Identity Defined by Opposition

A paradox of Totalitarianism is that while trying to homogenize society defines it by oppositions. One of the core principles of socialism is that the individual has to be submerged in the collective. The formation of the individual from the first years at school is aimed at erasing personality traits and individual inclinations that doesn’t fit into the collective aims and the political purposes. This is a kind of utilitarianism in politics that have disastrous consequences for the individual. As we know, utilitarianism sees pursue of happiness and the avoidance of pain as the end of all human activities (Bentham). But when utilitarian doctrine is taken at the political level, happiness n society means the number of individuals in society who are happy, the bigger the number of them that are happy the more just a political system is. Problem with this doctrine is that discriminate the rights of minorities who doesn’t fall into the criteria for happiness of a given group, thus giving birth to all sort of human rights violations. Going back to my point about the homogenization  of society by totalitarian regimes, anything that doesn’t fall inside the homogenized happy group –the contented pigs of John Stuart Mill -- is excluded and converted into an enemy.
The conversion of ill-conformed individuals into enemies is just a part of a major necessity to construct identity st the national level in opposition to what is strange, out of norm and therefore dangerous. Fear is used to create image and spirit of an exterior enemy who is ever present and who is always ready to attack. During the 50 something years of the Cuban revolution, fear and war has always been present in a way or another, whether in the form of the embargo, Bay of Pigs, nuclear war, sabotages, killing attempts to Fidel Castro, the CIA, etc. Of course those fears are no unfounded, they are based in instances of truth, But when is concerned to propaganda, these fears are exploited to the level that war and state of exception become the way of life of a nation and a people. The life of a society revolves around the idea of external invasion and war.

When invasion and war doesn’t occur, and it hasn’t since Bay of Pigs, the prospect of war lose credibility and new enemies need to be created. The only way to fill this gap is by taking individuals from the ranks of inconformists of society and convert them into enemies. They are labeled and classified as gusanos –worms- or scum, terrorists, mercenaries and other names to  make clear that they are the enemy of the happiness of the group. By this opposition of us versus them group identity is created. The group of conformists identify with the Commander in Chief and the Revolution by way of symbolic association. Fidel Castro is the continuator of Jose Marti ideals; Jose Marti is the Cuban per excellence and therefore Fidel is the Cuban per excellence of the 20^th C. The Cuban flag is associated with Fidel and the Revolution that Castro started become one. Everything else that doesn’t fall into the categories of Fidel/Revolution is not a Cuban. Fidel and his idea of Revolution has usurped Cubaness; to be Cuban means to be Fidelist and Revolutionary.

Jacques Ellul talks about the need for a combination of individualism and collectivism in society for propaganda to be effective. Propaganda needs to catch the individual in isolation, abandoned to the forces of industrial and post-industrial society. But also need to be part of a collective so that the psychology of the group can have its effects on him. “The society that favors the development of society must be a society maintaining itself but at the same time taking on a new structure, that of the mass society” (Ellul 93). The Cuban revolution has taken care that the individual is left alone, out of an ineffective church and a disintegrated family. Children are raised with no religion in Cuba, which is a fundamental core of the doctrine of the formation  of the New Man since in classical Marxist doctrine religions is the opium of the people, a tool in the hands of the exploiters to keep the oppressed subjected to their condition. In order to raise in the ranks of Cuban official society you have to be first a young pionero –boy scout-, then a Communist youth and finally a full fledge Communist militant. A condition to go through all these stages is that you cannot be a religious person. Families therefore foster tha rearing of children without a religion and without church. Families are also broken apart, at least 45 days a year by the School at the Country or irrevocably by exile. In this condition of isolation and defenselessness the individual joins the organizations where he can find solace and strength, such as the Communist Youth Union, the Communist Party, the Committee of Defense of the Revolution, the Militias of Territorial Troops, the Obligatory Military Service, the Brigades of Rapid Response, the Brigades of Production and Effort, etc, etc. Once the individual join one of these organization, and is almost impossible that he would not join any of them, he will be subjected to the norms and rules of the group, its ideology and psychology, the individual dissolve in them and breaks apart, his private opinion rendered ineffectual by the public opinion of the organization that represents him. 

