THE+PART+ABOUT+NEW+CHILEAN+POETRY

Who is Carlos Wieder? Rest assured, the father of New Chilean Poetry is “a man and not a god.” The body of Angelica Garmendia (“my adorable, my incomparable Angelica”) is found, even if the bodies of her sister and aunt are not. The Garmendia sisters were magnificent poets. As youths, they shared a poetry workshop with the implied authors of __Distant Star__, Bibiano O'Ryan and Arturo Belano, as well as Alberto Ruiz-Tagle. It was Ruiz-Tagle who would later take the name of Carlos Wieder and, as a member of a Dirty War death squad, abduct and murder the Garmendia family. Bibiano and Belano write __Distant Star__ to chronicle their investigation of Wieder. Perhaps Wieder wants Angelica's body to be found. Maybe it is just one of the many artifacts he intends to leave behind – like the photos, the ones he shows to officers of the Chilean airforce, surrealist (or “super-realist”) journalists, and one woman, Tatiana von Beck Iraola, the military heiress “who went into the room expecting to see heroic portraits or boring photographs of the Chilean skies” at an exhibition that leaves some vomiting, some fleeing, and some remaining, dazed, with a sense of camaraderie. “Someone referred to an oath.” That is to say: Wieder makes a few converts. This is New Chilean Poetry: the extermination of beauty and the aestheticization of that extermination. Before opening the door to the claustrophobic room that contains his photographs (he lets only one person in at a time, as "the art of Chile is not for herds"), he says that it is, "time to plunge into the art of the future." What exactly is shown in the pictures? Only a little is said: some were of objects or spaces, some were of the Garmendia sisters, most were of women, and the women “had all been taken to the same place.” There was, “a progression, an argument, a story (literal and allegorical).” It is important to know that Wieder is not a god because, as Herlinghaus notes, "Brute violence, when it silences resistance, has a tendency to enter a delirium of being 'god-like,' spreading the poison of its own myth." The monolithic power of the machine can make it seem invincible, unopposable. The Sonora femicides are instance of such a myth where, as I'll explain, strange and practically-religious rituals begin to evolve. This complex of problems may seem so vast as to be insurmountable. It is the task of the detective to demystify this evil: thus the importance of Belano's investigation of Wieder. We should not, however, take too much solace in Wieder’s humanity. The evidence he leaves behind, the found body, is an artifact that spreads his “poison” in a new way – as poetry rather than brute force. By being human, Wieder infects humanity. If he were a god or even an übermensch (he is a man of steel but not an übermensch) he would become an ‘other’ and thus less threatening. By remaining human to some degree, he threatens all humanity in the same way the perpetrators of The Crimes do: by making clear the bestial brutality of which the species is capable. This seems to blur the lines between perpetrator and detective – that is, at least, when both make art from the same violence. The difference between the two is clear, of course: Belano is not a murderer. Bolaño is not a murderer. All the same... does Wieder's depiction of violence differ from Bolaño's? Does it matter if the photographer of Wieder's exhibition is himself the killer? What about Ernst Jünger, who wrote about his experience as a German soldier in WWI in __Storm of Steel__ and who appears as a character in __Distant Star__? I take his style to be matter-of-fact, neither glorifying nor condemning violence. What is the difference between Wieder and Jünger? I don't think we're given enough information to really answer any of these questions. What's important is that Wieder is involved in his own sort of investigation. Wieder, like Bolaño, is “undaunted. . . by incoherence.” He performs his skywriting immediately prior to the photographic exhibition and in very poor conditions for flying. Few members of the audience are able to decipher the poem he writes, as the smoke is blurred and swept away almost instantly by the wind. In fact, there is some suggestion that the lines recorded in the book may be inaccurate. In any case, Wieder is like Bolaño in that both accept indeterminacy and make use of it in their work. I think his admirable qualities make him all the more terrifying. Part of the goal of Bolaño’s work seems to be experimenting with different positions from which to view the world’s problems (contrast the psychedelia of __Amulet__ with the analytic gaze of “The Part About the Crimes”). Herlinghaus calls this the search for “configurations that help articulate violence poetically, which is a matter of countering the powers of the oppressive ‘real.’” That is to say, it is a means of opposing the infectious "myth" of violence, the capability of violence to silence dissent. I call the story of Wieder an "intellectual horror" in that it does not equal Sonora or Auschwitz in scale but rather contains a "tunnel" back to the remote malevolence, a suggestion about humanity that can be as disturbing as a tragedy of greater magnitude. This tunnel is useful to us because it allows us to examine the monster from another perspective. If there were a real life Wieder, we might think of him like Josef Mengele: his work would be horrific, but nevertheless a contribution to human knowledge, a contribution to the investigation. The artifacts he creates would provide us with insights, provided we are willing to tolerate their histories. Of course, Bolaño solves the problem of "history" by creating the art //and// the artist, the photographic exhibition without the murders. He tells a number of stories like this, stories about people creating art that would be impossible, impractical, or unethical for Bolaño to create himself. One such figure is Edwin Johns, the painter in __2666__ who is best known for a self-portrait which included his own severed and mummified hand. His success leads to the birth of a new school called “English animalism” or “new decadence” and attracts numerous young artists to his poor neighborhood, which gentrifies rapidly. Here, as