6.28.2005

Caracania (2002)
Isabel A. Parra




Teatro Teresa Carreño Posted by Hello

Start of Opposition March, Chacaito, June 2002 Posted by Hello

Jun Yue Posted by Hello

Approach of Opposition March Posted by Hello

Opposition Marchers Posted by Hello

Looking Toward Chavista Concentration Posted by Hello

Chavista Motorcyclists Posted by Hello

Policía Metropolitana Posted by Hello

La Candelaria Posted by Hello

San Bernardino Posted by Hello

I, N, G Posted by Hello

Edificio Atlantic Posted by Hello

6.27.2005

Guru

I think of Satchidananada as I'm trying to dispel insomnia, which leads me back to this obsession I seem to have with moments in my past. One of which is the times in the mid 1970s when I would accompany my parents to hear his lectures here in Boston. I have two distinct memories of him, although maybe those have been distorted by time and stories from my parents. One is jumping out of my parents' parked car and running on the sidewalk shouting: "Satchi, were here!" and him laughing back at me from a doorway entrance. Another is sitting on his lap amid a crowd of people. Both moments stand out in my memory as genuinely happy and powerful in a very plain, everyday manner.

I've only tried doing Yoga once, in college, and I found it pleasant. So much that I fell asleep while lying on the mat toward the end of class. But I despise Yoga's hipness and the Orientalism that permeates most American approaches to Yoga, Buddhism and other spiritual practices.

Anytime I read Satchidananda, his teachings seem true, particularly when it comes to his notion of what it means to teach and learn. A text of his at his website reflects my own philosophy of teaching:

"The Guru should not think that he or she is a Guru. But, the disciple should think of himself or herself as a disciple. It is the disciple that makes the Guru. When you see something beautiful in someone and when you want to learn from that person, then he or she becomes your teacher. The person should not come and say, "Hey, I am your teacher; learn from me." No genuine teacher will ever say that. If asked the question, "Are you my teacher?" they would say, "Well, I don't know. You should know that. If you are learning something from me, maybe I am your teacher then. If you are not learning anything, then I am not your teacher." As long as the disciple wants to learn, it's fine. If the disciple feels, "I am not really satisfied with this teaching; I would like to go to someone else," then, fine; go. There is no bond. A teacher, a Guru, is there not to bind the disciple, but to free the disciple."
("What is a Guru?")

Until this morning, I'd never bothered to look more closely at the word "guru," which I always simply translated as "teacher." But I just found out that "Gu" means "darkness" and "ru" means "remover."

I found out about Satchidananda's death from my mother, the week he died in August of 2002. She had noticed his obituary in the New York Times and gave it to me. We didn't say much about it. Neither of my parents really have anything to say about him or the time they spent with him. Neither of them reject that time and the few comments they've made about him have always been positive. I'm probably the only one in my family who continues to return to Satchidananda, somehow imagining there's something in his teachings that can offer guidance and peace.

I had often thought of seeking him out, making some effort to ask him questions about anger or failure or love or breath. A loud truck goes by outside my windows, followed by the world's loudest and most inefficient subway trolley (the B green line that screetches along Commonwealth Avenue like a hyena screaming while being torn apart by lions) and I shoot the finger in their direction. The loud noises of the city feel like so much death & violence to me. This morning, the city outside seems to be particularly violent. Vibrations, intuition or subconscious awareness are real and I've never doubted their existence. And that's at the core of this dilemma I have with spiritual progress: I don't see it as a viable presence among humans, at least not anywhere around me. Or at least in my own life. I can sense moments or memories of it, or perhaps read about it and believe it, but we (or I) have long ago reached certain walls that cannot be avoided.

I write about this because it exists in my life, Satchidananda is a recurring presence for me. But I also write about it to acknowledge the presence of anger & violence in life and how these really seem like the central facets of existence. I know I don't have faith in any guru. Maybe I have hope, or some of my utopian affinities still flicker to life at times.

I don't know when exactly anger became such a central presence in my life. I do know that when I first listened to Never Mind the Bollocks in 8th grade (on vinyl) it was just as much of a revelation as running towards Satchidananda on a sidewalk in Cambridge years earlier. Autobiography as a dispersal, as a way to acknowledge and disappear ghosts.

6.26.2005

Les Fleurs du Mal


1.
Yesterday I finished reading John Sutherland's Stephen Spender: A Literary Life (Oxford, 2004). For anyone who likes Spender's writing or is interested in the so-called Auden group this book is excellent. I think one of the elements that makes it such a great biography is that the author worked closely with Spender's wife, Natasha, for this project. While that does make this a relatively tame "authorized" biography, her anecdotes and perspective on Spender's life help define his writing.

Regarding a series of lectures Spender gave at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. in 1968, Sutherland writes:


"Spender centered his series on the theme of twentieth-century modernism. The hero of the lectures is Baudelaire—a fellow poet with a lifelong passion for the visual arts and the first critic to use the term 'modernism.' The Frenchman was 'not just a critic, he was also a partisan, an advocate, a polemicist...he wanted an art which was a synthesis of past values with the heroism, beauty and squalor that characterized modern life.'"


Reading over Spender's assessment of Baudelaire, I can't help but think of Jean Michel-Basquiat's answer to an interviewer's query regarding his subjects: "Heroism, royalty, the streets." Basquiat's recent retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum was full of beautiful evil flowers. Making me think of that great rap song whose lyrics consist of "Puerto Rico!" being chanted over & over with the choicest beats.


2.
As Nick pointed out recently at his blog, much of Spender's later years were spent hustling for temporary teaching positions and speaking engagements around the globe to pay his bills. Even after being knighted, his final entry in his journal (6 July 1995) is regarding worries he has about his wife's financial affairs after his death.

Of course, Spender undoubtedly lived a privileged and cosmopolitan life, outliving most of his friends. But reading about his continuous financial worries is a sharp reminder of the monetary uselessness of poetry.

Spender's comments on Baudelaire above, and at other moments in the biography, have led me to the book I plan to begin reading today (along with the final pages of Ernesto Cardenal's memoir): Enid Starkie's Baudelaire, which has been sitting on my bedside shelf for almost two years now. Her Rimbaud remains a crucial text for me, so I expect great things from her Baudelaire bio.

An e-mail I got from a friend recently concerning my poem "Evil Stanzas" reminded me how much I've borrowed or imitated from Baudelaire in my attempts to write, even though I've only read a handful of his poems. But those few poems I first read in college have stayed with me with continued intensity, particularly his (allegorical) use of evil as a motif and subject. Augmenting this cult of Baudelaire, I would also have to mention Walter Benjamin's fantastic essays on that poet's relationship (in life and on the page) with Paris and the concept of the city in general.

