Part 2 of an essay that begins here.
5.1. Health and Its Discontents
Some of my best friends, and I’m talking about people in their twenties or early thirties, the ones with truly radical and self-sacrificing souls, have been so terminally unhealthy and non-athletic, or anti-athletic, that in the rare moments that we end up playing a sport, they invariably fall ill, they turn red or purple, they vomit and they take to bed for days.
In Buenos Aires, Mario and I joined a pickup basketball game right before he got on a bus to Santiago, and when he missed his tenth or his twentieth shot (not even coming close to the rim), one of the porteño kids quipped, no comiste hoy (you didn’t eat today)?, and afterwards we debated whether or not to take him to the hospital. None of this is meant whimsically, or humorously. I despise health or rather I worship health but despise the healthy, and believe the unhealthy, in general, to be victims of an organized social cruelty, whatever the social or class origin of the unhealthy person, so that when I see people of my age, give or take ten years (and I’m not exempting myself), succumbing to pre-diabetes, heart troubles, pre-emphysema, testicular tumors or varicoceles, pre-cervical or pre-oropharyngeal cancer—to limit myself to purely physiological disorders, to the pre-disorders—I want to accuse the guilty purveyors of death, pre-death, and ill-health, and I mean this especially in the cases when these friends suffer ailments related to their so-called “personal choices,” I stand up unequivocally for the right to drink oneself to death and at the same time to blame that death on someone else.
I stand up for a dipsomaniacal and nymphomaniacal thirst—as a principle, as an ontological act—and at the same time I condemn the organized narco-porno mafias, with their Puritanical veneers, that have perverted the Greek gods Narkē and Pornē, those ill and aging gods who rule over a kingdom of absolute pain: the last country worth visiting or receiving asylum from, home of the proletarian nomad, of a permanent red agitation or red tide before the arrival of the Revolutionary Army, a workers’ state after a night of insomnia and a warm meal, whose only currency is a cigarette and the memory of future caresses, whose national library is made up of a single book which is also an undying conflagration, where every night is Kristallnacht, whose diplomacy is nothing but subterfuge, practical jokes, and rain-delayed world warfare, whose leaders are only pretending to dismantle their nuclear and biochemical weapons programs, which is in fact a good thing if the world is not to succumb to a final barbarism, if something like a new détente is to be reached between pain and its opposite, which is to say between pain and death, or pain and the arms-trafficking demiurge who creates and exports and instantiates pain, a demiurge who respects no borders.
5.2. A Mexican Digression
José Revueltas was born in 1914, the same year as Octavio Paz, and sometimes their forking paths would cross, like tangled roots in a vanishing earth, in the same way that the courtier poet meets—in his steady stroll along the road of letters (which is actually the road to serfdom, though not the courtier poet’s serfdom, but rather history’s serfdom)—the foaming and accusing apparition of the infidel Minnesänger or the poète maudit. Or in the same way that both a courtier poet and an infidel poet, borrowing from Kafka (who was both), can imagine themselves to be surrounded by chattering, fornicating, incarcerated monkeys (though whereas for the courtier poet the monkeys are the zoologically regressive radicals of the New Left, hurling feces at the poor courtier poet’s humanist citizen’s toga, for the infidel poet the monkeys are the close kin or comrades of a man whose mirror-stage has been broken, shattered, usurped). For instance, in 1968, Revueltas went to prison for his support for the Mexican students, and Paz belatedly and dishonestly resigned his ambassadorship to India after the nightmare of Tlatelolco, and from the safety of his open air prison Paz lamented the fate one of the best Mexican writers of his generation.
The name Revueltas literally means scrambled, turned upside down, unsettled, turbid, in revolt, etc. It’s a good name for a man who believed in the inversimilitude of reality, for whom this inversimilitude was not the terminus of a bourgeois melancholy, taking spurious comfort in the sleek labyrinth of part-time paradox, but the opening of a rational dialectics of madness, a Marxist dialectics Mexican style.
