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Geography is Destiny

Two notes before reading: This interview was mostly conducted in virtual space. Also, be aware that Andrei Codrescu uses the term „herm“ instead of „his“ or „her“ to evoke an all-encompassing gender intimacy when speaking about unspecified individuals. Herm is not a typo.

Pulse: Your writing, and your public persona as a poet and writer and radio personality, has often been linked to specific places: Romania, Boston, New Orleans, Zurich… How deeply do you think these ties to geography have affected your work?

Andrei Codrescu: Geography is destiny, anatomy, and evolution, to put it mildly. I was born in the medieval Transylvanian-Romanian hilly town of Sibiu, surrounded by Carpathian peaks, so I wrote mysterious craggy poems with snow on the tips of end-lines. The geography dictated poetry to the skinny (sort of craggy) adolescent who renamed himself „Steiu,“ meaning „crag“ in Romanian, in order to melt into the landscape. The communist era was threaded through by certain mountainous clichés, one of which was the requirement to be a „pine.“ The national poet of communism was one Ion Brad (John Pine) whom we hated but understood, geographically and politically. I never became a „pine,“ but „crag“ was close enough, suggesting (to my mind at least) a certain dangerous ambiguity: yes, we rise high to the „yawning heights“ of communism (as Alexander Zinoviev called them), but we also impale you, reader, like Dracula and fascism (which was well represented in Sibiu by the nationalist poet Octavian Goga, who as a minister of state in the 1930s passed a slew of antisemitic laws intended to eliminate Jews, i.e, me, from the landscape.) My hometown Sibiu was a multilingual, multireligious town of dour people who rang their church bells at different hours in order to cause insomnia in their hated neighbors: the protestant Germans rang in the vespers maddeningly slow, the Catholic Hungarians boomed martially thirty minutes later, and the Orthodox Romanians rang them all the time to sound like bleating copper sheep. My mother, who was agnostic, stuffed our ears with wadded cotton. At school we sang the „Internationale“ every morning. For all that, it was a quiet crumbling city filled with mute ghosts who specialized in twilight and autumn. I had an intimate idyll with the city, and a distant but sentimental relation to the mountains. Mostly, I cried and felt proud, which is what my birth town did since its inception in 1100 or so CE. Living there for eighteen years made me morose, craggy, cruel, filled with demonic joy, and very good at listening to tiny gasps. The rest of my geographies did their job too: San Francisco made me watery and brisk, Sonoma County made me cry wine, Baltimore made me proud to be an American because of the mighty erect phallus of George Washington on horseback in Peabody Square, and New Orleans made me first fat, then decadent, then skinny again. Should I go on?

Maybe on another matter. Ok? You often praise the writers Twain, Cervantes, Gombrowicz, Marquez. Regardless of what country they lived in or wrote about, all these writers speak sensually of their geographies, both literally and fictionally. Do you think a place and a writer create each other as imaginative presences? Does that have anything to do with why you like these writers?

I like Twain because he‘s deep and funny, Cervantes because he‘s free and funny, and Gombrowicz because he upholds the sanctity of childishness (and he‘s funny). There are others, but they are too numerous, so let me just point to this crowd of scriveners having an orgy in this swimming pool in Hell, and say: „I like‘em all! They are funny!“ Like I said, the place makes the writer, but the writer, of course, makes the place feel more „at home“ by expressing things the place tells herm. The most interesting places, with the most varied history, are composed of layers of feedback between what they fed the animals (er, writers) and the stuff the beasts spewed back. A really great place, like Venice, Italy, is a palimpsest of spews of the greatest specificity. In a literal sense, flesh is shaped by place, place puts culture into the flesh, and the flesh gives place sensual, fleshy features. A new place is a new lover: the first sensation is immersion, then not knowing where one starts and the other begins. Most post-adolescent writers bring with them the places they lived in and add them to their new places, exactly like lovers bringing their amorous experiences to a new person. Mark Twain, for instance, was preoccupied in his childhood by Time, a notion he found in Missouri caves, which are perfect representations of Slow-Time and Fast-Time, and he dragged it to the West and the East: to each new place he brought his Time jokes, and like a good 19th century thinker, he made the places he lived in more modern, more intellectual, more… timely. He had a stopwatch and was fascinated by speed. Cervantes ended the chivalric novel‘s dominion in Spain and closed the door to Moorish baroque: he invented Europe because that‘s where he found himself in the 16th century. Europe back then was a place that needed to end one history and start another (expansion, the New World) and Cervantes took dictation. Gombrowicz was a Pole-Argentine or Argentine- Pole and he took some mighty strange instructions from the surroundings, the main one being that Exile is itself a place, a 20th century place that „real“ geographies must make room for.

And how does all this physical movement affect one’s sensual world, do you think? Is there something about movement that opens up a new inner space?

Think of lovemaking: movement is all. Or dance. Or speech. Or eating. Humans move in physical space and make objects through movement. If I wink at you I make an elliptical rocking shape. If I come up from behind and bite your ear I can make a propeller spin or an apple fall (or I might make you reach for your gun). Since movement is such an effective creator of material objects I try not to move much: I type with one finger and I stare straight ahead. Try to budge me. Space is a web: anything moves, everything changes. And everything moves, like Heraklitus said, so make as many funny faces as you like, or none at all.

In your work about New Orleans, you discuss the German immigrant writer Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein. His writing is built out of the sooty, sultry contradictions of New Orleans. I wonder if he needed the city to make him a writer. Could he have written such affecting pieces had he not changed countries? Could you?

No, me and the Baron could not have written what we did if we‘d stayed nailed to our birth space. We would have been still great, but unknown. And we‘d still have been „outsiders,“ because you have to be an outsider to write. Only outsiders are foolish enough to take dictation from the environment; they believe that observation and literacy improves the wobbly thing inside them. The wobbly thing is the feeling that one doesn‘t belong. The real secret, though, is that nobody belongs, whether they are natives or not. After expulsion from paradise all humans are in exile. You can be a Colonel Sanders chicken, born, raised and fried in one quarter of a square foot and you‘ll still be an outsider. The thing we call reality is a holding tank for people who must worry about belonging — it‘s a worrier prison. Don‘t worry people! You‘ll soon be fried and eaten. A few of us are writers, hence double-alienated, but happier (because we are busy).

If it‘s true that many of us go through life feeling like we don’t belong, how might digression (geographical and otherwise) be our way of trying to forget, or to escape, that feeling?

Bad news: there are no digressions. Everything is connected in the whole darn ball of yarn: start pulling at any end and you‘ll get to the same place. On the other hand, most normal people dislike digression because they have to lose themselves to follow you. The surest way to drive your dear ones crazy is to digress. In private, it‘s an offense. In public it‘s „art“, „performance“.

The internet feels as though it was built for digression. But it also proves your point: everything is connected; we move from link to link. Has the internet changed the writer’s relationship to geography? Has this “new place” changed the role of the storyteller?

Six books it took me to answer these questions!

I know. But…in short? Are there regional writers and regional poets when it comes to the virtual world?

In short, the internet liquefied physical borders faster than they were already doing on their own. For all that, there are only regional writers. There are no „internet writers“, like there used to be „paperback writers“. Every tweet comes from somewhere, and that „somewhere“ goes into the „somewhere“ where you‘re reading it in. You read Nietzsche in the Ozarks for a while, let‘s say, then you get up and sweep the leaves from your porch for a longer while. Place wins on time spent every time, unless you‘re demented enough to put out your eyes on screens longer than you sweep. We are in a state of „transitional regionalism“, a place where regions are instantly transmitted to other regions, but they don‘t universalize them, they only make them more provincial, by framing them with the local. Like I said, six books! Amazon.com. Now that‘s a Weird place! To wit, „virtual space“ is just another place, like a house on a street in Columbus, Ohio. If you get up from your computer you can go out and forget all about the virtual place. If you tell stories about the internet from Columbus, Ohio, you‘re an Ohio internetist (tho it might pay better to be an internist); if you tell stories about a fried-chicken incident that could‘ve been in a Sherwood Anderson novel, you‘re a double-regionalist: an internetist in a place. Like the founder of VR said to me in Seattle in 1997: „At least reality has a competitor now!“ He was being hopeful. VR won‘t keep you out of the VA (hospital), to coin a saw.

But what happens to modernism then? Can there be modernism without the big literal city?

