tiene algo que ver con tu novela? (El caso de Norman me recuerda mucho a Schreber)

Estudié psicoterapia, la ejerzo. Todo lo que escribo gira en torno a la psique humana, en torno a la hipótesis acerca de su inexistencia, a la historia de su fracaso faetónico o su éxito comercial. Respecto a Freud, estoy de acuerdo con lo que decían Wittgenstein, Foucault y Levi-Strauss: Freud era un mitógrafo.

16. ¿Qué tanto desdeña la “realidad” que perciben tus personajes a la “realidad”, llamémosle, “objetiva”?

Lo que pasa es que mis personajes no son parte de la realidad objetiva, ellos son partes integrantes de la alucinación de alguien más. No tienen más realidad que el chupacabras, Topo Gigio, Bart Simpson o Pepito.

17. Tus juegos estructurales son peculiares, porque no son como los del nouveau roman , no se basan sólo en los cambios en el “punto de vista”, en los tiempos, y en la exploración de discursos diferentes –ya sabes, monólogos, fragmentos teatrales, imágenes- sino también la forma se vuelve fondo –creo, salvo las opiniones de críticos expertos- porque cuentas mucho y no “amarras” nada tu historia, claro, desde un punto de vista de la novela tradicional. ¿Qué opinas al respecto?

Cuando amarras una historia terminas ahorcando todas las otras. No encuentro ningún placer en las historias en que el lector desemboca en una conclusión, porque si eso ocurre cayó en la trampa del autor, quien predestinó ese rumbo que el lector creyó encontrar por sí mismo. Según Benjamin, el narrador del short story o el de la novela contemporánea, han perdido algo: la mayoría de las versiones que posee una “misma” historia. Por eso no me interesa amarrar nada. Yo relato muchas historias o ninguna, porque me gusta conservar la varianza. Quien quiera una historia que vaya a Blockbuster y renté una película, pero que ni se le ocurra rentar una película de David Lynch, porque en Mullholland Drive tampoco va a encontrar una historia. La acabo de rentar y me divirtió muchísimo. Nunca supe qué pasó.

18. ¿Podrías definir el conjunto de tu obra?

Una búsqueda tránsfuga hacia la felicidad del texto.

19. ¿Podrías definirte tú?

Un cliché metafísico en busca de su ex.

20. ¿Practicas la minificción? ¿Qué opinas de ella?

Sí, me gusta la depuración de la historieta. Me gusta tanto como la saturación, ambas me parecen deformaciones, porque no veo cómo un gigante podría ser menos irrisorio que un enano. El minimalismo es depravado. La frase de Mies van der Rohe “menos es más” es la refutación de sí misma. Apenas la escuchamos, queremos trastocarla, parodiarla: aumentarla. Lo mismo le sucede al microcuento de Monterroso, que se llama “El Dinosaurio” porque Monterroso sabía que un texto así de chiquito va a terminar convertido en un Godzilla. Desde ese punto de vista, sí: menos es más y más y más.

21. Como es lógico en los escritores jóvenes, aun cuando ya poseen cierta trayectoria como es tu caso, no abunda información biográfica de ellos, como también es tu caso. ¿Cómo redactarías tus datos personales en la solapa de uno de tus libros?

No me gusta hablar de mis datos personales. Cuando los doy es que son falsos.

22. ¿Qué opinas respecto a que El matasellos es una anti-anti-novela, como lo señala Diana Palaversich?

Una anti-antinovela sería una parodia de la no-novelación. Quisiera pensar que estoy haciendo eso.

23. ¿Qué es la postmodernidad para ti? ¿Tu literatura es postmoderna?

La postmodernidad se define de muchas maneras. Postmodernidad, por ejemplo, como abandono de los metarrelatos, y esa forma de definir lo postmoderno, ahora, me parece una cursilería. Me choca esa forma de nihilismo lánguido. En cierto contexto consideraría el calificativo de “postmoderno” como un insulto, una forma derivada de la ideología neoliberal.

24. ¿Cuál es la mayor satisfacción que te ha dado tu literatura?

Entrever en sus momentos más lúcidos que algún día dejará de existir en mi vida. O sospechar que yo jamás he existido en ella.

25, ¿En qué estas trabajando ahora? ¿Qué podemos esperar los lectores del Yépez que sigue?

Más ensayos pseudo-híbridos, más pseudo-novelas, algunos falsos poemas y uno que otro dizque-cuento.

26. ¿Qué futuro ves en la literatura nacional?, ¿qué papel jugará tu generación en ese escenario?

Una generación nueva es una jauría de advenedizos que no merecen la presa bosquejada. Una jauría de avaricia a la que, sin embargo, le está deparada apoderarse irremisiblemente del banquete. Esta es la mala noticia: nosotros somos el futuro de la literatura mexicana. Pero la buena nueva es esta: la aceleración inter-generacional bajo la cual operan nuestras culturas nos cerciora que detrás de cada generación se prepara otra, compuesta de saqueadores todavía peores. A mi generación ya se le dieron muchas becas, así que, por lo menos, tiene que admitir que ha sido una excelente Generación Hazmerreír.

LA NOVELA QUE NO

2006-10-21T15:17:00.000-07:00

Entrevista con Heriberto Yépez
Juan Carlos Hidalgo

Aunque constantemente se hace referencia explícita en la obra a un hipotético lector, parecería que es muy difícil a este tipo de obras encontrar un lector natural, un público. ¿Cómo fue que hallaste en la filatelia toda una serie de características que la convierten en una actividad tan asincrónica con el tiempo presente y tan susceptible de ser ironizada al extremo?

Los neuróticos elegimos la ironía como Solución Final automática. O, mejor dicho, autómata. Porque en la neurosis o eliges el orgasmo o eliges el sarcasmo. (Aunque si te masturbas, eliges ambos). Así que yo, novelista onanista, seleccioné ironizar la filatelia porque es parte de mi vida. Ironizarla es inevitable: al igual que escribir, coleccionar estampillas es una actividad centralmente idiota. ¿Qué hace el filatelista? Invertir su dinero y su tiempo en ordenar pedazos de papel que debido a su hipotética escasez adquieren valor monetario o insómnico debido a que otros idiotas desean esos mismos fragmentáculos. Para mí la filatelia y la literatura se disputan el puesto de la actividad que más desperdicia y humilla al papel. Por eso decidí escribir una novela sobre filatelia, para llevar este absurdo hasta su punto más bajo: lo ridículo elegante.

Por momentos, más que un afán narrativo, al estilo clásico, parece que como autor nos estuvieras mostrando las entrañas de una casa que ya existe de hace mucho. Parece que más bien estás deconstruyendo, ¿qué opinas de tal apreciación?

La novela como estructura ya está acabada. Unos han concluido que sigue su muerte. Soy de otra opinión, quizá influida por Bajtin o quizá por la música electrónica. Creo que cuando algo se acaba, comienza su carnavalización, su remezcla y su loop de muertes. Como mexicano viviendo en la frontera con las próximas ruinas del imperio norteamericano, escribo narrativa tomando la tradición occidental de la novela —incluida su ala experimental y posmoderna— como un cuerpo extraño, sobre el cual opero. La “novela” es para mí un género eurocéntrico con el cual no me identifico, que sólo me interesa como algo que he llamado una estrategia apócrifa. El matasellos, ¿es una novela sobre la novela? Más bien creo que es una ex novela sobre la post-novela. No es una novela, es uno de sus accidentes post mortem o pre resurrección.

Los personajes que manejas se muestran como simples piezas para tu partida literaria. No se consolidan uniformemente, son múltiples, diversas sombras conjuntadas en un nombre. ¿Para tu concepción no funcionan los personajes tridimensionales, esos que van cobrando casi independencia del autor?

Hay autores que usan en sus novelas las sombras de personas reales o sus fragmentos o desdibujamientos. Yo utilizo los escombros y fantasmas de mis yoes. El drama en gente del que hablaba Pessoa o la bidentidad de Husserl. Todos ellos son la manera en que yo nunca soy yo solamente. Además, como bien dices, los utilizo como piezas de un juego, de la misma manera que el individuo contemporáneo es utilizado por los reality shows o las elecciones. Quiero tener muy claro que el arte o la literatura son la continuación de las reglas de poder de la sociedad entera, analizar esa continuidad, dejar que aparentar que en los libros somos distintos a los verdugos, las madres o los productores de Hollywood. Este libro mío es un show sobre la disolución.

En tu carrera has destacado básicamente como ensayista, ¿tienes bien en claro donde termina este y donde comienza el novelista, u optas por una concepción total del texto, algo muy similar a eso que llaman metanovela?

No, no tengo claro dónde termina el ensayista y dónde el novelista. Me inclino por un modelo de hibridación crítica y simulacro total de los géneros. Reciclo, deconstruyo, finjo. Favorezco las formas mestizas. Deseo llegar a otras estructuras, no quedarme en estas estructuras provisorias post-genéricas, creo que todavía hay algo más allá. Aunque pensándolo bien, sí tengo claró donde termina el ensayista y dónde el novelista. El ensayista termina en el desempleo y el novelista en el best-seller.

Ciertos pasajes de la novela se repiten como si fueran loops con mínimas alteraciones, ¿qué sentido tiene este recurso?

El Eterno Retorno de lo Retro.

El matasellos incluye imágenes, juegos lingüísticos, citas a pie de página, en fin, es un completo ejercicio de estructura, ¿qué pretendes obtener con ello?

Hace poco leía que las corporaciones transnacionales desean imitar la estructura de Al Qaeda, su fluidez, para volverse más flexibles y producir más ganancias. Me gusta aprovechar todos los recursos posibles, los recursos del enemigo —la cultura mediática, la novela clásica o la experimental— para crear un contexto donde el lector tenga una experiencia anómala de lectura, donde diga: ¿qué es esto? Donde el lector finja que ese engendro no se parece exactamente a ella o él. Quiero alejarme cada vez más de las formas conocidas de novela.

La anécdota y la historia son casi minimalistas, pero lo no lo es la carga de reflexión, de peso filosófico, es decir, ¿será esto último más importante que el hecho narrativo mismo?

Así sucede en las noticias y en la filosofía griega. A algunos narradores les interesa explorar cómo son las habitaciones o las personas que desarrollan las acciones. A mí me interesa expandir qué ideas pueden derivarse, qué burlas, qué estructuras prolongan los actos o los desdicen. Además, evito que sucedan cosas en el libro, porque todos los días suceden en el mundo y en los medios tantas cosas que en mi libro decidí que casi no sucediera nada. Ya sucedió todo, incluso Hiroshima y Nagasaki —como si Hiroshima no hubiera bastado—, así que es mejor no contar nada, que cada vez que alguien quiera que algo suceda le cortemos las manos. Se le muestre el video en que se le mutila y generosamente se le ofrezca el control remoto para que, en el momento que ella o él decidan, cambie de canal.

Aparentemente, El matasellos sería una historia no muy complicada de plantear pero finalmente posee cierta densidad, será compleja para gran parte del público, ¿es una intención fundamental para tu propuesta?

No creo. La gente que lee es la misma que atestigua películas o vigila extensas telenovelas, sobre-vive vidas terriblemente repugnantes y complejas, repite eficientemente todo tipo de pases de baile engorrosos y malsanos, compone argumentos de celos increíblemente intrincados (e improbables), soporta noticieros tautológicos y se arriesga a tomar el metro o el taxi, se atreve a comer lo que McDonalds o su esposa le sirven, así que no creo que todas estas personas tan complicadas y aventuradas tengan la menor dificultad en leer una novela que escribió un pobre profesor satírico de filosofía, un escaso discípulo de Bartleby o de Ibargüengoitia que cada vez que quiere escribir una novela, decide que mejor otro día. Yo definiría El matasellos como la novela que no.

