Exchange: Meruane vs. Rivera Garza
From February to March 2013, Lina Meruane and Cristina Rivera Garza exchanged emails. Among other things, they discussed the impact of the internet and the English language on their own writing, the death of Daniel Sada, and David Bowie's new album.
Read their correspondence here.
February 25, 12:57 am
Dear Cristina, I begin by confessing that it’s somewhat awkward to have a conversation with you this way. We’ve only seen each other a couple of times, always in literary, yet solemn, contexts. Last time you were the juror of an award I received practically from your hand, and shortly before we’d been on a panel discussing the relationship between new media and literature–a topic, if I recall, that you suggested. This reminds me that the first time we met was in New York, on a panel about the short story; I was left with that image of you: Cristina Rivera Garza reading her short paper on the screen of her cell phone. What surprises me, and this is what I’m getting at, is that in spite of the fact that you seem at ease with new media your novels, especially the last ones I read (La Cresta de Ilion and El Mal de la Taiga), they are the opposite of the brevity and the simplification to which new technologies seem to push us. I mean that these two novels (I recall Nunca me verás llorar in a more diaphanous style, though my memory might betray me), these last two novels are explorations in the shadows of the psyche. Not only because of the psychological complexity, or the air of mystery, or the ambiguity in the plot, but also for the sinuosity of the language.
Tuesday 26, 10:31
How strange the ways memory works, don’t you think, Lina?
I remember New York, yes. For some reason, more than the literary topic of the conference (where was it? what was talked about?), I remember the walk after, going from one place to the next, a bar, yes, a bar, a place with very large windows through which the whole city came in. Although I’ve never been a fan of NYC (may the gods of the Northeast forgive me, but Chicago’s more my thing), I liked those days of long coats and talks around miniscule tables, yes, I liked them a lot.
From those days in NY, however, I don’t remember your voice, Lina. And I say it because it was that, the voice, the rhythm of the voice, the way in which your voice ascends and descends, vertiginous, what I recall of you from Guadalajara. I’d read it, of course, since the first line of your book. The voice. What one calls “a great rhythm” while meaning “that way of breathing.” Then in the panel with the other writers, also that: the voice. A particular enunciation. A certain volume, even. Some belligerence and some of the outbursts which are sometimes brought about by shyness. And then, as the cherry on top, that exact and ferocious and extremely beautiful and true “speech” with which you received and critically explored the awards for books written by women such as, no doubt, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award.
In NY there wasn’t, or I don’t remember, that rhythm, that voice. Did it come up after? Was I distracted and didn’t notice? Did you hide it then? Who knows. All those questions can’t be answered by Memory or Truth. The only true thing, the only empirical proof (that’s what it’s called), is that it’s there, in the book, in between the periods and the semicolons, and commas, the sudden cuts of phrase and paragraph which are, at the end of the day, the skeleton of Sangre en el ojo.
And I say it could’ve been there before, that way of breathing (because, what is punctuation on the page if not the breathing of the text?), because I do believe that, far from being natural, or belonging to oneself, breathing is learned and/or changes with time. I’ve been swimming for some months now, swimming frantically in a cold, semi-olympic pool (with water that comes, I’m told, from a spring not far from here, at the top of a hill that looks more like a mountain), and something I can say is that rarely before have I been as conscious of how breathing affects, for instance, the quality of water. I guess (or hope) that that awareness will appear (consciously or unconsciously) on the page afterwards: how to place the word here or there in order to, for example, accentuate the flow of the liquid-language, or how to stop the rhythm to avoid the nervous presence of those small waves that only get in the way. One takes care of the water when one swims (Temperly already said that; and afterwards Moscon did too). One submerges oneself as the person who becomes submerged, in reality.
I digress.
This was a letter or a response. I use different technologies, yes. I like to move in different platforms, but I’m no digital native (I don’t pretend to be). Some, like Twitter, ask for brevity, but not necessarily or intrinsically for simplification, I think. Josefina Ludmer addressed it very well (although she wasn’t referring directly to these platforms) in that brief and luminous essay on post-autonomous literatures. It doesn’t matter if they’re literary or not, but they move in a liminal zone between the private and the public, the fictional and the autobiographic, interested, above all, in producing present. That’s what it’s about, I think. In any case, that’s what it’s about when users “write” instead of “communicating”.
And now, Lina, I go on with the concept of communication in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. I’m re-reading “The Inoperative Community” because I think there are interesting, yet unexplored, links between his concept of community and the communality discussed by some anthropologists I’ve been reading lately (Floriberto Díaz, for example, although also Jaime Luna). And also because not long ago, in a workshop I’m teaching here, in Oaxaca, we read Tabarovsky (La literatura de izquierda), who cites long Nancyan passages with little success or clarity, and the workshop participants ended up breaking down and destroying the book. In any case, there is a relation between communality and disappropriation (that’s what my workshop in Oaxaca is about), which I investigate without really knowing how or where to go, but do so with pleasure, certainly. Always with pleasure.
Hugs,
crg
p.s. Today more than one friend sent me the newest David Bowie video: the stars (are out tonight), and if that’s not speed, then what is? Here it is, in case you haven’t seen it yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH7dMBcg-gE
Thursday 28. 14:42
Cristina,
Your answer arrives in my absence. Absence from the screen. I’ve been away from home, in New Haven, and before leaving this city, this hotel room, I downloaded your letter in order to answer and not take longer to do so. There’s something about the tempo of traveling. For me, leaving home means changing frequency. Going into another frequency, another time or another temporal disposition.
I fear this letter will be a long one, not so much a conversation as a moving through.
