“All the immortality
you could hope for is present
here and now, there is no more
than these fleeting pieces of
eternity”
Gonzalo Millán
I. The Personal Stairway
“The finest thing of all is that I can at least write down what I think and feel, otherwise I would suffocate completely.” I skipped over this line when I was thirteen years old and The Diary of Anne Frank was required reading, but it made its mark on me when it found me again, shut in mid-pandemic after my third dose of vaccine, with soldiers out maintaining “law and order” on Valparaíso’s Cerro Yungay. I reread this diary in a bedroom with a single small window (without a chestnut tree like hers), and I discovered another book that was actually called The Secret Annex: the original title that Anne Frank gave her diary when she learned via British radio of a call to publish testimonial writing on the war. The Secret Annex (Het Achterhuis) was published by her father, Otto Frank, the last of eight survivors, in Amsterdam in 1947.
The idea of secret writing, concealed and interior, compelled me—better late than never—to start my own diary. I picked up a black notebook and pressed down my ballpoint pen to write: “Life Break.” I started rereading what few personal diaries I had in my library: Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile, Teresa Wilms Montt’s Diarios íntimos, and Luis Oyarzún’s Diario íntimo, in an edition I oversaw in 2017. At the time, I did not pause over a phrase I later underlined, in 2020: “I could write like an antiquarian, like an alchemist isolated from life, in a dark room lit by a gaslamp that casts only a circle of light around my notebook.”
I now realize that my obsession with diaries started with Oyarzún, who, before being a philosopher and essayist, was a poet: “No puedo tener dios / sin hacerlo morir / no puedo estar en mí / sin hacerme morir” [I cannot have god / without making him die / I cannot be within myself / without making myself die]. I had read the first edition, from 1995, on the website Memoria Chilena, but I was surprised to find this was the only existing edition, and we decided to publish it through Editorial UV, where I was editor-in-chief. I quickly contacted Leonidas Morales, and this encounter opened doors onto many secret annexes or “back rooms,” as The Diary of Anne Frank was called when it was first translated into Spanish. Morales was a pioneer in the study of personal diaries in Latin America; a portion of his research was logged in his essays, which he titled El diario íntimo en Chile. Thanks to this book, almost every day, a new diary started arriving at my state-subsidized hovel. One of them was Páginas de un diario (1954) by Lily Íñiguez (1902-1926), which opens with a note from the author: “My diary is very sincere and, therefore, too personal. Someday, perhaps, a selection might be made: ‘Pages from a Diary.’ But later, much later; after my death, at any rate.” In the prologue to this diary, Joaquín Edwards Bello compares Lily Íñiguez to painter and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff (1858-1884); both died at the age of twenty-four. I jotted down this name and called Pedro Lastra; he knew her very well, he described—in the greatest detail, as he always does—the edition he recalled (Colección Austral, 1962, brown cover), and he repeated that he had read her with great interest, but had not heard her name in decades. Bashkirtseff’s story is impressive: she painted and wrote every day of her life. Her complete diaries, which have not been translated to Spanish, fill sixteen volumes of more than three hundred pages each. She was aware she might well be forgotten:
This poor journal, the confidant of all my struggles toward the light, all those outbursts, which would be regarded as the outbursts of imprisoned genius if they were to be finally crowned by success, but which will be regarded only as the idle ravings of a commonplace creature if I am destined to languish forever in obscurity. […] What then do I desire? Ah, you know well what I desire—I desire glory! It is not this journal that will give it to me, however. This journal will be published only after my death; for I show myself too nakedly in it to wish it to be read during my lifetime. Besides, it would not in that case be the complement of an illustrious existence. (July 3, 1876; translated by Mary J. Serrano)
Marie Bashkirtseff fell gravely ill with tuberculosis, and wrote: “The rage of seeing yourself die!” Her final entry is also moving: “For the last two days my bed has been in the drawing-room, but as this is very large, and divided by screens, poufs, and the piano, it is not noticed. I find it too difficult to go upstairs.” If we put together all the last lines from every diary, we would have the best boat in which to get across the river: “TAKEN for a RIDE” (last line by Luis Oyarzún).
