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The Messianic view of an Andean writer: On Gamaliel Churata (Arequipa, 1897-

Lima,1969) from the Titikaka 1

(Non-published draft)

By Maya Aguiluz- Ibargüen CEIICH - UNAM

www.ceiich.unam.mx

Abstract Big attention has deserved the role of writers as prima voice in the formation of a modern public sphere. As part of the intellectual field, writers have built their images as a reflexive and reflective point of reference about what is relevant in the cultural and political life. They conserve in a new featured way, the figure of the philosopher or the intellectual, whose birds'eyes view was transformed in models to build cities and nations. However, there were always writers as strangers, who were most of the time playing a different role in their societies. They embodied an stranger, who was in and out, sometimes as outsiders, other times as men and women without place, extraterritorial bodies in the midst of cultural and political battles. This article focuses on an Andean journalist and writer of the 50's in the past twentieth century, whose name Arturo Peralta was displaced by his pseudonym Gamaliel Churata (Arequipa, 1897- Lima,1969). This article tries to show how Churata view was rooted in the Qhechuan and Aymaran cultures and how this writer understood an Andean way to share the social space of living.

1. The requirement of the gift in the work of Gamaliel Churata In 1987, the second edition of El Pez de Oro (Churata, 1987) (here and after cited as

The Golden Fish)2 appeared under the seal of the Puneño Institute of Culture, whose

work was published in 1957 during the life of the writer and journalist Arturo

Peralta, Gamaliel Churata (a pseudonym that hybridizes Christian imagery of a

Gamaliel with Quechua-Aymara descent, with "Churata" meaning "he who gives,

donates, or delivers"). This work of 408 printed pages, spanning 11 chapters, is

subtitled "Laykhakuy’s Altarpieces" [magical altarpieces, of Laykha-witch, or

warlock paths] (emphasis revealed by Huaman, 1994), and simply from this

subtitle they derive the generous character of a book made, in the words of Luis E.

1 This article is an English translation from "Espacio para una mística de lo común ¿Churata en perspectiva barroca?", published as a part of the collective book Encrucijadas estético-políticas en el espacio andino. [Aesthetic-political crossroads in the Andean Region], edited by Aguiluz-Ibarguen (2009). 2 Even though the book El pez de Oro is not already translated into English, I rather to cite it alternatively as The Golden Fish.

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Valcárcel, for those who have made "the preliminary novitiate of the Andeanism

mystic." (Valcárcel, 1987: 13)3

No further proof is required to declare that this book has broken out this exclusive

limit, even the grade of "esoteric".4 It is not enough to say that there are several

ways and channels of understanding the indigenous culture and politics in the

Andes; my intention in moving forward is to show a journey of significance,

beginning with an inspection of the centrality of this work and attempt to suggest

in this journey a change in the gift of Churata.

El pez de oro (The Golden Fish) belongs largely to that field of "indigenous textuality"

if we consider the author's stated intention: to give an account of the Quechua-

Aymaran cosmology. But as a complex narrative it adjusts itself to what Edward

Said recognized as the discontinuous process of Beginnings (1985): a subject begins,

follows and is followed, in an elusive text, which makes him/her strange and

identifies in the presence of new situations and events. The subjectivity alluded by

this subject responds to a movement more so than to a point, therefore, it is said to

be a polyphonic subject,5 interlaced, by voices that overlap or hide, or negotiate, one

with the other. (Mazzotti, 1996: 333)