His life, briefly: he was born in 1914 in the village of Santiago Papasquiaro, in the state of Durango, to a poor provincial family that arrived in the capital like a hurricane, a Jewish or Gypsy hurricane, a Promethean hurricane, his siblings establishing themselves as Mexican-modernist luminaries in music, painting, acting, dance, and literature (with stints of revolutionary commitment and premature, alcoholic, mental illness-infused death). He went to the reformatory for the first time at the age of fifteen for participating in a worker’s uprising. He was a member of the Communist Party and imprisoned twice in a penal colony on an island in the Pacific Ocean, which was the subject of his first novel, Los muros de agua (Walls of Water), about a prisoner’s uprising in which the prisoners’ feces become a prime source of matériel. In 1943, he published his second novel El último humano, a novel governed by an unrelenting pessimism, about the construction of a prison and the efforts of Communist militants to work with peasants in the wake of Cárdenas’ Agrarian Reform. He went on to publish more books, with equally foreboding titles (Dios en la tierra, Dormir en tierra, Los días terrenales), whose principal themes were evil, the indecipherable magnetism of the earth, the indecipherable eschatology of Christianity and of Marxism and the oblique bureaucratic shadows who acted in the name of those eschatologies. Naturally, in 1947, he was expelled from the Communist Party, a sentence which he considered worse than death and which he accepted like a penitent monk, and Neruda wrote an article about him, calling him a reactionary and an existentialist, which was as bitter a judgment as the judgment of the Party. For ten years he lapsed into relative silence, relative hermetic contemplation. Though his strictly literary output suffered (as if Communism itself were a strictly literary genre), he wrote some memorable film scripts, collaborating with Buñuel and with Roberto Gavaldón, for whom he wrote the script for a movie about a charlatan fortune teller who blackmails and extorts rich society ladies by threatening to expose their future adulteries. It was during this period of ignominy, of suffering, of oblivion, during which Revueltas claims to have immersed himself in a profound politico-metaphysical reading/dark night of the soul, that the Mexican and the Latin American Boom authors got their start (in Mexico we’re talking about Paz, about Carlos Fuentes, about Juan Rulfo), and though these authors all had varying degrees of talent, even of genius, it can generally be said about them that they lacked Revueltas’ heroism and integrity, or at the very least Revueltas’ capacity to go five minutes without the attention of the media, of the political superstructure, or of a celebrity sex partner, and that as the well-marketed products of the international publishing industry (and not to mention, despite their perfunctory leftist politics, as recipients of the largesse of the U.S. security apparatuses), they could be counted on only as literary personalities, and not as human beings. In 1960, Revueltas returned to the Mexican literary scene with a book of short stories that was widely praised, and the myth that Revueltas was a mediocre novelist but a great raconteur took off: precisely because Revueltas’ short stories, like most short stories, were intimate, microscopic, whimsical or melancholy, which is to say that they weren’t political, or as political, and this gets repeated in Mexico as often as it gets repeated in the U.S. today that the short story is democratic (which is to say apolitical, a confessional piece of data in a gigantic Leibnitzian NSA Super-Panopticon Computer), whereas the novel is the province of the Great Male Fascist: though naturally exceptions are made, so that a few increasingly terrible novels every generation, such as Infinite Jest, become required canonical fetishes, and even an occasional Elif Batuman, rehashing the role of the Jewish anti-communist dissident, even gets to engage, to widespread applause, in the reactionary spectacle of standing up for the non-egalitarian novel, since we all know we’re sick of this dross of democracy, we want a fucking jackbooted mandarin to tell us we’re nothing, that we’re phenomenologically and culturally empty, and that we can only be saved by a last-minute submission to the market tempered by a transhistorical elite.
