from the future Spanish of Mario Bellatin translated by David Shook

Josué’s mother was blind. Not always. She lost her eyes one at a time, starting at about age 49, in people years. That’s seven years old for a Chihuahua, which, though a little early, isn’t exceptionally unusual. The process began with a slight milkiness at the perimeter of her bulging left eye. Aw, she’s got cataracts, the show circuit groomers cooed. Know-nothings with no creativity, no curiosity. She had uveitis. Her ophthalmologist explained the disease by making a drawing on a whiteboard: tiny triangles, which she explained were the eye’s pumps, shedding off the eye’s regular waste emissions—mostly a solution of minerals and salts. The regular wastes were represented by tiny squares that looked like grains of rough-cut salt, maybe Himalayan. The ophthalmologist prescribed two medicines: ... Read More »]]>

from the future Spanish of Mario Bellatin
translated by David Shook

Josué’s mother was blind. Not always. She lost her eyes one at a time, starting at about age 49, in people years. That’s seven years old for a Chihuahua, which, though a little early, isn’t exceptionally unusual. The process began with a slight milkiness at the perimeter of her bulging left eye. Aw, she’s got cataracts, the show circuit groomers cooed. Know-nothings with no creativity, no curiosity. She had uveitis. Her ophthalmologist explained the disease by making a drawing on a whiteboard: tiny triangles, which she explained were the eye’s pumps, shedding off the eye’s regular waste emissions—mostly a solution of minerals and salts. The regular wastes were represented by tiny squares that looked like grains of rough-cut salt, maybe Himalayan. The ophthalmologist prescribed two medicines: a 5% sodium chloride hypertonicity ointment, to help with the shedding of the wastes, and Flurbiprofen, an eye drop administered every other day, to slow the progress of the tiny pump’s malfunction. Josué’s mother, two-time Inland Empire regional show champion Okie Doke, retired at an early age because of the C-section required for Josué’s birth—at 2.2 pounds, she was too small to deliver him. The operation had left two scars: the one along her lower abdomen, which somehow also resulted in the disappearance of one of her left-row nipples, leaving her just seven, her breeder’s favorite number—and God’s—but an unacceptable disproportion for a show dog, and the psychological scar, which faded more slowly, fleshy and keloided and suspicious. It was that scar, more than the eyes, that disqualified her from showing. Still, she remained her breeder’s favorite, his most needy beast, living most of her adult life atop some piece of furniture: his sofa, his favorite Milo Baughman recliner, his bed. She was too small to jump up onto them herself, so he would grip her body like a tiny American football, fingers laced between her uneven nipples.

The breeder’s favorite Chihuahua, Okie Doke, c. 7.5 years old, displays early signs of uveitis in her left eye.

 *

Dik Dik Tracy, named after the miniature African gazelles the breeder had seen as a child in his pictographic encyclopedia, impregnated Okie Doke with Josué one afternoon while the breeder catnapped on the couch, some procedural police show droning on as soundtrack to the dog’s impulsive act. The breeder awoke as the beast’s lipstick penis pumped its penultimate squirt of semen into his innocent Okie Doke. Horrified, he began to scream, then swatted Dik Dik with a rolled newspaper until he cowered beneath the coffee table. The breeder spent the evening floundering in guilt and Malbec, first for having fallen asleep with the two sexually peaking animals unsupervised, then for having punished Dik Dik so severly.

Dik Dik was too large to be a proper show dog, weighing in at just under five pounds. Still, as a young dog he had participated in several shows, more for the experience than the possibility of winning. Plus, the breeder reasoned, perhaps he could get work as a stud, with his strong frame and good lineage. (His grandmother, Queen Isabel, and great-uncle, Columbus Casanova, had both been champions.) In some way, the breeder also considered it a sort of punishment for having impregnated Okie Doke: the meticulous grooming and fuss—gland cleaning, nail polishing, ear flushing—violated Dik Dik’s sense of dignity, as he had Okie Doke’s.

Whether in revenge or by nature, Dik Dik soon embarrassed the breeder publicly, first by humping a judge’s leg, a frowned-upon but not entirely uncommon occurrence for a young show dog, which though not technically disqualifying the animal was perhaps worse for their future on the show circuit, as such behavior was not quickly forgotten and the judge pool, especially in culturally deprived areas like the Inland Empire, was not large. The breeder kept Dik Dik in the competition, despite the humiliation, to practice his new handler, a psoriatic thirty-something vet tech who outweighed Dik Dik by at least 50 times. According to the handler, now one of the breeder’s few true enemies, a leash malfunction had led to Dik Dik’s escape from the grooming area after his humiliating performance. Returned to the floor during the Pomeranian showing, Dik Dik mounted R.S. Poofball, a four-time American Kennel Association champion and fixture on the European circuit—perhaps more unfortunate than his pedigree was his male sex, since, owing to the quick wit of one show commentator, the act was widely referred to thereafter as the Dick-Dick Incident.

It took the breeder several months to consider Dik Dik Tracy a dog again. He read several articles about homosexuality in non-human animals: a natural behavior in giraffes and some birds, apparently. He consulted several dog trainers about the possibility of training it out of him, which they generally advised against. Finally he decided to neuter Dik Dik, a difficult decision considering his previous plans to hire the beast as stud, but an easier and much faster solution, he thought, to curb the dog’s homosexuality—one he would come to regret in old age as an act of unwarranted cruelty, a return to the Middle Ages even, and a failure to accept the personality, however deviant, of one of his beloved dogs.

Clay figurine of R.S. Poofball, sculpted by a deafblind student as part of a history display at the Academy of Writing Arts for the Blind and Deaf.

*

Before I tell much more of this story, I must admit to the strange nature of its telling, which deserves some basic explanation. First, the unusual coindence of my brother’s deafblindness. As best I can understand it, I contracted congenital rubella syndrome in the womb, six weeks into my mother’s first pregnancy, when she came down with a particularly purplish case of rubella in Colton, California. The salt-and-pepper retinopathy of my condition allows me to make out vague figures in well-lighted environments; my sensorineural deafness is severe, but the surgical implantation of an experimental clucking device allows me to identify vocalic, nasal, bilabial, and velar phonemes, and years of practice at contextualization and a system of lexical elimination allow me to identify alveolar sounds with 75% accuracy. My brother, with whom I share a mother but whose father is unknown—at least to me, is far less lucky, having been born with Usher Syndrome I. Though his early doctors hoped he would retain foveal vision, he was completely blind at six, having already learned to read. As I am almost five years his elder, our mother had already endured two bankruptcies in financing my own healthcare costs, and financial limitations prohibited the possibility of discovering whether a clucking device like my own would have also worked for my brother. Perhaps his reading before the complete onset of blindness facilitated his adeptness as Braille, which he quickly mastered—even composing occasional poems in the language, and which we use to communicate to this day, using both his 1970s Brailler, his first—which he prefers for its nostalgia, and my computer, which allows me far greater speed in storytelling.

This document, and its account of the unusual founding of the Academy of Writing Arts for the Blind and Deaf, is primarily for him, typed originally into my computer Brailler over the course of several months, following years of investigation. I have traveled across the country seeking relevant sources, no matter their seeming inconsequentialness, and have interviewed persons from R.S. Poofball’s handler on the morning of the fateful Dick-Dick Incident, who still lives quite nearby in Downey, California, to the surviving heir of the breeder’s poetess companion, who now resides on the East Coast. I have chosen to output this document in its current form in the hopes that it might be of interest to the greater public, both as historical document and as inspiring case study on the fulfillment of improbable dreams by even more unlikely actors. The Braille version of this account is available free of charge from the Academy of Writing Arts for the Blind and Deaf, as well as from several mail-order Braille resource services.

*

One afternoon, sitting in the waiting room at the canine chiropractor while Okie Doke endured her weekly adjustment, the breeder read a magazine article about a blind chemist. He was fascinated. MRIs had shown that Okie Doke’s brain, though just larger than a walnut in its shell, placed her in the upper 20th percentile for her diminutive body weight, and the article made him wonder if, like the blind chemist, her worsening sight had sharpened her other senses. The blind chemist had learned to identify within three to five degrees the temperature of a Bunsen burner’s flame, by the sound of the combusting butane it emitted. The breeder excused himself to the office restroom, where he discretely ripped open the magazine’s seams to remove the three-page article, before disposing of the magazine in the wall-mounted trashcan and covering its remains in several crumpled paper towels. His mind was already whirring.

* *

Ten emails about the translation of the still-unwritten Writing Lessons for the Blind and Deaf, with all characters mentioned explained by the translator

Mario Bellatin and David Shook
translated by Heather Cleary

Ernesto Hernández Busto translated by Heather Cleary 

The future is always a lie. We have too much influence over it. — Elias Canetti

I.

It all began in September of 1991, when a friend (let’s call him I.) showed up at my place with the news that we’d be able to leave the country a few days later. I vaguely recall that we celebrated (despite the superstition about doing so in advance) and then went for a deliberately nostalgic walk around the city. I realize now that I don’t have a clear memory of that last stroll, of where we were, exactly, as though all that premeditation had generated the opposite effect: an overly illuminated screen on which we could barely make out blurred figures and places.

In another country, our departure would not have been anything special. In ... Read More »]]>

Ernesto Hernández Busto
translated by Heather Cleary 

The future is always a lie. We have too much influence over it.
— Elias Canetti

I.

It all began in September of 1991, when a friend (let’s call him I.) showed up at my place with the news that we’d be able to leave the country a few days later. I vaguely recall that we celebrated (despite the superstition about doing so in advance) and then went for a deliberately nostalgic walk around the city. I realize now that I don’t have a clear memory of that last stroll, of where we were, exactly, as though all that premeditation had generated the opposite effect: an overly illuminated screen on which we could barely make out blurred figures and places.

In another country, our departure would not have been anything special. In Cuba, it gave us the right to invent stories about our charmed relationship with Fate. I was twenty-two and had travelled twice: to a youth conference in Bulgaria, and to study math in the Soviet Union. The first trip ended up being a kind of return: the Greek girl who sat next to me on the bus to Stara Zagora reminded me of an old lady I knew, and the spectacle of Gypsies jumping barefoot over hot coals had the solemn air of a family gathering. Even today, when I walk into certain places I still catch the “scent of Bulgaria”—a mix of dairy, roses, dried fruit and air conditioning—and several parks remind me of the gardens in Boyana, residence of President Zhikov, whose daughter Ludmila, the Socialist Lady Di, entertained herself by collecting children who would talk about world peace, live together under the watchful eyes of their omnipresent instructors, and go to bed early in their little fenced-in preserve. Aside from those closely monitored nights, everything seemed perfect: sweets, flags, mansions, the freshly shaved cheeks of the reporters…

Five years later I arrived in the Soviet Union, where my affinity for math was quickly decimated: I preferred taking long train trips, dragging behind me a trunk full of books that my mother had found in the dilapidated home of a relative who had fallen on hard times. When I finally returned, the case went to the house of a friend I’ve never dared to ask about it. It was covered in real crocodile, and a group of sailors from Odessa wanted to buy it from me for what seemed a fortune at the time. There it was, unmistakable out there on the pier, surrounded by three or four brawny men. Surprised by the anachronistic object, they ran their fingers over its fastenings and reticulated skin, not believing the relic could belong to that foreign kid who seemed too young for so much luggage, too skinny for an itinerant casket like that one. I didn’t sell it, and I was right not to: armed with that monstrosity, I was able to survive the wait for trains that took days to arrive as I crossed into the Russian steppe like the hero in a comedy of errors.

It might have been better, I thought then, to have left all those books behind, to have fully dedicated myself to a future “free of the superfluous,” as someone once suggested to me in a letter. But with that suitcase, I always felt I was on the verge of a new beginning, like someone who suddenly notices that a gesture they always make, reflected in the living mirror that is their distant relatives, is more a matter of nature than nurture.

After a few months, this new panorama was blanketed in the same feeling as my previous trip: the deck of a boat, the sun-kissed houses along the banks of the Bosphorus, the golden glint of a wood floor, the soft crunch of boots on snow, only recently discovered… all this seemed like part of something inescapable: “real life,” the outside world. There was just one problem: I was only passing through. Due to some kind of temporal misalignment between that reality and my other obligations, the time I spent in those settings was always too brief: something separated it from the time to which my plans—their predetermined trajectory blurred by the sudden appearance of so many new landscapes—adhered.

