Anachronies
An implacable observer of Venezuelan reality – the Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec, who lived in Caracas for about ten years while editing the magazine Nueva Sociedad – used to tell me that our society, while seemingly modernized, thought of itself through a rural lens, as though it had no relationship to any new events. We have to recognize that in our speech, for instance, similes that have to do with flora and fauna are abundant, and we also have to remember that most Venezuelanisms, according to Ángel Rosenblat, originate in games and chance. The stamp of turning significant events into nature is so marked that even petroleum, perhaps the 20th century’s most influential milestone, rather than being seen as a rupture of the pastoral paradigm, is understood within the context of sowing it, that is, of returning it to the earth, as if a hundred years of extraction were not enough to speak to us of another reality.
This fixation could even be laughable if it didn’t mean, on the other hand, a true process of social immobilization. If everything is earth and its excretions, then cities, streets or aqueducts are third-rate solutions. Today’s urban impulse, of which the capital city is the best example, is non-existent. In this revived process of reconquering lands, even at the cost of invasions, the cities are abandoned: there is no one to theorize them, to reread them, to invest in their progress. A vegetal, heavy and preterite arcadia conquers the minds of our leaders while the cities rot. But the state of our cities is barely an example of what is actually an anti-modern thought that ends up opposing everything, instead of navigating these challenging times in order to opt for improvements and to correct excesses. And after so much excess, against any model, it ends up finding nothing.
Our civic images belong to the past, as though we had already lived them. And they belong to the past because that’s where we seemed to feel most comfortable, as if the uterus were enough shade rather than thinking of adolescence or adulthood. Seen from a psychotherapeutic angle, we prefer immaturity, inconsistency, instead of facing the challenges of later stages. Except that no responsibilities exist within immaturity, no life project, no vision for the future; nor is there any effort, tenacity or desire for improvement. Let the vegetal arcadia rule, we say to ourselves, with pastures moved by the wind and cows that graze with millenary chewing.
These ages of ours will have to be seen in a not too distant future as a true social reversal, as a fear of growth, as a rejection of the minimal modernizing impulse we harvested in previous decades. Under the narcotic spell of petroleum, betting as ever on a state economy, the sum of individual efforts evaporates without incurring in collective construction. We already know the brand: of a society that is its own prisoner, immobilized by its own lack, nostalgic for a lapsed imaginary, ignorant of the processes all modern societies set for themselves so as to be up to the task of global challenges, which translate every time into growth, as well as human development and environmental equilibrium.
To live in anachrony – that could be the slogan –, as though we were someone else’s dream, as if 25 million beings depended on the good or bad nights of a single dreamer.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 15 April 2008 }
Showing posts with label Antonio López Ortega. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Antonio López Ortega. Show all posts
4.17.2008
8.04.2007
Descapitalización / Antonio López Ortega
Decapitalization
Not just the one that has become obvious to us in recent years – of the young people who emigrate, of the professionals who line up at the consulates, of the oil workers who’ve ended up finding jobs in Canada or Qatar, of the information or communications technicians that are absorbed by multinational companies. Nor the one that relates to the field of economics, when a company stops investing because the risk or the regulations dampen even the most optimistic visions. Rather, I’m referring, as defined by the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, to “the social or cultural impoverishment of a community.” There are inner exiles that decapitalize us, works whose null reception impoverishes us, individual efforts that never connect with the country (with what we understand as the national country). People write, think or reflect for another time, maybe not this one, because we’ve now added political misery, sectarianism and so many other illnesses to human misery. The sense of belonging to a collective fades in parallel lines that run alongside nothingness and never touch or coincide.
Never has the homeland – that concept so worn out, so trampled by military boots – been so foreign to its children. The decrepit old woman marches along a path and doesn’t gather anyone in her lap. She is perfectly indifferent, alienated by the current government and avid for flesh that looks more like cannon fodder than human. Since all consensus has died and we are moved only by interests, the discourses of validation or celebration cross paths without establishing real foundations. Not even the past serves as a source from which we drink the same water: to some it seems insipid, others find it filthy, and others yet see a mere simulacrum in the transparency.
We also decapitalize ourselves when our own are only recognized abroad, beyond our borders: the Octavio Paz Prize for Eugenio Montejo, the Herralde Fiction Prize for Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Armando Reverón’s retrospective exhibit at the MoMA. During the first week in October, on the occasion of the publication of his Complete Works by the Spanish publishing house Pre-Textos, the Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas will be the guest of honor at a great tribute in Madrid’s Casa de América; poets from Spain and the world, along with well-known critics and researchers, will discuss one of the major oeuvres of our contemporary poetry. Sadly, an event of this nature is inconceivable in our country today.
It could be that Cadenas is from Barquisimeto, that he was exiled in Trinidad during the years of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, that he founded the literary group Tabla Redonda in the already distant sixties, that he wrote a startling book for readers of that era (as was the effect of Los cuadernos del destierro), that he was a professor at the Escuela de Letras at UCV until his retirement and that he’s read and translated English and American poetry like no one else among us. It could be that Cadenas has written all his books in this country, that his referents have in some way been those of this reality, that his Spanish has been the creation of our tongue, of this colloquialism, of this thought. All this history, all this forging can be recognized, we could make them our own, but they are truly enjoyed by others today, by all Hispanicity, from which we seem to be more and more absent each day. This is also a way of decapitalizing ourselves, of letting others reap the benefits of what we’ve created with so much effort with our own in mind.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 31 July 2007 }
Not just the one that has become obvious to us in recent years – of the young people who emigrate, of the professionals who line up at the consulates, of the oil workers who’ve ended up finding jobs in Canada or Qatar, of the information or communications technicians that are absorbed by multinational companies. Nor the one that relates to the field of economics, when a company stops investing because the risk or the regulations dampen even the most optimistic visions. Rather, I’m referring, as defined by the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, to “the social or cultural impoverishment of a community.” There are inner exiles that decapitalize us, works whose null reception impoverishes us, individual efforts that never connect with the country (with what we understand as the national country). People write, think or reflect for another time, maybe not this one, because we’ve now added political misery, sectarianism and so many other illnesses to human misery. The sense of belonging to a collective fades in parallel lines that run alongside nothingness and never touch or coincide.
Never has the homeland – that concept so worn out, so trampled by military boots – been so foreign to its children. The decrepit old woman marches along a path and doesn’t gather anyone in her lap. She is perfectly indifferent, alienated by the current government and avid for flesh that looks more like cannon fodder than human. Since all consensus has died and we are moved only by interests, the discourses of validation or celebration cross paths without establishing real foundations. Not even the past serves as a source from which we drink the same water: to some it seems insipid, others find it filthy, and others yet see a mere simulacrum in the transparency.
We also decapitalize ourselves when our own are only recognized abroad, beyond our borders: the Octavio Paz Prize for Eugenio Montejo, the Herralde Fiction Prize for Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Armando Reverón’s retrospective exhibit at the MoMA. During the first week in October, on the occasion of the publication of his Complete Works by the Spanish publishing house Pre-Textos, the Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas will be the guest of honor at a great tribute in Madrid’s Casa de América; poets from Spain and the world, along with well-known critics and researchers, will discuss one of the major oeuvres of our contemporary poetry. Sadly, an event of this nature is inconceivable in our country today.
It could be that Cadenas is from Barquisimeto, that he was exiled in Trinidad during the years of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, that he founded the literary group Tabla Redonda in the already distant sixties, that he wrote a startling book for readers of that era (as was the effect of Los cuadernos del destierro), that he was a professor at the Escuela de Letras at UCV until his retirement and that he’s read and translated English and American poetry like no one else among us. It could be that Cadenas has written all his books in this country, that his referents have in some way been those of this reality, that his Spanish has been the creation of our tongue, of this colloquialism, of this thought. All this history, all this forging can be recognized, we could make them our own, but they are truly enjoyed by others today, by all Hispanicity, from which we seem to be more and more absent each day. This is also a way of decapitalizing ourselves, of letting others reap the benefits of what we’ve created with so much effort with our own in mind.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 31 July 2007 }
6.21.2007
Regencia / Antonio López Ortega
Regency
A few historians have wanted to recognize the university and the army as the two most important traditional breeding grounds for modern political leadership in Venezuela. This could be because both institutions have always achieved a consistent balance between social and regional representation. In simple terms, army and university are profoundly representative since they’ve concentrated within their core, origins, creeds, social origin and the desire for self-improvement. That’s where the similarities cease, of course, because the ends and means of both institutions eventually branch off in opposite lines. On one side (army), concentration of power, verticality, uniformity of visions. On the other (university), expansion of knowledge, horizontality, diversity of visions. The other big difference is that the mixture of university (as the civil estate that it is) and politics is not only natural but favors the student (many political leaders start out by being leaders at their own universities). While the mixture of army and politics, at least in what is understood as modern democracy, is always explosive, maybe because the military estate, bound by specific jurisdictions, must always be subordinated to the civil estate.
The military appetite for power – a specter that, as Ramón J. Velásquez would point out, we thought was buried since 1958 – continues to thrive in contemporary Venezuela and conceals, as it did in the past, a profound disdain for civil forms, which are always more sinuous and forced when the hour comes to find a necessary democratic consensus. But what is most difficult for us to recognize is, when the decline of the civil estate – in other words, the political estate in effect since 1958 – ended up imploding and allowed, at a point of extreme emptiness, the entrance of military jurisdiction as the only sustenance of power in a hopeless Venezuela. Whoever can rewind back to the year 1998, when the electoral choices of the common citizen were split between an ex-beauty queen and an ex-coup plotter, will be able to see the abyss we faced. That a historic party such as Acción Democrática, kidnapped by a civil caudillo with presidential appetites, could have wagered on a clearly losing option with only weeks to go before elections speaks of an inexpressible decrepitude.
In view of what is evident since 1998 – the militarization of politics, of the forms of governance, of public habits, of social orders, of governmental terminology –, it’s worth asking ourselves if what we now have as a form of government is actually simply an exercise in regency, that is, a period estranged from conventional political forms, a hole in the democratic road that’s temporarily filled in while we wait for the historical line of succession to recover its sense of orientation and purpose. At least it would be a benevolent explanation, so as to not speak of the abuses and the patrimonial losses of the nation. Since civil power, incapable of regenerating its leadership, fell apart in all aspects, the military estate, with its habitual appetite, has come to take hold of its possessions like a regent who occupies a throne.
It could be that the real sovereign power of the people hasn’t reached adulthood, but its growth is unstoppable. The return to the university as a political breeding ground is barely a sign of the slow renovation of the civil estate. And in that variegated mixture of identities, conditions, regions, social extracts and sexes at least we can perceive an identifying principle capable of being a nucleus for a Venezuela with no need for militias or uniforms to imagine a shared destiny.
