THE SYMPOSIUM was  a special hybrid project presented in conjunction with the international exhibition project PR04 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. PR04, a bi-annual contemporary art event in Puerto Rico, includes installations, interactive projects, and is an important forum of exchange and dialogue of conteporary art. This year the subject of PR04 is the Olympiad, and projects developed as part of it address, to some extent, the Greek tradition of the Olympics.

SYMPOSIUM  was a hybrid product between  a traditional symposium and an actual performance of Plato’s symposium, as an updated reenactment by various prominent writers, artists, and critics. The objective was to utilize both the more relaxed discussion format of the symposium in the tropical setting of the Caribbean, and to transpose the philosophical debates about love, passion and desire to current issues in contemporary art. Participants were asked to present the points of views of their “characters” following the format of this famous dialogue, and to enter into a debate with participation from the attending public.

The project followed the general spirit of PR04 in that it reclaimed the classical cultural tradition of Greece as in the Olympics, and seek to also revive the nourishing nature of the public dialogue, making it more a matter of both spiritual and physical enjoyment than a dry academic affair.

The Symposium is one of the foundational documents of Western culture and arguably the most profound analysis and celebration of love in the history of philosophy. It is also the most lavishly literary of Plato’s dialogues–a virtuoso prose performance in which the author, like a playful maestro, shows off an entire repertoire of characters, ideas, contrasting viewpoints, and iridescent styles. A symposium is literally a “drinking together”–in other words a drinking party. In Athens, in Plato’s day, symposia were strictly stag affairs. As a rule, they consisted of a fairly lavish, semi-formal banquet followed by ceremonial toasts and bouts of drinking.

Symposia were usually held in private homes in specially designed dining and party areas. The guests (from as few as 3 or 4 to as many as 12 or 20) reclined on couches arranged in a circle. An entire service of ornamental cups, bowls, plates, and vases were set out for the occasion. After dinner, amid hearty servings of wine, the guests would converse, engage in song contests, enjoy the professional entertainment, or, as in the case of The Symposium, compose speeches or deliver mock orations.

A preliminary rehearsal was conducted on June 4^th, 2004 at the University of Camaguez, and the  public final performance was presented at the Olympic village of Rincón the following day, with food and drink being served throughout the entire duration of the event.

T H E    S Y M P O S I U M

By Plato

Written 360 B.C.

Reinterpreted by Pablo Helguera
Persons in the dialogue:

Xandra Eden as ARISTOPHANES

Nelson Rivera as PHAEDRUS

Ryan Hill as PAUSANIAS

Hamza Walker as ERYXIMACHUS
Pablo Helguera as AGATHON

Christine Hill as ALCIBIADES
James Elkins as SOCRATES

–

PABLO HELGUERA (Agathon) (Mexico City, 1971) is a visual artist living and working in New York.

HAMZA WALKER (Eryximachus) is the director of Education of the Renaissance Society in Chicago.
NELSON RIVERA (Phaedrus) is an artist, theater director, writer and composer living in San Juan, Puerto Rico
RYAN HILL(Pausanias) is a visual and performance artist living in New York.

XANDRA EDEN (Pausanias) is associate curator of the Power Plant in Toronto.
JAMES ELKINS (Socrates) is an art historian and critic based in Dublin. He is the author of many works, including “The Object Strikes Back” and “What Painting Is”
CHRISTINE HILL (Alcibiades) is an artist based in Brooklyn. Her ongoing project, Volksboutique, was featured in Documenta IX and many other international exhibitions.

SYMPOSIUM

Symposium

First part

PR04 Olympic Village, Rincón, Puerto Rico

June 5, 2004

Pablo Helguera

Ladies and gentlemen:  two thousand, two hundred and thirty four years ago, a certain banquet amongst notable Greeks took place, and that’s what became known as the Symposium. I am here to present to you the Symposium by Plato. My name is Agathon in the Symposium. In the symposium Agathon gathers a group, and as in any symposium people drink, sing, dance, do speeches. In Plato’s Symposium, the guests decide to do speeches about love, and thus here, we will talk about love.

But one thing I would like that you do with me first is to have a toast.

(the audience toasts)

What each one of us here will do is to take a role front the original characters of the Symposium. As we go into the discussion, we would like you to be part of it, asking questions or interrupting.

In the symposium the discussion starts with Phaedrus, who tells us his theory of love.

Phaedrus

In my speech I thought about using Phaedrus’ own words, but at the same time bring in the words of a lot of poets, not from Greece but from later years – including my own. So I included these and brought them together with whatever Phaedrus is talking about.

My text is Spanish and English, some of it is translated.

Gran dios es el amor

Love is a great god

Todos mis pensamientos hablan de amor

No tiene el amor genealogia conocida ni se la invento por nadie pueblo o poeta

Su origen no lo se pues no lo tiene, mas se que todo origen de ella viene aunque es de noche

O soleil c’est le temps de la raison ardente

Amor fin doble corazon son la misma cosa tal como dice el sabio en su cancion

Y asi no puede ser uno sin el otro como el alma sin la razon

You must sit down, says love and taste my milk

So I did sit

How fair you are, how all rapturous love

Here is your figure stately as a palm tree and your breasts are like clusters of fruit

I say let me climb the palm tree and take hold of your branches

Qué lindos se ven tus pies con sandalias

tus caderas torneadas son collares obra artesana de orfebre

tu ombligo una copa redonda que rebosa vino aromado

tu vientre montoncito de trigo adornado de azucenas

tus pechos igual que dos crías mellizas de gacela

quedeme y olvideme del rostro recliné sobre el amado

ceso todo y quedeme dejando un cuidado entre las azucenas olvidado

de vos será.

Her image had passed to his soul forever.

And no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy

Her eyes had coal and her soul had —

To live to her to hold, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.

To rage, to lust, to write, to commit, all these were product of the god of love

If you were to drop dead i would never stop loving you

Even though we could no longer screw

Solo a los amantes les viene de voluntar morir por otros

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence,

The most sublime act is to set another before you,

Solo el amor puede poner verguenza por lo feo

Respetuoso amor por lo bello, que sin amor y verguenza no hay manera

De que ni particular ni ciudad alguna lleven a cabo obras grandes y buenas

No picture is made to endure or to live with, but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura sin against nature

Todo cuanto existe digno es de entrar en la obra de arte, porque goza de la inmanente dignidad de la existencia

El arte no distingue cosas sucia o inferior, la distincion de la cosa sucia podra venir del estómago, la cosa inferior del cerebro, el corazon no tiene nada que ver en estas diferenciaciones. Un gran dolor, un inmenso placer hacen olvidar lo sucio y lo inferior, liberando todo en emocion.

Love is worth it

Tal vez nos casemos este anio, amor mio,

Y tengamos una casita,

Y tal vez se publique mi libro

O nos vayamos los dos al extranjero

Tal vez caiga Somoza, amor mio

and yet you know, hatred, even of meanness, contorts the features,

Anger, even against injustice, makes the voice hoarse

Oh we who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness

Could not be ourselves friendly

Y sin embargo sabiamos tambien que el odio contra la abadesa desfigura la cara

Tambien la ira contra la injusticia pone ronca la voz

Desgraciadamente nosotros que queríamos preparar el camino para la amabilidad

No pudimos ser amables.

Perdoname amor, si no te nombro,

Fuera de tu canción soy el asceta,

La muerte y yo dormimos conjuntamente

Cantarte a tí tan solo me despierta

Incapaz de acción politica, no denuncio a mi solitaria vocación de cultura

A mi empecinada busqueda ontológica

A los juegos de la imaginación en sus planos más vertiginosos

Pero todo esto  no mira ya en sí mismo y por sí mismo

No tienen ya nada que ver con el cómodo humanismo de los mandarines de occidente

Que lo mas gratuito que pueda yo escribir asomara siempre una voluntad de contacto con el presente histórico del hombre

Una participacion en su larga marcha a sí mismo como colectividad y humanidad

What thou lovest well is a true heritage

What thout lovest well shall not be taken from thee

Entonces todos los hombre de la tierra lo rodearon

Desvío el cadaver triste, emocionado, incorporose lentamente

Abrazó al primer hombre, y hechose a andar

Y en resumen tales son mis palabras

Que el amor es entre los dioses el más antiguo, el más venerable

El senor de los senores

Que en cuyas manos se encierra para los hombres vivos

Para los hombres toda posesión de virtud y bienaventuranza.