All personal stairways are connected. After a few months, I had a wooden shelf full of diaries over my head. During mental lapses, and while I was working from home, I would put my hands on my head in an effort to stretch and look up, running my eyes—sore from ten hours of screen time—over all the spines of the books I had bought in the image and likeness of my anxiety. I hid those I disliked, so as not to even see their edges: The Business of Living by Cesare Pavese, misogynistic and overrated (though the old geezers of the past century will kill me for saying so); I also hid the boring diary of Thomas Mann, with all his minor details and rigorous routines. The most visible—in every sense of the word—and the one I left closest at hand was the diary of Alejandra Pizarnik, in the latest expanded edition: hardcover with a dust jacket, more than a thousand pages long. Reading it was the best medicine I found for all the inner turmoil of the COVID era. “I bought a really big mirror. I looked at myself and realized the face I should have is behind—imprisoned behind—the one I have.” Her frames of mind, whether known or as yet undiscovered, can be found in Pizarnik’s diaries. I copied her entries in mine, changing only the date; I identified with her difficulties: “This is the problem: a day shouldn’t go by when I don’t spend at least two hours writing. When I don’t spend another few reading. My problem is one of rhythm, of organization.” I was so moved by her diaries that I gave my first writing workshop dedicated to the diary. After this experience, I became a regular in these secret annexes, listening to these imprisoned faces, pulling back the thick curtains of family (as Pilar Donoso did) and uncovering the legion of voices that we carry inside. To write and to share about life is to stay afloat and learn in first person how you have to bite your tail in order to find the antidote. I became so fascinated by diaries that, thanks to Constanza Castillo, we put out a Chile-wide call for adults to write and send us their entries. Almost four hundred people took part, and the result was a collective pandemic diary—the only one of its kind—that lets us relive the pain, the uncertainty, and also the transformation that came with that time.
It was the illness of others, not my own, that led me to seek out diaries written by the sick. I was asked to teach a course on illness and literature; this was my excuse to reread Gonzalo Millán’s Veneno de escorpión azul, published a year after his death, in 2007. I read the title as if it were a verse of poetry, and I remembered a book I saw on the back cover of his anthology Trece lunas: Dragón que se muerde la cola (1982), which is linked to the verses of the poem “Virus”: “Muérdete la cola donde está el antídoto / como el ouróboros” [Bite your tail where the antidote lies / like the ouroboros]. Reading this diary’s pages, I found out he was referring to a Cuban remedy he learned about from the writer Pía Barros: “Pía tells me of her Cuban elixir which is curing her cancer. I started taking it yesterday.” Not long ago, poet Damaris Calderón told me the origin story of this antidote; she called the scorpion an alacrán rather than an escorpión. The reason for this change might be astrological or aesthetic or both; if the diary were called “Veneno de alacrán azul,” it would not be the same. We published the new edition of the diary in May of this year—the same month Millán’s “terminal log” begins. From that point on, I kept rereading his entries in daily doses, like the words of an oracle, knowing that death grew closer with every page. The poetic coincidences, almost twenty years later, serve to awaken the present; like this one, from July 16, which happened again nineteen years later in Santiago: “El primer aromo florido entre dos temporales, / isla de la primavera anticipada, en la mitad / de la avenida torrentosa” [The first flowering acacia between two storms, / island of the early spring, halfway down / the rainsoaked avenue].
II. “The scribe of my nonsense watches me waiting for the next earful”
A black box that survives: within there are four notebooks; three of them are alike, red and old, “El Lucero” brand; the fourth is yellow, and on the cover is Mickey Mouse looking at Donald Duck as he comes in through a hole. Gonzalo Millán dubbed it “The Disney Tower”: his last, unfinished notebook, in which he never got to write “today I turned sixty,” but at least he saw the spring for which he yearned. Each of these notebooks is full of pages crammed with slanted words, with almost no space between them; his prose and verse are written in the same script, and dates and places stand out like an hourglass on the nightstand. The pages are covered in a five-millimeter grid, crossed on the left side by a red line that is both margin and alert. When you open the notebooks, the first thing that appears is not the writing, but the scent and smoke of a scribe who lives on, coughing from page to page. Every day, blots appear, like a wine stain or a smudge. There are some drawings, too: an upside-down man, a marijuana cookie, a crocodile threatening to devour a paragraph, blue crosses that go up to the margin, and even phone numbers and lists of books.
Touching and holding these four notebooks in my hands was the starting point from which I put together a new edition of Veneno de escorpión azul, which is laid out as four seasons and contains all the verses the poet ever wrote.
The diaries would never have been published if not for poet and academic Mané Zaldívar, who made a pact of honor with Millán to edit his Veneno de escorpión azul. She transcribed his words—all while grieving the loss of her spouse—with heartbroken rigor. When she was asked for an epilogue for the new edition, she preferred to let the poems she had written in the midst of her mourning stand as a testament to the process. The last of them is called “Certeza”:
Desde antes de conocernos
y sin decirlo durante años,
tú y yo siempre supimos
que esta batalla sería
cuerpo a cuerpo
verso a verso
y a muerte.
