Octavio Paz: Ontology and Surrealism (Latin American Decolonial and Postcolonial Literature) 9781793610317, 9781793610324, 1793610312

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Octavio Paz

Latin American Decolonial and Postcolonial Literature Series Editor: Thomas Ward, Loyola University Maryland Latin American Decolonial and Postcolonial Literature features works that analyze and engage with Latin American decolonial and postcolonial literatures. Recent work by Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Aní-bal Quijano, and others has shown how colonial elements were instituted during the colonial period and offer mechanisms and methodologies to overcome the persistence of those colonial forms in literature, philosophy, theology, and society during the post-Independence era. This series focuses on the medium of literature. Decolonial can take the form of resistance to the colonial during that period or it can occur after independence trying to overcome the cultural and political heritage of the colonial interval. Some works in the series may depart from the Anglo-American perspective and use its terminology and thus would prefer the term “postcolonial.” Others may depart from the Mediterranean or Latin perspective a la Frantz Fanon and thus use the term “decolonial.” All decolonial or postcolonial perspectives on literatures of Latin America are welcome. Advisory Board Arturo Arias, University of California, Merced; Tara Daily, Marquette University; Juan G. Ramos, College of the Holy Cross; Javier Sanjinés, University of Michigan; Javier Valiente Núñez, The Johns Hopkins University; and Gustavo Verdesio, University of Michigan Titles in the Series Octavio Paz: Ontology and Surrealism, by Roberto Sanchez Benitez Omar Cabezas, Nicaragua, and the Narrative of Liberation: To the Revolution and Beyond, by José María Mantero Decolonizing Indigeneity: New Approaches to Latin American Literature, by Thomas Ward

Octavio Paz Ontology and Surrealism Roberto Sanchez Benitez

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945866 ISBN 978-1-7936-1031-7 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-1032-4 (electronic) TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To my parents, Teresa and Roberto

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1

Poetics in Modernity

2 3 4

Erotic Metaphysics Magnetic Fields The Writing on Desire

ix xi 1 29 99 147

References Index About the Author

183 187 201

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my son Roberto Emilio Sánchez Pérez for his support in the attention to editorial details, as well as his initial comments on the general subject of this book. My wife, María de los Angeles, and son, Héctor Patricio, were always close by in the decisive moments during the composition of the manuscript. I have nothing but words of profound gratitude for them. None of this book could have been written without the fantastic family atmosphere they created, surrounding me with magical moments. I finished the final version of the book thanks to a sabbatical license granted by the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, as well as a postdoctoral stay at the Chihuahua College in Ciudad Juárez, 2019–2020. Special thanks to Dr. Melanie Slone, a bilingual editor, for her great contribution to the final version of the manuscript.

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Introduction

The Mexican poet Octavio Paz (1914–1998) is certainly one of Mexico’s most controversial cultural figures. Yet the fact that many scholars have not taken his intellectual work into account over the past decades has unfortunately meant that his essays are not well known. Some of the consequences of this disregard include the failure to recognize him as a great thinker and, especially, as a connoisseur of German ontology and phenomenology. He was also an important member of the generation of artists who were greatly influenced by the historical artistic avant-garde of the first decades of the twentieth century. 1 His case illustrates the way in which philosophical proposals enriched Mexican culture at a time when the reconstruction of this culture was the most outstanding demand of the post-revolutionary period. For example, as a poet, he formulated a conception of language as an equally important cultural product and anthropological substrate. Intellectually, he moved from a phenomenological ontology to a historicism of the human condition, wherein morality, politics, and the arts all reside in an ideological context where dogmatisms were imposed in the face of a lack of internal criticism. It was all fueled by the obsession with the “geometries” of reducing and debasing thoughts about life, typical of dogmatic political ideologies. It was in those decisive years of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that he published Libertad bajo palabra (1949), El laberinto de la soledad (1950), ¿Aguila o sol? (1951), Semillas para un himno (1954), El arco y la lira (1956), Piedra de sol (1957), Salamandra (1962), Ladera este (1967), Conjunciones y disyunciones (1969), and Posdata (1970). This book analyzes the themes of the poetic act that Paz associated with his ontological and surrealist readings, leading up to when they were transformed by his experience in India and the assimilation of Eastern philosophies (the “other shore”), and going through a set of Western proposals relating to love, eroticism, and art. Thanks to his early ontological readings, he was able to deal with essential elements of the human condition, such as its temporality or finiteness, or the Heideggerian “being-towards-death,” as well as nothingness and the condition of being thrown into or “fallen in the world.” Anguish and poetic inspiration are understood as an aspiration to be, linked to the central theme of otherness and the “other voice,” inspired clearly by surrealism, and to the phenomenological solution of “pre-meditation” that Paz suggests regarding the Freudian idea of the unconscious and that seems to have recovxi

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ered from Montaigne. This book considers three key moments of Paz’s intellectual formation that reveal the creation of a poet without parallel in Latin American literary history: first, his dialogue with Heideggerian ontology and its sequels in Sartrean existentialism; second, the surrealism that helped him confront the Marxist dogmatism of his time; and finally, his incursions into the Hindu religious vision, which allowed him to strengthen his mature approach to poetry, language, the sacred, otherness, the body, and women. Through a careful, intelligent analysis, and research on the history of modern poetry, Paz came to a series of theses that served as the starting point for his approach to a poetic vision of the world, where greater justice could be done to the desires and aspirations of contemporary man, recovering man’s severely damaged poetic faculty. He criticized modernity from a poetic point of view, meaning from the original poetic word. Thus, he was able to assume a Heideggerian stance in the sense that “Llegamos tarde para los dioses y muy pronto para el ser” (“We were too late for the gods and too early for being”), adding, “cuyo iniciado poema es el ser” (“whose poem already began, is being”) (Paz OC, I: 241). 2 It is why he placed so much importance on Romanticism and its heirs in the twentieth century, not only lamenting the nihilistic “death of God” but also establishing a search for the “lost half,” a “descenso a esa región que nos comunica con lo otro” (“a descent to the region that communicates us with the other”). Paz thought that Martin Heidegger’s diagnosis fit very well with the situation of the contemporary poet. Man is “lo inacabado” (“what is unfinished”); that is why he writes poems and ends up being a poem. Man is the being “siempre en perpetua posibilidad de ser completamente y cumpliéndose así en su no-acabamiento” (“always in perpetual possibility of being completely and thus fulfilling himself in his noncompletion”). 3 The situation cannot be more than an endless errancy, a permanent flight to what we are not—too late and too soon at the same time. The gods have sunk into the horizon of mythologies and religions, while we glimpse the actual being, which we are not yet, with stammering words—barely an image—that appears in dreams, madness, delirium, in the same way that the Spanish thinker Maria Zambrano (2006), a friend of his, could appreciate it; it is an experience that comes out of ourselves towards the encounter of a true presence (Heidegger would speak of Gegenwart des selbst). Poetry is the way to encounter this presence, to whose nature Paz (OC, VII: 98) dedicated important efforts since his early writings, as we read in the poem “Poesía” of Libertad bajo palabra: “Insiste, vencedora,/ porque tan sólo existo porque existes,/ y mi boca y mi lengua se formaron/ para decir tan sólo tu existencia/ y tus secretas sílabas, palabra/ impalpable y despótica/ substancia de mi alma” (“Insist, victor, / Because I only exist because you exist, and my mouth and my tongue were formed only to say your existence and your secret syllables, word/ impalpable and despotic / substance of my soul”).

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The experience of otherness allows us to contemplate this dimension of presence that oscillates between separation and reunion, solitude and community, between the one (the Heideggerian entity of daily life), and the whole (revealed by anguish). Paz aspires to the possibility of leaving behind a merely anthropomorphic vision of reality, taking on the challenge of understanding the different manifestations of being superior in face of those that reduce everything to the self—separation from oneself, an incarnation of the other, self-improvement in the transcendence of the other, an indistinct fusion–union in which the other already is. Through this idea, we fall into the “endless” aspect (where Heidegger speaks of a “whirlwind”) of ourselves, where time opens its entrails and “nos contemplamos como un rostro que se desvanece y una palabra que se anula” (“we saw ourselves as a face that disappears and a word that is annulled”) (Paz OC, I: 242). We have felt the same way some afternoons when we knew what the tree in the middle of the field meant, when the wind rocked it and the leaves spoke of something, “la vibración del cielo, la reverberación del muro blanco golpeado por la luz última” (“the vibration of the sky, the reverberation of the white wall struck by the last light”) 4; or one morning—the poet continues with his most intimate voice and vision—when he was able to listen to “the secret life of plants,” and, at night, remains “in front of the water between the high rocks.” The poet cannot serve as a comforter in the face of death, as perhaps philosophy can, but rather proposes that man has to understand that life and death are inseparable—a totality, an attempt, says Paz (OC, I: 242), to recover the one in the other “y así descubrir la figura del mundo en la dispersión de sus fragmentos” (“and thus to discover the shape of the world in the dispersion of its fragments”). In what is currently the most complete biography on Paz, Christopher Domínguez Michael (2014, 150) documents how, in the early 1950s, Paz discussed Martin Heidegger and surrealism with Albert Camus in Paris. Meanwhile, Domínguez Michael also conveys that André Breton taught Paz to underestimate the novel as a literary genre. This judgment may seem exaggerated at first, if we take into account the role of Miguel de Cervantes’ writing in Paz’s own work and the large number of novels that Paz obviously read as commented by Edgar Morin (w/d). Like Breton in the 1930s, Paz was doomed to be the subject of contradictions, setbacks, and controversy between his initial communist sympathies and poetic and philosophical ideas, as was detected by the man who was perhaps the greatest of the poets called “Contemporáneos,” and someone he admired deeply—Jorge Cuesta. More than a man full of personal contradictions, he was the reflection of an era that oscillated between the example of a social reality that resulted in an atrocious utopianism state, like the Soviet state, and the constant rebellious and dissident movements of the time.

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Paz was interested in avant-garde mainly because these artists presented the possibility of linking life and art (“to practice poetry,” Breton orders in the First Surrealist Manifesto), and chance and love, its undeniable components—the possibility of transforming life through art—hence its revolutionary nature, i.e., making life a poetic act. Artistic creation is thus deeply identified with social revolution. As Stanton (2015, 361) stated “The conjunction of these two central obsessions (creation as freedom in action, the sacred as an immanent revelation) naturally explains the author’s interest in the surrealist program and its equalization of the poetic act with the revolutionary act.” Yet Paz never agreed completely with the surrealist “psychic automatism,” in fact agreed with other aspects, such as translating “the real functioning of thought,” or the possibility of a “higher reality of certain forms of association neglected before it.” He likewise believed in the “omnipotence of the dream,” and the disinterested play of thought, all tending to “ruin definitively all the other psychic mechanisms and to replace them in the resolution of the main problems of life,” as Breton (1973, 49) pointed out in the First Surrealist Manifesto. We should add the surrealist apothegm that “existence is elsewhere,” a notion that we certainly find in a “novel” on the circumstances of post-World War France, which Paz experienced when he was a Mexican diplomat. In The Mandarins (1954), Simone de Beauvoir said “Elsewhere. It was a word even more beautiful than the most beautiful names.” Yet Paz’s example refers to a poetic work that never abandons intelligence, resolved with an understanding of the problems of language, aesthetics, and theoretical speculation, as we can see in Paul Valéry, whom Paz admired and exalted as the premier European thinker of the first half of the twentieth century, challenging the presence of Sartre and others. For this reason, Paz held intense dialogues between poetry and criticism (critical passion, as he came to identify it), understanding that the latter is consubstantial to the former. Paz’s philosophical and literary criticism allowed him to understand the illumination and the recreation of the poem from the shadows of silence (mysticism), and the stridency of the common voice (conciliation, community), as well as the permanent means of his self-evaluation and self-representation. If the philosophical and artistic tendencies analyzed in this book that influenced strongly Paz’s intellectual formation have anything in common, it is the dissolution of the subject—the self-creator takes the usual boundaries and transposes his identity into dynamic contacts, links, and transmutations the poet used to approach decisive spiritual experiences in the twentieth century. It can be described as a dissolution of the ego into liquid, aerial, weightless, igneous, solar evasion (Paz’s recurrent metaphors). It is this dismantling of the self that he registers in one regard, in the collective voice, in a romantic sense, a voice of the tribe, the “anonymous poet” and creator of myths. Meanwhile, this dismantling also finds him in an impossible unity with the whole, the emptiness, the

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light, the universe, the nothingness that generates the being of everything and vice versa, the full experience of love, the impossible union of lovers who stop being one, or two, to transmute into the unknown and unattainable; an identity that ends up linking with the possible—an encounter with and desertion of the self, which is located in another time: continuity and discontinuity together, permanence and change. Each poem can be understood as an allegory of the impossibility of an encounter with oneself—I, who is therefore another, in the depths of himself, never himself. The elusiveness of the self can only be understood through symbolism, thanks to the poet’s inventions. Each poem is a reunion with the forgotten parts of ourselves, a primordial beginning, a return to the origins of the world–word and towards an imagination venturing “to the abyss in order to arrive at an open space where it will touch Song and Existence, where Body becomes Imagination” (Chantikian 2002, 18). History can be seen as the beginning of the future, which is now, at this moment, this present. Paz’s poetry can be understood as a search, an adventure, an inner experience that criticizes the outside world; it is an exploration of the abyss. There are several repetitive verbs that Paz uses to indicate this aspect in his poems, such as “vuelta” (“return”) to the origins, following the Bretonian approach of “recovery of the original powers of the spirit” (Wilson 2002, 50). It is also a search for the forgotten and repressed self that, to a certain extent, corresponds to the recovery of the Heideggerian “forgetfulness of being” approach. In sum, it is the search for the word of the “beginning” of man, before all men and civilizations, very much in the Roussonian sense—a search for the “lost man,” innocence, the other part or half of the being, the lost half, “the other.” It is also a search for the “pure word” in the sense established by Mallarmé when he pointed out that, “donner a sens plus pur aux mots of the tribe” (“endow the tribe’s words with their purest sense”), even recapturing a Sartrean feeling in that the man who speaks is closer to things and beyond words. For the poet, this man is found in a “wild state,” untamed. He searches through the words for an expansion of consciousness, of the conscious mind; that is how he reaches beyond human limitations in a typical surrealist project. If he opens his consciousness to other unconscious levels, he satisfies the desire for transcendence of subjectivity. It is in the poetic creation that this tension between the conscious and the unconscious, between imagination and reason, is revealed with intensity. The word descends into unconscious depths and formulates the dark impulses it finds, but also serves as a vital means of adjustment through which the human being retains contact with his inner and outer world. That is why we can say that the word is a means of survival. To have this experience, we shall see that a non-linear conception of time that emphasizes the importance of the moment, of the intensity of time, in short of the presence, will have to be renewed. It refers to the idea

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of “the other voice” that Paz knew how to develop in-depth, consisting of instantaneous revelations. We are talking about poetry that tears off the mask that hides the world and seeks to recreate it as a “presence.” It is an allusion to what Breton called “eternity in the instant,” already present, for example, in erotic love—the peak of eternity. It is a sublime instant, an absolute strangeness, a delivery to the other, a confusion. It is also an orgasmic instant that reveals the being–desiring in which the poet becomes the poem he has written, an image of what his desire, temporarily liberated, can say (to be imaged), as we shall see in our analysis of Paz’s Mono gramático (1974). We are faced with the fact that we cannot escape the fatality of time, and the poem takes on the role of redeeming us in it, and “fixes the temporal flow creating an eternal return” (Wilson 2002, 71) as an ever-renewed experience based on cyclical or natural time. It is why Paz considered poetry as a “momentary reconciliation” between the being and the desire to be, as is expressed at the end of El arco y la lira. The poetic moment is collected in Paz’s poetry through exciting images, analogies, and metaphors, including lightning, a spark, a tree, a wave as it crests and breaks, the fall, midday or a moment of revelation when the sun does not create shadows, a moment of maximum luminosity (light); transparency, without shadows or darkness (a stone). Transparency is crystallization in poetry, a condition sought by mystics and surrealists. He points out in “Apuntes del insomnio,” from his initial poetry book Libertad bajo palabra: “En la cima del instante/ me dije: ´Ya soy eterno/ en la plenitud del tiempo´./ Y el instante se caía/ en otro, abismo sin tiempo” (“At the peak of the moment/ I said to myself: ‘I am already eternal/ in the fullness of time.’ / And the moment was falling/ in another, abyss without time”) (Paz OC, VII: 54). Poetry is a dialogue of transparencies that cannot be understood outside the action it adds to opacity and lifeless daily speech. This action is linked to embellishment and to the ideal that spirits tend to through purified inner revelations. The essence is made up of mental and visionary worlds, where poetry is not a matter of style or words but fundamentally of vision. Certain images in Paz’s poetry are decisive to understand what was said before, such as with dreams, the night, light, water, shadows, the abyss—emblems of the incarnation of poetic societies, archetypes of the perfect society. In this context, dreams are understood as being close to the origin, at the beginning, in the “remote baptism” where the real “I” is born. In particular, light is a center of unity referred to in several poems, or even in El laberinto de la soledad, when the light of the high plateau is described as “crystal clear.” It is sunlight which reveals the world as it is, a divine vision confused with a poetic vision: a lightspirit, or “spiritual sun.” The sun does not so much heat the earth as it makes the world shine, taking it out of its darkness thanks to the action of language and poetry. It is a revelation that is illumination. Light is like an image of Eden and the Infinite. In Paz, poetry and thinking light inaugu-

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rate a kind of formless perfection. While the light brings the world out of darkness and makes it shine, the word shines among the opaque and the everyday mass of language—word-light, light of the word that makes the world tangible by making it appear, “luz que madura hasta ser cuerpo” (“light that matures until it is a body”) (Paz, cited by Wilson 2002, 76). The dawn of light is the dawn of the word in poetry, the dawn of memory, like in the poem “Blanco.” According to the Mexican poet, the real man, buried under a civilized mask, is in reality a “fragmento de esta luz cósmica” (“fragment of this cosmic light”). In this sense, Paz sought to preserve the links between the Aztec solar religion and the idea of rebirth in the Fifth Sun; a way to be ourselves again like suns, a being that is defined by its luminosity. Drawing on ideas from Lautremont, in one of his decisive initial essays, “Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión” (1942), Paz formulated the possibility of imagining a revolutionary poetic society that could be practical for all, as Harold Bloom (2002) points out. He imagines a society where the creation of a pure language, necessary to reform intellect or thought, could come about. It can be said that Paz extracted this idea fundamentally from Nietzsche. It would entail a reform and criticism of language that would be the basis for future philosophical transformations—not a scholarly or selective elaboration of philosophy but a reformation linked to society that could receive immediate changes to language. It would be a parallel process where a society, and the language that it speaks, are enriched. There would be a liberation of thought— consciousness—and of society as a result of a “language purification.” After all, Paz sought a recreation of ourselves through an authentic selfconsciousness that would no longer be chained, gagged, and buried. The approach toward a reform of understanding that transitioned through language could only sketch a utopian image of a liberated society. Paz envisioned the beginning of the creation of a new utopia that would be political insofar as it required an authentic critical self-consciousness that passed through the poetic sieve and would be a way of enjoying life as a whole, since life is made up of collecting essential features and returning them for better understanding. Poetry is in itself a universe of experience that refers to the deep structures of the culture and history of a people, to the extent that it maintains and nourishes the imagination and makes possible consciousness, i.e., the understanding of societies. In this sense, Paz could understand freedom only as a liberation of consciousness through a purified language. Spiritual freedom, that is a central “celestial vision,” is clear in his poetry; a sensual experience that liberates desire. The purity of language can only be understood as a renunciation of dead metaphors, and as an extra-aesthetic experience that affects human beings as a unit. For Paz, this project was always utopian, it implied the whole of society having this experience in daily life. Poetry would be an authentic,

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true art, capable of modifying consciousness and life, as the artistic avantgarde of the early twentieth century wanted. He described a life enriched with poetry—movement, change, flow, desire, and invention as true reality. The society Paz desired is rooted in myth, born of evil and of history, obeying a poetic wisdom, hence the powerful, radical image that he creates of Mexico City as a set of ruins that time has built out of mineral sediments, at the same time igneous, liquid, and aerial—a desolate, ruined city, cemeteries of cement and death, uncultivated lands where solitude and communion have been woven; urban desolation, orphanhood, as in the poem “Crepúsculo de la ciudad”: “Todo lo que me nombra o que me evoca/ yace, ciudad, en ti, signo vacío/ en tu pecho de piedra sepultado” (“Everything that names me or moves me/ lies, city, in you, empty sign/ in your chest of buried stone”) (Paz OC, VII: 68). There is deep insight into Mexico’s reality, understood through its cultural manifestations. T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland” is put into play through a rejection of conventional societal values and morality; it is a culture that has lost its spiritual roots. Vast images of devastated cities, labyrinths of solitude, doors that lead to nothing, symbols of lonely, abandoned lands, a fine, intricate image of which Juan Rulfo provides in his novel Pedro Páramo (1955), and in his collection of stories El llano en llamas (1953)— sand, desert, garbage, dust, saltpeter, rocks, and above all, agave, that plant whose figure contains the violence that crowns it as the “armed plant.” It all creates the composition of a “key,” “bridge,” “border,” “shore,” “weapon” that is poetry’s intervention as a deconstructive social act. In fact, shortly before Rulfo did so (based on the air that the Mexican Revolution had cleared), Paz (OC, VII: 87) appreciated the landscape of the Mexican countryside, which he had experienced as a young teacher at an elementary school in Yucatán, facing a country thirsty for sun and harmony yet absorbed in its telluric force like the volcanoes, as we read in the poem “Entre la piedra y la flor” from Libertad bajo palabra: “¿Qué tierra es esta?/ ¿Qué violencias germinan/ bajo su pétrea cáscara,/ que obstinación de fuego ya frío,/ años y años como saliva que se acumula/ y se endurece y se aguza en púas?” (“What Earth is this?/ What violence is germinated/ under its stony shell,/ what obstinacy of fire already cold,/ years and years like saliva that accumulates/ and hardens and sharpens into quills?”). In short, Paz sought the formation of “poetic communities” in societies devastated by the false illusion of progress and fragmentation that affected the “unity of the world’s being.” It can be seen as a “restoration of the origin” that Paz learned from Breton’s readings of Rousseau, as we shall see. He sought a return to the moment prior to the creation of the dichotomies that have characterized the history of the West—freedom and existence, reason and imagination, love and eroticism, culture and society, art and work, one and whole. We can assume that for Paz, the creation of poetry from life was a way to release the erotic and the revolu-

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tionary potential of the imagination in a metamorphosis of what is given in a creative community, transforming life into the creative being of a poem, opposing ideas such as those of the Sartreans, who considered literature as mere illusion. Paz subscribed to the Heideggerian idea that we are constituted by language, since it is what gives us our humanity. No other aspects could be the agents of change that poetry puts into play, as we shall see, such as criticism, desire, eroticism, or elements of change and transformations of history. Paz wanted poetry to be an act that liberated us from the petrifying everydayness of the consciousness, moving us towards the formulation of a history that takes into account the authentic immediacy and intentionality of a new consciousness for a new being. For this reason, he was congruent with the ideas of Marxism that he had once embraced, in the sense of dismantling the superstructure of society, destroying the “false consciousness,” and moving towards a universal socialism so that the essence of poetry could not be dissociated from the task of restoring the original being of humanity. Paz saw poetry as a great moment of understanding of our being, beyond the alienating social conditions of domination, slavery, exploitation, and misery. Also, it would be necessary to recognize the deep substrate on which the being is based—love and eroticism—as true elements of criticism. Only poetry seems to embody utopian visions in a time of disenchantment, displaying futuristic, prophetic, visionary, revealing, enlightening traditions; it allows us to understand the being we want to be. Poetry serves as a prophecy of changes. It is the poet who prophesies the communion between poetry and permanent revolt, as I aim to elucidate in this book. NOTES 1. Enrique Krauze (2014), a collaborator and intimate friend of the Mexican poet, has been in charge of documenting accurately this history of misunderstandings between Paz, the intellectuals, and the Mexican left in the second half of the twentieth century. See especially “The heresy of Octavio Paz,” from the book El poeta y la revolución. In one of the few texts written on Paz, in Mexico, when he received the Nobel Prize in 1990—Gabriel Zaid’s “The Swedes Proclaim it,” published in the Mexican magazine Vuelta, No. 168—he is acknowledged not only for his great status as a poet but also as a thinker on the level of José Ortega y Gasset, based on his critique and rethinking of Western culture: he is considered an “intellectual leader” (Flores 2011, 256). 2. From here on, all references to Paz’s works will correspond to the edition of his Complete Works, cited in the bibliography, unless otherwise noted. The Roman numeral denotes the volume, followed by the page. In other cases, we follow the usual reference style. 3. Paz used several of these ideas in El laberinto de la soledad, as we shall see later. Carlos Fuentes ridicules the use of Heideggerian jargon, very fashionable at the end of the 1950s, in his novel La región más transparente (1958). There is a supposed “Heidegger introducer,” with Orteguian influence, where Dasein turns out to be superior to the everyday Mexican, in an agile mixture with existentialism: “The Mexican is this entity,

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anonymous and disjointed, who looks at his circumstance with, at most, fear or curiosity. Dasein, on the other hand, has become aware of the finitude of man; he is a set of possibilities, the last of which is death, always seen in third parties, never experienced in their own skin. How is Dasein projected to death?” (Fuentes 2008, 51). It has been said that in Fuentes’ novel, the character of Manuel Zamacona embodies Paz himself (Sheridan 2018, 78), following precisely the themes of poetic inspiration and speaking against the thesis of socialist realism in art. Paz expressed his reservations about this novel, which was the first step in their personal and ideological distancing. 4. Stanton (2015, 356) refers to a 1956 letter from Cortázar, following his reading of El arco y la lira, in which he highlights precisely the way Paz ended some of his essay paragraphs with essential, complementary, poetic effusion in the analytical argumentation of the topics. Next to the “dialectical exercise,” says the author of Rayuela, suddenly appears that “beautiful tendency that you have to go shooting suddenly, and finish a paragraph or a chapter with a rain of imperatively necessary images.”

ONE Poetics in Modernity

Being able to distinguish a time without history—content in itself—and at the same time, the origin of all time, a time before time that corresponds fully to poetry, is part of the condition that Paz called the “tradition of modernity,” or “historical awareness.” The ability to make this distinction can occur only in an era when time flows unceasingly into the future: “Al cambiar nuestra imagen del tiempo, cambió nuestra relación con la tradición. Mejor dicho, porque cambió nuestra idea del tiempo, tuvimos conciencia de la tradición” (“By changing our image of time, our relationship with tradition changed. Or rather, because our idea of time changed, we became aware of tradition”) (Paz 1989a, 26). Modernity has been characterized precisely by “abrir las puertas del futuro” (“opening the doors of the future”), that is, the idea of successive, irreversible time. Things happen only once and are unrepeatable, which breaks with any cyclical approach to time. Modernity has privileged the future, which is simultaneously both the projection of successive time, and its negation. It is time that we tend to inexorably, even as we do not, so it can only be considered a continuous beginning, a permanent going beyond. We have had to wait for this present time, called “modernity,” so the appreciation of the “tiempo del principio” (“time of the beginning”) can be given as a return to the original beginning, denied at the same time by modern age. For Paz, poetry is the art that—in its critique of modernity— can embody this beginning “anterior a la historia, la revelación de una palabra original de fundación” (“prior to history, the revelation of an original founding word”). As part of a speculative tradition that includes Rousseau, Vico, and Hegel, the Mexican poet argued that poetry was the original language of society (passion and sensitivity)—the true language of all revelations and revolutions.