Pablo

As you have seen, Phaedrus has a very ideal notion of love- a poetic interpretation of love.  We can start to reflect what kinds of love we have.

Pausanias

One of the things that makes love ideal is to say that it is only one thing, and everything that isn’t that ideal is dishonorable. So what I am proposing is that there are two ideals of love: there is the older god of love, and there is one love whose nature is absorbed in ethereal desires: the common and the heavenly.

What is interesting in Pausanias is that he talks about the purpose of love.  What is animating this love?  Is it to not discriminate, to engage one’s lusts, one’s appetite, or is it more heavenly?  Is it more about the soul than the body?

The other idea is that love is goal oriented, [it has to have a noble goal] so for example the love would be not noble if you are only thinking about the orgasm, and not the spiritual side.

As I go through these ideas, what’s interesting to me is my reaction to them, because I wonder what’s going to make them relevant to my life, or what’s going to make it relevant to the time I am speaking in. I think it is interesting and sad that we don’t have a definition of what a soul is.

Pausanias also talks about rules for love, that there are rules for love, that there is good and bad love.

Agathon

What is bad love?

Pausanias

I don’t know…[however]  I’ve had a lot of bad love…

Alcibiades

Bad love could be publicly acknowledged [negative] sexual things like pedophilia. We [maybe also] are talking about masochistic love.

Pausanias

In psychology there is an idea that there is an unhealthy love for you.

Alcibiades

It could be a much more subtle evil, doesn’t have to be about drug abuse.

Pausanias

My experience is that even bad love brings wisdom. If I am going out with someone who is insane, then maybe it will make me a little less insane…

Eriximachus

I think the problem has to bring together bad and love. Part of the problem is that you can’t translate the term in a more subtle way, the way that  they are referring to love, as it refers to the state and citizens and being a good person so that “bad love” is still “love” all the same but its not in the sense of pederasty, bestiality, those things mentioned as value judgments as we do today,  such as adultery. Maybe [bad love] is more like ‘love that has to be conducted in secrecy”.

Pausanias

There are a lot of ideas here such as that love is more than about the body and beauty, and that once beauty its gone, the love is gone, and that a good love can endure the loss of beauty. What’s moving to me is this split that I see happens in contempoary culture, and that’s what makes more sense for me.

These speeches are not about love in how we relate [to each other], but on the idea of love and how we celebrate the spiritual love and how it is beneficial to society- because if one falls in love with someone who is good and you are trying to be good, there’s two people trying to be good, and this can only benefit society.

Alcibiades

This issue of honor and dishonor in the text speaks about on whether its honorable for you individually or whether if it is for the greater good. It talks about some sort of workmanship to love rather of love for its own sake, which is also interesting to go over the art context about whether we are actually contributing something in the greater sense.

Pausanias

I think this talks about the idea of working out love, this idea that love should be this manageable thing… What means to work on your love? It means to make your love an ideal that you can work towards. After that notion of the ideal becomes institutionalized, you’ve got a lot of underpaid workers there!  In art, seems to be same kind of thing, instead reverse: you can’t just love your art, you have to work at it

Agathon

So what does Pausanias says about relationships today?

Pausanias

That’s where [Pausanias’ speech] doesn’t work for me, because I think it is a mixture for me of both-  although I have to say in terms of , that the idea of healthy and unhealthy love seems to be something you see in a lot of talk shows, like Jerry Springer.  Is that about bad love or is it about good love? I can’t answer if it is good or bad, but what is interesting to me is that a good love is something that lasts over time, that once the beauty has faded, there is a deeper love that goes beyond the body.  That’s something that we talk about when we transfer it over to the state. Which is: Bill Clinton was the Daddy of America and suddenly became a national interest because how can he be a great leader of state if he can’t control his lower common self? This made American people very upset because they didn’t want to think about how perhaps this idea of a long term relationship would not work for everybody. So in this sense Lewinsky is perhaps an example of bad love, because of her interest in power, etc.

The other idea [ that I like] is that when you are truly in love you are of service to your partner. It could also be that because there is an understanding that their well-being is your well-being.

Erixymachus

I want to go back to the issues of ethics , good vs. bad love. I am deeply troubled by it, and in thinking of a structure of discussion, only once before have I been at a dinner when the topic of love came up in an informal setting and the idea of raising the dinner conversation to the level of theater. The conversation stopper of that evening, [which I will bring up] in the spirit of this of this symposium, was: could you sleep with an artist whose work you didn’t like?

At some point we had to agree whether we would have to say yes or no.  I would like to know by a show of hands, who would sleep with an artist whose work you didn’t like?

(some in the audience raise their hands)

Audience member:

How about sleeping with a curator whose work you didn’t like?

Socrates

Socrates’ favorite thing is to take notes on what everyone is saying that check off contradictions and things like that… but in relationship to this, I wonder the kind of thing Socrates might say is that you have to define “like”, because by definition you don’t like anyone’s work more than you like yours, because otherwise you would be doing that work.

Erixymachus

I would object to that idea, because if you were to reverse that question… I mean to say…if it is an artist whose work I like and I slept with him, then it’s the word “like” problematized?

Socrates

Socrates doesn’t know what the word “problematized” is.

(laughs)

Erixymachus

If you saw it and you like the work, the idea of a virtuous person who you admire and you like the work and turns you on?

Pausanias

A great artist is not necessarily a virtuous person. I think there are certain kinds of artists out there who don’t think of themselves first, but there are great artists whose social, human part is not working that well…

Aristophanes

Also I want to say that in relation to the idea of sleeping with someone whose work you don’t like-  you can see it in two ways: first as taking advantage of them by having a love of the flesh while you have a distaste for whatever they are trying to express through their work; or you can look at it as being very generous because maybe there are other things about their personality – the way they look, etc-  that actually you  are willing to overlook, and are willing to love somebody despite their imperfections.

Pausanias

This brings interesting questions, because if art is the only thing that is important to you, then what is your artwork about? Then, concerning this idea of tying philosophy to judgement,  on whether something is good or bad… I am not the kind of person that believes in that kind of philosophy.  I like to be confused, because when I am confused I am free, and there are not these kinds of categories, there are no categories that have to be broken all the time. There are a lot of things that I am thinking in terms of that duality.

Agathon

Perhaps what you mean is that you don’t want to be ruled by permanent paradigms, but you don’t want either to be confused all the time?

Socrates

Nobody in this dialogue says that they are confused, but in any case if anyone would say that, it would be Socrates himself…

Pausanias

The arguments presented in this Platonic dialogue are made in a way to support Socrates’ final comment, who solves the “problem” by breaking it down by categories. And [back to the realm of art] when you look at the art of the 60s and 70s, you can see that there are these artists who are trying to do that [deconstructing the essence of art]. Then look at the marketplace, where [art is objectified and] objects are bought and sold. Because there is money there, perhaps that’s bad love. And good love is when art can be experienced with no way to be bought and sold. So, what is the role of the market in this discussion? Maybe you should tell everyone about Andrea Fraser.

Agathon

Andrea Fraser is an artist who is very involved with institutional critique. Most recently she did a piece that consisted in having sex with the collector- as part of the piece.

Alcibiades

A word that we haven’t used in discussed honorable and dishonorable is ‘whoring” its not only marketplace, it’s about dirtiness… Andrea Fraser is asking “who owns who” in this experiment. Are they in power? Is someone more or less dignified for taking money for their work?

Audience member:

There is a difference between selling and selling out. She’s doing what she is doing in her own terms and she has created a context in which to do it; what she’s done is to maintain control of the context.