Anyway, as I was saying, Revueltas returned to the literary scene, but he also returned to the Communist Party, whereupon he immediately published a book called Ensayos sobre un proletariado sin cabeza (Essays On a Headless or Decapitated Proletariat), whereupon he was once again expelled from the Communist Party, whereupon he tried to join and was subsequently expelled from various Trotskyite and ultraleft parties, such as the Partido Socialista Obrero, where he only lasted four months, maybe five, and a beautifully named Liga Nihilista Espartaco, which he himself took a part in founding but to which, like the Sparticist nihilists in The Big Lebowski, he was ultimately unacceptable.
Well, these were literary experiments, erratic and peripatetic experiments, prefaces to his last novel, Los errores, which comprises a concatenation of madnesses, including a Mexican pimp who wants to cease to be a Mexican pimp, who wants to live an honest life, and so takes advantage of a homosexual dwarf who’s in love with him, packing the dwarf into a suitcase which is taken to the house of a local loanshark, so that the homosexual dwarf can exit the suitcase and open the house to be robbed, and also a Communist attack on the headquarters of a fascist party, which is planned, not in order to strike a blow against the fascists, but to kill an undesirable party member with a stray bullet.
That would have been the end of Revueltas, a final Rabelasian send-off to a world which he’d approached, initially, with theological seriousness and to which he remained loyal but became increasingly hostile towards, had it not been for the Mexican student movement of 1968. Suffering from terminal alcoholism, terminal social ostracism, and from terminal homelessness (though his friends took him in), he went to live at the university and, in an unending drinking binge, he gave a series of ad hoc lectures, pausing only to pass out at his desk, bearded and long-haired, like Rip Van Winkle, he became a kind of saint or traveling (though stationary) Dostoevskian idiot to the student movement, and he even attempted to give a series of talks on what he called cognitive Marxism to the main council directing the student strikes, though they had to kick him out occasionally, they were talking about praxis, about the seizing of buildings and the reappropriation of wares. Eventually, gradually, the theme of his lectures shifted, from cognitive Marxism to angels. For instance, he was known to narrate a story about a group of angels, who were clearly the students themselves, who had descended to Earth and returned to heaven in a state of gloom and disillusionment, and God, always the optimist, tried to lift their spirits, saying that something good must have happened during their sojourn, and finally one of the angels confessed, Well, I did meet an atheist by the name of José Revueltas, and he was awesome.
The rest of Revueltas’ life was descent, darkness, and drink, and yet a kind of special beatitude. In 1976, towards the end, a doctor told him that if he took another drink, he would die, and he left the hospital and took a double shot of vodka.
5.3. Stalinists Make the Nicest Friends
Conversation between friends—between open-minded and generous people who have either vanquished repression or constructed a kind of libidinal and political dérive around, or an antisocial map of, the urban landscape of repression—tends to be free, creative, playful, and multitudinous. Nevertheless, in a depressive state (which is to say the bad reeenactment or the good reappropriation of the repressed state), one can always trace the lineaments of a conservative inertia in the discourse of even the most emancipated friendship. For instance, with Mario, I tended to discuss art, or rather the frauds and pernicious social corruptions of the world of art, and sometimes I’d steer him towards a political interpretation of this degraded state of affairs, and sometimes he’d steer me towards a more surrealist or metaphysical interpretation of the same state of affairs. And we’d talk about women, too, and about sex, but not physiologically or pornographically, though occasionally something comes up, some awkward detail, some repressed content. With Dani, who was his oldest platonic friend but only recently his romantic partner, I tended to talk about her field of interests, or what I took to be her field of interests, which is to say ethnobotany. So that often I would find myself pointing, like a gawking idiot, or an entranced Caliban (the first Patagonian anti-imperialist revolutionary), to some tree, plant, bird, animal, culinary-botanical specimen, etc., asking for its name. Anyway, for our asado in Pucón, she wanted to prepare a dish of dihueñes, a fungus that grows on trees, which apparently is rare for fungi and has something to do with spore disperal and with wind, with a kind of Beckettian noumenal asexual reproduction that has a flickering sense content but is also free of animal desire, animal conquest. I was the only one tall enoug –Chileans can be short, after all—to reach the dihueñes on the highest branches of the trees (with the help of a ten-foot fallen branch) and so I spent a half hour knocking down the ingredients of our salad, acting out the part of a soulsick Tolstoyan right-wing anarchist land owner, but happy, nonetheless.
