Carles H

In the first two months of this year, quite a lot of well-known peo­ple in the per­form­ing arts died be­fore their time (or at least be­fore the av­er­age West­ern life ex­pectancy of 80): Black, Alan Rick­man, Glenn Frey, David Bowie... Here in Cat­alo­nia, at the tail end of Jan­u­ary, we lost Car­les Hac Mor, a per­for­mance poet (or maybe just poet would do) who never reached nor wished to reach a wide au­di­ence, but who will re­main very much alive in the mem­o­ries of all those who read him or saw him read. It would be easy to pi­geon­hole Car­les as avant-garde, but he went way be­yond many avant-garde artists, who tend to end up im­pos­ing cer­tain lim­its on them­selves. Car­les didn't be­lieve in any lim­its what­so­ever. A lit­er­ary an­ar­chist, he rev­elled in writ­ing anti-poems and anti-nov­els which de­fied all con­ceiv­able norms, but would then take things a step fur­ther by un­der­cut­ting his own de­fi­ance: 'There's no point in mak­ing an in­sti­tu­tion of every­thing “Anti”'. On oc­ca­sion - and they were good oc­ca­sions - he would write ma­te­r­ial that was an­ar­chist in the sim­ple po­lit­i­cal sense. For ex­am­ple, when the cur­rent King's sis­ter got mar­ried in 1997 (both bride and bride­groom, in­ci­den­tally, are now up on cor­rup­tion charges) Car­les de­fied Span­ish laws which pro­hibit crit­i­cisms of the monar­chy with a 'Nup­tial Ode' that in­cluded the lines: 'Monar­chy, an­ar­chy, an­ar­chy!/Out with the bol­lock­ing, bol­lock­ing Bour­bon!” His own work aside, he and his part­ner Ester Xar­gay gave dozens upon dozens of new writ­ers and artists a chance to air their work at live read­ings and per­for­mances, year after year, both in re­mote vil­lages and in­dus­trial towns, in closed venues and on the street, usu­ally with Car­les as a nat­u­rally droll mas­ter of cer­e­monies. He also kept a close eye on world events, the seem­ing ab­sur­dity of which im­bued Car­les's work with a cheeky ni­hilism (a line in his last poem reads: 'There was a time in which every­thing was as it is now, and so many things hap­pened in the mean­time that they gave the im­pres­sion of noth­ing ever hav­ing hap­pened at all'). But this ni­hilism sui generis never stopped him com­ing to the aid of those of us who badly needed a sound­ing board in the form of a live au­di­ence, for our as yet un­pub­lished work. He who loved con­tra­dic­tions, was the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of a con­sid­er­able con­tra­dic­tion him­self: that of the un­re­lent­ing anti-writer who thought noth­ing of lend­ing a help­ing hand to so many, many non-anti younger writ­ers, some­thing he did with un­ques­tion­ing gen­eros­ity. May he rest in per­ma­nent un­rest, which is where I sus­pect he felt most at home.