Traveling in order to turn off some voices and allow oneself to listen to others, sometimes one’s own. Taking oneself away from the never-ending conversation that’s kept with others through writing, and going back to the voice inside without so much mediation, so much exposition. Perhaps I contradict myself.
But I think that’s what this is about, at least part of this.
Produce a voice, learn to breathe, Cristina, isn’t that what we live doing?
I think that’s what you tell me or write to me. Learning to breathe as we run from one place to another (these days, I run from my home to the university and from there to the rehearsals of my play, which is about to start showing, and right now I’m heading back home from New Haven, on a train. (Next station: Milford), for a moment, I see through the window the snowy landscape and think this is how I imagined Taiga while reading you, a landscape, this one, over the other one, the one in your book), or while we let the fingers run through the keyboard (that’s what I’m doing now, but I interrupt myself because the conductor is coming).
Searching for punctuation within such accelerated movement. And learning to breathe in one’s own way, search for one’s own rhythm, without the breathing of someone else. I write this and I imagine you in a bathing suit, diving into those cold waters, trying to control the breathing cut short by the cold, breathing to overcome the impact of the low temperature. It’s also done when writing: finding a rhythm to overcome the harshness of the cold, empty page.
(I digress, as this train goes through a pale landscape, a cemetery of stones that rise from the snow in between barren trees. Next station: Stratford. Next to me, two British passengers talk, I identify them by their voice, their accent, without looking at them.)
Memory is certainly curious, its digressions. Its nostalgic back-steps into irretrievable places, but above all I’m interested in its imaginary operations, its means of reconstruction. Everything I can say about that encounter is for me an effect of that partial reconstruction that we call memory. I don’t have those windows you speak of. I remember only that table of our panel in which you read from your phone, and looking you up at your hotel, a huge hotel that was then full of Mexicans. I remember you introduced me to Daniel Sada and Álvaro Enrigue, and remember the arrival of a woman of mysterious eyes, black but shiny eyes that were the only visible thing beneath the hood of an enormous coat, and that woman seemed to me very small, I don’t know why, because years later I recognized in those eyes Valeria Luiselli and Luiselli is not small at all, she is, in fact, taller than myself. I also remember it was raining cats and dogs. I remember or imagine the cab we got in while trying, myself, British when it comes to punctuality (the hour and the minute as my own means of punctuation in my chaotic life), not to arrive late.
(We’re now arriving at Bridgeport)
What came after is erased from my memory. It must be that in my New Yorker life I’ve seen infinite windows, and infinite little windows in the projects, also illuminated, acting as multiplying beacons on the avenues. Windows superimposed on memory. The city’s night. And I don’t remember my voice at the time either, or yours then, Cristina.
(We stop at the Fairfield Metro. Suddenly, the transition from one station to the next seems too brief, or perhaps it’s that I distract myself looking at the train’s window. This is a train that stops at infinite places).
I still have the text I read that night. I looked over it again to verify if what you think of as my voice was already there. Was it there or not there? It must have been, showing its fists, one does not hear one’s own voice, does not perceive one’s own accent. It can’t be smelled, but sometimes it can be, right? Sometimes it can be heard. Maybe the volume was simply lower and it simply exploded now. Maybe all previous books are preparations, slow tune-ups and voice modulations. This makes me think that I used to be very on key when I sang, I was a soloist in my school’s choir, when young. But I stopped tuning my voice and the voice dies when you stop using it. In writing, however, I’ve done nothing other than work on that voice. Maybe not singing anymore has made me more aware of a voice inside. Or maybe a certain anxiety has become more acute, a certain speed that’s aspired in the written word… Lezama Lima used to say that his baroque rhythm, his voice punctuated with commas, was an effect of the asthma he suffered from. A manifestation.
This brings me to another question, Cristina. What has your voice produced, which seems to me, in your books, to be very prominent?
(We’ve stopped in Green’s Farms, and though I spent a year taking this train route I don’t remember this station, I ask myself, while looking at the board, if it’s a new station.)
And this brings me to another question, not too far off: How is your breathing determined by the motherland’s spoken word, by the mother tongue’s own singing? Since I’ve lived outside Chile for twelve years I think my literary breathing has recovered a certain singsong. And I don’t mean by this a local mimesis, but rather a breathing or punctuating that I identify or imagine as Chilean. This, which was already here but was practically inaudible in the books that I wrote while still in Chile, has become dramatically sharpened. There’s a delight in that cueca rhythm, that tapping of the tongue is the only thing I miss from Chile. Because I myself have adjusted my manner of pronouncing Spanish, and I evoke that daily loss when I write.
I wonder if this happens to you too, Cristina, if your breathing, in the water or on the page, is more Mexican each time. (Announcement for Westford.) I say again, Cristina: you, who’ve lived far away for so long, longer than I have, I think.
(Meanwhile: East Norwalk and South Norwalk. This is a train to Grand Central, the recording says every time we stop and start again).
On to the next thing. Writing or communicating using new media. I’m not convinced by this distinction, or, more than that, I don’t believe it’s an absolute one. I write this letter to you (while going over a river) because I have the time now. I write to you or I communicate with you: isn’t that perhaps an effect of writing, the communication of something. Paul Watzlawick said in some of his axioms that it’s impossible not to communicate, that even silence communicates. All writing therefore communicates something, even if it tries not to, because in its resistance there is a desire. I know I’m drifting away from the subject, but that’s my mental state today. Tell me more about community and communality and disappropriation; I sense that many of those reflections are materialized in your novels. (Rowaton, how fast.)
Your books are populated with alienated beings, perhaps disappropriated beings.
Tell me about that when you have some time. (This station is Darien, the voice pronounces dariaan as I write the previous period. There is, of course, a time difference. Then the voice says: Please watch the gap when you leave the train.)