[Since before we met
and though it went unsaid for years
you and I always knew
this battle would be
body to body
verse to verse
and to the death.]
III. “Ask questions of that hive of wayward cells that have settled into your lungs”
Gonzalo Millán’s writing is terminal, it is condemned, it has been given a death sentence. Yet, at the same time, it is also a site of arrival and departure: a vanishing point. “My terminal license allows me almost everything with a certain impunity,” he wrote in his diary. Gonzalo Millán was diagnosed with lung cancer in May of 2006, and he opens his “Diario de vida y muerte” with the words: “The cancer news changes everything, before and after May ‘06.” From that point on, he wrote every day; he assembled a time bomb with unheard-of perseverance. All his mood shifts are recorded in these notebooks and, as readers, we take these doses, unaware of their contraindications. “The word, for me, is a pharmakon,” he once said in an interview.
When diaries are published—that is, when notebooks and scratch pads are turned into a book—a number of sacrifices are made: the original foundation disappears, the drawings are suppressed, and the handwriting becomes absent. And, when a diary is very long, the first victim—if there is one—are the poems that are cut out and expurgated; it they are lucky, they might be confined to a measly footnote, but in most cases we see nothing of them, unless we have the original manuscripts at hand. Poems within personal diaries tend to vex or interrupt editors, much like illegible script and smudges deemed unworthy of being reproduced in facsimile, as they dirty the sober prestige of transnational editorial policy. In the case of Veneno de escorpión azul, the poems represent the most personal part of the diary, transfigured or encoded into waves that are sometimes humdrum and sometimes lysergic. They allow for digression.
Little has been said of the fact that almost all of Millán’s diary was written under the influence of marijuana cookies (baked by Pino, the son of Mané, called “M” in the diary); he even notes what time he ingests them and the subsequent results, which tend to come as unforeseeable verses: “Los queltehues tijeretean el silencio” [The lapwings scissor the silence]. Procrastination, incoherence, unfinishedness, writing that forks off down unexpected paths, like the notes written with a Lakers vs. Spurs game on in the background and the full Beaver Moon in the sky: there is room for everything in this intimate and extimate writing, as Millán demonstrates with his fingers on the “switches.” I dare say his Veneno de escorpión azul is the diary with the most unhinged imagination I have ever read; its images merge together and stack up to the point of delirium (a word María Zambrano used, as did Bashkirtseff, to describe her own poems, at the fringe of her “official” work). Here are three examples of the aforementioned switch:
Un viejo desdentado
y con el bigote blanco.
Soy yo convexo en una paila de cobre.
[A toothless old man
with a white mustache.
It’s me, convex on a copper pan.]
(…)
Me he mudado a vivir
en la antesala de la tumba.
Me he quedado para adentro
otra vez viajo en el camarote de una nave
un ferry, un bergantín de cristal.
Un barco griego con sus velas forradas
con billetes, de dólar, de dolor.
[I have moved in to live
in the lobby of the tomb.
I have stayed inward
again I travel in the cabin of a ship
a ferry, a glass brigantine.
A Greek vessel with its sails lined
with bills, dollars, dolours.]
(…)
Un temporal en el acuario del pecho,
algas y efigies sinuosas en ascenso
y descanso, piños de burbujas impenetrables.
[A storm in the chest’s aquarium,
algaes and sinuous effigies on the rise
and at rest, flocks of impenetrable bubbles.]
In these notebooks, Millán’s poetry surpasses the limits that might be imposed on a poetry book, where we generally seek coherence, precision, a common thread, a consistent tone, a singular and precise voice, agreement between sound and sense, and all those clichés that come up in “Mercurial” reviews. Millán—in Mané Zaldívar’s words—lets his hair down in these notebooks; he no longer shies away from incomprehensibility or error, he declares war on journalists and sets aside his fear of the absurd. In his daily entries, the smudges, the roar of the vacuum cleaner, the old lady sweeping the street all become oxygen in his inkwell. A deep vein of contradiction runs through the diary, the tension between sickness and custom: “You won’t last long with those boots on and your bad habits.” To face illness, to write to it, to cherish it, to negotiate toward its removal or a truce:
The blow is well-aimed and overwhelming, perhaps mortal, dangerous and painful at any rate. Talk to your cancer. […] Write a letter to the Crab and ask the bastard why he picked your lungs as if they were a couple of rocks. I feel no loathing for the cancer that I cannot see and that I feel, it is an abominable (shapeless) abstraction. It is a deep, secret, and scarlet scourge.
