Hello.
I didn't prepare anything to show you.
I thought I could just improvise, of course.
And so, but it's been really wonderful to hear all of you
and see how all these things are speaking to each other
as equals just as you do, Nietzsche said.
And what is missing from my perspective in this fantastic
association of the offness and the page is the space poetry.
And by poetry in space is--
I mean something that is not even an issue.
It's not a category, it's not known.
For example, I recently published a book
of which I was the co-editor of the Oxford
book of Latin American poetry and attempting
to see an indigenous view where poetry was always
simultaneously happening in space
as a collective experience, happening in sound,
happening as well in thread, happening as well in ceramics,
happening as well in infinite numbers of media.
And this has been going on for a long time.
For example, the quipu, the way of writing with cords.
It's probably older than writing as has been
developed in the Middle-East.
Did any one of you knew that?
No.
Did any one of you know?
You see, I don't get the verbs.
You see, this has never been really known.
It was only recently that a perfectly composed quipu being
5,000 years old was found, it's true.
And so the fact that the quipu is already
completely functional as a complex form
of a script 5,000 years ago--
it means it was further in time when it was developed.
Nevertheless, for example, even when
you come to writing, when you come to think of Maya writing,
the idea that is a Western idea that the writing is
against orality or that is superior to orality
has been really used as a weapon to destroy cultures
around the world.
Nevertheless, the Maya had an enlightened view
where orality was everything and writing was part of orality.
You have to wait until Marshall McLuhan comes
into Western culture and says orality
is the future because morality creates complexity
while writing creates linear thinking.
And so after the '60s, this amazing explosion
of interplay-- and I love your idea
of a love affair between the page and the screen
really begins to explode in the hands of everybody.
Now to give you, I was supposed to speak really
about my installation here.
But I cannot really speak about what I have been doing here
in Tucson or Tucson without telling you a little bit
of background.
I grew up in Chile, and I never knew
I was an Indian until a few years ago.
My mother didn't know that she was Indian either.
And this was something that was probably
a very good thing for us because as you may know,
most Indians don't want to know or don't want to be Indians
because to be Indian is to be despised, is to be an unperson.
But my mother tells the story that when I began to write,
I would speak always to my drawings.
So what I consider writing when I was maybe
three or four years old was a form
of song, a form of drawing.
And I also was reading at the same time.
So the relationship in space between the song, the sound,
the reading, and the line was somehow in my body
even before it was in my thought forms.
And what came to be my art is that as I grew up,
when I was about maybe 14, 15 years old,
I came upon the concept of Dada, the concept of art
as an action, of poetry as an action.
And I saw the works of Miro and of Picasso
done in the rocks in the beach.
So I saw how they were completely entranced
by what was called at the time at the late--
at the end of the 19th century and beginning
of the 20th century, primitive art.
Think of that name--
primitive.
What is primitive?
And in any case, when I saw all that, I saw myself.
I saw my way of being.
So my art began that way.
You will notice that I have never
included in any exhibition of artist books, of visual poetry.
I have never anywhere--
Rosa Alcalá was telling me a few minutes ago--
isn't it interesting that your poetry is not included because
it's not text based--
which meant is that I am working with time,
I'm working with the moment, I am working with the breath,
with the song, I am working with the threads.
And the idea that threads are a text
is embedded already in the brain.
For example, now with the incredible science
of neuroscience where you can go inside the shapes of the cells,
the shapes of the connections inside the cell,
they're calling them spinning, spinnets, because they spin.
So the brain communicates with itself
through a form of weaving.
So weaving is a cosmic event.
Weaving has always been part of life.
There's a student scientist called Humberto Maturana that
came up with the concept of life itself was autopoietic.
So when Johanna comes up with the concept of type of poiesis,
she's responding to this ancient idea that comes
to us expressed by the Greek.
But this Chilean man has converted it
into the way life organizes itself.
I don't know if Humberto Maturana knew
that another Chilean put before him in the '20s
wrote this fantastic line that poetry is life itself.
And this is experienced by people that universally
in Latin America, especially people that
are not so-called educated.
My first film was called, "What is Poetry to You?"
And you can now see it--
I don't remember if it's in YouTube or in email.
And what I did--
I went about with a microphone and with the camera in 1980
and I went about the streets of Bogota,
speaking to prostitutes, policemens, beggars,
all kinds of people.
And the way they speak about poetry--
when I show it here in the US, people
think that I gave them a script because they
speak of poetry as poetry being in life, as poetry being them,
as poetry--
For example, one man in passing, I
ask him, what is poetry to you.
And he says, continua.
That means it continues.
And I was very touched by Stacy Doris saying,
life's principle property is continuity.
Continuity in Latin means with thread.
So everything that's tenuous, that is delicate,
is also a thread, is the most delicate and fragile
and the strongest thing on Earth.
So now come to this song.
How many more minutes I have?
OK, very good.