NO NAME FOR YOU

2006-10-18T15:44:00.001-07:00

Have you notice, how you get thinner and thinner? Yes, I know I’m talking to you, my TV. But I find no purpose in talking to Earthlings. Humans make me puke. Just the other day when I changed my old TV for you, when I was about to climb up the stairs, Fred offer some help. He offered me help, what he hell is wrong with him? I don’t need no help from him. C’mmon! He’s a man too. What is he trying to do? Doesn’t he know two men shouldn’t help each other unless they wanna steal each other’s wives or something? I’m no swinger, dear Fred, no swinger at all. I don’t even have a wife, Christ sake. I mean, Fred, I don’t need no help from you. You’re just a loser, go back to your make believe war, go help the wounded or wait for the flag to arrive. I just bought a TV, okey? I can handle it.
You know why I changed my old TV for you? Because Patty —that’s the name both of us chose for it— was too fat.
It’s was a black TV. I’m no racist at all, no racist in any way. C’mmon! I think black is beautiful. In fact, I’m kind of brown. I was born in El Salvador. Why am I not using Spanish is something I’m not going to discuss now. I don’t think my prejudices or idioms have to be an issue. (Not anymore). I fought for this country. I kill people for that flag on the wall. Huntington is wrong, dead wrong. Mexican are not changing this country. I’m no Mexican, but I see Mexican going in the right direction, even though they keep choosing lefty guys for Congressmen for what it looks from here, I mean, I dunno know, but that’s the way it looks from here, ok? And that’s why I changed Patty too.
I was never sure what kind of political agenda Patty was following. I’m no Republican at all. I think Reagan must return. I think Reagan must come again. He would save us all. I hope some scientist is listening now and can use his science gimmicks, his little engineering to bring Reagan back to life again. I’m sure they can find cells of him in some Russian’s nails. Reagan is somewhere out there. I’m no Republican but I think Patty was too liberal.
You’re thinner. You’re even thinner than the first day I brought you here. I think Fred was offering help because he wanted to put his greasy hands all over you. I know that trick! That’s the same trick he used when Karla came back drunk from work. He helped her get to the door. Karla denied that every time, every time she denied receiving any help from Fred, but: C’MMON! Every time I opened the door, Fred’s figure was going down the stairs. She was all drunk. I used to ask for explanations. She said she was working at the bar and at the bar it was impossible for her not to drink. Karla, that’s just an excuse, and you know it. People get mad when their employees drink. What you say doesn’t make sense. You’re an alcoholic.
Her alcoholism even affected me. I used to not drink that much, but after Karla’s drinking got heavier and she even lost her job and had to rely of her sister, I had no option but too drink too. I got sick, but drinking so much was the only way to understand Karla. Somebody is totally drunk. You can’t understand that person being completely sober. I tried to give counseling to her. You know, I learnt that from the shrink. How to help somebody in need. She didn’t accept it. She even blame me for her drinking. I don’t remember doing any of that. I used to drink before her, yes, but I think that’s an excuse she used on me.
I’m better of without Karla and without Patty. The two of them were somehow related. If you mind me talking so much about those two girls, let me know, after all, you and me have just started our little relationship here. I’m open to your suggestions.
If you like to choose a name, for example, go ahead. I don’t mind.
But if you ask me, I prefer for you not to have a name.
It’s kinda sick for a TV to have a human name.
The only reason why I’m talking to you it’s because I learnt tricks from the shrink. He was no psychiatrist. He was just a counselor. But he sometimes put a chair in front of me and asked me to tell the chair things. You can’t say that to your mother anymore, he said, your mother is dead. But here’s the chair.
And I said things to the chair. And you must think, ey this guy from El Salvador is lunatic, he’s a maniac. He’s an alcoholic, probably a total freak. I can understand you saying that. I’m not even from El Salvador. I chose that nationality because I know it rises your own uncomfortable thing there. (And I like “El Salvador” because its means “The Savior” and I want to save YOU). I’m just a person breaking up into pieces, can you see that? I’m talking to a TV. Isn’t this wrong? I know it’s wrong. But I’m trying, I’m trying. I want to redeem you. There’s no Jesus. You would have to trust me. There’s no Jesus. There’s just me.
And talking to a TV isn’t as dull as talking to a chair. I said that once to the shrink. I said. Doctor, I know you’re trying to help, but you haven’t paid enough attention to me, and you said we should discuss any feeling I have toward you and I am having that kind of feelings now. I’m feeling a chair is not enough. I need a TV.
A TV responds, you know. A TV cares a whole lot than a chair would too in a zillion years. Chairs have no way of communicating with you. A chair is just a place where you put your ass on, that’s it, and I don’t want to talk to no ass, doc.
All right, go ahead, use a TV. It doesn’t matter as long as you express yourself and stop keeping your feeling to yourself, or as you call it “withholding the info”.
I’m out of touch with myself, I know, but don’t laugh at me. You’re probably out of touch too. I feel I’m encapsulated in this body and this body is not exactly mine. I don’t want to let you know my real nationality, I don’t feel comfortable doing that now. Maybe later.
And of course I’m making up names. You never know who knows who. Somebody might end up recognizing “Karla” or “Reagan”.
I feel as an extraterrestrial. Some morning when I wake up I want to go to the crops and make signs there. That way I could probe I am an extraterrestrial. When I said that to the shrink he said I was playing games. I was trying to evade reality making up situations like that.
But fantasies help me understand life. Writers know this also. They know it better than me. Without fantasies reality could not be explain. Or even enjoyed. The only way Karla and I could enjoy sex was imagining we both were somebody else.
The last time I saw the doc, he knew it was my last time there. Karla “died”. The doc knew he remind me too much of her and I wasn’t returning. He meant too much memories.
Before leaving his office, he said I would be good for me if I bought a special TV and started talking to it, to reveal my inner feelings to it.
—Doc, this is the first time something you say is of some use, thank you. Bye.
And I left his office hoping he would immediately cry after I shut the door. I always fantasize about people crying because of me, because somebody needs me, I mean something for somebody out there in Earth.
I bought Patty. It was a nice relationship the one we had. Maybe telling you all of this —and I know you’re just a TV and not a living being—, maybe telling you all of this is not exactly something you want to hear. After all talking about a past relationship is not a good way to start a new one, but that’s what I consist in. This is who I am.
I get out and in. I get deeply inside and then, I flip.
The TV doesn’t listen all the time. You start talking and the person listening there goes away. You’re talking to her and, in the next second, she is the arms of another man, just like that. TV is dangerous. People there don’t pay you attention. They only demand.
He’s talking to you about something horrible, somebody being killed, some hostage situation, a terrible flood in Florida, burnt houses, you try to let him know your with him, you can feel his pain, and what does he do? He changes subjects and starts discussing sports or somebody’s dog winning some price in Cleveland.
If some business man is hearing me, some business man should offer a TV service where the TV is really listening, they can call it Dr Phil TV. I’m sure it would make tons of money, after all millions of people read books, because they feel the book understands them. And what about Oprah? I think Oprah is just the beginning of something even bigger.
That’s why I gave Patty to Fred. The two of them get along better. And even though “Fred” wants to mess with you know—and I know I fueled that situation by giving Patty to him—Fred’s a good man.
Just the other day we were talking while the washing machines finished their job and he said to me Patty was sure helping him cope with life and I said, Fred, that’s what I’ve being telling you all this time, but you don’t listen that often, now you’re open, you’re listening, so listen real well now, Patty wants to have sex with you, TV is just the beginning of something big, real big. What’s coming next are TV’s that can have sex with you. I’m not talking science fi here. I’m talking regular talk, man to man. Forget the Internet!
TV’s have give us everything. I know you deep into computers now. Not a good idea, really.
The only reason many of us are still alive is because TV’s exist. But it’s time we mess with them. I’m not going to lie to you, Fred, I want to have sex with my new TV. It’s a lot thinner, sexier. Ok, laugh, laugh all you want. Patty is just a surrogate mother. My new TV is like a brand new girlfriend. She’s trendy. I bet she listens to cool music. I bet she has some dancing video on You Tube.
I want to have sex with her. I want to have sex with her now that she has no name.
But you know what is stopping me?
What?
The certainty that once the TV and I have sex, both of us are going to destroy one an another, destroy one and another, real, real bad.

POETRY IN A TIME OF CRISIS

2006-10-18T15:14:00.000-07:00

* Read at the event "Poetry in a Time of Crisis ~ Is Poetry Enough" (April, 2004), at the University of California, Santa Cruz

First I would like to say two things:
One, I believe poetry exclusively occurs when it is discussed. [i.e. “Poetry” as a privileged structure is an anachronistic notion. I can only stand poetry in the context of prose].
Two, Americans should leave Afghanistan and Iraq so writers and clerks can move to more boring topics.
I’ve learned something over the years. [I noticed how my English derives from clichés, as if I was writing from the debris; what Eileen Myles said at the conference after telling her story reading in English at Russia and the reaction of the audience, “Writing with a filthy language”].
“I I’ve learned something over the years”. The instant we’re talking about a crisis we are hidings ours.
[This comes from my Mexican background and my training in Gestalt psychotherapy; the projections we make, how to recuperate those projections in order to reorganize the self, to not impose on the world was it ours. It also comes from Guangfan’s “There is nothing in the whole universe that is not you”; the basic Upanishad teaching “Thou are you” and Hegel’s comment at his Phenomenology of Spirit regarding philosophy starting only once we recognized ourselves in/with the absolute other. Mexican popular culture says: “No the hagas pato” (lit. Don’t make yourself a duck, meaning, don’t pretend you are not you, don’t turn into a third person in order to not assume the responsibilities of knowing you are the person you accuse, don’t become 3 in order to not accept you are both 1 and 2].
I take “crisis” not a crisis I too am provoking. At the same time the victim and the agent of imperialism in every case. Something I share with Americans].
Iraq, for example, is Bush’s way to hide he is the crisis itself.
Bush is our way to hide we are Bush.
It’s easy to blame governments when they in fact do represent awfull societies.
I only can call poetry the most critical voice against every order, including its own.
I suspect as poets we take advantage of times of crisis to try to offer poetry as part of the solution. Maybe to hide poetry is part of the problem.
In saying “Poetry in a time of crisis” I certified poetry.
I certified it as part of a time.
As part of a time of crisis, which is something really good for poetry.
Poetry in a time of crisis must be useful. At least in that phrase.
That phrase is optimistic.
It makes poetry look good.
Part of the solution. Not part of the problem.
But I think poetry is part of the problem.
In a way Bush does poetry too.
I may say his poetry is pretty bad but it’s poetry too.
Bush tries to cling meaning. He tries to make the audience feel the ecstasy of words. He performs.
The president behaves similarly to poets I know.
I am now doing what Bush does much better than me.
No wonder why poets decide to be poets. They become Bush.
There’s only one step from the blank page to the White House. I’m in it.
I am Bush.
Poetry in a time of crisis can also mean poetry is an emergency measure.
Poetry as something you reuse or return to when things get worst.
For example, if you’re depressed. Or there’s a war down there in Iraq.
You can make an anthology out of emergency poetry like this.
Poetry is part of the problem.
Emergency measures follow a psychology of panic.
Red or yellow alerts.
Put some poetry into the dying nation, into the dying discourse.
Poetry in a time of crisis. Poetry in yellow alert. Or red.
How can poetry help?
Somebody may offer this clue: poetry can help not getting in the way. For example promoting the end of speeches. A country where every politician that tries to give an speech –especially a speech to the nation—is killed.
[I liked Walter Lew’s approach, ‘talking again’ about Spirit as something you need before doing poetry. And after. No spirit, no poetry. What he meant by “Spirit” I think was the beyond-deep-cultures-are].
Yet that clue would only be a pretty bad joke.
The way poetry does not help.
It’s not part of the solution but just part of the laughter.
México and the United are nations that resemble each other too much. They should be completely different, so different that they would go on war every two or three months. Instead they go to bed every four years.
Countries that laugh too much. Part of the problem is laughter.
How come you laugh when a political joke is done?
Why SNL?
How did we get to this point?
Because poetry worked.
What poetry aim at, building the common I, the Nosotros, the We / was achieved.
Homer wanted to praise the heroes. He did. The heroes were praised.
Whitman sang America. He achieved his goal.
Poetry is full of successes.
Poetry has been historically linked to war.
Poetry is always trying to put an end to a war that continues wars that poetry helped to instigate.
Whitman is full of bullshit American poetry hasn’t get rid of.
Whitman was very American. Free verse means having no meters. No limits. Respecting no borders. Free verse breaks the territories, makes it bigger. Free verse was how poetry materialized on the page the imperialism of the United States. Why being American was the best thing that could happen to the rest of the continent.
Free verse explains how Mexico was stolen of half its territory through a take over, an expansion of the map of the United States.
In fact, Whitman supported that war.
Whitman wanted to construct a space-time where/when everything fitted. That’s why Whitman broke the conventions of how much text could be written, how long could the line be. That’s why Whitman wrote so much. Wrote those heroic lists, those listings. Groceries of History. The many landscapes. The different peoples. Every thing: America.
[I am here trying to start a discussion on how from Whitman to Stein, the way “America” writes reflects/refracts the imperialism this writing is developing under, developing in its own structures. Acker would have agreed on this I think].
So, from this point on we are going to call “America” the image of a space-time where/when everything is there/then. The containment of All. What Pound called “Vortex” and Borges “Aleph”.
What we forget conceiving such a total-time/space is that a system of simultaneous realities taking place at once would make all of them absurd.
“America” is a comical nightmare.
Viewing poetry in a time of crisis doesn’t help to put an end to the crisis, it only helps to make poetry (again) a possible solution, a praxis that can really mean something good for the culture it belongs to; viewing poetry in a time of crisis puts the emphasis on the time of crisis, erases the fact that the institution of poetry is part of the crisis, that poetry is in a crisis itself.
[My reading of Efraín Huerta, Nicanor Parra, Renato Leduc, etc, gave me this ideas from the start: we received literary ‘poetry’ from the Western tradition, at one point we dominated that and even contributed our own thing to It, but let’s not forget ‘poetry’ is part of the Western colonial heritage, a post-colonial self-critique stand implies a going beyond ‘poetry’].
Times of crisis help poetry hide its own crisis. I think instead of thinking how can poetry help in a time of crisis, think how poetry has collaborated for the production of a crisis, how that production of a crisis makes a culture risks itself, and thus having to strengthen the strategies to perpetuate itself using the institution of crisis as an excuse.
To make poetry a possible measure. To make ourselves forget we live in cultures that are dying, cultures that want to kill.
I think poetry is part of the obscurity.
I think poetry is the place where people go when they want to miss therapy.
The place people go when they are to snob to go to the movies but they still want to pretend their life can have meaning as their moon, an elevator to acquire more power or at least meet the readers.
The readers, that group of people who want the same stuff poets crave for, but don’t have the courage even to write.
Or to corrupt themselves in order to publish.
What I am saying is I don’t believe poetry can fix.
Nor I believe poetry should be saved.

(How much more I would have enjoy 9-11 if the twin towers had been full, completely packed, with poetry books].

I think Wittgenstein was right when he realized he should concentrate on proving philosophy could do basically nothing.
When crisis arise I’m one of those persons that think words can help prevent the catastrophe. This is one of the reasons I consider myself a poet. I believe in alerts. I’m part of the problem.
Poetry should not look for ways to survive. But the poet, at least, should make an effort to disclose all the information she or he has historically used to gain authority.
Show even a dying cultural practice like poetry can be more honest than usual politics.
Poetry should unveil where its authority comes from. Should push its own contradictions, let them come out of the closet. Should push the crisis further until the authorities that created it to remain in power are remove by the continuation of the crisis until nothing remains.
I came from all the way from Mexico, made lines, ask for a permit, say hi to American Immigration agents, lie in the airport, ate peanuts, had a ride, I came all the way from Mexico to basically accept I have nothing to say.
I only come here to do what I think poets should do every opportunity they have: contradict ourselves all we can right in front of the audience we once tried to convince poetry was something good, something we should share, something that helped. Publicly and very openly contradict ourselves until the laughter stops, until there’s no credibility left in the authority we inherit or won ourselves, until it is made clear those who have authority have stolen it.
The function of poetry is to lose its function. The function of poetry is to diminish the general notion of authority.

TRANSLATION AS MATRICIDE (THE SEQUAL!)

2006-10-18T14:59:00.000-07:00

* Originally Published in Chain #10 (2004)

When somebody commits a crime,

he hides--just like the translator does.

(An epigraph)

1
The first rule of traditional translation is to make two languages
Become
The second one.
(Domination).
(Disappearance of the first language).
(Conquest: Erase the Native!).
(Delete The Other, and then…
declare the “Other” has been translated).
(Mission Accomplished).
(¡Us!). (Nosotros!).
[Cool = Ajúa!]
(Translation Awards Needed Here). 1521 + 1847 = XXI
(Translation as cultural Communication with the Other--Remains to be seen).
(Chinese Emperor Looking for Hot Latina).
Translation should become the transformation of one first language into (at least) two other languages.
Translation as the practice where the permanent presence of the first language takes place in the context of a second language.
Co-presence of tongues.
(Good intentions?)
Translating the word Translation into Inglich results in:
1. Trans-nations.
2. Tranny Tongue.
3. Trans | Late | Nation.
I am not writing in English. I am recycling it.
Mexico (†) never had a mother tongue. Spanish was brought there and it meant the disappearance of dozens of mother tongues. Spanish was not a first language.
She wasn't even my first mother. I’ve only had second mothers.
I’m recycling it.
That’s why writing in English is Arte Povera for me.
(I am not a Chicano. Too easy a mix).
A big pro-translation culture is cannibalistic.
Imperialism employs huge quantities of translators. Builds universities for them.
Departments.
(We all work in them).
Recycling it.
(Domination).
Translators should quit.
Too easy a mix.
Translating A into B makes A feel it is now obliged to continue talking to B, even though B doesn’t understand A.
To talk to A, B transforms A into B.
B talking to B.
Monologue.
In translation A feels it is in a conversation [was forced into a conversation] in the terms of B.
B always wins.
Translation gathers.
Gathers cultures into B.
B always wins.
To easy a mix.

2 (Ajúa!)
Well,
In my case
I didn’t decide to translate American Poetry into Spanish because I felt we had neglected that field. (But we have) (But “my” dislike of “our” Mexican reluctance toward American Culture was NOT the reason | why | I decided | to | translate American Poetry). I decided it because I knew it was time to.
It was time to
Translate | American poetry
Into Spanish.
Translate it
Before
History
Politics
“The Economy”
Makes
“Us”
Enemies.

