"ONE-SINGLE-THING": Infrarealism and the Art of Everyday Life

Author(s): COLE HEINOWITZ

Source: Chicago Review , 2017, Vol. 60, No. 3, THE INFRARREALISTAS (2017), pp. 94-101
Published by: Chicago Review

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26380037

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COLE HEINOWITZ

"ONE-SINGLE-THING": Infrarealism and the Art of Everyday Life

He who can drink from the fountain will not drink from the cup.
—Dimitri Merejkowski, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci,
translated by Herbert Trench (1902)

For many writers and artists coming of age in the 1970s, the great
avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century appeared to
be dead. More accurately, they had been neutralized—either through
historical erasure (as in the case of Mexican Estridentismo) or through
absorption and commodification by the very institutions they opposed
(as in the cases of Dada and Surrealism). The last four decades have
offered little relief from these policies of silence, containment, and
cooptation. Infrarealism continues to be denigrated or denied by the
literary establishment in Mexico, while images of Beat writers like Jack
Kerouac are still used to sell khakis and other "lifestyle" commodities
in the US and abroad.
The young poets who came together in mid-1970s Mexico City
to found Infrarealism were keenly aware that the artistic and political
freedoms promised by the historical avant-garde had been betrayed.
What was left was an ossified, institutionalized literary vanguard
whose dominion was jealously guarded by a small circle of cultural
elites. The Infrarealists were united by their collective and individual
determination to subvert the forces that imposed this regime and
conspired to maintain it. And while these acts of subversion would
take many forms over the next two decades, at the heart of them all
was a commitment to integrating art and life "by means of an ethics
aesthetics carried out to the end" (Bolano, "Leave It All, Once More").
From this base, the Infrarealists created a fluid, decentralized
community that transgressed borders of all kinds (political, economic,
spatial, cultural, personal), making their nomadic homes in the inter
stices where one reality ends and another begins. This expansive sense
of community is perhaps most visible in the frequency with which the
Infrarealists enter into each other's work. I am not referring here to

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Bolano's portraits of his friends in novels like The Savage Detectives
(1998) and Amulet (1999), but rather to the intimate conversations
that take shape between these poets through their writing.
These conversations unfold across a variety of registers, from
dedications, quotations, and direct address to visionary conjurings of
another poet's presence. Here is one such nexus, extracted from Mara
Larrosa's poem "For Mario Santiago" and Santiago Papasquiaro's
untitled poem beginning "Mariana Larrosa appears":

Larrosa:
We have all been calling each other with the noise of totally open mouths
believing that each one of us from the outside in were 10,000 men

Santiago Papasquiaro:
1 branch of dates

hangs between her mouth & mine

1 hammock of crayons / ready
to color 1,000 throats

Larrosa:
Serving myself tejocote fruits,
streams of skeleton,
mute knots of street bodies newborn to an Iron Age.

Santiago Papasquiaro:
you can barely jump over you can barely approach on your hands & knees
the barbed wire fence covered in arrow signs
pointing to the closest post-mortem hotels

Larrosa:
That's why we first set out to buy sweets waiting to find other
things and of course we never found them; we set out to see the stone,
elbows bare to the sun, we
licked everything, they licked. It was a different love...

Santiago Papasquiaro:
the honeymoons or chewing-gum moons or moons of stuffed squash
that say they blossom & become presence

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Larrosa:
.. .to love a life that we ourselves might make
with our own liquids.

Santiago Papasquiaro:
with this movement this sweat this gesture
that trembles smiles gets hot / for all I know I see her

Larrosa:
I see you all along the open windows
I see you all through the people who live as if there were no dancers

Santiago Papasquiaro:
Mariana Larrosa appears
drummer of her own dance—
hemp-sprung from her singular inimitable swing

Read together, many of the Infrarealists' poems create such networks

of image, gesture, and sensation. That is, they are more than the sum
of their parts—they are living poetic exchange.
Beyond the poetic conversations collected here, this special section
gives readers access to another essential facet of the Infrarealists' ethic
aesthetic: selections of previously unavailable personal correspondence,
photographs, and the foundational manifestos of Santiago Papasquiaro
and Bolano. Even in the cases of canonized writers and movements, it
is rare to find such a gathering. More often, the "literary" is separated
from the "extra-literary material" or "ephemera," severing the links
of collective endeavor and producing a work or author that appears
sui generis, stripped of its cultural context, isolated, and therefore
contained. By contrast, when the Infrarealists published their work,
it was almost always with independent presses—journals, magazines,
broadsides, and anthologies—often read aloud, mimeographed, and
passed from hand to hand.
Nor was the Infrarealists' sense of community confined to their
immediate circle, or even to contemporaries outside Mexico such as
the poets of the Peruvian movement Hora Zero. As this collection
shows, the Infrarealists made a point of foregrounding the literary,
artistic, philosophical, and political traditions they drew sustenance
from. What makes these references distinct from many other forms

