tara's tierra

Jaime Saenz, a magnetic pull

There was a night long ago when I was awake at about 2am on 16 Essex Street. I was in my top bunk, with my sister sound asleep below me, and I had a comforter (it was Laura Ashley, I remember my mother saying this) with widely spread out flowers all over it in many primary colors. The wall paper matched the comforter except the flowers were all yellow. It was like having buttercups all over the wall. There was lots of white space though, which I liked, I remember, between the flowers. And they were scattered about in no particular order. I liked that, their randomness. Anyway, that night in bed, I remember feeling this sense of  mischievous secrecy in that I was the only one up, and I had my small blue typewriter at hand and I was probably talking to myself out loud.  Knowing me, I was probably thinking of all the swear words I knew so far, or all the items my cousin Abby had that I wished were mine. There was something sneaky about me, but I sensed that it would lead to lots of fun . . . that moment of self-awareness then has stayed with me ever since.

Jaime Saenz is someone I discovered when sitting in Guatemala at an internet cafe. I think I google searched something strange like, "depressive artists Bolivia," or some phrase that only made sense to me, and I started reading about Saenz. In all honesty, I am a terrible researcher, but certainly a unique one, because I come up with the oddest ways of saying things. You get 200 hits, I get 5. But my 5 are all gems. Anyway, ever since then, probably about 2002, I have been reading him periodically when the mood strikes me. He is an amazing writer. I read some of his lines and feel like they are running through my veins, like ice-cold water. His words would be glacier blue, not just because I am obsessed with blue. He is from La Paz, and sometimes I feel like I am in a teeny alley way near the plaza of San Francisco when I read him, ducking into a doorway to block myself from the wind. Other times I feel like I am tucked into a narrow twin bed with woolly itchy blankets thinking about how happy I am to be alone. And other times, like I just noted, I am brought back to a corner of myself that is formative not to anyone in the world but me. These formative moments are always so ordinary. They are simple. They are the minutes that no one sees of you, realizing, you are you.

Here's a beautiful section of Saenz that makes me breathe really deeply in thanks for someone else who was once in the world who felt the alienation that some of us still feel:

Nunca me sentí en el mundo como si fuera mi casa; siempre me sentí quisquilloso, susceptible y desasosegado, como un intruso o, en el mejor de los casos, como un mero visitante.

I never felt as if the world were my house; I always felt uneasy, exposed, and restless, like an intruder or, in the best of cases, like a mere visitor.

He also writes, and these lines inspired me to go back to Essex Street, "Aprendí cosas y cosas de la vida y de la muerte, del mundo y del sufrimiento en la oscuridad de mi cuarto, en la soledad de un rincón de mi cuarto, cuando mi madre, joven aún, me miraba con mucha pena, pues según su sentir, yo era muy retraído y huraño, y además muy tímido. . ." I learned things, and things about life and death, about the world and about suffering, in the darkness of my bedroom, in the loneliness of a corner of my room, when my mom, still young, would look at me with concern, because it was her feeling that i was very withdrawn, unsociable, and timid. . ."

His writing consistently pulls on the part of me that loves to have hours at night to myself so that I can sit up in my bunk bed and write without anyone asking me what I am doing, or can imagine bodies under sheets and blankets dreaming while I study them, peering at them, even touching them, from afar. And it's weird, but I feel like the other dwellers of corners know who else is up right now doing the same thing they are, those few lights you see when you arrive on a late bus into a city and think how reassuring it is to know that someone is up; someone who might be your friend. Saenz would have always been up, even if he was in the dark.

. . . todo es la imagen de una belleza inaceptable.
la condesa sangrienta...

