Matías Ariel Chiappe Ippolito translated by Andrea Rosenberg

日々旅にして旅を栖とす。 （松尾芭蕉）

“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.” –Matsuo Bashō, tr. Sam Hamill

I’d been told I should get in touch with Hideki, whom everybody calls “the sensei.” I thought I was prepared for my visit to the city of Nikkō—I’d asked a number of people and looked at a bunch of websites; I’d even acquired a tourism pamphlet about Tochigi Prefecture that I hadn’t gotten a chance to read yet. I knew about the surrounding area: Kegon Falls, the Shinkyo Bridge, Mount Nantai. I knew that the main attraction was the Rinnoji Temple and the shrines of Futarasan and Toshogu, the latter of which houses the tomb of Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first shogun of the Edo period. I knew I was about to ... Read More »]]>

Matías Ariel Chiappe Ippolito
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

日々旅にして旅を栖とす。
（松尾芭蕉）

“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
–Matsuo Bashō, tr. Sam Hamill

I’d been told I should get in touch with Hideki, whom everybody calls “the sensei.” I thought I was prepared for my visit to the city of Nikkō—I’d asked a number of people and looked at a bunch of websites; I’d even acquired a tourism pamphlet about Tochigi Prefecture that I hadn’t gotten a chance to read yet. I knew about the surrounding area: Kegon Falls, the Shinkyo Bridge, Mount Nantai. I knew that the main attraction was the Rinnoji Temple and the shrines of Futarasan and Toshogu, the latter of which houses the tomb of Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first shogun of the Edo period. I knew I was about to enter an ancient, magical place whose buildings were decorated with carvings of dragons and cats and, most famous of all, one with three monkeys covering their mouth, ears, and eyes, respectively. A place suspended in mist and crisscrossed by a million lantern-lined paths.

Each of these elements has a story. One of the lanterns, for example, is known as 化灯籠 (Bake-Doro), the Ghost Lantern. This lantern is famous because, thanks to its particular design and the properties of the materials it’s made from, the shadows it casts are unusually dense. The samurai of centuries past, believing that the lantern was invoking ghosts and spirits, would attack the shadows, never making contact with those illusory menaces. You can still see the marks of their swords, born of paranoia or a bad trip, on the lantern’s lattice-work. People were so terrified of the lantern that even today it’s lit only once a year, from April 13 to 17, during the Yayoi Festival, when the place is packed with people who could come to one’s aid in case of a spectral assault.

“You’re into that crap?” Hideki asked me when I said I was going there next, describing my intention to follow in Matsuo Bashō’s footsteps on a trip that would take me through all of Japan. I stared at him for a second. Then I looked down. I felt like a tourist, a dupe; I sensed that the man before me knew a great deal and carped about the same things Ariel Rodó had objected to in Rubén Darío’s imitations of Loti: the novelty of appearances; frivolity; easy, amusing puerilities. “I guess,” I said, like an idiot. He laughed and told me all those things were only interesting on the surface. “So what’s the best thing in Tochigi, then?” I asked. Telling me to hang on, he got up from the futon, went over to a little bookcase to fetch a book, and opened it in the middle. He showed me the image, which filled the entire page.

“Tochigi is the land of Japanese marijuana,” he said, showing me other photos from the book: hemp fields, ukiyo-e woodblock prints of weed, lacquered smoking pipes in every shape and color. Then he added, “It’s grown other places too, like Nagano and Okinawa, but nothing as potent as what we have here.” He continued in the tone of somebody giving an academic talk: the material produced from the marijuana plant (commonly known as hemp, he clarified) was used in countless ways on the Japanese archipelago starting in the Jōmon period, a thousand years before Christ. Later it was used in the manufacture of clothing and baskets, to make writing paper during the Heian period, to tie coins together in the years of the feudal lords, in performing dohyō-iri (when a sumo wrestler cleans the combat area wearing a hemp rope around his waist), and, because of its durability, for soldiers’ hats during World War II. In addition, cannabis has long been a symbol of purity in Japan’s native religion, Shintoism, and is used for rituals and ceremonial clothing.

“But in 1948 production was outlawed during the US occupation of Japan.” Apparently, General Douglas MacArthur thought marijuana was closely linked to communism, politica non grata after the war. It was also associated with the black musicians who’d ruined real American jazz. As his homeland was wont to do, he established a prohibition in Japanese territory. “Yukio Funai, the author of this book, says it was because of military factors—a way of reducing Japanese military power, which had been running a vibrant, profitable industry.” Whatever the case, that prohibition remains in place today. Politicians have even been reluctant to loosen (I mean, update) the penalties or even consider allowing medicinal marijuana, Hideki added. Again I stared at him in silence. On this topic, it seemed, Latin America and Asia, or at least Japan, shared a history of imposed Yankee hypocrisies.

At any rate, Tochigi became the epicenter of a countercultural resistance, reclaiming the country’s long tradition of cannabis use. “So that lantern thing doesn’t have anything to do with the lantern’s design or materials. The samurai, honoring customs from our most ancient traditions, were high as a kite, and they’d just go whacking away at the metal pole with their swords.” The image of a Rastafarian samurai flitted through my mind. This meant that one of the most important centers of so-called “Japanese culture” was actually a pot paradise. “Did you see the movie The Beach?” “Of course, I’m obsessed with the ’90s.” “Well, kind of like that, but with Japanese scenery.” How many other cultures could explain themselves through their use of sacred psychotropic plants? I recalled that Albert Hofmann and Robert Wassan proposed something similar about Greek culture when they analyzed the concoction consumed during the ritual to the goddess Demeter; they concluded that the mixture of wheat and barley was an excellent medium for the fungus Claviceps purpurea, from which a precursor of LSD can be derived.

“This is all I have left from then . . .” Hideki said, opening a little box decorated with an image of a smoking geisha. While loading a pipe, he asked me if I’d ever thought about the connections between marijuana and poets like Bashō, who “were actually the hippies of their time,” he noted. A counterculture that resisted first the imperial aristocracy and then the military elite. “That’s why they had such an impact on the beatniks.” Haiku poets as forerunners of stoned hippies? It was true that the beatniks had taken Bashō and his disciples as models. Not just in terms of pilgrimage, escape, and vanishing lines, but also by adopting Zen Buddhism as the core of their philosophical project. “Exactly,” Hideki said, bringing the flame up to his face.

One poet who exemplifies these unexpected connections was Dom Sylvester Houédard, a Benedictine monk at Prinknash Abbey, who translated the Bible while exchanging letters with Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others. Like the beatniks (or, rather, like Saint John of the Cross and Sor Juana Inés), Houédard was seeking some kind of mystic revelation, which he found both in Catholicism and in haiku. Unlike the beat poets, however, he chose to write visual poetry, so-called “concrete poetry,” and especially calligrams. In fact, he wrote a number of pieces of literary criticism, each of them in a different calligraphy. He also translated Bashō’s famous haiku about a frog:

frog
pond
plop

The original (古池や蛙飛びこむ水の音 Furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto, which can be translated literally as “Old pond / a frog leaps / sound of water”) has been the object of hundreds of versions, with greater and lesser degrees of embellishment: “The old pond / a frog leaps in, / and a splash” (Makoto Ueda); “Un vieil étang / une grenouille plonge / le bruit de l’eau” (Joan Titus-Carmel); “Un viejo estanque / salta una rana, ¡zas! / chapaleteo” (Paz and Hayashiya). But I think Bashō would have liked Houédard’s (even more) minimalist version. Or at least found it amusing. Maybe it would have confirmed for him that there are coincidences in this world, in this universe. After all, one of his contemporaries had experienced a similar revelation. Bashō observed a frog jumping into a pond and—splash!—a moment of mystical enlightenment. Meanwhile, in England, an apple fell on Newton’s head and—thump!—a moment of rational enlightenment.

Hideki reached out and handed me what from that moment on I began to think of as a basic and even necessary element of “Japanese culture”—if such a thing exists, if it is necessary to qualify it in national terms. Then he stretched from the futon without getting up and moved his fingers on the touchpad of his computer. Scroll up, scroll down, and, with a little tap like a leaping frog, he selected a song from a playlist. “These guys do a mix of folk, ska, and reggae, all in the Ainu language spoken by that ethnic community in Hokkaido.” I looked over and managed to see the name of the band: Oki Dub Ainu. Hideki told me about other similar groups: the rapper Oni and his band Still Ichimaya; the singer Likkle Mai; Cicala Mvta, who’d done a cover of Víctor Jara’s “El derecho de vivir en paz.” It was a brief, fascinating trip through stoner music in present-day Japan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ByiXt0TUr0&list=PLN8jn1rpcIHCCDsH3_Tg5rO2_4x3-_JI1

After a while, I couldn’t get my eyes to focus anymore. Hideki was telling me about the trees around the Nikkō shrine. “Out in those woods, I had the best . . . the most intense trip of my life.” He told me he’d gotten so high on a joint of Toshigi marijuana that he didn’t even know where he was. At one point he got lost in the music in his headphones and started wandering aimlessly through the trees, along a creek, and past some waterfalls—walking for two, three, who knows how many hours—and came to a clearing with a cabin, through whose windows he thought he spied naked bodies in bizarre sexual positions; he kept going and ended up in a little town right out of the American Old West, with horses and barrels and the inevitable sign reading “Saloon”; and then he got the feeling like somebody was after him and took off running, and only then noticed that there were some ninjas with swords behind him. “ほんとだ！” he added. He said he managed to escape that nightmare—he doesn’t know how, but he reached a train station, where he boarded a train and slept the whole way back. “Like I say . . . the most potent ganja in Japan.” His story seemed so wild that I never for an instant doubted it was true.

We said goodbye and he told me, “Have a good time in Nikkō. Next May we’ll go to the legalization march together.” I left. In the train on the way back, I rummaged in my backpack and found the same items as always: my collapsible umbrella, that Pynchon novel I can’t seem to finish, the kanji flashcards that by now I think are going to be with me for the rest of my days, as if they were prayer cards or some kind of talisman. Way down at the bottom, I came across the tourism pamphlet. I opened it. There, among other things, I found information on the Kinugawa Sex Museum; the Old West–themed amusement park; the ancient village of Edo, where they still do ninja shows . . . Even all about a “Marijuana Museum.” “Tochigi, Japan’s most amazing prefecture,” the pamphlet declared. I thought back to the pyramids at Chichén Itzá, swarming with vendors; Notre-Dame Cathedral, where they sell souvenirs during mass; the section of the Great Wall of China where they installed a slide for visitors to ride down on little carts. I sat staring straight ahead, eager to get home. When I left Koenji Station, the wind blew a ticket out of a woman’s hand and down a storm drain. It was a moment of revelation, a trip: I was suddenly filled with the words I’ve just written here.

