Inharmonic Incidents of the Rational World
Inharmonic Incidents of the Rational World
Ruminations on a photograph.
[The following are excerpts from a work to be performed on Friday, November 18th, at the Longwood Art Gallery of the Hostos Community College in the Bronx, as part of the 2022 New York Latin American Art Triennial]
1. The Photograph
I never saw the actual photograph, only the book cover. The image is a high-contrast reproduction, something that we have come to associate with the 1960s, mainly because of the use that some have made of that particular effect. It is black and white, taken in 1968, three years before I was born. It is the cover image of La Noche de Tlatelolco, the extraordinary chronicle by Elena Poniatowska of the student movement in Mexico that led to a bloody massacre by the Mexican military against university students, all unarmed civilians, days before the Summer Olympics of that year. The book contains a number of photographs about the movement, all of them uncredited— I surmise in order to protect the identity of the photojournalists at the time. Today we know that this particular image was taken by photographer Pedro Meyer.
It shows a number of young people, university students. They all are happy, chanting, laughing amidst a street protest. They are carrying a coffin. There is something incongruous about that fact, mainly because of the laughter that surrounds that funerary march. It is hard to believe that they are carrying a real coffin. It has to be symbolic. There are countries where the funerals become celebrations— like in Ireland during the Great Hunger, where the body would sometimes taken to a pub and a raucous party would ensue while further funeral arrangements would be made. But this is different.
So what is this coffin that they are carrying? It is the celebration of the death of someone, of something? Is it symbolic of the old regime the new generation is intent on burying, perhaps? It is, we now know, the preamble of something darker, the bright afternoon before darkness. Who of them in this photo was in Tlatelolco the day of the massacre? Is any of them still alive today? I might never know.
When you zoom into their faces, in that high contrast composition, they begin to look like pre-Columbian masks, like representations of Mictlantecuhtli, the god of death.
Looking at that image I briefly feel I am having a glimpse of the underworld.
2. The City at Dusk
The year is 1988. I am 17 years old. I read La Noche de Tlatelolco in high school, assigned by my history teacher who I secretly had a crush on (it is important to recognize those things). She told us the story of the student movement, led by the generation before us, when they themselves were students. The strength and motivation of an urgent cause was deeply inspiring to me.
Our teacher says that there is going to be a protest downtown to commemorate the 20 years of Tlatelolco, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas where the massacre took place. Me and my friends decide to go; it is the first protest I ever attend in my life. The political leaders Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Heberto Castillo, Rosario Ibarra de Piedra and others are there, walking down Eje central Lázaro Cárdenas, right beside Bellas Artes. The various political parties are joining forces to protest the continuation of the PRI and call for the restoration of democracy. They were the first competitive elections in Mexico since 1929. On the first hours of counting the votes on election day July 6, 1988, they showed that Cárdenas was in the lead. By 7pm, counting stopped and the president of the Federal Election Commission declared that the system had broken down. The results given at 3:10am declared Carlos Salinas de Gortari as the winner. Huge demonstrations ensued; one of them, precisely, on October 2nd.
The protests do not prevent Salinas from taking the presidency; however, we feel in the air that something has clearly shifted; the Mexican people have awakened. This period will lead, a dozen years later, to the first election in 71 years won by a candidate from an opposition party.
A few days after the October 2 protest I walk down Insurgentes Avenue, thinking of La Noche de Tlatelolco and the anonymous photographs on the book. That image of the cover I have mentioned, with the students chanting and smiling, resonates with me. The students all seem to have the same age as I.
The chants, the slogans, the rough guitars.
No queremos olimpiada, queremos revolución
Pueblo, Abre ya los ojos
Soldado, no dispares, tú también eres el pueblo
Students adapt folk songs like La Adelita, La Valentina, and La Llorona to include political lyrics that speak to the moment.
There is a song dedicated to the president Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, using a famous song by the children’s songwriter Cri Cri:
Di por qué, dime Gustavo,
di por qué, eres cobarde,
di por qué no tienes madre.
Dime Gustavo por qué.
This is also the time when I first discover the anthropology of shadows. On an overcast day, as I walk north on Insurgentes Avenue, crossing Avenida Nuevo León over the Río Becerra overpass, around 5pm, in this hour where the afternoon morphs into evening, I stop by the garage of a residential building and pay close attention to the chiaroscuro of the lower level of the modern structure. I have always had the strange, eccentric sensation that light tells stories, and that I have been wired to read the stories that shadows tell— or at least I want them to tell it. In this case, I know that this building was already there in 1968, and I try to imagine that exact place two decades ago.
Those are the same shadows of the image of the smiling students in the photograph.
What is it about those high contrast images anyway?
The extremes of light and dark carry a certain symbolism. The heroism, the martyr, the image of El Che resolutely looking upwards. Patria o muerte, Hasta la victoria siempre. The high contrast treatment comes back whenever we want to idolize someone— think of Obama’s Hope poster by Shepard Fairey.