3 In 1987, Luis E.Valcárcel dedicated forty entries to preface the book and replicate in each of them the trascendental claim of Churata: "The true American aesthetic ability is to make America an Indian world ...." (Valcárcel, 1987: 9) 4 There is a new critical edition of El pez de oro, which was cared by Helena Usandizaga, of the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, and was published by Cátedra Publishers (Madrid), 2012. 5 For the definition of "coralidad"("choralness") or polyphony in Andean text, the definition of José Antonio Mazzotti seems more than appropriate: written with several affiliations, with multiple levels of discourse (1996: 326). In the epilogue to his book about the Coralidad mestiza and the reporter Garcilaso de la Vega, Mazzoti offers an approach which is also recognized as a baroque subject: he talks about the subject of the writing (the Inca) as an identity situated in a plane of emergencies and simultaneous constitutions, which is what happened with Los Comentarios Reales. This subject comprehends scattered series of compositions: the author, narrator, singer or the historian (Mazzotti, 1996: 328). It would be an interesting analogy with Churata, who among the journalist, cultural promoter, writer of public speeches and writer could approve his texts with a sustained accuracy about the base of his familiarity with the referents to which it was concerned (though he was indifferent to the claims of factual evidence of other discourses of truth).

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For its polyphonic assembly, The Golden Fish has been reviewed from semiotic

analysis of the Andean myth (Bosshard, 2007), as well as from interpretations in

which the cosmological intertextuality hints at the potential significance of

epistemological positions in the discourse of Churata (Uzandizaga, 2009, and

2005). On the other hand, the Churatian connection with the ground of the Latin

American aesthetic and political vanguards, from the beginning of the early last

century, since a very first cultural circle of Churata was putting together with his

two brothers, in Puno, and has impacted this region as the Grupo Orkopata and

through in the famous Boletin Titikaka (this bulletin was published between 1926-

1930) (See Vich, 2000, Zevallos-Aguilar, 2002). The saga of works in the literary

studies in the Andean region refer to the connections of a young Arturo Peralta

with the cultural program of José Carlos Mariátegui (Melgar Bao, 2009), to the first

inclusions in literary criticism by Cornejo Polar (1989), by the hand of seminal

works like those of David Wise (1983) and of Miguel Angel Huamán (1994),

passing by the brief appearance of the indigenous writer and poet of the Puno

vanguards within the classic on Latin American vanguards from 1991: Vanguardias

latinoamericanas. Textos programáticos y críticos (Schwarz, 2002), until reaching the

circle of new interpretations once this decade was set on track, with the works of

Cynthia Vich, (2000) and J. Ulises Zevallos-Aguilar, 2002, among others.

There would be so many descriptions for El Pez de Oro (The Golden Fish) that I

preferred to call it an atopic work, which resists its permanence in an authorized

space. It is also a product of what has been set up as its own tradition, Latin

American baroque, with a philosophical core limited to authors such as Leibniz,

Eckhart, or the vitalism of Bergson. It is a space of roads, alleyways, shortcuts to

the whole, the cosmos; along those mystic paths crossroads of the living and the

dead6, incarnations and divinities, as it has been seen in this book, and in a few

6 Churata resizes the relations between the living and the dead. Through a speculative procedure, of an almost existentialist stamp, it abounds first in death, as an absolute fact. And it perceives this in the Epicurean manner as that Other absolute, of which we know nothing. Because death does not

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examples of contemporary postchuratian Peruvian literature (such as Oscar

Colchado’s narrative, particularly his Rosa Cuchillo7). El Pez de Oro (The Golden Fish)

is a representation of a group of living and deceased beings, the living-dead,

hybrids and gods, philosophers and absent friends, a fictional world where they

exist, learn and act. In that capacity (representational and inventive) The Golden

Fish is not referring to real reality, it is better to say that "the uniqueness" of this

fictional and paradoxical narrative is that it does not purport to establish factual

truth (Meyer-Minnermann, 2004: 49).

Helping me on these trips of cultural and literary analysis, I followed the core of

speculative discourse, quasi-philosophical, of Churata, that is a fragmentary one as

we can notice from his work -and some articles and essays. The main objective is to

uncover a reflective pattern of memory and a rational pretension of memory in the

categorical usage (Churata thought in significant categories such as mnemonics).

