31.8.03
On the 20th MTV Award a celebration of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” took place. In those same days America celebrated the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech (1963). In the event, by the way, somebody said the dream had become reality. Blacks and white both had cable TV, and could vote for their favorite artist.
Of course, the highlight of the night was Madonna’s kiss to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Her two lighter disciples. The two sang Madonna’s famous song, now a tradition in every retro party. Then Madonna appeared, dressed as a groom ready to kiss his two virginal brides. What a threesome. Male fantasy all over.
Madonna knows that in dressing/becoming a ‘man’ she invests herself with the ‘power’, and doing that she makes a homage to the masculine-disguise. That black suit real man wear. The ‘rebel’ female paying her respects to the signs of the Father.
Britney and Christina hate each other, of course, but say nothing in the presence of her Mother-Father, Don Madonna.
Madonna, Britney, Christina have all play the game of introjecting the male fantasy of an innocent young girl who is really a fucking ninfo. Kissed by the very first time anthem to call The Perverts. In doing that they teach society, girls and boys, all of them, to think and desire what old man want.
A diva: a being incapable of creating new female characters.
This is what Madonna’s kiss means. The traditions continues, the role is passed from Madonna to the next generation. A part of the global society, of course, plays the game too. They get alarmed by the lesbian kiss.
Obsviously the kiss is not lesbian. It’s just a Christian performance.
Kissing they make a part of society feel we still have something morally wrong, something to which we can object. War! War! War!
Madonna’s retrieves society into the fifties, as if female to female love is something we still haven’t assimilated—she plays the role well. The game of “transgression” and truly makes the Christian Right feel it needs to exist.
She also strengthens the idea that women can only communicate to man or even between themselves through sexual language. All ‘female’ language is sex, or at least that’s what Madonna explains.
Madonna’s a Christian, a central part of Late Night Capitalism.
Her kiss is no parody of heterosexual love. She plays the role of a man. So she verifies eroticism must comply with the rules of binary and polar language. Yin and Yang are a must.
She also helps Bush. Madonna’s makes front news. A stupid kiss becomes more important than killing people in Iraq. So, Bush rebel daughter is the real threat to values, and she really thinks so. She even is against daddy.
Yet Madonna plays at the end not the role of a man, but even a more tradition role in Christendom and Family.
She plays the Mom.
She is the Mom who welcomes her two young and beautiful daughters the day of their sixteen birthday, their presentation to society.
She is the Sexy Mom, the Sexual Goddess who assures us male domination has a lovely, erotic and exciting aspect to it.
Madonna is morality. The Family. The Older Woman who teaches the Way —the Sexual Female Way— to her daughters.
Letting Madonna kiss them, Britney and Christina accept her authority, her preeminence, her teachings. The kiss does not represent any radical criticism against social hegemony and Family Values. To the contrary, it confirms one of its worst laws: Mom, you’re my authority, Mom I will follow you as I follow my Dad. I’m the actualization of the past. I will be again your character. Some day I wanna be just like you, and today is the ceremony in which I receive your ritual kiss. I love you. I will always follow your footsteps.
The Family is Safe.
29.8.03
(A SHORT-STORY)
Right now I’m studying a master’s degree in psychotherapy. The first book I reread before getting into that was The Myth of Psychotheraphy by Thomas Szasz, so I won’t say I believe in what I’m doing. But who cares. I don’t believe in writing either, and look what I’m doing right now. Writing, I suppose. I pursue both activities anyway—without believing in them—because from a very young age I learned any praxis is better than actual reality. We act because we want to escape from our current conditions. And to do that praxis is even better than fantasy.
I was the son of a prostitute, which means I had to learn doing anything is better than staying in the first position the world puts you in. One day my mother told me—she was happily stoned—she made herself into a prostitute in order to escape from her family, which was even worst than prostitution. That’s the reason most whores ended up in the streets: the Family is an institution which makes you feel even worst than having sex with a drunk man.
In fact I can only take into practice things in which I don’t believe, because at the end we act because we want to change our current conditions but in doing that we only get worst. We want money, and what do we get? A boss. We feel alone, and what do we get ourselves into? Marriage. We go to therapy, and what happens? We find out we are mentally ill.
Escaping from one’s current conditions makes us fall into a bigger pit. That’s why wu-wei and other Taoism or Zen myths were so popular some time ago. Not-acting is best. But not acting is impossible. Even people who would do anything in order to escape from their real lives, like actors, have to act.
I perfectly know practice ruins things. So I don’t take into practice something I don’t want to fucked up.
I try, for example, not to love anybody. I don’t think people deserve to be destroyed by me. And I don’t want to be destroyed by them. Love should remain just an interesting theory.
I like Thomas Szasz. I think him and Feyerabend are the real followers of Nietzsche, not Cioran, Baudrillard or even Foucault. I make this philosophical observation because I think preserving the philosophical is important.
If philosophy didn’t exist, how would us be allowed to love other males? In Christian countries like Mexico or the U.S. loving authors is one of the few alternatives gay men have to not reveal they are gay and not ‘men’.
Philosophy is crucial. Even if tradition is a hoax, for the sake of male-to-male love let’s leave philosophy alone.
The same goes for literature.
Psychotherapy students are the worst. At least in Mexico. They think they are either Sigmund Freud or Carlos Castaneda. I already know in some months I’m going to take a sexuality course in which I am going to have to dance salsa with somebody of the opposite sex. I hate salsa. Not even to put my penis close to some girl’s vagina I would dance salsa.
I don’t belong in that class. That class gives me nightmares. But as I said I never am in places I should be. What happens is I like to play dead. Writing I play dead too. That’s what I like about theory by the way. In theory one does not have to do anything. In theory-world the body isn’t needed. In theory-world dying does not happen. In theory-world writing and sex fulfill you.