Translator’s note: Antonio López Ortega was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he’ll use for travel to the U.S. and England in preparation for writing a novel.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 19 June 2007 }
A few historians have wanted to recognize the university and the army as the two most important traditional breeding grounds for modern political leadership in Venezuela. This could be because both institutions have always achieved a consistent balance between social and regional representation. In simple terms, army and university are profoundly representative since they’ve concentrated within their core, origins, creeds, social origin and the desire for self-improvement. That’s where the similarities cease, of course, because the ends and means of both institutions eventually branch off in opposite lines. On one side (army), concentration of power, verticality, uniformity of visions. On the other (university), expansion of knowledge, horizontality, diversity of visions. The other big difference is that the mixture of university (as the civil estate that it is) and politics is not only natural but favors the student (many political leaders start out by being leaders at their own universities). While the mixture of army and politics, at least in what is understood as modern democracy, is always explosive, maybe because the military estate, bound by specific jurisdictions, must always be subordinated to the civil estate.
The military appetite for power – a specter that, as Ramón J. Velásquez would point out, we thought was buried since 1958 – continues to thrive in contemporary Venezuela and conceals, as it did in the past, a profound disdain for civil forms, which are always more sinuous and forced when the hour comes to find a necessary democratic consensus. But what is most difficult for us to recognize is, when the decline of the civil estate – in other words, the political estate in effect since 1958 – ended up imploding and allowed, at a point of extreme emptiness, the entrance of military jurisdiction as the only sustenance of power in a hopeless Venezuela. Whoever can rewind back to the year 1998, when the electoral choices of the common citizen were split between an ex-beauty queen and an ex-coup plotter, will be able to see the abyss we faced. That a historic party such as Acción Democrática, kidnapped by a civil caudillo with presidential appetites, could have wagered on a clearly losing option with only weeks to go before elections speaks of an inexpressible decrepitude.
In view of what is evident since 1998 – the militarization of politics, of the forms of governance, of public habits, of social orders, of governmental terminology –, it’s worth asking ourselves if what we now have as a form of government is actually simply an exercise in regency, that is, a period estranged from conventional political forms, a hole in the democratic road that’s temporarily filled in while we wait for the historical line of succession to recover its sense of orientation and purpose. At least it would be a benevolent explanation, so as to not speak of the abuses and the patrimonial losses of the nation. Since civil power, incapable of regenerating its leadership, fell apart in all aspects, the military estate, with its habitual appetite, has come to take hold of its possessions like a regent who occupies a throne.
It could be that the real sovereign power of the people hasn’t reached adulthood, but its growth is unstoppable. The return to the university as a political breeding ground is barely a sign of the slow renovation of the civil estate. And in that variegated mixture of identities, conditions, regions, social extracts and sexes at least we can perceive an identifying principle capable of being a nucleus for a Venezuela with no need for militias or uniforms to imagine a shared destiny.
Translator’s note: Antonio López Ortega was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he’ll use for travel to the U.S. and England in preparation for writing a novel.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 19 June 2007 }
6.07.2007
Las otras voces / Antonio López Ortega
The Other Voices
With the recent disappearance of the writer Elizabeth Schön (1921-2007) we’ve possibly lost the last great Venezuelan poetic voice of the twenties. Along with her, just a few years ago, we also lost Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922-2003), whose legacy and influence continue to grow continentally due to the avant-garde accent of his voice, its sonorous device, its perennially fresh and renewed vision. Schön belonged to an airy, metaphysical current of Venezuelan poetry. It has been a marginal current, but a powerful one nonetheless. Poets like Ida Gramcko (1924-1994), Alfredo Silva Estrada or Alfredo Chacón emanate from that current and evolve toward other horizons.
These deaths raise the question of their work’s dissemination, and the situation is uneven in this field. To speak of the projection of Venezuelan poetry is to speak of an uneven process, which when achieved is due more to the efforts of the poets themselves than to the publishing houses or public policies. In 1988, under the Siruela imprint in Spain, an anthology of Ramos Sucre appeared called Las formas del fuego. Beginning with that pioneering gesture, there have been a succession of editions or translations in various countries, with greater or lesser resonance. The complete poems of Sánchez Peláez, for example, was taken up by the prestigious Lumen imprint in 2004 and today it remains the great Venezuelan poet’s definitive text. The thirties generation seems to be living through a stellar moment – especially if we pause to consider the work of Rafael Cadenas and Eugenio Montejo –, since their editions and recognition abroad are obligatory references. But the forties poets – such José Barroeta (1942-2006) or Hanni Ossott (1946-2002) – already have editions of their complete work in important Spanish editorial houses. The list would be longer because of the additional efforts needed in regards to the arrangement and promotion of poetic oeuvres, and not only in the case of Elizabeth Schön, as necessary as they are deserved. Closer poets whose deaths interrupted mature works – such as Miyó Vestrini (1938-1991) or Elí Galindo (1947-2006) – would also deserve this distinction.
The voice of the poets – we’ve known this since Homer – always moves beneath historical currents and vicissitudes. It is the other voice of societies: the one that could be the equivalent of the voice of the unconscious on the psychic plane, always reverberating beneath thought and ideas.
It is the voice that remains, that belongs to deep humanity, and the one that gathers the misfortunes, accidents or phantasmagoria of human desires. The voice of the poets survives while historical pomp disappears or ends up trapped in marble. One could say that History varies, for good or ill, due to intrinsic reasons. But facing variety, which is inconstant by nature, it’s good to hold up the invariability of poetry, the voice that remains.
All cultures, in their most extreme or compromised moments, have known to quench their thirst in those fountains so as to recognize, in their misplacement, what has nourished the past and will nourish the future. This is why we must return to the poets: to recognize the trunk from which the branches flourish, to reconcile ourselves with the word that doesn’t stain or diminish itself each day, to seek refuge in the soul and to understand that suffering, no matter how prolonged it might be, is always fleeting.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 5 June 2007 }
With the recent disappearance of the writer Elizabeth Schön (1921-2007) we’ve possibly lost the last great Venezuelan poetic voice of the twenties. Along with her, just a few years ago, we also lost Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922-2003), whose legacy and influence continue to grow continentally due to the avant-garde accent of his voice, its sonorous device, its perennially fresh and renewed vision. Schön belonged to an airy, metaphysical current of Venezuelan poetry. It has been a marginal current, but a powerful one nonetheless. Poets like Ida Gramcko (1924-1994), Alfredo Silva Estrada or Alfredo Chacón emanate from that current and evolve toward other horizons.
These deaths raise the question of their work’s dissemination, and the situation is uneven in this field. To speak of the projection of Venezuelan poetry is to speak of an uneven process, which when achieved is due more to the efforts of the poets themselves than to the publishing houses or public policies. In 1988, under the Siruela imprint in Spain, an anthology of Ramos Sucre appeared called Las formas del fuego. Beginning with that pioneering gesture, there have been a succession of editions or translations in various countries, with greater or lesser resonance. The complete poems of Sánchez Peláez, for example, was taken up by the prestigious Lumen imprint in 2004 and today it remains the great Venezuelan poet’s definitive text. The thirties generation seems to be living through a stellar moment – especially if we pause to consider the work of Rafael Cadenas and Eugenio Montejo –, since their editions and recognition abroad are obligatory references. But the forties poets – such José Barroeta (1942-2006) or Hanni Ossott (1946-2002) – already have editions of their complete work in important Spanish editorial houses. The list would be longer because of the additional efforts needed in regards to the arrangement and promotion of poetic oeuvres, and not only in the case of Elizabeth Schön, as necessary as they are deserved. Closer poets whose deaths interrupted mature works – such as Miyó Vestrini (1938-1991) or Elí Galindo (1947-2006) – would also deserve this distinction.
The voice of the poets – we’ve known this since Homer – always moves beneath historical currents and vicissitudes. It is the other voice of societies: the one that could be the equivalent of the voice of the unconscious on the psychic plane, always reverberating beneath thought and ideas.
It is the voice that remains, that belongs to deep humanity, and the one that gathers the misfortunes, accidents or phantasmagoria of human desires. The voice of the poets survives while historical pomp disappears or ends up trapped in marble. One could say that History varies, for good or ill, due to intrinsic reasons. But facing variety, which is inconstant by nature, it’s good to hold up the invariability of poetry, the voice that remains.
All cultures, in their most extreme or compromised moments, have known to quench their thirst in those fountains so as to recognize, in their misplacement, what has nourished the past and will nourish the future. This is why we must return to the poets: to recognize the trunk from which the branches flourish, to reconcile ourselves with the word that doesn’t stain or diminish itself each day, to seek refuge in the soul and to understand that suffering, no matter how prolonged it might be, is always fleeting.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 5 June 2007 }
4.04.2007
Desde la periferia / Antonio López Ortega
From the Periphery
In a certain manner, we are aging. That is, part of the country is aging, quickly, without being able to contribute anything to what we might call the national destiny. It is a crude sensation, a real one, which installs itself in the collective spirit, like a sledge hammer that falls from the sky. If what certain theorists define as social capital is measured by the highest social consensus, we obviously live in a dismantled society, where every sector looks in a different direction. Although it sounds like a euphemism, the old State occasionally exhibited an instrument that in its own way offered a vision: the Plan for the Nation. Something that allowed planning, getting ahead, glimpsing the future. What might be our Plan for the Nation today? Nothing we might share as a collective. Or in any case, nothing that we know of, and if it did exist it would be in the hands of a small sect.
There is a centripetal, vertiginous effect in Venezuelan society. A whirlwind takes us on an unknown route, amidst sonorous bursts, amidst the whips of shadows, and no one is surprised any more. Whoever shows up with any state of consciousness only procures a way of retreating, thinking the whirlwind won’t drag them away completely. This is a passing illusion that allows a temporary reassurance. The most benign, those who have dreamed of a country different from the actual one and the one in the past, fight to participate in some way – with ideas, with reflections, with projects –, but the whirlwind ends up repelling them because it only feeds on discards. This is the hour of followers, not thoughtful beings. A fundamental value of modern democracy – participation – is exercised in a slanted manner: those who don't question participate.
Not participating is a way of aging, of dying – at least democratically –. The sensation of being on the periphery, of not being able to contribute, of not finding channels, separates more than one and it disintegrates us as a Nation; it is the families that emigrate, the professionals who leave, the young people who seek their destiny elsewhere. Not believing in the country, seeing no future in the country… – Therein lies our society’s greatest defect –. At a moment that is propitious for invoking all social forces, for creating the greatest consensus, for gathering the best talent, we have veered off on an unproductive and anachronistic short cut: division, pugnacity, debasement. The opportunity for a quantitative leap presented itself, possibly the only one available to us in the final years of the 20th century to create an economic paradigm different from the petroleum-dependent one. But today we are more of the same: wasteful, pretentious, inconsequential. Of past kindnesses, none remain; but of errors, all the possible and imaginable ones.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 3 April 2007 }
In a certain manner, we are aging. That is, part of the country is aging, quickly, without being able to contribute anything to what we might call the national destiny. It is a crude sensation, a real one, which installs itself in the collective spirit, like a sledge hammer that falls from the sky. If what certain theorists define as social capital is measured by the highest social consensus, we obviously live in a dismantled society, where every sector looks in a different direction. Although it sounds like a euphemism, the old State occasionally exhibited an instrument that in its own way offered a vision: the Plan for the Nation. Something that allowed planning, getting ahead, glimpsing the future. What might be our Plan for the Nation today? Nothing we might share as a collective. Or in any case, nothing that we know of, and if it did exist it would be in the hands of a small sect.