When I got back from Russia, the three or four friends I saw regularly began to think of me as part of a set, as part of the set of books we would pass between us. I remember feeling the comforting aura of friendship one day as I traveled with P. to Casablanca, a little town overlooking the harbor with one train station and a solitary Christ at the top of a hill. It was one of the few trips I took in Cuba, a fact I have since come to regret.

The yellow walls of the palatial house where my friend’s father lived were covered in water stains, like a giant Rorschach test. It was a nineteenth-century villa with an open patio in the center, long, dimly lit hallways, and lustrous mahogany and wicker furniture. We had gone to pick up a few books; condemned to see his library scattered among the three or four places he used to live, my friend tried to gather his most treasured ones in an old bookshelf, a gift from an antiquarian. (A strange word comes to mind: mudada, a combination of “mute” [muda] and “move” [mudanza]. Leaving a house behind is like shedding a skin: it marks the beginning of a new season.) P. talked about his trouble holding on to books as part of an older curse: few Cubans were able to build a real library—José Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier were rare cases. “You have the Milanés family’s meager collection, full of Lope,” he said, “you have Varela, Saco, and Casal with his Kempis Christ; you have Count Kostia’s Parisian suitcases, the novels copied by Zacarías González del Valle, Martí’s nomadic collection, Heredia leaving Cuba without his books… Del Monte left his collection with the Aldamas, didn’t he? And the books Virgilio Piñera read and gave away.” To this day, Cuban historians have only mourned the burning of our forests (strangely enough, I think it is in this context that the word “Cuba” appears in Marx’s writings); when will we mourn our charred libraries? Those fires crushed all hope of a real literary future. We seemed condemned to carry suitcases, to talk about a few books—read with the passion of those who prefer wreckage to riches—stored in some old piece of furniture.

Later on I got a group together to do a couple of improvised philosophy courses at my place. The only condition was that everyone had to contribute their best books to the communal library. It was around then that this double “need” began to bother me: having to leave places behind, having to do things. Those books transformed the future into due time. Still, I took a tape recorder everywhere I went, convinced that the mix of confessions, digressions, and pretentious reflections I captured would be useful for something, someday. Not as a way to remember, though; in those days no one took memory seriously. The past didn’t exist—there were only plans, projects, the future towering in the distance. When I listen to those tapes now, I feel like I’m spying on someone else’s life.

The headstrong gesture of gathering books and talking about them ended, once again, with empty shelves. The people who read them are now in London, New York, Barcelona, Havana… Sometimes we talk on the phone without saying anything important. There’s some kind of unspoken rule that keeps us from mentioning those days.

“The course,” as we called it, was just a pretext for friendship, that trade in identities which so often comes down to a few biases. It’s hard to live surrounded by witnesses in a place where prudent gestures become habits that disguise indifference. Philosophy was supposed to soften those disappointments, to instill a sense of order, but our curiosity about distant lives and landscapes burned just below the surface of this interest as a desire to break through the membrane of a stifling reality and rummage around in a basement it had declared off-limits. This was not a question of strength, as we had thought at the beginning; dismembering the private meant moving like Chuang Tzu’s knife: knowing the victim’s body well enough to cut through organs without brute force.

But projects and readings meant little when a few authorizations to leave appeared and the country’s unbelievably tangled red tape was lifted, as if by magic. After treading the volatile terrain of politics and religion, “the course” was left stranded in its fledgling phase, a rite of passage eclipsed by the private study into which the adolescent emigrant retreats after his social phase.

II.

I recently discovered, in a friend’s novel, the description of a unique feeling: J., the protagonist, travels constantly while making shady business deals, until one day he realizes he has left his soul behind. His most intimate double is lost in some hostile city, so J. decides to let it catch up while he waits for letters that might give him insight into the disappearance of V., a Russian girl kidnapped from a harem in Istanbul. The novel mentions the idea of “Iamblican bilocaction,” a phenomenon discussed by Iamblicus and the Neoplatonists, a simple version of which might be the story of the man who never took an elevator because he thought his soul would not keep up with his body, and preferred that the two take the stairs together.

What I admire about José Manuel Prieto’s novel Livadia is not so much its metaphysical plot as its penchant for revealing the pockmarks of experience on its face. For J., the future is, in a Proustian sense, the anticipation of a past seen clearly, the possibility of a time recaptured in and through writing. The past, in turn, takes shape because it is accompanied by written memory, the potential metamorphosis of the real into the unreal, and vice versa: of pain into the memory of pain, of the sublime into the ridiculous sketch of the sublime, of the essential into the useless image of a life to which we add almost nothing new, making time the (only) thing that goes on.

Prieto is a careful reader of someone whose work is likely a logbook for all emigrant writers: Vladimir Nabokov. There is something very Nabokovian about this character who organizes his memories as he sets out to start a new life, an existence shaped by the idealized image of V. Here, the problem of exile is not so much a matter of struggling with a new reality, but rather one of settling accounts with a past that has become a limitless font of details. Hence his obsession with the senses, with certain unrepeatable sensations. Just like in Nabokov. The famous scene in Mary, for example, in which the protagonist tries to remember the cheap perfume his beloved wore, only to end up declaring that “memory can bring back everything but perfume, even though there is nothing the brings the past to us as intensely as a smell we associate with it.”

The strange uni-directionality of olfactory recall is also a good metaphor for the limits of memory: a certain resignation, a shrug of the shoulders in response to the arbitrary way recollections reach us is part of the adult life of the emigrant. Over time, we tend to forget the immediate; instead, images that we thought we had lost reappear a ritroso as radiant allusions along the way. Because of this, memories are interesting less for the experience of their protagonist or the moment they take place than for their details (“those wonderful details!” Nabokov dixit), those recollections of a landscape on the verge of disappearing, a backlit filigree or forgotten toy, that resonate across the life of the narrator and become the possibility of reconstructing a soul.

Together, imagination and memory allow us to connect with a lost world that offers only a succession of ghosts, of fragile archetypes that crumble when we try to take hold of them. The attempt to reconstruct the past inevitably ends in the grotesque, as Nabokov has demonstrated at different moments (most notably in Glory and Look at the Harlequins!)… In “The Return of Chorb,” one of his short stories, this bid to rewind the “typewriter ribbon of time” reveals its darker, more cynical tones.

The story is about a young emigrant writer who marries a German girl. The two decide to travel through Germany, Switzerland, and the Riviera, but she dies in the middle of the honeymoon after touching an electrical wire on a highway outside of Grasse. Wanting to be alone with his pain, Chorb does not tell his in-laws about her death. Instead, he looks back over each moment of his failed romantic getaway in reverse order, archiving every trifle he saw with his beloved. When he finally reaches the hometown of the deceased, he stops at the final chapel of his pilgrimage: the cheap hotel where they hid, laughing, from her parents on their wedding night. Unable to stand the solitude in the room, Chorb hires a prostitute—not for sex, just to fill the void beside him for the night. Meanwhile, the wife’s parents, who have had no news of their daughter in a month, hear that Chorb is there. They burst into the room and… that is where the story ends.

The protagonist of José Manuel Prieto’s novel also seems destined to an absurd end, forced to accept that life is shrouded and confused by the desire for a predetermined future, that it only draws back its veil after a few direct blows from those ineffable masters, space and time. Letting go of his “assured” future, his expected horizon, the exile becomes an emigrant.

What the English call displaced persons and the French call émigrés or depaysés are those who have lost their way, who aren’t going anywhere, anymore; they are people who have reached, in a sense, the end of the road. In German they are Ausgewanderten, a word that calls to mind a beautiful book in which W.G. Sebald, also an emigrant writer, reconstructs the biographies of four characters who at one time or another each had to abandon their homeland, abandoning themselves in the process. They are modest stories, far from any “great destiny.” And yet, recounting these lives reveals a gripping, surprising world grounded in details, in memory, and in the mysterious power these have to move us.

Of course, there is a more or less hidden homage in Sebald’s book to Nabokov, who appears in each of the stories as a minor figure: the butterfly man. These apocryphal nods are mixed in with strange images and fragments of conversations, interviews, and entries from other people’s diaries. For Sebald, as for Nabokov, emotional ambiguity is the principal feature of being uprooted: the emigrant’s feelings tend to be contradictory, tied as they often are to memory, that fickle mistress. In Sebald’s work, this malaise becomes background music: phrases stretch out and are distorted, adopt a liturgical rhythm. But only to show us something more important: by beginning this recherche in the dashed hopes of his forefathers, the narrator becomes our guide through the purgatory of memory. This is why there is no hierarchy to his memories of that hazy world—there is no ordering criterion, no imperative to burden the narration; nothing disrupts the light tread of this visitor without any real identity who enjoys walking among ghosts.

III.

Over the past twelve years, I have lived in four different countries. I have felt like a stranger in each of them, though the intensity of this strangeness might vary as it is limited by routine or takes on a nostalgic air. I have forgotten many things, moving from one place to another. I take solace in the idea that the things I have forgotten are more “personal” than those memories we cling desperately to. What is unique about each of those forgotten things, the most unsettling part, always lags behind: it is this bit of fiction in our lives that just might appear in a book—ours or someone else’s—one day.

I associate this discovery with a novel by Nabokov, in which the protagonist unwittingly goes to see a movie on which he had worked as an extra several months earlier. Seeing his own gaunt image on the screen embarrasses him and reveals the impermanence and randomness of life. He leaves the theater feeling queasy, convinced that he sold his shadow out there on the fairgrounds where floodlights point like canons at the anonymous masses. As he walks, he thinks about this shadow of his, about how it is moving from one city to another, one screen to another, and how he will never know what kind of person will see it, or for how long it will make its rounds through the world.

Reading that book was a therapeutic experience for me. Not only because, having changed countries so many times, I felt like the character who sells his shadow (an idea that recalls stories by Andersen and Count von Arnim), but also because I had finally found an explanation for the “feeling that might be described as a reverse nostalgia, that is, the burning desire to find myself in some other, unknown, place.” That sensation had a name, it could be written about, and doing so brought the character and his shadow into contact; the shapeless blotch began to imitate the movements of it owner, eventually reaching a subtle, undulating synchronicity.

Since then, I have thought of exile as the paradoxical revelation of the “essential,” as though it were only possible to get a panoramic view of life far from the predictable, known, or habitual world. By some strange effect of inertia, the most important landscapes of my past are of travels and books; it is like seeing my life reflected in a distant mirror. In exchange, this inertia offers me an imaginative space in which the “important” freely makes way for the “superfluous” governed by that flow of details by which the first seed of a sensibility is formed. Thanks to the time I have spent living outside my country, my future has come to seem less like a moment in history and more like something imbued, unlike most theories and timeworn “universal ideas,” with the tangibility by which perception achieves its subtle continuity.

When we begin to suspect that life may have a predetermined course, we string together its details and feel we have to look at the world around us differently, since each sensation necessarily bears a secret logic, or so we think. But even if our “destiny” turns out to be the pale reflection of this conjecture, we have experienced the pulse of the world. It is like the morning after a night of drinking: any flash of light is unbearable, but in this apparently dulled state we nonetheless discover an unexpected agility, an image.

When we decide to reconstruct the past, we start out with an advantage: any memory is a good place to start. Memory requires no particular lineage if you have a taste for words. A dubious repository of pleasure, the past warns us that by following time’s arrow we are betraying “something,” almost always going against what “should be” done. I am not talking about personal memories, those timeworn postcards of reminiscence, but about memory as an activity that separates us from the utilitarian side of things, or rather, that exists because it can do without that side. We are used to thinking about the life we “should lead” and the things we “should do” as “objective” realities, the opposite of more or less elaborate daydreams. But whoever sharpens their senses will find in those daydreams the secret logic of all that exists. When we dig deeper into those “real” aspirations, on the other hand, we reveal their ties to vague theories and concepts (what do success, power, and happiness mean, exactly?), if not their enslavement to the spectral world of clichés.