In theory-world if I ask a girl if she wants to fuck with me, she says she needs to think about it.
And so we both think about sex and that’s it.
In reality things work very differently. There sex sometimes happens. And if sex happens, sometimes other things also happen, like kids, love, family, hate or orgasms. Sex has consequences. In theory-world there are no consequences / just hypothesis.
Theory-world may or may not exist.
Theory-world is subjective. It’s a very personal experience. We don’t need to share theory-world with anybody else. Theory-world is just like anarchism but without having to read Stirner, Bakunin or the Unabomber. Anarchism takes too much activity. Theory-world is wholly depolitized.
Reality is very different. Sex is more difficult. In reality the same girl that said she would think about having sex with me, may now say Yes. And if she says Yes we need to do it, because in reality two people that want to have sex do it anyway. But she may also say No. That may mean we both want to live in theory-world and have sex there, or simply may mean she really doesn’t want to have sex with me. That’s fine with me, because if I ask somebody to have sex with me that means I don’t want to do it. If I ask somebody to have sex with me what I’m looking for is not a Yes or a No, but a Why?
Saying Yes or No to Sex is nothing but quotes. I hate quotes. Sex is referential, and references don’t let us be truly us or truly free. I want to live in a newly born world, just like Adam and Eve.
So as soon as I finish my master’s I am going to go some place else. I’m thinking about Chiapas. I want to join the Zapatistas. Die there. Fighting globalization. I want to become a famous Mexican writer who left literature to die in a horrible jungle. That’s even better than the hoax of Rimbaud. That myth about Africa and so on. I think I am going to be remembered as the next hip thing after magical realism. I’m pure gold. My two Mexico City agents are right. Spain is welcoming me. The government is looking for me. My Mexican female readers love me. I’m going to achieve Glory. Mighty Glory. In my dreams I see myself as a very just man. I see myself very close to Benito Juárez and Martin Luther King. I am almost morally perfect. That’s why I want to kill myself with a black mask in my face, and a wood rifle in my hand. I want that photo in the Sunday newspaper I now write for.
I don’t think the Lacandona is a beautiful jungle. I think it’s a horrible place. Ecology lovers romanticize nature. Nature is not nice. Nature doesn’t deserve to be loved. Cave men were afraid of it. To love nature is not natural. Nature is dangerous, and that’s the way it should remain so humans don’t get close to it and ruin it. We should understand nature is death.
People think the Zapatistas are people full of hope and shit like that. But that’s not the case. Zapatistas are Mexicans —Indian or not— who know our culture is falling because of our own government corruption and American companies. We don’t know which was first, if Mexican corruption or American Companies, the same way we don’t know the solution for that game about the chicken or the egg. History doesn’t help. But we do know we are close to our end. And instead of keeping ourselves alive when the country becomes completely Americanized (aka, is dead) we prefer to fight until that dead end comes.
So I want to find death in Chiapas and not in the Chia Pets. I just told a friend there, an Indian poet in San Cristobal de las Casas, if she can help me find a quick way to join the guerrilla. She is hesitant of giving me the info. In her last email she said most people that suddenly want to join the Zapatista guerrilla are either in hunger of sex or in hunger of death.
“People come to Chiapas saying they want to see how the Indians are living. Yeah right [‘Sí cómo no…’ her exacts words]. What they really want is to meet a European tourist to fuck with him or her”.
She’s right. The Mexican middle or upper class mostly travels to the South to find out if they are bisexual or to attend a swinger’s party.
“And if your purpose is to find death in Chiapas, then you are not a true Zapatista but a suicidal person”, she wrote. Haven’t heard from her since. So I think I am not going to live in Chiapas, and I will need to go to San Francisco when I finish my master’s.
In San Francisco I would join the experimental lit scene. My English isn’t that bad. I can handle conversations. I could go to the parties, readings, workshops, make them believe I am the mexperimentalism guy from the South. I think that could be attractive to that community, right? I could do the same in NYC but I don’t understand their accent. People from NYC speak English as I it was a foreign language. I think people in NYC speak that way because they slowly want to develop different dialects, so in the near future they won’t have to understand each other, or have to learn another real language to achieve the same results.
In San Francisco I would meet a young fiction writer like me. I would translate her or his work into Spanish, or make him or her believe I’m doing that in order to make him or her fall in love with me. That never fails. I once did that with a girl in L.A. I said I was translating her into Spanish, a language in which her work didn’t sucked. And she loved me that entire weekend.
I am going to meet there a fiction experimental writer and not an experimental poet because I find experimental poetry very conservative. After the LangPo and other literary strategies, a foreign reader like tends to think younger American poetry writing must certainly be stupendous. I have found that’s not the case. Most American poetry is just like their Mexican counterpart, dull. We are two countries united by one same boring verse.
Experimentalism is a structural function whose purpose is to open the way to the emergence of new emotions through language. That’s what Stein, Spicer and Hejinian did. So if new emotions don’t come after experimentalism, something went wrong. And American contemporary poets didn’t find new emotions. They only found new careers.
But don’t pay any attention to me. I don’t even try to be experimental. I trust old lady irony. I still believe in desire. I fall in boredom very frequently. Everything I do is conventional. I wanted to change Spanish, and what did I do? Switch into English, just like our latest presidents have recommended.
That’s why I want to meet an experimental fiction writer in San Francisco. I don’t care if it’s a girl or a boy, because my proposal would be to have a relationship in which we won’t have to have sex, because sex is the root of all conventional emotions.