There is a centripetal, vertiginous effect in Venezuelan society. A whirlwind takes us on an unknown route, amidst sonorous bursts, amidst the whips of shadows, and no one is surprised any more. Whoever shows up with any state of consciousness only procures a way of retreating, thinking the whirlwind won’t drag them away completely. This is a passing illusion that allows a temporary reassurance. The most benign, those who have dreamed of a country different from the actual one and the one in the past, fight to participate in some way – with ideas, with reflections, with projects –, but the whirlwind ends up repelling them because it only feeds on discards. This is the hour of followers, not thoughtful beings. A fundamental value of modern democracy – participation – is exercised in a slanted manner: those who don't question participate.
Not participating is a way of aging, of dying – at least democratically –. The sensation of being on the periphery, of not being able to contribute, of not finding channels, separates more than one and it disintegrates us as a Nation; it is the families that emigrate, the professionals who leave, the young people who seek their destiny elsewhere. Not believing in the country, seeing no future in the country… – Therein lies our society’s greatest defect –. At a moment that is propitious for invoking all social forces, for creating the greatest consensus, for gathering the best talent, we have veered off on an unproductive and anachronistic short cut: division, pugnacity, debasement. The opportunity for a quantitative leap presented itself, possibly the only one available to us in the final years of the 20th century to create an economic paradigm different from the petroleum-dependent one. But today we are more of the same: wasteful, pretentious, inconsequential. Of past kindnesses, none remain; but of errors, all the possible and imaginable ones.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 3 April 2007 }
6.28.2006
El mestizaje como legado / Antonio López Ortega
Mestizaje as a Legacy
In these days honoring the centennial of Arturo Uslar Pietri's birth, in which luckily many cultural institutions and universities from all corners of the country have participated, we are once again obliged to ponder the value the master gave to the concept of "mestizaje" in defining Latin America's cultural specificity. Obviously, the concept is not of his exclusive invention nor does it belong exclusively to his time. We find antecedents in the texts of the Emancipation, in Simón Rodríguez, in Andrés Bello, and later on in a large portion of the intellectual developments of the XIX and XX centuries. The novels of Rómulo Gallegos, to give one example, are a cultural wager that makes a melting pot of cultures live alongside each other with coinciding vocations. The union of opposites, or of differentiated elements, can be seen in the founding doctrines of the Republic, and fortunately the constitutions we've had have continued to employ the term as a defining lever.
The situation is no different in Latin America, where the great thinkers and artists have established in mestizaje the foundation for their ideas and the fountain of their prodigious images. From José Vasconcelos to Alejo Carpentier, from Octavio Paz to Carlos Fuentes, cultural mestizaje has been seen mostly as a discursive strength, as a unique gift of our historic specificity, as a legacy that is profusely enriched by cosmovisions. A narrator as curious as Juan José Arreola went further and sustained that our mestizaje could not be circumscribed merely to the constitutive trilogy of the Indian, the African or the Spanish.
Through Spain we inherit—he acknowledged—the Islamic culture, the imprint of the Visigoths, the final consequences of the Roman empire. The simple culture of the Iberian settlers, previous to the Roman conquests, survives 2,000 years later in our Andes in a word as beautiful as "páramo." Moreover, in idiomatic peaks such as the work of José Lezama Lima, the concept of "Baroque culture" would seem to be an evolutionary state of mestizaje. According to the Antillean master, the imago is the expressive tool with the greatest power of aesthetic concentration. And that concentration is inadmissible without the synthetic faculty of mestizaje.
By cultural mestizaje we should understand mixture, crossing, synthesis, the cannibalization of certain senses by others. It is found in customs, in habits, in ways of dressing, in the kitchen, in music, in urban rites, in country chores. It is found in our prodigious faces, which range from an Andean austerity to a Barlovento voluptiousness. It is found in our beliefs, in our religious faith.
It is found in our family values, in what we've inherited from ancestral cultures and in what we've adapted from outside cultures. A certain cosmopolitan vocation, present from the moment Venezuela follows the literature of the Enlightenment, provides a doctrinal base for the Emancipation, and it also speaks of a culture open to influences and crossings. An expression of traditional music like the Veleño drums, from La Vela de Coro, is inexplicable without the human, commercial and cultural trafficking that historically have characterized the relations between the coasts of Falcón state and the Dutch Antilles; and another such as the Guayana Calypso is inconceivable without the crosssing of influences and the migratory waves that went from the British or French Antilles to the mining town of El Callao.
A food historian such as José Rafael Lovera reminds us that the similarities between the Veracruz tamal and our December hayaca could perhaps be due to the commercial traffic during colonial times that carried Venezuelan cocoa to the ports of Veracruz and brought back Mexican dishes and spices to the shores of La Guaira.
During times when the temptation of the originary consumes wills, passions and false proclamations, it is to our benefit to keep in mind the intellectual and human effort we have spent over several centuries defining the mestizo condition of our culture. The supposed original purity—which leads people to knock down the statue of Columbus, to replace institutional logos with Panare tribal ideograms or to defend a concept of the endogenous that implies pure races and cultures—reminds us what Nazism postulated about a supposed Aryan purity. Facing reductionist temptations, which truly reflect a profound ignorance of our cultural processes, we should remember along with Carlos Fuentes that the most prodigious experiment in mestizaje in our continent has been the reappropriation of the Spanish language. To write in the Spanish of the Americas is the equivalent of placing all our cosmovisions on the sacrificial altar. But from that arduous, substantial effort, which invents unforeseen images and pushes syntactical properties to extremes, has surged one of the world's greatest literatures.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 27 June 2006 }
In these days honoring the centennial of Arturo Uslar Pietri's birth, in which luckily many cultural institutions and universities from all corners of the country have participated, we are once again obliged to ponder the value the master gave to the concept of "mestizaje" in defining Latin America's cultural specificity. Obviously, the concept is not of his exclusive invention nor does it belong exclusively to his time. We find antecedents in the texts of the Emancipation, in Simón Rodríguez, in Andrés Bello, and later on in a large portion of the intellectual developments of the XIX and XX centuries. The novels of Rómulo Gallegos, to give one example, are a cultural wager that makes a melting pot of cultures live alongside each other with coinciding vocations. The union of opposites, or of differentiated elements, can be seen in the founding doctrines of the Republic, and fortunately the constitutions we've had have continued to employ the term as a defining lever.
The situation is no different in Latin America, where the great thinkers and artists have established in mestizaje the foundation for their ideas and the fountain of their prodigious images. From José Vasconcelos to Alejo Carpentier, from Octavio Paz to Carlos Fuentes, cultural mestizaje has been seen mostly as a discursive strength, as a unique gift of our historic specificity, as a legacy that is profusely enriched by cosmovisions. A narrator as curious as Juan José Arreola went further and sustained that our mestizaje could not be circumscribed merely to the constitutive trilogy of the Indian, the African or the Spanish.
Through Spain we inherit—he acknowledged—the Islamic culture, the imprint of the Visigoths, the final consequences of the Roman empire. The simple culture of the Iberian settlers, previous to the Roman conquests, survives 2,000 years later in our Andes in a word as beautiful as "páramo." Moreover, in idiomatic peaks such as the work of José Lezama Lima, the concept of "Baroque culture" would seem to be an evolutionary state of mestizaje. According to the Antillean master, the imago is the expressive tool with the greatest power of aesthetic concentration. And that concentration is inadmissible without the synthetic faculty of mestizaje.
By cultural mestizaje we should understand mixture, crossing, synthesis, the cannibalization of certain senses by others. It is found in customs, in habits, in ways of dressing, in the kitchen, in music, in urban rites, in country chores. It is found in our prodigious faces, which range from an Andean austerity to a Barlovento voluptiousness. It is found in our beliefs, in our religious faith.
It is found in our family values, in what we've inherited from ancestral cultures and in what we've adapted from outside cultures. A certain cosmopolitan vocation, present from the moment Venezuela follows the literature of the Enlightenment, provides a doctrinal base for the Emancipation, and it also speaks of a culture open to influences and crossings. An expression of traditional music like the Veleño drums, from La Vela de Coro, is inexplicable without the human, commercial and cultural trafficking that historically have characterized the relations between the coasts of Falcón state and the Dutch Antilles; and another such as the Guayana Calypso is inconceivable without the crosssing of influences and the migratory waves that went from the British or French Antilles to the mining town of El Callao.
A food historian such as José Rafael Lovera reminds us that the similarities between the Veracruz tamal and our December hayaca could perhaps be due to the commercial traffic during colonial times that carried Venezuelan cocoa to the ports of Veracruz and brought back Mexican dishes and spices to the shores of La Guaira.
During times when the temptation of the originary consumes wills, passions and false proclamations, it is to our benefit to keep in mind the intellectual and human effort we have spent over several centuries defining the mestizo condition of our culture. The supposed original purity—which leads people to knock down the statue of Columbus, to replace institutional logos with Panare tribal ideograms or to defend a concept of the endogenous that implies pure races and cultures—reminds us what Nazism postulated about a supposed Aryan purity. Facing reductionist temptations, which truly reflect a profound ignorance of our cultural processes, we should remember along with Carlos Fuentes that the most prodigious experiment in mestizaje in our continent has been the reappropriation of the Spanish language. To write in the Spanish of the Americas is the equivalent of placing all our cosmovisions on the sacrificial altar. But from that arduous, substantial effort, which invents unforeseen images and pushes syntactical properties to extremes, has surged one of the world's greatest literatures.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 27 June 2006 }
4.04.2006
Dos países / Antonio López Ortega
Two Countries
Two countries exist, at the same time.
One is the most visible, the vociferous, the forcibly media-driven, the one that postulates itself as real, with its front page headlines and its crime pages. It is the country of misery, of the daily emergency, of inefficacy taken to its most exquisite extremes, of the operations that always come to the rescue of habitual chores. It is the country that displays the worst of our culture: corruption, immorality, spiritual lowliness, Venezuelan craftiness. It is the country that is closest to the State, or perhaps more accurately to Power, that thrives thanks to public funds, that displays a wealth of dubious origin, that elevates its arrogance above the collective miseries or the infinite ignorance.