1

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Chapter 1

The crisis of modernity has been a crisis of the ideas of “progress,” “future,” and “utopia,” but not of “crítica” (“criticism”). It has allowed for the vindication of a time that can only be counted based on its intense moments, on its instants of plenitude, as we read in Paz’s poem “Conversar,” from the poetry book Árbol Adentro (1987): “Al decir lo que dicen/ los nombres que decimos/ dicen tiempo: nos dicen,/ somos nombres del tiempo” (“Saying what they say/ the names we speak/ tell time: they tell us,/ we are the names for time”) (Paz OC, VII: 638-9). Poetry makes it possible to claim the moment, the “tiempo del placer, pero también el tiempo de la muerte, el tiempo de los sentidos y la revelación del más allá” (“time of pleasure, but also the time of death, the time of the senses and the revelation of the hereafter”) (Paz 1990, 53). The new vision of time is the now, the present—the point of convergence of the three traditional dimensions of time, and of the two aspects of life, as we read in the poem “Pasado en claro”: “Desde lo alto del minuto/ despeñado en la tarde de plantas fanerógamas/ me descubrió la muerte./ Y yo en la muerte descubrí al lenguaje” (“From the moment’s peak/ flung down into an afternoon of sexual plants/ death discovered me./ And in death I discovered language”) (Paz OC, VII: 592). Thus, only the “instant is perpetual.” Paz insisted on the need to build upon values in the context of morality, of politics, of the erotic and poetic aspects of the present time. He sought a poetry that could only be pure time, the intersection of times, the point of convergence facing the “tradición de la ruptura” (“tradition of the rupture”)—“imaginación encarnada en un ahora sin fechas” (“imagination embodied in a now without dates”). The Mexican poet did not fail to recognize the place that poetry has held in modernity, central and eccentric all at once. He recognized a poetry that expresses realities alien to modernity, such as worlds and psychic strata that are not only the most ancient but are also the most reluctant to change history. Only poetry has carried out the critique of modernity to its final consequences, because denying modern times is a way of keeping them alive. Speaking in contradictory terms, poetry is part of the movement by which modernity is refounded day after day. Critique has not been rational or philosophical, but passionate, representing realities denied by modernity itself—“pasión crítica” (“critical passion”). It is a poetry that is memory made image, and image converted into voice. It could not be otherwise if we take into account that “poetic thought” is imagination, which as we know consists of the ability to place contrary realities in relation to each other. In poetry, language is conceived as an “animated universe,” a journey through the double movement of attraction and repulsion—the living fabric of affinities and oppositions. In this sense, Paz wrote Ladera Este (1962–1968) during his so-called Asian period, where a part of the poem “Tumba del Poeta” states: “Haz de mundos/ instantes/ racimos encendidos/ selvas andantes de astros/ sílabas errantes/ marea/ todos los

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tiempos del tiempo/ SER/ una fracción de segundo/ lámpara lápiz retrato/ en un aquí no sé dónde” (“Bundle of worlds/ instants/ clusters ablaze/ walking jungles of stars/ erratic syllables/ tide/ all the times of time/ BEING/ a fraction of a second/ lamp pencil portrait/ in a here I know not where”). CRITICAL PASSION Poetry is a chronicle of days. Paz attempted to elucidate “la naturaleza de la vocación poética y la función de la poesía en las sociedades” (“the nature of the poetic calling and poetry’s function in societies”). He saw poetry as a perfect way to feel linked to a deep tradition in the history of the Spanish language, among other reasons, because “cada poeta es un latido en el río del lenguaje” (“each poet is a heartbeat in the river of language”). Compared to other forms of language, poetry is universal in nature. There can be societies with no philosophy, with no novels, with no dramas or comedies, but what they are never missing is poetry, which has always been of a social nature: a practice linked to collective life—“de la sexualidad a la magia, de la camaradería entre los cazadores a las reglas que rigen la convivencia entre las mujeres” (“from sexuality to magic, from the camaraderie among hunters to the rules governing coexistence among women”). Poetry in its beginnings had to have poetics, because it needed to be communicated, and its rules and principles had to be shown. Rhetoric and poetics have never been reduced to a mandatory or abstract formulation, but have been found in the development of the history of poetry. Still, despite the several theoretical, philosophical, anthropological, and sociological resources that he used as support in his book on poetics, Paz the poet had to understand modern poetry from its own history, as we can see in the extraordinary examples El arco y la lira, Los Hijos del limo (1974), and La otra voz (1990). His poetics is a dialogue with the history of poetry that, in the end, would be converted into an erotica, as we shall see in Chapter 4 of this book. It is for this reason that he never used a preconceived scheme that would culminate in elementary reductionism, although, behind these initial historical “poetics” he found some elements of philosophy or theology that appeared on the historical scene very early in the understanding of poetry. Hence Paz’s justification of his discussions or assimilations of prominent philosophers, as well as his use of conceptions of the “sacred,” “otherness,” “temporality,” “freedom,” “love,” “eroticism” which he found in the modern ontology, surrealism, and erotic metaphysics of Antonio Machado and the Hindu philosophies. He could not have discussed poetry without having entered the domains of philosophical, religious, metaphysical, and mythical thinking, using a large number of significant humanistic sources.

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Indeed, all poetics suppose a philosophy (Paz OC, I: 16), as we find in Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Horacio, Callimachus, Philodemus, Virgil, and Dante, as well as in representatives of the Eastern tradition (Zeami). All of these poets were also critical creators of poetics. Paz sought to reinforce through poetics the solidarity and complicity between philosophy and poetry. Carlos Fuentes noted that “Paz’s essays and poetry are inseparable because they are united philosophically” (cited by Kushigian 2002, 80). Paz was aware that poetry and reflection have always been linked, although under different forms, in some cases as precept or rules of diction. Poetry has always been associated with collective life, although it has also been subject to certain rules, order, and learning. Paz wanted to go beyond these normative elements to find contemporary philosophies, and even a theology at stake. Paz mentions (OC, I: 17) Novalis and Hölderlin who, he said, wrote texts “en prosa en los que la filosofía se convierte en defensora y cómplice de las visiones y de las efusiones del poeta” (“in a prose where philosophy becomes a defender and accomplice of the poet’s visions and effusiveness”). He recalled that it was in 1800 when the Lyric Ballads, containing poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge—the first modern “poetic manifest”—was written as prologue, proving later to be the prelude to the artistic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of his interesting conclusions is that every poem is a poetic, and that each of the “poética se resuelve en una visión filosófica o religiosa” (“poetics is resolved in a philosophical or religious view”). This “philosophical spectrum” (if we take the term’s two meanings—in an otherworldly sense, and as a diverse mosaic, consisting of inlays of various reflective sources and knowledge) will be of interest to us. In other words, Paz reconstructed the philosophical–poetic operation as a means of a reflection of oneself, poetry, and art. We will limit it to the surrealist artistic movement, and to one of the most influential philosophical trends of the twentieth century, the Heideggerian ontology. All poetics is “entusiasmo y geometría” (“enthusiasm and geometry”). It entails an unwavering relationship between understanding and imagination. Thus, for Paz, the history of modern poetry is inseparable from the poetics that justify and defend it. A unique feature of modern poetics would be its belligerency “lo mismo ante el pasado literario que ante la realidad presente” (“toward both the literary past and the present reality”): “son poéticas combatientes, doblemente críticas, tanto de la tradición poética como de la sociedad, sus valores y sus instituciones” (“they are combatants poetics, critical of both of the poetic tradition and of society, its values and its institutions”) (Paz OC, I: 18). More precisely, modern poetry has been a tradition of successive ruptures, but also of conjunctions, confluences, convergences, and restorations. The invention of new traditions has meant the resurrection of forgotten works and au-

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thors, as well as grafts and adaptations of traditions from other peoples and cultures. Perhaps it is useful in this context to refer to the idea Jacques Derrida developed in his highly relevant book Spectres of Marx (1995), in which the specter “is never present as such.” Without analyzing his elaborate argument to support an idea of justice that holds us responsible for the past, memory, inheritance, generations, and the future (in a very Sartrean style), Derrida pointed out that the specter is like the ghost that Hamlet makes enter and exit and then re-enter the scene. It is precisely the “más de uno” (“more than one”) to which Paz often appealed, because it is impossible to evade bequeathed inheritances, the influences present in poetic considerations, and the world they managed to diagram, which are now inhabited by those we find in the “presente vivo” (“living present”). We shall see that Paz follows this surrealist precept of beingwith-the-specter, who is no longer or has not yet been. It is the same attitude as one who is not at all, even though there is a type of presence in what we inherit and in what we will bequeath. Hence there is the idea of some responsibility and justice that covers what no longer is but does not stop being present, even if what can be expected is especially the future. It is a “non-contemporaneity of the living present with itself” (Derrida 1998, 13, italics in the original). 1 It is a temporary “inadequacy” that Paz assumed, inevitably and essentially. We can read some of these ideas about spectrality, where the past navigates in the present and the presence, in Paz’s sublime poem “Nocturno de San Idelfonso.” The specter is a dog looking for a ghost bone on a forgotten street, stemming from the poet’s childhood. The poet’s friends have acquired the same dimension; in general, everything living becomes spectral, so that only time remains—“Las ideas se disipan,/ quedan los espectros:/ verdad de lo vivido y padecido./ Queda un sabor casi vacío:/ el tiempo/—furor compartido—/ el tiempo/—olvido compartido—/ al fin transfigurado/ en la memoria y sus encarnaciones./ Queda/ el tiempo hecho cuerpo repartido: lenguaje” (“Ideas scatter,/ the ghosts remain:/ the truth of what is lived and suffered./ An almost empty taste remains:/ time/—shared fury—/ time/—shared oblivion—/ in the end transfigured/ in memory and its incarnations./ What remains is/ time as apportioned body: language”) (Paz OC, VII: 575). In this sense, poetry consists of these reincarnations, or “resurrections of presences.” Poetry is the story “transfigured in the truth of time undated.” After all, poetry is located between history and truth, assimilating the core of contradictions, represented by the logical figure of the oxymoron: “La poesía,/ puente colgante entre la historia y la verdad,/ no es camino hacia esto o aquello:/ es ver/ la quietud en el movimiento,/ el tránsito/ en la quietud.” (“Poetry,/ suspension bridge between history and truth,/ is not a path toward this or that:/ it is to see/ the stillness in motion,/ the change / in stillness”) (Paz OC, VII: 574).

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The solutions Paz offers involve these domains, including literary translations and the poetic sense in general, within contemporary circumstances. We have to keep discovering the true facets of his intellectual work as a real thinker and not consider only the poet, or the controversial figure magnified by his ideological and political divergences or by his pioneering mass-media appearances, where he created programs with high cultural and historical content (in a way that has never again been done in Mexico). Paz even proposed poetic experiments with moving images, while those who criticized these suggestions were perhaps after their own fifteen minutes of fame, as Andy Warhol once suggested. For Paz, poetry was a long search for itself, in its history and meaning, as well as a search for himself. Certain approaches to his poetry also suggest that he may have resorted to critique as a way of “justifying” or “enhancing” his poetic work by seeking to explain it. Meanwhile, as he himself argued on several occasions, critique has been a necessity in modern poetry, becoming a creative work. In modernity, relations between poetry and poetics (which Paz understands simply as a “reflection on poetry”) become more intimate. Using Bretonian terminology, creation and reflection are “communicating vessels.” What is found in one is a part of the other. We are facing a single body, or substance, with different limbs or modes of being, depending on the model chosen. It is a single substance that is scattered by both poetry and critique, which the poet called “critical passion.” As we shall see, the attempt to know himself as a poet led Paz to the understanding of what is human, in the dialectic of otherness that he illustrated in several of his poems and essential essays. Searching for himself, he ended up finding the others. These others are similar to everybody; the other is one who is simultaneously like the others in a contemporary and timeless manner. It is a movement that coincides with the rediscovery of the other, in effect, and its decisive importance in understanding poetic activity, as we shall see throughout El arco y la lira. On this subject, Paz (1990, 43) also refers to other civilizations, including Eastern and Amerindian, that adopt inconceivable art forms, often contrary to the West: “La presencia de paisajes y formas artísticas de Oriente, África y la América precolombina es un rasgo general de la poesía y el arte de vanguardia” (“The presence of landscapes and artistic forms of from the East, Africa, and Pre-Columbian America is a common thread of avant-garde poetry and art”). Modern poetry takes the discovery of “the other” to heights beyond the limits set by romanticism. Such change was the extreme consequence of its aesthetic revolution. Strangeness, abandonment, loneliness, necessity of communion, and integration with the whole, nostalgia, exile, wandering—these are all issues associated with the revelation of what is not, or what has been, or what is wanting and waiting to be. Poetry is part of the exercise in critique with which modernity was born—critique of religion, philosophy, morality, politics, law, history,

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economy. Critique is understood as “un método de investigación, creación y acción” (“research, creation and action method”) (Paz 1990, 32), to which the central concepts of modernity are linked, such as “progress,” “evolution,” “revolution,” “freedom,” “democracy,” “science,” “technique,” and an equally powerful concept—“utopia.” Utopias are the other extreme of critique, and perhaps only a critical age could have induced them, since they fill the vacuum of what is demolished by the critical spirit. They represent the dream of reason, to paraphrase Goya, and have helped with revolutions and social reforms, although sometimes with unwanted results and unforeseen outcomes. Paz said that another test of the failure of rationality in history was the desire to find laws that govern it. Here, we have one of the constant criticisms of historical and dialectical materialism, which seemed to Paz an insufficient scheme to explain the meaning of human acts. The preeminence of Utopia has been another original and characteristic feature of modernity, according to Paz. When confronted with visions that have made the human past an ideal destiny, a Golden Age to which we must somehow return, modernity has imposed the vision of the future, of something to be done or conquered. No longer is there yearning for lost time, or “Paradise Lost,” but for the possibility to found another humanity in something incomparable in itself, as is seen in modernity’s demand to depart from any other time in history, irreducible to any past. Utopia embodies the vision of the future to be conquered, a land of exploration and the design of a new existence not given by the Creator of everything but by the imperfection of the creature. The perfection associated inevitably with the utopian feeling is not something that we once had, nor is it contained in our origin, but rather it is something that we must continue proposing with all the accidental finiteness of the human future. It is why the approach taken by Paz is also a critique of the Christian notion of eternity and of the notion of finite time defined between a beginning and an end; modernity opens time to infinity, while perfection moves into this world, so within history man forges his sense and destiny. Paz (1990, 34) quotes a wonderful Hegelian phrase about the way in which human beings unfold in history—“la rosa de la razón está crucificada en el presente” (“The rose of reason is crucified in the present”). Paz (1990, 32) believed that on this critical journey, the eighteenth century marked one of the most decisive movements to reach reason, the fundamental idea of thought becoming critical of itself: “la razón renunció a las construcciones grandiosas que la identificaban con el Ser, el Bien y la Verdad; dejó de ser la Casa de la Idea y se convirtió en un camino: fue un método de exploración” (“reason renounced the grandiose constructions that identified it with Being, Good, and Truth; it ceased to be the House of the Idea and became a pathway: it was a method of exploration”). And he mentions the great figures who nurtured that peri-

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od of modern critique—Kant and Hume in metaphysics, with a critique of certainty and belief; Rousseau, Diderot, Laclos, and Sade in reflections on passions, sensibility, and sexuality; Gibbon and Montesquieu with historical criticism; he also mentions the discovery of the other, as well as advancements in astronomy, geography, physics, and biology. In the end, he saw critique embodied in the various revolutions and independence movements that followed this fortunate century. Criticism is an element of poetics that Paz notes has accompanied the history of modern poetry; it is a means that allows for reinvention, a rebirth of traditions, and the creation of new ones. This criticism should contain the idea of a reflective consciousness, as one can find, for instance, in the “Aguas del Abismo,” a poem by Francisco de Quevedo that was central to Paz in one of his first essential essays, “Poesía de doledad y poesía de comunión.” While the Spanish poet represented the loneliness that accompanies the contemporary poet, who is increasingly estranged from the social communion of which he was a part in ancient societies, St. John of the Cross was the opposite—a poetry of communion to which Paz always aspired. In that self-consciousness he would have to reveal the idea of the “caída en sí mismo” (“fall into oneself”), and “caída en el alma” (“fall into the soul”), the latter of which is equally important in his poetics, particularly in the understanding of inspiration, as we shall see. Paz saw Quevedo as a predecessor, avant la lettre, of existentialism, of the consciousness of evil in a Baudelaire style, taking part in a modernity that assumes the “dramática conciencia de la caída y en la imposibilidad de su rescate” (“dramatic awareness of the fall and the impossibility of being rescued”). The consciousness of separation is one of the ways in which he identifies another key notion of his poetics, “negatividad” (“negativity”), which led him to discuss the Hegelian inheritance. Quevedo’s stoicism became one of the most obvious existential signs of modernity—anguish, fear, rupture, blasphemy, rebellion, and—in rare moments—even reconciliation. Contemporary poetry is inherited from the poetic movements of modernity, from romanticism to the artistic avant-garde movements of the first decades of the twentieth century, but also from its negation—“lo moderno es por naturaleza transitorio y lo contemporáneo es una cualidad que se desvanece apenas la nombramos” (“being modern is by nature temporary and being contemporary is a quality that fades away as soon as we name it”) (Paz 1990, 32). 2 There will be as many modernities as ancient times in existence, making “modernity” a “wrong and provisional” designation. Of the constitutive moments of modernity, Paz highlights the eighteenth century, since it already contained what we are still. It was in that era when contradictions had to traverse the coming centuries, to the degree that our era has been a “desfiguración de las ideas y proyectos de ese gran siglo” (“disfigurement of the ideas and projects of that great century”), rich in social reforms and utopian projects.

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Paz saw romanticism as a reaction to the critique established by the eighteenth century, which defines what is moral, erotic, politics. In sum, it established a way of living and dying. Romanticism is the “hijo rebelde” (“rebellious son”) of that century and stood counter to it—“hace la crítica de la razón crítica y opone al tiempo de la historia sucesiva el tiempo del origen antes de la historia, al tiempo futuro de las utopías el tiempo instantáneo de las pasiones, el amor y la sangre” (“it criticizes critical reason and contraposes the time of the origin before history to the time of successive history, and the instantaneous time of passions, love, and blood to the future time of utopias”) (Paz 1990, 35). Romanticism is the denial of the modernity born in the eighteenth century, but a denial within that same modernity. Paz highlights two ways in which such a transgression could be accomplished—analogy and irony. He understood the former through a definition that he would repeat in many places, particularly in Los hijos del limo—“la visión del universo como un sistema de correspondencias y la visión del lenguaje como el doble del universo” (“the vision of the universe as a system of correlations, and of language as the universe’s double”). Analogy is part of a tradition that moves from antiquity to romanticism, to modern poetry and surrealism. Irony, meanwhile, is the exception in analogy, the hole that interrupts the “tejido de las analogías” (“tissue of analogies”); it is the dissonance that “rompe el concierto de las correspondencias” (“breaks the concert of correspondences”). It represents the irregular, the “bizarro” (“bizarre”) already denounced by Baudelaire; in the end, it represents death in the sense of what we least expect. Additionally, analogy is inserted in myth, “su esencia es el ritmo, es decir, el tiempo cíclico hecho de apariciones y desapariciones, muertes y resurrecciones” (“its essence is rhythm, i.e. cyclical time made up of appearances and disappearances, deaths and resurrections”), while irony is “la manifestación de la crítica en el reino de la imaginación y la sensibilidad; su esencia es el tiempo sucesivo que desemboca en la muerte. La de los hombres y la de los dioses” (“the expression of critique in the realm of imagination and sensibility; its essence is the successive time that leads to death. Death of men and of Gods”) (Paz 1990, 36). Here, Paz makes an important allusion, akin to those who allude to the death of God, mainly Hegel and Nietzsche, noting that this subject already appears in “la conciencia moderna con los primeros textos de los románticos” (“modern consciousness with the first texts of the Romantics”), referring in particular to Jean-Paul Sartre. Analogy and irony both commit a double transgression; analogy opposes the linear or successive time of history, as well as the “beatificación del futuro utópico” (“beatification of the utopian future”) in a way that represents cyclical time, and irony “desgarra el tiempo mítico al afirmar la caída en la contingencia, la pluralidad de dioses y de mitos, la muerte de Dios y de sus criaturas” (“rips apart

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mythic time to claim lapses in contingency, the plurality of gods and myths, the death of God and his creatures”) (Paz 1990, 36). One of the key aspects to consider in this crisis of modernity is the strange “enfermedad del tiempo” (“sickness of time”), reflected in the uncertainty established in the different human realities—material, social, political, legal, family (“criadero de fantasmas,” “breeding ground of Ghosts”)—as well as in consciousness and art, where significant changes influenced the Mexican poet. In the context of the “cult of the mystery of the universe,” and the poet understood as a “priest,” the poets of the twentieth century opposed and asserted the irony and prose found in the streets, the squares, the “now,” the “instant,” facing the indefiniteness of a beyond-recognition, away from the concrete life of beings. In the cities of Charles Baudelaire and Guillaume Apollinaire we see this new aesthetic and vision emphasized, as well as the revelation of the figure of the poet as a subject adhered to uncertainty, chance, and human misery. The poet is more like a fallen angel than a priest who officiates from the inaccessibility of his abstract figure. The poet is a flâneur lost in the crowd, meaningless, anonymous, just a reflection of the neon-filled street signs and advertisements. In short, this new poet is “un pobre diablo y un ser dotado de poderes ocultos, un payaso y un mago” (“a poor devil and a being endowed with hidden powers, a clown and a magician”), says Paz. He is a solitary figure, wrapped in soliloquies that have ended, often not in visions of the future nor in the nostalgia of the past but rather in madness, delirium, exile, and suicide. He is a poet immersed in the daily life of his anguishes and solitude, miseries and dangers. The consciousness that the poet constructs, and which the poetic reveals in the comprehension process, does not pertain to the phenomenologically intentional act imposed upon things to turn them into a world inhabited by the same consciousness. Instead, it suspends the proofs of the world. It is consciousness that adds to the vigil, yet not only to memory, dreams, fantasy, and imagination, but also desires, ideals, delusions, and blinded nights of pain and mystery. Poetry is devised easily of expanded consciousness. It is a consciousness of the “ruptura” (“rupture”), of separation, of the abyss that opens before it, within it, in front of it, and under all the signs of suspicion, to recover the world under another logic of understanding. Poetry is inspired by the mechanics of analogy, metaphor, and irony. It is a consciousness of rupture, a suspension of judgment; its doubts have Cartesian roots and are set to dispel the resolution of other uncertainties. THE ART OF CONVERGENCES: POETRY INCARNATE We live in the twilight of modernity, with the decline of two of its central assumptions—the cult of the future, and the idea of progress, as we have

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said. 3 For this reason, as part of the task of inventing the future every day, poetry finds a greater equilibrium, because “es la memoria de los pueblos y una de sus funciones, quizá la primordial, es precisamente la transfiguración del pasado en presencia viva. La poesía exorciza el pasado; así vuelve habitable el presente” (“it is the memory of peoples, and one of its functions, perhaps the main one, is precisely the transfiguration of the past into living presence. Poetry exorcises the past, making the present inhabitable”) (Paz OC, I: 25). Moreover, what touches poetry “está pasando siempre” (“is always happening”); in it, time embodies a “presence.” One of Paz’s most famous expressions is that the poem is “la casa de la presencia” (“the house of presence”). It is evident that he was very inspired by the Heideggerian idea that “language is the house of being.” Modernity has also been dominated by the “estética del cambio” (“aesthetics of change”), as Paz identified it. It can be described as a tradition where self-denial is the only means of preservation. Baudelaire (1980, 797) indicated it as much in a sober, punctual way—“Modernity is the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is eternal and immutable.” 4 The difference is that the Mexican poet saw that this tradition would also have to come to an end, because such aesthetics would no longer have the negative force that have characterized it; we would be supporting denials that are “repeticiones rituales” (“ritual repetitions”), i.e. “fórmulas sus rebeldías, ceremonias sus transgresiones” (“their rebellious acts are formulas, their transgressions are ceremonies”). We would be promoting the end of an aesthetic “fundada en el culto al cambio y la ruptura” (“founded on the cult of change and rupture”). Neither the terms “postmodern” nor “postmodernism” describe the situation sufficiently for Paz, since they continue to suppose the belief in linear, progressive time, identified with critique and change, which are in crisis now—a recurrent element of modernity that does not seem to be as worn out as others that structure it. Still, if this dynamic seemed to be entering a moment of crisis, it would be precisely because “critique” lost strength. If critique were to survive, its changes would be highly visible. Faced with the crisis of the future and with no possibility that our contemporary time could be called a form of postmodern modernity, Paz felt that the “new star” that has been able to orient intellectual, artistic, and poetic efforts is the “ahora” (“now”), the instant, the dimension that corresponds to pleasure but also to death, to the senses as a “revelación del más allá” (“revelation of the hereafter”). As we have noted, it is why Paz (1990, 53) designed his project to consist of “edificar una Moral, una Política, una Erótica y una Poética del tiempo presente” (“building a Moral, a Politics, an Erotic and a Poetic for the present time”). Paz recognized that the path to that present was the body. What resulted was the bond he established with youth, which was prominent in his reading on

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the government repression of the Mexican people in 1968. The attempt should not be confused with a futile exaltation of a hedonistic contemporary that saturates the mass culture of messages, and of his banal, venial consumption habits, but a reminder that this present “es el fruto en el que la vida y la muerte se funden” (“is the fruit in which life and death merge”). Paz was clear in that poetry best revealed this moment in the form of a presence that contains or reconciles opposites, the “mitades de la esfera” (“halves of the sphere”). Plural presence is not lost in the different historical forms where the halves have been shown and are preserved in a “pure” way, without being overturned in diversity. It is a presence that reveals the “pure time”—singular, unique, particular, having never ceased to “pass” or be, from the “beginning”—what has not ceased to be from the origin, and which poetry reveals in a deep sense. It is a presence that is “el ahora encarnado” (“the now incarnate”) at a time when the word has a powerful influence on the human condition. Paz (OC, I: 390) argued in Los hijos del limo that, “la poesía es el puente entre el pensamiento utópico y la realidad, el momento de encarnación de la idea” (“poetry is the bridge between utopian thought and reality, the moment when the idea is embodied”). Poetry is the true revolution that “acabará con la discordia entre historia e idea” (“will put an end to the discord between history and idea”). Borrowing some ideas from Rimbaud, for whom poetry ends with the act, Paz considered that, “La alquimia del verbo es un método poético para cambiar a la naturaleza humana” (“The alchemy of the verb is a poetic method to change human nature”). Therefore, the poetic word is the predecessor of the historical event, because it is a “multiplicadora de futuro” (“future multiplier”), using Rimbaud’s terms. Poetry not only provokes new psychic states, in a manner similar to religion or drugs, but also has the mission of inventing a new eroticism, of changing the passionate relationships between men and women. Paz could thus oppose the aesthetics of change, the tradition of rupture, by transitioning to an “art of convergence” that would search for the “principle of change,” the invariant foundation of change. Poetry would seek identity between the beginning of change and of permanence, which is posed as “un perpetuo recomienzo y un continuo regreso” (“a perpetual restart and a continual return”)—the search for the intersection of times, the poetry of the present, of the presence that is but the reconciliation of the past, present, and future. In the late 1980s, Paz (1990, 54) consolidated what is perhaps one of the most recurrent theses of his poetics—a poetry of reconciliation that could only be that of an “imaginación encarnada en un ahora sin fechas” (“imagination embodied in a now without dates”). This notion would oscillate between a social, spiritual, and ontological approach. In “Poesía, Mito y Revolution,” a speech he gave when awarded the Alexis de Tocqueville Prize in 1989, Paz insisted on defending poetry, explaining it and justifying it as imperative to the defense of freedom. He

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reiterated that poets deal with public and political affairs and establish a relationship between poetry and freedom. The modern age has brought about a division between poetry and revolution, a critique of the myths, although in many cases it has been expressed in powerful politicians and their ideologies of terror—“relaciones inflamadas y extremas, de la seducción al horror, de la devoción al anatema, de la idolatría a la abjuración—toda la gama de las dos grandes pasiones: el amor y la religión” (“inflamed, extreme relationships, from seduction to horror, from devotion to anathema, from idolatry to recantation—the full range of the two great passions: love and religion”) (Paz 1990, 60). He saw modern poetry existing between myth and history, “las dos manos del tiempo” (“the two hands of time”), but consecrating a “fraternidad distinta y más antigua que la de las religiones y las filosofías, una fraternidad nacida del mismo sentimiento de soledad del primitivo en medio de la naturaleza extraña y hostil” (“different, more ancient fraternity than that of religions and philosophies, a fraternity born of the same feeling of loneliness as is felt by primitive man surrounded by strange, hostile nature”) (Paz 1990, 66). This loneliness now not only resides within the cosmos but also afflicts human beings, although it can never be total; rather, it is a “fraternidad sobre el vacío” (“fraternity over the void”). Paz takes a cue from Eliot’s Four Quartets to explain this aspect. The dilemma of the new era was between freedom and fraternity at a time when the great myth of the revolution fell, under both its own weight and the irrepressible tendencies of individual liberalism. There were also poetic battles between liberalism and socialism. The contribution of poetry in this context of modernity in crisis and in the scenario of political ideas would have to be one of memory, that is, what the “otra voz” (“other voice”) is able to speak. It is a subtle contribution of poetry to political thought—a voice that is nothing more than time, which passes and becomes “unas cuantas sílabas cristalinas” (“a few crystalline syllables”). It is a voice that remembers and reminds us of what we have been and still are: Es la voz del poeta trágico y la del bufón, la de la solidaria melancolía y la de la fiesta, es la risotada y el suspiro, la del abrazo de los amantes y la de Hamlet ante el cráneo, la voz del silencio y la del tumulto, loca sabiduría y cuerda locura, susurro de confidencia en la alcoba y oleaje de multitud en la plaza. (It is the voice of the tragic poet and of the jester, of melancholy solidarity and of fiesta, it is raucous laughter and sighs, the voice of the lovers’ embrace and of Hamlet facing the skull, the voice of silence and of turmoil, crazy wisdom and sane madness, a secret whisper in the bedroom and the swell of the crowd in the square) (Paz 1990, 68).

