The Poetic Act
Inspired by Filippo Tommasso Marinetti’s belief that art must be action, a boy and his friend decided to do a “poetic act” and walk across their hometown of Santiago, Chile in a straight line “without ever wavering.” Alejandro Jodorowski writes about this feat in his autobiographical work, Psychomagic.
“We walked down the avenue, and we came to a tree. Instead of going around it, we climbed up and over it; if a car crossed in our path, we climbed on top, walking on its roof. In front of a house, we rang the doorbell, entered through the door and exited where we could, sometimes through a window. The important thing was to maintain a straight line and not pay attention to it, the obstacle, as if it didn’t exist.”
Jodorowski is known as an experimental artist and film director. To me, he’s best understood as a Lebenskünstler, German for “Life Artist.” Like Marinetti, he believed art and poetry were best done through action, with the world itself as the canvas.
This notion isn’t exclusive to art-devoted eccentrics like Jodorowski, however. Harriet Tubman is one of my favorite Lebenskünstlers, though she likely never thought of that word or the idea of “poetic acts” as described by some Italian poet. Her masterpiece was the collaborative work of survival known as the Underground Railroad.
Young Jodorowski’s “poetic act” took place in the 1950s. He described Chile as a place where poetry was woven into the culture. His act explored the idea that the borders and partitions of a city were social suggestions rather than impenetrable lines. If we zoom out beyond Santiago, Chile, we would find this to be true on the international level as well. At the time, most of the world’s international borders were left unmarked and unguarded. The world wasn’t devoid of borders or migration restrictions as we know them now, but compared to today’s strictly demarcated globe, then was a nascent stage of geopolitical demarcation.
The End of the Wild World
Before then, monumental borders between nations, like the Maginot Line and the Great Wall of China, were built for armies, not individuals. Such lines were the exceptions in most of history. Jodorowski could have safely hiked across most of the world’s borders in his straight-line fashion as safely as he did in his Santiago neighborhood. The sharp, defined borders on our contemporary maps were then mere sketches, drawn in pencil, not in concrete, steel, and surveillance.
In the age of empires, the British, Ottoman, and Roman were distant powers who ruled over swathes of non-sovereign lands. By 1950 the dust of two world wars settled, revealing spoils that carved the earth entirely into sovereign nation-states for the first time in human history. Over 90% of the world’s borders came to be in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the ones that were there were usually only “there” on a map.¹ But this would change quickly in this age of hard geographic lines. Any “poetic act” that sought to cross national borders would soon become much more dangerous than the lines Jodorowski sought to whimsically ignore back in Santiago.
I think of this ultimate demarcation as the true end of the terrestrial frontier. That concept now exists only in antiquity. The finale of the wild world flowed delicately from men’s pens for decades and, around this time, erupted at the four corners of the earth, solidifying the new global partition structure for the rest of history as we know it. In mentioning four corners, I do specify four, actually, that can be thought of as the four horsemen of the end. At these places the wandering Jodorowski would have his most serious troubles completing his feat.
The Four Horsemen
ONE: The partition of India-Pakistan, the haphazard slice carved by a British lawyer who had never been to the subcontinent, that turned into one of history’s largest and most violent forced migrations. TWO: The “Iron Curtain” cut Germany into two for a brutal experiment, deemed necessary by the drafters. THREE: The Korean Peninsula was being split into two by a dam holding tides of annihilation. It separated distinct worlds, philosophies, and families, seemingly forever. FOUR: And in the Middle East, the borders of the new state, Israel, were being drawn — lines emanating constant conflict like a fault line where the only reaction is a firmer, deadlier grip.
For now, let’s just let Jodorowski make it across Santiago, through the suburbs and farms and up into the mountains. He didn’t really go that far, but let’s say he continues his straight line over the rocks and trees and the elements of Chile – an impressive physical feat but not an impossible one. If you have ever seen a pipeline or an electrical line cut across hills and forest, you know that where a man wants to make a line, he can make a line. Jodorowski eventually approaches the border of Argentina.
Though he does stumble across one of the world’s greatest mountain ranges, there is no border security to worry about. There’s not even a sign marking the border, much less a fence. In fact, Argentina and Chile hardly even knew exactly where their borders were at the time.
The 3,000-mile line between these nations runs the spine of the Andes mountains, more or less, all the way down to Antarctica. The border, decided in the 1800s, was supposed to follow where the peaks of the Andes divided the water flowing east and west.² This decision accidentally produced two different borders because there were cases where rivers flowed eastward despite having to go around the Andes’ tallest peaks. Oops. As recently as the 1990s, Argentina and Chile were still deciding who owns an ice sheet at the tip of the continent.
After his epic hypothetical hike, Jodorowski walks “downhill” right on into Argentina. He encounters no passport checks or detentions. He is the son of immigrants himself, and his Hungarian, Jewish, Russian, and Spanish-speaking self would blend in just fine into the European cultural mosaic of Argentina.
By choosing this time period as a demarcation, I am separating the temporal world into a before and after. But to be clear, I don’t intend to depict the “before” in any sort of Edenic way, not even with respect to human migration. Just because there weren’t hard borders around the world doesn’t mean there wasn’t xenophobia and periodic total abjection of the “foreign” human – aka, the alien. Xenophobia is as old as xenos and phobias (xenos means stranger, guest, foreigner). In either case, Jodorowski will not face any xenophobia or abjection as he arrives to meet the peoples of Argentina, who are themselves immigrants. Interesting fact: Argentina is more ethnically European than Europe.³
Jorge Luis Borges explained: “The Argentines are Italians who speak Spanish, educated by the British, who want to be French.”⁴ In this time, after World War 2, they had just received over 200,000 Jewish immigrants into their folds. Also, a few Nazis.
They accepted the 2nd most immigrants in the whole world, the first being the USA.⁵ They were operating under a popular Argentine idea of the time: “to govern is to populate.”⁶ Hard immigration controls during the 19th and first half of the 20th century were the exception.
If Jodorowski and his buddy had decided to wander northward, he would surely join the gritty lineage of world-walkers and nomads, but he would by no means be an “illegal alien.” He would not need to climb any international fences nor would he be getting detained at countless crossings across Central and South America.⁷ He approaches the U.S., which despite having a well-developed immigration policy, still had little to no border protection. He walks right on into Texas.
Footnotes
¹ Papin, D., Tertrais, B., & Laborde, X. (2023). Atlas of borders: Walls, migrations, and conflict in 70 maps.
² Mazzitelli Mastricchio, Malena (UBA). (2007). Límite y cartografía en el último tercio del siglo XIX. XI Jornadas Interescuelas/Departamentos de Historia. Departamento de Historia. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Universidad de Tucumán, San Miguel de Tucumán.
³ Devoto, Fernando and Roberto Benencia. (2003). Historia de la inmigración en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana.
⁴ Borges, J. L. (attributed). Widely cited in scholarly literature on Argentine national identity, including: Buenos Aires: Rayuela de Cortázar (in Spanish). 15 March 2009. Archived from the original on 29 January 2011. Retrieved 24 May 2026.
⁵ Supra note 3.
⁶ Alberdi, J. B. (1852). Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina. Imprenta del Mercurio. (“Gobernar es poblar” / “To govern is to populate.”) See also: Encyclopædia Britannica. (2024). Juan Bautista Alberdi. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Juan-Bautista-Alberdi
⁷ Zolberg, A. R. (2006). A nation by design: Immigration policy in the fashioning of America. Harvard University Press. See also: Ngai, M. M. (2004). Impossible subjects: Illegal aliens and the making of modern America. Princeton University Press.