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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 95 YEAR II EDITORIAL INTERVIEW
WITH THE POET
Carmen Salamanca: This
section is already beginning to have collaborators, a woman doctor who has sent
me some questions because she would be interested in knowing how you respond to
her. You studied Medicine, didn't you? Miguel
Oscar Menassa: Today, you have come ready to insult me. CS:
About that question of having been a sailor? MOM:
No. You say to me "you studied Medicine" when I must be one of the
most important doctors of the Twentieth Century. And then you added another
stupid thing. CS:
Excuse me. What is your opinion about the researches that are being made
that relate depression to cancer? MOM:
What you're asking me is very difficult, because watching TV this week I
realised that we are governed by mentally feeble people, trying not to insult
the mentally feeble people. Do you understand what I say? CS:
Yes. MOM:
That my present position is very compromising. Afterwards, if the people in the
government are mentally feeble, the opposition must also be mentally feeble
because they allow the government to do those things to them… I'm
talking about depression, don't you ever think that I'm talking about the
government. CS:
Yes, you're talking about Zapatero who's suffering from a depression… MOM:
And about Aznar, too, I'm talking about the people who govern us. But I didn't
want to talk about that. Doctor Rojas Marcos is capable, in a press conference,
of stating that alcoholism isn't such alcoholism or drug dependency isn't such
drug dependency, if the fact that there is a previous depression isn't taken
into account. It frightened me, because depression, as you know, can come by the
loss of a beloved relative being, the loss of a wanted object, or it can come
directly by the loss of ideals. I do understand why cancer is increasing; why
the automobile accidents increase in spite of
lots of money being spent, why people go quickly from a home-made herb to
a drug that kills them. All those questions are responded because each two days
the Spanish people lose an ideal. I reached the top of a depression when I
realised that I'm being governed by mentally feeble people, and as I take care
of mental health, I know what a mentally feeble person can do to the family, so
imagine what a mentally impaired person can do with the State. That's my present
worry. What were you asking me? CS:
About the relations between depression and cancer. MOM:
Well, I've just finished saying that it is evident, that as you have well said,
I was a doctor the last century. I don't dare to say that psychoanalysis cures
cancer because it will be said that I'm an esoteric, but it is clear that
patients that by chance, by luck, at the same moment that they were suffering
from cancer, of beginning a psychoanalytic treatment or being in psychoanalytic
treatment, have had a better evolution of their illness. I'm not going to say
that psychoanalysis avoids illnesses, what I mean is that psychoanalysis gives a
different look of the world, therefore, of the illnesses. Is that understood? CS:
Yes. Audience:
That for psychoanalysis illnesses are different than for medicine, for example. MOM:
Different and more than that. For medicine there are illnesses that, from the
point of view of psychoanalysis, are unimportant functional disorders that can
be overcome in four psychoanalytical sessions. It not only believes that
illnesses are more unimportant, because psychoanalysis isn't a fool, it knows
that there are serious illnesses and that man dies from an illness. What is
man's illness? You could ask me. CS:
What is man's illness? MOM:
Well, being mortal, to owe oneself to language and not to believe that language
belongs to him and this has its double erotic sense, as you may realise. CS:
Of course. MOM:
One thing is to depend on language and another thing is to make language depend
on me. Language is able to creep through the most abject corners of the other's
intimacy. However, our morality, our prejudices, the television, the advice
given by El País newspaper, make us have our language repressed, in the sense
that we make the movements of our tongue depend on our personality, instead of
making our personality depend on the movements of our tongue. CS:
It means that one is what one says and what one silences. MOM:
Well, one is what one says if he is lucky enough to have someone that listens to
him. Afterwards, it is what the governor says, the chief of the police, the
chief executive in government, what the president of the president of the
government says that, as you may know, are the great international companies.