*   *   *

Bibliography

船井幸雄 [Funai Yukio].『悪法! ! 「大麻取締法」の真実』[¡Damn law! The truth about the marijuana prohibition in Japan]. Tokyo: Business-sha, 2012.

Mitchell, Jon. “Cannabis: The Fabric of Japan.” The Japan Times. Accessed 21 Nov. 2016.

長吉 秀夫 [Nagayoshi Hideo].『大麻入門』[Introduction to marijuana]. Tokyo: Gentosha, 2009.

*   *   *

Images courtesy of the author.

Lucas Mertehikian

We don’t know much about Gordon Ross. We don’t know how long he lived in Buenos Aires nor where exactly he had come from. The first pages of his book Argentina and Uruguay only tell us that he served as an official translator for the Fourth Congress of the American Republics, held in 1910, and as a financial editor for The Standard, a journal addressed to the English-speaking community of Buenos Aires, first published in May of 1861 as The Weekly Standard and which kept coming out, with slightly different titles, until 1959. The editors had made their initial statement in the first issue of 1861: “The Weekly Standard in unfurled to the four winds of heaven, not as the emblem of a party or the watchword of rivalry, but as the bond of fellowship between the ... Read More »]]>

Lucas Mertehikian

We don’t know much about Gordon Ross. We don’t know how long he lived in Buenos Aires nor where exactly he had come from. The first pages of his book Argentina and Uruguay only tell us that he served as an official translator for the Fourth Congress of the American Republics, held in 1910, and as a financial editor for The Standard, a journal addressed to the English-speaking community of Buenos Aires, first published in May of 1861 as The Weekly Standard and which kept coming out, with slightly different titles, until 1959. The editors had made their initial statement in the first issue of 1861: “The Weekly Standard in unfurled to the four winds of heaven, not as the emblem of a party or the watchword of rivalry, but as the bond of fellowship between the various members of the Anglo-Celtic race.” Argentina still hadn’t received the overwhelming wave of immigration that it would later receive at the turn of the century, but The Standard was already an early witness of the process that would shape the country’s social physiognomy forever.

This is precisely of one Gordon Ross’ main concerns. First published in New York in 1916, and later republished in London 1917, Argentina and Uruguay was actually written in the midst of that deep process of social transformation and, therefore, poses a question which is impossible to answer: what will become of the future Argentine? Perhaps because of his work as a financial journalist, Ross can’t help to relate the Argentine’s features with the business opportunities that flourished in the country at the beginning of the 20^th century. However, he notices the same basic features that John Foster Fraser had observed before him and Katherine Dreier would highlight soon after:  a widespread lack of organization, a wild and rather irrepressible nature, and the tarnished role of women in local society. Also, like Foster Fraser and Dreier, he outlines a genealogy for the Argentine people that goes back to the Spanish conquerors and their Oriental heritage. Unable to predict what was about to happen, in this first excerpt Gordon Ross focuses on a different question, hoping that an accurate answer, combined with his knowledge of the past, would allow him to glimpse that obscure future: What are Argentines like today?

Racial Elements and Social Conditions

Gordon Ross

What will be the result some generations hence of the enormous influx of immigration from all parts of Europe to Argentina and in, as yet, a much less degree to Uruguay? What manner of man will the Argentine of the future be when he has completed his development as a national type? This is a question often asked, but as to which only the most shadowy answer can yet be given. The elements which are going to his formation are so many and the qualities of those elements so difficult to reckon in regard to their respectively possible likelihood of survival in the settled type. The most that can be done here is to enumerate the chief of such elements in their approximate quantitative values.

The true Argentine of the past is the descendant of the Spanish conquerors with usually some admixture of native Indian blood derived from a remote ancestress, while another less remote has perhaps given him a tinge of black blood in remembrance of the days when African slave labour tended his great-grandfather’s sugar canes and maize.

But Spanish blood is predominant and Spanish qualities distinguish most of the Argentine, and all of the Uruguayan, leading families of to-day. Ceremoniously courteous to a fault—the fault of deeming it rude ever to refuse a favour asked; regarding it as a strange lack of savoir vivre on the part of the suppliant should the latter not understand the granting as a mere polite formality, in no way to be taken as a serious engagement.

An Argentine will ask a favour of another as a mere hint that he would be very glad if the latter granted it; a stranger ignorant of Argentine manners and ways might ask it really expecting to receive a substantial response to his request. Both would be met with a charming if vague assertion that nothing would give the person asked greater pleasure than to do anything the asker desired. Each might attain his object or not, as other considerations dictated; but whereas the demand would be credited to the former as finesse, contempt for boorishness would be the lot of the latter did he present himself expectant of the immediate fulfilment of the promise. Almost as well might he turn up unexpectedly to lunch at the home of an Argentine who on first receiving him had said with a graciously comprehensive wave of his hand, “This house is yours.”

As a matter of fact an Argentine’s home is a very difficult castle for a stranger to enter.

This probably for two chief reasons. For the first of these we must trace racial elements back to the Moorish civilization of Spain and the jealous seclusion of women from all male eyes but those of close relations. The second is a general lack of orderliness (also an Oriental characteristic) usually pre vailing in even the richest Argentine households ; which makes it inconvenient to receive except on special and specially prepared occasions.

We must follow up the Arab-Semitic blood brought in the veins of the Spaniard to the new world through mingling with Native Indian and Negro blood before we come to the heroes who fought for and won independence from Spanish rule now over a century ago. Since then what intermarryings, mostly with natives of Italy but also with British, French, German, Scandinavian and Belgian men and women.

Guthries, Dumas, Murphys, Schneidewinds, Christophersens, De Bruyns, Bunges, not to mention bearers of the historic patronymics of Brown and O’Higgins, are now among the landed aristocracy of Argentina; though, still, the crème de la crème consists of the descendants of the Spanish families of Colonial days. Among the middle and lower classes, especially in the towns, the Italianate element is now overwhelming; though recently again Spanish immigration has begun to exceed Italian. All this goes to make a strange racial mixture; of which the first generation born on Argentine soil knows little about and cares nothing for the language of its parents, but grows up with a pride, comical to the detached observer, in the glorious Wars of Independence (fought at a period when its own ancestry were, as likely as not, peasants in one or another comer of Europe, and wholly ignorant of the fact of the existence of the River Plate) and patriotically devoted to the blue and white Banner and National Anthem (an Italian composition, by the by) of the land of their parents’ adoption.

Everyone born on Argentine or Uruguayan soil is Argentine or Uruguayan of his own very decided will as well as legally; furiously so with the exclusive fervour of the convert. He cannot or will not speak English, French, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish or Flemish as the case may be ; nothing but Spanish, River Plate Spanish, that is to say, is worthy of his tongue, and he has a truly Galician contempt for the lisping Spanish of Castile.

They won’t stop, that is all. She may give them sleeping or other accommodation which they may never before have enjoyed nor probably even dreamed of. These attentions strike no sympathetic chord if they be accompanied by what the native Argentine considers silly pettiness of interference with the way in which he or she is accustomed to do his or her work. Any Argentine servant would sooner sleep, as many do, on a mattress thrown down at night in any passage way in the house of a native Argentine family and suffer the alternate friendly familiarity and impassioned scolding of a mistress whose ways they understand and who leaves them to theirs, than occupy the nicest possible servant’s bedroom in a more strictly ordered establishment. The true and main lesson of all which is that the Argentine, to whatever social class he or she may belong, is a child of nature to whom disciplinary fetters of any kind are unbearable and to the freer nature of whom the monotony of much of the punctual regularity which Europeans are apt to consider a necessary factor of real comfort is impossibly burdensome.

* *

Gordon Ross. Argentina and Uruguay. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1916.

Lucas Mertehikian translated by Jennifer Croft

The history of the Americas has always been inseparable from the notion of travel, and Argentina is no exception to this rule. In fact, the history of Argentina’s literature can only be understood in connection with the men and women who arrived at its shores from far-off lands and wrote about that very experience.

No sooner had Argentina declared its independence than it began to see travelers—many of them from Great Britain—looking to try their luck and explore the commercial prospects of the new nation. The country’s vast plans captivated this multitude of newcomers who, with their aesthetic sensibilities that tended to fall somewhere in between the naturalism and the romanticism of the era, documented this astonishment in numerous books.

Adolfo Prieto has suggested that it was those books that led the first writers ... Read More »]]>

Lucas Mertehikian
translated by Jennifer Croft

The history of the Americas has always been inseparable from the notion of travel, and Argentina is no exception to this rule. In fact, the history of Argentina’s literature can only be understood in connection with the men and women who arrived at its shores from far-off lands and wrote about that very experience.

No sooner had Argentina declared its independence than it began to see travelers—many of them from Great Britain—looking to try their luck and explore the commercial prospects of the new nation. The country’s vast plans captivated this multitude of newcomers who, with their aesthetic sensibilities that tended to fall somewhere in between the naturalism and the romanticism of the era, documented this astonishment in numerous books.

Adolfo Prieto has suggested that it was those books that led the first writers of the young republic—like Sarmiento, Alberdi, Mármol—to the landscape that would become the foundations of Argentine literature. Then, in the twentieth century, a new breed of celebrity travelers, like José Ortega y Gasset, made their way to Argentina to celebrate the nation’s centennial in 1910 and didn’t stop coming after that. Those “cultural travelers,” as they’ve been called by Gonzalo Aguilar and Mariano Siskind, constitute a cornerstone of early-twentieth century literature in Argentina. The local intellectual and artistic circles eagerly awaited them and heatedly debated both them and their works, all the while hoping they’d be able to provide an answer to the same question Argentina’s earliest authors had asked themselves: what are Argentines?

Between those periods, in the 1920s, there was also another type of traveler to Buenos Aires, coming from Europe and the United States. Neither trailblazers nor celebrities, though some enjoyed a certain notoriety in their home countries. They were not anticipated by the Argentines with any particular eagerness, nor given a particularly warm welcome.

Perhaps because of this, with only a few exceptions, their writing has yet to be translated into Spanish. This series from The Buenos Aires Review aims to revive four of the authors from this in-between category and resuscitate their writings on Argentina: John Foster Fraser, Gordon Ross, Katherine Dreier and John Alexander Hammerton, in that order. Joining these four is Jules Huret, who was translated from French into Spanish at the time by Guatemalan writer Enrique Gómez Carrillo, but these translations have been widely neglected until now.

