They say the digestive process takes about eight hours, can you believe that? With time running mercilessly by, do we have time for that? I get hungry again before it’s over. I could just do so much while things are still happening inside there. Crazy how we know only so slightly what goes on in our bodies, huh? How they work wihtout us needing to give them instructions. Almost as though they knew what to do; almost as though we could talk about them, our bodies, as a separate thing; different from us; at least in a certain way.

Can we actually do that, can we actually consider our own bodies, if only for the sake of analisis, as an entity that has somewhat of an independent existence, independent from us, that is?

What is intuition? What is our subconscious self?

Digestion might be much shorter than that anyway, I don’t even remember where I got that piece of information from. I just remember somebody telling me it’s not normal that I get hungry two hours after I eat.

At any rate, the same thing happens with emotions. You have an experience and it touches certain particular sensitive or emotional fibers, which might or might not be located somewhere in your body, and then you get emotions from that for an indefinite period of time. You meet somebody, you have an interesting conversation or, say, interesting sex, and who knows for how long that might stay in your memory. You might as well remember it all your life.

Emotions stay there, somewhere, lingering, changing in substance, metamorphosing, aging, being digested if you will, and we can’t control them. We actually have this other system or, to put it in different terms, this whole other dimension of our selves, in which emotions dwell. It’s deep and dark, obscure, in great part unknown to us. And, thankfully, it changes all the time. It works alone, without us having to intervene. Even if we don’t understand it, it has its own logic, its own ways, it knows what it’s doing. I know it often might seem like it doesn’t, but it does. Even when you have the strangest emotions, ugly, ugly, horrendous ones. Emotions that come out of who knows where and make you scared of what they say about you. Emotions so coarse, violent, abnormal, you can hardly recognize them as coming from you. You say: “That’s not me, that cannot be me!”. But it is you. And even then this other system of yours knows what it is doing. And thankfully it changes all the time.

Time is merciless. You haven’t finnished with something when you’re already meeting new people, having new experiences. Time is like a bull, un torello, and a crazed one, racing stubbornly, burning its lungs out, a white, shinning, silver stud with its nose in flames, horses, horses, horses. Irrational. Just moving, moving, moving ahead. Not thinking, not looking back. But it’s not so bad though. Sometimes you meet a lot of people[1] and talk to them and dance with them and fuck with some of them and then you think about them (for who knows how long) and it’s wonderful. You may like some of them and hate some of them or even like very much some of them (I don’t use the word love, what is love anyway? I kinda mistrust people who say they fall “in love”) but they all teach you things. Good things and bad things. Things you like and things you don’t like. Things that may hurt. But it’s wonderful nevertheless. People are great.

What is also great is how erotic attractions determine the dynamics and relations among a large group of people. It’s like suddenly you find yourself moving in a web of threads pulling you in different directions. Rapport de force, Pierre Bourdieu would say. You find yourself in a field where you have to take a stand, hold a post in relation to the others, choose a position (for it is really a choice, be it conscious or not) in a field of power (dans le champ du pouvoir: Bourdieu), in the hierarchy of possible hierarchic erotic and affectional relations. I mean, it is really a fight. With blood and sweat and sperm and saliva and tears spurting all over the place. How may fluids, huh? It’s amazing.

And also sad how our affections are determined in such an elementary way by power. So gray that we relate to others so in terms of “power over” rather than “power to act with” the others. People have the power! People have the power! To dream! To redeem the work of fools! Ha, ha, ha. Oh, Patti…

This is true as much in the field of affections as in the field of thinking, or of creativity (art, if you will). Art is a field of power (Bourdieu), art is a system of production (Bourdieu), it is a market (…).

Art is also full of hierarchies. Which depend on the quality of your work but also on your skin color, your nationality, your gender, even your economical level, your cultural capital… and depending on just how astute you are when it comes to understanding the logic of power relations within the field, at understanding the laws of the game, so to speak, an understanding that will shed a light on the possible ways to get to the position you want, or just to a good position in the worst panorama. If you understand the game, then you will know how to talk (langage et pouvoir symbolique), what to talk about, who to talk to, who to fuck (eventually).

Do I like art? Do I like sex? I think I might prefer mechanics. To fuck or not to fuck. The recurring question, eternally reinvented. Anyhow, sex is no emergency, really.

