2024-09-26 03:01:00
The anarchism of the American writer Jesse Ball –one of the guests at the literature festival Filba International, which will begin this Thursday 26th and will run until Sunday 29th– disdains ranks and authorities as did his father, a great admirer of Kropotkin. “The world order will not be overthrown, nor will sweet communes flourish in the meadows. But within these insane confines we can do our best to ignore hierarchy and generate exchanges that intertwine lives with the debts of life instead of dividing them with the use of money,” he suggests in the hypnotic Self-portraitpublished by Sigilo, with translation by Virginia RechThere, the writer emulates the same procedure that the French artist and writer Édouard Levé had used in his own Self-portrait“an approach that does not elevate any fact above another – as explained in the introductory note – but rather lets the facts coexist in a useless mass, like life.”
Ball (New York, 1978)an extraordinary narrator whose work is part of the literary current of the absurd, arrives with another book under his arm: Sleep, brother of deathan instruction manual for having “lucid dreams”, which also came out this month by Stealth, translated by writer Santiago Featherston. Both volumes are added to the catalogue of a publisher that had already published How to start a fire and why, Children 6 y When the silence began. Curfewa world where music has been banned, was published by La Bestia Equilátera. poet and narrator The most tattooed figure in American literature has hearts, foxes, letters, bees, wasps, a circle and even the entire text of an instruction manual that he wrote himself on his left leg; it starts at the ankle and the English words go up the tibia.
“Even though it may seem that imagination allows us to even exceed nature, we will probably never be able to achieve this. The world is full of plants and animals, and it is much more interesting perhaps to analyze or think about life, this very vivid life that amplifies our hearts and our ideas. That is why I think about plants and animals all the time, and it seemed to me that it was only right that they should have a central position,” Ball acknowledges. Professor of Creative Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicagothe importance of animals, plants and trees in Self-portrait. He wrote that book in December 2017, when he realized he was 39 years old, the same age as the French artist and writer Édouard Levé when he wrote his famous Self-portrait.
“We are organisms in the universe and we have this faculty related to imagination that allows us, perhaps, to reach other places. In my experience, that is a wonderful thing; to be as if asleep in our own body to be able to think about the animal condition,” adds the American writer with a tone of voice where it is revealed that he loves “the sweet sadness that is simply feeling everything that has been lost, everything that is gone.” Behind the young Jesse who I stole books There is a story of rebellion, a kind of modest revenge against predatory neoliberal capitalism. “When the big bookstore chains appeared, many small bookstores could not survive and went bankrupt. One of my favorite bookstores was owned by a friend on Long Island, where I grew up, and he had to close it. Because I was very angry, very angry about what was happening, I decided to steal the first books in the big bookstores, a collection of classics published by Harvard University Press, in Greek, Latin and English. I didn’t steal the entire collection, but I stole quite a bit,” he confesses without boasting about these thefts, and clarifies that he would never be able to steal books from an independent or small bookstore.
-The theft of these books may be connected to the fact that you define yourself as an anarchist, like your father. What is it like to be an anarchist in the United States in the 21st century?
-I think there are different kinds of anarchists. One that has become popular is the anarchism that is used to commit violent acts or to destroy images, activists throwing Molotov cocktails. The anarchism that I adore is the one that perceives the power structures and social structures that stratify and put individuals in boxes and reduce them to the point that they lose their quality as people. So I like to act outside of those structures; that not everything is an exchange mediated by money. For example, if I am moving and I ask for help, and someone comes and gives me a hand with the boxes, and then that person calls me and tells me that their grandmother has Alzheimer’s, then I go visit her to read a book to her; there is a relationship there, an exchange that allows people to enrich their humanity. Anarchism does not erase the humanity of people. I like to be in that kind of relationship. As an anarchist, I don’t like to call the president “Mr. President” because I believe that all people are equal.
-Does this egalitarian anarchism that you practice translate electorally into voting for any political force?
-The voting process in the United States is quite ceremonial. In general, the candidates are all conservative; the policies they pursue are similar. Even those who claim to be more liberal end up adopting conservative measures. For example, in the case of (Barak) Obama, all the war interventions abroad were continued and the work of journalists was also greatly restricted. There were attacks on journalists and also a lot of surveillance during his administration, when he is supposed to be more liberal. The electoral process in the United States seems to be a joke. People think they are guaranteeing democracy, but democracy is consolidated when we strengthen the smallest exchanges in our communities. I think that if we could get a significant part of the population to stop believing in the importance of money, people could behave in a more humane and united way. Voting would then be something insignificant because the population would understand that democracy depends on joint action and that lives could benefit from each other.
-Why is one of the ideals you hate most in American society the concept of freedom?
-There is an exaggerated idea of the individual that is promoted by Western thought, which is quite obscure and which understands, for example, that authors are original writers, that they are special people who created something. The idea of originality is quite false because the work of a writer depends on a movement and a context, which in turn is related to what happens with others. There is no such thing as genius. for himselfbut it makes sense in terms of the impact that other people’s lives have on your own life. In my life as a writer, the techniques I used in my books have been thought of as extremely original or experimental, but it turns out that these techniques or ideas are simply the product of me reading a lot of old books, and they are things that have been around in the culture for thousands of years. It’s not just something that I came up with. There are people all over the world who use the tool of writing to express their thoughts, that’s always been the case, and today we are lucky enough to have access to a lot of documents. It would be beautiful if people could use the heritage of humanity much more.
-Your works are not popular, you say, because they are absurd and because only “crude generalizations of the absurd, like Dali, are popular.” Why are you interested in the literary movement of the absurd?
-The strength of absurdity is that it enters into what we might call “realism,” which has nothing to do with false realism, which is when someone says “this film is realistic,” meaning that it shows events within the universe that we have all agreed upon; it is the universe in which our lives are found. True realism has to do with accepting that life is made up of fragments. That we look forward and backward, and we are confused and desperate because we want people to agree on who we are, that we have what we want to have, and things like that. The ambiguous is closer to the real than the realistic. The interesting thing about this absurd literature is that it allows us to make a gap through which the light enters and we can see what the point is that we are facing. There is a very strong social burden for people because they really don’t know what to say. Even the most renowned philosophers have not known what to say. And what Buddhism tells us as a solution is that we simply have to sit down and not talk. That that is enough. But the literature of the absurd highlights that the truth is something difficult and people have a hard time assimilating that.
-In a moment of Self-portrait You claim that you have difficulty writing and being understood. Isn’t the misunderstanding implicit in the connection between writing and reading?
-I wouldn’t say that it’s difficult to write exactly. What’s difficult is getting people to understand what you wanted to say, a barrier that is natural. The meaning of language is a question of identity. We are creatures that use language all the time to communicate in order to acquire resources. I don’t think that language is something that stands alone or on its own. It has to do with the movement and behavior of people within society. The wonderful thing about writing has to do with not being well understood; perhaps that makes the work richer than it was initially. In the work of creation I have only one initial layer, which is my understanding. When a person reads my work, there are two layers in that person’s mind. In the first, the person is trying to imagine what I wanted to say and in the second, they use those characters or what I created to populate their mind with them. There, a relationship also arises with their own life and that becomes much more radiant than the meaning I sought when writing.
* Friday 27th at 11am in the Malba auditorium, keynote lecture “Our own version”.
* Saturday 28th at 6pm in the Malba auditorium, “The paradox of writing silence”, dialogue with Vietnamese-Canadian Kim Thúy.