I think I overextended myself, it’s all this train’s fault, this train advancing that allows me to digress, to think that I write and communicate with you. I have to start packing my computer, closing my suitcase, putting on the coat because we’ve left behind Noroton Heights and others like myself show signs of getting ready to get off while the voice says, and then repeats The next station is, and I know because this is an old trip, that I have to get off to make the connection at Stamford.)
Time’s up.
I await your answer, with no hurry.
Hugs, Lina.
P.s. I’ll look at the Bowie video when I’m able to go online.
Thursday 28, 15:25
You remind me of so many things, LinaMeruane!
You remind me, of course, of that rain of New York—of course, I tell myself, if I mentioned coats before it’s because, sure, I tell myself again, it was raining. But you remind me, above all, of the long, really long conversation that I had with Daniel Sada that time in New York. I think it’s the last time I really talked with him. We had gone out to eat with Oswaldo Zavala and his wife to some restaurant, the first one we found, because although we were hungry and love eating, in reality we wanted to talk. And talk we did. We had the main course and then dessert, coffee, more coffee, new waiters came along with a new wave of diners and we were still there, talking. Of books, yes, but also of many other things (as in letters, Lina, you know what I mean). Of sons and daughters, for instance; we talked about them. Of work or works. Of chance. Of time, how time flies! And of books, of course, we went back to them, the new, the very old. I remembered that afternoon and then that very long night, later on, when, after a party I hosted in the backyard of my house in San Diego, I learned of Daniel’s death. I got scared, you know? I felt that death, which has touched so many in my country, in your country, which has touched us so much and so often, came a little closer. And I cuddled in bed and, if that concentrated thinking of another and with another is called praying, then let’s say I prayed.
You make me remember that, Lina, for example. And I best keep quiet. I best keep quiet and look, as if I was looking at something else, at the window. Through the window.
And now I’m heading out to eat (here, in the residence I have in the Centro de las Artes de San Agustín Etla, in the glorious state of Oaxaca, there’s no kitchen and, because of it, my son and I go to eat in a small and homey restaurant where, often, they cook for us what we like with a warmth that, I’m now sure, I’ll crave later on, in the future, in San Diego).
Hugs,
Cristina
Friday 1. 12:23
Yes, Cristina, precisely Sada’s death, the loss of Sada. I’m sorry I took you there but I’m even sorrier I wasn’t at that dinner, part of that conversation with all those friends who are now also my friends here. Many people close to me have passed away this month, people dear to me who didn’t have to die so soon. Anticipated deaths scare me, too. One always writes against death, don’t you think? But there’s time for fear, every time that terror comes close I run away. I’ve been fleeing from that fear, perhaps since I came out of my mother’s womb, crawling. I’m now rushing towards the university. Tell me about that other topic when you get a chance, languages, of how you move between them, I’m curious to know how you live and how you write between them… because I also live and write in between two or more languages. I send you a hug as strong as a shield, a hug that’s heavy and from which I free myself in order to run lighter. (But one who lives in a rush dies in a rush, my grandmother –who died old but suddenly– used to say). Lina
Friday 1. 13:50
Ahh, everything seems to indicate that today is the international day for the return of David Bowie. Yes, like everyone else, I also heard his stuff today. Yes, I liked it. How was I not to like Bowie after all these years? Of course.
Anyway, here’s the link, in case you’re interested: https://www.davidbowie.com/news/listen-next-day-itunes-now-and-win-prizes-50611
March has just begun, LinaMeruane!
And here’s something so that you don’t forget its waters (you should know that cheesy is the new punk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q2BK6nNslo&feature;=youtu.be
Let’s see. Not long ago I wrote an essay on the North American poet Juliana Sphar (here’s the link for the article: https://www.milenio.com/cdb/doc/impreso/9169705), which pays close attention to the unique writerly production that she locates at the end of the XX century in the U.S. It deals with that peculiar array of writers that decided to distance themselves, voluntarily, from the average English, not in order to think of their identity, but in order to say something about language, about how it forms us in uneven, dynamic contexts. Those writers who’ve distanced themselves from the average English write with what she calls “the disquieting grammatical dislocation (I cite from memory) of migration.”
I liked Juliana’s text a lot because, in many and varied ways, I believe that little by little, but inexorably, I’ve become distanced not only from the average Spanish, but also from the average English (of average books I was already distanced from before, I believe). I’ve been living for many years (maybe more than half of my life) in a constant coming and going; a swinging back and forth that doesn’t cease; an oscillation I’m not interested in stopping or, in reality, naming. I live in between different places of Mexico (Toluca, in the highlands of the middle of the country; Mexico City, which I adore for its intensity, but which exhausts me because of its hierarchical nature; Oaxaca now; Oaxaca which, along with Tijuana, are part of the most interesting and suggestive axis of cultural/writerly production of the country), and some places in the U.S (San Diego, above all, where I work at UCSD, in the MFA of Creative Writing). Truth be told, I live a lot in the airplanes that take me from all those places to many others throughout the year: inside and outside the continent. I live in hotel rooms, another scarcely elegant truth. In the hotel rooms that every room in which you sporadically live becomes. But I can’t say that: my homeland is hotel rooms: my language is the language of hotel rooms because, by God, it seems a majestically monumental exaggeration, and somewhat tricky too.