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of literary homage or invocation, however, is the way in which eros
animates remembrance. In Santiago Papasquiaro's "Infrarealist
Manifesto," to take one example, the eroticized body of Claudia Kerik
("TOTAL PAINTING: CLAUDIA KERIK BACKWARDS & FORWARDS")
frames his list of "WORLDS PEOPLE VIBES THAT INTEREST ME"
(including, among others, the Comte de Lautréamont, Friedrich Engels,
the Marquis de Sade, Francisco de Quevedo, and Catullus). Kerik's name
closes the list with an unwavering ray of sunlight: "JUDITH GARCÎA
CLAUDIA SOL (AND EVEN ON CLOUDY DAYS) CLAUDIA SOL."
This recuperation of past traditions as embodied, present-tense
experience constitutes a seminal aspect of Infrarealist ethics-aesthetics.
Nevertheless, their work continues to be caricatured as jejune or
ignorant. As Rubén Medina notes: "With few exceptions in Mexico,"
Infrarealism has been treated "as a group ultimately alien to literature,
angry youth and examples of bad taste who could not even articulate a
coherent intellectual or theoretical position."1 Such misrepresentations
have long been used to marginalize the work of poetic innovators.
It bears remembering, for instance, that in England John Keats was
ridiculed as an illiterate "Cockney" and Percy Shelley's adaptations of
Shakespeare were condemned as plagiarisms until almost a century
after his death.

In other words, the problem was not that the Infrarealists repudi
ated or naively dismissed tradition but rather that the traditions from
which they drew ran contrary to the current values of the Mexican
literary establishment. If we are to think of Infrarealism as marking
a rupture, then, we must be precise about what is being broken—
and, more importantly, what is being built. The purpose of Santiago
Papasquiaro's call "TO CONVERT LECTURE HALLS INTO SHOOTING
RANGES" is not gratuitous violence; it is "TO RETURN TO ART THE
NOTION OF A PASSIONATE & CONVULSIVE LIFE." His terms are

taken directly from the first manifesto for the "Theater of Cruelty,"
in which Antonin Artaud explains his use of classical Balinese
performance "to restore to the theater a passionate and convulsive
conception of life." Like Artaud's theater of cruelty, Infrarealism

1/ Rubén Medina, "El infrarrealismo y el callejôn sin salida de la ética-estética," in

Perros habitados por las voces del desierto: poesta infrarrealista entre dos siglos, edited
by Rubén Medina (Mexico City: Matadero, 2016), 43.

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returned to a more ancient fountain in order to revitalize a culture
it saw as moribund.
In some of the works collected here, this recuperation of suppressed
or forgotten traditions reaches back even before the standardization
of literary language, integrating Nahuatl words, many of which still
sound strange to most defenos. In others the historical community
extends still further, to the emergence of recognizable human forms
(according to Bolano: "We are still in the Quaternary Period"), and
even to the Jurassic Era. In the poem "Pristine Wing," Larrosa writes
of the Archaeopteryx, "the oldest bird known to man," which "lived
150 million years ago" and, she asserts, still exists for us "in the arm
pits, in the big trees of the avenues, in the fine, caged homes, in the
neighborhoods with ammunition in the gut...folds of flamingos in
our long history working our way to becoming mammals."
Medina's "Eyes and Ears of the World" offers another way of
expanding the conventional parameters of what it means to be an
individual in relation with others, with history, and with the world.
The poem takes us to one particular night (26 August 1955). As an
unnamed young woman exits a cheap movie theater in Mexico City
and rushes through the rain, Miles Davis enters the lobby of the
Waldorf Astoria ("attracting the attention / of all who were present,
/ surprised to see a Black man / who wasn't a servant"), Fidel Castro
has his first conversation with Che Guevara, "Citizen K." (who has
been writing "for 76 hours / straight") opens another bottle of mezcal,
and "in a safe house / in Johannesburg, / a group of shadows / was
coming to the conclusion / that the theory / of a single party / wasn t
possible." "Two hours later," the poem ends, the woman gives birth
to a son—the poet himself. "Mi cuerpo / es un pais / sin fronteras,"
Medina writes in "Mapa del dia," a body without borders.
Opening the channels of communication across time and space
is a form of poiesis, of making, of building a world. Innovation and
recovery are mutually constitutive and coterminous in this process
of creation. As Bolano writes: "we are going to invent to discover"—
not even a comma or an ampersand divides the verbs "invent"
and "discover." This synthetic and borderless model of invention
investigation is also an art of extreme precision in which a single fact,
as Ezra Pound wrote, "give[s] one a sudden insight into circumjacent
conditions, into their causes, their effects, into sequence, and law"

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and thereby "vivifies one's total perception of relations." Such is the
"luminous detail" that shines from Kerik's calligram: "even without
a bra / something is too tight," which bitingly testifies to the limits of
second-wave feminism. And such is the qualifier, "AT A TIME WHEN
MURDERS HAVE BEEN DISGUISED AS SUICIDES," by which Santiago
Papasquiaro distills the shift from an openly repressive political regime
to a more sophisticated regime that erodes resistance by pathologizing
its victims.