[I wrote the last text after reading a comment by Dubravka Djuric made for Chain 9 magazine. I also wrote it before the Wall Street Journal (Oct 29, 2002) called Mexico-- because of its position on the war to Iraq--“Saddam’s friends South of the Border”. So, it appears we are now beginning to become enemies.
Translation-Time just went by.
Game Over.]

¿3?
Translation makes the reader feel At Home.
AT home.
Welcome.
Welcome to Mexico (†)
[Bienvenidos, am(b)ig(u)os!]
--Translation sucks--
Makes the Reader feel AT Home.
Welcome Again!
“Transparency” | “Absorption”.
“Oh, nice prose”
“Those lines even sound like Duncan!”.
Translations should be uncomfortable.
(Viva Babel): .
Unreadable.
Why do translators | writers in general | think so much about the Reader?
Is he paying them
OR WHAT?

4 (or 6)
Translation should be A becoming A, B & C.
In translations A is never present. Just B. It does not make much sense.
Fast food, Hush Puppies and Brazilian poetry.
“Translation” represents a case of hermeneutical violence.
Even (date) rape.
A is forced to have a child with B.
A is left behind.
HTML made going from Here to There possible. But HTML is a (secret English) lingua franca—meaning: going from Here to There is always
an English Based Operation.
The troops.
English | Behind | The scenes.
(The Internet is the United States through other means).
Total Translation would really mean returning to the first tongue. Make translators write in the language they began wanting to disappeared from the face of the page.
Special Effects.
(Continuará…)

WHAT ABOUT THE MEXICAN POETRY SCENE?

2006-10-18T14:18:00.000-07:00

* Originally Published in Tripwire #6 (San Francisco, 2002)

When I went to New York to read in the Double Happiness Series, James Sherry asked me “What about the Mexican Poetry Scene?”. I thought about my answer a few seconds, but then I knew there was no way to respond to that queston with a beer in hand and in just a few minutes. So I simply said to him: “Its really different from the American poetry scene... in general, REALLY different” [Is there an American poetry scene? No]. I have written these notes to have a second chance to explain what is happening right now in Mexico in terms of discourse building and poetry communities.

Peace is over. Life after Octavio Paz
First thing somebody has to know to understand the postmodern literature situation in Mexico (and in many ways in the whole Latin American literary circle) is that after Octavio Paz died in 1998 everything changed (See end not 1). Paz was the center of Mexican poetry almost for half a century. I don’t think there is an equivalent in America, where no one has become so huge and influential to the point of becoming an obstacle for newer developments in literary discussions. When Paz was alive making poetic discourse without reference to him was impossible. Here we need to remember, Paz wasn’t just a poet but also an important translator, historian, anthropologist, art critic, strong polemist, literary commentator of every genre, philosopher, TV intellectual. He was the head of the Mexican “Republic of Letters” (sic). To have an idea of this position in Mexico and Latin America please combine figures like Jerome Rothenberg, Allen Ginsberg, E. H. Grombrich, William F. Buckley in one: the result of this bizarre mixture is Octavio Paz.
As the PRI (2) did in politics, Paz represented intellectual monopoly in Mexico for too many decades. But once Paz died his ideological monopoly started to collapse and still is corroding. His Vuelta magazine disappeared and was divided in two new journals (Letras Libres and Paréntesis), which not only represent two different factions of the Paz followers, but also constitute the center of literature discussing and creation in Mexico) (3).
So, I see two paradigms which are going to change in the upcoming years:

1. We are going to destroy the idea of a “national” literature. We are now seeing that we don’t want to survive in a “small” context. Even Paz knew that Mexican literature was closing its door to the outside (he wrote a letter intended to be published after his death saying his young collaborators weren’t giving signals of being interested in the poetries from abroad). For example, we are going to come into a bigger and active contact with the American scene(s) –a goal increasingly under discussion. For Paz American poetry was protagonized by Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, so you can imagine how American poetry is perceived by the great majority of his followers (who still control Mexican literature), but that’s something which is going to be modified. We are even going to see Mexican writers using English or getting into the U.S. in order to have paralell literary careers or serve as bridge in the postmodern condition, and in general, future poetry in Mexico is going to be constructed as part of a much bigger series of references.

2. The idea of avant-garde and radical innovation is finally returning. Octavio Paz established the idea that after surrealism no avant-garde could be possible again. Doing something in an “avant-garde” context during the Paz period was even taken as joke. (That’s a key idea of his whole history of Modern literature and his poetics). So, now that his ideas are being put in scrutiny as never before, the idea of radical experimentalism and new avant-gardes is returning. Paz believed there could be no more drastic rupture with tradition, but guess what, Octavio?

Politics / Poetics Mexican Style
The essential relationship between poetics and politics in Mexico is going to survive Paz death not only in terms of content in texts but also in terms of real social influence. Poets in Mexico are respected and can become popular as in Russia or have influence on public affairs as in France. Mexican writers immediately become public intellectuals. In the United States, writers and artists don’t play a part of the major Media, but in Mexico that’s really different. In Mexico (before and after Paz) a linguistic creator has always played importants roles in the making of national discourse and daily political issues. Intellectuals helped to invent post-revolutionary Mexican Identity (mestizaje as the basis of our Volksgeist). Let me give you an example. If September 11 had happen in Mexico, we would have a panel of writers/poets discussing the significance of that event in the main nightly news. The opinions and views of poets are part of the socio-political equation; this role is mainly played on national TV and Mexico City newspapers. (That’s how the left has become so important in Mexico, but that’s also how many poets have become puppets or instruments of the government...).
To continue making awkard comparisons let me make this one: in Mexico, Charles Bernstein and Rae Armantrout would have to be (even pressed) to periodically speak on current issues on the Mexican equivalent of NBC’s evening news or Nightline. In Mexico writers (from every genre and aesthetic tendency) have real power and use it frontly. They are highly respected (or used) as opinion makers –even when they use humor or are “excentric” as Carlos Monsiváis, the great (and now old) writer, cat lover and marxist-satiric commentator of popular and high culture who appears in TV making play words in the best Latin American tradition and who is both a Media trickster and a Man of Letters (4). That’s something, I think, nobody wants to loose. On to the contrary, with the opening up of the democratic system, that is something which is going to become even bigger.
Writers can die or make points in the political arena. When the Zapatista army announced itself at the beggining of the nineties, and Paz basically condemned them a few hours later in the most important nightly news, one knew he was in the down side. Paz reactionary position on the Zapatistas killed him as a role model for the younger generation. The same happened with Jaime Sabines our (now dead) second“national” poet (Sabines is a mixture or Joyce Carol Oates and Maya Angelou), who lost his credibility as a poet for the masses and the elites when he reacted negativaly to the Subcomandante Marcos figure (5).
This is also why in Mexico poets (careless of their literary ideas) become our country’s ambassadors and diplomats per excellence. If they were Mexican, Lyn Hejinian or Bruce Andrews would be our ambassadors to England, Italy or France.

Mainstream / Alternative Cultures
The defining socio-political role that a Mexican poet adquires (from whatever aesthetic position he takes) is what makes impossible for even a radical poet to stay marginal for too long. If you become important in a literary group, you are pushed into the “mainstream”. We need here to understand there is no “mainstream” in Mexico in the American sense of that notion. (We are a marginal culture, so how can we talk of a mainstream?)
Mexican writers understand poetic innovation and experimentalism in a way that resembles the self-understanding of black innovative tradition (6). As a culture fundamentally constructed to resist imperialism and alineation (and now globalization) we can’t help but to be a counter-proposal to Western literature. Mexican writers are always looking for a border place to have different discourses encounter in a way they can participate in different language-systems and groups, even if they are totally opposed. From the beggining of our modernism (like the neodada estridentista group in Mexico at the beggining of the 20th Century) there have been group (not hegemonic for the most part) that have search for a way to be contemporary to the rest of the world at the same time they adapted international experimentalism into our own cultural agenda (7).
That’s why every experimental writers need at the same time to invent new forms but also (and this is crucial) to deal with the conventional forms –that’s why a Mexican postmodern writer as Gerardo Deniz plays with traditional forms; radicalism in Latin America is mainly a transformational interplay with traditional rhetorics –this is a move as old as our avant-garde: when J. J. Tablada made visual poems using Chinese themes and contexts (a few years before the publication of Apollinaire’s calligrammes) he at the same time was using traditional constraits to write lyrical poetry (8).
One can see this interplay between the tradional and the highly experimental both in novels and in poems. This is something as readers we need to understand, because I have the feeling that outsiders misunderstand this very often: they look into Latin American new writing and only see a continuation of the “old” when in fact there they could find an open (or hidden of codified!) breakthrough in linguistic use. Rather than a rejection Latin American literature and art constitues a reconstruction of the “mainstream” and popular culture and tradition. (We do this because we are in the periphere and we find playing with the Western mainstream usefull for our own purposes and cultures codes). That’s also why a figure such as Borges in order to destroy Western Literature he had to appear as a “normal” or “clasical” part of it, when in fact he developed something radically new, which can very easily be misread as a clasical author because of his strong engament with European, Latin American or North American traditional authors and tendencies. Latin American modernism (vanguardia) hasn’t really been undestood in the U.S.–nor in Mexico for that matter. So we need to be really carefult not to take as simbolism, naturalism or pre-concrete writing what is not –or is simply another way to challenge the same values and conventions which the English based avant-garde is challenging in a post-structuralist methodology and canon (9).
Also we need not to forget that there is no hard mainstream in Latin America (as in the U.S.) simply because in Latin America the avant-garde won. The Mexican equivalent of the New Yorker (the official verse culture frontline) is going to be much more open to new possibilites. So even our conservative mainstream accepts the foundations proposed by our modernism and the international avant-garde. This is also one of the complex reasons why in Mexico even if you’re an extremist you have to interact with the more conservative national context. In the U.S. there are many reading circles of journals in which a post-language writer (to give an example) can have a place far from the Mainstream anthologies, circles and magazines. In Mexico we don’t have that (and maybe we don’t want it. Do we want to loose our chaos and mixtures, do we want to have ways in which we can ignore one another?)
Our mainstream is really underground and our underground is really mainstream. We don’t want to ignore each other. We want to have face to face battles. This is something that hasn’t happened in the U.S. where, to my great surprise writer American academics do not take seriously a movement as important as Language Poetry–they in fact can ignore it in their journals and reviews as if it didn’t exist! In Mexico, because of the chaos collision scene, this would never happen –I hope.

Language, voice and body
To continue enlisting differences between the American scene(s) and Mexican poetics in general, one can mention a very crucial one: voice and performance have been protagonist of American counterpoetics from the Harlem Renaissance and the Beats to today’s San Francisco and New York poetry scenes. In Mexico this is not the case. We are hung to a text based composition, where voice and body aren’t even close to be as important as the written page.
In Mexico we neither have a postmodern language-based-performance nor something similar to the populistic slam or spoken word poetry. Voice is simply not an issue. We consider the other-reader as the only true “authority” to make poetry outside the page. If a Mexican poet becomes the fundamental reader of his work, he is going to become the subject of suspicion and is going to be accused (for sure) of getting in the way of the text. At the same time we might have a big change on this matter in the next years. Mexican poetry is now looking into ways of getting the body and the voice in the substancial presentation of poetry. The youngers generations don’t want to read in the same boring way Paz read. We want performance. We feel we need it. In this change of paradigms, the American performance tradition is becoming our definitive role model.
I find this very interesting because while American contemporary avant-garde is insisting (very positively of course) in destroying the authority of the poetic subject, its tradition of highly developed oral-presentation can also be contrary to this purpose. Many American texts are undoubtely composed for performance and that reinstalls the authority and presence of the poetic subject again. Introducing chance operations, multimedia, experimenting with syntax, non-finished writing, etc, American poets since the seventies emphasized the role of the reader and dimished the paradigm of an individualized poetic subject-genius behind-and-after the text, but at the same time continue to have a strong (neccesary even!) presence of the poet at the moment of the unfolding of the text, because without him/her the text looses its purpose or greatest achievement. Isn’t this paradoxical? In the upcoming development of a performance-text dialects in Mexico, I am sure we are going to deal with these contradictions in ways still not predictable at all.

P.S.
After the crack down of Mexican Modern poetics and a new era (more open to a new possibility of post-Octavio Paz rupture, postmodernism as our context, etc.) we are now witnessing a formation of different (even isolated) groups which are destroying the idea of an unitarian discourse formation in Mexico. Since the nineties a group of bilingual Indian poets began to form. Also a group of visual poets developedaway from what they perceived as the “maintream”. Indian bilingual writers and visual poets aren’t participating or being invited in the dominating or underground magazines, so for the first time in Mexican recent history we are now seeing a fragmentation of literary construction, where one group can develop without taking into account the others, such as it has naturally happened in the U.S., where the Chicano, Nuyoricans, Blacks writers, the university academics poets, gay-lesgian poets, the Pulitzer Prize’s poets (to give them a name) and the Language-writers can basically ignore each other without any damage to their scope of readers and interests.
Is this fragmentation (examplified by Indian bilingual writers and visual experimental creators) going to be a characteristic of the new arenas in Mexican poetical discourse? Or are we going to find a way to again recover a problematic symposium of the whole such as we relativaly have managed to do untill now? How are we going to handle Chicano discourse into our idea of postmodern literature in Latin America? (10) And also a new generation of young women writers seem to be appearing all over the country, this is going to be a major break through for sure. They could potentially be the real revolutionaries against male dominated literary discourse in Mexico (11).
To this point poetics hasn’t been divided or isolated from the other genres. (This is again a point in which we differ greatly from the U.S.). Fiction (experimental and popular) and poetry are seen as one language. The same happens with criticism. So in Mexico when an avant-garde takes place it is developed both in fiction prose and in verse. Novelists and poets aren’t in totally separated areas of verbal transformation. So if somebody wants to follow the changes in postmodern poetics in Latin America she or he needs to go into novels as much as into poetry books.
Anothe big difference is that current American poets are more domestic than we are. They can feed each other. In Mexico, for example, there is now a growing discussion on using English and getting in touch with contemporary American poetics (experimental and mainstream). Is that the case in the United States? Are American poets feeling the need to write, translate or read in Portuguese or Spanish? I don’t think so. I think Latin American poets have a big advantage here. We have it, because we have been always under the demand of becoming hibrid and eating up Western Literature (12) and also because a Mexican poet never writes as just a ‘Mexican’ writer but creates her/his work under and for a bigger context than American writers: Latin Americans work with the assumption that they belong to a larger cross-cultural tradition that travels from Argentina to Cuba to Mexico. We are used to to think of ourselves as transnational discourse-designers. The radicalization of that feature is going to be a key instrument in Latin American poetics in the next decades.

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(1) After Paz died in 1998, José Luis Martínez–one of Mexico’s foremost respected critic–ridicuously declared that the years left until the end of the century were going to be nemontemi days–a prehispanic calendar notion in which the nemontemi days are counted as valid, and whatever happens during them has no significance. A repetead comments in writings since Paz death is a sense of loss of center and direction in “Mexican Letters”.