Concerning identity and nationalism things become more problematic for the Cuban government since the advent of the Internet and SMS. National frontiers are rendered increasingly obsolete due to the porosity brought about by communication, travel and trade. So far the reaction of the Cuban government regarding globalization has been to strengthen isolationalist measures such as requiring of visas to Cuban nationals to re-enter the country and permits to leave it. 

The oppositional lines enemy/friend becomes more difficult to maintain since the lines of kinship and camaraderie of Cuba’s younger generations are not based on ideology or politics but on age, interests, likes and common life experiences. It is not possible anymore to make believe that someone is an enemy just because has decided to move to the US, like it was in the past when emigrants were labeled with epithets and automatically rendered enemies of society in the public mind. The recognition of Cuban authorities of the difficulties of establishing and maintaining clear lines of separation along ideology and politics gets manifested in a recent video posted on the Web about a Cuban counter-intelligence officer giving a lecture about social networks and blogging by Cubans. In it the counter-intelligence officer recognizes how Internet access through satellite connection and WiFi has rendered impossible total propaganda and mind control. It is also impossible to render a youth an enemy for using the Internet to play games, watch entertainment shows or the news; but the mere act of accessing information other than the provided by the Cuban propaganda apparatus provoke a change in worldviews and thinking and therefore a more difficult to control subject.

 

Shaman. Afterwords.

This paper started as a writing exercise. After reading Harvey’s account of a shaman women in Korea I went to write a recreation of the story in 1^st person. To my surprise, as I was writing I realized that there were many things in common between the shaman woman of the story and my experience as an artist.

In pre-modern times, that is the time of Homer and beyond, there is no separation between the cosmos or physical universe and the body and the social. The cosmos cut across the body and the social with myth. Myth is the understanding of the workings of the universe and the position of the individual and the group in it. If the body and the social are separated they both are included in the cosmos through mythical thinking. The separation between the body and the social in one hand and the physical universe on the other starts when man looks upon himself as an object of reflection, when he sees himself as the center from which will, thinking and action emanates. Man is no longer an extension of the will of God or the deities. Man is a subject among other subjects and occupies a place in the network of inter-subjective social forces.

In pre-modern times man is still not separated from the forces that govern the universe, he is one with it. The first accounts of art are inseparable from magic and ritual. From the caves of Lascaux and Altamira to the Venus of Willendorf aesthetics results are inseparable from function. Aesthetic products are a mean to an end, whether the hunting down of a beast or the securing of germination at the dawn of agriculture.

 

In pre-modern times the rainmaker, shaman or medicine-man fulfills a necessary activity in the community. He is the one that secures the rain after a long drought; or cures a disease by restoring the flow of energies in the body. This activity is a double edge sword since the life and well being of the rainmaker depends on the results of his practice. If he doesn’t heal, if he doesn’t produce rain, he could attract the anger of the tribe and be eliminated. But if he does produce rain or gives health he fulfills a social need while at the same acquiring social relevance and status.

The story of the shaman woman in Korea is placed in a pre-modern context. She and the group she belong to are still living in unity with the forces of cosmos. Their thinking is still embedded in myth. They are a group of pre-enlightened individuals under siege by the forces of modernity and they have to struggle and come to terms with the features of the modern state, its politics and economics. These modern features are experienced as repression to which they need to oppose strategies of resistance such as going underground, secret societies, secret codes, etc. A would be shaman has to overcome the forces of fear and repression that comes from the family and the state. But if the activity of the shaman produces positive results, she or he is socially appreciated.

There is another element that has to do with choosing such a precarious profession such as shaman. Is related to the impossibility of doing any other productive activity. Real shamans are not made; they are born. And it is here where I started to see parallelisms between the shamans and the modern artist. Artists are not made, they are born too –at least real artists This has to do not with talent or anything else but with the impossibility of doing some other activity.

