A Career

(a: 1863)

Rodin working on the bust of Father Eymard, from http://www.musee-rodin.fr/sjeun-e.htm

(b)

Rodin in his studio at Medoun. © Harlingue-Viollet, Paris, from http://www.rodin-art.com/

Re: Becoming Nothing

What follows is a letter I received from the author of the italicized text in the previous post, "Becoming Nothing". Reader responses posted here will be forwarded to the author.

Dear -------,

I wanted to submit a few remarks in response to the comments of mine that you included in the previous exhibit at Altarpiece. In conjunction with the ideas presented there, I have been plagued by another thought, and, more relevantly, I have been plagued by my own inability to express it. In this particular case it seems that I might benefit from trying to express it clearly to someone who has a hope of understanding. I trust you won’t mind me using you as a sort of test subject in this endeavor, but if you do, stop reading now and discard the letter! In any case, perhaps you will also get something out of my meandering here to include in a future exhibit.

The idea in question began as an intuition, which you posted, regarding the relationship between art and the “real world.” This was the intuition expressed in the phrase, “Politics is [or perhaps it should have been ‘are’] a lame substitute for art.” What I had in mind was the ability of art to transform the state of humanity, to create better worlds by virtue of its ability to awaken truths that lie dormant in our spirits. Art is direct democracy imbued with a sense of what is good and true. This, I thought, renders politics unnecessary as a form of representation of art, an unnecessary regulation of a world that man self-regulates through communicative and expressive tools given him at and before birth.

Of course, this all sounds more or less wonderful on paper, but it began to butt heads with reality when I was put upon recently to explain it in the language of “daily life” in conversation. My interlocutor insisted that any system of organization of the exigencies of daily life counts as a political system, for example the working out of how a society’s collective garbage will be dealt with. Art, he argued, simply could not take the place of such necessities.

This argument upset me considerably because, while I could see how it derived from my own remarks, it seemed to miss the point entirely. It seemed to miss the significance of what I was saying, to somehow render banal a point that had begun in my mind as a (subjectively) inspired moment. I couldn’t see how to reconcile this problem, and in fact it appeared to me as merely an instantiation of a general difficulty I had encountered before. Namely, so many of the ideas and principles that are the most important to me are seemingly incompatible with daily reality. The values implied by a commitment to the realms of art and ideas bear no relation to the world inhabited by people. At best they provide some guidelines by which those in positions of comfort can organize their thinking, but even the lives lived by these individuals are not freed of their ultimate constraints. It seems more likely that thought and art have developed into parasites that flourish in the fertile heat and moisture of the first-world intellect. At this point in history we feel deeply the need to reconnect with our own species and not to labor under the illusion that the idea is a creature that serves and depends upon us. We experience a keen drive toward action, which unites us with our immediate, physical realities and brings us back into existence, back into integration with a world we have almost destroyed.

This is a historical pressure that I feel in the same moment that I feel illuminated by the transcendent importance of art in the broadest sense. When I am confronted with the question of how my dream for the world—so full of expression and expressive forms of knowing that politics as we know it no longer fits—relates to the need to dispose of garbage, I am stricken with something like the pain of separation… the realization that my visions, about which I care deeply, do not relate to people, about whom I care deeply. The idea of communicating with and transforming people’s souls is irrelevant and indulgent when people are too abused and too hungry to have souls in the first place. So you can see the depths of confusion into which my friend’s well-meaning criticism plunged me.

I have, however, recently come to a possible solution, or a justification which I would like to submit to both your and my own scrutiny. After a brief chat with another friend about the degree to which the present systems of the world have doomed themselves, we agreed that the human species will probably outlive the impending implosion in some form. We couldn’t escape the inevitability of, at the very least, a sort of Malthusian collapse after the failure or refusal of human ingenuity and compassion to catch up to growing populations and dwindling resources and compromised ecologies and greed. (You and I have discussed this as well in connection with that National Geographic article.) Nevertheless, the total elimination of mankind seems unlikely. We will still be here, and this allowed me to realize that the questions of why and how we are here are becoming more rather than less relevant. Perhaps in order to undertake intellectual and artistic projects in the face of such contagion in the modern world, one has to resign oneself to an almost appalling level of hopelessness.