Sutherland's exhaustive and compelling portrait of Spender reminds me of Jacinta's recent post ("El poeta desayuna"), which recounts a brief encounter she had with the Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas in Madrid. She writes:


"Anyways, he doesn't look at me, he only has eyes for his bread, even though there's no one else in the dining room with twenty-something empty tables, and I retire and leave him there, Gonzalo Rojas eating alone.
But I remember that image later on: the empty dining room, the sunny morning in Madrid, the white table cloths, the silence, his wise animal profile. And it seems to me it was a good way of being with The Poet."

6.25.2005

De nuevo la revolución / Alexis Márquez Rodríguez

Revolution Once Again

If in 1998 the Venezuelan situation required truly revolutionary changes, it needs them even more now, since that situation bordering on the catastrophic has been aggravated considerably today. There is not a single vice, a single lack or a single act of corruption that has not been enormously multiplied over the last six years. With the aggravating circumstance that, while governmental bad practices were sometimes enacted in the open, but often with the appearance of legality—which didn't make them any less harmful—, along with being increased to the maximum, today they are enacted with the most unbelieveable nerve and without the least bit of camouflage.

In order to begin implementing these profound measures, Chávez counted on an almost complete consensus in 1999, since the political parties, the business community, the media, the middle class, the workers in general and the poor were unanimously convinced of the necessity of these changes and they were ready to collaborate. Of course, once the task was undertaken, and seeing as it was inevitable that some of the measures would affect powerful interests, that consensus would diminish. But in such a situation an intelligent and effective governmental politics could have avoided the pitfalls and neutralized opposing factors. What Chávez and his government most lacked was intelligence, and instead of gaining more adherents they began to alienate the support, not only of the large capitalists, which was inevitable, but also of the middle class and of important and diverse sectors of society.

That is why what Chávez has insisted on calling revolution, first Bolivarian, then pretty and now even neo-socialist, has been a fiasco, in which no one believes anymore. How can a regime where the most universal and unbelievable corruption rules be revolutionary; where the head of the Government is the first to violate the Constitution and the laws, without even bothering with technicalities and pseudo-legal tricks, but instead in the most shameless manner and with total impunity; where the separation of powers is mocked, and the great majority of functionaries of those powers, without exception, act submissively as mere executors of the boss's wishes; where human rights are mocked and even those that remain, such as freedom of speech, are kept within a regime of threats and pressures; where poverty has grown to obscene numbers; and finally, where the head of the Government uses filthy, arrogant, defiant and crude language on a daily basis, which not only discredits him nationally and internationally, but also deepens the abyss separating him from a good portion of the population, including that sector which is not originally anti-Chavista?

It is this attitude of the President and his followers, more than the content of his incoherent and epileptic politics, which undermines his supposedly revolutionary character, and it irremediably damages the few positive measures that have been implemented. Because, for example, who can deny that the so-called missions, beyond whatever attributes they might have, have been an opportunity for so many thieves to enrich themselves quickly and shamelessly with the country's money? By defining itself as revolutionary, what the current regime has done is prostitute the concept of revolution.




{ Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, TalCual, 17 June 2005 }

6.23.2005

Library


Looking forward to reading Stephen Spender, New Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2004). Writing before the day, for the day.

Years spent building a library, which remains vulnerable to weather, poverty, accidents, theft, and mismanagement. Some editions kept in boxes or plastic bags on a shelf, others gathering dust beneath open windows. Facing the avenue below, summer trees & in-house concerts.

Diminishing prose, translations lined up but for disguise. Writing an essay on poetics, the place of the cursor on this screen, the floating library.

What I lived a decade ago, in other cities whose influence.

Birds alight in branches, traffic course avenue at dawn.

*

Typing a partial list of newspaper articles, op-eds on Venezuelan poetry & politics in the last 5 years:

Rafael Arráiz Lucca on Rafael Cadenas in El Nacional
Yolanda Pantin interview TalCual
Harry Almela, letter to Luis Alberto Crespo El Nacional
Joaquín Marta Sosa column in El Nacional
Eugenio Montejo interview TalCual
Elizabeth Schön interview TalCual
Rafael Cadenas, interview El Nacional Spring 2005

[...]

6.22.2005

"Los frutos en la poesía..."


Finished reading Juan Villoro El testigo (Editorial Anagrama, 2004), which I enjoyed overall. Hope to think through my notes and maybe write about it later.

Continue with finishing the biography of Stephen Spender and with volume 3 of Ernesto Cardenal's memoir. Look also to beginning Paradiso.

Reading Alfredo Silva Estrada's poems and translations, his Spanish versions of another Lebanese poet, Georges Schehadé (1907-1989) Las poesías. El nadador de un sólo amor (Angria Ediciones, 1999):

"Y yo a menudo pensaba en ti sobre el indeseable mar
Nuestro deseo está triste como la muerte de las aguas
El aire ha palidecido de un cielo bajo los árboles
Y estáis aún en el dolor de los jardines
Cerrad mis ojos con la rosa de vuestras rodillas
En la casa secreta de los alimentos
Para tus ojos cálices blancos de la amargura
Los frutos en la poesía en el mar
No veremos jamás las ciudades oh luz
La rosa al borde de los ojos oh espejismo"

6.21.2005

Escribir en el límite



"La poesía vive de dar lugar.
Dar lugar, situar el instante, desear situarlo, ese tormento, esa tormenta, ese temporal suscitador del poema.
Acercar más y más el instante (no poder situarlo), acercarnos a los otros por inmersión en el límite de los instantes de palabra en palabra."



Alfredo Silva Estrada, Al través (Caracas: Angria Ediciones, 2000).


*


The final section of Alfredo Silva Estrada's collection Al través is a series of prose poems called "Escribir en el límite" (To Write at the Limit). The quick sentences in this section, tune up the ample spaces of the earlier poems, which stretch out to long single-line stanzas or groups in variation across the page's field.

The cover of this edition is a drawing by Gego. Silva Estrada may be invoking her distinct lines, their clear trajectories in both poem and canvas or sculpture's 3-D, as her room-sized wire hanging in the Galería de Arte Nacional.

In the summer of 2002, Angria Ediciones collaborated with Editorial Blanca Pantin to publish La libertad del espíritu, Paul Valéry and Antonin Artaud, tr. Claudia Schvartz. A paperback edition in bright orange cover, with an introductory note by poet and editor Blanca Elena Pantin, who writes:

"En días de inmensa confusión donde los discursos únicos alcanzan depuradas manifestaciones o abiertas adhesiones a totalitarismos, las voces de Artaud y Valéry reivindican la disidencia y la diferencia, "la figura del intelectual indócil a las exigencias de cualquier acercamiento," el lugar de la libertad."