Socrates

A lot of this is apart from the dialogue, but I am thinking what Socrates would say about this whole discussion about corruption…and he might say that money is not good nor bad- that stuff we are talking about in here is not in the dialogue, but one of the reasons it is not, aside from that its not related to art, is that it would be considered utilitarian, completely detachable, so it wouldn’t even matter what ends you were looking with your art.

(…)

For the sake of this conversation you can say that [the relationship between art and money] there is hypocrisy here, but is this hypocrisy relevant?

(…)

I don’t think Socrates would have been interested in any of this, so the question is what has happened in the 2000 years prior to this dialogue? Somehow we have figured that there is some sort of connection between these things, and we all sort of believe it but can’t really say how, and especially not in terms of this dialogue.

[We turn into ERYXIMACHUS speech]

Eryximachus

[quoting from Eryximachus’ speech from the Symposium]:

…but one has to deal with the effect upon human beings of rhythm and harmony by a process  known as composition or the right use of melodies and verse forms in what is called education difficult as it occur,  which demand skillful artists we come back to the old notion that is the love felt by virtuous men which should be gratified and preserved, with the objective of making those virtuous who are as yet less so. This is the noble, the heavenly love, which is associated with the heavenly muse, Urania; but there is also a vulgar or common love associated with Polyhimnia, and anyone who employs this must exercise great caution in its choice of people upon whom to employ.

Love is in the air.

[Eryximachus puts on the radio and starts changing stations. The audience listens to various songs of love in different styles: salsa, bolero, religious songs, rap, Paulina Rubio, etc]

Its such a dirty old shame when you gotta take the blame for a love song, because the best love song is written with a broken heart. Now the tears in my eyes are ever blinding;  the future that lies before me I cannot see.  Although tomorrow I know the sun is rising lighting up the world but not for me.

Example B (little Kim)

I know a dude, his name is Jimmy

Used to run up imme

Night time, pissy drunk, off the hainy grainy

I didn’t mind it when he fucked me from behind

It felt fine

Specially we used to grind it

He was a trip when I sucked his dick

He used to pass me brick, credit cards and shit

Something to sleep, I took the keys to the jeep

Tell em I’ll be back

Don’t fuck some other cats

Flirting, getting numbers, in the Summer

Ho hop raw top you know mans drop

Then theres homy Jimmy hes screamy gimme

Lean in my back busting nuts in all in me

After 10 times we fucked

I think I bust twice

It was nice

Kept my neck full of ice

Put me in chanels, kept me on ice

Cold sucking his dick rocking the mike

There was something about this dude I couldn’t stand

Something that could have made his ass, really

Something I want, but I never was pushy

The motherfucker just never ate my pussy.

I don’t want dick tonight. Eat my pussy, right?

Oh oh oh

Li’l Kim  L’il Kim

Bring it to me now

I know it dude

Push a cue

On Flatbush and Avenue U

Had a weak spot

Used to pump african black

Used to seal his bags

So his work was woodn cap

I used to see him in the tunnel

With fuckers at dawn

Whispered in my ear

You wanna get this fuck on

I dug him

So I fucked ‘im

He wasn’t nut

He wanted me to suck im

But I didn’t

I aint from

Sex was Wack

I jumped on his dick

Brought his ass to sleep

He called next week

Asking why I didn’t meet him

I thought your ass was still sleeping

He laughed

Told me he bought it pack

Could he come over right could he come over right fast

And fuck my pretty ass

I’ll pass nigger

I think we’re stretched

If sex was record sales

You would be double plat

The only way you are seein’ me

Is if you are eating me

Downtown taste my love

Like forest brown

Try to impress me

With your five g-stones

I can be ten g’s nigger

If you leave me alone,

Screaming

The moral of the story is this,

You ain’t licking this

You ain’t sticking this

And I’ve got witnesses

Ask any nigger I’ve been with

They ain’t eat shit

Til they stick their toungue in this.

I aint with that front shit

I got my own bends

I got my own ends

Immediate friends

Me and my girls rock worlds

Some big niggers fuck for car keys

And double digit figures

Good dick I cherish

I could be blunt

I treat it like its precious

I ain t gonna front

For lectic niggers that front that they really

Suck my pussy

Till they kill me.

You feel me?

Example C: James Brown

Ha! I don’t care

About your past

I just want a love to last deep

I don’t care darlin about your faults

I just want to satisfy your pulse.

[inhales helium]

When you kiss me

When you miss me

Hold my hand

Make you understand

…

In a cold sweat

Ho ho ho

I don’t care about the wants

I just want HA to tell you about the do’s and don’ts

I don’t care about the way you treat me darling

I just want you to understand me, darlin’

[inhales helium]

When you kiss me

And you miss me

Hold me tight

Makes everything all right

Put it put it

Where is at now

Miss io miss io

Let me have it.

That owes its thanks to Eryximachus, Little Kim, James Brown, John Corbett, Terry Kapsalis, John Cage’s speech. Thank you.

Symposium- Second part

Aristophanes

I will present something related to Aristophanes’s myth- the classic story that usually starts like a tagline of a film, something along the lines of “they were all alone in the world until they found each other” this is and old story, and everybody knows it, it’s the one about the search for the soul mate – so-called your other half but the belief that the romantic relationship between two people form some type of fullness is suspect these days. In the age of internet dating the intellectual part, the very basis of romantic love, concept that the personal fulfillment, the love for another, is often considered to be an embarrassing illusion, and the illusion that two form one is started by Aristophanes in Plato’s symposium. He proposes the idea that originally there were three sexes: a man, a woman, and a man-woman, and these humans had four arms and four legs; they had two legs looking the opposite ways, they walked upward but they often rolled over and over again on their hands and feet very very quickly, that way over large territories, and they were very powerful and strong, and actually threatened the gods. So Zeus decided to cut them into two, and when he divided they were very much saddened and clung to each other, so Apollo decided that he would rearrange their sexual parts in the direction of their faces so that when they embraced each other they would be able to have sex with each other and get some satisfaction from their embrace, and that would be true also of all the female and male humans. So that is how the idea of “looking for the other half”, and it has survived for thousands of years, and also has rationalized the idea of family and other needs in one person. So our notion of love, I think partially the idea of financial independence of women, along with advances in science, that make it possible for women to be artificially inseminated and have a child of their own, and even the idea that we can clone ourselves, and make another human out of one, so we are creating independence in countries that are technologically advanced and affluent. But love is still such an intense fascination … we seem inundated with the topic. I can’t think of any other topic, there are so many ruminations on the idea of love and manifestations and symbols of love in mass media, on the internet sites like love live, friendster and other offer many opportunities to hook up with individuals and the reality shows where people try to get the perfect match, and even the music industry, which since its earliest beginnings has been relying on the love song, sexual lyrics, of such explicitness that they verge on the comical- so we all seem desperate for a little amore but all these forms (television, internet, music industry) are really commodifying the idea of love, its not really about love at all, but about selling the idea of love. Were are in a society that emphasizes the self, and self preservation, and internet relationships tend to tell great risk- I think there is a certain disillusionment with love as this perfect oneness, that has to do with the internet – the idea of socializing from the isolation of the computer screen also we are living in a time when its increasingly open culture and part of this isolation could be that people are confused about what people’s sexual preferences are, and it is hard where to stand, or how to go about courtship, and there is still a very high divorce rate, that shows us how fragile relationship are, and  that relationships cause a lot of emotional stress. I got a very sad talk! So this is the side that is shown in mass culture, mass media, but at the same time there is another thing going on- last summer I did studio visits with many studio artist and many were doing work that dealt with the subject of intimacy and desire, and love- although they would never say that this was what the work was dealing with. Also I think that some people, at least in Toronto,  sort of expressed it through a camaraderie and openness that was very inspiring and there is this day, August 14^th, the great blackout, when the whole city of Toronto, and new York, and many cities we experienced this very peaceful night that brought strangers together, this wonderful feeling in the air that you know its there, but you just need the time to experience it an enjoy it. And so I organized this exhibition showing this young artists entitled “the republic of love”  and I  basically wanted to give the audience an opportunity not only to see the work but also to reflect upon what the conceptions of love were in that context versus popular media. I won’t describe what was in the show, but I think it is something that is important, this idea of self-realization through love is perhaps not seen as something as a possiblity and I think love — where I grew up most people were encouraged, said you have to happen this yourself before you can see it happen it to someone else. Anyway that’s my stance on the subject of love and want to propose that if they misbehaved  and perhaps that’s whats happened to us now instead of looking for another half we could be looking for three other quarters– that’s why there is interest in non-monogamous relationships and also growing population of people that define themselves as bi-sexual, searching experiences in more than one person.

