Fraternity In Impermanence

OCTAVIO PAZ Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature

Although I occasionally found this book annoying with its bold and sweeping pronouncements on aesthetics (Our painting seeks to be a language without ceasing to be a presence; the oscillation between these two incompatible requirements constitutes the entire history of modern art . . .), mostly I was incredibly impressed with Paz's vast but lightly-worn erudition and his practice of making stimulating connections and correspondences.

As in his poetry, he sees history, society, humanity and art as ever-changing processes, a perpetual dance of complementary contradictions: tradition and modernity, conformity and revolution, stillness and motion, being and nothingness. He likes to compare and contrast, to discover similarities and differences — and, again as in his poetry, explores these polarities by the use of paradox and, sometimes, a very dry wit.

These essays do show their age in some respects (most were written in the 1970s) — particularly when dealing with politics and technology; but their general pervading spirit and philosophy I found eminently sympathetic. Paz does perhaps rely rather too much on the 'logic' of structuralism and semiotics, but he more than compensates for this with his faultless (in my view) opinions on the equivocal merits of our machine and communications age, the dubious 'progress' of science and history, and the subjectivity, relativity and plurality needed for a vital art and culture.

How better to give a flavour of Paz, both man and writer, than by quoting some passages which leaped out at me while reading the essays.

First an example of his dry humour:

It is more difficult to maintain a tradition of good cuisine than a tradition of good literature, as England teaches us. At Table and in Bed 1971

Here he defends the individual against the collective, the lone voice against the system:

We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity — life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or the mass society created by capitalism. Every system, by virtue as much of its abstract nature as its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life. Iniquitous Symmetries 1979

And here he connects erotic desire with intimations of mortality:

The desired body and the desiring body know each other to be mortal bodies; in the now of love, because of its very intensity, the knowledge of death is present. The New Analogy: Poetry and Technology 1967

He is open to popular as well as high culture, and is aware that both constantly feed into each other:

The relation between the two [high culture and popular culture], like all relations, is one of opposition and attraction. At times there is a contradiction between the two extremes, and at times there is fusion. This is what makes a society creative: complementary contradiction. The Verbal Contract 1980

Plurality, particularity, the local and the regional are desirable, as opposed to uniformity and mass production. He would have railed against our current and increasing globalisation, though he was always wary of a too-narrow nationalism:

The nineteenth century inherited from the Encyclopedia the idea of universal man, the same in all latitudes; we in the twentieth century have discovered the plural human, everywhere different. Universality for us is not the monologue of reason but the dialogue between human beings and culture. Universality means plurality. The Verbal Contract 1980

Uniformity is death, and the most perfect form of uniformity is universal death; hence the collective extermination practiced in the twentieth century. Life is always particular and local; it is my life, this life of mine here and now. The resurrection of national and regional cultures is a sign of life. Ibid

This is a perceptive comment on travel:

The French poem is wrong: to travel is not 'to die a little'*, but to practice the art of saying goodbye so that, our burden that much lighter, we may learn to receive. The Tradition of the Haiku 1970)

Among a huge variety of other subjects, Paz was very interested in Eastern thought and Buddhism:

. . . that feeling of universal sympathy with everything that exists, that fraternity in impermanence with human beings, animals, and plants, which is the most precious gift that Buddhism has given us. Ibid

Fraternity in impermanence — I like that.

Finally, he believed passionately in the importance of the personal and the particular in art . . .

To suppress subjectivity is to cut the heart out of art.

. . . and how the history of art can never be measured according to the 'norms' of scientific advance or rectilinear time:

It is difficult — or even absurd — to believe that such a thing as progress exists in the realm of art. From the book Alternating Current 1967

Though it perpetually changes, poetry does not advance. Ibid

All translations from the Spanish by HELEN LANE

*I have traced this quote ('Partir, c'est mourir un peu') to the poem Rondel de l'Adieu by the obscure French poet and playwright Edmond Haraucourt (1856-1941). 

Words Speak Us

Octavio Paz is for me one of the great Hispanic poets — indeed, one of the great world poets. Luckily he has been blessed with some talented translators, many of whom are fine poets in their own right: Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Mark Strand, Eliot Weinberger. Reading and much enjoying A Tree Within recently — which contains more than fifty poems written by Paz between 1976 and 1987— I was struck by some common themes and techniques running through the work.

Romanticism, Surrealism, contemporary painting — all have left their very clear mark on Paz. In this collection he draws word pictures of paintings by Duchamp, Tàpies, Balthus, Matta, Rauschenberg —and Miró:

Blue was immobilised between red and black.
The wind came and went over the page of the plains,
lighting small fires, wallowing in the ashes,
went off with its face sooty, shouting in the corners, 
the wind came and went, opening, closing windows and doors,
came and went through the twilit corridors of the skull . . .

From A Fable of Joan Miró

Buddhism and Japanese poetry are big influences:

The whole world fits in-
to seventeen syllables,
and you in this hut.

Straw thatch and tree trunks:
they come in through the crannies:
Buddhas and insects.

Made out of thin air,
between the pines and the rocks
the poem sprouts up.

