The Illustrated World
Just like your nonexistent window
Like a hand shadow on a ghost instrument
Just like the veins and the intense circuit of your blood
With the same equality with the precious continuity that
ideally assures me of your existence
At a distance
At the distance
Despite the distance
With your forehead and your face
And your entire presence without closing your eyes
And the landscape born of your presence when the city
wasn’t, couldn’t help being the useless reflex of your
catastrophe presence
To better wet the bird feathers
This rain falling from high above
And it locks me alone inside you
Inside and far from you
Like a road getting lost in another continent
{ César Moro | Peru, 1903-1956 }
2.23.2009
2.20.2009
Edward Upward (1903-2009)
[Photo: Upward in the 1930s]The English novelist Edward Upward died last Friday. The Guardian has an obituary written by his bibliographer Alan Walker. (My friend Michael Carr points out in an e-mail this morning that Upward even outlived his obituarist!) Other notes on Upward can be found at The Times, The Independent, the Isle of Wight County Press, the Morning Star, as well as the blogs Tom Roper’s Weblog and “An unrepentant communist...”, and these two letters to The Times from readers who knew him. (A note from Upward’s grandson in the latter blog mentions that he was buried today in the Isle of Wight next to his wife Hilda Percival.)
*
The New York Times obituary [7/21/09].
*
On Edward Upward
Guillermo Parra
The Can #1
March 2007
Katalanché Press
Cambridge, MA
Someone I often think of in relation to my own life in poetry is Edward Upward, who at 103 is the last remaining member of the so-called Auden group of the 1930s. I came across his work about six years ago, when I read his first book, the novel Journey to the Border, which was published in 1938 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Soon after the publication of his book, Upward gave up writing and spent the next two decades working as a high school English teacher outside London, removed from any type of literary scene.
Upward’s initial rejection of a career in literature probably added to his legend, which had already been established by his presence in Christopher Isherwood’s memoir Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties, also published by Hogarth Press in 1938. In Isherwood’s book, Upward is portrayed as a radical young poet, a prodigy who was awarded a Chancellor’s Medal for Verse in 1924 at Cambridge. Stephen Spender, in his autobiography World within World, describes the immense effect Upward had on their group in the late 1920s and early 1930s: “…[J]ust as Auden seemed to us the highest peak within the range of our humble vision from the Oxford valleys, for Auden there was another peak, namely Isherwood, whilst for Isherwood there was a still further peak, Chalmers [Upward].” Later on, Spender describes Upward as: “Very much the emissary of a Cause he seemed, with his miniature sensitive beauty of features, his keen-smiling yet dark glance, his way of holding the stem of his pipe with his finely formed fingers of a chiseller’s or wood-engraver’s hand.”
While his friends became literary celebrities, Upward disappeared from public view. He emerged again in the early 1960s, after his retirement from teaching, with the first volume of a trilogy of novels called The Spiral Ascent. The trilogy chronicles a communist poet’s struggle to balance political and aesthetic concerns, while working as a teacher. But it was in the 1990s that Upward published his best work, a series of short story collections marked by a minimalist prose with surrealist undercurrents. His matter-of-fact narratives sometimes venture into the realms of science fiction, usually through the banal occurrence of dreams. Upward hasn’t published poetry since he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, yet his work can be understood as an alternate way of writing poetry, within the confines of a short story.
Although I realize it is an exaggeration for me to think of him as a contemporary, I’m inspired by his prolific late period of the 1990s, when Enitharmon Press in London began to publish his new work. Since I first became immersed in poetry during the first half of that decade, I think of it as a specific age that defined me as a reader and writer. I like knowing that Upward was busy writing at that time. Spender wrote the introduction to a second edition of Journey to the Border published in 1994, shortly before his own death. He assessed Upward as being essentially a poet: “But he is also the poet of visions which, although they fit within the context of his politics, seem to transcend time and their occasion like pure poetry. […] This is prose poetry. And it is not too much to say that Journey to the Border contains some of the most beautiful prose poems of the century.”
I began reading Upward during my first year as a high school teacher, at the beginning of our current decade, when I was assailed by doubts about whether I had made the right choice. I would come home from work too exhausted to read or write, and the indifference my students felt toward the literature I was trying to teach them only reinforced my doubts. So, while reading Journey to the Border, I recognized the idealist young teacher who undergoes a breakdown and transformation during a day off from his job as a private tutor for a wealthy family in the countryside. I could relate to the protagonist when he bemoans his feeling of powerlessness against the forces of history and society. The teacher spends a day at a county fair, where he suffers various hallucinations and a final moment of sudden awareness. He undergoes a personal transformation and vows to join the fight against the rising tide of fascism. Of course, I read Upward from an utterly different age, so I have no political faith to adhere to or proclaim.
The teacher’s hallucinations at the county fair allegorize the imminent threat of war in Europe. By not succumbing to the power of those visions and by reinforcing his own political faith, he is able to avoid losing his mind. I find some of the incidents in this novel to be reminiscent of the dynamics of the psychedelic experience (again, a characteristic of the distinct era I feel I inhabited during the early 1990s):
“His sense of control was becoming in itself an excitement. He felt as though he was in solitary command of some huge unexplored power-house. Or as though he was very ingeniously, with consummate mastery, concealing the fact that he was drunk or mad. But was this control natural? Wasn’t it a new form of mysticism, or self-abnegation? Why shouldn’t he dare give free play, within sane limits, to a happiness which was based no longer on fantasies but on the actual possibilities of his real surroundings? He relaxed his control. The marquee looked the same as before. Only his feelings had changed, had expanded their power, risen at last to the actuality which was before his eyes.”
I tend to fetishize limited edition chapbooks and miscellaneous publications whose construction (paper, binding, font, cover illustration) matches the beauty of the writing presented. Two prized items in my library are the gorgeous pamphlets Enitharmon Press produced for two essays by Upward, Christopher Isherwood: Notes in Remembrance of a Friendship (1996) and Remembering the Early Auden (1998). My copies are punctuated by the author’s small signature in black ball-point ink in the colophon. As with his fiction, Upward’s autobiographical writing is unsentimental and defined by impeccably balanced sentences:
“In 1986 when Christopher died it seemed strange to me that I felt so little grief, whereas Auden’s death thirteen years before had grieved me deeply. Now, nine years after Christopher’s death I remember that for some while before it he had ceased to answer my letters to him. It was then that I grieved. I couldn’t believe he would have turned against me without letting me know why. I did realise it was possible that he might be seriously ill and didn’t like to admit this to me. […] Why did I mourn so much more for Auden? It was because he died before I had been able to become reconciled with him. I had criticised statements he had made in support of the American war in Vietnam, and I wanted to tell him how greatly I still admired him as a poet. After his death he used to appear to me in my dreams at night. Now he doesn’t, but Christopher quite often does.”
The key texts of Upward’s late phase are An Unmentionable Man (1994), The Scenic Railway (1997) and The Coming Day and Other Stories (2000). Enitharmon Press celebrated his hundredth birthday in 2003 with an edition of selected work entitled A Renegade in the Springtime, whose texts range from his Gothic and surreal Mortmere stories (co-written with Isherwood at Cambridge) to recent narratives of old age and Borgesian dreams. Revolutionary faith has remained the core of Upward’s aesthetics throughout his long career. The front cover of A Renegade in the Springtime is a black & white photograph by Humphrey Spender entitled “Jarrow Marchers Approaching Trafalgar Square” (1936). Upward can be seen with his mouth open to a chant as he walks by under banners held aloft by fellow marchers. He is looking directly at the camera, serious and determined.
Having grown skeptical of radical political stances, regardless of their ideological provenance, I occasionally feel at odds with Upward’s continued faith in revolutionary politics. And yet, I admire his eloquent explorations of small and anonymous moments in relatively ordinary lives. I appreciate the respect he shows for the ordinary in his writing, the portraits he creates of individuals trying to maintain their ideals against aging and the pressures of our disastrous, immoral moment in history.
Upward has managed to live long enough to be a contemporary to several generations. His prodigious first steps as a writer are there for us to find in the pages of his friends’ books. As, for instance, when Isherwood recalls an encounter with him during a trip to France, while they were both still in secondary school. Even then, Edward Upward’s style was distinct, vivid yet devoid of self-importance, an alluring presence in Lions and Shadows:
“It was strange to see him standing there, puffing at his pipe, placid and vague as usual, and seeming perfectly at home amidst these alien porters and advertisements. He had grown a small moustache and looked exactly my idea of a young Montmartre poet, more French than the French. Now he caught sight of us, and greeted me with a slight wave of the hand, so very typical of him, tentative, diffident, semi-ironical, like a parody of itself.”
Los alegres desahuciados
Los alegres desahuciados (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2004) was written between January 22 and February 26, 1947, when Andrés Mariño-Palacio (1927-1966) was still a teenager. It is an autobiographical account of his participation in Contrapunto, a group of writers who were active in the 1940s, meeting for salons at his family’s house as well as in the bars, plazas, streets and assorted nightspots of Caracas. The novel is self-consciously adolescent and arrogantly ambitious, invoking Baudelaire’s notion of decadence as a guiding spirit. The poets who populate its pages are aware of themselves as aristocrats of the spirit, in a manner the Visceral Realists of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives would have recognized.
The novel is now in print again thanks to its inclusion in the excellent series Biblioteca Básica de Autores Venezolanos [Basic Library of Venezuelan Authors] which Monte Ávila Editores has been publishing recently. All the titles in this collection are available at extremely low prices and include helpful introductions and chronologies that contextualize each volume. In the notes to this edition by Emilcen Rivero, we learn a few details of Mariño-Palacio’s short and brilliant career. He was born in 1927 in Maracaibo and moved to Caracas with his family in 1941. He published his first book, a collection of short stories entitled El límite del hastío [The Limits of Weariness], in 1946. Los alegres desahuciados [The Happy Hopeless] was published in 1948. That same year he finished his second novel, Batalla hacia la aurora [Battle Towards Dawn] which was eventually released ten years later. During the mid to late 1940s he published articles in various Caracas newspapers and magazines while being active with the Contrapunto group. However, by 1949 he fell ill and soon retreated from literature. He spent the rest of his life institutionalized in the Coromoto Clinic of Caracas, where he died of a heart attack in 1966. In 1967, a selection of his essays was published.
