Let Melancholy Not Be Diluted by Cheap Optimism: Santiago Vizcaíno's Destruction in the Afternoon

Destruction in the Afternoon (Lavender Ink 2015), by "one of Ecuador's finest poets," Santiago Vizcaíno, is reviewed at Entropy. "Against the grain of this [U.S. cultural] optimism, I would argue that melancholia sometimes leads to insights and ways of thinking not accessible to joy, and that poetry especially is richer when the voices of melancholy are not shouted down by the voices of optimism," writes James Pate. We're in! Pate notes, in fact, that many Latin American poets are writing under Gerard de Nerval's black sun. (Julia Kristeva writes of the latter here--which became a book--if you're interested.) More:

2. What the Melancholic Sees

Tomorrow
they’ll dress me in ash for the sunrise,
they’ll fill my mouth with flowers.

— Alejandra Pizarnik, “Shadow from Days to Come” (trans. by Yvette Siegert)

Santiago Vizcaíno’s relentless Destruction in the Afternoon (Diálogos Books), beautifully translated by Alexis Levitin, is part of this tradition. The collection consists primarily of two long poems whose titles immediately tell us we are in a bleak, elemental space — “Hands in the Grave” and “Dark Water.” These long poems begin and end the book, but they are not long poems in the heroic, Whitman-ian sense. Rather, they are fragments, accumulations, as if the poet wrote each in a brief burst before sinking back into the silence so often mentioned in this book. Here, we are entirely in Dickinson’s “hour of lead,” a time of heaviness and density and enervation. In “Hands in the Grave,” Vizcaíno writes, “We are sunk in lethargy. / The monkeys stretch their limbs and there is a series / of sickly screams. // To react is as stupid as suicide.” As the last line suggests, there is no easy remedy for the despair of this vision — “to react” is stupid — and there might not be any remedy at all.

One of the essential motifs in this collection is life-in-death and death-in-life. The speaker appears to be inhabited by death. Or maybe the speaker is a figure who actually is dead but who continues going through the gestures of life, like a marionette that only seems alive. In section XIV of “Hands in the Grave,” the poet writes:

Sometimes
as if we were alive
we walk up to the wall,
a sad spectacle
of scarecrows in the sun.

And in section XXX of the same poem:

“You are a frightening mummy,” I tell myself.
You ought to dig a grave and bury yourself,
and take along your smell, your tongue.

The poet is simultaneously the corpse that must be buried, and the one to do the burying: the fact that the poet is talking to himself emphasizes this sense of doubling.

In several of the poems, an “other side” is referenced, an “other side” that is just beyond a wall. This other side could be the other side of life (death), or the other side of human perception, or related to both. But whatever this “other side” is, it stores a sort of vitalistic negativity. In the opening of “Hands in the Grave,” Vizcaíno tells us that on the other side there is “an enormous hungry blowfly, / a smiling bluish corpse…a hand that longs for an arm, / a stomach full of worms.” Hunger, smiling, longing: this other side might be outside the human conception of life, but it is not simply dead. This other side is shot through with elements we associate with life, with energy, even if what is being shot through (a corpse, an arm) is dead. (This undoing of an absolute opposition between “life/death” finds echoes in modern philosophy too, where writers such as Nietzsche and Kristeva have tried to have a more nuanced approach to the issue. Nietzsche: “Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.”)

Read more at Entropy.