Those contrasts are perhaps the best representation of social movements, of the struggles where it is not possible to be neutral. I then think that this is also part of being young: now that I my hair has started to gray, I have to admit nuance. I have seemingly forgotten that youth is lived intensely, where there are no gradations. Everything is lived in extremes. And because of that, it is youth that can most readily show us, the older generations, where injustice lies: they see it more clearly. That is what the students in 1968 saw, and their actions, their response, led the response of the rest of the country.
I ask myself where I am positioned within that composition of political and generational contrasts.
Chants, and slogans, rough guitars.
The city in the center of everything. Our unconditional love for that dark metropolis, a love that goes beyond patriotism. Our determination to keep hold of those shadows.
3. El Poeta
My brother worked for Octavio Paz — sometimes referred to by the Mexican literary community as El Poeta— as editorial assistant in his magazine. The soon to become Nobel prize was larger than life, unofficially presiding in the art and culture of Mexico.
As a teenager I read his poems avidly. One of them read:
My grandfather, taking his coffee,
would talk to me about Juarez and Porfirio,
the Zouaves and the Silver Band.
And the tablecloth smelled of gunpowder.
My father, taking his drink,
would talk to me about Zapata and Villa,
Soto y Gama and the brothers Flores Magón.
And the tablecloth smelled of gunpowder.
I kept quiet:
who is there for me to talk about?
What could I, a sheltered 17 year-old, speak about, indeed? I could only speak about the shadows in a building garage in colonia del Valle, my imaginary memorial of a 20 year-old movement.
18 years before 1968, in 1950, El Poeta wrote about the Mexicans’ love affair with death. “the Mexican chases after death, mocks it, courts it, hugs it, and sleeps with it. He thinks of it as his favorite plaything and his most lasting love”.
72 years later, we have to reevaluate that interpretation of death for the 21st century. What to make of it, after Tlatelolco, after Ayotzinapa?
There is a difference between the deep awareness and acceptance, even engagement with death and a lasting love. It is a pretentious intellectual chimera: we Mexicans do not love death, and never have; we are not suicidal.
Yet that interpretation endures, embraced by tourism. The Mexican death to those eyes is the film Coco, the Christmas-like lighting on altars, the artificial cempasúchil sold at Walmart.
Death is alive, it is there; we know how to speak to it, but it is not our lover.
4. É Proibido proibir
The day is June 11, 2011. I work in the education department of a museum and on that day my job is to interview, along with my colleague Lilian, a noted guest who is coming to speak to a small group of us about the work of a friend of his, the late artist Lygia Clark, who we were doing research on for an exhibition. He is a veteran musician and the cultural consciousness of the political left. He was a founder, along with other singers such as Gal Costa, who passed away this week, of Tropicalismo, a musical movement that merged pop music with jazz and avant-garde ideas, during the height of the Brazilian dictatorship. Upon being detained by the government for his activities, he fled to London where he spent a number of years in exile, continuing to compose songs and producing a body of work that is a symbol of resistance and inspiration.
When participating at a student music festival, he was booed by the students for the provocative aspects of his psychedelic, overtly sexual performance.
On September 15, 1968, on his second intervention during that festival, he told the students: .if “you are the same in politics as you are in aesthetics, we’re done for!"
On that day he sang the following song, É proibido proibir, (forbidden to forbid):
E eu digo "não".
E eu digo não ao "não".
Eu digo: é proibido proibir.
É proibido proibir.
É proibido proibir.
É proibido proibir.
Lilian and I sat down with The Singer. The conversation was recorded, but the recording might have gotten lost. I have been trying over the last few days to recreate the conversation in my mind, afraid it might be completely gone. Maya Angelou once wrote, “people might forget what you said, they might forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” And that is true for me in that instance. The Singer was generous, warm, relaxed, fully focused on us. He did not appear to have the attitude of a celebrity or politician who utilizes canned responses or rehearsed phrases to common questions. He discussed his relationship with Lygia Clark, as agreed. Clark, who is now regarded as probably the most influential artist of the second half of the 20th century in Brazil, left art at the end of her career to conduct what she described as “therapies”—experimental one-on-one sensorial body experiences that she would conduct inside her house. She would employ a variety of simple materials with different textures and temperatures ( a bag with pebbles, an inflated plastic bag, objects with odd textures) in order to unlock the sensorial potential of the human body.
The Singer told us that she subjected him one day to one of her therapies. Clark was very strict and dry in her demeanor —this is something that I have found to be so interesting about Brazilians: their capacity to be infinitely sensual and seductive, while at the same time capable to also be strict to a fault.
As The Singer was lying there, undergoing the therapy, which was full of surprising sensations, he told us he said at some point to the artist:
—“Lygia: I have a hard on”.
—“That’s OK, just relax”, she said, and continued her therapy.
The one thing, however, that I clearly remember asking him was about what it was like to be an artist during the period of the military dictatorship in Brazil. His response has kept me thinking over the years. He said that as an artist his role was to challenge the “rational state”.