Pausanias

Brings the idea of gender and asexual gender, and trasgender. This idea of self-definition instead of being defined by gender they are defined by themselves. Its almost a way to take these two halves and making them whole again but in a new way, people reinventing categories in order to have a greater sense of themselves. Maybe it is three fourths that are together. How can a marriage survive that?

Eryximachus

I think what makes it sound fresh from the gender perspective contemporary parlance of contemporary gender politics that gender has this essentialist notion relates to identity is gender is something like means to an end I think. Wholeness is the issue, not gender.  When you think about gender it’s a charged issue, but I think the issue of love in a broader, holistic sense, love and socialization, love and its relationship to medicine, as the foundation of other things, as opposed to “now we can’t talk about love unless we talk about the institution of marriage”, the issue of marriage does not even come into this conversation.

Aristophanes

The idea of romantic love and marriage is very new- with the rise of the bourgeoisie, that is something that we are supposed to seek out, a mate that you are in love with and get married to, instead of an arranged marriage or marry for money or for family reasons.

Eryximachus

But when we use the idea of modern love, what time does that entail? Renaissance or..?

Socrates

There is a book by Dennis Cuchebrand [ sp?] called “love in the Western world” its all about the origins of modern romantic love that is rooted in the Trobadours in the XIIth century, and so brings up things like Tristan and Isolde and other romantic periods, that would like be an anti-Platonic reading: marriage, love, fall, separation…

Pausanias

One of the things that interests me about Aristophanes story is that it’s not a Hollywood plot, – a man and a woman getting together- it’s about all these different kinds of ways that these relationships can happen. But aside from that, I think its not about finding wholeness, but about getting rid of loneliness. I mean, when I read that all I thought was the desire to completely not feel alone in the world, and the desire to unify with someone else was didn’t matter who it was, just finding that other half

Socrates

This question would be an out of character in the dialogue, but why would you say that none of the characters in the dialogue talk about loneliness?

Eryximachus

I think that the tone Aristophanes’ story, which is quite fantastic and somehow has a sort of “are you serious” quality, eliminates a certain human set of motivations- such as loneliness. The tale has something of an Eastern influence…

Aristophanes

I just want to mention that homosexuality in Plato’s time is very common and accepted, and also that Aristophanes claims that the union between the male beast divided into two is the purest type of love, which I think is largely due to the fact that is a very male-dominated society, and also that the perfect union man-man, they are longing to be with each other but they cannot say why is it that they need to be with each other and that is why Aristophanes makes this story up.

Socrates

Just want to mention that in the literature on the Symposium people make a lot of that,  and they make it into this whole story of the enigma of the story of love, that one passage, which is a very brief passage- becomes the whole —– that Aristophanes is really aiming at, that he loves to talk about but you don’t know why, that’s another kind of romantic projection, of romantic love back into the past .

Agathon

Here is where Agathon has to weigh in- as he comes after Aristophanes in this speech- and he is into is to understand what this whole idea of wholeness is about, and he questions Aristophanes in what the is forgetting about this kind of higher power which is God, and the love to God is what is truly important.

So what I thought would do would be to first explain what Agathon says, and then how this translates into the notion of how art, which is a product of love, (according to Agathon) how art makes us whole.

He says first: love is blessedest of gods, he also is the youngest, because he did not exist in the early years, when the gods were at war.

The things that were done before love were done out of necessity only unlike other things in humankind. So love is young and dwells in soft places, in hearts and souls.

Love is all flexibility and grace, and like any natural thing, it cannot do or suffer wrong.

Men and women serve the god of love out of their own free will, and where there is love there is obedience, and where there is love there is justice. However, love is the ruler of desires, and love can conquer war… etc.” and he goes on and on. But I will try to break it down a little bit and tell you what he would actually say about art:

Love is the fairest and blessedest and the best of gods, it is also the youngest, because the love was not invented out of not necessity, like other things in humankind.

Art is also invented out love, not out of necessity; There is something youthful about making art; Art does not become important for being useful

Love is always young and dwells in soft places, like the hearts and souls of people.

Art that only exists in people’s brains is not real art; art that you don’t feel something for is not real art.

Love is all flexibility and grace, and like any natural thing, it cannot do or suffer wrong.

If art is the product of love, and if love is all flexibility and grace, then there is nothing such as bad art. Meaning, Art is only what it is,  because it could not be either good or bard, so it should not be treated as something wrong.

Men and women serve the god of love out of their own free will, and where there is love there is obedience, and where there is love there is justice.

Art is a disinterested activity- which makes me think that political art or commercial art don’t really exist or are not real art.

However, love is the ruler of desires, and love can conquer war.

Art can help us do things that can help us would improve the world. And Art can defeat politicians

Love is the author of poetry and generates poetry in others

Art generates art in others

Love is the core of creation, as we are all the product of an act of love,

Art is the core of its own creation, because we create art once we see art and learn the language of art;

Love makes humans to be of one mind at a banquet

Art is a language that we all share and make us a universal community;

Love fills us with affection and empties us out of disaffection

We recognize each other through this language, and can fall in love with each other;

The pilot, helper, defender, saviour of men, in whose footsteps every man follows is love.

Which I think in equal portion it can be that

Art can take us to safe places where we can better deal with this world,

Art is a savior of our tormented minds,

Art, as a product of love, can make us grow,

Making Art is a different way of making love,

The best art we have made in our lives contains all our love,

We love art because it makes us strong,

Because it makes us richer, because if makes us better than who we are,

Even if everything ends, if the world disappears, if we have to live in wholes

We can thing about things and think about them as art,

The limits of art is only the limit of our imagination and it does keep us, if not necessarily young, it does keep me alive.

I want to make a toast to our love, for art.

Socrates

That was really interesting, because I did something very similar to that, but also different, because what you did was to take the word “love” and substituted it with “art”; what I did was to go through the dialogue and substituted the word “love” with “love of art”; its an important kind of difference, because what you were doing was changing the subject, in a sense  – which is not to say you didn’t get truths out of that- whereas my notion was if every time they say “love” they “say love of art” then you know they are taking the subset as an example, seeing if the doctrine applies, so this is what I was toying with. And I got this idea from that book on painting by Derrida, in which he says at the beginning that the subject is the shape of the desire for truth, in what it pertains to painting; and so there would be other shapes for the desire of truth. So in this case there would be love and there would be shapes of love when it pertains of art- it would be like a special case.  But, while this has been going on, Socrates has been making a list of all the things that would have baffled him, and then things that he would have disagreed with.

Among the things that would have baffled him would have been what Ryan (Pausanias) said about the embrace of ambiguity- because the shape of his dialogues for the classicists that study that- is that they (called aporiatic dialogues) lead to a state where the person arguing with Socrates is reduced to a baffling idiot, the aporia is the person who has no idea what they are claiming anymore and this happens a couple of times in this dialogue, like in this bit where Socrates questions Agathon. Then there is a thing called “elenchus, or elenctic dialogues” when you demonstrate, through this immeasurable series of horrifying annoying questions, that the person actually holds the opposite to what they were claiming minutes before. So the reason why I think what we have been doing would have baffled Socrates,  is that I think we don’t have anything against that, if any of us could actually sum up that kind of rhetoric we would be happy to have someone say “okay, I have no idea what I am saying”, but then we would enjoy that, so that ambiguity is, as the art historian  —- would say, a use of power for us- a lot of contemporary art is based on trying to find ambiguity- we love the kind of darkness and obscurity and the difficulty- but in these dialogues that would truly baffle Socrates, because if we ever reach the point in our conversations where we would know what to do, Socrates would say: “okay, now what? Let’s not be there anymore”.

