Conversation with Anne Waldman

This conversation took place in Anne’s NYC home and what you will find below is an excerpt that is featured in the upcoming poetry journal 1:AM edited by David Garcia Casado.

1:AM
I know there have always been deep challenges in different times of history, but these times look even more urgent due to the unprecedented climate crisis. Could you give us a general vision of how you see the world today?

Anne Waldman
Well, I’m trying to be grounded, stay with what I know, stay with the karma of my own life and try to understand, being in New York in this particular home. My mother had lived in Greece for a decade living a pretty simple life weaving and making her own clothes. It was a kind of visionary community called the Delphic ideal. And I think she left the US like many female poets who could not be themselves living in the US, like Gertrude Stein being a lesbian, with a very experimental mind, and so on. HD, Hilda Doolittle, the famous modernist poet also escaped. And many figures like that are people who couldn’t live in this country for a number of reasons, often coming out of an upper-class expectation. Even as I was growing up there were certain expectations and certain boundaries. Luckily, my parents were somewhat bohemian, having been in these other worlds – my father lived in Provincetown, and he was a swing piano player. So, one has to talk about one’s own experience with this question, because it’s where you are. I mean, if we were in Pakistan, right now, with the amazing suffering going on or even back with the flooding in New Orleans years ago, that would be a different experience. So, relative truth, relative reality, relative experience is one thing to consider. We could just sit here and enumerate for days all the things that are wrong, so it’s complicated. Societies are complicated. For instance, Roe v. Wade is one of the most horrific defeats, and that’s just got to change. There’s just so much suffering, already extraordinary suffering on women’s bodies. I can barely read the news because so many individual stories are coming up. And yes, there are fights everywhere and I do want to say many people are working on all these things, existentially, psychically, spiritually, etc. So the point is to stay awake, to stay conscious. I kind of embrace this sort of Buddhist view, which is unborn*. There’s no salvation, there’s no ultimate savior. I love all the traditions of all religions, but I’m not expecting to be lifted to the great beyond. Also, we have so much wisdom already on this planet, from the entheogens, the various traditions that go way back, connected to the earth, to the interconnectedness of everything that can be helpful, to medicine that comes from various cultures, the intelligence, spiritual knowledge. But it is also true that a lot of that wisdom has been dumbed down or eviscerated.

1:AM
How do you teach poetry?

AW
I don’t think you can teach anybody how to do it. It’s just about opening up worlds. Reading is so important, reading other poets, knowing the mind of some of these poets, knowing their work, being able to memorize it at times, knowing what the prosody is, knowing about meters, knowing about all these different traditions and languages around the world. And also with the view that poetry is the oldest way of language, there’s poetry from the very beginning. I mean, they call it the first religion. So I just have confidence in that, but there’s still some perception through putting these things together: the image, the sound, the ideas.

1:AM
Do you see poetry as a way to save or heal?

AW
Well, reading or seeing it helps me feel stabilized. I feel I want to follow the reality of somebody’s will. For instance, Jean Luc Godard just died. And thinking of his mind and the consistency in his work, the playfulness, the risks, the vitality within the actors in their bodies, the wit, the politics, all that using language the way he does, using montage, it’s a breakthrough. I’m always interested in breakthroughs. So I think that’s where I’m stimulated. And I like looking at the sky and understanding as much as I can.
So in the end, I feel connected to those sorts of fantasies, dreams, nightmares, that come from a lot of interesting places. And also how you work with dreams, noticing your dreams, seeing how you can work with them…

*(There is an Unborn, an Unoriginated, an Unmade, an Uncompounded; were there not, O mendicants, there would be no escape from the world of the born, the originated, the made, and the compounded – The Buddha, Udana 8:3 of the Khuddaka Nikaya. Editor’s note).

(Texto que acompaña a la exposición La Perspectiva, de Aitor Lajarín, en la Galería Artnueve. Murcia, 2022)

“Y mi maestro me enseñó, qué difícil es descubrir el alba dentro de las sombras.”

Franco Battiato. Perspectiva Nevski.

