From Kino-e-no-komatsu Collection, 1826. Translation of the inscription by: James Heaton and Toyoshima Mizuho. Published in the Kyoto Journal, No. 18, 1992

STORY. Japan closed its borders to the world for 250 years, between 1603 and 1853. No one, foreign or Japanese, could enter or leave Japan under pain of death. All European foreigners were expelled from Japan.

Autarchy, or the discreet charm of autonomy, generated unity and interior stability and a time of everlasting splendour. They learned, like the anchorites or hermits, from their inner life. I have heard it said that the long confinement and the isolated life turned the Japanese into a kind of extraterrestrials.

Agriculture, technology and communications improved. A diverse and original urban culture flourished and contributed to a new artistic pluralism. The relationship between painting, poetry and calligraphy was characteristic of artistic expression in Japan. The development of polychrome woodblock prints produced cheaply and in large quantities made possible the production and consumption of art on a scale previously unknown in Japan.

One of the best-known artists of the time is the teacher Katsushika Hokusai (1760 -1849). He was born in Edo (present Tokyo). One of his most recognised woodblock prints is the explicitly erotic woodcut known as ‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’ (in Japanese ‘Tako to ama’, ‘The Octopus and the Girl Diver’ ).

The image has mistakenly been interpreted as representing a rape with a diabolical or terrifying meaning according to a folk tradition of monsters, in a country that feeds on fish and shellfish. They have not read the text included in the work.

The original Japanese text arranged by Hokusai in the space around the three interlocking bodies says something eloquently different and more blissful. The creator’s intentions had creative bases. The work is parodic and imaginative, like all great works are, almost like an erotic comic.

What is it?

It is an octopus performing cunnilingus on a beautiful woman while another sea creature kisses her while introducing its beak into her mouth and caressing her nipple. The play is a frenzy of imagination and eroticism between a woman and her slimy lovers as they talk joyously.

What do they say?

Listen to the lust:

OCTOPUS MAXIMUS: My wish comes true at last, this day of days; finally I have you in my grasp! Your ‘bobo’ is ripe and full, how wonderful! Superior to all others! To suck and suck and suck some more. After we do it masterfully, I’ll guide you to the Dragon Palace of the Sea God and envelope you. “Zuu sufu sufu chyu chyu chyu tsu zuu fufufuuu…”

MAIDEN: You hateful octopus! Your sucking at the mouth of my womb makes me gasp for breath! Aah! yes… it’s… there!!! With the sucker, the
sucker!! Inside, squiggle, squiggle, oooh! Oooh, good, oooh good! There,
there! Theeeeere! Goood! Whew! Aah! Good, good, aaaaaaaaaah! Not yet! Until now, it was I that men called an octopus! An octopus! Ooh! Whew! How are you able…!? Ooh! ‘yoyoyooh, saa… hicha hicha gucha gucha, yuchyuu chyu guzu guzu suu suuu….’

OCTOPUS MAXIMUS: All eight limbs to intertwine with!! How do you like it this way? Ah, look! The inside has swollen, moistened by the warm waters of lust. “Nura nura doku doku doku…”

MAIDEN: Yes, it tingles now; soon, there will be no sensation at all left in my hips. Ooooooh! Boundaries and borders gone! I ‘ve vanished….!!!!!!

OCTOPUS MINIMUM: After daddy finishes, I too want to rub and rub my suckers at the ridge of your furry place until you disappear. Then I’ll suck some more, “chyu chyu…”

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POETRY. Sean Bonney’s poems do, in the end, express a great belief in poetry. In one poem, Bonney contemplates ‘loneliness’, an effect that grows in power to encompass ‘Syria’ and ‘Templehof’, an effect that ‘destroys private property’,  says Johannes Göransson in this essay.

1.

The scream. It’s a motif I keep coming back to when reading UK poet Sean Bonney’s brilliant final collection, Our Death. Throughout the book, a scream pierces the text, the city, the capitalism. This might seem paradoxical because the book is not very shouty. It’s often reflective, pared-down – austere, even. Yet it keeps coming back to the act of the scream: ‘I think of my friends as blackbirds/screeching from rooftops/murdered by rising rents.’ Or: ‘My coffee cups and typewriter I leave to, I dunno, whoever can scream the loudest.’ Or, more importantly: ‘I take that scream to contain all that is meaningful in the word communism.’ Or perhaps most hauntingly, when he recollects an early dream – probably his first – about a quarry where there’s a mouth in the wall, and that mouth begins to ‘make a low moan’, a moan which continues to build in intensity until it becomes ‘a siren’s shriek’.

This scream makes me think of a classic quote from 20-century modernism: Theodor Adorno’s assertion that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Our Death is a ‘barbaric’ collection of poetry. To begin with, it constantly interrupts itself with vulgarity and violence, as if both to literalise the violence of capitalism and to destroy the beauty of the poems. We repeatedly get lines like ‘I boot your face in over and over’ and ‘pack up your roses, asshole, get out’. Swedish readers may think of Johan Jönson’s 1000-page opuses to the obscenity of having a body in late capitalism.

Like Jönson, Bonney’s poems do, in the end, express a great belief in poetry. In one poem, Bonney contemplates ‘loneliness’, an effect that grows in power to encompass ‘Syria’ and ‘Templehof’, an effect that ‘destroys private property’. And in the end, it too ‘is screaming is smashing your windows with boots and chains/its ruined hands’ loneliness a sharpened axe.’ The book seems to stage a struggle for the very existence of poetry. In essence, it becomes violence, a scream, to overthrow. But then it becomes poetry again. There is a sense of a tug of war between violence and poetry. Poetry is a loneliness, but it is also a scream, communism and an almost messianic violence.

But the scream is barbaric in another, more specific sense: barbaric originally means foreign. And the scream in Bonney’s book has much to do with the sense of a foreign language. Over and over, Bonney’s speaker contemplates foreign sounds in his mouth: ‘A kind of high metallic screech. Unpronounceable. Inaudible.’ Or:

“For lack of anything better to do, I sit here and try to conjure up some kind of meaning from the scars that have been left there. I sit there in the dark and read your poetry. Or rather, I reconstruct from memory what translations of it exist. I stare at the traces of an alphabet I don’t understand. I think that in the gulf that separates your poetry from mine I might be able to find the beginnings of a counterlight to see by, or a way of pronouncing the language needed to help undermine the fascist tinnitus that all of our sensory networks have become.”

In this poem, addressed to Greek poet Katerina Gogou becomes a ‘scream’ not so much in loudness but in its foreignness, a foreignness that is also equated with a ‘scar.’ He takes a foreign, ‘unpronounceable’ entity into his mouth. And that is the scream of poetry. Almost a reverse scream, reverse exclamation, a language that goes back in the mouth, becomes unpronounceable.

4.

I am here reminded of a very different writer, Anne Carson. In her essay ‘Cassandra Float Can’, Carson discusses the art of ‘prophecy’ as an art that creates a ‘rip in spacetime’. ‘What is it like to be a prophet?’ Carson asks. ‘Everywhere Cassandra ran she found she was already there.’

Bonney the prophet: throughout Our Death, wherever he goes, he’s already there.

5.

For Carson, the art of prophecy is inextricably bound up with translation: ‘Whenever I am engaged on a translation project, I experience continually, offside my vision, a sensation of veils flying up.’ This translation-ness is connected in Carson’s mind to Cassandra whose opening line is ‘OTOTOTOI POPOI DA!’ Carson explains: ‘This utterance is a scream. It is untranslatable, yet not meaningless. A scream conveys a specific emotion and can make things happen.’ The way it is connected to translation is this: ‘What is Cassandra doing speaking Greek? She is, after all, a Trojan princess who has never been away from home before.’ The answer Carson gives is this:

‘Aeschylus would like us to see the veils flying up in Cassandra’s mind, would like us to be wondering at what level of herself she is translating some pure gash of Trojan emotion into a metrically perfect line of Greek tragic verse and what that translation has to do with the arts of prophecy. Because in both cases, there is some action of cutting through surfaces to a site that has no business being underneath. What is the future doing underneath the past?’