This is why I avoid thinking about the future, which turns the world into an abstraction and makes it hard to appreciate the shimmering dust of life. The only “maturity” with any meaning would, then, be that momentary twist when memory helps us take true measure of the present, over and against its illusory depth.

IV.

In one story from in The Emigrants, the one in which Sebald gives us the biography of a certain Ambrose Adelwarth, there is a strange allusion to “Korsakoff Syndrome,” a mental illness named after Sergey Sergeevich Korsakov (1854-1900), the Russian psychiatrist who discovered it, which involves compensating for memory loss with fantastic inventions. Those who suffer from the syndrome are unable to remember events from their recent, even immediate, past; they retain that information for only a few seconds before sinking into confabulation, into detailed and convincing memories of events that never occurred. The patients have no sense of continuity between one experience and the next—these gaps affect memories a few weeks old and those from fifteen or twenty years before they fell ill, alike—and their amnesia is never complete or consistent, since “islands” of memory can be discovered through persistent questioning. It is not any sort of radical metamorphosis, but rather a no-man’s land where imagination and delirium coexist.

Is it not possible that all emigrants need to rebuild their worlds, too? Reinvent the narrative that shapes their identity? For the emigrant, could “being himself” mean having to gather the fragments of his first-person pronoun and assemble the pieces of his inner drama, even at the expense of an ambiguous truthfulness? Is literature not a similar attempt to instill a blank canvas with reality and continuity in a fleeting world about which we can only draw connections in a frenzied kind of mythmaking? Is there something dangerous about this attempt to free ourselves, to some extent, from our servitude to immediate reality by means of its expeditious conflation with memory’s creative reconstructions?

Appearances aside, every emigrant is a futurephobe. He is not afraid of any particular future, regardless of whether that future is rosy or not for one reason or another; what he tries to avoid is perspective, anything that might organize his feelings, like those checkerboard floors you see in drawing manuals. Every so often he goes through, pretty much out of habit, the dull motions of projection, though deep down he mistrusts its domesticated, inevitable time. He understands that he has lost his “natural” time and begins to appreciate a form of imagination in which style, “that sign of transformation the writer’s thought subjects to reality” (Proust), takes on the form of a temporal inversion, the exchange of the future for the past, of the predictable for the provisional. This temporal metamorphosis in the name of style also implies a change in the way we relate to the people around us. If in a world organized around the future we are all grayish citizens of “what will be,” competitors in some pointless circular race, in a world of pure memory we are all ghosts, the living dead, characters based on ourselves.

In Atlantis, Leo Frobenius tells an unusual tale of a ghost town: “When one travels a great distance, one meets people in the market—whether in Ife, Dahomey, or the land of the Ewe—who died in their own countries and have retired there to avoid being recognized. When they see one of their compatriots, they quickly scurry away and make sure they are not seen again.” I live, along with almost everyone I know, in the skin of these zombies; withdrawn in one way or another, we wander through a lost world. We generally avoid seeing one another so as not to remind ourselves of this uncomfortable condition. (Other times, following an impulse that is the mirror image of the last, we seek these peers out so they can remind us of this feeling of estrangement.)

There is no doubt that solidarity begins to crumble when one bears the weight of something lost. It is easy to misinterpret this fact, taking it for the reflection or mimicry of behaviors found where privacy is a value. The habit of collectivization has been left behind and we are “free,” completely on our own. How much of our tendency to avoid people similar to us, those who force us to travel into the past, is grounded in fear? In recent years, I have come to believe that this fear is a key element of the emigrant’s civility, the reason we turn our memories into the gravestones of our being, of what we were and were not able to be, of what we never had and what we possessed with the joy of new initiates, of what we are not and could never be. I worry that exploring the future, for those of us who are “outside,” might become a bleak tour through these gravestones, a journey along which, at the end of the day, all we can do is dig up a few incidental bones from which to form the skeleton of a ritual figure. 

* *

José Manuel Prieto’s Livadia was translated by Carol and Thomas Christensen as Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire for Grove Press in 2007.

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Image: “Keeping All My Ships in the Harbor” by Nadja Bournonville. Curated by Marisa Espinola for Espacio en Blanco. (More)

Translated by Victoria Lampard and Heather Cleary

From “Ultramarina,” a contemporary opera by Marcelo Lombardero, with music by Pablo Mainetti and a libretto by Edgardo Cozarinsky, based on his novel “El rufián moldavo” (Emecé 2004). “Ultramarina” premiered in “Hasta Trilce” in April 2014. The excerpt that follows is a play on tango kitsch sung by a prostitute named Perla.

A CLEAN SLATE

If I could spit out all the kisses That tainted my young lips…

If I could wash away the scratch of of all those god-forsaken sheets…

If I could wipe away the caresses that consumed my skin, then I could love you.

Oh how I wish you were my first, the one who lied to me a thousand times.

(Does it matter? It is a man’s way to lie to a woman, and love her all the same),

How I wish you could see me as I once was, and ... Read More »]]>

Translated by Victoria Lampard and Heather Cleary

From “Ultramarina,” a contemporary opera by Marcelo Lombardero, with music by Pablo Mainetti and a libretto by Edgardo Cozarinsky, based on his novel “El rufián moldavo” (Emecé 2004). “Ultramarina” premiered in “Hasta Trilce” in April 2014. The excerpt that follows is a play on tango kitsch sung by a prostitute named Perla.

A CLEAN SLATE

If I could spit out all the kisses
That tainted my young lips…

If I could wash away the scratch of
of all those god-forsaken sheets…

If I could wipe away the caresses
that consumed my skin, then I could love you.

Oh how I wish you were my first,
the one who lied to me a thousand times.

(Does it matter? It is a man’s way to lie
to a woman, and love her all the same),

How I wish you could see me as I once was,
and I could give myself to you as though you were my first.

How I wish, for you, I once again had
A body that you could please,

I know: there is no hope
for a clean slate, a fresh start

A clean slate, a fresh start,
It is too late, I know.

Some nights I dream it could still happen…
I dream that not all is lost.

Something, I feel, still beats inside me,
Something in me lives on…

It scares me to say it, even to think it:
Could this something be my heart?

* *

Image: Pola Oloixarac

“What,” I said. That was how I answered the phone then. It was a forceful what—scrappy, combative. But combative isn’t quite the word, because my greeting was always followed by the desire to be left alone. The way I answered the phone had to do with a few demoralizing years misspent in Mexico working as a reader for a commercial publishing house, and also with all those sniveling Colombians who say Aló? and then launch into one story after another like idiot nightingales in a cage.

A voice on the other end of the line said hello.

“Yeah, what?” I repeated.

“Hello?” repeated the voice.

This kind of game isn’t my thing. I cut right to the chase.

“Who is this? What do you want?”

“Galvareza?” The voice asked, timidly.

“That’s right.”

“My name is Estela Lara. I’m María José and María del ... Read More »]]>
Juan Álvarez
translated by Heather Cleary

“What,” I said. That was how I answered the phone then. It was a forceful what—scrappy, combative. But combative isn’t quite the word, because my greeting was always followed by the desire to be left alone. The way I answered the phone had to do with a few demoralizing years misspent in Mexico working as a reader for a commercial publishing house, and also with all those sniveling Colombians who say Aló? and then launch into one story after another like idiot nightingales in a cage.

A voice on the other end of the line said hello.

“Yeah, what?” I repeated.

“Hello?” repeated the voice.

This kind of game isn’t my thing. I cut right to the chase.

“Who is this? What do you want?”

“Galvareza?” The voice asked, timidly.

“That’s right.”

“My name is Estela Lara. I’m María José and María del Mar Pizarro’s mother.”

Two years earlier, I had figured out a way to con a bunch of intelligent and enthusiastic young editors. I made them think I had written a good book, a collection of short stories I had researched and worked on for years. A monument to discipline, the kind of book only a mature writer could produce. Two drinks later, we sealed the deal. I asked for a million pesos, which came out to around five hundred dollars, and stressed that they were in a great position. I told them I had asked for so little because I believed in small, independent publishers. I told them that we all had to sacrifice a little in the name of solidarity. We raised our glasses and smiled. I took the money and bought myself the oldest Vespa I could find, then headed for a little town near Bogotá to relax.

I had written the book using Rafael Alberti’s under the sun method, meaning that I grabbed a notebook and filled it with a little bit of everything. I filled it with love and I filled it with politics. To be clear, in one of the stories I did use the figures and imposing surname of the Pizarro girls, whom I had never seen in real life. I only knew that one was a model and the other made jewelry and promoted street artists. The imposing surname? Their father’s, of course, the leader of a Colombian guerrilla group sui generis. By sui generis I mean a democratic, urban, media-savvy guerrilla group that made important symbolic attacks and was militant throughout the seventies and eighties, then integrated itself into mainstream society in the nineties. Handsome and charismatic, the guy even tried to run for president, but was shot in the narrow walkway of an airplane by some poor kid with a machine gun provided for the occasion, just in case the guerrillero had gotten any big ideas. I went over the story quickly in my head. If their mother had called to chew me out, I needed to be prepared. I didn’t remember describing her daughters as slutty, stupid, or cruel, so I calmed down a bit and said hello. As I did, I remembered the words the police had found scrawled on a piece of paper in the young hit man’s pocket: “Please, send the million pesos to my mother.”

“I read the story you wrote about my daughters. I’d like to invite you to coffee,” Mrs. Lara said.

I thought about explaining a few basic principles of literary theory to her, to get her off my back. I racked my brain for the right words. Mrs. Lara, the story isn’t about your daughters. Your daughters are in it because their father’s last name is a perfect hook, politically and commercially… But what if she already knew? After all, how could someone with a model for a daughter not have some insight into this kind of thing? I had to be precise. The last thing I wanted was a repeat of what I went through with my own mother, who also appears in one of my stories—the memoir. The more I explained the trick to my old lady, the more she saw the piece as a catalog of her hardships.

As I ran through these mental calculations, my stomach alerted me to the fact that I was hungry. What if I were to tack a prosciutto sandwich on ciabatta and a mango mousse on to that coffee? It was just a question of going to the right place.

“Mrs. Lara, how would you like to meet right now?”

*

As could have been expected, things went badly at the café. Mrs. Lara rattled off fifteen minutes of enthusiastic and impertinent questions about my life and what she delighted in calling my “commitment to literature.” Trying to avoid any more of a debacle, I cut her off and asked her what she wanted. My sandwich had arrived and I had already wolfed half of it down.

“I want to tell you the real story of my two daughters.”

I might have been a leech back then, but I wasn’t a sucker. I turned her down emphatically.

“Mrs. Lara, don’t take this the wrong way but, to be totally honest, I couldn’t care less about what you call the true story of your daughters.”

I paired the phrase with the movement of getting up from the table. The mother of the Pizarro girls grabbed my arm, squeezed, and said:

“What a son of a bitch you are. I buy you lunch and you can’t even manage to listen to me for a few goddamn minutes more?”

I felt the pressure of her dry hand increase exponentially and remembered the rumors about her years as a guerrilla. What if they were true? What if the old bag really could throw me down on the polished tiles of the café with some crazy ninja move and beat me to a pulp, right then and there? I scanned her eyes, sat back down, and ordered two cocktails. It was happy hour. I wasn’t taking advantage.

*

Going through her daughters’ life story took Mrs. Lara twenty minutes. Each. Somewhere in the course of the torture I lost count of how many times she said Love and Human Rights.

“All the rest is just lies told by the press. María José lives with her daughter Camila in Barcelona. María del Mar is going to college in Puerto Rico. Their days are so much calmer now,” she concluded between sighs, and, fortunately, didn’t speak again.

I went back to my burrow and felt sick all of a sudden. I blamed that damned sandwich. I blamed the cocktails. I blamed myself for not listening to my instincts. Why had I agreed to listen to such a trite, cloying story? How was it possible that for one fucking lunch and two sickly sweet drinks I was willing to subject an organ as noble as the ear to the torture of that maternal epic? It had been easy enough to predict that the Pizarro mother would be riddled with guilt for the kind of childhood—always looking over their shoulders, always on the run—she had forced on her two daughters. But it was worse than that: she entertained the warped idea that, in some way, it had made them stronger.