This is the site of the changing meaning of the gift in "Churata": the gift, which is

giving without expecting repayment even of his last name, coexists with the

intentionality of his discourse: to be read as a donation (donation understood as

that which exceeds and complicates the free act of an individual who gives in a

gratuitous act), since the gift of Churata, and not in a figurative sense, has to do

exist (“because if it existed, we would cease to exist ipso facto”—so Churata endorsed the axiom of Epicurus—and concluded that Death is a dimension of life characterized because death is not, because we don't know about it; then to it in such a differentiated dimension, we call it “the unknowable.” 7 Many critics refers to Oscar Colchado’s narrative, particularly his Rosa Cuchillo. An analysis of Rosa Cuchillo, framed in the literature of the internal Peruvian war of the decade 1980, indicates its place as a narrative made from the collective indigenous voice that, in a manner similar to Churata, supports its structure in the Indian mythologies even though the literary piece supposes the disappearing of the other world (mestizo, misti). As Miguel Gutiérrez asserts in Colchado “the legends where gods and men live together: Rosa Cuchillo—the character—is in reality the goddess Cavillaca that conceived Liborio, more or less the hero of the story (ontologically he would be a demigod), in his council with the mountain god (¿un apu?, ¿un auki?, ¿un wamani? Pedro Orcco)”, but he also champions for an Indigenous utopia that conceives itself in “a restoration of the ancient world, not a revolution but rather an unleashing of a new 'pachacuti' ('...Once the natives in the government—says Liborio cited by Gutiérrez—would rescue our customs, our language, our Pachamama, the jirkas, the Lightning god, and who knows, the Sun god.')” ( Gutiérrez, 2007: 15).

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with the word that can be given, with the force of the delivery of discourse

anchored in the force of human life. In this sense we can think that the

transcendent statement by Churata: "to make of America… an Indian world…"

(Valcárcel, 1987: 9) called for the transcendence of that fellow man, denied (and

hidden), in which Churata, the writer and intellectual, recognized the power of

"talking the talk" , (with the multiple richness of the Same, which is not identical,

insistedBlanchot,1990:95).

2) The other reason for Churata: thinking is remembering

I have hinted how reflection on Churata is midway between the speculative and

the philosophical, and I have tried to indicate that notwithstanding his features of

discourse filled with allegories and symbolization (fictional and paradoxical

narrative), he allows an ethical and humanist reading (it is talking the talk, a

discourse committed to another: the Indian world) that deals with the Quechua-

Aymaran terminology that, for Churata, was a synthesis of anamnetic reason:

reason that recalls the memory of the others.8

I pause in my speech on the keys of reading this ethical discourse of memory. First

I review within the tradition of mythical history to which Churata would be

limited, there I concern myself mainly with the writer’s aesthetic and political

readability, due to the fact that "his aesthetic did not have to do with forms but

with forces"(Deleuze): germination, life, transcendence, truth, and so on. Due to

8 I have considered this one of Churata's main contributions since the dialogical constitution of his discourse. The concept of this other-reason comes from the reflections of the theologian Johann Baptist Metz, who on the philosophical debate on critical reason in confrontation with the modern instrumental rationality, occupying itself by a tradition in which would appear thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Ernest Bloch, Emmanuel Levinas and in which they would talk about “concepts” of different languages. It is tradition that rescues the notion that “thinking is remembering” and “that in the indivisible reason it has a deeply anamnetical structure.” (Metz, 1999: 75) [ New Latin, from Greek, anamnēsis: to remember; a recalling to mind. See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Anamnesis].

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limitations of time and space I will refer only to the importance of the concepts of

event and pachakuti. 9

We all know the long discussion started in the late 1970s on the Andean

contribution to contingency in history. This conception, eventually founded in the

catastrophist sense of human events, owes its epistemic reach, in large part, to the

thesis of pachakuti: the principle of alternation and reinvestment of all the worlds

that have remained backward. The theoretical production and practice in this

regard has greatly abounded, and therefore I only mention how in Churatian

writing, while not worrying about an extra-literary horizon, this term pachakuti

shifts to the aesthetic dimension when he himself is involved in separating the

understanding of past and present societies. Churata's discourse is always

"drawing distinctions" as it does one observer of second order (who is reflecting on