Bonney’s book is an act of prophecy. In essence, it’s a translation (of Gogou, Anita Berber, Pier Paulo Pasolini, etc.) and it’s an act of ‘cutting through surfaces’. The scream – the vulgarity, the obscenity, the poetry – is about cutting through surfaces.

Q: What does he find beneath the surfaces?

A: ‘The secret workings of the sun’; ‘revenge’; and, most importantly, what Bonney in an essay calls ‘the language of the dead’.

7.

This language of the dead – ‘our death’ – is stunning, veering as it does between the surreal and the stark, the poetic and the obscene, beautiful and depressing:

‘Fuck it. The sun is doing whatever suns do

The citizenry all creeping like flowers.

Idiots. The sky is grey on further grey and

The haunting, its sharpened hail, never stops.’

8.

In the same essay I mentioned above, Bonney gives us a succinct answer to what it is he aims for his poetry to do, distinguishing it both from the establishment ‘accessible’ poetry on the one hand as well as the experimental establishment poetry of conceptualism:

‘Poetry doesn’t talk about the world, nor does it create meaning, but instead aims at meanings not yet articulated, meanings not catered to in the currently available aesthetic and social networks. This pushes poetry to a critical edge-condition which risks its destruction as poetry in a way that is far more serious than any silly corporate nihilism claiming to have “killed” “poetry”. Meanings are communicated, which risks tearing the poem apart.’

The prophecy scream is the poem coming apart. Language coming apart. In Our Death, Bonney writes: ‘I kept screaming, past all voice, all body, all of my borders.’

9.

There’s another vein in the book – related the issue of the scream and prophecy – and that’s the body. Here I think of another classic modernist statement, André Breton (in Nadja): ‘Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be at all.’ The body in these poems is constantly flawed, damaged, high, tired, falling apart, spastic: ‘The catastrophe that is his body.’ It is as if the body registers all the violence of capitalism in a direct way. Like Raul Zurita, who registered the violence of the Pinochet coup by scarring himself, by burning his face, by screaming, Bonney takes on the violence with his body to cut through, to make visible these forces. When this book talks about ideology, it is visible: cops enact violence. The poets fight back. The violence has been laid bare.

10.

It’s hard for me to write about screams and not think of two screams from my own life. When my third daughter was born, she didn’t scream. Couldn’t scream. I could see her little face, and she was trying to scream, but nothing came out. The doctors rushed her to some other room and came back with a grim prognosis: due to a hole in her diaphragm Arachne could not breathe. When she heard this news, my wife Joyelle let out a scream like I have never heard before; it knocked me over. I fell on the floor and could not get up. The scream had torn the veils off for me. I was trying to make sense of my experience, I tried to spin it, tried to make it all right, but the scream meant I couldn’t. There was no way to make this OK. This may seem like a very private experience, but the reason for Arachne’s congenital disability was, of course, environmental. The earth had translated its toxicity into Arachne’s body. And the scream (I mean the screams) was the unpronounceable, barbaric poetry of a world setting itself on fire.

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LIFE. On October, Saturday 22nd, 1938, a 46-year-old woman wanders in Buenos Aires towards the train station; she buys a one-way ticket to Mar del Plata. She moved to a modest boarding house, having the blurry fate of committing suicide. It is said – the incident is obscure- that she is sick, tired and longs for death to set her free. Perhaps her time goes by in an old bench thinking about her life. Maybe She spends time writing her poem “I’m going to sleep too”. 

I’m going to sleep, my nurse, tuck me in. Put a flashlight on the headboard; a constellation, the one that you like they are all good; dim it a little. She goes to the post office and sends the poem to “La Nación” newspaper. She stays awake the whole Monday night because of her moral confusion. Probably screams of rebelliousness and words of submission were heard. She talks to herself. She writes a letter to the only son she had, Alejandro, 26 years old.

She goes out and heads to the sea at 1:00 am. Her biographers assured she jumped into the sea from a breakwater. The myth, however, more poetic and with more spirituality, was that she slowly walked into the water.

Hours later, two young workers who were strolling down La Perla beach found her body. She was Alfonsina Storni, one of the most important poets of the century. Alfonsina Storni was immortalised in the song “Alfonsina y el mar” (Alfonsina and The Sea) by Luna and Ramírez.

Through the soft sand that the sea laps against

Your little footprint will not ever come back

A path full of pain and suffering

Reaches the deep water

A path only of silent grief Reaches the surf.

Alfonsina Storni was a Gemini of 1892. Fire Dragon. She once said: “I was called Alfonsina, which means willing to anything”. She was born in a canton of Switzerland. Her family settled in San Juan, later on, in 1901, they moved to Rosario. When Alfonsina was 10 years old the “Café Suizo” is her family business, where the girl works as a dishwasher and waits the tables. Her father, depressed and alcoholic dies in 1906. Alfonsina, who does not stop writing poems, works as a cook and as a labourer in a workshop of caps. She dedicated some time to the theatre too. She finally graduated as a teacher.

They were seen together. The photographs show them happy. Her friend Nora Lange says that she witnessed an erotic game for children: Quiroga holds in the air a chain clock they both had to kiss in the opposite faces; in the right moment Quiroga raised the clock. Naughty boy.

At age 19, She already writes, recites and publishes in magazines. And then came love. It is said that in a literary soiree in Santa Fe, Alfonsina had an affair and from the affair, she had a son, Alejandro, in 1912. From birth, another verse appeared: I am like a she-wolf, I walk alone, and I laugh…the son and then I, and then…whatever! In spite of the years Alejandro´s father name remains unknown, he was a journalist, older, and married.

Alfonsina, a single mother and a feminist, moves to Buenos Aires. In 1920, she wins the First Municipal Prize of Poetry and the Second National Prize of Literature for “Languidness”. In 1925, “Ochre” is published, In 1926 “Poems of Love”, 1934 “Seven Wells World” and in 1938 ” Mask and Shamrock”, which is the last book. Alfonsina Storni, brave speaker for women’s rights and a driving force of the Writers Society of Argentina, she had many friends. She asked Leopoldo Lugones if he could read some of her verses in 1915: She wrote; ” This I am asking you for a reason, it is because my book is due to be published soon. I know that I am going to be labelled as an immoral”.

In 1919 Amado Nervo arrives in Argentina as an ambassador for his country and goes to the same meetings Alfonsina does. She dedicates him a copy of “The Uneasiness of the Rosebush “. In the dedication, she called him “Divine Poet”. To Juana de Ibarbourou, whom she met in Montevideo in 1920, she seemed happy, perky, sometimes acute, and sarcastic.

She met Horacio Quiroga, a story writer, in 1922. She liked Quiroga. Obviously. He was a mixture of insolent and a tragic beast, a real magnet for women. His biographers say that he was a womaniser. Smear? Read this letter of Quiroga: “There is a girl in Buenos Aires, an admirable 16-year-old creature, to whom I recall well since I once dinned at her place, spending the long hour looking for with my foot what, oh, Lord! I had agreed to find, with someone else’s acquiescence. I even put my hand under the table to arrange my napkin, and put it right in her knee for a moment, just for a moment”.

They were seen together. The photographs show them happy. Her friend Nora Lange says that she witnessed an erotic game for children: Quiroga holds in the air a chain clock they both had to kiss in the opposite faces; in the right moment Quiroga raised the clock. Naughty boy.

One day the Chilean Gabriela Mistral called her on the phone. She wanted to meet her. When Gabriela saw her she was surprised: “The head is extraordinary, not for cheated features but for her silver hair, which frames a 25-year-old visage”. The Vicuna poetess insists “I have not seen a hair more beautiful than that, it is strange like moonlight at noon would be. It was golden, and some sweetness remained in the white clusters. The blue eyes, the retroussé nose, very funny and the rose skin, give her a child thing which challenges the astute conversation and mature woman”.