Pausanias

I think that these dialogues are about trying to created order. But I would say now that people are more interested in embracing chaos. That may be the difference – now what is interesting to me is to look back and see how order was important to these people, and now I start to see how there may be a need in our culture for search for some kind of a balance…

Agathon

Well, in a way that was the origin of this whole discussion. Usually the discussions that take place nowadays feel so unstructured that I really wanted to know what would happen if you really try to follow some sort of structure.

Socrates

There are a couple of books that have come out on beauty and the search for clarity and balance, so this is in the air…

Pausanias

Just to add, in our political time, which is so conservative, this interest in balance is in fashion. As soon as you got this isolated point of view, and you are out doing stuff in the world… you have to allow chaos…

Socrates

I think that is completely true and some of these people who are writing stuff about beauty and truth, they are seriously conservative and old-fashioned.

You would ask yourself on whether there is any artist who wants to make something that is not ambiguous. At the Art Institute in Chicago we have these Koreans who are educated in a very conservative art setting, and they really don’t like ambiguity. One of my students brought a picture of a fish, a happy fish with smiley face and eyelashes, and said that it was a self-portrait. I said that couldn’t be because no one is that happy, and she said ‘I am’.

The next thing that would have baffled Socrates, was [the notion] that values are essential. This comes up a number of times. Communities believe that an artwork of like Rembrandt is good because many believe so- this would be what we would call “re-response criticism” in other words, that Moby Dick can mean anything if your class decides what it means.  That is really different from these dialogues, where goodness is beauty, inherently, is not because the majority voted for it, but because these are eternal facts.

The third thing I think that would baffle Socrates would be called “pscyhologisms”, which is is values or judgements of psychological origin or best explained through psychology, for example self-esteem, destructive relationships, relating, and loneliness particularly.

Then in terms of “love of art”, that it has a moral character or a virtue, like a moral purpose. Second that “love of art” entails moderation or temperance, which is an idea that is completely out since the Renaissance, basically- noboby is trying to moderate anything- nobody is trying to de decorous and balanced. Also, love for art is “tough, and shriveled, and homeless,” which sounds too much like the [romantic struggling] artist idea. There is also this thing about immortality, that “love of art” “wants reproduction, or immortality in birth and beauty”, “love of art neither comes to be nor passes away”, “love of art is not anywhere in any other thing, but itself, by itself, with itself”- that is the moment in which Plato supposedly enters the dialogue. I think there is a huge gulf there between our attitudes and Socrates’ attitudes. First of all, we don’t believe in that we are making stuff for the ages in the sense that Michaelangelo was, and then there’s this whole thing about creativity here, which is close to old clichés of creativity and depends on the equation of art and beauty so it’s a real pre-modernist idea- you could hold to it, but you would have to be someone like Odd Nerdrum in order to believe anything like that. Then there’s this question that love of art that love of art could really be known through the kind of discussions that we are holding, and here I think the misunderstanding would be mutual: because to Plato, there would be way too many digressions, we are not sticking to the point, we just like to chat – “chat” is not a Greek word, I guess-  and the incomprehension would be mutual- there is a lot of great literature about how awful person Socrates was, there’s great stuff that Nietzsche’s written about how he was the “disease” that was produced by the decadence of the Greek society, that he was the gadfly, famously, but mostly, that he was this annoying person, which was a source of truth but also of breaking the illusion- so there would be  a mutual mistrust: Plato would mistrust our dialogue as much as we distrust his. There is a fair amount of scholarship about how this is not really philosophy, and not really a dialogue, and not really a narrative, but a mixture of all rest of them,  the way that it comes on the fourth, fifth, sixth hand, that someone remembers that he told someone else then told it wrong so he retells to him again, and this exercise makes a lot of people these days ask why it had this form, why there are speeches that didn’t have the final truth- so that problems we have with that would be reciprocated- there would be problems if we tried to insert this conversation there.

Erixymachus

Would it be perhaps that the theatrical form helped to make a clearer story and really convey the point more strongly?

Socrates

One kind of answer is that back then they only had a limited set of categories for the kinds of dialogues, and all that was in what we now call poetry, but they conceptualized them in different ways,  but the other kind of answer is that the truths that happen in the dialogue are the kind of truths that pertain to concepts that are so widely held in life that they are entangled with many other concepts- that is why its so easy for Socrates to set these trip wires for everybody, because you can’t have consistent set of beliefs unless they are fenced off, so the point therefore of having a dialogue like the Symposium, which is not just a doctrine, but which actually takes the people through the steps of humiliation, by Socrates’ hand- the point is that because these things have so far-reaching connections, therefore every reader has to rediscover in the answers of the hapless people what their answers would be, so it has to be enacted.  But then there’s still an enigma which I still don’t see anyone giving an answer to- which is when Plato starts speaking in his voice, which is what happens when the simply writes his doctrine- then how does Plato want people to think about that in relation to what he wrote before, because how come there is other kind of truth that doesn’t require that kind of dialogue?

In terms of what we would agree on, is that the love of art has to do with seduction. This whole rhetorical business of the dialogue is about seduction, and that becomes obvious at the end, when Alcibiades comes to Socrates and says “all what you say has no truth or content, all you wanted to do is to seduce me”. That is a way of twisting the whole thing, so I thought point of contact is that artworks are about seduction. There’s all kinds of parallels between the language of talking about liking art and the language of love, and the rhetoric of seduction and the way of speaking in studios. Sometimes when students are fiddling in their studios, getting them ready for the critique, it’s a lot like being in front of the mirror, with makeup and things like that, although its not you who wants to do the seducing but it’s the work. This infamous word, “interesting” , its like a post-modern stand-in for whatever statements that are not being made; but for this context it’s also infuriating because it shows that the seduction is not going well!

The second one has to do with Aristophanes’ doctrine of doubles and all that. But the idea of ‘complement’ is similar to a word used by Derrida uses, which is “simplelong” which is the thing that matches you from you which you were divided before history began, which you don’t necessarily recognize but which you need,  so I am not continuing your critique but I think you can really use this, because if for love you substitute “love of art” then the doctrine is really nice, because then it would mean that art is the simplelong, it is the thing that complements you, but you can’t ever reattach yourself to it, ever.

Aristophanes

There is also this nonverbal way, where it gives but it remains a mystery.

Agathon

In fact art is in a better position, as it can always remain mysterious, whereas love normally fails to be mysterious forever.

Socrates

There is a passage from Daniel Halpern, who teaches at MIT, who says about this idea that Eros (love) “springs from a sense of lack or limitation, it pursues a fullness of being that forever moves in and in the course of that continuous struggle establishes a tenuous whole on existence or presence”.  Which is something that sounds reasonable to me?

Then there is this thing where, in this infamous passage, there is a lot written about how this dialogue anticipates Judeo-Christian, Christian love (agape) but apparently both Saint Agustine and Jerome both say that the Symposium contains a lot of Judeo-Christian values, and apparently there was a lot of backlash against that, and now people are returning to this idea that there is genuinely an expansion of the idea of love past the limits of the Greek language, and this special kind of love, which is similar to the Christian idea of love. One example is Kierkegaard, who asks “what is “love thy neighbor?”” and the answer is “he who I love as my neighbor is not the object defining love but the nature of love that defines the object”. And St. Augustine in the “City of God” there is a passage where he is talking about different kinds of love and says “there is a love which is itself to be loved, there is a love which is not to be loved, and there is the “agape”, the human virtue which is the right order, free… unimposed of human love by human love itself”. That’s the expand of Christian “agape”. So in a sense this love for art would be this whole consuming kind of thing; we wouldn’t be able to theorize it in the rest of the dialogue.

Then there is this notion that you could use the Symposium to prove that art is interpretation, and it would go this way: Diotima treats “interpretation” itself as an erotic enterprise; Diotima tells Socrates that Eros serves as “an interpreter between gods and men, filling and bridging the gap between beings who otherwise would never meet”, and so the whole art of love and also the prophetic interpretation depends on Eros, so interpretation itself (or, in this case, the love of art itself) would be  a form of interpretation.