*

Here in Boston, I'm glad to see Pettycoat Relaxer #7 is out at newsstands.

I'm finishing Juan Villoro's novel El testigo, which has turned into a crime novel, Mexico's drug cartel underworlds and an anonymous poetry society, informal gathering of readers and writers in an apartment in the Zona Centro of Mexico City.

Boston and Tampa and maybe Miami.

*

Editing my English versions of excerpts from Rafael Castillo Zapata Providence (Angria Ediciones, 1995) which I'll post at Antología next month. After that, Jacqueline Goldberg poems, excerpts from Insolaciones en Miami Beach (1995) in August.

6.20.2005

La tierra con el olvido


Salah Stétié
, tr. Alfredo Silva Estrada, La tierra con el olvido (Caracas: Angria Ediciones, 2002).


"He aquí, rosa de fuego en la quemadura,
Aquello que el fuego da su frutecer
Cuando el agua está allí, hija de la casa,
Y cuando está en vigilia con el fuego de la quemadura
Sobre el techo y la larga palma de las nubes
Encendida por la sangre
Por encima del afluente del olvido" (15)

In his introduction to this Spanish translation from the French original, Alfredo Silva Estrada writes about Stétié's poetics:

"La poesía que ha entrañado para este poeta sabio indagación rigurosa, apasionada e incesante, situado alguna vez "En el umbral de la belleza de los muertos"..."En el umbral del origen", afirma ahora con dolor: "Reconocer la poesía es, extrañamente, comenzar por desconfiar de ella, abstenerse de conocerla al menos hasta no haberla experimentado en las balanzas interiores por lo que ella misma es." Curiosa experiencia, praxis tanteante que precede a todo conocimiento teórico. La poesía se le torna entonces "una totalidad opaca con posible vocación de transparencia"..." (6-7)

I first read Stétié's poetry in 2002, in these Spanish versions by Alfredo Silva Estrada. I've seen English versions of his poetry published in England by Bloodaxe Books. What stands out from Silva Estrada's versions is the refined individual lines, how the untitled short poems vary against each other, the lines always threatening to take off beyond the rest of the poem.

*

IM vs Eurochavismo

In today's El Nacional, Ibsen Martínez discusses European approaches to Chavismo in "Enzensberger y el Eurochavismo."

*

Went to see Cafe Tacuba on Saturday night at the Paradise, a few blocks away from here. Lead singer Sizu Yantra was energized as always, ironically commenting on the Boston audience ("letrados y estudiantes") and responding to chants of "Viva México!" saying: "Todos los países son un negocio y son chuecos...” Toward the end of the show they danced boy-band like in synchronized moves across the stage. Electronica interludes in decades-old songs, "yo tampoco se si existes en realidad..."

6.19.2005

"albas o penumbras"


The last stanza of Aire sobre el aire is:

"persona indivisible que nos unes a la vida
nos es urgente
tu anillo nupcial, tu esmeralda en nuetro dedo
y que distribuyas entre nosotros
albas o penumbras
y una rosa húmeda
con numen y sílabas de tus vergeles y praderas
amén y amén
al avistar nuestros puertos."

*

Stephen Malkmus Face the Truth (Matador Records, 2005) sounds good on some songs, "you're the maker of modern / minor masterpieces for / the untrained eye," watching cable TV River Phoenix say on a highway in 1991: "I've been on this road before. I'm a connosseuir of roads. This road will never end. It probably goes around the world."

You could make a good argument for Sonic Youth Goo (1990), taking extended epic stories to twin guitar to make a whole group of years sound similar, 1990 to 1994 about, give or take those varied events, eras can be named with music. Less private than Daydream Nation, which I always associate with the highway between Providence and Cape Cod at night in the summer. I saw them for the Goo tour in a theater at USF. A year later they opened up for Neil Young & Crazy Horse at the Sundome. Thurston Moore was so wasted the guitar hung off the stage by the wire and made a hugely loud feedback sound which echoed off the canvas ceiling dome.

6.17.2005

(Postmodern) Caracas


What would an English edition of Juan Sánchez Peláez Obra poética (Lumen, 2004) (reviewed in this month's Letras Libres) look like? How many translators would it need? A mentor and friend to many fellow writers in Venezuela (including Eugenio Montejo, Elizabeth Schön, Luis Alberto Crespo, Rafael Cadenas, Vicente Gerbasi, Antonia Palacios), while having his own very strange quiet style, infinite but distanced urban adherence, suburb or library, garden, writing against Venezuela in its material and political presences, writing rather for muses in classical variations, the nine goddesses.

Allied with trees, mountains, cliffs, clouds over a back yard garden or courtyard, "mundos invisibles" in one of the nine new poems in the final chapter of the collection. His first book Elena y los elementos (1951) written reading France from Chile and Venezuela. His second book, Animal de costumbre (1959) contemporary to Jesús Rafel Soto's geometrical abstract paintings and sculptures, written in Paris where he lived in the early to mid 1950s. (Postmodern) Caracas is necessarily Paris, Madrid, London, New York, Boston, Miami, Mexico D.F.


"Viví mi primera etapa en París en las peores condiciones económicas. Oswaldo Barreto, cuando nos encontramos por azar frente al parque Luxemburgo, me dio al poco tiempo de mi llegada alojamiento en su buhardilla. ¡Pero qué importaba la pobreza, si estaba en París, había días luminosos y estaba entre amigos!"
—Miyó Vestrini, Entrevista con Juan Sánchez Peláez, El Nacional, 17 October 1982.


Postmodernist, dissident against militarism and caudillismo. In April 2001, he published three poems in Verbigracia, El Universal's weekly literary supplement edited by Patricia Guzmán. (Mis)read as Venezuela's first postmodern poet in 1951. Olson contemporary? Prophetic mode with private gestures (alchemical). Latin American origins of the word 'postmodern.'


"Charles Olson, writing to his fellow-poet Robert Creeley on return from Yucatan in the summer of 1951, started to speak of a 'post-modern world' that lay beyond the imperial age of the Discoveries and the Industrial Revolution. 'The first half of the twentieth century,' he wrote soon afterwards, was 'the marshalling yard on which the modern was turned to what we have, the post-modern, or post-West.'"
—Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, Verso, 1998.