If the practice of the modern artist is not linked to magical-religious thinking, it still retain some element of magic in it exclusion of any practical, instrumental activity in favor of the aesthetic, disinterested realm.

The modern artist experiences the same manifestations of oppression that come from the family, society and the state. He or she can also acquire social relevance proved that his activity produce results. The artist is a producer of an object that is linked not only to the social and to the body, but to that long lost realm of magic and natural forces, to the universe. The aesthetic production of a work of art is a residue of the magical ritual of the cave man.

Another thing is the relation between creativity and madness but I’d rather focus on the concept of madness in itself. If we read the account of the body aches of the shaman of this story as symptoms she could be considered mentally ill. We can consider her as having hallucinations and psycho somatic manifestations and fit to be thrown in any mental institution of the West. But because she lives in a magical, pre-modern context, her experiences find a positive reception and they are even deemed necessary to the well being of the community. This possibly has to do with the power of suggestion and with the place that punishment and reward occupy in the ethical conduct and the personal realization of the subjects. She is not regarded as mentally ill but as a necessity in the family and the group, a restorer of the emotional and psychological well being of the subjects. Here another dimension of the problem. The notion of metal illness as un-separable from social context and culture.

Shaman

It not easy to be in sinbyong, to be sick and possessed. Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night with strange nightmares. Sometimes you are afraid that your power will hurt others, another times you succumb to the temptation of using your power to gain notoriety and fame. And it doesn’t ends there; I also experienced a lot of physical pain during about three years. I remembered my hand and feet feeling cold most of the time. I also used to suffer from diarrhea, which could come and go about any time and anywhere, I used to faint and get dizzy. The spirit that possessed me was so strong that I even had pain in my joints, and my heart suddenly could start running so fast that I even thought I was never going to make to the next step. So, all these dangers have to be overcome. I have to empty myself from mundane things and focus on the light. Once I was full of light and energy, full of spirit and spirit myself, and I was not afraid of death or getting sick anymore, then I realized that I had the power of healing. You need a lot of support from your family, you have to go trough a lot of sacrifices, to suffer and get stronger, looking at the ways the universe works, dealing with all those estrange forces.

I charge a fee for my healing. I was born with an uncommon sensibility to things around me. The men in the village didn’t want to get involved in the responsibilities that comes from been a shaman, they were too young and want it to go to the city and explore life. I dreamed about living in the city too, but I heard that it was even harder for girls there than for guys. A cousin of mine came back from the city about six months ago, running away from a gang that forced her to prostitution, she was lucky. Well, with so few choices left, I decided to hear the shaman’s advice and became a mudang.

You asked me before and I already told you that I get a fee for my services. But is not enough to make me rich. If it wasn’t for the government taxes, maybe I would be fairly wealthy, but I’m not.  My uncle Shu told me once that the government started taxing shamans sometime after it failed to eradicate shamanism in Korea. He told me that the Yi Dinasty, which lasted from 1392 to 1910, started the policy of eradicating shamanism totally and replaced it by neo-Confucianism. Neo-Confucianism is too rational, doesn’t believe in spirits or anything like that and people need religion, that’s why Neo-Confucianism didn’t work and shamanism persisted. One day the government woke up realizing that its policies were not going to eradicate shamanism but merely drive it underground and decide to tax us but at the same time made us register as shamans and ascribed us outcasts .

            So it is not easy for us. But despite of that we are still growing in number, especially the number of women who are shamans is growing even more since most of the men are leaving to work in the cities. Although the Yi Dinasty ended in 1910, we are still persecuted and ostracized today.

When my family first realized that I was sinbyong, they feared that if I become a shaman they would be out-casted by the government. But what am-I, and the other sinbyong women like me, going to do? If you resist becoming a shaman the spirits either could kill you or bring miss-fortune to your family. And if you die somebody else in your family will be sinbyong instead and will have to become a shaman. So, once you are sinbyong the best thing to do is follow the path traced by the spirit and become a shaman. Never-mind that the others will call you crazy or unmoral or whatever, you got it to do what you got to do.

