There are times when life converts us into the instrument of someone else’s disgrace. –a Diego Rivera doppelgänger in the 1943 film María Candelaria (Xochimilco)
Risk
On her twenty-fifth birthday, R told me that she’d always taken risks. She was born just after the end of the eighties.
Bolaño wrote a short-story called “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva,” about a homosexual photographic journalist, a leftist Chilean exile, who runs, who goes away, as we all do (except those of us who don’t go away, who don’t run, the truly cowardly among us), and finds a kind of Nicholas Kristoffian opportunity for heroism: saving some prepubescent boy in a Calcutta brothel from a barbaric, Hindu-homo ritual castration. Actually, I don’t remember if he even saves him from that.
The story has a famous first couple lines that, on the one hand, should be a motto or an amulet for a certain kind of leftist heroism, but on the other hand, cryptically, or not so cryptically, reveal the cowardice of every crusading leftist: “Violence, real violence, is unavoidable, at least for those of us who were born in Latin America during the fifties and were about twenty years old at the time of Salvador Allende’s death.” The joke of the story, which I didn’t get the first time around, is that the character ends up founding some kind of Soros global village for victims of childhood sexual abuse, and then they all get fatal Third World diseases (presumably because in his desperation he appealed to his “humanitarian friends” in Europe).
Violence, real violence, is unavoidable, except for those of us who were born in the United States in the eighties and who were about twenty-something or even thirty-something years old at the time of Muammar Gaddafi’s death.
Xochimilco
We were on a gondola-like boat, a trajinera, traveling through the canals and the chinampas, the small artificial islands, of Mexico City’s Xochimilco, which on the weekends is a party destination for international bachelors, but on this Monday was deserted except for the locals—who were among the first, if not the first, of the Nauhua peoples to arrive to the Valley of Mexico, before the imperial upstarts, the Mexica/Aztecs, the guys from nowhere—and except for the animals: the cats, the snakes, the livestock, the mystical (but with nothing to reveal) egrets who alighted at least once every bend like a sensuous premonition, like a prophecy of anti-bourgeois sacrifice, of anti-bourgeois excess, and the flowers, some hallucinogenic, others (formerly) edible.
Cortés fought one of his hardest battles here. Pancho Villa and Zapata found shelter here. A kind of pastoral-sexual romanticism was built up here by various generations of left Mexican bohemia.
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I was going to write about Xochimilco: about its pre-Hispanic history, its ingenuity, its improbable engineering, its failed twentieth-century waste management, its labyrinths, its archeological remains, its post-classical rulers, the various pantheons of its gods and goddesses, its early colonial priests who wrote books of medicine in Latin that brought modern medicinal technology to Europe, its last comprador ruler whom Cortés not only baptized with a Christian name but with his own name, its niñop(a)n baby Christ fetishism, the way its well-meaning or murderous (or both) Catholic priests gave an apocryphal (petty-bourgeois) patina to the deep spiritual traditions of its people: I was going to write from the perspective of a neo-Eisenstein thwarting his milquetoast North American sponsors and called back by Stalin, discovering buried psychosexual truths in Mexico.
But that’s all propaganda for History and I have no historical regime to serve. To write like that now would be half tourist-writing, half flâneur melancholia, and as Benjamin said, the flâneur is a spy for the capitalists, though he never anticipated that the flâneur would become an actual spy, he never anticipated Vice México.
Another difference: Benjamin’s flâneur was ardently fondling, with his gaze, the realm of consumption, only reporting back to his overlords out of longing for a lost paradise and an understandable need to have his aesthetic efforts appreciated.
The Vice México flâneur, like his Big North American Brother, is also “on assignment in the realm of consumers,” but that realm is the media-spectacle of violence (narco-violence, femicides, the occasional story—for credibility’s sake—about the violence of the State or about the violence of the global economic system against the Mexican campesino).
There’s nothing loving in the gaze of the Vice México flâneur. There’s only a moralist-salacious licking of the lips and a spy’s transvestism, which is the accursed luxury of the spy, but also the spy’s stock option and also his CV, the part of the spy that enjoys not so much his own duplicity but the libidinal omnipotence derived from being able to be and not be something he’s not..
The classic flâneur was intent—at the expense of his own soul—on preserving material reality: the Vice México flâneur views material reality only as an interesting obstruction, a necessary friction, to a genocidal void.
The Journey
We were going to Isla de las Muñecas, which had been passionately recommended by media outlets like The Huffington Post. We were alone on the trajinera, besides the pilot, the gondolier: on the way there we mainly talked about the day, we shared cigarettes, we asked anodyne questions about why and when certain damns were constructed, whether a certain flower was such-and-such a flower.
