House Made of Dawn

(Broadside designed by Aaron Tieger, Ithaca, NY, 2005.)

Hughson’s Tavern

On Saturday night I went to a reading here in Durham by Fred Moten who read the centerpiece sequence of poems from his new book of the same title, Hughson’s Tavern (Providence, RI: Leon Works, 2008). Moten read the entire sequence of 40 poems that takes its title from a bar that existed in lower Manhattan in the late 1700s, a place where whites and blacks gathered to socialize at a time when such leisure was considered a threat to colonial authority. And sure enough, the tavern was eventually closed down, its owner and some if its patrons executed for allegedly conspiring against authorities. It was a raining here in Durham, so while Moten read we could hear the rain falling on the skylights of the living room, a counterpoint to his poetic historicism.

I don’t have time to review the book here (the acceleration of the now), rather, I just want to register a few fragments of the reading itself. By which I mean its subtle, anonymous place in the sequence of history we inhabit, this collapse his poem addresses by means of reading, time travel, music and the voice of the poet, singing or enunciating words that last as long as the rain does on rooftop skylights.

Moten stood the whole time as he read, stopping once or twice to sip from his beer. Occasionally he would pause before certain passages, as though seeing some of his lines anew, or finding those fragments beyond his own recollection. Hughson’s Tavern gathers various cities from across the United States, ranging from the colonial to the postmodern, with stops in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, Las Vegas, Arkansas and pockets of the deep south. The intersection of black and white American countercultures is sung by the flexible, undogmatic, seemingly improvised (though, really, meticulously planned) focus of his verses, attuned to a blurring, elegiac and inspired palette of black American music (which includes Joey Ramone and Rickie Lee Jones, generous and mixed at its core).

I found myself transported during the 45 minutes or so it took Moten to read his sequence of poems. At a time when hip hop has committed suicide with its evocation of capitalist excess and its complete renunciation of any collective consciousness, Moten’s poem reminds us that music belongs to the Muses, that we can still gain access to visionary states of awareness by means of skilled repetition & variation. Hearing Moten read, I was reminded that music offers the possibility of sustenance yet: “...and the music make every crushed little room a holy place...” I wrote down fragments from Hughson’s Tavern as I heard them, trying to register the beat being set by the poet’s exploration of erased minutes from our nation’s timeline. It felt like a historic evening, one of those moments when you have the privilege of hearing a poet read a text that not only explains our present landscapes but also sings a lineage. (“How You Sound??”) The following transcriptions reflect my notebook scribbles as I listened, not the typography of the poem itself, which you should track down for your own ears:


“like maroons of the city”

“the problem of amusement in black reconstruction”

“I love to cut somebody when I’m in love”

“things don’t represent / they must be broke”

“and all my native weather will be mine”

“they walk with one another to wear black hoods in the sun”

“this is smooth Los Angeles”

“die witout a sound but hoping for a bridge”

“the black expanse dwindles to regress”

“to break this broke quietness”

“security of the near is far away”

“the black market is an open city”

“meanwhile, trying out beats”

“the sharp, rapid notes on dialectics”

“everyday already there to write a poem”

“event cascade the sphere in hand”

“radio won’t even play my jams”

“fucking with electronics”

“excuse me while I disappear”

“so this is for the ones who illuminate black suffering”

“the new Black Studies is this”

“to sing like things do”

“just decided to not go home because the jam wouldn’t let us”

“have no right to my ear philosophically”

“the revolving interview on the edge of town”

“the civilization without friends”

“apparatus tear shit up and always”

“the calm traffic of industrial culture”

“the madness of the worker”

“I talk with the street spirits”

“my English was too good”

“madness is the absence of the work”

“simple motherfucker, ain’t you nothing?”

“dance to fantastic information while we kick off the modern world”

“make a song about the sky they sold”

“dance around the crisis on the table”

“be secretly in love”

“skin is illegal beginning with color”

“the romance of freedom in the commons”

“unbuilt hotel”


And the stanza that jolted me the most, that seemed talismanic in its instant beauty and logic, for which this long poem deserves our attention and digression, song as reminder, sustenance – I found it when I went back to the physical book itself on Sunday, delighting in the echoes of my listening revealed on the page:


“be secretly in love. to read everything to caress
the sinful communism. a hideaway underground in the
jailhouse by the water. is there water in the room by myself?”

Israel Centeno: “Mi novela no es una obra política” / Michelle Roche Rodríguez

Israel Centeno: “My novel isn’t political”

[Photo: Sandra Bracho for El Nacional]

Utopias refer to places where things function with such efficiency they become fantastic; anti-utopias obey the opposite formula: they are territories where nothing goes well and humans live in desperation.