The Paradise of her Memory

"ella se desnuda en el paraíso
de su memoria
ella desconoce el feroz destino
de sus visiones
ella tiene miedo de no saber nombrar
lo que no existe"
                                  --Alejandra Pizarnik

I've been kind of stressed out about school lately. Stressed in a way that is new to me, because it's not about not doing good work or not progressing, but about feeling like my work has become somehow  increasingly detached from myself. Maybe it is part of an earlier version of myself that is still in me, but is not what is as pressing to me right now? Or maybe it is that I fear that the part of my heart that is dark and loves art and paradoxes and eroticism that dwells a thousand feet deep in a poem has been left to whither while I concern myself with questions that are much more of the political sort -- resolving the power relations between the north and the south; the rich and the poor; the white and the indigenous; Spanish and Quechua; coloniality vs. colonialism; decolonization vs. decoloniality. I feel that I am less committed somedays to the politics that have become increasingly larger than myself. I feel like I am a spider in a web that studies the web over and over again, but never turns her eye any longer on  the spider. And speaking of spiders...

I really miss the side to me that is concerned with limit experiences, the dark side of the moon, eroticism, and just plain sex. This is the side that reads literature slowly and contemplates the idea of not knowing how to name what doesn't exist for a half an hour and then smokes a cigarette to reflect on the aloneness I feel inside. This is the person that likes the idea of pain and torture as part of a process of ultimate pleasure. This is the person that wants to swim in the dark, sometimes freezing river that is the self until I reach a shore where I encounter a a way of feeling that I have never felt before. This is the me that wants to be, not that is forced to be, but simply chooses to be submissive so that I don't have to do anything but simply be in the presence of someone else, an author, a person, a ghost, a thought.  This me is so much more natural for me to be than the me I fear I have become.

In the paradise of my own memory, I don't get so caught up in everything around me and the desires of others for me or of me. I spend more time mining the self in the dark than acting in the name of others who most probably want to act (and think) for themselves. In the paradise of my own memory, I am naked, dark, and scared and yet totally uninhibited to be myself.

Voy a hablar de la esperanza

There are some days when I have so many words to string into beautiful sentences. In my life, only a small handful of people have inspired me to write, and they bring out different sides to my personality and my soul. Lately I have been reading Alejandra Pizarnik on the side, when I have time, because she reminds me so much of a person that I love very much. And then I have also been reading César Vallejo because his poetry gets at the root of the human condition and the alienation that one can feel on a daily basis in the world. He has a way of parodoxically turning the one into the many and the unsayable into the said. He transforms materiality into spirit and spirituality into the concrete. Today has been one of the saddest days I have felt in some time. It's that indescribable sadness that isn't attributed to one thing, but rather, to the impossibility of transcendence for any sustained amount of time. I wish that Alejandra were here, in the room with me, to brush my hair or to talk over a verse. And I wish that I could sleep in between the period and the last sentence of César Vallejo's prose, if only to meet him there and share, for a second, understanding. I'm too sad, really, to write my own words. And so, I'll write his, in translation, because maybe more people will find him when they wake up, suffering, and wonder what it is that gives life meaning, or more importantly, takes meaning so quickly away. Slippery time and slippery touch.

* * *
I do not suffer this pain as César Vallejo. I don't hurt now as an artist, as a man, or even a simple living being. I don't suffer this pain as a Catholic, a Muslim, or an atheist. Today I simply suffer. If I weren't named César Vallejo, I would suffer the same pain. If I weren't an artist, I would still suffer. If I weren't a man or even a living being, yes, I would suffer it. If I weren't a Catholic, an atheist, or a Muslim, I would suffer just the same. Today I suffer from a place farther down. Today I simply suffer.

I suffer now without explanation. My pain is so deep that there was never a cause or a lack of cause. What would the cause be? Where is there something so important that it would cease to be the cause? Nothing is the cause; nothing has been able to cease being the cause. Why was this pain born? For itself? My pain comes on the wind of the north and the wind of the south, like those neuter eggs some rare birds lay on the wind. If my sweetheart had died, my pain would be the same. If life were, in sum, different, my pain would be the same. Today I suffer farther up. Today I simply suffer.

I observe the pain of a hungry man and I see that hunger is so far from my suffering that even if I fasted till I died, a sprig of wheat would still sprout from my tomb. The same for the lover. How rich with begetting his blood compared to mine with no flowing spring or utilization.