(2) The “Revolutionary Institutional Party” which was in power for more then seventy years–the most succesfull political party in Modernity anywhere!

(3) There are other national magazines, like Nexos (mostly politics, but with novelists as Carlos Fuentes and Hector Aguilar Camín as their spokespersons); La Tempestad (cultural in general with an increasing emphasis on new poetry from abroad); Alforja (a journal that’s represents the opposition to Paz, but hasn’t still got enough attention or strenght); Moho and Complot (mostly prose, and considered the place where the underground young writers publish). There are other mediums, of course, run by universities or little groups, but none can be considered as influential as the listed before. There’s a lack of independent and marginal reviews or journals, one of the reason that hasn’t spread as it should is that the government implemented a decade ago a State run program called “Tierra Adentro” which publishes young writers from all the country in its extensive book series and in the quarterly it supports. The preoccupation of young writers to be included and benefict from this program, I think, has slowed down the emergence of trully independent mediums and little presses. But still there is a growing tendency to change that.

(4) Before Monsiváis, Mexico had Salvador Novo, another gay writer (a very openly and “scandalous” one) taking the character of a cruel and intelligent political commentator at the same time that he is part of our beggining of the century modernism (vanguardia) movement in poetry and prose.

(5) Even Marcos’ strong relationship with literature is a sign of the crucial relevance of poetry in Mexican politics. Marcos is considered a writer, an increasingly good one. He knows perfectly that in order to gain authority, support and have an image as somebody who can lead Mexico to a better way, he has to be seen as an intellectual, a writer by himself, a short story teller and an accomplished verbal artist, even in a “postmodern” way.

(6) Here I have to recognize the great help Tripwire 6 was to me to understand not only continuity and change in African-American writing but also to redefine at this light our own tradition of rupture and tradition in Latin America. When Lorenzo Thomas writes “What may be particularly noteworthy about African American artistic movements in the 20th Century, however, is that they were interested (in highly successful) in creating models that quickly became mass culture”, this is an exact description of Latin American experimentalism. (I can also very easily see how concepts such as Harryette Mullen’s “vernacular innovation” can be of great insight in Mexican criticism). I think we have more things in common with the African-American idea of innovations that with the “white” one.

(7) The estridentistas for example became our version ofdadaism but with a nationalistic-and even provincial-turn! But before conceiving this as a strange twist to the European avant-garde let’s remember that Marinetti and Khlebnikov also inscribed their experimentalism into a nationalistic discourse. So, instead of seen the Mexican avant-garde as a mere and simpistic copy of an European tendency (as it has been considered in Mexican dominant criticism) we can see it as a legitimate part of a pattern of revolt through language all over the world at the beggining of the 20th Century.

(8) I find an increasing possibility of dialogue between the “hybrid” experimentation techniques in Mexican poetics (mixing traditions genres and forms with new purposes and perspectives) and the more recent American poets. A piece such as Mark Wallace’s “On the Lyric as Experimental Possibility” (http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/wallace/lyric.html) reflects (unwillingly) the way experimentalism in Latin American has worked in the last decades: not as a denial of lyricism (and other traditional categories of writing) but as a way of transforming them radically.

(9) Let me give just one example. In Mexico free verse was destroyed not through complex or abstract writing (as in the Jackson Mac Low tradition) like in the U.S. but through, for example, the rather humoristic experiments with slang and street puns by Efraín Huerta’s poemínimos (minimal poems) and their characteristic vertical and fragmented antipoetical structure. This is a very different ways to achieve the same: Whitman never again. But of course to an simplistic eye Efraín Huerta can pass as another comical traditional (or populist) poet, who ‘claims’ and ‘uses’ his authority in traditional ways, when in fact his poemínimos are exactly the opposite. After Huerta Mexican poetry cannot be any more a lyrical rendering of the poet’s feeling but the fragmentation of language used to show how language itself determines the meaning and plays with ‘intimate’ and ‘public’ discourse.

(10) This may sound strange to American ears, I mean this preocupation with a subdivision of literary discourse. I know that in the U.S. nobody is going to worry because Science Fiction and Raymond Carver aren’t seen as part of one unitarianor combined circle, but in Mexico we are now looking for broader critical systems to have our increasingly boom in science fiction and underground urban-dirty realism (realismo sucio) narrative movements coordinated with the other currents in prose fiction. We don’t want to have isolated discourse areas. Are we being obssesive?

(11) This situation, by the way, has had in the past American conections. And in the present we are waiting to see Jen Hoffer’s bilingual anthology of Mexican Women Contemporary poetics. That anthology might reveals of some new tendencies in what is going to become the next generations of poetry in Mexico.

(12) This kind of hibrid experimentalism is, according to early Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade, a counter-conquest based on devouring up the European culture by the “evil savage” (not Rousseau’s “noble savage”). In his “Pau Brasil Poetry Manifesto” of 1924 (the same year Breton’s Manifesto appeared) De Andrade calls this strategy “anthropophagy”, a cannibalistic way of eating the Other (European Tradition) to transform it and take advantage of it from a resistence position. (Haroldo de Campos thought De Andrade’s anthropophagy was a kind of Nietzchean transvaluation of all values). In De Andrade’s anthropophagical philosophy we can again understand how Latin American experimentalism tends to cannibalize traditional forms for its own purposes of advance. This assimilation sometimes, as I said before, can be wrongly view by outsiders as a mere repetion of tradition, when it is just a good way to deal with more artificial forms (in an Oulipean sense), a challenging way to work from and against “constraint”.

MAN WAITING FOR GAS

2006-10-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

Man waiting for gas. Is it me? I think I’m going mad. Getting closer and closer to my father. Sooner or later I’m going to get there. Alcohol or Christ. Debris. I’m on the campaign trail. I’m waiting for gas, all right! Alcohol or Christ.
I don’t understand my car. I think both of us are lonely. I can’t cope with people. I just get away from them. If I isolate myself I even like people. I kinda feel close to people when’am alone. When my car is parked it reminds me of how I feel. Talking the wrong way. In my thought humanity and me get along pretty well. I learnt to do that from dad. He was nasty and said he could only be good with people if the people he was supposed to be good to weren’t around.
He is a strange man. My dad. He never speaks. My biggest fear is to one day find myself sleeping on the street. My back hurts. I’m split. Cats are happier than me. On the campaign trail, yes! yes! Someday gonna get there, the presidency of the United States. Sleeping on the street.
My hand is now cold. Any moment now, not going to move anymore. What’s my hand doing now? It’s saying no, no. I’m not going to do that for you. Not helping you to put gas in your car. Alcohol or Christ.
I don’t want to get on the airplane. I’m going to send hundreds of thousands of troops, gonna kill all those fucking bastards. I’m not saying this. Language is speaking through me. Language is sort like God. But God does not speak to me until later in my life. Language is saying right now I need to continue my rambling against others or Arabs. Don’t know who they are. Maybe my family. I think my mother does not exists.
Is it me? My mother is the worst thing that happened in my life.
I have this little hypothesis according to which every time I drink I feel something happening. I turn my head but nobody is watching me. I hold the bottle at the level of my mouth and at the precise moment I drink, the image of my mother appears. I think she does not exists. I think she’s rumor invented by Democrats.
When I was born I didn’t feel her womb caressing me. The walls of the ugly tunnel didn’t help me a bit. I think she was dead and that’s why I didn’t receive any heat. Refrigerators make me think of her.
Any, nothing, no womb caressing me. I like to ask women to give me head. Their hot mouths on my swollen cock. Things she didn’t do for me.
Dad is not dead. It was his hand that helped me escaped from that horrible place. My mother kept me there for nine months. She was hiding me because I was a monster parasite. Every time my dad’s cock entered on the hole of my mother I had to suck it hard, really hard. That happened each night.
That’s why I grew so strong. I drank cock’s cum instead of mommy milk. I think milk is despicable.
My business is not going well. The oil industry is not for me. I think my employees hate me. I think they are paranoid. Their sex lives must not be fun. They are laughing all the time and I keep meeting people, more people, I mean lots of people, lots. I have to hug some of them. I’m on the campaign trail and the cameras are always watching me. I can crush birds with my fists. I have millions of dollars with me. I don’t differentiate them from all the millions my father has. I’m going to kill lots more people than him. I think his glasses prevent him from becoming all the man he really is. Being in the CIA hasn’t help him a bit.
I think my dad didn’t become a real man because he never was a real dad.
Sometimes he falls sleep reading the memos. He’s preparing war, you know. He’s doing the planning. Detailing every fucking soldier’s movement. If he does not do that nobody is doing it. The others are just his sons. He has to take charge.
Yes, man waiting for gas here. That’s me. Soon, very soon after him, I’m going to become the president of the United States. Just the other day he called me from his office and he said to me, son, you must be ready, I may die soon and somebody needs to take my place, can you handle that? And I said, yes, dad, of course I can handle your job, your job is really easy, dear dad, I just need to screw mom. Your job is something I can do because your job also involves messing the life of a son, and that’s me, an expert on fucking the life of your son.
And what about the country? What about it, son? I’m worried, dad, that’s something I cannot handle. Don’t worry, you asshole. The United States doesn’t exist. The only thing that exist is this family, give up the pump, you’re an ass handling it, you can’t even perform such a simple task, you’re not worthy of our name, you’re not a real Bush, you’re just a fucked up version of me, the real George, you’re just what your mother came up with to make me feel bad after she was opened up.
I don’t care what you think, dad. I know I can do it. I’m going to probe that to you. I’m going to leave alcohol behind and embrace Christ. I feel his hand in my shoulder now. I’m going to talk to him, talk to him all the time, you will see. You’re going to have to take all these words back, you’re going to die and pretty soon after that people are not going to remind you that much, they are just going to refer to you as the first step, a mere first experiment to attain the real George Bush, me.
You mother fucker! I always knew it. Since your mother threw you into the world, I knew that was part of a plan by the Democrats. Your mother laughed, she slapped you in the face, she was drunk and very happy to see you were my son and you would become just like me. That was her revenge. She was trying to replace or repeat me. She was trying to escape being my wife becoming my mother, and then trying to escape being your mother being your wife.
You’re wrong, George. You’re wrong all the time. Your son is not a plan. Your son is nothing. He’s just a man waiting for gas, leave him alone. I’m not even sure he is off drugs now. He’s nothing. Let him find his Alcohol or Christ.
You’re wrong, mom, you are dead wrong this time. I’m indeed a plan, a very careful plan by God. What kind of plan? Huh. Not going to reveal that, you’ll see, dad, you’ll see mom. You’re going to be front news some day, when I’m the president of the United States, I’m on the campaign trail, you know. Dan Rather is looking for me, people are hugging me, babies fly to my hands so I can caress their little bodies and give them warmth. I am a mother. I am father. I am a family. I rule.
Shut up! You don’t have any idea what you saying. You’re just like your dad, look at him, he’s dying, but he can’t even do that, instead he kills people, he wants to kill himself but he can’t, that’s why I threw you into the world, to let your dad know even if he succeeded in dying that would be of no use, since you, another version of him, was now around to take his place. Don’t you both realize that? So please shut up. And you George stop pretending your dying, you’re a lousy cadaver, you can’t even commit suicide or fell sleep like Ronald, you’re condemned to stay alive, because you know there’s going to be a George 3 and then a fourth George. I’ve seen the plans. George is going to stay with us for a long-long time. And you George, take that gas pump and put it in its place. It’s not your time yet.
You know why I hate you so much, mom? Because you’re a woman. That’s basically it. I know, son, I know, that’s why I hate you too, because you’re a man, and woman and man mean war, and you know what else? Your father can not even fuck and that gas pump you cling to is not a gas pump, you ass, it’s just that dirty old umbilical cord you refuse to leave behind. So go, George, go with your Christ friends, go with that old man who talks about Christ in order to feel he’s a good dad, go and drink some alcohol, do some drugs or clean your automobile and dream you’re already the president of the United States.
Okey, mom. But before leaving, let me tell you one last thing. You know why I’m leaving know? Why son? Because you don’t exist, mom, you just don’t. You’re just the gas I need. Gonna get there, huh! And you know how am I going to call my triumph over you and dad?
How, son?
«Iraq 2. The comeback»
You son of a bitch! You’re not even original! Kill your son, Barbara, please kill him before he takes over my oval office and my Texan name, kill him!
Too late, George. He already left. He took one of your cars. He’s already on the campaign trail and you know what? What, Barbara? He’s gonna win, George. He sure is gonna win. Gonna win big. After all, he’s your son.
His name is also George.

THE TRUE LENGTH OF NEO-EMOTIONALISM (A SHORT STORY)

2006-10-18T13:47:00.000-07:00

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?

< on character >

2006-10-18T01:21:00.000-07:00

* Originally published in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, edited by Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy, and Gail Scott (Coach House, 2004)

experimentalism means “identity in crisis”. events that made “me” more—an awareness i was no longer my self, one-self. luce irigaray, on the one hand, wrote that reality is always 2. [bidentity then]. and on the other hand, lao tzu reminds us that where there’s 2 soon there’s 3—like couples, which in reality are, at least, threesomes. the destruction the couple is—was already here.
and now: history:

“in general the mexican body is suffering ‘changes’. meaning:
a second drama of hybridization. a second conquest.
a new corpus”.



the day nafta was put into practice (january 1, 1994) was the day postmodern mexican history began. not only because globalization had officially started, but because an indian guerrilla—long in training—appeared. the post-national and “profound mexico” (bonfil batalla) clashed. no hegelian synthesis there, no fucking aufheben—if anything is taught by mexican history, beyond any kierkegaardian report, it is that when the one and the other collide, not even either/or is a choice: no synthesis, no co-existence, none of the two are going to survive in their original state. [saint] max stirner said it best: i is all and what all destroys. all.
first the indian guerrilla was denounced as central american marxists (“they couldn’t be mexicans”), and “transgresores de la ley” (law transgressors) as the infamous pro-state nightly news anchor-man jacobo zabludowsky called them. the main visual characteristic of the zapatistas was their black pasamontañas. (“they must be hiding something”).
they used their masks to not be recognized by the government, but also because masks have a strong power on mexican popular culture: the power of transformation, social change and new personal identity. masks have always played this role in our culture, as in many other places in the world. there is a long tradition of using masks in pre-colombian cultures, from ritual to war masks and disguises. that’s also why we have adapted so well to halloween. culture and body, how we affect the other & how we are affected by them.
in another arena, masks are related in mexico to superhero figures. wrestlers use masks, and at one point the movies used real wrestlers acting as superheroes, in bizarre plots where they would fight vampires, gangsters or extraterrestrials (sometimes at the same time). wrestlers like el santo, blue demon or mil máscaras became household names, just like superman or spiderman in the united states. the mask has continued to function to both hide identity and build a new identity through a facial disguise, as shown by the social activist superbarrio in mexico city, who has used a mask to attract attention for popular causes since the late eighties.
as the apparition of the zapatistas has made many of us aware, mexican identities have been undergoing a dramatic process of life and death. the zapatistas were using experimental strategies to represent that phenomena. the zapatista mask has many functions, for example, to emphasize the collectivity of the movement—from its leader to the last soldier. it paradoxically makes us aware of who is behind the mask while at the same time forces us to not see the indians according to our longstanding stereotypes—passivity, loss-of-identity, etc—with the implication that they are not going to remove their masks until we learn to see their true faces.
the zapatistas announced the renewal of mexican character. writing narrative in our zapatista country means to accept that our traditional face and identity has been modified. no more fixed personalities, or long standing structures. who are we and how we represent ourselves, how do we narrate our being and non-being, our selves and otherness, how do we build the text is now a question of how are we going to survive.



whose character? always some | body else. character is always ‘us’—in a way it’s never just ‘us’. character can be identified (partially) with the writer. each character has some characteristics (secret or announced) that the writer has, i.e, characteristics s|he supposes are hers or his. but are not. characters are part of the writer’s life, but are never him or her, nor any person in particular; they cannot be separated, nor are they fantasy. characters are the author’s psychical family, society’s trail of doppelgängers in its course through time. imagination cannot happen. fantasy is impossible. reality pollutes everything. imagination cannot escape completely from the here and now of material/historical/bodily circumstance. “fiction” wanted to escape from history—the possibility of a realm made exclusively of fantasy—a critical illusion it has always pursued, only to leave evidence of failed fugitives. who’s the character? no-one, but many. anyone’s double. including, of course, the other side, the so-called readers, some-body else too (many). characters operate in the field of indeterminacy, of multiplicity. (i hate names. names are in favor of being-just-one). writing a character (packages) we do not respond to the question who am i? but to this the interrogation who else am i? a question that cannot be responded to. a character, a failed attempt to know ourselves.