She met Federico García Lorca in the famous café Tortoni when he went to Buenos Aires to direct his play “Wedding of Blood”, between 1933 and 1934. She dedicated him a poem, “Portrait of García Lorca”: In comes a Greek / because of his distant eyes (…). Out goes his throat/outside/ asking / for the moon knife / sharpen water (…) Let the head fly, / the head alone / wounded by sea waves / black ones…”.

In the summer of 1935, she knew the terrible news: she had breast cancer. She was operated on, but the cancer continued. She suffered from depressions. Since then she called the sea in her poems and talks about the embrace of the sea and the crystal house waiting for her there in the bottom, in the Madre pore avenue. The suicide floats in the environment. In 1937, Horacio Quiroga also gets sick of cancer. One midnight he took cyanide. Alfonsina Storni said good-bye with moving verses: “Dying like you, Horacio, in your full senses, like in your stories, It is not bad”. Then Leopoldo Lugones poisoned himself.

Storni, Dragon of fire, he begged the sea, his rage, his fierceness:

Oh sea, give me your tremendous rage,
I spent a life forgiving
Cause I understood, sea, I gave myself away:
“Mercy, mercy for the most offensive”.
Give me your salt, your iodine, your fierceness,
Sea Breeze! Oh, tempest, oh anger!
Poor me, I am a sharp rock,
And I die, sea, I succumb in poverty

Finally, the sea asked for her. And, in the place where she went down ready for everything, a Monday night, there is a statue in her honour, overlooking the sea.

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ART. L’Exibition(niste) – is a play of words with the English word ‘exhibition’ and the word ‘exhibitionist’. This famous French shoe creator is showing his art in the Palais de la Porte Dorée, Paris, for the first time.

There’s a reason for France’s leading role as the handicraft’s Eldorado. Fashion and especially its haute couture have helped preserve these artisans that are so skilled at their professions. But what would they be without the creators and designers?

This February 26, 2020, I took the long subway drive to the other side of Paris to this Arts Deco palace, built-in 1931. It’s an imposing building that used to host African and Oceanic works of art (now in Quai Branly) as well as an enormous aquarium – that’s still there in the basement – but has lately been renamed the Museum of Immigration. So what do shoes have to do with immigration? I pondered the question.

I was soon to find out that Christian Louboutin loves to travel, and different cultures have inspired his creations, as displayed in this fascinating exhibition. Shoes are, of course, made for walking in, but his creations looked more like pieces to be exhibited rather than to be worn. They’re so intrinsically well embroidered, designed, assembled, coloured…

An imitation of a craftsman’s room is part of the exhibition, and the layperson can follow the creation from it’s beginning, as a drawing on a piece of paper, to its final stage. Using unusual materials, such as fish skin or tree barks for example, and working closely together with other artists from the pop culture, dance, theatre or literature and even from the cinema. Just to mention a few of his collaborators: the photographer and filmmaker, David Lynch; Lisa Reihana video artist from New Zealand; the English designers Whitaker and Malem; the Spanish choreographer, Bianca Li.

Of course, there can’t be a shoe exhibition without a blink towards the fondness of certain people towards fetishism. Finally the “imaginary museum” illustrates works of his most cherished artists.

In the first room, the visitor is introduced to the architecture of the place through colourful and fun glass windows, not depicting the usual Biblical scenes as found in churches, but shoes and boots. These are mixed with an array of shoes as well as drawings and designs.

In the middle of the “treasury” room, an enormous crystal sculpture made in India is surrounded by shoes inspired by his travels. Then comes the “nudes” where Louboutin shows his inspiration for human skin to make shoes or boots looking like “a prolongation of one’s body”.

In the atelier, I learned, through video clips and utensils, about the shoemaking skills. A Bhutanese theatre showing a spectacle pointed to his Asian inspiration.

After viewing a large video from New Zealand, I arrived in the “pop corridor” – covered in bright red and entirely mirrored – where, apart from pictures of movie stars wearing his shoes, his first men’s collection is displayed.

Of course, there can’t be a shoe exhibition without a blink towards the fondness of certain people towards fetishism. Finally the “imaginary museum” illustrates works of his most cherished artists.

An unforgettable image is one of the singer Aretha Franklin’s all dressed in red, wearing the famous fire-red Louboutins, which have become his fans favourite brand. “I was sitting in my atelier and saw my assistant’s red nail- polish and decided to try it under a black high heel shoe, added some varnish to it and that was it. I never thought that it would make a world-wide hit!” he admitted. But there you are, creativity and boldness can lead to unexpected results.

Art can be seen in everything, it’s a question of having the eye and the imagination. Then it takes the skill, of course. Christian Louboutin has revealed that he masters them all. Craftsmanship has been disappearing in the Western world since the beginning of the industrial area, but it’s not too late to retrieve it, as haute couture shows.

Many women would die for just one pair of his shoes, and so would I, for sure! However, as long as my valet doesn’t permit me such extravaganza, I enjoyed admiring them in the Palais de la Porte Dorée.

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LIFE. The legend says that Gregorio Fuentes is the alter ego of the old Santiago, from the novel “The Old Man and The Sea”, that he has delivered version-myths: once they were navigating through Pinar del Río and they saw an old boat with an elder and a boy.

The elder was fighting with a swordfish bigger than his boat. They approached to help him. As they approached, the old man started yelling: “American, son of a bitch, get out here”. Hemingway told him:” don’t mind him”. When they were away, he said: “I am going to write a book about this story”.

Everything could be doubted. But, what we cannot doubt in is that there in Cojimar, between fishers, was spawned “The Old Man and The Sea”. We must also believe in the legend, that he wrote it, as usual, standing up and in his portable Royal typewriter.

The last time Gregorio saw Hemingway in 1960, he told him: “take care of Pilar as you have been doing.” Then he came back to his country and the next year he committed suicide. That it was a case of suicide, for respect to the dead, we cannot doubt. Neither I hesitate to believe that the writer left the yacht El Pilar to Gregorio in his will. I think it was an act of brotherhood.

Gregorio Fuentes has said too that he named the novel. Hemingway would have asked him: “What title should I give it, Gregorio?” And he answered: “haven’t we met an elder? And wasn’t he in the middle of the sea? So, there you have the name”.

Everything could be doubted, but I don’t have any doubt that the old Gregorio knew Hemingway better than his 4 wives. In the 1950s,  Hemingway was a star. But his works were suffering the sourness of the critic. His editor returned him some manuscript because it was not publishable. But he liked the story about an old Cuban man and his dramatic story, 84 days in the sea obsessed with catching a swordfish.

In 1952 in Life magazine, The Old Man and The Sea was published. It was a success. Critics were talking about a classic then. The Old Man and The Sea won Pulitzer Prize. In 1954, Hemingway won Nobel Prize. That distinction was dedicated to the fishers, and he deposited the medal before the Virgin of Charity of The Copper, Catholic Patron of Cuba.

The last time Gregorio saw Hemingway in 1960, he told him: “take care of Pilar as you have been doing.” Then he came back to his country and the next year he committed suicide. That it was a case of suicide, for respect to the dead, we cannot doubt. Neither I hesitate to believe that the writer left the yacht El Pilar to Gregorio in his will. I think it was an act of brotherhood.

But Gregorio could not guarantee the yacht security. He says that he talked to Fidel Castro when he went to visit it. The truth is that shortly the Comandante sent a crane and a van, took it away. The ship where he caught needlefish and “hunted” German submarines along with Gregorio Fuentes sits now at the Vigia Ranch, in its yard, between ferns, mango trees, and the sons of his cats.

That is the truth.

(Translated by: Fernanda Manzano and Claudia Pérez)

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LIFE. Ernest Hemingway presence in La Havana, Cuba, is irrefutable for any wanderer. In La Bodeguita del Medio you can drink mojitos (rum with mint and sugar) that Hemingway would drink. In El Floridita, the tourist should drink a “Daiquiri”, the drink Hemingway liked. Moreover, I’m aware nowadays there is a special Hemingway drink: a considerable measure of rum, a finger of Toronja juice, a half green lemon squeezed, stirred and served very cold.