I have chosen San Francisco because San Francisco is a better place to live than Tijuana. Tijuana, like the rest of Mexico is soon going to be fully Americanized, so if I am going to leave in ‘America’ anyway I prefer to be in San Francisco and not in this awful maquila-place. The only reason I live in Tijuana is that is part of Mexico. I wouldn’t leave in Tijuana just because. Tijuana is a horrible city. Only drug lords or writers can stand it.
The only way one can survive in a city like Tijuana is to be an alcohol or marijuana user or be in some kind of psychotherapy program. I’ve tried both, but no real results. So in theory-world I already live either in Chiapas or in San Francisco, depending if that day I feel leftist or I feel cynical.
In this piece I think I feel cynical.
But if the reader thinks otherwise, he or she can put a mark where he or she feels the author is really coming from.
( ) Third World Writing
( ) Mexperimentalism
( ) Late Ironic School
( ) A new emotion
( ) Anti-Americanism
( ) Comedy
( ) Something Else
Is this the beginning or the end?
27.8.03
ON SCHWARZENEGGER II
Some post ago I did a note on the meaning of Schwarzenegger. The longer version in Spanish was published last Sunday in a Mexico City newspaper, in case anybody reads Spanish: read here.
Some post ago I did a note on the meaning of Schwarzenegger. The longer version in Spanish was published last Sunday in a Mexico City newspaper, in case anybody reads Spanish: read here.
26.8.03
RE-READING MARÍA SABINA
1
The UC Press just released María Sabina: Selections, edited by Jerome Rothenberg. I have been a reader of the Sabina world for some time now, but after getting to know this new volume —the best single compilation on her world that I know of— I immediately wonder what other interpretations of her work could appear in Mexico or the U.S. This volume is a gathering of points of view that invites us to start a re-reading of her practice. I take books as provocations, and I think this book should be read that way.
The book includes a very insightful essay by Henry Munn, which gives some hints into some of the cultural meanings of the artifacts enlisted by Sabina in her chants. I think Munn’s piece is the decisive one, apart from the “The Life” which occupies pages 3-79 of the book.
There’s are also pieces by Anne Waldman (a revision of her essay included before in Fast Speaking Woman), texts by Álvaro Estrada, Pavlovna/Wasson, Rothenberg, Gregorio Regino and an account of the last days of Sabina written by Homero Aridjis (which, btw, I co-translated into English for this assemblage).
Sabina is associated with the counter-culture poetic scenes. That’s one of the reasons why the Mexican mainstream-lit (the Mexican ‘Republics of Letters’ as O. Paz called it) hasn’t paid much attention to her: they see her as an interesting ethnographic phenomenon but not as a poet or verbal artist. And the association with the sixties atmosphere is something Mexican writers don’t want anymore—something which I think they share with contemporary American writers, and so returning to Sabina is something which is risky in terms of literary (little-)politics. Sabina = icon of hippie culture. “Indigenismo”.
So I wonder what do Language and post-LangPo writers make of shamanism and María Sabina in particular? Can they create a new approach to her work and shamanism in general--in relation to the one produced by anthropology or ethnopoetics?
2
From my side I have a few comments on current hegemonic Mexican ideas on Sabina, which, I think, derive mainly by whom else but dear Mr. Paz.
In his piece in María Sabina: Selections, Álvaro Estrada —Sabina’s interviewer and translator— comments on the opinion Paz gave after the Sabina oral-biography project:
“On finishing the text I polished it various times before sending it to Gordon Wasson, whom I had met in Mexico City in 1975, and to whom I had promised to send it. (Our initial meeting was in the house of Henry Munn). Wasson then asked the Mexican poet Octavio Paz for his opinion of the manuscript. Paz expressed his appreciation for the work: he said it was a document with anthropological and human value. Notwithstanding, he suggested that the author eliminate terms and words that didn’t seem in accord with the personality of María Sabina, both in the text and in the translation of the chants. He suggested greater simplicity in the words, and in a letter to Wasson, he said that one ought to give the literal meaning of the shaman’s words without it mattering whether the reader understood them or not”.
Is it a coincidence Paz didn’t mention anything about the literary / poetic value of her work, and only mentions her “anthropological” and “human” value? I don’t think so.
I think Paz was denying Sabina’s poetic stature, because he saw her as a sorcerer (in an essay on Breton he describes her as an “hechicera”) and just a traditional healer, and not as a verbal artist as well. I think Paz though Sabina’s poetry lacked the signs of ‘modernity’ or structural complexity. He didn’t look carefully.
Paz suggestions on eliminating terms and words could be a sign of that. If he saw Sabina as simply a traditional healer, his ideas on her personality were certainly wrong, so his suggestions could be erasing key notions and simplifying them in both the Spanish translation and, subsequently, in the English version. But that’s something, which only Estrada could know.
In case Estrada accepted those suggestions, in my opinion he made a mistake, whatever they were, simply because Paz had no real insight into Sabina’s world and wasn’t particularly sympathetic to her as a poet, which she clearly was, even though Paz wouldn’t acknowledge her as one.
Estrada himself is suggesting the firsts drafts of his translation show a more complex Sabina. So I hope one day we can see the first versions of the bio and the chants, or have a second translations to them directly from the Mazatec transcripts.
Who knew Sabina more, Estrada or Paz? I don’t think Paz even knew her. But Paz cultural importance could be the reason why Estrada followed his suggestions. But if Paz didn’t consider Sabina a poet and didn’t really know her how could him know what was and what wasn’t in accordance to her ‘personality’?
3
Sabina poetic praxis consisted in a re-reading —not ‘improvising’ (whatever that means)— of a ‘book’: the tradition of Mazatec language. Sabina is quoting. Her chants are a reorganizations and a series of personal add-ups, a rewriting of prior quotes and linguistic-patterns. Sabina’s chants are not a practice of spontaneous creation but of reappropriation.