“it helps my mother was a prostitute. she kept inside of her too many. i didn’t know who my father really was. never sure enough, and neither her, him or i wanted to find out. identity means = too many came inside | name is not necessary”.



i write fiction while i hear music. i’ve always being under the impression that a novel’s characters should be volatile entities. i would like for characters to be entities who i pass by, reading, and don’t recognize. a movement in the page, a strange event, a nebulous event, what was it? maybe a character.
not bodies but waves. i find in radiohead what deleuze found in bacon: the vision of bodies who are the subject of forces which determine their form, whose features are deformed by the effect those forces have in their flesh. we seem to be clouds drawn away by the wind, stripped, goes a caifanes song, a rock group from the nineties whose name was later changed to jaguares after the band leader lost his voice—according to a friend his voice was lost because he discovered too many secrets. this didn’t delight the gods, so they turned his voice into a ridiculous event.
when i write a character it must feel to me as if composed of bubble gum. a character is not a stable thing. a plasma. characters should always melt.
the instability i look for in characters can even be a genealogical trace they’ve left. kristeva reminds us that in twelve century love songs—probably mistranslated by pound—the loved-one was not a clear character, was almost never described, and “her” could refer both to the woman and the song itself. (homer too never described helen but she incited a war anyway, the passions she was used for). but then (back to kristeva) music was lost in poetry, and some time later prose took the place of verse and the troubadour became a novelist—masculine characters who not only were unwilling to celebrate with joy the distance between themselves and their lovers (i.e., reference) but also were under the spell of the spirit-of-conquest-of-the-other instead of seduction-by-it. in this way cervantes’ and swift’s satires on woman, on love, became possible. the novel was born, and in it, characters, visible ones, “individuals”, not the ghost of the past, those volatile entities where object and subject were undistinguishable in a way adorno never imagined. the character became clear, its limits and borders determined, and their names, personalities, everything in them was made recognizable, in order for them to become property of someone—another character, themselves, the author, the reader, the book, capitalism itself. jealousy makes the other recognizable, ‘predictable’, imaginable. jealousy draws a ‘truth’ soon to be discovered, a property we can have thanks to a mental map, a system of control on the body of the other.
i write fiction while i hear music so i don’t forget this is what ‘characters’ became, but not how they structurally must be. in the past characters at least in one form of discourse were plasmatic, even invisible, ghostly, not solid; in fact, characters had no other architecture than that of mystical music.



not a place. but how light and darkness happen in that place or maybe in some place else.



an end to the novel? to require an end the novel would need to be a fixed entity, something whose life depended on itself, but we suspect the novel is part of a decadence of which it is not yet the lowest point. that’s why kafka is always a symbol of the history of the novel, a history that can never end, because it’s a process that can only be left unfinished in its “novel” stage / a posthumous attempt to understand what the complete history of the novel might have been. the novel has already changed, there’s now no way to terminate it or to write it again.



time to look at what we’ve done as writers serving optimistic politics. making the reader a co-producer, we declared we were empowering him or her. the truth was that everything became work, even leisure, play or silence. in our era even “words work” (barrett watten). workaholism. writing as the metaphysical shop window was proof that language was also labor, everything was working—well. the reader as co-producer means him/her as slave. we (writers and readers) made the ‘reader’ believe s|he had to be active too, because if s|he was not s|he was “passive”. that myth. even working when he dreams or reads. that’s why i like books that don’t work.
the storyteller creates, “produces”. that’s what s|he is supposed to do. s|he follows maker (god/producer). this is very obvious. but s|he can follow another path: disappearance. instead of making something appear from nothingness (sic), s|he can make everything disappear into nothingness. (one is as impossible as the other. so, why not?) the storyteller could play the role of anti-god, a not-producer. sabotage. a consumer of everything. let the universe grow and expand, produce; let the storyteller decrease the world. writing pursuing the achievement of nothing, to stop-working as soon as it begins.



[voice leads to religion. there, where voice appears, a god is possible, a god is unavoidable. the author reads, and co-produces community, he or she is near being a priest, even when she or he abhors this role, as we do, as we do because we no longer believe in gods, nor in ourselves. comedy is opposite to religion. exactly when re-union is going to happen, laughter breaks.]



“those two don’t work one without the other. they depend on each other. their dynamics—those little jumps they make [dogs or balls]—suggest they’re emotionally attached, pathologically incapable of being autonomous; they have no health, they are not whole”.



i like to write pieces in which characters never know who they are. they can even realize at some point that they are not an individual but just a name and set of events that belong to a character whom they had been taught was somebody else. i become angry when i read books in which i see the same character more than two or three times. how can she or he not merge?



“he kept changing channels. zapping! zapping! zapping!—the dull theorist exclaimed, perpetually drunk on old neologisms—changing psychically following his teenage voluptuous moods… changes personality quickly, just like tv”.



we cannot change. we are already everything. changing would mean turning into something different. (and would mean producing). “changing” is simply a very complex way to die. a pseudo-category created in order to not accept “transforming”/“changing”/“producing” are those skills which are aim to attack or wound us. “changing” means killing some of us inside or outside. even my training in psychotherapy teaches me this: we must murder some of what/who we are. health is adequate murder. and my mexican culture reinforces this also: the most important thing is to know we must die. storytelling for me is writing about how we commit suicide or participate in homicide both in life and in history. not how a story unfolds or how a character develops, but how death happens all the time. for me the page is war.



“while writing this piece i dismantled the yellow pages and threw them all over the floor. it was raining heavily. i was trying to keep water coming below the door to ruin the books piled on the other side of the room, but kant’s small filosofía de la historia was soon ruined”.



how can i build my mexicanness here. certain references. i could allude to being a mestizo, and how that makes me naturally multiple.



“autobiography”. we should read this term the other way around, and say something like this: writing is always autobiographical. never writing on me. but: graphos (text) constructing bios (life) that appears as auto (on-itself). autobiography: language writing on itself and thus becoming “alive”.



we aren’t really living dark times.
that’s what we say / what we argue.
but we are.

/ the contours of the characters ready to contort… diapasons…. they vibrate… outlines-not-willing-to-stand… [unreadable] with what surrounds them or is incredibly far away”.



“poor gramsci. / those weren’t good years to exist. being in prison made him obsessed with details, just like wittgenstein’s closet did [for him]. thinkers whose work feels like an old man browsing a bazaar, finding everything amusing as if this were his first time there, and not his entire life’s pattern of attempts to smell the vendor’s hair. don’t even think of mentioning the other guy. i just don’t like him. gramsci was just the other day telling us about his latest finding / one more of his ‘crucial’ remarks. nothing but scraps. he told us about how the italian word for mysticism was being used with the french mystique’s meaning ‘predominantly critical and pejorative’. / enlisting consequences / he wanted the two of us to say something that would have propelled his little speech even further, but both of us said nothing, dependent on one another as we are / we kept both mouths closed while we were there. we fed each other / letting our 20 fingers caress each other’s hair while / he / continued explaining how those 2 words united. he wanted us to let him know our opinion of it or how his words made us realize something! / saw something in our mind! /…understanding what culture had come to… / but we didn’t respond in any way. we kept silent, making no sign of human contact between us as though me and her didn’t even know each other and it was only accidentally we had come today to be at this young old man cell”.



a character is not getting away from us, nor going (more) inside. none of us can be written. in order for “us” to be written (down) (=subjected) (controlled), in order for any of “us” to become text / even just one /, (we) need the presence of the others, their co-existence, due to the ghostly fact that there’s no single-one. no-one (none) can be written. always some of us left behind.



“kill every indian. let them die while escaping in the jungle. let’s behave like those hunters, tribes, or helicopters.”



fiction equals.
personality. “life”.
who is the real subject, leonardo or mona lisa? flaubert or madame bovary? borges or the other borges? none of them. just two out of a multiplicity, the two-of-them chosen by reception or the author(ity) precisely because any of them could play the polarity game well, could fit into the fixed or easily movable personality patterns. how is the author or character determined? by the historical hegemony of bodies established in its time and culture. writing happens, books, etc, and who the character or the author is gets determined by what kind of bodies are accepted. which are discarded. class, gender, unconscious, culture, all of these artifacts are used to establish a recognizable entity, a group of them (author between them)……….. “after the crucifixion jesus wasn’t the same [character] anymore. but we couldn’t afford to know that. that’s why somebody needed to interpolate saint thomas’ proof. even after passion, death and resurrection occurred, jesus kept himself the same, son of god himself”.
…unfinished.
…gospels that contradicted and blurred jesus’ image too much… brought confusion on who & how he was… calling that corpus of text apocrypha.



man asks: masks—so many of them—why?

—m(other).



chupacabras appeared in mexican culture through national enquirer type publications, tv series, and mere oral transmission (the “streets”). chupacabras means goat-sucker. this creature could even be linked with ufo’s—shares with them the feature of never-being-completely-seen (See end-note 1). if we use plot-theory “chupacabras” was a distraction. those holes in dead animals started to appear on the news in the late nineties, when former mexican president carlos salinas was selling the banks, making deals with drug cartels, and signing nafta with canada and the u.s. chupacabras was used in mexico as michael jackson’s pedophilic scandals were used in nice america. but the distraction was far too obvious and goat-sucker became synonymous with the look of salinas, permanently mocked/remembered for his big rat-like ears, an infamous corruption figure defined as a little monster sucking the blood of the “people”, and even having killed his nanny when he was young. black humor masks and toys sold in mexican cities skillfully exploited the resemblance of chupacabras and salinas, how they were related, co-produced.
chupacabras to me is a meta-character on how character works.
a dead/unclear body that hides and reveals the political.
unclean



in his seminal essay on the storyteller walter benjamin makes a collateral and brief attack against the short-story. benjamin despises it because through the short story we abbreviate and destroy the possibility of multiple strata—fast-food storytelling. benjamin writes that idea—and many more, many—in an essay. a short essay, by the way.
the essay assures. the essay also shortens. like aphorisms & short-stories, the essay synthesizes. gives manageable package to a previous more complex and abundant—transpersonal—material—or spiritual linguistic net of meanings. maybe we are an age—these last centuries of which we are still a part—that is only now realizing we have impoverished language altogether.



in some apocrypha and other gnostic, judaic, and muslim sources, jesus had a twin. he could be very well the one that impersonated him as the resurrected son-of-god. this is an especially tempting hypothesis because his name was tom. [saint] thomas is called “didimus” (twin) in certain versicles of the new testament. a character identical to jesus (maybe “jesus” himself) (his double) putting his finger in the wounds on his hand / made by the nails of the romans / in order to confirm the reality of his [own] identity and life. in order to produce a unique tale. here too jesus, a damaged body, a doubtful one, metaphysically evolves into a hole in the flesh. what the holes means is something i’m telling in this paper. also something i need to explore in another place.



…if this were correct, poetics and fiction/theory would represent forms of decline. these genres of speculation would have appeared once the secrets, traditions, innovative powers, craft, and ideas behind/toward narrative had come to a stop or—fearing complete loss or desiring control— ‘authors’ had decided to become written dogmas, laws, established prescriptions replacing the previous and more personal oral or transpersonal transmission. and i’m not talking here of an esoteric male one-to-one school of in-your-ear-transmission but simply an environment in which the narrative-producer (or any maker) would gather the tools and visions for her/his creation from the collective culture, s|he would hunt during her/his travels, findings in her/his own mind, techniques s|he would hunt or received from that concrete historical language/world. the essay-mode, the written reflection-upon, would be, if this is correct, much more elitist than the apparently silent way of keeping the narrative transformation dependant upon the more fluent processes of dialogue among its makers, listeners or ghosts.
let’s face it: by writing we become instant elders. authorities. intelligent people who appropriate ideas and structures from the culture we live in—and increasingly from other cultures, decontextualizing meanings—and thanks to this taking-away we build our «own work». people who not only steal but sign. and construct a character who tells, doubts, proposes or ignores the way we should narrate.



from story to history. auschwitz. china. vietnam. chiapas. iraq—every name or place is now a reference to a murder—1945. 1968. 1994. 2001—every year, a plot—nixon’s “i’m not a crook”. bush’s “read my lips…”. clinton’s “didn’t inhale”, even milli vanilli’s lip syncing—why write fiction in a time of total fabrication and lies?
how to narrate so nothing more happens? how to story-tell events so not even one more takes place? there’s only one thing worse than the 20th century: having survived it. this is for me the un-final dilemma: why and how to write narrative in a time when man begins to be indescribable?

------

1 chupacabras was dimly photographed. it was never captured alive, the best shots were of it as a badly decomposed corpse. that’s what i liked about it. chupacabras was never completely a body, never completely something describable. even though chupacabras (btw, a comic name) sometimes was imagined as a kind of reptile, gila-monster, a mutation, sometimes as a bigger-bat. chupacabras’ true body were the two holes left on dead animals.

ON REMAINS

2006-10-18T01:08:00.000-07:00

* Originally published in 127 Cuerpos (Germany, 2006), translated by: Discobole, S.L.

I. FROM THE BODY WITHOUT ORGANS TO REMAINS

Mexican culture is closely associated with the skeletal, lost, half-dead, concealed and decomposed body. This relationship with the body is in itself a clandestine continuity, an atavism that has escaped the Westernisation that began in 1521. The first characteristic of the Mexican body is that it transcends colonialism; it is an unknown body.