I have a lot of requests. People come to me asking for help in many ways. They either need me because they want to talk and make peace with their ancestors, or they want to know about the appropriate day to bury a relative or get married. Other times they want to know about the real personality and intentions of their would be husbands and wives, or they want to help with their children careers and jobs. Some how I’m a sort of functionary, dealing with spiritual transactions, another times I’m like modern psychiatrist, trying to restore balance and peace in the minds and souls of my patients.

            Turns out that my family is helping me these days. They too realized that it was inevitable that I will be a shaman. All the miss-fortunes of my life happened for a reason: My ex-husband suicide, my inability to find a steady job, my children death. These days I’m dating what seems to be a good and mature guy. He is a recovered alcoholic but he says that he found peace with me. I talk to his ancestors every week and ask them to keep him away from alcohol. I also feed and give presents to his ancestors to keep them quiet. The effect on him is so good that even my mother in law is so happy that she is helping me with my spiritual work, taking care of the daily house activities. Even my own family, though they resent being called outcasts, is happy, my nieces and nephew are doing well at school and it is because of my talking to the spirits, or so they said. And who knows, maybe some day I will have children again.

Based on Kim Harvey, Youngsook. Possession Sickness and Women Shamans in Korea. In Nancy Auer Falk and Rita M. Gross Unspoken Worlds, Women Religious Lifes. Wardsworth/Thomson Learning, 3^rd Edition. Canada. 2001.

Baskiat at Shafrazi

The flat, brilliant surfaces of color are an influence of the strong impact I received from seeing for the first time a solo show by Jean Michel Basquiat; at Tony Shafrazi gallery. That distant day of 1998 Ana my Canadian girlfriend and I where strolling down Soho looking at the work in the galleries. In those days Chelsea wasn’t an art destination and all the major artistic events were still going on in Soho.  We arrived at Shafrazi’s the next day the gallery took down Baskiat’s show and it felt so bad not to have the opportunity to see it that we went to talk to the manager of the gallery. I said to him” I’m an artist from Cuba and I came to see Jean Michel Basquiat show. I know it was taken down yesterday but is there anything that we can look at?” The manager, “ Wait a minute”. He goes to talk to Tony in his office surrounded by smoked glass walls and comes back to us, “Follow me”. We walked to the back of the gallery and there is a stair that goes to the basement. The manager lift up the cord that prohibit visitors to go through, and down we go. To my outmost surprise the whole Jean Michel Baskiat show is in front of us, in the basement, just like when Baskiat used to work in the basement of Anina Nosey gallery. I've been waiting for this moment for years. There was a yellow painting with foam on it and tons of black tar; there were some other major pieces made on wood; assemblages with tons of nails on it; several drawings in their frames. ”Charlie Parker sold for $150 thousand”, say the manager. Les than ten years later they were selling for millions.

While living in Cuba a friend of mine, who was also a friend of Basquiat, send me a book of him as a present. He knew I was a major Basquiat fan. I never dreamed of visiting New York, much less seeing a Baskiat painting alive. It still amazes me how strange life is. The yellow and orange surfaces of these works come directly from that day of shocking Basquiat basement experience.  This is how New York and Basquiat felt for a young Cuban artist those days. Like being in heaven and hell at once. Like being torched by light and sorrounded by darkness at unison. I have tried to convey the conflicted emotions of those times in these works.

Edna St. Vincent Millay: Oh What Lips My Lips have Kissed.

 

She was a political activist and she had many love affairs during her lifetime. She reminds me of another of my favorite femmes fatale: Tina Modotti. I have such a penchant for these vampire political-artistic personalities. Until not long ago it was fashionable for artists and intellectual types that if they have a boring, unattractive name, they would chose their hometown’s. That is the case of Hans George Kern, who was from Grossbaselitz, a country village a short distant from Dresden, Germany, and who accordingly changed his name to George Baselitz.
Etnas St. Vincent Millay took her middle name from St. Vincent hospital in New York  --something very fit for an American. There was a sentimental side to that choice though: her uncle was saved by that hospital just before she was born.

