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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 96 YEAR II EDITORIAL INTERVIEW
WITH THE POET Carmen
Salamanca: Let's see, Menassa, interview time. Miguel
Oscar Menassa: Interview, who is it? Salamanca? CS:
Yes. MOM:
Listen to me, Salamanca, do you work for El País newspaper? CS:
Not that I know, at lest they don't pay me. MOM:
Be careful, because everything I say to you, fifteen days later, appears in El
País newspaper as a piece of news. CS:
Well, it is because you are a good reader of reality. MOM:
You think that I anticipate myself. CS:
Yes. MOM:
And, why don't these people hire me, if I could give them the news fifteen days
before? CS:
It seems strange to me that Polanco hasn't made the attempt to hire you as
Director of El País. MOM:
You're already exaggerating. CS:
As a political analyst. MOM:
Well, or to give them the news fifteen days before. Journalists and advertising
agencies are nowadays a little impolite because look at what they say about that
young Italian boy, poor devil. CS:
Berlusconi? MOM:
No, the other one. he is a little rightist but he isn't a son-of-a-bitch. And
the journalists say "he wanted to sink the ship with all the immigrants
inside" and he had said that it was a punishment measure for the smugglers
, after releasing all the immigrants, they would sink the ship and this way to
call the attention of the other smugglers of souls. And the journalists
translated that Mr Bossi, as they don't want him (because rightist, yes, but not
so rightist, they don't know what they want), then they say: "Mr Bossi
wants to sink a ship with 500 immigrants on board". CS:
Yes, and the appearance of the Red Brigades seemed to me suspiciously
well-timed. MOM:
What! CS:
Yes, suspiciously convenient. MOM:
Don't print that. What does that mean? CS:
That it was very convenient for the government, it can radicalise itself a
little. Right now that unions are protesting, there were two million people in
yesterday's manifestation. MOM:
You doubt if the Red Brigades are the Red Brigades, is that what you're telling
me? I wouldn't dare to say that. CS:
I listened to a political analysis the other day and they said that the great
danger of the last attack isn't the reappearance of the Red Brigades but that
the precarious political equilibrium in Italy can be destabilised at this
moment. What does destabilising mean? It can be a radicalisation. MOM:
I don't know. CS:
Let's say what's going to happen in Italy in fifteen days. MOM:
In Italy, I'll tell you and you'll see how I'm right, in fifteen days, in Italy
they will continue speaking Italian. Audience:
Nothing ever happens in Italy. MOM:
Italy intervened in about 500 wars, it won none, nor even when the war was
against squash cultivators. The same thing happens to Italy with war than what
happens to Spain with democracy, it tries, it tries, it tries but it can't
achieve it. Italy makes war in order to gain something and Spain makes
democracy: democracy and democracy can't be handled by Spain. And I don't know
why it is like this, it must be because they desire it so much. Psychoanalysis
says that for things to happen one must pretend to be stupid. And these people,
having such interest they shoo away the partridge. CS:
Do you mean that each country has its own aesthetics? MOM:
I wish they did! They have a moral, if they had aesthetics they would spend more
money in education rather than in arms to force the enemy. I think it's OK that
you believe in those things because you're young and I was told that there is no
growth without a strong disenchantment, I think it's OK that you believe in
those things because when disenchantment comes you'll write better. CS:
Psychoanalysis of the Leader, August, 27th, 1977.
"In the inter-subjective relations the only thing one risks is a little
security and a little of money, the rest is profit, all humane". MOM:
But he, what he didn't know in that moment is that money is the only thing which
is at risk in the inter-subjective relations…he says: don't be afraid that the
only thing you are risking is a bit of money. What else did you say? CS:
A bit of security and a bit of money. MOM:
When I said this today's problems didn't exist, where money and security are two
problems of the modern states. Do you understand a little of what I'm saying?
I'm sure you must, because it's so simple. The
phrase is not bad, I don't deny the phrase, of the saying, I simply say that
that phrase needed to know that he didn't run a small risk, because he says in
that moment "look, get related to the world, risk but only a little, a bit
of security". But there he made reference to the security of the mother,
now, instead, security has to do with the bombings with weapons of massive
destruction, with the only possibility for the American State to continue to be
powerful. Security, the American invention about security, beyond the question
that how necessary it might be or not: is the only direct, easy way for the
United States to maintain its economic power. See that it's true? You only risk
a bit of security, meaning security in the mother's arms, not meaning the
generation of atomic arms so that some citizens die and other citizens live
tranquilly, no, about that no, I spoke about the calmness in the arms of the
mother. By
the way I'm here painting a child in his mother's arms, touching. If 2 million
painters before me wouldn't have painted this, I would be a creator, but this
I'm doing, has already been done by 2.5 million painters. You may say "yes,
but it isn't as beautiful", what has beauty to do with it.