Unlike Pound, however, the Infrarealists were wary of assigning

broad explanatory power to such discriminations, knowing too well
the degree to which our senses can be manipulated and culturally
overdetermined. As Bolano diagnosed the problem: "Sensations don't
come from nowhere...but rather from a reality conditioned, in a
thousand ways." And as Santiago Papasquiaro asks in Advice from 1
Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic:

is it the news /

those who report it /

those who read it like 1 necessary drug?
[•••]
Given the circumstances you don't even trust your own eyes

But as the poem unfolds, skepticism reveals a vital curiosity which

critique lacks:

1 poem is occurring every moment

for example
that fluttering of mute flies
over 1 package nobody manages to decipher
how much is trash & how much miracle

Acknowledging uncertainty is what attunes us to the "miracle"

lurking within the unseen, neglected, and debased. It makes possible
what Robert Duncan called an "identification with the universe," a
"symposium of the whole" in which "all the old excluded orders must
be included... [t]he female, the proletariat, the foreign; the animal and
vegetative; the unconscious and unknown; the criminal and failure
all that has been outcast and vagabond must return to be admitted in
the creation of what we consider we are."

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 The works collected in this issue show us what it might mean
to inhabit such a whole, to open perception "by means of an ethics
aesthetics carried out to the end." In one sense it means bearing witness
to the synergy—at times both brutal and childlike—of art and everyday
life. As Edgar Artaud Jarry writes in "Outside My House":

I'm writing Poems

a drug dealer aims a handgun at me
it seems like child's play
the man aims at the table and fires off several

shots bangbangbangbang shattering plates and the

wooden table

sending splinters through the air, a hole

in the wood, I'm afraid
I can't control how I'm shaking out of fear
I am writing Poems
bangbangbangbang

It also means registering the imprint of ideological force on the body.

As Larrosa writes: "The angles of values are shifting.. .and now I seem
/ a cubist woman full of empty parts that clash."
Considered from another perspective, though, carrying ethics
aesthetics to the end where life and art become—in Bolano's words—
"one-single-thing" meant exclusion from the centers of literary
production. As Juan Villoro notes, "Mexican society throughout the
20th century had a pyramid structure [in which] the majority of our
national writers worked in public office at some level," with the result
that "prestige and publication have always passed through more or less
official channels."2 But the Infrarealists courted institutional scorn and

made art from their marginalization. Hence their famous assaults on

official readings and soirées, insulting anointed and aspiring literati,
smashing highball glasses, starting fisffights, and staging "happenings"—
interventions José Peguero exuberantly describes as "driving a runaway
train / through the Avenue leading to the Palace of Fine Art."
Official sanction, status, and publication were not the Infrarealists'
objectives. They did not fight to be recognized by those in power.

2/ Juan Villoro, "La ironîa de la soledad," interview by Alejandro Hermosilla Sânchez.

El coloquio de losperros 22 (Fall 2008), n.p.

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Rather, they fought to make their silencing audible and their erasure
visible. Ultimately, however, the Infrarealists' acts of tacit and overt
resistance to the protocols of cultural power were extensions of a much
larger project: the practice of an incarnate art, an art of everyday life.
When asked why, after over two decades of writing, Santiago Papasquiaro
didn t publish a book of poetry until the mid-1990s, his widow Rebeca
Lopez commented: "poetry was, above all, his way of traveling through
life, crossing a path of light-filled essence, on which he bet every breath,
stride and soul.. .always in perpetual eruption, living life to the fullest,
in the absolute combustion of his cardinal points: poetry, walking,
dreaming, and fraternity."3 Santiago Papasquiaro was an inveterate
walker, always composing as he walked, reciting lines out loud in order
to gauge their weight and mass in the world, the force of their impact
with other bodies, the way they harmonize and shift responsively in
time with their surroundings.
This calibration of life and poetry, of writing in collaboration with
the world, is what Santiago Papasquiaro called "A CULTURE IN FLESH."
Just as poetry resonates in our sensory organs, so too the shapes,
movements, textures, sounds, and smells of other beings constantly
vibrate inside us, body to body. This energetic affinity goes deeper
than the power relations that appear to structure our reality. Unlike
Surrealism which, as its etymology suggests, sought to surmount this
reality (sur = over or above), Infrarealism delves beneath it (infra =
under or below) to probe the primordial forces that generate our world.
By reaching down to this common root, poetry can communicate
directly with the source of life and participate in its creation. It is in
this sense that Infrarealism opens up "UNPRECEDENTED MEANS OF
INTERVENTION & OF DECISION IN THE WORLD."

3/ Roberto Careaga,"Mario Santiago, perpetua erupciön: entrevista a Rebeca Lopez,"

December 2009, Rebeca Lopez Garda, 10 June 2011, http://rebecalopezgarcia.blogspot.
com/201 l_06_10_archive.html. Translated by Rubén Medina.

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