There is no president who runs any country, you know it, don't you? CS:
Yes. MOM:
There are presidents who are appreciated by the great capitals. As
happens with me, I'm director of this institution, why? Because I'm
appreciated by the great capitals, the day that I'm no longer convenient to the
great capitals that support this institution, surely they will employ another
director. CS:
That's politics, isn't that? MOM:
That's almost politics. Because politics, in general, is the art of what is
possible. Psychoanalysis is also the art of the impossible, if you allow me. As
many foolish things are said around there, we could say that psychoanalysis has
its own politics. It would be right to say that psychoanalysis has already
produced, in some way, a psychoanalytical philosophy, even though not yet
written in any text. You, that you enjoy reading, Psychoanalysis
of the Leader, a book that I published more or less when Felipe Gonzalez
took power, that could be a manual of psychoanalytical philosophy for the lower
grades, couldn't it? CS:
For the lower grades? MOM:
Yes, the first year of the secondary school… In reality, I first thought from
six years of age, but as you asked me the question I didn't want to disappoint
you and said, "well, from 13, 14, 15 years old". Because
Sartre was really wrong in a lot of things but a person who was wrong in
a lot of things and worked for 50-60 years writing and thinking, he must have
been right in some things. CS:
Yes. MOM:
Yes, what?, homing pigeon. CS:
That he must have been right in something for us to continue talking about him. MOM:
But do you know what I was referring to? CS:
Yes, that children posses that capacity of learning. MOM:
Is there an age of reasoning or isn't there an age of reasoning? CS:
At 7. MOM:
And that age is more or less at around 6-7-8 years of age, after all what we are
seeing with psychoanalysis it would be at 2 when the child processes the mirror
stage. The symbol is already there, that is why some films show a four years old
child telling his mother how she must treat him. Psychoanalytical consulting
rooms are full with cases where a 4 to 5 years old child tells his mother how
she should behave with him so that he could reach school instead of going to
hospital. CS:
The craft of dying has shorts stories about this issue. MOM:
Yes. The craft of dying is a novel, it's a collection of poetry, it's a
diary, instead it seems to me that Psychoanalysis
of the Leader is a text on psychoanalytical philosophy. In reality is the
text in which Menassa separates himself, in the sense of understanding, in the
sense that he understands some of what Cero Group Buenos Aires had been. He took
distance from some things that he didn't like, evidently he began a new
stage: it is the book which opens the current stage of Cero Group. Yes,
because Menassa
gives to himself some advice, he says: "No one ever has to stand out
because the
head of he who stands out is cut off". Afterwards he distinguishes between
a famous man and a working man and he chooses the working man because he says
that the famous man is all day in the streets riding a cardboard horse running
from one place to the other. And that a writer is a person that is more or less
quiet looking at how the world rotates to show posterity how the world in which
he lived, rotated. I know that the world always rotates, but sometimes it turns
this way and sometimes it turns the other way. How
lovely the painting is! I did it in three minutes, we are some geniuses. The
painting is more than beautiful. How nice it is! How he fucks her! Don't you see
it? This one laughs because she doesn't see it. CS:
She's very stuck to colours.
MOM:
Ask me, please, how was it? CS:
We were talking about a psychoanalytical philosophy and of the book Psychoanalysis
of the leader. MOM:
I think that it was the book which initiates the current stage of Cero Group.