A turn-of-the-century study done in Mexico City demonstrated that residents’ concept of the body retains several features of the vision of the cosmos that existed before the Hispanic era and the time of the viceroyalties. Even though our super-ego relationship with the body has had to make terms with the Western standpoint, the vision of the body remains indigenous in the popular imaginary and probably in the collective subconscious. The ’globalisation’, ‘modernisation’ and ‘Americanisation’ of Mexico are demands (political goals, nationalist fears and macroeconomic projects) that, when all is said and done, only operate at the level of the super-ego: they are nothing more than a series of instructions and rules issued by an element regarded as external, authoritarian and, in the best of cases, ‘desirable’. (The colonisation of Mexico only exists in the super-ego.) In ancient Mexican cultures, in contrast, the body is kept in the subconscious (which, in passing, reveals that the subconscious is made of historicity), hence the age-old notion of the body, which seems to have sprung into being during the Conquest and which nowadays due to globalisation, in fact, remains present as a lurking phantom. This ghostly and at the same time neo-material body is what I have termed the ‘Remains’.

The Remains are the post-mortem body (or rather, the trans-formation of the body). We could also view it as the ‘residual body’ or even the ‘post-body’, since it has become a no-man’s-land, a nowhere or a wasteland where it is neither a living body nor strictly a cadaver. The Remains are a profane relic and a piece of counter-flesh.

One aspect of the Remains has been explored by the notion of the ”body without organs”, a concept developed by Antonin Artaud following his experiences in Mexico in the 1930s and subsequently altered by Deleuze and Guattari, an idea that still reflects some of the Mexican concepts (now trans-created) on the body and its post-existence. We should at the outset note that this concept already belongs to a body of post-Western thinking and is, to use the expression of the Cuban poet and thinker José Lezama Lima, a ‘counter-conquest’. Among other things, the concept of the body without organs is an Americanophile dismembering of the rational-unitarian-body of traditional Western thinking; body without organs also signifies ‘West disordered by otherness’—the revenge of tribal peyote against the Judaeo-Christian duality. (Carlos Castaneda would be another of the sources who conveyed his personal version of Mexican notions on the magical body to the West.) For Deleuze and Guattari, the body without organs is an urge to rid oneself of one’s organs, to lose them. The body without organs is the denial of integrity as well as the body’s desire to become Remains. If the body without organs is the fragmentation of the Whole, then the Remains are its ghost.

William Burroughs, in Naked Lunch, writes: “No organ is constant as regards either function or position” […] “sexual organs sprout everywhere”. Later, in the same book, he goes on to declare that the human body is full of unnecessary parts. Burroughs also had an experience of his body being possessed by a malign entity—which occurred, so he said, in Mexico City in 1951 and which drove him to kill his common-law wife, Joan—which led him to formulate the notion of a body that wants to escape the ‘control’ of its pseudo-integrity and for its various parts to blossom, to drive itself onwards to its total decomposition. The body without organs of Artaud, Deleuze, Guattari and Burroughs is the self-destruction of the body, the spilling over of its boundaries. The Remains, however, are more than the body without organs; they are the process of generative putrefaction that comes afterwards. The Remains are not solely the self-destruction of Control or of the System, Structure or Organism. The Remains are also the phenomenology and metamorphosis of the post-corporeal residue into a neo-body.

In Popol Vuh—the sacred book of the Maya Quiché—Hun Hunahpu descends to Xibalba (the underworld), where he is dismembered by the gods. (This dismembering is the body without organs.) Hun Hunahpu’s head is not buried along with the rest of his body (and the body of his twin brother, who had accompanied him on his voyage), but was placed in a dry tree. The tree put forth new growth thanks to the graft. (Any likeness to Derrida’s deconstruction is purely coincidental.) One day, a young maid passed by and noted the strange hybrid tree and wondered what its fruit would be like. Hun Hunahpu answered her by spitting into one of her hands and so made her pregnant. This entire process describes the body’s transition to becoming Remains; the Remains are above all the spit.

II. MEXICAN CONCEPTS OF THE BODY (TEZCATLIPOCA V. QUETZALCÓATL)

The body that appears in the cross-eyed, Medusan gaze of Jean-Paul Sartre and in the call to mystery of Gabriel Marcel is also to be found, of course, in art. The aesthetic reflections of the body not only had a correlative in post-structuralist theory—extending into the punk of Kathy Acker and the neo-Baroque of Severo Sarduy—but the body and its ‘reformation’ were an exploration at the very heart of the avant-garde movements—the ready-made of Marcel Duchamp, the happening of Allan Kaprow and the Minimalism of Robert Morris—through to the scrutiny of mutant bodies in the art of the late 20th century. In Mexico, this exploration of Remains in the 20th century is manifested in satirical skulls and ‘calacas’ (figurines of skeletons and skulls) from José Guadalupe Posada—George Grosz, in whose work there is, paradoxically, no flesh—to the research on morgues conducted by Teresa Margolles, the Mexican artist who best embodies the ‘decarnation’ and the reincarnation of the forensic body.

In our culture, how were what are termed ‘the Remains’ organised psychologically and historically? In order to answer this, we will have to consider Mexican ideas on the body. One of the central myths of ancient Mexico—which still influences the Mexican subconscious, though this influence remains largely unnoticed—is the flight of the humiliated Quetzalcóatl. This myth helps us to understand our culture’s relationship with corporeality.

Quetzalcóatl, a shaman-ruler according to the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, was visited by Tezcatlipoca, a handsome, young god (on occasions, an underworld dog). Quetzalcóatl, now old, had led a mystic life—to use Nietzsche’s dichotomy, we would say that Quetzalcóatl is ‘apollonian’, whereas Tezcatlipoca is ‘dionysian’—no human sacrifices having been made to him, since he only approved of the sacrifice of animals (vipers, birds and butterflies), and had neither indulged in nor encouraged excess. Now he was tempted by the Mexican gods of darkness and approached by Tezcatlipoca, his diabolical double. Upon meeting Quetzalcóatl, Tezcatlipoca told him that he had sought him out in order to “give you your body”, to “make you see your body”. (Tezcatlipoca always carried a mirror in which subjects could see themselves as they truly were, without deceptions, in other words, a mirror of the cruel truth.) Quetzalcóatl had never seen himself in a mirror due to his life of seclusion and prayer in the shade of his sacred enclosure and was scared of his reflection and his old age.

Tezcatlipoca convinced him to put on make-up and to adorn his old body so that he might look handsome to those who served him. Quetzalcóatl, confused at the sight of his aged appearance, agreed and, in an attempt to look younger, tidied himself up and disguised himself. Just a few hours later and Quetzalcóatl is by now drunk. His sexual desire has been awakened and he has copulated with his own sister. He has become bestial since, after an entire lifetime of exile from his own body, Tezcatlipoca has invited him to enter suddenly into his human flesh. When Quetzalcóatl realises what he has done, he decides to flee his kingdom in shame. (One part of his body becomes Venus.)

Interpreted from a Judaeo-Christian viewpoint, this myth would seem to reinforce the dualist idea of a pure spiritual life in contrast with a catastrophic surrender to the pleasures of the flesh, since the body (according to this view) leads to nothing but misfortune, sin and disaster. Yet this myth developed in a civilisation very different to Judaeo-Christian civilisation. Tezcatlipoca does not play the part of corrupting Satan nor of a merely evil demon. The myth tells how Quetzalcóatl falls. Quetzalcóatl falls because his exclusively spiritual life has distanced him from the undeniable reality of the body and from his own mortality. Tezcatlipoca teaches him a lesson. His shamanic wisdom points out that the fundamental truth is the body and its loss. According to ironic, nocturnal shamanism, the body is the ultimate truth. (The Remains are silence.)

III. MEXICAN CONCEPTS OF THE BODY (NAGUAL, REMAINS, CO-BODY)

Another fundamental notion for understanding the Mexican body and its periphery is ‘nagual’. As has been said, ‘nagual’ is a concept with numerous different meanings but which essentially refers to a shaman able to transfigure himself into various animals. Even today, some Mexicans still hold to certain notions whereby a man and a coyote, for example, share an existence. (Beuys in Mexico would be a peasant farmer.) Both the shaman and the animal are known as ‘nagual’ (or ‘nahual’). The man does not necessarily transform into the body of an animal—as occurs, for example, in the legend of the werewolf—but it may happen that in a dream, a shaman has an animal double.

This transfiguration or ‘corporeal correlative’ takes place by means of the expulsion of the ‘nahualli’ or ‘ihíyotl’, an entity contained in the body that is related to the Earth, the mother and the liver and which is, so to speak, a secretion of the spirit and body that enters into another being or which is received by this other being’s body. (The ‘nahual’ is the correlation between the human body and the body of the other.) ‘Nagualism’ is the ability to exist simultaneously or intermittently in two bodies. This is neither the time nor the place to go into detail on the theme of ‘nahual’ and ‘Nagualism’, but suffice to say for now that the concept of ‘nahual’ is the notion of a Co-Body.

I would like to make it clear at this point that the passage from one body to another, the trans-formation of a body into a neo-body is achieved through the Remains (in this case, the expelled ‘ihíyotl’ that spills forth). This externalisation is of course related in a number of ways to the corpse, not only because the ‘nagual’ is believed to devour the dead, but also because the ‘ihíyotl’ is, according to the Nahua Indians, one of the three post-mortem emanations—the other two being ‘tonalli’ (emanation from the head) and ‘teyolía’ (emanation from the heart)—that make up what I term the Remains.

The Remains are, therefore, the ‘residue’—or Inter-Body—that makes the conversion from one form into another possible, which makes the existence of the Co-Body and in turn the Post-Body possible.

IV. MEXICAN CONCEPTS OF THE BODY (1521-1847)

Mexican psychological history, it is said, allows very different thinking on the body—and above all an experience of the body—to Western thinking. Another aspect that should be borne in mind when examining the understanding and contextualisation of the investigation of the Mexican body is the fact that the Mexican body is, in many respects, the loss of the body. The so-called “mestizaje” (the mix of races that occurred in colonial Mexico) is, in many senses, experienced as an experiment in social engineering and the amnesia of the body, which is ejected from its own corporeality.

The philosopher Arturo Rico Bovio wrote: “Someone might say that the Indians’ soul was stolen from them, but why not translate that as a loss of the body? Their own body image had been stolen from them.” The Mexican body turned into its own double psychologically and historically.

The fleshly or racial body is not, however, the only lost body. With Westernisation, the body of the gods, the temples and cities was also lost. If Mexican culture is characterised by anything, then it is the condition of the ‘ruin’, the historical form of Remains. A civilisation of the gods—such as the goddess Coatlicue, whom Alexander von Humboldt asked to view, and upon seeing her was horrified and asked that she be re-interred—and buried cities, a civilisation of concealed bodies, Mexico has maintained through to the present day a special relationship with the ruined, hidden, cadaverous body torn limb from limb.

It is no coincidence that theorists such as Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz should have defined Mexicans on the basis of their connection with the macho demand not to “abrirse” (open up), “chingarse” (get screwed) or “rajarse” (crack open), all of which are concepts in Mexican-speak that allude to female sexuality, and at the same time (and more secretly) to avoid losing the integrity of one’s body, to avoid becoming (once again) Remains.

The key feature in our psychological history, however, is the fact that modern Mexico defined itself precisely as a loss of geographical body, as the country lost half its territory in 1847 when it was defeated following the invasion by the United States. This loss of body is felt and complained of even today (but which illegal Mexican immigration seems to be remedying). Whereas Aztec civilisation defined itself in relation to the Toltec body and the mythical Aztlan—situated somewhere in what is now the southern part of the United States—Mexican cultures today have lost much of their body—workers and family members—to migration to America. From popular songs to film, the new lost body—the new Mexican Remains—is defined by the peoples who remained in Mexico and by the peoples who went to the United States. Our body once again, from 1847 to the dividing wall that now in the 21st century stands between the two countries, continues to exist underneath the recollection of a body that has been snatched away and which is, at the same time, a dolorous Co-Body.

V. THE AESTHETICS OF THE REMAINS

In a country in which the very idea of the ‘disappeared body’ fell into abeyance because it was better to avoid any reference to the Dirty War against Mexican guerrillas and leftists, which started in the late 1970s, and in a country that has in recent years seen the deaths of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez at the hands of serial killers, policemen, murderous husbands, copycats, lorry drivers, drug-fuelled Satanists and uncontrolled businessmen, and in which more than a thousand migrants have died—many of whose bodies have never been found—in the border area attempting to cross from Mexico into the United States, in a country like this, pondering on Remains is not a conceptual distraction of critical post-theory but an everyday requirement.

From the periodic destruction of images among Mesoamericans to Mario Bellatin, Colectivo Nortec, SEMEFO and Gabriel Orozco, the Mexican culture is an exploration of the residual body and the neo-body.

Teresa Margolles’s aesthetic is one of the most chilling and at the same time beautiful meditations on the body in the early 21st century. Using the remains of murder victims, substances taken from the morgue, water used to wash the dead, photographs of autopsies, foetuses, forensic lab benches, fluids from corpses, extracts from suicide notes displayed on the skeletal canopies of abandoned cinemas, dissected animals and human remains, Margolles has produced an œuvre of profound unity, a unity that is not only internal but with the life of the body after the subject’s death. Is it necessary to explain in detail that Margolles’s work alludes directly to what we here have termed the Remains?

Whereas Mexican culture thinks of the face through the mask—pre-Hispanic masks and those of wrestlers, post-modern guerrillas and social anti-superheroes—we think of the body through the cadaver. (These are two pieces of Mexican wisdom: masking and death.)

In my view, Margolles’s work emerges to a large extent from the subconscious substratum of ancient Mexican concepts of death and the body. According to Eduardo Matos Moctezuma (see Muerte a filo de obsidiana), at least two-thirds of pre-Hispanic art seeks to represent death. The Mexican aesthetic of death is given one of its most successful modern and critical expressions in the SEMEFO collective and in the work of Teresa Margolles.

This communication is of course realised through conscious negotiation, a visible reflection, an aesthetic that rethinks Minimalism (a tendency that rationalises and reduces the body and its disappearance). By working with remains, Margolles touches the sphere of bodily emanations, of which there are three according to the Nahua Indians, as mentioned earlier (‘tonalli’, from the head; ‘teyolía’, from the heart; and ‘ihíyotl’, from the liver). Her rethinking of ‘ihíyotl’ is especially well-known.

Vaporización (2000, p. XY)—shown in Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values at P.S.1 in New York—is a work with a space bathed in steam generated from water used to wash the dead. I remember thinking of ‘hijillo’ or ‘ihíyotl’ as I entered this space. “The ’iíyotl’ was, it was said, conceived of as a luminous gas capable of influencing other beings, in particular of attracting a being to the person, animal or object from which it emanated. Today the Nahuas imagine it to be a gas that is cold during life and shapeless and diffuse after death. The Chorti Indians say of ‘hijillo’ that it is like a form of air, though one that is different to ordinary air, since it is so dense that it is almost visible […] The emanations issued not only from a living being. They could also issue from human remains […] The worst emanation is the one issued by cadavers.”

I am not, of course, the first person to point to the continuity of Margolles’s work and deepest Mexican culture. But I believe that we have not yet taken full note of how remarkable this continuity is. Her work is a meditation on the theme of death and a question on whether the posthumous part can speak on the Bio-Whole. It is also an exploration of the assaults that the body may suffer; an inquiry into the possible forms that the dead body may take and on additions (tattoos, scars and piercings) and dismembered body parts; a reflection on the space-time continuum in which the body is no longer (it has died and disintegrated) and has not as yet entirely become another body (a meditation on the Inter-Body). It is, overall, an œuvre on Remains.