an knowledge object or as a historian who after that time points to a future). In

same way as it has been done in the social reflections of the Andean region, the

conception of pachakuti points to a story in formation (protohistory), to "the social

to come." The term is also visual and spatial, as well as pointing out the forces in

conflict and a social birth (a new beginning), because of a pachakuti is conceived

like a movement of forces, aesthetic and political ones. I mean in other words, that

if it would be possible to look at it its image would correspond to a social space

with irregularities and eruptions. The envisioned society, then, is a construct of

what really happens: a "distribution of the sensible" (Rancière, 2003: 18): each share of

land, each territorialization, every place in the social space is concerned with,

eventually, being, which is to say, contingent being in common.10

Moving forward I will stop at some parts of El Pez de Oro (The Golden Fish) and

other texts in which recognize social memory devices identified by Churata. These

9 When European colonization started, it also has began a pachakuti, a cataclysm, "the world upside down", from Andean worldview. Nevertheless, this word is part of a whole worldview and its related to the time-space sense of the world. 10 A distribution of the sensible for Jacques Rancière is explained in terms of divisions between spaces, times and activities . See the English edition, Rancière, 2004: 7-46.

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devices for the writer consist of the relations with the dimension after death. And

to conclude this presentation I will give a brief description of Churata’s political

expression that consisted of a mysticism turned to the formation of that

community's social world.

3) Paths of memory in Churata A feature of the memory in Churata is in the El Pez de Oro (The Golden Fish)...

Laykhakuy’s Altarpieces, especially in the materiality referred to in the box itself. It

seems that the altarpieces in his external dimension are linked to symbolic

substitutions present in the iconographic tradition of the viceroyalty and the

colonial art in the area situated between Cuzco and the highlands, around Lake

Titicaca, known as "angelic worship" and altarpiece art, rightly so.11 The iconography

and Indian myths in the art, studied by the Bolivian historian Teresa Gisbert account

for some substitutions that took place in the short period of a century, during which

"the Christian God concealed the Sun (Inca), the same which before had replaced

the figure of Viracocha (Wiraqucha)" which demonstrates the logic of the

conquistador over the vanquished, in a process that invaded the mental categories,

collective and unconscious, of the populations (Bouyesse and Harris, 1987: 11). In

other words, the altarpieces have pleats: they are the superpositions of certain

domains over old kingdoms, yet the folds are together.

On the other hand, the altarpieces are paths, and these more so than leading

anywhere are liminary spaces, par excellence. They give rise to traffic, as well as all

sorts of contingencies. They are spaces for crossroads for the living of different

species, like the dead. In Churata, as in the Andean vision, in the crossroads of

11 Each altarpiece corresponds to a chapter of The Golden Fish, corresponding to the small crafted altars of and to the Andean imagery that reappropriates the European tradition of the religious triptych, as well as because it is a product made at the request of its future user, and finally as a symbolic text in which it repeats the interpretations of the chroniclers, in particular that of Joan Santacruz Pachacuti (Huamán, 1994: 53 and 54).

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paths, different species of living, the dead and the supernatural find themselves

and make contacts.

The same can be said, if we affirm that for Churata, as in the mysticism of the

master Eckhart, German theologian of the fourteenth century12 (who finds himself

within the limits of our author’s recurrent European authors), that death is not the

end of life, but the "state in which life is made to proceed, the body of a immobile

and unchanging essence", of which is exposed in the "Sentencia CXXV" of El Pez de

Oro (The Golden Fish)… (Churata, 1987: 94).

Although El Pez de Oro (The Golden Fish), has been linked to ritual and practice of

tinku (to the Andean sense of complementarity) (including that this has been

identified as the depositary of the Churatian writing genre (Huaman, 1994: 64), it

seems important to me, rather than delving into an investigation of anthropology

and semiotics, to retrieve the analysis in literary studies as a structure of chapters

in El Pez de Oro (The Golden Fish), which refers to the position of tangible beings,

places and things according to the male/female axes. In the narrative course of this

book, all of them (beings, places and things) are understood as presences that

actually belong to specific periods in time and the beings and things are

understood as topographies: they possess concrete locations in space (Bouyesse,

Casagne and Harris, 1987: 14).