What happened to Freud with the word time happens to me with the word
institution, because in that book I ended up saying, as I didn't have another
concept of institution, I had to say "no more institutions". It is a
very interesting book. And afterwards, few years later, I ended up generating or
participating in the creation of an institution that as you know is quite
powerful which is Cero Group Psychoanalysis School, that encloses a lot of
activities: Psychoanalysis School, poetry School, Cero Group Editorial, Art
Workshops, expositions, film making interventions, writing workshops,
publications of two magazines of 125,000 copies each… Then
we could say that Psychoanalysis of the
Leader is the book that allows Cero Group to reach the place where it is
now. And because of things that are happening to me in my private life, I think
I'm processing a book I wrote in 1999 called Condemned Poet, 99 Manifesto or the Condemned psychoanalyst, which
would open a new stage, because I'm just assuming what is said in that book that
I have already assumed. So that I imagine that if you people take the trouble to
read that book tonight perhaps you may also realise that he who writes makes you
assume something that you haven't yet assumed. CS:
Such diversity of activities, such creativity makes me remember of that issue
Menassa talks about, which says that genital issues cannot be sublimed , that it
is a different energy. MOM:
I understood the joke, the joke that you're making for the readers is that if
genital energy that is to say fucking, could be sublimed… Before
you said that I paint, that I write, that I this, that I the other. I
understood the joke, you're asking me when is it that I…look how you've
got the cough. CS:
I see you coming… I'm asking when you fuck? MOM:
Of course, then you pull my leg. CS:
I don't expect you to answer me, it is simply a joke. But in a theoretical level
explain to me that matter of sublimation, creation and fucking. MOM:
The only thing I can sublime here is, to tell you and that you understand, for
the psychoanalysts to understand. Amelia
Díez: I listen to you. MOM:
You can only sublime if you really love a person. I'm going to say
it so it can be understood, the energy of the subject can only be
sublimed with a small other. AD: The energy of loving oneself. MOM:
Interpreting the matter, yes, of course, because if the other is only my image
in the mirror or I can only love my father, my mother, what I am, what I was or
what I will be… AD:
With the energy of my passion for myself. MOM:
Sure, but placed on another, instantly placed on another. Because if not we
think of a primary narcissism and what is sublimed is a narcissistic
energy, as Amelia says, all that love that I have for myself, but
has already been placed in another, was already object-like libido. AD:
I can be another from me. MOM:
You can be another from you. You'll have to write a little more. Transform
yourselves Amelia Díez and Amelia Kostaflichi. AD:
No. MOM:
You don't want, you already told me no. Please, I want to listen to you. AD:
What happens is that always "my own self" is someone else for me. But
what did you mean, with the love I feel for another, in the sense that the other
always reminds me that I'm mortal. MOM:
For example, you say it in a way that in saying it I say: no, there must have
been castration if not, how could there be sublimation? AD:
You sublime with drive, with language, I have to have another alike, I have to
have a symbolic another, I have to have the whole apparatus, I have to be a
social being. MOM:
If I don't do anything else, sublimation is that: I hold up the life that I
already learnt to live and that I live well, as well. Because sometimes we are
carried away by appearances, that poet who suffered in Paris, for example
Vallejo, but Vallejo thought intimately that he was transforming the Spanish
language. He really lived a paradise-like life, he never ate, he was hit in
Paris, he was hit in Portugal, his ass was broken in Spain, but he was that
energy, that force. Sometimes
you see me painting and I don't paint very well, I paint, but I paint because I
think of closing up all the museums in Spain, if not I wouldn't be able to
paint. And why am I going to close them up? Because they are not painters,
because for me they are draftsmen, they are ladies, they are commercial
employees and there are some painters, but we don't need so many museums, the
rest can be shown to children in photographs and that's all.