I felt better after banging my head against the foam matting tacked to the wall next to my desk for a while. The impact cleared my mind. I started to see things how they were: the little box of trifles offered up to me that afternoon had kept me from sniffing out the gold mine right under my nose. I had a love story and the right to use the phrase “human rights” with impunity. I would write the novelization of a pseudo-biography of comandante Pizarro. Good and sensationalist. About him and the women within the orbit of his affections: his wife, his lovers, his strong-willed daughters. One an inveterate hippie and the other the young promise of Colombian modeling. I couldn’t seem to escape all the information about the family, and whatever was missing, well, it had been proven that the mother would talk nonstop if given the chance. What about the lovers? Simple: insinuations that the darkness of the jungle and the hardships of the hills would easily put into perspective. With a female combo like that, on top of the media frenzy that turned the Pizarro name into an icon long ago, someone was sure to invest. In a country full of hummingbirds happy to feed on the nectar of war, drama and romance, there would be no shortage of readers.

After such a productive day, I slept like a baby on pills.

*

The next day I called the office of my friend Armando Torres—a smart young man, good conversationalist, attractive, blue-eyed. Everything a major national producer of stationery and books with an annual gross of around 160 million dollars could want in an editor of fiction and journalism. I tossed my idea out in all its glory.

“But Galvareza, buddy, didn’t you write about all that a few years ago?” the idiot said, thinking his memory was really something. I explained it to him again. I told him to clean out his ears and pay attention this time. He must not have liked that, because as soon as I had gone through the whole thing a second time, he added:

“I’m not interested. The story’s been done to death. I don’t see anything original about it.”

“Don’t be dense, Torres. Who said anything about it being original?” The time had come to go all in with this asshole. I showed him no mercy. “People look at reality and they see it. Words don’t make the invisible visible. Fucking Romanticism, Torres. Is that what you went to college for? Words take things that were already visible, things that everyone looks at but no one can, or knows how to, or wants to see, and makes them visible all over again. These people’s lives were hard, appalling, joined by fate to a society and a murderous, Manichean ruling class, the lives of acrobats whose muscles cramp up mid-air. And all that, for what? You have to have a real set of balls to look that straight on and not close your eyes or take off running, because whoever sees it breaks down or goes crazy. It’s big business, man.”

“I’m not interested. I’m hanging up.”

I threatened him. I said I was going to put a curse on the bullshit imprint he worked for. He sighed, annoyed. I beat him to the punch and hung up. I looked over the three or four other publishing contacts scribbled in my agenda. I’d had a similar conversation with each of them in the last six months. Shit.

It took me two days to feel better. Three to clear my head. By the fourth day, I woke up glowing, without any memory of the name Pizarro, of the deal, of Torres’s bad breath over the phone. None of it.

On the fifth day, my doorbell rang. Bogotá’s western peaks read four o’clock sharp. I opened the door to find the fresh, angular face of a young woman. Short hair, modern bangs. Red boots exposed to halfway up her calves. Those tight jeans probably wrapped up the best part of her personality.

“Hi. I’m María José Pizarro,” said the little surprise.

Son of a bitch. What the hell was going on? Some kind of sick joke, I thought.

“It’s a shame you’re not your sister,” I said quickly. “What do you want? How did you get this address?”

“I have my ways … I don’t want anything. Mamá told me you had a bad attitude. I’m visiting the city. People don’t get together much around here, so I decided to stop by and say hello.”

“You could have called. I would have told you that you weren’t welcome.”

“And my sister would have been?”

“I don’t know. Depends on what she was wearing,” I lied. Doing research for those stories, I’d taken a look at a few photos of the young model. I would have let her in, even if she had only come to work me over with a whip.

“Are you saying you think I’m ugly and badly dressed?”

I looked at her again. The truth is, she wasn’t half bad. Sometimes you lie. But sometimes you don’t.

“No, you manage.”

“I manage to what?”

“Well, you manage to…”

Seeing me at a loss for words, she slid nimbly between my arm and the door, brushing my armpit with the crown of her head. Once she had stormed the living room, she said:

“Don’t close it, my sister’s on her way up.”

“Oh?”

“What? Do models make you nervous?

“Honestly, I’m not in the mood for this today. Submit your complaints in writing and leave me alone.”

“Complaints? Not at all. We just dropped in to have a few beers. Since you’re sort of rude, we assumed you weren’t buying. We left the ones we brought in the cab, so my sister went to get more,” she said, flashing a smile.

The sister appeared on my doorstep wearing a skirt with greenish flowers that fell just above her knees. She stuck out her arm, proudly showing me a bag full of beers. She looked as sweet as a ripe kiwi.

“Is this Galvareza?” she asked her sister as soon as she saw me, belittlingly.

“Go figure,” answered María José.

I said nothing. I was already spent.

“Darling, just a joke,” the model went on, to me this time.

“Your name is a joke. Who in their right mind would baptize someone María del Mar?” I said.

“They were a little crazy, it’s true. That’s probably why we were never baptized,” she said, laughed just like her sister, and headed for the kitchen. When she came back, she was carrying two cans of beer per head. I had to hand it to them: the Pizarro sisters were doing their best to make a good impression. “Do you know what my father thought about Catholicism in Colombia?”

“Why would I know that?”

“He said that it was bullshit, an imperishable weed, a highly corrosive mold. That was how the gentleman guerrilla spoke.”

She opened her can and took a long, gleeful sip. Then she asked if her sister had explained the reason for their visit.

“Yeah, she said there wasn’t one.”

“Exactly. That, and also to see what kind of guy our dear mother has been telling all about what she thinks are our lives. Speaking of which, you’re not naïve enough to believe that mothers know about their daughters’ lives, are you?

“I don’t care. A few days ago I had thought about making some big money off you and your father, but luckily the publishing industry took it upon itself to discourage me from that idiocy.”

“I believe it. This country has a gift for discouragement. That’s probably why we don’t live here. Here the people are faced with a merchant of well processed, well packed cocaine and a thug bastard who goes through life carving up farmers he doesn’t like with a chain saw, and in the end they find one just as horrifying as the other. Degenerates! Cocksuckers!

“Hey, whoa. This is a family joint,” I cut her off. “You’ve got a pretty filthy mouth, for a model.”

“And you haven’t heard her talk about the other girls, or do her imitation of Viena Ruiz, or tell that story about the President’s son,” María José chimed in.

“What story about the President’s son?”

“You haven’t heard? I thought you were in the loop. Tell him, María.”

The model made it clear that said she’d rather shoot herself than waste her time with that. Her older sister made a face at her for being difficult, then said:

“I’ll tell you, then, because it’s important.”

The story she told begins when the President’s family picks up on the strange fact that, for some time, the younger son seems not to want to leave the presidential palace. Unlike the older son, who takes every chance he gets to travel around the country with his father, the younger one is always using his studies or his delicate constitution as an excuse to shut himself in. One day his father comes homes from visiting towns along the Pacific that had been devastated by floods. He’s exhausted because, among other things, he’s had to pose for hours kissing the foreheads of little brown babies abandoned to their luck in the most ferocious poverty. And what does he find? His youngest offspring wailing with pleasure as a dark-skinned soldier from the Presidential guard gives it to him up the ass with his uniform around his knees. The scene takes place in the older brother’s bathroom, from which the President drags them both at once, then beats the crap out of them and throws his son down the stairs of the palace screaming, You disgusting faggot pig!

“No way.”

“Oh, yes.”

“What happened to the soldier?” I asked.

“What happened to the soldier?” María José repeated, sounding surprised.

“Yeah, what happened to him?”

“How the fuck am I supposed to know what happened to the soldier? Galvareza, please.”

“They transferred him or gave him a medal or he became the hero of the National Guard,” María del Mar interrupted. “Who cares? We’re telling you about the fucking tumble President Uribe’s son took down the steps of the Presidential Palace. Three broken ribs, a broken arm, a fractured skull… Jesus, Galvareza, what part of this don’t you understand? Check and you’ll see that for about three months last year, the little darling wasn’t once seen in public.”

I opened my second beer and drank half of it in one gulp.

*

“Hey, handsome,” María del Mar interjected about a half hour later. “It’s time you knew the truth. My sister and I are here to invite you to go for a drive.”

“Are you insane? Terrible stories have started that way in this country.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, we’re not going to do anything to you, you pussy.”

What followed was a proposal that consisted of my joining them the next day at a country estate near Fusa, one of the houses where Commander Pizarro had hidden. They were going now because their mother had just told them about the place. Everything suggested that they would find boxes full of their father’s documents there. Books, photos, notebooks. Even clothes from his guerrilla days. The truth was, they didn’t know exactly what might be there. But whatever it was, it had occurred to them that I was the kind of guy who might be interested. If we found something important, they would let me use it. Publishing, subsidiary rights, all of it. The plan was to leave first thing in the morning.

“There’s a pool, Galvareza. The only danger is that you might tan that pasty skin of yours.”

I admit that I considered it. The idea was tempting, and so were the Pizarro sisters. But it was getting late and it was time to be honest with them. I hadn’t been feeling well, I said, for a while. I’d been to the doctor, who diagnosed me with a minor problem, but one I needed to keep an eye on: perspirative transudation. When I was done talking, the Pizarro sisters moved back a little on the couch.

“Don’t worry. It’s not worth making that face over.”

I went on with my explanation. My reputation was at stake, and I didn’t gamble with my reputation.

“It’s got nothing to do with my ass. They’re chronic secretions that lead to weight loss, through my pores. I’m a bit weak right now and I need to be careful. Going on a trip, crossing a field, discovering documents, getting some sun—pretty much everything about a trip to the country could be harmful to me.

They laughed. The rest of the afternoon passed like a giant’s sigh. No one said human rights or love. No one said politics.

Somewhere in the flood of alcohol the prospect of a sexual escapade did cross my mind, but in the end I didn’t mention it. Perspirative transudation can be fatal.

Fortunately, my Mexican friends never heard about the invasion of the Pizarro sisters. They would have found my lack of initiative in the presence of such sweet little things offensive. They probably would even have spit at me. In my country, those were days of half-blind pelicans, grand birds that used their long, straight beaks only as crutches. I answered the phone with a “What.” It was a forceful what—scrappy, combative. But combative isn’t quite the word.

* *

Artwork: Alejandro Musich, “Lobos II” (2012), courtesy of miau miau

Interview and introduction by Pola Oloixarac translated by Heather Cleary

A young professor of literature in Los Angeles collects funding and poems online in order to make his dream a reality: he wants to fly over the territory, dropping poems like bombs. He believes that, in light of the recent history of the United States, cleaving the air with his own drone is the best way to protect poetry: everything else can collapse—NASA can close its doors and employees of the State can fall victim to the shutdown—but military programs remain intact, the drones still carry out their secret missions. By joining with these unmanned vehicles, poetry refuses to capitulate, David muses, twirling his long connoisseur moustache.

The son of preachers from the heart of Texas, David Shook grew up having faith in the spoken word. He studied the ... Read More »]]>

Interview and introduction by Pola Oloixarac
translated by Heather Cleary

A young professor of literature in Los Angeles collects funding and poems online in order to make his dream a reality: he wants to fly over the territory, dropping poems like bombs. He believes that, in light of the recent history of the United States, cleaving the air with his own drone is the best way to protect poetry: everything else can collapse—NASA can close its doors and employees of the State can fall victim to the shutdown—but military programs remain intact, the drones still carry out their secret missions. By joining with these unmanned vehicles, poetry refuses to capitulate, David muses, twirling his long connoisseur moustache.

The son of preachers from the heart of Texas, David Shook grew up having faith in the spoken word. He studied the lost syntax of languages in danger of extinction like Kiowa and Nahuatl, and translates from Isthmus Zapotec and Zoque, the language of Chiapas. He was not able to raise the money he needed (some ten thousand dollars) on the internet, but that didn’t stop him: the song of the drones has attracted private investors, and he expects to be flying over Los Angeles with his poems within a month.