Bajo las hojas [Beneath the Leaves] by Israel Centeno is the novel about an anti-utopia that represents Venenezuela in the field of 10 finalists for the III Premio Iberoamericano Planeta-Casa de América award.

Centeno clarifies that his pessimistic vision is not merely a vision of the country, but also of the planet. “Even though it portrays elements of the Venezuelan moment, the book shouldn’t be interpreted as a political novel, since it has elements from many areas,” he says.

Set in Caracas, Havana and London, Bajo las hojas is the story of a few journalists who instead of writing about the news, spend their time changing events and creating a new (and fictional) reality. “The reporters don’t “report” the news but rather they “compose” it according to the taste of whoever’s in power,” the author points out and alludes to the evident influence of 1984, written by the Englishman George Orwell in 1949.

Bajo las hojas is the first of a tetralogy of unpublished novels that includes: Jinete a pie, El reencuentro and Una novelita victoriana.

The situation of an anti-utopia also offers fertile ground for magic and includes elements of the thriller, the Gothic and themes of Victorian literature. “In this proposal I worked on archetypes of horror such as vampires, the wolf man, lycanthropes,” enumerates Centeno.

The author highlights that the story’s structure is based on the counterpoint of literary voices, topics and characters that illustrate the obsessions of the recent century’s conclusion.

Headed to Mexico. In the three times the contest has been held, Centeno is the first Venezuelan to have reached the list of 10 finalists.

“I proposed a very ambitious project for myself and during 4 years I dedicated myself exclusively to writing this. I think my work speaks for itself and I have faith in my novel. I’m gratified that it ended up among the 10 best ones out of nearly 500 (including those by 16 Venezuelans) and I wager on my work no matter what the results might be,” the writer assures, somewhat nervous.

The rest of the authors competing for the prize, which will be announced in Mexico’s capitol on the 31st of this month, come from Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico and Spain. The last three nations are represented by three novels each. This year, 493 novels written by Latin Americans were submitted.

Among the books Centeno has published are: Calletania (1992), Rabo del diablo y otros cuentos (1993), Hilo de cometa y otras iniciaciones (1996), Exilio en Bowery (1999), Criaturas de la noche (2001), El complot (2002), La Casa del Dragón (2004), Bengala (2005) and Iniciaciones (2006).




{ Michelle Roche Rodríguez, El Nacional, 26 March 2009 }

This disgrace

This disgrace
         awoke from
     fevered pause
                  meanders while
a registered croaking
         a square of sun
       positions involved
astral mission
            after the elegiac
Americanisms in
     the letters of Gregory Corso
O finitude
     (this feels false)
I make like frogs
            from the mud
   creek bed
          resource formed
 with crystalline
     resurgence from
furthest edge of wood

Los huesos andantes de Ludovico / Héctor Silva Michelena

Ludovico’s Rambling Bones

He had the privilege of shining in the various fields where he projected his sensitive intelligence. Philosopher, essayist, literary critic, poet and newspaper writer of great importance, Ludovico Silva (1937-1988) was a columnist for El Nacional, as well as the author of an extensive oeuvre that has been translated into several languages.


“If my bones were to perish, make them walk.” Ludovico would speak these chilling words to those of us who were intimate with him, and it is what I, his tutelary brother, aspire to achieve in these lines: to rescue his bones from the folds of my memory and make them walk: full of blood and sun. Yes, the sun because in a letter he sent me in 1956 from Freiburg in Breisgau, as he preferred to call it, he wrote: “Héctor, these sun cymbals bloody the shores of my eyes.”

I’m going to evoke terrible and beautiful splinters of the bones and sun that sustained and animated a tormented existence, which prolonged itself thanks to the spiritual rest he received in the last decade of his life, the love of his wife Beatriz.

Tormented existence? Yes! Together we traveled to alcohol’s chiaroscuro kingdom, together we caroused in the bars and taverns in the whirlwind of the República del Este and the Callejón de la Puñalada, together we gave food and drink to beggars and gangsters at high dawn. We received in the three apartments we shared together numerous friends, poets, actors, painters, novelists, like Darío Lancini, Caupolicán Ovalles, Luis Salazar, Héctor Mayerston, Indio Guerra, Salvador Garmendia and Adriano González León, who wrote, in front of a bottle of rum, a stupendous short story that Guillermo Meneses published in the magazine Cal. One day I arrived at our apartment in El Marquéz, where electricity blackouts were frequent, and I noticed thick smoke coming through the crevices of the door. I quickly opened the door and ran to the room where we slept. I found my brother laid out drunk on his bed, which was on fire on all four sides, a fire that spread to our clothes, which were ruined or scorched. Ludovico had passed out with a lit cigarette. In 1986 he entered the Casa Blanca clinic, where he wrote some moving and hard texts, which the poet Harry Almela published (2002). Four years later I opened my eyes in the intensive care unit of a hospital, where I was taken during an emergency of brain convulsions due to my alcoholism.