In his key piece (“The Uniqueness of María Sabina”) Henry Munn explains how Sabina inherited from her culture a repertory of themes and motifs on which she, as other shamans, based her own individual variations. We cannot forget this if we really want to understand her verbal production.
What this means is that Sabina was a wise-one not because she ate mushrooms and got into trips, but because she dominated a dynamical dictionary of meanings.
She re-produced those meanings in the ceremonies; she rewrote that dynamical dictionary throughout her life. She was trying to revolutionize the praxis. That’s why she even allowed foreigners to participate. She was trying to go beyond. She wanted to open the book. Maybe trying to open the book too much was the reason why her own book fell apart.
Understanding her praxis consisted in quoting means to reestablish the context. Understanding the recontextualization practice she made. Understanding time was her page. Her chants are the remaking of a cultural history. She was a woman working very consciously in the field of socio-metaphysics.
When she calls herself, let’s say, “opossum-woman” she is not referring to the animal but to a string of myths. Munn (using as sources the books of Carlos Incháustegui) synthesizes how the opossum represents for Mazatecs the power to play dead and gain invulnerability, the task of stealing fire--which is key because stealing fire creates ‘culture’. So if at first “opossum-woman” can bring images of Sabina identifying with ‘nature’ reading her more carefully brings us to the fact that Sabina chants are an interweaving of artificial meanings, and not an animistic exercise or ‘flow-of-words’ or a simple litany of plants, objects and characters. From the Moon to the Water, Sabina quotes cultural artifacts. Signs-with-histories. She re-constructs the order of words, meanings, contexts, subjects, cultures and things.
When reading
I am opossum-woman
We should read,
I am the interplay of nature and culture-woman.
I am the performance-of-death-woman.
I am the recasting-of-myths-woman.
I am the keeper-and-changer-of-the-meanings-of-‘opossum’-woman
Our traditional understanding of Sabina (Paz included) falls very short of what she was really doing. Words for her are a therapeutic instrument, and a way to depict visions, but also a self-conscious flesh that remakes and investigates prior texts.
There’s nothing spontaneous, naïve, automatic or unconscious in María Sabina’s poetic praxis. Sabina is not a poet of the unconscious but of self-consciousness itself, a poet of cultural rereading and rewriting.
Sabina represents a critique on those who believe (like Paz and most mainstream poets) that poetry is a voice that comes from nowhere, ‘inspiration’ or the unmediated unconscious, an ahistoric otherness, those who consider poetry is an individualistic practice by essence or solitary compromise, she challenges those who find the idea of having just a single identity possible, of who try to produce a voice without a context, an impossible purity.
But Sabina is also a critique on those who believe there can be radical experimentation without healing, or see the poet as a sophisticated specialist whose social role is just writing, those who act in the mere sphere of literature, and who don’t break up the boundaries that separate the different domains of their own culture. ‘Poets’ without radical wisdom, wisdom that comes from the roots; ‘poets’ who don’t go to the roots of society, to cure ignorance, sickness, injustice and poverty.
Sabina was without a doubt a poet. She was not only a poet, but more importantly poetry’s wholeness. Her activity’s goal was totality. She reached for the impossible. Searching for a book-beyond-the-book. Having a new poetic body. Breaking the differences between writing, reading, chanting, talking, dancing and silence. Removing pain from others. Fighting for the survival of a great culture. Investigating sounds, meanings and languages. Increasing wisdom. Teaching. Being radically self-critical, recognizing when one fails, when one is dying.
Being a writer is easier.
1
The UC Press just released María Sabina: Selections, edited by Jerome Rothenberg. I have been a reader of the Sabina world for some time now, but after getting to know this new volume —the best single compilation on her world that I know of— I immediately wonder what other interpretations of her work could appear in Mexico or the U.S. This volume is a gathering of points of view that invites us to start a re-reading of her practice. I take books as provocations, and I think this book should be read that way.
The book includes a very insightful essay by Henry Munn, which gives some hints into some of the cultural meanings of the artifacts enlisted by Sabina in her chants. I think Munn’s piece is the decisive one, apart from the “The Life” which occupies pages 3-79 of the book.
There’s are also pieces by Anne Waldman (a revision of her essay included before in Fast Speaking Woman), texts by Álvaro Estrada, Pavlovna/Wasson, Rothenberg, Gregorio Regino and an account of the last days of Sabina written by Homero Aridjis (which, btw, I co-translated into English for this assemblage).
Sabina is associated with the counter-culture poetic scenes. That’s one of the reasons why the Mexican mainstream-lit (the Mexican ‘Republics of Letters’ as O. Paz called it) hasn’t paid much attention to her: they see her as an interesting ethnographic phenomenon but not as a poet or verbal artist. And the association with the sixties atmosphere is something Mexican writers don’t want anymore—something which I think they share with contemporary American writers, and so returning to Sabina is something which is risky in terms of literary (little-)politics. Sabina = icon of hippie culture. “Indigenismo”.
So I wonder what do Language and post-LangPo writers make of shamanism and María Sabina in particular? Can they create a new approach to her work and shamanism in general--in relation to the one produced by anthropology or ethnopoetics?
2
From my side I have a few comments on current hegemonic Mexican ideas on Sabina, which, I think, derive mainly by whom else but dear Mr. Paz.