I thought till now that all things of the universe were, inevitably, fathers or sons. But today I see that my pain is not that of either a father or a son. It is a lacking in spine at nightfall as it is supplied with courage at dawn, and if it were put in a dark room, it would not give light and if put in a bright room, it would not cast a shadow. Today I suffer no matter what happens. Today I simply suffer.

* * *
I do not suffer as Tara Daly. I suffer as someone else who was once alive and is now almost dead, but who dances inside me every day, wanting to come out.

To believe

Few people have the chance in life to believe what I believe. I don't think my belief in in what I believe in is necessarily anymore than a belief, in that, maybe it just stays as a belief that I walk around with in my pocket and that makes me work harder to be a better person. I never  expected to be where I am in my life now two  years ago, and I couldn't possibly appreciate what I know about myself now then. I believe that I lost myself and refound myself and did that work mainly all by myself. It would have been easier if I had given myself over to love earlier, but then I would not be able to own it for myself right now. I would have thought that I was doing it for the wrong reasons and the ease of just being done.

I talked to my Mom for awhile tonight on the phone and she said she was so happy, that I sounded so happy on the phone the last couple of times I have talked to her. And you know what? I really am. And I am happy not because of a person, but because of me. Because I know who I am and what I want. I am doing what I want with my time and with my life. I am being who I want to be. If I keep doing that everyday, then I think I will find someone who I'll let hold my glass heart. And in the meantime, I will just keep doing what I am doing for me -- even if it means that folding sheets is the most exciting thing on my agenda.

Believing in one's self is the only reliable thing to do in the world.

Melancholy and Literary Lovers

"Creo que la melancolía es, en suma, un problema musical: una disonancia, un ritmo trastornado. Mientras afuera todo sucede con un ritmo vertiginoso de cascada, adentro hay una lentitud exhausta de gota de agua cayendo de tanto en tanto. De allí que ese afuera contemplado desde el adentro melancólico resulte absurdo e irreal y constituya "la farsa que todos tenemos que representar". Pero por un instante -- sea por una música salvaje, o alguna droga, o el acto sexual en su máxima violencia --, el ritmo lentísimo del melancólico no sólo llega a acordarse con el del mundo externo, sino que lo sobrepasa con una desmesura indeciblemente dichosa; y el yo vibra animado por energías delirantes" (Alejandra Pizarnik: Prosa completa 290-91).

"I believe that melancholy is, in a nutshell, a musical problem: a dissonance, a disrupted rhythm. While outside everything occurs with the vertiginous rhythm of a cascade, inside there is an exhausting slowness of a drop of water falling from time to time. Therefore, that outside contemplated from the melancholic inside seems absurd and unreal and it constitutes "the farse that we all have to represent." But for an instant -- maybe because of frenetic music, or some drug, or a sexual act in its maximum violence --, the slowest rhythm of the melancholic not only jives with the external world, but it surpasses it with an excessiveness indescribably pleasing; and the "I" vibrates, animated by a delirious energy."

This explanation of the melancholy is from Alejandra Pizarnik's La condesa sangrienta, published for the first time in the magazine Testigo, año 1, num. 1 en 1966 (Buenos Aires, Argentina). I am reading the version published in Alejandra Pizarnik: Prosa completa published by Lumen. La condesa sangrienta is a fascinating story recounting the life of the countess Erzébet Bathory. Pizarnik's version is based on another version first published in French by Valentine Penrose, who compiled a history of Bathory based on the documents and stories surrounding this contentious countess. Bathory was a very real person who  lived in a medieval castle in Csejthe, Hungary and supposedly tortured and killed up to 650 young girls, for whom she had a perverse liking, in the 1600s. In Pizarnik's version of the story, I cannot help but want to know this countess for some reason, despite her depravity. She was most likely a lesbian, according to what I can gather, but was forced to marry at the age of 11. Who wouldn't be melancholic? Then, after her husband luckily died (for her sake, anyway), she started inviting girls to her castle and purportedly liked to bathe in their blood to maintain her own youth. She tortured them and  supposedly got much pleasure out of watching them suffer and inflicting pain. She was eventually imprisoned and walled into a tiny room where she  died after years of isolation and no light.