And then, a few days later, I read a review in The New Republic, naturally, of a book by a professor at Princeton, of course, in which the author argues that mushroom picking is not only a worthwhile form of subsistence or indigenous praxis, but should be celebrated as a kind of organic metaphor for the new precarious labor force after the defeat of the traditional (macho, non-fungal) working class institutions, so that in the same way that the foresting industry destroys the supposedly patriarchal land (particularly in southern Chile) and allows for the “vulnerable” existence of the informal labor class of mushroom-picking foragers, the ravages of post-national capitalism should be greeted as a kind of revolutionary—if technically destructive—force, because it produces a more survivalist, mushroom-like post-working class.
The reviewer of the book, half way through, after a thousand words of sycophantic praise, suddenly steps back and realizes that the author’s theory is pretty much aligned with the arch-neoliberal mysticism of Hayek.
Dani, who’s getting her PhD in bio-technology, has a more progressive view of things: deeply in love with nature—including nature’s Frankensteinian posthumous existence—she loathes Monsanto and the major agro-imperialist companies. At the same time, she demands the socialization of food technology. Which is to say that for her, a mushroom is a mushroom, and not a reactionary metaphor. But if we’re to stick to metaphors, it’s useful to remember that the so-called young Marx (personally, I side with Marx, the historically concrete human being, and I don’t vivisect him, as certain vegetarian American college students are prone to do, into made-for-TV generational miniseries) said the fallen timber in the feudal German forest belonged objectively to the peasant, and not to the landowner, because the peasant was like the discarded limb of the living tree, which is to say the peasant was denied his own living social and economic sovereignty
6. The Last Regenerative Leg of the Journey
In Santiago, where everything seems more or less realistic in comparison with the rest of Chile, in the capital where reality starts to resemble its own parody (which is to say itself), P. told me, after a year in which we hadn’t seen each other, that things were going well for him. His girlfriend was pregnant (his iPhone showed me the swelling progression of her Marian belly), he was still plugging away at a system he didn’t believe in (but having come from a poor family in Santiago, he had no choice but to act out his belief in it, or rather he had a choice but didn’t want to face that choice, which presumably no one can blame him for), and his medical tourism company was going to take off sooner or later. When I brought up the organ harvesting rings that mined the poorest and youngest citizens of Chile, or even the Catholic Church’s opportunistic exploitation of certain children who’ve died waiting for organ transplants—priests visiting them on their death beds and afterwards planting fake miracles at their graves, starting up Facebook sites for them, trying to get them canonized—he said that he knew the Church was the scum of society, second only to the Church’s lifeblood, Capital.