In his piece in María Sabina: Selections, Álvaro Estrada —Sabina’s interviewer and translator— comments on the opinion Paz gave after the Sabina oral-biography project:
“On finishing the text I polished it various times before sending it to Gordon Wasson, whom I had met in Mexico City in 1975, and to whom I had promised to send it. (Our initial meeting was in the house of Henry Munn). Wasson then asked the Mexican poet Octavio Paz for his opinion of the manuscript. Paz expressed his appreciation for the work: he said it was a document with anthropological and human value. Notwithstanding, he suggested that the author eliminate terms and words that didn’t seem in accord with the personality of María Sabina, both in the text and in the translation of the chants. He suggested greater simplicity in the words, and in a letter to Wasson, he said that one ought to give the literal meaning of the shaman’s words without it mattering whether the reader understood them or not”.
Is it a coincidence Paz didn’t mention anything about the literary / poetic value of her work, and only mentions her “anthropological” and “human” value? I don’t think so.
I think Paz was denying Sabina’s poetic stature, because he saw her as a sorcerer (in an essay on Breton he describes her as an “hechicera”) and just a traditional healer, and not as a verbal artist as well. I think Paz though Sabina’s poetry lacked the signs of ‘modernity’ or structural complexity. He didn’t look carefully.
Paz suggestions on eliminating terms and words could be a sign of that. If he saw Sabina as simply a traditional healer, his ideas on her personality were certainly wrong, so his suggestions could be erasing key notions and simplifying them in both the Spanish translation and, subsequently, in the English version. But that’s something, which only Estrada could know.
In case Estrada accepted those suggestions, in my opinion he made a mistake, whatever they were, simply because Paz had no real insight into Sabina’s world and wasn’t particularly sympathetic to her as a poet, which she clearly was, even though Paz wouldn’t acknowledge her as one.
Estrada himself is suggesting the firsts drafts of his translation show a more complex Sabina. So I hope one day we can see the first versions of the bio and the chants, or have a second translations to them directly from the Mazatec transcripts.
Who knew Sabina more, Estrada or Paz? I don’t think Paz even knew her. But Paz cultural importance could be the reason why Estrada followed his suggestions. But if Paz didn’t consider Sabina a poet and didn’t really know her how could him know what was and what wasn’t in accordance to her ‘personality’?
3
Sabina poetic praxis consisted in a re-reading —not ‘improvising’ (whatever that means)— of a ‘book’: the tradition of Mazatec language. Sabina is quoting. Her chants are a reorganizations and a series of personal add-ups, a rewriting of prior quotes and linguistic-patterns. Sabina’s chants are not a practice of spontaneous creation but of reappropriation.
In his key piece (“The Uniqueness of María Sabina”) Henry Munn explains how Sabina inherited from her culture a repertory of themes and motifs on which she, as other shamans, based her own individual variations. We cannot forget this if we really want to understand her verbal production.
What this means is that Sabina was a wise-one not because she ate mushrooms and got into trips, but because she dominated a dynamical dictionary of meanings.
She re-produced those meanings in the ceremonies; she rewrote that dynamical dictionary throughout her life. She was trying to revolutionize the praxis. That’s why she even allowed foreigners to participate. She was trying to go beyond. She wanted to open the book. Maybe trying to open the book too much was the reason why her own book fell apart.
Understanding her praxis consisted in quoting means to reestablish the context. Understanding the recontextualization practice she made. Understanding time was her page. Her chants are the remaking of a cultural history. She was a woman working very consciously in the field of socio-metaphysics.
When she calls herself, let’s say, “opossum-woman” she is not referring to the animal but to a string of myths. Munn (using as sources the books of Carlos Incháustegui) synthesizes how the opossum represents for Mazatecs the power to play dead and gain invulnerability, the task of stealing fire--which is key because stealing fire creates ‘culture’. So if at first “opossum-woman” can bring images of Sabina identifying with ‘nature’ reading her more carefully brings us to the fact that Sabina chants are an interweaving of artificial meanings, and not an animistic exercise or ‘flow-of-words’ or a simple litany of plants, objects and characters. From the Moon to the Water, Sabina quotes cultural artifacts. Signs-with-histories. She re-constructs the order of words, meanings, contexts, subjects, cultures and things.
When reading
I am opossum-woman
We should read,
I am the interplay of nature and culture-woman.
I am the performance-of-death-woman.
I am the recasting-of-myths-woman.
I am the keeper-and-changer-of-the-meanings-of-‘opossum’-woman
Our traditional understanding of Sabina (Paz included) falls very short of what she was really doing. Words for her are a therapeutic instrument, and a way to depict visions, but also a self-conscious flesh that remakes and investigates prior texts.
There’s nothing spontaneous, naïve, automatic or unconscious in María Sabina’s poetic praxis. Sabina is not a poet of the unconscious but of self-consciousness itself, a poet of cultural rereading and rewriting.
Sabina represents a critique on those who believe (like Paz and most mainstream poets) that poetry is a voice that comes from nowhere, ‘inspiration’ or the unmediated unconscious, an ahistoric otherness, those who consider poetry is an individualistic practice by essence or solitary compromise, she challenges those who find the idea of having just a single identity possible, of who try to produce a voice without a context, an impossible purity.
But Sabina is also a critique on those who believe there can be radical experimentation without healing, or see the poet as a sophisticated specialist whose social role is just writing, those who act in the mere sphere of literature, and who don’t break up the boundaries that separate the different domains of their own culture. ‘Poets’ without radical wisdom, wisdom that comes from the roots; ‘poets’ who don’t go to the roots of society, to cure ignorance, sickness, injustice and poverty.
Sabina was without a doubt a poet. She was not only a poet, but more importantly poetry’s wholeness. Her activity’s goal was totality. She reached for the impossible. Searching for a book-beyond-the-book. Having a new poetic body. Breaking the differences between writing, reading, chanting, talking, dancing and silence. Removing pain from others. Fighting for the survival of a great culture. Investigating sounds, meanings and languages. Increasing wisdom. Teaching. Being radically self-critical, recognizing when one fails, when one is dying.