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Paz never stopped studying the defiant relations between poetry and modernity, where the poetic word had reserved or limited success, and its fate still makes it appear almost clandestine, yet critical and insubordinate. It is truly nothing short of a conflicting relationship, though deeply enriching and symptomatic of the times, because poetry “escarneció los valores tradicionales, tanto los morales como los estéticos; socavó el lenguaje; transtornó los signos y sus significados; inventó mundos poblados de fascinantes monstruos verbales y estanques de engañosa transparencia donde la conciencia se abisma” (“ridiculed traditional values, both moral and aesthetic; undermined language; altered signs and their meanings; invented worlds peopled with fascinating verbal monsters and pools of deceitful transparency into which consciousness plunges”) (Paz 1990, 83). In other words, modern poetry followed the aesthetics of the historical avant-garde; it became a challenging vanguard of which the middle class, proud of its progress, was suspicious or fearful, in that the middle class could not trust anything that was beyond itself and questioned its faith or the illusion of its values and comforts. Paz viewed even the intervention of certain sectors of the university academy with discord and antipathy, as he also viewed what he deemed the ignorant and vulgar journalism that curtailed consciousness and stifled wills through informative control of an impoverished literary style. The book Los signos en rotación was originally published in the Argentine editorial Sur, and then as an epilogue to the second edition of El arco y la lira. The dominant themes are the incarnation of poetry in history, the quest for reconciliation between the poem and the act, and the existence of a society that is “palabra viva y palabra vivida, creación de la comunidad y comunidad creadora” (“living word and lived word, creation of the community and creative community”) (Paz OC, I: 228). These questions would become the reason for Paz’s writing, while history would reply “something else.” What Paz proposed in those years was to “buscar ese punto de inserción de la poesía que es también un punto de intersección, centro fijo y vibrante donde se anulan y renacen sin tregua las contradicciones” (“seek that point of insertion of poetry that is also a point of intersection, fixed and vibrant center where contradictions are constantly annulled and reborn”). As we have noted, the dilemma Paz observed was that there could be no poetry without society, nor society without poetry, even when the former ended up denying the latter. The double aspect had no solution—poetry denies social speech, and society can never be done as poetry; it will never be poetic at all. Yet it seemed to Paz that both realities had sought a “mutual conversion” that would consist of “poeticizing social life” and “socializing the poetic word”— “transformación de la sociedad en comunidad creadora, en poema vivo; y del poema en vida social, en imagen encarnada” (“transformation of society into creative community, into living poem; and of the poem into social life, image incarnate”). This approach is close to a certain utopian-

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ism rooted in both romanticism and Marxism. Paz envisioned a revolutionary and communist yet libertarian society where values such as freedom, recognition of the other, and the display of identity between all men predominated, while at the same time the radical difference or singularity of each one was affirmed. In a society like this, the poem would cease to be “ese núcleo de contradicciones que al mismo tiempo niega y afirma la historia” (“that nucleus of contradictions that simultaneously affirms and denies history”); poetry would be “practical” at last. It would, in fact, be a double conversion—from society to “community,” with the poem constituting itself as a kind of “living tissue” that would make it possible for the doom of each person to be linked to the freedom of all; meanwhile, it would become “practical poetry.” Paz had to recognize that contemporary societies were far from this ideal, even those that proclaimed themselves as socialist but that still did not eliminate hierarchies, human exploitation, dehumanization, reduction of the person to the masses, or a vast panorama of political, economic, moral, and religious decay—an impoverishment of the level of life in general. Paz observed the risk of poetry against the possibility of falling prey to information and the news, not true knowledge of facts. Regarding information, poetry would have little chance to transcend the moment to which it was dedicated, whereas regarding the news, it would be an enigmatic eruption of history able to contain the fate of a whole era, able to be more revealing than photographic poetry, to call it something, to which the so-called “committed poets” relate. The poetry of the news is easily converted into propaganda poetry, falling prey to opportunism and to commercial or monetary gain, the last of which Paz considered unforgivable. Writing for an ideology could be no different than writing for money, and then thinking only of money, disregarding completely the high mission of poetry. Paz placed the fascination of intellectuals and artists with totalitarian regimes under information poetry. Taking an approach similar to that of François Revel, he pointed out that such fascination is part of the study of moral aberrations and collective delusions— passion for the absolute and idolatry through power. THE POET Paz understood that, in his own contemporary setting, the poet did not know how to distinguish himself from the rest of the mortals; he is no longer a stranger to the fate of others and is not marked by anything special other than the moment in which he carries out the creation, in which he is himself and another, in which he converts to the other voice that must be recognized but not entirely understood, since poetry continues to refer to the most enigmatic dimensions of the human condition. Paz (1990, 131) remained reserved, with the eternal assumptions of what-

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ever the creative act was, apparently without anyone or anything to convince him—“¿Posesión de fuerzas y poderes extraños, irrupción de un fondo psíquico enterrado en lo más íntimo de su ser, o peregrina facultad para asociar palabras, imágenes, sonidos, formas?” (“A possession by strange forces and powers, a bursting forth of psychic depths buried in the innermost of his being, or a strange ability to associate words, images, sounds, shapes?”). Whatever the answer is, he was sure that it was a kind of “ailment” that had afflicted the human condition for ages, and which we can identify over time—sacred fury, enthusiasm, “transporte” (“transport”), or some kind of sublimation, absence, inner emptiness, or “melancholy yawning,” irreplaceable realities—“Plenitud y vacuidad, vuelo y caída, entusiasmo y melancolía: poesía” (“Fullness and emptiness, flight and fall, enthusiasm and melancholy: poetry”). Paz also assumed the role of the poet based on another disconcerting feature of modernity, as a seer or soothsayer—though not as a prophet. These functions and qualities have certainly changed over time. The poet could know the future because he knew the past: “Su saber era un saber de los orígenes” (“his knowledge was a knowledge of the origins”) (Paz 1990, 91). In ancient societies there was a founding poetry of the peoples, aligned closely to mythology and religion, as well as to other arts. People sang and danced to poetry, as the Aztecs often did, for example. Certain kinds of collections of poems have become the ethical, religious, aesthetic, philosophical compendium of several societies. For instance, philosophy “comenzó como una crítica a Homero, su teología y moral” (“began as a critique of Homer, his theology and morality” (Paz 1990, 91). Such poetic traditions were part of the education of citizens who were in charge of government and held power; poetry inspired both action and contemplation. Paz (1990, 91) recognized the wide-ranging influence of poetry on antiquity and on intimate life—“el erotismo, la amistad, el placer, la piedad ante los dioses o ante el prójimo desdichado [. . .] la soledad, los placeres amargos de la melancolía, los reinos frágiles de la memoria” (“eroticism, friendship, pleasure, piety before the gods or before the unhappy neighbor [. . .] solitude, the bitter pleasures of melancholy, the fragile kingdoms of memory”). It was a knowledge of the passions, of envy, sensuality, cruelty, hypocrisy, all the “complexities of the soul,” that is to say, knowledge of ourselves—poetry as a fundamental element of human consciousness and of the perception and construction of oneself. It not only reveals what we are but helps fill what is lacking; it incorporates reality into the project of being, which is endless, even if it does not stop returning to its origins as one of its types of “progress.” Indeed, poetry has only progressed by revolving around its origin, as a founding word that does not stop speaking and making sense of the subjects in every human age. It is a voice that has to speak again, to be recovered in the saying that touches or is part of it—a voice that tells us, makes us say, name, and discover with us what it is, what has reality.

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Even philosophy, once born of a critique of the epic poem and mythology, was unable to evade the influence of poetry. Paz (1990, 92) argued that, “casi no hay ninguno de nuestros grandes pensadores que no haya escrito poemas o cuyos escritos no estén esmaltados con versos y máximas de los poetas, de santo Tomás a Maquiavelo, de Bacon a Schopenhauer, de Montaigne a Carlos Marx” (“hardly any of our great thinkers have written poems or have writings unembellished with verses and maxims of the poets, from Saint Thomas to Machiavelli, from Bacon to Schopenhauer, from Montaigne to Karl Marx”). The ambition to change reality can be divided into inseparable, opposing directions—politics and magic, “la tentación religiosa y la revolucionaria” (“the religious and revolutionary temptation”). Paz (OC, I: 384) was interested in highlighting the contradiction between the revolutionary spirit and the proper poetic—where the poet has been involved in modernity—a contradiction that has been the transmission canal of the old Christian and pre-Christian religious spirit, throughout “the dismantling of Christianity by critical philosophy” as Paz points out in Los hijos del limo. Analogy, alchemy, magic—“syncretism and personal mythologies,” the poets, also touched by modernity, reacted against religion and themselves by use of irony—“ni los filósofos ni los revolucionarios pueden tolerar con paciencia la ambigüedad de los poetas que ven en la magia y en la revolución dos vías paralelas, pero no enemigas, para cambiar el mundo” (“neither philosophers nor revolutionaries can patiently tolerate the ambivalence of poets who see in magic and revolution two parallel but not mutually exclusive methods of changing the world”) (Paz OC, I: 386). The poet is warned not to abandon his “magic half,” since it would imply becoming “an official and a propagandist.” The situation of poetry in the face of power does not seem to have changed in history. Just as the Church was rife with mystics, enlightened and quietist, the revolutionary or modern state persecuted poets—“Si la poesía es la religión secreta de la era moderna, la política es su religión pública” (“If poetry is the secret religion of the modern era, politics is its public religion”), a “bloody and masked religion.” To the extent that poetry has also been a religious process, revolution has condemned it as heresy. While in poetry we find analogy and irony, in politics—as a public religion—we find the “transposición de la teología dogmática y la escatología a la esfera de la historia y la sociedad” (“transposing of dogmatic theology and eschatology to the realm of history and society”) (Paz OC, I: 387). Paz notes the origins of politics as a religion in the eighteenth century, which Hume had already detected, unable to witness the “descenso de la filosofía en la política y su encarnación, en el sentido religioso de la palabra, en las revoluciones” (“descent of philosophy into politics and its incarnation, in the religious meaning of the word, in revolution”). Thus, the “epifanía del universalismo filosófico adoptó inmediatamente la forma dogmática y sangrienta del jacobinismo y su culto a la diosa Razón” (“epiphany of

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philosophic universalism adopted immediately bloody, dogmatic Jacobinism and its cult to the goddess Reason”) (Paz OC, I: 387). Magic–politics is not the only duality found in modern poetry. Another is love–humor, as Paz finds in the work of Marcel Duchamp, from where he obtains the notion of “meta-irony,” defined as “una suerte de suspensión del ánimo, un más allá de la afirmación y la negación” (“a sort of suspension of the spirit, something beyond affirmation and negation”). While irony devalues the object, meta-irony is not interested in the value of objects but in their function, which is nothing but symbolic. In the end, it is a moral and aesthetic release that puts opposites in communication. In the same vein as Duchamp, who questions what is observed and who is the observer, James Joyce is a poet of “comic-erotic cosmogony,” with a critique of language and what is said in it—the myths and rites of man. In both authors’ writings, the critique becomes creation. THE OTHER VOICE Paz (OC, I: 388) understood the opposition between poetry and the revolutionary spirit as being part of a greater opposition—the linear time of modernity versus a triple sense of time, as we will see in the different parts of this book, the “rhythmic time of the poem,” the time of the analogy; the “instantaneous time of eroticism,” and the “hollow time of the ironic conscience.” It is why, as a whole, all modern literature is a “passionate denial of the modern era.” For example, the image in Joyce and humor in Cervantes constitute two negations of the successive time of critical reason and the deification of the future. For this reason, most contemporary poets have been “la otra voz” (“the other voice”)—not only the modern voice of the here and now but that of “there,” the “other” that corresponds to the “beginnings.” The difference is in the accent of this voice, which does not cease to be the transgressor, hence its anti-modern character—“La modernidad antimoderna de nuestra poesía, desgarrada entre la revolución y la religión, vacilante entre llorar como Heráclito y reír como Demócrito, es una verdadera transgresión” (“The anti-modern modernity of our poetry, torn between revolution and religion, wavering between weeping like Heraclitus and laughing like Democritus, is a true transgression”) (Paz 1990, 133). The trans-historical “beyond” that Paz detects in poetry has to do not with a religious beyond but with “the perception of the other side of reality,” which corresponds to the deepest experiences he lived intensely during his long sojourn in India, put into words in the second part of El arco y la lira, El mono gramático and, of course, in the poetry book Ladera este (1969). He supposes that there are common experiences among all men of all ages that precede religions and philosophies.

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Compared to other arts, poetry is a fragment made up of words that cannot be treasured but rather worn out, a waste that runs from mouth to mouth and does not stop despite its little “value.” It resists the “value of change” and remains closer to the spiritual needs and experiences of antimodernity. These needs were filled by romanticism in its time, and now they go against the flow of consumer frenzy in neoliberal societies. Without being an actual, tangible image, poetry evokes mental images—“La poesía se oye con los oídos pero se ve con el entendimiento. Sus imágenes son criaturas anfibias: son ideas y son formas, son sonidos y son silencio” (“Poetry is heard with the ears but is seen with understanding. Its images are amphibious creatures: they are ideas and they are forms, they are sounds and they are silence”) (Paz 1990, 134). In discord with modernity, poetry has redefined its right to transcend and create forms that, as debtors of the past and part of a continuity, are still an unprecedented return to the origins that feed it. It is a turning of time which marks modernity to be in dissent with what it represents. The critique of modernity has been made in the name of passion and realities denied or ignored by this era. We must listen to that other voice that refers to realities that are buried, hidden, not heard by modernity. Any political project or political philosophy should also listen, if it does not want to end up giving way to social systems based on totalitarian and orthodox ideologies. Rather than feeding ideas in order to think (perhaps before turning ideas into thinking, as Heidegger would say), Paz was more in favor of a poetry that served as a memory of the forgotten, a project that would not know to distinguish itself from that recovery from being that Heidegger would have designed for philosophy, the so-called “oblivion of being.” The voice of this poetry, which corresponds to the occult or underground, is that of the man “que está dormido en el fondo de cada hombre. Tiene mil años y tiene nuestra edad y todavía no nace. Es nuestro abuelo, nuestro hermano y nuestro biznieto” (“who is asleep at the core of every man. He is a thousand years old, is our age, and has not yet been born. He is our grandfather, our brother, and our great-grandson”) (Paz 1990, 136). That is the task of poetry in light of the predatory rhythm of contemporary societies—where civilization is ruled by a “fatality so blind, mechanical and destructive”—and faced with the tasks of survival in a time marked by an eternal end: the slow agony of destruction. Paz considered that the influence of poetry in this scenario could not be more than indirect—it would suggest, inspire, and insinuate. It would serve not to insinuate but to show how everything is united and dispersed, how each thing is one and another simultaneously, and how the realities approached acquire unpublished senses. In short, it is being part of everything that the imagination creates, performed through language, thanks to the various tropes that it is capable of—comparisons, analogies, ironies, metaphors, metonymies. Language is like an “animated universe,” animated by a double

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current of attraction and repulsion. In poetic language “se reproducen las luchas y las uniones, los amores y las separaciones de los astros y de las células, los átomos y de los hombres” (“struggles and unions, loves and separations of stars and cells, of atoms and men are reproduced”) (Paz 1990, 138). The influence of Charles Fourier, whom Paz admired, is evident, especially when he insists that poetry could be a model of universal fraternity, a “brotherhood,” coexistence, and a relationship between all things against destructive impulses. It could serve as a brotherhood between “stars and particles, chemical substances and consciousness.” And all because the universe is a “living tissue of affinities and oppositions.” It is a recognition of differences and a discovery of similarities. In the end, we have to understand poetry as an antidote to the market approach. Poetry is ensured as long as man exists and his imagination does not perish, die, or become corrupt, that is to say, as long as he does not forget his true self. In this regard, poetry can be placed in an eccentric, critical centrality of modernity. Having participated in subversion and emancipation movements, it can also be the expression of “realidades y aspiraciones más profundas y antiguas que las geometrías intelectuales de los revolucionarios y las cárceles de conceptos de los utopistas” (“realities and aspirations deeper and older than the revolutionaries’ intellectual geometries and the Utopians’ imprisoned concepts”) (Paz 1990, 130). It could be a “cornerstone of the scandal of modernity” because it is a “persistent and stubborn heterodoxy”—“Incesante movimiento en zigzag, continua rebelión frente a todas las doctrinas y las iglesias; asimismo, amor no menos constante a las realidades humilladas, reacias a las manipulaciones fideístas y a las especulaciones racionalistas” (“Incessant zigzag motion, continuous rebellion against all doctrines and churches; likewise, an unflagging love for humiliated realities, reluctant to accept Fideist manipulations and rationalist speculations”). Paz preserved this approach from his contact with surrealism, as we shall see. The voice of passions and visions, contemporary poetry may be tireless in the face of any obstacle that could limit it—unbeatable, an eternal transgressor, without limits, collecting all the range of human experiences without distinction: “Poesía herética y cismática, poesía inocente y perversa, límpida y fangosa, aérea y subterránea, poesía de la ermita y del bar de la esquina, poesía al alcance de la mano y siempre de un más allá que está aquí mismo” (“Heretical, schismatic poetry; innocent, perverse poetry, crystal clear and muddy, air bound and underground, the poetry of the hermitage and of the corner bar, poetry within reach and always beyond reach yet right here”) (Paz 1990, 131). Poetry could become, as it was in the past, a common good, strongly subjective, individually and powerfully shared by a great majority, belonging to all and to no one, to the poet and the reader and, at the very least, poetry of communion.

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A RADICAL SUBVERSION Modern poetry has lived intensely as the last radical change that puts an end to the tradition stemming from the Renaissance, where the rupture created by art has broken the continuity of the West. It is a self-denial and a metamorphosis—“fin de las representaciones que pretenden dar la ilusión de la realidad” (“the end of representations that attempt to give the illusion of reality”) (Paz 1990, 44); a search for another beauty and not just the substitution of the canon and an operation that consisted of dismantling appearances, going to the structure of objects. In a strange Neoplatonism, the archetype, modern poetry recovers the idea, the essence of things, but with all the expressive possibilities and resorting to gadgets such as looking at objects simultaneously, meanwhile other attempts, such as futurism, have wanted to consign the movement. After all, the new means of reproduction of reality will be within the reach of the artist. For example, in cinema, Paz noted the use and presence of two techniques that fascinated him—juxtaposition and simultaneity, which, together with metaphor and irony, are techniques he considered central to the understanding of modern poetics. Juxtaposition is a rupture in the narrative’s linearity, and there is a confluence of several causes towards the same effect: a simultaneous presence of several causal lines. From a foreword to the I Ching by Carl G. Jung, Paz obtained the approach of this confluence, synchronous coincidence, a “conjunction of times” and spaces. Paz defines simultaneity as “un arte hecho de conjugaciones temporales y espaciales que tiende a disolver y a yuxtaponer las divisiones del antes y el después, lo anterior y lo posterior, lo interno y lo externo” (“an art made up of temporal and spatial conjugations that tends to dissolve and juxtapose the divisions of before and after, preceding and posterior, internal and external”) (Paz 1990, 45). The principle that governs simultaneity is contiguity, especially in the arts of space. For arts of time, such as music or poetry, the principle is succession. In poetry, Paz found simultaneity, or poetic cubism, the form of comparison, metaphor, rhythm and rhyme, which are “conjunctions and repetitions that obey the same law of simultaneous presentation.” Cendrars and Apollinaire, inspired by cubism and Delaunay’s orphism, started this trend in the poetry of the twentieth century. Cendrars used the cinematography montage and flashback technique, while Apollinaire was more radical, suppressing connective and syntactic grammar links and applying the collage technique, inserting phrases made in the text and using the juxtaposition of different verbal blocks. These poems move, pass: “El poema es una totalidad movida—conmovida—por la acción complementaria de la afinidad y la oposición entre las partes. Triunfo de la contigüidad sobre la sucesión” (“The poem is a moving whole— touched—by the complementary action of affinity and opposition of its parts. Triumph of contiguity over succession”) (Paz 1990, 49).

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These techniques led to the extensive poem, which embraced the spiritual history of the West, and which Paz thought would be an extraordinary strategy to address disymbolism and contrasting aspects of Mexico’s personal and cultural history in poems such as “La Noche de San Idelfondo,” “Piedra de Sol” and “Pasado en Claro.” Paz saw in Pound’s Chants and in Eliot’s Waste Land a consequence of what Apollinaire and Cendrars had initiated. Thus, simultaneity is seen as another manifestation of analogy. Paz detects this same poetic function in Mallarmé, for whom the poem is happening in time and space, a situation which, as a moment of convergence, questions the linear conception of time. What converges in the poem is time—it is the no-place where everything takes place, like the wonderful paradox illustrated by the image of Borges’ Aleph. In the poem, all times are conjugated contradictorily, but above all, the now, where eternity also concurs. Its moment, its time, is the dissolution of all time in the affirmation of the presence. The pure Mallarmean act is that its place is a non-place, i.e., eternal circumstances where the absolute and the relative are confused without disappearing. Thus, the moment of the poem is the dissolution of all moments, although its eternal moment is any moment—a unique time, unrepeatable and historical in the sense of being exceptional. For Paz it is not so much a “pure act” but a contingency, “a violation of the absolute,” even when this contingency is part of “the roll of the dice,” i.e., is subsumed by the absolute and dissolved in an infinite “total account in formation” (Mallarmé). Hence, poetic language is for the “initiated,” in the sense of those who escape temporal continuity. In such a language, words by their very nature are loaded and weighted. Every word is dizzying with a mineral clarity that reflects and amazes us. It is necessary to recognize not only Mallarmé’s attempt to create a language that “was the magic double of the universe” but, above all, his elaboration of the awareness “de la imposibilidad de transformar ese lenguaje en teatro, en diálogo con el hombre” (“of the impossibility of transforming that language into theatre, into dialogue with man”). This is how Mallarmé came to silence: it is not a hush but a “speech” that appears when we cannot say what we mean—a silence or blank page. That´s why silence is “implicit communication, latent sense”: “El silencio de Mallarmé nos dice nada, que no es lo mismo que nada decir. Es el silencio anterior al silencio” (“Mallarmé´s silence says nothing to us, which does not mean that it says nothing. It is the silence that precedes silence”) (Paz OC, I: 69). We find this idea in Mallarmé’s famous poem Un coup de dés jamais n´abolira le hasard (1897). It is not a question of verses but of “subdivisions prismatiques de l´idée” (Mallarmé). Here, poetry is music for an understanding “que oye y ve con los sentidos interiores” (“that hears and sees with the inner senses”) (Paz OC, I: 93). The idea ceases to be a mere object of reason and becomes a reality that the poem reveals in a series of fleet-

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ing forms—in a temporal order. Being equal to itself, the idea cannot be contemplated in its entirety since man is time or “perpetual movement.” What we see and hear are “subdivisions” of the idea through the prism of the poem, where our apprehension is partial and successive, as well as simultaneous—visual, sonorous, and spiritual. Mallarmé’s poems inaugurated a new form that served for subjects of pure imagination and of intellect, and is also an attempt to seek free verse and the poem in prose. For that reason, Mallarmé represents the end of symbolism and the beginning of contemporary poetry. Paz points out that his work left two veins, one that led to Apollinaire and surrealism, and another that led to Paul Claudel and Saint-John Perse. It is a scenario of the tension between prose and verse, reflection and singing. With Mallarmé’s example, French poetry has destroyed the “illusory architecture of prose,” while showing “that syntax rests on an abyss.” His poems reveal the absurdity of wanting to make the poem twice in a linear universe. In this sense, poetic writing reaches its “máxima condensación y su extrema dispersión” (“maximum condensation and its extreme dispersion”) (Paz OC, I: 243). In defiance of the Identitarian approach to being, which alludes to Parmenides with his blunt distinction between what is and what is not, Paz opposes the perspective of reality elaborated by poetry and mysticism, which is not allowed to be understood under the presumptions of identity and the principle of contradiction. It is like a Parmenidean formulation of being as a “rootlessness” in relation to chaos—a “tearing” which, in turn, harms poetry and mysticism. The contemporary condition is exile, clandestinity, and diminished life. Poetry is a permanent testament to this brutal, unjust suffering of separation from being linked to chaos, even though it is the foundation of our thinking. The establishment of this foundation is what has given rise to both science and the banishment of poetry. It is a dismantling that is “unspeakable and constant” and that in reality constitutes the ultimate nature of poetry after rational foundation came about. Paz widens this consideration by identifying the destiny of poetry, set from then on, since its sense and nature before then were different from that of man, who endures this destruction as a “cosmic exile.” The meaning of the human condition is essentially linked to that of poetry, or to the establishment of ontological foundation. One single event led poetry and human beings to drift apart—“Las consecuencias de ese exilio de la poesía son cada día más evidentes y aterradoras: el hombre es un desterrado del fluir cósmico y de sí mismo” (“The consequences of that banishment of poetry are more evident and frightening every day: man is in exile from the cosmic flow and from himself”) (Paz OC, I: 107). Paz passed quickly over the philosophers who had attempted to solve this situation, and nobody seems to have done so satisfactorily. For example, Hegel returned to Heraclitus, and Husserl

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returned “to the things themselves.” Both philosophers fall into solipsism. IN PERENNIAL TRANSIT The understanding of poetry requires a vital renovation, both aesthetically and sensitively. This renovation calls for a cultural change, in the primary sense of cultivation: the reader must be cultivated and must unlearn the known and learn the unknown. He must learn the new vocabulary and syntax; be educated in the new poetry, and be inhabited with it, live it, as Paz wanted. Paz was convinced by the avant-garde, especially surrealism, that poetry was a moral, a vision, a way of understanding the world that marches against the current of its time. The new poetic wisdom required changes in sensitivity and vision, an intimate renovation that is in its own way, an inner revolution. It is a phenomenon, Paz points out, repeated in every era and society. The difficulty and ambiguity are so extreme that modern poetry is a product of modernity and, as such, is the purest exercise of its critique, which is but the reflection of a society that struggles with itself and that cannot fail to do so. Hence the alliance achieved with the contemporary reader, which is recognized as a producer of this modernity but also as the object of such poetry—the subject achieved by his work. Paz reflected on the paradoxical condition of the contemporary reader, who oscillates between concentration and the dissipation of mass media. Everything seems to distract us, to scatter us; we concentrate on nothing, and nothing manages to catch our attention. We are confused with what we are not, even when it is attractive. We are attracted to the ephemeral, to that which is haunting for only a moment, out of ourselves, lost in “mediocre and foolish daily agitation.” Life becomes “arena entre los dedos y las horas humo en el cerebro” (“sand between your toes, and hours smoke in your brain”). Paz describes it as a combination of squandering and forgetfulness—“Si nuestro pecado se llama disipación, nuestro castigo se llama olvido” (“If our sin is dissipation, our punishment is oblivion”). Yet reading is a possibility to return to ourselves and to stay in our fantasies, even with all the horror that dwells within us, together with all that we have lived or can live or would have lived. It is an internment in oneself as far as possible considering the present demand of the forgotten present. The act of reading becomes a recovery of ourselves from the alienation caused by diffused interest. Reading keeps us from vanishing into the outside with no return. It prevents absorption in the everyday and a sense of inauthenticity. This view of reading reflects Paz’s understanding of Heidegger, as we will see in the next chapter; while almost compared to the process of thinking, it represents a recovery of the self, an ability to “mantenerse-en-sí” (“remain in oneself”).

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Reading serves as a thinking task and moral recovery: “leer es un ejercicio mental y moral de concentración que nos lleva a internarnos en mundos desconocidos [la inconmensurabilidad de la que se hablaba] que poco a poco se revelan como una patria más antigua y verdadera: de allá venimos” (“reading is a mental and moral exercise in concentration that leads us to bury ourselves in unknown worlds [the incommensurability we spoke of] that little by little are revealed to be an older and truer homeland: from there we come”) (Paz 1990, 80). Reading reveals us in the unknown, but allows us to recognize in ourselves something that transcends our time, and returns to another temporality where authentic truths dwell. To the falsehood of worldly existence corresponds another existence linked to the poetic–imaginary, rooted in the original sources in our being. Again, we find the project that crisscrosses Paz’s critical literary intention regarding a poetry of reconciliation and communion as the only way to avoid dissipation, the loss of being in the mundane, of being in the entity, because it is a form of being. It is a type of recovery best described almost as “healing” by poetry, or of being able to “cure” oneself of that deadly disease which is a mortal fall in time, a detachment from oneself, leading to a deliverance or an ascent through art. It is a process of dissipation, fading, absence, and recovery of oneself through poetry; a recovery of the sense of belonging, continuity, and originality. Paz anticipated not an end to poetry, even if it came to languish, but to what has long been called the end of “the tradition of the rupture,” which corresponds to the first decades of the twentieth century, beginning with the avant-garde artistic movement (an aspect that is developed in-depth in Los hijos del limo). Movements of a large poetic magnitude have not been presented since then, which seems to place poetry in an unprecedented situation, as if it were indeed struggling for its survival. What interested the Mexican poet was the position of poetry in a society that tends to hide it in the “catacombs” as a result of mercantilism, a position that seems to be constant in all eras, challenged by all kinds of conditions. Uncertainty has been beneficial for its enrichment and to the extent that it has continued to seek the “other shore” of the river of time. The case of Latin America is more delicate in the sense that forgetfulness, the lack of memory or distortion of history, has contributed to the neglect of traditions; it is a historical loss that has been devastating. In any case, poetry will persist to the extent that it is linked to society, beyond the forms of its understanding and preservation—“la poesía canta lo que está pasando; su función es dar forma y hacer visible la vida cotidiana” (“poetry sings what is happening; its function is to shape everyday life and make it visible”) (Paz 1990, 116). It is not its only mission, but it is the most universal, ancient, and permanent mission. It satisfies a psychological need inherent to the human being. Poetry is of the soul. Facing the crisis over the notions of progress and the future, understood in a chronological linear sense, Paz saw the need to invent every

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day in the future, where poetry did not lose the function of being the memory of the people and of “transfiguring” the past into “pure presence.” The time that takes place in poetry is always being; it is something that is always happening, is eternal. It cannot fail to be current; it refers to all time, in particular to the time in which we are living. Everything (time) takes place in it. All times are only one in poetry. 5 It is why Paz, paraphrasing Heidegger, argued that the poem is “The House of Presence.” Its fragility may be contrasted with the “weight” of history. In short, “La historia de la poesía en el siglo XX es, como la del XIX, una historia de subversiones, conversiones, abjuraciones, herejías, desviaciones. Esas palabras tienen su contrapartida en otras: persecución, destierro, asilo de locos, suicidio, prisión, humillación, soledad” (“The history of poetry in the twentieth century is, like in the nineteenth, a story of subversions, conversions, abjurations, heresies, deviations. Those words have their counterparts: persecution, banishment, madhouses, suicide, prison, humiliation, loneliness”). NOTES 1. In general terms, Paz condemned the post-existentialist philosophy in the works of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida for being an usurper of the academy prestige attained by poets. He observed the sequence that begins with great French poets— such as Paul Valéry, whom he read at a very young age and whom he would deem “the true great French philosopher of our time”—continues with the advent of the Sartre-style theorists, and ends in the progressive movement of institutionalization, with scholars and the unfortunate abandonment of the imagination, where the reductive, analytical–critical method has been more important than the literary object: poetry. Paz criticized these methods, saying that they simplified the object for the sake of systems that were useless, unsuccessful, obsolete “palabrería” (“wordiness”), as will be seen in his critical attitude toward Sartre and the left-wing intellectuals who used Marxist dogmatism theses to stifle the modern poetic project. In an interview with Jean François Revel, “Our World with the Askance,” Paz (OC, VIII: 798) said “Cuando estuve de nuevo en Francia, después de 1950, un nuevo camino cultural se había producido, no sólo en Francia, por lo demás, sino en muchas partes del mundo: la toma del poder por los profesores y la preeminencia de los críticos sobre los creadores. Los teóricos han llegado a expulsar a los poetas y a los novelistas [. . .]. Hay que devolverle a la imaginación la función que le ha sido usurpada por los profesores y los teóricos” (“When I was in France again, after 1950, a new cultural path had emerged, not only in France, by the way, but in many parts of the world: the takeover of power by professors and the prevalence of critics over creators. Theorists have come to drive out poets and novelists [. . .]. It is necessary to give back to the imagination the function that has been usurped by professors and theorists”). 2. When La otra voz was published, Marshall Bergman had already published his classic study on modernity, All that Is Solid Melts into Air (1982). Paz was probably familiar with it, based on an expression close to the title of that book, which appears in Marx’s Communist Manifesto. 3. With his typical irony, using a word game with the expression “Zoocrates,” Baudelaire (1980, 725) referred to the believer in progress—an average citizen who sees advances in communications and technology as a way to show progress, especially in the characteristic confusion between the material and the spiritual—“The poor Man is so Americanized by his zoocratic and industrial philosophers that he has lost

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the notion of the differences which characterize the phenomena of the physical and the moral world, the natural and the supernatural.” 4. All references to bibliographic sources in a language other than English are the author’s own translations. 5. It is impossible to dissociate this type of approach from the vision of the soul developed by Plato in Timaeus. The divine body of the world is governed by the soul, a circle of the same, which “interfused everywhere from the center to the circumference of heaven, of which also it is the external envelopment, itself turning in itself, began a divine beginning of never ceasing and rational life enduring throughout all time” (Platon, 174).