Thanks to Monte Ávila Editores, this great, weird novel will continue to be available, even if at times it seems its author is barely known in Venezuela. I translate below a few excerpts I particularly enjoyed:
“Sometimes he would stop amidst his unhinged, mundane position and say: I am this! Simply: this! Vivián: tall, elegant, fun, friendly, beautiful, white, with black hair, sharp and subtle in conversation. Inside, however, in the depths of my true being, how much conflict and anguish do I carry! For mundane eyes, the only thing that exists is the well-dressed and frivolous gentleman who in one night liquidates many bottles of champagne and whiskey, who is capable of conquering a luxurious automobile and arriving at Bahía Grande and drink deliriously large glasses of gin with coconut water, while birds squeal in the fresh hollow.” (10)
“We: who go through life with an enormous weight on our backs, our foreheads heavy and sleepy, our kidneys flayed and ground to pieces... And yet, we have enough courage –or cowardice– to laugh and cackle, to say we’re happy and love life, and we enjoy love and beauty... We do all this with a unique coldness, with a terrible reflexiveness. The terrible coffins await us, our neck is tired, nobly tired, and yet we laugh. We are the happy hopeless, the facile and fun lovers of death... We hope to die with irony on our lips and a paradox in our heart... Let the earth fall on our coffins... The echo of these blows will sound like the laughter of hyenas in the vast desert... And we shall also laugh, with a horrible grimace, like horrible and happy hopeless ones, banal people married to death...” (87-88)
“Lombardo lifted his left arm and looked at the time on his watch. He realized he didn’t care at all about the time, nor about the time that had passed since they arrived at this luxurious establishment, but he had to make a gesture, a simple gesture, mechanical and complicated, to conceal his unease a bit, the vague trembling that attacked him when he felt so solitary, so wrapped up in himself within such a chaotic and turbulent universe.” (112)
The author himself makes an appearance twice in the pages of his own book. Once, in a brothel, the poets notice him and talk about his legend as a Caracas Rimbaud:
“I assure you Lombardo’s other moon is that teenager with an old man’s gestures who’s sitting at the table in front of us. Don’t you know him? How’s that possible? It’s no less than the brilliant Andrés Mariño: he has transformed his adolescence into myth and his myth in adolescence... But he’s miserable, a blue cancerberus... He hates me, he detests me, Lombardo, because for me to live is to be delirious... While he, hieratic, wise, insulting, reads Aldous Huxley and feels too mature among adolescents and too adolescent among adults... The tragedy of Andrés Mariño is too simple... I want to synthesize it... (Please, Vivián, don’t look at me with such tempting eyes.) His tragedy consists of simply trying to act like Dorian Gray and write like Raskolnikov...” (62)
The book’s last chapter is an author’s confession, imploring the readers to take pity on his characters. Mariño-Palacio self-consciously acknowledges the artificial nature of his book, poised between a visionary adolescence and an ambitious faith in writing as a transformative act:
“I can’t let these lives escape from my hands. These lives that were so tied to me for hours and hours of intense delirium and hallucinated anguish. Because for my current vision, during this bitter and difficult instant of my life, art is nothing more than a naked passion and a morbid desire to conquer the serenity that never comes.” (119)
“Throughout the night one hears the fascinating noises of those beings who dream their banal dreams. I don’t dream. I’m on a vigil, which is the most beautiful of all dreams.
This is my testimony, my torn and intimate testimony of adolescence.
I affirm myself upon it, I believe in it, I know it will engender something.” (121)
In these final words, Mariño-Palacio is aware of his text moving beyond that February of 1947 into futurity, a visionary impulse sealing the pages of his book. In the prologue to this edition, Emilcen Rivero suggests the author was prescient in his self-awareness, as Venezuela’s most important living poet today, Rafael Cadenas, was among those who were drawn to Mariño-Palacio during his brief literary career:
“In his time everyone wanted to know him, even the poet Rafael Cadenas, at age 17 came from Barquisimeto and, along with Héctor Mujica, went to visit him at his house and saw books in the already full library, on the floor, on the tables, in the corners, everywhere, and got to know the intelligence that kept everything in order and a conversation as though the library itself were speaking with such grace, sensibility and detachment.” (X)
2.18.2009
En ruta / Enrique Molina
En Route
How many days and how much shadow!
How many nights contaminated
By the memory of other nights
By the tattoo of other beaches!
There are wandering insomnia blocks
Huge serpents of laziness
Families invaded by weeds
Pale people who recede
How many black-winged trains
In the dementia of other skies!
How many fugitive plains
Like sand amidst your fingers!
There is sunrise with a bird
There is a burial with a priest
The letter no one reads
The hospice that escapes
Archaic mothers like a totem
Tending to a table of oblivion
Bread soaked by the waves
Unknown companions
And so many heads on fire
Captives of ancient history
Dazzling like the ocean
At the bottom of memory!
There is the wind with a feather
The lair without a caress
The summer’s golden sound
The breeze’s fresh wound
There is the hand made of stone and shade
That seeks the biggest roots
There is the man of dream and bone
With the moon of other countries
There is the one who turns his head
(Prisoner of the dead)
And the one who sees a woman from afar
When he glimpses the open door
And poor couples that love each other
On the astral weeds
Entwined beneath the shade
Under the shade of their arms
There are disappointed sand dunes
With black, sunken cities
Living basements that close up
Like enormous carnivorous flowers
And strange anxious meals
Of the Earth’s ardent hunger
Beautiful meals exalted
By the silence of stones
The savage farewell scream
Of the coast in the distance
A tortured lightning bolt
The splendor of ancient days
The mysterious burn
Of such light and such breath
With creatures who become absent
Masked by time
But I keep biting the leaves
Drinking wine and rain
Adoring that sun born
Of a woman disrobing
The sea returns a hero
Covered in flames and arrows
A blade burns and the chains
Of weeds fall apart
Lips like a river crossing
A body’s pure valleys
The raving of your hair
The nebulousness of your sex
(I belong to the tempest
I reclaim my species’ honor
The idolatry of my veins
My neglect amidst the current)
{ Enrique Molina | Argentina, 1910-1997 }
How many days and how much shadow!
How many nights contaminated
By the memory of other nights
By the tattoo of other beaches!
There are wandering insomnia blocks
Huge serpents of laziness
Families invaded by weeds
Pale people who recede
How many black-winged trains
In the dementia of other skies!
How many fugitive plains
Like sand amidst your fingers!
There is sunrise with a bird
There is a burial with a priest
The letter no one reads
The hospice that escapes
Archaic mothers like a totem
Tending to a table of oblivion
Bread soaked by the waves
Unknown companions
And so many heads on fire
Captives of ancient history
Dazzling like the ocean
At the bottom of memory!
There is the wind with a feather
The lair without a caress
The summer’s golden sound
The breeze’s fresh wound
There is the hand made of stone and shade
That seeks the biggest roots
There is the man of dream and bone
With the moon of other countries
There is the one who turns his head
(Prisoner of the dead)
And the one who sees a woman from afar
When he glimpses the open door
And poor couples that love each other
On the astral weeds
Entwined beneath the shade
Under the shade of their arms
There are disappointed sand dunes
With black, sunken cities
Living basements that close up
Like enormous carnivorous flowers
And strange anxious meals
Of the Earth’s ardent hunger
Beautiful meals exalted
By the silence of stones
The savage farewell scream
Of the coast in the distance
A tortured lightning bolt
The splendor of ancient days
The mysterious burn
Of such light and such breath
With creatures who become absent
Masked by time
But I keep biting the leaves
Drinking wine and rain
Adoring that sun born
Of a woman disrobing
The sea returns a hero
Covered in flames and arrows
A blade burns and the chains
Of weeds fall apart
Lips like a river crossing
A body’s pure valleys
The raving of your hair
The nebulousness of your sex
(I belong to the tempest
I reclaim my species’ honor
The idolatry of my veins
My neglect amidst the current)
{ Enrique Molina | Argentina, 1910-1997 }
2.16.2009
El agua en la noche / César Moro
Water in the Night
II
Infallible butterfly
Nocturnal light
A favorable exit for my insomnia
Honey of the day’s sour urn
Voluble and extinct oven
Dead under the sun
Shadow’s blemish
On the wall
Night’s crevice
With no star
You come to my home
Familiar ghost of silence
To open the new cycle
In the hard solitary kingdom
VII
I travel through marvelous storms
Proud of sinking into desperation
Since you smile while you crush my heart
I see the flame of your eyes
They shine elsewhere
The prodigious earth of stars
You laugh from your same laugh
From your strength surrounded by caresses
Overflowing with serious love
IX
To be or not to be
The glacial bitterness embellished in gold
The peal of a teardrop in full sunlight
Atrocious pain in lucidity
The fixed idea the fixed object
Shadow ivy mirror echo
To be man’s nocturnal aspect at the edge of old age
Maturity iridescent rotten
Morganatic
What doesn’t provide full rights
To health quaffed in a single drink in the cloudy materialist glass
To not be abandonment
Nor the metaphysical waiting thought’s colossal winter
To not be the one who arrives
To be stone blindness deafness
The cold of the abandoned place
Doors open to night
Footsteps disappear
Rain falls
One by one the stars close their immortal eyes
To the world’s night
X
Having to write to you until the end of my life
To illustrate the dead weight of days
I will live without you
Inebriated by the secret vibration
Irradiating in nature the sickly East of a black pearl
I depart ceaselessly at each pulse of blood to become a part of you
Memory’s fire grinding a life
The caress of slowness over the impending separation
I love you
Atrocious insomnia night made of lead
Of what dream heavier than distance
Should I demand an unfolding?
Illumination in the flight of your eyelids
Living fountain where I am amazed by the blessing
Flapping the pure air
Your obelisk shadow
And You at the end of the glass road
I would follow you in the storm
Until reaching breath
Translator’s note: Originally written in French. Translated from the Spanish version by Ricardo Silva Santisteban, published in Antología de la poesía hispanoamericana actual, ed. Julio Ortega, México DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2002.