Being a writer is easier.
22.8.03
DISINTEGRATION IS THE SOLUTION
I think the solution for the United States is disintegration. Is pretty evident you can’t stand each other. People stand each other on the Internet because they lie about themselves, from the color of their skin to the sex they are or pretend. A disintegrated United States would be a whole lot more happier entity. That way the Christian right would run only a part of the country, and not the whole country. Another part could be run by blacks, and another by Hispanics, and another by Arnold Schwarzenegger if he likes. So people would move from one part to the other in relation to their prejudices or tastes in human flesh. That way you could also travel a lot more. Having many neighboring countries would make you feel you’re in a New Europe. After the disintegration of the United States you should call yourselves the New Europe, and you would stop envying France, because as we all know you’re so much vulgar than them. Or if you don’t call yourselves the New Europe you could call yourselves The Upper Third World, and that way nobody would panic about riots, drugs, blackouts, white trash, males, or aids. You would lift up from your shoulders the weight of being The Greatest Country in the World and would accept yourselves as a bunch of tiny countries with lots of banks. Another benefit achieved from this separation would be keeping some languages alive. Every separate new country would have, maybe, different officials languages. I mean the South of the country is going to be Spanish speaking anyway. I think this proposal is exciting for you. Can you imagine yourselves traveling from one country to another? Being foreigners in California or in Alaska would make your sex life so much better. And a lot of relatively small but key communities would gain from this rearrangement. Think not only about marihuana users but also of experimental writers. Both groups could be representative of one of those new nations; they could become the language forefront of a whole country. Wouldn’t this be nice? The rest of the world, of course, would be happy too. Many American countries instead of this gigantic and chaotic monster would make the world so much peaceful.
I think the solution for the United States is disintegration. Is pretty evident you can’t stand each other. People stand each other on the Internet because they lie about themselves, from the color of their skin to the sex they are or pretend. A disintegrated United States would be a whole lot more happier entity. That way the Christian right would run only a part of the country, and not the whole country. Another part could be run by blacks, and another by Hispanics, and another by Arnold Schwarzenegger if he likes. So people would move from one part to the other in relation to their prejudices or tastes in human flesh. That way you could also travel a lot more. Having many neighboring countries would make you feel you’re in a New Europe. After the disintegration of the United States you should call yourselves the New Europe, and you would stop envying France, because as we all know you’re so much vulgar than them. Or if you don’t call yourselves the New Europe you could call yourselves The Upper Third World, and that way nobody would panic about riots, drugs, blackouts, white trash, males, or aids. You would lift up from your shoulders the weight of being The Greatest Country in the World and would accept yourselves as a bunch of tiny countries with lots of banks. Another benefit achieved from this separation would be keeping some languages alive. Every separate new country would have, maybe, different officials languages. I mean the South of the country is going to be Spanish speaking anyway. I think this proposal is exciting for you. Can you imagine yourselves traveling from one country to another? Being foreigners in California or in Alaska would make your sex life so much better. And a lot of relatively small but key communities would gain from this rearrangement. Think not only about marihuana users but also of experimental writers. Both groups could be representative of one of those new nations; they could become the language forefront of a whole country. Wouldn’t this be nice? The rest of the world, of course, would be happy too. Many American countries instead of this gigantic and chaotic monster would make the world so much peaceful.
21.8.03
NIHILISM
Nihilism preaches everything has lost its value, and thus nothing more can go wrong. 'From now on just same all sameness'. That's what E. M. Cioran, for example, represented for Europe after the wars: everything had happened, nothing more would come. The nihilist man is afraid—wants to prevent and believe that which could come, is not going to be. The-Extra has been cancelled! (The Nihilist says: I'm full, I've seen it all, and I don't even feel anymore).
Nihilism at the end is very optimistic: it concludes we have arrived to the Worst.
But nihilism is always wrong. We can always take more. Go lower.
The sub-animal can happen.
Nihilism preaches everything has lost its value, and thus nothing more can go wrong. 'From now on just same all sameness'. That's what E. M. Cioran, for example, represented for Europe after the wars: everything had happened, nothing more would come. The nihilist man is afraid—wants to prevent and believe that which could come, is not going to be. The-Extra has been cancelled! (The Nihilist says: I'm full, I've seen it all, and I don't even feel anymore).
Nihilism at the end is very optimistic: it concludes we have arrived to the Worst.
But nihilism is always wrong. We can always take more. Go lower.
The sub-animal can happen.
20.8.03
SEX WITH LUCIA
Having sex becomes social power thanks to speech. If we didn't gossip about who are we fucking and who is fucking us, sex would be socially useless.
Having sex becomes social power thanks to speech. If we didn't gossip about who are we fucking and who is fucking us, sex would be socially useless.
PRIMITIVE MEANS US
In the long run, Schwerner is going to be considered summerican. Writing only has 6 000 years here. And "literature" half of that. We cannot speak of primitive writing practices, not only because that concept is a prejudice, but because primitive writing is what we still are. Primitive means us—now. We're so fucking arrogant we feel writing is now so much different than the past—ilussions. The very possibility of experimental writing proves writing is still fetal. In the long run writing in Mesopotamia in the year 3.500 B.C is not going to look that different from writing in the Internet in the aftermaths of 9-11. Being primitive, being us, means writing can still be anything. Writing is just six months old—before being born.
In the long run, Schwerner is going to be considered summerican. Writing only has 6 000 years here. And "literature" half of that. We cannot speak of primitive writing practices, not only because that concept is a prejudice, but because primitive writing is what we still are. Primitive means us—now. We're so fucking arrogant we feel writing is now so much different than the past—ilussions. The very possibility of experimental writing proves writing is still fetal. In the long run writing in Mesopotamia in the year 3.500 B.C is not going to look that different from writing in the Internet in the aftermaths of 9-11. Being primitive, being us, means writing can still be anything. Writing is just six months old—before being born.