While you drink the special, you can watch on the wall some photographs of the writer with the actors Errol Flynn and Spencer Tracy. The places where Hemingway drank, ate or slept are a tourist station. For example, Hemingway stayed from 1932 to 1939 in room 511 in La Havana Vieja in the Ambos Mundos Hotel. That room is a museum.

The cultural visitor, looking for something else than a spot on the beach where to put his towel, will also go to the Hemingway museum in the Vigia Ranch 15 kilometres away from La Havana, in the neighbourhood of San Francisco de Paula. Hemingway bought the estate in 1940 and shared it with her 4th wife, Mary Welsh, his 4 dogs and with his 57 cats. Hemingway’s museum is in the same condition he left in 1960. Includes, apart from the descendants from the cats, 9000 books, 500 vinyl records, personal belongings, hunting trophies and his famous yacht “El Pilar”.

In 1932 a hurricane left the Hemingway’s yacht isolated. Gregorio Fuentes, a fisher born in The Canary Islands, rescued him. In 1936, he asked him to get in charge of his yacht and become his fishing guide. During 2nd world war, German submarines operated in the Cuba keys with the mission to torpedo down American merchant ships, which carried raw material to make armament in the United States. Hemingway and Gregorio Fuentes painted the yacht in black, then armed it with a machine gun and sailed away to hunt submarines. In the yacht, among others, was a radio operator from the North American embassy. From the El Pilar, they warned the American air force when they spotted a submarine.

Finally, the visitor will take a short trip to Cojimar, sailors’ village, 15 kilometres away from La Havana, the pier where they left El Pilar. Here the writer met fishers that used to fish with bottles of water, sugar and cookies, they would venture to the sea to fish with lines, and barehanded, some fish more significant than their boats. Gregorio Fuentes and Ernest Hemingway would sit in the bar La Terraza to observe the sea and drink mojitos.

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LIFE. “Like hundreds of visitors, I look out over the mighty ruin city of Machu Picchu in Peru. Below is the winding river Urubamba or Willcamayu, which in Quechua means “the sun’s river”. I sigh with amazement, as do hundreds of hundreds of tourists every day, at the sight of these high mountains and the most famous creation of Inca culture.

Although it is not so easy to get here, the number of tourists increases every year. In an hour and a half, a bus takes us early in the morning from Cusco to Ollantaytambo, where a train awaits to take us to Aguas Calientes, a tourist town among green mountains. From there, a bus takes us along a winding mountain road 700 meters up to the Machu Pichu entrance.”

In October 1943, poet Pablo Neruda was said to have visited Machu Picchu. According to him, the visit came to be a magical revelation that transformed him as a human and as a poet. In 1945, he published one of his best-known poems, Alturas de Macchu Picchu (“Machu Picchu’s Heights”).

How could Pablo Neruda get to the city of Machu Picchu, is a question that is asked spontaneously? Luis Nieto Degregori, one of the more critical writers in Cusco, has researched the story Pablo Neruda’s visit to Machu Picchu. His father, Luis Nieto Miranda, met Neruda in Cusco in 1943.

In a 2004 chronicle entitled “Neruda in Machu Picchu,” Luis Nieto Degregori claims that Neruda arrived in Cusco by train on the afternoon of October 26. With him was his wife Delia del Carril, the Peruvian writer Esteban Pavletich, as well as Uriel Garcia, writer and senator for Cusco.

Cusco, situated at 3,500 meters above sea level, was not the tourist Mecca of today. The city had only about 45,000 inhabitants, most of whom spoke Quechua that came to the Plaza de Armas chewing on coca leaves with their hats, colourful ponchos and llamas to sell agricultural products and handicrafts.

Cusco’s mayor appointed Neruda, the guest of honour in the city. During the visit, Neruda was hailed during a ceremony in Cusco’s theatre in the presence of representatives of cultural organisations, artists and workers from the area. Luis Nieto Miranda provided the welcome speech.

The Inca trail was an access road. Everyone who has passed it certifies that it is one of the most challenging paths on earth. The four-mile trail runs along steep mountain paths. The precolonial trail with high stone steps is maintained today by the guides. There are several archaeological centres and tunnels in the mountain. It takes four days and three nights to arrive, and you pass an altitude of 4,200 meters above sea level in cold air.

Neruda reads some of the poems. On All Saints’ Day, November 1, Neruda and his wife boarded the train to continue their journey to Chile. At the station, delegations from cultural organisations and trade unions dismissed them. Nieto Digregori claims that the local press did not inform about the poet’s visit to Machu Picchu. That trip must have taken place between Wednesday, October 27 and Saturday, October 30, 1943.

“On inaccessible paths and on ridge ridges, we came up to the lost city: Machu Picchu.” (Neruda, Condé Sur Iton, January 1972). “We got there on horseback. At that time, there was no road. From above, I could see the old stone buildings, surrounded by the high, green mountains of the Andes ”(Neruda, I confess I lived: memories, 1975).
Esteban Pavletich (1906-1981), a Peruvian writer, organised Neruda’s trip to Machu Picchu. Pavletich was 37 years old at this time and had the experience of climbing mountains after joining César Sandinos and Farabundo Martí’s guerrillas in Nicaragua in the late 1920s.

The mystery remains. How did Pablo Neruda come up to Machu Picchu? One way to get to Machu Picchu was via Aguas Calientes, where the train has been going since 1934. From there, the trip went up on foot or on horseback. That was probably the road Neruda took. But it was not until 1948 that the winding road from Aguas Calientes was opened up to Machu Picchu, the so-called Hiram Bingham’s road. And it was not until 1950 that Machu Picchu was opened to tourists.

The Inca trail was an access road. Everyone who has passed it certifies that it is one of the most challenging paths on earth. The four-mile trail runs along steep mountain paths. The precolonial trail with high stone steps is maintained today by the guides. There are several archaeological centres and tunnels in the mountain. It takes four days and three nights to arrive, and you pass an altitude of 4,200 meters above sea level in cold air.

This is heaven. Altitude sickness can cause headaches, dizziness, lack of appetite and difficulty sleeping and can have complicated consequences. You have to prepare physically, and it is important to drink a lot of tea of coca leaves. It is an adventurous route. The day we visited Machu Picchu it started to rain.

We took the bus down to Aguas Calientes, and before we drank a Pisco Sour, it started raining with lightning and thunderous thunder. From the terrace of the restaurant, we saw how American, German, Italian, French and Spanish tourists continued to pour into Machu Picchu. No one goes astray anymore; everyone is well informed with the help of map and GPS in their iPhones. All are equipped with rain cover, hat and boots.

The journey to Macchu Picchu is still an unpredictable adventure to this day, also for well-trained tourists who travel a safer route than the Inca Trail. Pablo Neruda was not an Indiana Jones. Neruda was an urban bohemian dandy. He wasn´t a rock climber.
Could Neruda really have made it to Machu Picchu during a four-day ride? I haven’t been able to confirm that.

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LITERATURE. A Swedish emigrant travels back to Sweden to work on a book and ends up writing another book – about pornography, poetry, foreignness and Lars Norén. Born in Lund, Sweden, Johannes Göransson now lives in South Bend, Indiana, where he teaches at the University of Notre Dame. He’s the author of seven books, including The Sugar Book and Transgressive Circulations: Essays on Translation, and the translator of many Swedish poets, including Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund and Helena Boberg. POETRY AGAINST ALL is forthcoming this spring from Tarpaulin Sky Press.

from POETRY AGAINST ALL (a diary)

The photographs of Woodman and Bellmer both take place in the aftermath. In a private space, the photograph both registers the crime and somehow is the crime, the poison. It taints the space by turning it into Art, images, corpses. Art as murder mysteries that are never solved. The corpse makes the setting baroque. The atmosphere is always overwhelming.