L., after a year in which we hadn’t seen each other, also said that things were going well for her, though she was less psychotic about it, it was clear things weren’t going well for her, because she was constantly breaking down in tears. She was going in for a career in the tourism industry (she had the bubbly personality of a Texas cheerleader, though I’m just talking about her personality, not about her actual being, and in fact her English was nearly flawless, if a little hysterical, since she’d spent a few years living in Texas during high school, with evangelical families, she herself being from an evangelical family: in Texas she got herself into various exploitative situations, toggling between families that wanted to use her as an unpaid sex worker and “better families” that only wanted to use her as an unpaid household worker). She was working at a tourism company in the Gran Costanera Tower (980 feet in the air, the tallest building in Latin America), where she’d recently become a Youtube star, of sorts, for her unwavering courage and poise during the most recent earthquake, sheperding panicky tourists through their fear with a relentless good humor, a discourse about the history of earthquakes in Chile (a tragic history, but in her telling a picturesque history). But despite her good work and her possible job opportunities with certain North American tourism firms, she’d run into trouble with her boss for trying to organize the workers—and imagining L., a more or less easy-going and non-radical twenty-something woman, who loves nothing more than salsa dancing on the weekends and a good faith effort towards the social body, “organizing the workers” is radical, if not preposterous, in itself—against the exploitative and deleterious effects of the working conditions in this supposedly glamorous tower, where the rapid velocity towards a high altitutde (repeated eight to ten times a day) causes health complications ranging from nose bleeds to nausea, vertigo, chronic fatigue, insomnia and difficult sleep, cognitive difficulties, irregular heart beat, pulmonary complications, and even, in the worst cases, ischemic stroke and miscarriage. Her boss’s response was basically that in a country run on the neoliberal logic of overwork and sickness and the mocking of workers’ rights, she was barking up the wrong tree.
6.1. Return to an Uninhabitable Land
The bus ride from Santiago to Buenos Aires was delayed by two days due to a storm that later hit Mexico. It was supposed to take eighteen hours and ended up taking twenty-six hours, which was not so much a result of the poor conditions of the wending and abyssal roads—which threatened a spectacular death at every turn, particularly due to the trucks transporting cyonide and other dangerous mining materials at the behest of war criminals/mining magnates/Zionist Nazi-collaborating cocksuckers like Peter Munk (of Barrick Gold) —but to the sluggish angry vigilance of the Chilean and Argentinian gendarmerie, who kept us at the border for six or seven hours. The dazzling white of the Cordillera, snow and sky, and the corresponding breathlessness failed to disturb the passengers. When we got to the Argentinian side, we stopped at a restaurant. The meal was prepaid and we were cordoned off into one section of the restaurant and fed a pathetic antipasto and a piece of inedible chicken that looked as if it had been starved in Auschwitz, though the truth is that fatter, meatier, bacterially and hormonally saturated paraplegic chickens are the true victims of the modern industrial Auschwitz. I sat at a table with a twitchy, chain-smoking, nervous kid, a medical student at the University of Buenos Aires, from Rancagua (the first major city south of Santiago, a kind of minor Texan regional capital), who absolutely refused to eat anything and who initially talked to me only about the various costs of basic items in Chile and Argentina. Also at our table was an old, toothless, but tough-looking white-haired man and his pretty (or once pretty) wife, a woman in her seventies with dyed jet-black hair. This older couple was extremely friendly. They were Chilean but they’d been living in Buenos Aires for forty years, which is to say, since the coup (he talked about his reasons for leaving vaguely, he mentioned syndicalism and persecution, unfavorable political conditions, but he never said anything about communism or about fascism). When the young medical student and the older couple discovered that they were all originally from Rancagua, they started to talk about the town, about its history and its neighborhoods, and mostly about El Teniente, Chile’s iconic copper mine, and they traded stories about their fathers and grandfathers, uncles, cousins, great-uncles and second cousins, and the different jobs they’d performed there, or how they’d started at one job and ended at another—the level of physical cruelty decreasing, technologically, but increasing, socially—or how the company had originally tried to play one sector against the other but how they’d all eventually banded together, to rationalize the imposed psuedo-technological divisions, how naturally the Christian Democrats, as they always do, fucked things up, though it wasn’t the fault of the miners who were loyal to the Christian Democrats, necessarily, but to the cooptation of that party, to the ideological divisions of that party, whose leadership was always indebted to the social control of the proletariat. But the political talk didn’t last very long, the conversation started to give way to nostalgia and after nostalgia to a list of the work-related premature deaths of their family members, most of whom gave way prematurely to silicosis or cancer, political disappearance or so-called suicide.
And then we split a bottle of Argentine wine—not included in the fare—and got back on the bus.