The chronicles we’ll be presenting here were published between 1914 and 1920. We are interested less in establishing a core Argentine identity than we are in enriching this question with the potency of history that the rereading of these texts, a hundred years after their original publication, demands be taken into account. What, in other words, have Argentines become?

Read the first entry in the series

Read the second entry in the series

John Foster Fraser

Lucas Mertehikian

translated by Jennifer Croft

In 1899, Scottish writer John Foster Fraser (1868-1936) made a name for himself in Great Britain with his book Round the World on a Wheel, the result of a bicycle trip made with two friends across over ten thousand miles of Europe, Asia and the United States. Unlike other books dedicated to travel, Foster Fraser’s book was not “about anthropology or biology or archaeology.” He made no claims to studying the places he went—only claims to fame: “We took this trip round the world on bicycles because we are more or less conceited, like to be talked about, and see our names in the newspapers,” he states in the preface.

And it worked: over the course of the next few decades, Foster Fraser traveled to and wrote about young ... Read More »]]>

John Foster Fraser

Lucas Mertehikian

translated by Jennifer Croft

In 1899, Scottish writer John Foster Fraser (1868-1936) made a name for himself in Great Britain with his book Round the World on a Wheel, the result of a bicycle trip made with two friends across over ten thousand miles of Europe, Asia and the United States. Unlike other books dedicated to travel, Foster Fraser’s book was not “about anthropology or biology or archaeology.” He made no claims to studying the places he went—only claims to fame: “We took this trip round the world on bicycles because we are more or less conceited, like to be talked about, and see our names in the newspapers,” he states in the preface.

And it worked: over the course of the next few decades, Foster Fraser traveled to and wrote about young countries like Canada (Canada As It Is) and Australia (Australia: The Making of a Nation), as well as histories with long and storied traditions, such as Russia (Red Russia) and the nations of northern Africa (The Land of Veiled Women). “Sir John, who was born in Edinburgh, spent almost the whole of his adult life in search of variety,” wrote The Glasgow Herald in his obituary, from June 8, 1936.

It may well have been this same search that led Foster Fraser to Argentina, where, in 1914, he wrote his second-to-last book: The Amazing Argentine: A New Land of Enterprise. Variety, after all, was already in the ethnic composition of his fellow passengers on the ship to Buenos Aires: wealthy Argentines returning from Europe, poor Spanish and Italian immigrants, English businessmen. “South America is not the land of the future. It is the land of to-day,” he writes. The trails blazed by European travelers in the first half of the nineteenth century in the exploration of fields and mines in the Andes had fallen into disuse—but there were now new paths.

Upon his arrival, Foster Fraser encountered a city in which an accelerated capitalist rhythm coexisted alongside archaic gender biases, something Beatriz Sarlo has described as part of Buenos Aires peripheral modernity. Perhaps his voyages around Australia and the Middle East had prepared him for his trip to Buenos Aires, a city whose contradictions he found, as he will note below, strangely fascinating.

Some Aspects of Buenos Aires

John Foster Fraser

The Argentines call their city of Buenos Aires the Paris of the southern hemisphere. It has a population nearing a million and a half, which is greater than that of any other town below the line of the Equator. The people promise that in time it will overtake London.

You insult an Argentine if you mix him up with Chilians, Brazilians, and other South Americans. He does not thank you for being reminded his father sailed from Italy, or his grandfather from Spain. He has no affection for any old land from which his sires came. The beginning of the world for Argentina was in May, 1810, when the Republic was set up.

He has no pride of historic race. When he makes money and visits Europe it is not to find the ancestral home in Spain or Italy. It is to have a good time in Paris. When he takes his family to Paris it is not to spend three, five, or six months. It is to spend three, five, or six hundred thousand pesos —and the value of a peso is one shilling and eightpence. When the pesos have flown he returns to Argentina and makes more.

The Argentines are a dignified people. They accept the English because in round figures five hundred millions of British capital in gold have aided in developing the country. They dislike the citizen of the United States because the big brother Republic of the north patronises them, and they need nobody’s help. They have a contempt for all other Latins beneath the Isthmus of Panama, particularly the Brazilians. They are conscious of their own qualities.

And the visitor blinks, and rubs his eyes, and admits the wonders of Argentina. If his acquaintance with geography is casual he has shrugged his shoulders at South American Republics, where they have revolutions every six weeks, and where tawny Spaniards in quaint costumes drive mules and die from difference of opinion with other Spaniards.

Then he goes to “BA” —the familiar description of Buenos Aires— and he finds he has landed in a rampantly modem American-cum-European city. There is none of the sloth of the Southern, no checking of business between noon and three to pass in siestas.

It is a busy city. The port is thronged with shipping, mostly British. High-shouldered elevators stick out long tongues, and streams of wheat, grown on the plains of the interior, pour food for Europe into the holds. Trucks of cattle grunt through the noisy railway yards. There are huge killing establishments, and animals go to their death by the many thousand every day with a celerity which would awaken a Chicagoan. There are mighty avenues of chilled and frozen meat. Labour-saving machinery carries it on board the steamers which hasten across the Atlantic, carrying cheap beef to the London and Liverpool markets. Commerce is conducted on the latest scientific lines. The North Americans have nobbled the meat trade, and the Jews have control of the wheat market.

Buenos Aires is the mart where the produce of the rich back-lands is bartered. It levies a heavy toll. The most imposing business buildings are the banks —national banks, British, German, French, Spanish, and Italian banks. In and about Reconquista are these banks, ever busy. Near by are the rival shipping offices, a glut of them. The offices of the great railway companies are enormous. Widespreading premises exhibit the latest and best agricultural machinery that Lincolnshire and Illinois can produce. There is the hustle of commerce. The streets are as narrow and as crowded and as vital as within the City of London. There is earnestness about the men.

The Argentine is sombre in manner. He dresses in conventional black. A light waistcoat, a gay tie or fancy socks, is bad form. You cannot tell the difference between a millionaire and one of his clerks, except that the former has an expensive motor-car and the latter hires a taxi or a victoria, or travels by electric tramcar. At every corner you see evidence of prosperity, of successful money-making. And money speaks in BA as loudly as it does in New York.

Folk of the Saxon breed tend to scoff at the decadence of the Latin race. But there is something revivifying in the transplanting of a people. We have evidence in our own colonies. The man of Spanish descent in the Argentine is not always the spry fellow he thinks himself; but he has dropped the cloak of sluggishness which enwraps Spain. He is often rich; he lives in a gorgeous residence; his extravagances are beyond those of a Russian archduke. He is polite and hospitable.

But the wealthy Spanish Argentine is not the creator of his own wealth. I heard of only one case of a Spanish Argentine owing his great fortune to commercial enterprise. The fortunes of most of these Argentines come from land. Their grandfathers got immense areas by the easiest means. Properties were so enormous that extent was not reckoned in acres, or even square miles, but by leagues. But a hundred leagues, however good for cattle or sheep, or wheat growing —what was its value a couple of hundred miles from a port? Then came British railways. They pierced the prairies. The land bounded in value, tenfold, a thousandfold. Other people came in; first shrewd Scotsmen; then industrious Italians; then Englishmen bent on becoming estancieros. Their children are Argentines. But the mighty fortunes are mostly in the possession of the early Argentines —those who were settled fifty and more years ago. They have sat still and seen their land blossom in value. They pay no income tax; there is no tax on unearned increment. Mr. Lloyd George was once in the Argentine, associated with a land development company. That, however, is another story.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants pour into the Republic every year. They come from every land on earth. Mostly do they come from Spain and Italy. Italy provides the greatest number, and splendid colonists they are. Though the language will always be Spanish, the race is rapidly becoming Italianised. There is a commingling of the sterner stuff from Europe. So in this rich land —rivalling Canada and Australia in productiveness— there is being blended a new people, keen, alert, successful, ostentatious, pagan —a people that has a destiny and knows it.

The Argentines are town proud. You are not in Buenos Aires a couple of days before you are bombarded with the inquiry, “Don’t you think this is a beautiful city?”. It is not that; but it is an interesting city.

In the oldest quarters the streets are narrow, after the Spanish style. So narrow are they that, with electric cars jingling along them, vehicles are allowed to journey only one way. To reach a shop by carriage it is sometimes necessary, to drive along three and a half sides of a block of buildings. Funny little policemen, brown faced, blue clad, and with white gaiters and white wands, direct the traffic. In the Florida —the Bond Street of BA— all wheeled traffic is prohibited between the hours of four and seven in the afternoon, so that shoppers may have an easier way.

Most of the streets are called after Argentine provinces, or neighbouring republics, or national heroes, or some politician or rich man who can influence the authorities. When a popular man has lost his popularity the remnant of his fame is obliterated by the street called after him being named after someone else. It is as though the Government at home decided to change Victoria Street, Westminster, into the Avenida Asquith, with the prospect of its being altered later on to the Calle Bonar Law.

Wide plazas decorate the city. Vegetation is luxuriant, and statues are numerous. The Plaza Mayo is not called after an Irish peer, but after the month of May, 1810. The shops are as big as those in London. Argentina manufactures practically nothing, and all the lovely things have to be imported from Europe. The hotels are imitations of those in Paris. The restaurants are on a par with the best we have in London. A Viennese band plays whilst you have Russian caviare and the waiter is asking your choice in champagne. But everything is expensive. A man needs three times the salary in Buenos Aires to live the same way he would live in London. If you calculate exchange rates you go mad. It is best to count the peso (1s 8d) as a shilling, and then remember that you are spending your shilling in South America, where things are dear. You can get a modest luncheon for 10s; but you will pay 2s for a bottle of beer, and 8s 6d for a cigar worth smoking.

Yet nobody minds. Immense sums are being spent on improving the city. It is built on the American T-square plan. But it is to be subjected to the plan of Haussmann, with great tree-girt avenues radiating diagonally from the Plaza Mayo. An underground railway, honeycombing beneath the town, is in rapid construction. The railways have a great suburban traffic, and are being electrified. There are British colonies at Belgrano and Hurlingham, and you have a choice of three golf courses. In the summer months —December, January, and February— there is river life on the Tigre, the Thames of the Argentine. A charming spot is Palermo, a combination of Hyde Park and the Bois de Boulogne —open sweeps and charming trees, a double boulevard with statues and commemorative marbles in the middle, well-cared-for gardens, radiant flowers and the band playing.