Another that love of art could be understood as an obligation. That would be from a notion that Derrida has that art is an unasked-for gift, that when you walk into a gallery and you see something it’s a gift to see it but you didn’t ask for it; the gift is on a form that you didn’t quite anticipate, as the experience is unique and surprising, so it instills in you this sense of obligation that you have to return, but because it is an artwork, you can’t return it, there is nothing to give back. Then Derrida goes into all different kinds of ways in which people try to return it: by becoming curators, or becoming art historians and try to tell the “truth” of it, or becoming conservators and trying to physically change it…

Agathon

Why would that be seen as a return of a gift, as opposed to the claiming of ownership of it?

Socrates

Because it can’t; because it is a gift of truth, because you return the truth; but in the wider sense of “gift” there is no really giving back.

So what strikes me about that is that after a lifetime of looking at art you’ve got a very complex sense of unfulfilled obligations…

And the last thing: it struck me that talking about how we love art as we are doing here, has maybe in a way of hiding from actually loving art; this occurred to me because I am reading this book by George Perec, his biography entitled “W”, where every other chapter is about this childhood, and there is a chapter of a story that he wrote when he was thirteen or fourteen about a mythical island off Tierra del Fuego, where everybody plays a sport, and then what happens as you read about the island in excruciating detail, things start go to terribly wrong, judgment is arbitrary, and women are kept sequestered until the age of fourteen, so it is a story of a place that tried to keep the world at bay but that fantasy keeps getting more and more horrific; so it occurs to me that there’s a way of arguing that the whole dialogue – and our discussion- is a way to keep at bay what is going on in art, and there are ways to support this by looking at the text. Halpern says “to fix one’s case on a literary object (and I would substitute here with “art”) which is to say in the prospect of someone else’s neurotic activity is a perversion of direct desire”; which is to say that the Symposium is fundamentally perverse, because it is about someone else’s desire, and what you should do is to stop the conversation and just love the art.

Alcibiades

Alcibiades comes all the way in the end, drunk. I am not drunk, but I will summarize a bit about Alcibiades’ position that I align myself with… he is overwhelmed and obsessively in love with Socrates, and is completely unafraid to embarrass himself,  ready to speak the truth. And Socrates has basically summed up Symposium. From the position of Alcibiades, we talk about replacing love with art, and the question of sleeping with someone whose work you didn’t like, from his perspective the point is the experience, that its all about the position- Alcibiades has this interesting, introverted perception created by being inebriated and open, in a way he is talking about it all is an issue of perception. And I think that in that case, being able to grasp what the real situation is depends on how one sees it. And definitely within my own practice, once we are acting one role out, I don’t want to be pretending to be something, but I want to be “something”. I think Alcibiades’ idolatry of Socrates is mythological. The position that I identify with is having a completely uncynical, possibly naïve, yet completely genuine belief that one is doing is large and effectual and that is the core of  what one wants. There is a book entitled “Against Love” by Laura Kipnis, and it is polemic because she speaks intentionally against love, it’s about being confronted against love. Her ostensible argument is that Western American, monogamous love, is a completely archaic form- in other words, what she is arguing, is that monogamy is dead, and we should accept it, and society will favor a long-term monogamous relationship over a happy one. But what her argument ends ups being – and she goes into a really long list  and diatribe of things you can’t do with monogamy-  its actually creating your own circumstances. And this is what Alcibiades does- he decides what he wants and goes for it. And in art too, there is so much art history that asks are you a techno artist, a conceptualists, neo conceptualists, all these fake point of application – and I think the underlying thing that you have to be cognescent of is that it is “my life” and that you have to construct it yourself. And love, like art, is one’s own construct. I am talking about a  life-long investment that becomes one’s own legacy that we leave behind.

*****

Luis Ignacio Helguera (1962-2003)

Pablo Helguera

When I die, I shall finally have both garden and basement
(L.I.H.)

The Colonia Condesa is perhaps the most extemporaneous and melancholic neighborhood in Mexico City. Despite the recent commercial metamorphosis that has devalued its character, its buildings continue acting as tableaux vivants or postcards from an old Mexico: the subtle provincial air composed by the texture of the trees and the 1930s avuncular houses, the parque España and the parque México, the now extinct Bella Epoca cinema, the Rosa and Basurto buildings.

It made sense for Luis Ignacio to live there: not only due to his fascination for that era, but also because his state of mind always required a certain inoculation against the present. He hated driving, or any other speed-based activity outside of soccer: his favorite thing to do was to walk down Veracruz street, where he lived, go into the tio Luis restaurant or any given Cuban joint, visit the street fair and check out the man shooting ducks at the shooting stand, examine the meat and poultry shops, or simply sitting at the park bench and watch children go by with their balloons, and think about Aristotle and man’s final goal:

BALLOON

Happiness lies high for us
man’s ultimate goal, according to Aristotle
it lies high
rarely do we ever reach it
but sometimes
in a burlesque balloon fashion
it comes down our poor heads
and we feel its softness
electrify our hair
and we hold its string
and we caress its oval weightlessness
and we stroll through the park of the world
with our balloon
and we laugh like idiots
drunken with joy,
until we find it ordinary, boring, dull
to stroll through the world with a balloon like idiots
and the hand loses the string
and the balloon flies away in our anguish
as if into a precipice
towards the infinite.

As with everything else that surrounded him, he had a contradictory passion with the place where he lived, which simultaneously captivated and exasperated him (a feeling not that uncommon amongst those who live in Mexico City). One of this favorite quotes was by the Latin poet Catulus: “I love and hate. Do not ask me why, but I feel it so. And I suffer.”

Be it houses, hotels, villages or neighborhoods, plazas or alleys or mask stores, places in general provoked in Luis Ignacio long, repeated and intense experiences. These would result in memories, which, in turn, after many meditations during naptime and insomniac exercises with the pen and the paper at night, turned into literature. His works usually were born at the table of our family dining room set, the one thing that was with him his entire life and which he himself commemorated in a poem:

Pain and pride of my movings
the ony imperial thing I’ve got
this dining room set of my grandfather
in which I portrayed him when I was four
while he was talking business
with my dad

This dining room
in which the family
passed around salty and sweet phrases
flying rug
changes with me of time and home

I fly with the dining set,
I touch its wood to land
while my daughter hides under the table
as if behind a tree
as I did as a kid
returning the legs to the woods
of diffused genealogies
We hit our heads with the table
we scratched it
we poured hot coffees onto it
and my grandmother, and my mother, and my wife
rubbed red oil on its wounds
When after all
I think
that’s all it ends up remaining
our pains,
our scars
on the table of the dining room.

Luis Ignacio was particularly sensitive to the personal anecdote and the place where it had transpired. My brother and I shared together, for more than a decade, a room in the old family house in Arizona 106, along with my parents and my two sisters. (Also with us there was a ghostly, 90-year old great aunt, Lolina, who I remember as an entirely white and almost ethereal being who would walk silently around the house. When she died, we continued suspecting her quiet steps around the stairs). Our room had very large windows, with beautiful dark wood French blinds, and it overlooked a garden with high walls covered with ivy.  It was in this room where Luis Ignacio one day was working at his desk and suddenly a bat appeared, hitting against the window, disappearing almost instantly. This incident resulted in a prose poem that gave the title of one of his books and which he dedicated to me (according to him, as a right for the co-ownership of the room):

Bat at Midday

To Pablo Helguera

A group of mockingbirds breaks loose into flight from the high ivy of the house in the garden. Fearful premonition of birds. Only one moment later, indeed, a brownish bat —slow, indifferent intrusion— arrives pushing itself in the air against midday, and passes through the abandoned home, clumsily hitting his wings against the windows, the ivy, the instants. Brief accidents of things, glitches of the itinerary. Lethargy, disorientation, untimeliness, flight in the desert of light. The inside surface of the dry leaves, the dark tree trunks, the hidden shadows. Soul in disarray. Sad comet of ash. Hairy and stupid flapping that crumbles in cave dust on the illuminated wall.
And the night still so absent in the plants.