Man is only interested in the surprise, not in the beauty, because beauty
perhaps is swallowed by man, but surprise always says no. "That's not my
mother", man says and it's over. I,
as I'm afraid of love, prefer to surprise the staff. CS:
I'm thinking in what you told me at the beginning of the interview when I
answered that you read reality very well. MOM:
You flattered me, I realised, but you're young and if I point out all the errors
you make, I don't let you advance. CS:
Then now, I won't flatter you. Perhaps the people working in El País are slow,
that what you say is already happening. I say this because I found a phrase in
this book, Psychoanalysis of the Leader,
that you sent me to read in the past interview, as a manual of psychoanalytical
philosophy, which says: "To write, one always write about what happens, the
writer who tries to write about the past or to forecast the future, it's never a
great writer. If he writes about the past he will be a good psychoanalyst, if he
forecasts the future he will be a visionary, never a great writer. I hope that
in the prior lines you could have envisioned my desire to be a great
writer". This is also from '77. MOM:
Well, a lot of years have passed and it seems that I am now a great writer. CS: And do you go on writing about what happens? MOM:
Well, today more than ever, not as a left wing intellectual, as a writer.
Fooling the tyrant, not giving information to the tyrant so that the tyrant may
go and kill, as left wing intellectuals do, denouncing any movement, any
situation for the State to be alert, that is why a real creator says something
or does something that neither the State, not the University, nor the police
from the right, from the left, from the top or from the bottom can repress
because they don't realise what it is about. Why? Because a well directed
message can only be understood by the one whom that message is directed to. CS:
Then Saramago is losing his time when he recommends the politicians (by the way
he also copied from the Indio Gris) to read Blas de Otero. It isn't well
directed, how would politicians understand this question of poetry? MOM:
Besides, politicians read it and understood what they understood about it, that
is the serious matter, not that they haven't read it, but that they understood
what they understood about it. I continue to insist on the question that a good
message, and the poem is always a good message, only enlightens the one to whom
it is directed, not his oppressor. In
the sense that we can make reality as beautiful as we wish but that we cannot
deny injustice, we cannot deny, for example, a philosopher who now agrees with
the State in that English must be spoken in the Basque country, but if this
philosopher, by chance, is Catalan, afterwards, when they want to make Catalonia
speak English, this philosopher will be against the State, in this way no one
thinks in no one else, each one touches his navel and if his navel is healthy he
says that there is health and if his navel is unhealthy he says that there is
sickness, but no one thinks neither in the sickness of the world, nor in the
sickness of the problems. We are a little trapped in a sort of love for
stupidity. Don't they see now that there is a
Rajoy consultant whom they want to make a politician, who has been
advised to make fun of everyone and if this happens in a civilised country,
which there is no civilised country in the world, people won't vote for a person
who is making fun of everyone, if he deceives his colleagues in the depute
chamber, won't he also deceive people? And talking for the sake of talking, I
saw on TV that Mr Aznar, whom I cannot name in any other way because in front of
everybody, he said to an open microphone that the speech he had delivered was
extraordinary. And you can't live with such people. I don't feel that not even
when I'm delivering a class to 15 year old students and he felt that when he was
talking to the heads of the world, so imagine what the heads of the world must
be if Aznar continues to be the President of the European Commission, look at
what the world is. If the world is able to forgive that it is because dirty
businesses are being made, bad businesses, daring businesses, they are
defrauding the majority of the kind people who go and vote for those incompetent
persons and they continue to be there and nobody says anything to them. You
smoke a "porro" (pot cigarette) in the street and they put you in
jail, the young boy has a beer and they break his ass. There is no equality,
there is injustice and don't make my balls swell with these things because I
don't like to talk about these things. Do you know why? Because I don't
understand these things.