Semi-secret & influential poet. One of his last public acts was signing an open letter ("S.O.S. Venezuela") by Venezuelan intellectuals in support of the month-long workers strike against the incipient dictatorship of Hugo Chávez in December of 2002.




PD
(Juan Sánchez Peláez signed this open letter against Chavismo along with Adriano González León, Rafael Cadenas, Eugenio Montejo, Guillermo Sucre, Elizabeth Schön, María Fernanda Palacios, Edda Armas, Israel Centeno, Ana Teresa Torres, Yolanda Pantin, Victoria de Stefano, Rafael Arráiz Lucca, Elías Pino Iturrieta, Manuel Caballero, Antonio López Ortega, Isaac Chocrón, Elisa Lerner, Márgara Russotto, Oscar Marcano, Leonardo Padrón, Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, Oscar Sambrano Urdaneta, María Ramirez Ribes, Milagros Socorro, Eduardo Liendo, Antonieta Madrid, Patricia Guzmán, Milagros Mata Gil, Juan Carlos Méndez Guedez, Federico Vegas, Slavko Zupzic, Carlos Pacheco, Luz Marina Rivas, Maribel Espinoza, Rodolfo Izaguirre, Belén Lobo, Blanca Strepponi, Harry Almela, Silda Cordoliani, Igor Barreto, Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Ibsen Martínez, Carlos Oteyza, Leonardo Azparren, Mary Ferrero, Gabriela Rangel, Ariel Jiménez, Iris Peruga, Verónica Jaffé, Angelina Jaffé, Jacqueline Goldberg, Eleonora Requena, Alexis Romero, Gisela Kozak, José Luis Palacios, María Celina Nuñez, Vladimir Vera, Sonia Chocrón, Roberto Echeto, Angel Gustavo Infante, Juan Carlos Chirinos, Graciela Bonnet, Fernando Cifuentes, María Griselda Navas, Francisco Javier Pérez, María del Pilar Puig, José Carlos Terrada, José Antonio Parra, Silvio Orta Cabrera, Mercedes Sedano, Carmen Vincenti, Violeta Rojo, Annabelle Aguilar, Belkis Arredondo, Edgardo Malaver Larez, Vilma Ramia, Gustavo Guerrero, Leonardo Milla, Beatriz González Stephan, Ana María del Re, Nines Pérez Luna, Elena López Meneses, Pedro Castillo, Maranta Rubiera, Silva Consolini, Sagrario Berti, Alicia Torres, Martha de la Vega, Diana Lichy, Miguel Gomes, María Josefina Barajas, Joaquín Marta Sosa, Boris Muñoz, Humberto Mata, Matilde Daviú, Cristian Alvárez, Alfredo Herrera Salas, Sonia González, Kiria Kariakin, Eduardo Casanova, Victor Krebs, María Elena Maggi, Helena González Cuello, Katyna Henríquez, María Elena Ramos, Corina Michelena, Boris Izaguirre, María Auxiliadora Alvárez.)

6.16.2005

Retrato de un sable / Héctor Silva Michelena

Portrait of a Sabre

Beginning with an old machete and with the official's beret beside which he stands out, a Cadet who swore to use his sabre in defense of freedom, according to legend was always riding a horse between history and myth. The imposing figure of the Hegemon finally appears, transformed into a Magistrate, who goes armed with an axe to assassinate an old usurer, to kill a "useless and harmful" louse, like he says. The old usurer, according to his whims, represents the past, which smells rotten to him. His artistic embryology and his ideological evolution, which made him feel faint and sweat blood, were developed in a prison under the heat of a Marxist-Lenininst-Stalinist-Maoist-Castroist-and even Saddam Husseinist trinket.

Today, after great efforts which began amid neoliberalism, his speech acts decant in Socialism.

He said loudly: "Socialism hasn't died, it was off partying." His entourage of autistic thinkers (Oh, Rodin!) advised him in a conclave: "You have to say that true Socialism has never existed and thus it cannot have died. We will invent the new Socialism." Yes, gentlemen of the conclave: since we have close relations with Cuba, we deduce that Castro has created the true Socialism, which thus does exist.

The Hegemon lives a paradox: his crime (the coup d'état) is not that but is instead a praise-worthy military rebellion that guarantees human acts. In another aspect, the economic, the crime is a simple operation aimed at reestablishing the natural balance of money and rectifying its defective distribution: the assassination of the old usurer who guards in her safes a wealth which should flow generously toward the people, this is his absolution. How can that be called a coup d'état? His hegemonic humility leads him to assist a prostitute and he becomes piety in the flesh. And a symbolic cross hangs from his chest.

The prostitute whispers into his ear like a Christian: "Rectify, oh great Magistrate; that old woman wasn't a louse, she was a human being." But the Magistrate doesn't understand. The only thing he understands is that he is an extraordinary man, a genius who is authorized to violate the law. That's the reason for his popular charisma and the impulse that took him to prison. Olympian irrationalism convinced this Magistrate, even though he mocks it. He pronounces against any who use reason and persuasion to look for consensus. That's why it doesn't matter if they call him Robespierre or Napoleon, or if they consider him a simpleton, even though he's read Marx or Lenin. Regardless, it's noteworthy that he'll praise the communist prison where he was, where the individual is treated, if not like a louse, then like an ant, against those individualist excesses. To enter that communist paradise one has to pay for the right of entry: to sign a RR. What would he think of Stalin, who made all of Russia a prison without demanding that right of entry? A word against his sabre was enough. Our Magistrate could achieve an absolved language by merely grinding down the others until they become cosmic dust.




{ Héctor Silva Michelena, TalCual, 23 May 2005 }

6.14.2005

"...el ver del vidente no permanece..."

Another Chilean poet associated with Juan Sánchez Peláez is Humberto Díaz-Casanueva (1906-1992). The only text of his I've read is an essay included in Juan Sánchez Peláez: Ante la crítica (Monte Ávila Editores, 1994), a compendium of critical approaches to the Venezuelan poet's work, edited by José Ramos.

The essay by Díaz-Casanueva is a review of Sánchez Peláez's collection Rasgos comunes (1975), originally published in Caracas in the Revista Nacional de Cultura. He writes about Sánchez Peláez's extensive use of prose poems in his 1975 collection and the tensions that can arise between prose and verse:

"Podría afirmarse que la actitud dual de Sánchez Peláez ante el mundo es desocultar su riqueza esencial con la ayuda de ricas y extraordinarias imágenes, para luego demostrar que lo presente <<no cumple su presencia>>, el goce es indebido por algo que se interpone y que es preciso exorcizar, la multiplicidad de lo presente es abundante pero fugaz, el ver del vidente no permanece, hay un extravío del hombre, una vivencia de lo inconciliable sin negar los elementos múltiples y a veces contradictorios que componen cada ente o circunstancia. Porque nos negamos a creer que esta poesía no traiga su mensaje que sólo advertiremos del todo sumiéndonos en el poema, sin disecarlo en lo conceptual. Así, entenderemos mejor por qué nos cruzamos con un niño que de repente pasa <<al capricho del viento, con una luz y una melodía>>. El nos indica que aun en la demolición del mundo, hay una fuerza transparente que todo lo entremezcla pero que se opone a la desintegración dionisíaca del hombre y del mundo."