This Andean space-time conception occurs on the paths. These, owing to the traffic

and, at the same time, converted into borders, would correspond to the spaces of

the common. Only in them can there be a convergence of the non-human, animals,

the "evil ones", and also "the souls of the dead" bidding farewell (Spedding, 1996:

256). For this very reason, they are contingent, along them anything can happen.

12 Johanes Eckhart the teacher of amalgamation of mystical experience from the scholastic, Arab, Neoplatonic and Greek traditions, conceived the path of union of the individual soul with God. And God is fully internalized and present in all particular things. The mystical theology of the master Eckhart in the early fourteenth century gained currency among some Marxists of the twentieth century. Sermones and Sobre el apego, el libro de las consolaciones are some of his titles.

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In any case, the contingency is based on the weight of the here and now: while the

encounter with others can be at random, the same not always occur on the road

because of the coexistence with tutelary and protective beings (from the ahayu, soul

or spirit) as with the souls of the old–aukis in keschwa, souls of the old, which for

the Aymara, the achachilas13–or with the presence of the dead.

In my opinion, the roads with great ascendance in the ethical modality of life

(coexistence as obligation to others), are aimed for the passage of the dead, as well

as a loss of feeling. In this way, when in the altarpiece "Pure Walk" (1987: 211-258),

Churata refers to a certainty, in which Teresa de Jesus and the ancient Inca

coincided, which says:

"we all take the living to the dead, that the dead may live" (1987: 212). Both the body of the mystic and the law of the extraearthly world affirm the

passage of the dead:

"Who was drawed away will be knowed by his/her ghost, and who is living because of the deads and ghosts are haunting around. I hear the sound of autumn forest breezes shaking: Saj, saj, saj, saj… The whining ivory I hear from the paths of the Chullpa-tullu; I hear that the road in me walks. The infinite path? And in you?" (1987: 223) (“ …. Al que muere ha de conocérsele porque anda; y al que vive porque le andan muertos. Oigo rumor de brisas sacudiendo bosque otoñal; oigo ágrias, crujen las choquezuelas: Saj, saj, saj, saj… El quejumbroso marfil oigo de los caminos de la Chullpa-tullu; oigo que el camino en mí camina ¿El infinito camino? ¿Y en tí?", 1987: 223)

The dead that walk, leave no trace of their passage in the world of the living. One

cannot detect them in the manner that a crouching hunter detects the footsteps of

their future prey. The passage of the dead upon the earth is clear. "Small

13 In the introduction to this book, there is reference to the story glossed with the meanings of the

aukis – "in keschwa" they were the same as the achachilas in Aymara (the tutelary souls of the old, or the dead, the good spirits that inhabit the hills, see Boletín Tititkaka, number XXX, May 1929 (Callo, ed., 2004).

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perceptions" state their presence among the living, as if he could "see" the dead by

the dust raised in its path: they are "figures without object" (Deleuze, 1989: 122).

Real imaginary for Churata is one which includes the sense of 'here and now'

since for him it is necessary a present time of listening. The sonority of the current

consists in an unintelligible sound: the rustle of leaves in an "autumn forest." The

older sounds, those that produce a groan of wo!..., coincide with the

onomatopoeias, "saj, saj, saj." It is an articulation of sounds and silences, the only

linkage that buries certain sounds in oblivion in the predominantly written

cultures (where they joined the world of language things, and they did not feel the

absences, for example).

But leaving aside this Baroque sonority, to put it in some way, the truth is that this

is a call to socially constituted present hearing. Listening, as a hermeneutical

category also in Churata, is unrelated to a magical horizon but rather to the

approach toward the world that the word try to make it –in our case, toward the

world of the dead. As one reflection affirmed:

"The word approaches the thing imitating its form", but the imitation (mimicry,

mimesis) fails when the human language names a variety of languages, then the

affinity between what is heard and the material movement, the same as "the

relationship between word and thing", remains in a kind of waiting, a reservoir of

pure language, which only arises to be put together in writing (Santoveña, 2004:

78).