A drive through Palermo at the fashionable hour causes one to gasp at the thought that one is six thousand miles from Europe. Nowhere in the world have I seen such a display of expensive motor-cars, thousands of them. Ostentation is one of the stars of life in the Argentine. Appearances count for everything. You must have a motor-car, even though you have not the money to pay for it, and you owe the landlord of your flat a year’s rent. The ladies are exquisitely gowned, but they have not the vivacity of the French women nor their daring in dress. There is a demureness, a restraint which reminds one that the atmosphere of far-away Castile is still upon them.

On Sundays and Thursdays there are races at Palermo. The price Argentines pay for horseflesh has become a proverb. It is a good race-course. We have nothing in England, neither at Epsom, Ascot, nor Goodwood, so magnificent as the grand stand. It is a glorified royal box. The restaurant is like the Ritz dining-room. Everybody dresses as they would at Ascot. There are no bookmakers. The totalisator is used. Betting is officially conducted by the Jockey Club, and there is constant announcement of the amount of money put on the horses. Those who have backed the winners share the spoil, less ten per cent. As this ten per cent, is deducted from the total amount put on each race, the income of the Jockey Club runs into hundreds of thousands of pounds. So the Club maintains a good racecourse, offers capital prizes, has a house in BA —undoubtedly the most palatial club-house in the southern world— and distributes the remainder amongst the hospitals. The income of the Jockey Club is so large it is really embarrassing. The members are proceeding to build an Aladdin’s palace of super-gorgeousness.

But at the races at Palermo I noticed that no ladies attended, except in the members’ enclosure. Even there they did not mingle with the men-folk. There was no mirth, such as we are used to in Europe. They kept themselves to little groups. Moving from wonder to wonder, I was present at a gala performance at the Colon Theatre. I have seen all the great theatres in the world, and this is the loveliest —a harmony of rose and gold. The audience was as fashionably dressed as at the opera in London, though I missed the dazzling display of diamonds which had been promised. Most of the audience were ladies; there were boxes of them, and most of the men were in the stalls. There was one gallery reserved for women.

I began to discern a strange Orientalism in the relations between the sexes. The Argentine women are amongst the best mothers in the world. But there is practically none of the good fellowship between young fellows and young girls which is so happy a feature of our English life. For a man and a woman to take a walk together would shock the proprieties. There are brilliant receptions, but dinner parties, as we know them, are rare. An Argentine seldom introduces a friend to his wife. Except amongst the poorest a woman scarcely ever goes into the streets alone. If she does she runs risk of being insulted. There are Argentines, who would be offended if refused the name of gentlemen, who think it excellent sport to walk in the Florida in the evening and mutter obscenities to every unprotected woman who passes. Buenos Aires is the most immoral city in the world. So the Argentine guards his women-folk from contact with other men. His attitude is a relic of the days when the Moors had possession of Spain.

I have called Buenos Aires a pagan city. So it is. The men are frankly irreligious. In conversation I have been told of the tolerance to all religions. What is really meant is indifference to any religion.

Money-making and flamboyant display —these are the gods which are worshipped. The houses in the wealthier districts are exotic in architecture. I remember driving along the Avenida Alvear, a street of palaces, reminiscent of the Grand Canal at Venice if it were a roadway. But the fine stone blocks are nothing but stucco. The ornamentation, the floral decorations, are not carved stone; they are stucco. Imitation, pretense, showiness, the flaunting of wealth, are everywhere.

Yet this city, which has grown in a generation on the muddy flats by the side of the muddy Parana River, has something that is weird in its fascination.

from The Amazing Argentine. A New Land of Enterprise. London, Cassell and Company, 1914.

Andrew Berardini

Even if the meaning of ancient totems disappeared, their meaningfulness has not. A human hand altering nature with purpose, these ancient stacks of stones mark a path or honor a god, measure the stars or memorialize war. We can’t really know for sure. Stand in the shadow of a megalith and you feel its force, an ancient energy still at work, blunted by our ignorance but no less powerful in its shifted mass. We know it means something important, even if we’ll never know precisely what. In stone cairns scattered across a planet, we find evidence of our ancestors, a simple shape we still make in the few wildernesses we have left. It is a basis of communication and expression with material, the beginning of sculpture.

Here these sculptures stacked by Luna Paiva angle with their own obscure ... Read More »]]>

Andrew Berardini

Even if the meaning of ancient totems disappeared, their meaningfulness has not. A human hand altering nature with purpose, these ancient stacks of stones mark a path or honor a god, measure the stars or memorialize war. We can’t really know for sure. Stand in the shadow of a megalith and you feel its force, an ancient energy still at work, blunted by our ignorance but no less powerful in its shifted mass. We know it means something important, even if we’ll never know precisely what. In stone cairns scattered across a planet, we find evidence of our ancestors, a simple shape we still make in the few wildernesses we have left. It is a basis of communication and expression with material, the beginning of sculpture.

Here these sculptures stacked by Luna Paiva angle with their own obscure and powerful spirit. Much like their ancient inspiration, her cairns do not easily reveal their secrets. We can glean some history of humans, the subtle properties of metals at work, how they learned to shape them. We can feel their rough and towering presence. Their mystery is their power.

Cast in bronze, Luna’s shimmering totems take on the aura of their material. Tooled and statued, formed and fetished, the casters of idols and statues prefer bronze for its particular properties. Composed of copper and usually tin, the ductile and enduring bronze when setting expands just slightly to fill a mold’s finest details. It can be poured into grand and dynamic poses. The finish of patinas can make that metal turn a hundred chemical colors, transform cold hard metal into supple flesh with fresh bruises and stained blood, give the static statue the illusion of shifting movement and coiled animal grace. A perfect material to shape and tribute the gods.

The cults are gone, the idols desecrated. Very few of the most beautiful of the ancient bronzes survive. The body of the god boiled into weapons and money. So go all religions. Many a bronze crucifix has melted into the belly of a cannon, the pocket of a priest. But the metal of many uses persists and is used again, bending to each new need. And just as easily bent back.

Bronze’s primary component, copper still moves the flows of energy across continents, linking house to house, station to station. A bringer of Luciferian light, lace it together into the electrical grid and this metal illuminates modern life, turning shadowy cities into bejeweled circuitboards. This power makes Aphrodite’s element essential for modernity and more than one landscape has been despoiled to satisfy a mechanized world’s gluttonous and irreparable desire for more. Ever a medium to what lies beyond, a pure attraction of energy across space and time that cannot linger, tensile and conductive, copper bends and carries but does not keep. The lust that shivers through it dissipates in consummation with other metals, but alloyed it births the powerful bronze and the all the expressions that artists can shape with it. Bronze endures. The burnished brown whispers origins we’ve since forgotten, but that survive in this alloy.

As history passes into legend and myth before its forgotten, only a few artifacts remain to teach us the tales of our ancestors and how we came to be. In these ancient structures renewed, Luna entices us to try and follow the mysterious trajectory that brought us from there to here, and even maybe further yet.

* *

“Memorias herméticas” is currently on view at Gallery SlyZmud in Buenos Aires.

Images: Javier Agustín Rojas for SlyZmud

Pablo Maurette translated by Andrea Rosenberg

In the winter of 1904–1905, in Beijing, a bodyguard named Fuzhuli was accused of killing his master, a Mongol prince, with a butcher knife. The punishment set forth by the Qing code[1] for crimes of such a serious nature (regicide, patricide, matricide, and other “enormicides”) was the infamous execution by lingchi, which had been practiced in China since the time of the Liao dynasty (tenth century). Lingchi, commonly translated as “death by a thousand cuts,” consisted of tying the condemned man to a post and cutting him into pieces. On that winter morning in the Beijing vegetable market, before a silent crowd, the executioner began carving large slices of flesh off Fuzhuli’s chest, biceps, and thighs; then cut off his limbs; and finally decapitated him. Once the process was over, the executioner ... Read More »]]>

Pablo Maurette
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

In the winter of 1904–1905, in Beijing, a bodyguard named Fuzhuli was accused of killing his master, a Mongol prince, with a butcher knife. The punishment set forth by the Qing code[1] for crimes of such a serious nature (regicide, patricide, matricide, and other “enormicides”) was the infamous execution by lingchi, which had been practiced in China since the time of the Liao dynasty (tenth century). Lingchi, commonly translated as “death by a thousand cuts,” consisted of tying the condemned man to a post and cutting him into pieces. On that winter morning in the Beijing vegetable market, before a silent crowd, the executioner began carving large slices of flesh off Fuzhuli’s chest, biceps, and thighs; then cut off his limbs; and finally decapitated him. Once the process was over, the executioner uttered the standard declaration: “Sha ren le” (“This person has been executed”). Lingchi did not involve an interminable torture session; it generally lasted only a few minutes, and usually the executioner, after making a couple of cuts, stabbed the condemned man in the heart to put an end to the nightmare. Contrary to what a scandalized Europe chose to believe, the cuts numbered not a thousand but only a few dozen. It was also customary to offer the prisoner large quantities of opium so he would not suffer. Soon after Fuzhuli’s execution, which was photographed and circulated in Europe thanks to a book by Louis Carpeaux (and later thanks to the morbid aestheticism of Georges Bataille in The Tears of Eros), China abolished lingchi.

Despite the misapprehensions of the Norwegian, English, French, and Spanish chroniclers who attended these executions and were fascinated by the idea of “Chinese torture,” the purpose of lingchi was not the infliction of inhuman suffering but instead dismemberment. Lingchi was the form of execution reserved for the most aberrant crimes in the Chinese penal code because its objective was to dismantle what one Sinologist and legal historian called “somatic integrity.”[2] The human body is a collection of parts—limbs, organs, muscles, tendons, and so on—that make up an organic whole. The perception of that wholeness is owed in large part to propioception, a type of haptic perception. Humans perceive themselves as being a sum of parts, but that perception is enforced by a fundamental undergirding experience: that of being an indivisible and inalienable unit. Lingchi is an assault on that fundamental experience, revealing it to be only a belief, an act of faith. The process of dismantling the body exposes its true nature—divisible, fragile, and contingent—by transforming the person, the “human being,” into a pile of pieces of flesh. The fact that the condemned man was given opium to anesthetize him is all the more revealing. Protected by the poppy’s magical narcotic and analgesic powers, Fuzhuli becomes numb to the agony: it is intangible. Before the executioner makes the first cut, Fuzhuli has already ceased to be a sentient body and has become a heap of flesh to be cut into pieces. Touch is the only sense we cannot lose, because losing it means ceasing to be a person and becoming mere flesh. Fuzhuli, drugged and tied to a pole, is like a cadaver on the table in an anatomical theater: a didactic spectacle. Anyone who observes the execution, who observes the ease and speed with which a person is reduced to a pile of lumps of flesh, returns home not just with a brutal memento mori but having learned a valuable lesson about the true laws that govern human life: the laws of physics. If everything is the body and the body is, fundamentally, divisible, pieces and textures are all that remain.

