Hay que hundir las palabras en la realidad hasta hacerlas delirar como ella. You have to bury the words in reality, make them hallucinate the way reality does. - José Galván
epigraph to Relations, poems 1971-1973, Buenos Aires, by Juan Gelman, translated by Joan Lindgren
CONFIDENCES he sits down at the table and writes "with this poem you won't take power" he says "with these verses you won't make the Revolution" he says "nor with thousands of verses will you make the Revolution" he says what's more: those verses won't make peons teachers woodcutters live better eat better or him himself eat live better nor will they make a girl fall in love with him they won't earn him money they won't get him into the movies free he can't buy clothes with them or trade them for wine or tobacco no scarves no parrots no boats no bull no umbrellas can he get for them they will not keep him dry in the rain nor get him grace or forgiveness "with this poem you won't take power" he says "with these verses you won't make the Revolution" he says "nor with thousands of verses will you make the Revolution" he says he sits down at the table and writes - Juan Gelman
“confidences” and the next poem, from Selected Poems, Juan Gelman, edited and translated by Joan Lindgren, University of California, Los Angeles, 1997
NOTE XXV beloved friends / friends dead in combat or by betrayal or torture / I do not forget you though I love a woman / I do not forget you because I love / as you yourselves once loved / remember? / how you walked in beauty through the air / how you fought? / and the warmth of a woman loomed up in your face / remember? I remember having seen in you a woman shining in the midst of painful combat / then you shone immortal against pain / against death / now sleeping ones some sweet shadow silently touches you preparing your stand against the dogs of oblivion
here’s my idea of character in short: “The essence of pleasure,” writes Søren Kierkegaard, “does not lie in the thing enjoyed, but in the accompanying consciousness.”
Nuar Alsadir, where this is found, continues: Think of a madeleine… When I do, I think of the accompanying consciousness for which the madeleine is no more than the schematic.
Intuition, the most familiar kind of embodied knowledge, often has the adjective feminine preceding it. Hysteria, marked by the conversion of feelings and thoughts into bodily symptoms, is generally seen as a feminine disorder (its etymological root is hystericus, meaning “from the womb”) and carries a negative connotation associated with an emotional excess that obstructs reason–being too much. Even my beloved Joyce reportedly said, in response to being asked what he thought of writer Gertrude Stein, “I hate intellectual women.” What is so threatening about this way of knowing?
“We have been raised,” according to the writer Audre Lorde, “to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings” because it threatens any system that calls upon us to prioritize external logic over internal knowledge. “The True Self comes from the aliveness of the body tissues and the working of body-functions,” explains writer Winnicott of his version of the yes within ourselves, “including the heart’s action and breathing.” Trained to suppress the True Self and what Lorde calls the erotic power of “nonrational knowledge,” we settle for lesser understanding, permitting essential meaning and emotion to be lost.
— Nuar Alsadir, Animal Joy, (London, UK: Fizcarraldo, 2022), 69-70
… the yes within ourselves … aliveness of the body tissues and working of body-functions including the heart’s action and breathing equate with Deleuze’s affirmative power (of the false and) of philosophy, positive difference; and equates with duration, for Bergson. Life animated by duration, in the living tissue and rhythms of breath and heart: it is a wealth, energy source and source of creative energy.
YOU ARE HER EXIT
— Alsadir, op. cit., 297
Leave a Reply