in Juarez, economic flows produce tides of irresistible transformation. As Wieder would say, “Death is resurrection.” The new decadents didn’t know they were part of Johns’ art (who knows if Johns planned for them to be?), but their influx caused the destruction of the neighborhood as it had been and its rebirth in a new form. Thus Johns destroys two things he loves: his own ability to paint and the neighborhood that was his home. All artists enact transformations on reality, argues Bolaño, and some transformations happen to be violent. The main difference between Johns and Wieder is that Johns is primarily self-destructive. Both, however, destroy what they love. Why not? That's what's most valuable. Pelletier, Espinoza, Norton, and Morini go to visit Johns. He says, “the whole world is a coincidence,” “the manifestation of God. . . A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion.” Morini then asks him, “Why did you mutilate yourself?” to which Johns replies in a whisper that the reader never hears. He also insists that he is not an artist. Note that "communion" is a word used by Wieder in his last skywritten poem. He writes: "Death is communion." Who is in communion with whom? The gangsters of Juarez find communion in blood. The Fascists of Chile and the Third Reich find communion in blood. But might Johns mean that all people find communion? Death, and the hurricane of death that is life, creates a communion between all living beings. Note also that this hurricane, this "osseous implosion" mirrors the form of González-Rodriguez's "femicide machine." It is a convergence of factors. Auschwitz and Sonora are coincidences. What sort of god rules this universe? We'll take a look at that in a moment. A more immediate question: what did Johns say to Morini? Why would a man who violently ended his artistic career (in what most people would call a clear exercise of agency) come to believe in coincidence and fate? How does Santa Teresa change if we think of it as a matter of coincidence or fate and not, as the humanist is inclined to do, as a conflux of human weakness and malevolence? It is no longer a problem to be solved but rather a thing that happens, a part of reality. Part of the storm. There’s a great deal at stake here. On one hand, Johns is clearly not a role model. While he’s certainly a brilliant artist (whether he admits it or not), his philosophy would leave us all impotent, confined to various metaphorical asylums. Did he believe his self-mutilation to be coincidence or fate at the time he performed it, or did he only come to believe that later? Can it be fate //and// a deliberate act of artistic transformation? Probably not. I suspect that Johns believes he’s not an artist because art requires intentionality, which is impossible in a universe populated by senseless beings. To put it another way, nobody can be "artist" or "not artist" is everything is senseless coincidence. On the other hand, Johns’ perspective allows us to re-envision horrific events as part of a greater whole, at once beautiful and terrible. I recall a passage from Amulet (among my favorites): And when I heard the news [of a spurned man’s suicide] it left me shrunken and shivering, but also amazed, because although it was bad news, without a doubt, the worst, it was also, in a way, exhilarating, as if reality were whispering in your ear: I can still do great things; I can still take you by surprise, you silly girl, you and everyone else; I can still move heaven and earth for love.

Here we see evidence of an ancient and essential poetic process: the weaving-together of good and bad into a manageable vision of reality. I suggest that Johns’ hurricane of coincidence is an attempt to do just this. I imagine that Johns’ whispered answer to Morini’s question might have been something along the lines of either, “I just did,” or “Because I thought it mattered.” How do we reconcile this totalizing vision with the search for a “remote, incomprehensible malevolence?” Well, Johns provides us with a sort of escape from this philosophy by admitting that a friend of his disagrees: “Suffering is accumulated, said my friend, that’s a fact, and the greater the suffering, the smaller the coincidence.” In places like Juarez, the friend seems to argue, choices matter. Johns seems to confirm my earlier suspicion that his own philosophy is anti- or post-humanist by saying that his friend, “believed in humanity, and so he also believed in order, in the order of painting and the order of words, since words are what we paint with.” Here I think it’s hard to disagree. Certainly language is not as orderly and systemic as it may at first appear. Bolaño knows this, and probably knows that for this reason it’s hard to agree or disagree with Johns because it’s hard to know precisely what he means by “coincidence.” The killers and victims, perhaps, are equally senseless: a culture of bacteria in a petri dish, some dying and some reproducing. But if there is a vortex of death in one part of that dish... shouldn't we look more closely? What we have to look at are the artifacts that remain. Let's look at this issue of "communion" and this strange relationship between the sacred and the profane. Among the phobias listed by psychologist Elvira Campos in __2666__, a set of endemically Mexican fears, is "sacrophobia," fear of the holy. This //seems// intimately related to the Sonora femicides... but how? Keep in mind that sacrophobia is one element in a set of phobias so large as to be practically meaningless: for example, both agoraphobia and claustrophobia are included. Those two are a little easier to understand – perhaps they're symptoms of living in the vastness of the desert. But sacrophobia? Well, I might call it a symptom of Catholicism, a religion brought by conquerors to the Americas. But let's not worry about it for a moment. Let's look instead at places where the holy converges with the violent. The most clear situation is in Juarez itself, where the woman is "punished" for being outside the home. This is the product of a social conservatism that casts such women as "public." This in turn is a product of strict gender roles, an element of faith in culture. The transgression of the working woman thus becomes