I read about Fuzhuli’s execution for the first time during a break at the National Library in Paris. I had been awarded a scholarship to spend a month comparing Renaissance editions of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, which I would use in the first chapter of my thesis. On occasion, while waiting for the librarians to retrieve the books I’d requested, I would browse the stacks in the basement. It was thus that I came across Louis Carpeaux’s book and the chilling photo of Fuzhuli. The subject of my research was the discovery of Lucretius’s work in Renaissance Italy, and especially its influence on the writings of a pioneer of epidemiology named Girolamo Fracastoro, who lived during the first half of the sixteenth century. As tends to happen when one is totally immersed in a topic, a powerful monothematic (if not monomaniacal) tendency led me to associate the history of capital punishment in China with that of the rediscovery of the Roman poet and philosopher in Italy. The more I thought about Fuzhuli’s execution, the better I understood the forbidden fascination that Lucretius aroused among Renaissance intellectuals. To prevent this unusual association from running aground on the shoals of absurdity, we must begin our discussion at the relevant moment.

In the summer of 1549, Giambattista Bussini, one of the innumerable humanist clerics who abounded in Rome under Pope Paul III, was present at a curious event. It might be going too far to declare it emblematic of the secularism that was to characterize modernity, but what happened in the meeting that Bussini described to his friend, the art historian Benedetto Varchi, is manifestly a postcard from the future of science and Western culture; a future that the church itself, which had organized the meeting, did not even suspect and about which it doubtless would have been scandalized. During that 1549 meeting, attendees discussed which new works to include in the infamous list of banned books that would be formalized a decade later under the title Index librorum prohibitorum. Faced with the growing Protestant threat, and only four years before the Council of Trent began, the intransigence of the Catholic church had reached its apex. The list of forbidden books written by atheists, heretics, Lutherans, antipapists, and pagan sympathizers grew ever longer, and someone at the meeting suggested including De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), the philosophical poem in dactylic hexameter by the ancient Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus. The nomination was hardly unjustified. Lucretius was an Epicurean who believed the universe was eternal and infinite and that the human soul was material, divisible, and therefore perishable. As for the divine, he was little interested in its existence and claimed that, if the gods did exist, they too were material beings, but composed of such delicate atoms that it was impossible for their actions to affect us. For Lucretius, concepts such as providence, rewards and punishments from beyond the grave, and divine intervention were lies cooked up by priests and theologians to keep the masses fearful and subdued. Lucretius’s verses are dazzling; his arguments, solid: Lucretius is convincing. De rerum natura may be the most virulent and beautiful anticlerical manifesto in the history of the world. The work had already been banned in the schools of Florence by 1517, and the term “Epicurean” was synonymous with “atheist” in the sixteenth century. And yet, when someone suggested including Lucretius among the forbidden authors at that meeting in 1549, incredibly, miraculously, absurdly, the suggestion was not well received. Cardinal Marcello Cervini argued that banning the book was unnecessary, as the pagan myths it contained were utterly harmless.[3] In the decades and centuries that followed, Lucretius’s work in particular and atomist materialism in general would profoundly influence and shape the thinking of figures such as Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, Denis Diderot, Charles Darwin, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, and Erwin Schrödinger, among others. Antiprovidentialist materialism and the conviction that nature conceals within it the keys that can unlock its secrets are pillars of atomist thinking and helped lay the foundations of modern science. Though Cardinal Cervini’s pragmatic attitude did not increase the importance or influence of the work—Lucretius had already been an influential author among the Italian pioneers of the new science for more than a century—it is a clear demonstration of the inevitability of the secular path that modern thought would take. And this secular turn was in great measure inspired by ideas disseminated by Lucretius, a poet and philosopher for whom the cornerstone of existence and perception was the sense of touch.

The second book of On the Nature of Things begins with the image of a man on a cliff watching a storm rage over the sea. The poet reflects on the strange sensation of satisfaction and fear experienced by someone witnessing a catastrophe from the safety of shelter. Lucretius explains that the pleasure that person feels is not the product of someone else’s suffering (Schadenfreude) but simply the consequence of knowing himself to be momentarily safe from harm. Similarly, reflects the poet, drawing an analogy, a person who is able, through philosophy, to elevate his knowledge beyond that of all other men will understand the nature of things and loses irrational fears that govern his life—in particular, two of them: fear of death and fear of the gods. Observation from a distance produces pleasure. The adjective that Lucretius uses, and that guides this, the fundamental book of On the Nature of Things, is tactile: suavis—that is, “smooth” or “pleasurable.”[4] Here we have the famous pleasure exalted by the Epicureans, the pleasure of avoiding suffering through knowledge, the pleasure of distance and detachment, a smoothness that caresses every atom of the body and spirit. So that young Memnius, to whom Lucretius dedicated the poem, will learn to enjoy this Epicurean smoothness, the poet devotes the second book to untangling the complex ontology and epistemology of atomism. Both center on an idiosyncratic notion of haptic perception.

Lucretius composed his poem sometime in the mid-first century BC. We know that the work enjoyed fame among his contemporaries. Cicero and Virgil read and admired it. In the first centuries of the Christian era and for the whole of the Middle Ages, however, the poem was almost entirely forgotten. In 1417 a humanist adventurer, rare book hunter, and explorer of forgotten libraries, Poggio Bracciolini, happened across a manuscript of Lucretius’s work in a German monastery. He knew at once that his find would capture the interest of his friends in Italy. He was not wrong. Not only did Lucretius become part of the classical canon, but also, surreptitiously, his ideas ended up shaping the discourse of secular science. This is the Lucretian miracle: despite its staunch anticlericalism, its dogmatic sensualism, its denial of the afterlife, its ideas on the eternity of the universe and the infinity of worlds, On the Nature of Things is rescued from censorship. Two of the greatest poets of the late fifteenth century, Angelo Poliziano and Giovanni Pontano, revere it. Pontano says, “Lucretius takes his readers where he wants to go”[5]; Ficino, Machiavelli, and the editor Aldo Manuzio, among others, succumb to the contagion of Lucretianism as well. They are not only captivated by the poetry but also galvanized by the ideas. Pious Ficino, fascinated by the text, writes a commentary that he later burns in a fit of guilt. “I offered it to Vulcan,” he tells a friend, with combined embarrassment and relief.[6] Sometimes, Lucretius explains, the doctor must sweeten the cup that contains the bitter medicine so that the child will drink it and be cured.[7] Poetry is the honey that sweetens the cup of knowledge. Human beings are like children who are afraid of the dark: to help them lose their fear and become free, one must explain how nature works, convince them that the supernatural does not exist, that everything is material, atoms falling for ever and ever through the void. Lucretius uses an unusual verb to confess that he has infused his cup of knowledge with the honeys of epic poetry: the verb is contingo, a compound of tangere, “to touch,” and the preposition cum, from which the word “contagion” is derived. Contagion is a touch that brings something with it, that leaves something behind, that transforms and influences. Equating the emergence of Lucretius with the spread of a contagion is fitting because his poetry and his thinking—which are inseparable, almost indistinguishable from each other—entered the bloodstream of European humanism like a disease that upheaves and transforms. Europe was infected by Lucretius, by his haptic poetry and his philosophy of the tangible, the way one is always infected: without realizing it.

* *

El sentido olvidado (The Forgotten Sense) was published by Mardulce Editoras in July 2015. 

Image via the Charmet Archives of the National Library of France.

Craig Epplin

 Y el eco es anterior a las voces que lo producen. —Nicanor Parra

The title of Mario Bellatin’s 2008 biography of Frida Kahlo, Las dos Fridas, is unsurprising, obvious even; of all her paintings, Bellatin chooses one whose resonance with his own literature is unmistakable. Unmistakable because everything in his work seems at once doubled and modified, his endless self-portraits mapping a landscape of dissemination. The name Mario Bellatin, or more often mario bellatin, proliferates, attaching fleetingly to any sort of body, young or old, male or female. One of his most recent books, Disecado (2011), follows the model of a Baroque painting (as Federico Zamora aptly puts it), detailing a somnolent encounter between the narrator and a phantasm of himself. The book feels like an expansive fresco of the literary life of the author, ... Read More »]]>

Craig Epplin

 Y el eco es anterior a las voces que lo producen.
—Nicanor Parra

The title of Mario Bellatin’s 2008 biography of Frida Kahlo, Las dos Fridas, is unsurprising, obvious even; of all her paintings, Bellatin chooses one whose resonance with his own literature is unmistakable. Unmistakable because everything in his work seems at once doubled and modified, his endless self-portraits mapping a landscape of dissemination. The name Mario Bellatin, or more often mario bellatin, proliferates, attaching fleetingly to any sort of body, young or old, male or female. One of his most recent books, Disecado (2011), follows the model of a Baroque painting (as Federico Zamora aptly puts it), detailing a somnolent encounter between the narrator and a phantasm of himself. The book feels like an expansive fresco of the literary life of the author, one of numerous volumes in which Bellatin appears not as a specular figure, but rather as simply another being on display. His writing undergoes a similar process, as every new title seems to reinterpret the previous ones.

In other words, copies abound in Bellatin’s oeuvre, though each is slightly different from its antecedent. Every element acts as a correction or addendum to what came before, which is invariably coupled to something else. He employs numerous strategies of duplication, just as Kahlo, in this painting, ciphers various affinities between her two avatars: physical resemblance, biological dependence, the experience of touch, and the casual brush of worn garments.

The painting is one of her most famous. In it, two representations of the artist clasp hands, sharing both a bench and an artery, their exposed hearts alluding to the biological substrate beneath the multiple experience of life. Their faces are nearly identical, with difference inscribed only in their respective dresses: one is clad in colonial garb, while the other wears indigenous attire. Two Fridas and two Mexicos, in other words, linked together by the coursing of blood, blood that ultimately overflows, staining the white dress of the figure on the left. Redoubled identities, along with their excesses, here signal the irreducibility of national culture.