In reality, instead of taking the road of certainty about things and languages, I’ve opted for something that works better with my own work and life: vulnerability. Vulnerability as method, let’s put it that way. I express myself now, yes, mostly, you’re right, in two languages (my creative writing classes in San Diego are, for example, in English). Far from being a victim of the process (I detest that lamentation about what cannot be expressed in one’s second language, as if that limitation wasn’t really an almost Oulipoean means by which one is invited to produce, with unprecedented rules, an unprecedented, unfinished expression, surprising in many ways), I see myself as someone who explores, feeling about, the possibilities and intricacies of the new medium.
I’ll be clear: I’m not interested in returning (I don’t suffer from that kind of nostalgia) because I don’t believe, for starters, in returning (Said dixit), and because, in many ways, I’m always returning. Returning and leaving are the cities I visit the most, it could be said.
The second tongue, which can be Spanish when I’m in the U.S, or English when I’m in Mexico, or vice versa, has helped me generate a way of attending to language –to what language allows and provides, and to that which it takes and complicates– which really benefits (or tarnishes, depending on how you see it), the books I end up writing.
I write in transcript, I said once. Look: https://www.milenio.com/cdb/doc/impreso/8908206
I write in English, yes; I translate from Spanish to English, yes; I write in Spanish, yes; I translate from English to Spanish, yes. I guess that belonging resides in the “in,” in the “from.” The passage, then. The journey.
And you know what, LinaMeruane? All this, especially lately, is much to my liking.
I remember the day –for some reason writing to you, now, these days, invites me to remember things that I seldom or never remember, LinaMeruane– in which, for example, I began to love San Diego after a long, tentative and, even moreso, ambivalent relationship. It was a romance that began with a corner of the wooden table where I used to write. I told this to a friend who wasn’t asking me about that, but since I was surprised with the process, with its unpremeditated irruption, I did what I know how to do: write. I told him what was happening, that just in that moment I was loving like never before, maybe like never after, that corner of the table, and I could see the first sign of affection on its way, and then the unrestrained love, for the entire surface, the chair, the floor supporting the chair, the door, the sidewalk, the street. I could see it coming, I said, and that’s what I saw days or months after. It’s strange how things happen sometimes.
In contrast, I started loving Oaxaca, where I am now, immediately. That’s why I came back: for the connection Oaxaca established with me or that I established with it (how to really know?) one or maybe two years ago. It’s a matter of taking up that connection, in any case, and feeling, yes, at home. I’d never lived before in an indigenous, or so-called indigenous, zone of Mexico– and talking with my Mixe or Zapoteca friends is, among other things, occasion for awe and curiosity and sharing, as they say. Often, especially in their markets, especially in the winding paths of the mountains, especially in their parties of masks and dancing, I have the impression I’m not from here, nor from here, but that’s precisely the most familiar sensation, if you want to look at it that way: the most homey, that I know.
Obliquely, I like that word. The words alabastro, lacustre, enjambre.
I digress, Lina. I’m tired. I wrote since dawn. I wrote something I’m close to finishing. I carry that adrenaline: knowing that it’s already there (it’s at that point on the road), knowing that it can all be destroyed there (at that point on the road), knowing that.
Or not knowing that.
I better stop. Look at Gulliva la dompteuse de canards that decorates the very white wall in front of the desk where I write. I found the postcard in Poitiers, this fall. Something about its absurd dimensions and it’s, let’s say, peculiar activity (that ring of fire! that belt buckle!) made me think in this thing which we do: write.
Ceaselessly. With pleasure. Fearfully. Obliquely. Possessedly.
Affectionately, CRG
Monday 04. 10:19
As always, Cristina, I keep hobbling with this correspondence. I run and hobble at the same time. But the thing is now over: the thing is a play that has also had me traveling this past month, first to the rehearsals, and these last three nights to the university where it premiered. Only three nights, but three tense nights. A very strange experience to see the words alive, to see they had a body. The second night, the words were much faster but everything was also much more serious. I was sweating, there was an evil heat in there. The third night it started snowing, it snowed outside the theater but it also snowed inside, in the play. In that plaza which was the stage it was cold, there was snow, ice, puddles, lots of water and a pale sun, at the end, to accompany death. And I didn’t stop sweating, but this is to tell you that the thing is over. I get an email from the person who invited us to this conversation and he asks me how we’re doing with this conversation, then tells me we’ve gone too far, that we must start cutting. You start or I will, the editing. I’m sorry to have to say goodbye, but I say goodbye nonetheless.
And I send you a hug until our next email, an email that will now be private.
Crunchy hugs (a storm is coming, the streets become covered with salt)
Lina
So Bowie. Bowie’s good, very good, but lately I’m more for some very strange girls called CocoRosie. Or a pop singer, very experimental, called Regina Spektor.
Tuesday 5. 11:49
How wonderful to see your words embodied! And also wonderful to see the snow, I guess, outside and inside.
Let’s say, then, that the thing is interrupted, don’t you think? Because I’d like to continue speaking with you about this and the other and that and much more in the near and not so near future. Living in the U.S and continuing to participate in a writerly conversation carried out in Spanish is something we share, and it’s no small thing. Lately I’ve been thinking of something Antonie Volodine used to say: that the ultimate end of books (its ultimate medium, lets say) is to meddle with the dreams of the readers, thus forming a kind of dreamlike community. I believe in that, you know? More and more. From what I’ve read of yours, from the manner in which your words play with the rhythm of something beyond what’s solely conscious, I’d dare say this is another idea we share. Perhaps. Maybe. So in the so-called real life or in the dreams where the books that truly inhabit us end up: we’ll be seeing each other there, sure we will.
Oh, I also like the girls from coco rosie. But actually I’m a devout follower of Four Tet, of Burial too. Right now, in the shuffle of the soul, a gypsy piece plays and makes me want to get up from the chair and go round and roooooound.
Hugs. Many hugs.
