20 Sep, 2024
In the process of making my essays presentable for this archive, I haven't yet felt the need to defend any of them. Especially the ones from within the last year. I feel like they're mostly pretty good. But this ten pager spanning twenty years of Bolaño poetry is, perhaps not shockingly, messy. One might say "led by the hand of a manic depressive." Reading his work, I felt like someone had finally, reaching across a space-time language barrier, given me permission to go there. Maybe I should have stuck to just The Detectives suite, and maybe I should have tried to reign in my thesis a little more before I turned this in as a mid-term paper freshman year. I think I got a B+. I also think that there's a sharp, intact, emotional core to this piece that comes from a really special time in your life, and it still makes me cry, for some reason. This is how we felt, I think, and this is how I still feel. I hope you feel that.
Roberto Bolaño’s poetry collected in The Romantic Dogs forms a nonlinear, kaleidoscopic odyssey. From twenty years old to looking back at his life in the rearview, its centerpiece, a tortured run of detective stories, paints a portrait of a man lost in his own world. Bolaño sees guys like him, detectives, barefoot boys, dogs, stumbling in after a great mystery. Or a collective dream. Grasping at what isn’t there, it runs through his fingers.
The Dirty, Poorly Dressed narrator’s soul came upon his heart. At the start of the poem he says so. Following the poet’s journey’s gotten him beaten down and shattered, scared and doubting himself, it’s looking bad. From the familiar Mexico City of the Romantic Dogs, he slips into a swirling, parallel reality within a reality of detectives in Los Ángeles. A fantasized world out of a movie or writing where he can see his path play out, and he’s looking for something there. He crosses over deeper into his own world when he has to, close to home. “Only fever and poetry provoke visions. Only love and memory.” (Bolaño, Dirty, Poorly Dressed.) “The black and white trip of forties and fifties films. Pedro Infante and Tony Aguilar dressed like police traveling through the infinite Mexican dusk on their motorbikes.” (Bolaño, Visit to the Convalescent.) In Visit to the Convalescent, a dying friend is a movie. Freezing to death in Mexico City, the narrator becomes a detective in Bolaño’s hometown, Los Ángeles, Bio Bio. With his heart and soul aligned, he’ll travel into his depths and come out thawed, God willing.
The Detectives describes a dream, picking right up from the end of Dirty, Poorly Dressed. The dreamer dreams of detectives lost in the city and desperate to resolve a brutal case. One returns to take in the bloody crime scene and smokes. In between what happens are hazy, urban vignettes: They watch the glowing footprints of serpentine trains, paintings are judged, and the nighttime of the dream won’t let up. The big moment is as in the worst nightmares, a bedroom caked with blood. Someone going nowhere fast. The poem is an establishing shot, wearily accepted. Then The Lost Detectives continues, texture, abstraction, action. Detectives at the theater, cafes, and parks. Someone screaming in the city, lost detectives still moaning as before. This poem’s trick is the first person’s perspective mixing in with the bloody detective’s.
Return to the scene of the crime
Tranquil and alone
As in the worst nightmares,
I saw him sit on the floor and smoke
In a bedroom caked with blood
While the hands of the clock
Traveled feebly through the
Infinite night. (Bolaño, The Detectives lines 19-27)
Their open palms,
Destiny stained by their own blood.
And you can’t even recall
Where the wound was,
The faces you once loved,
The woman who saved your life. (Bolaño, The Lost Detectives lines 7-13)
These are a little different. There’s many ways detectives get lost, but now it could happen to you. Bolaño is describing how it feels. The detectives are no closer to solving the mystery, answering only to their Greek chorus and generally prioritizing the wrong things. The call of their work leads them to bloody dead ends.
The Frozen Detectives are Latin American. They’re struggling to keep their eyes open. Wary of the blood but not the crime scene (they take it in “with a single sweeping glance”) they’re frozen and lost. Bolaño sees them in the convex mirror of his dreams, distorted reflections of his life. These are the guys like him in Self Portrait At Twenty Years, who followed the mysterious and convincing call and danced with death. Except their rhythm hasn’t changed, and they haven’t grown up. He shares the hero’s journey driving men from his generation and perspective in and out of a romantic dream, wrapped up in the amorphous mystery leading them back to the crime scene, again and again. This throughline is present from the first to the last page of The Romantic Dogs, a collection of Bolaño’s poetry spanning twenty years.
and I was crazy.
I’d lost a country
but won a dream.
As long as I had that dream
nothing else mattered. (Bolaño, The Romantic Dogs line 1-6)
I heard that mysterious and convincing call.