Actually, it is not a country too far removed from the one the voter repudiated and finally condemned in the ballots in 1998, in hopes of a nobler public scene, one that is more transparent and conscious of its own goals. This country is bicephalous: what it postulates in its discourse, always with fanfare, is undone by its actions, or by their absence. It is a deceitful, or perhaps mythomaniacal, country that believes the word suffices in forging realities. It is a country that, in its most delirious facets, dreams of continental integrations, only to settle for shortcuts, or that strives to unsheathe eighteenth-century swords without realizing the new century is carrying a new energy paradigm under its arms.
While the country of imperial vocation, with its Cyclops body and clay feet, sates itself with its tepid adventures or with its street corner dreams, another country, forcibly realer and more desperate, survives it. It is a country closer to the social act, occult or half-buried, suffering and disoriented, that clamors for a more benevolent reality, that dreams a future for its children, that still believes in the effort or nobility of work. This country goes below, like a subterranean current. It is the historical country, that survives every sudden attack, that resuscitates after each ruin. It is the real country, with its vicissitudes and limitations on its shoulders, with its beliefs and disinterest, with its imperturbable values, that sometimes lets the other live for it while in its depths it harvests a dream of alternatives.
In its most visible or desperate postures, this country protests, closes down a street, makes demands of an undelivered housing plan, aspires to a job offer, offers bodies and victims so the delinquency that decimates it might be sated.
The grandiloquent country goes one way and the quotidian country goes the other. They walk on opposite trails and they never meet. The first uses a blind man’s stick, believing it represents everything, that it concentrates everything, while the other wanders in disbelief, constructing another sense of reality, or perhaps leaving tracks for the future. Since its condition is one of infinite waiting, it organizes itself in its own way to survive the adverse times: it is the one that flowers in an apartment building collective, in a neighborhood association, in a citizens assembly; it is the one that restores an abandoned school or plants trees in an empty lot, it is the one of the children that grow and are shaped in the net of the Fe y Alegría foundation, or in the System of Youth Orchestras.
In its moments of highest consciousness, when despair does not torture and tear it apart, this country joins up with effort, daily work, the education of its children and social reconstruction. It is not the country of omnivorous Power, which turns thieves into magistrates or transforms soldiers into delinquents. It does not have the authority to subvert order, nor to give other names to extreme realities like the poverty that grows or the delinquency that increases. There is no dissolving discourse, nor any magician’s gestures, in this quotidian, street-wise country, that fights with grit so that life does not fall from its hands, like water running nowhere.
That one country might go to encounter the other, like two reconciled brothers, would be the greatest of omens. That the powerful, self-sufficient country might show a minimal gesture of humility and join with the real country, so as to be one, would be an event of major design. It is entirely desirable, but perhaps it is not a possibility. These separations, however, these divorces without the separation of belongings—History confirms this—, have their ends, have their limitations. Either a nation is the consensus of the collectives, or it is no such thing. The rooms might be different but the house remains the same. And unlike what happens in “Casa tomada”—the memorable short story by Julio Cortázar—, no one can go out into the street with immunity and throw the key in the gutter.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 4 April 2006 }
Two countries exist, at the same time.
One is the most visible, the vociferous, the forcibly media-driven, the one that postulates itself as real, with its front page headlines and its crime pages. It is the country of misery, of the daily emergency, of inefficacy taken to its most exquisite extremes, of the operations that always come to the rescue of habitual chores. It is the country that displays the worst of our culture: corruption, immorality, spiritual lowliness, Venezuelan craftiness. It is the country that is closest to the State, or perhaps more accurately to Power, that thrives thanks to public funds, that displays a wealth of dubious origin, that elevates its arrogance above the collective miseries or the infinite ignorance.
Actually, it is not a country too far removed from the one the voter repudiated and finally condemned in the ballots in 1998, in hopes of a nobler public scene, one that is more transparent and conscious of its own goals. This country is bicephalous: what it postulates in its discourse, always with fanfare, is undone by its actions, or by their absence. It is a deceitful, or perhaps mythomaniacal, country that believes the word suffices in forging realities. It is a country that, in its most delirious facets, dreams of continental integrations, only to settle for shortcuts, or that strives to unsheathe eighteenth-century swords without realizing the new century is carrying a new energy paradigm under its arms.
While the country of imperial vocation, with its Cyclops body and clay feet, sates itself with its tepid adventures or with its street corner dreams, another country, forcibly realer and more desperate, survives it. It is a country closer to the social act, occult or half-buried, suffering and disoriented, that clamors for a more benevolent reality, that dreams a future for its children, that still believes in the effort or nobility of work. This country goes below, like a subterranean current. It is the historical country, that survives every sudden attack, that resuscitates after each ruin. It is the real country, with its vicissitudes and limitations on its shoulders, with its beliefs and disinterest, with its imperturbable values, that sometimes lets the other live for it while in its depths it harvests a dream of alternatives.
In its most visible or desperate postures, this country protests, closes down a street, makes demands of an undelivered housing plan, aspires to a job offer, offers bodies and victims so the delinquency that decimates it might be sated.
The grandiloquent country goes one way and the quotidian country goes the other. They walk on opposite trails and they never meet. The first uses a blind man’s stick, believing it represents everything, that it concentrates everything, while the other wanders in disbelief, constructing another sense of reality, or perhaps leaving tracks for the future. Since its condition is one of infinite waiting, it organizes itself in its own way to survive the adverse times: it is the one that flowers in an apartment building collective, in a neighborhood association, in a citizens assembly; it is the one that restores an abandoned school or plants trees in an empty lot, it is the one of the children that grow and are shaped in the net of the Fe y Alegría foundation, or in the System of Youth Orchestras.
In its moments of highest consciousness, when despair does not torture and tear it apart, this country joins up with effort, daily work, the education of its children and social reconstruction. It is not the country of omnivorous Power, which turns thieves into magistrates or transforms soldiers into delinquents. It does not have the authority to subvert order, nor to give other names to extreme realities like the poverty that grows or the delinquency that increases. There is no dissolving discourse, nor any magician’s gestures, in this quotidian, street-wise country, that fights with grit so that life does not fall from its hands, like water running nowhere.
That one country might go to encounter the other, like two reconciled brothers, would be the greatest of omens. That the powerful, self-sufficient country might show a minimal gesture of humility and join with the real country, so as to be one, would be an event of major design. It is entirely desirable, but perhaps it is not a possibility. These separations, however, these divorces without the separation of belongings—History confirms this—, have their ends, have their limitations. Either a nation is the consensus of the collectives, or it is no such thing. The rooms might be different but the house remains the same. And unlike what happens in “Casa tomada”—the memorable short story by Julio Cortázar—, no one can go out into the street with immunity and throw the key in the gutter.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 4 April 2006 }
1.31.2006
Sergio Pitol, Mérida y el Cervantes / Antonio López Ortega
Sergio Pitol, Mérida and the Cervantes
For Diómedes Castro
A ventured thesis: the 2005 Cervantes Prize recently granted to the great Mexican novelist Sergio Pitol marks the first distinction for a Latin American writer of the post-Boom. Until now, in one way or another all the protagonists of that prodigious generation had been awarded a prize but with Pitol we move to another bench. It is not a matter of distinguishing authors with an encyclopedic breath but rather of stopping to appreciate the narrative meanderings the Boom's results went on creating or discarding by the wayside.
With Pitol we celebrate the peak of what, in words better spoken by Deleuze, would be a minor literature. That is, a literature more nourished by periferies than by centers, more in love with brief formats than extensive ones, more friendly with the fragment than with the maxim, closer to exploration and more skeptical of discoveries.
With Pitol, also, by accident or not, a paternity is discerned: that of the new Hispanic literature, the one with the most avant-garde accent, since authors such as Enrique Vila-Matas, César Aira, Juan Villoro, Roberto Bolaño and a few others have drunk from his springs to augment their own riverbeds.
By the light of the recent edition of El mago de Viena, a type of literary diary in which Pitol recounts periods from his beginnings as an unknown writer until now, it is worth pondering the influence that Venezuela and some of its writers had on those more than doubtful origins. The mark of a journey between Havana and the port of La Guaira, on board the cruise ship Francesco Morossini, fixes what was the writing of his first "passable but a bit pompous" poem for the critical eye of the budding poet. Pitol recognizes it wasn't in Tepoztlán—"some four years after that first trip to the Caribbean"—where he began his work but rather on that almost forgotten journey where he aspired to "describe the qualities of the ocean, its music, its brilliance and opacity and the contrast of its magnitude with the diminutive, greyish and atonal destiny of man." Once on dry land, a letter of introduction from Alfonso Reyes allows him to establish contact with Don Mariano Picón Salas and, through the latter's interventions, to attend a reading circle every Saturday curated by the poet Ida Gramcko in her own house with the occasional presence of Antonia Palacios, Oswaldo Trejo, Salvador Garmendia and Picón Salas himself. Pitol also recalls the long stay in a mansion in Los Chorros, at that time in the outskirts of Caracas, where he dedicated himself to reading and, possibly, writing "horrendous Dadaist poems" he later discarded.
But his second Venezuelan chapter, or at least the most significant one (literarily speaking) since his Caribbean journey, was undoubtedly the Bienal de Literatura Mariano Picón Salas celebrated in Venezuela's Mérida in 1993. A crucible of crossed literary destinies was created in that Andean city and marked Hispanic American fiction of that moment in no small dimension. The Spanish editor Jorge Herralde has said that, because of that encounter, Pitol met César Aira and tried to introduce his work in Spain. Likewise, Vila-Matas mentions that the Mérida Biennial allowed him to talk with Pitol like never before and sponsor a major diffusion of his work in penninsular publishing houses. Attending the same event in 1993 were Juan Villoro and the recently deceased Colombian novelist R.H. Moreno Durán, followers as well—along with the Venezuelans José Balza, Victoria de Stefano and Ednodio Quintero—, of the great master who is honored today. Pitol presided, without intending to—his humble giant's silhouette always placed itself in front of false flattery—, a movement in gestation whose lights we now see spread across the Ibero American verbal continent.
Sergio Pitol has affirmed: "Language, form, plot appear simultaneously and from the start; each entity goes along leading the others, and the pulsations, tensions, fissures and reconciliations produced in them allow me to build an oblique, oneiric, delirious storytelling vision, and to achieve an open and happily conjectural ending." This could be, more or less, the definition of an ars poetica that many of the best Latin American novelists of the moment follow.
I am referring to a tendency that doesn't wager only for history, that broaches the narrative pulse as an entity, that intuits within the narrative manner the very development of the story.
This lineage belongs to Pitol and his legacy is carried today by the continent's new voices. It is not insignificant that the Cervantes Prize has noticed this: by distinguishing Pitol the critical judgement takes a triple leap and puts itself at the tip of the spear. On few but wise occasions, consecration can also be a figure from the avant-garde.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 13 December 2005 }
For Diómedes Castro
A ventured thesis: the 2005 Cervantes Prize recently granted to the great Mexican novelist Sergio Pitol marks the first distinction for a Latin American writer of the post-Boom. Until now, in one way or another all the protagonists of that prodigious generation had been awarded a prize but with Pitol we move to another bench. It is not a matter of distinguishing authors with an encyclopedic breath but rather of stopping to appreciate the narrative meanderings the Boom's results went on creating or discarding by the wayside.