There is no more „modernism,“ or its better sibling, „the avantgarde.“ Those revolutions ended in Restoration in 1978: the monarchies (of boredom) came back then, psychology snuck back inside people, institutions reshaped people, money was everything again. (As opposed to other currencies such as youth, poetry, love, feathers, and murder). „Diversity“ is just a word for hiding the crime of increasing monocultures, growing like mold since 1978. Fun ideas are created in free interplay by people with big eyes and insatiable appetites who feel like laughing whenever anybody says something, anything. It‘s true that city neighborhoods full of bohemes and wannabe bohemes are more inspiring when you‘re young and poor. Those places exist mostly in the imagination now: no sooner do artists funkify a hood, the developers move in. Though there is some hope now, thanks to the financial meltdown, that places may rust back for a while and we can breathe freely, ah, ah. Unemployment is good for art too, necessary actually. Give us about 20% unemployment and we will rise again!

Big cities require diverse people to find a way to live in close proximity; opposing ideas often end up walking side by side. In an internet age, what happens to that kind of contradiction and paradox?

It‘s not diversity or cities that create contradictions: everything does. You have to make a bigger effort to accommodate seemingly opposed ideas in New York, for instance, because New York is aggravating every second. Your landlord and your temperament will never see eye to eye. The violent anarchist and the pacifist next door, both of whom you‘re sleeping with, are trying to present their cases as irreconcilable, but the intellectual standoff dissolves because your body bridges them. As long as you have a body, ideas can clash all they want, they won‘t harm you. It helps to have a young healthy body. The body is currency, creativity, and insurance: the better you know that, the better your works. The common usage of the word „creativity“ these days is „marketing.“ How you see the world and what you make is all terrific, but you have to be really creative to make others see you the same way.

Does that mean first being skeptical of both the anarchist and the pacifist, and then finally accepting and loving them both?

The only way to stop doubting is to develop selective forgetting. Alzheimer‘s is a disease, and it‘s sad, but you don‘t need a disease to reap the benefits of forgetting. Listen to me: take a deep breath, close your eyes, and on the count of ten repeat ten times: My brain will automatically erase the bad, the boring, and the ugly. My brain will automatically… Now open your eyes and drunk-text.

Maybe it’s possible to be playful and honest without also being drunk, or maybe being playful and honest is itself a way of being drunk. Is it one way or the other: play Judge, or Just play?

We have to play. So we‘re silly. So what? We are artists. We don‘t have good taste, we‘re too busy for that. If you have to judge make it final. If hypnosis doesn‘t work, moving out might. To paraphrase and quote my master Ted Berrigan, there are only two solutions: „suicide and murder// but that‘s dumb!“ Moving out (and on) is better.

Is moving really always better though? In New Orleans Mon Amour, you write about how old cities soothe and ease the pain of living because they are places with histories; it’s comforting to know others have lived and stayed there before you. And yet, one hardly recognizes the history and depth of one’s place until one has left it. Can travel be less a matter of finding new places and more a matter of really seeing what is right in front of one, of being still?

Both are true: you appreciate a place after you leave it, and you can train yourself to appreciate it while you‘re in it (though it‘s harder). The Mysteries of Paris by Eugene Sue was the first novel to discover the exotic at home; Sue was too poor to travel so he found the magic where he lived.

In that sense, are languages ways of traveling too, of entering a new geography?

Yes, but like I said before, it‘s better done in bed.

Florida and Louisiana, 2010.

Imaginary Places

Article and interview by Anna Rohleder, 2011.

Even in a brief conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum, it becomes apparent that his interests are broad-ranging, from Sigmund Freud to film stars, 1960s American pop-culture icons to European Expressionist poetry, opera recordings to billboard advertising. His work also spans (and occasionally combines) fiction and non-fiction, as well as prose and poetry. Of his books, The Queen‘s Throat: Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, an investigation into the affinity of gay men for opera, and Hotel Theory, a novel set in a hotel juxtaposed with an extended essay about hotels, are among the best-known. He is also involved in the visual arts. He taught on the faculty of the Yale University School of Art and has contributed art journalism and criticism to magazines such as Art Forum and Art in America as well as general-interest publications such as Vanity Fair and Vogue. He is a poet, novelist and professor of English at the City University of New York.

Pulse: There is a Matisse show about to go up at MOMA („Radical Reinvention“), and one of the recurring motifs in his work is the artist‘s studio, which is both an artificial and necessary space. I was trying to think of a counterpart to the artist‘s studio for a writer. Is it possible to do creative work in an office?

Wayne Koestenbaum: I have. I started writing poetry at an office job. I worked as a typist, and while I was at work, when no one was looking, I‘d write poems on index cards, or sometimes on the back of one of those „While You Were Out“ message pads. The size of the index card was the poetic form, and the duration of time would be the amount of time stolen. This goes back to Certeau‘s idea of „la perruqe“ („the wig“), which I talk about in my book Hotel Theory – stealing time from the boss and using it for my own purposes. There was a permission for me that being surreptitious allowed. I could not have authorized myself to write a poem at home: it would have been too much of an abyss. By being at the office job — which was a job I had no sympathy with — there was a sense of being off duty from myself.

I tend to write in different genres out of that same impulse to find an incognito. Poetry is the free space outside the writing I‘m supposed to do. In terms of writing environments in general, this café for example (Café Le Grainne, New York) used to be quieter and less bustling. There was something more lax about it, and I could lose myself. Now it‘s become louder and busier.

There‘s more regulation.

If we extend that idea to mental landscapes, do you think that the synapses of the brain may reflect or mirror the paths we take through a familiar place, so that we always encounter the same thoughts at the same points of topography?

I like to ask myself, „Where is that emotion (or memory, or fantasy)“ when I feel it. „Where is it located?“ And I‘ve begun to feel split between a palpable self and a nimbus or thought bubble or haze that‘s located somewhere behind my eyes and above my nose but which is not material. I am vaguely coincident with my body as I move through the world but there‘s a split second of delay.

We‘re trained to think of our emotions as embodied, in the chest or in the shoulders, but what if it‘s not that specific? What if it‘s all just hovering? If your thoughts are not in your head, maybe they are somewhere outside waiting for you.

I think all of us have had the experience of moving through an environment in the wake of an emotional event, and feeling that resonate in the landscape, that everything actually looks and feels different as a result.

Well, I don‘t have that many romantic or nostalgic memories of places. But I once stayed in Venice for a month and I used to take a nap in the afternoons listening to Luigi Nono. The recordings I was listening to would go in and out of audibility, and I had the windows open, so these characteristic Venetian sounds would come in at the same time, which for me made up an idealized soundscape. Nono himself lived in Venice, so he composed to the same sounds I was hearing, and I was completing the mystery by returning to Venice with his music. Similarly, I recently took a book of 20th century German literature on a trip to Germany. And I think being in Berlin while reading Brecht for the first time made his poetry make more sense to me.

This then leads you into the field of ethnopoetics. What does it mean to mark an environment, or make a map of a place? Think of the medieval arts of memory, which encompassed not only maps of topography but also the music of the spheres.

That makes me think of the Austrian fin-de-siecle poetGeorg Trakl, who died very young – in the first year of WWI – of a drug overdose , and who in fact had been a drug addict since he was a child. He describes an entire synesthetic universe where the landscape itself makes music, and even colors ring or chime…

I am fascinated by imagining the world of the German or Austrian child at the turn of the 20th century. Take Freud‘s case of Little Hans, for example. What possibilities were there for a four year-old boy in the Vienna of 1900? Leaving Freud‘s formulations aside, what were the emotional possibilities? Little Hans had such an unfettered curiosity. He was encouraged so much by his father and by Freud. It seems quite idyllic, like the antidote to Michael Haneke‘s vision of childhood [in a film like The White Ribbon]. And you know, later in life Little Hans actually became a major opera director. He worked for the Met for over 30 years.

I try to imagine childhood in other historical times. Imagine a particularly dreary time to be born, so for example, what if you‘re a woman who‘s not from one of the upper classes born in rural Austria, 1805? What is your emotional environment? When does it dawn on you that it‘s a blighted time – if, in fact, it ever occurs to you? Like the photographs of August Sanders. You look into the faces and try to imagine what their sense of expectation and possibility was in relation to what the environment allowed.