You either hear it or you don’t, and I heard and almost burst out crying… (Bolaño, Self Portrait at Twenty Years, lines 7-8)
A voice coming on like an arrow. (Bolaño, The Lost Detectives, line 4)
An unnamable and useless courage, for sure… (Bolaño, The Donkey)**
…the gateway to the evicted Mind… (Bolaño, The Worm)*
Like a bright diabolical plan suspended in the sky… (Bolaño, The Greek, line 8)
And the dream lived in the void of my spirit. (Bolaño, The Romantic Dogs line 10)
Your heart. (Bolaño, Lupe, line 43)
In the partitions of the final dream,
In the confusing and magnetic trail,
Of donkeys and poets. (Bolaño, The Donkey)**
A minimal dream,
but one on which they staked
all their stubbornness, all their will. (Bolaño, The Worm)*
In the evicted Mind.
In the enchanted mirrors.
In the hurricane of Mexico City. (Bolaño, The Worm)*
An unforgettable love
And brief,
Like a hurricane?
No, a love brief as the sigh of a guillotined head… (Bolaño, La Francesca)***
Of the lost poets
In the motionless mud… (Bolaño, Parra’s Footsteps, lines 54-55)
…frozen stiff in a mire that’s maybe not
of this world, barefoot in the middle of the dream that works its way
from our hearts towards our necessities… (Bolaño, Day Bleeding Rain, lines 9-11)
Like embers defoliated like an onion
beneath the Latin American detective’s baton.
Though maybe we’re all crazy
and there’s never been a crime.
Like someone led by the hand
of a manic depressive. (Bolaño, Half-Baked, lines 18-23)
And it’s ferocious and infinite
But it’s totally pointless
Get walking, then, Latin Americans
Get walking get walking (Bolaño, Parra’s Footsteps, lines 49-52)
And he traveled, from one side to the other
of dreams,
just like an earthworm,
dragging his desperation,
devouring it. (Bolaño, The Worm)*
A runaway love.
A dream within another dream.
And the nightmare telling me: you will grow up. (Bolaño, The Romantic Dogs lines 19-21)
But back then, growing up would have been a crime.
I’m here, I said, with the romantic dogs
and here I’m going to stay. (Bolaño, The Romantic Dogs lines 23-25)
fractured,
scattered,
in the air of Mexico City. (Bolaño, The Worm)*
Fragments are what’s left of the crushed detectives. It’s past four in the morning, and the night of the Dirty, Poorly Dressed narrator’s dream has turned to dawn. Four in the morning, all boys, Majorcan, a variety, dead. Heard on the news by a guy inside his car, the rain tapping at the bodywork. Girls in a window saw what happens to detectives.
Orpheus and Eurydice, legendary Greek lovers, are separated by tragedy. In the classic myth, Orpheus charms the gods of the Underworld with poetry and music so profound he may bring his dead wife to life, so long as he won’t look at her on the way back. In the 1950 French film adaptation, Orpheus is obsessed with the poetry that plays over the radio of a princess’s Rolls Royce. He won’t look at her, but when Eurydice touches his cheek from the back seat they lock eyes in the mirror and his wife disappears. Like Orpheus, poetry is interwoven with Bolaño’s fate. It’s a steady, neutral force, like rain. The rain hits his car, a guy’s car, morse code in a Rolls Royce. Bolaño is asking: Will he be crushed under the forces that push guys like him to make art, the detectives?
might go
I go.
I follow your radiant trail
across the long night.
Not caring about years
or sickness.
Not caring about the pain
or the effort I must make
to follow you.
Because with you I can cross
the great desolate spaces
and I’ll always find the door
leading back
to the Chimera,
because you’re with me,
Muse,
more beautiful than the sun,
more beautiful
than the stars. (Bolaño, Muse, lines 61-80)
Bolaño “abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence” after his son was born. Jorge Herralde, a close friend, wrote in Bolaño frente a Herralde that he straightened out in the 1990s, deciding “he was responsible for his family’s future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction.” Bolaño didn’t sentence himself to death by red ants, empty villages, and fever dreams. In the 80s he moved to a small beach town in Spain to raise a family. The poetry in The Romantic Dogs spans from 1980 to 1998, but it never left Mexico City.
Nothing that could have been yours
Exists anymore
(Bolaño, With The Flies, lines 1-3)
Get lost...
The Romantic Dogs
Bolaño frente al Herralde
Orpheus (film)
With The Beatles