Margolles does not recreate solely corpses but also their individual dismembered parts, fluids and re-uses. To be exact, Margolles works with an intermediate body between the living body and the corpse and, on occasions, with the post-corpse, with Remains, in order to demonstrate the continuity of the social conditions beyond the apparent end of personal history. Margolles works with liminal categories of the body and the corpse. She works, so to speak, with the ‘extra-body’.

Margolles’s work recreates ancient concepts of the body in the 21st century. Mexico does not have a series of unchanging traits. Mexico is not synthetic but diabolic, in other words, Mexico is a method for multiplying. Mexico is metamorphous, as is to be expected of a culture with deep shamanic roots. Mexico does not have an identity. Mexico is a collection of methods of transformation. Influenced by their own essentialism, Westerners have not understood the innermost functioning of Mexican cultures. (During his supposed trip to the Sierra Tarahumara, Antonin Artaud never grasped the fact that according to Tarahumara Indian thinking, the body is not inhabited by one soul, as believed in the West, but by several simultaneously.) The secret is that Mexico is transcreation.

Margolles transcreates Mexican concepts of the body in the context of the economic (and crypto-political) integration of Mexico and the United States (and Canada to a lesser extent) as a result of the Free Trade Treaty that came into force in 1994, which triggered the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. Margolles also transcreates the concepts of death, the body, life, beauty, form and time in the tragicomic context of recent non-history: the conversion of many Mexican cultures into a huge drug culture inspired by music, the imaginary and the dialect of northern Mexico from Sinaloa to the border with the United States.

Another of her great achievements has been to show how drug trafficking has altered our relationship with the corpse and death, since drugs are not only responsible for placing those executed the day before—according to their various categories: those found in boxes and in shelters, beheaded, etc.—on our television screens and in the pages of our newspapers, but also stirred up renewed popular debate on death, an obvious manifestation of which is the recent dramatic rise in interest in ‘Santa Muerte’, Saint Death.

It should not be forgotten that popular Mexican culture has a long tradition of displaying corpses. As an example of this, one only has to think of the archetypal sensationalist weeklies such as Alarma!, which have captured the counter-aesthetic of the national morbid curiosity in death. It is no coincidence, then, that Margolles explores drugs and death.

As we know, when Spain invaded Mexico in the 16th century, Nahuatl civilisation contained elements of increasing nihilism—the poet Netzahualcoyotl sang of the pleasures of life given that it was merely a dream and after it there is nothing, a nihilism that grew stronger with the fall of Tenochtitlan and the Spanish colony. In the late 20th century—above all after the recession in Mexico in the 1980s, when inflation reached stratospheric levels and devaluation sent the peso to record lows—Mexican nihilism began to acquire a new dimension. Some of Margolles’s works explore the macabre aspect of urban violence and the nihilism around it: the body as the vortex of Mex-Global psycho-politics.

Body Art? Neo Body Art? No, rather: Ex-Body Post-Art. Let us not forgot that art talks above all about itself, of the history of its forms. At a time when the discourse on the death of art has become a cliché, Margolles’s work offers us elements that enable us to take a new approach. I am convinced that any of her pieces could be used as the starting point for a reconstruction of contemporary Mexican culture, while at the same time the history of this culture helps us to appreciate her work better. Above all, however, I am in no doubt that her work goes beyond national contexts because it deals with the human fundament, the body. What we have in Margolles’s works is art as a metonym of the body, in other words, the Remains.

SOBRE MATTHAI

2006-10-18T01:04:00.000-07:00

Entrevista electrónica de Enrique Mendoza para un reportaje suyo sobre Horst Matthai en Zeta (2006). Me pareció una serie de preguntas clave para entender a Matthai, en sí misma, una definición de su obra. Van aquí mis comentarios.

1.- ¿Cómo podrías definir el proyecto de Matthai "Pensar y Ser" plasmado en sus publicaciones?

Pensar y Ser es una obra mental. Esta noción de Matthai la discutimos algunas veces. Él no la había desarrollado, porque el número de ideas es infinito, pero a mí un día se me ocurrió decirle que Pensar y Ser era una obra mental, no era un libro, ni la suma de sus renglones. La primera vez que le dije eso, la tomó a broma, porque Matthai tenía un sentido del humor peculiar, entre infantil e iniciático. Frecuentemente se estaba riendo o afirmando paradojas, extrañamente cómicas. Le daba risa que su obra fuese, sobre todo, un libro intangible. No era puramente escritura. Pensar y Ser era un libro cerebral, una red conceptual, un “sistema”. Cuando le dije esa palabra, “sistema”, no le gustó demasiado, pues Matthai era un crítico de la máquina. Pero proseguimos pensándolo. Teníamos esos diálogos entre clase y clase o en su cubículo. Una de las últimas veces que lo vi, Matthai estaba acostado, ya enfermo, en su casa; me enseñó la revista Time, algo sobre la guerra nuclear, la globalización —de la cual Matthai es pensador crítico, pues la obra de Matthai sólo puede comprenderse en el contexto de la globalización, de la frontera México-Estados Unidos, tercer mundo-capitalismo—y todavía le dije, “Matthai, no se preocupe, su obra va a ser terminada en la mente, en el futuro”. Y es que Matthai, cuando estaba a punto de morir, estaba preocupado de que su proyecto Pensar y Ser no iba a quedar acabado, porque faltaba el volumen sobre los atomistas de Abdera y el volumen sobre Hegel, cierre de la serie.

Poco después, Matthai murió. Hasta el último momento el pensó que iba a sobrevivir. Deseaba escribir sus dos últimos libros. Confieso que lo que más me dolió fue ver su tristeza de no poder terminar sus dos investigaciones restantes. Creo que fue ahí donde aprendí a no dejar para otro momento ningún libro, como tantos escritores hacen. No hay que postergar nada. Todo debe estar siendo hecho AHORA. El Yo sólo puede existir en el Ya.

Matthai dejó cuatro obras publicadas. A su sistema hermenéutico sólo le faltaron estos dos volúmenes, la parte quinta y sexta. Pensar y Ser se trata de 4 libros sobre filosofía pre-socrática, dos libros imaginarios y un libro privado, un libro mental: el conocimiento que el lector de los cuatro libros publicados y los dos libros imaginarios produce en cada mente. Eso es Pensar y Ser, un libro posible, hecho de libros reales y libros imaginarios. Es una obra que es Pensar y es Ser. Sobre todo, pensar.

La obra de Matthai es una indagación de cómo se produce la realidad. Matthai era un filósofo alemán que llegó a Tijuana de la Ciudad de México, donde estudió en la UNAM. Era un anarquista alemán. Nació en Hannover, en 1912. Había huido de Alemania en los años treinta. No quería ser enviado a la guerra, como su hermano, muerto en el frente. Matthai, como un Artaud más sabio, huyó. Por su trabajo, viajó a México y ya aquí, me contaba, decidió no volver jamás a la “gris Europa”. Le gustó el clima, el caos mexicano. Aprendió español y se quedó. Quiso indagar el gran secreto que ningún otro europeo había atrapado, el conocimiento sobre la realidad del espacio y, sobre todo, el tiempo, entre las antiguas culturas indígenas y cómo ese conocimiento coincidía con el de la filosofía presocrática.

Curiosamente, fueron refugiados españoles, como José Gaos, Joaquín Xirau, Wenceslao Roces, García Bacca, los que lo introdujeron al pensamiento alemán y griego, qué paradójico, ¿no? Matthai perteneció a la misma generación, a las mismas aulas en que se formaron Carlos Monsiváis —que estudió filosofía—, Emilio Uranga, Leopoldo Zea. Ellos buscaban definir lo mexicano. Matthai estaba en otro canal. Pero quedó infectado de esa corriente, además, de los que comenzaban más claramente a estudiar el pensamiento indígena en la UNAM. Propiamente ahí aprendió filosofía. Aquí la hizo. Matthai es el primer filósofo europeo hecho en México.

Antes de Matthai, los presocráticos eran considerados, debido a los juicios de Aristóteles, meros precursores, físicos especulativos. Pero Matthai deja claro que los presocráticos tenían una visión del mundo más profunda que sus sucesores. Sus ideas coinciden con la sabiduría oriental y la indígena. Matthai estudió a los presocráticos porque se dio cuenta que ellos coincidían en su metafísica con el conocimiento sagrado prehispánico. Lo griego arcaico coincidía con la “Piedra” mexicana.

2.- ¿Podrías resumir las tesis postuladas en las cuatro publicaciones de Matthai?

a) La teoría parmenídea del pensar (1990)

Se trata de una interpretación sobre el poema de Parménides, que es un texto fragmentario griego antiguo, sobre qué es pensar, qué es “Ser” y una serie de conceptos, desde la “Noche” hasta el “Ahora”, concepto pilar de la obra de Matthai. Matthai pertenece a una estirpe de pensadores alemanes, entre ellos, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Heidegger —inclusive académicamente Jaeger—, que han reinterpretado a los presocráticos, o repensado el mundo griego, de un modo y otro, y han hallado una clave de vuelta a un sentido perdido en Occidente, en la Modernidad, tanto en la Ciencia como en el hombre de todos los días. No olvidemos que la filosofía, la poesía, el pensamiento, en general, se trata de nosotros, no de conceptos en sí mismos, como se cree en las universidades y los libros, mayormente. ¿Qué es el tiempo? Es la gran pregunta de Matthai, como antes fue la de Heidegger y Borges. En su primer obra, La teoría parmenídea del pensar, Matthai indaga qué pensó este griego, cómo explicaba la aparición de lo real y qué hay debajo del mundo vuelto imagen, vuelto objeto, vuelto espacio y temporalidad. Es la obra más breve de Matthai, quizá por ser la primera, quizá por lo breve del texto parmenídeo, y es una obra fascinante, es una crítica al hombre actual, francamente creo que es su obra más tijuanense, porque fue aquí donde Matthai escribió. Antes de llegar a Tijuana estudió griego y sánscrito. (Matthai dominaba cinco o seis lenguas). Vivió en montañas de Puebla, según recuerdo, estudió filosofía en la UNAM, enseñó, levantó un negocio de cría de pollos, había invertido en la industria textil, leía furiosamente la historia de la filosofía, anotaba, vivía en su totalidad, y cuando López Portillo dio su célebre informe sexenal, en 1982, Matthai dijo “Ya no aguanto esta ciudad, es asquerosa” y buscó el lugar más alejado de la Ciudad de México y se dio cuenta que era Tijuana, el más septentrional, y viajó y comenzó a dar clases aquí, y lo que había reunido de su fortuna le sirvió para vivir —pues nadie puede sostenerse económicamente solamente de dar clases en una universidad mexicana— y aquí, en Tijuana, comenzó a escribir más sistemáticamente, a darle forma final a sus anotaciones de varias décadas. Y así nació La teoría parmenídea del pensar, publicada por la UABC en 1990, como sabes, que constituye la cuarta parte de su serie Pensar y Ser.

b) La Escuela de Mileto (1994)

La Escuela de Mileto apareció cuatro años después, porque es una obra que se ocupa de descifrar el significado de las ideas de los llamados Siete Sabios (Bias, Cléobulo, Sólon de Atenas, el espartano Quilón, Tales de Mileto, Periandro y Pitaco) y a Anaximandro y Anaxímenes, de Mileto, y a otros pensadores como Ferécides y Protágoras. Matthai era un exégeta de la antigua Grecia. ¿Qué querían decir estos pensadores por “voluntad”, “medida”, “mundo”? ¿Qué es el “Tiempo Primordial”? Esta es una de las grandes preguntas de Matthai. Creo que solamente Heidegger y, a veces, Giorgio Colli, coinciden en visión sobre lo presocrático, con Matthai, que está convencido de que los presocráticos discutían el gran secreto. La Escuela de Mileto se trata del amanecer de este secreto. La hermenéutica metafísica de Matthai arranca de este punto: tomando en cuenta que somos occidentales o algo semejante, ¿qué pensaron los primeros de nosotros, los primeros “occidentales”, los griegos? Y lo que Matthai re-descubrió es que los presocráticos sabían que el hombre se había degradado. Había que recordarle cuál ha sido su mayor significado. La filosofía es una memoria abstracta. Lo que esta memoria quiere recordarnos es que, alguna vez, fuimos Todo.

En este libro, Matthai comienza a demostrar que entre los presocráticos existe una unidad de reflexión. Todos ellos son variantes de una cosmovisión específica de la antigua Grecia, lo que Matthai denomina la “teoría de los infinitos mundos”. Estos griegos postulaban que la realidad es múltiple, que no existe un tiempo, sino infinitos tiempos simultáneos. Toda la obra de Matthai se trata de esta teoría, de cómo pensaron al tiempo los presocráticos y de cómo él mismo lo define. Matthai es un pensador de la policronía.

c) Ensayo de una fenomenología metafísica (1995)

Matthai puede ser entendido de dos maneras: como un intérprete de la filosofía griega arcaica y como un filósofo en sí mismo. El Ensayo es su libro de teoría. Su propia exploración. Los otros libros son sus libros de interpretación, aunque en todos está su postura personal, que él fundamentó mediante sus investigaciones hermenéuticas. El Ensayo se trata de la primera parte de Pensar y Ser. Una vez le pregunté a Matthai qué pensaba de este libro y me dijo: “Los mexicanos saben varias cosas. No muchas, algunas —decía riéndose— y una de las que saben es que la ‘tercera es la vencida’”. El Ensayo fue su tercera obra, la de 1995. En un curso de metafísica que llevé con él explicaba qué significaba el Ensayo. Una vez, ya que entré en confianza con él, le dije: “Oiga, Matthai, ¿no cree que usted está abusando, no se ha puesto a pensar —le dije irónicamente— que deberíamos leer a Kant o a Wittgenstein en esta clase?” y se rió —se reía siempre agachándose, colocando el puño derecho en su boca, como una calaca germana tosiendo— y dijo: “No”.

Este libro es la base de su obra. Es un libro abstracto, en forma de diálogo, decía él, “para facilitarlo”, pero, obviamente, es su obra más difícil. Matthai era tragicómico. Era un hombre simpático, bonachón, duro, muy duro, de su boca salían unas cosas que ponían a temblar a la gente, durísimas, pero dichas con amor, con certeza. Según yo, Matthai, ante todo, era un psicólogo del tiempo.

Te lo confesaré. A pocos hombres amo, a pocos hombres les entrego mi corazón, y no te lo digo homosexualmente, te lo digo con mayor profundidad, con raíz. Yo amé a Matthai. Él me enseñó algo inolvidable: “El camino a seguir es el que tú inauguras”. Es un europeo, es cierto, pero es uno de los fundadores del pensamiento fronterizo. Matthai es cómo el pensamiento europeo fue modificado por México. La más profunda filosofía en diálogo existencial con el pensamiento mexicano, con la piedra más sabia y, a la vez, la más degradada, la piedra-gastada. Aunque escribió poco sobre el pensamiento indígena, era claro que se trataba de una de sus mayores influencias. Siempre lo decía.