CS:
No. MOM:
I understand a little. Now I'm going to apply a claw to this one that she can't
even imagine, nor her, nor I, nor no one else, no one else, no one else. CS:
I clarify for the readers that "this one" is the picture, not me. MOM:
You were alright because they are capable of believing anything. CS:
Sure, this question about the world is disturbing because now we have the talks
through the Arab countries to get support to invade Iran… Audience:
Iraq. CS:
Well, Iraq. MOM:
But, did you see how poets are? And you are young and fool, besides, they will
also invade, they will also invade Iran. CS:
It seems it has been a failure, everyone has said no to them, even Turkey that
has been always an ally, they have told them to come to an arrangement with
Israel and Palestine first. MOM:
Well, but it is a business though. CS:
Sure that it is a business, they are not going to desist from their purposes,
USA will postpone it. MOM:
Do you know what happens? They think that what is at stake is the survival of
the specie. They are nuts, crazy people, they think that what is happening to
them is what will happen to the whole world in the future, they're all nuts.
Aznar thinks that he's giving a good education to the Spanish people, but it is
a lie. He, when he has a secret meeting with the Council of Ministers, with that
Pío Cabanillas, who should be sent as a doorkeeper to the television and we
know now that he was the owner of the television, he is now the owner of the
television media, when he should be working as a doorkeeper, a whorehouse
doorkeeper, to call people to vote, to fuck, whorehouse doorkeeper. Many years
ago there was always a doorkeeper who attracted men by saying: "There are
some ladies here" "Spain is doing good, come in and see how Spain is
doing well" Do you understand what I say? CS:
Yes. MOM:
What else? Let's see, ask me, that I will realise to which prison you want to
send me, if to Alcatraz… CS:
Another phrase from this book: "So, to be the best is good for nothing,
let's be something else". MOM:
Because to be the best is what corresponds to being the worst. What do I gain
when I get mixed up in a dialectics where the worst exits? Because today, I bet
to the best and I am the best, but as it is a dialectics where the worst exists,
therefore tomorrow is my turn for the worst. Bad dialectics. Not to be the best,
to be many, not to be the best. You say to me: Menassa, what do you want? To
paint the best painting in the world or to have 30 painters from your school
invading the market with well-done painting, cheap, made in a wonderful
entertainment, a meeting with friends, a poem that surges, a girl who opens her
legs forever… that is art when one
devotes oneself to it. When one surrenders to it, art permanently remains
open, it may get inside through any crack. What do you want to do, painting? Now
that Miguelito sings I'll start singing at any moment and I smash him. I sing
very bad but everything is a question of learning, everything can be learnt. If
he was capable of writing poetry, why shouldn't I be able to sing. Or am I
further away from singing than he is from writing poetry? CS:
Of course, because everything turns into a decision. Let's see what you think
about this one: in 1977, Menassa already knew that we were going to do
"Painting at home" first he says: "I lived surrounded by animals,
small and big, from all colours, anyone would have said schizophrenia. I said to
myself "painter", a rebuff of nature, a dream in raw flesh". And
then he says: "Painting, that necessary passage for a great movie-making
which may live among us". "Painting at home". A decision, one can
choose between a word or another, schizophrenia or painter, with one of them you
save yourself… Amelia
Díez:
Psychiatry or psychoanalysis. CS:
He lived surrounded by animals, small or big, of all colours. MOM:
I hallucinated them a bit, but do you know how people are? Imagine how people
were in 1977. CS:
Much more colourful. MOM:
I recall having written (and I wasn't wrong) in the first book I published in
Spain which was called Summersault, I
remember perfectly that one of those days the writer writes desperately:
"I have made no contact with the symbolic thought for three
months" CS:
Thought? MOM:
Symbolic, where no one says nothing to anyone, that is the symbolic thought,
words speak to each other and, if one pays attention, you understand what they
say, but they speak to no one in particular. But it was very difficult here, at
that time everybody thought that they were speaking to each other. CS:
"As things happen in due time, for the time being I dedicate myself to
paint any colour, animal or shape my right hand recalls from those unforgettable
days of my adorable and fleeting, short madness". MOM:
Well, that too is a theoretical concept. Madness lasts an instant, if you make
it last more it becomes an illusion. But considering that people are accustomed
(states accustomed them) to live from illusions, they live from the illusion of
madness. Madness is an instant, well I would say that health is also an instant.
CS:
But in this phrase the idea of Cero Group is also included, of how one learns or
how one knows. MOM:
I didn't understand you. CS:
It attracted my attention: any colour, animal or shape my right hand recalls.