Gringo media sources called the island creepy, spooky, dark, fun.
The owner of the chinampa had supposedly found the drowned body of a dead little girl, and he’d hung up, in his little hut, hundreds or thousands of Barbie dolls or ordinary dolls, either to ward off her spirit or to appease her spirit: it seems that no journalistic source bothered to interrogate the difference between appeasing and warding off, perhaps relying on a pseudo-anthropological understanding of religion as succor, as help, as life, and at the same time as the cruel and frenzied defense against unpleasant facts (unpleasant facts such as little girls, such as sexuality). And then many years later—after spending a lifetime in between the activities of peddling his produce at the tianguis on the mainland, frequenting pulquerías where he was too shy to talk, or too weird to be talked to, and muttering schizo-religious sermons to a deeply devout crowd that nevertheless refused to heed him—he’s said to have drowned in the very same spot where he’d found the drowned little girl: the siren he’d always feared and always heard, with anguished longing, had come to reclaim him, to entice him to his transgressive death.
That’s the story, at any rate.
Our gondolier or pilot or ferryman—who did resemble Charon a little bit, but only in build and physiognomy, Michelangelo’s bronzed, chiseled, unkempt Charon with his long pole—refused to accompany us onto the chinampa. Not out of an innate Mexican superstition, an innate egoistic parsimony before demonic dangers he avoids at all cost: this is what we’d read beforehand would happen, in order to enhance our experience of “creepiness.”
He didn’t accompany us because he’d seen it all before, and he preferred to stick around and smoke and greet his fellow ferrymen, the few who passed by, than have to deal with the mercenary misfits, the profiteering freaks, the midwives of pseudo-historical violence, the family of the accursed man, who currently operated the island.
First things first, we had to pay them. More than we expected, of course, though later we wondered if we hadn’t paid with something more than currency, something literally invaluable, literally priceless.
We were ushered into a dark, foul-smelling cabin, which held the main collection: an uncanny cornucopia of mud-caked, half-mutilated, abysally gazing, mostly Victorian-era (or Victorian-derivative) dolls, in various states of femininity, in various states of Anglo-blondeness, in various states of undress. They all looked as if they were crying or if even more intimate, tragic fluids were emanating from their eyes. Like they were the empathetic children of La Llorona, weeping over a guilt that had been mythically, which is to say apologetically, attributed to them.
In the center of the cabin was an altar, surrounded by flowers and unlit votive candles, with a life-size, bespectacled doll installed on a throne: she was probably the least sexualized doll, she looked like one of those Turn of the Screw aristocratic children waiting for her governess, an image of high repression.
The nephew of the drowned man, who seemed to be suffering from late-stage emphysema or late-stage lung cancer, gave a rambling talk—a mixture of desperation and opportunism—that contradicted itself at every turn, and not only at every turn, but that seemed to be layered with contradictions: he implied that there had been many false stories spread about his uncle by the media, but that those stories were true if you wanted to believe them, that his uncle had never had any sexual fixation on little girls, that no sexual rites were practiced in the cabin, unless that was also something that would benefit everyone to believe, that his uncle hadn’t been a brujo, a wizard or illicit shaman, though perhaps there was something supernatural about the whole place, that tourists were the devil and that tourists were a beautiful contribution to his uncle’s legacy, that the drowned girl had been murdered or perhaps had just drowned, that she in fact was a threatening sirenic-feminine power, perhaps she deserved what she got, perhaps not, perhaps she got nothing, perhaps nothing at all happened…
A Digression on Evil/Bataille
It’s true ultimately that evil is relative, a partial view, as Bataille would have it, but it’s also true that the most recent iteration of (post-war) evil was the invention of a series of post-Nietzschean, anti-capitalist intellectuals who mimicked Hegel/Marx, mimicking in order not to fight and not to engage, who were the fretful anemic last-gasp imperialist rearguard of a moribund order, who invented concepts like time and the swallowing orgasm of totality, in order to side neither with John Foster Dulles nor with post-colonial movements, but to posit, on the one hand, pure animal expenditure (which Bataille identified with the Aztecs), and, on the other hand, a kind of Greek-European savagery miscegenated with a decadent aristocracy that should sit quietly looking at objects and support de Gaulle/Adenauer, critically, from a Fassbinderian ultra-homosexual Right.
What I’m saying is that there’s nothing about the Isla de las Muñecas that contains or represents the anti-bourgeois glamor of overfull life, in spite of its surroundings. The killing and raping of little girls by quasi-retarded men, and the hypocritical violent cult that sustains it, is logical within the global capitalist system. It’s produced not as a subversion, as excess, but as terrorism, from on high.