Escuchar la canción de Battiato, Perspectiva Nevski, causa tristeza en estos días en los que reina la brutalidad, y las proezas de Stravinsky o Nijinsky parecen ecos fantasmales de una breve época dorada de la cultura en la Rusia de principios del siglo XX, donde al arte se le daba una función central como herramienta de construcción y manifestación de libertad. En esos días se poseía una perspectiva en apertura constante que tendía a expandir la concepción del mundo por el simple poder del intelecto y del conocimiento. Pero para utilizar la perspectiva como herramienta de conocimiento universal hay que asumir cómo esa expansión de la percepción inevitablemente conduce a sabernos relativamente más pequeños y quizá insignificantes ante la magnitud del mundo. Las obras de Aitor Lajarín parten de esta idea de inaprensión del mundo. En ellas el sujeto se ve diminuto ante la inmensidad del cosmos, aunque no por ello posee menos brillo, o relevancia. Es decir, la inmensidad no nos reduce a la nada, ni resta nuestra existencia; por contra le da sentido como dimensión sin la cual no puede darse una relación de perspectiva, y por tanto de discurso.

La perspectiva también lleva implícita una distancia, es decir una separación con el objeto que se mira, y la obra de Lajarín parece querer entender tanto sus referentes pictóricos como los temas que aborda, con una clara distancia. Es así como se hace más comprensible, el sujeto separado del objeto, el yo del resto del universo, y es quizá por esto que en casi todas sus obras se da una relación de un sujeto de experiencia ante lo inabarcable del cosmos en el que se ve inscrito. En se universo el sujeto tiene su propio lugar, su sitio, lo cual – recalcamos – no indica que posea un dominio sobre su mundo sino que es su pura presencia la que da sentido a la inmensidad por la simple condición de ser testigo de esa magnitud. Así, interpreto esta faceta de la obra de Lajarín como una metáfora de la soledad del artista ante las posibilidades de la creación; de cómo el artista encuentra un hallazgo a partir del cual desarrollar su creación pero a sabiendas de que es tan solo una posibilidad, una pequeña luz que se enciende en un ignoto mundo de sombras.

Por otro lado hay momentos en sus obras en las que la relación es inversa, es decir, es la fuente de luz – un planeta, una estrella, una luna – la que parece ser testigo de la actividad del sujeto, un sujeto cualquiera, que podríamos ser nosotros mismos. Por eso tal vez hay en algunas de sus más recientes obras una desaparición del componente humano para darse puramente fenómenos astronómicos que parecen indiferentes al espectador, tan alejado y remoto de esas luces como ellas lo estan de nosotros, pero que también – por el simple hecho de ser contempladas – atestiguan nuestra existencia.

Desde la perspectiva de las estrellas somos también nosotros constelación, o, siguiendo el concepto desarrollado por Negri y Hardt: multitud. “A diferencia del concepto de pueblo, el de multitud es una multiplicidad singular, un universal concreto […] En el desarrollo de las formas de vida nos descubrimos como multitud de cuerpos y nos reconocemos en cada cuerpo una multitud de moléculas, de deseos, de formas de vida, de invenciones”1 . Permítaseme sugerir entoces que la obra de Aitor Lajarín también parece hacer un guiño al potencial político y revolucionario de la multitud. Y la invitación que hace el autor a otros individuos (no necesariamente artistas) a intervenir en sus cuadros puede entenderse como una simpatía hacia esa idea de multitud a la que refieren Negri y Hardt y que conecta de algún modo con la parábola de la Rusia revolucionaria que hace Battiato en perspectiva Nevski. Una zona temporalmente autonoma2 , donde se acarició el concepto utópico por el cual el potencial creativo del individuo puede y debe tener un caracter relevante en la definición de lo social, y no como en la encarnación actual del arte basada en la simple capizalización del trabajo creativo. Por contra, los cuadros de Aitor son lugares de encuentro, espacios en los que se da la posibilidad de un intercambio creativo, de manifestación de invenciones, aunque sea dentro de un universo particular, el que se contempla desde la perspectiva Lajarín, de la cual ustedes ahora mismo también forman parte.

1 Toni Negri. Michael Hardt. La multitud contra el Imperio. Revista Contretemps. 2001 (París: Textuel) No. 2, septiembre, 153-166.

2 Este termino ampliamente conocido se atribuye a Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson), que uso como homenaje al haber fallecido apenas hace una semana antes de que escriba este texto.

I would like to talk a little about presence, which is something I have been preoccupied with for a while, perhaps I could say forever, since I was a child, always finding myself struggling when trying to cross the border between the safe haven of my “inner world” and that what pertains to “real life” of the interaction with others, in other words: a call for my presence. 