a sort of profanity. As in centuries past, individuals punish this transgression by violating the Fifth Commandment. Then again, given that the murders are performed mostly by gang members, it's likely that the individuals responsible set aside the Fifth Commandment long ago. What I mean to say is that the psychological complex, the conflux of forces, includes some deep-rooted cultural element that falls under the umbrella of what we call "religion" or "faith." Sacrophobia is linked especially to the criminal known as the Demon Penitent. This individual routinely urinates in churches. It seems as if his bladder is supernaturally large. The first incidents are violent, but as he perfects his technique he's able to do his work without interruption. The attacks on these churches, "got more attention in the local press than the women killed in the preceding months." This isn't surprising. After all, the news media is known for caring more about a good story than the in-perspective magnitude of the events described. Why else would CNN.com's headline be, as I write this, "Convicted rapist caught after 35 years on the run" and not "6000 children starved today"? This is part of the hurricane as well, you see: Weaknesses in the human brain (our general preference for stories and images over statistics) cause us to ignore the greatest cases of suffering in favor of the ones more easily digestible. (I am aware of the irony, of course: the Sonora femicides are a drop in the bucket compared to global starvation. All the same, they are important because they are a tunnel back to the greater evil.) The story about the Demon Penitent is included in the fourth section of __2666__, "The Part About the Crimes." It is interwoven with the tale of ongoing rape and murder. An experienced investigator, Juan de Dios Martinez, is assigned to the case of the Demon Penitent. An experienced investigator in an underfunded police department is dedicated wholly to solving the problem of urine on church floors. This is sacrophobia. The fear of offending the holy causes individuals to prioritize the afterlife over the present. This leads us to a number of odd cases of ritualistic behavior in the murders. While reading "The Part About the Crimes," the aspiring detective may notice that a number of the victims have missing nipples. There is no answer in that text, and one could easily take it as another example of indeterminacy, an unsolved mystery, a perverse element added to highlight the barbarity of the crimes. One might not guess that the missing nipples was a real-life mystery, at least until a journalist found that “some of the gang members liked to wear the victims’ nipples like trophies on chains around their necks.” This ritual is not explicitly religious, but is part of a trend that seems to see the murderers elevate violence to the status of art: a trophy or a remembrance. This should not be surprising, as the operations of the gangs are based on faith, loyalty, silence, and fraternity – a distinct ritualistic culture naturally evolves. Other behaviors evolve, this time freighted with religious imagery. Atop a hill overlooking Ciudad Juarez, a strange site is found: the bodies of two women, the remains of a bonfire, and a heart-triangle of 138 stones, each at least ten feet in length. When you add 138's digits together, you get 12, and when you add 12's digits together you get 3, the same as the number of sides. This is thought to symbolize the Holy Trinity. The apex of the heart points south and the cleft points north, towards America. Is this symbolic of the function of the gangs, the channeling of drugs from south to north? Why the heart? "God is love?" Or, as Wieder, would say, "Death is love." What sort of bizarre murder cult could have created this fusion of faith and blood? Consider the ancient legacy of this artifact-space: it harkens back to a war between Catholic Conquistadors and practitioners of human sacrifice. This is the profound expression of a marginalized populace born and bred in violence. This is New Chilean Poetry.

 Op. Cit. __Distant Star__. Pg. 23.  Op. Cit. __Distant Star__. Pg. 82-6. (Might they be journalists //de ultraismo//? I’d have to get my hands on a Spanish copy to find out. I remember the Infrarealists resolutely refusing to be called “the Mexican section of surrealism.” Perhaps this was in Los Detectivos? It would make sense if they were Infrarealist journalists. After all, the account is described as “accurate” [Distant Star 83])  Op. Cit. __Distant Star__. Pg. 84.  Op. Cit. __Distant Star__. Pg. 88.  Op. Cit. Herlinghaus. Pg. 213.  Op. Cit. __Distant Star__. Pg. 82.  Op. Cit. __Distant Star__. Pg. 80-82. For reference, the full poem goes: // Death is friendship / Death is Chile / Death is responsibility / //// //Death is love// / //Death is growth / Death is communion / Death is cleansing// / //Death is my heart / Take my heart / Carlos Wieder /// //Death is resurrection// //  Herlinghaus 214 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 2295, 11%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __Distant Star__. Pg. 80-82. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> It might not be a coincidence, ironically, that the “hurricane” is “osseous.” Herlinghaus reports that Bolaño worked closely with Sergio González Rodríguez while writing __2666__. Rodríguez is the author of //Huesos en el desierto// (Bones in the Desert), a book about the Sonora femicides. (Op. Cit. Herlinghaus. 633) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Bolaño, Roberto. "Amulet." Trans. Chris Andrews. Loc. 131, 8%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> 2666. Loc 2269 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> 2666. Loc 2283 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> 2666. Loc 9075. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> 2666. loc 8739 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> //It is estimated that 2.6 million children die of starvation annually.// World Food Program. https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Rodriguez 85% <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> González-Rodríguez. 89. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> González-Rodriguez