Then
all the museums can be closed, there whorehouses can be set up, and money can be
collected, instead of having whores going around the neighbourhoods pocking on
everyone else's noses. I close those facilities, I open a whorehouse controlled
by the State, the State earns a commission and with that money it pays for
secondary education, because teenagers need more professors, more classrooms,
and I solve several collective problems. AD:
It never is in the order of
necessity, of natural or primary necessity, but of the necessity of
desire. MOM:
Yes, because, in any country, when children who are starving, are not being fed,
the question isn't the lack of food, is that if I feed them, afterwards, I have
to educate them. AD:
I have to let them sublime. MOM:
I have to let them sublime, perhaps an artist may appear. CS:
Let's go back to last week's matter, I give them drugs and it's cheaper. MOM:
It's cheaper, to educate a child is very expensive. CS:
With a bit of luck he dies, they are made useless. MOM: And the problem of Social Healthcare is solved. CS:
Now I understand the first phrases of the interview. Let's rewind, you had said
that the only thing that can be sublimed… MOM:
Love, to put it foolishly. CS:
Love in relation to a small other or in front of another, but then, what can't
be sublimed? MOM:
He who doesn't fuck because he thinks he sings better when he doesn't fuck, must
go to a psychoanalyst. AD:
Fucking is subliming. CS:
Is fucking subliming for a human being? MOM:
Sure, it's one of its forms. Not everyone can achieve it, you are very
theoretical, Amelia, in the sense that any one can be ill because of that
precisely, I have my subliming apparatus broken because there is no castration
yet, so not even fucking like a crazy horse can I achieve to sublime something. Audience:
But in such an individual, narcissism must be influencing too much, don't you
think so? MOM:
What I believe is that such an individual isn't a subject neither this or the
other way. You people think that narcissism is an illness and narcissism is a
vital stage of the individual. I'm saying, as well, that there is no primary
narcissism, (although I have some researchers in Cero Group who are
investigating the existence of primary narcissism). There is only a secondary
narcissism, though it may seem prior to castration because it is something that
comes from when you are a child and you love, it installs itself after the
operation of castration. AD:
If there were primary narcissism, the human being wouldn't need anything else,
he would be contented, he would be satisfied, it is as if there were a
gregarious instinct. MOM:
Exactly. Audience:
If there were primary narcissism there wouldn't be any conflict, there wouldn't
be desire. MOM:
That is the problem. I can as a subject what has to do with the subject (I don't
know if I say it in a Tarzan-like way, but it's on purpose). I may have
different conducts with respect to the word death, I can't avoid death. I can
fuck this way or the other way, but I can't exactly attribute myself that
fucking, because the fact that man fucks is a problem of the specie and the
specie is greater than me, then though I might think myself very intelligent…
But you tell me that there are people who have children and continue fucking.
Well, I happened to think of two or three obscenities but I won't tell you. CS:
There would be an uncontrollable factor for medicine in all illnesses, I mean to
say a psychic factor. In what measure does the psyches influence at the time of
getting ill? MOM:
Do you want to solve the problems of medicine or do you want to chat? Because if
you want to chat, I'll tell you that that problem medicine has with
psychoanalysis all the other disciplines have it as well, all, there are
disciplines which won't be able of giving another step forward if they don't
take seriously the matter of the existence of a concept, that is the concept of
the unconscious, which was produced a hundred years ago and it precisely
explains that matter that people seek to explain themselves. It is the case of
medicine with illnesses, the case of educators, some of the things that happen
with adolescents, in the case of school failure, some things
happening to professors, only psychoanalysis can understand these things,
till psychoanalysis isn't taken up, there won't be a solution for many things. CS:
Sure, another of the questions which they had prepared for me was related to
pain-control units in hospitals, what can psychoanalysis contribute to the
problem of pain? Pain is psychic par excellence. I mean to say that it is
touched very strongly by what is psychic, we know of the existence of placebos,
we know that everything is relative. MOM:
I, the first thing I wanted to do, was to fool you. When you told me what
psychoanalysis can do for pain, did you say something like that? What
psychoanalysis can do is to collect money and pay four or five agriculturists to
grow first quality marihuana and distribute it among hospitals, in the
pain-control units. And before letting the patients try it, make the doctors try
it so as to see how they no longer have so much pain, and as they don't have so
much pain in themselves, they won't have necessity of watching
pain around them. A
pneumonia aches, a pleurisy aches, I'm no fool, I opened bellies with my own
eyes and found nothing. I say that pain aches, but evidently the present
medicine, governments, want nothing to do with solutions to mitigate pain. In an
epoch that to make citizens happy is prohibited, we don't know what to do with
happy citizens, and to mitigate the pain of the people is to make happy
citizens. Man only suffers because something aches in him or because something
will ache in him, for no other reason man suffers. Because if my lover leaves me
and doesn't produce in me that grudge it produces, how could I forget her, I
forget her immediately but she produces in me that narcissistic wound, "she
abandoned me, me, that I was the best lover" CS:
And, why don't laboratories take possession of marihuana when they have taken
possession of morphine, opium, of all the sedatives? MOM:
Because you can't manufacture opium at home, try to manufacture any synthetic
substance, it can't be done. Instead grass has tradition. I read the newspapers,
I have no strange information. That 83 year-old lady, who first of all reached
her 83 which is quite difficult, smokes marihuana for her arthritis and it aches
less, she doesn't have arthritis any longer, she mustn't have much arthritis
because she plants the small plants, she waters them, she picks up the seeds. CS:
She invented her arthritis to be allowed to smoke. MOM:
Maybe. But the problem is that there are people who invent the disease to have
something to do and that something doesn't help them to cure the disease.