From Basho An

He is also massively interested in the relation and interplay between the world of language and the world of things both concrete (nature, the city, the body) and amorphous (feelings, the spirit):

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

From Between Going and Staying

One of his methods is the use of figures of speech, such as oxymoron, and literary effects, such as synaesthesia, in order to define but at the same time deliberately confound the separateness of word and thing, action and non-action or, as in this case, the bodies of both poet and sleeping lover:

But at my side, you are breathing;
buried deep, and remote,
you flow without moving.
Unreachable as I think of you,
touching you with my eyes,
watching you with my hands.

From Before the Beginning

Paz wants to shake up any preconceived ideas about language, time, distance, knowledge, love etc. and shock us into considering them afresh:

Love begins in the body
— where does it end?
                                     If it is a ghost,
it is made flesh in a body;
                                            if it is a body,
it vanishes at a touch.

From Letter of Testimony

Koan-like questions are inherent in his poems — for example: do we invent the world or does the world invent us? What is the nature of time? What is appearance and what is reality, and are the two interwoven?

     
                  Poetry
speaks and listens:
                                it is real,
And as soon as I say
                                   it is real,
it vanishes.
                   Is it then more real?

From Between What I See and What I Say . . .

There is a constant mixing of interior and exterior worlds, dreams and actualities:

The day is short,
                             the hour long.
I walk through lots and corridors and echoes,
my hands touch you and you suddenly vanish,
I look in your eyes and suddenly vanish,
the hour traces, erases, invents its reflections
— but I don't find you,
                                       and I don't see me.

From A Song out of Tune

. . . and an opposing of transience and timelessness, illusion and reality, life and death — which ultimately may not be opposition, but reconciliation and unity:

                                       The art of love
— is it the art of dying?
                                        To love
is to die and live again and die again:
it is liveliness.
                        I love you
because I am mortal
and you are.

From Letter of Testimony

Paz is also fond of celebrating the world in all its beauty and multiplicity with Whitman-style litanies:  

. . . the fruits and the sweets, gilded mountains of mandarins and sloes, the golden bananas, blood-colored prickly pears, ocher hills of walnuts and peanuts, volcanoes of sugar, towers of amaranth seed cakes, transparent pyramids of biznagas, nougats, the tiny orography of earthly sweetness, the fortress of sugarcane, the white jicamas huddled together in tunics the color of earth, the limes and the lemons: the sudden freshness of the laughter of women bathing in a green river . . .

From 1930: Scenic Views

Certain valued words crop up time and again in Paz like signals or beads on a rosary: mirror, flame, river, landscape, body, brain, knot, glance, word, syllable . . . These are symbols yet not symbols — another blended contradiction which is quite typical.

I leave you with some more lines from Letter of Testimony, one of the most remarkable poems in A Tree Within. Note the painterly eye and the preoccupation with language:

In love with geometry
a hawk draws a circle.
The soft copper of the mountains
trembles on the horizon.
The white cubes of a village
in the dizzying cliffs.
A column of smoke rises from the plain
and slowly scatters, air into air,
like the song of the muezzin
that drills through the silence, 
ascends and flowers
in another silence . . .

Let yourself be carried by these words
toward yourself . . .

Words are uncertain
and speak uncertain things.
But speaking this or that,
                                            they speak us.

All translations by ELIOT WEINBERGER

Inventing Anew The Reality Of This World

Lately I've been reading a lot of Octavio Paz.

Las puertas del año se abren,
como las del lenguaje,
hacia lo desconocido.
Anoche me dijiste:
                               mañana
habrá que trazar unos signos,
dibujar un paisaje, tejer una trama
sobre la doble página
del papel y del día.
Mañana habrá que inventar,
de nuevo,
la realidad de este mundo.

The doors of the year open,
like the doors of language,
onto the unknown.
Last night you said:
                                 tomorrow
we must draw signs,
sketch a landscape, hatch a plot
on the unfolded page
of paper and the day.
Tomorrow we must invent,
anew,
the reality of this world.

OCTAVIO PAZ The opening of Primero de Enero (January First)

Tal vez amar es aprender
a caminar por este mundo.
Aprender a quedarnos quietos
como el tilo y la encina de la fábula.
Aprender a mirar.
Tu mirada es sembradora.
Plantó un árbol.
                          Yo hablo
porque tú meces los follajes.

Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable.
To learn to see.
Your glance scatters seeds.
It planted a tree.
                           I talk
because you shake its leaves.

OCTAVIO PAZ The close of Carta de Creencia (Letter of Testimony)

Translated by ELIOT WEINBERGER

Octavio Paz

I discovered this great Mexican poet some time ago, and bought two of his poetry books, though until recently they remained scarcely opened on my shelf. These from Selected Poems:

(Untitled)

The hand of day opens

Three clouds

And these few words

Poet's epitaph

He tried to sing, singing

not to remember

his true life of lies

and to remember

his lying life of truths.

I love the choice of 'and' rather than 'but' in the last poem. Finally, to continue the 'nobody' theme of my last post:

The street

A long and silent street

I walk in blackness and I stumble and fall

and rise, and I walk blind, my feet

stepping on silent stones and dry leaves.

Someone behind me also stepping on stones, leaves:

if I slow down, he slows;

if I run, he runs. I turn: nobody.

Everything dark and doorless.

Turning and turning among these corners

which lead forever to the street

where nobody waits for, nobody follows me,

where I pursue a man who stumbles

and rises when he sees me: nobody