To create a genre the way Galileo discovered the Medicean Stars is different than to create a movement. Petrarca created a movement. Rubén Darío created another movement. Breton created a movement. And generations are a product of time. The Generation of the 27. Or the Beat Generation. Movements and generations exert their power at a particular point in history, while genres exert their power as a phenomenon in space. The creation of tragedy by Aeschylus is the invention of a prototype—or a model that has been used from ancient times to our time. Dramatists still go to this model like designers to the prototype of a chair with four feet and a seat to sit on for generations to come. A new genre is not a movement—or a generation—dated—but a shift in thinking that has a structure, a location, a territory. That territory was the Oresteia where a paradigm shift happened when the furies agreed to transform their fury into blessings. The source and the sorcerers are the same. The power is there in the No of furies—and in the Yes of blessers. In the No of their curses—and in the Yes of their blessings. To create a new territory where paradigm shifts happen, you have to create a new prototype that can be reproduced for generations to come.  You don’t need the baggage of history and the pestilence of culture to create the transition. You need a midwife to hum enchanted words—and a witch or furies to change their curses to blessings—the knots into nests—and there you will have the shift in a nest full of eggs. You can say the language is out modeled but the invention works because the shift happened in society—and the new genre captured what happened and how it changed. It captured the change in the prototype it invented. And it figured out how the change worked—and it changed with the work—what works—that is not the work, but the pleasure involved. It is not about the hours spent in making the prototype, but the passion that produced the change. The prototype is achieved as a phenomenon that appears, makes a turn, and changes the way of making things—it changes the thinkings—it inserts in the thinkings not a method, but a pattern—with many structures—many ways of making the prototype in different locations in time—sometimes with ineptitude—other times waking late at night—not working at all—and not always changing shifts but shifting always the paradigms of time. As time has said once and again things happen in time—and the repetition of this lie has been perpetuated by the storytellers of fiction, but things don’t always happen in time. And when they have a method—the method is broken—and there is a space where the things broken that find no method find a structure—not of analysis nor of theory—no theory is allowed—because they are all destroyed by the method they use in their analysis. What is needed is to start creating in the void where nothing works. What is needed is to find that void—that the analysis tries to fill with theories—so that we don’t find the gap, but it is necessary to be acquainted with that void—and to not fear that space where nothing works the way it used to—because that is the space where possibilities take place. To make the shift you must inhabit the void and confront the terror that happens in that void where nothing works—where music starts—where pleasure invites the muses to come along to inspire the void to shift its course to the space where new shifts can be attained. We don’t need storytellers. We need soothsayers. I never said I am a storyteller. I said I am a soothsayer. I say the sooth. When you say this doesn’t work, at that moment, you start shedding the works of others and working for yourself. If you go on working in the void—there where nothing works—starts the shift that moves this work forward. Imagination starts where nothing works. Where people say: Nothing works—this is a disaster. I say: I’ll take it from here—I’ll make a work of art that doesn’t work but creates beauty. Listen, I used to worry when people thought I don’t work, I’m lazy. I used to apply work to my method of understanding. And it never worked. When I applied a method to my madness nothing works because a method is part of a plan to exterminate creativity. To cut everything with the same scissors. To make me inclusive—not exclusive. I am exclusive. I am creating a work that doesn’t work. It should not even be called a work. Work is the problem. The word work doesn’t work. Even when it creates a work. It creates a problem inside the work. We have to stop using the word work because work implies a production that has an expiration—a bankruptcy—and it always loses its job—because work implies replacement. Capitalism believes everyone is replaceable. But time is not a limit of productivity. To produce is not our limit. Don’t listen to those who tell you: I’ll make it work—I’ll apply a method to your madness. That’s where everything goes wrong. When a method of logic dated and expired comes to offer you the help to expire and not to create the genre you aspire to create without a method. To apply productivity to your creativity—is to apply expiration to breathing. Breathe through the void. Don’t give up when you meet the furies or the sirens. Know what happened in the past and change the outcome. Transform the energy of the furies—from curses to blessings—and give them a land where they can bless the coming into being of new babies. When you create a genre—which is not a movement—because it has no past—and if it has a past—its past is pregnant with a future bigger than its past—its past is its post-creation—only a point of departure—it created modes of thinking. A genre has in itself movements, generations—and after all these concepts expire in time—the genre—that is an artifact—that is a fact made shift—it doesn’t belong to a date—it is not dated—it includes all the expirations that expire in its belly—and it is still pregnant with new beginnings. It allows transformations, revolutions but in itself it is a discovery, an invention like the stars Galileo discovered and dedicated to Cosmo de Medici. 

Excerpt from Putinoika (unpublished)

Photo: Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi, by Laurent Elie Badessi.