CRG
Previous entries:
[Mario Bellatín vs. Edmundo Paz Soldán]
[Patricio Pron vs. Rafael Gumucio]
Read their correspondence here.
February 25, 12:57 am
Dear Cristina, I begin by confessing that it’s somewhat awkward to have a conversation with you this way. We’ve only seen each other a couple of times, always in literary, yet solemn, contexts. Last time you were the juror of an award I received practically from your hand, and shortly before we’d been on a panel discussing the relationship between new media and literature–a topic, if I recall, that you suggested. This reminds me that the first time we met was in New York, on a panel about the short story; I was left with that image of you: Cristina Rivera Garza reading her short paper on the screen of her cell phone. What surprises me, and this is what I’m getting at, is that in spite of the fact that you seem at ease with new media your novels, especially the last ones I read (La Cresta de Ilion and El Mal de la Taiga), they are the opposite of the brevity and the simplification to which new technologies seem to push us. I mean that these two novels (I recall Nunca me verás llorar in a more diaphanous style, though my memory might betray me), these last two novels are explorations in the shadows of the psyche. Not only because of the psychological complexity, or the air of mystery, or the ambiguity in the plot, but also for the sinuosity of the language.
Tuesday 26, 10:31
How strange the ways memory works, don’t you think, Lina?
I remember New York, yes. For some reason, more than the literary topic of the conference (where was it? what was talked about?), I remember the walk after, going from one place to the next, a bar, yes, a bar, a place with very large windows through which the whole city came in. Although I’ve never been a fan of NYC (may the gods of the Northeast forgive me, but Chicago’s more my thing), I liked those days of long coats and talks around miniscule tables, yes, I liked them a lot.
From those days in NY, however, I don’t remember your voice, Lina. And I say it because it was that, the voice, the rhythm of the voice, the way in which your voice ascends and descends, vertiginous, what I recall of you from Guadalajara. I’d read it, of course, since the first line of your book. The voice. What one calls “a great rhythm” while meaning “that way of breathing.” Then in the panel with the other writers, also that: the voice. A particular enunciation. A certain volume, even. Some belligerence and some of the outbursts which are sometimes brought about by shyness. And then, as the cherry on top, that exact and ferocious and extremely beautiful and true “speech” with which you received and critically explored the awards for books written by women such as, no doubt, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award.
In NY there wasn’t, or I don’t remember, that rhythm, that voice. Did it come up after? Was I distracted and didn’t notice? Did you hide it then? Who knows. All those questions can’t be answered by Memory or Truth. The only true thing, the only empirical proof (that’s what it’s called), is that it’s there, in the book, in between the periods and the semicolons, and commas, the sudden cuts of phrase and paragraph which are, at the end of the day, the skeleton of Sangre en el ojo.
And I say it could’ve been there before, that way of breathing (because, what is punctuation on the page if not the breathing of the text?), because I do believe that, far from being natural, or belonging to oneself, breathing is learned and/or changes with time. I’ve been swimming for some months now, swimming frantically in a cold, semi-olympic pool (with water that comes, I’m told, from a spring not far from here, at the top of a hill that looks more like a mountain), and something I can say is that rarely before have I been as conscious of how breathing affects, for instance, the quality of water. I guess (or hope) that that awareness will appear (consciously or unconsciously) on the page afterwards: how to place the word here or there in order to, for example, accentuate the flow of the liquid-language, or how to stop the rhythm to avoid the nervous presence of those small waves that only get in the way. One takes care of the water when one swims (Temperly already said that; and afterwards Moscon did too). One submerges oneself as the person who becomes submerged, in reality.
I digress.
This was a letter or a response. I use different technologies, yes. I like to move in different platforms, but I’m no digital native (I don’t pretend to be). Some, like Twitter, ask for brevity, but not necessarily or intrinsically for simplification, I think. Josefina Ludmer addressed it very well (although she wasn’t referring directly to these platforms) in that brief and luminous essay on post-autonomous literatures. It doesn’t matter if they’re literary or not, but they move in a liminal zone between the private and the public, the fictional and the autobiographic, interested, above all, in producing present. That’s what it’s about, I think. In any case, that’s what it’s about when users “write” instead of “communicating”.
And now, Lina, I go on with the concept of communication in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. I’m re-reading “The Inoperative Community” because I think there are interesting, yet unexplored, links between his concept of community and the communality discussed by some anthropologists I’ve been reading lately (Floriberto Díaz, for example, although also Jaime Luna). And also because not long ago, in a workshop I’m teaching here, in Oaxaca, we read Tabarovsky (La literatura de izquierda), who cites long Nancyan passages with little success or clarity, and the workshop participants ended up breaking down and destroying the book. In any case, there is a relation between communality and disappropriation (that’s what my workshop in Oaxaca is about), which I investigate without really knowing how or where to go, but do so with pleasure, certainly. Always with pleasure.
Hugs,
crg
p.s. Today more than one friend sent me the newest David Bowie video: the stars (are out tonight), and if that’s not speed, then what is? Here it is, in case you haven’t seen it yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH7dMBcg-gE
Thursday 28. 14:42
Cristina,
Your answer arrives in my absence. Absence from the screen. I’ve been away from home, in New Haven, and before leaving this city, this hotel room, I downloaded your letter in order to answer and not take longer to do so. There’s something about the tempo of traveling. For me, leaving home means changing frequency. Going into another frequency, another time or another temporal disposition.
I fear this letter will be a long one, not so much a conversation as a moving through.
Traveling in order to turn off some voices and allow oneself to listen to others, sometimes one’s own. Taking oneself away from the never-ending conversation that’s kept with others through writing, and going back to the voice inside without so much mediation, so much exposition. Perhaps I contradict myself.