{ César Moro | Peru, 1903-1956 }
II
Infallible butterfly
Nocturnal light
A favorable exit for my insomnia
Honey of the day’s sour urn
Voluble and extinct oven
Dead under the sun
Shadow’s blemish
On the wall
Night’s crevice
With no star
You come to my home
Familiar ghost of silence
To open the new cycle
In the hard solitary kingdom
VII
I travel through marvelous storms
Proud of sinking into desperation
Since you smile while you crush my heart
I see the flame of your eyes
They shine elsewhere
The prodigious earth of stars
You laugh from your same laugh
From your strength surrounded by caresses
Overflowing with serious love
IX
To be or not to be
The glacial bitterness embellished in gold
The peal of a teardrop in full sunlight
Atrocious pain in lucidity
The fixed idea the fixed object
Shadow ivy mirror echo
To be man’s nocturnal aspect at the edge of old age
Maturity iridescent rotten
Morganatic
What doesn’t provide full rights
To health quaffed in a single drink in the cloudy materialist glass
To not be abandonment
Nor the metaphysical waiting thought’s colossal winter
To not be the one who arrives
To be stone blindness deafness
The cold of the abandoned place
Doors open to night
Footsteps disappear
Rain falls
One by one the stars close their immortal eyes
To the world’s night
X
Having to write to you until the end of my life
To illustrate the dead weight of days
I will live without you
Inebriated by the secret vibration
Irradiating in nature the sickly East of a black pearl
I depart ceaselessly at each pulse of blood to become a part of you
Memory’s fire grinding a life
The caress of slowness over the impending separation
I love you
Atrocious insomnia night made of lead
Of what dream heavier than distance
Should I demand an unfolding?
Illumination in the flight of your eyelids
Living fountain where I am amazed by the blessing
Flapping the pure air
Your obelisk shadow
And You at the end of the glass road
I would follow you in the storm
Until reaching breath
Translator’s note: Originally written in French. Translated from the Spanish version by Ricardo Silva Santisteban, published in Antología de la poesía hispanoamericana actual, ed. Julio Ortega, México DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2002.
{ César Moro | Peru, 1903-1956 }
2.14.2009
La mañana alza el río... / Emilo Adolfo Westphalen
Morning lifts the river...
Morning lifts the river hair
Afterward fog night
The sky the eyes
The eyes the sky watch me
To awaken without vertebrae without structure
The skin is in its eternity
It softens until it loses itself in memory
It existed it didn’t exist
On the path of the eyes on the path of the sky
How sweetly the summer cries in your mouth
It rains ecstasy beatitude
The sea brings its love closer
Fear the rose the foot the skin
The sea pulls back its love
The sea
So many boats
The waves say love
The fog again another boat
The oars love doesn’t move
It knows how to close its eyes sleep the air not the eyes
The wave reaches the eyes
They sleep beside the river hair
Without the threat of shipwreck in the eyes
Calm lateness the sky
O the eyes
Fire fire fire fire fire
In the sky sky fire sky
How silence rolls
But over the sky fire love silence
What torment bathes the forehead silence
Behind absence you watched fireless
It is absence night
But the eyes fire
Caress summer the eyes the mouth
Fire is born in the eyes
Love is born in the eyes the sky fire
Fire love silence
{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen | Peru, 1911-2001 }
Morning lifts the river hair
Afterward fog night
The sky the eyes
The eyes the sky watch me
To awaken without vertebrae without structure
The skin is in its eternity
It softens until it loses itself in memory
It existed it didn’t exist
On the path of the eyes on the path of the sky
How sweetly the summer cries in your mouth
It rains ecstasy beatitude
The sea brings its love closer
Fear the rose the foot the skin
The sea pulls back its love
The sea
So many boats
The waves say love
The fog again another boat
The oars love doesn’t move
It knows how to close its eyes sleep the air not the eyes
The wave reaches the eyes
They sleep beside the river hair
Without the threat of shipwreck in the eyes
Calm lateness the sky
O the eyes
Fire fire fire fire fire
In the sky sky fire sky
How silence rolls
But over the sky fire love silence
What torment bathes the forehead silence
Behind absence you watched fireless
It is absence night
But the eyes fire
Caress summer the eyes the mouth
Fire is born in the eyes
Love is born in the eyes the sky fire
Fire love silence
{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen | Peru, 1911-2001 }
2.13.2009
Bomba de gasolina / Alberto Márquez
Gas Station
At the gas station
as I fill the tank
a girl passes by and looks at me
and also comes in to fill her tank
on this desolate road
The towns only seem to have
these passing moments
these stops to stretch your legs
Back at the wheel
you can’t remember
anything from the road
except the gas station
{ Alberto Márquez, Circulación de la sangre, Caracas: Editorial Angria, 1989 }
At the gas station
as I fill the tank
a girl passes by and looks at me
and also comes in to fill her tank
on this desolate road
The towns only seem to have
these passing moments
these stops to stretch your legs
Back at the wheel
you can’t remember
anything from the road
except the gas station
{ Alberto Márquez, Circulación de la sangre, Caracas: Editorial Angria, 1989 }
2.11.2009
“El poeta milita en una resistencia simbólica” / Michelle Roche Rodríguez
“The Poet Is an Activist in A Symbolic Resistance”
With every word Armando Rojas Guardia declaims in his measured voice, his small eyes light up behind his glasses. He reads “Fuera de tiesto,” the poem that gives the title to the collection Bid & Co. Editor has juts published, which contains 30 years of his work, from Del mismo amor ardiendo (1979) until Patria y otros poemas (2008).
He is sitting amidst books, in the small living room of his house, the place where his artistic experience overflows. This is where one understands why this poet says that the image that pursues him is that of “solitary writing at a work table illuminated by the lamp in the middle of the urban night.” He seems like a monk dedicated to theological contemplation, because in his litany, as in the believer’s, the word is embellished and his verse “is partial toward victims,” as he says about the Christian God he adores. This familiarity with displacement marks his poetry.
Without a flowerpot. Harry Almela selected the poems for Fuera de tiesto [Beyond the Flowerpot] based on four themes that mark Rojas Guardia’s trajectory: dailiness as the plot of the urban poem, the aesthetic dimension of the religious experience, the erotic as the sacred space of an encounter with the other and meditation on the poetic act.
The arguments relapse over the poet’s marks: understanding the other by means of the relationship with God and knowing that one is a part of otherness, which is like saying the periphery. That explains why the title of his collection claims to be external to the “tiesto,” a word that, as a noun, indicates flowerpot and as an adjective, to be stubborn. Both ideas are found in his poetry: the sensation of being removed from the world and the tenacity of interpreting it from the peripheral space to which he’s been relegated.
“I’m the prototype of four marginalities,” explains Rojas Guardia. “The first is being a poet in a country that doesn’t favor profound states of consciousness. The second, being a homosexual in a machista culture. The third, being a Christian in a country where the intellectual elite are not only secular but secularist. The fourth, having been a psychiatric patient for years; because the modern West expels them to the margins of society, considering them as unproductive.”
But it is precisely that removed space that allows the poet to articulate his own voice so as to challenge the avatars of a hieratical society, and speak to its victims: homosexuals, believers, those who pray or who know how to value a verse. Because the role of the poet, according to Rojas Guardia, is resistance – “a noble word, that one,” he says – because it has to do with endurance and creativity.
“The poet is an activist in a symbolic resistance that allows him to interpret what happens in a different way. Marginality creates a distance he can take advantage of precisely in order to interpret what’s happening in a different way,” the writer points out.
That distance has allowed him, at the same time, to approach the collective consciousness of Venezuela, a country divided in political sectors that seem irreconcilable. That’s why the poem that closes the anthology is called “Patria,” [Homeland], a scream of common sense rising from the periphery.
{ Michelle Roche Rodríguez, El Nacional, 27 January 2009 }
With every word Armando Rojas Guardia declaims in his measured voice, his small eyes light up behind his glasses. He reads “Fuera de tiesto,” the poem that gives the title to the collection Bid & Co. Editor has juts published, which contains 30 years of his work, from Del mismo amor ardiendo (1979) until Patria y otros poemas (2008).
He is sitting amidst books, in the small living room of his house, the place where his artistic experience overflows. This is where one understands why this poet says that the image that pursues him is that of “solitary writing at a work table illuminated by the lamp in the middle of the urban night.” He seems like a monk dedicated to theological contemplation, because in his litany, as in the believer’s, the word is embellished and his verse “is partial toward victims,” as he says about the Christian God he adores. This familiarity with displacement marks his poetry.
Without a flowerpot. Harry Almela selected the poems for Fuera de tiesto [Beyond the Flowerpot] based on four themes that mark Rojas Guardia’s trajectory: dailiness as the plot of the urban poem, the aesthetic dimension of the religious experience, the erotic as the sacred space of an encounter with the other and meditation on the poetic act.
The arguments relapse over the poet’s marks: understanding the other by means of the relationship with God and knowing that one is a part of otherness, which is like saying the periphery. That explains why the title of his collection claims to be external to the “tiesto,” a word that, as a noun, indicates flowerpot and as an adjective, to be stubborn. Both ideas are found in his poetry: the sensation of being removed from the world and the tenacity of interpreting it from the peripheral space to which he’s been relegated.
“I’m the prototype of four marginalities,” explains Rojas Guardia. “The first is being a poet in a country that doesn’t favor profound states of consciousness. The second, being a homosexual in a machista culture. The third, being a Christian in a country where the intellectual elite are not only secular but secularist. The fourth, having been a psychiatric patient for years; because the modern West expels them to the margins of society, considering them as unproductive.”
But it is precisely that removed space that allows the poet to articulate his own voice so as to challenge the avatars of a hieratical society, and speak to its victims: homosexuals, believers, those who pray or who know how to value a verse. Because the role of the poet, according to Rojas Guardia, is resistance – “a noble word, that one,” he says – because it has to do with endurance and creativity.