Afterwards there were these Spanish guys who had decided that marihuana was good
for the brain and that it prevented brain tumours. There are two or three brain
tumours, one of them, the glioma tumour, that neurologists (I hope that this is
seen by neurologists who have read some books), consider it biological and
operate it, but they always allude that in the unfettering of the tumour there
was a mental catastrophe. The truth is that they were carrying ahead a research
which could have been fruitful and it seems to me a foolishness that for a
little lack of money had put an end to it, they probably didn't want to give a
small amount of money to avoid people to think they were subsidising that…
We
are Europeans and it happens to be that the marihuana additive is used
throughout Europe, not to get drunk, but to give colour, to give smell. It is
allowed at least in 4 or 6 European countries. The fact that it is prohibited in
Spain doesn't speak highly of us, because it means that we are confused people,
we prohibit what shouldn't be prohibited and we set free what we should
prohibit. CS:
Have you heard about the youngest consumer of ecstasy of history? A two year-old
child whose mother, because of a confusion, thinking it was water, gave the
child to drink
liquid ecstasy which was in a mineral water bottle. The lady worked
cleaning up a disco and it seems that the owner of the disco, at his house, in
the fridge, had another compound which wasn't ecstasy, it is called liquid
ecstasy, a commercial name, but that is worse than the ecstasy pills. MOM:
It's pure poison. What do you mean? CS:
That there are things that are prohibited which are harmless and other things,
which are more noxious, are allowed. Because it's illegal but if so many people
have it, it's allowed. MOM:
Sure, we can't close down all the discos in the world, but we can advise mothers
that it isn't convenient that they give their children to drink things they find
in a disco. Because we won't go around closing down all the discos in the world.
People should be able to earn a living someway. CS:
They have to have something to drink. MOM:
Of course, because they say "let's end up our dependence on beer" and
the question we must ask ourselves isn't that, it is "where will all that
youth end up without a correction? All right, we prohibit them to have beer and
now, what are they going to do? We should have to calm down because for the time
being it's just beer. And at the same time to see how I can do to correct that
youth so that they don't go each time for more, each time for more. I teach them
badly, I tell them that there is no work instead of saying that work is going to
save their lives. CS:
I think we are carrying on a very psychosomatic interview. MOM:
You started it. CS:
And that phrase, "I teach them badly", I happen to think of
"poetry". It wouldn't be bad to teach the young to read poetry, beyond
the fact that it's good for everybody, but I say the young. MOM:
That's what we do, but the results are relative. CS:
Relative… MOM:
If you compare our micro numbers with the macro numbers of intoxicated people we
are losing evidently, but if we think that when reading poetry we end up writing
it, well, yes, because poetry is read by a lot of people who aren't precisely in
the same moment we are here. CS:
Losing or winning, no one has died on us by an overdose of poetry. MOM:
It isn't a question of convincing people that we have no panacea because we
don't have any, if not, I would convince them, but we don't have any panacea. If
we give our lives to the significance, if we surrender life to the word, then we
can make use of the word. I want to say exclusively that, if I don't give my
life to the word, I can make use of what I'm giving to life unconsciously, my
mother, family, the state, work and with this I'm saving myself, if I give my
life to work instead of giving it to the word. I already have a sort of
salvation because there is legislation there. CS:
What is clear is that life must be given for something because if not, one has
no life. MOM:
And how do you manage to have life without surrendering it to something? To
love, though it may be only one, even if you know that they are things of
horses, of beast, of cows, at least for love, perhaps for love you are able to
jump forward. Did you see how we are? Any man and woman, if their lover says to
you: I want you to get me such a thing, you, for love, even though in that
moment you might be masculine, you go and conquer something to give to your
love. CS:
"There I go, Milady, behind the beam of light of your desires". MOM:
So it is. CS:
It wouldn't be bad to wake up in the morning and say that. MOM:
I would never say "may there be light" in a place where electric light
didn't exist and where I couldn't go to switch it on for there to be light.