Her father was a nut with three children, including Etna. He was an alcoholic –you should confirm that out-; a SOB who never took care of them. That seems to be the reason why his wife divorced him under the term “financial irresponsibility” -wow, I thought only some Cubans were like that. It is understandable that Etna,  who used to call herself Vincent, may have hated men and started treat them like meat, growing up into a dragonfly that loved to jump from rose spine to rose spine. Good for Vincent and good for the men who got to enjoy the dragonfly trance dance. I’m envying them already. 

Vincent mother and sisters used to travel from town to town with a bunch of books, including Shakespeare’s and Milton’s. They finally settled down in Candem, Maine. Vincent may have been the only true poet of the family but she wasn’t the only rebel. Her three sisters, fittingly, never accepted authority either. A crazy family ahead of the times. Edna’s professor at school perennially refused to call her by her chosen name Vincent, calling her instead by any female name. What an offense. This is not “Don’t ask; Don’t tell” policy, this is “If someone ask you who you are; Say that you are not gay”. But she was not anyway, as testified by her many lovers, although perhaps she was already by-sexual. In any case, she was a complete human being.

After some poetry award was snitched from her she moved to Greenwich Village in New York. She went out dancing and enjoyed life despite being so poor. Some nagging critic of whom we don’t even remember his name called her "a frivolous young woman, with a brand-new pair of dancing slippers and a mouth like a valentine." she was not. She was a hot, a revolutionary feminist.

In  1923 Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver". But Alas, her reputation was hurt after she wrote “Aria da Capo”, an anti-war, pacifist play. I will not extend more in “Aria da Capo” but just to point out that Da Capo Aria is a Baroque musical form and that Johan Sebastian Bach has a famous piece http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFAcXIXWLMw that has being used as the background theme for Hannibal Lecter's saga. Weird world.

She got married when she was 31 years old or so. But that didn’t precluded her for taking other lovers; famous among them 17 years old poet George Dillon, to whom she dedicated several sonnets, among them probably the one analyzed below. Her husband, who supported her rebellious attitude against the hypocrite’ stance towards sexual freedom, didn’t mind.

In 1925 Boissevain and Vincent bought Steepletop, a home near Austerlitz, New York. They also purchased an island in Casco Bay. Maine: http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab=wl. Not bad for a poet and a political activist.

Vincent died at age 58. Her sister Norma and her artist painter husband moved to Steepletop and found the Millay Colony for the Arts on the seven acres around the house and barn, which they ran until Norma's death in 1986. The story doesn’t end there. Poet Mary Oliver visited Steepletop at age 17 and stayed there for the following seven years, helping to organize Vincent’s papers. Mary Oliver eventually became a Pulitzer winner poet on her own. In 2006, the state of New York acquired Steepletop in order to restore the farmhouse and turn it into a museum. Steepletop features a Poet's Walk leading to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s grave. Now open to the public.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet know its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

This nostalgic sonnet is about the long gone joys of youth. In the first two verses: “what lips my lips have kissed (…) I have forgotten”; the author makes a reference to time and aging.  Speaking in first person, she seats lonely while it rains outside, trying to remember a time in her life when there were lovers and courtiers titillating around her. In “pain” (verse 6^th), she knows that forgotten “lads” (verse 7^th) will not ask or request love or caresses from her.  In verse  9^th, personifying in reverse, she compares herself to a lonely tree, silent and in sorrow, knowing that youth is already gone and that it will never come back.

In this sonnet the first verse rimes with the 4^th, and the 2^nd with the 3rd. The first four verses make a stanza; then the following 4 verses make another stanza. The turn happens in verse 9^th, which ends with the word “tree”, this word rimes with the word “me” at the end of verse 13. The third and last stanza, starting at verse 10, is of a different rime structure; first verse of third stanza, or verse 10^th, rimes with verse 12^th; while verse 11^th rimes with verse 14^th, “before” and “more”.