But even as I write I can sense the weakness in this point of view. Have I so little hope and love for people living now that I have to resort to the apologetics of art as a withered attempt at communication with people who do not yet live? And, you will point out, I have not even addressed the original problem of politics and art. I suppose the only response I can give is to admit with a mixture of pride and shame that, yes, my dream involves such a radical reorganization of life, such a reinvention of the real, that art will supplant even trash collection, that there will be no such thing as trash as we pull ourselves along the rope of existence toward the infinite and the truly meaningful. That almost no one now living can understand this. As for how it will come about I do not know, I guess there will have to be some kind of disaster, or perhaps people can claw their way there slowly through the mud (a process for which, surely, I am not needed).

Art in its broadest sense is not only writing and painting and film, but also every thought and action in which we chip away at the veil between us and everything. Maybe the straight-talk description of this involves all of us sitting in silent meditation from birth, or voluntarily extinguishing the species, or simply living in such a way that we create no excesses like garbage or profit or nations that can’t sustain all their individual voices.

Ultimately I think I would like to distinguish between politics and governance. The governance of things like the way water flows, how food is stored, where information can be found, etc…. these can be artistic acts insofar as they are externalized means of integration with the world—insofar, basically, as they are done selflessly and out of the same duty toward people that the artist-poet feels. This is how politics destroys art and inhabits the resulting void. Politics is the governance of people, the creation of mutes, the belief that we can be spoken-form, the hypnotized agreement of people to remain uninvolved in the creation and exposition of reality.

Becoming Nothing

Art creates, alters, and reinforces certain aspects of human nature. This fact destroys the notion of art as apolitical. Politics is a lame substitution for art.

Susan Sontag

I have several times applied to the work of art the metaphor of a mode of nourishment. To become involved with a work of art entails, to be sure, the experience of detaching oneself from the world. But the work of art itself is also a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

We are working now to dissolve human nature through art. To achieve an aesthetic experience that does not remove us from ourselves but annuls the self, allowing us to become empty and to merge seamlessly with everything else so that we are everything else.



Robert Musil:

And so, whatever the relationship may be between objects and feeling in the civilized person's mature view of the world, everyone surely knows those ecstatic moments in which a split has not yet occurred, as though water and land had not yet been divided and the waves of feeling still shared the same horizon as the hills and valleys that form the shape of things.

Andrei Tarkovsky:

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

The pinnacle of human nature is Nature.




[1] [2] [3]

First Infrarealist Manifesto, English

Update: Since its first publication in 2009, this translation has undergone several minor changes.  To those who have reproduced this text elsewhere on the Internet, I recommend updating it to reflect these changes. (5 April, 2013)

Inspired by Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives, and disappointed that I couldn't find one pre-existing, I have attempted a translation of the First Infrarealist Manifesto into English. The original can be found here.

See also an interview with Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, co-founder of Infrarealism.

-->ABANDON EVERYTHING, AGAIN

first infrarealist manifesto

“It is four light-hours to the end of the solar system; to the nearest star, four light-years. A disproportionate ocean of void. But are we really sure that it is only a void? We only know that in this space there are no bright stars; if they existed, would they be visible? And if there existed bodies neither bright nor dark? Could it not happen on the celestial maps, just as on those of the earth, that the star-cities are indicated and the star-villages omitted?”

-Soviet science fiction writers scratched their faces at midnight.

-The infrasuns (Drummond would say the happy proletarian boys).

-Peguero and Boris alone in a lower class room predicting the miracle behind the door.

-Free Money

*

Who has traversed the city and for music has only had the whistles of his fellows, his own words of amazement and rage?

The handsome type who didn’t know

that a girl’s orgasm is clitoral

(Look, it’s not only in the museums that there’s shit) (A process of individual museification) (Certainly all that has been mentioned, revealed) (Fear of discovering) (Fear of the imbalances not foreseen).

*

Our next of kin:

the snipers, the lone plainsmen who devastate the Chinese cafes of Latin America, the butchers in supermarkets, in their tremendous individual-collective dilemma; the impotence of action and investigation (on the individual level or clouded in aesthetic contradictions) of the poetic act.

*

Tiny bright stars eternally winking at us from a place in the universe called The labyrinths.

-Dancing-Club of misery.

-Pepito Tequila sobbing his love for Lisa Underground.