Years before, I had diminished the journey, due to my studies. But Ludovico continued his atrocious trip: he had his son, Rodrigo, whom he barely got to know, to his own mortification; Rosa del Olmo, his wife at the time, soon left him; she had grown tired of having to welcome him home drunk on so many nights and of picking him up from their apartment hallway. This initiated a terrible orbit through rented rooms, pigsties, jails, alleys and a few lovers who were fascinated by bohemia and by his dazzling and suggestive words.

Ludovico was born on February 16, 1937 and died early one morning in December of 1988. He was killed by a major cirrhosis of the liver that gave him a heart attack. Death came and took his eyes without agony. Thus ascended to encounter Baudelaire and Machado, his aesthetic fathers, he who had never stopped writing not even while under the lash of his abundant ethyl and psychic crises. From them he extracted his Ars Poetica: “Poetry is the musical combination of symbols.”

I don’t want to continue without clarifying that I write this at the request of my friend, the writer Nelson Rivera, and on the occasion of the recent publication of Ludovico’s book Teoría poética (Caracas: Editorial Equinoccio, Universidad Simón Bolívar, 2008). This is a unique edition in many ways. It was discovered in Maracay, in 2005, in the offices of the Fundación Ludovico Silva, run by his widow Beatriz. We owe the discovery of this manuscript, which he began to write in the mid eighties, to the intimate and tenacious dedication of the high poet Edda Armas, who with admirable diligence “put the pieces of the puzzle together,” on the tough trail of loose and dispersed texts, in order to piece them together with one objective: to reveal what for Ludovico was a great dream: to write a major work, “a vast book entitled Teoría poética de la cultura occidental,” which ranges from Homer to Vicente Gerbasi.”

Nothing better for discerning the great interest of this discovery, than transcribing a fragment from Edda Armas’s stupendous prologue: “Invited by the Fundación Ludovico Silva, I traveled to the city of Maracay to give a reading in the poetry series Cuadernos de la Noche, at the Agustín Codazzi Library. Once the event was over, we gathered in the offices of the homonymous Foundation where the manuscripts, photographs, portraits and art works inspired by the poetic work of Ludovico are housed. Late into the night, when I was ready to sleep, I received from Beatriz Guzmán, Beatrice, his widow, a river blue-green folder, dated 1986, with the heading “Teoría poética,” so that I might look it over. This sparked my curiosity once I was installed in the small guest room and beneath the precarious light of the bedside table I opened and read “Las misteriosas correspondencias,” which is what he titled the first chapter. The original folder contained the original and the carbon copy of this document, composed on a typewriter. He clarifies that these are his notes on Teoría poetica and that he selects as an ideal and concrete door for them the name of the well-known and inexhaustible sonnet by Baudelaire, “Correspondances.” ”

Edda says the text moved her in a particular manner, not because of its yellowed pages no the date but, dramatically, because of what it contained: the topics the poet addressed in the first poetry workshop offered at the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos (1975-1976), in which Edda participated and never forgot: mainly the poetics of Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé and Valéry; these were his literary preferences, balanced on the immortal verses of Saint John of the Cross. I drop the curtain here and continue.

Luis José Silva Michelena–Ludovico’s birth name–was the youngest of five siblings. He was born in the house Villa Marietta, located on Argentina Street in the uninhabited neighborhood of Catia. It’s not possible, nor desirable, to follow Ludovico and his family’s steps in life. For that we have the excellent chronology in the book edited by Edda. Nor am I going to analyze his work, for two reasons: first, I lived alongside it intensely; secondly, such an examination has already been undertaken, even if in an unsatisfactory manner because of its fragmentary nature. I could say, for example, that the seeds of Teoría literaria spring from our intense discussions of Aristotle’s Poetics, as well as by a luminous essay by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle,” which greatly influenced Baudelaire’s ideas.

Our family’s life was itinerant, until we entered the San Ignacio School, where we graduated from secondary school. Important things happened there. Truthfully, Ludovico wanted to be a poet since he was a child, and this desire would not have given early fruits had it not been for three decisive factors that came together at San Ignacio: his conversations with me, the stimulus of the Jesuit priest Leopoldo López Guerrero, and the strong influence of the Haitian writer Paul Verna, who instilled in us the divine poison of French poetry in his classes. Paul turned us into fanatics of Baudelaire. Under his warmth, he made us read Les Fleurs du mal and several biographies, among which stands out one I bought in Buenos Aires, by François Porché, which is psychoanalytical and chilling, and which left us forever feverish. This is the reason why Ludovico chose the poem “Correspondances” as an entrance to his Teoría poética, following the teachings of Hugo Friedrich, his professor of Roman Philology at the University of Freiburg.