TWO Erotic Metaphysics

Octavio Paz sought to understand the complex relationship between art and life. His case illustrates how culture in Mexico was enriched by a diversity of theoretical–philosophical proposals emerging from a plurality of traditions from diverse contexts. He lived during the period of national reconstruction after the violent Mexican Revolution and of dangers presented by a false nationalism and a no-less-influential Marxist dogmatic ideology. In this chapter, we will refer to resonances of Heideggerian ontology present in (a) the poetic act as a revelation of the human condition; (b) the temporality of the finite condition, or “being-toward-death”; (c) nothingness and the condition of being thrown into or “falling in the world”; and (d) anguish and poetic inspiration understood as an aspiration to be. These aspects are all linked to the central theme in the poetics of otherness, and the “other voice” in a context of critique of modernity, where man is “severed from his poetic faculty,” as we have seen. Above all, it is through the experience of otherness that we understand the dimension of the presence, which oscillates between separation and union, solitude and community, the “one,” and the whole revealed by anxiety, in a Heideggerian sense. In these oscillations or rhythms, the possibility to which Paz aspires means to emerge from a purely anthropomorphic vision of reality, and assume the challenge of understanding the different manifestations of being that seem superior to those that reduce everything to the self. We are talking about separating from oneself to be an incarnation of the other; overcoming oneself in the transcendence of the other; an indistinct union–fusion in which one is already the other, ultimately an unbound subject. There are experiences of separation and of meeting, like when “we fall” into ourselves endlessly (it is curious that Paz uses this word when Heidegger speaks of “whirlwind”), while 29

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time opens “sus entrañas y nos contemplamos como un rostro que se desvanece y una palabra que se anula” (“its entrails and we contemplate ourselves like a face that disappears and a word that is annulled”) (Paz OC, I: 242). A PREAMBLE OF CRITIQUE Enrico Mario Santí documents superbly the evolution of Paz’s ideas and “his links with various intellectual movements,” especially the crossover between surrealism and existentialism in defense of the poetic act. According to this Cuban critic, who had the privilege of interviewing the Mexican poet on several occasions, surrealism served Paz as a means to identify poetry as an “epistemological revolution,” while helping him interpret phenomenologically “life as meaning and temporality” (Santí 2016, 268). In an interview with Roberto Vernengo, quoted by Santí, Paz points out that what he was trying to do was find parallels between surrealism and “Heideggerian metaphysics of freedom,” and the need to “meditar, como punto de partida de semejante confrontación, el sentido de las palabras inspiración y proyección, entre otras” (“consider as a starting point the comparison between the meaning of the words inspiration and projection, among others”). Ultimately, he was finding a coincidence between poetic creation and philosophical reflection, “enlightening each other.” According to Santí (2016, 269), Paz maintained “las jerarquías conceptuales del surrealismo, pero sustituye la revelación psíquica por la ontológica: no le interesa revelar el inconsciente sino al Ser” (“the conceptual hierarchies of surrealism, but replaces psychic revelation with ontological: he does not want to reveal the unconscious but rather the Being”). Paz associated Heidegger with French surrealism, while seeing it as “el reducto de cierto humanismo existencialista que permea la vida intelectual francesa durante la posguerra” (“the stronghold of a certain existentialist humanism that permeates French intellectual life during the postwar period”). According to Santí (2016, 269), it is why Paz’s Heidegger was akin to Sartre (a doubtful statement, given the Mexican poet’s skepticism towards the French philosopher, as we shall see, mainly for his poetic, moral, and political assumptions), especially in the second part of Being and Time, “which is limited to posing systematic links with the notions of ‘healing’, ‘being in time’, and, in general, the ‘being there’ of existence that is explained in the first part of the same treaty.” “Temporality,” “being cast,” and “projection” are some of the Heideggerian terms in El arco y la lira. Everything is subordinated to a personal vision of temporality, to a certain “emotive” reading of Heidegger in the 1950s (which, at the time, Ramón Xirau, a close, faithful follower of the poetics of Paz, surely understood).

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Santí evaluates—based on evidence from Emir Rodríguez Monegal— that changes made to the first edition of El arco y la lira for the second edition (1967)—published in French edition—sought to diminish the essentialist seal and “to update its argument with approaches derived from structuralism,” thanks to Paz’s studies of Lévi-Strauss. Yet the humanist argument remains intact. The Cuban critic notes that the updating of critical discourse, based on structuralism, “will further dramatize a gap between the fidelity of the poetic presence and the discovery of the enjoyment of an original difference.” Paz’s “philosophical position” remains halfway between the “defense of the speaking subject and the arbitrariness of the sign, between the ‘presence’ proposed by phenomenology on the one hand, and the ostensibly liberating ‘difference’ of structuralism and its expressions on the other” (Santí 2016, 272). It is why a discussion of existential humanism is warranted. Santí considers that the poetics Paz developed corresponds to an unstable, undecided, changing, endless poetry under the mask of a “totalizing text,” as we in fact find in Libertad bajo palabra, also revised for its second edition. Paz was certainly interested in the “impossible organic relationship” between these texts. Anthony Stanton points out that Paz’s links to phenomenology were established to the extent that the poet sought “to interrogate the testimonies of the poetic experience” (Paz, quoted by Stanton, 2015, 385), since it was precisely an experience. He further notes that the choice was made unlike with other strategies that reduce the literary object “in trying to explain literature via other disciplines”: “The author sees in Husserl’s philosophical method an instrument that allows one to focus on the phenomenon from its inner essence; its autonomy, immanence, and specificity” (Stanton 2015, 385). This appropriation of phenomenology recognizes the influence on Paz of the Spanish philosopher José Gaos, who was both a translator and a scholar in this field, as well as in what this critic calls “Heidegger’s existentialism.” The phenomenological dimension of the poetic of Paz’s poetry is thus exposed in its anti-reductionism, in its aspiration to the eidetic vision (the intuition of irreducible essences that are universal invariants), and in the intentional nature of its awareness, an aspect we will also have to consider. Husserl is quoted only three times in El arco y la lira. In one instance, Paz links Husserl, Heidegger, and “other German philosophers” to “existentialism,” when he arrives in Paris in 1945. The second reference seems to clarify slightly more whether Paz finally accepted the eidetic, idealistic Husserlian vision. Paz mentions Husserl as a representative of the necessary consequence of his own idealism—something with which Paz does not seem to have been in agreement—and of a return not to experiences or to things, but “to facts.” Finally, Husserl is part of the destiny of metaphysics in modernity, to which Paz understood that poetry could not adhere. Meanwhile, as Stanton points out, Paz did not make a phenomenological general analysis of the poetic experience in a rigorous sense but rath-

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er in an “eclectic synthesis” of visions, methods, and categories, including phenomenology and existentialism (in what way is not yet to be seen), and irreconcilable tendencies. It is because additionally the former stands out for its ahistoricism—as in “the existentialist hermeneutics of Heidegger”—temporality and historicity constitute the trait that makes up the self. They are the “threads” that Stanton must distinguish and understand, in their connection and presence, and have to do with temporal ontology and the Heideggerian “poetic,” while Paz takes the concept of the “sacred” from the phenomenology of the sacred by Rudolf Otto, and the “essential heterogeneity of being” from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado. Although this overwhelming variety of discourses intersects and interacts in El arco y la lira, three very consistent and dominant elements can be defined: philosophy, religion, and poetic reflection. Stanton (2015, 392) rightly highlights that, in this book, proliferate notions extracted from the understanding of Heideggerian philosophy which are all employed to “describe the temporal condition of being.” Such appropriation of Heideggerian categories also led Paz to consider how opposites coexist without annulling each other but rather being deeply linked and transforming each other, as will be discussed later with the Hegelian dialectic in mind. Paz thus restores a total vision of being “our original condition” according to Stanton. One aspect that must be taken into account in the appreciation of the Heideggerian influence in El arco y la lira is that it coincides with the philosophical turn that Heidegger made towards the poetic studies. As a result, according to Stanton (2015, 393), we can understand Paz’s change in ontological considerations toward language and history—“The anthropocentric existentialism of the philosopher’s first moment is now shifted by a vision that gives primacy to language: ‘language speaks’.” TWO WELCOMES: ALFONSO REYES AND JOSÉ GAOS Martin Heidegger was the “philosopher–poet whom Paz most appreciated” (Domínguez 2014, 246), and he was already present in El laberinto de la soledad (1950), especially the first two parts. Paz’s knowledge of these trends in contemporary European philosophy can be established somewhat earlier. In a footnote to El arco y la lira, Paz emphasizes the importance for his generation of the famous Revista de Occidente, directed by José Ortega y Gasset, where he read some translations and took note of some of the German thinkers of phenomenology and ontology. Aurelia Valero (2015, 79) states that Alfonso Reyes was the first Mexican to reference Ortega, and that the Spanish magazine circulated in Mexico in 1923, a year after its founding. In 1931, students at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) began to delve into these areas of contemporary thinking. 1 Paz (OC, I: 660) points out that “No entendíamos gran

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cosa de las investigaciones lógicas de Husserl pero leíamos con pasión, entre otros a Max Scheler [. . .]. Un poco después tuvimos una revelación fulminante: un ensayo de Heidegger, aparecido en Cruz y Raya, cuyo tema era precisamente la nada” (“We did not understand much of Husserl’s logical investigations but we read passionately Max Scheler, among others [. . .]. A little later we had a sudden revelation: an essay by Heidegger, published in Cruz y Raya, whose subject was precisely Nothingness”). 2 Paz also recalls another poet who is not often mentioned as having influenced him, Rainer Maria Rilke. His voice can be seen in how he “saw death as an interior maturation,” as will be shown later in this book. In 1931, the magazine Cruz y Raya, number 6, published the text “What is Metaphysics?” by Heidegger, translated by Xavier Zubiri and Eugenio Imaz. 3 The magazine ceased circulating shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, when Paz attended the Congress of AntiFascist Writers, in 1937. In Mexico, the initial knowledge of Heideggerian ontology and of surrealism would be mainly due to the work carried out by a group of writers called “Contemporáneos”: “The knowledge of Heidegger and of Husserl’s philosophy was decisive for Contemporaries in general, and for [Mexican poet Jorge] Cuesta in particular [. . .]” (Panabière 1996, 308). At a time when the two German thinkers were scarcely known in Europe, Cuesta mentioned them in Mexico. 4 It was Cuesta who introduced Paz to the “group without group,” the soon-to-be called “Contemporáneos,” where he met the poet Xavier Villaurrutia and the Mexican philosopher Samuel Ramos. In 1934, Ramos had already published his essential El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México, the clear predecessor of El laberinto de la soledad. He was also one of the Mexican thinkers that Paz most recognized in this volume, and he translated Heidegger’s Art and Poetry in 1958, having spread the German philosopher’s teachings since the mid-1930s. 5 A decade later, the “Hyperion” Mexican intellectual group, encouraged by José Gaos and Samuel Ramos, “systematized” the influences of existentialism and phenomenology, which would be “applied” to issues in Mexican culture, in particular to the “ontology of the Mexican,” as Paz had done. Moreover, Carlos Fuentes ridiculed the jargon of the “Mexican Existentialists” in a novel as important as La región más transparente (1958), 6 while Paz, in a letter written to Alfonso Reyes in 1949, expressed his discomfort with “the Sartrean prominence placed on the Hyperions” (quoted by Domínguez 2014, 204). The Hyperions would return the “courtesy” to Paz, staying silent when El laberinto de la soledad was published, a situation that would become more uncomfortable when Emilio Uranga—a member of the group whom many consider to be the brightest critic of that generation—dedicated his analysis of El ser del mexicano (1952) to Paz. Moreover, ignoring the work of Ortega’s magazine and the knowledge that the “Contemporáneos” already had of it, Uranga noted that it was only with the arrival of José Gaos that Heidegger began to be known in Mexico,

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particularly his interest in death. With his unique irony and rebelliousness, Uranga (2016, 144) pointed out in 1983 that, What particularly attracted him [to Gaos] and infected us were the ideas about death, our death, my death. This was the revelation, the cardinal motive that attracted him in Heidegger’s book. And it had enormous consequences. First, it made José Gaos into a dying entity, given to death and not to life.

For a summary of how El laberinto de la soledad was received, especially by Mexican philosophers such as Leopoldo Zea and Abelardo Villegas, see Domínguez Michael (2014, 209–211). Zea had already received scathing comments from Paz (OC, VIII: 319) on his doctoral thesis El positivismo en México (1943), which Werner Jaeger recognized, and José Gaos directed. In an article that year in the Argentine magazine Sur, where Paz published papers that had been rejected in Mexico, he wrote about Zea: “el autor ha desdeñado los datos de la historia mexicana o no los ha sabido interpretar correctamente; es visible, pues, que no ha empleado ningún método histórico para examinar las ideas en su ‘concreción histórica’” (“the author has disdained the facts about Mexican history or has not been able to interpret them correctly; it is thus evident that he has not employed any historical method to examine the ideas in their ‘historical precision’”). For example, he identified Porfirism with a supposed Mexican bourgeoisie that still did not exist. Guillermo Sheridan (2015, 111) points out that Paz’s criticism of Zea was for his “historicism, his nationalism and his ignorance of Marx.” Yet in El laberinto de la soledad, Paz (2010, 142) highlights Zea’s contribution to the knowledge of positivism during the Porfiriato, mentioning the first edition of the work in 1942, a situation that contrasts with information offered by Domínguez Michael: “We owe to Leopoldo Zea a very complex analysis of the ideas of this period.” At that time, Paz found Zea’s analysis to be “unbeatable,” except when he suggested not to consider positivism as a disguise or a “historical overlap,” destined to hide “the moral nudity of the regime toward its own usufructuaries.” Paz recognizes Gaos as the great translator of Being and Time (1927), although he offered the translation of that title as The Being and the Time. 7 In addition to some French introductions to Heidegger’s works, and direct knowledge of this German thinker’s books such as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) and The Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), Paz used Gaos’ Introducción a “El Ser y el Tiempo” de Martin Heidegger (1951), among other references, in El arco y la lira. In this book, we find a peculiar development of the Heideggerian ontology relative to nothingness, anxiety, being of protection, otherness, worldliness, falling Prey and Thrownness, and being-towards-death. Paz would take into account this last core subject in Mexican culture in what he read of the “Contemporáneo” Xavier Villaurrutia, another early phenomenologist in

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Mexico. In addition to the aforementioned books, when Paz published El arco y la lira, Heidegger had already published the fundamental study Nietzsche (1936–1946); some initial studies on Hölderlin, in 1942; The question for the Technique (1949); Lost Paths (1950); What it means to think (1954); Principle of Reason (1955); and Identity and Difference (1955). He was turning to art and language studies, with which Paz was familiar, although he reserved final judgement on them in his considerations on language. The major explicit references to Heidegger can be found in El arco y la lira, in the chapters devoted to poetic revelation and inspiration. The Xavier Villaurrutia Prize was founded in 1955, when it was awarded to Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955). In 1956, it was awarded to El arco y la lira, which Don Alfonso Reyes aided in publishing: “veía con simpatía mis esfuerzos, aunque no aprobaba mis ideas” (“He looked upon my efforts with sympathy but did not approve of my ideas”), Paz (OC, I: 24) stated. The title of the book comes from Heraclitus and alludes to the “lucha de los opuestos, que la poesía convierte en armonía, ritmo e imagen” (“struggle of opposites, which poetry converts into harmony, rhythm, and image”). As we have said, Julio Cortázar believed that it was the best book on poetics “ever written in the Americas” (quoted by Stanton 2015, 381). 8 Alfonso Reyes had already published El deslinde (1944) and La experiencia literaria (1942), outstanding works on poetics, linguistics, and language history. Paz stated about them that “me hicieron claro lo que me parecía oscuro, transparente lo opaco, fácil y bien ordenado lo selvático y enmarañado. En una palabra: me iluminaron” (“they made clear what seemed dark to me, transparent what was opaque, easy and neat what was a tangled jungle. In a word: they enlightened me”). Meanwhile, Reyes’ silence on Paz’s work was notable, as Stanton has decisively written. Yet Paz mentions Reyes on several occasions in this work, for example, to talk about how prose cannot be written without a permanent awareness of what is said; in other words, prose is fundamentally a written language. Furthermore, Paz quotes Reyes to remark that poetic language works like a second artificial language, one that is not necessarily common language, even if its words are. In this regard, Paz (OC, I: 55) quotes Reyes—the Homeric poems were “composed in a literary and artificial dialect that was never properly spoken.” In addition, Paz aligns Reyes closely with surrealism, as can be seen in his discussion on automatic writing, where there are “strange and dazzling associations of language, left to their own spontaneity.” Reyes warns the poet who suddenly feels too safe in his mastery of language: “Un día las palabras se coaligarán contra ti, se te sublevarán a un tiempo” (“One day the words will band together against you and rise up in revolt all at the same time”) (Paz OC, I: 65-66). In another reference, Paz mentions Reyes’ ability with classical versification, given the demands of the Spanish language, which has a “tendencia a la historia e inclinación por el canto” (“tendency for History and an inclination toward song”). Paz had already referred to

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Reyes in El laberinto de la soledad as someone who called for attention and care toward language, for us to become responsible for it in that it would allow us to think. Reyes’ work is “classicist”—“se busca y se modela a sí mismo, espejo y fuente, simultáneamente, en los que el hombre se reconoce, sí, pero también se sobrepasa” (“it seeks its own form and becomes its own best model. It is simultaneously a mirror and a clear spring in which man can recognize himself but can also surpasses himself”) (Paz 2010, 176). Reyes is a lesson in expression, a lesson in “clarity and transparency.” He is an example of how, from an idea that Paz derives from Nietzsche, the critique of language is both a historical and a moral critique, such that every literary style is “una manera de pensar y, por lo tanto, un juicio implícito o explícito sobre la realidad que nos circunda” (“a way of thinking and, therefore, an implicit or explicit judgement of reality that surrounds us”). Paz (2010, 178) acknowledged Reyes’ titanic task—his “mission”—because his work is “la invención de un lenguaje y de una forma universales y capaces de contener, sin ahogarlos y si desgarrarse, todos nuestros inexpresados conflictos” (“the invention of a universal language and form that can contain all our unexpressed conflicts without smothering or disfiguring them”). It is an essential search for a form that expresses our will and, without betraying it, transcends it, and is able to contain the extremes that “devour every Mexican”—solitude and communion, individuality and universality. Paz took this lesson to its ultimate consequences. If through the writer’s work language is individualized, thanks to it he participates in the “life of the city.” Forms as a means of intervention already constitute a praiseworthy activity, that of the intellectual writer. Fidelity to language becomes fidelity to a culture and people, where the writer helps create the expressions of “un hombre que no acaba de ser y que no se conoce a sí mismo” (“a man who is not finished and who does not know himself”), bringing chaos to traditions and, in the end, making them ours. Paz dedicated a copy of the first edition of El arco y la lira to Gaos: “To José Gaos, to whom this book owes so much.” He was even one of the two writers—the other being Federico Gamboa—who responded to Gaos’ call to attend one of the first seminars that he tried to offer on his arrival in Mexico, dedicated precisely to “Philosophy and Literature” (Valero 2015, 212). Unfortunately, due to a lack of response, the seminar did not take place. 9 For Gaos, Paz’s book would be not only “the most important fruit of existentialism in the Spanish language that I know of but also one of the greatest in philosophy, just like that, in our language, that I have news of” (quoted by Stanton 2015, 378). What Gaos admires is the way in which Paz rethinks the multiple intellectual sources that are quoted in the book and that come from different fields of knowledge— philosophical, literary, psychological, historical, religious, and sociological sources from many eras and cultures. Yet he reproached Paz for having used a philosophy, in this case, Heideggerian, to understand poetry,

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instead of taking from it “autonomously,” as its own comprehension. He also did not think that the ideal Heideggerian work for the case was Being and Time, since it preceded “Heidegger’s philosophical version towards Poetry” (quoted by Stanton 2015, 379). It seems that the great translator of Heidegger to Spanish language did not consider sufficiently Paz’s uses of Heideggerian ontology. As mentioned, the publication of El arco y la lira coincided with a Heideggerian turn to studies on art and language that Paz did not pay attention to. It is remarkable that, after his essay on poetics, Paz did not refer again to Heidegger on aspects that have to do with language and poetry. 10 He would prefer, for example, the theories of the American anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf, a prominent investigator who contrasts the mental structures underlying the different human races; or, as we shall see, the theses on language formulated by Rousseau and Breton, as well as those deriving from his interpretation of Hindu myths and the presence of image and metaphor in memory. We shall discuss this point in the fourth chapter of this book, focusing on the remarkable work El mono gramático. In the end, Gaos held the position that Paz’s book of poetics was “philosophy of poetry,” and El laberinto de la soledad should be considered a philosophical work, so its author should be placed “in the forefront of philosophy, not only Mexican, but Spanish-language” (quoted by Stanton, 2015, 380). In a 1966 letter, Gaos recognized the way in which the poet, the philosopher, and the scholar have come together in Paz, “the three of first order.” Domínguez Michael documents Gaos’ late recognition of Paz in the 1960s, because he had not mentioned him in his studies on “Mexican philosophy or the Mexican,” although later he mentioned El arco y la lira. The most important reference that Dominguez (2014, 208) points out is when Gaos predicted that Paz would win the Nobel Prize. In any case, in El laberinto de la soledad, Paz refers to Gaos as the “master of the young ‘intelligence’,” whom we must thank, among other reasons, because he also separates modern thought in peninsular Spanish language from Hispanic in general. Almost ten years after the publication of El arco y la lira, Paz wrote the article “Una de cal. . .” (1967), where he recognizes Gaos’ influence in Mexico as a “perfect Spanish Hispanic,” whose legacy he summarizes in three points—his modern European philosophy traditions, his reintroduction of Hispanic thinking within “its true Hispanic-European context,” and his demonstration of a European Spain. POETIC REVELATION Paz (OC, VIII: 911) considered his earlier text “Poesía de soledad y poesía de communion” (1943) to be the “poetic equivalent of El laberinto de la soledad” since it presents his vision of man. At the same time, he viewed it

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as the poetic program developed in El arco y la lira—“What I wrote in El arco y la lira is a development of all that,” indicated Paz (OC, VIII: 1175) in an interview granted to Enrico Mario Santí, “Retrato de Octavio Paz” recorded in 1996. Here, he also notes that “I could not have written this last book without Heidegger.” The programmatic text was published in the magazine El hijo pródigo, where he argues that knowledge is a way to “seize” reality, to reduce it to language and concepts, trying to dominate and hold it. Against this idea, there is contemplation, an attitude that does not necessarily derive in knowledge, “salvation or condemnation,” but rather tries to “delve into its object.” He who contemplates does not want to know anything, “sólo quiere un olvido de sí, un postrarse ante lo que ve, un fundirse, si es posible, en lo que ama” (“he only wants to forget himself, to kneel down in front of what he sees, to melt, if possible, into what he loves”). The root of this attitude is found in love, since the instinct of love is an instinct to possess the object, of yearning for fusion, of forgetfulness, “de disolución del ser en lo otro” (“the being dissolved into the other”). In this instinct, death is also given, a “force of gravity of the soul” in which there is an encouragement of “arrobo silencioso, el vértigo, la seducción del abismo, el deseo de caer infinitamente y sin reposo, cada vez más hondo; y la nostalgia de nuestro origen, oscuro movimiento del hombre hacia su raíz, hacia su propio nacimiento” (“silent rapture, vertigo, the seduction of the abyss, the desire to fall infinitely and without respite, ever deeper; and nostalgia for our origin, man’s dark movement towards his roots, towards his own birth”) (Paz OC, VIII: 229). Such is the fall of lovers who return to the indistinct state prior to the separation of life and death, need and satisfaction, sleep and act, word and image, time and space, fruit and lip: Los amantes descienden a estados cada vez más antiguos y desnudos; rescatan al animal humillado y al vegetal somnoliento que viven en cada uno de nosotros y tienen el presentimiento de la pura energía que mueve al universo y de la inercia en que culmina el vértigo de esa energía. (Lovers descend to increasingly ancient, naked states; they rescue the humiliated animal and the drowsy vegetable that lives within each of us and they sense the pure energy that moves the universe and the inertia where the vertigo of this energy culminates) (Paz OC, VIII: 229).

Thanks to desire, the poetic spirit moves between loneliness and communion. The poet tries to commune, to meet with his object, i.e., his own soul, the beloved, God, nature. Both religion and poetry tend to commune; they are part of loneliness and try, “mediante el alimento sagrado, romper la soledad y devolver al hombre su inocencia” (“through sacred nourishment, to break with solitude and return to man his innocence”).