What I love about murder mysteries are the crime scenes. All those disparate objects brought together in one scene is like a surrealist assemblage. They have a mysterious atmosphere, in which the killer lurks. To solve the crime means to create a narrative that makes sense of the assemblage, removes its mystery. The narrative clears the atmosphere, turns the killer into a person who can be prosecuted, establishes the guilt (in the interiority of the killer or in wider political conflict) through causality. I’m not interested in guilt. That’s about balancing the accounts. Balancing the account is the opposite of art. Art should be ravishing images.

Henning Mankell’s Wallander mysteries have the most evocative crime scenes: swans set on fire, a girl sets herself on fire in a rape field, a group of dead young people dressed in 17^th century garb. Wallander is capable of finding the killers because he loves opera. Because he’s an alcoholic, a diabetic, coming apart. His body is vulnerable to art and intoxication, it is breaking down.

Wallander’s father is similar to Wallander: he’s tainted by art. He’s an artist who keeps repeating the same painting – an idiot Warhol (or the idiot Warhol always liked to pretend he was) – as if he had no memory. By the end of the series the father is dead, the daughter has taken Wallander’s place as detective and Wallander has Alzheimer’s, the narrative disappearing again. The parasite of art has used up Wallander – the man and the series.

It’s like the protagonist in Stalker: art’s forbidden zone has turned his hair gray in patches and has contaminated his sperms, causing his only child to be born deformed but magical. The relationship between guide, detective and poet evokes for me someone who works with atmospheres and mysteries. It’s why the main character in The Sugar Book is all of these.

The atmosphere is the killer. That’s why the detective only catches glimpses of the killer at first. The killer is not yet a person. The detective has to use narrative make a whole person out of the glimpses, the atmosphere, so that he can turn art into a crime that can be tried in court.

Never balance the accounts.

The logic of The Sugar Book has to be contaminatory because the foreigner has no interiority and in the Los Angeles of The Sugar Book we are all foreigners. We go to the movies to find a home but it’s not there anymore. That’s what the movies tell us. They lie. It was never there. Solaris.

Foreigners make the best detectives, but they also make the best killers. They have no souls, portrayed as flat. This allows them to move in the volatility of atmosphere. This is also why the foreigner is kitsch. I take a selfie. Insects and electricity.

There is no cure for looking at images. At least that’s what they would have us believe. The degenerate porn addicts keep looking at pictures of naked bodies. An underworld of bodies and flowers: The poet must be a pornographer. No the poet must make pornography against porn.

In Distant Star by Roberto Bolano: The climax is when all the fascists go into the photography show and come out puking. But we don’t see the photographs. We just see the effect, the vomiting. The exhibit is like a black hole in the middle of the book: it both explains everything that happens and refused to actually show anything. Of course the photographer is a poet. The character is a poet-as-pornographer. But Bolano’s book – with its black room at the center of the book, a center that cannot be seen but whose effects is vomiting – is a work of parapornography: the pornography vomits itself.

The word “tusenskönor”: The correct translation is “daisies.” Daisies. Ann Jäderlund would never write a poem with “daisies” in it. Her poems are teeming with thousandbeauties.

The words “baroque” and “ruins,” which play such a central role to Friedlander’s notion of Nazi kitsch, are replayed in all the discussions in the US right now about “ruin porn.” Ravishing pictures of luxurious ruins: Is it the fact that the ruins are mostly formerly wealthy buildings that makes the ruin porn luxurious, or is it the ruination process, the debasing process that is the ultimate luxury?

These ruin-porn buildings always strike me as toxic spaces. The toxicity of art.

With a stunning frequency, ruin porn is condemned in xenophobic terms. The photographers are accused of being foreigners, or worse, foreign tourists. I’m reading a discussion right now, where one accused photographer points out that he’s actually from Detroit. A critic immediately replies: “No, if you were really from Detroit you wouldn’t aestheticize our economic collapse.”

Not only is it only foreigners who make “porn,” making porn seems to make you into a foreigner.

That time D. [an “experimental writer” from Bay Area] attacked me for turning her book into pornography by reading it retinally and failing to see it as a very ethical “critique” of pornography.

Later she forbade me from writing about her writing because I come from “some place different.” I’m not from the Bay Area. I’m from some place else. A foreigner, I made pornography out of even her moral critique. I ruined her sense of agency. I made kitsch out of her experimental art. As Haryette Mullen might have put it, I was an “unimagined reader.” I perverted her book. She had throw me out of her Republic (because I was not a member already). She wanted to denaturalize me.

Like when S. [critic and professor] said I was “tossing bombs” into US poetry. Being sensationalistic. Being a flat foreigner. Being violence.

Tarkovsky’s Stalker must be one of the origins of “ruin porn.” The images are so beautiful – so “ravishing” – they verge on kitsch. The snow falling indoors, the reliquary of discarded objects under water. The imagery is so gorgeous, iconophilic. I just want to look and look.

You can’t long for a place that still exists. The worst is to be in the place and yet to long for it. This paradox transforms me into a ghost. No, I was already a ghost. Since I was 13 years old I’ve been a ghost. And America has tried to exorcise me. But not as hard as I’ve tried. I’m trying right now. It’s finally working.

How strange it is to be home. Seeing this place where I grew up is oddly similar to the sensation of going to Korea. The feeling of returning home and the feeling of being some place utterly foreign, belonging and strangeness: How can these feelings be so similar? Something between joy and melancholia. A head-on crash with fantasies.

I want to take away all my ties to this place.

Went into town with Thomas and walked around. Had an ice cream and sat on the benches on Stortorget. Nothing has changed. It was sunny in that dusty way that smells of lilacs. To write The Sugar Book I have to become a tourist in my own home. I have to fake my own death. Disappear in order to live here again.

I have to make this book into a riddle.

I have to throw away the key.

In Paul Celan’s “Paris Memories,” the tourists can’t breathe until they die.

The Sacrifice, is a vacation movie, a tourist film. It could be read autobiographically. Tarkovsky is on vacation in Bergman’s Sweden, when the Soviet Union returns with nuclear attack – return of the repressed – to tear apart the fabric of his new life. Tarkovsky had of course abandoned his family in the Soviet Union in order to dedicate himself to his melancholic madness, his art. But Sweden is contaminated by his Russian nostalgia. It’s like his nostalgia brings about the end of the world.

The apartment I rent in Malmö has a beautiful terrace but it smells like sperm.

Everyone in Sweden is talking about Lars Norén’s diaries, the second installment of which were just published. Most reviewers are negative. In Aftonbladet, Göran Greider manages to accuse Norén of all my favorite charges: Norén is like a spectator in a “spectator democracy”; he’s like an Internet troll; if Norén was the head of a country, he’d be a merciless “despot,” annihilating cities at random; he’s like a mirror; he writes “a kind of pornography for the middle class”; he’s “like an animal waiting to be dissected”; and, of course, dead, a corpse. But on the other hands, Greider acknowledges: “when he doesn’t hate, his language is the most beautiful I know.” Somehow “the most beautiful” can so easily turn into dictatorships, bleeding corpses, animals. Kitsch and its deathy force is all over Greider’s thinking. He might as well have called Norén “debased Romanticism.”

Music about sharp objects. A cutter’s music: I’m imagining that I’m writing this in a hospital. I’m always picturing myself in hospitals when I write.

I got an email from Sara. She wanted me to meet the head of Teater Mutation. The three of us met on the square. Went to a bar. When I got back to the apartment I started to write my own captivity narrative, giving the main character a son he keeps in a separate room. I think about Herzog’s “Every Man for Himself and God Against All.” Wrote about a Kaspar Hauser situation. Everything that America touches turns into torture. I’m an American.  Later at night I met up with Sara again. Different bar. Talked until late. She lent me her copy of Norén’s diaries. A big black brick. Like a minimalist work of art and/or a gravemarker.