6.13.2005

"Tatuado con la tinta imborrable del sonámbulo"

In some of the outdoor covered hallways between buildings at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, you'll find stretches of book and CD vendors at portable stalls. My father says they've been in that spot at least since he studied at UCV in the early 1960s. Among the books I've found there, these two were the most thrilling:

Juan Sánchez Peláez, Poesía 1951-1981 (Monte Ávila Editores, 1984).
Rosamel del Valle, Antología (Monte Ávila Editores, 1976).

The 1984 edition of Sánchez Peláez's collected poems has a deep brown paperback cover and, next to the title page, a photo of the author in oversized 1970s glasses and a wide tie, looking down at something on his desk. This edition also has a great introduction by Adriano González León, who writes:

"Se trata de una brusca irrupción de precisiones, de texturas desdeñosas, elocuentes en el freno y el cincel, a veces frías por el mucho cernir las palabras; por fortuna hay un tono, una obsesión que siempre se abre paso. Vuelve la constante herida de la muerte y el amor, regresan las visiones, se hace presente el descarrío verbal, porque las palabras, según dice espectacularmente el poeta, 'suenan como animales de oro.' "

A story I've heard from a friend about Sánchez Peláez is that he was trying to find as many copies as he could of this edition of his collected poems so he could destroy them. Supposedly, after the 1994 edition had come out, he'd noticed various mistakes in the earlier edition and wanted to ensure those didn't remain archived. I don't know how many copies of that edition (3,000 were printed) he was able to destroy. But this one was saved and ended up at one of the bookstalls, where I was lucky enough to find it.

The second book was edited by Sánchez Peláez the year I arrived in Venezuela from the US. The same year my brother was born in Caracas. The copy I have is in excellent condition and includes a great selection from the Chilean poet, ranging from his early book Mirador (1926) to poems he wrote in New York City and back in Chile before his death in 1965.

I hadn't read his work before finding this edition, though I'd heard of him through reading Sánchez Peláez, who uses two of his lines as an epigraph to his third book Filiación oscura (1966). I rarely see Rosamel del Valle mentioned in relation to Chilean poetry. Overshadowed by the often dull Neruda, I suppose. But the secret poets are so much better anyways.

Here's part III of his poem "Cánticos," from El corazón escrito (1960):

"Luz del verano dormida entre mis dedos
Viva en mí y muerta en mí
Y rosario del santo temeroso del milagro
Un pájaro en vigilia en el nido de este cuerpo
Tatuado con la tinta imborrable del sonámbulo
Deshecho en cada sueño mas despierto en tu oído
Como el amor que lleva en un cesto las catástrofes
Porque tu sonrisa es la sonriente cicatriz que te hizo el ángel
Y arrojada estás en mi pequeña eternidad
Por una hora y otra hora y un siglo y otro siglo
Cada día recibida y amada cada día
Por el fuego de mi palabra ardiente y sin origen"

6.12.2005

La revolución perdida

1
When I was in Mexico City in 1999, I found a copy of the first volume of
Ernesto Cardenal's autobiography (Vida perdida, Seix Barral, 1999) at one of my favorite bookstores, the Librería Gandhi in Coyoacán. I've bought the subsequent volumes in this trilogy and am now finishing the third one, La revolución perdida (Editorial Trotta, 2004).

Cardenal's prose in these volumes is nothing short of brilliant. He's written an autobiography employing the research methods of a journalist, combing through newspaper articles from his own archives, as well as interviewing friends and other witnesses of the political and literary events his own life has encompassed. Each of the volumes is massive, pointing to his prolific nature as a writer.

But as I've been reading La revolución perdida over the last year, I've found myself having moments of deep distaste toward certain aspects of Cardenal's narrative. In particular, I'm noticing some of the hypocritical stances Cardenal takes in order to justify or explain some aspects of his political allegiances over the years.

Cardenal has been very vocal recently in condemning the current leaders of the Sandinista party in Nicaragua for corruption and for what he sees as their betrayal of that movement's original goals. The title of this volume (The Lost Revolution) implies a sense of grief and anger at a betrayal on the part of many of his fellow companions.

What I find problematic in Cardenal's third volume is his inability to go beyond a critique of the Sandinistas and to include himself in some of those betrayals he so vehemently denounces. One glaring example of this inability to include himself in his critique is the manner in which Cardenal idolizes Fidel Castro, a figure whose dictatorial actions over the last four decades cannot be ignored. Of course, Cardenal and his fellow Sandinistas owe much of their survival to the crucial material and intellectual aid Castro gave them before and after their ascent to power in 1979. But there are simply too many passages in La revolución perdida where Cardenal will discuss the crimes of the Somoza dictatorship without mentioning any of the crimes committed by the Cuban revolution.

My reading of Cardenal's autobiography is inevitably a personal one. Much of my writing on this blog has been dedicated to denouncing the incipient dictatorship in Venezuela under the regime of Hugo Chávez and his so-called Bolivarian revolution. Cardenal has been one of the more vocal supporters of the Venezuelan farce, visiting Caracas recently as an official guest of the government and writing painfully naive accounts (such as this one) of his experiences there.

Several of Cardenal's friends in Venezuela, including the poets Armando Rojas Guardia and Joaquín Marta Sosa, have pointed out the failure and hypocrisy of the Chavista revolution, but Cardenal has chosen to follow the Venezuelan government's party line on the crisis. Joaquín Marta Sosa wrote in his column for El Nacional about a coversation he had with Cardenal in Caracas. Cardenal refused to believe his own friend, choosing instead to adhere to the (false) epic narrative of Chavismo as a movement for social justice.

2
As a reader, I remain passionate about Cardenal's work. I don't suppose this will wane any time soon. I'm particularly drawn to certain mystical moments in his poetry, and how he manages to incorporate history into a cosmic world-view, as he does in texts such as "Hora 0."