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Poetry reveals the innocence of man and his instincts. It deals with the word, while the mystic deals with silence. It is an expression of the absolute or “de la desgarrada tentativa de llegar a él” (“of the tattered attempt to reach it”). Through the word, poetry seeks to “make the World sacred,” to put into what is sacred “la experiencia de los hombres y las relaciones entre el hombre y el mundo, entre el hombre y la mujer, entre el hombre y su propia conciencia” (“the experience of men and man’s relations with the world, between man and woman, between man and his own awareness”). It can be a “testimony of ecstasy, of blissful love” as well as of despair. It may be a plea or a blasphemy. In it, the poet discovers the secret force of the world; he sinks into it, he shows it naked, terrifying, in the “strange mechanism of enchantment that is the poem.” It is a holy yet cursed force that is one of ecstasy, of vertigo, whether carnal or spiritual; moments of fusion of lovers who reach the peak as much as the depth of vertigo—“El cuerpo y el alma, en ese instante, son lo mismo y la piel es como una nueva conciencia, conciencia de lo infinito, vertida hacia lo infinito” (“The body and soul, at that moment, are one and the same, and the skin is like a new awareness, an awareness of the infinite, spilled into infinity”) (Paz OC, VIII: 233). The senses dissolve consciousness into the absolute, and “reintegrate it into the original energy.” For this reason, eternity and the absolute are in the senses. In an interview with César Salgado, “Poesía de circunstancias” (1998), Paz (OC, VIII: 1107) recognized once again that “in my book El arco y la lira (1956) traces of Heidegger are visible.” He points out that Heideggerian ontology served as a starting point not to elaborate a poetic but rather to elaborate a vision of poetry as a “revelación del ser cuando se despliega en la temporalidad del lenguaje” (“revelation of the being when deployed in the temporality of language”). Here, the role of the image is as an “instantaneous appearance of the self,” an appearance that is also a disappearance, an aspect that Paz develops from surrealism, as we shall see. It is a peculiar situation of man in time that allows him to transcend incessantly in search of the other that is himself, and that the image, as much as love, allows us to glimpse. Poetry is knowledge for the way that “it is the instantaneous perception of the otherness that constitutes us.” Paz confirms these ideas in his studies of Buddhism and its core concept, emptiness. He was not surprised that in the works of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Lévi-Strauss there was both an involuntary and “surprising affinity for Buddhism,” a central concern for language as a way of reaching a similar conclusion—“Cada palabra se resuelve en silencio” (“Every word is decided in silence”) (Paz OC, VIII: 1238). The possibility of being another through poetry is an approach that Paz (OC, VIII: 45) derives, among other conceptual sources, from a Heideggerian thesis, in particular the idea of temporality and projecting, given the fact that man is “constantly transcending, is always going beyond himself,” as he noted in an interview with Fernando Savater, “Octa-

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vio Paz: ‘La poesía es el origen de lo sagrado’” (1979). There, he admitted to other approaches such as the Socratic “know thyself,” or even psychoanalysis, where each one is several unknown—“nuestro cuerpo, el hombre que aparece en nuestros sueños o el que brota en ciertos momentos privilegiados, como el amor, la conversación, la pasión. . .” (“our body, the man who appears in our dreams or the one that arises in certain privileged moments, such as love, conversation, passion. . .”). This strangeness leads him to invent an identification with the other, “to make his separation from nature more radical.” On the topic of poetic revelation, Paz (OC, I: 135) wondered whether temporality in Heidegger was not “a man’s continuous casting himself toward that which is not he himself, if not but Desire.” The combination of ontology with surrealism and eroticism (since the 1940s, Paz had readings on Georges Bataille) must have allowed him to subscribe to the loving utopia of both the surrealists and his beloved Charles Fourier. Expressing himself with the ontological categories inherent to Heidegger, he points out that “si el hombre es un ser que no es, sino que se está siendo, un ser que nunca acaba de serse, ¿no es un ser de deseos tanto como un deseo de ser?” (“if man is a being who is not, but rather who is being made, a being who never stops becoming, is he not a being of desires as much as a desire to be?”). Therefore, “La voz del deseo es la voz misma del ser, porque el ser no es sino deseo de ser” (“The voice of desire is the very voice of being, because being is nothing but desire for being”) (Paz OC, I: 172). A greater emphasis must be placed on otherness and desire to understand Paz’s poetics. Love is as much a revelation of being as of nothingness, but Paz (OC, I: 172) considers that the “amada” (“beloved”), that presence to which we aspire—according to the ideas of Antonio Machado—“está ya en nuestro ser, como sed y otredad. Ser es erotismo” (“is already in our being, as thirst and otherness. Being is eroticism”). It is on this subject, and particularly on the sacred, that Paz revisits the Heideggerian concept “being thrown into the world,” the primordial human condition which, in some way, is a return to the origin. We are beings thrown into strangeness, “finite and helpless,” while the original situation is understood as “the abrupt feeling of being (or being found) there.” It is from emotional states that the mortal human condition, and its temporal character, can be understood. Heidegger (2002, 357) points out that “Being thrown means existentially to be in this or that way,” and that “emotional states represent how every time I am mainly the entity thrown.” Accumulated mood experiences make it possible—the “ecstasy of having been,” “the encounter with oneself in the form of the find-self affective.” Psychic disposition is founded on this “having-been.” The timing of the mood is “ecstasy,” and moods have an original existential function because they are at the foundation of the hermeneutical understanding of the self.

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The condition of being thrown into the world is one of the essential considerations that Paz deals with in his image of the poet and his creative work, and because writing is like “arrojarse al vacío” (“throwing oneself into the void”)—the poet needs to get rid of the world and question everything. The poet’s condition of being-in-the-world is born of his disposition and is where he reaches the most “openness.” The poet has two possibilities—everything either evaporates or fades, or closes and becomes a meaningless object—“materia inasible e impenetrable a la luz de la significación” (“matter that is unseizable and impenetrable to the light of significance”) (Paz OC, I: 169). It is how Paz transforms the notion of anxiety—“El mundo se abre: es un abismo, un inmenso bostezo; el mundo–la mesa, la pared, el vaso, los rostros recordados—se cierra y se convierte en un muro sin fisuras” (“The world opens: it is an abyss, an immense yawn; the world—the table, the wall, the goblet, the remembered faces—closes and becomes a wall without fissures”). Either way, the poet is left alone, and even worse, without words. He will have to recreate words to repopulate this empty and meaningless world, and only then will he realize that a private language is not being built, but rather that language already lies within him, to the extent that from the origin, we are in the world before distinguishing it or having it “in front of us.” The words he must find or reinvent are not outside of us, but “son nosotros mismos, forman parte de nuestro ser. Son nuestro propio ser. Y por ser parte de nosotros, son ajenas, son de los otros: son una de las formas de nuestra otredad constitutiva” (“they are we ourselves, are part of our being. They are our own being. And because they are part of us, they are alien, they belong to others: they are one of the forms of our constitutive otherness”) (Paz OC, I: 170). In the same vein as Heidegger, Paz (OC I: 141) notes that anxiety and fear, and the experience of love and the sacred, are “opposing and parallel paths, opening and closing us, respectively, accessing our original condition.” Conclusively, Heidegger serves to “reveal the role of religious interpretation.” Some examples of how the sacred is involved in an interpretation that conceals the meaning of its revelation are St. Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard, but also Unamuno and Quevedo—authors who divert the meaning of this revelation “denunciando la nadería del pecador ante Dios” (“proclaiming the sinner’s nothingness before God”) (Paz OC, I: 141). The sacred is precisely an interpretation of that original condition; it is not a direct affective revelation of it, and it cannot be inferred that “falta y poco ser sean lo mismo que pecado original” (“lacking and being little are the same as original sin”), such that the first implies the freedom to prefer “oneself and turn your back on God,” for example. So as not to confuse that deficit of being, or “being little” that we are, with the idea of original sin, Paz (OC, I: 143) uses a quotation from Heidegger’s Being and Time, which points out that “ser deudor no prueba nada ni en pro ni en contra de la posibilidad de pecado” (“debtor being does not

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prove anything either for or against the possibility of sin”). The notion of “lack of being” does not agree with sin, unless an impossible freedom is desired—“¿cómo la libertad, antes de la caída, pudo escoger el mal?; ¿qué libertad es esta que se niega a sí misma y no elige el ser sino la nada?” (“how could freedom, before the fall, have chosen evil?; what freedom is this that denies itself and does not choose being but rather the nothingness?”) (Paz OC, I: 144). Paz (OC, I: 144) believes that the sacred reveals our fundamental original human condition, although deceived by the different religious traditions that tend to obscure the sense of revelation sought for which, in turn, can be understood as a reaction to our mortality. Thus, poetry must be linked to the “situación humana original—el estar ahí, el sabernos arrojados en ese ahí que es el mundo hostil e indiferente—y del hecho que la hace precaria entre todos: su temporalidad, su finitud” (“original human situation—being there, knowing we have been thrown into that there that is the hostile or indifferent world—and the fact that makes it precarious among all others: its temporality, its finitude”). 11 As we have mentioned, the poetic act is a revelation of this original human condition, so—as Alphonse de Waelhens wrote in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger, published in 1948, a book Paz also read—“El sentimiento de la situación original expresa afectivamente nuestra condición fundamental” (“The feeling about the original situation expresses affectively our fundamental condition”). The poetic word is the “rhythm” of this condition, which is how Paz tackles the question of temporality— time that “flows” and “regenerates incessantly”; a “jet of time” that turns out to be an affirmation of both life and death. Poetry is a “supplier of rhythm–image” that expresses what we are—a revelation of our condition, although “defective” through death, but that allows us to give meaning to the whole—a meaning that our finite possibility of being gives it. Paz quotes Gaos, from Introduction to Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, “as soon as a man enters life he is old enough to die.” Poetry seems to lead then to the revelation of this non-being, to the affirmation of a “lack” or “falling.” Paz’s interpretation of the Heideggerian thesis led him to argue that it is because of this human condition that we are able to understand the sense of astonishment that the world represents—since it is strange to us—but are also able to feel indifference because of the limited sense that our finiteness represents. It is a sense of “discomfort in the world” that poetry can reveal—“Desde el nacer, nuestro vivir es un permanente estar en lo extraño e inhospitalario, un radical malestar. Estamos mal porque nos proyectamos en la nada, en el no ser” (“From birth, our life is a permanent being in the strange and inhospitable, a radical malaise. We get alone badly because we throw ourselves into the nothingness, into nonbeing”) (Paz OC, I: 145). Our lack of being is original; it is a founding element in our way of being and comes from the origin. Paz points out

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that, on this point, Heidegger coincides with Rudolf Otto, in the sense that “nuestro ser se reduce a un ‘actual, permanente poder no ser, o morir’” (“our being is reduced to a ‘current, permanent ability not to be, or to die’”). 12 These approaches are reflected in Paz’s poem “La Caída,” in Libertad bajo palabra, dedicated to the memory of his dear friend Jorge Cuesta—“¿qué soy, sino la sima en que me abismo,/ y qué, sino el no ser, lo que me puebla?/ El espejo que soy me deshabita:/ un caer en mí mismo inacabable/ al horror de no ser me precipita” (“What am I, but the abyss into which I plunge,/ and what, but not being, inhabits me?/ The mirror that I am vacates me:/ an endless fall into myself/ to the horror of not being I am thrown”) (OC, VII: 67). Paz raises the point that “it is certainly revealing” that Heidegger did not want to interpret this “not being,” “this negativity in which our being culminates” 13 that turns our human condition into a “lack” or “deficiency.” It is acceptable as long as we maintain that death comes from the outside, but when we take it as inherent to our being, when we accept that living is at the same time dying, that “it is us,” it is not a negative thing. Paz brings together the Heideggerian approaches (as well as apparently, tacitly, the Hegelian approaches), and clarifies them in a creative vision that leads to a “meeting of ourselves” (a key currency in his reflections on the Mexican people in El laberinto de la soledad)—from being to not being, going through being and vice versa, and likewise of being, not to be, and later becoming being—“Vivir es ir hacia adelante, avanzar hacia lo extraño, y este avanzar es ir hacia el encuentro de nosotros mismos. Por tanto, vivir es dar la cara a la muerte” (“To live is to go forward, to advance toward the strange, and this advancing is to go to the encounter of ourselves. Therefore, to live is to face death”) (Paz OC, I: 146). For Paz, “to face death” is to leave oneself to go to an encounter with the strange (being thrown implies these notions—strangeness, escape, flight)—“To die, to live: by living we die, we die living.” Again, this idea of death is linked to our finite condition and takes on the meaning of the “disclosedness,” the “void,” according to the Heideggerian approach, which is what allows for “the step forward,” or what Paz calls “el salto mortal” (“the mortal leap”). In the poem “Crepúsculos de la ciudad,” from the book Libertad bajo palabra, he deals with these certainties that being in time traverses towards the nothingness of death—the key moment of nihilism when the sky is “deshabitado de dioses” (“uninhabited by gods”) and the soul has lost “root and birth,” two sides of the same coin—“Nada te mueve, cielo, ni te habita./ Quema el alma raíz y nacimiento/ y en sí misma se ahonda y precipita.” (“Nothing moves you, heaven, nor does it inhabit you./ The soul burns root and birth/ and delves and plunges into itself.”) And later, “mi ser, que multiplica [el espejo] en muchedumbre/ y luego niega en un reflejo impío,/ todo, se arrastra, inexorable río,/ hacia la nada, sola certidumbre” (“my

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being, which [the mirror] multiplies in the crowd/ and then denies in a heathen reflection,/ completely, is swept, relentless river,/ toward nothingness, sole certainty”) (Paz OC, VII: 70). Paz wants to understand the dialectics generated by the opposites being and nothingness, life and death, affirmation and denial, fulfillment and lacking, which become one and the same (the work of the Hegelian “negative”), and he realizes that it is our most profound raison d’être. We are that contrariety or complementarity, which have different results when the boundaries are taken first from nothingness to being, and then in the opposite direction, as we have said. Paz follows his intuition and comes to conclusions based on the Heideggerian theses, making them equivalent to other notions from the Latin tradition with which Heidegger probably would not have agreed. In any case, it is an example of the “appropriation” of ideas (in the Gaosian sense of the term) that seems to stop at certain times, and of making conclusions based on the understanding of these ideas rather than considering whether there is an implication in the Heideggerian approach. This appropriation becomes recreation, not a mere mechanical, insubstantial repetition of the so-called “original approach.” Seeking to understand Heidegger, Paz (OC, I: 146) is clear that being arises from the experience of nothingness. Yet he identifies “the being” with man—something Heidegger would never have accepted, noting that, “advierte que está sumergido en una totalidad de cosas y objetos sin significación, y él mismo se ve como un objeto más, todos cayendo sobre sí mismos, todos a la deriva” (“he observes that he is submerged in a totality of things and objects without significance, and he himself is seen as one more object, all toppling over one another, all tumbling aimlessly”). The being coming from nothingness is “thingness,” a consideration that is constant in his poems. This existence that emerges from nothingness seems to owe much to the Greek cosmological view. This emergence of the self is an instantaneous revelation that appears to man to the extent that he realizes that everything has meaning in terms of the awareness of finiteness. Paz does not seem to follow a sequence of degrees ranging from a detachment of chaos to an awareness of the self that recognizes what is in the lack of meaning, what is outside of it. In approximately ten lines, the poet looks for an abbreviated synthesis of the passage of time, from the absence of it to an awareness of the world’s meaning. The appearance of the self is already an unspeakable fall into chaos since, at the moment of being and being among things, it begins not to be; it is this double nature that leads us to the impossibility of naming it all—“nada podemos decir sobre nosotros, nada sobre el mundo, porque nada somos” (“we can say nothing about ourselves, nothing about the world, because we are nothing”) (OC, I: 146). An apparition that faces not the nothing from which it comes, but the possibility of its not being.

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For Heidegger (2002, 159) “to be thrown into the world” means the “facticity of oneself,” where this self “falls” into the world; its condition of being is in the midst of it, and with which we deal. It is a way of saying that it is absorbed—“The state of falling into the ‘world’ means being absorbed by the world of other people governed by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity” (Heidegger 2002, 198). The interesting thing is that this character of absorption presents the Dasein in the world through the “coexistence of the others in the one.” It is all about a non-being of the Dasein that Heidegger uses to point out that, in this “reassuring” and “enticing” condition, the Dasein has “hidden its own power-being,” which is a positive trait in that it is being immersed in its daily life and immediacy. It represents the Dasein’s way of being immediate and constitutes a way to defect in the world of which it is part, and of which the world is also a part. In the end, the phenomenon of the fall is not from a pure initial state, as in the Biblical version, but rather reveals in palpable form an existential modality of being-in-the-world. This condition leads the Dasein to “become entangled” in itself, so that, coupled with temptation, reassuring, and alienation, the specific type of fall is characterized. Heidegger calls this mobility of the Dasein in its own self “descending.” It is impossible not to recognize this Heideggerian notion when Paz speaks of the precipitation in oneself from oneself. The German philosopher points out that, “Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nothingness of inauthentic everydayness” (Heidegger 2002, 200). Heidegger also uses the notion of “whirlwind” to describe “the mobility of descending,” which at the same time takes the Dasein out of its own condition and drags it into the one—it is our way of being-in-the-world. Our “own” existence is not something that is achieved outside of the condition of being-in-the-world, that is, above the facticity of the Dasein, but rather “existentially it is only a modified way of assuming this daily life.” In a pedagogical manner, Heidegger argues that the fall of the Dasein cannot be understood as a “night vision” of it, but as “the whole of its days”; it is an essential ontological structure of the Dasein, not something that could happen to it or that it could do without, so “the fall is an ontological concept of movement.” Heidegger never agreed to construe the being of the Dasein “from an idea of a man.” EXPERIENCES OF NOTHINGNESS Heidegger (2009, 21) does not equate nothingness to negativity because “we maintain that nothingness is more original than the not and negation.” Faced with the difficulties of defining it adequately, he seeks the “fundamental experience of nothingness” revealed by the state of mind of anxiety which, far from identifying with fear, turns out to be an experience derived from the “essential impossibility of determining it.” In anx-

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iety we are “suspended,” unable to do anything, so only the “pure beinghere” remains. This situation leaves us speechless to the extent that there is no “something” to refer to, nor what can be said to be “it.” Anxiety is considered in Being and Time as “a fundamental affective disposition” in which the world acquires the character of “total insignificance.” Anxiety is of “the self-in-the-World.” It is anxiety that initially opens the world as such. In Introduction to Metaphysics, which the young Paz was very familiar with, the nothingness “nadea” (“swims”), that is, it walks constantly among us, so we have a way of knowing about it by the mere act of having found it. A nothingness “walks without feeling, thought, or conversations” (Heidegger 2009, 22), like when we do not “want anything,” or when “nothing disturbs us,” or when we say “we do not want to talk about anything,” or when someone thanks us and we answer “it was nothing.” It is a manifest nothingness, present with us in expressions that contain it. There is already a presence of it that is the basis of understanding it, since it cannot follow the path of logical demonstrations under penalty of going against logic, where an object cannot assert that it is its own negation of itself or that it is never in itself since it could refer to anything but itself, i.e., to nothingness. The paradox is not solved because being nothingness is a denial of everything, or of the whole, which should be assumed as a radical absence of everything. Yet it is, because it has somehow asserted its existence. It is the absence of everything, yet it is. Nothingness is a form of awe that has the whole to reveal to us—a background where our events take place and where, similarly, the entities with which we have a relationship are placed. Is nothingness the imagination? This question seems fair since Paz’s idea of the imagination derived above all from Kant. When we detach from entities, “when we are not properly occupied with things or with ourselves” is when “we are invaded by real boredom,” that strange and fine heritage of the late nineteenth century revealed by Nietzsche and Baudelaire, among others. This tedium, alongside poetic rapture, an escape from the mystical, wandering, and all possible detachments from oneself, rootlessness and contemporary exiles, is capable of revealing inner emotional states. It reinforces the previous formulations (the entity in its entirety or totality), at least the immersion of our particular entity in it—“Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of the Dasein like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole” (Heidegger 2009, 24). Generally speaking, for Heidegger, states of mind contribute to this revelation of ourselves “in the midst of the whole entity.” Emotional states, including joy, reveal a vast community of beings that make it possible for us to situate ourselves among the whole, but with an attitude of selflessness—a condition that Kant already posed as the requirement

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for the aesthetic appreciation of reality. Heidegger attributes to these states a fundamental unveiling of our being in circumstance—chance cannot be eliminated in many of these mental situations, which happen unexpectedly, even if they constitute “the fundamental event of our being-here.” The role of feelings is thus essential to our being; they reveal the whole, always in their own way—they reconstitute the scattered unity of things and beings, of interests and ends under a peculiar state of mind. But then what happens with nothingness, which is still the interest of the German thinker? Heidegger asks which emotional state leads to it, because only one can do so. The answer is anxiety, a subject Kierkegaard treated soberly in his The Concept of Anxiety (1844), after having published his Fear and Trembling (1843) one year earlier. Anxiety is the possibility of being for the Dasein that presents the phenomenal foundation for the explicit capture of the original whole of its being, which is revealed as “care.” We are talking about the apprehension of a totality that is never the sum of its parts, achieved through anxiety as a “fundamental affective capture,” an eminent mode of the openness of the Dasein. This whole is the “pre-what” of anxiety that is entirely indeterminate. It is why anxiety “distresses itself,” but not in front of a certain entity. In this manner, the world “has the character of complete insignificance” (Heidegger 2002, 208). An empty and insignificant whole shown by anxiety cannot be more than a “nothingness,” which is merely “being-in-the-world.” In addition, anxiety reveals in Dasein “its being toward its ownmost potentiality-for-being the power-being, that is, its being free for the freedom of choosing and grasping itself” (Heidegger 2002, 210). Sartre soon declared, and popularized, the phrase “We are doomed to be free.” Paz thus highlighted the notion of a self devoid of itself, turned into itself, in a retreat into a world that is revealed in a new or amazing way, and in the face of which he effectively “stutters.” Heidegger in fact does not define nothingness as “not being,” as something that nullifies or rejects the self, given its impotence in the face of what it is. The German thinker instead uses the formula of “being with” nothingness and the being, which he also calls the “totality of the entity.” Nothingness is with and in its entirety, even though it is always escaping or in “retreat.” In the end, the essence of nothingness is a “withdrawal” in which the entity is “shipwrecked in its entirety.” It is in the very being of the entity that “the withdrawal that is nothingness” happens (Heidegger 2009, 32). It is from nothingness, and from its foundation in always-hidden anxiety (in the sense that it can show up at any time) that the entity’s transcendence takes place. “Being thrown” into nothingness, abandonment, and estrangement are moments of revelation for the entity. Certainly the image of “being thrown” or of “falling” are important in Paz’s poetic considerations, as are the consequences in the sense of the recovery of the entity in its entirety. It is a notion of transcen-

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dence like the abandonment of oneself to nothingness, or getting rid of “the idols that we all have and in which we tend to evade,” through something similar to the exercise of critique, to finally let “the sweep of our suspense take its full course, so that it swings back into the basic question of metaphysics which the nothing itself compels: ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?’” (Heidegger 2009, 43). Dasein is conceived as “not being” absorbed in the world, which represents a positive possibility to the extent that it deals with the world, and “being there” is conceived immediately as it shifts from the ordinary. It occurs as soon as “decay,” or the being there deserts itself to fall into the world that is already part of its being. If the self is not “missing” or “deficient,” as Paz sees it, it is instead “decaying.” In Being and Time it is argued that the essence of the Dasein consists of its “have-to-be” (Zu-sein) or the possibility that “it can ‘choose’ itself in its being, it can gain itself, it can lose itself, or it can never and only ‘apparently’ gain itself” (Heidegger 2010, 42). Going from nothingness to being, we conclude with a “fall” into the world, that is, the emergence of existence in the world of consciousness limited by its finiteness. Yet if we name nothingness, as Paz points out, “it will light up with the light of being,” i.e., the name is a way of “inserting” death into life. Nothingness is assimilated into life by being named. Naming assimilates not being into being and thus reintegrates it. The fundamental reason language exists is this nothingness that the “luminosity” of the self faces. Every word is a revelation of that nothingness that appears before us, a way to transcend the “negativity” that conforms us—“Podemos acercarnos a la nada por el ser. Y al ser, por la nada. Somos el ´fundamento de una negatividad´, pero también la trascendencia de esa negatividad. Lo negativo y lo positivo se entrecruzan y forman un solo núcleo indisoluble” (“We can approach nothingness through being. And being, through nothingness. We are the ‘foundation of a negativity’, but also the transcendence of that negativity. The negative and the positive intersect and form a single indissoluble nucleus”) (Paz OC, I: 146-7). Paz (OC, I: 147) sought to extend the dominion of experience of nothingness beyond anxiety, where Heidegger had placed it. First, he assumes that anxiety is a meeting of ourselves, and he points out that, for something similar, we must resort to the experience of boredom described by Baudelaire, in whose “nothing happens” he found one of his best intuitions. In boredom, “el universo fluye, a la deriva, como un mar gris y sucio, mientras la conciencia varada no refleja sino el golpe monótono del oleaje” (“the universe flows, aimlessly, like a gray and dirty sea, while the stranded consciousness reflects nothing but the monotonous pounding of the surf”). 14 According to Paz, another situation that would reveal the “content of nothingness” is “solitude in company.” Faced with mechanical and often senseless actions, consciousness takes refuge in itself, but falls into an

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abyss. This nothingness is the abyss of loneliness when facing the irrationality of the world. Man in solitude is “drifting towards death.” From the “high” of life, solitary consciousness—or the condition of solitude—is dismissed in the abyss of nothingness, but this “sighting” or “revelation” of “la naderia del hombre” (“man’s nothingness”) is transformed into his being. Paz made an additional use of nothingness in a journalistic note “Don Nadie y Ninguno,” published in the Mexican newspaper Novedades in 1943. With a burlesque, critical-appropriation tone, it is almost a social diagnosis linked to the Samuel Ramos method of understanding the character of the Mexican. Paz (OC, VIII: 332) is astonished by “logical absurdity” and contradiction, a “provocative subject” that represents nothingness to the extent that, if something is, it is itself nothing—it is what it is not. In this note, he points out that “La nada es un gran escándalo que ofende a la razón pues en ella los opuestos, el ser y el no ser, se funden en un disparatado, impensable ser-no-ser” (“Nothingness is a great scandal that offends reason because in it opposites, being and not being, merge into a ridiculous, unthinkable not-being-being”). Here, nothingness refers to something without borders, something with no name and devoid of boundaries, of contours; it is the “undefined” itself. The category serves to refer to two common physiognomies of the Mexican, “Nobody” and “None,” similar to how Ramos (1951, 54) referred to the Mexican character of the “peladito” (a “bare” man), who belongs to the lowest category of social fauna and represents the human waste of the big city. In the economic hierarchy he is less than a proletarian and in the intellectual, a primitive. Life has been hostile for him all around, and his attitude toward it is one of dark resentment. He is a being of an explosive nature who is dangerous to deal with, so he explodes at the slightest touch.

“Nobody” designates who nothing is, or rather, the instance where nothingness is humanized, which corresponds to the Mexican high-class, a bourgeois, a rich politician, who is colloquially said to be “a nobody.” It is the public man par excellence, whose “gran panza oculta la Nada que lo habita” (“great belly hides the Nothingness that dwells in him”). Next to him is the “wretched none”—“El pariente pobre, flaco, tímido, amarillo de rencor, desvaído como un sueño. Posee un alma romántica y triste y una figura borrosa, semisonriente, de perro callejero” (“The poor relative, skinny, shy, yellow with resentment, faded like a dream. His soul is romantic and sad, and his figure, blurry, half smiling, like a stray dog”). “None” has the belief that he is someone, and his greatest ambition is to “colocarse al lado de Don Nadie, asistir a sus mismas fiestas, enamorar a las mismas señoras, decir discursos, escribir artículos, ir a la sinfónica, a la ópera, al hipódromo, apostar en el frontón y aplaudir en los toros” (“stand next to Nobody, attending the same parties, falling in love with

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the same ladies, giving speeches, writing articles, going to the symphony, the opera, the racetrack, betting on fronton and clapping at bullfights”). It is Nobody who creates or generates the None, that is to say, anyone who is intended to be real in front of him. “Ninguneo” (making someone a nobody) is mentioned as a very common way for Mexicans to ignore someone, especially enemies. For this reason, Nobody creates anything around him, including its “innumerable children, Nones.” It is Nobody who makes Mexico a massive shadow; it makes of everybody Nobody, nothing. Paz (OC, VIII: 333) concludes his note stating that “El filósofo Martin Heidegger asegura que existir significa ‘estar sosteniéndose dentro de la nada.’ Para México, por lo menos, la definición es exacta. Pues existir, aquí, significa impedir que Don Nadie nos sumerja para siempre en la Nada” (“The philosopher Martin Heidegger assures that to exist means to ‘hold onto oneself within the nothingness’. In Mexico, at least, the definition is accurate. Here, to exist means to keep Nobody from immersing us forever in nothingness”). Paz (OC, I: 147) refers to another aspect of the experience of nothingness that he felt Heidegger barely mentioned. It is the revelation of what we are giving in the experience of love, in which it is possible to glimpse for an instant “the indissoluble unity of the contrary,” a unity that is the self—“Heidegger mismo ha señalado que la alegría ante la presencia del ser amado es una de las vías de acceso a la revelación de nosotros mismos” (“Heidegger himself has pointed out that joy in the presence of the beloved is a means of access to the revelation of ourselves”). Therefore, using ontological categories, Paz argues that love is “ir al encuentro” (“going to meet up”). Love is a waiting in which “todo nuestro ser se inclina adelante. Es un anhelar, un tenderse hacia algo que aún no está presente y que es una posibilidad que puede no producirse: la aparición de la mujer” (“our whole being leans forward. It is a yearning, a stretching towards something that is not yet present and that is a possibility that may not occur: the appearance of woman”). It is this waiting that keeps us in suspense, outside of ourselves, suspended before a vacuum or absence of what is not yet; the presence of the beloved is another way of projecting forward. Through love, waiting enters the strangeness of the world into ours; the world is invaded by its remoteness and slow time, by a gradual estrangement of the things that it creates between us and them, an empty or unusual abyss. As long as we do not become too eager and we wait, we live in proximity with the world. In doing so, it begins to depopulate, and our consciousness reduces itself in a spectral vacuum. It is loneliness that again begins to invade in the context of “in-waiting.” This waiting throws us into the “unexpected,” that is, our loneliness. Here, Paz restates how human situations are interdependent, and how they are passed from one to the opposite in a certain need; the hope of presence “has been exchanged in the certainty of solitude.” This experience reveals our not being or “non-existence,” versus waiting for the

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presence. The waiting or yearning derails us; it thrusts us into the dimension of an unfilled desire. Waiting in the experience of love puts us back to nothingness— “Nothingness opens at our feet. And in that instant comes the unexpected, what we no longer expected.” Paz expects the presence of the beloved to rescue us in the instant of the fall or flight, of the “attraction to the abyss” already pointed out by the romantics. It is this presence that lifts us from the fall; it takes us out of the abyss, which again means the world that is “magnetized by eyes, suspended in a mysterious equilibrium”—a sense of presence before the emptiness of life revealed in anxiety, boredom, and loneliness: La presencia rescata al ser. O mejor dicho, lo arranca del caos en que se hundía, lo recrea. Nace el ser de la nada. Pero basta con que no me mires para que todo caiga de nuevo y yo mismo me hunda en el caos. Tensión, marcha sobre el abismo, marcha sobre el filo de una espada. Tú estás aquí, frente a mí, cifra del mundo, cifra de mí mismo, cifra del ser. (The presence redeems being. Or rather, it wrests it from the chaos in which it was sinking, re-creates it. Being is born of nothing. But you have only to cease to look at me to make everything collapse again and cause me to sink in the chaos. Tension, a walk on the abyss, a walk on the cutting edge of a sword. You are here, before me, the emblem of the world, emblem of myself, emblem of being) (Paz OC, I: 148).