I think about Hawthorne’s brilliant murder story “Rappaccini’s Daughter”: Raised in the lethal garden, the daughter is exposed to so much poison that she becomes immune to the poison, but it also makes her poisonous. I think it’s an allegory about Art. I’m writing a poison book about America: Foxglove, hemlock, thousandbeauties.

The Rappaccini’s Daughter Complex: I write with poisons. I expose myself to their harm. It’s how I stay alive in here. It’s why I’ve returned to the garden.

Joyelle wrote. Majken is babbling compulsively. The compulsion must be the pleasure of language. Something akin to vandalism. Language scratched the public sphere. The origins of expression is obscenity. My daughter is obscene in her language. Children are obscene. Poetry is obscene. But there are those who want to maintain the illusion that it is good for us.

Reading Sara’s copy of Norén’s diary. I’m surprised to discover how much of it consists of shopping lists. Like a caricature of the bourgeoisie, he keeps buying fancy clothing, it seems so that he will be forced to remain incredibly productive, writing as many as three plays at the same time. It’s as if he’s using debt as a kind of currency, a kind of meaning, a reason to keep writing plays.

The sugar is leading to an all-out assault: “god against all.” The violence is like an atmospheric violence, a plague that strikes everyone: Bodies strewn everywhere.

“To cut forth the essential” (Sept 2000): From the beginning of Norén’s diary there’s an emphasis on “simplicity” and “cleanliness.” He’s constantly cleaning his apartment. And in his writing, he “skriver rent” [literally “writes clean”] his plays – as if revising was a matter of cleaning them up. It’s a rhetoric of abjection. While cleaning his apartment, he writes that he is “sorting” out the junk from the stuff he wants to save. If he’s “sorting out” his writing, what are the parts he wants to keep and what are the parts he want to get rid of? Or is the diary the ultimately “clean” text: I do this, I do that. The sentences are short, often he writes without any transitions. Diary as montage of curt sentences.  He wants to clean by writing, but writing produces art, ie filth.

The name Reagan marks my transition into adulthood. A counterfeiter determined my life. A cold war shaped my art. I write as if poetry was another name for Berlin.

Gertrude Stein supposedly said she went to France to be alone with the English language. I went back to Sweden to be contaminated by Swedish.

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LOVE. The “discovery museum”, or Palais de la Découverte, is trying to answer that question with this unusual and fun exhibition. And what a better place to show it than in Paris, the “city of love”?

After having passed by a giant vibrant and pulsating heart made out of feathers, to remind us of the emotions that love evokes in us, I entered the heart of the exhibition. Love is much more than passion, though, as I discovered in the next room.

The English word “love” is vast and narrow at the same time. We may “love a spouse” and “love eating pizza”, but the significance isn’t the same, is it? The exhibition, therefore, starts out by exploring the ancient Greek words for love:

eros – passion; storgê – family ties; agápê – unattached or spiritual love; filial – friendship, social relationships.

These are then explained one by one through sculptures, paintings, teddy bears, installations, videos, poetry, love stories or legends. I walked through this labyrinth of objects, sounds, tales and music in awe.

Finally, we got a historical/scientific explication of the clitoris. I learned that it was psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud who “killed” the clitoris and it wasn’t until 1998 that the organ was finally given its rightful place in the female body. An Australian doctor, Helen O’Connell, managed to scan it and show how it looks using 3 D. Now some researchers are looking for the famous G-point that doesn’t seem to exist though.

Among the people representing agápê, Malala (who got the Nobel peace prize in 2014), Nelson Mandela and the late, so media exposed young Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, were cited, among others.

As in spiritual love, it’s a giving of self that counts in agápê. We aren’t just bodies, but a mixture of spirit/soul, mind and body and all three must work together for true love to flourish and deepen, as older couples can testify of.

Unfortunately, that’s a too often forgotten value in our consumption society where humans are easily objectified. The flip side of love is its use for a depreciatory purpose, such as it is in pornography or with sexual harassment, as has been highlighted in the recent MeToo movement.

The second part of the exhibition concerns the scientific side of love through the works of sociologists, chemists, anthropologists and psychologists, among others. It consists of doing tests and games to find out our level of empathy; how we react to online interactions and meetings; the consequences of lack or distorted childhood memories of parental love for example.

I discovered, in a short movie, that it’s the brain and not the heart that is the real centre for love. And what about the molecules and genes and their role in, for example, gender preferences? Well, apparently no scientific explanation has been found for homosexuality or transsexual penchants or for that matter for paedophiles.

The teacup was used in a video to explain what was meant by consent. Do you want more tea? No? Really no? Yes, do have some more tea… The victims’ apathy in many cases of rape was explained scientifically by the fact that it’s a bodily reaction to avoid heart attack! This clarification can be used in court cases where the victim is accused of consent when there was no consent but fear for one’s life.

Finally, we got a historical/scientific explication of the clitoris. I learned that it was psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud who “killed” the clitoris and it wasn’t until 1998 that the organ was finally given its rightful place in the female body. An Australian doctor, Helen O’Connell, managed to scan it and show how it looks using 3 D. Now some researchers are looking for the famous G-point that doesn’t seem to exist though.

Apparently, we all have similar sexual organs until 8 weeks old foetuses before the genders split in two to evolve into a girl or a boy. Unfortunately still 200 million girls worldwide have had their clitoris cut off (and sometimes been sewn together). Genital mutilations are common in many parts of the world, mainly in Africa and in parts of the Middle East. It’s part of the “honour” system in patriarchal systems.

This exhibition is mostly made for adolescents and young adults who discover their sexuality. It covers many essential areas especially in France where very little on this subject is taught in the schools. The classes present, with giggling girls and boys, seemed to enjoy it. But even adults can appreciate and learn from it.

Love encompasses a wide range of feelings, of dedication or lack thereof. The joy or, on the contrary, the traumas that it entails, show the importance of love and trust. “Love your neighbour as yourself”, the second command in the Bible, was a profound statement and is at the basis of the Human Rights Declaration.

Love, in its broader sense, is the glue that binds humans living together, whether in an opened and democratic society that claims gender equality or within a family and among friends. The lack of it can also destroy society as we’ve seen during Stalin’s purges in the former Soviet Union, Hitler’s holocaust, Mao’s cultural revolution to mention just a few.

Fortunately, some inscrutability still remains about finding the scientific answers for love and gender. Everything can’t be explained by genes or molecules as yet, which I am grateful for. Because what’s love without it’s mysteries?

If you can’t make it for Valentines, don’t worry; the exhibition is on until the end of August 2020 and Paris remains the City of Love par excellence!

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LIFE. On Sunday, 25 April 1965, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, a 66-year-old, got off a plane at Lima’s international airport. He was accompanied by his student, the educated, young and beautiful María Esther Vázquez, 27. They stayed at Hotel Bolivar, Plaza San Martín, in the historic centre of Lima.

On Monday Borges gave a press conference. He admitted that he knew little about Peruvian literature. In the traditional Café de Los Huérfanos, which still exists and where the speciality is sweet anise bread, Borges had a coffee with numerous writers. Then he visited the ‘Gold of Peru’ exhibition at the Museum of Art on the Paseo Colón.

The following morning Borges spoke at the National University about ‘The Metaphor’, one of his favourite subjects.  On Wednesday, 28 April, Borges and María Esther Vásquez travelled by plane to Cusco. In Cusco, he was taken to see the Stone of the Twelve Angles on Calle Hatunrumiyoq. The stone is a cultural heritage of Peru – the base previously held the palace of Inca Roca and now supports the Archbishop’s Palace.

From Cusco, they travelled on the small train to Aguas Calientes and then by bus to the terraces of Machu Picchu. Borges, erect, almost blind but active, swaying like a wild boar and leaning on his bamboo stick, approached the terraces as María Esther was telling him what she saw. They took the classic photo with the citadel behind them.