“The poet is an activist in a symbolic resistance that allows him to interpret what happens in a different way. Marginality creates a distance he can take advantage of precisely in order to interpret what’s happening in a different way,” the writer points out.
That distance has allowed him, at the same time, to approach the collective consciousness of Venezuela, a country divided in political sectors that seem irreconcilable. That’s why the poem that closes the anthology is called “Patria,” [Homeland], a scream of common sense rising from the periphery.
{ Michelle Roche Rodríguez, El Nacional, 27 January 2009 }
2.10.2009
2.7.09
The poem asks for
no interruption
to finance its war
Upon broken
tree limbs
sawed trunks
at angles from
the night (road)
A bass line
marks the deluge
Frequency rips
up the forms
You make small orbits
of your days
Built around
paralysis, admonitions
A public space
for the most intimate
detours, enamored
of epigraphs, you know
full well its conceit
no interruption
to finance its war
Upon broken
tree limbs
sawed trunks
at angles from
the night (road)
A bass line
marks the deluge
Frequency rips
up the forms
You make small orbits
of your days
Built around
paralysis, admonitions
A public space
for the most intimate
detours, enamored
of epigraphs, you know
full well its conceit
2.08.2009
Elizabeth Schön: El amor permite que el poeta encuentre el lugar que le falta / María Antonieta Flores
Elizabeth Schön: Love Allows the Poet to Find the Place She Is Lacking
The poetry of Elizabeth Schön (1921) is linked to the essentialist tendency of language and there are those who have found in her work a philosophical vision, but her poetic proposal is not limited to these aspects. The nonexistence of contraries has been a principle that marks her lyric conception, along with circularity as a cosmic and verbal movement. I met Elizabeth in the nineties and we maintained a fertile dialogue marked by friendship and poetry. We spoke at her house, a typical Caracas house of which few remain, with an inner courtyard marked by orchids. In this dialogue she offers her particular vision of an experience and coexistence with Poetry for more than fifty years.
– Elizabeth, how do you think the poet can contribute to freedom?
– The poet can contribute by loving, because in order to handle the real, the real that life provides, you have to love it and then work on that. You can’t separate love from your process of expression, from your language. Of course, you have to deal with the positive and negative parts of reality itself that man gives us.
– And how has this negative part of reality manifested itself to you, an aspect where violence and power express themselves in such a destructive manner?
– Since I was a young girl, since the day when I saw a boy completely tied to a telephone post and his hands were bleeding, a twelve or fourteen year old boy. I don’t know who he was, if he had stolen something, if he had done something. At that moment I felt an approach towards that. It was my first contact with the negative part of life. The complexity of life is found in that both good and evil are constantly walking together, they don’t walk separately. If someone fights for a freedom, he must see what exactly is blocking that freedom. So, both freedom and oppression go together, even if in reality you can say this side is one part that side another. I find it very beautiful how existential facts unfold in life, beautiful in the sense that freedoms have triumphed. Freedom is born when you emerge from the womb.
– And that freedom, how is it concretized in the poetic word?
– By loving. Because freedom can never be for you alone, freedom has to be for everyone. And the poet when he only speaks for himself is like someone who drinks an orange juice and completely forgets the plant from where that orange, that fruit was born. Freedom itself gives you the fact of loving more. If you’re restricted, subjugated, you can’t love freely.
– How does that relationship between love and the poem come to be?
– A word doesn’t fit in the poem, love finds it. Love is a generative force. The poem is a generative force combined with sensibility, emotiveness, memory, presences. All those intimate factors belonging to the poet join to provide equilibrium. The poet situates the word where it has to be by means of love’s consistency. Love allows the poet to find the missing place. When the poet is lacking love, the poem emerges without flesh as though it were lacking breath.
– In a certain manner, you’re proposing an aesthetics that revolves around love, around eros as a vital force, an aesthetics of agape. It’s obvious that your poetic writing has been an exercise of love, but it’s also been an exercise of rigor. How do those two forces coexist?
– By means of love itself. Love itself teaches you how to maintain an equilibrium. When the equilibrium breaks, everything is left like a fallen tree. What’s beautiful is for that tree to grow and look towards the sky. In that sense I think love is indispensable, because you find a rigor by means of love. Rigor doesn’t exist alone out there. Rigor is the product of a knowledge, of a knowledge that implicitly includes freedom, reason and intuition. A poet’s rigor is found through man and through the word, through the act of making sure that what he says of reality holds up a mirror where men might look at themselves, or find themselves or not find themselves.
– How do you conceive the poem as a mirror?
– It’s what illuminates. It’s a mirror where men can look at themselves. The mirror illuminates your face, poetry illuminates man so that he might find himself or not find himself, because when you reject a book for X reason, you haven’t found yourself in that book. You set it aside, it didn’t convince you. Why? Because your rigor and your demand have been elaborated in a sense that’s very much your own and crucial for agreeing or disagreeing. That agreement doesn’t preclude that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow you might accept it a bit more. I don’t believe in rigidity. Sometimes the poet makes himself a bit rigid and maybe it’s out of fear.
– After hearing that, it’s inevitable that I ask you which have been the mirrors that have illuminated you in poetry: those books, those poems, those voices that have illuminated your face and have illuminated your word.
– When I grab a book of poems, I open it. I read a phrase or, perhaps I’m being too rigorous there, two or three or four or five or six, but if I can suddenly manage to see its root I stay with it. At that point, I’m illuminated. It fills me with light because I’m seeing a root that extends toward nature, toward everyday life, toward the smallest, the most minor object. There it is and it illuminates everything, because the word illuminates. The word, for me, is a clarity, but it’s not a solar clarity because the sun’s clarity comes and goes, while poetry’s clarity is always there. And it’s beautiful when you grab, for example, Ida Gramcko who says to you “el mismo yo mas caracol” [the same I plus snail], the I, the same I, everything. It’s not a dividing light, it’s a unifying light, by means of the root. I don’t conceive of any poet unless he’s not raised up by a root, whether it’s love toward the smallest thing, whether it’s love of sex, whether it’s love of erosion, because in order to write about erosion you have to love it in some way. Otherwise you can’t feel it, you can’t feel it as something outside of you but part of life instead. So, yourself, in order to give it you must love it even if it hurts because of how you’re going to give it. Otherwise, something completely dry comes out of you.
– What role does fear play in all of this?
– Fear is a dread of not touching… and of not allowing oneself to be illuminated by what’s there.
– Has fear been present in what you’ve been writing lately?
– Fear is there because first of all there’s the sensation of not being able. At that point it stops you, because you think you won’t be able to. This is a battle. But, fear is much stringer and you don’t eliminate it. Let’s suppose, which is much simpler. This room. I close the doors and leave it in darkness… What you immediately think is: “Oh, a ghost is gonna emerge.” And you get scared, because you don’t know what the ghost is like nor do you know what darkness is. Darkness is the root of the luminous, but it’s darkness because of fear. It becomes dark because of fear, because fear stops you from seeing the clarity the poem brings. For example, Huidobro has moments, he has words, he has images that propose darkness, propose wasting away, propose sinking. But you find that along with all that there is a proposition of clarity.
Silence Is the Most Fruitful Thing In the World
– You’ve commented to me about a sensation of having your memory taken over, erased, that you feel this because of the moment we’re living through today, a moment where sometimes we’re asked to take on extreme positions. What would your role be during moments such as this one?
– For me, the extremes have never been fruitful. The extreme is cutting down another tree and you have no right to cut down. But sometimes an extreme is necessary. When a totalitarian and extreme government exists, it falls of its own accord. They’ve never been able to sustain themselves. The poet must always seek out the roots. I never forget that the person who taught me this the most was Lao Tse when he said that the state was unnamable, because then you feel as though you have complete freedom to create. The root is unnamable. Once it constitutes itself into a form it immediately implies the One, you’re the person who’s going to form that One. I don’t know if I’m explaining myself. When Thales of Miletus tells you that water is the world’s essence, he gives you something that is One.
– But, don’t you also receive it?
– You receive it but that reception is blocking you from reaching the unnamable. That One forms your own conception. The root of your perception is not yours but another’s. I point to Lao Tse as something that frees me so that I can feel casually that the unnamable can be anything. When one finds something fundamental, which is your root, which is what shines on you and you lose it, one can go mad because, unfortunately, we don’t know how to be content with nothingness. Because nothingness is like a silence, although I think silence is the most fruitful thing in the world.
– What has your experience been with silence in writing?
– A process. Silence is like a seed. It internally prepares you for being able to receive everything that comes to you, because things come to us, they arrive. In that arrival, it gives. It’s not a silencing in the correct sense of language. From silence surge a love of the world, [Armando] Reverón’s women, Reverón’s beaches.
– Facing the world’s events, the poet contemplates. Could silence be a stage, a right, or is it a sin?
– I don’t think it’s a sin, absolutely not, nor is it a stage. It exists and you hear it once in a while. It’s like the soul, the soul can be heard because it moves within you. Whoever doesn’t hear it, misses it because he has tied himself to something else, almost always the negative. You close the door to this room and there’s a total silence and that silence has always been there, but what happens is that the furniture, the dog, the word, conversation, they are like the wave.
– But our society today doesn’t seem to understand or accept silence.
– Of course, that’s natural. From that silence is born noise and in order for it to happen it needs the source that is silence. For example, you throw a rock and at that moment the distance it covers was made by a silence that existed before you threw it. Silence and solitude are incubating sources.
– What has your been experience with solitude?
– Ever since I was a girl I distinguished that the sky was blue and since I was born into a very religious family, I thought the blue was because of the virgin, because that was the virgin’s blue skirt. So I felt taken care of. I saw it from a distance but I wasn’t lost because there was the blue mantle of silence as though I could touch it with a finger.
– And that religiosity, how does it become a poem?
– By loving. Because love is what provokes the transformation of the fact into words. Love participates in imagination, it participates when you intuit, when you pronounce… It’s love that provokes, as though it gathered all those things and elements and joined them into one. That’s why you can pronounce, you can say: “el mismo yo, mas caracol.” That doesn’t come out so easily. Of course, you don’t perceive that. But it’s there because love exists within you; there is silence within you; there is solitude within you. And solitude is not abandonment, it is a wealth.