And It’s interesting how most of the people I mentioned the subject of my presentation reacted like, duh, presence of course that’s something we are all struggling with, especially during a pandemic. So let’s try to elaborate a little bit…

There are many pertinent discussions on the idea of presence: social presence, cultural presence, political presence… all connected with hegemony, privilege & status. I will get to those issues. But I want to start speaking about a more ontological or primitive foundation for the idea of presence from which those issues emerge:

Namely, presence, described in the first place by its etymology as the: “space before or around someone or something”

That strikes me as something interesting, to consider presence as the space around someone or something instead of what we commonly understand as “having presence” which normally we attribute to an actual thing or being. However, presence here is described as the negative space of things or rather: the space which allows things to be. Something like an Atmosphere that allows things to be considered as separate, defined, real. Without space, perception would be cluttered, a pure block of information, a continuum that would be unperceivable. We need the space, we need gaps. Just like silence makes it possible for sounds to be heard, or void makes objects visible. This is how the invisible makes room for the visible. Probably not by accident, I titled a book I published: Buscando Invisibles,  Looking for Invisibles. 

But let me follow with a second etymological definition of presence: <<the state of being in a certain place and not some other>>

Being in a certain place and not some other. This raises the question of what I am doing here or better, how did I end up being here today. And also, Why are you here instead of somewhere else, doing something else? There’s certainly an extensive and invisible net of micro-events that conditioned our being here today sharing this common space. It sounds almost heretical, an absolute waste of time and opportunity, to regard it as something that can happen anytime we want, like a youtube video we can play over and over, as often as we wish. That is then the challenge, to treat this occasion (or, for that matter, any occasion) with the respect of an unrepeatable experience.

So let’s say that the respect for the present moment is possibly the or a beginning of understanding what presence really means. 

Then again, all of us have a different reason for being here, which can be more or less accidental, let alone we all have a different regard for things, a slightly different perception of things and therefore a different and particular appreciation of what we have in front of us in this precise moment, – these appreciations can range from indifference, boredom, entertainment, and hopefully interest,… 

However, each and every one of us is responsible for determining an idea of presence and although it is particular – personal – at the same time it is equivalent to others in the way that all our particular forms of presence emerge on a common area of collective perception, the surface known as REALITY. 

REALITY – such a big word…

Reality is just a term referring to a collective consensus of consciousness, which is determined by what our culture defines as something that EXISTS and that all of us can basically experience. Something that Michel Foucault calls CONFORMITY. 

Although we can objectively say that existence is truly a flexible thing that goes beyond our own perceptual limitations, the consensus of reality acts as a fence, a demarcation of territory (of what’s Considered as real) which is clear enough for the majority of subjects.

On a purely individual level, most of us are able to distinguish between the private realm of our own thoughts and perceptions and the public consensus of what the rest of the people supposedly perceive just like us. Red is not blue, big is not small, it’s all relative, it’s true, but we understand and have tools to understand the differences of perceptions and that although relative, we know how they work in specific contexts. We have logic, the laws of physics, and we have the language to communicate and exchange our differences and commonalities in this consensus known as reality. 

We can distinguish between our imagination – the images that constitute our memories and our desires – and the images we can actually see, the sounds we hear… and that we know are real because we are convinced that everybody can experience them in a similar way. That’s what’s considered sane as opposed to “insane”, in other words: outside of the limits of consensus. – in the margins of society, like an outsider…

But it is also true that for some people with so-called “mental disorders” – a very arguable tag – the private and the public realms of their thoughts are diffused and everything appears to be happening in one same space where there’s not a clear distinction between what’s real and what’s imagined. Since there is no way for them to tell the difference between the private realm of their own thoughts and perceptions and the ones that are common with others and thus public, there’s no way for them to know if what they do will or won’t have real consequences. Without the guidelines of the consensus, they are adrift, utterly lost, suffering because of their inability to find a way to access a common ground. 

They can’t find the fences that surround the common ground because for them there are no fences, they are invisible. Or perhaps ephemeral, like a LIGHTNING…

———————–

Art in all its forms is a truly powerful way to help us free ourselves from the constrictions and the limitations of the fences of the consensus but without the clinical effects of unadaptedness to what society defines as real. It is known that art is symbolic, it’s a metaphor, it’s not literal… We can play.

Alongside Art, critical thinking helps us realize that often the consensus of the real is in fact connected first to a colonial and patriarchal idea of reason, and then, with the advent of capitalism, to productivity –  for how well can a subject perform within a society, how can they be functional, and in that way how can they serve as unpaid agents to uphold the limits of the real. 