Who said artists were free? What is freedom?. As if we were not crossed by the same systems of values, the same ethics and prejudices as everyone else. Comment libérer les intellectuels libres? Les intellectuels sont-ils hors jeu?

Patti Smith: He [(Robert Mapplethorpe); (the artist)] will be condemned and adored. His excesses damned or romanticized. In the end truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it (the fuck, we cannot judge it…). For art sings of God (whatever!), and ultimately belongs to him (oh, please…).

Bourdieu: Pareille phrase, prélevée dans un de ces innombrables plaidoyers sans âge et sans auteur en faveur de la lecture, et de la culture, aurait à coup sûr déchaîné la furieuse allégresse qu’inspiraient à Flaubert les lieux communs bien-pensants…

As I said, the fight is amazing. It’s really a matter of life and death. Very much like science fiction. You meet people and see their work, hear them talk, see them construct affections between one another. And you like some of them. Some of them you feel you wanna stick to. Some of them you don’t like. And some of them you feel you (or someone) have (has) to take a stand against and spit on their face and DO SOMETHING. It’s wonderful.

Your relations to people change all the time. Time doesn’t stop, it doesn’t wait for you. It just goes on and on changing its mind. It is kind of schizo. Nothing to be scared of, though. For when you look closely at the dialectics of schizophrenia, you understand fully how, indeed, change is nothing but constant sex.

However, sometimes the bull does seem to be thinking, it does slow the pace and look around. Instead of racing blindly ahead, like a shot arrow, it goes up in a spiral, taking you by the same place but on a higher level. It does seem to be galloping more cheerfully, it does seem to be more jolly.

This is when you re-encounter people. In a different context. So you relate to them in a different way in terms of affection, erotic awareness and desire: in terms of power to put it plainly. You meet again, look into each other’s eyes. You say “I see you”. You recognize each other in this unlikely situation, in this other horizon, this fresh landscape. And you learn to love (every so often it is impossible not to use the word) each other differently (this shouldn’t be interpreted as if I believed in it, though). You stir, readjust, move together, sweat together, feel the other’s breath on your skin, listen to each other. It’s almost like a dance. A mating dance. You weave a new thread that attaches you to one another for some more time in the unified field.

This is when sex requires that we act a bit more like cows than humans and learn the art of slow rumination.

It’s hilarious, you never know when you’re gonna meet someone again and under what circumstances. You never know how people are gonna act in a new context. Life turns and turns. People are crazy. There is, undoubtedly, a collective mycosis under way. Life turns and turns and it’s wonderful. No matter whether you move to find yourself closer or farther away from people, it’s always fascinating. And you should always keep on moving, up the spiral preferably. Always passionately. We should always love and fuck and sweat and cry passionately. ‘Cuz this never stops.

He said: “Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final”.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve lost all power of imagination. Like I’ve lost the capacity to imagine a different order of things.

I feel hopelessness and anguish, anger and hunger and anxiety and eagerness to live more and more.

Sometimes I fear I don’t believe in any of this.

Sometimes I hear myself screaming.

I fear the foundations of our existence are flimsy.

Sometimes I fear I just came here to walk nameless streets at night, through unknown cities, alone, through empty streets, kicking a can.

Sometimes I feel I’m being surrounded by horses. Horses, horses, horses.

Sometimes I wake up and say: “I’ve lost everything”.

I dreamed I was doing oral sex to Susan Sarandon.

I dreamed I was fucking Iggy Pop and then he died.

I dreamed I fucked the mayor of Mexico City.                                                                                     

I dreamed I saw a man raping an older man and then cutting his left foot off.

Do you want the water running?

I said: “Oh, pretty boy, can’t you show me a little more surrender?”

Sometimes I wake up and say: “This is the time, and this is the record of the time”.

I wake up and I see the face of the devil. How much time do you need? How much time do you need?

She feared as she always had, that all that was ever meant was loneliness, hard work, striving to make a difference when no difference could possibly be made.

She said: “I shall dream my dreams. My hand shall wear no wedding ring. The roots shall twine about them. I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it; life –and behold, death is better. I have known many men and women, none have I understood. It is better that I should lie at peace here with only the sky above me…”.

Saints may still be kissing lepers. It is high time that the leper kissed the saint.