In a clear allegorical appeal death is situated as the limiting event from which

social norms are derived, some of them worthy of ethical evaluation. I want to

take up two cases in which death as a limit, in the Heideggerian sense of "being for

death", was inserted in the discoursive logic of Churata, intended for men and

women walking about, citizens of the street.

The 'Churata journalist' is also used to designate the allegorical action and a set of

social norms or critical situations such as the market speculation during the radical

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time of "the revolution of 52". Among his regular columns in La Paz newspapers

circulated a series of notes in 1955, on the dates prior to "all saints day," the first

day of November, and were prepared according to the rituals for the dead that are

linked with "strong times" of the agricultural cycle. Let's see how the dead entered

the world of the living:

a. In one of these texts entitled "Are the dead in our hearts?" which

appeared in the column signed with the nickname of "Man of the street" in La

Nación (Churata: 1955a)14 Churata thought worthwhile an Eastern story to give a

glimpse into a morality of everyday life. It was said there that a beautiful young

woman lost no opportunity to swear to the philosopher Mi-Tal, that she would

never replace him if he died before her. Given this promise of sacrifice, the old

husband asked if she would keep his memory in mourning for no longer than the

time that it would take for the soil of his grave to dry. Following the fatal incident,

and followed by an unfulfilled promise by the woman, Churata contrasts the

contrary behavior of a disciple who opted for remembering while forgetting appears as

a violation of the pact between the living.

b. On the other hand, Churata thought that in social life one decides how

to live in the present with respect to the established relationship between life and

death. It is a threshold that forces a way of being: "... the dead break the veil of our

ignorances, sad and ridiculous, and because of them part of the knowledge of what

we call death is only a way of life, not corresponding to the duty of living in

fullness "(Churata: 1955b).

4) Mystic experience in Churata

Following one of the analyses done on El Pez de Oro (The Golden Fish), on the

Andean cosmogony, the entities symbolized by the feminine and masculine are

14 I appreciate the recovery of articles about "the dead" published in 1955 by Churata to the research has done by Arturo Vilchis-Cedillo, who is also author of a work on Arturo Peralta, the true name of Gamaliel Churata (Vilchis-Cedillo , 2008).

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aligned; on one hand the sun, the grandfather, the earth, the man placed in front of

their females, moon, grandmother, lagoon and women united by the omnipresent

figure of the golden fish (represented above, with the rain god, Wiracocha15, and

below by the Colocopata), concluding that this being bases and displaces itself in each

part and event of the book.

We could conclude in confluence with the analysis that " El Pez de Oro (The Golden

Fish)—symbol, character, subject, thing—is likewise in the whole work progeny of

the Puma and the Lagoon, synthesis of hanan (upper) and urin (lower), light and

darkness, day and night" (Huaman, 1994: 54, 59 and 77: sub added). The golden fish

is an entity that moves nearby, presenting itself in any of the events of the world, and at

the same time it is far away, as absolute fulfillment.

This mystical path, if it has not made invisible the political and ethical stance of

Churata, given that he made use of self-identifications to take a position in the

intellectual field, emerges as a part "incompatible" with other aspects that have

been studied on his work.

For the treatment of mysticism, which is split into several aspects, I will refer to the

resonances of the master Ekchart, and to the reflection that Ernesto Laclau made in

connection with “Los nombres de Dios”( "The names of God", as he has entitled his

essay), devoted mainly to re-enrolling in politics and ethics the norms of mysticism

(See Laclau, 2000).

For the mystic the experience of the transcendent totality follows a negative way.

Whatever the name, in the case of religious mysticism or not: God / the totality is

not attainable, unmoved, unintelligible, not petty, no imagination .... and so it

continues. Ultimately, the transcendens is ineffable and the negations distorting the

language: it is stripped of its representational function.