19.8.03
ANARCHISM AND WRITING
Writers don't always accept they are anarchists, but they are. Stirner wrote that anything we need to survive becomes our property. And writers need language to survive, and they sure take it as theirs.
But not only writers. Everyone. In terms of language we are all desperate anarchists. We take the whole of language as ours. No private property, only survival.
We are all anarchist even if we don't want to recognize it. But writers are very contradictory anarchists.
They say writing is a critique on authorities, but the real reason writers write is they want to become authorities.
Writing is authoritian.
Of course, writers can always argue writers are very self-critical.
But I don't believe in me as an honest writer, nor I believe in you. We are all very cynical.
Writers don't always accept they are anarchists, but they are. Stirner wrote that anything we need to survive becomes our property. And writers need language to survive, and they sure take it as theirs.
But not only writers. Everyone. In terms of language we are all desperate anarchists. We take the whole of language as ours. No private property, only survival.
We are all anarchist even if we don't want to recognize it. But writers are very contradictory anarchists.
They say writing is a critique on authorities, but the real reason writers write is they want to become authorities.
Writing is authoritian.
Of course, writers can always argue writers are very self-critical.
But I don't believe in me as an honest writer, nor I believe in you. We are all very cynical.
17.8.03
ON SCHWARZENEGGER: MASCULINE MOM
From this side of the fence Arnold Schwarzenegger looks to be a figure who represents a lot of things for the American and global minds.
It first represents the transition toward the post-human. I don't have to mention the titles of his movies to make this obsvious point plausible. These same movies present technology as something which scares us but at the same time seduces. Seduction is always frightening. That's why the seducer seduces: the seducers is afraid of being seduced. We don't need either Don Juan or Baudrillard to know this.
Technology seduces us because it brings us the possibility of self-destruction. The hope of suicide, that sexy experience. The experience we most delight into. Technology is sublime. A way out. I love Schwarzenegger! We now want to stop being human. We want to stop suffering like humans do, we want to be machines. Cool ones. Machines are our postmodern dreams.
Schwarzenegger represents the body-soon-to-be. He represents our future transformation. From athlete to Terminator, he symbolizes the end of our actual body. A body that dies.
A body that does not return.
From Conan to Commando: Schwarzenegger is better than Darwin.
In another sense, what "Hasta la vista, baby" means, again, the good-bye of the Human. He uses another language (Spanish) (Spanish, because it ironizes familiriaty, mocks emotion, which 'Spanish' is link to in the American mediatic mind) to end the relationship with the Human-baby in us in a way that makes us feel happy: we ended... at the same time that "Hasta la vista, baby" means also: see you soon, again, and again. Always. "I'll be back".
Don't worry: I will scare you again. You will have this thrill through out your whole life.
He assures us violence will return.
Schwarzenegger general character moves in the spheres of our relationship with the maternal, the natural, and the national.
"Hasta la vista, baby", are the words of the mother saying a comic-violent (masochistic) good-bye to the son. And if he is going to return, he must be our mom! And I'm her son! Family is immortal. Family is natural. Family doesn't die. Kids! Please give a Big Thanks You to Mr. Freud!
(Dear Sigmund,
...You're always going to be in my mind...).
Schwarzenegger is a non-natural mother, a high-tech-violent-mom, which is even suggested in other roles, like the ones he has in Kindergarden Cop, where he is a masculine mommy. Mrs. Cute-Phallus. There he proves (as every masculine mom needs to prove) he has also feelings, he doesn't know what to do to take care of the children... The android-terrorist-cop does have emotions after all!
Schwarzenegger is not only the symbol of the post-human. He also represents the pre-human. He talks like a baby. He is the underdevelopment of language itself. He is the Nice Savage, the Mother but also the Baby himself. He is what is after us, but also what was before us.
If Schwarzenegger exist, that means we don't have to be, we can skip ourselves, and go directly from the pre-human to the post-humanoid.
"I'll be back" contains the ironic pain of being separated but it also contains the promise of the return. Schwarzenegger is all about ambivalence toward technology, ourselves, the future, the body, humanity, violence and language: politics.
California one day wants to vote for him, the other it doesn't. "I'll be back" calms people, but brings back the menace of our mother coming again.
In this repetion of the Masculine Mother, Terror is lost.
We become addicted to it. We liked it. The rush.
What Schwarzenegger ultimately signifies is the American war-drive.
Its cyclical return.
For Americans war comes and goes, and never touches them. It's nothing but espectacular! Even the soldiers are convinced they fought at a distance from reality. Nobody wants to recognize the war is in their skin.
We are adicted to strong emotions, to being afraid, to catastrofies. We don't want to see It, but can't stop looking at it. Schwarzeneggeer is fascinating.
He is thrilling. Just like wars are. War that say to us "Hasta la vista, baby" and "I'll be back", and reappear every season, periodically with each American president, those reassuring masculine moms, those warm dads.
War is the masculine mother of the United States. Schwarzenegger incarnates this cultural-emotional ghost. He symbolizes the defeat of language.
From this side of the fence Arnold Schwarzenegger looks to be a figure who represents a lot of things for the American and global minds.
It first represents the transition toward the post-human. I don't have to mention the titles of his movies to make this obsvious point plausible. These same movies present technology as something which scares us but at the same time seduces. Seduction is always frightening. That's why the seducer seduces: the seducers is afraid of being seduced. We don't need either Don Juan or Baudrillard to know this.