Sometimes people say that Menassa is a boaster because I say "may there be
light", but I get up from my seat, I press the switch and light is made,
but I'm no boaster. Now I'm ascending to the heights and I'm riding a lift. Or
ascending to the heights always means going to heaven as the Virgin Mary? No. I,
for example, permanently paint ascensions, people say: the Virgin Mary and I
tell them no, poetry ascends, any other thing can ascend, any fragile thing like
the Virgin Mary, because you realise that the Virgin was fragile, and that is
why she could be ascended. Jesus, who was heavier, you couldn't see him fall
from the cross nor ascend to heaven, instead, something so fragile as a Virgin,
such a non-existence, at that time… CS:
There was no pollution. MOM:
Absolutely, but there were neither virgins, because nobody had the concept of a
young Virgin as a child, that comes from 200 years ago. CS:
Something else for the interview? The
truth is that I would like that you, for example, who has that polemic position
in the world, why don't you create a political party? I'll be your consultant. CS:
I liked that one that you created when you were in Buenos Aires, the Parted in two. MOM:
I was the ideological consultant of the Parted
in two. CS:
Split in the middle, the fundamental excision from the hand of psychoanalysis. SARAMA Sarama
is the place of the woman I love, Afterwards,
already tired of dreaming, Darling, In
the days of love I used to love, without turning back, with all possible
desperation, afterwards something quieted in me, something in me turned
sweetish, as if clumsy. I'm
poisoned, absolutely poisoned. Blood
and semen are impetuous pus in your memory. They are glorious pus charging
against the world. We
were high and lusty of our bodies rotting in the fog. Everything was
delicate, from time to time an antibiotic called us back to reality, which
was never beautiful, there was always an unpaid debt in reality, some
burnt food, some colourless love…
She
was joyful like in the great days. -
Sex-she told me- is practised by imbeciles and some street dogs, the rest
of humanity, including both of us, try, without being able, to talk about it. -Yes,
I understand you -this time I answered her- you are in love with me because I
hold you in the air, without touching you. She
preferred us to continue the next time. I,
before she left, told her: -
Make the world more beautiful, collaborate with poetry. She
made a grimace with her mouth and that was her farewell.
We
are two imbeciles- I told her looking in her eyes. And
she said nothing. -
We are two enamoured imbeciles - I told her. And
she didn't allow me time to look at her in the eyes because she sweetly
spitted my gaze.
To
triumph doesn't mean to triumph over nothing, it means to remain. I'm
here, buried, I understand, but the dead talk, who doesn't know that? The
dead talk and dance and some of them like me, impure even in glory, are
able to write. The
massacre of the letters, I have placed the spacing tab in number one and
the letters will be cramped up, all of this to save a little paper, until
I don't know what I'm writing. The greatest son-of-a-bitch of all,
including me, of course, is me. I give my life for a full verse and I
realise that it means a work of forty volumes. I don't know if that will
be enough or I'll have to have, besides such a quantity of pages, such a
quantity of companions. I,
truly, don't want to be happy, nor to love, nor none of those things. What
I want is to find out how much it exactly costs to live 200 years. After
achieving such thing, I imagine that love, art, happiness, will come on
their own in due time. INDIO GRIS THIS IS ADVERTISING
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