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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 117 YEAR III EDITORIAL INTERVIEW
WITH THE POET MIGUEL OSCAR MENASSA Carmen
Salamanca: What
attracted my attention the most is that it is the turn for some to understand
and you had your turn to understand. I would like to understand. Miguel
Oscar Menassa: When I say understand, I'm practically saying to live,
because to understand, to understand… I
set off from the basis that I would like to be genial in everything, but I also
set off from the basis that it is impossible, that is why, to tell the truth, I
consider myself a Great Lama, someone who knows that happiness for the current
man is very difficult to obtain, but I don't stop seeking happiness, I don't go
around proclaiming that happiness is impossible, I keep on searching for it, I'm
more than a Lama. Because a Lama is a gossiper, someone who realises that
something can't be done and goes and denounces it. And he takes away the
illusion from people, the utopia. The serenity that gives to be working in
something, even if it is worthless, because you shouldn't believe that all the
people working make of their work something useful. CS:
A great Lama, someone who knows that happiness doesn't exist. MOM:
Of course I know that happiness doesn't exist, that it is very difficult to
obtain, because God knows who manages the quota of happiness. They don't sell it
in the supermarket, afterwards they say that you can be happy if you fulfil your
obligations and so no one obtains happiness, they tell you that you can be happy
if you have a girlfriend and you cannot obtain your happiness, then they tell
you that you can be happy if you write a good poem and you cannot obtain your
happiness and no one obtains their happiness because as soon as you write a good
poem, you want to write a second one and afterwards when you already have twenty
five poems you want to publish them… Life is full of problems. This question
about happiness is very difficult. And what if you like cars, a car today,
another car tomorrow. CS:
We have talked about how you do to read in such a way and we have also outlined
what you say to your students, how this question of reading is at your school,
but, how do you do to convey that? What do you do in order to teach? MOM:
First of all, learning lasts the whole life. Secondly, I have to allow myself to
be carried away by the art I want to practise, that is to say, I have to allow
myself to be carried away after fulfilling some minimum requisites. CS:
Which are… MOM:
I told you before, for example, if I want to write, I have to be writing, later
I can decide to write about something I don't know about and write a lot of
bullshit or I can write about something I know, with the consequence that the
poem may become a bad class about some odd knowledge. And I can start being a
cultured man and I'm learning, I will be thinking with the thought of that
epoch, then it doesn't matter what I write about because I'm a cultured man and
I had worked to be one. And,
the truth, I have worked more in my psychoanalysis than in the libraries.
Because if you think that all my learning or my knowledge come from the books I
have read, you might read the books I have read, but what you call my thinking
doesn't appear like a magic trick, it means that it is somewhere else. CS:
What can't be avoided when teaching or when transmitting is that the one who has
to make the research is the one who learns. MOM:
It is the apprentice, of course. If the apprentice does the apprenticeship, that
is to say, does it, and if he accepts me as his teacher, because if not I can
neither teach him to do it better, or to do more effectively. CS:
Yesterday they asked me "help me to assemble a book", and I said, well
(it is a psychoanalysis book), make a list of the tittles of the works you have
done and bring them to me and we'll try to find some coherence" and she
told me, "what kind of help is that, I ask you for help and you send me to
make one more task". But of course, the work must be done by each one,
there is no other kind of help. That
recalls me a phrase from The 2001 nights which says: a psychoanalyst cures more
because of what he is than what he says. MOM:
You arrive to a place in man's life where man cannot say any longer one thing
and do some other thing, when the truth is, that the writer is the only one who
has nothing to do with what he writes, but as I tell you, I'm not going to
question how a bad writer writes, perhaps in a few more centuries he is good.
But, yes, what I can question is how he has read, that yes. I'm a writer and I
have complete freedom, but, freedom for what? I have freedom for writing, I
don't have freedom for love, I have to build up for me my freedom for love, in
the same way I built up my freedom for saying. To have freedom for writing
doesn't mean to have freedom for living, those are two different constructions.