But I think that’s what this is about, at least part of this.
Produce a voice, learn to breathe, Cristina, isn’t that what we live doing?
I think that’s what you tell me or write to me. Learning to breathe as we run from one place to another (these days, I run from my home to the university and from there to the rehearsals of my play, which is about to start showing, and right now I’m heading back home from New Haven, on a train. (Next station: Milford), for a moment, I see through the window the snowy landscape and think this is how I imagined Taiga while reading you, a landscape, this one, over the other one, the one in your book), or while we let the fingers run through the keyboard (that’s what I’m doing now, but I interrupt myself because the conductor is coming).
Searching for punctuation within such accelerated movement. And learning to breathe in one’s own way, search for one’s own rhythm, without the breathing of someone else. I write this and I imagine you in a bathing suit, diving into those cold waters, trying to control the breathing cut short by the cold, breathing to overcome the impact of the low temperature. It’s also done when writing: finding a rhythm to overcome the harshness of the cold, empty page.
(I digress, as this train goes through a pale landscape, a cemetery of stones that rise from the snow in between barren trees. Next station: Stratford. Next to me, two British passengers talk, I identify them by their voice, their accent, without looking at them.)
Memory is certainly curious, its digressions. Its nostalgic back-steps into irretrievable places, but above all I’m interested in its imaginary operations, its means of reconstruction. Everything I can say about that encounter is for me an effect of that partial reconstruction that we call memory. I don’t have those windows you speak of. I remember only that table of our panel in which you read from your phone, and looking you up at your hotel, a huge hotel that was then full of Mexicans. I remember you introduced me to Daniel Sada and Álvaro Enrigue, and remember the arrival of a woman of mysterious eyes, black but shiny eyes that were the only visible thing beneath the hood of an enormous coat, and that woman seemed to me very small, I don’t know why, because years later I recognized in those eyes Valeria Luiselli and Luiselli is not small at all, she is, in fact, taller than myself. I also remember it was raining cats and dogs. I remember or imagine the cab we got in while trying, myself, British when it comes to punctuality (the hour and the minute as my own means of punctuation in my chaotic life), not to arrive late.
(We’re now arriving at Bridgeport)
What came after is erased from my memory. It must be that in my New Yorker life I’ve seen infinite windows, and infinite little windows in the projects, also illuminated, acting as multiplying beacons on the avenues. Windows superimposed on memory. The city’s night. And I don’t remember my voice at the time either, or yours then, Cristina.
(We stop at the Fairfield Metro. Suddenly, the transition from one station to the next seems too brief, or perhaps it’s that I distract myself looking at the train’s window. This is a train that stops at infinite places).
I still have the text I read that night. I looked over it again to verify if what you think of as my voice was already there. Was it there or not there? It must have been, showing its fists, one does not hear one’s own voice, does not perceive one’s own accent. It can’t be smelled, but sometimes it can be, right? Sometimes it can be heard. Maybe the volume was simply lower and it simply exploded now. Maybe all previous books are preparations, slow tune-ups and voice modulations. This makes me think that I used to be very on key when I sang, I was a soloist in my school’s choir, when young. But I stopped tuning my voice and the voice dies when you stop using it. In writing, however, I’ve done nothing other than work on that voice. Maybe not singing anymore has made me more aware of a voice inside. Or maybe a certain anxiety has become more acute, a certain speed that’s aspired in the written word… Lezama Lima used to say that his baroque rhythm, his voice punctuated with commas, was an effect of the asthma he suffered from. A manifestation.
This brings me to another question, Cristina. What has your voice produced, which seems to me, in your books, to be very prominent?
(We’ve stopped in Green’s Farms, and though I spent a year taking this train route I don’t remember this station, I ask myself, while looking at the board, if it’s a new station.)
And this brings me to another question, not too far off: How is your breathing determined by the motherland’s spoken word, by the mother tongue’s own singing? Since I’ve lived outside Chile for twelve years I think my literary breathing has recovered a certain singsong. And I don’t mean by this a local mimesis, but rather a breathing or punctuating that I identify or imagine as Chilean. This, which was already here but was practically inaudible in the books that I wrote while still in Chile, has become dramatically sharpened. There’s a delight in that cueca rhythm, that tapping of the tongue is the only thing I miss from Chile. Because I myself have adjusted my manner of pronouncing Spanish, and I evoke that daily loss when I write.
I wonder if this happens to you too, Cristina, if your breathing, in the water or on the page, is more Mexican each time. (Announcement for Westford.) I say again, Cristina: you, who’ve lived far away for so long, longer than I have, I think.
(Meanwhile: East Norwalk and South Norwalk. This is a train to Grand Central, the recording says every time we stop and start again).
On to the next thing. Writing or communicating using new media. I’m not convinced by this distinction, or, more than that, I don’t believe it’s an absolute one. I write this letter to you (while going over a river) because I have the time now. I write to you or I communicate with you: isn’t that perhaps an effect of writing, the communication of something. Paul Watzlawick said in some of his axioms that it’s impossible not to communicate, that even silence communicates. All writing therefore communicates something, even if it tries not to, because in its resistance there is a desire. I know I’m drifting away from the subject, but that’s my mental state today. Tell me more about community and communality and disappropriation; I sense that many of those reflections are materialized in your novels. (Rowaton, how fast.)
Your books are populated with alienated beings, perhaps disappropriated beings.
Tell me about that when you have some time. (This station is Darien, the voice pronounces dariaan as I write the previous period. There is, of course, a time difference. Then the voice says: Please watch the gap when you leave the train.)