– All those coordinates that form the map of your writing, they also include abandonment.
– Of course… but I’ve gone on living. There is abandonment because I lost the most essential thing, which was my mother. Sometimes, in my case, that’s never filled by anyone. I feel that death can fill that for me.
– You’re speaking to us about a cycle that closes, this has to do with the circular and encompassing movement that can be seen in your writing, a movement that leaves nothing outside.
– All that inner movement surges up within me and I give it. What’s important is that the other discover that light I’m talking about and which I carry as though it were part of my intuition, but when I read it I’m capable of seeing the roundness and all those things, but I say to myself: “Is that me?” Then I feel afraid.
– Does poetry lead us to constantly live with fear?
– Yes, constantly. Because you get scared. For example, when I wrote La espada [The Sword], I never in my life had thought of writing something about the sword. Never. Because for me a sword was a terrible sign, but it turns out that in the book it transforms into a sign of equilibrium. The sword is the way of intelligently cutting away what is not positive for everyone else.
– Does poetry have a meaning beyond aesthetics for you?
¬– Poetry can’t be a decoration, a beautiful thing. Poetry must have a frightening human content. Its problem is man.
– What has poetry given you, after giving it so many years of your life, so much passion?
– To have discovered certain aspects of life and knowing that certain books of mine reach the public and knowing they’re useful.
The full version of this conversation was published in Versos comunicantes II (poetas entrevistan a poetas iberoamericanos), México: Alforja, 2005.
{María Antonieta Flores, El Cautivo, No. 40, November 2008}
The poetry of Elizabeth Schön (1921) is linked to the essentialist tendency of language and there are those who have found in her work a philosophical vision, but her poetic proposal is not limited to these aspects. The nonexistence of contraries has been a principle that marks her lyric conception, along with circularity as a cosmic and verbal movement. I met Elizabeth in the nineties and we maintained a fertile dialogue marked by friendship and poetry. We spoke at her house, a typical Caracas house of which few remain, with an inner courtyard marked by orchids. In this dialogue she offers her particular vision of an experience and coexistence with Poetry for more than fifty years.
– Elizabeth, how do you think the poet can contribute to freedom?
– The poet can contribute by loving, because in order to handle the real, the real that life provides, you have to love it and then work on that. You can’t separate love from your process of expression, from your language. Of course, you have to deal with the positive and negative parts of reality itself that man gives us.
– And how has this negative part of reality manifested itself to you, an aspect where violence and power express themselves in such a destructive manner?
– Since I was a young girl, since the day when I saw a boy completely tied to a telephone post and his hands were bleeding, a twelve or fourteen year old boy. I don’t know who he was, if he had stolen something, if he had done something. At that moment I felt an approach towards that. It was my first contact with the negative part of life. The complexity of life is found in that both good and evil are constantly walking together, they don’t walk separately. If someone fights for a freedom, he must see what exactly is blocking that freedom. So, both freedom and oppression go together, even if in reality you can say this side is one part that side another. I find it very beautiful how existential facts unfold in life, beautiful in the sense that freedoms have triumphed. Freedom is born when you emerge from the womb.
– And that freedom, how is it concretized in the poetic word?
– By loving. Because freedom can never be for you alone, freedom has to be for everyone. And the poet when he only speaks for himself is like someone who drinks an orange juice and completely forgets the plant from where that orange, that fruit was born. Freedom itself gives you the fact of loving more. If you’re restricted, subjugated, you can’t love freely.
– How does that relationship between love and the poem come to be?
– A word doesn’t fit in the poem, love finds it. Love is a generative force. The poem is a generative force combined with sensibility, emotiveness, memory, presences. All those intimate factors belonging to the poet join to provide equilibrium. The poet situates the word where it has to be by means of love’s consistency. Love allows the poet to find the missing place. When the poet is lacking love, the poem emerges without flesh as though it were lacking breath.
– In a certain manner, you’re proposing an aesthetics that revolves around love, around eros as a vital force, an aesthetics of agape. It’s obvious that your poetic writing has been an exercise of love, but it’s also been an exercise of rigor. How do those two forces coexist?
– By means of love itself. Love itself teaches you how to maintain an equilibrium. When the equilibrium breaks, everything is left like a fallen tree. What’s beautiful is for that tree to grow and look towards the sky. In that sense I think love is indispensable, because you find a rigor by means of love. Rigor doesn’t exist alone out there. Rigor is the product of a knowledge, of a knowledge that implicitly includes freedom, reason and intuition. A poet’s rigor is found through man and through the word, through the act of making sure that what he says of reality holds up a mirror where men might look at themselves, or find themselves or not find themselves.
– How do you conceive the poem as a mirror?
– It’s what illuminates. It’s a mirror where men can look at themselves. The mirror illuminates your face, poetry illuminates man so that he might find himself or not find himself, because when you reject a book for X reason, you haven’t found yourself in that book. You set it aside, it didn’t convince you. Why? Because your rigor and your demand have been elaborated in a sense that’s very much your own and crucial for agreeing or disagreeing. That agreement doesn’t preclude that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow you might accept it a bit more. I don’t believe in rigidity. Sometimes the poet makes himself a bit rigid and maybe it’s out of fear.
– After hearing that, it’s inevitable that I ask you which have been the mirrors that have illuminated you in poetry: those books, those poems, those voices that have illuminated your face and have illuminated your word.
– When I grab a book of poems, I open it. I read a phrase or, perhaps I’m being too rigorous there, two or three or four or five or six, but if I can suddenly manage to see its root I stay with it. At that point, I’m illuminated. It fills me with light because I’m seeing a root that extends toward nature, toward everyday life, toward the smallest, the most minor object. There it is and it illuminates everything, because the word illuminates. The word, for me, is a clarity, but it’s not a solar clarity because the sun’s clarity comes and goes, while poetry’s clarity is always there. And it’s beautiful when you grab, for example, Ida Gramcko who says to you “el mismo yo mas caracol” [the same I plus snail], the I, the same I, everything. It’s not a dividing light, it’s a unifying light, by means of the root. I don’t conceive of any poet unless he’s not raised up by a root, whether it’s love toward the smallest thing, whether it’s love of sex, whether it’s love of erosion, because in order to write about erosion you have to love it in some way. Otherwise you can’t feel it, you can’t feel it as something outside of you but part of life instead. So, yourself, in order to give it you must love it even if it hurts because of how you’re going to give it. Otherwise, something completely dry comes out of you.
– What role does fear play in all of this?
– Fear is a dread of not touching… and of not allowing oneself to be illuminated by what’s there.
– Has fear been present in what you’ve been writing lately?
– Fear is there because first of all there’s the sensation of not being able. At that point it stops you, because you think you won’t be able to. This is a battle. But, fear is much stringer and you don’t eliminate it. Let’s suppose, which is much simpler. This room. I close the doors and leave it in darkness… What you immediately think is: “Oh, a ghost is gonna emerge.” And you get scared, because you don’t know what the ghost is like nor do you know what darkness is. Darkness is the root of the luminous, but it’s darkness because of fear. It becomes dark because of fear, because fear stops you from seeing the clarity the poem brings. For example, Huidobro has moments, he has words, he has images that propose darkness, propose wasting away, propose sinking. But you find that along with all that there is a proposition of clarity.
Silence Is the Most Fruitful Thing In the World
– You’ve commented to me about a sensation of having your memory taken over, erased, that you feel this because of the moment we’re living through today, a moment where sometimes we’re asked to take on extreme positions. What would your role be during moments such as this one?
– For me, the extremes have never been fruitful. The extreme is cutting down another tree and you have no right to cut down. But sometimes an extreme is necessary. When a totalitarian and extreme government exists, it falls of its own accord. They’ve never been able to sustain themselves. The poet must always seek out the roots. I never forget that the person who taught me this the most was Lao Tse when he said that the state was unnamable, because then you feel as though you have complete freedom to create. The root is unnamable. Once it constitutes itself into a form it immediately implies the One, you’re the person who’s going to form that One. I don’t know if I’m explaining myself. When Thales of Miletus tells you that water is the world’s essence, he gives you something that is One.
– But, don’t you also receive it?
– You receive it but that reception is blocking you from reaching the unnamable. That One forms your own conception. The root of your perception is not yours but another’s. I point to Lao Tse as something that frees me so that I can feel casually that the unnamable can be anything. When one finds something fundamental, which is your root, which is what shines on you and you lose it, one can go mad because, unfortunately, we don’t know how to be content with nothingness. Because nothingness is like a silence, although I think silence is the most fruitful thing in the world.
– What has your experience been with silence in writing?
– A process. Silence is like a seed. It internally prepares you for being able to receive everything that comes to you, because things come to us, they arrive. In that arrival, it gives. It’s not a silencing in the correct sense of language. From silence surge a love of the world, [Armando] Reverón’s women, Reverón’s beaches.
– Facing the world’s events, the poet contemplates. Could silence be a stage, a right, or is it a sin?
– I don’t think it’s a sin, absolutely not, nor is it a stage. It exists and you hear it once in a while. It’s like the soul, the soul can be heard because it moves within you. Whoever doesn’t hear it, misses it because he has tied himself to something else, almost always the negative. You close the door to this room and there’s a total silence and that silence has always been there, but what happens is that the furniture, the dog, the word, conversation, they are like the wave.
– But our society today doesn’t seem to understand or accept silence.
– Of course, that’s natural. From that silence is born noise and in order for it to happen it needs the source that is silence. For example, you throw a rock and at that moment the distance it covers was made by a silence that existed before you threw it. Silence and solitude are incubating sources.
– What has your been experience with solitude?
– Ever since I was a girl I distinguished that the sky was blue and since I was born into a very religious family, I thought the blue was because of the virgin, because that was the virgin’s blue skirt. So I felt taken care of. I saw it from a distance but I wasn’t lost because there was the blue mantle of silence as though I could touch it with a finger.