-He sucks it, you suck it, we suck it. [In Spanish as in English, the verb can be used literally or informally in a derogatory sense.]

-And Horror

*

Curtains of water, cement, or tin separate a cultural mechanism, which serves as both the conscience and the asshole of the ruling class, from a living cultural event, scrubbed clean, in constant death and birth, ignorant of most of history and the fine arts (quotidian creator of its own insane istory and its amazing fyne artz), body that suddenly tests new sensations on itself, product of an epoch in which we approach at 200 kmph the toilet or the revolution.

“New forms, rare forms”, as old Bertolt said, half curious and half smiling.

*

Sensations don’t arise out of nothing (obviousness of obviousnesses), but from a conditioned reality, in a thousand ways, as a constant flow.

-Complex reality makes us seasick!

So, it is possible that in part this is a birth and in part we are in the front row for the death throes. Forms of life and forms of death pass by the retina daily. Their collision constantly gives rise to infrarealist forms: THE EYE OF TRANSITION

*

Put the whole city in the insane asylum. Sweet sister, howling tanks, hermaphrodite songs, diamond deserts, we only live once and every day the visions are bulkier and more slippery. Sweet sister, lifts to Monte Albán. Tighten your belts because the corpses have been watered. A scene of subtraction.

*

And the good bourgeois culture? And academia and the incendiaries? And the vanguards and the rearguards? And certain conceptions of love, good scenery, the precise and multinational Colt?

Like I told Saint-Just in a dream I had once: Even the heads of aristocrats can’t use us as weapons.

*

-A good part of the world is being born and another good part dying, and we all know that we all have to live or we all have to die: in this there is no middle road.

Chirico says: thought must move away from all that which is called logic and good sense, must move away from all human problems, in such a way that things appear under a new aspect, as if illuminated by a constellation appearing for the first time. The infrarealists say: We are going to fill our heads with all human problems, such that things begin to move inside themselves, an extraordinary vision of man.

-The Constellation of the Beautiful Bird.

-The infrarealists propose indigenousness to the world: a crazy and timid Indian.

-A new lyricism, which is starting to rise Latin America, supports itself in ways that never fail to amaze us. The way in to matter is ultimately the way in to adventure: the poem is a journey and the poet is a hero revealing heroes. Tenderness like an exercise in speed. Breathing and heat. The shotgun experience, structures that are devouring themselves, crazy contradictions.

If the poet is mixed up, the reader will have to mix himself up.

“erotic books without spelling”

*

The THOUSAND DISMEMBERED AVANT-GARDES OF THE SIXTIES precede us

The 99 open flowers like a smashed-open head

The massacre, the new concentration camps

The White underground rivers, the violet winds

These are hard times for poetry, some say, drinking tea, listening to music in their apartments, talking (listening) to the old masters. These are difficult times for man, we say, turning to the barricades after a full day’s work of shit and tear gas, discovering / creating music even in our apartments, largely overlooking cemeteries-that-spread, where they [sic] despairingly drink a cup of tea or get drunk on pure rage or the inertia of old masters.

HORA ZERO precedes us

((Raise baboons and the hags will bite you)) [Sp: Cría zambos y te picarán los callos]

Still we are in the quaternary era. Are we still in the quaternary era?

Pepito Tequila kisses Lisa Underground’s phosphorescent nipples and watches her leave for a beach on which black pyramids sprout.

*

I repeat:

the poet is a hero revealing heroes, like the fallen red tree that announces the start of the forest.

-The attempts at a consistent ethic-aesthetic are paved with betrayals or pathetic survivals.

-And it is the individual who will be able to walk a thousand kilometers but eventually the road will eat him.

-Our ethic is Revolution, our aesthetic is Life: one-single-thing.

*

For the bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie life is a party. Every weekend they have one. The proletariat doesn’t have parties. Only rhythmic funerals. That is going to change. The exploited will have a grand party. Memory and guillotines. Sensing it, acting it certain nights, inventing edges and humid corners, is like caressing the acidic eyes of the new spirit.

*

Journey of the poem through the seasons of rioting: poetry producing poets producing poems producing poetry. Not an electric alley / the poet with arms separate from the body / the poem slowly displacing his Vision of his Revolution. The alley is a complex point. “We are going to invent in order to discover its contradiction, its invisible forms of refusing, until it is explained”. Journey of the act of writing through zones not at all favorable to the act of writing.