I think I overextended myself, it’s all this train’s fault, this train advancing that allows me to digress, to think that I write and communicate with you. I have to start packing my computer, closing my suitcase, putting on the coat because we’ve left behind Noroton Heights and others like myself show signs of getting ready to get off while the voice says, and then repeats The next station is, and I know because this is an old trip, that I have to get off to make the connection at Stamford.)
Time’s up.
I await your answer, with no hurry.
Hugs, Lina.
P.s. I’ll look at the Bowie video when I’m able to go online.
Thursday 28, 15:25
You remind me of so many things, LinaMeruane!
You remind me, of course, of that rain of New York—of course, I tell myself, if I mentioned coats before it’s because, sure, I tell myself again, it was raining. But you remind me, above all, of the long, really long conversation that I had with Daniel Sada that time in New York. I think it’s the last time I really talked with him. We had gone out to eat with Oswaldo Zavala and his wife to some restaurant, the first one we found, because although we were hungry and love eating, in reality we wanted to talk. And talk we did. We had the main course and then dessert, coffee, more coffee, new waiters came along with a new wave of diners and we were still there, talking. Of books, yes, but also of many other things (as in letters, Lina, you know what I mean). Of sons and daughters, for instance; we talked about them. Of work or works. Of chance. Of time, how time flies! And of books, of course, we went back to them, the new, the very old. I remembered that afternoon and then that very long night, later on, when, after a party I hosted in the backyard of my house in San Diego, I learned of Daniel’s death. I got scared, you know? I felt that death, which has touched so many in my country, in your country, which has touched us so much and so often, came a little closer. And I cuddled in bed and, if that concentrated thinking of another and with another is called praying, then let’s say I prayed.
You make me remember that, Lina, for example. And I best keep quiet. I best keep quiet and look, as if I was looking at something else, at the window. Through the window.
And now I’m heading out to eat (here, in the residence I have in the Centro de las Artes de San Agustín Etla, in the glorious state of Oaxaca, there’s no kitchen and, because of it, my son and I go to eat in a small and homey restaurant where, often, they cook for us what we like with a warmth that, I’m now sure, I’ll crave later on, in the future, in San Diego).
Hugs,
Cristina
Friday 1. 12:23
Yes, Cristina, precisely Sada’s death, the loss of Sada. I’m sorry I took you there but I’m even sorrier I wasn’t at that dinner, part of that conversation with all those friends who are now also my friends here. Many people close to me have passed away this month, people dear to me who didn’t have to die so soon. Anticipated deaths scare me, too. One always writes against death, don’t you think? But there’s time for fear, every time that terror comes close I run away. I’ve been fleeing from that fear, perhaps since I came out of my mother’s womb, crawling. I’m now rushing towards the university. Tell me about that other topic when you get a chance, languages, of how you move between them, I’m curious to know how you live and how you write between them… because I also live and write in between two or more languages. I send you a hug as strong as a shield, a hug that’s heavy and from which I free myself in order to run lighter. (But one who lives in a rush dies in a rush, my grandmother –who died old but suddenly– used to say). Lina
Friday 1. 13:50
Ahh, everything seems to indicate that today is the international day for the return of David Bowie. Yes, like everyone else, I also heard his stuff today. Yes, I liked it. How was I not to like Bowie after all these years? Of course.
Anyway, here’s the link, in case you’re interested: https://www.davidbowie.com/news/listen-next-day-itunes-now-and-win-prizes-50611
March has just begun, LinaMeruane!
And here’s something so that you don’t forget its waters (you should know that cheesy is the new punk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q2BK6nNslo&feature;=youtu.be
Let’s see. Not long ago I wrote an essay on the North American poet Juliana Sphar (here’s the link for the article: https://www.milenio.com/cdb/doc/impreso/9169705), which pays close attention to the unique writerly production that she locates at the end of the XX century in the U.S. It deals with that peculiar array of writers that decided to distance themselves, voluntarily, from the average English, not in order to think of their identity, but in order to say something about language, about how it forms us in uneven, dynamic contexts. Those writers who’ve distanced themselves from the average English write with what she calls “the disquieting grammatical dislocation (I cite from memory) of migration.”
I liked Juliana’s text a lot because, in many and varied ways, I believe that little by little, but inexorably, I’ve become distanced not only from the average Spanish, but also from the average English (of average books I was already distanced from before, I believe). I’ve been living for many years (maybe more than half of my life) in a constant coming and going; a swinging back and forth that doesn’t cease; an oscillation I’m not interested in stopping or, in reality, naming. I live in between different places of Mexico (Toluca, in the highlands of the middle of the country; Mexico City, which I adore for its intensity, but which exhausts me because of its hierarchical nature; Oaxaca now; Oaxaca which, along with Tijuana, are part of the most interesting and suggestive axis of cultural/writerly production of the country), and some places in the U.S (San Diego, above all, where I work at UCSD, in the MFA of Creative Writing). Truth be told, I live a lot in the airplanes that take me from all those places to many others throughout the year: inside and outside the continent. I live in hotel rooms, another scarcely elegant truth. In the hotel rooms that every room in which you sporadically live becomes. But I can’t say that: my homeland is hotel rooms: my language is the language of hotel rooms because, by God, it seems a majestically monumental exaggeration, and somewhat tricky too.
In reality, instead of taking the road of certainty about things and languages, I’ve opted for something that works better with my own work and life: vulnerability. Vulnerability as method, let’s put it that way. I express myself now, yes, mostly, you’re right, in two languages (my creative writing classes in San Diego are, for example, in English). Far from being a victim of the process (I detest that lamentation about what cannot be expressed in one’s second language, as if that limitation wasn’t really an almost Oulipoean means by which one is invited to produce, with unprecedented rules, an unprecedented, unfinished expression, surprising in many ways), I see myself as someone who explores, feeling about, the possibilities and intricacies of the new medium.