With the distortion of language, it is emphasized that something, the totality or the

uniqueness of God or, from Kant in "sublime" as that dimension with which the

15 The multifaceted god, of which Junupa is a version, divinity in the Sun Door in Tiawanacu is located along side Lake Titicaca.

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human being finds expression in silence, since it is not only ineffable but rather

slides to the side of the unrepresentable, "...it is beyond all representation" (Laclau,

2000: 104). Not being able to contribute to that which transcends all possible

content, this extreme limit is at issue only in one of two alternatives: either to adopt

the rational course "there is nothing .... That cannot result in a representational

content ...", or it is taken to the field of experience" (Laclau, 2000: 118).

Let us ask ourselves as Churata: what happens with the Andean experience of

death, better it is to say the Indigenous present coexistence that would make the

theologian Eckhart ask (in his appearance in a dialogue, "Paralipómeno Orko-pata" in

his "Sentencia CXXXIV" from the chapter El Pez de Oro (The Golden Fish) from the

book of the same name).

While asking about the abode of the dead (where they are), would provoke what

the Bolivian sociologist Cecilia Salazar have cited "the creole-mestizo rhetoric", and

what Churata here describes as the immediate response of silence to be followed

by "a century of parliamentary logorragia" (which differs from the voice of Marx,

because Marxism does not respond to the place of the dead, without their

authority over the living).By far, the question on the abode of the dead finds the

third space in Andean culture:

What do you look for in your dead Indians? Eckhart asks - The Indian answered him: I look for my living Indians And what about the ancient Indians? I look for the new (Churata, 1987: 101) (¿Qué buscas en tus indios muertos? —pregunta Eckhart— El indio le respondería: busco a mis indios vivos ¿Y qué en estos indios antiguos? Busco a los nuevos) (Churata, 1987: 101)

From mystic sources, the experience appears in Churata as a double dimension

possible of social coexistence. On the one hand, there is indication that the

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possibility of coexistence in the present depends on a horizon of memory (which is

not necessarily a shared memory as a culture of public memory, a common

recognition of different representations of the past). On the other, it is more them

telling that in the words of Churata the existence of the being-now means being with

that which was (Churata, 1987: 101):

It is about a primal spatial experience, the attachment to the place with the ancient

past, and the individual dead, it is a way of being in the commonplace, it is not

embraced by the revenge of the oppressed, but by the possible reciprocity that

constitutes identity from the internal turmoil, which comes from "being moved by

others"—which in that sense employs Levinas—and refers to an experience of a

self-surrender (in the religious aesthetic experience that pragmatists like William

James linked with a self-surrender16 and that in Germany would be expressed in the

notion of Ergriffesein, an experience that is found in acts of love, compassion,

collective euphoria (see Joas, 2005: 226) that belongs to very special acts of

affectation.

The experience of Churata condenses itself in that of pain:

"The dead hurts us—he says—because we hurt them there where they hurt us", in life. And if it hurts in American the Indian will be the cause, "because only the Indian is alive" (1987: 101).

I am not sure about going around the person of Churata from the perspective of

fixed mysticism, when it is not introduced, but rather about his sense of experience

of being exposed, that if found in acts of love, compassion and religious

attachment, it is also found in the aesthetic experience, in collective euphoria, in 16 It is interesting to note that the Bolivian critic Carlos Medinaceli, when reflecting on Bolivian literature under the frame of Nietzschean thought, stopped at the kind of dazzling possessive experience of the vision of the spirit of Zarathustra “to say it in the language of cábala.” The mystical experience was therefore recognized by Medinaceli in this philosophical tradition as aesthetic experiences around a "ring of fire" and that the artist's personality was transfused. It was an “'objectification of the subjective,' which the German aesthetics designated by an untranslatable term Einfühlug" (Medina, 1975: 136). He meant the word spread by the aesthetic theory of Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, the work published in 1908 which has been translated into Spanish as Abstraccion y naturaleza (1997). Worringer's book was instrumental in subsequent art movements, including German Expressionism, and is recognized as a contribution to the problem of phenomenological empathy.