Ludovico was in Europe from 1954 until 1960. He read voraciously, traveled, took classes and frequented bars and taverns. In none of his letters I received did he hint at any political inclination, although a light air led him to flirt with the right. Many moons passed, unsettling for me. Ludovico returned to Venezuela in 1960, inserted himself in the rebellious literary groups of the 60s. The poet couldn’t find work. He lived with me, a communist activist, for five years, during which, after arduous discussions, I convinced him to go see comrade Pedro Duno, who had an important position at a Marxist institute and who asked him when he visited: “What can you tell me?” Ludovico answered: “All the world’s darkening will never eclipse the light of Being,” a phrase by Nietszche known to Pedro, who hired him. He taught classes on grammar and literature, but he never joined the party; he said it restricted him. But he did become a student of Marx, whose discourse and, in particular, his literary style fascinated him. Ludovico and the PCV, though not the MIR, hated each other, save for a few exceptions. (Jesús Sanoja Hernández, Héctor Mujica, Federico Álvarez, Pedro Duno and Alfredo Maneiro.)

In this manner, the move towards enchantment was produced, which Sanoja briefly describes (2002): “After the dissolution of the group that animated this magazine (Crítica contemporánea) and the confrontation between some of its members (…) and Ludovico having traversed leftist journalism, he made the decision to study philosophy (…) This transitional stage coincided with his magnificent work in the magazine Papeles, funded by the Ateneo.” In August of 1965, Jesús Sanoja Hernández presented in the Ateneo, the Antimanual para uso de marxista, marcianos y marxólogos, which resulted in, according to Sanoja, “not a few complaints that my comrades of inquisitorial nature expressed to me for ideological tolerance.” Honor to Jesús Sanoja Hernández!

Let us make ask ourselves a burning question: How would Ludovico’s stupendous and sharpened pen have written today? Is he be happily listening, in that warehouse full of alcohol and wine that is his grave, to the cheers of imposture that he receives today from a claque under its veil of ignorance? As my brother’s only literary executor, I think his bones would have been walking, without listening to the call of the sirens. Those bones would be like flutes blown by Orpheus, allowing the beautiful prosody of his verses to be heard: “the waters departing from me forever / passing mutely in front of my world.”




{ Héctor Silva Michelena, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 21 March 2009 }

Llamado a los tres reinos / César Moro

Call to the Three Kingdoms

I speak to the three kingdoms
to the tiger above all
more susceptible to hearing me
to the filings to the cinders
to the wind displaced from any of the three kingdoms
for earth one would have to use a silt language
for water a suction pad language
for fire squeeze poetry into a lathe and break the atrocious
         skull of the churches

I speak to the deaf with swollen ears
to the dumb more imbecile than their impotent silence
I flee from the blind since they will not understand me
the entire drama occurs in the eye and far from the brain

I speak of a certain incomprehensible enchantment
of an unknown and irreducible habit
of certain dry tears
that swarm over man’s face
of the silence the great scream of birth turns out to be
of this death instinct that incites us
for us the best among mankind
each morning becomes tangible beneath the form of a
         bleeding Medusa at the height of the heart

I speak of my distant friends whose confused image
behind a curtain of waterfall clash
delights me like an inaccessible hope
beneath a diver’s bell
simply in the solitude of a forest clearing.




Le château de grisou (1943)




{ César Moro | Peru, 1903-1956 }

Epigraph

“Despite the skepticism of some people–or of many–I don’t think it would be paradoxical to sustain that poetry’s diffusion prefers to select those underground avenues–that the more camouflaged and clandestine the transmission the more probabilities exist that it will be efficient and lasting.”

(Emilio Adolfo Westphalen)

Miente, sobre todo miente (Onetti) / Israel Centeno

“Lie, above all lie” (Onetti)

(Considerations realized after advice by Juan Carlos Onetti)


In the novel (and in the short story) imagination’s will is expressed by literary language; thus it should not be accountable to reality nor to history, whether one is writing about them or not.

Whoever seeks to cross-check sources has chosen the wrong genre.

Truth is censorship.

Likelihood is the fiction writer’s main tool for writing short stories and novels.

Likelihood is more important than truth.

Whoever is looking for entertaining content should go watch a movie, a TV series or should read non-fiction and good biographies.

Whoever is looking for ideology, refer to the ideological treatises that fit your taste and purposes.