Jorge Luis Borges was dressed in a khaki suit. María Kodama wore a two-piece suit. At the airport, he was received by a group of students as if he were a Beatle. They settled in Cesar’s hotel in Miraflores. Borges gave numerous interviews at honorary dinners with writers and finally at critical academic events, such as the reception of the Honoris Causa Doctorate from the rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, José Tola Pasquel.

Maybe at that moment, Borges understood that Machu Picchu had nothing to do with him. Alternatively, perhaps he imagined it as a maze of stones, a large circular space where a lion and his hunter were hopelessly dead. María Esther Vásquez explained later:

‘Borges could be moved by the sound of a verse or the poetic cadence of a phrase, but the feeling of the terraces of the pre-Columbian past, so close to the sky, did not stir his aesthetic passion. I never saw him more politely bored.’

The ruins of Machu Picchu did not dazzle him. On Friday, 30 April 1965, Borges left Peru. He would not remember those five days, but he went back. On 21 November 1978, the Argentine writer landed in Lima again. By now he was 79 years old and accompanied by his friend and personal assistant, María Kodama. She was 41 years old but had the face of a teenager.

Jorge Luis Borges was dressed in a khaki suit. María Kodama wore a two-piece suit. At the airport, he was received by a group of students as if he were a Beatle. They settled in Cesar’s hotel in Miraflores. Borges gave numerous interviews at honorary dinners with writers and finally at critical academic events, such as the reception of the Honoris Causa Doctorate from the rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, José Tola Pasquel.

On Friday, 24 November, they flew to Cusco. If Borges did not like Machu Picchu, why would he return? Well, he liked paradoxes. In Lima, Peruvian writer and journalist Alfredo Barnechea asked Borges a precise question:

‘Why do you go to Machu Picchu?’

Borges responded politely:

‘There are two reasons. First, I want to see Cusco again, I know how much it impressed me, and I know that now, although I cannot see it, I will believe to see it. And then I want María Kodama to see Machu Picchu.’

Borges arrived in the town of Aguas Calientes affected by altitude sickness, which is not unusual for a 79-year-old man. The lack of air affected him. He got on the bus that climbed the hill to the sanctuary. The entrance to the ruins was full of tourists waiting for their turn to enter Machu Picchu.

In 1946 the first hotel was created there. In the hotel lobby, the pale Borges sat silently and motionless in an armchair, drinking coca tea under the supervision of María Kodama. Borges was not impressed. Back in Cusco, he got excited about the history of an old house, a relic. He visited Casa Cabrera, a pre-Columbian art museum, near the Plaza de Armas. Borges mentioned that Cabrera was one of his ancestors. The Spanish conqueror Jerónimo de Cabrera (1528-1574) had lived in Cusco, and his house is a museum today. Cabrera left Cusco and founded the city of Córdoba in Argentina.

Borges’s genius was a little petulant. In Cusco, Borges’s rancid soul appeared as a ghost, to vindicate supposed old kinships with Jerónimo de Cabrera. This is what Borges said:

‘Jerónimo de Cabrera was one of the thousands of my ancestors. The Peruvians took me to their house in Cusco. It was strange for me to think that from that house, Jerome had left Cusco, never to return.’

On the morning of Sunday, 26 November, he flew to Buenos Aires. In 1986 Borges married María Kodama in Geneva and died two months later.

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LIFE. Why do people start truly valuing what they love when things deteriorate or worse yet when they lose them entirely? People are more motivated to move away from something they dislike and not towards something better. Consequently, it makes them have a scarcity mindset and focus on the negative. This can be explained by years of evolution because we needed to look out for danger and adverse outcomes to survive for centuries.

However, things have changed; our limbic brain doesn’t have to rule any longer, and yet we let it control us in many ways. What people don’t fully realize is that it’s much simpler, more enjoyable, and productive to have an abundant mindset and create, not force, and take. With creativity and flow, more energy frees up for enhancement.

If we act out of fear, control, and desire to overpower, the energy it unleashes will eventually turn into a destructive force, which will inevitably lead to resistance and deterioration. Unfortunately, that’s what’s happening to our planet now. If we, as human beings, learned to perceive and act out of constructive, creative, and preservative energy, our existence would be fruitful, not destructive.

In other words, if we thought about the consequences of our actions and moved toward abundance, it would be beneficial for all. Unfortunately, we prefer comfort to common sense, selfishness to sharing, and to appreciate things once they are about to be lost.

When we value life, we start to appreciate all living things because they all begin to matter. Then we notice how our actions influence the world, and if we carefully thought about and attempted to feel through what the world is experiencing, we would not complete mindless activities.

And that’s how we develop in general. We grow and improve out of pain and trauma and not out love and contentment. We look for help when things are bad, not when they are good. Why are we driven by suffering so much? Drama attracts and entices people more than reality. Do you often hear people saying, “my life is so great that I’m thinking of ways to make it even better?”

I believe that things will start to change and shift when all of us look at how we live our own lives. Can we be content with what we have and learn to cherish it? The secret is to live out each moment consciously, to learn to find pleasure in small, everyday routine, and be content with yourself while completing tasks. It’s being not doing that makes us happy, being there for yourself and others, experiencing what it is to be human, and learning to appreciate life.

When we value life, we start to appreciate all living things because they all begin to matter. Then we notice how our actions influence the world, and if we carefully thought about and attempted to feel through what the world is experiencing, we would not complete mindless activities.

People need to start viewing mistakes as lessons so that humankind has a chance to take history seriously enough not to repeat it. And what history taught us is that jealousy, hate, anger, and forceful aggression only bring more resistance and destruction in the end.

We all need to ask ourselves, “Is what I am doing right now benefiting me and my environment?” Whether we want it or not, everything is interdependent and connected, and you can’t view yourself separately from the environment. Start with your way of life, what purpose do you serve in this world, and then decide whether your actions align with who you want to be.

The post What drives change? first appeared on Opulens.

POETRY. Ann Jäderlund first became famous in Sweden in the late 80s and early 90s with a pair of books that blended pastoral imagery with experimental cut-up techniques: Som en gång varit äng (Which once had been meadow) and Snart går jag i sommaren ut (Soon into the summer I walk out). The heated reception of these books placed her at the centre of the so-called “Ann Jäderlund debates,” a discussion about “incomprehensibility” in contemporary poetry. Members of the critical establishment criticized Jäderlund for being inaccessible, and as such symptomatic a new aesthetic that was gaining traction in Sweden.

Although the debate is now long over – and Jäderlund has gone on to win many awards while becoming inarguably one of the most influential poets in Sweden – the debate offers a way of thinking about Jäderlund’s latest book, Ensamtal.

Ensamtal, a writing-through of the correspondence between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, undoes the dominant model of communication that undergirded the original charges against her, her “inaccessibility.” Instead of offering “clear” or “accessible” poetry, or the common alternative, the embrace of “communication failure” (as in the early language poets), Jäderlund finds a beautiful, strange alternative approach. Taking a term from Ensamtal itself, I might call this approach “omklar” (around clear or about clear). These poems are indeed utterly “clear” – the language as “simple” as the poetry her original detractors advocated— but this simple language is made volatile by the small prefix “om”. Instead of imagining “clarity” as direct access, Jäderlund’s poetry creates a different model of communication, in a language of “about”-ness.

Jäderlund’s title signals the project of the book: We might read Ensamtal as the portmanteau for “ensam” (lone, lonely) and “tal” (speech); or it could be “en” (one, though to be grammatically correct, it should be “ett”) plus “samtal” (conversation). Either way, the title gives the sense of isolation, but this isolation is not so much a failure to reach a wider audience as space where language vibrates, where words are “about clear”:

If there is a theme or motif in the Bachman/Celan correspondence, it is the constant blockage of their relationship – their inability to communicate with each other or their physical inability to meet up and rekindle the original romance that sparked the correspondence. It is a book of miscommunication and communication failure. For example, this, in Wieland Hoban’s English translation, is how Bachmann wrote to Celan on December 23, 1958:

“Paul, I am thinking about your question, and this letter cannot write down everything I am thinking, only say something starting at the end. I do not think there is any answer, for you or from you, to this report; it belongs in the bin…”

Or this letter from Celan to Bachman from December 9, 1957:

“Ingeborg, my dear Ingeborg – I cast another look out the train, you had looked around too, but it was too far away. Then it came and choked me, so wildly…”

One letter has to do with the failure of “thinking” and “writ[ing] down everything,” the other about being unable to look at the other person and getting “choked” by this failure.