What happens is that people want to fix everything, if they quarrel with their
girlfriend, they have a second girlfriend and they want to do the same thing
they did with the first one, they want to save, they don't want to realise that
they have changed girlfriends, they do the same things they used to do, then
they lose them again. Well,
there are people who have spent all their lives like this, without being able to
make love because they went on treating new lovers as they had treated the
previous ones, from whom they had precisely separated because of the way they
treated people. CS:
That is to say, they went on treating everybody like their mother. MOM:
Yes, if you think so. If
life will have to come TO
LIVE, although our destiny DARLING, Today,
after a prolonged encounter, even more than our prolonged encounters, you made
me admit that I was wrong. Now,
alone, without the presence of your trembling voice, I can't remember nor the
motives for your sadness, nor the argument of my mistake. What I remember is
that you cried the whole night and a great part of the next day and that I was
anguished like when being a child I touched the ass of one of my neighbours and
when seeing me my mother slapped me in the face. How
could I explain to my mother then, that I, truly, loved Her and what I did with
my neighbour was just for playing sake, it was just for fun! How
can I explain to you, my companion, about this inscrutable journey, that love
never gave up anything and, because of that, it doesn't exist. Let's
give up, my love, to our love, to be able to love each other. Let's
give up, my love, to pertain to each other, so that we can have each other. Let's
give up, my love, to our wretched ambitions, to posses together with the poet
the grandeur. We
live in a world, darling, that he who doesn't need money, needs love. And in
this desperate and perplexed world because of not being able, it is where I pose
the fit of a dialogue. An old way of finding new roads for life. I propose to
you a dialogue maintained at a certain distance, a true acid test. To begin with
we'll look at each other as if weighing each other's own weight. To find in the
other, in that gaze the place where one will be defeated. Not death, but the
black and infinite space of madness will be our place of work. Everything
will be wonderful and sinister, we will win and lose several times, in various
situations. We'll be able or we won't be able with love. We'll succeed and we'll
be defeated playing the same game with the same rivals. I want you to remember
it forever, in those moments, She looks like a mask of a past joy. She is
impenetrable when she is dead, and, however, your body tightens under your
clothes, your body breaks underneath your oldest feelings. Darling, it is about
the repetition of a phrase that She more than speaking, prefers to
tremble. An old rite is established in the contours of your body, like when in
my neighbourhood we set in fire San Juan's bonfire. There, like today in your
body, all what was old was burnt, there, each time, the past was burnt. There,
the warm rancors were burnt, the brilliant tiles of death.
She
said to me, of course without knowing, that she would have wanted to have a
child with me. She herself told me that I answer that she is a fool and that I
hate her a little. -
You have me under surveillance -she told me- to see how I work. Perhaps
aren't you thinking that all this that happens to me with you is an invention? And
if all this is an invention? You
are calling me an ignorant, because I know that it isn't an invention.
Psychoanalysis can be an invention, my life is not. Afterwards
she laughs like a crazy person and she tells me about a friend who is a poet
to be able to tell me that I disgust her. She says she sees me too old,
but not so much as not to able with her. -
You never wanted me to be your daughter, you were afraid to be mixed up
into troubles. -
You never wanted to be my mother. -
You are a son-of-a-bitch, doctor. You never wanted me. The only thing
that mattered to you was my money. You
really disgust me and nevertheless, I'm in love with you. Thinking
it over well, you are my only comfort. On
the other hand, to psychoanalyse yourself is quite cheap, to be so original.
What I have is a terrible fear: after such a long time masturbating nothing will
be alright. Doctor,
I tell you, with me you can only fail, let me go! -
Two companions of yours told me the same thing last week, does it bring
anything to your mind? -
Go to hell. -
We
will continue the next time.
A
pleasant bath: two young bodies fucking crazily in the bathtub while the water
of the shower slided quite strongly over our naked bodies, we embraced each
other trying to stick as much as possible every inch of our skins. And
we kissed our wet faces, our wet eyes, her mouth opening slowly pushed by his
tongue leading in salutation, towards welcoming. We greeted each other joyfully,
the two tongues meet under the small waterfall which insists, like love, like
desiring. The
bodies slide and hollow out to collide again. Plaf. Plaf. And it was the sound
of water and it was the sound of sex. His
hands traverse my back and holding my buttocks with both hands, he pulls me up a
few inches and puts it in all the way to my throat. Then I, on tiptoes and with
my knees flexed, I go up and down over the central obelisk, hard and hot, in
full midday. Standing
this way, we fucked in the doorway. He made me stand on a banana crate and I
opened my legs slightly, and he put it in and I felt that finally, I was a
woman. There,
he kicked the crate and I remained nailed in his body, directly nailed.
1 My
work is my work and it can't be altered at all, not even in misfortunes. I say. 2 They
are clumsy, they need to be dominated. That is to say that if I don't want to
dominate I must send them to hell or get someone who wants to dominate them. 3 The
disorder around me is me is my jail. The
soul hasn't got an appropriate dwelling. We have got what the proletariat of
some civilised countries obtains: a house for the body, for the family. Now we
have to go for the house for our souls and that in these societies is obtained
by some bourgeois, mostly. I
try to reach the closest distance of each word, I get lost in its articulation,
like women: the more I worry about one I lose grace in the articulation. You
have to carry on the story up to its last consequences. I will live alone in a
four-bedroom house and I will have the whole house as an art laboratory, this
way no one will cry when I will be able to write an unforgettable poem. Up to the last consequences will mean that there will be those who will take care of my subsistence , I will be the one who will take care of the livelihood of the poem. Everyone will have what they deserve, we will go through the issues like those who are accustomed to walk over snow, do so. I won't have time to investigate what is good and what is bad, they will be conventions between the ones who dare to convene. The rest will have to stand what is convened as if they would agree or will be judged for something. Indio Gris THIS IS ADVERTISING
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