Moreover, categories such as “madness” or “hysteria”, have been used as ways to demote, repress, and expel any criticism and potential risk to this convenient illusion. We have to keep in mind that until not too long ago, doctors had the power and were applauded for locking away in asylums any subjects that didn’t fit within the limits of a productive society. (And We can see echoes of this in the very recent case against Britney Spears where men still have the power to decide on women’s judgment and free will, not to mention the new Texas Anti Abortion Laws). 

But, arguably, it is through those considered to be “outside” of those limits that we are able to question how solid are the limits of consensus, the limits of an alleged reality, and how being outside can enlighten what we think as fixed & permanent and allow us to start seeing the cracks. 

Like a true explorer of consciousness and the limits of his own sanity, Antonin Artaud wrote:

<<I am the witness, I am the only witness of myself. This crust of words, these imperceptible whispered transformations of my thought,  I am the only person who can measure its extent.>> 

Artaud’s words suggest that our experience and our sense of the self lies within an interval, an open interval, ever-expanding and contracting, breathing in and out of the common realm, 

like a valve. 

Another explorer of the limits of the real, Aldous Huxley, precisely compared the brain to a “reducing valve” – a filter that makes the whole interval of reality somehow digestible, reduced to a fixed sense of self we consider as common. 

But If the brain, as Huxley said, acts as a valve, the body, on the other hand, tends to open outwards. It’s holistic; bodily perception is designed to receive, and as much as we try to set limits to it, sometimes it’s practically impossible. Perhaps that’s why we try to numb our bodies with images, sounds, and substances. Our body is the reminder we are part of a whole, and that the limits are purely a kind of fiction, the fiction of the self.  It is through our bodies, our “nerve meters”, in the words of Artaud, that we are guided towards an expanded notion of reality, measuring the relationship to what we think our bodies are and aren’t, of what we are and we are not, of what is real and what is not… 

The truth is we often have trouble measuring this and feel awkwardly trying to focus, in a state of constant zooming in and out, desperately looking for something to get us out and away from the uncomfortable experience, the unbound character of reality. We are constantly looking for limits and the confirmation that we exist within those limits –  that’s why it’s easier to embrace the realm of conformity and feels riskier to explore and look for the gaps.

 —

This symptom is often expressed in our daily life by our endless scrolling through information, verifying that everything is still in place. We go over and over to see that everything has been checked, that there are no unread messages or unseen notifications, that all “breaking news” has been read and we are up-to-date. 

When Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp went down for a few hours a couple of weeks ago I found myself checking every couple of minutes to see if the system was back online. On the one hand, I was experiencing anxiety related to this disruption of the continuum – of my ability to plug myself in the matrix – but on the other hand, there was something fresh in this disruption. A GAP. Some space which at least momentarily allowed things to be.

We can say that being present is often more common, and inevitable perhaps, in those gaps when, as they say, “the rug is pulled out from under you”. And I think we all have had this feeling during the pandemic in one way or another. What you thought was solid blows up in the air and our ideas of permanence, taking things for granted, and all the resources we employ to organize and control our lives, are revealed as unsuccessful techniques to prevent us from being present. So let’s admit it, presence, in the end, is not an option, it will find us sooner or later, it is our destiny, there’s no way out 

But as I think we all can agree, this kind of sudden call for presence, which I think Burroughs described well as, “the frozen moment when you see what is on the end of every fork.” is often not a pleasant one. The confusion, frustration, anxiety, and all the feelings that come through in those moments tend to be difficult. We can experience fear, the feeling of being exposed without any veil to separate or protect ourselves from the rugged quality of events.

I believe that with patience and kindness to ourselves and others, we can be more present in tough moments, and understand that <<our feelings and the honest exploration of them>> in Audre Lorde’s words: <<become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas.>>

Let me conclude my presentation with a paragraph from the book Practicing Peace by Pema Chodron. It says:

<<We start with taking a close look at our predictable tendency to get hooked, to separate ourselves, to withdraw into ourselves, and put up walls. As we become intimate with these tendencies, they gradually become more transparent, and we see that there’s actually space, there is unlimited, accommodating space. This does not mean that then you live in lasting happiness and comfort. That spaciousness includes pain.