The novel and the short story aren’t fun and they don’t entertain; their end is not spectacle, nor to strive for ratings. The novel and the short story have as their charge to implicate (alienate) the reader with an atmosphere, a language and a time belonging to its own universe; to recreate or create and in that direction to gratify by means of its aesthetic value, because even though we tend to forget, good novels and good short stories are inscribed in the fine arts.

If they roll out the red carpet, avoid walking on it.

Be invisible.

Lying brings us closer to truth and not vice-versa.

The good fiction writer is more of a sophist than a philosopher.




{ Israel Centeno, israelcenteno.blogspot.com, 16 March 2009 }

Artificio para sobrevivir / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen

Survival Artifice

– Prevent the sunrise – shut the night’s innumerable doors and windows – don’t leave a single crack through which the sun might leak – annul all vestiges that Apollo’s chariot once crossed the firmament. – He who expressed this idea – does he intend to put a black mask without any openings on our face? – does he forget the inescapable alternation of light and darkness – the recurring schedule – the eclipses punctual for the occasion? – Of course – he answers. But what does language serve if it doesn’t insinuate (invoke) the impossible.
         All of you, look at this: the sun fell in the (fictional) trap set for it by words. There is no sun – there is no light – nor do we need the night.
         –(Close your fists – squeeze your eyelids shut.)





{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen | Peru, 1911-2001 }

El Nadaísmo y El Techo de la Ballena / Juan Calzadilla

Nadaísmo and El Techo de la Ballena

[Photo: Verbigracia, 2002. El Techo de la Ballena in 1963, L-R: Juan Calzadilla, Salvador Garmendia, Zonia Asparren M., José María Cruxent and Adriano González León.]


In what ways do El Techo de la Ballena and Nadaísmo identify or distance themselves from each other, in terms of their proposals, influences and their actions in common? On principle, I wouldn’t ask myself this question if I wasn’t sure that the similarities that joined us together are greater than the differences that might emerge from studying the two very different contexts in which both groups moved. A social context on the Colombian side and a political context on the Venezuelan side.

This peak I refer to should be understood keeping in mind that the Nadaísta movement remains active, even if hidden, and has now moved into a retroactive phase that surprises us with the boom of its editorial activities, not just in the present production of its living representatives, but also the launching of new work, always under the banner of Nadaísmo, while far from resigning itself to succumbing, it continues to generate polemical information, year after year, as a corollary to a long collective history of processes, that its most radical apologists, Jotamario, Eduardo Escobar and Armando Romero, are committed to defending until the end. This is how Nadaísmo has become not only the literary group with the longest history in Latin America, but also the most prolific in actions and in work collected in books.

A History in Fragments
The history of El Techo de la Ballena is shorter and more elliptical and can be contained in a work that gathers seven or eight months of battle, viscous humor, acts within jurisdictions and non-conformist challenges, as can be seen in an austere and stingy work of criticism that, in the absence of a more exhaustive and complete publication, continues to be the anthology by Angel Rama (Fundarte, 1987), the most consulted text and practically the only example of value-driven matter to be written about the group. And yet as an anthology, it is an enormously minor publication. The editorial luck of El Techo de la Ballena is not a limitation that can be attributed to the group not being very productive. On the contrary , we all know there’s plenty of material in magazines and newspapers, or still unpublished or that hasn’t been gathered into a book, particularly those of graphic or testimonial nature. And I provide as an example the profuse, intransigent, and very singular work of Dámaso Ogaz, today scattered and at risk of being lost in experimental magazines edited by mimeograph in an artisan manner by Ogaz himself, during his long via cruces in the Venezuelan provinces. Or the extensive autobiographical poetry of Caupolicán Ovalles, delicately published in the form of bricks that, in order to oppose other more traditional publications, Edmundo Aray called tubular editions, throwing them into political events and exhibits.

The good critical fortune of Nadaísmo is explained in part by this movement’s continuity, since its foundation in 1959 until today, throughout what has perhaps been the most dynamic and controversial chapter of modern Colombian literature. In this sense, the fact that its central chroniclers are its most polemical members, has helped Nadaísmo attain greater unity and guarantee, despite the ravages of time, desertions and death, coherence with its first propositions, which is to say, an attack against bourgeois morality, the use of daring humor, subversion against the clerical institution and preaching anarchy as a subversive form.