This “failure” is what John Durham Peters identifies as “communication failure,” the necessary result of the impossible ideal of communication as “direct contact between interiorities,” in his book Speaking into the Air. This communication ideal strangely both depends on and excludes language since we need the medium, but the moment we use the medium, we mediate the interiority that should be beyond mediation. Language both promises communication and ruins the perceived purity of our interiority. Peters suggests that this impossible ideal is a reaction to the onset of mass communication and new technologies of communication that allows us to speak or dialogue over thousands of miles in no time. He also notes that there are historical precedents for this paradigm – in, for example, St Augustine’s belief that the body pollutes the purity of the soul, or in Socrates’s anxiety about the written word.

In Ensamtal Jäderlund finds a way out of Peters’ paradox, looking to language not as direct, clear access, but as an “omklar” (about clear), poetic language, as she translates and transforms the letters between Celan and Bachman into a series of short, evocative lyrics. Rather than failures to communicate, Jäderlund finds in these correspondences a sparse, evocative and mysterious lyric that challenges the assumption of “communication” and “accessibility” by drawing its subtle energy from small twists and turns in the language.

Jäderlund’s title signals the project of the book: We might read Ensamtal as the portmanteau for “ensam” (lone, lonely) and “tal” (speech); or it could be “en” (one, though to be grammatically correct, it should be “ett”) plus “samtal” (conversation). Either way, the title gives the sense of isolation, but this isolation is not so much a failure to reach a wider audience as space where language vibrates, where words are “about clear”:

Häpnad

den är brusten

också där

rå och

omklar

omklar

den är brusten

Which I might translate as:

Amazement

it is burst

also there

raw and

about clear

about clear

it is burst

The language is simple, but its small twists and turns corrupt the idea of easy communication – it is “about clear.” It asks us to read the wrong meaning to words or to hear the echoes of some words leak into other words.

The Swedish language stutters falter, creates odd rhythms and puns. Many poems contain the word “brister” as a kind of model for how the words fail to comply with a simple semantic reading – “Lilla blomma/du brister” (“Little flower / you burst”) reads an entire poem. As if to stage this semantic non-compliance, many of the poems contain the word “ister” (lard, fat) instead:

Uppe på berget

finns träd och floder

och bakom berget

andra berg

vad floden vill

vet ingen

den rinner

och rinner

ister

[Up on the mountain

there are trees and rivers

and behind the mountain

other mountains

what the river wants

nobody knows

it runs

it runs

lards]

The breakages in language may seem like a lack, a failure – but it is exactly in those spaces that the language “lards” the poem, generating a beautiful excess in the minimalist structures.

Another poem reads:

Domna

ister

jag måste

ändra

mitt liv

[Go numb

lard

I have to

change

my life]

Here the rewriting of Rilke’s famous exhortation is re-valenced with the strangely active negativity of “go numb.” The “ister” here seems so out of place that it is almost like I want to say that the poem forces you to read it entirely as a failed “brister.” Nevertheless, the lard does bring something important to the poem – as it does every time it appears – an “about clear” quality that almost overwhelms the poem. In Jäderlund’s world, the things and stuff – the senses of the world – inevitably both trouble the idea of poetry as “communication” and creates a different kind of communication – refracted, intensive, weird.

Other times the “lard” moments almost ask the reader to misread the poems, generating poetry of the kind of lazy misreadings that often take place on line:

Ställ dig så att vinden

blåser på dig

från köket

köket är en kammare

som går på huvudet

I luften du är

gjord av luft

[Stand so that the wind

blows on you

from the kitchen

the kitchen is a chamber

that goes on the head

in the air you are

made of air]

As in other poems, there is so much movement in such few words, and the poem is vertigo-inducing. The kitchen may be “kammare” (chamber”) but it goes “on the head”, in my mind causes the “kammare” to carry an echo of “kam” – comb! Similarly, in the very airy final couplet – in the air are you are/made of air” the “gjord” (made) echoes “jord” – earth, soil. It is as if the pun pulls the body back down in the earth. The speaker keeps wanting to “fly” but the language is on the side of gravity, depression, and continually pulls them down.

Unexpectedly, to understand Ensamtal, with its translations, refractions and vibrations, it might be worth revisiting the notorious debates that surrounded her early work. In his notorious attack on Jäderlund from 1989, Tommy Olofsson wrote this curious piece of criticism:

”Dikterna betyder så litet som möjligt, bäddar tryggt in sig i sina egna motsägelser och släpper ifrån sig ett minimum av belöning åt den som vill löpa linan ut och är beredd att ta Ann Jäderlund på orden. De antyder mening, men stänger sedan om sig. De låter sig villigt möbleras med traditionella motiv och symboler, men sedan smäller de igen dörren. Genom nyckelhålet viskar poeten med flickaktig förtjusning.”[1]

“The poems mean as little as possible, bedded safely in their own contradictions and releasing a minimum of reward for the one who wants to read the whole thing and is ready to believe in Ann Jäderlund’s words. They suggest meaning but then close themselves in. They are willing to be decorated [as in furniture] with traditional motifs and symbols, but then they shut the door. Through the keyhole the poet whispers with girlish delight.”

As many critics, led by Åsa Beckman, pointed out, this conceit was misogynist: the poem that is not “accessible” is in a sense prudish; it seduces the man but closes the door on the man rather than giving him sex (her poem is a “tease”!). There are other sexist elements: Jäderlund’s poetry is “decorated” with symbols like the female domestic realms, rather than using these tropes for in-depth, profound communication.

However, is shutting the door on the critic that demands “accessibility” such a bad thing? Perhaps more importantly, why is the conceit of comparing her writing to moving furniture around such an insult? The furniture suggests the traditionally feminine domestic sphere, and the moving around of the furniture suggests a lack of meaning, a circularity; it seems to leave out the idea of interiority. Alternatively,: the interior is just a room, not a soul. So Jäderlund’s poems are the opposite of great (male) poetry of communicating interiority; they are moving stuff around.

However, if we discard these assumptions and read the quote against the grain, we might find that Olofsson very astutely identifies a poetry that problematizes the ideal of communication of interiority. Instead of the traditional idea of the poet as a great revealer of the soul, Jäderlund becomes a translator of language, a poet as “möblerare” of language. She moves the words around, and she alters them, she erases – she corrupts the great original.

Jäderlund’s poetry is mysterious. We can sense a narrative, a conflict. We may not know exactly who is doing what to whom, but the mysteriousness is what not only makes the poem interesting (even irresistible) and – indifference to what Charles Bernstein would argue around the same time in “The Artifice of Absorption” – absorbed in the way riddles are absorbing. We might say that the poems display an extreme case of what Daniel Tiffany has called “verbal obscurity”: “a resistance to understanding or communication inherent in language, a semantic condition allowing certain pragmatic effects of language to prevail in one’s experience of a text.” Furthermore, along with it, a “lyric obscurity” that is “an event, a speech act.” Nevertheless, this act is not only a negative, a failure to communicate; it contributes to the “charm of language.” I am charmed by Jäderlund. “Charm,” the Latin root of which is “carmen.” That is “song, verse, incantation.” Or, later in the middle ages, “a spell.”

[1] Originally in Svenska Dagbladet, but I found the quote on Rasmus Landström’s Blog: https://rasmuslandstrom.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/st-tommy-af-svenskan/

The post On translation and Ann Jäderlund’s latest book first appeared on Opulens.