In Pizarnik's somewhat sympathetic reading, Bathory is representative of the melancholic dissonance referred to above. It is not that her behavior is justifiable, but rather, an example of the extreme alienation that one can feel in the world when one is, for whatever reason, that "out of sync." The way that Pizarnik describes melancholy as resting  between the  rhythm of the inside  with that of the outside resonates so intimately with the way I feel when I walk around lately. I cannot sleep and so my internal clock is out of sync with the rest of the world's. I feel an emptiness inside about why it is that I am doing what I am doing, why my thinking is relevant, and moreover, if any of my feelings, past and present, have been authentic. I feel like I am detached from the world around me lately and am almost positive that my body is made of glass.

Now, this does not mean that I am going to start torturing girls. But feeling this melancholy inside is a very real thing when it happens. It settles into, on top of, and around you and is invisible from the outside. No one thinks it is possibly "real," they just think you can snap out of it, or shift your lens, or refocus. I always can, and do, eventually.  But when I do feel made of glass, I cannot thank Pizarnik and Sylvia Plath enough for accompanying me at night, for sleeping with me, or even for me, when I cannot for myself. The melancholic people of the world do not make the rules.

As a side note and conclusion, I think people probably think I am self-absorbed because I am always writing about me. And that makes me feel horribly. All I have inside is love to give. And if anything, I have too much and it scares people away. I don't write about me because I am self-absorbed, I write about me because I feel so much of the world as it enters that I need to get it out. I write because I absorb your silence and her insecurity and his lack of self and her fear of speaking. I write because I do feel melancholic, today, and yesterday, and last year, and not just for myself, but for so many other people. I am just weary of being misunderstood when I feel that all I do is understand too much the emotional state of people around me, from every angle. And maybe by doing that I don't do some other things well, like my laundry or keeping a schedule. But I wish everyday that I could do those things better.  I wish every single day that I could mesh more easily with the "norm," I wish I could care about the right things instead of forgetting them, I wish that the things I did to brighten peoples days and lives mattered instead of the fact that I am too passionate.  I always feel like I am on the outside looking in as everyone laughs about the joke I did not hear. 

For those of us who are like this, this all makes perfect sense.  And if it doesn't, just please don't throw  stones at me as if you had the right to judge me for who I am inside when you actually have very little idea what it is like. Literature understands me.

Guillermo Bedregal García's Colorless Rivers

In 1974 the Bolivian poet Guillermo Bedregal García died a tragically-early death at the age of 20, only three months after he had gotten married. He was in an automobile accident in the steep hills of Llojeta, a “comarca” not very far from the center of La Paz. Jaime Saénz, one of the most important twentieth-century Bolivian writers, wrote the introduction to the first edition of La palidez, Bedregal García’s first collection of poetry, only to be published posthumously by Plural. In his moving preface to the book, Saénz notes: “Una cosa es cierta; y por lo mismo quiero repetirla. Con la muerte de Guillermo Bedregal, Bolivia ha perdido un poeta. Todos os lamentamos, con grande congoja” (8).  After La palidez, which is divided into four parts, Guillermo Bedregal’s father, also Guillermo Bedregal, and the former's widowed wife, published two more volumes of his poetry: Ciudad desde la altura and Empiezo a visitarme, also through Plural. The three books are also available as a complete collection.

I want to highlight a very specific aspect to his poetry, which is his constant use of sinestesia, a rhetorical figure that involves mixing senses in poetry, so that one might hear a color or see a sound. Sinestesia was employed heavily by modernists like Ruben Darío and Charles Baudelaire, but takes on a new significance in Bedregal, where it seems to very realistically capture the visua, sensorial, aural, and tactile drama of life in La Paz, Bolivia.  Whereas Darío or Baudelaire may have used sinestesia to distort reality in some way, creating a unique space of art for art’s sake, in this paceño tradition, the sinestesia reflects the sensorial reality of this city’s extreme landscape and sometimes sensorially disorienting atmosphere. The sky is so blue that it smells like indigo and the air so thin that it tastes like an icicle melting on your tongue. Here is a sample of Guillermo Beregal García’s beautiful poetry. And a special thanks to Milka, at the Instituto Exclusivo on el 20 de octubre in La Paz, for introducing me to this work:

No hay 

Es decir que basta con desaparecer.
Yo me oculto en los seres que desaparecen en el transfondo
De sus ojos que no están,
cubierto de trenes
en un silbido tocado por mi borrosidad ya incluso
inexistente.
El rasgo aquel en aquella calle desvanecida
aunque en sí el desvanecimiento haya pasado
y esté dispuesto en un lugar inexpugnable.
Lejos, o demasiado cerca de algo que pudiera ser mi
permanencia
en la virtual inexistencia de los seres que con su
desaparición
me ocultaron alguna vez,
en un tiempo que no ha sucedido,
justamente porque sucede a cada instante.

Y el río en aquel color inexistente de mis ojos,
y mis manos que se quedaron tocando una voz extinguida
de tus manos.
Algo así, transparente en la transparencia,
bajo el hueco que recuerdo ahogado en el recuerdo de una
lluvia que lavó mi cuerpo de purezas e impurezas,
a la oscuridad, recobrando el olvido en el olor destilado
por las cosas olvidadas.
***

I really recommend the first collection for more lucid poetry from someone whose talents only began to reveal themselves before his untimely end. Erasing and sketching, erasing and sketching as he floats along in a river that runs a color that no longer exists -- except in his eyes.

a mid-day quote

All's well that begins well and never ends

the title of an art exhibit currently at NYU

An August Haiku

Blue butterfly wings
Found asleep on glass pebbles
Vanish in my sky

The Door(s)

I'm reading, little by little, the prose works of Cesar Vallejo. I wanted to share one of the pieces I liked the most, titled "Regla gramatical" from El arte y la revolución:

    "La gramática, como norma colectiva en poesía, carece de razón de ser. Cada poeta forja su gramática personal e intransferible, su sintaxis, su ortografía, su analogía, su prosodia, su semántica. Le basta no salir de los fueros básicos del idioma. El poeta puede hasta cambiar, en cierto modo, la estructura literal y fonética de una misma palabra, según los casos. Y esto, en vez de restringir el alcance socialista y universal de la poesía, como pudiera creerse, lo dilata al infinito. Sabido es que cuanto más personal (repito, no individual) es la sensibilidad del artista, su obra es más universal y colectiva." (Ensayos y reportajes completos, Pontífica Universidad Católica del Perú. 2002.)

What is the difference between a personal and an individual creation? The dictionary definitions according to my Oxford Unabridged as well as the mere connotations that jump to mind from practical useage, indicate that personal is imbued with a sensibility or emotion that individual seems to lack. The definition of "individual" contains more biologically derived vocabulary such as "organism" or "entity."  The individual, in a sense, can be replicated or translated perhaps, but the personal grammar cannot ever be fully translated and is thereby what makes such a work universal. This reading is in line with Vallejo's own views on translation:

    "Todos sabemos que la poesía es intraducible. La poesía es tono, oración verbal de la vida. Es una obra construida de palabras. Traducida a otras palabras, sinónimas pero nunca idénticas, ya no es la misma. Una traducción es un nuevo poema, que apenas se parece al original."
***
    "Los mejores poetas son, en consecuencia, menos propicios a la traducción, así pensaba también Maiakovski. Lo que se traduce de Walt Whitman, son calidades y acentos filosóficos y muy poco de sus calidades estrictamente poéticas. De él sólo se traduce las grandes ideas, pero no se traduce los grandes movimientos animales, los grandes números del alma, las oscuras nebulosas de la vida, que residen en un giro del lenguaje, en una tournure, en fin, en los imponderables del verbo."

What is untranslatable in words, to me, can sometimes metaphorically be represented by other artistic genres that are not based on words and the reason why so many artists cross-fertilize in other medium. The representation of Vallejo in other form is the constant reminder that he the poet is never fully translatable. His afterlife as person and the afterlife of his work is their continual replication yet never complete translation; a constant arriving to a door that is never opened. Why is it that we seek that door? (And I cannot resisit it: when will we break on through to the other side? never, Jim, at least not when we are conscious.).