The knowledge of the painter doesn't go through the conscience, could we say it
this way? Or it is in another place. MOM:
No one's knowledge goes through the conscience, what goes through conscience is
learning. AD:
Knowledge is outside us. CS:
Thanks God. AD:
Thanks to psychoanalysis. MOM:
The recommendations Amelia Díez is giving you are because she assures that
these things couldn't be said like this if there weren't a psychoanalytical
theory. It is a thing we could talk about. Yes,
please, what happened. CS:
Time went by. MOM:
Is it all over? CS:
No. MOM:
Ah! you made a joke. CS:
There is a curious quotation: "All of the Western world and we in it, is
still submerged in the Universal Christian Flood, because two specimen of each
animal are enough for everything". Let's break up with the Christian
mystery, let's be a group. A very interesting view that one of the Universal
Christian Flood. MOM:
Well, the idea isn't bad at all. If there would be a Universal Flood again and
I'm the owner, I would leave three or four things because I know that some
things might fail, but I would do the same, bare in mind that it's in front of
the flood. People do that afterwards when they go on holidays. In the Flood, God
was right, poor man, the Flood was approaching, everyone was going to die and he
said no, let's tell Noah to save two fish, two horses, a man and a woman and
therefore the world will reproduce. But if you go on holidays, think about it,
and you believe that you have to save yourself and the image in the mirror, you
and your mother, who are two. You
read one of my books and instead of reading my book you are there, in your
mother's arms reciting the Bible, God doesn't like that either, don't even think
he likes that. God says: "Look at this jerk, being able to live a hip of
vital experiences and allowing me to exercise the role of educator, no, he
educates himself, he represses himself. I can't even punish him, nor send him to
hell, I have the purgatory empty…" Audience:
Everything is in a state of flooding. MOM:
It's no good, this way nor even God is contented, it's a catastrophe. The same
way Bush says: "Kill 30.000 of those who think differently to us", God
does more or less the same. People are fucking too much, they abandon children
in the streets, they kill the people who are in surplus... He says: well, I'll
make a good flood there and kill 10,000 in one blow". CS:
It is because we usurp God's functions. MOM:
Yes, sure, then the guy is giving them an education. You believe that Bin Laden
exists, Bin Laden doesn't exist, the one who exists is God. It's God who
punished that people because that people for more than ten decades have been
killing children everywhere, and it isn't necessary to be on top of a house,
they kill them in the fields, in the sea, in the mountain. How can you imagine
that a man is capable of punishing that? If all the men of the world are
enlisted in the American intelligence service and when they get up in the
morning they decide at what time I have to relieve myself, at what time I have
to eat, whom I should go to bed with. That was God, the only one who could have
planted a bomb in the United States was God. Don't come to me with such stories. CS:
I remembered a joke. About that question of us usurping God's work. They are
going to canonize Escribá de Balaguer, founder of the Opus Dei and it said,
"imagine if they are making him a saint for only one work, they directly
should make Alvarez del Manzano, God". MOM:
I think the people votes in that way because Alvarez de Manzano is the Mayor of
Madrid, who has been there for a long time now. Let's see, why do the Spanish
people vote in favour of those candidates? Because they can make fun of them,
they don't give a damn if they are good or not. CS: To laugh at them? MOM:
They are capable, if Hitler would come they would vote him to make fun of his
little moustache. CS:
I have finally found a reason. MOM:
Uh, the little moustaches and the little moustaches, I didn't want to make any
similarity between the little moustaches and the little moustaches. There were
many men who wore moustaches, Clark Gable wore one. CS:
Errol Flynn. MOM:
What a nice moustache Errol Flynn had. Audience:
Charles Chaplin. MOM:
Charles Chaplin also wore a very nice little moustache. I don't know if I like
it but there it is. CS:
The painting, isn't it? MOM:
There's something here… Audience:
How beautiful, a girl with a veil. MOM:
Here is the prophet Isiah, here there is a whore, there are whores in all
religions, to speak badly of woman. It isn't that they speak badly of woman,
they speak badly of whores. CS:
And why do they speak badly of whores? MOM:
Why do they? AD:
To speak badly of the mother. MOM:
The existence of prostitution is possible because men, in general, except for
odd cases, they never choose right whom to live with, never. There are, well I
won't say 8,000 movies, but there are around 80-90-200
about this subject. There would be more suicides without prostitution, a
lot more murders in matrimony and so. You have to learn to think that all that
the State being able to destroy, doesn't destroy is because it is convenient for
the State: drug dealers, prostitution, procurers, how do you call it?, infantile
pornography. Because the State could put an end to these things, but they don't
because these things give work to many people. They are violating fundamental
laws, though they may answer me: "yes, but the only fundamental law is to
eat, in the end, man has no other fundamental law". As soon as we learn
now, with the next steps we are giving,
that Spain is not doing well, you will see how they lose some votes.
