v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Born to the blues

From Against Happiness  by Eric G. Wilson:

The gene pool — before and beyond time — froths and sloshes. What flops up onto the temporal shores is a matter of chance, a product of the waves' whims. At some point this teeming reservoir of DNA spumes forth a saturnine gene, a double helix destined to produce melancholy dispositions. From this instant onward what we know as human history begins: that striving, seemingly endless, toward an ungraspable perfection, that tragic effort to reach what exceeds the grasp, to fail magnificently. This gene, this melancholy gene, has proved the code for innovation. It has produced over the centuries our resplendent towers, yearning heavenward. It has created our great epics, god-hungry. It has concocted our memorable symphonies, as tumultuously beautiful as the first ocean. Without this sorrowful genome, these sublimities would have remained in the netherworld of nonexistence. Indeed, without this genetic information, sullen and ambitious, what we see as culture in general, that empyreal realm of straining ideas, might have never arisen from the mere quest for survival, from simple killing and eating.

We can picture this in the primitive world. While the healthy bodies of the tribe were out mindlessly hacking beasts or other humans, the melancholy soul remained behind brooding in a cave or under a tree. There he imagined new structures, oval and amber, or fresh verbal rhythms, sacred summonings, or songs superior to even those of the birds. Envisioning these things, and more, this melancholy malingerer became just as useful for his culture as did the hunters and the gatherers for theirs. He pushed his world ahead. He moved it forward. He dwelled always in the insecure realm of the avant-garde.

This primitive visionary was the first of many such avant-garde melancholics. Of course not all innovators are melancholy, and not all melancholy souls are innovative. However, the scientifically proved relationship between genius and depression, between gloom and greatness suggests that the majority of our cultural innovators, ranging from the ancient dreamer in the bush to the more recent Dadaist in the city, have grounded their originality in the melancholy mood. We can of course by now understand why.

Melancholia pushes against the easy "either/or" of the status quo. It thrives in unexplored middle ground between oppositions, in the "both/and." It fosters fresh insights into relationships between oppositions, especially that great polarity life and death. It encourages new ways of conceiving and naming the mysterious connections between antinomies. It returns us to innocence, to irony, that ability, temporary, to play in potential without being constrained to the actual. Such respites from causality refresh our relationship to the world, grant us beautiful vistas, energize our hearts and our minds.

Indeed, the world is much of the time boring, controlled as it is by staid habits. It seems overly familiar, tired, repetitious. Then along comes what Keats calls the melancholy fit, and suddenly the planet again turns interesting. The veil of familiarity falls away. There before us flare bracing possibilities. We are called to forge untested links to our environments. We are summoned to be creative.

Given these virtues of melancholia, why are thousands of psychiatrists and psychologists attempting to "cure" depression as if it were a terrible disease? Obviously, those suffering severe depression, suicidal and bordering on psychosis, require serious medications. But what of those millions of people who possess mild to moderate depression? Should these potential visionaries also be asked to eradicate their melancholia with the help of a pill? Should these possible innovators relinquish what might well be their greatest muse, their demons giving birth to angels?

Right now, if the statistics are correct, about 15 percent of Americans are not happy. Soon, perhaps, with the help of psychopharmaceuticals, we shall have no more unhappy people in our country. Melancholics will become unknown.

This would be an unparalleled tragedy, equivalent in scope to the annihilation of the sperm whale or the golden eagle. With no more melancholics, we would live in a world in which everyone simply accepted the status quo, in which everyone would simply be content with the given. This would constitute a dystopia of ubiquitous placid grins, a nightmare worthy of Philip K. Dick, a police state of Pollyannas, a flatland that offers nothing new under the sun. Why are we pushing toward such a hellish condition?

My Girlfriends

Morbid Anatomy

When I was a graduate student in uptsate New York, back in the 70's when video was just coming into vogue, in a cold room, air conditioned from hell, so to speak, I worked a large video camera that ran all over dismembered bodies for the sake of new medical students. I would walk over in the breezy afternoons and set my backpack besides the director's desk and go into the spotlighted studio to man my camera. Zooming in to unknown body parts and slowly panning back so the young students would be able to identify the those mysterious body parts. Occasionally I wondered who in the world gave up their bodies for this test. Wondering at times when I would see my girlfriend in the near future. Strange but true. Mysterious body parts.

Main Features of My First Impression of Hashish-Walter Benjamin

1. Spirits hover (vignette style) over my right shoulder. Coldness in that shoulder. In connection with this: “I have the feeling there are four others in the room besides me.” (Bypassing the necessity of including myself in the count.)

2. Elucidation of the Potemkin anecdote with the explanation or rather suggestion: show someone the mask (the mask of one’s own face, that is, the displayer’s face).

3. Convoluted utterance on an ether mask, which (it goes without saying) would also have mouth, nose, and so on.

4. The two coordinates in the apartment: cellar—floor / the horizontal. Great horizontal extension of the apartment. Suite of rooms, from which music is coming. But perhaps also dread of the corridor.

5. Boundless goodwill. Falling away of neurotic-obsessive anxiety complexes. The sphere of “character” opens up. All those present take on hues of the comic. At the same time, one steeps oneself in their aura.

6. The comic is elicited not just from faces but from incidents. One seeks occasions for laughter. And perhaps it is only for this reason that so much of what one sees presents itself as “arranged,” as “experiment”—so that one can laugh about it.

7. Poetic evidence in the phonetic: at one point I maintain that, in answering a question a little earlier, I had used the expression “for a long time” purely as a result (so to speak) of my perception of a long time in the sounding of the words of the question and answer. I experience this as poetic evidence.