With his drones, David Shook joins the continent’s long tradition of fighting eagles. Among his inspirations he counts Raúl Zurita, who painted his poems in the air (antecedent prosthesis of Carlos Wieder, Bolaño’s fierce poet-pilot), the CasaGrande collective, which made poems rain down over London, and the Russian Futurist Vasily Kamensky, whom Shook translated from Cyrillic and who was a kind of 1930s Kanye West that saw breasts as earthquakes and life as resurrection. The canon (the poetic canons) range from English to Pashto, Saraiki, Somali and Urdu, by authors like Todd Swift, Sam Hamill, Mandy Kahn, Danielle Moody and Víctor Terán. He hopes to be able to publish the poems of Gaariye, the preeminent Somali bard who sang about nuclear weapons in 1970 and whose recorded voice circulates as contraband; the Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, a political exile living in London; along with Said Salah, Caasha Lul Mohamud Yusef, Rifat Abbas and the great Urdu poet Noshi Gillani.

He imagines them crossing the sky like geometrical insects, moving slowly 100 feet above our heads, opening their metal bellies, releasing their precious cargo. The wind is an issue, but publishing poetry is always that: tossing bits of paper into the breeze from too far up, without a care for which way it is blowing.

*

Pola Oloixarac: Obama tried to convince Congress and the G20 to bomb Syria. Whom do you have to convince in order to send out poetry drones?

David Shook: The most pressing people to convince are my potential funders, and I’m still working on that. I’d also like to convince my fellow poets that the Poetry Drone is more than just a gimmick, a look-at-me attention grab. To me it’s about more just the novelty of the poems’ distribution. It’s about the symbolism of transformation: the physical transformation of sword into plowshare. That physicality is crucial to the project—it’s as important as the poems themselves.

What’s behind the superposition of the most widespread literary genre in the USA—that is, war—and poetry, which is the most marginal? What are the implications of turning poetry into a geopolitical experience?

I like the conception of War as a literary genre. It certainly has been core to our national mythmaking. Poetry is a subgenre of speech, of language—it’s our least practical form of communication, and as a citizen of a nation often too impatient or too proud for diplomacy, poetry is a radical alternative to both rhetorical and physical political aggression.

I think it’s important to remember that all poetry is political, and that’s because all language is political. I’m not talking about Democrats versus Republicans, about political parties or principles—I think that kind of stuff typically results in some pretty uninteresting poetry. Language is political because it’s how we relate with other people—and I think that’s the important thing, that we relate with other people, people like and unlike us.

Modern warfare has worked hard to facilitate the dehumanization of our enemies—to eliminate the supposed barbarism of hand-to-hand combat, of seeing our enemies up close, of having to recognize their humanity. To recognize that our enemies are people. But drones are a perfect example of contemporary war’s very real barbarism—from the Greek barbaros, or “foreign.” We’re distancing ourselves from murder; since we’ve justified it in theory we ought not endure the ethical complications of carrying out its physical act. I think this conversation is a worthy topic for our poetry.

Do you think the people who do the bombing will read your poems?

The guys doing the bombing? The teenagers and twenty-somethings joy-sticking Predators from their bunkers in Texas/Florida/Nevada? Probably not. I’d like for them to, of course. I’d love for them to write some poems to be dropped from the drone. How amazing would it be to drop some poems over an army base? I don’t know if I’m ready for Guantanamo, though.

War is so interesting as a horizon; we live inside it, and that’s what I love about your drones: the state of poetry is right there, because war is the reality of the case (“case” in the sense of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus). How do you see this case, this war that is so different from the ones with Iraq and Afganistan?

The United States has been at war my entire adult life, my entire professional life as a poet. It’s difficult for me to know experientially how this case is different from others in the past, but I suspect that our displacement of war has reached new levels. War happens in the background, like an open window on your computer that you’ve buried under a thousand Word documents and Chrome tabs. The average American is not affected by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, at least not in terms of their daily living situation. This is somewhat less true for those in lower income brackets, and somewhat more true for those in higher brackets. This displacement of war is dehumanizing to those who suffer its effects. War is dehumanizing, period, but we have developed an unprecedentedly effective method of dehumanizing the objects of our supposedly just wars. But here’s the catch: you can’t dehumanize others without dehumanizing yourself. Drones are a physical manifestation of that idea, an emblem of our times.  Afghanistan and Iraq are conveniently just beyond the visible horizon. I don’t know a United States at peace. I don’t know that one exists. Maybe that’s true of any political state, inherent to the nature of systems, but as an artist and poet I want to be one of those—and here I borrow from the fantastic South African magazine /Chimurenga/—”who no know go know.”

Have the conditions under which poetry is produced come to resemble the conditions of war?

No. We’ve allocated $91.5 billion to the war in Afghanistan this year, and just under $5 billion to drones, which is a little more than we’ve invested in poetry.

I produce most of mine in bed on a MacBook Air, in my Los Angeles studio, with a tiny chihuahua on my stomach and a fan on my face, or on the bus, on my iPhone. Although I guess that’s increasingly what war looks like to the soldiers on our side of the drones, I don’t think I can compare my own experience of writing poems to the experience of war. I’m immensely privileged, and I think that to claim otherwise is offensive. I do aspire to do more than just document the interior life of the privileged, but I think that the ability to do so is a function of my own privilege. Maybe the conditions under which a Twa woman composes an oral poem, or someone like Raúl Rivero writing poems in prison, or Recaredo Silebo Boturu’s veiled political critique of the police state approach the depraved conditions of war, but not the conditions I write in.

Has poetry gone to war against common modes of existence? Is this a challenge it should take on?

I’m not convinced that common modes of existence are all that common themselves. Common to whom?

Poetry is huge, so I’ll speak only for myself: my poems seek to explore and subvert common modes of language, of communication. That sounds very serious, which it is, but not at the expense of pleasure. Like Biko says, “I write what I like.”

I’m not terribly keen on these types of abstractions—they often lead to very romantic and bourgey notions about writing. It feels dramatic to say that poetry is at war with anything. If it is, it’s doing a pretty shit job of it. Have you seen the soldiers? Most poets can’t swim; their feet blister easily; they’re belligerent, get drunk on the job, and are prone to desertion. That’s our charm, but drones don’t fall for it.

If Hollande ultimately supports Obama’s bid to bomb, will you include poems written in French?

I’d love to include French-language poems! So far I have poems from Arabic, English, Pashto, Somali, and Zapotec, but I’d love to include all the languages I can get. There’s an open call for submissions on my website.

In Elio Petri’s La decima vittima, Ursula Andress is chasing after Marcello Mastroianni, trying to kill him. In the end, they get married and flowers sprout from the gun. If we consider the fact that, instead of bombs, your drones drop poems, doesn’t your project end up aestheticizing war? In the context of the USA’s proposed attack on Syria, is it possible that your project depoliticizes war, and is therefore an inversion of Walter Benjamin’s ideas?

I don’t know that I’ve contributed to an aesthetics of war, though I do appreciate some art that I think has done this, like Mahwish Chishty’s visual reappropriation of drones and Yoshua Okón’s re-contextualization of war exercises (Octopus).

The Poetry Drone is an attempt to aestheticize political engagement, to aestheticize protest. It offers a symbolic alternative to my culture’s promulgation of political and economic domination, of empire. I hope.

At the same time the Poetry Drone is more than just an exercise in aesthetics, in aestheticizing protest, or an experiment in the distribution of poetry. That’s the importance of its physicality. Like Pedro Reyes’ instruments and shovels. Reyes is an inspiration; I would love to meet him.

The PoDro repurposes an actual physical object intended to be used to kill people from the safety and comfort of a military installation some 7,000 miles away.

There are some obvious practical differences—I don’t have the millions it would take to control a drone from that distance, but the model I’m hoping to acquire, which is most often used for aerial photography, can be controlled from over a mile away. The poems that the drone deploys do come from that far away—from Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan—and from nearer by.

I’ve joked that if anything, the Poetry Drone might kill children from boredom, but honestly I don’t believe that will be the case. The poems I’ve collected so far are great, and the physical imposition of the drone—a seemingly autonomous machine humming as it hovers in place—will make for an impressive and I hope mildly terrifying display.

I think that Benjamin’s aestheticization of politics applies more broadly to empire, not just to fascist regimes, and thus also describes today’s United States. So sure, the Poetry Drone might politicize aesthetics, but I’m hesitant to say that it does so in the heroic and antidotal mode that Benjamin envisioned. I do think that there is an inherent relationship between aesthetics and politics, but I’m no scholar and I haven’t worked out its exact nature—maybe you, Pola, could help me come up with some wild theories?

* *

Artwork: Rosario Zorraquin, “Guerra” (2013).

* *

David Shook grew up in Mexico City before studying endangered languages in Oklahoma and poetry at Oxford. His collection of poems Our Obsidian Tongues, longlisted for the 2013 Dylan Thomas Prize, is available from Eyewear Publishing. He served as Translator in Residence at the Poetry Parnassus in London, where he premiered his covertly filmed documentary Kilometer Zero, featuring Equatorial Guinean poet Marcelo Ensema Nsang. His translations include Mario Bellatin’s Shiki Nagaoka, Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto, and Roberto Bolaño’s manifesto Leave Everything, Again. He lives in Los Angeles, where he edits molossus and Phoneme Media. (Photo: Crispin Hughes)

I used to live in Madrid, but now I only go when I’m able, and feel like it. When I get there I perform certain rituals, like a pilgrim arriving at Santiago de Compostela. One is to have a beer at a great bar called Pepe Botella, and another is to give in to the temptation of Arrebato (“Rapture”), a bookstore on La Palma street, right in the middle of Malasaña. It’s a second-hand bookstore, but that second hand has a soft touch. Pepe, the bookseller, finds objects of value to the literary sybarite and offers them up for sale instead of keeping them for himself, which is what I would do. It’s not like Tipos Infames, a nearby bookstore with a Michelin star for selling new work. It’s a space for exploration, a place where you never ... Read More »]]> Juan Soto Ivars

I used to live in Madrid, but now I only go when I’m able, and feel like it. When I get there I perform certain rituals, like a pilgrim arriving at Santiago de Compostela. One is to have a beer at a great bar called Pepe Botella, and another is to give in to the temptation of Arrebato (“Rapture”), a bookstore on La Palma street, right in the middle of Malasaña. It’s a second-hand bookstore, but that second hand has a soft touch. Pepe, the bookseller, finds objects of value to the literary sybarite and offers them up for sale instead of keeping them for himself, which is what I would do. It’s not like Tipos Infames, a nearby bookstore with a Michelin star for selling new work. It’s a space for exploration, a place where you never know what you’re going to find. Pepe knows everything about Spanish and Spanish American poetry, and laughs a little when he sees me with the Stephen King novels I scoop up from this fount to feed my collection spilling from my arms. I tell him I’m a bit of a freak, and he indulges me. Then we get to talking about poets, about our friend Ajo Micropoetisa, and about the situation in Spain. Arrebato is my School of Continuing Education.

I did penance there, once.

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Arrebato Libros – La Palma 21 – Madrid

Mariano López Seoane translated by Pola Oloixarac

In fairy tales, curiosity, one of the forces that sets the story in motion, is always punished. This ancestral warning has stopped few, even though punishment has rained down upon us from Eve’s appetite for apples to the present day. It was the desire to see things up close, to be where the action was, that drove me to visit the Venice Biennale and Art Basel in the space of two weeks. The punishment was not long in coming. Like a hero in disgrace, I was condemned to repetition: in both places, the same artists, the same names, the same questions and, what’s worse, the same experience.

There’s little to say, in critical terms, about Art Basel. It’s a fair: it aims to sell works and make names circulate, ignite careers, turn artists into ... Read More »]]>

Mariano López Seoane
translated by Pola Oloixarac

In fairy tales, curiosity, one of the forces that sets the story in motion, is always punished. This ancestral warning has stopped few, even though punishment has rained down upon us from Eve’s appetite for apples to the present day. It was the desire to see things up close, to be where the action was, that drove me to visit the Venice Biennale and Art Basel in the space of two weeks. The punishment was not long in coming. Like a hero in disgrace, I was condemned to repetition: in both places, the same artists, the same names, the same questions and, what’s worse, the same experience.