Rimbaud, come home!

Subverting the everyday reality of modern poetry. The confinements that lead a circular reality to the poem. A good reference: the madman Kurt Schwitters. Lanke trr gll, o, upa kupa arggg, runs the official line, phonetic investigators codifying the howl. The bridges of Noba Express are anti-codification: let him shout, let him shout (please don’t take out pencil or paper, don’t record him, shout with him if you want to participate), so let him shout, in order to see what face he makes when he finishes, what other incredible things we experience.

Our bridges to ignored stations. The poem interrelating reality and unreality.

*

Convulsively

*

What can I demand of current Latin American painting? What can I demand of the theatre?

More revealing and expressive is stopping in a demolished park because of the smog and seeing people crossing the avenues in groups (which contract and expand), when so many motorists, like the pedestrians, urgently approach their hovels, and it’s the hour when the murderers come out and the victims follow them.

What stories do the painters really tell me?

Interesting void, fixed form and color, at best the parody of movement. Canvases that will only serve as bright posters in the rooms of engineers and doctors who collect.

The painter is made comfortable in a society that is every day more “painter” than he is himself, and that is where he is found unarmed and registered as a clown.

If a painting by X is encountered in some street by Mara, this painting acquires the standing of an amusing and informative thing; [in] a sitting room it’s as decorative as the iron armchairs of the bourgeois / a question of the retina? / yes and no / but it would be better to find ( and unfortunately to systematize for a time) the explosive factor, class-conscious, one hundred percent concerned with work, in juxtaposition to the value of “work” that precedes it and conditions it.

-The painter abandons the studio and ANY status quo and fills his head with wonders / or sets out to play chess like Duchamp / A painting that shows how to paint it again / And a painting of poverty, free or cheap enough, unfinished, of participation, of questioning the participation, of unlimited physical and spiritual extension.

Latin America’s best painting is the one that has even unconscious levels, the game, the party, the experiment that gives us a real vision of what we are and reveals to us what we can do will be Latin America’s best painting is the one that we paint with greens and reds and blues on our faces, to recognize ourselves in the incessant creation of the tribe.

*

Try to abandon everything every day.

Architects, abandon the construction of stages inside and extend your hands (or clench them, depending on the place) toward this space outside. A wall and a ceiling become useful when they are not only used for sleeping or avoiding rain but when they establish, starting, for example, at the everyday act of sleep, conscious bridges between man and his creations, or the momentary impossibility of them.

For architecture and sculpture the infrarealists start from two points: the barricade and the bed.

*

The true imagination is the one that dynamites, elucidates, injects emerald microbes into other imaginations. In poetry and in what is, the way in to matter still has to be the way in to adventure. Creating the tools for everyday subversion. The subjective seasons of being human, with their beautiful trees, giant and obscene, like laboratories of experimentation. Establishing, seeing signs of parallel situations and as harrowing as a great scratch on the chest, on the face. Unending analogy of the face. There are so many of them that when newcomers appear we don’t even count, although we are creating them / looking into a mirror. Nights of torment. Perception is opened up by means of an ethic-aesthetic taken to the extreme.

*

Galaxies of love appear in the palms of our hands.

-Poets, let down your hair (if you have any)

-Burn your garbage and start to love until you get down to the priceless poems

-We don’t want synthetic paintings, but enormous synthetic sunsets

-Horses running 500 kilometers per hour

-Squirrles of fire jumping through trees of fire

-A bet to see who blinks first, between the nerve and the sleeping pill

*

The risk is always somewhere else. The true poet is the one who is always letting go of himself. Never too much time in the same place, like guerrillas, like UFOs, like the white eyes of prisoners in perpetual chains.

*

Fusion and explosion of two shores: creation like audacious graffiti and opened by a crazy kid.

Nothing mechanical. The scales of of amazement. Someone, maybe Hieronymus Bosch, breaks the aquarium of love. Free money. Sweet sister. Libidinous visions like corpses. Little boys cutting the meat of kisses until December.