(C’était pendant l’horreur d’une profonde nuit…)

---

[1] It was a large room, full of people, all kinds. And they had all arrived to the same building at more or less the same time. And they were all free. And they were all asking themselves the same question: what is behind that curtain?

yet untitled

El conejito me miró, y aunque no dijo nada, yo entendí lo que me quiso decir. Caminamos juntos un rato mirándonos de reojo de vez en cuando. Llegamos hasta un río y el conejito se detuvo, miró el agua e inclinó su cabecita hacia la derecha. Observando los pececillos nadando a contra corriente se lo dije de nuevo:

   –“Lo perdí todo”.

   –“…”

Seguimos caminando, esta vez por la orilla del río, hasta llegar a un puente. Mientras lo cruzábamos el conejito empezó a cantar “Laki, laki, o laki mou”. Los días de campo son una pitufada, pensé. Él siguió tarareando “Mou kila, o kila, kila”.

Del otro lado del río, a unos cuantos metros, encontramos un claro de bosque y el conejito dijo:

   –“Let us go in, the fog is rising”.

Cruzando el claro llegamos a los límites del bosque, más allá de los cuales una pendiente bajaba hacia un amplio valle rodeado en la distancia por montañas azules.

Comenzamos el descenso y no pude evitar decírselo una vez más:

   –“Lo perdí todo”.

   –“…”

   –“Entiendo: romper la dura corteza mental”.

   –“Y qué, ¿lo necesitas mucho?”

   –“…”

Entonces, mientras nos adentrábamos en el valle, el conejito dijo:

   –“La corta duración de mi vida, el pequeño espacio que ocupo: la inmensidad de los espacios. Hay más estrellas que gente en la tierra, gente o estrellas me ven con tristeza, etc…”

everybody happy

La historia es para miarle encima. A los 17 yo me sentía a mil kilómetros del centro del mundo. Crecí en la periferia, siempre viendo hacia adentro. Siempre mirando por la ventana. Salía a caminar por la ciudad y regresaba decepcionado: era parte de una generación en busca de un soundtrack. Viví una historia secuestrada. Por ello, el problema cultural se me presentó como obsesivo, humana, filosófica y existencialmente: “¿Quiénes somos culturalemente? ¿Cuál es nuestra identidad histórica?” No era una pregunta sobre la posibilidad de describir objetivamente dicha “identidad”, era algo anterior. Era saber quién es uno mismo como angustia existencial. ¿Quién soy? Soy lo que quiero ser: soy hermano, soy amante y amigo de quien quiero ser. Afirmo que la puta es mi madre y que la puta es mi hermana y que el puto soy yo y que todos mis hermanos son maricones. Soy hombre, soy indio, soy padre, soy loco, soy puto, soy viejo, soy joven, soy discapacitado, soy blanco, soy moreno, soy pobre, soy mujer también. Y en el centro de esta disputa reposaban preguntas que pretendían ir más allá en relación a la autenticidad. En 1975 me aburrí. En 1976 también. Y luego vino el ruido cómo un endemoniado relámpago, el ruido que se convirtió en un recurso a lo largo del siglo XX. El ruido era una guerra cultural, era una sociedad secreta, era un mundo dentro un mundo, con el más intenso y glorioso soundtrack, con la mejor ropa, el debate más feroz, y la política más idealista. El ruido lo cambió todo. No sólo mis pantalones. Mi vida. El rol del ruido era catalizar y acelerar, poner las cosas de cabeza y, al hacer esto, abrir nuevas perspectivas. La potencia dentro del ruido se fijaba, peligrosamente, en una considerable cantidad de negatividad; la violencia, de una suerte u otra, fue un frecuente y volátil aspecto de la forma. La negatividad por oposición a las declaraciones de positivismo indispensables a la, por entonces nueva, respectabilidad académica. El ruido debe ser visto como la falla constante, la falla de seguir siendo ruido al volverse una práctica familiar o aceptable. Como subsuelo de todo lo anterior encontramos la idea del ruido como negatividad: el habitual deslizamiento filosófico imparable hacia el lado opuesto. No quiero pertenecer a un club que me acepte como miembro. No futuro (Da! Da! Da!).

A love supreme

 

To put it in simple terms, New York is part of me. How that came to be is a long story. Long but not too long.

It was the summer of 1968, or 69, it was the summer Coltrane died. I was there seeing it all happen and I told myself “this is the time” and “this is the record of the time”. It was a hot summer, hot like hell, hot like a kitchen, hot like myself at that very moment.

