94 COLE HEINOWITZ “ONE-SINGLE-THING:” Infrarealism and the Art of Everyday Life He who can drink from the fountain will not drink from the cup. —Dimitri Merejkowski, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, translated by Herbert Trench (1904) For many writers and artists coming of age in the 1970s, the great avant-garde movements of the earlier twentieth century appeared to be dead. More accurately, they had been neutralized—either through historical erasure (as in the case of Mexican Estridentismo) or through absorption and commodification by the very institutions they opposed (as in the cases of Dada and Surrealism). The last four decades have offered little relief from these policies of silence, containment, and cooptation. Infrarealism continues to be denigrated or denied by the literary establishment in Mexico, while images of Beat writers like Jack Kerouac are still used to sell khakis and other “lifestyle ” commodities in the US and abroad. The young poets who came together in mid-1970s Mexico City to found Infrarealism were keenly aware that the artistic and political freedoms promised by the historical avant-garde had been betrayed. What was left was an ossified, institutionalized literary vanguard whose dominion was jealously guarded by a small circle of cultural elites. The Infrarealists were united by their collective and individual determination to subvert the forces that imposed this regime and conspired to maintain it. And while these acts of subversion would take many forms over the next two decades, at the heart of them all was a commitment to integrating art and life “by means of an ethics- aesthetics carried out to the end ” (Bolaño, “Leave It All, Once More ”). From this base, the Infrarealists created a fluid, decentralized community that transgressed borders of all kinds (political, economic, spatial, cultural, personal), making their nomadic homes in the inter- stices where one reality ends and another begins. This expansive sense of community is perhaps most visible in the frequency with which the Infrarealists enter into each other’ s work. I am not referring here to CHICAGO REVIEW