Zoning in, zoning out
A trialogue
Note: When I first met Edgar and Jose-Luis in Chicago some six years ago, and then again two years later, it seemed like we had known each other forever. Three nerdy, studious, politically minded Cali blokes far from home (they in Chicago, me in New Orleans) couldn’t talk fast enough to connect the dots between us historically, philosophically, politically, and poetically. And since meeting them, the range of accomplished publications they’ve both produced presented me with rich materials from which I felt I could engage them both — at the same time. I proposed we try a writing trialogue in which the three of us would bring forth our most current, rawest thoughts on what might be the next great poetic tasks of our epoch.
This trialogue ranges widely over issues of metapolitical poetics of this hemisphere. It is a concerted look into what a workaround of US-centric poetics might look like, how to imagine paths into a larger and deeper plane from which to think, speak, and be. My decidedly historical materialist outlook, always on the lookout to “sharpen the contradictions,” is uniquely counterbalanced and contrasted by Edgar’s deep understanding of Mesoamerican dimensions of story, language, and understanding of time. Jose-Luis’s lines of thought split “open veins” (see Eduardo Galeano) at every turn, keeping us in a frenetic present tense but with an eye towards futural tenses that are just now emerging. He right away launches us into what it might be like to think from an “Atlantean” perspective, “new compass points for creation myths about the undiscovered continent” where “entanglements, miasma, clouds of speech-acts, word clouds masquerading as people, the dreaded algorithm that measures our footsteps on daily runs with a phone watch strapped to our wrist” might constitute “nuevo puntos de observación” in which a radical alterity might arise. And so, the three of us hack away at “Atlantean” while heaping a dozen or so new stepping-stones to the notion of The Zone, an infrareality (“from Panama to Alaska”) that might act as a metapolitical horizon to our poetics. — Rodrigo Toscano
Jose-Luis Moctezuma: Ikniutin, amigos, homies: let’s start with creation myths. Edgar wrote a children’s story about Atlantis, and he recently wrote two riveting texts on the Popol Vuh (the K’iche’ Maya story of creation that provocatively situates creation in colonial crisis), one a mirror/mirroring epic poem and the other a book-long commentary, and I might start our thread here by asking about “mythistory” (a term which ethnopoetics scholar Dennis Tedlock would often invoke, and which Edgar also cites in his work, to reference those moments when myth and history interact as equals in the creation of historical consciousness) and its conceptual relationship to uncharted territories, to Atlantis, to holographic statehoods like “Aztlan,” to “Coatlicue states,” peripheries and boundary zones that four-dimensionally we sometimes only see the shadows of, poetically speaking. “Chronotopologies” is a term that comes to mind, albeit in a different sense than its coiner, Charles Muses, had in mind. Rodrigo, I’m thinking of a recent interview in MAKE Magazine with Cristian Gomez Olivares and what you call “political terrains that are largely uncharted”:
I believe that living in a condition of split consciousness, say, between a Latin American consciousness contrasted against an Anglo (or African or Asian or whatever) “American” perspective, casts momentary flashes of light onto political terrains that are largely uncharted. I’d even say that it’s those terrains that afford us fresh vantage points from which to see, sense, something entirely else. I mean, look at the terrible situation that we’re in right now, globally. People are reverting to nationalisms of all kinds.
“Nuevo puntos de observación” (“fresh vantage points”) in which a radical alterity arises? New compass points for creation myths about the undiscovered continent? What is this continent (let’s call it momentarily “Atlantis”), what is this alterity (let’s call it “Atlantean”), and are they tied to anything concrete or graspable in our present stew of things? (Entanglements, miasma, clouds of speech-acts, word clouds masquerading as people, the dreaded algorithm that measures our footsteps on daily runs with a phone watch strapped to our wrist, etc.)
Edgar, we worked on nahualismo before (and perhaps we are never not working on nahualismo), and in your children’s tale I see the dolphin-nagual as representative of the uncharted territory, Atlantis. This radical alterity we call nahualismo, nagualism, “algo completamente otro” (“something entirely else”) is a refutation of the petty stability of systems and nationalisms and ethnocentrisms. In Plato’s Critius, and in the Timaeus, Atlantis arises from oppositionality, a war game of oppositions — and I’m also thinking of Montaigne’s essay on cannibals, on the beginnings of anthropological relativism, on the colonialist construction of Caliban as a counternarrative for, equally, the narcissism of Eurocentric knowledge and the (equally narcissistic) self-regard of Eurocentric subjectivity, abridging Caliban’s own pathway to enunciative self-knowledge — but perhaps we can rethink all this under a different lens, the creation myth as a “seeing device” (ilb’al, as it’s called in the Popol Vuh), an apparatus for new formal logics in our ways of writing. Do we still have creation myths, and what are they? Is there a way in which they are not, as Rodrigo points out about Latinx poetix in the interview with Olivares, “¿insistiendo en la poesía de identidad étnica?” (“doubling down on ethnic identity poetry?”)