There’s little to say, in critical terms, about Art Basel. It’s a fair: it aims to sell works and make names circulate, ignite careers, turn artists into stars. And that is exactly what it does. All critical cannons are aimed at the Biennale, which presents itself as an intellectual, or at least a reflective, exercise. The fact that it’s hard to establish a clear distinction between the two events speaks of the direction the Biennale has taken, but also about major changes in the art world and the culture industry behind this change. What follows is an attempt at capturing these transformations.

Repetition Hell opened up under my feet at Basel. I arrived in the Swiss city a little tired after an exhaustive inspection of the Biennale and its excretions. I didn’t know much about the fair (beyond its reputation for being the biggest art fair in the world) or about the city (I only knew of its Roman past, and its place in the tortured biography of Nietzsche). It’s possible that the insistent buzz of his name conditioned, or telepathically imposed, a receptivity to what returns.

Nietzsche taught at the University of Basel from 1869 to 1879, in what would be his only formal tie to a teaching institution. At the time, he was a young promise in the field of classical philology. Health problems, and his growing weariness of academic conventions and repetitions took him to quit. He left Basel to become an independent, traveling author. Only then could he focus on composing his greatest works, The Gay Science among them, where, in section 341, he presents for the first time the eternal return as the ultimate test. Let me explain: Beyond cosmological pretentions, the figure of the eternal return can be understood as proof that we’ve reached what the philosopher understands as the height of human greatness: amor fati, the love of destiny. If, when faced with the prospect of having to repeat our lives for all eternity just as we have lived them, we are inclined to accept, then, says Nietzsche, we are demonstrating the highest affirmation of life, the greatest love for life’s twists and turns. This would be a transcendental, positive repetition crucial to the affirmation of life, and quite different from the mind-numbing repetition of routines, academic work and, we could add, of the market.

The first effect of my double voyage was an objective déjà vu: the artists highlighted in the Biennale reappear in the more openly commercial displays of Basel. What’s more: some of the works that could be acquired at the fair seemed to complete what the Biennale didn’t propose as a series, but the fair revealed as such.

Berlinde De Bruyckere shines in the Belgian pavilion of the Biennale with her monumental zombie tree trunk, but lays down just two little sticks (a -dead?- deer on a table, and a small trunk) at two of the Fair’s central stands. In the section of the Biennale curated by Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy exhibits a doll that seems like something straight out of Sesame Street; conveniently, in Hauser and Wirth, he presents a Snow White made of black silicone belonging to a series he did a couple years ago at the Armory Show. George Condo, who shot into the pop firmament after the cover he designed for rapper Kanye West, also makes a double showing (multiple, in fact, since his work appears in several galleries). Alfredo Jaar presents an interpretation of the Apocalypse tailor-made for Venice, and an excessive intervention in the Unlimited section at Basel. Jeremy Denner shoots us a dose of English Magic in his curatorship for the British pavilion, and reappears with a simple print (“Bless this Acid House,” 10 editions, sold out) at the stand of Parisian gallery Art Concept in Basel. The omnipresent Ai Wei Wei, as vast as the Chinese Empire, proliferates at the origin (in Venice, in at least three different places and circumstances) and returns at the fair. Llyn Foulkes’ deforming portraits can be seen at Punta della Dogana and the halls of the fair. Thomas Schütte’s neogothic sculptures reappear everywhere. Rikrit Tiravanija is also present in the two cities of global art. The examples could multiply (eternally?), forming what Graciela Speranza has called the “globalized checklist” that defines contemporary art today.

The question is whether the art at the Biennale and Basel can pass the test of eternal return, or whether we are standing before a repetition of another kind, the banal repetition that haunted Nietzsche in his days as a professor. In any case, and as Nietzsche would have wanted, the Eternal Return Test can serve as a measuring stick to distinguish artworks that break through the desert of ennui created by the rest, artworks that turn their gaze on us, capturing the light and shadows of the present, open to today, to the future, and to the archaic, from those frozen in the category of symptoms. In either case, faced with these two types of repetitions, criticism has something to say.

Let’s start by affirming life: let’s fix our eyes on the artworks we could revisit over and over again, for all eternity. They are few, they can be counted on two hands. Five come to mind at the moment: the aforementioned Berlinde De Bruyckere at the Belgian pavilion; the SS Hangover ship by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, on the shores of the Encyclopedic Palace; Mathias Poledna’s video at the Austrian pavilion; the barely perceptible performance by Tino Sehgal at the entrance to the Giardini; the mock-encyclopedia by the Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss.

I think these artworks stand out from the rest of the exhausting itinerary because they cultivate languages that set them apart from the manic pulse of the Biennale, because they make us question the grammar of the spectacle, because they highlight an emerging dissent, and offer a warped image of the circuits themselves, fostering a critical distance not always present at these events.

Their significance comes through most clearly against the backdrop of the conditions of reception of the works at the Biennale and Art Basel. The overwhelming quantity of artworks; the mingling of techniques, languages, traditions, horizons; the fact that, even at the Everest of spatial design, we are visitors to a mind-numbing heap of artworks, names and cultures. Everything conspires to make these itineraries a confusing experience in which one learns as much as one forgets, in which one’s senses and understanding are stupefied like those of an inhabitant of a megalopolis. Where one experiments not the artworks, but rather the internal logic of the itinerary: its speed, rhythm, and lack of relief. All in all, the experience is closer to that of visiting an amusement park than an exhibition at a gallery or a museum. This manic pulse is the first thing reverted by the aforementioned artworks. Let’s see how.

Right after the impressive architecture of the Arsenale, Ragnar Kjartansson’s “S.S. Hangover” surprises the fatigued visitor. After hours of walking and seeing without looking (a sort of immunological response to the confusion), his legs, head and eyes are sore. After the main event and a series of national pavilions, the view opens onto the water (the channeled sea), a surface that invites you to sit down and relax. That’s where the Icelandic artist placed his ship, a fishing boat redesigned with Greek, Icelandic and Venetian patterns. Like the visitors to the Biennale, the ship repeats a mechanical itinerary. But it does so at a pace impossible to sustain in the frenzied succession of halls and pavilions and the reflux of visitors: crewed by a sextet playing a piece for wind instruments specially composed by Kjartan Sveinsson, this “kinetic sculpture” maintains a slow pace—more like drift than travel. Indeed, the ship goes nowhere: it travels from one point to another along the wharf, in the shape of a U. A controlled, limited drift that invites the viewers to question the sense of their walks and provides them with a much-needed moment of relaxation. The grateful visitors gather in the grass by the dozen; the proof of the restorative, healing effect of Kjartansson’s work is found in the amount of time they spend there, given to contemplation, a practice seemingly banished from the rest of the Biennale.

It is quite possible that, seeing this artwork, the viewer resumes a capacity for action that the cruising speed of the official itinerary forbids, or at least debilitates.

The remaining pieces provide a similar repose, allowing the visitors to engage their interpretive apparati. The installation prepared by Berlinde De Bruyckere for the Belgian pavilion opens up like the gullet of a mythological animal. The almost blinding luminosity of the Venetian spring and the Biennale rooms finds a fierce counterpoint: the pavilion is almost completely dark. The only illumination comes from a filthy skylight, where opacity claims the advantage over transparency. The viewer’s advance necessarily comes to a halt.

Our eyes need a few minutes to adapt to this new environment; when they do, we can only move in cautious, small steps. At the center of the room, where the darkness is less dense, stands what the artist, in collaboration with JM Coetzee, has called Kreupelhout: the trunk of a zombie tree, scarcely alive, barely strong enough to search for light. It’s a sculpture that brings the dark forces of nature, the haunting whispers of the woods, into the shrine to encyclopedic vanity. Kreupelhout seems to speak both of a past that we willfully block from our sight, and of a future of ecological disaster and genetic mutation. Standing before it, the viewer’s response can only be emotional: alone, surrounded by shadows and icy currents of air, the viewer beholds the agony of a semi-living being, half human work, half error of nature. He is caught—perplexed, speechless—between the desire to flee and the will to help.

It’s no accident that De Bruyckere’s project involved the collaboration, in the form of curatorship, of a writer. The process of creating the installation, documented in the catalog of the pavilion, entailed a back and forth over emails between the artist and the writer, in which suggestions, corrections, and encouraging words were exchanged: all this was set into motion by a short story Coetzee sent De Bruyckere at the end of 2012. Here, this sporadic contact and elective affinities conspire in the creation of a monstrous work that distances itself from the “professional” supervision and bookkeeping of aseptic curators, always looking to make a splash.

The monumental, unfinished piece by the Swiss artists Fischli & Weiss also brings us to a halt, for other reasons. Their famous “Plötzlich, ein Übersicht” hides in a central room within the Giardini, only accessible via a narrow stairs. Two guards stand at the entrance, forcing the visitor to line up to see the work. The wait provides an initial deceleration. The work, a vast 3D encyclopedia of small figures made in clay, demands a detailed, slow motion examination.

The viewer’s gaze is necessarily tender: the Lilliputian size of characters and scenes lends itself to a respectful, almost intimate close up, yet the succession of scenes ends up raising a series of questions, inspiring reflection. The artists gathered together their personal obsessions, building an encyclopedic work-in-progress that calls into question the all-encompassing pretensions of the Encyclopedic Palace and mocks the enlightened ambitions that serve as the premise of that endeavor, and others. Nevertheless, what they offer is a labor of love: love for tradition (by reconstructing a humanist canon we could call romantic, ranging from the figures of Goethe, to Frankenstein’s monster, to Freud); love for certain moments of the culture industry (TV characters, the Rolling Stones); love for thought and philosophy (many of the little sculptures represent concepts like Theory & Praxis).

The two remaining artworks are unique in that they transcend the hell of repetition by making use of repetition. The animation presented by Mathias Poledna in the Austrian pavilion invites contemplation on loop. It’s a short film produced using the animation techniques of 1930s Hollywood. A character that could be a dog or a rabbit takes a stroll while singing a song. Other animals join in and sing along; even flowers wake up to say hello. Walter Benjamin has analyzed the utopian potential of prosopopoeia in Mickey Mouse. The impact of the video, in this context, is more modest, though: a new pause in the darkness, a moment of rest in which we are all eyes and ears. Peaceful, comfortable, we surrender ourselves to the mimesis of one of the first forms of cultural industry as though it were a soothing balm. The video is short. We can watch it over and over again. Get in the loop. And take advantage of this state of mind to think about the conditions under which it was made, about what sets it apart from an old Hollywood film (where does art begin and end?), about a natural landscape that is not seen as a friendly wonderland anymore. About the pleasure of senses as a horizon in and of itself, one that is typically dimmed, or banished entirely, by art seen at Biennales. The artwork is simple, candid, yet it opens up a space for questions that other monuments to sophistication don’t manage to pose.

The specter of the loop is also present in the winning performance by Tino Sehgal. Almost imperceptible, it takes place in one of the central halls of the Giardini; in a way, it disturbs the contemplation of the artworks hanging on the walls. Upon entering the hall, the visitor hears a swarm of sounds, from howls to drumming. Immediately, the viewer discovers that the sounds are made by people, by then revealed as performers, kept at bay in a corner of the room, who use their mouths as versatile instruments, improvising an unstable choreography that consists of just a few steps. This choreography and cacophony goes on as long as the Biennale is open. The continuum is repeated—if we can speak here of repetition—day by day, from the first to the last day. Rather than repetition, Sehgal in fact proposes a reflection on its impossibility. Every day, the performers are the same; what changes are the combinations—directed by Sehgal—that make up the groupings, and the sounds and movements they improvise.

Paraphrasing Hegel, Borges once wrote that music was the most perfect form of time. This intervention adds the human body to the phrase: music and dance, syncopated and erratic, yet contained in space, are offered as the most perfect forms of time for the Biennale visitor. Indeed, without even knowing what’s been seen (there are no signs indicating this is an artwork, or declaring authorship of any kind), the viewer stops at the threshold, or uncomfortably at the center, observing a narrative develop with no recognizable structure, seeming to caress entropic drift. What’s destroyed, once more, is the firm step of the visitor that seeks to remain a pure observer. An unsettling contemplation is imposed upon us that makes us question again the limits of art (or our notions of art) and the pace that marks the consumption and absorption of an artwork.