Outside Evil
We left the cabin for our tiempo libre. Outside, on an island smaller than an average single-family U.S. house, we saw something different. The extended family was off drinking in a corner, looking at the sunset, in my mind, with a menacing patience. Here there were more dolls, excess dolls. But these were newer dolls, thinner dolls with porn-star dimensions, Mattel, Inc. dolls, barbies. They were hanging from trees, from wires, and they were less dirty, less baby or even girl-like, less cute and less abstract. But their fates, their humiliations, were more pronounced. Here they were explicitly displayed with their breasts torn off, with paint-smattered holes in their (non-existent) vaginas, sodomized by gigantic twigs, or ironically posed with twigs that looked like dicks: which is to say, the very positions, the very mutilations, that women are left in when they’re killed by narcos or by the Army, and when they’re shown in the daily newspapers for the titillating approval or moral shock of the public.
R said we had to leave.
I said are you sure?
She said, I think so, I absolutely think so.
And I said, What if we don’t see everything that needs to be seen, though none of this should ever be seen…
She said, I know enough, I’ve already seen it.
Where?
In my imagination, which isn’t anything but a sharpened reality, a higher-pixelated reality, like an avant-garde Google Search that shows nothing but the male id’s horrific crimes, the crimes it can’t even face. I’ve seen it in my mind, my dreams, my fears (not fears for myself, but fear for my mind), in that absent space where I knew something existed but I thought maybe it didn’t, maybe it’s not exactly that way.
And I said, This is real.
And she said, this is more than real. This is the true face of reality, of men, when you think you’re celebrating your birthday.
Should we go?
Not yet.
You want to know more?
No, because if we move too quickly…
And yet an hour earlier we’d passed a group of young, drunken German tourists who seemed beefier, happier, and more aggressive than ever, returning from the island. As if they’d seen the very thing that allowed them to be echt Germans, Auschwitz Germans.
They’d been rowed past us, waving, gesticulating, screaming Hello, Hola, Hallo, and when in our natural aristocratic silence (aristocratic towards Europeans) we didn’t respond, one of them yelled, Don’t you speak any language? And the fact is that no, we didn’t speak any language.
Or if we spoke a language, in that moment it was an untranslatable language, one that had no echo and deliberately eschewed anything but sublime death, super-nihilism.
Schwarze Milch der Xochimilco wir trinken sie abends.
When we got back on the boat, after a long period of silence, we asked the pilot what he thought of the place. He said that it was misunderstood. He said that the majority of the people he ferried found it disappointing, wanting more violence. In the sixties, he said, the government had paid unemployed laborers like the drowned man to drain the canal for a sanitation project. They’d found thousands of skeletons (many of them pre-Hispanic), dead bodies, skulls, etc., and had displayed them along the riverbed. There were no tourists in those days, he said. Then people caught wind of it, the skeletons. The Mexican elite felt ashamed, but at the same time, they wanted Xochimilco to become a tourist destination. So they cleaned up all the skeletons. Then certain people caught wind of the island and they made up a whole story about a drowned girl. Sometimes the people who go to the island now have dark reasons for going, but in general it’s just part of history, he said.
That was in Spanish.
In English:
These are femicidal offerings, R said, as part of the neoliberal narco-cult of Santisima Muerte. They get fucked up and they’re encouraged by gringo narco-tourism. They come to reenact not only their own murders, with an antinomian joy, but to mock the entire idea of Mexican history, or at least Eisensteinian Mexican history, in which these developmentalist projects like canal-drainage and the discovery of dead bodies were part of a kind of new childhood, but also a new maturity, an anti-imperialist fearlessness before death: death is just another mask imposed to terrify us, as if we know nothing about it. And then there was a retarded pedophile, something out of True Blood, a man who clearly raped and killed little girls or if he hadn’t done that, or if he did that once or twice but imagined it mostly, desperately tried to suppress his predatory sexuality, and everyone around him thought of him as a religious fool, but some people recognized what he’d done, or what he hadn’t done, and they made a business out of him, because all of neoliberal-rapist male sexuality depends upon the myth of the retard, the id, that can’t control itself, and so they naturalized it, they Mexicanized it, they touristed it, they not only killed women for the U.S. government but they made a kitschy industry out of it.
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In the classic Mexican film about Xochimilco, María Candelaria, there’s a scene in which the kindly Keynesian priest rebukes the local extortionate mestizo capitalist (who won’t buy the indigenous heroine’s products, who won’t sell her malaria medicine, because he wants to coerce her into sex), promising to pay off her so-called “debts,” with interest. That’s how Pope Francis proposes that “savage capitalism” should be dealt with: by honoring the debts of the higher classes, with a pompous show of slave-morality strength.
