13 LAS MEXICANAS : CHAVELA VARGAS

No soy de aqui, ni soy de alla

I like the sun and a woman crying

the swallows and the bad ladies

climbing balconies and opening the windows

and the girls of April

I like the wine as much as the flowers

and the lovers, but not the gentlemen

I love being friend with the rovers

and the songs in French

I'm not from here, nor from there

I have no age, nor future

and being happy is the colour

of my identity

I like to be constantly lolling on the sand

and chasing around Manuela on a bicycle

and to gaze the stars all the time

with Maria in the cornfield

Continuing on the thought of ambivalence: I'm posting this song because those two lines seem to resonate so closely:

I'm not from here, nor from there

I have no age, nor future

Vargas lets her fluidity of identity carry her into such brightness--cavorting and regaling, even. Because when you have no strings, you have few obligations. Meaninglessness allows you to do whatever you want. It hardly matters

The matter of identity: is it set in memomory? In this commitment to things like place and time? 

If Vargas is able to testify to fluidity, I feel that my history has testified rather to series of lacks, erasures, and, more recently, reassertions. I haven't found the promise of happiness in an identity that refuses commitment.

I am writing this retrospectively so I can say more clearly: I confess that this time, my projecto is conflicted in both wanting to reassert my own interests in painting, using paint, and in yielding to a certain desire to some sort of legibility, a desire, perhaps, for the belonging that commitment promises. It was a complicated moment, then, to receive the (nonetheless highly-valued) notes of praise that I did. Presence and identity are not autonomous self-projections: to the extent that they are, they are also self-delusions. But equally so the sense of validation built out of convictions foreign, imposed upon, oneself. Presence and Identity, rather, seem to elicit from a dialogic process within a social sphere. It is something I am still after, my own forays being characterised alternately by compulsive, fear-driven hiding and withdrawal, and sudden anxious attempts at self-disclosure. I don't know where on the spectrum (if there is a spectrum as such) this tiny canvas stands: It seemed to in some way testify to the kind of success that one is left at the mercy of others to validate, but at the same time--I know the mark of my own honest strokes.