I’ll be clear: I’m not interested in returning (I don’t suffer from that kind of nostalgia) because I don’t believe, for starters, in returning (Said dixit), and because, in many ways, I’m always returning. Returning and leaving are the cities I visit the most, it could be said.
The second tongue, which can be Spanish when I’m in the U.S, or English when I’m in Mexico, or vice versa, has helped me generate a way of attending to language –to what language allows and provides, and to that which it takes and complicates– which really benefits (or tarnishes, depending on how you see it), the books I end up writing.
I write in transcript, I said once. Look: https://www.milenio.com/cdb/doc/impreso/8908206
I write in English, yes; I translate from Spanish to English, yes; I write in Spanish, yes; I translate from English to Spanish, yes. I guess that belonging resides in the “in,” in the “from.” The passage, then. The journey.
And you know what, LinaMeruane? All this, especially lately, is much to my liking.
I remember the day –for some reason writing to you, now, these days, invites me to remember things that I seldom or never remember, LinaMeruane– in which, for example, I began to love San Diego after a long, tentative and, even moreso, ambivalent relationship. It was a romance that began with a corner of the wooden table where I used to write. I told this to a friend who wasn’t asking me about that, but since I was surprised with the process, with its unpremeditated irruption, I did what I know how to do: write. I told him what was happening, that just in that moment I was loving like never before, maybe like never after, that corner of the table, and I could see the first sign of affection on its way, and then the unrestrained love, for the entire surface, the chair, the floor supporting the chair, the door, the sidewalk, the street. I could see it coming, I said, and that’s what I saw days or months after. It’s strange how things happen sometimes.
In contrast, I started loving Oaxaca, where I am now, immediately. That’s why I came back: for the connection Oaxaca established with me or that I established with it (how to really know?) one or maybe two years ago. It’s a matter of taking up that connection, in any case, and feeling, yes, at home. I’d never lived before in an indigenous, or so-called indigenous, zone of Mexico– and talking with my Mixe or Zapoteca friends is, among other things, occasion for awe and curiosity and sharing, as they say. Often, especially in their markets, especially in the winding paths of the mountains, especially in their parties of masks and dancing, I have the impression I’m not from here, nor from here, but that’s precisely the most familiar sensation, if you want to look at it that way: the most homey, that I know.
Obliquely, I like that word. The words alabastro, lacustre, enjambre.
I digress, Lina. I’m tired. I wrote since dawn. I wrote something I’m close to finishing. I carry that adrenaline: knowing that it’s already there (it’s at that point on the road), knowing that it can all be destroyed there (at that point on the road), knowing that.
Or not knowing that.
I better stop. Look at Gulliva la dompteuse de canards that decorates the very white wall in front of the desk where I write. I found the postcard in Poitiers, this fall. Something about its absurd dimensions and it’s, let’s say, peculiar activity (that ring of fire! that belt buckle!) made me think in this thing which we do: write.
Ceaselessly. With pleasure. Fearfully. Obliquely. Possessedly.
Affectionately, CRG
Monday 04. 10:19
As always, Cristina, I keep hobbling with this correspondence. I run and hobble at the same time. But the thing is now over: the thing is a play that has also had me traveling this past month, first to the rehearsals, and these last three nights to the university where it premiered. Only three nights, but three tense nights. A very strange experience to see the words alive, to see they had a body. The second night, the words were much faster but everything was also much more serious. I was sweating, there was an evil heat in there. The third night it started snowing, it snowed outside the theater but it also snowed inside, in the play. In that plaza which was the stage it was cold, there was snow, ice, puddles, lots of water and a pale sun, at the end, to accompany death. And I didn’t stop sweating, but this is to tell you that the thing is over. I get an email from the person who invited us to this conversation and he asks me how we’re doing with this conversation, then tells me we’ve gone too far, that we must start cutting. You start or I will, the editing. I’m sorry to have to say goodbye, but I say goodbye nonetheless.
And I send you a hug until our next email, an email that will now be private.
Crunchy hugs (a storm is coming, the streets become covered with salt)
Lina
So Bowie. Bowie’s good, very good, but lately I’m more for some very strange girls called CocoRosie. Or a pop singer, very experimental, called Regina Spektor.
Tuesday 5. 11:49
How wonderful to see your words embodied! And also wonderful to see the snow, I guess, outside and inside.
Let’s say, then, that the thing is interrupted, don’t you think? Because I’d like to continue speaking with you about this and the other and that and much more in the near and not so near future. Living in the U.S and continuing to participate in a writerly conversation carried out in Spanish is something we share, and it’s no small thing. Lately I’ve been thinking of something Antonie Volodine used to say: that the ultimate end of books (its ultimate medium, lets say) is to meddle with the dreams of the readers, thus forming a kind of dreamlike community. I believe in that, you know? More and more. From what I’ve read of yours, from the manner in which your words play with the rhythm of something beyond what’s solely conscious, I’d dare say this is another idea we share. Perhaps. Maybe. So in the so-called real life or in the dreams where the books that truly inhabit us end up: we’ll be seeing each other there, sure we will.
Oh, I also like the girls from coco rosie. But actually I’m a devout follower of Four Tet, of Burial too. Right now, in the shuffle of the soul, a gypsy piece plays and makes me want to get up from the chair and go round and roooooound.
Hugs. Many hugs.
CRG
Previous entries:
[Mario Bellatín vs. Edmundo Paz Soldán]
[Patricio Pron vs. Rafael Gumucio]