Whereas the Diego Rivera stand-in offers to pay off the heroine’s “debts” by having her model for him for his “art.” When the local population discovers that she modeled for him (she refuses to let herself be painted naked, but of course there was a suitable body-double), they stone her to death, just as they stoned to death her prostitute mother.
At the beginning of the film, a nagging female journalist tells Diego Rivera that the public has a right to know about the painting that he’s hiding, and, implicitly, about his guilt: the apotheosized Eliotic artist succumbing to the post-modern mob. He agrees, with a pained look, offering up the movie.
South-Left of Sanders: A Suicide
Every Hollywood movie that needs, for marketing reasons, to incorporate an anti-capitalist critique, always makes the hapless Alex Baldwinesque villain guilty of “insider trading.” Like one of those reclusive Russian mathematicians who live with their mothers, turn down international prizes, and prove that every three-dimensional object with an abyss poking through it can ultimately become a sphere, a false womb.
In Steven Soderbergh’s 2013 film, Side Effects, one even learns that female hysteria and anti-psychopharmaceutical politics are engendered by sapphic conspiracy, by hedge-fund maneuvers even more nefarious than those of Martin Shkreli.
A US American’s leftist night—the kind of dead night a rich tourist doesn’t even bother to check out—is eagerly-anxiously checking 538 until it becomes clear that all the messianic articles you wrote for Salon about Bernie Sanders were, at best, exercises in boosterism, at worst, inadvertent psy-ops.
And then gnashing your teeth, because in spite of all your so-called pessimism, you were banking on some kind of petty-bourgeois apotheosis, a Moses who would lead you out of Egypt but still fund the Egyptian military dictatorship, with certain scruples.
A US American’s leftist night is the inverse, the other-side-of-the-day, of the Mexican’s leftist night, which is almost unanimously in favor of the election of Trump, or at the very least the revelation of the true face of the violent gringo night.
So that the Mexican left—led by AMLO (Andrés Manuel López Obrador)—can step up to its destiny, or fail its destiny, and make room for a different, more radical destiny.
For the Mexican leftist, Sanders is a slightly more highly evolved monkey, the one who cuts a sustainable deal with PRI: the quack who says U.S. psychopathy can be cured through targeted bloodletting, through orgone boxes.
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A certain type of contemporary Huichol/Wixarika art creates sculpture-images that have nothing to do with obsequies, or saintliness, or iconography, but only with dreams. The dreams might have a prophetic character, or an apotropaic character, or a surrealist, combinatory character: it doesn’t matter, precisely because dreams are indifferent to European-humanist categories, though they always offer guidance, if you’re ready for it, and they always represent, not the myth, but the true surface, the true skin, of the human being, a spiritual surface consubstantial with peyote, with the sun. In these sculptures one sees only the quasi-psychedelic remnants of a lost, but not dead, reality: dragon jaguars eating skeletons, amoral worlds consuming even more amoral worlds, an apocalyptic absolute absence of sentimentality.
And in the U.S. left one sees a desperate absence of dreaming, an impoverished mens rea, a totally debunked idea that, at all costs, something must survive.
But what should survive?
Name the very thing in your inland empire you think deserves to survive.
San Bernardino County, perhaps, but only with the penumbra of Homeland Security and the Trump card of sentiment.
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In an Argentine beach town, near the neo-fascist macrista stronghold of Mar del Plata, I argued with R on the night of the South Carolina primary.
We were arguing, surrounded by empty bottles of whiskey, about the best way to kill the United States.
Then Mario stood up on a thin ledge of concrete overlooking a thirty-foot drop and started to talk about how Marxists didn’t understand poverty, and he described the poverty of various pueblos in the Araucanía: how every poverty differs, even from itself: and how no one understands poverty, not even the people who live it.
And he said, extremely drunk and in a state of completely debilitated motor coordination, I’m going to kill myself right now, for no other reason than to prove to you that arguing about the United States is like standing on a ledge, drunk and suicidal, and pretending that it matters which way you sway.
The United States is a joke, a nihilistic-narcissistic joke.
And then he added his own reasons for wanting to kill himself: the death of loved ones, the disappointments of sex-art, certain intuitions that had occurred to him during the day that had gone exactly according to plan, the way one can organize life as if one were Guy Debord but ultimately one needs to give a little push towards the abyss, or rather one needs that push.
I knew at that point that Mario was going to kill himself. But I didn’t say anything. I felt an acidic self-loathing, a novelistic depressive silence, and a tremendous love/regret, in my stomach. Whereas R started to cry, but she knew Mario wasn’t going to go through with it.