I wonder, looking at this image, what Bellatin thinks about it: whether he thinks about Mexican history when he looks at it, or whether he sees the red, veiny web at the top of each heart as a little hand reaching up to choke the impassively seated subject—a sign, perhaps, of the ultimately sinister designs our bodies have on us. Despite having borrowed its title, Bellatin never discusses this painting, nor does he include a representation of it in his book. Instead, it hovers in the background, like the overcast sky in the scene itself.

This omission does not indicate an aversion to images. A single photograph adorns each page of Las dos Fridas. These photos seem artificially aged, an effect achieved, Bellatin tells us, by his employment of a toy camera from his childhood. Most of the images chart a trip he took in search of a woman who lives in a small town and sells her wares from a stand at the local market. The woman is not Frida Kahlo, who died in 1954, but she might be. Bellatin is willing to entertain this possibility. At least this is the pretense that grounds the writing of this book.

He describes the circumstances that spawned this unlikely hypothesis in the book’s first pages. When the biography was commissioned, he requested a photograph of Kahlo, which he then circulated among his acquaintances, seeking information about the woman. Most respondents saw the iconic painter and responded accordingly, but one wrote back that he recognized the woman from her stand at the market. Several others later claimed something similar. Bellatin’s reaction, as he registers it, was skeptical but not dismissive: “The information I received,” he writes, “about the supposed existence of Frida Kahlo running a market stand did not seem credible; nevertheless, I was intrigued by the idea that someone could continue living in spite of her death.” His trip is premised on this possibility.

We read about his arrival at the small town. He approaches the market and asks where to find the woman in the photo; his interlocutors snicker and warn him against proceeding. When I read this passage in Las dos Fridas I couldn’t help but think of Pedro Páramo and other quest narratives. Similar moments of sinister foreboding are fundamental to these plotlines. Bellatin plays up this literary parallel, writing that his journey (itself literary from the outset) now mimicked “the regular outline of certain literary works. There always seems to exist an intermediate place where they warn the traveler not to continue on his path.” This point is where life and fiction become indistinguishable.

In spite of this cautionary foreshadowing, the narrator eventually finds the second Frida, the woman who works at the market. She is occupied at her stand and surrounded by assistants, but he manages to carry out an interview through the throng around her. He asks what she knows of Frida Kahlo, the artist. She responds with a succinct biography worthy of Wikipedia—dates, important life events, professional accomplishments, etc. Immediately following this passage, the book’s longest, the narrator tells us that he noticed her reading this list straight from a book hidden in her lap, perhaps a winking fulfillment of Bellatin’s own commissioned task as biographer.

It is a virtual repetition of the dynamic implicit in the Congreso de Dobles, a 2003 exhibition organized by Bellatin wherein various non-professional actors stood in for four Mexican writers, whose presence had been promised in advance. These stand-ins recited memorized scripts, channeling their avatars at a distance. Arturo Valdivia has shown—brilliantly, playfully—how the shadow puppetry of that exhibit coheres both with the strategies of Las dos Fridas—both Bellatin’s book and also, to a degree, Kahlo’s painting. As the second Frida reads what she knows about Kahlo the painter, we become witnesses to an odd scene: Kahlo’s presence is channeled, as if by a medium, but the tangible source of that channeling is underscored, not obscured.

This moment in the narrative recognizes that little up to this point has been directly about Frida Kahlo, at least not in the conventional sense of the word about. I see two possible ways of interpreting this gesture. On the one hand, we might conclude that Kahlo has served simply as a pretext for Bellatin to tell the story of a trip that meanders not in space but in memory: hence the narrator’s extended asides on his dog, friends, and Fascist forebears.  In other words, narcissism is inevitable. We are always writing about ourselves, and Bellatin has simply made this unavoidable conundrum the object of his book. The play on identity and presence would be nothing but a device that enables the writer himself to take center stage.

The other way of understanding Las dos Fridas is less obvious, but might shed more light on Bellatin’s broader practice as a writer. This second option holds that the book actually makes good on its promise; that it is, in its way, a biography of Frida Kahlo, despite the fact that most of the narrative is composed of preparations and tangents, that few of the photographs seem to bear a direct connection to Kahlo or her world, and that the author takes palpable pleasure in leaving most of the standard biographical details for the last few pages.

Bellatin’s approach, then, directly engages the genre of biography and its assumption that a life can be reduced to a sequence of events closely tied to the displacements of a body, arranged chronologically and retold as a linear narrative. In this genre, birth and death provide the framework for family and professional engagements, political action and civic ambitions, and the passage through various institutions. We know, however, that life does not proceed in a vacuum, which is why the best biographies allow us to relate an individual destiny to broader historical forces.

Bellatin insists on this last point, amplifying it, not only in his own, varyingly autobiographical narratives, but throughout the entirety of his work; one strand that unites these texts is their tendency to take the notion of context to its extreme. To stick with the present case, he has decided, in Las dos Fridas, that the mystical path of his friend is somehow relevant to the life of Frida Kahlo, as are the Fascist beliefs common both to his own ancestors and to an isolated immigrant community in rural Mexico. Those are just two instances in a book that is full of such asides. By including so many seemingly unrelated narrative strands in this biography, Bellatin seeks to erase the lines that separate a given life from others and, indeed, from everything else.

That said, the inclusion of these stories is not entirely arbitrary. They emerge successively from the process Bellatin describes at the outset: the circulation of the initial photograph and the road trip that ensued. This process becomes a sort of method, whereby Bellatin seeks to approach his subject through the paths opened up by one manifestation of her image in the present. This method seeks to destabilize the basic unit of biographical writing: the neatly delineated life. In place of this rigid notion, Bellatin seems to propose that a life always extends outward, that it glimmers and reverberates in unexpected places. A project like Las dos Fridas, like much of Bellatin’s work, tries to uncover those places. The background becomes the foreground. Or, to draw out another cinematic analogy, if the traditional biography is a cleanly edited film, Bellatin would rather sit and watch the outtakes.

In other words, if life indeed extends endlessly beyond all limits, then Bellatin sees the task of the biographer as that of hearing the sudden echoes and revealing the subterranean traces of the dead through controlled situations, artificial scenarios. This is biography as séance.

The results of such an operation might turn out to be banal. They might devolve into the brand of narcissism I mention above. Is this a weakness in Bellatin’s method? Maybe, though perhaps it owes more to the fraught nature of the biographical impulse itself, based as it is on the slippery task of delineating a life. And also to the fact that this task has grown even more daunting in the present, when our likenesses proliferate widely, a point that Bellatin underscores toward the end of Las dos Fridas when he photographs a pair of Chuck Taylors silkscreened with the face of Kahlo herself. In this media ecology, traces of the dead—and the living—surface with or without the séance of writing.

Everything becomes outtakes, in other words. The reel is endless. And some of it is even compelling.

* *

Images: Photograph by Sebastián Freire; Las dos Fridas via Proyecto Kahlo.

Edmundo Paz Soldán translated by Sarah Bruni

Fifteen years ago or so, I traveled to Lima in search of a shaman who would free me from the ghost of a dead friend. The friend had killed himself, and his ghost, or what I thought was his ghost, appeared to me every night. Lima, they said, was the solution, so I went. The shaman was dressed in black, wore military boots, was bald and missing his right arm. His name was Mario Bellatin and he went everywhere with his dogs. He was also a writer. He told me he wrote novels, though genres were actually rather blurred for him. He wanted to reach a point where he would be free to just to write books. In the first therapy session he asked me to write for an hour. About ... Read More »]]>

Edmundo Paz Soldán
translated by Sarah Bruni

Fifteen years ago or so, I traveled to Lima in search of a shaman who would free me from the ghost of a dead friend. The friend had killed himself, and his ghost, or what I thought was his ghost, appeared to me every night. Lima, they said, was the solution, so I went. The shaman was dressed in black, wore military boots, was bald and missing his right arm. His name was Mario Bellatin and he went everywhere with his dogs. He was also a writer. He told me he wrote novels, though genres were actually rather blurred for him. He wanted to reach a point where he would be free to just to write books. In the first therapy session he asked me to write for an hour. About what, I asked. Anything you want, like when you were a child. So I did, somewhat nervous because I wasn’t used to such informality. I admired Vargas Llosa—that meticulous structure, that narrative architecture. Mario laughed when I mentioned Vargas Llosa to him. He told me that writing was intuition and gave me some of his books. Beauty Salon impressed me, Flowers and The Szechuan School of Human Pain startled me, and Blind Poet left me cold. I asked him about my dead friend. In reply, Mario started to spin like a dervish. He belonged to the Sufi religion, he told me, and this had taught him that I should not be afraid of my friend. Instead, I should enjoy him. The dead are alive and remain with us, he said. They live in another reality, perhaps more interesting than this one. I left Lima with a certain peace of mind; although the friend didn’t stop appearing, I already knew what to do with him, at least, that’s what I thought. Five years later I traveled to Mexico, and in the subway I encountered a man dressed in black, wearing military boots, bald, and missing an arm. Mario, I whispered. He told me that by pure coincidence his name was Mario, but he didn’t know me. His last name, also by pure coincidence, was Bellatin. He sold his books in front of the subway. They were handmade books, in good condition. He wanted to write a hundred books, and if he published a thousand of each, he would sell a hundred thousand. I bought several from him, still surprised by the meeting, sure that he was who I said even if he denied it. At home, I read books I didn’t understand, with titles that mentioned dead hares and great glasswork, books written in an impenetrable style that denied me access. Even so, I went back to the subway the next day to say hello. I didn’t find him. I thought that maybe Mario Bellatin had died long ago and I had run into his ghost. A little while later, in Ithaca, where I live, the visions began. One day, in the mall, Bellatin started walking with me and stole a baseball hat from an Old Navy store. Another day he gave a presentation to my students on Beauty Salon, during which he never opened his mouth. The students listened entranced to a recording of Mario on the autobiographical origins of Beauty Salon. To talk about Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction, he showed us a ten-minute video in which he goes on about Rulfo, José María Arguedas, and Prince while his dogs run around the house. Bellatin stopped appearing, but his books continue to. The most impressive of all is called The Uruguayan Book of the Dead (published by Sexto Piso). “The truly unique images come from the intuitive,” says the narrator of this flawless book, whose name is Mario Bellatin, although this intuition is, of course, also governed by a meticulous structure, an impressive narrative architecture. Which Mario is the narrator? It doesn’t matter anymore. I now understand that, starting with his years in Lima, he has been building a phantom reality from his apparently iniquitous practice. A space where the rules are different. So different that they made possible a moment in which, at my age, I would set out after a Mario Bellatin who wandered through the subway stations of Mexico City selling, one by one, the books that—irony of ironies—are slowly turning him into one of those indispensible beings that will never die.