Being seems to be something akin to a tide that covers and uncovers the “beach of existence,” a “tide of being,” using an image that resembles the one provided by Rousseau at the end of his Confessions as he returned to himself on the island of a lake in Switzerland. An image is evoked of a sea that moves away and leaves the moor of sand bare—the raw desert of the indistinct, the full presence of things thrown, returned to their material condition. The estrangement of the self is revealing—Rousseau’s passage is on the beach; the beach is his step, the stage or space of its approximations and distances. Paz recreates the love metaphor where the lover approaches the beloved to make the world disappear into a fusion where it is not possible to distinguish “nothing or anyone.” In this way, besides anxiety, boredom, and poetic revelation, love’s passion represents another encounter with that “nothingness” or not being, i.e., death, the absence of self, whose dynamism Paz tries to catch by any means—the sum of abysmal experiences that give body to the being that will be departing in each and every one of its moments. In this passion of love we also enter a certain region of the indiscernible, where nothingness is distinguishable from what happens, but above all, where the “nudity of words” occurs:

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The self is hidden in the appearance of the other who, behind him, hides nothingness. Appearance and presence are two aspects that make possible an understanding of the concealment of the self in the other, but also the descent into nothingness that is implied. Being and nothingness are the same in that hidden background of presence–appearance, but they are different in their raison d’être, in the way they cease to be; they are hidden and appear again, submerged in one another. The being falls, precipitates into nothingness; nothingness is what the being is left in, what fills its retreat. Nothingness is there to conceive the being but also to lift it. The being falls and rises from nothingness. Paz uses a line by the poet Antonio Machado to insist on this revelation of the being and of nothingness in love, in particular within woman. According to the Spanish poet “La mujer es el anverso del ser” (“Woman is the other side of being”). Thus, she is “pure presence, being crops out and makes itself present in her. And in her it sinks and is hidden. Thus, love is simultaneous revelation of being and of nothingness” (Machado quoted by Paz OC, I: 148). Then love is “algo en lo que nosotros participamos, algo que nosotros nos hacemos: el amor es creación del ser. Y ese ser es el nuestro. Nosotros mismos nos aniquilamos al crearnos y nos creamos al aniquilarnos” (“something in which we participate, something we make for ourselves: love is the creation of being. And that being is ours. We ourselves annihilate ourselves in creating ourselves, and we create ourselves in annihilating ourselves”) (Paz OC, I: 149). Sartre established a similar structure (1993, 59) when he characterized the essential relationship that the human being has as “carrier” and producer of “nothingness” in his

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womb: “Man presents himself at least in this instance as a being who cauces Nothingness to arise in the world, inasmuch as he himself is affected with non-being to this end.” Additionally, Sartre formulates the topic of freedom as an essential human condition; the human being is free insofar as he “conditions” nothingness, which is his reason for being, and he incorporates anxiety into the topic of nothingness and freedom, the fall and vertigo facing it. Sartre (1993, 67) assumes the idea of “project” as being what is not, very much in the style developed by Paz—“en la medida exacta en que el yo que no soy todavía no depende del yo que soy” (“to the exact measure that the self that I am not yet does not depend on the self that I am”). Therefore, we can say that we wait for ourselves in the future. It is based on this idea that we are what we are being. Another domain of the experience of nothingness, “naderias” (Sartre calls them “negativities,” “lagoons of non-being”) refers to the feelings that we adopt when facing the immensity and strangeness of nature, something related to romanticism’s sublime feeling. It is an overwhelming experience against the rolling up of things themselves, and of the absolute strangeness in front of us—an external world that owns its absolute existence without having to depend on us at any time. It is a feeling of cosmic loneliness in defiance of the observation of superior natural forces, a feeling of nullity, or better said, of “naming” when facing “so much existence closed on itself.” Paz (OC, I: 149) notes that “la naturaleza se repliega sobre sí misma y el mar se enrolla y se desenrolla frente a nosotros, indiferente; las rocas se vuelven aún más compactas e impenetrables; el desierto más vacío e insondable” (“nature turns inward and the sea heaves and plunges before us, indifferently; the rocks become even more dense and impenetrable; the desert, more vacuous and inaccessible”). It is a “reflux” from this state to another where the initial nothingness comes out, to end up fused with that strange whole, if of course “contemplation is prolonged and panic does not overwhelm us.” Once again, being emerges from nothingness; it is filled with “everything”—it is the whole thanks to this rapture that follows the initial petrified astonishment. We discover all that we are in the whole; there is no part that is not a whole, but also everything outside of us “is animated.” Paz has the mastery of adding poetic images when the moment of conceptual precision does not seem to give him greater possibilities of expression. In this state of fusion, identity, or communion, “el ritmo del mar se acompasa al de nuestra sangre; el silencio de las piedras es nuestro propio silencio; andar entre las arenas es caminar por la extensión de nuestra conciencia, ilimitada como ellas; los ruidos del bosque nos aluden” (“the rhythm of the sea keeps time with that of our blood; the silence of the rocks is our own silence; to walk among the sands is to walk through the span of our consciousness, as boundless as they; the forest murmurs allude to us”) (OC, I: 149). They are revelations of the being through which it is discovered in the whole that surrounds it. Life seems

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to be a movement of untiring echoes, a being that vibrates with the rhythm of cosmic oscillations, that dances before universal music and its time. This transformation seeks to uncover the subject of death and life, where death is “unspeakably” life, the non-being inscripted on the depths of being, since it is the source where it is borne—“Thrown into nothingness, man is created in front of it.” The plasticity of nothingness, a matter that is more poetic than conceptual, allows it to shape what it is. This act of creation not only depends on a lucid consciousness that has gone through a thousand and one existential crossroads, indistinct from the blueprints of reality, but can be an event that occurs, an anonymous event at the end of the day. Such is what the word “revelation” entails for Paz, in the sense of “showing oneself” or being exposed, the occurrence of truth as a happening of the self—“La revelación de nuestra nadería nos lleva a la creación del ser” (“The revelation of our nothingness leads us to the creation of the being”) (Paz OC, I: 149). According to Paz, the act of revelation implies the creation of what is to be revealed. It is not that I am there before, but, in the poetic experience, this revelation creates above all ourselves, our own being, in the sense of greater authenticity, like when someone speaks “properly.” We are created by the revelation of what we are not, and by the death that keeps us from its silence, from the possibility of the unspeakable—the creation of silence and the immensities of the cosmic ocean that throw glimpses of being onto the incandescent beaches. Thus, Paz’s sense of poetic creation cannot be detached from the way in which he appropriates the Heideggerian categories of nothingness, being, shedding, falling, time, and finitude. The poetic revelation, which occurred in the poetic experience, is the creation of “our own being,” also in that it belongs to us, like the one that binds us, the one we touch, and the one who responds to almost everything. Any human being can access the poetic act. It is not reserved solely for the one who makes “poetry” with pencil and paper, creating the being, revealing it. “Todos los hombres, por gracia de nuestro nacimiento, podemos acceder a esa visión y trascender así nuestra condición. Porque nuestra condición exige ser trascendida y sólo vivimos trascendiéndonos” (“All men, by the grace of our birth, can access that vision and transcend our condition. Because our condition demands to be transcended and we only live transcending ourselves”). Here lies the important difference with other experiences of “nothingness” analyzed by Paz, despite the fact that erotic or amorous experiences resemble it, since it is also the creation of a non-existent unit, of another one that becomes evident with its presence and extracts the being of the nothing, where it “swims” or sinks, without this action. The creation of the being has to be incessant, interminable, unfinished, and so on, since its foundation is nothingness. Hence the important characterization of being as a possibility to be before

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being altogether and forever; the same characterization that will permeate Paz’s understanding of the Mexican in El laberinto de la soledad. A Lacanian psychoanalysis would describe a “lack in being,” a similar perspective in Paz’s appropriation of Heidegger. Because the foundation of being is nothingness, it is constantly being made (its being is in the face of nothingness, and is therefore the lack of being) and owes much to acts such as the poetic experience of revelation. Being has nothing left but to “stand up for itself, be created at every moment.” In other words, Paz points out that “al ser no le queda sino serse” (“the being has nothing left but to be”). That is to say, one is. The original, and in the origin, which are lacking in being, make it possible to tend to its abundance or plenitude, to the “conquest of being.” Yet more than by lack and abundance, Paz (OC, I: 150) is convinced by the notion of possibility on which he will also establish human freedom—“La libertad del hombre se funda y radica en no ser más que posibilidad. Realizar esa posibilidad es ser, crearse a sí mismo. El poeta revela al hombre creándolo” (“Man’s freedom is rooted and grounded on being nothing but possibility. To realize that possibility is to be, to create one’s self. The poet reveals man by creating him”). In the end, the sense of all poetry consisted in the revelation of life in death, and in the fact that living “implies and contains dying, a being that is this and also that.” The existence that promotes poetry is thus nothing more than one where a person lives intensely and where death cannot be denied, but where it is not the final end, in the sense of an existentialist “being for death,” or a platonic “preparing oneself to die,” which Paz also associates with Montaigne. There is something transcendent in life that the poet is concerned with— at least, it is a transcendence of the human condition in which life and death are reconciled. This reconciliation of opposites defines the function and sense of the metaphor as well as the image of a poetry that aspires to communion. Paz wants the poet to end up exalting life and, in it, to “live also death,” natural as it is, albeit in a tragic way. Thanks to the antinomy of the image, life and death are no longer perceived as contradictory. It seems that Paz’s inquiries concluded in this possibility of opposites unifying without becoming confused or nullified in a dialectic of affirmative oppositions. In an idea Paz adopts from Nietzsche, poetry should lead us to “glimpse the incomparable vivacity of life.” It allows us to understand each thing as “like this and like that,” that is, the acceptance of each other in ourselves. Poetry shows a man “hurled to be all the contraries that constitute him,” which include, in a typical enumeration that Paz made based on André Breton, “la vida y la muerte, lo real y lo imaginario, lo pasado y lo futuro, lo comunicable y lo incomunicable, lo alto y lo bajo” (“life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicative and the noncommunicative, the high and the low”).

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Thus, the poetic experience opens up “the sources of being” in an instant. 15 As we can see, Paz places the experience of love alongside anxiety and the sacred as an element of “revelation of being,” an idea he develops in a sui generis book that is scarcely consulted, the Mono gramático (1970)—to which we will return later on the topic of writing—and of course, in La llama doble (1993). Both texts are embedded with his contact with Hindu experiences and philosophies. After a tiring wait where “nothing” happens, the “presence” is able to restore the order and the harmony of the world—“el mundo impenetrable, ininteligible e innombrable, cayendo pesadamente sobre sí mismo, de pronto se levanta, se yergue, vuela al encuentro de la presencia. Está imantado por unos ojos, suspendido en un misterioso equilibrio” (“the impenetrable, unintelligible, unnamable world, falling heavily onto itself, suddenly rises, stands erect, rushes to the encounter of the presence. It is magnetized by some eyes, suspended in a mysterious equilibrium) (Paz OC, I: 148). Yet to reveal man through poetry is to do so through image, which is no less important in the understanding of Paz’s poetics. What he reveals is the poet’s paradoxical condition of being another. It is about the “being this and that” of surrealism—a totality lived in an “instant of incandescence.” Poetry is the act by which man melts and reveals himself, even more originally than religion, since it is based on a poetic word and image as an indirect path to the sacred. Poetry is recreation of the human being, and what makes his “true condition.” Paz understood, via imagery, any verbal expression where the human condition is encrypted. A common way to be identified is through rhetorical figures such as comparisons, similes, metaphors, puns, symbols, allegories, myths, or fables. Thanks to the image, there is a reconciliation of what is contrary; it submits to “unite the plurality of the real”; it challenges the binary logic of “this and that” to install a sequence and analog rhythms where “this is that and that and that” without end. It is a wandering of the image and of the symbol through which poetry and man have known the banishment caused by the ontological immobility of the being. Paz (OC, I: 107) recognizes the history of metaphysics relayed by Heidegger in the form of “forgetfulness of being,” recognizing that this history is nothing more than of an error, “un extravío, en el doble sentido de la palabra: nos hemos alejado de nosotros mismos al perdernos en el mundo. Hay que empezar de nuevo” (“a going astray, in both senses of the word: in losing our way in the world we have become estranged from ourselves. We have to begin again”). An example of this historical and eventual error is language itself, which does not stop referring to things without ever exhausting them, moving them in each sense and meaning, making the unspeakable its center of gravity, the whirlwind from which all kinds of representations radiate. Its conventional aspect has created a false thinking problem. As Valéry, the French poet Paz greatly admired,

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noted, “Most difficulties and philosophical problems are remissible to errors related to the true nature of language, especially the error that leads to isolating words and trying to see in them something more than a pure means of transitive change. And the error that believes in an inherent meaning of those words” (cited by Löwith 2009, 68). The image created by language makes possible and impossible meanings not disappear in a way that defines an autonomous reality, valid on its own, with its own existence yet revealing what we are in a perceptual unit that corresponds to every sense. The image places us in the presence of the real, reviving it. Poetic work is added to the countercurrent struggle of the “oblivion of being” by making us “recordar lo que hemos olvidado: lo que somos realmente” (“remember that which we have forgotten: this that we really are”) (Paz OC, I: 113). The image is able to reconcile name and object, representation and reality. For this reason, a poem does not make more sense than the sense of its images, where the word and reality are one, but where it ceases to be language, crossed by the image. It is why each poem comes from the word but goes beyond it—“la imagen es un recurso desesperado contra el silencio que nos invade cada vez que intentamos expresar la terrible experiencia de lo que nos rodea y de nosotros mismos” (“the image is a desperate measure against the silence that invades us each time we try to express the terrible experience of that which surrounds us and of our selves”) (Paz OC, I: 115). Conclusively, the image transforms man, turning him into an image, that is, into “a space where opposites melt,” becoming one another, thanks to the moment when the “universe ceases to be a vast warehouse of heterogeneous things”—“Astros, zapatos, lágrimas, locomotoras, sauces, mujeres, diccionarios, todo es una inmensa familia, todo se comunica y se transforma sin cesar, una misma sangre corre por todas las formas y el hombre puede ser al fin su deseo: él mismo” (“Stars, shoes, tears, locomotives, willow trees, women, dictionaries, all is an immense family, all is in mutual communication and is unceasingly transformed, the same blood flows through all the forms and man can at last be his desire: he himself”) (Paz OC, I: 117). Through the image, the poem “enters into the being” and makes man. It is how the poem transcends language via the image, as we can see in Blanco (1966), one of Paz’s most important poems—“Si el mundo es real/ la palabra es irreal/ Si es real la palabra/ el mundo/ es la grieta el resplandor el remolino/ [. . .] El habla/ Irreal/ da realidad al silencio/ Callar/ es un tejido del lenguaje” (“If the world is real/ the word is unreal/ If the word is real/ the world/ is the cleft the splendor the whirl/ [. . .] Unreal/ speech/ brings reality to silence/ Keeping still/ is a strand of language”). The poetic image installs transformations of what is possible, like in the Aristotelian “impossible plausible” observation—a truth that is not reduced to the immutable identity of things and beings, and that also occurs in a non-successive time that has to let something no longer be to

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give way to the other but in an instantaneous transformation that emerges and flows from itself—“Es el tiempo mismo engendrándose, manándose, abriéndose a un acabar que es un continuo empezar. Chorro, fuente. Ahí, en el seno del existir—o mejor, del existiéndose—piedras y plumas, lo ligero y lo pesado, nacerse y morirse, serse, son uno y lo mismo” (“It is time itself engendering itself, flowing itself, opening itself to an ending that is a continuous beginning. A water-jet, fountain. There, at the heart of existence—or rather, of existing oneself—stones and feathers, the light and the heavy, being born and dying, being oneself, are one and the same”) (Paz OC, I: 108). VOICE OF ABSENCE As we have seen, Paz preserves for the most part the Heideggerian scheme of Dasein’s worldliness to explain the poet’s condition and poetic inspiration—the detachment from the world, falling on itself, the radical otherness of the external world, all expressed in terms of his relations with ontology. On yet another occasion (Heidegger had already indicated that the “original” situation impels the Dasein to remain in the dynamism of the “whirlwind”), the poet confronts his “fall into himself,” where silence, or the “noisy and deafening chaos” (Paz does not explain why there are these two images of the “abyss”) dwells and—this “and” is important—to that extent that “tartamudea y trata de inventar un lenguaje, él mismo es quien se inventa y da el salto mortal y renace y es otro” (“he stammers and tries to invent a language, he himself is the one who invents himself and takes the mortal leap and is reborn and is another”) (Paz OC, I: 170). It is a “stutter” found in the luminous verse “that says all without saying anything,” in the style of St. John of the Cross where language is tense in “la ardiente repetición de un pobre sonido: ritmo puro” (“the ardent repetition of a poor sound: pure rhythm”) (Paz OC, I: 97). Paz cares about this meaning of otherness, wherein he himself is the other, through the language which belongs to all, and which he makes unique though not exclusive. The poetic self is driven to this otherness in an original way and in an endless process of being. It would be sufficient for any human being to seek in himself that otherness through the poetic experience, to realize the “many who inhabit in him,” as Walt Whitman maintained. The language of the poet is his because it belongs to others; through it, he can leave his initial solitude, or silence, improper mist or daily fog, to reach others, being one with them, in a broad solidarity and co-belonging. This being in constant creation of being, or being and not being able to be otherwise, being another, reveals the constant promotion of life. This constant change compels us to be to the extent that we cease to be (to be another), through transformations that affect beings in a

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conjunction of being-already-all-in-between—“La palabra poética es revelación de nuestra condición original porque por ella el hombre efectivamente se nombra otro, y así él es, al mismo tiempo, este y aquel, él mismo y el otro” (“The poetic word is a revelation of our original condition because by it man actually names himself another, and thus he is, at the same time, this and that, he himself and the other”) (Paz OC, I: 170). Paz situates these moments of destruction and creation in the instant, but also in the passing of history, since language is time. In the foreword he wrote for Jacques Faye’s Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe (1974), he presents a clear glimpse of the notion of “being” toward that of “in between” (men), also reminiscent of Heidegger. Otherness, constitutive of man, is not “adentro, en nuestro interior; ni atrás, como algo que de pronto surgiera del limo del pasado” (“inside, in our interior; nor behind, like something that suddenly arose from the sludge of the past”) but rather is “ahead” and corresponds to something or someone who calls on us to be ourselves and is not but “our self.” It is because inspiration (something passive, chaotic, and vague in romanticism) is an “aspiration” to be—a “go,” a “forward movement towards what we are ourselves” that arrives or returns. It is a dynamic will to be at the rhythm of our constitutions. It is an exit from oneself and a return to oneself—temporary lapses, but lapses that also exist in the game of freedom, the decision to be. Freedom and imagination 16 are like poetic inspiration—aspiration that represent a transcendence—to go beyond ourselves to be totally, to be others, “the other voice.” It is a meeting with others, as is the case of Don Quixote, a self who cannot be another without the others, whom he finds on the journey of adventure and to whom he listens and makes them be. It is an exit from and return to himself, akin to the temporality of Don Quixote and Ulysses, the heroes who come and go, creating time, being like time, although Don Quixote does not really suffer more than two transformations throughout his existence, the one that makes him what he will be throughout the novel, and the one that returns him to his initial condition of not being Don Quixote. Regardless, that end coincides with the formulation of a final yearning—the utopia of returning to a more original condition where he will not even be called Quijano, or Quixote, but be able to name himself something else in a proto-original sense, beyond the identities he has had—an action that puts freedom, the decision to be, at stake. Somehow, that which “demands” that we be another is both “inside” and “outside.” If it is outside, we are talking about “the other voice” that “llama” (“calls”), like a “flame,” (“llama” translates from Spanish as both “calls” and “flame”) to the extent that Paz (OC, I: 172) finally ends up identifying the escape from oneself into the other as an erotic act—“Being is eroticism.” In doing so he is departing from Heidegger, turning his ontology into a poetic-erotic meditation. This ontological vision of Paz’s will be unwavering; thanks to it he formulates a transcendence that has to

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do with the other, the community in which the human being is realized, being in its indispensable way—“El hombre es temporalidad y cambio, y la otredad constituye su manera propia de ser. El hombre se realiza o cumple cuando se hace otro. Al hacerse otro se recobra, reconquista su ser original, anterior a la caída o despeño en el mundo, anterior a la escisión en yo y otro” (“Man is temporality and change, and ‘otherness’ constitutes his own mode of being. Man realizes or fulfills himself when he becomes another. In becoming another he recovers himself, reconquers his original being, prior to the fall or the plunge into the world, prior to the split into self and ‘other’”) (Paz OC, I: 171). Paz wishes to understand the dialectic generated by the opposites of being and nothingness, life and death, affirmation and denial, fullness and lacking, which become interchangeable. He realizes that it is our deepest reason for being. We are that contrariety or complementarity, whose results are different if we go first from nothingness to being, and then in the opposite direction, as we have mentioned. For Paz, everything suffers this contrariety of wanting to be more than what it is, and consequently faces endless destruction and nothingness, as we read in the poem “Pasado en claro”: “La injusticia de ser: las cosas sufren/ unas con otras y consigo mismas/ por ser un querer más, siempre ser más que más./ Ser tiempo es la condena, nuestra pena es la historia” (“The injustice of being: things suffer/ one with the other and with themselves/ for to be is the desire to be more, to always be more than more./ To be time is the sentence, history our punishment”) (Paz OC, VII: 592). It is why he also comes to the conclusion in the same poem that there is a “third state” between being and nothingness, “ser sin ser, la plenitud vacía,/ hora sin horas y otros nombres/ con que se muestra y se dispersa/ en las confluencias del lenguaje/ no la presencia: su presentimiento” (“being without being, empty plenitude,/ hour without hours and the other names / with which it appears and vanishes / in the confluences of language / not the presence: its presentiment”). At the beginning of El laberinto de la soledad, Paz alludes to one of Antonio Machado’s ideas that refers precisely to the dilemma of otherness, “the essential Heterogeneity of being,” a phrase by the Spanish poet found in his Juan de Mairena (1936). Paz guesses that both Henri Bergson and Heidegger can be found in Machado. He dedicated an extraordinary essay to Machado in 1951, when the Spanish poet was given an homage at the Sorbonne, which was printed in Las peras del olmo (1957). There, he refers to his “erotic metaphysics”—“Solo en el amor es posible aprender radicalmente al otro sin reducirlo a la conciencia” (“Only in love is it possible to learn the other radically without reducing him to awareness”). Paz (OC, II: 891) notes that the being is like in Machado’s poems— “puro erotismo, sed de alteridad: el hombre se realiza en la mujer, el yo en la comunidad” (“pure eroticism, thirst of otherness: The man is fulfilled in the woman, the self in the community”). Several theses on the

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“mask” and its “fall” to reveal authentic man, a moment of reconciliation of man with himself, which Paz had already presented in El laberinto de la soledad, are repeated in this essay. In addition, Machado formulated the thesis that “every poet supposes a metaphysics,” which constitutes another reference in understanding the critical relations between poetry and critical thinking that Paz wanted to establish in all of his intellectual production. In the texts of Posdata (1970), where he seeks to clarify aspects of El laberinto de la soledad (an “essay of Moral Critique”), Paz (2010, 238) uses a historical approach, rather than an ontological or psychological one, to the question of the “essence” of the Mexican, preserving otherness—“La pregunta sobre nosotros siempre se revela como una pregunta sobre los demás” (“The question about ourselves is always shown to be a question about others”). His insistence on moving away from ontology regarding the Mexican does not seem to correspond with the attitude that he took on his poetics in El arco y la lira, where the ontological approach is decisive. That is why, wanting to talk about the “essence of poetry,” he elaborates a history of modern poetry, to which he will dedicate two essays, Los hijos del limo and La otra voz. Poetry is its history in the same way that the character of the Mexican can only be understood through its cultural manifestations, but also what transcends them—the face that remains free after the mask falls, man’s nakedness that “is never the same and is always the same” (Paz 2010, 291). Paz’s otherness refers not only to the Heideggerian being-in-theworld with others, mit-sein, but also to the limits of the human condition where one can experience the ultimate that is humanly possible. Therefore, otherness can be internal (towards oneself), external (towards others), and transcendent (beyond the one, and of one), although in all cases there is a turn towards a self that is altered by “the same.” It is not a vain renunciation of himself, but a way out of himself with a return—an enriched return that recovers the cycle of existential pursuits. Where one comes from is the stranger-borderline, but to restructure the subject. It is why poetry turns out to be a vast vision of becoming-others from the self cast in itself, thrown into the world and returned on an endless whirlwind, reiterated, infinite. Each poem is the act of a transformational event, a way of reading in the sense that the world is pervaded with meaningful action. We can draw the conclusion that, in addition to being a testimony, the poem is the defeat of silence before death. As Paz (OC, VII: 638) states in the poem “Un sol más vivo”: “La palabra del hombre/ es hija de la muerte./ Hablamos porque somos/ mortales: las palabras/ no son signos, son años” (“The word of man/ is the daughter of death./ We speak because we are/mortal: words/ are not signs, they are years”). It is the way of confirming that one continues to go beyond, although that other one, or that in which it is believed to be found (something), is unreachable. It is merely the rung of a revelation that scales in reverse

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towards the descent of oneself—faces, ghosts, shadows. The poetic “being another” is a secular form of transcendent pretensions achievable without having to wait for death but rather in confronting it daily. Some years later, in 1994, in “Nosotros: los otros” the prologue to volume X of his Complete Works, Paz returns to the importance of the subject of otherness, emphasizing its relevance in the history of philosophy since Plato, and also in Eastern philosophy. There, he raises the subject in terms of the one and the whole, and remembers the reference to Machado at the beginning of El laberinto de la soledad, where the character invented by Machado is mentioned—“Abel Martin, con fe poética, no menos humana que la fe racional, creía en lo otro, en ‘La esencial Heterogeneidad del ser’, como si dijéramos en la incurable otredad que padece lo uno” (“Abel Martin, with poetic faith, no less human than rational faith, believed in the other, in ‘the essential heterogeneity of being’, as if we were to say in the incurable otherness suffered by the one”) (Paz OC, X: 9). This condition of transcendence towards the other, the possibility of being another, allows man to pose himself like an “entity of words.” Words are the fundamental means to achieve humanity. Paz (OC, I: 171) points out that this poetic possibility of transformation is given if we remain in the midst of the “somersault,” between what is and what we must “lose and give ourselves,” between one thing and another—“Ahí, en pleno salto, el hombre suspendido en el abismo, entre el esto y el aquello, por un instante fulgurante es esto y aquello, lo que fue y lo que será, vida y muerte, en un serse que es un pleno ser, una plenitud presente” (“There, in the very act of leaping, man suspended in the abyss, between the this and the that, for a lightning instant is this and that, what he was and what he will be, life and death, in a being himself that is an absolute being, a present plenitude”). Moreover, in a Neoplatonic sense, he holds that man is already all he wanted to be. It is enough to do that somersault that will reveal him as many times as he would want. It is the call of the “other voice” that commands the “leap,” which obliges as an imperious voice to transcend. The call is enough to assume that the transformations have begun. If inspiration has been an aspiration, it is also appealing, a calling to be, a speaking/calling voice—“La inspiración es esa voz extraña que saca al hombre de sí mismo para ser todo lo que es, todo lo que desea: otro cuerpo, otro ser” (“Inspiration is that strange voice that takes man out of himself to be everything that he is, everything that he desires: another body, another being”) (Paz OC, I: 172). It is a voice of desire, a voice that calls, the flame of eroticism, since being is desiring to be, an endless aspiration of the other. In the aforementioned essay, perhaps the most important of that time, “Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión” (1942), Paz highlights love as an experience of worship, contemplation, forgetfulness of oneself thanks to the merging with the other, i.e., falling on the object rather than possessing it. It is a process of divinization and fascination, an experience of “dissolu-

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tion of being in ‘the other’.” Paz (1963, 96) argues—“Porque en el amor la pareja intenta participar otra vez de ese estado en el que la muerte y la vida, la necesidad y la satisfacción, el sueño y el acto, la palabra y la imagen, el tiempo y el espacio, el fruto y el labio, se confunden en una sola realidad” (“Because in love the couple tries to participate again in that state in which death and life, need and satisfaction, the dream and the act, the word and the image, time and space, the fruit and the lip, are mistaken for a single reality”). FORGETTING HEIDEGGER Paz made some quick judgments on the figure and work of Heidegger after El arco y la lira that had nothing to do with ontology. These judgments implied that he had ceased to be interested in the subject, definitively, and had moved on to other historical and cultural matters. For example, in 1967, in a note in his essay “Claude Lévi-Strauss o el nuevo festín de Esopo,” he points out that in Being and Time, Heidegger proposed to do something similar to Kant and Lévi-Strauss (taking into account a judgment made by Paul Ricoeur), which was to postulate “una comprensión universal regida por leyes y categorías inmutables” (“a universal understanding governed by unchanging laws and categories”), only not in the sphere of understanding but of temporality; for this reason Heidegger’s thinking was confused with existentialism. In “Nihilismo y Dialéctica,” published in Corriente alterna (1967), Paz shows his differences on two fundamental themes of the twentieth century—the death of God, and the Will to Power, both in the Heideggerian version of the reading of Nietzsche (the first volume of this study was published in 1939, and is dedicated to the Will to Power as art). For Paz, it is clear that the death of God implies the disappearance of metaphysics, even if God is understood a-la-Nietzsche–Heidegger, i.e., as the suprasensitive world in general. Without God, says Paz, metaphysics has lost its sacred source, as Hölderlin had already understood. If in the past philosophy provided man with wisdom after “having devoured the pagan gods,” in the modern age Paz senses a disillusionment with that philosophy that gave policy to certain “crowned philosophers” such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao. Modern wisdom cannot come from philosophy or religion but from art—“No es una sagesse sino una locura, una poética. En el siglo pasado se llamó romanticismo y en la primera mitad del nuestro: surrealismo” (“It is not sagesse but madness, poetic madness. In the last century, it was called romanticism and in the first half of ours: surrealism”) (Paz OC, VI: 1038). Moreover, he argues whether the socalled “Will to Power” is truly the new basis for contemporary values— the new principle that establishes values, even when this principle is life itself. It seems to him that the key lies in understanding this Will to