I saw the film „Babies“ recently, which deals with this question of environments across cultures, and allows one to study the unmarked face of an infant, the degrees of boldness or shyness. I was very excited by the audacity of the African boy – this phallic narcissism – his extreme confidence of his place in the universe, in contrast to the more cosseted child in California, who seems to be somewhat at sea. In the African scene, there‘s so little of what we consider to be stimulating: this little boy is sitting with women who are not really dressed, and he is just playing in dirt. Meanwhile, in California, the American baby is in a bedroom full of toys, the kid seems confused, because it‘s just glutted with codes.

I‘m convinced the next great leap in technology is going to be a means of dynamically „forgetting“ data, because we‘re coming to the limits of what we can do with storage. Even in terms of the electricity to power all the data centers needed to „remember“ the information we generate, never mind figure out what to do with all of it.

I saw a billboard the other day for a company that said it could shred and/or store your documents, and it really struck me that there is this dual relationship between storage and shredding. I‘ve come to the point in my life where I‘ve starting thinking about the placement of an „archive.“ I imagine it as a very comforting space to be in, if you had a whole room in a house full of personal papers and books – even old books of mine that have gotten brown and look depressing now, because I remember when they were first published, and they seemed so permanent, like they‘d be around forever, but now they seem like trash – and I‘ve started to understand why publishers pulp books. It always seemed like a sacrilege before but now I can feel the distance even on my own bookshelf between what‘s worth keeping and what isn‘t.

A lot of what I tend to do is try to find internal and external environments that allow me to concentrate, because most environments I find myself in make it difficult. It‘s not just a matter of finding the right coffee shop. There is a need to forget a little, to clear space and pay attention. We have no night anymore, no moment of silence between yesterday and today. This perpetual awakeness without the interruption of sleep is just terrifying.

There is also a dimension to this that concerns an inattention to ceremony. I had noticed I was sliding into writing rather than preparing for writing as an act. Over the years I‘ve accumulated several manual typewriters, and lately I‘ve begun typing on colored construction paper when I use my pink typewriter. I choose the color and put the paper in, choosing to begin deliberately.

I used to think in terms of performance, of the higher stakes that an audience brings, but now I think it has more to do with issues of attentiveness, concentration and deliberation. Attentiveness doesn‘t depend on performing.

In our world of constant interruptions and fragmented attention, it‘s almost as though you have to choose your own form of autism to filter some of the stimulation.

[Austrian poet] Trakl is a good form of autism, because he has a limited vocabulary and a limited body of work. I was reading him while I was on jury duty recently – immersing myself in an entire body of work was my chosen autism.

I made another decision to limit the field and only read poetry this summer. I will only be taking my messages from people who have worked on themselves and their language – who have edited and isolated. There‘s no pandering though there‘s plenty of bad faith… Reading poetry means I‘ll always feel at home in my reading.

The In-Between Place of Contemporary Art and Politics

When I arrived in New York from New Orleans in 1978 to become an artist, the city was emerging from a very dark time. New York nearly went bankrupt. Manufacturing had mostly left the city, opening up vast amounts of cheap industrial real estate to artists. One of these areas became known as Soho, which was at that time a scary place after dark. New York was dirty, dangerous, and cheap. As Soho quickly became too expensive for some of us, we began to populate the East Village and Lower East Side. My classic East Village walkup on East 10th near Avenue A, with the bathtub in the kitchen, was $115 per month. Artists met cruising each other on the streets and we created our own scenes in bars, clubs, and storefronts. Performance Art was having its heyday, an indicator of just how much the work was about ideas and community rather than commerce. This lasted until the Wall Street and concurrent New York art-world booms of the late ‘80’s, a time when some argue the ‘Art Star’ was born and New York’s bohemia died. Even without the rose-colored glasses—I was mugged, robbed and attacked numerous times, and we all suffered the tragic and painful losses due to AIDS—it was still an exciting time to be an artist in New York. The downtown slate was blank.

These days it’s filled in. When the latest financial crisis hit in 2008, the initial spin was that the crisis would supply the New York art world with what it was sorely lacking—the space for new ideas. Comparisons were made to the 70’s and 80’s. There may be around a ten percent unemployment rate in the U.S. today but we New York artists still must juggle two or three jobs to maintain our work, studios, apartments, and wardrobes. Our artistic community is reduced to a place for networking where introductions are contacts for career advancement. And still our voices are barely heard above the commercial cacophony. New Yorkers are carrying on as though there were no crisis at all. I have frankly never seen this level of extravagant construction and consumption in the thirty years I’ve lived here.

Granted, this jaundiced view of New York is mine only on bad days. And I am loath to admit that it may have been for nostalgic reasons that I first wanted to go to Berlin. I had often heard that Berlin today is like New York was in the 70’s and early 80’s, sans the danger. And to some extent this is still true. Berlin’s slate may no longer be completely blank, but there is considerable space left. Berlin occupies the theoretical, philosophical, political and ideological space between east and west, which translates into potential, into the cultural space of in-between. Berlin is all about occupying unoccupied spaces—the abstract ones just mentioned, and the real empty cheap ones like those in New York in the ‘70’s, where new experiments happened on the site of those that failed. My real interest in Berlin is in understanding to what extent contemporary art participates in these experiments and/or to what extent it is a casualty.

As art movements go, the term ‘contemporary’ might refer to all and none. Unlike the modern project, whose mission it was to reinvent traditional forms and belief structures no longer viable in a post enlightenment, newly industrialized (western) world, contemporary art acts as a catch-all for a variety of ‘anything goes’ made in the ‘here and now’. Yet it is not simply a designation for all art made in the present. While anything from the most traditional to the most experimental of materials, forms, processes and projects can constitute contemporary art; it is its discursive and socio relational connection to the present that constitutes its contemporaneity and the extent to which it is taken seriously. At the same time, another characteristic or condition of our contemporary present is that it is dis-connected in so far as it is post-oppositional. Our present is not connected to what it opposes, at least not in the way east-west opposition delineated by communism defined modernism’s utopian present.

Now is a time of no clear sides, which along with technology has rendered our global culture borderless, nomadic, all over the place. Like the post-feminist woman, contemporary art must now be all things. So contemporary art is now. But it is also post: post-oppositional, post-Cold War, post Marxist, post-modern, post-academy, post-colonial, post-identity, post-feminist. What kind of now is contingent on being after? And what is its relationship to the future?

Nowhere is this borderless, post-oppositional now-ness embodied more than in Berlin, where the gap left by a lack of conflict is as palpable and visible as the yet undeveloped real estate that once housed modernism’s greatest symbol of division, the Berlin Wall. And it is the propensity of this space to be filled that is attracting all the action there. Berlin’s post-oppositional now in no way means that the action in Berlin excludes critical dissent, quite the contrary. In the short twenty years since the failure of communism when the whole of Berlin was united under the banner of democratic capitalism and its promises, Berliners have witnessed 9/11 and the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression. While Germany’s economy rages on as the strongest in the European Union, Berlin itself continues to struggle economically and to experience repercussions from reunification’s radical shift in its society, a society largely subsidized by what many German citizens collectively dub the ‘Berlin Tax’. This contributes to political tensions within the country, but adds to the allure of Berlin’s marginality and its experimental moment—artists, poets, and philosophers on the dole—creating a space for the valid critique of the systems that
were meant to save them.

One meets artists and writers in Berlin today who really are “In Search of the[ir] Postcapitalist Self” and who look critically at our new ‘post-Fordist’ economy predicated on ‘immaterial labor’ where ideas are sold as opposed to material objects using factory labor. This is a marketing, design, branding, consulting, finance, information and communication service economy that is computer reliant. To fuel the post-Fordist economy, immaterial workers sell us ever-changing ideas about ourselves resulting in our endless pursuit of products that go out of fashion long before their usefulness, while much of the manufacturing or material labor for these products is outsourced to places like India and China. The process appears to benefit both sides of the global economic coin, but there are, at the very least, serious environmental, therefore economic, consequences.

Designing things with planned or built-in obsolescence uses an inordinate amount of natural resources and end up as mountains of toxic waste. Today’s economy is dependent on our dependency on ever-new things and our greed-over-entitlement impulse. We must desire more than we need and choose what we do need from a surplus of options all designed to match our ‘lifestyle’. Lifestyle itself is commoditized. This lopsided production strategy seems destined to falter.