IV. “Toward an objectivity”
To place Gonzalo Millán, we must go from back to front, as he does in his famous poem “48” from La ciudad: “Los torturados cierran sus bocas. / Los campos de concentración se vacían. / Aparecen los desaparecidos. / Los muertos salen de sus tumbas. / Los aviones vuelan hacia atrás” [The tortured close their mouths. / The concentration camps are emptied. / The disappeared appear. / The dead leave their graves. / The planes fly backward]. We should start reading his body of work with Veneno de escorpión azul. His penultimate book, Autorretrato de memoria (2006)—part of a trilogy he called “Croquis,” which he started with Claroscuro and ended posthumously with Gabinete de papel—captures in its title his vocation as a painter-writer, using images as the primary colors of his writing. Speaking of Autorretrato de memoria, Millán mentions in an interview that his mother—who came from the countryside—used the verb “recordar” (to remember) as a synonym of “despertar” (to wake up): “The boss lady remembered early this morning.”
In 1983, Millán wrote—in an anthology on and from exile, titled Entre la lluvia y el arcoíris: algunos poetas jóvenes de Chile—a poetics he called “Hacia una objetividad.” In this text, which is key to understanding his vision, he states, “In my poetry there has always been a reciprocal relationship between imagination and external reality.” Reading all his poetry books and placing Veneno de escorpión azul as the culmination of his poetic career allows us to trace the origins of his interest in the autobiographical, his obsessions with his divided body, the tension between Eros and Thanatos, and the domestic world. Especially in his book Virus, we find verses that could have been written in the last months of his life, but that were composed in 1980, when the poet turned 35 (“Millán / a mediados de su mediana vida” [Millán / midway through his middling life]), which he concludes with a colophon signed as “Zonaglo” (an anagram of his own name, which lives on in his visual archives). Two poems:
ENTROPÍA
Nosotras, las locas células del cáncer,
las que fuimos extirpadas del cuerpo
dejándolo en las manos de matasanos
que hoy lo tienen más canceroso que antes,
hemos vuelto a tomar control del caos.
[ENTROPY
We, the crazy cancer cells
who were excised from the body
leaving it in the hands of quacks
who left it more cancerous than before,
have come back to take control of the chaos.]
EL PAPEL
Hotel de la pluma;
hospital de la tinta.
La partida y el acta:
el pañal y el sudario.
[PAPER
Hotel of the pen;
hospital of ink.
Certificate and record:
diaper and shroud.]
My copy of Virus was autographed by Millán himself, with a drawing I looked at a great many times during the pandemic, which deserves to “go viral” itself:
V. “The exercise of scars” or “The autobiography is a reinvention of our identities”
Writing, for Millán, was alchemy and self-discovery, as he made clear in the title of a practically unknown text from 1999, which I came across thanks to Mané Zaldívar. The poet tells of his beginnings and offers some keys to autobiographical writing:
I gave my first workshop on autobiographical writing in 1992, in Charleston, South Carolina, with graduate students of the College of Charleston. The experience was a big surprise because of how different and new it felt compared to the other workshops I had given until then.
In 1993, I returned to Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, where I was living at the time, and I focused on reading autobiographical works and studying and finding out about theory on this very special literary genre. Below I will cite a few thoughts that have served me as points of reference for this task:
– Reality is far superior to imagination. We all have the potential to be mysterious and fascinating characters. Our lives are not logical stories.
– Intimate and individual truths do not match official and established truths. We know very little about ourselves. […]
Writing about self-discovery is also a poetic task that invokes revelation, clairvoyance, and delirium. In his four final notebooks, Gonzalo Millán leaves us a kaleidoscope through which to watch the movement of the dragons and scorpions that leap between our organs, waiting for the spirit to retire.
Millán led an exercise in his workshops, inspired by a text by Severo Sarduy, in which students wrote about their scars. His personal and collective pursuit was to put together scraps of life so as to assemble, albeit inconclusively, an “archaeology of the skin.”
Veneno de escorpión azul, now about to turn twenty, is the black box that, in a future even more dystopian than our own, the dolphins will find after our extinction. In it, they will discover that poetry was a “Preparación para el viaje”: a “preparation for the journey,” one of the titles Millán wrote by hand, which could have been the name of his posthumous book.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