With Pitol we celebrate the peak of what, in words better spoken by Deleuze, would be a minor literature. That is, a literature more nourished by periferies than by centers, more in love with brief formats than extensive ones, more friendly with the fragment than with the maxim, closer to exploration and more skeptical of discoveries.
With Pitol, also, by accident or not, a paternity is discerned: that of the new Hispanic literature, the one with the most avant-garde accent, since authors such as Enrique Vila-Matas, César Aira, Juan Villoro, Roberto Bolaño and a few others have drunk from his springs to augment their own riverbeds.
By the light of the recent edition of El mago de Viena, a type of literary diary in which Pitol recounts periods from his beginnings as an unknown writer until now, it is worth pondering the influence that Venezuela and some of its writers had on those more than doubtful origins. The mark of a journey between Havana and the port of La Guaira, on board the cruise ship Francesco Morossini, fixes what was the writing of his first "passable but a bit pompous" poem for the critical eye of the budding poet. Pitol recognizes it wasn't in Tepoztlán—"some four years after that first trip to the Caribbean"—where he began his work but rather on that almost forgotten journey where he aspired to "describe the qualities of the ocean, its music, its brilliance and opacity and the contrast of its magnitude with the diminutive, greyish and atonal destiny of man." Once on dry land, a letter of introduction from Alfonso Reyes allows him to establish contact with Don Mariano Picón Salas and, through the latter's interventions, to attend a reading circle every Saturday curated by the poet Ida Gramcko in her own house with the occasional presence of Antonia Palacios, Oswaldo Trejo, Salvador Garmendia and Picón Salas himself. Pitol also recalls the long stay in a mansion in Los Chorros, at that time in the outskirts of Caracas, where he dedicated himself to reading and, possibly, writing "horrendous Dadaist poems" he later discarded.
But his second Venezuelan chapter, or at least the most significant one (literarily speaking) since his Caribbean journey, was undoubtedly the Bienal de Literatura Mariano Picón Salas celebrated in Venezuela's Mérida in 1993. A crucible of crossed literary destinies was created in that Andean city and marked Hispanic American fiction of that moment in no small dimension. The Spanish editor Jorge Herralde has said that, because of that encounter, Pitol met César Aira and tried to introduce his work in Spain. Likewise, Vila-Matas mentions that the Mérida Biennial allowed him to talk with Pitol like never before and sponsor a major diffusion of his work in penninsular publishing houses. Attending the same event in 1993 were Juan Villoro and the recently deceased Colombian novelist R.H. Moreno Durán, followers as well—along with the Venezuelans José Balza, Victoria de Stefano and Ednodio Quintero—, of the great master who is honored today. Pitol presided, without intending to—his humble giant's silhouette always placed itself in front of false flattery—, a movement in gestation whose lights we now see spread across the Ibero American verbal continent.
Sergio Pitol has affirmed: "Language, form, plot appear simultaneously and from the start; each entity goes along leading the others, and the pulsations, tensions, fissures and reconciliations produced in them allow me to build an oblique, oneiric, delirious storytelling vision, and to achieve an open and happily conjectural ending." This could be, more or less, the definition of an ars poetica that many of the best Latin American novelists of the moment follow.
I am referring to a tendency that doesn't wager only for history, that broaches the narrative pulse as an entity, that intuits within the narrative manner the very development of the story.
This lineage belongs to Pitol and his legacy is carried today by the continent's new voices. It is not insignificant that the Cervantes Prize has noticed this: by distinguishing Pitol the critical judgement takes a triple leap and puts itself at the tip of the spear. On few but wise occasions, consecration can also be a figure from the avant-garde.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 13 December 2005 }
10.07.2005
La pobreza como condena / Antonio López Ortega
Poverty as a Curse
Material poverty, of course, but also infinite spiritual poverty. Times of misery but also times of the death of ideas, of anachronisms, of ideological survivals. What vision of the world today can validate concepts such as nutritional security, endogenous development, asymmetric warfare? The poverty of ideas is a reflection of the poverty of goods. “Poor poor country”—said the motto of a seminar promoted by the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello not long ago—. Our essential, primary, unavoidable theme is the theme of poverty. Poverty in all its facets: not only that of the beggar who asks from a wheelchair, of the street performer who entertains with balls of fire at stoplights, of the Wayúu Indian girl who crashes her little face against your car window; but also that of political leadership, of public institutions, of the educational system. Nothing escapes the putrefaction and each day we submerge ourselves more in the mud. A minister makes a declaration and his language is trash, a mayor speaks and his ideas are trash, a teacher gives a class and thinks his students learn something. It has already been decades of deterioration, malnutrition and mental dysfunction. Organic masses who wander, who spend their day rummaging through the trash, who collect cans in sacks.
In the 1960s the middle class, which is the one that makes a country grow, represented more than 20%; today it barely exceeds 10%. The most poverty-stricken [la clase E], on the other hand, make up more than 50% of the population according to recent surveys. There is no locomotive that will pull such a heavy and immobilizing load. If the statistics keep rising, if the deterioration is not contained, a wave of mendicancy will flood everything: properties, land, streets, gestures, beliefs, worldviews. There is no greater curse than poverty; or, better said, there can be no future without a reversal of poverty. But to add to the ills, in a period of oil earnings without precedents, the governmental rhetoric (or what is today understood as the State) actually disconnects itself from society. Just as in earlier periods, the “Petrostate” deploys its maximum splendor: the agenda does not include the social anxiety but rather a phantasmagoric rosary that includes assassinations, invasions, bilateral conflicts, internal enemies. The supposed great solution is no different from past formulas and has evolved very little beyond assistance formats, which is like keeping a dead person always at the edge of death.
It is convenient for a certain State that it all be this way, for a certain State occupied in other affairs it is convenient that the great masses remain ignorant, that they resign themselves to their crumbs, that they remain imprisoned within their daily misery, so that it can perpetuate its power and domain. Because the other option, the real and qualitative leap, the real and decisive inclusion, will always bring political risks. True sovereignty, at least in modern democracy, is individual sovereignty, the independence of spirit, the forging of criteria. We are speaking of an actual citizen, associated with work, with education for his children, immersed in the chain of economic circulation, and not this old-fashioned and battered collectivist rehearsal that confiscates properties, denigrates wealth and covers its own inefficiency by blaming those who produce it. It is easy to rule in poverty; what is difficult, because it is upright and worthy, is to rule amidst the prosperity of citizens. A society of the poor is equal to a poor government and poor discourses. An endless chain whose links continue to grow.
But these chains, as our National Anthem reiterates, can be broken, even if it is done unconsciously. The image of a man who during the Caracazo disturbances [in 1989] jumps onto a car, or carries a slab of beef ribs over his back, speaks not so much of looting but of re-appropriation. Poor Venezuelans can be in the most extreme misery but they associate the notion of progress with goods: the little piece of land, the little house, the little car. Material goods, their own, earned through sweat. Ignorance may be widespread but everyone coincides in recognizing a State, yesterday and today, as all-powerful as it is useless, as grandiloquent as it is incapable of generating sources of work and diversifying the economy. We suffer under the State because it has not exercised its essential role: to be the catalyst of social and economic change.
Old recipes are sold like new ones while the great evils remain. If the social explosions of past eras responded to causes that still remain, nothing allows us to think they can’t happen once again. Desperation gives bad advice and can take us through bad roads. But we would also have to understand that all human existence has limits and hunger is one of them. If the bulk of our society continues to sleep, doped up by misery, let us hope to God its awakening won’t be as violent as the ones from past eras.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 4 October 2005 }
Material poverty, of course, but also infinite spiritual poverty. Times of misery but also times of the death of ideas, of anachronisms, of ideological survivals. What vision of the world today can validate concepts such as nutritional security, endogenous development, asymmetric warfare? The poverty of ideas is a reflection of the poverty of goods. “Poor poor country”—said the motto of a seminar promoted by the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello not long ago—. Our essential, primary, unavoidable theme is the theme of poverty. Poverty in all its facets: not only that of the beggar who asks from a wheelchair, of the street performer who entertains with balls of fire at stoplights, of the Wayúu Indian girl who crashes her little face against your car window; but also that of political leadership, of public institutions, of the educational system. Nothing escapes the putrefaction and each day we submerge ourselves more in the mud. A minister makes a declaration and his language is trash, a mayor speaks and his ideas are trash, a teacher gives a class and thinks his students learn something. It has already been decades of deterioration, malnutrition and mental dysfunction. Organic masses who wander, who spend their day rummaging through the trash, who collect cans in sacks.
In the 1960s the middle class, which is the one that makes a country grow, represented more than 20%; today it barely exceeds 10%. The most poverty-stricken [la clase E], on the other hand, make up more than 50% of the population according to recent surveys. There is no locomotive that will pull such a heavy and immobilizing load. If the statistics keep rising, if the deterioration is not contained, a wave of mendicancy will flood everything: properties, land, streets, gestures, beliefs, worldviews. There is no greater curse than poverty; or, better said, there can be no future without a reversal of poverty. But to add to the ills, in a period of oil earnings without precedents, the governmental rhetoric (or what is today understood as the State) actually disconnects itself from society. Just as in earlier periods, the “Petrostate” deploys its maximum splendor: the agenda does not include the social anxiety but rather a phantasmagoric rosary that includes assassinations, invasions, bilateral conflicts, internal enemies. The supposed great solution is no different from past formulas and has evolved very little beyond assistance formats, which is like keeping a dead person always at the edge of death.
It is convenient for a certain State that it all be this way, for a certain State occupied in other affairs it is convenient that the great masses remain ignorant, that they resign themselves to their crumbs, that they remain imprisoned within their daily misery, so that it can perpetuate its power and domain. Because the other option, the real and qualitative leap, the real and decisive inclusion, will always bring political risks. True sovereignty, at least in modern democracy, is individual sovereignty, the independence of spirit, the forging of criteria. We are speaking of an actual citizen, associated with work, with education for his children, immersed in the chain of economic circulation, and not this old-fashioned and battered collectivist rehearsal that confiscates properties, denigrates wealth and covers its own inefficiency by blaming those who produce it. It is easy to rule in poverty; what is difficult, because it is upright and worthy, is to rule amidst the prosperity of citizens. A society of the poor is equal to a poor government and poor discourses. An endless chain whose links continue to grow.