Berlin’s history and present economic conditions make it naturally skeptical of this new order. No wonder that in such an environment of skepticism a once vigorous oppositional left has reemerged as an intrinsic community of ‘cultural producers’ with neo-Marxist tendencies. Members of cultural communities from other places and with similar tendencies go there to meet, creating global communities with overlapping purpose—a defining role for Berlin. In this sense, perhaps the defining role for contemporary art is as the solitary ambassador of social change. If we look at the big international biennials and exhibitions today, contemporary art is again political and in service of change; it’s now responsible for what the larger socialist utopian project failed to do. In the aftermath of so many failed or post systems, this is a heavy burden. Consequently Berlin, contemporary art, and culture itself, is under continual and intense scrutiny.

Take the term ‘Cultural Tourism’, for example. It’s pejorative use implies a worthy debate; just how much do these large exhibitions, like the recent Berlin Biennial, evolve out of a vital need to communicate the socially and politically engaged ideas of artists and curators, or the contradictory need to revitalize a city’s commercial viability? A biennial promises the cachet of membership in a select club of cities sophisticated enough to participate in the avant-garde conversation. This brings an exclusive stratum of tourism, and business, to a city like Berlin, now branded to be at the cultural fore. The ‘culturalization of the economy’ or the ‘economization of culture’ might produce the perfect immaterial commodity to be bought and sold by ambitious curators and urban planners, but it takes away art’s most emancipatory characteristic, its autonomy. What is interesting about this critique and others like it is that it comes from within the cultural community itself, who is in part culpable. If we as cultural producers are the sole heirs of the left’s mission for social change, then it makes sense we inherit the left’s unsparing self-criticism.
Living in Berlin for three months this past summer, during the time of the Biennial, I began to wonder if I was complicit in this cynical neo-liberal economics of culture. Was I contributing to Berlin’s gentrification by perhaps paying more for rent than Berlin artists could afford? It bothered me that I considered this (unsparing self-criticism), that I might be doing something wrong by living in Berlin. Of course I was a Cultural Tourist, and yes I was a member of an elite global audience that large international exhibitions catered to. Nevertheless, I concluded that I was in Berlin because I belonged there.

Site Berlin localizes and externalizes for the rest of the world our most monstrous and schizophrenic impulses, and, since the fall of the wall, our chance for redemption. We are all implicated and we are all responsible in some way for what comes next, and for not forgetting what came before. In this way, we are all citizens of Berlin, of the gap. That this international gathering place is affordable compared to other European cities contributes to its rich diversity. Its alternative scenes are possible because artists, poets, philosophers, curators, and other cultural workers, who are more often than not well educated and broke, populate it from far and wide. This is why I spent the summer in Berlin, and why I will return.

BIO: ARTIST BRADLEY WESTER,
Bradley Wester is a New York visual artist working in a hybrid medium that combines painting, sculpture, digital imaging and installation. For the past ten years Wester has worked on a project where he lives and works in three disparate but geographically symmetrical cultures, ultimately resulting in three connected bodies of work. He has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the U.S. and in Europe including most recently at Margalef & Gipponi Gallery in Antwerp Belgium. Awards include: Specialist Fulbright Fellowship to Kyoto Japan, two MacDowell Fellowships, Pollock-Krasner Grantee, and twice published in New American Paintings. Wester’s Visiting Artist credits include: CalArts in Los Angeles, Sint Lucas Antwerpen Belgium, Kyoto University of Art & Design, The American Academy in Rome, and a recent three-year Visiting Artist full-time faculty position at Ringling College of Art & Design in Sarasota FL. Wester has also designed theatre sets for Off-Broadway, and in Los Angeles for writer/director Eve Ensler, producers Mike Nichols, Fox Television, The Promenade Theatre-NY, LaMama-NY, Music Theatre Group-NY, and The Court Theatre-LA. His work was seen in a recent Adam Sandler film. He performed in a Robert Wilson production at New York’s Lincoln Center, and created his own performance/theatre works at venues such as The Kitchen Center and PS1 in New York.

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In the recent documentary A Crude Awakening, it is said that the United States of America was once “the Saudi Arabia of the world” when it came to oil production: in other words, much of the world once purchased its oil from the States. Now those vast resources have been depleted. Many other places around the world have also peaked. In Baku, Azerbaijan, miles of machine carcasses clutter the landscape – oil from here once powered the Allies (especially the Russians) towards defeating Germany in World War Two, and now the well is dry. Less than sixty years ago, the British found oil in the North Sea. According to Colin Campbell, an oil geologist and consultant to the world’s top oil companies, Britain will become a net importer of oil within the year, and its oil will be used up by 2020.

It’s easy to roll your eyes and ignore this trend. With all the noise being generated around ‚the end of oil‘, perhaps it is difficult to listen deeply to what‘s being said. The views sound extreme to some. The end of oil feels like a conspiracy theory. Even so, everyone admits that our current way of life is based on oil. We require oil to create all our plastics, fertilizers, tires, and computers; oil is also the primary energy behind our transportation. And oil is not a renewable resource.

Does running out of oil mean disaster? Is the end of oil also the end of civilization? Can we change and find new ways of thinking about energy? Author and environmentalist Derrick Jensen doesn’t think we can, at least not quickly. He believes the current culture is irremediable, and that it will be (and must be) destroyed. According to Jensen, we have treated our earth the same way a rapist treats his victim. And we have to deal with those who have hurt our world the same way we would deal with a man who has committed a particular act of violence.

Pulse: How do you define violence?

Derrick Jensen: The definition of violence that I like the most is ‘any act that causes harm to another’ and the reason I like that definition is because it demystifies the word and shows it to be what it is, which is a part of everyday life. Every time I defecate I kill zillions of bacteria. When I eat, it doesn’t matter whether I’m eating a carrot or a piece of chicken, I’m still doing violence to another.

Are you saying violence is natural?

On that level, violence is natural. It’s inevitable. We all feed each other. Eventually I’m going to feed the worms and the soil. It’s a big, beautiful circle. So the question becomes: what sort of violence do you find acceptable or unacceptable? Most of us under most circumstances see doing violence to a carrot as morally acceptable. And I think most of us under most circumstances see doing violence to a human being as not morally acceptable. And yet, even then, there’s a lot that doesn’t get counted as violence. An example I often give is: What do the movies Doctor Zhivago, Straw Dogs, On the Waterfront – and I could name so many others – all have in common?

Scenes of rape? I’ve heard you say that before.

That’s exactly it. Except it’s even worse. Each of those films has a rape scene where by the end of the scene, the woman is putting her arms around the man.

Rape that supposedly becomes something intimate?

Right. A pornographic rape fantasy. So my point is, from the perspective of those screenwriters and actors, that kind of violence is clearly acceptable because they’re turning it into an intimate act. In that same sense, judging by their actions, clearly there are also members of this culture who perceive the violence of destroying the planet as acceptable.

Do you think members of culture consciously accept these things, or is it something else?

There’s a great line by Combs which says “Unquestioned assumptions are the real authorities of any culture.” A Canadian lumberman once said “When I look at trees, I see dollar bills.” Another explorer of the American northwest, upon seeing the great waterfalls there, said “I determined that I would possess them.” I say in The Culture of Make Believe that any hatred felt long enough no longer feels like hatred, it feels like economics or philosophy or something else. There are things we don’t question, and so we think they are true.

Nietzsche said that there is nothing more resistant to correction than self-deception. Still, isn‘t there something to be said for a radical kind of honesty, for seeking internal clarity? Can such work lead to an awareness that affects the way one sees?

I think that’s really important; I just don’t think everyone is capable of it. I don’t think if you put BP former CEO Tony Hayward on the coast, he’d get all jazzed about the beauty of it. I think he’d see the money to be made. When the Europeans arrived in North America, they saw what the indigenous people called home and worshipped, and saw it as a savage wilderness that needed to be tamed. It’s a matter of how you perceive.

Are you saying there are simply different kinds of people? The people who want to destroy the environment, and those who see the beauty of it and care for it?