And yet, reading Cardenal's mistaken analysis of what's happening in Venezuela, and noticing his refusal to acknowledge any personal responsibility in the decline of the Sandinista party in his memoir, I can't help but doubt him. I keep seeing his current enthusiasm for Chavismo as an old man's senile efforts to clear (or is it cloud?) his conscience.

In the April 30, 2004 edition of her column for the newspaper TalCual, the Venezuelan novelist Ana Teresa Torres also pointed out Cardenal's child-like enthusiasm for a revolution he gets to watch from a safe distance. Meanwhile, his own friends in Venezuela, all of whom once offered him their solidarity, are now forced to eat the daily shit of Chavismo. None of which gets displayed to gullible or mercenary (cf. Richard Gott) revolutionary tourists, from Managua to London to the US.

I find it hopeful to note that Cardenal's close friend and neighbor in Managua, the novelist Sergio Ramírez, has been able to see beyond the multi-million dollar international marketing campaign of Chavismo, noticing the similarities betwen that movement's populist tendencies and those of Peronismo in Argentina.

Undoubtedly, the concept of revolution is now being discredited in Venezuela. But this news hasn't reached certain people and I know some will continue to think of Chavismo as a legitimate political movement.

Whatever disaster awaits us in Latin America has already begun in Venezuela.

6.09.2005

Oraciones para un dios ausente


For the month of June, I've posted some of my English versions of excerpts from Martha Kornblith's long sequence of poems "Oraciones para un dios ausente" over at Antología.

I've written about Kornblith and posted some of these translations here before. Her first book, Oraciones para un dios ausente (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1995), is one I return to frequently. I love Kornblith's ability to balance anger and clarity, in line after wonderful line. A few months ago, I translated this interview with Kornblith by Rafael Arráiz Lucca.

The Grupo Eclepsidra, a collective of young writers in Caracas that Kornblith belonged to, established the excellent publishing venture Grupo Editorial Eclepsidra. In 2002, Thelma Carvallo discussed their tenth anniversary in this article ("Libros reales") in Verbigracia.

6.08.2005

Obra poética, de Juan Sánchez Peláez / Jacobo Sefamí

Obra poética by Juan Sánchez Peláez


Juan Sánchez Peláez, Obra poética, Lumen, Barcelona, 258 pp.


The poetry of Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922-2003) is part of a rich heritage of Latin American writing with Surrealist affinities. The conections are evident in the magazines that ascribed to the ethics of the French movement, such as the Chilean Mandrágora (1938-1943), the Argentine Qué (1928) and A partir de cero (1952-1954), or the Peruvian El uso de la palabra (1939). Keeping in mind how problematic an explicit Surrealist allegiance can be and attending more to ethical and/or aesthetic connections, with a malleable criterion, one could elaborate a long list of poets. Just for the sake of establishing a point of reference for the reader, it's worth mentioning some of the names that come to mind: Aldo Pellegrini, Enrique Molina, Olga Orozco, Braulio Arenas, Gonzalo Rojas, César Moro, Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Octavio Paz, Álvaro Mutis, Vicente Gerbasi, Juan Liscano, Tomás Segovia (the list can easily be amplified). To these we could add other poets not ususally paired with Surrealism, but whose work contains certain echoes, images or an attitude which make us evoke it: Vicente Huidobro, Oliverio Girondo, Xavier Villaurrutia, José Lezama Lima.

But perhaps the poet who had the largest influence on the generations that began to publish in the 1940s and 1950s was the Neruda of Residencia en la tierra (1933, 1935). Starting with this text, a Latin American poetry that found its enchantment in the intersection of natural exhuberance and a verbal wealth channeled through surprising images began to take shape. The rhythm of Neruda's long and measured verses, accompanied by a strong eroticism, as well as a bleak condition, returned in various forms among subsequent writers.

Sánchez Peláez's poetry emerges amid this field. At 18 he went to Chile to study and was able to establish a friendship with the members of the Surrealist group centered around the magazine Mandrágora (Braulio Arenas, Enrique Gómez Correa and Jorge Cáceres, who were later joined by Teófilo Cid and Gonzalo Rojas; moreover, we should point out the presence of two other poets: Rosamel del Valle and Humberto Díaz Casanueva). But his books began to appear later, starting in 1951. Sánchez Peláez began to develop a concise poetry, which matured as the years progressed. Sadly, the poet died before this edition was published. Outside Venezuela, his poetry was impossible to find; so that this volume is a revindication while also being a final result that culminates and closes his cycle of creation.

Obra poética gathers seven books and nine unpublished poems. The books are: Elena y los elementos (1951), Animal de costumbre (1959), Filiación oscura (1966), Lo huidizo y permanente (1969), Rasgos comunes (1975), Por cuál causa o nostalgia (1981) and Aire sobre el aire (1989). There would not be actual stages or phases in this work, since a continuous line of exploration is sustained from beginning to end. There are different modulations of the voice and modes of expression: the long initial verse, the short poems with images loaded with silence (on occasion marked by spaces between the lines), the prose poems, the interrupted verses that spread out on the page (the style of Octavio Paz in the 1960s) from one side to another. And yet his poetics persists over time: to resist the condemnation to solitude, human misery, injustice, contingency and the anguish of being, through love, freedom and poetry (the famous Surrealist triad). Facing the awareness of failure, language ends up being a balm: "Though the word be shadow in the midst, home in the air, I am another, freer, when I see myself tied to her, at dawn or in the storm. // For the word I live in placid waters and in a foreign seam, outside the immense hole." If the word is a house that rescues him from the abyss, love is "a permanent state of revelation, the only climate capable of returning its magic and vital force to the languid universe" (as his compatriot Eugenio Montejo points out quite well).

Guillermo Sucre is correct when he points out that what predominates in the first book is "the verbal splendor, proliferation even," while in the second one his poetry "makes itself more concentrated and secret." In the same manner, one would have to note that Sánchez Peláez never loses the freedom of association in the image, which is characteristic of Surrealism: "The wheels that rock the sea are geraniums," "Two bodies join together and dawn is a leopard" or "Your fig kiss amid long branches." In "Poem" (from Filiación oscura), the hidden lines of communication are revealed through the surface of words: "From the stone to the flame to the sweet stream they call hummingbird / what term puts me in the unfortunate juncture? // I scratch and bury. The writing of my details in the fist." The Venezuelan's poetry insists on a type of alquemical vocation, a desire or a wish for the transformation of reality, even if he later falls into anxiety: "When I return from the imaginary voyage, I live and lie in the pure desert. Instead of advents and honors, solitude still tolls the bell in the forest."