Because Spain is doing well, Spain is doing well is the citizen who eats, goes
on eating and there are two more who they didn't eat before and now do so and
that is doing well. If there are four more who don't eat and the one who was
doing well, is doing more or less, it's over. Or as in the case of Felipe
Gonzalez who lost power because of a moral seizure of the Spanish people, which
are now causing many serious things. Because at that time Spain was really doing
well, they had done all the necessary restructuring that had to be done. Felipe
Gonzalez wasn't very leftist either, I don't know what people want. Or because
they leave you without food or because the morals don't suit people, but of
course, both things are very serious. We cannot think that the Japanese Mafia is
better than the Japanese government, because in the last earthquake, the
blankets, the first foods and the first help arrived from the hands of the
Japanese Mafia. For those people in that moment it is correct, but only for
those people, in that moment. AD:
And socialism demonstrated that being poor is not the same as being good. MOM:
Besides, they couldn't stand that. It was a punishment for I don't know how
long, because the punishment is against ourselves, for how long we shall have to
stand the punishment we created. I
finish because if not I'm gong to ruin this painting. CS:
Yes. "Let's give power to the ones who can hold power, to the rest let them
do crossword puzzles". MOM:
That is also a joke to the followers of Lacan, because Lacan said (he said it
because one says many things, it's a joke), we, like them, couldn't with
reality, twenty years have gone by and they still can't, because they don't
think well, Lacan's followers don't think well. They don't want to admit that
Lacan himself had said several times that he was a Freudian. AD:
Lacan's followers know that they are only listened when they speak badly of Cero
Group and they spend a lot of time speaking badly of Cero Group. MOM:
Do you know what is to speak badly of Cero Group? What do they say? CS:
What is it? MOM:
"People who spend their time writing, painting, making love, working, who
earn a lot of money monthly". Those are the criticisms they make about us.
That after earning the money they spend it in anything, in publications, in art,
in poetry, in subsidizing monthly magazines of 125,000 copies each…"That
everybody reads Cero Group and nobody reads us", those are the criticisms
they make about us. Because, logically, the other criticism they made about our
overflowing sexuality they can't any longer make because I don't know whom I may
overflow with the age I am. The
other day I met a lover from my youth who told me: "Don't deny so much of
our love because thanks to our love that was so passionate, now you can paint so
many pictures, you can write so many poems. It's not necessary that you speak
badly about love to write and to paint" she said to me. Perhaps the girl is
right. Give
my regards to the owner of El País, because I know that you're going to inform
him, I'm not totally convinced that you aren't working for him. I
am Satan opened to the white perfumes of the afternoon. Don't
you see that today I am singing desperately, I
am the fulgurant secret of nothingness, Darling, In
the uneven, enamoured feasts of your body in my body, I try to find all
your beauty in the subtleties of reason. I go opening in the mirages of
you voices, my most concealed loves. Dazed
by the subtleties of the night, I knit this delirium over your eyes, open
to the gentleness of everyday words. This
is the way one should go through life, singing and dancing! Darling,
let's clear up the labyrinths of hatred and a huge mountain of warmth and
gold will appear before us.
He
arrived tired, dropped on the couch and he could barely stammer: -
She, if I let her, will transform my life in a field harvested forever. I
have never felt so useless and so sexual at the same time. Almost a great
madness and she believes that what she does is normal. The great madness is hers
and that has no repair, so it's better for me to start learning to live alone,
to say no. -
What's the matter? -I told him- don't you want to associate freely, today? -
No, he said simply -, it seems brutal to tell her that it's her who is
wrong. The one who is ready for the asylum is me and not to earn money, that is
what she needs… -
Let's continue the next
time.
I
have to be able to put in order the feminine brain that surrounds me, it
seems that the only thing it's prepared for is to make love with itself.
To prepare the feminine brain for war, for commerce, for prostitution, who
isn't really who's going to exercise it with more passion in the current
societies; man, any man, a worker for example, prostitutes his life more
than the most stupid of the hookers from a low class neighbourhood of
London or Madrid.
1 Language
in itself doesn't assure us to say what it says. 2 If
I want to state something, I have to risk something. 3 What
no system stands is the making of love between adult persons. 4 Energetic
will for living, that is life, wrongly made accounts is the rest. Everybody
makes the same question: who's going to die first? I'm
worried. Yesterday I fucked three times in a row and I got up with my dick
erect. God
save Spain! INDIO GRIS THIS IS ADVERTISING
Tears
of exile author: It
contains thirteen illustrations of some of the best paintings |
