Chejfec, a journey

I have before me -- tilted against the base of an adjustable stool that does double duty, from time to time, as my writing table -- the hardback of Sergio Chejfec’s Baroni A Journey (translated by Margaret Carson, published by Almost Island), a sparse and delicately barren telling of his encounters with three artists in Venezuela – Juan Andrade, Tomás Barazarte and, first among equals, Rafaela Baroni. Each makes painted wood carvings – sometimes devotional, sometimes not -- and Chejfec chronicles buying a number of their works, so he is present in the book not only as visitor, narrator, traveler, outsider, but as collector/customer/consumer as well. 

In its structure, the book emulates the way Baroni's carvings take shape from the grain and splits in the materials with which she works. Her life -- at once harsh and harmonious -- has merged with her artistic practice. And so, in addition to carving, Baroni also conducts psychic readings of people’s national ID cards and twice-yearly (re)enactments of her own death, which can perhaps be interpreted as performative commemorations of a number of prolonged death-experiences the artist had in life.

Chejfec's conversations with Baroni are mostly plodding, yet oddly sublime. Of one chat in her garden, he writes: “And yet again, I found myself once more in a situation of the sort that happens to me repeatedly, relating to different universes of things, the moment when an initially slight uninterest announces the impending occupation of my senses and I realize it's no longer possible to do anything to save myself, until I end up succumbing to confusion, in reality a disintegration of my sensibility.”

The book also touches on Chejfec’s feelings about the death of his telephone friend, the poet Juan Sánchez Peláez, whose body he viewed at a funeral home, laid out in a new safari jacket the dead man seems to have bought specifically for the occasion, and who wrote, in a poem Chejfec quotes, “I am dead and I live / alive and dead at once. / Without lamentation. / With an almost absurd patience/ I live / walled-up or hidden / free / dead.”

Chejfec also reflects on the death of some fighting cocks owned by a friend named Barreto (Chejfec identifies him solely by last name, but this may be the poet Igor Barreto), who breeds gamecocks but refuses to watch them fight. About those birds, Chejfec notes, Barreto has written, “In their cages, the birds scratch with human / curiosity at every detail.”

Chejfec's scratching curiosity extends to the afficionados around the cock pit, and particularly those who, unwilling to concede the reality of impending death, make what he calls the 'Bolivar' bet, wagering on a mortally wounded bird. “No one writes off the fighting cock that seems defeated,” he writes.

A Bolivar bet, of course, is a kind of mortuarial promise or lure and as such is an enigma, a gesture from the past that points to fulfillment or verification in the future -- and whether that anticipated fulfillment or verification will come is an open life-or-death question.

I have now finished the journey of the book – though not that other journey, for every time I read the last line of a text and put the volume down, I feel both ecstatic and depressed, not knowing if I'm at an end or a beginning or both. And in this indeterminate state, I consulted the electric oracle and learned that Rafaela Baroni died last month at age 85 (though El Universal mistakenly said 86), and that so far there have been no (re)enactments -- a verification and vindication of the power of her performances.

Chejfec’s voyage proceeds by accretion of detail and subtle shadings of thought across time and space. The book is a durational performance, demanding attention because of how imperceptible its movement is. In this, it exemplifies what Chejfec writes of a sloth climbing a tree: “it's not easy to keep your eyes on a sloth for an extended time span, because the slowness engraved a kind of weariness on its movements and this made the event seem of little importance. That's why you would turn your eyes someplace else, or would simply get distracted, and later when you'd look again the animal would still be in the same place, or at least that's what it would seem like, as if the intermission hadn't occurred.” This makes Baroni A Journey close to life, and, with its sloth-like cadence of immobility, to death as well, which, contra-Wittgenstein, Baroni's art made part of life.

As Chejfec puts it, “each thing is a kind of signal; an anchor, even an albatross, but also a promise owed by the past.”

 

An Inadvertent Truth

At the start of April last year, we inhabitants of planet earth discovered that we had accidentally done something revelatory. It began early in the the month, when residents of India’s capital, Delhi, realized that they could see the vibrant colors of their city, hues that had long been obscured in a foul fog of pollution. A few days later, the same thing happened in Bangkok. Previously, it was difficult to even see to the end of your block in the Thai capital – but the pall mysteriously lifted and the entire city came into focus. By the middle of the month, the change had come to Brooklyn. I remember it well. The planets and stars seemed to defy the bright lights of the big city as they packed the night sky. My partner, who’s from Switzerland, said it was the first time that the city’s air reminded her of the alpine currents of her childhood.

 

 

For the next couple of weeks, I woke early and traipsed the chastened city. My sadness after another dark night of sirens and ambulances was gradually transformed as I came upon mockingbirds that sang without competition from backfiring trucks, massive schools of fish that were somehow thriving in the polluted waters of Newtown Creek

(and the handful of cormorants that were happily diving for a free feed), a raccoon crossing the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge, a goose and gander who were rearing their 11 goslings in an industrial and commercial zone between Brooklyn and Queens. And all of this under amazingly azure skies.

This sudden sharp break in global pollution and congestion was completely unplanned, a result of the global slowdown that attended the lockdown of the planet necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. A study by scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration confirmed it: on average, the global lockdowns due to COVID-19 reduced nitrogen dioxide emissions – which occur principally from internal combustion engines – in 50 of the 61 cities the agency tracks by 20-50%. Here in New York, NO₂ levels dropped by 45 percent. The impact was so intense that average temperatures on the globe rose last year -- not due to global warming but because there was less pollution to obscure the sun.

The pandemic has already killed 2.8 million people around the world and caused tens of millions more to suffer. The lockdowns also led to severe economic hardship, and this continues to this day.

But last April also proved that we residents of earth can make strides against a different killer. A joint US and UK study published earlier this year in the journal Environmental Research concluded that the pollution from burning fossil fuels is responsible for almost one of every five deaths on the planet and killed more than 8 million people in 2018.

We can do something about that ghastly number. For a few weeks last year, it was as if the Green New Deal was the new global norm, and the future, despite the awful toll of the virus, looked brighter and bluer than it has in many decades. Now, as more people get vaccinated and much of the world moves to reopen in 2021, let us not forget the moment a year ago when we got a glimpse of a world without air pollution.

Let’s start by making April an annual month of global repair. Let us dedicate the full 30 days to a reckoning – an ecological and social accounting, during which we do all we can to regulate emissions, to cut back traffic, to massively increase our efforts to clean up our all-too-trashed planet and to make ours a more just, equitable and fair world. Let us create a planetary scorecard to show our progress in repairing the harms we have created. Let us make April a month of repair, as we take stock of this increasingly bare and ruined rock we call home and the rat-race morals of the system we live by.

Change is possible. We have seen it. With cooperation, coordination and determination, we can end air pollution. We can stop millions of people from dying early due to noxious emissions. We can help save the planet from global warming.