* *

Image: Sebastián Freire

Sergio Pitol translated by George Henson

For Margo Glantz

A feeling of disaster is haunting the world. The novel records it and, in doing so, is resplendent. The more rotten it smells in Denmark—and today Denmark seems to be a large part of the universe—the more indispensable the novel becomes. Ultima Thule: a reflection of an indomitable impulse to survive, of the preservation of form over chaos, sacrifice over apathy, spirit over unformed matter—the novel is that and more. Fueled by extreme tensions, witness to violent upheavals, nourished at times by caviar and quail and other times by carrion, it reappears on the international stage today with enviable health. It blooms with a fullness that roses would envy. Behold it: protean, generous, bold, ubiquitous, skeptical, cheeky, and unmanageable. Each crisis of society causes it to regenerate. When necessary, it sheds its ... Read More »]]>

Sergio Pitol
translated by George Henson

For Margo Glantz

A feeling of disaster is haunting the world. The novel records it and, in doing so, is resplendent. The more rotten it smells in Denmark—and today Denmark seems to be a large part of the universe—the more indispensable the novel becomes. Ultima Thule: a reflection of an indomitable impulse to survive, of the preservation of form over chaos, sacrifice over apathy, spirit over unformed matter—the novel is that and more. Fueled by extreme tensions, witness to violent upheavals, nourished at times by caviar and quail and other times by carrion, it reappears on the international stage today with enviable health. It blooms with a fullness that roses would envy. Behold it: protean, generous, bold, ubiquitous, skeptical, cheeky, and unmanageable. Each crisis of society causes it to regenerate. When necessary, it sheds its skin. It grows with adversity. It is experiencing today one of its greatest moments, and, as a result, there are probably those among us who are beginning to predict its next extinction. Perhaps they have already chosen its coffin and burial place. This prophecy is part of the customs of our century. Each time the novel is reinvigorated, someone announces its death knell. The truth is no one can defeat it.

Ortega y Gasset announced its death, as did Breton. Paul Valéry alluded to it in passing with a phrase that became instantly famous. André Breton reproduces a comment by Valéry that refers to his refusal to write one because he is incapable of anything as banal as “The Marquise went out at five o’clock.” Is it possible that the author of The Cemetery by the Sea might have, out of politeness, uttered this sentence just to please Breton—who scorned this literary genre—that is, by chance, just to move the conversation along and thus avoid a lull? Or, perhaps at that moment, Valéry was thinking of some of the novelists fashionable at the time, Paul Morand or André Maurois, for example, in whose pages one might always see a marquise leave her home at five o’clock to take tea at the Ritz, perhaps a few minutes late? God only knows!

The truth is, “The Marquise went out at five o’clock” is an ideal incipit for stimulating the affectation of a certain type of reader who rejoices at hearing about marquises, princesses and baronesses, as well as the Cinderellas who, after enduring every imaginable hardship and humiliation, end up marrying marquis, princes, or barons. The absence of her ladyship’s name in itself instills a degree of confidence; it takes for granted that the novel is about the marquise, or one of the marquises, from the neighborhood. Perhaps reading about the Marquise de La Rochefoucauld or the Marquise de Varennes would have intimidated the reader a bit, but a simple marquise inspires confidence; there is something comforting in her concise, almost homespun simplicity, an aroma of hot chocolate and freshly baked cinnamon buns.

It is also possible that Valéry, distracted by other interests or busied by other subjects and other times, did not recognize that the novel was no longer what it once was, and that far from Morand, Maurois, and Montherlant, who had their own appeal, new writers in France and, above all, in other latitudes were determined to transform narrative language and were beginning their novels in a very different way:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: —Introibo ad altare Dei.

There is an explicit coarseness present in this paragraph. Its reading does not produce a delightful chill heralding the appearance of a marquise on the street. Instead of a lady dressed by Molyneux or Schiaparelli, frantic to arrive promptly for an engagement, which could well change her life, with the handsome son of an Italian banker, or to go to her jeweler’s shop to have him adjust the setting to one of her famous emerald stud earrings, or to the office of a seedy pawnbroker to hock them then and there, we find ourselves in the presence of a fat man, a few pedestrian barber utensils, and an untied yellow gown that establish a pronounced oxymoron, that is still very funny, with the liturgical Latin: “Introibo ad altare Dei”

Let’s consider the beginning of another novel:

He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut.

The reference to the gender of the protagonist, his aggressiveness toward the head of a Moor hanging from the rafters, the similarity with an old soccer ball immediately produces in us a slight bewilderment. What world have we entered? The brutality of striking a head, whether of a Moor or anyone else, immediately dissolves, and is made unreal by the levity of the narrative tone. There is instead a kind of peculiar humor that is enhanced by comparing the head to a soccer ball and his dry hair to a coconut. We cannot be sure whether the exquisite lady wished to leave her home at five to witness such an uncommon spectacle. She was not prudish, no, nothing of the sort, rather she lacked humor and was therefore extremely disquieted by certain eccentricities; she did not know how to behave, and that was the worst thing that could happen to her. Instead of going out that evening she was left to play with a pair of moss-green kid gloves, waiting for a telephone call that never came. In the end, she was so prostrate with anger that she could have chewed the gloves to shreds.

The first quote is from 1922. They are the first lines of James Joyce’s Ulysses; the second, from 1928, belongs to the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. A few years later, in the heart of Europe, Vienna to be precise, a young military engineer began a novel that would fill four large volumes that would remain unfinished on the author’s death. A novel that still radiates throughout universal narrative:

A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclination to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as they should. The air temperature was appropriate relative to the annual mean temperature and to the aperiodic monthly fluctuations of the temperature. The rising and the setting of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn, and many other significant phenomena were all in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The water vapour in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the humidity was minimal. In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August 1913.

You have probably recognized it by now; this is the first paragraph of Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, published in 1930. A stunning twist, a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn, has occurred in writing. It would seem to be a section of a scientific essay, or rather a weather report written by a highly skilled employee. However, it is a novel. In these ten lines, full of isotheres and isotherms, of monthly aperiodic fluctuations and phases of the moon, of Venus, and of the rings of Saturn, in addition to other phenomena that are incomprehensible to us mere readers, a mystery is communicated, in just eight words of quiet language, that, in the end, clarifies for us that it was a beautiful day in August 1913. This wordy pomp and, moreover, its subsequent clarification, grates on the nerves of our acquaintance, the marquise. For as long as she can remember, she has detested those Teutonic witticisms that, in her view, demonstrate a monumental lack of tact and taste. That beautiful day, she did not go out at five or any other time; she spent her time leafing through some magazines and writing several drafts that she angrily crumpled up, until she was finally able to write a dry, so very, very dry letter, in which she ended a long-standing romantic relationship. She then began to laugh like a mad woman, took sedatives with champagne, and soon had to be put to bed.

And on the other side of the Atlantic, a North American, a Southerner to be exact, began one of the most beautiful novels ever written as follows:

From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wistaria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or husband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed Voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust.

These are the first lines of Absalom, Absalom!, the brilliant novel that William Faulkner published in 1936. If our friend—I imagine that by now we can allow ourselves such familiarity—had gone out that day at five to take part in the conversation that Quentin Compson held with Miss Coldfield, she would surely have been on tenterhooks. She had dealings in recent years with many highly esteemed Americans: the Gereths, the Prest-Coovers, Mrs. Welton, and Howard Blendy, a young diplomat of whom she was a trifle enamored. Aristocracy of another kind, so to speak; rich, sophisticated, lighthearted, quite the opposite of that sleepwalking couple from the South that reminded her of a pair of ill-tempered crows who mumbled in some nonsensical language. Her education—although she’s not entirely sure about this—is firmly rooted in Descartes, which, combined with other limitations that the reader has probably noticed, cause her to rebel against that ecstatic verbal delirium. To hear that children’s feet have an air of impotent rage and that the summer dust was “biding and dreamy and victorious,” affects her in such a way that she could have slapped anyone who dared repeat those words to her.

Several years passed, almost forty since Ulysses appeared, until, in 1960, Julio Cortázar took Paul Valéry’s remark and crushed it with joyous abandon. The first sentence of The Winners reads:

“The marquise went out at five,” Carlos Lopez thought. “Where in the hell did I read that?”

Our poor, dear, old, powdered marquise! The years have taken their toll on her. She had imposed on herself a long and strict internal exile, and had completed it with exemplary rigor. The Argentine writer’s attack had wrested her out of her lethargy.

She lay awake all night, plagued by two opposing impulses. On the one hand, she felt the temptation to repair to a convent where she would take a vow of perpetual silence. An innate pride compelled her to punish the world by turning away and making her contempt known. The sacred music, the smell of wax and incense, the proximity of angels, the locks of hair on the floor around her, the coarse habit of cloister, the tears, all of it, everything, drew her closer to God. It was possible, she thought, hopeful, that some writer understood the nobility of her gesture and would one day be tempted to write: “The marquise went out at five o’clock. A simple black tailleur by Patou accentuated her elegance as she left the house alone. A car took her to the gate of the convent that would house her earthly body for the rest of her days.” An instant later, she recalled the allegations against Ives-Etienne, her niece’s fiancé, who was also a distant nephew of hers, a brash and insolent boy, though not devoid of a certain charm, who, to the astonishment of his entire family, sympathized with the so-called popular causes. Suddenly, the old woman saw herself marching through the streets, erect like a steel stiletto, her left fist raised. She heard her voice suddenly become powerful, her cries of hatred for militarism, and her commitment to the fight in Algeria. Her brave decision to betray her class to march arm in arm with the downtrodden and the oppressed moved her to tears. Her courageous attitude would certainly inspire some author, who would one day write: “The marquise went out at five o’clock only to fall all at once into a sea of flags.” And then he would describe with elegance the moment she leaned her arm on the arm of a metal worker to continue the march. They were wrapped in the music of L’Internationale, and they felt protected, secure in their cause, convinced that victory was near.