Rodrigo Toscano: Órale compañeros. Let’s go. The way I am hearing “mythistory” is metapolitics. Take “Aztlan,” for example, from the late ̓60s to early ̓80s (when Aztlan, or the origin place of the so-called Aztecs, referred, for many people, to a Chicano nationhood that was narrowly racial and patriarchal); this “holographic statehood” reached some level of operability for a realpolitik. I mean to say, it was a formative myth for some “Mexican American” folks who went on to later diddle with or actually torque the levers of power. But I want to jump-cut now to the motherlode of all mythistory/metapolitics moment of our epoch. Do you two remember the dynamo that was the Italian poet and master confabulator of “states,” Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938)? This bloke was the poet who whipped up the mythscape (and attendant ritual practices, i.e., the “Roman salute”) of an expanding imperial Italy. This protofascist “seer,” along with his protoblackshirts (long before Mussolini’s march on Rome), invaded Fiume (a former small town on the shores of what is now Croatia) and founded the “Italian Regency of Carnaro” with himself as Duce (the constitution made “music” the fundamental principle of the “state,” was corporatist in nature, and enabled the daily shit beating out of any dissenters). Without this magical bard, there’s no Mussolini (by Mussolini’s own account), and no backdrop for Hitler and his juvenile performance art of the early ̓20s. All this is to say that these “imagined peripheries and boundary zones” count for a fuck-ton. If metapolitics is the seedbed of realpolitik, poetics is the mulch of metapolitics. And how many poets in the US right now look at it that way? I’d say not many. Most US poets begin with themselves (their personhood, their identity) as the sole conduit of meaning-making. But the problem with that deficit of a larger vision is that if one doesn’t chalk out a geopsychic speculative poetics (from the ground up), someone else will do it for you. Another thing you said, Jose-Luis, about an “undiscovered continent” acting as a liminal space from which to imagine a place momentarily free of nation-state machine thought — to conserve that space as a functioning ontology — I find that quite alluring and potentially very operational. And as far as “creation myths,” I think that in our epoch, the ability (and desire and aim) to toggle furiously between cultural “mythistories” and hard science (please let’s not be Western chauvinists and call it “Euroscience”) might be fundamentally necessary for the construction of a protoglobalist “Atlantis” of the future, but by way of Autarkic Super Zones (our Zone being from Panama to Alaska?). And the ratio of that toggling (an accounting of that) is where we might get to know our relative positions as materialists or idealists. Though the only border that might actually count soon is the ozone. Still, I don’t think we can get to “global” in one leap. (Capital is more than happy to provide the ride.) OK. So, here, early in this trialogue, we’ve uncorked a barrelful of terms. Let’s maybe drill down substantially more. Here’s a prompt: compas, convince me that the Popol Vuh (which you, Edgar, have given us fresh new insight into), is somehow presently operational to a change-the-world politics.
Edgar Garcia: Hi, friends — thanks for the conversation and the constellation of topics. There are already more terms in play than may be needed to start talking. I’m hearing two questions that form something like a Gramscian inflection point: where we are now and why we are doing what we are doing. Those two questions are: Why not creation stories? And, hence: Why poetry? Atlantis has somehow trickled into the conversation and I think that is my doing. I am interested in Atlantis as a sort of creation story that is simultaneously a story of catastrophe — a genesis that doubles back on itself as apocalypse. In that regard, it may be the only creation story that counts for much of anything these days, as we head deeper into climate crisis, ensuing migration crisis (as more of Earth becomes uninhabitable), and the resulting social pressure on our political systems to think in terms of enfranchised migrancy — to consider the human presence of migrant lives. Those human movements are happening, and it is up to us to imagine the worlds in which such movement can signify horizons and not hells, social formations and not population crises (yes, we must do it, or they will do it for us — the evil ones, the deathly ones). It is the most pressing question of the present moment.
It is also the easiest question to misconstrue in terms of nation, state, identity, and community. We are pressed to imagine some way of relating outside our normal frameworks of belonging, the quickly available ones. The pressure to push out of that is because some terrible new thing awaits its birth — as Yeats might have said. I’m certain you feel it. I can tell that you do by the very excess of terms with which you both have tried to describe it. We don’t have its name because it’s only now being born, cresting as it were, while also carrying its five hundred years of mnemonic historicity. “The Americas” doesn’t quite name it, for obvious reasons. We might as well name this new thing after its father, some highborn but root-bruised Tarquin. No, it just won’t do. Now, while locusts a-wing multiply, and thick be their posterity, to whom shall we turn for our great reckoning? We are still coming to understand how the shift away from exhibition value for our art objects (who even wants to be seen these days?) pinpoints a new stage in how we see. I for one have become fascinated by the materiality of paint — its dynamic relation to light, minerals, vegetable matter, and human movement (my body as I move it to create what was erstwhile called the scene of crime that is the painting). We no longer need crime scenes — we need no more detention centers, material enclosures, physical abatements, immigrant holding cells. We need invisible movement — freedom and rights to move physically and intellectually. That’s tremendously aspirational, and perhaps only highlights how borders get animated with their legitimate and somewhat necessary ritualistic power, but it’s how I feel.
And why poetry? Because it’s been telling us this very thing for as long as I can see. One of the most inspiring things about the Popol Vuh, is that it situates creation in the crisis of colonialism. Unlike the Book of Genesis, for instance, the Popol Vuh doesn’t make the world out of cosmic darkness. Its originary darkness is explicitly colonialism — “here in the times of the preaching of Christ, in Christendom,” its authors write in 1702, just before they say they will bring light out of the darkness, the sun from its hiding place, the world back into existence. What kind of creation story begins in the very context of its attempted subjugation (in this case, the deep crisis of colonial transplantation, exploitation, and outright genocide)? Quick answer: A creation story that sees apparent apocalypse as only one more stage in an older and outlasting process of the moving world, teaching us how to see its manifold movements. Atlantean indeed. It is not “change-the-world politics.” It is “change-of-world politics.” And there is tremendous propositional shift in that prepositional shift. It is what I call migrant horizons, but there are certainly many other ways we could describe it.
No comments:
Post a Comment