We named five works of art. It is telling that, together, the great colossus of contemporary art (Documenta completes the Holy Trinity) produces barely a handful of memorable artworks, to be treasured and eternally repeated. There is, though, an overwhelming abundance of works informed by what we could call the “wow factor.” This factor dominates the selection concocted by the curator to build up the Biennale’s Encyclopedic Palace (which, from its title, aligns itself with a politics of exclamation). What’s interesting, or alarming, is that this selection coincides on so many levels with that of the market, as manifested in Basel. We are confronted by a repetition, in the works themselves but also, beyond them, in the contemporary experience of art. Indeed, repetition determines this experience, giving it the peculiar taste of something already known. The experience repeats like an ill-settled meal.

A sympathetic party might offer the following hypothesis: duly informed of the treasures that would be on display in the Ark of the Biennale, the world’s major galleries choose to (or have to) take advantage of the exposition, publicity and legitimization (by the sector of the market controlled by curators and critics) of their artists; as such they commission a work in a sellable format for their stand, an obvious yet nonetheless astute way to commercialize the je ne sais quoi of participation in the Biennale. It’s a perfectly rational, transparent strategy, which could be observed earlier on in Buenos Aires, more precisely at ArteBA, where the auction house Roldán offered a remnant of the monumental (and repetitive) piece that Nicola Constantino would present a few weeks later in the Argentine pavilion of the Biennale.

Meanwhile, those with a penchant for conspiracy theories—not delirious ones—might argue that there are questionable ties between the curatorial team of the Biennale and the directors of the most powerful galleries on the planet, who, from their positions of power, could have influenced the decisions of the Head Curator, the President of the Biennale, or the curators of the national pavilions. One could imagine (even discover) a murky system of returns.

Both interpretations are viable, and their exploration may bear edifying fruit. But let’s look beyond the craftiness of the gallerists and the amoral shenanigans of the great art companies and their highest functionaries, and consider the structural conditions for this trite, non-sublime, repetition that fails our Nietszchean test. Indeed: which traits of the contemporary art world would explain the family resemblance between the market’s fairs and their counterparts in the realm of ideas? A Biennale is, after all, an event for thought and intellectual dialogue, a space for exchange among artists, curators, critics, and audiences.

Isabelle Graw’s High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (recently translated into Spanish by Cecilia Pavón and Claudio Iglesias) offers some hints in this direction. The book can be read as a symptom: her attempts at defining the two worlds (the “art market” and the “knowledge market”) fail consistently throughout the book, almost like negative proof of her hypothesis. Graw alternates between insisting on the separation of what she defines as two independent worlds, and recognizing that the categories she’s using no longer serve. In a wonderful paradox, the failure of her argument brings forth the phenomenon in bold letters. Graw adopts the master narrative of many historians, brandishing post-Fordism to explain the subordination of art to celebrity culture and the growing role of the market as arbiter of art, assigning value in every sense of the word. What is brought to light is the loss of autonomy of the “knowledge market” in the face of the growing hegemony of the market as such: the fact that an artwork has a commercial value is enough to secure its value in the art world. Undoubtedly, this plays a key role in the bad repetition we’ve been talking about: artworks consecrated by the market, in Basel and at other fairs, gain visibility and become part of the cartography of contemporary art as mapped by the Biennales.

But other elements should be taken into account when thinking about this repetition, in order to paint a broader picture of the collapsing boundary between two art markets.

Beyond the celebrity status gained by many artists (such as Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Georg Condo, and Tracey Emin, among others), events associated with the contemporary art circuit have become part of the world of show business. Biennales and global art fairs are forced to fit on an international calendar that includes not only Cannes, various fashion weeks, and global parties, but also soccer’s World Cup and the Olympic games. Thus, the events of a supposedly autonomous world (art) have become part of the dynamic geography of the global spectacle, absorbing some of the key features of mass spectacle as defined by Walter Benjamin, and losing, along the way, much of what made it unique. And so the experience of visiting a Biennale feels more like visiting a mall or an amusement park than like visiting a small show in a museum or an artist’s atelier.

The key to all this can be found in the mass character of these events, as though the spectacle was the only language Modernity (and its many post- avatars) had learned for dealing with the gathered masses.

Walter Benjamin saw a political potential in these developments. The diffuse or distracted reception always allowed by architecture became, in the age of technical reproduction, a model for art emancipated from the aura, able to be politically repurposed. The motto in this famous essay was: politicize art as an antidote against the growing aestheticization of politics promoted by fascism.

Let us simply say that 20th century history documents the life of both options—that one is not enough to counteract the spread of the other. The political and the social’s growing engagement of the logic of show business is, in fact, not the exclusive patrimony of fascism, but rather a current reality, the byproduct of the industrialization of culture, what Adorno and Horkheimer would later deem “monopolic capitalism.” The vignettes in Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay, like the aphorisms in Minima Moralia, can serve as a starting point for an interpretation of the show put on in Basel and Venice; a spectacle that, without question, knocks art off its high culture pedestal—but without giving us anything in return. Benjamin’s proposal of politicizing art is practically annulled by the format that regulates both spaces. Only where a different logic and pace emerge, where viewing art is something other than taking a tour with predetermined pauses, speed and wow moments, can one find a space for reflection and thought. That’s what these artworks I listed before offer us.

It should be said that they are not alone. These artworks join other efforts silently navigating the Palace rooms and the pages of the Encyclopedia, works that the pace of entertainment encourages one to overlook. Partly because it’s hard to portray them as highlights, and even more so because it’s hard to sell them. It’s precisely those works that are not repeatable, in the flat sense in which George Condo, Ai Wei Wei and Paul McCarthy can repeat themselves. And yes, I said works: many are not even works of art. There has been much talk about the Biennale’s young curator Massimo Gioni’s choice of outsider art. Alongside the big names and emerging artists, there are housewive’s drawings, dolls devotedly hand-made by amateurs, voodoo flags, offerings to religious temples, etc. Beyond these examples of an extra-artistic impulse (in itself a way to challenge the commercial drift: how does one sell a voodoo flag collection?), we have the works of artists and intellectuals dedicated to exploring an interior world.

It doesn’t really matter that this interior world is a fiction; less powerful, interesting fictions have fostered meaningful explorations. And this is precisely what the Biennale produces in this respect, in very diverse ways (more than an interior world, one might have to speak of interior galaxies). I’m thinking about Aleister Crowley’s tarot cards, the temple-like sculptures by James Lee Byars, Carl Jung’s Red Book, Roger Caillois’ esoteric collection of stones, the mystical abstractions of Hilma af Klint. There’s something in the tone these interventions impose upon the environment in which they appear, the rhythm they set for the viewer, that sets them apart from the Palace of Entertainment. These magical objects set us in a mood, they situate us, they demand our attention.

That’s what is at stake in the good repetition, as defined by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition: “It’s about producing in the work a movement capable of stirring the spirit beyond all representation; it’s about making movement itself a work of art, without mediation: it’s about substituting mediated representations with direct signs; of inventing vibrations, rotations, turns, gravitations, dances and leaps that cut straight to the spirit.”

Had the Biennale’s curator been faithful to the pulse of these objects and artworks, he would have made a more silent, less spectacular, probably more hermetic show, one that was much more honest and disruptive for those very reasons. Concessions to the desire to leave the viewer speechless and to art consecrated by the repetition of the market make this journey an echoless experience, like a panoramic tour of counters full of commercial products. Naturally, a visit to the supermarket can be instructive, and become an aesthetic experience on its own. But a Biennale should foster the application of other skills, set up a dance floor across which our mental faculties can move freely.

This potential, this capacity to offer a profound, authentic, sublime repetition, is latent in the art world. But it remains inert, or dormant, when those spaces that could provide certain autonomy conform to the regime of the entertainment industry. The artworks I have singled out, and all the efforts to suspend the reign of the Palace of the Spectacle, encourage us to build and preserve spaces where art can present itself as a manifestation of the unrepeatable; as that which, because it is unique, we want to see repeated for all eternity.

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Images: Mariano López Seoane (of artworks mentioned in the text)
Counsel on the translation into English of this piece was provided by Heather Cleary

Alicia Bisso translated by Heather Cleary

I never liked poetry. My self-imposed task of learning to read it began with a strange discovery. One afternoon, a traffic jam brought me to a stop in front of what seemed to be a small bookstore. I was barely able to make out what the sign hanging from the iron door said. I-N-E-S-T-A-B-L-E. Unstable. I went back because of the name. As soon as I set foot inside, I knew I had found my place. I’m drawn to small spaces where I’m not overwhelmed by titles and authors, and where the salespeople don’t throw themselves at me like darts. When I’m in a bookstore, I like to feel invisible. The owner of La Inestable is always reading and seems not to pay attention to anything else, so I’m able to take all ... Read More »]]>

Alicia Bisso
translated by Heather Cleary

I never liked poetry. My self-imposed task of learning to read it began with a strange discovery. One afternoon, a traffic jam brought me to a stop in front of what seemed to be a small bookstore. I was barely able to make out what the sign hanging from the iron door said. I-N-E-S-T-A-B-L-E. Unstable. I went back because of the name. As soon as I set foot inside, I knew I had found my place. I’m drawn to small spaces where I’m not overwhelmed by titles and authors, and where the salespeople don’t throw themselves at me like darts. When I’m in a bookstore, I like to feel invisible. The owner of La Inestable is always reading and seems not to pay attention to anything else, so I’m able to take all the time I need to let the poetry grow on me. It doesn’t take long. I skim the covers of the foreign volumes. The books occupy all sorts of spaces and are stacked on different levels like in some kind of labyrinth. I read the poems of Elizabeth Bishop and Gertrude Stein for the first time in the comfort of the old armchair in the corner. Each seems like a little discovery, something revealed only to me. I sometimes think that on the day I stepped across the threshold and into that store, poetry did the same with me.

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Librería La Inestable. Calle Porta 185 “B” / Miraflores / Lima, Perú

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Image: Alicia Bisso

Milton Läufer translated by Heather Cleary

It’s true: Edipo is an ugly bookstore. And yet, though this may seem like a contradiction, its most notable trait is its invisibility. Though it was founded more than thirty years ago on one of the busiest stretches of Corrientes Avenue and has survived the rise and fall of some giants of its guild nearby, surprisingly few people know about it. The reason for this, I think, is that Edipo disappears among the dozens of its less important peers that surround it. The ones that, instead of shelving their books, heap them carelessly on rickety tables; the best-seller is everywhere in these stores, as are the self-help book and a few classics in reprint editions of questionable legality. These shops are passed over by the eye of the book fetishist, ... Read More »]]>  

Milton Läufer
translated by Heather Cleary

It’s true: Edipo is an ugly bookstore. And yet, though this may seem like a contradiction, its most notable trait is its invisibility. Though it was founded more than thirty years ago on one of the busiest stretches of Corrientes Avenue and has survived the rise and fall of some giants of its guild nearby, surprisingly few people know about it. The reason for this, I think, is that Edipo disappears among the dozens of its less important peers that surround it. The ones that, instead of shelving their books, heap them carelessly on rickety tables; the best-seller is everywhere in these stores, as are the self-help book and a few classics in reprint editions of questionable legality. These shops are passed over by the eye of the book fetishist, who is pained to see the object of his affection turned into fast food. The way Edipo camouflages itself to look like one of them is, precisely, a survival strategy, and—like any esoteric pleasure—getting to the real experience requires persistence: past a number of unwelcoming tables you end up in a more agreeable section, where you can find the peace of Anagrama, Tusquets, and Alfaguara editions of work by more or less contemporary, more or less respectable, writers. But the real Edipo only begins there. The used books section, on shelves organized in rows at the back of the store, is truly exquisite: there order reigns, the books are in good condition, the prices are fair, and it’s not uncommon to find a first edition. This may be the only used book store that has kept alive the spirit that made this stretch of Corrientes famous (Eco, in his prologue, claims to have found the manuscript of The Name of the Rose here).