I don’t know. In my different books, I’ve explored different answers to that question. In A Language Older Than Words, I talk about how most members of this culture are suffering from what Judith Herman called ‘complex post-traumatic stress disorder’: They’ve been so traumatized that they’re no longer capable of being in a relationship or conceptualizing what a relationship means. In the The Culture of Make Believe, I wrote about how this culture systematically rewards competition rather than cooperation, and how such a system leads to sociological atrocities. Then in Endgame I wrote about how if your culture is based on the importation of resources then it’s going to lead inevitably to atrocities. I’ve got a book coming out this spring where I explore an idea that Jack Forbes (an American Indian) raises in his work: He believes this problem is a spiritual illness with a physical vector. He talks about members of the dominant culture having a spiritual illness that causes them to become cannibals; they have to consume the souls of others in order to survive. The members of dominant culture are zombies, and they don’t see that the dominant culture is killing the planet. Very sober people are writing very sober articles about this, and still the response is to continue promoting capitalism. I’ve written fifteen books about this and I still can’t wrap my mind around it.

Does that mean you are resigned to this destruction? Do you believe it is impossible to change people’s minds?

Realizing we can’t change the minds of those who are destroying the planet doesn’t mean we are resigned to what they do. What that means is that we are going to use different tactics.

And what would be the goal of those tactics?

To stop those who are destroying the planet, using any means necessary. How do you stop Ted Bundy? How do you stop a rabid dog? How do you stop a sociopath? You don’t stop them by appealing to them. Lundy Bancroft wrote about the only way to stop an abuser is to give them no other choice. You can’t appeal to their best interests because the abusers are gaining tangible benefits from their abuse. You can’t change a capitalist because they’re benefiting from the system; they’re getting hot showers and gold-plated toilets. You stop them by stopping them, and that means going to any means necessary, because the world is at stake.

To do this, do you think civilization has to end, that it has to be brought down, that it will end through catastrophe?

Well it’s not that I think this. I mean, that’s like saying that I think if you jump off a cliff, you’re going to fall to the ground. Our modern way of life is by definition unsustainable. It’s based on oil, and oil will run out. Anybody who thinks we can go on as we are is engaging in magical thinking. (go read Richard Heinberg’s book The Party’s Over if you want an in-depth explanation of this). So to directly answer your question, yes, it will crash.

What comes afterwards then? Humans are curious. Curiosity leads to things like innovation and infrastructure and what we now call ‘civilization’, the civilization you say must fall.

Are you saying that the Tolowa, the indigenous people who lived on the land here in California where I live now, weren’t curious?

No.

Then how were they able to live here for 12,500 years without doing what the dominant culture today has done?

I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to understand. I can only learn another option if I can understand that option.

My point is that it is extremely dangerous and racist to believe that curiosity leads to technological innovation of the sort that this culture now has because that implies that people like the Tolowa or the Dakota were too stupid to invent backhoes.

I don’t think that follows. I am trying to get at the fact that if civilization falls, that doesn’t necessarily mean that all the people who created that civilization, or that all the ideas that have come out of that civilization, are suddenly gone. They’re still here. We’ll still here. I’m just wondering how we learn another way. How do we not repeat what we’ve done?

We can’t repeat it. There will never be another oil age because the reserves of oil will be gone. This is a one time blow out. Same thing happened with bronze: There will never be another bronze age. There will never be another iron age. There will never be another age of tall ships because they’ve cut down all the old growth forests that were necessary to build them. There were once runs of salmon twelve miles long that lasted for 28 days. Those are gone. The point is: the only way you can build up these modern cultures is by being extremely wasteful and destroying your landbase. The Fertile Crescent is no longer fertile. The Sahara Desert was once the bread basket of Rome. We’ve been destroying the landbase as we’ve created this modern culture. We’re using it up.

If you want to know what happens when a patriarchal culture collapses, look at the Democratic Republic of Congo (where women are being brutally raped in large numbers). As civilizations collapse, women are going to bear the brunt of this and it’s no use pretending that won’t be the case. What we need to do is to prepare for that crash. I love the line by Andrea Dworkin: “My prayer for women of the twenty-first century is harden your hearts and learn to kill.” What that means to me is that women need to learn self-defense and they need to learn it now. The time to learn self-defense is not when someone is breaking down your door.

Peggy Reeves Sanday did a cross-cultural study of rape asking why some cultures are high rape and why some are low rape. A lot of the markers she found are things you’d expect: a higher militarized culture is probably going to be higher rape, for example; a culture that treats children better is probably going to be lower rape, and so on. But there was one marker that was very interesting and a little bit unexpected, which is that if the culture has a history of ecological dislocation in its previous four or five hundred years, that could be a marker for high rape. What that says to me is that when a culture is stressed, men often take it out on women through rape and other forms of violence. Another thing that says to me – and this has to do with civilization coming down – is that it takes four or five hundred years for a culture to recover from trauma, so ten to fifteen generations. When people ask will there ever be sustainable cultures again? I would say it would take a good four or five hundred years for such cultures to develop locally once the dominant culture is gone.

So to get back to your original question, yes, when civilization crashes, the people who were assholes before are still going to be assholes afterwards, but those people will no longer have the power to control and kill the entire planet.

Won’t people still try to create order? To create civilization? Can freedom and order exist together, in this sense?

I don’t think that having freedom implies a lack of order. Part of the problem with living in this incredibly oppressive culture, is that because this hierarchy is oppressive we assume that all hierarchy is oppressive, and that’s not the case. It’s ok to have hierarchies that are based on experience, and they don’t imply a lack of freedom. If you go to a new place, you go to Costa Rica, and you want to go walking, and you know someone who has lived there their whole life and knows all the walking trails and can tell you what is or is not a good hike, what is or is not dangerous, then you still have the freedom to take the route they say is uninteresting or dangerous, but that doesn’t alter the fact that their experience makes them a leader in that specific and fluid sense. Order or hierarchy does not necessarily imply domination.

When it’s on an intimate basis, someone you trust, that’s one thing. But when it comes to large groups of people, to society and politics for example, how do we deal with it? How did indigenous people deal with it?

That’s a great point, because it’s not something that just happens magically. The Indians of the Columbia River had very specific hard-headed treaties that they would carry out with each other having to do with who could take how many salmon, to make sure that the salmon would survive, and that they could all eat. And if one group took too many salmon, the other group would either complain or if that didn’t work they would raid them. I was talking to a Dakota friend of mine about what the Dakota would do if someone took too many buffalo. That would burn their teepee, destroy their weapons. There would be consequences.

And did everyone agree on that somehow? Was it democratic? Or were there a few powerful people who enforced it?

Different cultures would come up with different methods. Anyone in any culture can sometimes end up hating others in that same species or culture, and there are different ways of dealing with that. There are rituals where people would enter trance states through dancing and that would bring people in the community back together. The Inuit, who would be stuck together inside all winter, had some sex games they would play to break up the monotony and to help people get along. Different peoples would have different means, to use a phrase that has been co-opted by the US government, of finding ‘checks and balances’. They would also often have means of being sure wealth was transferred from rich to poor because that would make everybody in the community secure. They would have gift exchanges, or other means for making sure power remained fluid.

In small groups, this works. It becomes more difficult with larger groups.

You’re right, they are small. I’ve seen sociological studies that suggest that it’s not really possible to have a functioning democracy with groups larger than 120 or 140 people.

It’s almost like the larger the group, the less personal it is and the less accountability there can be.

Absolutely. There’s no face-to-face interaction. There’s no community. You don’t need a police force when there’s a small group because if somebody does something horrible, then everybody goes ‘what the hell did you do that for, you jerk’ It becomes much more obvious that any one person’s act of theft or violence or stealing fish or whatever hurts the whole; it becomes much more obvious that it is not in anyone’s self-interest to allow such things to occur.

I see. So, in large social groups – nations or businesses, for example – it becomes very difficult for individuals to make the connections between cause and effect. Accountability becomes more ambiguous. Still, it seems self-deceptive to imagine that we can go backwards and live wholly as indigenous people have. But we can learn that there is something valuable in cultivating a “small group” way of thinking, can‘t we? Perhaps there is a way to have smaller groups within the larger whole, if that makes sense.

People have to learn that. And it will take a lot of time. But people have to learn that, or they won’t survive. It’s not going to happen in two years, it’s not going to happen in two generations. It’s going to take a lot of time to excrete all this terrible trauma. It’s going to take time for us to deal with all this violence we’ve generated.

In the beginning of this discussion, you defined violence as ‘any act that does harm to another’. In supporting that definition, it could seem you are generalizing. But in fact, aren’t you calling for people to look deeper? To be able to cope with more nuance?

Yes, exactly. I was being interviewed by a pacifist a few years ago and I said something like I told you at first, that we can mostly all agree that it is acceptable to do violence against a carrot but that it is not acceptable to do violence against a human being. And his response was ‘so are you saying that there’s no difference between committing an act of violence against a carrot and committing an act of violence against a human being?’ and I was like ‘did you even fucking listen to what I just said?’