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Power as something whose essence is in the word “more.” The Will to Power is appetite, “no un más ser sino un ser más. No el ser: el querer ser” (“not a more being but a being more. Not the being: the wanting to be”). According to him, this wanting to be more is where “the will to power bleeds,” since it prevents the foundation from being itself and the new values. Its essence is to go beyond itself so that it can find its raison d’être, or foundation. It should go to the end, that is, return to the beginning, restore the idea, the suprasensitive as the foundation of value. Paz considers that the Will to Power, and the idea refounded at the end of the return movement, are but moments of Eternal Return, “phases of the same thing.” In “El canal y los signos,” referring to Marshall MacLuhan, Paz alludes to the way that several twentieth-century thinkers have contributed to create serious suspicions about reality and its lack of foundation and, consequently, shows that it is not an easy way to understand it—to conceive reality as a “fabric of meanings.” MacLuhan would have exaggerated and simplified the positions of some thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Peirce, Lévi-Strauss, and Heidegger, for whom poetry was a way of alluding “beyond language.” In the essay Marcel Duchamp or El Castillo de la Pureza (1968), Paz (OC, IV: 161) refers to the Heideggerian judgment of the nihilistic character of technique “la expresión más perfecta y activa de la Voluntad de Poder” (“the most perfect and active expression of the Will to Power”), although in the aforementioned prologue “Nosotros: los Otros” (1994), he distances himself from this point of view, saying that technique is not simply an expression of the Will to Power, and that science is “knowledge” and “fraternity,” where we have discovered ourselves forming part of the Cosmos, “parte del movimiento de las estrellas y del crecimiento de las plantas” (“part of the movement of the stars and the growth of plants”) (he had vaguely covered the topic in his natural metaphors in El arco y la lira, 40 years earlier), being “hermanos de todas las creaturas vivientes” (“brothers of all living creatures”) (Paz OC, X: 18). 17 He saw “worship of technique” as another absurdity, a worship allied to the spirit of profit and to the will of political domination. It is worth noting Paz’s evaluation of technique in his later writings, regarding aspects that his critics have rarely commented on. It could help to understand the enthusiasm he had, for example, for the creative uses of television, in a neo-vanguardism style that could not materialize anyway (something similar to what Salvador Dalí attempted through a collaboration with Walt Disney). These assessments can be found in texts in the book Signos en rotación (1964), and in the essay “La Nueva Analogia: Poesía y Técnica” (1967), as well as in “Pacto Verbal” (1980), among others, included in volume XV of his Complete Works, where he refers to the scopes and limitations of television, for example, during a time when he was not published in Mexican newspapers. In these essays, and para-

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phrasing Heidegger, he denies that technique is an image of the world while poetry is a vision of it. Rather, poetry is a practice, an intervention, an action destined to change the world. He recalls his experimental poetic stage where he took several aspects of technique, mainly incorporating the dimension of time into space, like in his poem Blanco—“un libro cuyas páginas y tipografía fuesen la proyección física de una experiencia mental: la lectura de un poema que se despliega, simultáneamente, en el espacio y en el tiempo” (“a book whose pages and typography were the physical projection of a mental experience: the reading of a poem that unfolds simultaneously in space and time”) (Paz 1990, 121). For this reason, he felt enthusiastic about video recording and cinematographic film, as well as television, where he produced several talk shows with prominent international intellectuals in the 1980s. 18 He sought to understand technology at the service of new mental and poetic experiences, and not as a way to suppress them or un-inhabit the world. He thought about a screen image of mobile pages, sensory experiences that would assist in comprehending a poetry that would know how to use the means of expression through writing, using typography, space, and sounds, i.e., mobile spaces. He envisioned words said and heard with the eyes and the mind, just as Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz desired in one of her most relevant poems, “Óyeme con los ojos.” 19 Paz imagined the possibilities of television in the creation of poems, which could result in a new poetic experience. By understanding the poem as “a rhythmic verbal organism—an object of words said and heard, not written or read,” an intimate union between sound and sense, “sound word” that becomes support for the text drawn and written, “prosody poetic”—Paz envisioned enthusiastically the possibilities of television to conjugate the written and spoken word. The screen served as a page favorable for graphic and sound experimentalism, much more complex than Mallarmé’s idea design. He saw an animated surface that could change color, graphics, and sounds, using movement rather than the fixation or quietness of the merely written word. Right there, the human voice could be linked and combined with letters, resulting in sound, visuals, and mental modulations of meaning. The visual and sound elements could be transformed into organic parts of the poem’s body. Paz did not have the slightest doubt that the “projection” of poems on television would become a new “poetic form” that would affect the reader–seer–viewer in a new way, as had occurred with the book and with old typography in its time. We speak of a privileged conjunction between the eye and the ear, between the visual image and the word, a new aesthetic pleasure and a new experience that Paz barely intuited in the 1990s. Television media would have to restore the meaning of fiesta and contemplation, aspects that Paz rescued from his evaluation of the historical avant-garde at the end of the twentieth century. The fiesta entails art and communion, while contemplation

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sends us to a “silent dialogue with the universe and with ourselves.” Let us at least try to imagine what Paz (1990, 124) supposed could be changed in the field of poetry with the help of television—“sobre la página animada de la pantalla, la tipografía será un surtidor de signos, trazos e imágenes dotadas de color y movimiento; a su vez, las voces dibujarán una geometría de ecos y de reflejos, un tejido de aire, sonidos y sentidos enlazados” (“on the animated page of the screen, typography will be a supplier of signs, strokes and images endowed with color and movement; in turn, the voices will draw a geometry of echoes and reflections, a tapestry of air, sounds and senses linked”). Perhaps Paz was not very familiar with pop art, which he disqualified very early on, nor with Bauhaus’ experiments with art, for example, but it is known that these neo-vanguard artistical movements proposed something similar to Paz in relation to the image, the word, movement, and color—experimentalism that was still trapped in the voracious, degrading format of television marketing. Perhaps some of the examples that Paz might have enjoyed watching have been seen in some television commercials. From the 1980s onward, there was a massive use of the neovanguard dominated by technique, and its tireless repetitions. We only have to consult any of the scholars of image to discover some of the scopes that Paz foresaw for the electronic image, but with aesthetic and poetic interest. Finally, there is negative judgment of Husserl and Heidegger in the Ogro filantrópico (1979), in the text “El parlón y la parleta”—especially in the way that Sartre, a philosopher who seemed paradigmatic in more than one sense, and with whom Paz had serious poetic, philosophical, and political differences—was granted a place in existentialism. The same did not happen to Heidegger, the exegete Hölderlin, Rilke, or Tralk. The observation is that Sartre, in his early writings, would have followed the Germanic model of his teachers, i.e., treating “filosofía como trabalenguas” (“philosophy like a tongue twister”) (Paz OC, 9: 173). Either way, Paz would not fail to recognize the influence of both German thinkers on existentialism—Husserl, for his methods, and Heidegger for providing essential issues, despite his controversial bonding with national socialism. In an interview in 1991, “A Mexican writer in the Soviet Union,” Paz (OC, 9: 230) points out that totalitarianism via socialism and fascism attracts great intellectuals such as Ezra Pound and Heidegger who, Paz declared, was “a Nazi.” The September 1988 issue 142 of Vuelta magazine devotes a section to Heidegger after Víctor Farías’ controversial book, Heidegger and Nazism (1987), was published. Paz did not participate in the debate. As an example of this controversy, the Uruguayan-Mexican thinker Carlos Pereda (1988, 55) wrote “The Heideggerian pollution,” where he denounced the actions of Heidegger’s followers as:

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professorial pomp ex cathedra and with no less empirical support—that danger of unsubstantiated people—elaborating speculative anthropology or stories of the West armed with scraps of German idealism, a methodological terrorism that decrees and censors with careful rhetoric, though without developing the basic argument, and branch office fervor, in suburbs like in Latin America, repeating exhausted exaltations with more innocence (or without the least bit of shame).

As a result, the Heideggerian thinker, attempting to do something “superior” or “deep,” avoids argumentation and takes refuge in an easy rhetoric backed simply by his arrogance, in a priest-like imposition. In the end, Pereda notes that Heidegger’s “opinions” convey an “intellectual suicide” so we must take precautions against—(a) pretending something deep or higher to continue passing judgment in the “march of cyclical plots,” and (b) “homogeneous metaphysics, with the nostalgia of purity, with the dream of light-skinned people in a ranked community,” and, consequently “vertigo of the sublime, great gesture” since “we already know that from any of them, there are trails leading to Auschwitz.” Finally, Paz (OC, I: 214) made one last reference to Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, regarding the role of the imagination, making a synthesis of the Kantian approach. Transcendental imagination is the root of sensitivity and understanding that makes judgment possible. The imagination displays or projects objects upon which human capabilities shall be exercised. It is a manifestation of temporality that “unfolds and presents objects to sensitivity and understanding.” WITHOUT SARTRE According to Paz, the influence of Jean Paul Sartre on Latin American intellectuals was detrimental (unlike the remarkable and beneficial influence of José Ortega y Gasset), because he represented one of the many cases of the perverse use of the Hegelian dialectic in the twentieth century, in the sense that evil is required as a necessary moment in the realization of good. Paz (1993, 84) said “Mis reservas frente a Sartre fueron más bien de orden político que intelectual o literario. Su especiosa casuística política, más que sus pesadas novelas y sus ambiciosos tratados filosóficos, provocaron mi repulsa” (“My reservations toward Sartre were more political than literary or intellectual. I was repulsed more by his specious political casuistry than by his dense novels and ambitious philosophical treatises”). The criticism was also because Sartre did not care properly for art, in judgments such as “there are morons who find comfort in fine arts” (Sartre 2002, 193). Anthony Stanton (2015, 391, n. 84) points out that, in the first edition of El arco y la lira, Sartre is mentioned only twice, although in a reserved way and not in a very positive light. These references would be deleted in

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the revised second edition in 1967, perhaps with the idea of “decreasing the weight of anthropocentric and historic existentialism.” 20 In the first reference to the French philosopher, Paz (OC, I: 22) confesses he never aligned with him because of differences on literary matters. As for the revelations he witnessed in 1945 of “la naturaleza opresora del régimen soviético [. . .], la Guerra Fría, las convulsiones de América Latina, los movimientos de independencia en Asia y África, las polémicas y disputas filosóficas y políticas” (“the oppressive nature of the Soviet regime [. . .], the Cold War, upheavals in Latin America, independence movements in Asia and Africa, philosophical and political controversies and disputes”), the French philosopher would systematically deny them. Paz’s other references to Sartre are not from El arco y la lira but from La otra voz (1990), and therefore may not have accomplished much in the constitution of his poetry. On the contrary, he acknowledges that he was against the idea of an “engaged literature,” and that he had to fight several skirmishes, arguing that he had nothing to do with existentialism. On several occasions, he recalled how, upon his arrival in Paris in 1945, the cultural stage was made up of surrealists and existentialists. It is obvious what his final choice was. Speaking of these “struggles,” Paz (OC, I: 515) says, “Más tarde, la querella de ‘la literatura comprometida’. Si la idea de Sartre era confusa, las interpretaciones a que dio pie, especialmente en América Latina, fueron deletéreas. Hubo necesidad de fumigarlas con la crítica. No me arrepiento de esas batallas; valieron la pena” (“Later, the quarrel about ‘compromised literature’. If Sartre’s idea was unclear, the interpretations it gave rise to, especially in Latin America, were deleterious. They needed to be fumigated with criticism. I do not regret those battles; they were worth it”). 21 In another reference, alluding to the various types of literary translations, Paz (OC, I: 539) said that it is not the same to translate an “ideologue like Sartre and a poet like Mallarmé.” It is clear what his opinion was of the existentialist philosopher, who did not see beyond certain controversial theses, even when he praised his studies such as Saint Genet: Comedian and Martyr (1952), The Idiot of the Family (1972), dedicated to Gustave Flaubert, or Baudelaire (1947). 22 Other criticisms Paz made of Sartre had to do with what Dominguez Michael documents, in the sense that he knew very little about, and was not interested in, Hispano-American culture and literature. Paz realized it on the two or three occasions that he met the philosopher in Paris. For example, Sartre did not know about Santa Teresa de Jesús or Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. By the way, it is said that Paz contributed to Sartre’s spontaneous visit to Mexico in 1949, although Sartre did so disguised and with no expectations, with no particular interest in the country and culture, unlike his visit to Cuba in 1960, following the 1959 Revolution. In his talks with Paz, Sartre never mentioned the incognito visit he made to Mexico. In addition, Paz never understood why Sartre stubbornly denied

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the existence of forced labor camps during the Stalin era. Sartre’s work The Devil and the Good Lord (1951) seemed to him apologetic of Stalin (Domínguez 2014, 150). As we have said, what Paz most criticized about Sartre was the fact that, in his system, there is no place for poetry, unlike with Heidegger—“Para juzgar a un filósofo hay que situarlo frente a un poeta; compare a Sartre ante Baudelaire con la pareja HeideggerHölderlin” (“To judge a philosopher you must place him next to a poet; compare Sartre to Baudelaire with the Heidegger–Hölderlin duo”) (Paz cited by Dominguez 2014, 152). In Itinerario, Paz resumes his criticism of Sartre. Again, he highlights the minimal political sense he confers on the arts, almost contempt, when dealing with the intellectual commitment of the European intellectuals after the second World War, between the crisis and existential dilemma that struck them—within a totalitarian utopian vision, fanatical and absolute. We can devise no other explanation for his defense of the Communist regime, especially knowing the horrors that had occurred in the USSR. How could this silence be explained when there were so many lies and crimes? It was a question that Paz (1998, 34) asked, coming to a decisive conclusion—“En el caso de los intelectuales del siglo XX no hubo ni rebeldía ni soberbia: hubo abyección. Es duro decirlo pero hay que decirlo” (“In the case of the intellectuals of the 20th century there was neither rebellion nor pride: there was abomination. It’s harsh to say so, but it must be said”). In 1945, when Paz arrived in Paris, a city impoverished by the Nazi occupation, he found the significant presence of Sartre and a few Communists in “very powerful trade unions, in the press and in the world of arts and letters.” He admits that from the beginning he felt “far from Sartre,” and that it seemed important to discuss the issue, given the influence Sartre had in Mexico. Paz was well aware that his criticism of the French philosopher would likely distance him from many Mexican intellectuals for whom Marxist dogmatism was the salvation from the lack of criticism, knowledge, and analysis of the country’s realities, becoming “a full exercise of their freedom.” He not only foresaw Sartre’s attack on Camus’ essential work The Rebel (1951)—where ideologies are linked to crimes—but he also never saw him as the premier French mid-twentiethcentury philosopher, reserving the title instead for Paul Valéry—“y encuentro que el verdadero gran filósofo francés de nuestro tiempo no es Sartre: es Valéry, lo que se revela, sobre todo, con la publicación póstuma de los Cahiers” (“and I find that the true great French philosopher of our time is not Sartre: it is Valéry, as we can see, especially, in the posthumous publication of the Cahiers”) (OC, VIII: 800). 23 According to Paz (OC, 9: 36), for Sartre, poetry “diluye los significados, los vuelve equívocos y, en suma, está a medio camino entre la letra y la cosa, es arte pero no es literatura” (“dilutes meanings, turning them into misunderstandings and, in short, is halfway between the word and

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the thing, art but not literature”). While recognizing Sartre’s philosophical work as an “intelligent application of an adaptation, not devoid of originality, of Heidegger’s thought and Husserl’s method,” Paz’s observations about Sartre’s artistic thesis do not seem to be very just, if we look at them closely, such as What Is Literature? (1948), where, in addition to fending off accusations of wanting to reduce all art to “commitment,” Sartre (1950: 50) highlights the singularity of the poetic language in theses such as the poet is installed, rather than nothing, outside of language, in things, “to see words upside down,” having a quiet first contact with them, “looking back at these other kinds of things that words are for him, by touching them, feeling them, seeing in them their own small luminosity and particular affinities with the earth, sky, water, and all things created.” He likewise tried to make it clear that literature cannot be reduced to a mere exhibition of ideas, and that literary criticism should measure its scope in relation to the evaluation of poetical work, especially when it is young and unexpected—a novel, for example, is “the hazardous venture of a single man.” According to Sartre, in an assertion that Paz himself could have made, language is not a sign but the image of an aspect of the world, the “mirror of the world”—a synthesis of “reciprocal implications between the sound body and verbal soul.” As Paz states on several occasions, Sartre came to declare that one way of diagnosing the contemporary time was precisely by looking at language following the poetic crises, where situating oneself in relation to words is less known. Finally, for Sartre (1950, 55), language is an extension of our senses and, said in a phenomenological tone, “We are in language, as in our body,” and, “with every word that I say I get a little more in the world and at the same time I leave it a little longer, because I gear it toward the future.” Sartre, like Paz, had the enthusiasm to see an art freed from its contradictions in autocratic, fascist, totalitarian societies, and those degraded expressly by the savage consumption of material objects. He sought to develop a “concrete literature,” a “synthesis of Negativity, as a power of uprooting from the given, and a Project, as an outline of a future order,” which, using a repertoire of terms very similar to Paz’s vocabulary, will be like “the Festival, the flaming mirror which burns everything reflected in it, and generosity, that is, a free invention, a gift” (Sartre 1950, 156), precisely when he understood literature as the “subjectivity of a society in permanent revolution,” and as a reflexive awareness. It was a utopian bias that necessarily “bewildered” a generation that echoed the disastrous circumstances of the twentieth century, and asked for another meaning and purpose for literature. Paz’s political differences were with Sartre, more precisely, with “logic of history” as a superior moral instance that dominates his most “ambitious philosophical treaty,” regardless of the will and human intentions. It is a higher instance that may be called “revolution,” “dialectic,” “laws

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of social development,” but that has the quality to be imposed with the force of a “divinity” who must be “guessed” by the party committee and its general secretaries. A divinity of changing history like this could define the meaning of our actions over individual wills, an ironic logic of circumstances Paz could not agree with, being a fervent follower of random, surreal celebrations of the now, freedom, imagination, and love. For this reason, Paz found it quite surprising that Sartre was assumed as a philosopher of freedom, when in reality, and until the end of his days, he “covered up the crimes of the revolutionary Caesars.” Sartre sought to conceal the existence of the Soviet concentration camps with the argument that it was a revolution “underway,” something that made sense within that “dialectical logic,” which confused the leftist intellectuals, and where, ultimately, the evil was poorly justified for the sake of a good ultimately out of reach. 24 In “El parlón y la parleta,” Paz pits Sartre against Diogenes and calls him a “philosopher without a tongue.” He said that he was wrong in his judgments, on issues of his time, nine times out of ten. Paz criticized his lack of knowledge about the international reality, as well as his attitudes that were sometimes openly anti-intellectual, contradicting and ignoring the condition of the working class in certain countries, ignoring new reflections on the role of the state and the consolidation of “transnational technocratic bureaucracies,” and authentic intellectual tasks: Con treinta años de retraso intelectual y político, Sartre denuncia al régimen soviético como una dictadura burocrática. Sin embargo, su análisis es superficial y de orden moral, como si estuviésemos ante un pecado, un extravío, y no ante un fenómeno de raíces y significación universales. (Thirty years behind intellectually and politically, Sartre condemns the Soviet regime as a bureaucratic dictatorship. However, his analysis is superficial and of a moral nature, as if we were talking about a sin, a going astray, not a phenomenon of universal roots and significance) (Paz OC, 9: 178).

Paz reminds us that, since the beginning of the 1930s, he questioned whether the USSR was socialist or more like a “degenerated workers’ state, a bureaucratic state, state capitalism.” It was not until 1972 that Sartre recognized as much, having denied it in his famous journal Les Temps Modernes since 1946. Even Sartre, and Merleau Ponty did not deny such facts, they “refused to remove the consequences of their imposed existence on reflection.” Paz recalls his critical essay on the concentration camps, published by Silvina Ocampo in Sur magazine, “Polvo de aquellos lodos” (1974), when Sartre still claimed that year that violence and dictatorship were inevitable. Paz’s article was published in Argentina because, “las revistas mexicanas me habían cerrado de antemano: nadie

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quería saber la verdad de lo que sucedió en la URSS” (“Mexican magazines had already closed their doors to me: no one wanted to know the truth of what happened in the USSR”) (Paz OC, 9: 227). The same diagnosis is maintained in the mentioned interview “A Mexican writer in the Soviet Union” (1991), where Paz calls Sartre and Lukacs intellectuals who were “cómplices casi siempre involuntarios, aunque no inocentes, de muchos crímenes de nuestro tiempo” (“almost always involuntary, but not innocent, accomplices of many crimes of our time”). Ten years after the previous judgments, Paz published “Memento: Jean-Paul Sartre” (1984), in the book Hombres en su siglo. He again criticized Sartre’s ignorance in the field of Spanish literature, where he was often guided by hearsay about works and authors and was not familiar with, for example, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish theatre, which focuses on conflicts central to the existentialist movement, such as peace, grace, and freedom. The same goes for his knowledge of Mallarmé, who was not interested in poems but in the general project of “absolute poetry.” It is why he claimed Sartre “prefirió siempre las sombras a las realidades” (“always preferred shadows to realities”) (Paz OC, II: 342), 25 while his criticism, which ended up justifying tyranny, was an “intellectual disease,” that became “historical myopia: for him the sun of reality never shone.” Paz is forceful in pointing out that Sartre proposed reconciling freedom with communism, and failed (the same might happen to surrealism)—“his failure was that of three generations of leftist intellectuals.” Sartre “hid” the problem of Soviet socialism, wanting to save it at all costs, including its crimes. Intellectual dishonesty, Paz deemed it. Sartre believed that “as long as oppression and exploitation subsist in our countries, we had no moral right to criticize the vices of the Soviet system.” The problem was the expansion of his attitude, of his concealed judgments of Latin America that ended up paralyzing many intellectuals for more than thirty years. For example, there was a critical tradition inherited from the Enlightenment, placed at the service of “nuestro odio a nosotros mismos y a nuestro mundo. No hemos construido nada con ella, salvo cárceles de conceptos. Y lo peor: con la crítica hemos justificado a las tiranías” (“our hatred of ourselves and of our world. We have not built anything with it, except prisons of concepts. And the worst thing: with criticism we have justified tyrannies”) (Paz OC, II: 344). Paz (OC, II: 346) considered that Sartre’s talents were not those of an artist, and that often he “se pierde en digresiones y amplificaciones inútiles. Su lenguaje es insistente y repetitivo: el martilleo como argumento” (“get lost in digressions and useless amplifications. His language is insistent and repetitive: hammering out an argument”). There is an impression that Paz did not want to see him, in effect, as a writer. He claims that Sartre was incapable of “creating worlds, environments and characters,” forgetting the influence on Sartre of examples of new litera-

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ture, such as Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Albert Camus, whom he admired greatly in his early writings. Here, style was the simplification of circumstances and characters, short sequences, direct and immediate quotes with no references, timeless, appealing to immediate reactions disconnected one from another, without causality—a “compromised” style that, in fact, perhaps might not have been present in many of the wonderful novels of the nineteenth century that Sartre associated primarily with Proust, from whom he sought to distance himself given his insistence on the centrality of subjectivity. Sartre practiced a laconic prose made up of new beginnings that had nothing due to a relationship of causal motivations (Hayman 1987, 203). Precisely where Paz denotes a lack of narrative in Sartre’s works, we have to see one of his accomplishments in the “drama of ideas,” as will occur with his use of several of Heidegger’s theses. In spite of it all, Paz (OC, II: 346) remembers “las ideas de Les Mouches y de Huis-Clos, no a los fantasmas que las exponen” (“the ideas of Les Mouches and Huis-Clos, not the ghosts that expose them”). And as one might expect, Paz’s assessment of Sartre’s philosophy is not very positive; his “trabajo no es un comienzo sino una continuación y, algunas veces, un comentario de otros. Qué sería sin Heidegger?” (“work is not a beginning but a continuation and, sometimes, a comment by others. What would it be without Heidegger?”). For other critics, Sartre’s philosophical work was another reply to the philosophy of existence raised by Heidegger—some way of assuming the circumstances that he lived, covering the cardinal concepts of phenomenology and ontology. It would be better to say that Being and Nothingness (1943), written during the German occupation of France, and developed from Sartre’s World War I diary notes, is not a footnote of Heidegger’s work, as has been said endlessly, but rather a response to it, an alternative to understand the destiny of metaphysics in the twentieth century, a “comprehensive explanation of existence” (Hayman 1987, 201). Although it uses Heideggerian notions, the Sartrean meaning is not the same, such as in the case of “nothingness,” or “anxiety,” which Sartre equates to “nausea.” Meanwhile, for Heidegger, as we have seen, anxiety is meeting face to face with the “nothingness of the impossible possibility of one’s own existence.” Roquetin, Sartre’s character, has no nausea in him, but he is in it as everything that the world regurgitates as its fullness in each circumstantial scenario. Moreover, we should instead look at Hegelian philosophy as one of the largest sources of Sartre’s work, as the writer Iris Murdoch (1997, 146) noted in a text written in the 1950s: “Being and Nothingness is a very extensive and almost totally Hegelian work concerning the nature of human consciousness—an issue that does not exist in British philosophy.” To verify this idea, it is enough to remember Sartre’s in-depth discussion in the first part of this work, on the Hegelian relations between being and nothingness, and the work of negativity, as well as Heidegger’s con-

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tributions to this essential problem of contemporary ontology. After all, Sartre (1993, 52) does not agree with the full identification of being and nothingness, nor does he reify it, although it is clear to him that the idea we have of the second is a function of the fact of being—nothingness has a logically later status, “infesting being,” being inside it, “in his heart, like a worm.” This means that the being has no need of anything to be conceived, and that you can thoroughly analyze your notion without finding in it the slightest trace of nothingness. Nothingness, however, can have only a borrowed existence. It gets its being from being; its nothingness is not found but within the limits of being, and the total disappearance of being would not be the advent of non-being, but on the contrary the concomitant disappearance of nothingness: there is no non-being but in the surface of being.