The same does not happen with El Techo de la Ballena, whose trajectory was more brief, so it makes sense their dedication was more circumstantial, or if you’d like, more factual with events, although no less corrosive and transverse than the position Nadaísmo took in relation to Colombian reality. And if the former’s brevity does not serve in detriment of its importance, it is no less true what Angel Rama said when describing El Techo, in the prologue to the cited anthology, that “it was the product of a historical circumstance that moves while this circumstance transmutes, loses its characteristics and gives in to the most traditional forms of creation: the book, individual tasks, art.” According to Rama, “it was the confirmation of the failure of a defeat after which began the current every man for himself phase.” Although we can highlight the debatable content of this last affirmation, the truth is that El Techo was stopped by the loss of impulse to continue existing beyond the disappearance of the adverse conditions that were stimulating it.

It is evident that in the absence of leadership like that exercised by Gonzalo Arango in Nadaísmo, the cohesion of El Techo de la Ballena depended much more on the coherence of its transitory proposals and the challenges posed by them, than on weak generational connections, whose absence for the same reason contributed to members of the group having a more heterogeneous and open conception of the literary act and a less interdisciplinary one than what defined Nadaísmo, a matter that can be noted by comparing the Ballenero conception of the poem with the colloquial, narrative, unabashedly realist or descriptive tones that serve as common factors in the poetics of Gonzalo Arango, Jaime Jaramillo Escobar, Jotamario Arbeláez, Eduardo Escobar, Eduardo Zalamea and Elmo Valencia, and without taking away anything from the personal tone each one of these poets fiercely maintained. The diversity of styles and thematic registers in the poets of El Techo, aside from corresponding to formal or generational differences, indisputably carries with it an ingredient of anarchy or indolence that contributed to the group’s dispersion.

This common element of rejecting traditional lyricism on the part of the Nadaístas and the Balleneros remits, in both movements, to a recourse to Surrealism, or if you will the tradition of French poetry, just as Jotamario himself recognizes when he writes that “we practically dug up Lautréamont, the surrealists, Rimbaud, in our effort to change life” (this “to change life” is taken from Rimbaud and Jotamario thus underlines it). Although the surrealist precedent in El Techo de la Ballena can also be seen at a certain point as being defined by subscription or militancy, such as with the anti-clerical manifesto “Para aplastar el infinito,” and as could be observed in the use of automatic writing to compose their principal texts, as for example with Los venenos fieles or Dictado por la jauría, one has to say however that fantastic invention or the appeal to the absurd, to the unusual metaphor and to black humor as resources of speech placed in the service of writing in its goal to hyper-sensitize events, all this not the result, as one might think, of a mere adoption or copying of surrealist language, but rather it was a consequence of the development of imagining forms (or metadialectics, as linguists would say) inherent to radical expressive behavior, in tune with our realities, and surging as a reaction to the medium in which both groups had to move for impact and, as Aray used to say, with no gloves on. If we can speak of a model borrowed, as was the case with Surrealism, nothing stops us from accepting that what passed into our language from this model was a transformation of poetic speech.

We would have to add to the search for a foundation in other linguistic traditions, that Jotamario opposes to Spanish lyricism and the local traditions of it, the numerous affinities that filter quickly through the visceral body of Beat poetry and especially that of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso and Ferlinghetti, influences or maybe affinities who might have more consistency among the Nadaístas than in the language of the Balleneros, with the exception of Caupolicán Ovalles who, it turns out, face to face with what we’re recounting and if we compare his poetics with the rest of his companions from El Techo, was the one closest to the unabashedly colloquial spirit of the Nadaístas, as can be seen by his poem “¿Duerme usted señor presidente?” (1961).

Amid those attuned components, inspired by poetics from other languages and articulated toward our own, we find the recuperation of orality that proceeds from a few poets of the Colombian tradition, such as León de Greiff and Barba Jacob, in the same way they incorporate to the poetic language the profanities of common use in ghetto slang, as primarily glimpsed in the work of Mario Rivero, who somehow became for the Nadaístas, or for a few Nadaístas, the equivalent of what the work of Ramos Sucre or Juan Antonio Vasco indisputably meant for the Balleneros.

Literary Genres
Another type of investigation around the relationships between both groups could lead us to a consideration of the genres in which they wrote, which implies saying that the innovative aspect of their proposals, in terms of the forms themselves, is sustained in a radical opposition to social realism that continued to be written or painted in both countries around the time those groups emerged. And naturally this opposition, which saw clearly the importance of watching out for form in writing, didn’t result in El Techo de la Ballena or in Nadaísmo to be a perfectionist preoccupation and without even asking about the problem of style, but instead actually mocked everything that could seem too literary, cold, rhetorical or formally sacrificed to freedom for the sake of doing anything they wanted to with literary genres.