But I can understand why he said that. Many cultures teach one to think like that, to NOT make space for nuance. There are supposed to be all-inclusive objective rules that apply to everything. We think it’s a contradiction if we say that violence is okay in one case and not okay in another.

I think that’s absolutely right. And it’s part of the problem with literacy, because as soon as something is written down, then it’s considered wholly true in all cases. Rarely is any statement wholly applicable in all cases.

Maybe our next real evolutionary leap is one of being able to see more clearly, which means being able to handle paradox and nuance in our daily life. In that sense, William Blake talks about paradise being Now, already here but something we haven’t yet learned to see. Would you agree with that idea?

This answer’s not going to surprise you, but I think it depends. I think the whole ‘live in the present’ thing is really important sometimes, but sometimes it really pisses me off. I mean, how do you live in the Now if in your now you are being sexually assaulted? I don’t think that’s paradise. And I don’t think that pigs living on factory farms are living in heaven. I think that’s hell. I think the people in Guantanamo are in hell. I think right now I’m living in heaven. I’m having a nice phone conversation, looking at beautiful trees, I have a great dog here with me… So I think it’s circumstantial. When I’m standing in line at the airport to go through security, I don’t think that’s heaven. People have asked me over the years, do you meditate? And I always think: I live in a forest, I don’t have to meditate.

Every moment can be a meditation, in that sense.

Yes, exactly. But if I were in a traffic jam, we’d have a different discussion. I was actually stuck in a traffic jam a couple of weeks ago in Los Angeles, late to get to the airport, and I was really tense. I could have used meditation or someone to whisper in my ear –

This too shall pass…. But I guess when Blake wrote about paradise, he was using the word in a wider sense: we on the planet have paradise if we choose to see it and if we DO all see it, the stressful traffic jam experience would probably not exist as such–

People wouldn’t allow paradise to be paved over. The system would change completely.

Right.

Well, if that’s what Blake was saying, I totally agree.

interview by phone, 2011.

Sensual Visitation

Pulse: You were born in Iran and lived in Trinidad and England as a child. Today, you are a presence in the creative world of the United States, especially in California where you live for the majority of your time. How has all of this movement affected your work and your sense of self?

Wolpe: When I was a teenager, my mother used to say: when you are out of the house, your behavior, dress, manner of speaking and everything else you do reflect on your family. I took this to mean that if I did not conform, I could single-handedly ruin my family’s reputation. Therefore from a very young age, the idea of not belonging was very attractive to me. It stemmed from wanting to rebel, but also take charge of my own destiny.

However, not until I was sent to Trinidad and later to boarding school in England did I truly understand that belonging is not always a matter of choice. “Otherness” could be imposed because you don’t have the ‘right’ skin color, eyes, or don’t pray to this god or that deity. In Trinidad, I physically stood out. In England, at the boarding school I attended, I was the girl with the weird accent, or the one with wild brown curly hair who came from a place where everyone has an oil well in their backyard. These were the days of the Shah, and most people didn’t really know exactly where Iran was located.

As I gradually came to understand the complexities of belonging, I took comfort and pleasure in my “otherness.” I learned the art of fluidity. It allows me to be connected with different languages, people, neighborhoods and cultures, while maintaining my sense of “otherness”, which is a key ingredient in the force that defines my own creative life. I’ve found a sense of liberation in standing on the outside because I can choose to be who I want to be; it’s helped me to look inward, and consequently I’ve found that the inward journey is much more real and meaningful than anything else.

Have people in the United States become more aware of Iran in the years since you moved there? If so, how has literature played a role in that change?

In 1979, fifty-two American citizens were held hostage in Iran for 444 days. That’s when Iran became visible to many here in the United States. Before then, most people I met could not even locate Iran on the map, and if they could, they didn’t know what language we spoke, let alone anything about our culture, history or literature.

Unfortunately, because of the hostage crisis, the information people at the time got from the media about Iran was not flattering. However, over the past twenty years, Iranians living in diaspora – particularly those like myself who saddle both cultures and languages – have been not only writing, but also translating literature from Iran, giving the American public the opportunity to look at our country through a different lens.

Literature is a bridge that can span the chasm between cultures and countries. I edited the 2010 Iran issue of the Atlanta Review and it immediately became the journal’s bestselling edition. That indicates to me that people are interested in Iran itself beyond the picture presented by the current regime, and trust the poets to give them an accurate view of that.

You’re known for your writing and art, but also for translating the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad from Persian to English. Translators must work intimately with languages, and think deeply about their relation to place. Do you feel “at home” in any one language? Does your sense of a place change depending on which language you use to describe it?

I am intimately connected with the music of my native language. It affects the music of my own poetry in English. In fact, in trying to learn another language, I first try to hear its music. Recently I gave a reading with the Chinese poet, Yang Lian at the Semana Poetica festival in United States. Later, over a drink, he explained to me the hidden music behind every Chinese character, and how that music changes the meaning of words. That is something I intuitively understand and connect with.

Perhaps that’s why I find translating poetry pleasurable. It isn’t just about conveying meaning, rather the challenge is the transference of the music of one language to another.

Much of Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry centers on very feminine themes. Are these same feminine themes central to your own life and work? Is this part of what drew you to Farrokhzad’s work?

I am a woman and obviously I am very concerned about human rights violations against women — not just in Iran, but anywhere in the world, including such things as domestic violence here in the United States. It is my belief that women must learn to repudiate the unjust standards they are taught by the societies they live in, and empower themselves with a sense of self – demanding justice and equality of rights – and envision for themselves and their daughters a better life than the one imposed on them by male-dominated societies. More often than not, our mothers themselves are victims of oppression which they often demurely accept and in turn impose on their own daughters, while treating their sons as betters, teaching them a sense of entitlement withheld from girls. We have to break that cycle. I come from an educated class of professional women and even among these there are those who seem to believe that there are a limited number of good professional or artistic positions to be had by women in our society. They fight over these “positions”, adopting masculine sensibilities to survive. I don’t think there’s much of a question that we still live in a world dominated and too often defined by men, however, I believe that women need to break out of this competitive mode, and, in particular, be supportive of one another. If we are to truly achieve equality and change the unjust standards imposed on us, women must unite and achieve it collectively.

As to my interest in Forugh Farrokhzad… it has always been on two levels: as a ground-breaking, gifted modern poet, and as a courageous woman who did not allow the taunting of an unforgiving, morally rigid culture stop her from what she felt she needed to do to tear down the barriers of taboo and inequality. She is arguably the first women in the modern history of Iran to write poems purely from the perspective of a woman – sexually, mentally and emotionally. In her poem “Sin” she writes about sleeping with a man to whom she is not married, drinking wine, and finding both acts quite pleasurable. The question isn’t whether she is morally right or wrong. The core issue is that she wrote at a time when she was not free to express herself the way men had been doing for centuries: she was called a whore and her poetry was perceived as scandalous.

However, Farrokhzad was dedicated to her art, and her sense of “otherness” in her own society did not deter her from freely expressing herself as a woman. She was a brilliant poet, and very much a pioneer in the modernist poetry movement. She died at the age of thirty-two in a tragic car accident. By the time of her death, she was one of the most well-known and beloved poets in Iran. Today, she is an icon whose grave is always adorned with flowers.

I spent two years translating forty-one of her poems doing my best as a poet to recreate the music of her work in English without compromising the meaning. To me, translating poetry is a grave responsibility. I didn’t want her poems to end up as corpses in translation, rather I hoped to present living, breathing poems in English, as they are in Persian. Farrokhzad deserves to be read and appreciated internationally.

Your work is often very intimate and sensual, as is the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad. Do you imagine this sensuality as a place that one must discover? Is it part of our “natural state”, something we can always access if we search?

When I write, I connect to a bottomless well within myself– so deep that at some point I transcend myself. By that, I mean we are ultimately connected to one another and to an invisible world, accessible through a tireless, incessant searching that begins by going inward and eventually leads to what is no longer ourselves, but a collective self. Therefore, in my opinion, our “natural state” is more complex than we realize. It hides nothing. It is accessible. But, at the same time, it needs to be reached for, and that reaching is a journey that can take one a life time.