–
Games

In the room where he was visited by the bat, Luis Ignacio discovered Chekhov, Ravel, Stravinsky, Tartini and Khachaturian, Capablanca, Zeno, Heraclitus and Heidegger, and Julio Torri —all of them fascinations that would become the basis of his aesthetic vocabulary. Each one of these discoveries took place at different times, but his loyalty toward them —which sometimes appeared to be simple partiality— always was eternal and unconditional, maybe because each one of these discoveries had marked a moment of profound personal identification. He treated his influences like his friends, as holding an unbreakable contract. His list of loyalties started with being a fan of the Mexican soccer team León, and particularly for his heroic goalkeeper Salomone, who once held him in his arms. Even though the León eventually went onto the minor leagues, and long after its heyday, Luis Ignacio continued watching its games till the end, from his frail black and white TV.

He always felt the urgency to communicate his fascination for things. It was vital to him to have some sort of interlocutor in order to share the way in which he felt about a poem, a philosophical phrase, a photograph, or a musical work. As a child, and being nine years younger than him, he made me his first fan and audience member, job that I took enthusiastically.  I would usually sit there, a bit perplexed, as I would hear his first drafts of poems or stories (many of which would go straight to the trash can later). Oftentimes, in order to entertain both of us, he would transform his interests in games: in the height of his passion for chess, we would organize fictional tournaments that would last days (“round robin” style) where we would place “real” players of international and historical fame (Spassky, Karpov, Korshnoii, Reti, Lasker, Capablanca), alongside Mexican ones (Kenneth Frey, Marcel Sisniega, Willy de Winter) and entirely fictitious ones (Tontocho Chávez). Notably, Nacho would adjust his playing style throughout the tournament according to the apertures and strategies of every player. Despite such educational displays, I didn’t become such a great apprentice, although I did win under his training a few children tournaments, while he was teaching chess at a cultural center near our house and at the Casa del lago in Chapultepec. Sometimes I would accompany him to his own class the Black Bishop at the Colonia Roma, a chess club where his teacher was Enrique Palos Báez, a timid and smiling man who mysteriously lived at the club in a tiny room and had the looks of a friar (was he the black bishop, perhaps?)

Then there was a turn of experiences that gave him a strong aesthetic focus. In 1981, my aunts Elsa and Elena took Luis Ignacio to Europe, for his first and only time. It was an experience that impacted him deeply. Upon his return, he brought back ashtrays from Milan and Rome, small bottles of Grand Marnier, a gray checkered hat from London that he kept for decades, a handful of cotton balls he picked up from a garden in Bruges. He also brought back a firm passion for French music and art in general, adding many names to his pantheon. I helped him put together a huge poster-like collage with postcards and magazine cutouts that reminded him of this trip. The impact of symbolism, impressionism, and the modernist movements of the beginning of the century became around that time, and from then on, the main basis of influence in his work.

Luis Ignacio’s passion for music, which had been greatly nourished by our parents, manifested itself first for the works of Ravel and Debussy, Milhaud and Ibert, and for the Russians like Mussorgsky, Borodin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. In childhood games we would put records on the dinosaur-like Philco player, and we would act out choreographies or invent stories around Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, Pavanne for a Dead Maiden, Milhaud’s Beuf sur le Toit, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Petrouschka and The Firebird, Borodin’s Polovetsian Dances, or Respighi’s Pines of Rome. As he himself tells in his work “Atril del Melómano”, he tried to study music at the national conservatory, “in the bucolic gardens of the ruinous and for me attractive building of Pani”, another mysterious place which, with its huge windows and its burgundy concrete floors, would make him decide toward not making music, but writing about it.

It would be hard to find many people who enjoyed music with the intensity in which he did: he would spend hours next to the record player, looking toward the window or the ceiling, whistling, leaned over backwards, with the pen in the hand, closing his eyes, intensely savoring every note played by Heifetz, Gidon Kremer, Victoria de los Angeles or Tom Waits.

His literary interests, which would end up becoming his true profession, started with his attendance to literary workshops, chess games seasoned with literary conversations with Juan José Arreola, and with the guidance of Eduardo Lizalde, who was no doubt the greater inspiration of his youth.

However, when he was eighteen his passion suddenly veered toward philosophy, particularly existentialism. His studies at the faculty of philosophy and letters of the National University brought him eventually to phenomenology. He made his thesis on the notion of understanding in “Being and Time” by Heidegger, likely the most influential philosopher in his work. Heidegger’s and Husserl’s methodology and hermeneutics gave him a fundamental structure onto which exercise his critical and essayistic work, both musical and literary, whereas his interest in existential themes would constantly be expressed in his poetry and fiction. As editorial assistant of Octavio Paz’s magazine Vuelta at the end of the eighties, Luis Ignacio returned fully to literature and entered in touch with many leading Mexican writers, thus creating his most enduring artistic and personal friendships: Antonio Deltoro, Verónica Volkow, Aurelio Asiaín, Fabio Morábito, Gerardo Deniz, and many others.

His work on both music and literature never obeyed any sort of following of “current tendencies.” Instead, he almost automatically would lean toward any marginal or semi-obscure expressions that had captured little interest of other critics. This made him write about composers such as Conlon Nancarrow, Cri-Cri, or Candelario Huízar. In a similar way, his way of covering “current issues” was based mainly in commemorating death or birth centennials, or similar occasions, which were presented in the pages of Pauta, the magazine of which he was the editor for fifteen years under the approving oversight of Mario Lavista. Few music critics in Mexico have produced comparative music essays as useful and rigorous as the ones he made on the work of Silvestre Revueltas, Carlos Chávez, Rodolfo Halffter, and many others. He knew the work of Ravel and Stravinsky like no one else. One of the works that he never got to write could have well been a critical biography of either composer.

The “marginal” writers that occupied his interest, on the other hand, included
Pedro F. Miret – whose nightmarish and extravagant stories he loved—Uwe Frisch, Virgilio Piñera, Julio Torri and Dino Buzzatti. Toward the end, his interests darkened, ending with Charles Bukowski.  On the other hand, his emphasis on “impure” genres culminated perhaps on his work on prose poetry, a form that combined his inclination for elegance and brevity. This resulted eventually in his making the definitive anthology of prose poetry in Mexico.

Green Patios

Like every other family, our memories were marked by the places where we lived or visited. However, the circumstances around our leaving of these places —including the eventual departure of the core of the family to the U.S., which left Luis Ignacio as their sole interlocutor— made them acquire a more ghostlike quality. In his works, these places became part of a vocabulary of nostalgic mythology.

The first one of these places was our childhood home, located in the street of Orizaba 21 in the Colonia Roma, near the Insurgentes subway. When we left that house, an enormous mansion that housed the family for three generations, it was never inhabited again up till today, for reasons that to this date we ignore. Its continuous, empty presence, and the fact that it inexplicably appeared to resist being populated by new memories or people, gave it a certain air of enigmatic freezer of history, a sort of monument or memorial of a time that remains unburied. Luis Ignacio used to go visit it when he was in the area.  “I went by Orizaba the other day,” he would say, which would be just as saying “ I was thinking about those days.”

Another house that Luis Ignacio was prone to visit is located in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, and it has belonged to the family since the eighteenth century.  This one also occupies a symbolic place as it retains the residues and personal objects of more than six generations. Full of paintings, objects and photographs (“of diffused genealogies”), it has a great open patio with a well and a doorway through which we would see people like Kika freely enter in an out. Kika was a feeble, deaf, hunched old lady and neighbor of the family for more than half a century. Luis Ignacio developed a certain fondness toward her, in the same way in which he would grow an affection for all things and people who were in appearance marginal, forgotten, or invisible.