En el Ensayo Matthai desarrolla su teoría acerca de qué es el individuo y él dice que el individuo es el Tiempo. Desde su postura, define qué es la realidad. ¡Vaya pregunta! A Matthai se le pueden reprochar algunas cosas, pero no, no tratarse de un arrojado. Él dijo: puedo entenderlo Todo. Mis respetos. Coincido con él, si alguien no está dispuesto a entenderlo Todo, no vivirá nada.

Así que en este libro, Matthai se propone la más ambiciosas de las tareas, de los absurdos: definir cómo aparece el mundo. Vaya locura, ¿no?

Una vez le dije: “Matthai, no se haga, usted está queriendo provocar una revuelta contra Estados Unidos”, y me dijo: “Bueno, eso podría ser un inicio, pero nada más eso, un inicio”. Lo que Matthai propone, en lo político, es derrocar al Estado. Pero esa es sóla la punta del iceberg. Su teoría es compleja. Además, Matthai tenía una filosofía exotérica, sus libros, y otra secreta.

El Ensayo es su teoría de qué es el tiempo, qué es el individuo.

d) Heráclito, el obscuro (1997)

El último libro de Matthai. Es un estudio muy minucioso sobre los conceptos “Todo”, “Sueño”, “Fuego”, “Tiempo”, “Guerra”, etcétera, en los fragmentos de Heráclito. Fue publicado dos años antes de su muerte, que ocurrió en la última semana de 1999, como buen hombre del siglo XX, Matthai murió con su siglo, quiso pertenecerle. Algunos dicen que Heráclito, el oscuro, es el mejor libro de Matthai. Podría ser, depende de qué punto de vista utilices, pero la idea de que es su mejor libro sugiere, al menos, que se trata de una de sus obras más importantes. Heráclito no puede ser estudiado actualmente sin que se estudie la forma en que Matthai lo interpretó. Es su libro más extenso. Para Matthai, Heráclito es más profundo que Parménides, lo cual es toda una postura, un desafío a la historia de la filosofía. A Matthai hay que leerlo entre líneas, además, de leerlo línea a línea. En su escritura no hay línea sobrante. Cada parte de sus libros está escrita en excelente español, lo cual Olson, Artaud, Lawrence, Burroughs, Kerouac, ni siquiera soñaron. En este libro, Matthai teje toda una nueva interpretación de Heráclito, discutiendo los aciertos y errores de toda la escuela hermenéutica acerca de los presocráticos y Heráclito. Los libros de Matthai están llenos de citas. Cada uno fue una investigación asombrosa, minuciosa, lenta. Y, al mismo tiempo, son lo menos académico que puede haber. Son libros extraños. Según yo, lo que no comprendieron Artaud u Olson al venir a México, lo comprendió Matthai. Pero Matthai, además, a final de cuentas, quiso redimir a Occidente, probar que Occidente alguna vez supo tanto como Oriente y las culturas indígenas. La sabiduría occidental está en los presocráticos. Pero en los libros de filosofía, a los presocráticos se les interpreta de forma realmente babosa.

Matthai era persistente. La clave para él era volver a nuestros orígenes históricos, a nuestra propia memoria, aunque, al final, Matthai es una crítica tremenda contra la memoria, según yo veo su pensamiento. Creo que serán otros los que definan de qué se tratan los libros de Matthai. Es una obra complicada. Un atrevimiento muy cabrón. Para entenderlo, hay que dedicarle tiempo. Hay que gozar lo desconocido. Hay que retar todos nuestros entendidos. Estar dispuestos a perderlo todo en un instante.

3.- ¿Cuál era el interés de Matthai de tratar en sus obras a filósofos presocráticos cuando tradicionalmente se ha postulado que la cumbre de la filosofía griega fueron Sócrates, Platón y Aristóteles?

Sócrates, Platón y Aristóteles son la decadencia. A Occidente le gusta elegir líderes mediocres. Por eso eligió a Sócrates, Platón y Aristóteles como sus líderes filosóficos. Se trata de una afirmación dura. Y cierta. Los griegos eran una cultura en declive. Estamos acostumbrados a considerarlos una cultura joven, infantil, una cultura-origen, pero esta apreciación es inexacta. Los griegos eran una cultura moribunda. Para la época de Sócrates, los griegos ya no sabían algunas cosas que supieron antes, habían caído en una vejez vergonzosa. No tenían ya, consigo, la aceptación de qué es lo real. Habían huido de la verdad, justo como nosotros. Por eso nos fascinan: somos semejantes. Ellos no son la cumbre. Son su barranco. Y estos tres pensadores lo vivieron de manera espectacular. Crearon imágenes acerca de Grecia que son sublimes, apasionadas. Justamente porque son la noche de Grecia, son la despedida, ellos tres son memorables agónicos. Pero los más sabios sucedieron antes. Ellos tres son los últimos jóvenes, los primeros “viejos”.

4.- ¿Cuál consideras haya sido la aportación más importante de Matthai a la filosofía?

Quizá su reinterpretación radical de los presocráticos. O su versión personal de la teoría de los infinitos mundos. O quizá, sencillamente, haber tomado una postura que hace siglos no se tomaba en la filosofía: la vuelta a la metafísica.

Todos los filósofos modernos, desde Descartes hasta el propio Heidegger, huyeron de lo metafísico, como sucede hasta la fecha. La antimetafísica es ya un dogma. Los posmodernistas no rompieron con esta premisa, al contrario, la endurecieron. Pero Matthai tiene un concepto original acerca de la metafísica.

Este es uno de los términos más gastados. Uno de los más incomprendidos, probablemente el concepto más insultado. Tanto por los medios, donde “metafísica” significa “ocultismo” o motivación-personal-New-Age, y, por otro lado, dentro de la filosofía académica, “metafísica” significa “pasado”, irracionalismo abstracto, precisamente aquello que hay que “superar”, en beneficio de la Razón, en beneficio de la Ciencia, en beneficio del Sentido Común Capitalista. Matthai, en cambio, se autodenominaba un metafísico.

Desde lo que él denominaba “metafísica” Matthai buscó probar que cada uno de nosotros es su propio tiempo, que no hay manera de penetrar al otro. Él nunca dijo la palabra “otredad” pero lo que Matthai pudiera estar afirmando es que la otredad es inviolable. La alcoba no puede ser atravesada. Todo es espejo. Somos un gran camino hacia el punto-de-explosión. Llegaremos a nuestro propio orgasmo de disolución. Un fin y un principio simultáneos.

5.- ¿Cuál consideras es la importancia de Matthai en la Escuela de Humanidades de Tijuana?

Ahí no se han dado cuenta de Matthai. En las prisas de una universidad, no hay forma de detenerse a pensar. En las universidades, pensar es esporádico. Lo más relevante es la burocracia. El papeleo. Las luchas de poder. No hay forma de que en esa dimensión de la realidad haya espacio-tiempo para la profundidad, el peligro. A Matthai le iba bien. No se quejaba. Vivía de sí mismo, no esperaba nada de los demás, se sabía amo de su mundo. A mucha gente, que, a veces, ni siquiera lo había leído o escuchado, Matthai le daba miedo. El pensamiento de Matthai es subversivo. Solicita el fin de este orden político, psicológico, sexual, laboral, familiar, individual, la llamada a que no continúe, debido a su estupidez, a su olvido esencial. Por otra parte, como casi nadie entiende realmente filosofía en las universidades, a Matthai lo dejaron en paz. No se dieron cuenta de qué era lo que estaba investigando. Él me decía que su trabajo en la UABC era ideal, porque nadie lo entendía. No lo reconocían debidamente, es cierto. Pero tampoco lo molestaban y, entonces, pudo hacer lo que quiso: infectar a otros de sus ideas y métodos de interpretación; escribir sus libros.

Por otro lado, Tijuana influyó en Matthai bastante. No es casual que aquí fue donde comenzó a publicar. En la Ciudad de México, difícilmente había lugar para sus ideas, contrarias a las corrientas marxistas, colectivistas y positivistas, fundadas en el llamado giro lingüístico. Matthai eligió el lugar ideal para un anarquista metafísico como él, pues en Tijuana, desde Flores Magón, inclusive desde los grupos indígenas, pasando por la psique colectiva, siempre deseosa de independizarse del resto del país, en la región tenemos un pensamiento más bien anarco. Somos tribales. Y a Matthai ese espíritu tribal, individualista, separatista, le vino bien. Se sintió en casa. Los intelectuales tijuanenses nos distinguimos por la pasión que tenemos por la ciudad. Por ser bárbaros periféricos: felices de ser islas. Tijuana es un archipiélago de autofiestas.

Matthai es parte de esta periferia apasionada. Como Crosthwaite o Saavedra, Matthai idolatraba a Tijuana. Para él, Tijuana era una ciudad que vivía dentro de su propio tiempo. Pero hay que tener cuidado, porque todo lo que se refiere a Tijuana, lo quieren encasillar cómo manifestación etnográfica de esta cultura. Matthai rebasa, con mucho, al contexto de Tijuana. Matthai si es que pertenece a algo, es a la historia de la filosofía contemporánea.

6.- ¿Cuál ha sido la influencia de Matthai en los filósofos actuales?

La influencia de Matthai apenas inicia. Creo que he sido el primero en estudiarlo más sistemáticamente, pero ya hay otros que están analizando sus tesis, cuestionándolas, difundiéndolas. Es un legado del instante final del siglo XX. No dejó influencia directa. No hay discípulos de Matthai. Creo que soy la persona que intelectualmente estuvo más cerca de él. Estoy de acuerdo con él. Pero no me considero su heredero o discípulo o nada por el estilo. Antes era su alumno, luego fui su amigo, ahora soy su lector. No hay forma de estar de acuerdo con nadie. Somos totalmente originales. No hay deuda. Cada uno: en sí mismo. No hay relación. La otredad, nunca la alcanzaré. Soy todo lo que existe. Pertenezco a este mundo, el mío. Virginia Woolf era timorata: pedía un pinche cuarto propio. Yo lo que pido es todo un mundo. Y ya no lo pido: lo tengo. Cada pensador procesa la verdad de forma corporal, el límite es la vida, la muerte dentro de ella. No puede haber escuela. Lo que Matthai dejó fueron varios libros. Muchas ideas suyas. Un método de trabajo. Un ejemplo radical. Me da lástima la gente que va a las universidades y toma clases con profesores que se la pasan hablando del pensamiento de otros, algo tan absurdo como creer que uno tiene sexo porque habla del sexo que tienen otros. Matthai hacía libros. No era un simple hablador. Matthai construía. Los conceptos que utiliza los hizo él mismo. Ese será su influjo en la filosofía: haberle agregado conceptos. Haber retado sus hegemonías.

7.- ¿Cuál es la importancia de la obra oral que rescataste en distintos seminarios y conferencias, en comparación con su obra escrita?

Es una obra colateral. Después de entender que Matthai era más que un profesor extranjero de la UABC, decidí faltar a otras clases y meterme a las clases de Matthai para tener una perspectiva más amplia de su pensamiento, siguiéndolo tanto en sus libros como en sus performances orales. Mi tesis de licenciatura es un análisis sobre sus libros. Matthai era un profesor fuera de lo común. Imagínate a un anciano flaco, alemán, enjuto, de mirada retadora, atento de todo lo femenino, dueño del escenario, dando clases de filosofía, lentas, lentísimas clases de filosofía. Bueno, eso era Matthai. Tenía 21 o 22 años, probaba varias drogas en ese momento de mi vida, trabajaba en Verbatim, una maquila frente a la universidad, estaba harto de esa vida, y luego, las clases de Matthai, coincidían con el mensaje de la maquinaria: ESTO DEBE TERMINAR.

Comencé a anotar frases que decía. Y eran buenas. Síntesis de su pensamiento. Y fui juntando unas, otras. Y muchas páginas se me perdieron. La mayoría. Me da risa decirlo, pero es cierto: la mayoría de las anotaciones que hice de sus cursos se me perdieron una noche en playas de Tijuana. Una amiga me pidió que le leyera todo eso que yo presumía que había anotado en las clases de Matthai, y como la amiga era guapa y de buen cuerpo y de moral relajada, acepté, llevé los papelitos en que anotaba lo que escuchaba en sus clases y la noche continuó, la cerveza, el faje bajo la luna, los helicópteros gringos, y cuando, en la mañana siguiente, desperté, la mayoría de aquellos papelitos en que yo había anotado a Matthai se los había llevado el viento o el mar, mientras yo, desparrunzado, roncaba mi post coitum triste. El libro que Verdehalago publicará pronto, los Apotegmas de Matthai está compuesto de las pocas anotaciones que mi vida logró reciclar de su oralidad.

8.- Es evidente que en los aforismos de Matthai resalta mucho la individualidad por encima de la sociedad. ¿Es esta postura una de las bases de la filosofía de Matthai?

La única realidad es la pertenencia a mi propio mundo. “Individuo” significa: indivisible. Somos indivisibles del mundo. Somos indivisibles del universo. Aquello que veo ahí, soy yo. A Matthai le gustaba una observación del Contrato de Rousseau: cuando la sociedad frene la sobreviviencia del individuo, el Contrato Social queda abolido. Rousseau + Stirner. Hay que romper con las reglas de la sociedad, es decir, sus miedos, sus muros, para poder gozar. La vida es danza. La sociedad es una ilusión que mantengo para no hacerme responsable de mí mismo. La obra de Matthai es una defensa del Yo como única realidad. Todo lo que llamamos “mundo” es un yo no asumido.

9.- Como profesor pionero en cuanto a filosofía, ¿consideras que Matthai definió el rumbo de la filosofía metafísica por encima de la filosofía marxista, materialista, en la UABC?

No hay forma de estar encima de nada. Todo lo que hay está adentro. En la actualidad hay pensamiento marxista, judeocristiano, positivista, pragmatista, en la UABC. La universidad tiene diversidad ideológica. Lo que sí definió es que la filosofía es algo, a la vez, tremendamente teórico y descomunalmente vivencial. Cuando pienso en Matthai, en sus últimos días, cuando ya estaba muriéndose en el hospital, lo veo entrando en la muerte, veo a ese anciano flaco avanzar en el túnel, con una luz encendida en la mano, la luz de la filosofía radical entrando en lo obscuro, un anciano extático, iluminado. He conocido unos pocos hombres sabios. La mayoría de ellos, chamanes indígenas. Matthai, me disculparán sus egos, pero Matthai era un tipo que era un sabio, al modo de los sabios antiguos. Estaba situado entre la locura y la lucidez. Fue mi maestro, pero, sobre todo, ha sido uno de mis mejores amigos. Cuando nos despedimos, me dijo otro de sus chistes: “haga pedazos mis libros y cuando haga los suyos, mándemelos por correo a mi nuevo domicilio en el otro mundo”. A alguien que se despide de ti para siempre de ese modo, ¿qué puede decírsele?

10.- ¿Cuál consideras que sea la importancia de la reedición que hará la editorial Verdehalago de la obra de Horst Matthai?

Otros, fuera de estas tierras criminales, leerán su pensamiento. Lo que sigue es el tsunami.