– And that religiosity, how does it become a poem?
– By loving. Because love is what provokes the transformation of the fact into words. Love participates in imagination, it participates when you intuit, when you pronounce… It’s love that provokes, as though it gathered all those things and elements and joined them into one. That’s why you can pronounce, you can say: “el mismo yo, mas caracol.” That doesn’t come out so easily. Of course, you don’t perceive that. But it’s there because love exists within you; there is silence within you; there is solitude within you. And solitude is not abandonment, it is a wealth.
– All those coordinates that form the map of your writing, they also include abandonment.
– Of course… but I’ve gone on living. There is abandonment because I lost the most essential thing, which was my mother. Sometimes, in my case, that’s never filled by anyone. I feel that death can fill that for me.
– You’re speaking to us about a cycle that closes, this has to do with the circular and encompassing movement that can be seen in your writing, a movement that leaves nothing outside.
– All that inner movement surges up within me and I give it. What’s important is that the other discover that light I’m talking about and which I carry as though it were part of my intuition, but when I read it I’m capable of seeing the roundness and all those things, but I say to myself: “Is that me?” Then I feel afraid.
– Does poetry lead us to constantly live with fear?
– Yes, constantly. Because you get scared. For example, when I wrote La espada [The Sword], I never in my life had thought of writing something about the sword. Never. Because for me a sword was a terrible sign, but it turns out that in the book it transforms into a sign of equilibrium. The sword is the way of intelligently cutting away what is not positive for everyone else.
– Does poetry have a meaning beyond aesthetics for you?
¬– Poetry can’t be a decoration, a beautiful thing. Poetry must have a frightening human content. Its problem is man.
– What has poetry given you, after giving it so many years of your life, so much passion?
– To have discovered certain aspects of life and knowing that certain books of mine reach the public and knowing they’re useful.
The full version of this conversation was published in Versos comunicantes II (poetas entrevistan a poetas iberoamericanos), México: Alforja, 2005.
{María Antonieta Flores, El Cautivo, No. 40, November 2008}
2.05.2009
Zero Readership
In the middle of his first book, the long poem Zero Readership (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008), Filip Marinovich writes of his familial and aesthetic allegiances, two preoccupations that appear throughout this marvelous text: “The grampa brings me a cup of coffee while I type. Have I told you about him. Grampa Chaki. I’ve ever / fog / forgotten how to be a surrealist…” (103). Marinovich’s poem is partly about the effort to remember those aspects that sustain his life and art, to retain one’s allegiances across time and space. But forgetting can be fun. Or at least Marinovich makes it fun. And who wants to be a surrealist anymore anyways? (We do.)
The first thing you should know about this book is that it was composed on a typewriter between 2001 and 2006 during visits the author made to see family and friends in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and Serbia and Montenegro. (You should also know Filip is my friend and I think this is a brilliant book, so it’s pretty hard to be objective about Zero Readership. OK, back to the book and Mr. Marinovich.) The typewriter part is important because Ugly Duckling Presse has chosen to publish the book with a beautiful large-size format illustrated with Marinovich’s charcoal and crayon drawings, and using antique typewriter-style font. As one reads the poem, one senses the energy of the manual typewriter as an instrument the poet uses in order to break up space in his own mind as well as on the page. The narrow column format of this blog won’t allow me to render the exquisite care and beauty of the improvisations Marinovich works with throughout the book. This isn’t to say the poem wanders aimlessly, as its author definitely has a purpose and he achieves it with grace and precision. Rather, he wants the reader to have fun, to enjoy the interplay between poet and (antique) machine.
So, when he jokes that he’s “forgotten how to be a surrealist” the poet is reminding us that all great poetry must forget its ancestors, must start over with each page, no matter how loyal one might feel towards certain aspects of the past. As John Wieners wrote in the opening pages of his journal in the spring of 1958: “I must forget how to write. I must unlearn what has been taught me.” I mention Wieners because he’s one of the “ancestors” (comrades, really) one finds hovering throughout Marinovich’s poetry. Not necessarily in a direct manner, but in the poet’s awareness that there is no true separation between life and poem, that they bleed into each other constantly.
(The last time I saw Filip was in October of 2006, when I was in New York City for a few days and we unexpectedly ran into each other at the Poetry Project. We spent some time talking over a period of two days and I remember asking him what Jack Spicer book I should read first. After a few minutes of consideration he said: “The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether,” where I would later find this: “Promise to whatever is promised / Love to whatever is loved / Ghosts to whatever is ghosts…” Like Spicer, Marinovich understands poems as avenues the poet travels & inhabits, which is to say, he doesn’t control them, he’s merely a factor within them.)
This book is also an epistolary collection, as e-mails and letters to friends back in the U.S. are mixed in with journal-type sketches, automatic writing exercises on the typewritten field, meticulously measured stanzas that will suddenly break into prose or seep out onto the full page, bringing the reader into a variety of forms and moods, sometimes coffee-fueled (“I can drink as much coffee as I want to here and feel alert not panicky” (20)), at others in discomfort or perplexity at the complications of transnational family diasporas. One of these discomforts is the author’s awareness that he is returning to visit his family with a U.S. passport, a representative of an empire whose weapons and policies have devastated places such as Belgrade. One of his interlocutors says to him, at one point, in reference to his use of place as a muse:
“You like Belgrade?
You like the inspiration
you receive here
among family—million cousins—?
Befriend radiation—
deal with traces of
depleted uranium bombing
by NATO in ’99” (63)
Part letter/e-mail to friends, part journal, part ecstatic automatic poem, part paean to heritage and place, part travelogue, part pamphlet critiquing the U.S. as self-absorbed empire, part epic (as the subtitle says), Zero Readership never stands still. Let’s jump to some of the moments when Marinovich is at his best, surprising himself and his reader with sudden leaps in language and consciousness:
“Belgrade
a wreath
four black suitcases lined up against the china cupboard
ORIGIN in white lettering down their sides
where are we going?
ancestor ancestor what is an ancestor?” (16)
“oh but to find things where they be—
Muse do please assist me—
you flicker in Mark’s lightblue email screen and
the quiet things he types me— (—
“Muse, hah? Sounds progressive!” ” (47)
“Will US know it’s war until we have to use rations?” (52)
“You find a machine
and hit it hard
until it coughs up
a page for two
and throw out the poison
accumulating in you.” (91)
“refuse to be influenced
ache one step at a time” (97)
“and the naked will topple your governments, West
and nothing will be left not even nafta nafta nafta” (114)
I admit I find prophecy in these pages, though it might be more accurate to call it awareness. (Ginsberg is another comrade floating through this poem.) Our poet knows that his notebook and typewriter serve a greater purpose. He takes on the task of family scribe, tribal ear. And yet his poem remains a solitary excursion, one as concerned with sex and self as it is with the collapse of our shrinking world. The “epic” alluded to in the book’s subtitle is the adventure of the individual in a dangerous age, the awareness of poetry as a chronicle we can never fully translate but that sustains us in our grief and fear. He chooses a measured optimism: coffee and beer for the poet, along with books, lovers, friends and airplanes. New York City and Belgrade, the poet’s split homes, end up being one and the same in this vast pamphlet. In Zero Readership, Filip Marinovich’s typewriter joins them in an impossibly sweet concert, never too dreamy or too serious; equipoised.
2.04.2009
Los vasallos acríticos / Eduardo Vásquez
Acritical Vassals
There is no doubt that in Europe and the United States they consider us inferior. It seems to us this would explain why they are patient and sympathetic with governments they wouldn’t tolerate in their own countries, even for an instant. We, on the other hand, take up an inferior attitude in regards to that culture.
In philosophy, at least, it happens that way. We think a book elaborated by someone trained at a famous university has to be of great value. There are professors who continue to cite The Open Society and Its Enemies as a valid text. He situates Hegel as an enemy of an open and democratic society who, following Plato, expels individual liberty from the heart of society.
This is not true. Hegel critiques Plato for this expulsion, although he sees that fact as an effort by Plato to save the Greek state from the corrosive and subversive power of the free subjectivity that had appeared with Socrates.
In § 185 of Philosophy of Law there is a resounding critique against Plato. He not only expelled infinite autonomous personality, but he “even excluded it completely in its origin, which is found in private property and in the family, and then, in its subsequent development, regarding one’s own arbitrage and the choice of a profession.”
In § 206 Hegel posits how subjective freedom appeared in ancient States as a principle of corruption for the institutions and laws but in the modern State, where it is maintained within objective order and also within its laws, that subjective particularity becomes the beginning of any vitality in civil society.
There are at least six paragraphs in the Philosophy of Law where Hegel posits that same thesis. The free personality is the beginning of corruption in ancient States, but in the modern State it is the beginning of well-being and development. How could professor Karl Popper commit such a misinterpretation?
His great prestige gave him enormous authority to influence readers of Hegel. And there are still those who without reading Hegel follow Karl Popper’s interpretation. But there are many others who launch their nonsense to the four winds. One of them is the professor of philosophy at Princeton, Walter Kaufmann.
Isaiah Berlin writes that “he is one of the few philosophers of our time who understands, in tandem, Hegel’s thought and the world in which he lived.” W. Kaufmann writes the following: “I don’t so much reject the dialectic, as I say it does not exist.” (Hegel, Alianza Editorial, page 234, 1968).
We allow ourselves to doubt that professor Kaufmann read the Philosophy of Law. In § 31 Hegel very clearly describes what he calls the dialectic: “as in science (that is, logic) the concept develops from itself and is merely an immanent progression and a production of its determinations” (Spanish translation by Eduardo Vásquez).
It is true the term dialectic does not appear there, but “development of the determinations of the concept, immanent progress” are characteristics of the dialectic. In a book as well known by Hegelians as the Phenomenology we can read: “This dialectical movement of consciousness achieves within itself, both in its knowledge as in its object, as the new authentic object surges within it, exactly what would be called experience” (p. 58, Fondo de Cultura Económica).