But these chains, as our National Anthem reiterates, can be broken, even if it is done unconsciously. The image of a man who during the Caracazo disturbances [in 1989] jumps onto a car, or carries a slab of beef ribs over his back, speaks not so much of looting but of re-appropriation. Poor Venezuelans can be in the most extreme misery but they associate the notion of progress with goods: the little piece of land, the little house, the little car. Material goods, their own, earned through sweat. Ignorance may be widespread but everyone coincides in recognizing a State, yesterday and today, as all-powerful as it is useless, as grandiloquent as it is incapable of generating sources of work and diversifying the economy. We suffer under the State because it has not exercised its essential role: to be the catalyst of social and economic change.
Old recipes are sold like new ones while the great evils remain. If the social explosions of past eras responded to causes that still remain, nothing allows us to think they can’t happen once again. Desperation gives bad advice and can take us through bad roads. But we would also have to understand that all human existence has limits and hunger is one of them. If the bulk of our society continues to sleep, doped up by misery, let us hope to God its awakening won’t be as violent as the ones from past eras.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 4 October 2005 }
9.07.2005
Montejo y la poesía venezolana / Antonio López Ortega
Montejo and Venezuelan Poetry
Eugenio Montejo receives the Premio Octavio Paz in the name of Venezuelan poetry and, by extension, in the name of a language that is already over a thousand years old. In his acceptance speech in the presence of the Mexican authorities and the custodians of the prize, he didn’t want to be generous—he has always been so with his peers and with strangers—as much as consistent. We should remember that, regarding aesthetic and intellectual affiliations, Montejo has consistently seen himself as an inheritor. And one assumes the inheritors, at least the grateful ones, always give thanks.
Should we remember that the Premio Octavio Paz, in Montejo’s hands, is the highest international distinction that Venezuelan poetry receives? Perhaps only Arturo Uslar Pietri—with his celebrated Príncipe de Asturias and his not so celebrated Rómulo Gallegos—offers some type of comparison in the wider literary field. But it is good to remember that with Montejo the giants of the XX century also receive that prize: José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva, Fernando Paz Castillo, Rodolfo Moleiro, Vicente Gerbasi, Luz Machado, Juan Liscano, Ida Gramcko and Juan Sánchez Peláez, just to mention those who have left us.
The prize given to Montejo is a reading of the recent past but also of the vigorous present of Venezuelan poetry, as isolated on the continent as it is significant in values and distinct voices. We haven’t engaged other poetic bodies of the language with sufficient intensity but the exceptions, when these have occurred, count in our favor. The cases of Rafael Cadenas and Eugenio Montejo—undoubtedly the two most important Venezuelan poets of the moment—are representative when we enumerate the quantity of editions, anthologies, tributes and translations that have been dedicated to them in the last decade. The bulk of the movement has come from the outside in, as if the centers of criticism and validation, both academic as well as institutional, recognized in both of them the major signs of a crusade.
Venezuelan poetry has opened itself to the world on its own, thanks to the effort, curiosity and persistence of the poets themselves. The range of correspondences, the invitations received, the translations done both outwardly (projection) and inwardly (knowledge), the experiences of young writers in academic centers abroad, all these speak of a diaspora that has nourished interest and erased ignorance. To this we can add the value Venezuela had as a center for the publication of poetry from the continent (Monte Ávila, Fundarte, Pequeña Venecia, Angria) and as a center for valuation (a certain key moment of the Universidad Simón Bolívar, under the impulse of Guillermo Sucre, produced a celebrated anthology of Latin American poetry, which even today is among the major reference points of the continent).
This entire impulse is not lost but instead expands. It is astonishing to see the quality and rigor of the young poets, owners of very singular readings and voices. It is astonishing to see—if the classification is admittedly jarring—the promotion of poetesses, who at least since the 1980s have sustained a range of originality and expressive wager unheard of in the verbal Latin American continent. It is astonishing to see the efforts of certain editorial imprints, those that maintain themselves against hell and high water and without official subsidies. This speaks of a fortitude that belongs fundamentally to the creators and, secondarily, to a living society of readers, promoters and editors.
All of this and more has been represented by Montejo in Mexico. A prize of writers for writers, a prize of literature for literature, a prize that heightens the word through the word. Behind his discrete figure and proverbial work, stand all of us, both those who left the word as a trace, as well as those who continue to cultivate and pierce it. His example is that of all who with rigor, perseverance and engagement see a sense of commitment, truth and durability throughout time in the word, far beyond short cuts, false favors and empty rhetoric.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 23 August 2005 }
Eugenio Montejo receives the Premio Octavio Paz in the name of Venezuelan poetry and, by extension, in the name of a language that is already over a thousand years old. In his acceptance speech in the presence of the Mexican authorities and the custodians of the prize, he didn’t want to be generous—he has always been so with his peers and with strangers—as much as consistent. We should remember that, regarding aesthetic and intellectual affiliations, Montejo has consistently seen himself as an inheritor. And one assumes the inheritors, at least the grateful ones, always give thanks.
Should we remember that the Premio Octavio Paz, in Montejo’s hands, is the highest international distinction that Venezuelan poetry receives? Perhaps only Arturo Uslar Pietri—with his celebrated Príncipe de Asturias and his not so celebrated Rómulo Gallegos—offers some type of comparison in the wider literary field. But it is good to remember that with Montejo the giants of the XX century also receive that prize: José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva, Fernando Paz Castillo, Rodolfo Moleiro, Vicente Gerbasi, Luz Machado, Juan Liscano, Ida Gramcko and Juan Sánchez Peláez, just to mention those who have left us.
The prize given to Montejo is a reading of the recent past but also of the vigorous present of Venezuelan poetry, as isolated on the continent as it is significant in values and distinct voices. We haven’t engaged other poetic bodies of the language with sufficient intensity but the exceptions, when these have occurred, count in our favor. The cases of Rafael Cadenas and Eugenio Montejo—undoubtedly the two most important Venezuelan poets of the moment—are representative when we enumerate the quantity of editions, anthologies, tributes and translations that have been dedicated to them in the last decade. The bulk of the movement has come from the outside in, as if the centers of criticism and validation, both academic as well as institutional, recognized in both of them the major signs of a crusade.
Venezuelan poetry has opened itself to the world on its own, thanks to the effort, curiosity and persistence of the poets themselves. The range of correspondences, the invitations received, the translations done both outwardly (projection) and inwardly (knowledge), the experiences of young writers in academic centers abroad, all these speak of a diaspora that has nourished interest and erased ignorance. To this we can add the value Venezuela had as a center for the publication of poetry from the continent (Monte Ávila, Fundarte, Pequeña Venecia, Angria) and as a center for valuation (a certain key moment of the Universidad Simón Bolívar, under the impulse of Guillermo Sucre, produced a celebrated anthology of Latin American poetry, which even today is among the major reference points of the continent).
This entire impulse is not lost but instead expands. It is astonishing to see the quality and rigor of the young poets, owners of very singular readings and voices. It is astonishing to see—if the classification is admittedly jarring—the promotion of poetesses, who at least since the 1980s have sustained a range of originality and expressive wager unheard of in the verbal Latin American continent. It is astonishing to see the efforts of certain editorial imprints, those that maintain themselves against hell and high water and without official subsidies. This speaks of a fortitude that belongs fundamentally to the creators and, secondarily, to a living society of readers, promoters and editors.
All of this and more has been represented by Montejo in Mexico. A prize of writers for writers, a prize of literature for literature, a prize that heightens the word through the word. Behind his discrete figure and proverbial work, stand all of us, both those who left the word as a trace, as well as those who continue to cultivate and pierce it. His example is that of all who with rigor, perseverance and engagement see a sense of commitment, truth and durability throughout time in the word, far beyond short cuts, false favors and empty rhetoric.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 23 August 2005 }
2.12.2005
Intelectualidad y líneas divisoras / Antonio López Ortega
Intellectualism and Dividing Lines
A close friend of mine whom I've known for a long time—by all signs an emerging fiction writer from Paraguaná—was telling me during a recent trip I made to Coro: "Please, let's not talk about what separates us; let's talk about everything else." His phrase has been turning around in my head for several days because it expresses an additional sentiment: the belief that, by avoiding differences, we'll be able to get closer to a consensus. A comfortable recourse, if you will, in the field of politics, in governmental practices, in neighborhood debates. But an absolutely naive recourse, which goes against nature in the field of ideas, in the field of intellectual endeavors.
If anything drowns official discourse it is the willingness to dissent. The reduction of the truth to a black and white antinomy, the inability to look for shades and to confront points of view, the lack of wealth and complexity in one's focus, these constitute the very negation of the intellectual condition. Political sympathies can be understood; what cannot be understood is the suspension of the critical act. Intellectuals are not here to flatter; intellectuals are here to maintain an awareness of the perversions of power.
When my friend asks me to take a path that won't lead us toward difference, he is actually betraying the intellectual condition. There is nothing better than beginning with our differences in order to value the wholeness, the transcendence of the other. Dialogue has never been two mirrors confronting each other; dialogue is founded on the difference (in one's vision of the world?) that the other can offer.
If Venezuela's intellectual class has damaged itself in recent years, that damage is centered in having allowed dividing lines to have grown. What was until recently a harmonious region, where forums, roundtables, readings and cultural pages were shared, now exhibits a deep wound. It is a bad sign that political diatribe has entered the intellectual field, creating silences, ommissions and blind faith. The task of the intellectual is to understand and point out; never to take sides.
Power is by nature reductionist and it only seeks faithful adepts. The sad pages in which Paul Eluard sings to Stalin or the ones in which Anna Akhmatova wrote to her French peers to warn them that the Soviet utopia of the "new man" was not so true, these have all been left behind. We have forgotten the French poet's poems; and the Russian poet has been forgotten by her French peers. The Romantic stance that nourished utopia was more valuable than the extremely realistic fact of the arrival of political purges and the inauguration of the first jails for dissidents.
Having to agree no matter what, to believe every single aspect of everything that is announced, to believe that dissent is synonymous with betrayal, these all speak of an impoverishment of the intellectual condition. If the exercise of power has been able to cultivate silence, dividing us into the faithful and the foreign, that means that we have been weak, that we haven't given the alarm on time, that we have succumbed before an act that was our moral duty.
We will have to discuss a great deal about the relations between the Venezuelan intellectual and power. Some believe they have gotten closer by marking a distance and others believe they have distanced themselves by reproducing the same logic of control. The rarest cases are the ones who have truly turned their backs to it in order to affirm themselves in their own work. There are few of them but they're the ones that count the most. Vasconcelos remembered that, in countries such as ours, the intellectual was in debt to the public act. Well, after dedicating ourselves so much to the public act, our work ends up in the trash can. Or it simply never finishes because of its perfect invisibility.
Facing the temptations of power, the intellectual nature weakens and ends up shielding itself within a type of simplicity. More than intellectuals, we have simplistic politicians, poets who think they see heros out of novels where only petty tyrants exist. We continue to turn the wheel, and the civic desire that took more than a century to calm the shouts of the caudillos has lost all of its antidotes and has ended up without anyone to create a dialogue.