There is use of metaphor in verse 13^th: “ I only know that summer sang in me”. Here, the author is establishing a analogy between the seasons and the cycle of life; summer is used to mean youth, and the fleeting time.  Imagery is used several times in the poem: verse 3-4^th: “…the rain is full of ghosts tonight…”; verse 9^th: “…thus in the winter stands the lonely tree”; verse 10^th: “…what birds have vanished”. This use of imagery serves the purpose of creating the mood of melancholy, loneliness and nostalgia that the whole poem conveys.

We see alliteration in verse 1: “ What lips my lips have kissed and where and why”. Cacophony in verse 4^th: “ …ghosts tonight that tap and sigh”. Figurative language in verses 13-14^th: “…summer sang in me… in me sings no more”, connoting the lost of youth. The whole poem is a lament of the condition of aging and the lost of the enjoyments of youth.
Note: Please, read below what commentator "Gorditamedia" says about St. Vincent being closed. It was in my mind that my post would try to help them draw more visitors, but sadly that is not possible anymore.

­­

Stop; If You Want to Keep Your Love Going

The ego is formed in the reaching out of the child to its image in the mirror. The image in the mirror functions as a model, a paradigm of what he could be. By standing up, leaning his body against the mirror, touching the reflection of his fingers, from potential to realization, the child becomes the possibility of himself. Love is reaching out what you could be, the image of yourself becoming yourself.

Don’t move if you want to keep the illusion of love going –the illusion of the vase holding the flowers. You need to stay on the point where you see the image of the vase and flowers as a complete image. If you move away from that point, you gain your independence, but you lose the object of your love.  That’s why love is delusional and an impossibility. But when you are on the point where the vase and the flowers are one or you are in the presence of your love, you are still not satisfied because you are watching a mirage, not the true reality of the desert. You get disappointed because you are getting less of what you expected, not water but sand, not reality but a substitute of reality that in order to keep going and sustain itself needs your sacrifice, your freedom, your individuality. Then you have to choose between keeping your illusion going or regaining your freedom. You'll leave and them the illusion of the vase and flower as one is broken, you'll suffer because now you see only either the vase or the flower, although you have regained your freedom  there is no more the illusion of love.

Cuban Frankenstein

The Cuban Frankenstein is the offspring of Fascism and Marxism. Fascism --disguised as Stalinism-- and Marxism went in a pleasure trip on a Soviet battleship to the island of Cuba, around the year 1930. The Soviet ship was not allowed to enter the port of Havana and Cuban political activist Ruben Martinez Villena had to take a swim to visit the Soviet sailors. Martinez Villena died afterward from tuberculosis, but not without saying first to Cuban tyrant Gerardo Machado that he was an “ass with claws” and giving birth to a beautiful crossover, the first Cuban Frankenstein.

The Cuban Frankenstein is posing for me in the Cuban landscape. In the background there is a horse. This is not any horse, but The Horse. In the foreground, in front of the Cuban Frankenstein lies an hour clock that contains water instead of sand and that is horizontally instead of vertically. The Cuban Frankenstein spend his life waiting for The Horse to die. But because the hour cloak has water and is horizontal nothing ever happens and The Horse never dies.

In the next picture that I took of a Cuban Frankenstein –there are many of them, of different types-- he is so obsessed with leaving the island that he has become a boat himself with a pair of legs. In the meantime The Horse has taken control of time and is waiting with anxiety for the Cuban Frankenstein to leave. That way the Cuban Frankenstein will find a job in exile and send money back to Cuba to support The Horse.

Young Communist ID Card

The Communist Donkey or Red Donkey self-portrait has as a reference George Orwell "Animal Farm". He carries his past wherever he goes in the form of a hammer and sickle tattooed on his shoulder.