{ Eduardo Vásquez, Tal Cual, 11 December 2008 }
There is no doubt that in Europe and the United States they consider us inferior. It seems to us this would explain why they are patient and sympathetic with governments they wouldn’t tolerate in their own countries, even for an instant. We, on the other hand, take up an inferior attitude in regards to that culture.
In philosophy, at least, it happens that way. We think a book elaborated by someone trained at a famous university has to be of great value. There are professors who continue to cite The Open Society and Its Enemies as a valid text. He situates Hegel as an enemy of an open and democratic society who, following Plato, expels individual liberty from the heart of society.
This is not true. Hegel critiques Plato for this expulsion, although he sees that fact as an effort by Plato to save the Greek state from the corrosive and subversive power of the free subjectivity that had appeared with Socrates.
In § 185 of Philosophy of Law there is a resounding critique against Plato. He not only expelled infinite autonomous personality, but he “even excluded it completely in its origin, which is found in private property and in the family, and then, in its subsequent development, regarding one’s own arbitrage and the choice of a profession.”
In § 206 Hegel posits how subjective freedom appeared in ancient States as a principle of corruption for the institutions and laws but in the modern State, where it is maintained within objective order and also within its laws, that subjective particularity becomes the beginning of any vitality in civil society.
There are at least six paragraphs in the Philosophy of Law where Hegel posits that same thesis. The free personality is the beginning of corruption in ancient States, but in the modern State it is the beginning of well-being and development. How could professor Karl Popper commit such a misinterpretation?
His great prestige gave him enormous authority to influence readers of Hegel. And there are still those who without reading Hegel follow Karl Popper’s interpretation. But there are many others who launch their nonsense to the four winds. One of them is the professor of philosophy at Princeton, Walter Kaufmann.
Isaiah Berlin writes that “he is one of the few philosophers of our time who understands, in tandem, Hegel’s thought and the world in which he lived.” W. Kaufmann writes the following: “I don’t so much reject the dialectic, as I say it does not exist.” (Hegel, Alianza Editorial, page 234, 1968).
We allow ourselves to doubt that professor Kaufmann read the Philosophy of Law. In § 31 Hegel very clearly describes what he calls the dialectic: “as in science (that is, logic) the concept develops from itself and is merely an immanent progression and a production of its determinations” (Spanish translation by Eduardo Vásquez).
It is true the term dialectic does not appear there, but “development of the determinations of the concept, immanent progress” are characteristics of the dialectic. In a book as well known by Hegelians as the Phenomenology we can read: “This dialectical movement of consciousness achieves within itself, both in its knowledge as in its object, as the new authentic object surges within it, exactly what would be called experience” (p. 58, Fondo de Cultura Económica).
{ Eduardo Vásquez, Tal Cual, 11 December 2008 }
2.03.2009
Descolonización del pensamiento marxista (I) / Javier Biardeau
Decolonization of Marxist Thought (I)
The national-popular movements that are being activated in our America’s societies are configuring the ideological horizon of new socialist imaginaries, bringing to the agenda questions about the place of the Marxist tradition and its role in the transformations that are taking place. In multiple interventions we have wagered on the thesis of the decolonization and de-dogmatization of the Marxist tradition, as an indispensable premise for the renovation of the socialist imaginary, an idea that is constitutively articulated with the proposals of a democratic an ethical-cultural counter-hegemonic revolution. This leads to the decolonization of the tradition of the Marxist left itself, which supposes a process of disassembly, dislocation, detachment and opening towards new horizons of theoretical reflection, that mark spaces beyond Eurocentrism’s politico-cultural canon.
In a strict sense this implies a double negation in the heart of the Marxist tradition: superseding social democratic and Marxist-Leninist reformism; that is, the Eurocentric internationals. The time has come to provincialize the universal fallacies. There also exists an agenda of knowledge production that can and should enunciate that our north is the South. Does this double supersession implicate the liquidation of the program of Marxist research-action? It absolutely implicates its radical aperture and renovation. In this way, the imaginary of new socialisms from the South acquires a historical-cultural density that is rooted in the specificity of concrete circumstances, without abandoning the problematization of the existential condition of the human race, understood as a conjunction of differential experiences of civilizing, cultural and national circles.
There is no abstract humanity. There exist diverse humanities, incarnated in historic multi-diversity, in cultural dialogue. In fact, intercultural dialogue which is the condition for the possibility of other socialisms, even for communal imaginaries (different from any form of industrialism, or bureaucratic collectivism), armed from an eco-political platform that uncovers the disease-development of blind industrialism-productivism and the consumerist mentality. This supposes an even more profound rupture from developmental inertias, more than the indispensable epistemological turn, articulated to the complex, decolonizing thought that would overcome the crisis of a modernity in ruins.
Today we know where the abstract universalisms were elaborated, their categorical and conceptual measures, their historic “a priori.” We recognize their epistemological devices, their ontological wagers and their ethical principles. We know from which legitimate tongues, from which hegemonic apparatuses truths are enunciated and legitimized. We know how intellectual fields are accredited and how the legitimization of symbolic domination takes place. Today the word “intellectual” is a problematic sign crossed by its function as a support to multiple regimes of power. “Intellectual” today is a sign that distinguishes and articulates a specific social function for determined epistemological, political and cultural projects. So we have to mistrust the projections of purity, honesty and decontamination of “intellectuals,” since, in a certain sense, they are modernity’s new clergy.
Although in Europe the French Revolution liquidated to a certain degree the stew of religious superstitions disseminated by the block of dominant power, it installed the superstition of the symbolic authority of illustrated intellectuals, without considering that they carried their own ethical-mythical horizon.
In postcolonial America both sources of authority disputed the intellectual and moral hegemony over what they considered a popular field subjected to racial classifications, plagued by the need for a “pastoral power” and for a “coercive leadership.” The cross and the sword have been modified by the incitement to consume and the right to die of hunger.
Translator’s note: A slightly longer version of this essay in the original Spanish was published last month as “El imaginario de emancipación socialista y la descolonización del pensamiento marxista (I).”
{ Javier Biardeau, El Nacional, 31 January 2009 }
The national-popular movements that are being activated in our America’s societies are configuring the ideological horizon of new socialist imaginaries, bringing to the agenda questions about the place of the Marxist tradition and its role in the transformations that are taking place. In multiple interventions we have wagered on the thesis of the decolonization and de-dogmatization of the Marxist tradition, as an indispensable premise for the renovation of the socialist imaginary, an idea that is constitutively articulated with the proposals of a democratic an ethical-cultural counter-hegemonic revolution. This leads to the decolonization of the tradition of the Marxist left itself, which supposes a process of disassembly, dislocation, detachment and opening towards new horizons of theoretical reflection, that mark spaces beyond Eurocentrism’s politico-cultural canon.
In a strict sense this implies a double negation in the heart of the Marxist tradition: superseding social democratic and Marxist-Leninist reformism; that is, the Eurocentric internationals. The time has come to provincialize the universal fallacies. There also exists an agenda of knowledge production that can and should enunciate that our north is the South. Does this double supersession implicate the liquidation of the program of Marxist research-action? It absolutely implicates its radical aperture and renovation. In this way, the imaginary of new socialisms from the South acquires a historical-cultural density that is rooted in the specificity of concrete circumstances, without abandoning the problematization of the existential condition of the human race, understood as a conjunction of differential experiences of civilizing, cultural and national circles.
There is no abstract humanity. There exist diverse humanities, incarnated in historic multi-diversity, in cultural dialogue. In fact, intercultural dialogue which is the condition for the possibility of other socialisms, even for communal imaginaries (different from any form of industrialism, or bureaucratic collectivism), armed from an eco-political platform that uncovers the disease-development of blind industrialism-productivism and the consumerist mentality. This supposes an even more profound rupture from developmental inertias, more than the indispensable epistemological turn, articulated to the complex, decolonizing thought that would overcome the crisis of a modernity in ruins.
Today we know where the abstract universalisms were elaborated, their categorical and conceptual measures, their historic “a priori.” We recognize their epistemological devices, their ontological wagers and their ethical principles. We know from which legitimate tongues, from which hegemonic apparatuses truths are enunciated and legitimized. We know how intellectual fields are accredited and how the legitimization of symbolic domination takes place. Today the word “intellectual” is a problematic sign crossed by its function as a support to multiple regimes of power. “Intellectual” today is a sign that distinguishes and articulates a specific social function for determined epistemological, political and cultural projects. So we have to mistrust the projections of purity, honesty and decontamination of “intellectuals,” since, in a certain sense, they are modernity’s new clergy.
Although in Europe the French Revolution liquidated to a certain degree the stew of religious superstitions disseminated by the block of dominant power, it installed the superstition of the symbolic authority of illustrated intellectuals, without considering that they carried their own ethical-mythical horizon.
In postcolonial America both sources of authority disputed the intellectual and moral hegemony over what they considered a popular field subjected to racial classifications, plagued by the need for a “pastoral power” and for a “coercive leadership.” The cross and the sword have been modified by the incitement to consume and the right to die of hunger.
Translator’s note: A slightly longer version of this essay in the original Spanish was published last month as “El imaginario de emancipación socialista y la descolonización del pensamiento marxista (I).”
{ Javier Biardeau, El Nacional, 31 January 2009 }
2.02.2009
Manifesto of the Flying Mallet
Michael Hofmann
Poetry is—as the poet said, though his subject was butterflies—an army of stragglers. Contemporaries, aeons, and cultures apart slog wordlessly through the mud together, not at all pally, not at all like Virgil and Dante. There’s no uniform, no team shirt, no battle or plan of battle, no weapons, no organization, no hierarchy, no ranks or badges except for homemade ones that don’t count, enemies and detractors everywhere. Its colors you should think twice before rallying around (I don’t know what they are, perhaps sable on sable), and its only cavalry is the reader, and there’s only one of him or her, sitting at home minding his or her own business, without a horse to hand, or a thought of you. There are plenty of fellow travelers, whom you can tell from their air of confidence and impunity, and because they tend to get there faster. (Even though of course there is no “there.”)—How can I call anyone to the barricades?