In Rasgos comunes allusions to an oppressive social environment appear ("Taste the cup without soup / there's no more soup... / try the suit... / it hangs it drags at / the lapel"), although the references are minimal and figurative. This is perhaps the book that most intensely expresses the relationship between daily reality and the magic that underlies it. For example, see the very beautiful poems dedicated to horses or cows. I cite from "Trajectory" (I regret very much not having noticed it before publishing my anthology Vaquitas pintadas [Little Painted Cows], edited recently by Mexico's Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana): "When I see you, vertical and sacred cows, I see you as lush cows, I see you up close and jumping in the lanes, females with those udders for the male, your white liquor falling, Adam's fountain in our paradises."

Aire sobre el aire and the unpublished poems confront old age and death. They are themes faced with irony, parsimony, or with honest terror. In "Tracks," the last poem in Obra poética, the subject is stripped of everything and is made to march alone in front of his fate: "and if there were no one? no one but nothingness?" Álvaro Mutis affirms on the back cover of this volume that Sánchez Peláez "is Latin America's best kept secret." It's a very elegant way of saying the Venezuelan poet is unkown in Spain. This edition should help fight this ignorance.




{ Jacobo Sefamí, Letras Libres (España), June 2005 }

6.06.2005

La casa de cartón

I count this book among those that helped me figure out why I wanted to write and how I might go about it. I found a copy of Martín Adán, tr. Katherine Silver, The Cardboard House (Graywolf Press, 1990) at what was, for me, the best bookstore in Tampa, Ybor City's Three Birds Bookstore. I'm very grateful to that small but excellent bookstore for being one of the few places where culture thrived outside the malls and highways of Tampa in the early 1990s.

Martín Adán (Peru, 1908-1985) published this short novel in 1928 but when I read the English version it seemed as new to me as anything I had encountered. I first heard about it a few months before finding a copy, when my grandmother gave me a newspaper clipping she thought I might be interested in. It was a brief review in the 23 August 1990 issue of The Christian Science Monitor.

I've never seen a paperback edition of the book, so it seems to have gone out of print soon after publication. Which might simply reflect its status as a secret, or invisible, book. At least in its English translation.

Adán's novel is composed of 40 short chapters, most of which read like prose poems. The narrative is centered in the sea-side Barranco neighborhood of Lima, where the young narrator, his friend Ramon and the beautiful Catita live and go to school. There's no plot, other than the precocious narrator's observations of Lima and the sea, zooming in on the endless visions and sounds a large city and its environs offer:


"I walk away from sky. And, as I leave the countryside, surrounded by urbanizations, I notice that the countryside is in the sky: a flock of fat, fleecy clouds—award winners at the Exposition—romp about in the green sky. And this I see from far away, so far away that I get into bed to sweat colors."


I haven't been able to find a copy of the book in the original Spanish, though I have encountered Adán's poems in various anthologies. None of the single poems I've read of his interest me as much as this text, which I've yet to tire of. It has been a central part of whatever nomadic library I've built for myself over the years. Two chapbooks I wrote at the time (Typewriter and Cholo) now seem to me like poor imitations of Adán's hallucinatory and sometimes mundane (though never boring) prose observations of a decaying city.

I can't explain how certain texts become talismanic, nor would I want to. In this case, part of it has to do with when and where I found the book. By the mid 90s, when I was living in Ybor City, that area of Tampa was quickly losing any aura it held as a cultural vortex. Three Birds Bookstore closed in 1994, The Blue Chair Records closed soon after and galleries and studio spaces such as titanic anatomy were on their way toward extinction. The mainstream clubs and obnoxious bars were on the rise and today Ybor City is merely another tourist attraction. But I found this book there in 1990 or 1991, so some fragment continues in whatever map I've built of that time and place.

6.05.2005

El Techo de la Ballena

I spent the late afternoon yesterday sitting in a park in Cambridge by the Charles, reading more of Juan Villoro's novel El testigo. I'm midway through the book and am enjoying it very much.

While the protagonist, Julio Valdivieso, sits in a bar in Mexico City one afternoon, he's approached by a homeless man who starts talking to him. It turns out to be an old friend he hasn't seen since they were in a writing workshop together in the early 1970s. His friend is a poet who has fallen on bad times. At one point in their conversation the homeless poet mentions El Techo de la Ballena (The Whale's Roof), a collective of radical young writers and artists during the early 1960s in Caracas which included Juan Calzadilla, Adriano González León, Francisco Pérez Perdomo and Salvador Garmendia, among others:


"Yo tampoco sucedí—sonrió—. Las mafias no me dejaron. Ya sabes cómo es esta pocilga. Si no le lames los huevos al príncipe, te jodes. Aquí sólo hay cortesanos. No hay lugar para los poetas de hierro. Nunca habrá genios indecentes, irregulares, hijos de la chingada. Las vanguardias chidas de América (El Techo de la Ballena, los Nadaístas, La Mandrágora) jamás hubieran ocurrido en México. La rebeldía no es de este rancho. Publiqué en revistas de Perú, de Chile, de Colombia, de Venezuela, ahí tengo brothers, ahí estan mis pares, mis carnales del alma, ¡chupe y chupe! Ahí no importa si un poeta se coge a su perro, no tienes que ser un señorito, un gentleman fifirifi, un cosmopolitólogo, todo lo que hay que aparentar en Mexicalpan de las Tunas. Rolé por los Andes y el Amazonas, encontré poetas de lumbre, no mamadas, nada de haikus sobre la caída de la hoja. Luego me regresé y me hicieron el feo."


I first heard about this group when I was at Naropa in 1993. When I told Allen Ginsberg I was Venezuelan (during a brief conversation) he told me about them, asking if I knew their work. He had received an invitation from them to visit Caracas but he was never able to go.

I've been looking up information on this literary group ever since but much of it is impossible to find in libraries or bookstores here in the US. When I was in Caracas in 2001, I came across an excellent essay on the painters in that collective:

Gabriela Rangel, El Techo de la Ballena. Cambiar la vida, transformar la sociedad. De la pintura moderna a la instalación (Caracas: Espacios Union, Cuadernillo No. 24, 1999).

In November of 2002, El Universal's now defunct literary supplement, Verbigracia, published the following essay on El Techo de la Ballena by Juan Calzadilla: "El Nadaísmo y El Techo de la Ballena." In that same issue, Verbigracia also published a small selection of poems from the group: "Poesía contestataria."

6.03.2005

Canto llano: XXX

Cintio Vitier

Ara la letra sin saber
si un día fructificará,
si ha de ser trigo, estela o nada
la escritura de la soledad.

Pasan los días con los signos
que nos prometen no pasar,
vase girando la humareda
y el texto empieza a amarillear.