It was in this house (as well as in brief stays in Patzcuaro) where Luis Ignacio wrote great part of the material of his first book, Traspatios. Traspatios contains a series of daguerreotype-like vignettes of the provincial family life with which he exerts a phenomenology of memory and of the past. The personal experience and the family space would inevitably transform in a new place, populated by the familiar but also by the philosophical reflection:

In middle voice, through the antique hallway, lonely, an insinuation in chiaroscuro, preterital song of a woman who washes clothes by ear, rake that returns every afternoon for the leaves of the album to the tree of memory, friend of the house with her own key of the doorway, silent deaf old woman, subtle murmur of light debating between shadows, silent melody that lulls years, centuries, in the well of the oranges and hours (…)

Another place of the mnemonic nomenclature of the family, where we spent most of our childhood vacations, was the Jacarandas hotel in Cuernavaca, which has a number of gardens in a large area, filled with bungalows, golf courses, and cozy pool sections in the American style of the fifties. Over the course of the years, the gardens have been preserved, and the hotel still exists although a bit decayed, rather as a memory of a better time. But for us who remembered it in its times of glory, walking through its gardens was a process of reliving a series of anecdotes and incidents of before. Also stuck in its own time, this hotel also was an obsession to Luis Ignacio, who used to go back to stay at the bungalows to write perhaps to recover certain moments that could only be retrieved right there and then:

Jacaranda

Here thirty years later. The gardens grow experiences; memories take part of the vegetation. Just like those who grow in these corners: spot of soul, elbow, knee, shadow plant, ivy in waiting of being gardened by memory (…) in the leaf of the jacaranda is the living ground of the voices, the detention, the immense instant. We are a speck, a speck of a speck of our remembrances; and through specks like that, eternity shows.

Although for Luis Ignacio these places were constant references, the resulting works were in general a distilled product, composed by a variety of situations that he wasn’t seeking to represent but rather to reflect upon, leading to metaphysical and metahistorical problems that consumed his mind. On the other hand, as he himself admitted, by force of repetition and revision of anecdotes in after-meal table conversations, these memories would be transformed in new fictions (“human memory ([is]…) full of whims and prone to falsify, free and creative”), to the point that in many cases he himself wasn’t sure about what was real and what had been a fabrication (in some cases he would even adopt our own personal anecdotes and place himself in them, although conveniently taking the most heroic role). On the other hand, his way of experiencing things was almost preceded by the very act of commemorating the transformation of the act of living into the act of remembering (“moments which since one lives them appear to be old memories”; “this perfume, which today only smells to itself, tomorrow will smell to these moments”). His work is thus an enactment of automatic historicity, commemorative and meditative, sometimes sad and nostalgic (“rain belongs to yesterday”) and sometimes ironic, critic, skeptical, and humoristic.

Masks

Luis Ignacio’s extraordinary attachment to things, to ideas, to places, people, music, and definitely to confrontations of every kind, was in general fairly selective, although implemented with formidable vigor. Sometimes he was extreme (“neither yes, neither no, neither neither”). Every person or thing that would capture his interest he would take over with absolute dedication and sense of ownership, as if he was afraid of loosing everything he would find along, and if it went away from him he would do enormous efforts to claim it back. His literary works, in a similar way, at times appear to reveal that enterprise of recovering things and commemorate them in a symbolical process that was at the same time an acknowledgement nothing truly can be retained.

His greater obsession lied in trying to understand things, for which he had an ongoing anguish; the greatest of them all, I think, was the very impossibility of understanding himself. His introspective writing could be excessively self-critical, and sometimes even ruthless: highly suspicious of his identity, which in fact is manifested already in his earliest published text (written in 1981):

Scrap of Film

…all seen from the eyes of a dog. Discolored images, rather in black and white, in slow motion. It looks like dawn in these fields, although it could well be a gray dusk. The immense field seen through the eyes of a dog, which could well be a cow. The wheat sprigs bow against the passing of the wind, but with the same sleepy rhythm. The images wag from the dog because he walks, because all this moves… And again they relatively fix as they stop in front of a milkmaid who carries two pails of water. She looks toward our canine visual field: she looks at us with surprise and horror. She slowly leaves the pails on the ground and with the perplexed expression she moves back, without looking at me. She touches her apron with her white hands and mumbles something that is not heard (nothing can be heard, actually).  She continues to walk back and I think that I am also walking, toward her, as she walks back. We arrive to a humble looking house, nearby the abandoned mill. She pulls the door, a bit faster, and now without looking at me, she gestures with despair as she locks the door behind her. I am left alone, immobile. I touch my face. I must be a monster.

This kind of writing, that sometimes adopts the tone of Kafka or Mary Shelley -although not without a touch of irony- appears repeatedly in various poems that revolve around the notion of self-recognition, such as in his text “mask store” (“almost without realizing, I bring my hand to my face and touch it”), Minotauro (“people, prey of fear, move out of his way”), in his short story “costume party”, where an unknown character crashes a party, and his well known text “The child face” (“and a radiant blow of light in the plain visage of the insect revealed to the executioner an unknown shot, in which he himself appeared as a child making a painful and whining gesture”).

As a great humorist, either by inventing bestiaries for his daughter Marina or ridiculing the music milieu in Mexico from the pages of his magazine Pauta, he practiced his humor toward himself over anyone else.  Toward the end of his life, as he himself wrote, his life turned into literature (“without realizing, he became all literature”), in a process that was known to his friends as the “Nachoaventuras”.

Our aesthetic arguments usually revolved around contemporary art, the area toward which I gravitated as a visual artist. We never were fully in agreement in terms of form, neither in regards to conceptualism and the social dimensions of art. Luis Ignacio could never get enthusiastic about the problems that he found too alien or that didn’t concern him at a very intimate level. This very condition made him become a writer distant from every kind of current fashion or tendency, as well as any kind of careerist style, which he reasonably despised. In my view, it also made him one of the most original literary voices of his generation.

***

In a most ironical fashion that he himself  would have approved, we gave burial to Luis Ignacio on a Tuesday the Thirteenth, finally enacting a series of scenes that he had obsessively envisioned throughout the years: the wake ( “the wake is a party without host”), the funerary arrangements ( “there is some kind of sweet innocence in dying and in taking care of the dead one”), the ritual of the burial (which he addressed in his short story “Milpa Alta”), and in the large family gatherings that precisely take place only in wakes and weddings, with which he claimed to dream regularly  and which had caused in him a mix of anguish and fascination.

Always prone to observing funerary coincidences, he would have been the first one to point out that, at his forty years of age, he punctually followed the steps of his most admired Mexican composer, Silvestre Revueltas, whose music, sensibility, and biography captivated him. In an article of his (“Revueltas between the music and the wall”) he quoted a phrase of Revueltas that he liked very much: “wherever I want to go, I always run into a wall”.

Today I realize that he must have identified himself with that bat in midday that hit against our window: an anachronistic being, whose erratic presence, disoriented, seemed to enter in constant conflict with with the practical world into which he had arrived, a darkness in the middle of the light.  Luis Ignacio constantly questioned his place in the world, with full conscience of his finitude, as a true subject of a heideggerian “dasein” (or “being toward’s death”) with full lack of synch with time but in active search of his own parameters of duration ( from there his admiration to Bergson).  The work of Luis Ignacio is an exercise in extemporaneity, a dialogue with a world full of objects and circumstances  that refer to a certain present, but that as they are integrated into the territory of his literature evolve into signifiers of a lucid metahistorical reflection about our relationship with memory and time. This is because, despite his permanent restlesness with the place and time where he was, he was profoundly in touch with the experiences of life in a way that many of us will never be able to be.

I will miss him unspeakably. His life, which involved all of us near him in an extraordinary way, was unfairly consumed by his own personality, which absorbed both good and bad things without distinction— which is impossible to sustain in a regular life.

In his flight through life, Luis Ignacio always hit his head against the transparent window of reality. But as a redemption to his enormous anguish, every little blow generated a work that help us understand from the most abstract to the most banal.  As a bat that emerged from Plato’s cave, his work comes from a world of shadows that at first may seem unfamiliar, but if seen carefully, bestow the most prodigious clarities.

Zurich, May 2003