What really matters in relation to poetry has probably never been said—Ezra Pound’s “logopoeia” (doing things with words) the nearest thing. All there is is confusion, pretense, contradiction, and instinct. Most of what proposes itself—or is hailed or dismissed—as poetry at any given time probably isn’t. Poetry is soluble intelligence, but it reserves to itself the right on occasion to be stupid. (And sometimes it is nothing but feeling or eyesight or glossolalia or journalism.) Poetry is subtle, but sometimes “as subtle as a flying mallet,” as the man says. Poetry isn’t about rules or about infractions, but there is something by definition rebellious in its use of speech for its own purposes. Poetry may be effective or ineffectual, but it is never overly designing. Poetry is delayed, instant; unending, brief; electric, tiny. Each poem is an insurrection against the world before it existed—or a desertion from it.
There are no plurals, only chance or temporary agglomerations. The only plural forms are what Wallace Stevens—plural himself, as you might think—referred to as “functionaries” or “hacks,” and Lou Reed as “jim-jims.” As the world shrinks and grows, there is only one thing: be singular. Ezra Pound said: be against all mortmain. Gottfried Benn said: disappoint the season-ticket holder. Say not the straggle nought availeth.
(Poetry, February 2009)
Poetry is—as the poet said, though his subject was butterflies—an army of stragglers. Contemporaries, aeons, and cultures apart slog wordlessly through the mud together, not at all pally, not at all like Virgil and Dante. There’s no uniform, no team shirt, no battle or plan of battle, no weapons, no organization, no hierarchy, no ranks or badges except for homemade ones that don’t count, enemies and detractors everywhere. Its colors you should think twice before rallying around (I don’t know what they are, perhaps sable on sable), and its only cavalry is the reader, and there’s only one of him or her, sitting at home minding his or her own business, without a horse to hand, or a thought of you. There are plenty of fellow travelers, whom you can tell from their air of confidence and impunity, and because they tend to get there faster. (Even though of course there is no “there.”)—How can I call anyone to the barricades?
What really matters in relation to poetry has probably never been said—Ezra Pound’s “logopoeia” (doing things with words) the nearest thing. All there is is confusion, pretense, contradiction, and instinct. Most of what proposes itself—or is hailed or dismissed—as poetry at any given time probably isn’t. Poetry is soluble intelligence, but it reserves to itself the right on occasion to be stupid. (And sometimes it is nothing but feeling or eyesight or glossolalia or journalism.) Poetry is subtle, but sometimes “as subtle as a flying mallet,” as the man says. Poetry isn’t about rules or about infractions, but there is something by definition rebellious in its use of speech for its own purposes. Poetry may be effective or ineffectual, but it is never overly designing. Poetry is delayed, instant; unending, brief; electric, tiny. Each poem is an insurrection against the world before it existed—or a desertion from it.
There are no plurals, only chance or temporary agglomerations. The only plural forms are what Wallace Stevens—plural himself, as you might think—referred to as “functionaries” or “hacks,” and Lou Reed as “jim-jims.” As the world shrinks and grows, there is only one thing: be singular. Ezra Pound said: be against all mortmain. Gottfried Benn said: disappoint the season-ticket holder. Say not the straggle nought availeth.
(Poetry, February 2009)
2.01.2009
Pobrecito poeta que era yo... [excerpt] / Roque Dalton
It was transcribed in Nature’s memorandum down to the very details that this would be the day of my second birth. In less than ten minutes, when I still hadn’t normalized my breathing which had been altered by the rough run, the largest moon I’ve ever seen in my life started to rise in the center of the black sky, a moon like a photographer’s curtain at a fair or, to reduce myself to absurdity, a jungle cloth from the customs worker Rousseau. Everything was clear as day. Obviously, I decided to keep walking, no longer carrying the disadvantages of the black run. I walked, walked and walked, furiously. I walked until I fell to the ground exhausted, after nearly four hours of climbing and descending hills. I’ve always been a good walker despite my nicotine and all-night lungs with their hundred theater seasons (well, let’s say twenty), always full of tempermental and emtional second actresses at the exact instant. As I fell on the ground, before falling asleep, I thought I must have walked at least twelve kilometers and that I had twenty to go until San Salvador. I also thought: what type of persecution have they set up against me? Patrols, or have they surrounded me? Both at the same time?
When I awoke it must have been four in the morning. I tried to orient myself. But the night’s silence wouldn’t guide me and dawn’s lights had erased San Salvador’s glow from the firmament, which I’d been able to see before, each time I got to the top of a hill. After a while I heard the noise of a truck or bus and I could situate the highway. Despite the dangers I decided to reach it so I could see how far I’d advanced in parallel. A tough surprise awaited me at the highway, another “crater moment”: I was only two and a half kilometers away from Cojutepeque. In other words: still within reach of the hands of my jailers and more than thirty kilometers from the city where I’d seek shelter. The anguished walk had been invested in climbing and descending hills without moving farther away from the place I was escaping in a straight line like the highway. To console myself I recalled the imbecile Salvadoran soldier who in 1944, during the preparations for the student invasion from Guatemala to defeat Osmín Aguirre, calculated the distances on the map tracing straight lines from one point to another, without paying attention to the curves of surface level. Many of those invaders were killed by the National Guard when they’d fallen asleep along the way, dying of exhaustion. Those with the best luck had to execute their prisoners, accustomed to walking without cartographic limits, before falling asleep in their arms. I decided to walk on the highway a while, seeking out a better place to reenter the wilderness again, since the route I’d followed up until now cut through many paths. Darkness was still helping me. After about fifty meters I came across a group of campesinos headed to work. The bells of a nearby church rang, calling for the first service. I was in the outskirts of Santa Cruz Michapa, a little town I used to visit frequently as a child. I greeted the campesinos and picked up my pace. What to do? Cut through the little town and enter the wilderness through the street that goes to Tenancingo or keep going further down this road? I was meditating on this when a crosstown bus appeared rattling from the east, stuffed with passengers. Without thinking too much, almost automatically and not even believing he was going to stop for me, I gestured to the driver. I was surprised when the clunker stopped a few meters away. I got on. There was a National Guardsman riding with his machine gun. He looked straight at me, but did nothing else. My look, my torn clothes, my filth, enough to fail me at an auto-stop restaurant, were nonetheless not much of a spectacle: rags are the social uniform of extensive levels of El Salvador’s rural population. I still had sixty-five cents left over from the peso the gullible police officer had given me and the fare to San Salvador cost me fifty. For a minute I had thought of getting off mid-way there, in a little town called San Martín where I remembered a friend of mine and fellow student named Elías Herrera lived, but then I thought it was still possible to gain some time against the eventual trap they’d lay for me. Plus, it would soon be dawn, it was nearly five in the morning. Since the bus was packed I consciously hid amid the squeeze of bodies, smells and colors: an amorphous mass of my people, recently awoken and still sleepy, lap of us all.
The journey unfolded without incident for about twenty kilometers and I was thinking a great deal about how I would enter the city, how I needed to find a friendly house before the sun came up. Cursing the hour it ever ocurred to me to live a life so full of interviews and big photographs in all the newspapers, I thought they would surely be waiting for me already at the bus terminal and that going all the way there would be a stupid mistake. The presence of a high level CIA agent in the interrogation had forced me to accept that the Salvadoran repressive organs act with the methods of their masters, the North American secret service. The matter of mobilizing and eluding the persecution was becoming seriously more complicated due to my lack of knowledge of how the city and its surroundings function today. Since I’d been out of the country for two years and since the criteria of the Salvadoran authorities who monitor traffic are as variable as the interests at play, I made a chaos of the bus route numbers, their schedules, names and bus stop locations. In concrete terms, I didn’t know when to get off the bus so I could be as close to the city as possible without arriving at the terminal. Suddenly, the bus stopped, very close to the Ilopango airport. Because of the crush of bodies that absorbed my view of the entire panorama outside, I didn’t realize at the time why we’d stopped. An old man who was sitting next to me told his wife that a bus had stopped behind us, a city bus already, and he asked her to confirm if it was one from route 29, which goes between the airport and the Hotel El Salvador, at the other end of the city, at the foothills of the great volcano. When the woman, with her better vantage point, was able to confirm that it was indeed one of those buses, they both decided to get off and get on to the other bus. Since that route was also convenient for me, since it would resolve all my problems for getting into the city, since it crossed it lengthwise, I descended after them and likewise got on the other one. It was a very lit-up bus, a Berliet or Mercedes Benz. The fare was ten cents to downtown.
When I sat down and took a first glance through the ample windows, I realized why they had stopped the other bus. Stretched out across the highway, in the section that goes into San Salvador, were two cars from the police Special Investigations Unit. A group of plainclothes agents with machine guns, among whom were several who had guarded me in the gasconniére, were pulling people out of their cars and shining flashlights in their faces, checking the trunks and looking under seats. Two army officials were leading the operation. A couple got on the bus and sat behind me. The man was a fellow student of mine at Law School, for several years, but he didn’t recognize me when he looked at me as he passed by. The driver closed the door and beeped the horn asking for them to let him go through right at the moment when the police were making the passengers get off the bus I’d just abandoned (including the National Guardsman with his machinegun). Because of how the cars were parked they hadn’t seen me get off the bus, even though everything happened within a radius of about twenty meters. Our driver was behind schedule and he pressed the accelerator, starting the maneuver to back up and then go around the road block. But they blew a whistle at him and he stopped the bus, turning the ignition off. I thought they’d already seen me and that this was as far as my escape would go. I consoled myself thinking that my recapture would be witnessed by my old buddy from Law School and that through him people would know about the event until news reached the Party. As for me, I would make a big scandal and would shout out my name in order to leave evidence that I would still be held (or be killed) at the hands of the government, that was still denying any involvement in my kidnapping. But no one came over and the driver turned on the bus again, grumbling angrily that he was in no mood for losing time and that he had a schedule to follow. He passed the old bus and when a policeman tried to stop him, another one shouted: “Let it through, it’s a city bus and it starts from here.” As we went through the road block, the heads of the army officers passed by just below the level of my jaw.
{ Roque Dalton, Pobrecito poeta que era yo..., San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1994, pp. 439-442 }
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