Is this a task for these times, if not for the public scene then at least for the intellectual condition? Well, to talk about what separates us. Only by going deep into our differences, only by erasing the dividing lines with ideas and visions will we recover the region.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 8 February 2005 }
A close friend of mine whom I've known for a long time—by all signs an emerging fiction writer from Paraguaná—was telling me during a recent trip I made to Coro: "Please, let's not talk about what separates us; let's talk about everything else." His phrase has been turning around in my head for several days because it expresses an additional sentiment: the belief that, by avoiding differences, we'll be able to get closer to a consensus. A comfortable recourse, if you will, in the field of politics, in governmental practices, in neighborhood debates. But an absolutely naive recourse, which goes against nature in the field of ideas, in the field of intellectual endeavors.
If anything drowns official discourse it is the willingness to dissent. The reduction of the truth to a black and white antinomy, the inability to look for shades and to confront points of view, the lack of wealth and complexity in one's focus, these constitute the very negation of the intellectual condition. Political sympathies can be understood; what cannot be understood is the suspension of the critical act. Intellectuals are not here to flatter; intellectuals are here to maintain an awareness of the perversions of power.
When my friend asks me to take a path that won't lead us toward difference, he is actually betraying the intellectual condition. There is nothing better than beginning with our differences in order to value the wholeness, the transcendence of the other. Dialogue has never been two mirrors confronting each other; dialogue is founded on the difference (in one's vision of the world?) that the other can offer.
If Venezuela's intellectual class has damaged itself in recent years, that damage is centered in having allowed dividing lines to have grown. What was until recently a harmonious region, where forums, roundtables, readings and cultural pages were shared, now exhibits a deep wound. It is a bad sign that political diatribe has entered the intellectual field, creating silences, ommissions and blind faith. The task of the intellectual is to understand and point out; never to take sides.
Power is by nature reductionist and it only seeks faithful adepts. The sad pages in which Paul Eluard sings to Stalin or the ones in which Anna Akhmatova wrote to her French peers to warn them that the Soviet utopia of the "new man" was not so true, these have all been left behind. We have forgotten the French poet's poems; and the Russian poet has been forgotten by her French peers. The Romantic stance that nourished utopia was more valuable than the extremely realistic fact of the arrival of political purges and the inauguration of the first jails for dissidents.
Having to agree no matter what, to believe every single aspect of everything that is announced, to believe that dissent is synonymous with betrayal, these all speak of an impoverishment of the intellectual condition. If the exercise of power has been able to cultivate silence, dividing us into the faithful and the foreign, that means that we have been weak, that we haven't given the alarm on time, that we have succumbed before an act that was our moral duty.
We will have to discuss a great deal about the relations between the Venezuelan intellectual and power. Some believe they have gotten closer by marking a distance and others believe they have distanced themselves by reproducing the same logic of control. The rarest cases are the ones who have truly turned their backs to it in order to affirm themselves in their own work. There are few of them but they're the ones that count the most. Vasconcelos remembered that, in countries such as ours, the intellectual was in debt to the public act. Well, after dedicating ourselves so much to the public act, our work ends up in the trash can. Or it simply never finishes because of its perfect invisibility.
Facing the temptations of power, the intellectual nature weakens and ends up shielding itself within a type of simplicity. More than intellectuals, we have simplistic politicians, poets who think they see heros out of novels where only petty tyrants exist. We continue to turn the wheel, and the civic desire that took more than a century to calm the shouts of the caudillos has lost all of its antidotes and has ended up without anyone to create a dialogue.
Is this a task for these times, if not for the public scene then at least for the intellectual condition? Well, to talk about what separates us. Only by going deep into our differences, only by erasing the dividing lines with ideas and visions will we recover the region.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 8 February 2005 }
1.12.2005
Cultura y política global / Antonio López Ortega
Culture and Global Politics
Brazil is getting ready to be the great cultural vedette in France in 2005. The Gaul country has, in effect, invited the Amazonian country to display all its cultural potential throughout the entire year: its enthralling music, its traditional arts, its powerful literature, its architectonic genius. Works unknown in France will be translated, meticulous exhibitions will be set up, gastronomic festivals, cycles of the great musical masters.
The operation goes beyond mere cultural exchange and is revealed as an intelligent political strategy. France, who in all the international forums of recent years has defended what has come to be called cultural exception—in short: the privileged treatment that cultural goods must be afforded in all commercial exchanges—sees in Brazil a beneficient ally. It admires its continental size, shares its historical rivalry with the United States, recognizes its Latin American leadership and, for the sake of the average French citizen, provides exactly what Valéry Larbaud called the note exotique: Carioca mulattas and capoeira dance delighting the senses of Parisians.
In a parallel situation, thriving China prepares to receive France in all of its cultural splendor during the year that has just begun.Not only will the iconography of the XVIII and XIX centuries, such as pieces by Débussy and Ravel, fill the museums and theaters of Beijing, but so will contemporary dance, including les sons et lumieres de JeanMichel Jarré and an urban cultural phenomenon which the French already defend as their own: hip-hop. Nor is the endeavor innocent: it prefaces France's formal entry into what will be the fastest growing market of the XXI century.
Culture has value as a political tool and as a space for economic exchange. This is being understood by the great countries and the great economies. On a closer scale, Guadalajara's Festival del Libro is the most important center on the continent for the purchase of book rights and Guanajuato's Festival de Teatro doubles the income compared to expenses for that beautiful city. Each year Bogota strengthens its Feria del Libro—completely funded by the Colombian Chamber of Books—and Buenos Aires defends its own as the required yearly date for editors and writers in the southern cone. Miami's Museum of Modern Art, with an intelligent acquisition strategy, plans to have the most important collection of Latin American art within 10 years, while the Bienal de Sao Paulo continues to be the continent's plastic arts reference point.
Facing this overwhelming and changing landscape, Venezuela seems to have no reaction. Far from it, the plastic presence of Venezuelan artists and a certain status gained by some writers are truly deteriorating. Only the movement of youth orchestras has been able to attach itself to international relations, thanks to the acuity of the masterful José Antonio Abreu. In times of endogenous discourse and governmental visions that bring us back to the most chaste of nationalisms, the projection of Venezuelan culture is not included within State policy. The fact that the universality of an artist like Gego is being recognized by international critics or that the great Armando Reverón has been taken up by New York's MoMA for 2007 are actions that have not been generated by the State. Surprisingly, despite their human penury, artists have staked out their own name through the value of their work and through their intellectual rigor: Mexico acknowledges Eugenio Montejo's great work with the Premio Octavio Paz and the city of Leipzig acknowledges Álvaro Sotillo's graphic trajectory.
Where is Venezuela's great cultural potential? Where is the great design, the splendor of our composers and music, the thriving originality of our plastic arts, the mystery of our producers of folk art, our great poetry? Well, they're waiting for an articulate, unleashing, new vision, capable of offering intelligible images.
France enters its international relations hand in hand with culture when we, if at all, show up with oil barrels. Crafted material on the one hand and prime—primitive?—material on the other. The cycle repeats itself for years now while no public vision seems to notice our discouragement. Beyond making an inventory of flora and fauna—a reflection that we've been dragging along since the Chroniclers of the Indies—,we need to acknowledge our being's existence. And in that mine field, no one is more skilled than our artists.
The public, governmental visions will continue to be poor and they'll continue to be divorced from our finest intellect. We'll remain in the hands of clumsy ambassadors, cultural attaches who add nothing, relegating culture to the very last spot, without a State policy that reflects a vision of the world. But, parallel to this situation, our artists will continue to talk about the real country, to show its vicissitudes, its deeds and what's missing, leaving a lasting trace that will be rescued at some point in the future.
As a closing parabola, an important Venezuelan poet recently asked himself: "What's the difference between a Mexican and a Venezuelan writer?" The poet remained silent, thinking for a few seconds, finally answering: "The difference is that when a Mexican writer walks, the country follows behind him."
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 11 January 2005 }
Brazil is getting ready to be the great cultural vedette in France in 2005. The Gaul country has, in effect, invited the Amazonian country to display all its cultural potential throughout the entire year: its enthralling music, its traditional arts, its powerful literature, its architectonic genius. Works unknown in France will be translated, meticulous exhibitions will be set up, gastronomic festivals, cycles of the great musical masters.
The operation goes beyond mere cultural exchange and is revealed as an intelligent political strategy. France, who in all the international forums of recent years has defended what has come to be called cultural exception—in short: the privileged treatment that cultural goods must be afforded in all commercial exchanges—sees in Brazil a beneficient ally. It admires its continental size, shares its historical rivalry with the United States, recognizes its Latin American leadership and, for the sake of the average French citizen, provides exactly what Valéry Larbaud called the note exotique: Carioca mulattas and capoeira dance delighting the senses of Parisians.
In a parallel situation, thriving China prepares to receive France in all of its cultural splendor during the year that has just begun.Not only will the iconography of the XVIII and XIX centuries, such as pieces by Débussy and Ravel, fill the museums and theaters of Beijing, but so will contemporary dance, including les sons et lumieres de JeanMichel Jarré and an urban cultural phenomenon which the French already defend as their own: hip-hop. Nor is the endeavor innocent: it prefaces France's formal entry into what will be the fastest growing market of the XXI century.
Culture has value as a political tool and as a space for economic exchange. This is being understood by the great countries and the great economies. On a closer scale, Guadalajara's Festival del Libro is the most important center on the continent for the purchase of book rights and Guanajuato's Festival de Teatro doubles the income compared to expenses for that beautiful city. Each year Bogota strengthens its Feria del Libro—completely funded by the Colombian Chamber of Books—and Buenos Aires defends its own as the required yearly date for editors and writers in the southern cone. Miami's Museum of Modern Art, with an intelligent acquisition strategy, plans to have the most important collection of Latin American art within 10 years, while the Bienal de Sao Paulo continues to be the continent's plastic arts reference point.
Facing this overwhelming and changing landscape, Venezuela seems to have no reaction. Far from it, the plastic presence of Venezuelan artists and a certain status gained by some writers are truly deteriorating. Only the movement of youth orchestras has been able to attach itself to international relations, thanks to the acuity of the masterful José Antonio Abreu. In times of endogenous discourse and governmental visions that bring us back to the most chaste of nationalisms, the projection of Venezuelan culture is not included within State policy. The fact that the universality of an artist like Gego is being recognized by international critics or that the great Armando Reverón has been taken up by New York's MoMA for 2007 are actions that have not been generated by the State. Surprisingly, despite their human penury, artists have staked out their own name through the value of their work and through their intellectual rigor: Mexico acknowledges Eugenio Montejo's great work with the Premio Octavio Paz and the city of Leipzig acknowledges Álvaro Sotillo's graphic trajectory.