Two of its other unique qualities explain my love for this bookstore. The first of these is Oscar, a character who was born skinny, friendly, and with gray hair. Every single time I’ve been there, so has he (the fact that I lived on the same block explains my surprise at this). The years and other employees, each one less experienced than the last, have come and gone. But Oscar has never missed, or aged, a day. He’s one of those booksellers who know the location and number of copies of every volume by heart, as though the constant company of books had turned him into one. The second is its partial observance of an old custom among the bookstores on Corrientes: though it’s not open 24 hours anymore, as it was in the early 90s, Edipo closes at four in the morning. This has come in handy more than once for the 2:00am purchase of gifts on my way to birthday parties. And it doesn’t close for holidays. Not for Christmas, or New Year’s, or Bookseller’s day, or May 1. That steadfastness makes me happy, because of what it implies: that books are of a class of thing that may be needed as urgently as medicine.

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Librería Edipo – Avenida Corrientes 1686 – Buenos Aires, Argentina

Mariano López Seoane translated by Heather Cleary

A decade ago, the New York philosopher Jennifer Lopez gave us “Jenny from the Block,” an ode to upward mobility in the key of bling. In the hook, she syncopates what would become a mantra of the mamis of global latinization:

Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got / I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block. In fewer than twenty words, Jenny gave FM hip-hop not its social truth (it had been clear since the 80s that a main theme of the music would be gaining access to consumer goods that had previously been off limits), but rather a possible political stance. The single, released at the Everest moment of Jennifer Lopez’s ascent into the pop firmament, is meant to turn her power into something not only recognized, but also ... Read More »]]>

Mariano López Seoane
translated by Heather Cleary

A decade ago, the New York philosopher Jennifer Lopez gave us “Jenny from the Block,” an ode to upward mobility in the key of bling. In the hook, she syncopates what would become a mantra of the mamis of global latinization:

Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got / I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block.

In fewer than twenty words, Jenny gave FM hip-hop not its social truth (it had been clear since the 80s that a main theme of the music would be gaining access to consumer goods that had previously been off limits), but rather a possible political stance. The single, released at the Everest moment of Jennifer Lopez’s ascent into the pop firmament, is meant to turn her power into something not only recognized, but also accepted. Miss Lopez tells us: I don’t just want to sell millions of albums and call shots in the complex world of the entertainment industry. I also want to have authority among the masses—not the Machiavellian authority of an ice queen, but the esteem of a benefactress. To rule not by terror, but love. In these two lines, the star gives herself over to a populist strategy we know all too well: she acknowledges that she is nothing without her followers and, in a manner shaped by the ethics of street cred, she sets out to forge allegiances and inspire the active support of her audience. In the key of politics: she takes a page from hegemony’s playbook.

Eva Perón could have opened a manifesto on gender equality with these very words. In fact, there are nearly identical phrases in My Mission in Life (La razón de mi vida), which is meant to rewrite the biography of the Spiritual Leader of the Nation according to the political imperatives of the moment (which include Perón’s highly probable second term and the likely physical absence of his companion). The book is part of a larger set of strategies designed to ensure the active support of the Peronist masses, to encourage their participation and mobilization in defense of their social and political victories. And yet, the defense of these transformations is, in the Peronist epic, the defense of the leader behind them. And so the hegemonic strategies of Evita-ism, accused of being a fanatical cult of personality by a peevish middle class, are all designed to elevate the mother of the descamisados, to present her as both familiar and larger than life. Hence the worn image of Evita as a fairy godmother.

There is, in fact, a bit of magic to this series of operations. Creating hegemony is a process in the tradition of alchemy: activated by a political message, the symbols of social class change hands, value, meaning; they reveal themselves to be unstable, contingent on the accent they pick up in their new context. And so diamonds, those signs of senseless luxury, become, in Lopez’s verse, the proof that she’s arrived… but only recently. Turning the master narrative that at once elevates and vilifies the nouveau riche inside out like the leg of a stocking, Jenny asks, “Ladies, can’t you see I wear these rocks because I’m still just as common as you?”

Evita worked with the same narrative; her love affair with luxury, above and beyond her own personal indulgences, should be taken as a political gesture. It is well known: no one understood the concept of hegemony better than the Peronists. The figure of Evita is rightly associated with concrete victories of the Argentine working class, and with material and symbolic reparations that define the term “social justice.” But these reparations alone do not explain her ascent as an icon, her transformation into a pop heroine, or the intense demonstrations of support she inspired. Again: the alchemy of hegemony is at work here, in pitch-perfect harmony with the economic, social, and technological movements of the time. On the one hand, Evita brings to the region something that has recently been called “the politics of sentiment,” a strategy prevalent in My Reason for Being, which goes to work on the affect of a political collective that fell into rank behind its leader, and which the sobriquet “the mother of the descamisados” brings to the fore. On the other hand, and more in line with Jenny’s glitz, Evita emerges as one of the first South American examples of what Susan Sontag, after Walter Benjamin, has called “politics as spectacle.”

In her indispensable article on what she calls the “fascist aesthetic,” Sontag diagnoses the transformations produced in politics by the emergence of mass culture (in the key of production: capitalism under the Fordist model). These are transformations that Benjamin had already pointed out in several of his best-known essays, but Sontag expands upon them to posit an aesthetics of contemporary political styles. Mass culture demands that politics transform its language, adapting it to the channels of mass communication in which face-to-face interactions disappear and contact is mediated by the latest technologies. Foremost among these, of course, is that of the media, which allows a message generated within the institution and, in the populist tradition, amplified in the plaza, to reach the furthest corners of society. The politician, then, must follow in the footsteps of the actor or the journalist; he has to learn to speak the language of the media, to shine, to rise above the mire and produce his own truth, his narrative, as we’d say today, in tune with the technological conditions of his time.

The finest examples of this sort of political adaptation come, of course, from the fascist bloc. Tied for first place are Hitler and Mussolini, both experts at modifying their message to make it more appealing, and more enthralling, to the listener. Sontag describes meticulously the choreography typical of Germany’s “fascinating fascism,” in which the populace offers itself up to itself as spectacle. At the center of this choreography was a leader who, as if by osmosis, absorbed and redirected the currents of power that circulated among the masses. The leader, for his part, left nothing to chance: it is well known that Hitler’s gestures and hairstyle, along with the tone of his voice and his clothing, were understood and strategized as matters of State.

Evita’s fashion sense, then, is no less than a local take on this historical phenomenon: it is the new world order interpreted with Argentine cheek. It’s worth noting that this does not mean to imply that Evita was a fascist (a label thrown around as though, like a piece of prêt-a-porter, it could be made to fit anyone). Ultimately, fascism and Peronism are more or less contemporary, though divergent, responses to the crisis of representation that comes with mass culture.

And of course no one could occupy this emerging space better than a star on the rise. The channel between the communicating vessels of politics and the world of the spectacle finds, in Evita, its standard. A specimen in transition, a changeable emblem, Evita was an actress before she became a political figure. This biographical detail has been repeated ad nauseum, but its political dimension is not always emphasized. We live in a world in which the media is second nature. Not only politicians, but citizens in general seem ready to take their place in front of the camara at the drop of a hat. It’s worth pointing out that this was not the case in the mid-twentieth century, when media communication still had to be learned, still required training. It is precisely this leap that Evita takes: as a television and radio actress, she learns to fashion herself as an icon, to deck herself out as an object of desire, to present herself as a blank screen on which collective needs and desires can be projected. Politics as spectacle thus implies, first and foremost, the transformation of the leader into a character in a structured narrative that adheres to the codes of the media, a character that speaks the language of telenovelas and tango (Perón was often known to refer to their lyrics), moves like a movie star, poses like a mannequin and dresses like the images of power that circulate in the media.

The fact that power is fueled by its own representation has been clear since at least the time of the pyramids in Ancient Egypt. The point here is the way in which this representation changes when new technologies are introduced, and the nature of the political possibilities that they generate. So, then, if the country’s founding fathers were depicted as the secular versions of the European monarchs they claimed to be fighting, Eva Perón finds her handbook of style in Hollywood and in its local translation. Just as we can imagine someone in Cristina Kirchner’s entourage scanning the less daring sections of style.com, it is clear that Evita and those who advised her on her image (a group led by Luis D’Agostino and Asunta Fernández, but which included, particularly in her years as an actress, the fashion guru Paco Jamandreu) were dedicated students of the films of their time. Biographies tend to point to one key moment in this process of translation: when the young Eva Duarte decides to go blonde after seeing Marie Antionette, released by MGM in 1938, and coif herself in the style of its leading lady, Norma Shearer. It is interesting to break down the chain of mediations at work here: a leader in the process of constructing her political authority in a democracy draws inspiration from the mass media’s representation of one of the key figures of absolutism. She is, however—and this cannot be emphasized enough—a queen permeated and shaped by technology. Eva Perón understands that this is the figure of authority most accessible to men and women alike as the era shifts; an image of power that all can identify with and accept. And she sets about turning herself into the local version of this collective dream.

This is the aspiration that Andrew Lloyd Weber captures so magnificently in his rock opera Evita, when he has Eva sing, “So Christian Dior me from my head to my toes/ I need to be dazzling, I want to be Rainbow High… So Lauren Bacall me, anything goes/ To make me fantastic, I have to be Rainbow High,” and so on. The political figure models herself after these accessible, clear images. Piling designs from Henriette, Paula Naletoff, Balenciaga and Dior on top of one another, wearing jewelry commissioned for her through Van Cleef & Arpels by a magnate named Alberto Dodero, Evita hones her skill at enthrallment, creating an image of herself that puts her on par with the most glittering icons of cinema’s Mecca.

Christian Dior’s praise of these efforts is now legendary. Asked about his personal favorites among the members of Europe’s royal families, the brilliant designer declares, “I have only had the pleasure of dressing one queen: Eva Perón.” Dior and Evita starred in their own kind of romance, driven by the aspirations of both. Dior was beginning to introduce the daring details that would define the new look, a return to the princess femininity of the end of the nineteenth century (wide skirts, tiny waists, prominent busts, sloping shoulders), which required a vast amount of fabric and was thus fairly shocking in the context of Europe’s desperate situation after the war. He presents his first collection, a line called Corolle inspired by the silhouettes of flowers, in 1947. Eva Perón meets him in the northern summer of that same year, during the tour that takes her to Spain, Italy, France and Switzerland. From that moment until her death, the House of Dior would keep a dress form with Evita’s exact measurements, on which exclusive designs would be made and then sent to Buenos Aires on Aerolíneas Argentinas planes, where they had their own special compartment (the dresses were shipped upright on mannequins to avoid wrinkles). Dior admired and strove to become an avatar of Charles Worth, who outfitted the Empress Eugénie during the Second Empire; like Worth, Dior finds a political form that combines power and audacity, a mix that critics on the Left have identified as, precisely, the problematic aura of Bonapartism. For her part, Eva not only had to represent, through her dazzling wardrobe (much of which debuted in Europe), the relatively stable position of Argentina on the postwar stage; she also needed, through ermine stoles and silk dresses, to tell the story of her rise into the upper class, waging a symbolic battle along the way with the grand dames of the Argentine aristocracy.

“I want to be beautiful for my little commoners.” The phrase, most likely one of Evita’s responses to criticism of her excesses, suggests that her supporters were part of this logic of splendor. And that Eva was decking herself out primarily for them, as the standard-bearer of the humble masses. In effect, what she represented was not only her own upward trajectory, but rather the newly won well-being of an entire class. It wasn’t she who saw herself as queen, it was the entire Argentine working class, who now enjoyed the benefits of state protection, mass consumption, and vacations in Mar del Plata. “I want them to get used to living like the rich… to feel worthy of the greatest wealth… in the end, everyone has the right to be rich in Argentina… and all over the world. The world has enough wealth in it to make everyone rich.” This is how My Mission in Life formulates the impossible project of Peronism, committed to bending capitalist society to the point it folds in on itself. In this context, Evita’s preening should not be seen as a sign of hypocrisy, or as the most visible manifestation of the contractions that riddled a political program. Ultimately, the Spiritual Leader of the Nation’s affair with fashion is a nod toward a promise that capitalism makes and that Peronism, by sheer willpower, would try to make it keep.

Image: Gisele Freund