Life is what we call life but, even more, life is what we call death.
I
Then someone else went missing…
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I remembered the Argentine artist León Ferrari, who during the dictatorship drew accusatory and mesmerizing scribbles: an anti-linear metaphysics, a false calligraphy mocking the possibility of language. And the birdcages he placed over Christian images like the Last Judgment for the birds to shit on. And his obsession with the monstrous phalluses in thepornography of the Japanese Edo Period.
I saw many suns and many earths. So many they lost their meaning. Earth, sun, earth, sun, earth, sun, etc. But the blue light of night pours in like nectar. I am floating in a black lake. Or not me. A lover, a corpse. It doesn’t matter. Pale skin shining in the singular night in Lake Bohinj (Slovenia), her dark pubis visible. An adolescent hallucination, a forensic image for a dead detective, or a detective who surrendered to love, which is to say to death. In the sky is the visage of the wolf god. Time liquefies. There are infinite suns, but only one night.
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Infinite suns, fantastical patriarchies, sacrificed children. Every day is plagiarized from other
days, and the language we’re in (the one Kafka died in without understanding) is a bureaucratic
labyrinth through which we wander, from genocide to genocide. I remembered the Black Sun of
the neo-Nazi Chilean writer, diplomat, and psychopath Miguel Serrano (the same Miguel
Serrano whose name I once came to blows over one drunken night in Buenos Aires). Serrano has
a following all over the world, in the strangest subcultures, where hate grows psychotropically
out of shit. Mario told me he has passionate disciples in the south of Chile, among disaffected
youth, even among the Mapuche, some of whom are great admirers of his “esoteric Hitlerism,”
since he gave them a special pseudo-Aryan pride of place in his cosmology, as the lost children of Atlantis. He showed me a YouTube video of his funeral in Santiago, in which demented kids with dark skin gave the Hitler salute. He showed me a compilation album that was dedicated to his memory, which merged indigenous Mapuche musical styles with the National Socialist black metal of northern Europe. It was surprisingly good (there were few words, few that I understood anyway). When I left Latin America at the age of thirty I told Mario that if my life went to shit, if I was staring down the abyss, in five years I would return and take up arms with the Mapuche resistance. Not the neo-Nazi gangs, obviously, who have nothing to do with the resistance. That was five years ago. My life, life in general, has gone to shit, obviously. But I won’t return to Chile, at least not for that reason. Besides, one can kick off the people’s war wherever one finds oneself. Besides, the Shining Path might soon be in government in Peru. Besides, I’m no longer sure I believe in the violence of despair.
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Knowledge is a being that snakes, I thought on my last psilocybin trip. I was thinking about genocide and the bio-epistemic warfare of colonialism, which is only intensifying in our lifetimes. Though you don’t think under the influence of psilocybin, you’re overtaken by mycelial cognition, which isn’t really cognition anyway, but a kind of pattern that inheres in the universe: it can produce mystical gnosis in some and excruciating brain-death in others, it rots away the genitalia of cicadas, whom it makes sex-crazed, and in a way it does the same for us.
Vick’s dead, R texted me (Covid) (one of the new mutations, or mutants, killing off beautiful and young-ish militants in the so-called Global South). I shouldn’t have looked at my phone. I broke down.
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I hear the fizz of a gin and tonic. No, it’s an ocean of gin and tonics. I see Vick on one of the gay beaches he used to vacation at, in Uruguay or Brazil, his head planted in the sand, a man on top of him. His smile is a grimace of pleasure. The fate of memories is the grave, he says. And: this is a dream. But now he’s the snake that’s talking.
The snake encircles (ensorcells) the orb of this blue world in a primordial outer space. Back on Earth I see our stolen pleasures in a carceral dream. The ones we shared. Our lives were small, I say, looking on from the serpentine vantage of the cosmos. And yet, thinking of our endless nocturnal conversations, we talked about everything. Then there’s that night after everyone else had gone him where R and I are in a dark bar with Vick and his Mexican friend, Sergio. Sergio is telling me about the Kaczyinskites of Mexico City (though they’ve auto-critiqued and no longer consider themselves disciples of Kaczyinski, whom they view now as still infected by the virus of European Cartesianism, or cartesianismo cracker): the ones who commit femicide on the campus of UNAM for fun and to prove a point about civilization and the moral futility of the left. Sergio is wearing a heavy leather jacket and he chain-smokes, as we all do down there.
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Vick: left-wing psychologist who worked with victims of state terror and neoliberal social violence. Liver and breather of the oxygen of Latin American liberation movements. Survivor of being Black and gay and a migrant in a world that is designed to destroy people like that. Only to be killed by a virus that may (or may not) be non-sentient. A virus that is biological warfare, one way or another. Well, as Sofi wrote anonymously, on the website of the leftist human rights org he worked for: his enormous vitality, his acid sense of humor, the passionate lucidity of his mind, the inexhaustibility of his carnal appetites for conversation and alcohol and dance, etc. The two of them were beautiful together. Vick, a poor migrant from Venezuela (he was “a man of the left,” but he was an anti- Chavista, and he taught me that it was possible to disagree: not “respectfully,” but with love and solidarity), and Sofi, from a relatively well-off family from Lima (I have a vision of her father, the human rights lawyer driven half-crazy by Sendero Luminoso, though more so by Fujimori). They danced salsa together, and drank together, and looked out for one another. He went out of his way to befriend two naive, bedraggled gringxs and he stayed up with us talking and laughing in Buenos Aires bars well after everyone else had gone to bed. For R, who never thought it was possible that anyone really liked and valued her, this was an essential gift. He was an excellent, acerbic writer, but his conversation was better. That’s always the case with good writers. He hated bullshit, but he didn’t really hate anything. Even bullshit, even evil, which is to say the same thing, had a virtue in his mind, which was to make us laugh. His laugh was miraculous: sad, exuberant, and giddy, and like his voice it could go to any pitch, any fever dream. The kind of laugh that annihilates the structure of the world, so that we can have space for many worlds, all worlds.
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When someone laughs, you never forget it. Not really. When people die the last thing you forget
is their laugh and then when you die that laughter carries on into the people who remember you,
etc., and finally the world dies out in decrescendo or is snuffed out all at once.
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In grief: tears come first, then laughter, then ejaculation. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
All these things keep us warm beneath the spectacle of power and history. In the horrible 19th
century, a nightmare of a century, our families “toiled away” in various climes. I try to imagine his mother, his family, in Venezuela, but they are swallowed up in darkness. There’s so much we will never know about each other. We come into each other’s lives as strangers, as ineffable shadows, and leave even more strange and unknown. We know nothing about ourselves, really. We encounter ourselves only in the dark. It’s possible our own bodies are even more foreign to us than the bodies of others. And that when someone dies, even someone we haven’t thought of in years, a little bit of that body is returned to us. To do with what we will (cry, laugh, cum, etc.).