15

the multitude (Spinoza), and fundamentally in the creation involved in working

and in the actio.

One more comment, as a preamble to conclusion, on the relationship already

indicated between the distortion of language and meaning of the concept of event:

We remember that event (historically speaking) is always "an effect, perfect and

beautifully produced by bodies that collide, mix or separate", according to the

famous idea that inspired in Foucault, in 1970, the essay Repetition and Difference by

Gilles Deleuze (1995 [1968]). This "effect" -as we must understand- no longer

belongs to the distribution and order of bodies, because strictly speaking the

effectuation of events does not entail a necessary outlet to order. An event, as was

thought in the Andes, is social creation (political of course, and aesthetic), for

creating "brings about the event", and here again we should make one addition: the

creation should not be confused with the Christian meaning of creation ex nihilo,

otherwise we might think of a holistic understanding of the creation and recreation

of mankind on earth (concrete matter), integrated in the cosmos.

On the other hand, in the event with meaning, not only is work involved, the

termination or manufacture of our action-like actio,17 but every single word, in the

infinitive, that indicates how to do "the present", and how to say and see each

"event" that opens this time. Let us dwell a bit on this challenge, and think of a

sequence, of verbs which come in the events, (Foucault, 1995: 20): infinitives like

"to live" " to die" "to defeat" "to enjoy" "to weave " "to create " ... It is about

repetitions of language, but which no longer appear as reiterations of the same:

they do not consist of a movement of similarities that lead to identity (to the same),

but differences that constitute not only the diverse meanings of partition

17 The deeper meaning of actio refers to performatio if it is understood within the voice to the actions that caused to happen, those occurrences and events, before others. In the performative tradition there converges various conceptions of the subject and identity, but here actio summarizes the interpretation from Cicero that used to refer to the "language of the body,” the drama co-founded in the strength of voice, eloquence and physical performance that make the events happen in the eyes of another (Ribeiro Barbosa, and Alexandre, 2005: 229).

16

("partage"), of distribution of the place which is here. It also warns us that the

unstoppable creation in the social future depends on the verb placed in front, the

"displaced point" is named with today’s word, the verb to create and to live

opening differentially that "(multiple) eternity of the present" (Foucault 1995: 19).

One way to conclude We have tried to introduce ourselves by way of the mystic opening not to the

horizon of beliefs and religiosity, nor to the aesthetic postures inspired in an

abstract art movement at the same time challenging the rationalization of sight.

That from Churata which motivate us concerning the fact that we could link a

thought with memory in our interpretation is related to a kind of update of the

Andean traditions, of both the pre-Inca, as well as the worship of the dead of the

great space "Aymara",—visible in the highland buildings of the "chullpas" (the

tombs built in the form of turrets)—as the Christian-pagan syncretisms that have

been studied in art history within the "Bolivian Baroque. In the seventeenth

century, death was an enigma and destiny, pathway to punishment or to paradise,

but it also constituted a self-understanding of the fragility of the being and in the

Andean America the concept of death became the "polyhedron of many-sides"

(Gisbert, 2001: 206), which were also the faces of the "living dead" with which they

chatted and coexisted in indigenous cultures.

Churata speaks of this to refer to the survival of the worship of the dead that

restores the balance of the cosmos in Aymaran and Quechuan zones and

articulates itself with the scope of the practices of memorialization of the losses of

the social group, with the co-existence of the worlds and with a foundational part

of social life, such as defining and updating the threshold of life and death. It is

true that death is the founding moment of culture, in this regard it is considered as

the opening of language and symbolization However we have insisted on the

Churatian addition to the subject, and that falls on the social relations that are

negotiated under that threshold. It is then a mystical modality of thinking with

17

memory,18 a modern political mysticism. An attitude geared toward the kind of

predicaments that affect social life today.

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