Where is Venezuela's great cultural potential? Where is the great design, the splendor of our composers and music, the thriving originality of our plastic arts, the mystery of our producers of folk art, our great poetry? Well, they're waiting for an articulate, unleashing, new vision, capable of offering intelligible images.
France enters its international relations hand in hand with culture when we, if at all, show up with oil barrels. Crafted material on the one hand and prime—primitive?—material on the other. The cycle repeats itself for years now while no public vision seems to notice our discouragement. Beyond making an inventory of flora and fauna—a reflection that we've been dragging along since the Chroniclers of the Indies—,we need to acknowledge our being's existence. And in that mine field, no one is more skilled than our artists.
The public, governmental visions will continue to be poor and they'll continue to be divorced from our finest intellect. We'll remain in the hands of clumsy ambassadors, cultural attaches who add nothing, relegating culture to the very last spot, without a State policy that reflects a vision of the world. But, parallel to this situation, our artists will continue to talk about the real country, to show its vicissitudes, its deeds and what's missing, leaving a lasting trace that will be rescued at some point in the future.
As a closing parabola, an important Venezuelan poet recently asked himself: "What's the difference between a Mexican and a Venezuelan writer?" The poet remained silent, thinking for a few seconds, finally answering: "The difference is that when a Mexican writer walks, the country follows behind him."
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 11 January 2005 }
6.18.2004
La Diosa herida
Antonio López Ortega
Opinión
El Nacional
Martes 15 de Junio de 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debe estar lloviendo ahora sobre la estatua de Alejandro Colina, deben estarla bordando surcos de agua, ahora que su vientre está partido. Su alma está mojada bajo el invierno de estos días y todo es humedad en su musculatura. También el verano la ha llenado de rigores para comprometer su piedra porosa y su osamenta.
Son ya años de desidia, de arrinconamiento, de tiros al blanco en la oscuridad que la noche ofrece a ciertos conductores, presa esa quietud entre dos ramales veloces de autopista. No ha habido relación más críspida entre Modernidad y Tradición que la sujeción de la Diosa a una isla transitada con la velocidad del olvido. La hemos ido ocultando como ocultamos nuestros pensamientos más oscuros o como ocultamos las pulsiones de nuestro inconsciente.
De las muchas lecturas que el cisma de la fractura ha traído — desaparición del patrimonio urbano, desidia institucional, polarización política, menosprecio por la religiosidad popular—, nos interesaría situarnos en el plano puramente simbólico, iconográfico, mítico. Esto es, el que se refiere a nuestra estatuaria, a nuestros espacios reflexivos (porque reflejan precisamente nuestros valores, nuestros hábitos), a nuestro empeño en borrar todo lo que nos trascienda. El quiebre de la estatua de Colina, por su fuerza raigal, por su magnetismo, simboliza un momento de ruptura, de inconsciencia, de descenso a los infiernos. Lo que originalmente el escultor concibió, apelando al pretexto de la Diosa, como un punto de máxima concentración de la sensualidad —el busto erguido, los brazos fornidos, las caderas abarcantes, las posaderas como un imperio, el vientre absorbente— se ha reducido a piedra, ha vuelto al origen, se ha amparado en el silencio de la pre-significación. Que la fractura haya ocurrido precisamente en el vientre, en el pasaje que da pie a la vida misma; que el tronco se haya inclinado hacia atrás, en una gimnasia ciega, en una torcedura anti-natura, no pudo tener mayor sentido de dramatismo, de señal desesperanzada. De una u otra manera, en esa fractura estamos todos, creyentes o no creyentes, urbanistas o legos, fotógrafos o transeúntes nocturnos, planificadores o burócratas.
Si los mitos fundacionales asociados a la Emancipación del siglo XIX son los que Arturo Uslar Pietri creyó reconocer por descarte, en su París de juventud, mientras admiraba la fascinación por lo maya-quiché de Miguel Ángel Asturias o mientras se deleitaba con el discurso encendido de Alejo Carpentier sobre la cubanía de raíces africanas, nuestra pulsión ha sido de una cortedad de miras inexcusable.
Nos hemos quedado con el síndrome de lo guerrero, de quien arrasa tierras y no las cultiva, de quien prefiere el nomadismo de las batallas y no “la voz del patio” a la que hacía alusión María Fernanda Palacios. Como buenos herederos de Occidente, anclados en esta periferia tropical, el patrón heroico del guerrero pesa como una epidemia cotidiana y es el principal obstáculo para una verdadera creación de ciudadanía, que no es sino la respuesta colectiva y civilista a la pléyade de guerreros insurrectos. No nos interesa tanto la sangre de la herida infligida de unos a otros como la sangre de un vientre que es centro de creación y renovación humana.
¿Habrá que repetir, recreando la imagen escultórica de Colina, que la Diosa es símbolo de fertilidad, de maternidad, de feminidad?
Frente al patrón destructor del siglo XIX —especie de capa geológica que, a la manera de romanos con druidas, ha debido enterrar no pocos mitos ancestrales —, debemos oponer un patrón de fuerza originaria que admitimos con dificultad porque ha calado tan hondo que se vuelve inconsciente. Un estremecedor poema de Yolanda Pantin, llamado precisamente “El hueso pélvico”, nos recuerda que lo que Colina pone en las manos alzadas de la Diosa es nada menos que una pelvis. Como un centro gravitatorio elevado a las alturas, a la noche cósmica, esta pelvis simboliza el orificio por donde la vida pasa de un estadio a otro. Es un homenaje a la natalidad, a la renovación, al tránsito de la energía vital.
La inconsciencia de estos tiempos —concentrada en una Caracas envilecida, de indigentes y lunáticos, de lugares públicos reducidos a cero, de ornato urbano desdibujado, de celdas que van siendo tomadas por extraños como en el cuento de Cortázar— viene a encarnarse con fuerza inusitada en el vientre quebrado de la Diosa. La imagen perturbada de lo que antes fue esplendor y celebración nos señala que la renovación ha llegado a un punto cero y que la muerte ronda nuestro sino colectivo. El principio femenino que parece gravitar en los orígenes de la cultura venezolana se oculta nuevamente porque los tiempos son de desmanes y no de pulsión creadora.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 15 Junio 2004 }
Opinión
El Nacional
Martes 15 de Junio de 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debe estar lloviendo ahora sobre la estatua de Alejandro Colina, deben estarla bordando surcos de agua, ahora que su vientre está partido. Su alma está mojada bajo el invierno de estos días y todo es humedad en su musculatura. También el verano la ha llenado de rigores para comprometer su piedra porosa y su osamenta.
Son ya años de desidia, de arrinconamiento, de tiros al blanco en la oscuridad que la noche ofrece a ciertos conductores, presa esa quietud entre dos ramales veloces de autopista. No ha habido relación más críspida entre Modernidad y Tradición que la sujeción de la Diosa a una isla transitada con la velocidad del olvido. La hemos ido ocultando como ocultamos nuestros pensamientos más oscuros o como ocultamos las pulsiones de nuestro inconsciente.
De las muchas lecturas que el cisma de la fractura ha traído — desaparición del patrimonio urbano, desidia institucional, polarización política, menosprecio por la religiosidad popular—, nos interesaría situarnos en el plano puramente simbólico, iconográfico, mítico. Esto es, el que se refiere a nuestra estatuaria, a nuestros espacios reflexivos (porque reflejan precisamente nuestros valores, nuestros hábitos), a nuestro empeño en borrar todo lo que nos trascienda. El quiebre de la estatua de Colina, por su fuerza raigal, por su magnetismo, simboliza un momento de ruptura, de inconsciencia, de descenso a los infiernos. Lo que originalmente el escultor concibió, apelando al pretexto de la Diosa, como un punto de máxima concentración de la sensualidad —el busto erguido, los brazos fornidos, las caderas abarcantes, las posaderas como un imperio, el vientre absorbente— se ha reducido a piedra, ha vuelto al origen, se ha amparado en el silencio de la pre-significación. Que la fractura haya ocurrido precisamente en el vientre, en el pasaje que da pie a la vida misma; que el tronco se haya inclinado hacia atrás, en una gimnasia ciega, en una torcedura anti-natura, no pudo tener mayor sentido de dramatismo, de señal desesperanzada. De una u otra manera, en esa fractura estamos todos, creyentes o no creyentes, urbanistas o legos, fotógrafos o transeúntes nocturnos, planificadores o burócratas.
Si los mitos fundacionales asociados a la Emancipación del siglo XIX son los que Arturo Uslar Pietri creyó reconocer por descarte, en su París de juventud, mientras admiraba la fascinación por lo maya-quiché de Miguel Ángel Asturias o mientras se deleitaba con el discurso encendido de Alejo Carpentier sobre la cubanía de raíces africanas, nuestra pulsión ha sido de una cortedad de miras inexcusable.
Nos hemos quedado con el síndrome de lo guerrero, de quien arrasa tierras y no las cultiva, de quien prefiere el nomadismo de las batallas y no “la voz del patio” a la que hacía alusión María Fernanda Palacios. Como buenos herederos de Occidente, anclados en esta periferia tropical, el patrón heroico del guerrero pesa como una epidemia cotidiana y es el principal obstáculo para una verdadera creación de ciudadanía, que no es sino la respuesta colectiva y civilista a la pléyade de guerreros insurrectos. No nos interesa tanto la sangre de la herida infligida de unos a otros como la sangre de un vientre que es centro de creación y renovación humana.
¿Habrá que repetir, recreando la imagen escultórica de Colina, que la Diosa es símbolo de fertilidad, de maternidad, de feminidad?
Frente al patrón destructor del siglo XIX —especie de capa geológica que, a la manera de romanos con druidas, ha debido enterrar no pocos mitos ancestrales —, debemos oponer un patrón de fuerza originaria que admitimos con dificultad porque ha calado tan hondo que se vuelve inconsciente. Un estremecedor poema de Yolanda Pantin, llamado precisamente “El hueso pélvico”, nos recuerda que lo que Colina pone en las manos alzadas de la Diosa es nada menos que una pelvis. Como un centro gravitatorio elevado a las alturas, a la noche cósmica, esta pelvis simboliza el orificio por donde la vida pasa de un estadio a otro. Es un homenaje a la natalidad, a la renovación, al tránsito de la energía vital.
La inconsciencia de estos tiempos —concentrada en una Caracas envilecida, de indigentes y lunáticos, de lugares públicos reducidos a cero, de ornato urbano desdibujado, de celdas que van siendo tomadas por extraños como en el cuento de Cortázar— viene a encarnarse con fuerza inusitada en el vientre quebrado de la Diosa. La imagen perturbada de lo que antes fue esplendor y celebración nos señala que la renovación ha llegado a un punto cero y que la muerte ronda nuestro sino colectivo. El principio femenino que parece gravitar en los orígenes de la cultura venezolana se oculta nuevamente porque los tiempos son de desmanes y no de pulsión creadora.
{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 15 Junio 2004 }
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