Technology seduces us because it brings us the possibility of self-destruction. The hope of suicide, that sexy experience. The experience we most delight into. Technology is sublime. A way out. I love Schwarzenegger! We now want to stop being human. We want to stop suffering like humans do, we want to be machines. Cool ones. Machines are our postmodern dreams.
Schwarzenegger represents the body-soon-to-be. He represents our future transformation. From athlete to Terminator, he symbolizes the end of our actual body. A body that dies.
A body that does not return.
From Conan to Commando: Schwarzenegger is better than Darwin.
In another sense, what "Hasta la vista, baby" means, again, the good-bye of the Human. He uses another language (Spanish) (Spanish, because it ironizes familiriaty, mocks emotion, which 'Spanish' is link to in the American mediatic mind) to end the relationship with the Human-baby in us in a way that makes us feel happy: we ended... at the same time that "Hasta la vista, baby" means also: see you soon, again, and again. Always. "I'll be back".
Don't worry: I will scare you again. You will have this thrill through out your whole life.
He assures us violence will return.
Schwarzenegger general character moves in the spheres of our relationship with the maternal, the natural, and the national.
"Hasta la vista, baby", are the words of the mother saying a comic-violent (masochistic) good-bye to the son. And if he is going to return, he must be our mom! And I'm her son! Family is immortal. Family is natural. Family doesn't die. Kids! Please give a Big Thanks You to Mr. Freud!
(Dear Sigmund,
...You're always going to be in my mind...).
Schwarzenegger is a non-natural mother, a high-tech-violent-mom, which is even suggested in other roles, like the ones he has in Kindergarden Cop, where he is a masculine mommy. Mrs. Cute-Phallus. There he proves (as every masculine mom needs to prove) he has also feelings, he doesn't know what to do to take care of the children... The android-terrorist-cop does have emotions after all!
Schwarzenegger is not only the symbol of the post-human. He also represents the pre-human. He talks like a baby. He is the underdevelopment of language itself. He is the Nice Savage, the Mother but also the Baby himself. He is what is after us, but also what was before us.
If Schwarzenegger exist, that means we don't have to be, we can skip ourselves, and go directly from the pre-human to the post-humanoid.
"I'll be back" contains the ironic pain of being separated but it also contains the promise of the return. Schwarzenegger is all about ambivalence toward technology, ourselves, the future, the body, humanity, violence and language: politics.
California one day wants to vote for him, the other it doesn't. "I'll be back" calms people, but brings back the menace of our mother coming again.
In this repetion of the Masculine Mother, Terror is lost.
We become addicted to it. We liked it. The rush.
What Schwarzenegger ultimately signifies is the American war-drive.
Its cyclical return.
For Americans war comes and goes, and never touches them. It's nothing but espectacular! Even the soldiers are convinced they fought at a distance from reality. Nobody wants to recognize the war is in their skin.
We are adicted to strong emotions, to being afraid, to catastrofies. We don't want to see It, but can't stop looking at it. Schwarzeneggeer is fascinating.
He is thrilling. Just like wars are. War that say to us "Hasta la vista, baby" and "I'll be back", and reappear every season, periodically with each American president, those reassuring masculine moms, those warm dads.
War is the masculine mother of the United States. Schwarzenegger incarnates this cultural-emotional ghost. He symbolizes the defeat of language.
THE RETURN OF THE TIJUANA BIBLE
During and after the invasion of Iraq I left writing in English for a while. America went into the lowest point I have ever seen this country in. And writing in English became problematic to me. Existencially. Even my spoken English became erratic, due to my complete misunderstanding of what has happening with American language and culture in general.
I was trying to leave contradictions behind. You know: being an Anti-American State young leftist Mexperimental intellectual and writing in the language of the "Enemy"... But contradictions sustain me, so I can't live much time without them.
At that point it also became too much, writing in two languages, both now painfull to me.
I started to write in English because I didn't like people reading for me in the events I was invited to in the U.S. I prefered my mistakes to let somebody else speak for me. I don't like disempowerment. Living in the "Third World" is disempowerment enough.
And it also was entertaining to write in a second language. But the fun ended with the political climate of post-9-11. English became part of my writing life, which meant part of my life in general. Writing... living... at this point of our lives, does somebody know the difference?
I don't. I just write. I just live.
Yeah right. I don't write. I don't live.
Feel better now?
I don't.
That's why I write, that's why I live.
I don't feel right. I write, I live, because I feel left.
One learns a language is ours when we can feel through it. In that sense I have to accept English is also mine. To go away from it, would be to run away from an important part of myself. One of my demons.
During and after the invasion of Iraq I left writing in English for a while. America went into the lowest point I have ever seen this country in. And writing in English became problematic to me. Existencially. Even my spoken English became erratic, due to my complete misunderstanding of what has happening with American language and culture in general.
I was trying to leave contradictions behind. You know: being an Anti-American State young leftist Mexperimental intellectual and writing in the language of the "Enemy"... But contradictions sustain me, so I can't live much time without them.
At that point it also became too much, writing in two languages, both now painfull to me.
I started to write in English because I didn't like people reading for me in the events I was invited to in the U.S. I prefered my mistakes to let somebody else speak for me. I don't like disempowerment. Living in the "Third World" is disempowerment enough.
And it also was entertaining to write in a second language. But the fun ended with the political climate of post-9-11. English became part of my writing life, which meant part of my life in general. Writing... living... at this point of our lives, does somebody know the difference?
I don't. I just write. I just live.
Yeah right. I don't write. I don't live.
Feel better now?
I don't.
That's why I write, that's why I live.
I don't feel right. I write, I live, because I feel left.
One learns a language is ours when we can feel through it. In that sense I have to accept English is also mine. To go away from it, would be to run away from an important part of myself. One of my demons.