*

At two in the morning, after having been at Mara’s house, we listen (Mario Santiago and some of us) to laughter that came out of the penthouse of a 9 story building. They didn’t stop, they laughed and laughed while we slept below propped up in various phone booths. It was enough for the moment in that only Mario went on paying attention to to the laughter (the penthouse is a gay bar or something similar and Darío Galicia had told us that the police are always vigilant). We made telephone calls but the coins were made of water. The laughter continued. After we left that district Mario told me that really no one had been laughing, it was recorded laughter and upstairs there, in the penthouse, a small group, or perhaps a single homosexual, had been listening in silence to his records and had made us listen.

-The death of the swan, the last song of the swan, the last song of the black swan, ARE NOT in the Bolshoi but in the pain and the unbearable beauty of the streets.

-A rainbow that begins at a B movie and ends with a factory on strike.

-That amnesia never kisses us on the mouth. That it never kisses us.

-We dreamt of utopia and we wake up screaming.

-A poor lonely cowherd who goes back home, that is the wonder.

*

Making new sensations appear –Subverting the everyday

O.K.

ABANDON EVERYTHING, AGAIN

HIT THE ROAD

Roberto Bolaño, México, 1976

Fragments

I find myself in the midst of an unexpected hiatus from posting, due to extensive preparations for an upcoming series of posts and other more lamentable distractions. The normal, if already scanty, schedule will resume in a week or two. In the meantime, I encourage visitors to amuse and enrich themselves at the following excellent locations:

• Feuilleton - The blog of John Coulthart is full of interesting things to discover and rediscover.
• Les Délices de M. Ogre - For those who can read a little French, Monsieur Ogre has crafted a beautiful experience. Among other things, he is creating a breathtaking vision of the life of Arthur Rimbaud, providing images and sound along with the poet's writings and letters. Click here to view only those posts (in reverse order).
• Looking With My Eyes at Sight-Things and Hearing With My Ears Sound-Things - Jon Cone's collection of YouTube treasures will keep anyone entertained for hours.
• The Tarpeian Rock - A blog full of beautiful and rare items painstakingly displayed and discussed, along with an extensive list of links to explore.

Please enjoy the fruits of these remarkable individuals' labor, and, following the advice of the Good Soldier Švejk, "Take it easy!"

a bird which died advised me to / commit flight to memory.

Forough Farrokhzad's short documentary The House is Black can be viewed at UbuWeb.

Leprosy is chronic and contagious. Leprosy is not hereditary. Leprosy can be anywhere or everywhere. Leprosy goes with poverty. Upon attacking the body it deepens and enlarges wrinkles, eats away the tissues, covers the nerves with a dry shield, dulls sensitivity to heat and touch, causes blindness, destroys the nasal septum, it finds its way to the liver and bone marrow, withers the fingers, it clears the way for other diseases.

Leprosy is not incurable. Taking care of lepers stops the disease from spreading. Wherever lepers have been adequately cared for, the disease has vanished. When the leper is cared for early, he can be treated completely. Leprosy is not incurable.

The filmmaker, Forough Farrokhzad, is considered one of the most accomplished modern Iranian poets. Though her mastery of poetic form in Persian is probably difficult to translate into English, free translations capture something of the spirit.

Two excerpts from "Another Brith" (click here to read the whole thing):

Life is perhaps
a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch
life is perhaps a child returning home from school.

...

I will plant my hands in the garden
I will grow I know I know I know and
swallows will lay eggs
in the hollow of my ink-stained hands.

"The Couple":

Night comes
and after night, darkness
and after darkness
eyes
hands
and breathing and more breathing
and the sound of water
which drips drips drips
from the faucet.

then two red points
from two lighted cigarettes
the clock's tick-tock
and two heads
and two lonelinesses.

Much more of Forough's poetry, occasionally with Persian audio of the poems available, can be read at http://www.forughfarrokhzad.org/.

"I believe in being a poet in all moments of life. Being a poet means being human. I know some poets whose daily behavior has nothing to do with their poetry. In other words, they are only poets when they wrote poetry. Then it is finished and they turn into greedy, indulgent, oppressive, shortsighted, miserable, and envious people. Well, I cannot believe their poems. I value the realities of life and when I find these gentlemen making fists and claims--that is, in their poems and essays--I get disgusted, and I doubt their honesty. I say to myself: Perhaps it is only for a plate of rice that they are screaming. "