Que entre esas brasas haya una
que a alguno pueda calentar,
o acabe todo en el silencio
de las estrellas sobre el mar:

pobre destino de escribir
en sustitución del obrar!
Y quién sabe si la palabra
el Verbo la perdonará!



1953-1955



(Cintio Vitier, Antología poética, Monte Ávila Editores, 1998)

6.02.2005

DF Book Meme

Ernesto passed these questions on to me today. Thanks, Ernesto, for your kind words.


1. Total number of books I’ve owned

Somewhere in the indeterminate thousands, especially when I take into consideration my obsession with comic books as a child. That's when I first learned to love books, reading the likes of Sgt. Rock, G.I. Combat, Jonah Hex, Archie and Dennis the Menace in the US and Tamakún: El Vengador Errante and Kalimán in Venezuela. Then came my discovery of Tin Tin and Asterix & Obelix.


2. Last book I bought

Goethe, tr. Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan, The Sorrows of Young Werther.

I'm teaching this book next fall and had only read it before in a Spanish version. I've already noticed moments in the English version that seem flat to me. And W.H. Auden's Foreword at times borders on being ludicrous. For instance, when he writes: "To us [in the 20th century] it reads not as a tragic love story, but as a masterly and devastating portrait of a complete egoist, a spoiled brat, incapable of love because he cares for nobody and nothing but himself and having his way at whatever cost to others." (Auden needs to check himself.)

I think the Spanish version by Carmen Bravo-Villasante is magnificent. (Or does she only introduce it? The edition I read isin't clear on this.) I read it over several sleepless nights and kept wondering how I could have waited so many years to read it. A few days before I picked it up, I had noticed a woman on a bus in Caracas reading it in an edition published by Los Libros de El Nacional. Like many of the books I love, this one arrived as if by magic.


3. Last book I read

Cristina Rivera-Garza, La cresta de Ilión.

I read this over several months, with various interruptions from other books. As with the other book of hers I've read, Nadie me verá llorar, I found myself rereading certain sections as I moved through its pages. She concludes this novel with a brief reference to The Odyssey which made me reconsider my whole interpretation of the book. She writes scenes that flow at a dream's (or a nightmare's) strange pace. I'm on the lookout for more of her great work.


4. Five books that mean a lot to me

Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures.

I read this at BU for a seminar on Postcolonial literature. Ahmad's history of literary theory is exciting and I found plenty of ideas I could relate to, particularly in regards to how the West reads the so-called Third World. His chapter in response to Fredric Jameson is a classic.

Roque Dalton, Pobrecito poeta que era yo.

As I've said here before, this is one of the hidden masterpieces of the Latin American Boom. UCA Editores in San Salvador recently published a new edition of the book so it is available. Dalton's book is obviously responding to Rayuela, among other texts. What I find so wonderful about this novel is Dalton's hilarious sense of the absurdity and humor of human existence. I also admire how irreverent Dalton is towards any type of political dogmatism.

Teresa de la Parra, Ifigenia. Diario de una señorita que escribió porque se fastidiaba.

The passage when the narrator arrives to the port of La Guaira from Europe by boat reminds me of my own arrival there from NYC (via freight ship) in 1976. At first, the novel seems to be narrated by a frivolous young caraqueña. What ensues, however, is a story of intellectual freedom versus societal restrictions. So much of the novel captures the difficult choices a writer must face in a world ruled by commerce.

Wilson Harris, Jonestown.

This "Dream-Book" is narrated by the ghost of Francisco Bone, who was killed during the infamous Jonestown massacre in Guyana. Harris structures the novel on a juxtaposition between postmodern theoretical inquiry and Native American mythologies. This is a book that defies easy classification, since it can be read as an epic poem, a novel, critical theory and as a meta-testimonial.

Juan Sánchez Peláez, Aire sobre el aire.

In 14 beautiful poems, Sánchez Peláez manages to evoke an entire lifetime of poetic inquiry. Thanks to this book I encountered the poetry of César Moro and the fiction of Álvaro Mutis. The poems travel from Liverpool to Lima to Caracas and they reflect a devotion to poetry as a form of philosophy. All while remaining faithful to song.


5. Which five bloggers am I passing this to?

I pass this meme onto fellow book lovers: Claudia, Mark, Eileen, Jacinta & Sergio.

6.01.2005

Evidencias y creencias / Francisco Vera Izquierdo

Evidences and Beliefs

It is evident how each person who holds a position of power needs to maintain himself there with an influential layer of people who will obey and not judge.

In fact, such contingency is neither frequent nor easy, and this is why so many political positions end up crumbling.

The opportunists always appear at the birth of each success and the prudent caudillo knows how to use this to his advantage.

It can be presumed that, outside of armies, blind obedience of this sort can be extremely difficult to find. Thus the case of the life-long dictator, in the style of Fidel Castro, Juan Vicente Gómez or Francisco Franco, is infrequent.

I personally think the proceso will begin to provoke what Machado called: "This second innocence which results in not believing anything." Here it wouldn't be "in not believing" but instead in not knowing. And once integral stupidity is accomplished, to proceed then to fill minds with a single, predetermined idea. As has been the desideratum of Marxists in Power.

Chavismo is obtaining the first stage of the process. What remains will be sought.

In his speeches, the Vice President achieves a difficult goal, whose invention was attributed to Pemán, and which consists of saying nothing and saying it seriously. The presidential allocutions deserve to awaken thanks from all Venezuelans, for their ability to discredit two unpleasant things: oratory and revolution. And the birth of a new wave—which would discredit counterrevolution—is not within the foreseeable horizon.

Fashion has much more of an impact than one might suppose. The German defeat of 1945 replaced the fashion for fascism with communism. In Venezuela, the jailed students in 1928 found as their jailmate the doctor Carlos León, a very intelligent man and a communist who educated them.

Due to the Russian revolution, the communist empire seemed as though it was going to impose itself globally, and Don Miguel de Unamuno wrote that those countries traditionally under submission would accept the new empire; but that when it reached others, with independent histories, they would create autonomous communisms. This was the case with the Peruvian APRA.

Once the anti-Fidelista organizations disappeared due to their own superfluousness, Fidelismo itself disappeared, and anyone today with a minimum of education sees in the Cuban case a traditional Latin American dictatorship, with a little flag of leftism. What happens is that Fidel Castro is intellectually and personally worth much more than his enemies. In fact, each time I read the publications of anti-Fidelismo, I feel my own tremble. That's why I never read the Spanish-language press in the United States.




{ Francisco Vera Izquierdo, El Nacional, 30 May 2005 }