Regardless of whether Nadaísmo was a predominantly lyrical movement, or in whose origin we find poetry, we musn’t forget the narrative attempts their representatives more or less take on, as in the case of Jotamario, who fortunately for those of us who follow his poetry, confesses that he’s a frustrated novelist, the author of an epic poetry organized in blocks sewn with tailor’s thread. Gonzalo Arango, without abandoning poetry, presents himself as a precursor to crime fiction in Colombia, while Armando Romero and Elmo Valencia continue to ambidextreously produce poetry and stories. Jaime Jaramillo Escobar, the most metaphysical and marble-like of the nadaístas, is like a herald of the Colombian apocalypse erected in a statue barnished by the Roman moon of one of De Chirico’s plazas. Jaime has been in charge of petrifying the gestures of a real parody that’s not very well-constructed until he’s able to displace history for a puppet theater. Armando Romero, the youngest of the group, crossed Nadaísmo’s borders to wander like a hippie, backpack on his shoulder, through many countries, before settling in our Mérida, where he became the protagonist of the most corrosive farce that any writer has told in order to unmask, in a hilarious novel like La piel por la piel, the terrors and miseries of the Venezuelan university.

Common Origins
Nadaísmo and El Techo de la Ballena were groups that challenged, surging almost simultaneously in Colombia and Venezuela amid and as an expression of violent ruptures and historical cuts that shook the sociopolitical structures and the cultures of both nations.

Starting in the sixties – as Jotamario Arbeláez wrote – all of America was a great poetic commotion. Cuba was a focal point of suns over the hope of the new man. All the poetries founded movements and magazines that carried the airs of renovating language and the overwhelming sensibility of the moment that was this century. That’s how it went in Colombia and in Venezuela, this country we love as if part of it were ours, that miracle of challenging expressions, with all the violence of a perfidious humor and a butchering confrontation, that in Venezuela was called El Techo de la Ballena and in Colombia Nadaísmo.

It’s true that El Techo could claim for itself a larger portion of compromise facing the political violence that operated from power, an even a larger dose of utopian delirium and of stubborn experimentalism to the utmost, but in poetry we never reached in Venezuela, neither then nor later, to a derangement of the senses of such virulence as the one provided by the Nadaísta tribe of an unrestricted and unrestrained cult to insensitivity and situations at the limits.

Plastic Arts or the Informalist Insubordination
Another important analogy is the passion for plastic arts and the energy with which both movements moved to integrate them to the program of intellectual subversion. If this characteristic is more blatant in El Techo de la Ballena, for whom painting played a decisive role in the innovative proposals. But it would be better to explain. We founded our group at a moment when the avant garde in the plastic arts were reaching in Venezuela a tense and unbearably hypocritical atmosphere. The fact that several of the group’s activists were painters and art critics precipitated even more, by means of manifestos and exhibits, the alliance between literature and art in order to accomplish a result that would have never reached such a burning and radical moment if each discipline had marched separately, or if they hadn’t complemented each other in the way they did; the integration of both manifestations, literature and art, can be appreciated from the start at the group’s launch in March of 1961, through the exhibit “Para restituir el magma,” whose purpose, more than showing the work, even if they were of an experimental nature, was to provoke a scandal.

El Techo de la Ballena and Nadaísmo were polemical movements and it was precisely polemic that mostly nurtured the disaffection with the system that moved them to achieve higher objectives which when translated to literature and art produced innovative and subversive work. That its main enemies could have been found among the people who proclaimed themselves with the title of true revolutionaries, is nothing more than a formality which both groups knew how to take advantage of so as to point out with foresight that with Nadaísmo and El Techo de la Ballena an end was being imposed on the history of literary groups, but also on the reign of utopias.




{ Juan Calzadilla, Verbigracia, El Universal, 16 November 2002 }

Encuentro / Fernando Paz Castillo

Encounter

Beyond the night
and the star
and the silence,
I have found you
–new and perfect–
fountain of the perfumed night;
seed of light
–you yourself are light–
and melodious essence of silence.




Signo (1937)




{ Fernando Paz Castillo, Poesía, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1986 }

El fuego y la poesía / César Moro

Fire and Poetry

In the golden water the burning sun reflects
the hand of the zenith.

I

I love love
On Tuesday not Wednesday
I love the love of the disunited states
Under the noxious influence of Judaism on monastic life
Of the sugar henna ice shine or pocket birds
I love love with its bloody face with two immense doors open to the void
Love as it appeared in two hundred and fifty episodes over five years
Love from a broken economy
Like the most expansionist country
Over thousands of naked beings treated like beasts
In order to adopt those simple weapons of love
Where the crime spends the night and drinks clear water
Of the day’s warmest blood