Farrokhzad was speaking of natural feelings and inspirations, and yet she was considered a dissident in her society and time by some. An artist’s inner search at times requires questioning basic systems or traditions that govern their lives. Is there a way in which this inner search is dangerous? Can one go too far with such things?

“Going too far” always begs the question: For whom?

Berthold Brecht in his poem To Posterity writes:

Ah, what an age it is

when to speak of trees is almost a crime.

Everything is relative. I can’t say what exactly going “too far” is. Poets and artists dig deep within themselves, travel that endless inner landscape towards interconnectedness and beyond. And they chronicle their journey. And when religious or governmental authorities don’t like a particular chronicle, they move to censor or suppress it which in the end has the opposite effect of giving it prominence and credence.

In a sense, to connect with nature, and with our natural selves and each other, is a matter of being authentic. How do you see this idea of being true to oneself and one’s community, especially when it comes to finding ways to better our lives or make a positive change in our world?

The currency of the poet is truth. And truth is highly subjective. It manifests itself in different forms and textures. The function of the poet, in my opinion, is offering one or more perspectives to view the same “truth”. A good poet does that in an authentic, skillful way that goes right to the heart. This is the poet’s gift to humanity. Does that contribute to bettering the world? Absolutely.

Fractured Enviornments

His first two works, Nowhere Man (2004) and The Question of Bruno (2001), were well-received. The Lazarus Project (2008) and James Woods’ admiring review of it in The New Yorker established Hemon’s reputation, significantly raising his literary profile in the United States. A native of Sarajevo, Aleksandar Hemon came to English relatively late in life. Stranded in the United States by the outbreak of hostilities in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Hemon began to write in English within a few years of his arrival. Less than a decade later he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003) and a MacCarthur “Genius Grant” (2004). I met Hemon some months ago in New York, when he was in town promoting the collection he recently edited, Best European Fiction 2010, for Dalkey Archive Press. Over syrup-drenched French toast and coffee in a mid-town hotel restaurant, Hemon and I had a free-ranging conversation about some of the key themes of his work, and about his frustration with critics who assume every fictional character is an autobiographical reference. We also paused a moment to enjoy a little punk rock. What follows is a reflection on the theme to which our conversation kept returning: displacement.

Our conversation begins with a minor dispute. Hemon corrects me when I suggest that his writing is preoccupied with exile. Not exile, he says, but “displacement” is the proper word to describe the main characters of his novels, Joseph Pronek in Nowhere Man and Vladimir Brik in The Lazarus Project, characters far from their former homes in Yugoslavia who must confront the inevitable identity issues that arise as they forge new lives in the United States. Exile, Hemon says, implies a noble separation from the plebes and more suitably describes modernists like James Joyce, or one of Joyce’s main inspirations, the mythical figure of Ulysses. A quick glance at the Oxford English dictionary suggests that Hemon—the non-native English speaker!—is perhaps correct. Exile is “the state of being banned from one’s native country” or “a person who lives away from their native country, either by choice or compulsion.” The definition for “displacement,” by contrast, is more neutral, broader, and, I must concede, more accurately describes the rootless, unanchored state of many of Hemon’s characters. It is a word that perhaps also better describes the state of our contemporary world. Displacement, according to Oxford, is:

1. the moving of something from its place of origin

Where is the movie theater? When Hemon returned to Bosnia for the first time after the war he searched in vain for the theater and movie posters that had been such well-known parts of his youth and Sarajevo’s topography. He had a sense of the uncanny as he walked the streets of his hometown. Everything was eerily familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It was the late 1990s and a great deal had transpired since Hemon’s school and university years in Sarajevo, and his young adulthood in the United States. Hemon had left home in 1992 to participate in a cultural exchange program in Chicago. It was supposed to be an extended, but temporary, stay. A few months after his arrival war broke out in the former Yugoslavia. Hemon decided to remain in the U.S. When the war finally ended, he returned for a visit in 1997. It was not the same place he had left. Sniper bullets, bombing, and the accompanying fires, had dramatically altered the Sarajevo of his youth. With so many pieces of the urban environment gone, Hemon’s “place of origin” had ceased to exist.

2. the enforced departure of people from their home, typically because of war or persecution

Hemon’s characters, like Hemon himself, are part of the millions who have been displaced by one of the great hallmarks of the twentieth century: war. The end phases of the three great wars of the twentieth century, the First and Second World Wars, and the Cold War have all been marked by mass migration. At the close of World War I, hundreds of thousands of Russians, Greeks, Poles, Armenians and Germans were either forced from their homes or fled in fear of revolution or retaliatory violence. Adding to this spontaneous movement was the population transfers between Greece and Turkey, who exchanged their respective minority populations. The numbers involved are staggering. According to historian Mark Mazower, 1.2 million Greeks and half a million Turks had to leave their places of origin and “return” to their “national homes.” Even more dramatically, the end of World War II saw the movement of millions of refugees in the closing phase of the war: Hundreds of thousands of Germans, freed prisoners of war, Jews and other former concentration camp inmates, accused collaborators, and Greeks, Poles, Czechs, and Yugoslavs who had been transferred by the Nazis to work in Nazi-occupied factories and were now trying to get back home. Mazower estimates that between 1938 and 1945 there were over forty-six million people on the move in East Central Europe alone. After the war over 11 million people were officially classified as Displaced Persons, or DP. The last years of the Cold War and the first years of the twentieth century have likewise seen a remarkable increase in the number of migrants. According to the United Nations, quoted in a recent article in The New York Times, the number of migrants worldwide has increased by 37 percent in the past two decades. Most of these migrants are moving to more industrialized parts of the globe. In the past two decades the number of migrants in North America has increased 80 percent, in Europe 41 percent. If you add tourists and travelers to this number, a group known as “temporary migrants”, then the planet appears to be a mass of moving bodies. (According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, there were 806 .8 million tourist arrivals worldwide in 2005.) Unlike the displacement created by World Wars I and II, today’s permanent and temporary migrants are not only fleeing war and persecution, they are also fleeing the economic and psychic pains of modernization in search of jobs or a better way of life.

3. the amount by which a thing is moved from its normal position

When placed in water, an object, like a boat, forces a portion of the water to move from its “normal position,” to another place amidst the seemingly endless sea. War and modernization cut a similar path, plowing their way through the sea of human and animal life, destroying the natural and manmade habitats that stand in the way of their ever-receding destinations. Ruthless and dispassionate, bombs and wrecking cranes displace people, mountains, flora and fauna with reckless abandon. Military and modernization campaigns create a class of peoples known as the “displaced,” who lodged from their “normal position,” must either find a new home, or perish in the rubble. It is possible to measure how much water is displaced by a submerged, or partially submerged, object. But how does one measure the amount by which a displaced person is moved from her or his “normal position” when the damages of war and the drive to modernize force them from their natural habitats? Geographic distance reveals very little about the perceived distance between one’s place of birth and one’s new home. To get to zero, to establish a baseline of stability, a foundation solid enough to be worthy of the label “home,” requires a great deal of effort and, as the case may be, a great deal of self-reinvention. In the new setting, or environment, the narratives of self that formerly made sense no longer apply. Through characters like Pronek and Brik, and the fascinating Szmura in the short story, “Szmura’s Room” in Love and Obstacles, Hemon’s fiction explores this issue of the pains and pleasures of attempting to reinvent oneself. Even as Pronek wanders the streets of Chicago imagining himself inhabiting different roles in increasingly fantastic scenarios, he keeps bumping into the headline, “Bombs in Grozny,” implicitly reminding him that he is not only far from home but that home is no longer a stable, physical space to which he can return. Identity, Hemon tells me, is hard to reinvent. It’s a confusing process to try and reassemble yourself. Take Pronek again. In his new home, Pronek keeps changing his identity, trying on numerous hats— Greenpeace canvasser, English as a Second Language instructor, private investigator. But such willed self-invention begins to take a psychic toll on Pronek until finally erupting in a sensationally physical and violent display of his pent up frustration. (I am not Pronek, Hemon reassured me, contrary to what some reviewers have suggested. Pronek, he added, is an exploration of possibilities.)