8. Connection; distinction. In smiling, one feels oneself growing small wings. Smiling and fluttering are related. You feel distinguished because, among other things, it seems to you that fundamentally you enter into nothing too deeply: that, no matter how deeply you penetrate, you are always moving on the threshold. A sort of toe dance of reason.

9. One is very much struck by how long one’s sentences are. This, too, connected with horizontal extension and (probably) with laughter. The arcade is also a phenomenon of long horizontal extension, perhaps combined with vistas receding into distant, fleeting, tiny perspectives. The element of the
diminutive would serve to link the idea of the arcade to laughter. (Compare the Trauerspiel book: miniaturizing power of reflection.)

10. There arises, quite fleetingly, in a moment of introversion, something like an inclination [words illegible] to stylize oneself, to stylize one’s body.

11. Aversion to information. Rudiments of a state of rapture. Great sensitivity to open doors, loud talk, music.

12. Feeling of understanding Poe much better now. The gates to a world of grotesquerie seem to be opening. Only, I don’t wish to enter.

from On Hashish

Stranger than strange

Vallejo Nocturno 2006 - chicago underground

Sometimes it is better to play somewhere in the middle. Not too high, not too low. Spent sometime in Chicago on a business trip. Meeting colleagues from the past and present. Thinking too much about the past, too much about the future. Stability, something we crave, seems to be change. Sometimes it is important to recognize the moment.

May have been

Vallejo Nocturno 2006 - Victims

Sometime someone can help themselves. You, perhaps are friend, and must take the responsibility of guiding that damaged individual to home. Simple as that. Most necessary. Like looking at that that shoe in the middle of the floor and taking it back to where it rests best.

The curiosity of fotos

Vallejo Nocturno 2005

Recently we got an email from friends who we had not heard from in months. They in turn had received a call from another friend who they had not seen in nearly 20 years. The communication was that a friend of all of ours who we had spent a good 2-3 years with right after University had passed away under strange and difficult conditions.

How had it been that in almost 25 years we had not touched based or remained in contact to talk about our children or careers or concert? How had their lives taken them away through short and narrow forking roads to communities in a parallel worlds where neither of us would meet though we lived and worked several miles apart? How had we drifted to the end of Marion's story and found ourselves shaking our heads at the thought of it all?

So yesterday, our very good friend, who had spent those 2-3 years closer to anyone to Marion, flew from Los Angeles to spend time with other friends who had known Marion many years ago. Before  the Wake we came down basement where there are boxes and boxes of old photographs and started looking for some images that would reconnect us to Marion that evening. Quickly we found lots of slices of life. My friend from LA also had brought intimate and touching pictures of young people playing with their youth in ways that only young people know.

These images, combined with the others that friends would bring would recompile a fractured history of Marion who was once so close to all of us that we could intimately share a 3am Scotch and last cigarette.

I thought about my own life in pictures and photographs assembled by others and wondered what random moments would define the "me" at that moment when I was no longer me. Would it be a shot of my son and I standing in front of a beach at sunset last year or a photo of hairy, bearded guy with a young, dark woman standing in front of the Metropolitan. Or perhaps neither.

When I took the above photograph I didn't think that one day I'd select it to help define our friend Marion-with her back to the camera we can only imagine her expression as she looks over the waves lapping hard against the Caribbean fortress. Last night I realized that the freedom to see my friends in the unique perspective that only my collective and shared memories can provide is perhaps one of the most precious freedoms that I still have.

Spanish Yoga

Antonio Sanz  Luque writes in Camper.com via Resurgence:

OVER TIME, the frenetic activity of the day takes its toll: the sensestake longer than normal to register reality; certain negligence by the neurons' synapses leads to constant failure. It's at this moment that the Spaniard takes his or her place on bed, armchair or sofa to have a siesta. Spanish yoga.    

Centuries of wisdom vouch for the healthful siesta. It basically consists of disconnecting from the frantic alienating rhythm outside and connecting for a few seconds or minutes with an interior, kinder, healthier, more comforting rhythm. It's an instinctive meditation that all Hispanics carry    in their genes. Is it natural? Take a look at your pet and see what he or she does after lunch.      

On working days there exists a mutation of the siesta called 'the key'. Dali was a big fan, as were a number of his compatriots. It consists of sitting in a comfortable armchair and letting an arm fall down one side.The hand of the fallen arm must have a key in it (heavy, iron, old-fashioned kind) and under this hand must lie a china plate. When a delicious loss of consciousness occurs the hand drops the key which then hits the plate briefly, cracking the silence enough to wake the practitioner, who has been able to enjoy for a few seconds the benefit of siesta. It is necessary to reconstruct reality, your universe, and the exhausting state of being alive, to say nothing of being less dead.      

Sage visionaries created this formula thinking of the future, because  when a Hispanic has a siesta on a working day, hideous efficiency and the need to 'do', which only create anxiety, are sent packing. It's frowned upon by the timid and ignorant as a subversive act. Siesta is still an island of serenity amongst the waves of information, whose epicentre, where our neurons are shipwrecked, is the North.

Small Confession Number 1

It is obvious that last Tuesday's election results have put a deep negative tinge on my ruminations. When my future gets altered then I need to dwell on thoughts and things that transcend tomorrow. I can't continue to drill on how bad things will be-and they will be bad-so I will return to things that provide life to my imagination. I suppose it is a strategy that the supporters of the Right have managed to perfect-think about your reality and that is reality. In other tough times, coming out of a world war and going into another, the surrealists were born under complicated conditions. They dealt with an ugly reality in their way and from a distance it produced much good. Did it change the world? Perhaps, a little. Here we are nearly 80 years later and as primitive as ever. I'm going to concentrate on these other survivors, those on other side. That is until I can rehabilitate my sorry spirits and refashion them into something of strength.