We often think of authoritarianism as a deranged form of governing. Authoritarian cults are, as those of us in the U.S. well know today from experience, forms of domination that go beyond the rational; the devotion of its followers will evade any logic, truth, or reasoning. The emotional attachment forces them to come up with the most contorted logic to explain their unflinching allegiance to something that is cruel, destructive and sociopathic.
But because this aspect of authoritarian cults is the most visible on the surface, we don’t pay enough attention to what is really going on underneath: the machinations of those who know exactly what they are doing, operating with impunity and with the intention to benefit themselves and gain power. Authoritarianism is an art of its own, and successful dictators are calculating, organized, and able to construct and maintain a well-oiled oppression apparatus that works like clockwork. And in its laws, it can offer a fascistic logic that is predicated on cruelty, hate, and the destruction of the other. That is the rationality to which, I believe, The Singer was referring to.
5. Water of Life
In 1944, Mexican writer Juan de la Cabada wrote Incidentes melódicos del mundo Irracional (Melodic incidents of the Irrational World), a narrative that seeks to bring to life the world of fantasy and myth of the Maya region where he grew up. Now I confront a different type of thinking structures amidst with past and current events.
I do not want art to be the irrational escape from politics, in the way in which the Surrealists offered the seductive but ultimately pessimist method for avoiding engagement with the world. I know that as I look at that photograph, my own daydreaming of that moment may be a form of escape, the idealizing of a scene that could perhaps not be recognized by those who actually were part of the movement. I need to escape from the high-contrast romance of the past, the treacherous rationality of that history. I need to salute, but also, walk away from, that 17-year old who walks down Insurgentes Avenue, worshipping the shadows of the revolution.
But just as this is not a black and white problem, this is not a problem of madness versus lucidity, especially given that enlightened thinking can be equally misguided and tone deaf. I can’t allow myself to believe I am a rational adult that explains to others who they are and what they love, using structuralist logic; as The Singer point out, the dream of reason produces monsters.
I need to set aside the stories of the father and the grandfather and look at my own table. This is the best way I can honor those individuals carrying that coffin, celebrating permanently in that image printed on this yellowing, dog-eared book sitting right next to me.
I remember, once again, El Poeta’s poem, Himno entre ruinas, (Hymn amidst the Ruins):
Cae la noche sobre Teotihuacán.
En lo alto de la pirámide los muchachos fuman marihuana,
suenan guitarras roncas.
¿Qué yerba, qué agua de vida ha de damos la vida,
dónde desenterrar la palabra,
la proporción que rige al himno y al discurso,
al baile, a la ciudad y la balanza?
--
¡Día, redondo día,
luminosa naranja de veinticuatro gajos,
todos atravesados por una misma y amarilla dulzura!
La inteligencia al fin encarna,
se reconcilian las dos mitades enemigas
y la conciencia-espejo se licúa,
vuelve a ser fuente, manantial de fábulas:
Hombre, árbol de imágenes,
palabras que son flores que son frutos que son actos.
Night falls on Teotihuacán.
On top of the pyramid the boys are smoking marijuana,
harsh guitars sound,
What weed, what living waters will give life to us,
where shall we unearth the word,
the relations that govern hymn and speech,
the dance, the city and the measuring scales?
…
Day, round day,
shining orange with four-and-twenty bars,
all one single yellow sweetness!
Mind embodies in forms,
the two hostile become one,
the conscience-mirror liquifies,
once more a fountain of legends:
man, tree of images,
words which are flowers become fruits which are deeds.
—
I reflect on how all my life I have tried to escape from the lyricism, the poetical absolutism and categorical thinking of El Poeta, and yet, in spite of time and geography, I continue to be defined by it, even when I rebel against it.
And I now ask myself, knowing what I know:
How do we unearth ourselves from romanticism and not fall into the paralysis of cynicism and defeat? How do we acknowledge nuance and remain committed to ideals? How do we fight to change the world while aware of the youthful trap of easy contrasts?
How can we remain healthily irrational while not becoming delusional? How do we confront the cruelty of Darwinian logic? How do we confront violence without using violence?
The answer, I suspect, is that this is exactly the permanently, unanswerable, uncomfortable place for an artist to exist. We are not the ones portrayed in that image of the laughing students of Tlatelolco. We are not heroes. Our role instead may be to simply document; to be the anonymous photographer who took the image. We need to exist in the nonvisible gray zone. It is not about us individually, it is about art.
Images that are shadows that are light that are actions.
Photos that are witness accounts that are
grayscales that speak to those contrasts.
Pamphlets given out on the street with big bold letters
that incite us to act.
Images as water of life,
Images that become words, words that forbid to forbid.
Meanwhile, in the heart of that Mexican darkness, the rough guitars sound again.
Please join us this Saturday for a celebration of 100 issues of Beautiful Eccentrics!
A free conversation via Zoom with writers and artists Coco Fusco, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Dushko Petrovich, and Naief Yehya. Register here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/beautiful-eccentrics-at-100-tickets-462423389807