We may still get betrayed, may still be hated. We may still feel confused and sad. What we won’t do is bite the hook. Pleasant happens. Unpleasant happens. Neutral happens. What we gradually learn is to not move away from being fully present.>>

Llega un nuevo año, y quizá signifique bien poco en realidad, un día más, con la importancia o cotidianidad que se le quiera dar. Pero es indudable que a nivel simbólico la llegada de un nuevo año nos sirve para hacer balance de hitos y de errores, nos devuelve la ilusión de situarnos en la primera casilla, de que el juego de alguna manera empieza de nuevo. “El principio del fin”, que dirían algunos… Pero todo principio es un recordatorio del fin (solo puede haber principio si hay fin), un recordatorio de que nuestro tiempo es limitado.

El tiempo se agota, pero ¿el tiempo para qué? Si cuando se llega a la última casilla, el último día de nuestras vidas, todo se pierde, todo se esparce, todo se desvanece, no hay nada que podamos retener, entonces para qué nos afanamos en acumular recuerdos, imágenes, bienes, dinero,, conocimiento, si nada de eso perdura una vez muertos.

Se puede llegar a pensar que lo que vamos acumulando en nuestra vida beneficia a quienes nos rodean pero ¿es eso cierto? ¿En qué medida lo que acumulamos se usa para beneficiar a quienes nos rodean o más bien para ejercer un cierto poder sobre ellos? Podemos admitirlo, no pasa nada, solo nos importa el bienestar de los que nos rodean siempre y cuando ese bienestar nos incluya, siempre y cuando tengamos alguna garantía de que cuando menos seremos recordados – como seguramente lo harán nuestros familiares y amigos (si es que aun los tenemos) una vez que hayamos muerto. Es parte del contrato de ayuda, la proporcionamos siempre que exista al menos esa contrapartida, un mínimo compromiso de recordatorio, un velarnos (un ser veladura).

Por otro lado, o quizá debido a eso, durante toda nuestra vida somos islas rodeados de un océano de incertidumbre. Buscamos ayuda desesperadamente en las cosas que irremediablemente estamos condenados a perder: nuestra salud, amor, dinero, conocimiento… Incluso la “autoayuda” tiene una sección propia en las librerías y tal vez sea esa una de las pocas admisiones que hagamos de nuestro grado de soledad. Necesitamos ayuda y creemos que la podemos obtener por nosotros mismos. Buscamos, buscamos y buscamos ayuda, por todas partes, desesperados. Google es nuestro nuevo ayudante personal, aunque no deja de ser un repositorio de los testimonios de millones de personas desesperadas por encontrar ayuda.

Admitir que buscamos ayuda, que estamos absolutamente desesperados por recibir ayuda puede que sea un buen punto de partida para afrontar un nuevo año. Primero porque sabemos que por diferente que sea la situación en la que nos encontremos todos los seres estamos en esa encrucijada. No solo los habitantes del “tercer mundo”, o los pobres, o los inmigrantes, no solo quien sea al que asignemos una posición de vulnerabilidad o carencia. Todos nosotros y nosotras somos vulnerables y tenemos miedo. Miedo a morir, a perder nuestros bienes, nuestra salud, nuestro físico, a que no nos recuerden… Todos necesitamos ayuda.

Feliz Año Nuevo.

“Las palabras no contienen flechas ni espadas y sin embargo hacen pedazos las mentes de los hombres.”

Patrul Rinpoche

Las palabras son como el cuerpo en el sentido en que las necesitamos para aprender que somos más que ellas mismas. Solo a través de su simple enunciación podemos comprender la magnitud de lo que no son y que es hacia lo que tienden en su puro comunicar.

Por eso la palabra tiene ese poder de destrucción cuando reduce el objeto de su comunicación a el reflejo matemático de su propia finitud. La palabra que pretende ser autosuficiente, cerrada al exterior, es veneno para la mente. Las consignas fascistas, los códigos de ley… La palabra que no se abre a la relación con lo infinito de lo comunicable se convierte en insulto: un veneno para lo que no es ella misma. Quizá sea por este que Burroughs consideraba a la palabra como un virus; no ya por el proliferar y el multiplicarse de su significado sino por la latencia negativa de lo que la palabra misma no puede ser.

La corrupción de la palabra, así como la del cuerpo, se daría entonces en el despliegue sostenido de una estrategia de defensa y salvaguarda de la integridad de un significado estable ante lo inevitable de su desvanecerse en el tiempo.