II

I love the dense branched love
Savage just like a Medusa
Disaster love
Daily sphere in which total spring
Swings spilling blood
Love made of rain rings
Of transparent rocks
Of mountains that fly and disappear
And become miniscule pebbles
Love like a dagger stab
Like a shipwreck
The total loss of speech of breath
The kingdom of thick shadows
With bulging, murderous eyes
The very long saliva
The rage of being lost
The frenetic awakening in the middle of the night
Beneath the tempest that undresses us
And the distant flash transforming the trees
In lumber of hair that pronounces your name
Days and hours of eternal nakedness

III

I love the rage of losing you
Your absence on the horse of days
Your shadow and the idea of your shadow
That leans over a field of water
Your kestrel eyes in the hands of time
That undoes me and recreates you
Time that dawns leaving me more alone
When I emerge from my dream than an antedeluvian animal lost in the shadow of his days
Like a toothless beast chasing its prey
Like the kite over the sky evolving with clockwork precision
I see you in a loud jungle and throwing myself at you
with the fatality of a stick of dynamite
Rationing out your veins and drinking your blood
Fighting with the day lacerating dawn
Dislocating death’s body
And finally time is mine
And night reaches me
And the dream that annuls me devours you
And I can assimilate you like a ripe fruit
Like a stone on a sinking island




{ César Moro | Peru, 1903-1956 }

Descolonización del pensamiento marxista (II) / Javier Biardeau

Decolonization of Marxist Thought (II)

If democratic and socialist decolonizing revolutions have any relevance for the movements and national-popular forces now emerging in Latin America, we must knock down certain myths of Eurocentric internationals, without falling into national populism. During the nineteen twenties, the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui dared to recover “Inca communism” as a historical-cultural premise for socialist struggles. The Peruvian historian Alberto Flores Galindo in the epilogue to his book of essays Buscando un Inca. Sueños y pesadillas, follows Mariátegui, analyzing like him how the emancipating imaginary of the Andean communities could be articulated within modern socialism.

The conjunction between the popular imaginary of emancipation and a program of intellectual and moral renovation takes place in a double sense, as part of the unity between theory and practice in “the philosophy of praxis,” in a critical theory with historical efficacy. However, today we find ourselves amidst the decline of bureaucratic socialism as configured by western modernity. Does it maybe signal the definitive collapse of the socialist idea alongside the crisis of Eurocentric modernity? It was modernity’s very own Eurocentric foundation that justified the distinction between “utopian socialism” and Federick Engels’ “scientific socialism.” In times when we’ve long ago surpassed positivism, mechanicism, determinism: what remains of so called “scientific socialism”? It was this foundation that justified the myth of ideological-cultural neutrality of “the development of productive forces” (Stalin), with the devastating consequences for the Marxist left, which assumed the “developmental fallacy” as a natural axis for emancipatory discourse.

The power of technocracy in conjunction with the dominance of capitalist economy, define the horizon of development for nations. On these bases is organized the predominance of transnationals in the system-world, in their close alliance with the capitalist States of the planet. The decolonizing agenda surges not only with the function of building alternatives from the South, but with the function of rearticulating the struggles of the counter hegemonic blocks of the North. We need to fine tune the nodes of a broad web made up of the space of the socialist intellectual collective, with no attachment to the thesis of the school of cadres-political formation.

Both these fields for the production of knowledge are strongly linked to speech/action in western modernity. We must liberate socialist critical thought from bureaucratic-despotic Marxism and, at the same time, we must decolonize it from Eurocentric modernism and its ideas of progress, development, history, science, technology and knowledge, among others.

Is Marxism a central component of the Latin American rebellion or is it simply a “foreign ideology,” as national populisms or authoritarian regimes proclaimed? Mariátegui was convincing in assuming a creative use of the critical Marxist tradition. He not only cited Marx, but also assumed the intellectual and moral effort of configuring his own thought, dilucidating central aspects of the indigenous problem, articulating the anticapitalist struggles, anti-imperialism and socialism, Confronting both the national populism of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre as well as the Stalinism of Victorio Codovilla, Mariátegui inaugurated the Indo-Americanization of Marxism. In Venezuela, to say Marxism was to say Marxism-Leninism. Betancourt intellectually maneuvered throughout its reaches. The socialist imaginary can be paralyzed by acritical imitation of models from bureaucratic socialism, or by its cooptation by forces promoting a national populist direction, with a project of State capitalism, as a horizon for the revolutionary simulacrum. In both cases, it is the nonexistence of the socialist intellectual collective, the condition of the historical blockade, of the slowness of changes, and of its generalized disorientation. We must wager for intellectual and moral decolonization in order to build revolutionary popular-national unity.




Translator’s note: A longer version of this essay, “El imaginario de emancipación socialista y la descolonización del pensamiento marxista (II),” was published in January.




{ Javier Biardeau, El Nacional, 21 February 2009 }