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Indio Gris
FUSIONED - DIRECTED - WRITTEN AND CORRESPONDED BY: MENASSA 2002 WE
DON'T KNOW HOW TO SPEAK BUT WE DO IT IN SEVERAL LANGUAGES
INDIO
GRIS, IS A PRODUCT INDIO GRIS Nº 109 YEAR III EDITORIAL INTERVIEW
WITH THE POET MIGUEL OSCAR MENASSA Carmen
Salamanca:
A congress will take place in the month of July, "Cero Group 40 years of
writing". The figure impresses, forty years. Miguel
Oscar Menassa:
When is that? In what year of the last century does it fit? CS:
In 1961 you published your first book. MOM:
In reality, Cero Group writing started thirty years ago, with the Fist
Manifesto. CS:
Cero Group writing. In these forty years it can be said that a Writing School
has been created, referring to the heading of the Congress. MOM:
I
laugh because what was created was a Psychoanalysis School with a discourse
(differing from the other psychoanalysis schools) which produced a lot of
writers. CS:
The number of writers who had been formed is impressive. MOM:
Yesterday I had a dream where I quarrelled with everybody. Did you see how Cero
Group psychoanalysts quarrel among themselves to know who is a Cero group
psychoanalyst? I dreamt of a list which read: "Cero Group Poets". The
only one written down was me, "Menassa" it read and there was a dot
where it said: possible ones, Carmen Salamanca, Alejandra Menassa. Everything
was coming out perfect. Afterwards, there was a list of people with a negative
hyphen alongside. Then you could read, for example, "Advice to write
better". We sent some of them to psychoanalysis; Amelia Díez was advised
to stay quiet during a whole day and afterwards to write during the night. Cruz
was advised, who was the poet that was recommended to her? I don't even remember
the poet who was recommended to her, because apart from that I don't know what
that poet has to do with Cruz. It was Pavese or Machado, considering that Cruz
could become a good narrative poet, but she didn't appear in the list.
Everything like that. And they made a mess…! "But well, I'm not a Cero
Group poet, and I had already published two books". What I recall is the
mess they made. Well, the ones from Carmen's workshop, my God! Carmen arrived to
the workshop and they were all crying, "They have disinherited us, they
said, you deceived us, in the end everything was to name you poet, you never
wanted to have anything to do with us". CS:
Was it a dream or a nightmare? MOM:
It was a dream. CS:
What it seems incredible to me is that each one has a different style. What do
you do to produce writers? MOM:
I think it is very easy. Alongside all great writers there were writers whom the
great writers took the task of annihilating them. The only thing I did, which is
quite interesting to me, was that there were lots of poets besides me and I let
them grow, that is the difference. CS:
How did you let them grow? MOM:
Not killing them, not allowing them to write like me, not teaching them to
write, but teaching them not to be submitted. You, for instance, to your mother,
the primary school, the university, the sexual unions. I'm sick and tired of the
sexual unions. "They are a matrimony, they are homosexual, they are
heterosexual, we are travesties, we have a long cock…" That, they
wouldn't do it because I would have won, I would have won that competition, they
didn't do precisely that one. Besides, as if things would have something to do
with that, meaning that the world still didn't learn that a man's or a woman's
genital issue are animal things, like dogs. But if even my mother knew it, when
I dressed up to go out
she asked me, "where are you going?", and I told her "?
I'm going to fuck" and she said to me "son, dogs do that, men do other
things, they write, they paint, they go to the university, they build
bridges". My mother who was a worker at the factory, and you, who are
manager of who knows what, still didn't understand it. I'm sick and tired of
you. Why
do I tell you about my mother? Because in the end, I don't have so much beauty,
what happens is that I grew up within an interesting family: my father used to
read to me to make me fall asleep, he told me a story where if you refused
knowledge you were condemned to live a normal life, to make me fall asleep, he
told me that story. And my mother, one day, burst into tears when I went to
visit her from Spain to Argentina and I told her "mum, don't cry cause I
will be back in a month" and my mum told me "I don't cry for you, I
cry for me". And you come to tell me that you cry for me, suffer for me,
you want to love me. It
is as if it weren't enough for you. I advise you well and then you want to marry
me because I advise you well. It isn't so, you have to thank me for advising you
well, on top of that you want me to marry you. CS:
I'm recalling that when we went with Pilar Iglesis to the granting of Queen
Sofia's awards, which this year was granted to Alvaro Mutis, Chela was there. We
were talking to him and he told us: "To educate people, to make them
cultured is dangerous because until they become cultured they go through a stage
of stupidity and the majority remain there". MOM:
Envy: when I'm teaching someone, there is a moment when the other becomes really
stupid, more stupid than when I started to teach him. If he overcomes that
process of envy, he grows; if he doesn't, he doesn't grow, he's finished. CS:
To overcome envy, I imagine one has to be able to think that each one has a
history, that no one wants to occupy somebody's place. MOM:
It is also a business. Many times in my life I overcame envy because it was
convenient to overcome it, not because I wanted to. How can I envy the one who
gives me my bread? Even though there are people who envy the one who gives them
bread. CS:
Then envy is also an economic question. MOM:
Well, I can feel envy but I did understood that money, apart from representing
the shit, the penis and the children, is a general equivalent in the capitalist
system of production, evidently I cannot envy what makes me earn money or gives
me money, because there are people who envy even the person who gives them
money. And why is it not convenient to envy who gives me money: because I end up
destroying him. IV To
us poor, everything We
slowly become made of granite, He
doesn't need to be joined to no one Darling, One
more year, it doesn't matter, the same way it came, it will go. This
year I'll publish several books. I
must have an ambition going away from me, something placed in the world
that could interest me enough as to drink up till the last goblet, to
dance the last waltz and to start working like a condemned person. I
smoke, not knowing what I do, and the smoke always carries me through
undetermined roads. I entertain myself with the smoke spirals and when I
write, even the smoke trembles before my eyes as if it were an enamoured
woman. I
smoke once more and once more, without realising, to let the hours go by,
to give the words time so they desire one another in a brutal way. One
of those verses which are kept by humanity forever. What
must be brutal isn't the verse but its permanence. No
one was owner of oneself when we looked at each other.
Today
she said it to me without any shame: - I oppose my reasons to the reasons of oblivion. Nobody awaits for me,
enamoured, the violent vertigo of life. - I understand, she said sincerely, if I want to be original I should get
cured first of my common feelings.
We were used to tell things to one another calmly. So
that, when she preferred to talk, I listened to her. - You are fifty already - she told me with trust and afterwards, lowering
and hollowing her voice, she ended the phrase.
Afterwards,
as we already said, there is no rest. A
good lover must always get someone to love. When
the secret ogre of life imposes its dominion over the arrogant poetry, she
stops suffering about anything and starts singing. There
were men who trusted no one and, anyway died as rats. If I have to carry
the pain of being unique I would do so with chivalry, a while myself and a
while the Other. For the time being I separate from my body what can be
separated and, pure soul, battering heart, word by word I go about
building this mirage. I'm a graced poet by the fortune of not feeling in
general what other poets feel. This way not only makes me original but
basically inhibits suffering. I'm one among many, I understand it, but the
best one, the first one, no one will be able anymore to surpass me in
that. Besides, when someone gets near me he will be, surely, from my side,
a graceful person with part of my heritage in life, some writing, some
kiss in the dark. Someone
who, in spite of tendency to unify, could be able to differentiate
himself, that's what I'm looking for, to abide the law until the law
becomes exhausted. To be always the same ones perturbs any legislation. INDIO GRIS THIS IS ADVERTISING
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