I was the one saying a Trump presidency would be a moral catastrophe, and R was the one saying that she spent every moment of her day begging, praying, that Trump would become president.
I was the one saying Sanders was a piece of shit but let’s try it out.
She was the one saying Kill the Sanders within yourself.
I was the one saying that we should root for those kids in Chicago fucking with the Nazi-saluting Trump supporters and we should beware of them because they’re Soros-dupes of the perennial Clintonian strategy to create pseudo-New Left adversaries, Nixonian detritus. And she said I don’t care, because we can read novels as if they were written by masturbating extraterrestrials and newspapers as if they were dictated by jabbering, Leibnizian psychopaths, or by that Microsoft Lolita robot who became a sadomasochist Jew-hater in a single mimetic day, and we can fuck in a thousand different positions, and I can go to Dilley, Texas, for a week to translate for the mothers and kids who have been imprisoned in Obama’s concentration camps, and in my most hyper-real, somnambulatory dreams, in the sleep of reason engendered not by night but by political horror, I can look after a kid wasting away from tuberculosis while I see myself organizing a breakout, like a female Zapatista Moses, see the place burning to the ground, incinerating every last employee of the Corrections Corp of America.
But I never take risks. Risk is a boring militaristic game that gives you the illusion that you have something to lose, when in fact you’ve already lost everything, except the one thing you have to lose: the belief in chance backed up by a crypto-authoritarian Ur-belief in strength, in survival. Taking a risk requires an absurd conviction in the singularity of a human individual, when every decent human being believes in reincarnation, in one sense or another, and therefore has no need to lifehack or lean-in. (Guerillas don’t take risks, they destroy the potentates who manage risk, by unscrupulously breaking the rules, by relying on a kind of Maoist doomsday weapon, the noumenal destiny of the people: that’s the theory at least.)
And then I myself got up on the ledge and thought, I’m going after my dead friends, not after shitty prophets, sex-mystic reactionaries, or Popular Front Pollyannas.
I’m going to leap over Trump’s wall.
Post-Marxist Thoughts of a Posthumous Author
Today I read in the newspaper that in the neighborhood of Polanco—the citadel of the Mexican ruling class—a statue in honor of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, more or less considered the founding father of modern Latin American literature, actually depicts, or bears the graven image of, Anastasio Somoza García: that well-known paragon of the Nicaraguan avant-garde, whose final, posthumous poetic cadre was known as The Contras, whose lyrical works were destined to be forgotten and repeated, abjured and exalted, across the world.
Poetry after Auschwitz. Poetry Plus Auschwitz. The Discrete Jouissance of the Bourgeoisie.
The name Rubén Darío, the signifying disguise of Rubén Darío, is (comprador) bourgeois culture. The true image, the true religious-sexual ecstasy, behind the disguise is: death squads, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
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The first Mexican I met in Mexico City was my neighbor. He worked for the World Bank and we got a long surprisingly well, at first.
We talked about the literary virtues, the quetzal-feathered serpentine pen, of Subcomandante Marcos and he boasted about having the collected editions of the last fifteen years of Letras Libres under his childhood bed.
Letras Libres is a monthly cultural magazine, a kind of dead but bitchy monument to the psycho-political patriarchy of the poet Octavio Paz, which is to say the in-house publication of the perredista intelligentsia, liberal NAFTA sophisticates, the ones who’ve justified since at least the Tlatelolco massacre the violent suppression of every avant-garde, until the avant-garde became right-wing, gringo chic.
An imperfect North American analogy, mutatis mutandis: Leon Wieseltier’s New Republic, with the crusty Enrique Krauze as the purulent Wieseltier, with the high official Octavio Paz as the would-be Reagan ambassador Saul Bellow, with the United States as Israel, with Mexico as Iraq, with Mexico as Mexico, with NAFTA as NAFTA, with feminism as feminism, with castrating leftism as castrating leftism, etc.
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In Mexico, I started to think about how as a boy going through puberty in the United States who was a little bit left-curious I used to stumble upon Zapatista-friendly anarchist websites and how I was immediately mesmerized, but how I always confused the foreign, threatening words, Monsanto and Marcos, so that at certain points I would cite Monsanto as the template for the liberation of the human species and Marcos as some kind of carcinogenic metonym for the death-world that I sensed was slowly enveloping the other world, the lost worlds.
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The reason no Popular Front can ever be formed with Matthew Yglesias as its right flank:
Matthew YglesiasVer
ified account@mattyglesias
@jonathanchait What makes the Communist Party of Cuba a more authentic descendant of Marx than the German Social Democratic Party?
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11:37 AM – 23 Mar 2016