Then i saw him standing at a street corner. I was sitting on a bench and he passed by and stopped , waiting to cross the street. And so I fell in love. I knew it was an illusion but i didn’t mind. I did and that’s the important part of the story. He waited a bit too long and then I followed him for less than a block. Then i saw him stop, look for a too long moment at his cell phone and start walking in circles.

“i usually talk rather than walk in circles”, i thought.

Then he disapperaed and I never saw him again. He was slim and tall, maybe slightly taller than myself, which isn’t precisely a point of reference.

I put my finger just above my upper lip and started moving it from one side to the other, barely touching the skin barely covered with what people call “facial hair”.

People were passing by walking their dogs. People with small dogs. People with bigger dogs passinsg. That’s how my usual love affair ocurred, every step of the way, back in those days. The usual inital rush of passion with blood and sperm leaking, bursting, and doing other things.

That’s what was special about New York. That’s what i liked about it: when things were meant to happen, they happened, of their own accord, without the necessity of you doing any moves. I always felt so anonymous. The people were the same as everywhere. The gays were gay and the heterosexuals were castrated little kids always wearing short pants and polo shirts. From time to time you would also see one of those dangerous eunuchs. And people would come and sit at your bench without the slightest care. They would also chew things and make noise while doing so and piss you off.

I’ve always thought people are just as ignorant everywhere, in every country, rich or poor.

People in New York weren’t different. That’s what i liked about it, that people there were just like people anywhere. And so i felt at ease. So i felt on a common ground.

One problem in New York in the late 60’s was the lack of public bathrooms. If you happened to be sitting on any particular bench in, let’s say, St Mark’s place, or for the case, anywhere else, and you were defeated by the uncontrollable urge to urinate, you had no choice but to control youself even longer.

Even women carrying small children in their arms, most surely sleeping, or else, would come and sit on your bench. And people would pass by walking surprisingly small chihuahuas.

Back then people would tell you “Jesus died for your sins”, and i was like “who’s Jesus?”, “why did he die?”, “are you positive he’s dead?”, “did he suffer?!?”. They, no wonder, had no answer.

All things considered, 1969 was O.K.. Then came 1970, and it was boring, which is as much as can be said about: 1971, 1972, 1973 and 1974.

1975 was different. Two doors were closed that year. Coffee tasted better. Summer was warmer, no too warm. Rock ‘n’ Roll was more conceptual. And it was the year I met this guy again. I was at a coffee shop reading in a green sofa and he was at the sofa right accross the table. So we met face to face. Face to face in every way the expression can be understood. Face to face in the deepest, most abstract, purest sense. The mirror in the mirror so to speak. I saw him and numberless mes relfected in him. He saw me and countless hims within me. And i said: So anyway, how are you doing?

His answer was far too long and too complex for me to give an accurate account, or an account that could be understood anyhow. There are, indeed, certain ideas and bodies of ideas, huge, obscure and intricate concepts that can’t be told in their integrity. It becomes impossible without the lacking words, the missing words. This is why his answer contained no words at all. I sipped my coffee and he sipped his. He sipped his drink and i sipped mine and our discourse went on taking the most astonishing shapes, forms, unexpected turns and mutations. A lady said she didn’t want milk on her coffee and we understood, if even partially, what she meant. We took notice of every simple gesture performed around us. A girl rubbing her ankle, a guy impatiently skaking his right foot. It was as though someone had knocked rational understanding out of us and thus, necessarily, magnified our senses. We therefore reached a deeper, more subtle comprehension of the smallest details, such as we never dreamed of. Blood and sperm spurted. And all this while, our selves persistently disgorged a never ending stream of reflections which energetically joined in an incestuous, touchingly vulgar, yet incredibly aesthetic emotional intercourse.

Anyone could have predicted we would see people pass by walking big dogs and small dogs. And so it was.

I never saw him again but the taste of his sweat stayed in my throat for years. The feeling of his blood in my hands.

He talked, they all talk.

Me habló de cómo la célula cambió contemporánea: un entomatado de ideas abstractas... you know.

http://vimeo.com/16916142

Marcela!

When you're down, and troubled, and you need some loving hand... you just call out my name and you know wherever i am, i'll come running... hahahahha! We love you Marci!!!!

-El Pato.