4. psychoanalysis: the unconscious transfer of an intense emotion from its original object to another one

One possible response to the destruction of home is to transfer one’s attachment to another object and to latch onto new, seemingly stable, narratives: to nationalism or religion. In the face of the crumbling foundation of the Yugoslav state some Yugoslavs turned to their ethnic community and to the dream of finally establishing a homogenized nation-state. On the occasion of the arrest of Radovan Karadzic— the former president of the Serbian Democratic Party, a hard-line nationalist organization, wanted for inciting Bosnian Serbs to murder thousands of Bosnian Muslims— Hemon penned an op-ed piece for the New York Times. Karadzic, Hemon writes was “a prosaic nobody…a mediocre psychiatrist, a minor poet and a petty embezzler before the war” who sought greatness by linking himself to the Serbian nationalist movement. Wellacquainted with Serbian epic poetry, Karadzic cast himself in the role of “the hero in an epic poem that would be sung by a distant future generation.” If the account of a Belgrade newspaper is to be believed, even while in hiding, Karadzic couldn’t resist publicly reciting one such poem in which “he himself featured as the main hero, performing epic feats of extermination.” Karadzic is only one man, albeit a particularly vile specimen, but there have also been many others who, unable to find their footing in the ordinary world of anonymity, have transferred their ego onto the nation, attaching themselves to a glorious national destiny. After all, Hemon notes, a stable physical environment also provides a stable psychological environment. If you grow up in a stable society, without rupture, and with a sense of continuity in terms of infrastructure, you have a physical sense that the walls won’t crumble. But something happens when what was once a safe street is no longer a safe street, no longer safe because there might be snipers. In the face of such instability some become war criminals. Why? I ask Hemon. Why, do some people turn to violence and nationalism? Whereas others do not? Is it random? Well, Hemon speculates, part of it can be explained by the fact that once you cross the line you keep going that way. In the face of a constant, daily sense of displacement, when the stable network of people is torn asunder, it’s hard to turn back. One of his long time friends surprised him with his volte face turn to Serbian nationalism: This is partly, Hemon reflects, because in times of catastrophe what seems a stable identity can fall apart. In the context of a literal, physical destruction— and the values linked to home—ethics may also become fluid. In other words, lacking the continuity of the physical space that constituted home, all continuities are torn asunder. In the case of Hemon’s childhood friend, the state of fragility that accompanied the disintegration of the known environment pushed him to turn to the nationalist project of creating a unified Serbian nation-state. His friend, Hemon says, ultimately couldn’t distinguish his own narrative from the national one.

But what, I wonder aloud, prevented Hemon from falling apart or from turning to nationalism? It’s a constant negotiation, Hemon explains, between the state and other narratives. Still, I press him, how did you land on your feet, avoid schizophrenia? I landed on English, he answers. In Europe the native tongue is axiomatic. English didn’t displace Bosnian Serbo-Croation. It did provide me with a sort of anchor, though.

All Roads Lead Home?

Hemon’s prose offers an appealing mixture of serious introspection interspersed with moments of banal absurdity. Rambling, alcoholic priests, intensively sincere but naïve young environmental activists, violent poets, and megalomaniacal macho outsiders, his insecure but sympathetic antiheroes, blunder and stumble their way through America, inspiring self-reflection. Part of the drive to read fiction is to overcome a sense of isolation, to discover connections with people and places with whom we otherwise would never come into contact. When I read Hemon in particular, I am always tempted to weave my own story into his novels and short stories, finding points of identification with his fictional creations. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that during our conversation, when Hemon begins describing his return home to Sarajevo, my thoughts immediately turn to my own return home after a period of extended absence. Unlike Hemon, I reflect, when I returned home to Southern California for a visit in the late 1990s, I wasn’t looking for the movie theater. The Mann Six Theaters, though it had grown to the Mann Ten, was still there. (It has since closed.) But where, I wanted to know, had the kale and cornfields gone? The rows of Tapaia Brothers corn and the sickly sweet, slightly putrid stench of kale were endemic to my memories of my desert home in the far reaches of Los Angeles County. When I left for the first time in 1992 it was to study in Hawaii. I never lived there again, instead moving ever further away to such places as Provo (Utah), Athens (Georgia), New York, Seoul, Seattle, Prague, and Berlin. During my studies and travels abroad my hometown underwent an intensive campaign of urbanization and gentrification. Local civic authorities courted developers and wealthy white professionals, resulting in the decimation of nearly all of the elements that made home familiar. In the place of the corn and kale fields, a large, groomed park and baseball diamond now stood, with the aspirational name of “Central Park.” Newly planted trees and strip malls lined the former dust-and-tumble-weed main road, Bouquet Canyon Road. Scores of SUVs clogged Bouquet’s once quiet two-lanes, which now led not only to the freeway entrance but to a recently opened, and very successful, mall with an indoor carousel over which hung a mural of orange groves populated by smiling white and brown faces, wearing beatific expressions of joy to match their Sunday best.

In my case, the destruction of the physical environment that constituted home and its swift replacement with new structures, made my attempt at self-reinvention possible, or even conceivable. The absence of continuity is part of what made my self-reinvention possible. Other ruptures also severed my ties to home and my childhood self. My mother’s untimely death when I was on the cusp of puberty and my entire family’s eventual abandonment of the religion of my childhood—Mormonism— for reasons intellectual and personal, all found their metaphoric extension in the sudden and dramatic transformation of my hometown. The destruction of the known, however, pushed me to explore new narratives and to reconstruct the ones of my past. In other words, with the environment that created me torn asunder by bulldozers and death, I was in a sense freed up to reconstruct my personal narrative, my links to larger ones, and to indulge the myth that I could ex nihilo create and follow my own path. Even though I was born in California, I abandoned my hometown, my Mormon roots, and my national identity, and sought to reestablish myself in connection with a cosmopolitan elite, the wandering bourgeoisie, in search of experience and cultural capital. I studied and scrubbed toilets in Hawaii, cleaned houses and sold books in Seattle, taught English in Asia, backpacked in Europe, volunteered in France and Italy, studied Czech and babysat in Prague, learned German, conducted research, and gave birth in Berlin… The wheel of self-reinvention, and the drive to move, went on and on.

The wheels of self-reinvention can spin too fast, though. With the accelerated pace of moving in my early thirties and the complete exhaustion of my financial resources, things began to move so fast for me that they felt out of control. The birth of my son and a gradual but firm embrace of motherhood finally anchored me to one place. Pragmatism supplanted the fanciful. The stark reality that I was my son’s sole economic provider and source of stability killed my wanderlust and averted my gaze from dreams of artistic and intellectual greatness. My life became defined by the more earth bound, immediate goal of ensuring that my son had, quite literally, a place to call home. If there is a reason I misunderstood Hemon as preoccupied with exile, not displacement, perhaps that’s because I projected my own experience onto his work. It was me, not Hemon’s characters, who had adopted the state of exile as a lifestyle, who had unconsciously sought to become a part of the noble class of great intellectuals and writers who had distanced themselves from their places of birth, and countries of origin. In my naïve snobbery, I identified Americans as plebes from whom I wanted to separate myself. Thus, instead of recognizing the actual gulf that separated myself from Hemon’s fictional creations, who did not choose to escape, but were forced to leave home by war or persecution, I read Hemon’s work with a superficial eagerness to find links of identification The ongoing, internal, exchange with Hemon and his characters reminds one that home is more than a merely imagined space. It is also a physical reality. Over the course of the past century the relentless pace of war and modernization have permanently altered the physical environment, amplifying the separation between the past and present, between the longed for home and the reality of displacement. The resulting environmental damage goes beyond endangered animals, carbon footprints, and oil spills. It extends to the psychic level, creating a new community of the rudderless in search of a home to which they can never return.

Our conversation coming to an end— Hemon has already missed the first showing of the movie to which he had hoped to take his family—Hemon gamely turns to me. Oh, you’ve got to hear this song, he says, handing me his Ipod. (Hemon is known for writing with punk rock playing in the background.) I put the earphone up to my ear and hear—of all things!— the British band Gang of Four shouting, “At home he feels like a tourist…” I’ve listened to the song many times since. I still don’t know what the lyrics mean. Yet, every time I play it I end up shouting along with the chorus, singing in unison with my imagined cohort—with Hemon, with Pronek, Brik, and Joyce—“at home I feel like a tourist.” Perhaps you might like to crack open a novel by Hemon and sing along too. Standley is a writer, academic, and mother based in Brooklyn, New York. Her essays and reviews about Berlin, mass tourism, and contemporary art have appeared in such publications as Artdish, Left History, and in edited volumes published by Berghahn Books and Ashgate Press.