For a moment some other ideas swirled around her feverish mind. She dreamt, for example, that she was the heroine of libertine novels; she smiled ambiguously as she thought of certain terribly lascivious images, but those visions did not last, and the woman returned stubbornly to the previous dichotomy. At times she trembled, sobbed, admired the courage that was needed to cloister herself in the strictest order of silent nuns and, immediately, was even more dazzled by her own erect figure, rallying from a platform of the Mutualité to a throng of workers and students, or by the feat of having chained herself to the bow of a ship that would deliver arms to Southeast Asia. But such is life. Clinging to the possibility that she would once again grace the pages of some yet-to-be-published extraordinary novel, her heart grew weak, faltered, until a sudden blow shattered it completely.

The next day, the marquise went out at five o’clock. She did it inside a modest coffin. So far, to my knowledge, no one has recorded her departure.

Xalapa, July 1994

* *

This text and others can be found in The Art of Flight (Deep Vellum 2015). 

* *

Image: “Sky West” by Marisela La Grave.

Natalia Brizuela on Nuno Ramos translated by Andrea Rosenberg

“No sé.” “I don’t know.” That’s the response Tintin and Captain Haddock get from the inhabitants of the Andean country—vaguely reminiscent of Peru—where they’ve traveled in search of their friend, Professor Calculus, who has been kidnapped and taken there by the last descendants of the Incas. Whenever Tintin and Haddock encounter someone—all of them with indigenous features—and ask if they’ve seen their friend, the natives respond, “I don’t know.” That “I don’t know” is the resistance of the colonial subject. That negation is the power of the powerless: “You can arrest me, you can interrogate me, you can torture me, you can exterminate my people, but you can’t make me talk.” Today the phrase arrives on the shores of the Río de la Plata in the form of an embodied echo: ... Read More »]]>

Natalia Brizuela on Nuno Ramos
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

“No sé.” “I don’t know.” That’s the response Tintin and Captain Haddock get from the inhabitants of the Andean country—vaguely reminiscent of Peru—where they’ve traveled in search of their friend, Professor Calculus, who has been kidnapped and taken there by the last descendants of the Incas. Whenever Tintin and Haddock encounter someone—all of them with indigenous features—and ask if they’ve seen their friend, the natives respond, “I don’t know.” That “I don’t know” is the resistance of the colonial subject. That negation is the power of the powerless: “You can arrest me, you can interrogate me, you can torture me, you can exterminate my people, but you can’t make me talk.” Today the phrase arrives on the shores of the Río de la Plata in the form of an embodied echo: we might, with that phrase, trace a lengthy genealogy of resistance and struggle in Latin America, from the colonial period through the terror of the dictatorships of the twentieth century to today.

Here, a few pages of Tintin serve as a springboard for Nuno Ramos’s installation of sound and performance. Tintin, the young Belgian reporter and explorer who took his readers along with him on adventures in the Congo, Latin America, Egypt, China, India, and dozens of other places, was, through the numerous translations produced, a childhood fixture for millions of children in the last century. Tintin’s travels and adventures around the world are the product of a Europe in self-aware decline, a Europe whose centuries-long period of colonial control and exploitation of vast swaths of the earth was beginning conspicuously to fall apart. For that Europe, Tintin offered a sort of fantasy of its own life after death, the transformation and translation of the most brutal and violent legacy of modern times into “child’s play.” While no adult can doubt the imperialist ideology behind Tintin, for millions of children he offered History in the form of a fantastical adventure. For Nuno Ramos, philosopher-artist-writer, Tintin is not just a reminder of childhood but one of the quintessential sites of reading, of imagination, of exploration, and, in this case, of an activation of and movement toward the political realm through art.

“Passage,” “poetic simultaneity,” “latency,” “constitutive vacillation,” “a hybrid form,” “my art as an everything”—thus did Nuno Ramos himself describe his multifaceted artistic practice a few years ago. Films, sculptures, installations, paintings, performances, music, literary works that all echo one another. A single title, a single name, a single figure, or a single idea that is repeated, in passage from one medium to another, from one material to another, in an artistic endeavor that has since the end of the 1980s been necessarily hybrid.

Nuno’s art is never a single object, a single material, a single instance. Everything he does remains in a state of latency, ready to be retrieved, to reappear, to live again. Hence the title of one his most paradigmatic books, Ensayo general. Everything in Nuno is a rehearsal; we never view the definitive version. This is also the case with our “No sé”: it was first presented in Guatemala in mid-2014; now, we are witnessing a new version, revivified by the rich texture of the local context. The performance will be recorded, and at some future date this material will be turned into a film—probably one with the same title. As the days pass, the sound-filled garden will be transformed into a passage toward death.

The material of the world enters Ramos’s universe as if it were in an alchemist’s laboratory: thus, the mutation and transformation of the material and, closely linked, abandonment and death are two of the core themes of his poetics. Some of his favorite materials are:

Lime

It was at the end of the 1980s that Nuno Ramos, then a young painter, took his art beyond the pictorial frame and began to explore space, matter, and mutation in installations of what we now clearly know to be the expanded field of contemporary art. The vehicle or material that allowed him that departure and expansion, the instrument of his shift toward another artistic practice, was lime. This happened in a show called Cal in 1987 in Rio de Janeiro: the gallery space was shared by a series of constructions of lime: a heap of lime and canvas; wooden columns 1.8 and 2 meters tall, filled with lime; a “sail” made with lime and canvas. Into the early 1990s, lime was one of Ramos’s favorite materials in his alchemical laboratory: mixed with other materials such as cotton, paraffin, and tar, it created shapeless masses of matter that spread across the floor as grime, mounds very reminiscent of garbage [Pele 1 (Homenagem a Carlos Parana)) and Pele 2 (Para Frida)]; as words, a sort of writing in lime, to literally give body to the poetic and exploratory words of Nuno the artist, who is also a writer [Canoa]; and as a title for installations that explored the mutation and transformation of material without using lime as one of their materials [O pó da cal queima o pó do corpo].

Here, in no sé (El Templo del Sol), the body leaves its mark on lime, as the artist had already done in the series of photographs included in the book Minha fantasma. A white, ghostly body: a body that straddles the boundary between being a body and ceasing to be one, a threshold between living and dead matter.

Films

All of Nuno Ramos’s films, including the three being shown at the Parque de la Memoria, have a correlate or “poetic paraphrase” in visual art: Luz negra and Casco were exhibitions, and Illuminai os terreiros an installation. In a sense, it is easy to think that they function as a documentation or record of visual work, because in effect they are. In them we see the work’s process, its staging, its drift, its transformation. But we should not think of Nuno’s films as documentaries: they are not there merely to instruct the spectator on how Nuno Ramos’s art comes to be. The films are films; they are works of art themselves.

Let’s take Casco, for example. The first sculpture with that name is from 1999. An enormous mass of laminated wood, with a shape analogous to that of a ship’s hull, embedded in a large rectangle of burned and compacted sand. That first hull has a subtitle: the name of polar explorer Shackleton, whose ship, The Endurance, became trapped in the ice. In 2004 Casco returns, but it is different now. It began as a performance on the beach in which three characters recited texts written by Nuno as the tide rose. As they spoke, the characters also cut up small wooden fishing boats and fit one boat inside the other, destroying and reconstructing the hulls. As the tide rose, the ships and their destroyed hulls looked like the remains of a shipwreck. All of this was video-recorded, and the film was made based on this material. Later, some of the shipwrecked hulls served as sculptures for the exhibit Cascos at the Banco de Brasil Cultural Center in São Paulo. These wrecked hulls were covered in tar, emerged from sheets of tar. Others, made of compacted sand, were not included in the recorded material for the film.

The films are the last mutation, the final iteration in the alchemist’s laboratory, so that the substance returns eternally as a filmic image, as a ghost of itself. They are the continuation after the end. They are what survives. What continues to arrive afterward.

Sound

With the arrival of the new millennium, sound—like music, like noise, and like song—appeared in Nuno Ramos’s art. In this exhibit, sound emerges from the bowels of the earth, issuing through underground speakers, forming an interrogation whose questions are simultaneously both meaningful and meaningless, banal and metaphysical, concrete and abstract, and their goal is to apprehend the body, to restrain and expose it. In Ramos’s 2002 sound installation Luz Negra (Para Nelson 1), the sound issued from a series of graves, now covered and filled with earth, that contained massive speakers that reproduced the voice of Nelson Cavaquinho singing “Juicio final.” In that first sound installation, as in this one, it is soil—as an organic material but also as a metaphor for the world—that speaks, or questions, or sings. In both, the voice is disembodied, obscene in that it is literally off-scene and also sublime. Soil, haunted by the dead, composed of dead and decomposing matter—which allows it to regenerate and gives it life—speaks to us, will not leave us be. Sound, in Ramos’s work, emerges from an earthly beyond, from beneath the material—sometimes, as here, from soil, but also from salt, from water, and from hay [Vai, Vai] or from within furniture and statues [Grave, grave; Tenho sede]. The voice in particular, and the sounds in general, return from the beyond. They survive all destruction—that destruction that is so constant and fundamental in Ramos’s work. They are what remains and what always is. The return of the voice from death and, in that sense—but also in other senses—the voice once more.

Language and Writing

Nuno Ramos is an artist and a writer, and the two undertakings are inextricably linked in his work. He is, then, a writer-artist, or simply a contemporary artist, for whom the material or the medium in which he works cannot be identified. This became quite clear with the publication of his first book, Cujo, in 1993. Reading that text is like being in the artist’s studio, which by that point already more closely resembled an alchemist’s laboratory. In his installations and in his writing, Nuno, like those philosophical pseudoscientists of old, investigates the material composition of the world, the transmutation both of matter and of the soul. In no sé (El Templo del Sol), we hear a dialogue or an interrogation between an absent voice and the voice of a body that is in the process of being transformed into a ghost made of lime. I distinguish between words—language—and sound because words are important in both their material and their sonic qualities. That is why we hear “No sé” and see it written in charcoal on the wall. That is why the words of that first book, Cujo, appeared as material things before becoming mere symbols, in installations in the early 1990s: forms written with lime, with petroleum jelly, on the floor, on the walls. Words acquire bodies. Words in Nuno’s work always have bodies: they are objects and they are symbols.

It is the verge or the boundary, the place where materials mingle and blend together. That same boundary appears in Nuno’s most recent work. It is perpetually in motion, resisting clear demarcation, preventing the viewer from clearly distinguishing between one material and another, between one state and another. It is the boundary of the indistinction that marks today’s aesthetics. It is also, and perhaps primarily, the far boundary of the world.

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Image: from the video “Casco” (2004) dir. Nuno Ramos, Eduardo Clima, and Gustavo Moura.