At this time, and as Hayman has pointed out, Sartre conceives the human being as a “being who is distant,” taking into account the Heideggerian idea of being-in-the-world, a being that returns to itself after recovering from the whole or transcending. Still, Paz insists that Sartre’s best work is precisely his “uncommitted” writings, the more personal ones, which are close to a confession, such as Words (1964). He recognizes that he combines analysis and invective and that, in this sense, the polemicist damaged the critic—his analysis turns frequently into accusations, as in the books about Baudelaire and Flaubert, or his “wacky criticism of surrealism.” Worse than the “polemicist axe” was “the rod of the moralist and the rule of the teacher”—criticism like a court that hands out punishments and admonitions, penalties, Sartre’s apologies for abjection “as way to health,” for example, in his study on Genet. Yet Paz (OC, II: 346-7) notes that when Sartre was dragged by his verbal gift, his writing became amazing—“Si al hablar de los hombres los reducía a conceptos, ideas y tesis, en cambio convirtió a las palabras en seres animados” (“Whereas when speaking of men he reduced them to concepts, ideas, and theses, he turned words into animated beings”). In What Is Literature?, Sartre accuses the surrealists of being “miseries of fate” for their lack of social commitment. They are “parasites” of the class that insults—“their revolt remains in the margins of the revolution” (Sartre cited by Hayman 251), which contrasts harshly with his passion for the avant-garde movement when he was a student at the École Normale Supérieure, when he was 19 to 24 years old, and imitates his carelessness for beauty as well as the style of Breton’s poetic work The Immaculate Conception (1930), doing exercises in surrealism. In “L’enfance d’un chef,” from the book The Wall (1939), the character of Lucian writes poems in that style, seduced by this artistic movement. Sartre should have appreciated the surreal appeal to mysticism as a poetic solution to fundamental problems (Hayman 1987, 59). At that time in his youth, he

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was also bewildered by surrealists’ tribulations with the communists and Breton’s call that only through revolutionary, violent, bloody acts would life be transformed, a form of escape from “this fearful cage in which we go on arguing” (Breton, quoted by Hayman 1987, 60). At the end of World War II, Sartre was signing political manifestos with some artists and intellectuals associated with the avant-garde when there was a call for peace in anticipation of the Cold War that was on the horizon. When Sartre rejected the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961, Breton stated that it was all noisy propaganda in favor of the Eastern Bloc (Hayman 1987, 403). Still, at a 1965 Congress in Rome, on the European vanguards of “yesterday and today,” Sartre accused several surrealists of exploiting the possibilities of a given language, of experimenting with their limits, of introducing new ways of reading but not creating anything strictly speaking. According to him, they would remain traditionalists, involved in a “dialogue with the dead.” A genuine avant-garde should create language, not just “play” with it (a criterion similar to Paz’s rejection of automatic writing, as we shall see in the next chapter). Sartre (1981, 170) criticized the surrealists, in a much cited statement, for having accomplished “nothingness in the ways of a being in excess.” They destroy; they create additions to existing works, but in the end, they leave reality intact insofar as it interested them first and foremost as “subjective company.” Sartre points out that, indeed, they became “parasites” not only of the bourgeois class from which they came but of the human species, away from the “working class” to which the confusion of reality and dream, life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and incommunicable, were useful. Surrealism’s artistic synthesis settled these contradictions poorly, where their “nothingness” for example, is just “endless flutter of opposites” (Sartre 1981, 171)—an imaginary point of impossible confusions, says Sartre. He imagined their becoming “punishing and clandestine associations in the style of the Ku-Klux-Klan.” Sartre does not seem to have been aware that Breton visited Trotsky in Mexico in 1938, or that he had his ups and downs with the French Communist Party, whose links to the Restoration Government of the French Republic offer a very suggestive interpretation and help us clarify the allegations made by Paz. Sartre thought that Breton would succumb to Trotskyism as the USSR passed from a destructive phase to a constructive one, since this trend remained in “critical denial phase.” Trotskyism would make use of surrealism, given its essentially negative, destructive nature, according to Sartre, who matches the appearance of this avantgarde movement with the emergence of the communist parties as mediators between the intellectual and working classes, an aspect that escaped Paz in his assessment of that time—“I am well aware that surrealism, with its ambiguous aspect of literary chapel, spiritual college, church, and secret society, is only one of the post-war products” (Sartre 1981,

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178). Thus, the reprehensible action was Breton’s affiliation to violence and destruction. Hence, he approached political parties that still trumpeted these requirements and consequently had nothing, for having absolutized everything—“They were the proclaimers of catastrophe in the time of the fat cows; in the time of the lean cows they have nothing more to say” (Sartre 1981, 181). Existentialism’s relations with surrealism must be considered, taking into account Paz’s observations, yet also through the nuances of France’s postwar era, in order to understand more thoroughly the desideratum that the European intellectuals confronted at the time, something that Simone de Beauvoir portrayed exceptionally in her novel The Mandarins (1954). One of these dilemmas was the role of the intellectual in times of crisis. The character of Henry, embodying Sartre’s features in that novel, wonders about a newspaper that wants to move forward, “What is opinion? What is an idea? What can words do, in whom, in what circumstances?” (Beauvoir 1999, 157). For Paz, Sartre was consciousness of a passion, i.e., the awareness of the transit of time and men. He was a moralist who said essential things for the twentieth century at a time of major disasters. His thesis of “being condemned to be free” ended up defending tyrannies because “he thought the despotism of the revolutionary Caesars was nothing but the mask of freedom.” It was not sufficient for Sartre to confess over and over that he was wrong. According to Paz (OC, II: 348), Sartre acted in opposition to what he preached; he served as an example of irresponsibility, contradiction, precipitation, and incoherence. His ideas and attitudes justified what he proposed, namely, la desenfadada y generalizada irresponsabilidad de los intelectuales de izquierda (sobre todo los latinoamericanos) que durante los últimos veinte años, en nombre del “compromiso” revolucionario, la táctica, la dialéctica y otras lindezas, han elogiado y solapado a los tiranos y a los verdugos. (the carefree, widespread irresponsibility of the leftist intellectuals (mostly Latin American) who for the last twenty years, in the name of “commitment” to the revolution, tactics, dialectics and other niceties, have praised and covered for tyrants and torturers).

Paz would ultimately, and perhaps incorrectly, Christianize Sartre in his examination of conscience and remorse, self-chastisement and introspection, as a legacy of his Protestant ancestors. His criticism “comienza por ser un desvelamiento, un arrancar los velos y las máscaras, no en busca de la desnudez sino de la llaga oculta, y termina, inexorablemente, en un juicio. Para la conciencia religiosa protestante conocer el mundo es juzgarlo y juzgarlo es condenarlo” (“begins as an unveiling, a tearing off of veils and masks, not in search of nudity but of the hidden wound, and

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ends, inevitably, in judgment. For the Protestant religious conscience, to know the world is to judge it and to judge it is to condemn it”). Paz (OC, II: 349) also notes that “Sartre replaced predestination and freedom in Protestant theology with psychoanalysis and Marxism” to the extent that “El centro de su pensamiento fue la oposición complementaria entre la situación (la predestinación) y la libertad; este fue también el tema de los calvinistas y el punto capital de sus debates con los jesuitas” (“the core of his thinking was the complementary opposition between situation [predestination] and freedom; it was also a subject for the Calvinists and was the crucial point of their debates with the Jesuits”). The “situation,” or circumstances, is understood as a God without a face which one must fight with freedom as condemnation. This conclusion is very decisive, and is perhaps not entirely fair to Sartre—“Sartre heredó del cristianismo [. . .] la negación de este mundo y el aborrecimiento de nuestra realidad terrestre” (“Sartre inherited from Christianity [. . .] the denial of this world and a hatred of our terrestrial reality”). Therefore, “accusing his class [bourgeois] and his world, Sartre accused himself with the violence of a penitent.” Sartre had the opportunity to explain that the misuse of the “Hegelian dialectic,” which justifies the existence of evil for the sake of a general and universal good, comes from a version of dialectic under the influence of Stalinist orthodox Marxism, where both good and evil fade away and only a historical process remains in which neither the individual, nor his suffering and death, are capable of stopping “the time of the conquest of power”—“For political realism like for philosophical idealism, evil lacked serious-mindedness” (Sartre 1981, 195). Beyond understanding evil as a notion that knowledge would be capable of dissipating, Sartre saw it as pure action visible in any act of violence, as absolute as good— an action where different wills converge freely. Evil may be found in an infernal circle of sacrifice by a human who would have to break at some point in history, as Sartre saw in postwar times when humanity had to reinvent itself, located absolutely in his sovereignty with no tomorrow or with an uncertain future, blindly, in silence, in the solitude of the human desert, in the torments of torture, existentially situated and literally besieged, where men “remained silent and man was born of his silence” (Sartre): This man had to be invented with their martyrized flesh, with their hunted thoughts that were already betraying them—invented on the basis of nothing, for nothing, in absolute gratuity. For it is within the human that one can distinguish means and ends, values and preferences, but the tortured were still at the creation of the world and they had only to decide in sovereign fashion whether there would be anything more than the reign of the animal within it (Sartre 1981, 197).

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Paz notes that in one of the last interviews Sartre gave soon before he died, he showed resignation, and even recognized his frustrated political action, but maintained the hope that someday there would be brotherhood among men—early Christianity’s dream of a “universal brotherhood” state, says Paz (OC, II: 351), “naturally and supernaturally predestined, if we recover our original innocence.” What surprises Paz is that Sartre has collected the best and purest of our religious tradition—“la visión de un mundo de hombres y mujeres reconciliados, transparentes el uno para el otro porque ya no hay nada que ocultar ni que temer, vueltos a la desnudez original” (“the vision of a world of men and women reconciled, transparent for each other because there is nothing to hide or fear, returned to their original nudity”). This theme is also found in the works of other illustrious Protestants, such as John Milton, who justified the tyrant Cromwell, as Paz recalled. A LABYRINTH FOR LONELINESS AND DEATH Octavio Paz saw many things in the Mexican past. He understood the origin of many of the features that make up the contemporary culture of Mexico. Only for a little more than sixty years, and along with an extraordinary constellation of intellectuals and artists dedicated to the study and discovery of the Mexican and of Mexican culture, did “the legend of the Mexican” prevail. It would ensure that some “rags” of the past remained, present in social aspects—an old, eccentric, secret, “tesoro enterrado, espiga que madura en las entrañas terrestres, vieja sabiduría escondida entre los pliegues de la tierra” (“buried treasure, spike that matures in the terrestrial bowels, old wisdom hidden between the folds of the land”). It is why Mexicans were enigmatic beings that had not achieved the status of “abstraction.” Much was said then on this point. What is surprising is that this problem was in the immediate past, while today it is resumed insufficiently. It is said to correspond to a time of formation of the modern Mexican state, whose nation-building ideology the muralism movement represented well. 26 Yet one forgets that a country is reborn with each generation, and the past must be updated as a way to be in the present. Paz insisted that our attitude toward life is not conditioned by historical facts only, at least “no de la manera rigurosa con que en el mundo de la mecánica la velocidad o la trayectoria de un proyectil se encuentra determinada por un conjunto de factores conocidos” (“not in the rigorous way that in the world of mechanics a projectile’s speed or trajectory is determined by a set of known factors”). There is an attitude toward life that also intervenes, a will that may govern fate within certain limits. Historical facts are ingrained with problematic features. Each era is a unit, or a character that influences the way in which “historic conse-

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quences” act, or the effects of past events. Therefore, instead of having a linear set of causes and effects and one sense of historical time, we have a complex set of reactions and tendencies that penetrate each other, like in Vicos’ vision of history. Paz was more in favor of the study of cultural manifestations in the present, of what they carry from the past. One can know in great detail the “ghosts” or remains that surround us yet not dispel their effective presence. These remnants are within us, hence their invincible character and the fact that our will is in constant conflict with them. These realities of the past continue to be “un fantasma que nos desvela y una presencia que nos interroga. Presencia secreta, escondida, olvidada o enterrada, que aparece de pronto con la violencia de las revelaciones” (“a ghost that unveils us and a presence that questions us. Secret presence, hidden, forgotten or buried, appearing suddenly with the violence of revelations”) (Paz OC, IX: 678). Such is the tension that Mexico maintained between universality and “Mexicanidad,” derived from the contradictory relationship with modernity. Either way, Paz always had the conviction that he lived in a time characterized by the turn of the times—a return to the source, which is a return to the beginning. We have not witnessed the “end of history,” something Francis Fukuyama (1992) famously put in vogue, but a restarting of it—“Resurrección de realidades enterradas, reaparición de lo olvidado y lo reprimido que, como otras veces en la historia, puede desembocar en una regeneración” (“Resurrection of buried realities, the reappearance of the forgotten and the repressed that, like other times in history, may lead to a regeneration”) (Paz 1990, 126). It is possible to find this debate between modernity and tradition in any piece of Mexican culture and history. Still, while receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990, Paz (OC, X: 675) wondered if in Mexico “¿alcanzaremos al fin la verdadera modernidad, que no es únicamente democracia política, prosperidad económica y justicia social sino reconciliación con nuestra tradición y con nosotros mismos?” (“would we finally achieve true modernity, not only political democracy, economic prosperity, and social justice but also reconciliation with our tradition and with ourselves?”). Further, Paz claimed that thinking the tradition is not but to recreate it—“resurrección de lo que fue tanto como su re-ordenación conforme a la perspectiva de nuestro proyecto histórico” (“as much a resurrection of what was as its re-classification according to the perspective of our historical project”). Strong words, undoubtedly—“the future will give rise to the dead and impose an order on their works.” Therefore, in looking for the past we are looking for the future. The past does not depend on the idea of the future but on the search for that future. It is a matter of inserting the past into a reality in progress and with the important consequence that rating tradition allows the present not to be the only criterion with which we appreciate what is happening. 27

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In this sense, certain linguistic trope, a poet to the end, allowed Paz to evaluate the cultural past and present achievements, where there was an adherence to tradition but also a rupture with it or a return to the origins. Such is the case of analogy and metaphor. Analogy allowed him to understand the dynamic characteristics of the pre-Hispanic cultures, while through metaphor he wanted to deal with the more complex problem of a time without time, one in which the most primitive peoples had a reality, but whose information is often lost in silence, as we will see in El mono gramático. Ideas that follow a phenomenological perspective of time, not found in things but based on our relationship with it. We are the ones who introduce temporary dilatation—the past and future in a present continuous, constant in the world (St. Augustine had already pointed out that time is a distension of the soul). Indeed, we are the carriers of the non-being of the past and the future. In other words, the world has no time; it is eternal in itself, full. To be temporary requires us, who introduce the not-being of “in addition,” or the “otherwise,” or “tomorrow,” and perhaps the Mexican expression “al ratito” (“in a little while”), where it is not known when this extended moment of time will happen (tomorrow? never?). Analogy also has an important feature, in which Paz insists on a strange circularity where phenomena revolve and repeat, like in a game of mirrors—“Cada imagen cambia, se funde en su contraria, se desprende, forma otra imagen, se une de nuevo con otra y, al fin, vuelve al punto de partida” (“Each image changes, merges into its opposite, detaches, forms another image, joins again with another and, finally, returns to the starting point”). Such was the case of his famous analysis of Coatlicue, the mother of God, and the fertility goddess in the pre-Hispanic world, where we find the fusion between the literal and the symbolic, natural reality and the supernatural, which was a constant feature among Mesoamerican peoples. Like their works of art, these civilizations were complex forms animated by a strange but coherent logic of correspondences and analogies—superposition and juxtaposition of elements, like the artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century (collages and the Dadaist object), but instead of manifest presence they would only function in absences, embodying the vacuum, a testimony of the abyss. The poetics of analogy could only appear in a society founded by criticism, becoming an aesthetic of correspondences. With the metaphor, the Mexican poet wanted to understand a time prior to human or historical, and thus the presence of the past in the present. As we have said, this time is “before” the intervention of humans in nature, to clarify it or make it an object. It is a time prior to the divisions with which we understand it. The word to refer to that time without time is “eternity.” Again, St. Augustine noted that, in “the eternal,” nothing happens, but “everything is present as a whole.” With Augustine (1986, 197), we must speak of a “present form of the past, the present

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form of the present and the present form of the future.” The first is memory, the second, vision, and the third is waiting. Paz recognizes the difficulty in naming that time lived by primitive man, a time prior to consciousness that shows all the meanings of time and word; a time that is the original “metaphor,” therefore corresponding to poetry and the “imminence of the unknown.” It is a time of presence and a validity of a constant present that is revealed while hiding; it is what is and what is not, a presence that is with us and is not before us. It never occurs in historical time but in religious or cyclical time. It is the presence of the unknown that for us is “human, too human” (Nietzsche) in postmodernity, and represents the void—the nothingness equivalent to the being. THE FLOWERING IN THE SHEDDING OF THE SKIN The end of El laberinto de la soledad is composed of an appendix called “Dialectic of Solitude,” using an idea by Arnold Toynbee. In it, Paz seeks to specify what is understood by this notion throughout his work—a concept, no doubt, central to the analysis, which at the same time allows for an understanding of his dual role as a critic of Mexican history, culture, and society, and as a poet. Solitude is something that is linked to otherness, a sense of community and belonging whose great metaphor is “love.” The appreciation of solitude is incomplete if it is not associated with what one must give way, namely a sense of community or integration with the other, allowing the void that characterizes it to be filled. Solitude is dialectic because it requires being completed with love; it is not a state of absolute or definitive being; it lasts until the revolution of ruptures arrives, while preparing for the encounter with something other than itself—or while it incubates the forces of creation. Paz understood that solitude is not something exclusive to the Mexican. Rather, it is a condition that modernity has reserved for everyone and that has to do with criticism of traditions. Solitude is derived from our separation from the source of the past; it means finding ourselves in the present—as orphans, destitute, and without any reward. But it is also a necessary separation that involved (and embodies, because it is already living flesh, as the Spanish thinker María Zambrano puts it) the possibility of the future. We cannot be another someone in the end if we have not ceased to be, if we have not abandoned what has been. We cannot be if it means not being permanent, not having states of criticism, of consciousness and creation in desire—“La soledad es el fondo último de la condición humana. El hombre es el único ser que se siente solo y es el único que es búsqueda de otro” (“Solitude is at the very core of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another”) (Paz 2010, 211). Like the invention of

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ourselves, we are the fruit of desire, aspiration, a future that must be achieved through a constant rupture with what we have been. Solitude is both nostalgia and a search for communion with the other, a lack of the other—a feeling of what we lack, which is essentially otherness, but also the other. Although the Mexican is not technically the only solitary being that exists in the world, his solitude is marked by a particular break that is not abandonment or separation but a tearing or loosening of vital realities that once constituted the core of our ontic consistency, the axis mundi, as anthropologists would say. Ours is a peculiar loneliness that has to do with forgetting the word that named the essential aspects of a world from which we have been exiled. We have been “torn” from that creative and destructive reality that hangs between Heaven and Earth; we have forgotten the word that links us to “forces in which life manifests.” For this reason, our solitude is akin to “stagnant water,” in the sense that we no longer have our vital forces linking to ourselves. Solitude is a distance from oneself, from the center of life that reveals the uniqueness of being, the discovery of ourselves in the wealth of the world. Solitude is losing ourselves in our own awareness, in the “river of consciousness,” like the wonderment of the youth who stares amazed at what surrounds him, uncertain if the face he is looking at in that river is his—astonishment that turns into reflection. Paz was sure that after the Mexican Revolution Mexicans had time to find out, finally, who they were; to ask the appropriate questions; to recognize that Mexico was living a period of transition in which the word of a poet revealed the existence of rhythms in a conception of time that should allow for an understanding of the presence of the past and the future in the present—oscillating rhythms of different intensities. What can be wrong in thinking about the history of Mexico in the form of tones, rhythms, intensities, periods, even flavors? In the void that solitude represents we find primitive faces of desire, the need to reinvent the ties that unite us all. Paz saw in solitude the impulse to stop being one and find others; to break the limits that strengthen us and open up to the other, an urgent community with others that Rousseau identified with pity or love itself. Solitude is then a purge, a test, expiation, punishment, and promise. That is why “La plenitud, la reunión, que es reposo y dicha, concordancia con el mundo, nos esperan al fin del laberinto de la soledad” (“At the exit from the labyrinth of solitude we will find reunion (which is repose and happiness), and plenitude, and harmony with the world”) (Paz 2010, 212). Recalling the remarkable excerpt from Antonio Machado’s writing, chosen by Paz to be at the very beginning of El laberinto de la soledad, we are aware of the impossibility of being; when we want to be something we are in the incurable otherness that feeds our sameness. We are constantly throwing ourselves at the other, from us to others, relentlessly in a specific estrangement that likewise becomes nostalgia, loneliness, or

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emptiness for something that may never be. Paz understood this dialectic in which will of being consisted of transgressing it, becoming another rather than being in itself—being with another, which is another form of creation. Thinking about himself, the human being finds others; it is nearly impossible for it not to occur. Solitude is both a self-denial and challenge, but within it, Paz seeks “communion and health.” We have to go beyond our own self limitation, which renders us locked and jealous. Solitude is as a shawl that conceals and makes invisible. The feeling of solitude, superior to the “feeling of inferiority,” analyzed by the Mexican philosopher Samuel Ramos, is more “wide and deep,” and actually refers to the feeling of being different. It is a feeling that affirms and denies itself in “melancholy and mirth, the silence and the scream, free crime and religious fervor.” These notes of Paz also derived from an interesting observation he made on the U.S. society of criminal violence, which is a face-to-face context between the killer and his victim, as opposed to the serial killer who is “cold” and massive. It is as if one can say that, generally speaking, in Mexico it is important to know who kills (the killers leave behind messages, blankets, heads without their bodies, territorial marks, signs of power), whereas for the U.S. society it typically does not matter who kills. Paz made these observations seventy years ago. Identity was without a doubt an essential issue for Paz’s generation, continuing previous efforts made by poets and intellectuals, except perhaps the “Contemporáneos,” for whom the question did not have much relevance. Paz’s time was thus a time of “awakenings”—awareness that should take the shape of self-criticism and evaluation, which is the task of El laberinto de la soledad. Paz did not believe in having definitive answers to the question of Mexican identity, since changing circumstances would always offer new answers. If there is a different stimulus it is possible to expect a different reaction. What he rather hoped for was that the question would never disappear, or that we would be capable of redesigning it considering changed circumstances, since this question represents an insistent claim that we cannot forget, or else we are lost in history. It was on the Mexican-American border, and in Los Angeles, with liminal beings on the threshold—with an existence not simply preceding essence, but in abeyance, putting life at risk—that Paz found a fascinating explanation of the social diversity that makes up Mexico, with its cultures, expressions, languages, realities, and times. El laberinto de la soledad is a book that summarizes Paz’s voluntary two-year “banishment” to the United States, as if it had been necessary to settle in such circumstances to gain access to a twist of the human condition, full of concerns and questions. Only he who moves can understand movement. There are several ruptures that resonate with crossing borders, both physical and mental. It was in that alternative condition, watching himself from where his being is not, that more specific traits emerged—“Recuerdo que cada vez que

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me inclinaba sobre la vida norteamericana, deseoso de encontrarle sentido, me encontraba con mi imagen interrogante” (“I remember that whenever I attempted to examine North American life, anxious to discover its meaning, I encountered my own questioning image”) (Paz 2010, 14). Thus, in the “Pachuco,” that character who embodied a form of expression of being a young Mexican–American on the border in the 1940s, Paz assumes that solitude is linked to awareness in transit to be, against novelty and the wealth of the world—a process that continues into doubt and reflection, transgression and questioning. Solitude is a moment where one finds consciousness in the process of maturation and bravery of historical singularity—a time of metamorphic awareness that reflects the fine sand where the cultural identity of a people stands outside of them in the challenges of their further condition. Paz realized that his thoughts were part of a privileged post-revolutionary moment when the Mexican could finally “contemplate himself,” facing what he wanted to be in that reconstruction, which apparently did not stop the challenges of civilization. It is a tireless making that marks the progression to being. Wanting to understand the core of the Mexican culture, Paz started his reflections with the eccentric ones, the “Pachucos,” in an interpretation that bothered many Chicanos of yesterday, by the way. The Pachucos are human beings located on the margins of history, inhabiting a cultural periphery, the interstitium, the border, the limit that makes them represent—even for an instant—solitude. Marginality is solitude since they cannot recover the world that has been left, and because it is impossible for them to be integrated into another; they are neighboring beings, one of the many destinations that the Mexican has assumed. Pachuco “niega la sociedad de que procede y a la norteamericana. [. . .] se lanza al exterior, pero no para fundirse con lo que le rodea, sino para retarlo. Gesto suicida, pues el ‘pachuco’ no afirma nada, no defiende nada, excepto su exasperada voluntad de no-ser” (“denies both the society from which he originated and that of North America. [. . .] When he thrusts himself outward, it is not to unite with what surrounds him but rather to defy it. This is a suicidal gesture, because the ‘Pachuco’ does not affirm or defend anything, except his exasperated will not-to-be”) (Paz 2010, 19–20). Paz understood the Mexicanism of “Pachucos” in an atmosphere defined by a “delight with ornament, carelessness and pomp, negligence, passion and reserve,” that “floats in the air” and is not confused with the U.S. world “based on precision and efficiency.” It floats without offering any opposition, “never quite existing,” “never quite vanishing”—“se balancea, impulsada por el viento, a veces desgarrada como una nube, otras erguida como un cohete que asciende. Se arrastra, se pliega, se expande, se contrae, duerme o sueña, hermosura harapienta” (“it hovers, blown here and there by the wind, sometimes breaking up like a cloud, sometimes standing erect like a rising skyrocket. It creeps, it wrinkles, it expands and contracts, it sleeps or dreams, it is ragged but beautiful”) (Paz

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2010, 15). It is an affirmation of differences at the expense of everything— a “fanatical will” of not saying anything concrete and, says Paz, the ambiguous decision of “not being like the others that surround him.” It is why, in something that the Chicanos, the heirs of the Pachucos, have never accepted, “Todo en él es el impulso que se niega a sí mismo, un nudo de contradicciones, enigma” (“His whole being is sheer negative impulse, a tangle of contradictions, an enigma”), starting with the name, “Pachuco”—an exasperated affirmation of the personality, animated by a nihilistic, ambivalent will. The diagnosis was severe, incomplete, and unfair for those Chicanos who saw in Paz’s thesis an attitude of aggression like the acts the police committed. Paz seems to make the Pachuco characterization extreme with the purpose of fitting it properly into a derivative scheme analysis, one could say an “existential psychoanalysis,” in the style of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and within the Heideggerian ontological vision. The Pachuco seems not to belong to anything, but his nihilism projects to nothingness, as a way of denying its objectuality, and which results in affirming his “being for himself.” Says Paz, “el pachuco ha perdido toda su herencia; lengua, religión, costumbres, creencias. Sólo le queda un cuerpo y un alma a la intemperie, inerme ante todas las miradas” (“the Pachuco has lost his whole inheritance; language, religion, customs, beliefs. He is left with only a body and a soul with which to confront the elements, defenseless against the stares of everyone”). The Pachuco’s feeling of difference is associated with solitude. Because they are different, they recognize themselves as alone, self-absorbed, “dueños de no se sabe qué secreto, guardado por una apariencia hosca, pero que espera sólo el momento propicio para revelarse” (“owners of who knows what secret, guarded by a surly appearance, but that only waits for the opportune moment to be revealed”). While loneliness seems to be the contemporary condition of all men, in Mexican solitude Paz saw elements that had to do with breaking with the past, losing “the name, the word linking all those forces in which life manifests,” a supernatural reality that animates what exists and refers to the powers and forces of magic-natural order. So, the Mexican’s approach to solitude has to do with having been ripped from the “whole,” the center of creation, through successive events that stem from the Spanish conquest. The Mexican wants “to be Sun” again, to be at the center of life that was once detached. It is why he is on a “burning search,” “una fuga y un regreso, tentativa por restablecer los lazos que nos unían a la creación” (“an escape and a return, an attempt to restore the ties that linked us to creation”) (Paz 2010, 23). In the end, we must not forget that Paz is seeking the root of our differences— first of all, those that mark radical differences with the neighbor, the industrialized Protestant country, a contrasting image of progress and successful civilization, the United States, as he insisted on several occa-

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sions. On the list of items that make up this difference, Paz refers to a certain Mexican religiosity that makes possible the “contemplation of horror, and even familiarity and complacency in its treatment,” all of which is part of a cult to death that is, at the same time, life. It is love that is “hunger for life,” but also longing for death—the traits seen in the fusion of Indian and Spanish cultures. Thus, in contrast to U.S. optimism, Mexicans profess a “nihilism,” the product of an “instinctive reaction.” While Americans are active and practice contemplation, Mexicans prefer to be “quietists”—“disfrutamos de nuestras llagas como ellos de sus inventos” (“we enjoy our wounds and they enjoy their inventions”) (Paz 2010, 26). Next to their beliefs (in opposition to Mexicans, who are believers) in hygiene, health, work, and happiness, Mexican happiness is “an intoxication, a whirlwind”—“En el alarido de la noche de fiesta nuestra voz estalla en luces y vida y muerte se confunden; su vitalidad se petrifica en una sonrisa: niega la vejez y la muerte, pero inmoviliza la vida” (“In the hubbub of a fiesta night our voices explode into brilliant lights, and life and death mingle together, while their vitality becomes a fixed smile that denies old age and death but that changes life to motionless stone”) (Paz 2010, 27). Indeed, it is the prevalence of religious values, such as believing that “sin and death are the last foundations of human nature,” where the sense of Mexican communion seeking contact, proximity, and a lack of distinction against Protestant Puritanism makes a difference. Paz mentions Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess of filth and fertility, as well as sexual love, steam baths, and confession, as an element of religiosity that seems to turn on an “exhausted treadmill.” Either way, Paz saw in both U.S. and Mexican cultures aspects denoting an “inability to reconcile the flow of life” with the universe. Both cultures may have lost sight of the central aspect of the human condition, namely to ensure the validity of “an order that matches awareness and innocence, man and nature.” Even when the solitude of the Mexican is like “stagnant water,” it is also the “mirror.” For both, the verdict is that “we have ceased to be sources.” Paz adds one form of this shared or similar solitude we inhabit in the twentieth century, which corresponds to the personality discovered in the Spanish Civil War, i.e., solitude open to transcendence, the product of the moment before death. Solitude breaks anyone, generated fundamentally in an atmosphere that leads to the extraordinary and goes beyond the human condition in which a sort of “hopeful despair” is installed, and thus can be thought of as the dawn of the emergence of “another man,” like Nietzsche’s Übermensch. It is a certain hope that, once recognized in the hunger for life and justice, cannot be forgotten. Paz discovered a Mexican removed from himself, wrapped in silence and solitude, with little communication, using scornful language, not looking directly into the eyes of another, always on the defensive; everything seems to hurt and outrage him—“Atraviesa la vida como desollado; todo puede herirle, palabras y sospecha de palabras. Su lenguaje está

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lleno de reticencias, de figuras y alusiones, de puntos suspensivos; en su silencio hay repliegues, matices, nubarrones, arcos iris súbitos, amenazas indescifrables” (“He passes through life like a man who has been flayed; everything can hurt him, including words and the very suspicion of words. His language is full of reticence, of metaphors and allusions, of unfinished phrases, while his silence is full of tints, folds, thunderheads, sudden rainbows, indecipherable threats”) (Paz 2010, 32). Everything in him is suspicion, dissimulation—lack of authenticity, or if it exists, it must be found somewhere secluded, not readily available. First and foremost, the Mexican is protective of his solitude; he does not trust anyone, does not open up to anyone, and does not allow anyone to enter it because then he becomes uninhabited. It is loneliness that fills it. To allow otherwise would be to abdicate, surrender, renounce his privacy. Hence, he avoids everyone in case someone might catch him by intruding upon the most intimate aspect, by having him open what is kept inside. Hence, there is “machismo,” manhood, so “El estoicismo es la más alta de nuestras virtudes guerreras y políticas” (“Stoicism is the most exalted of our military and political attributes”) (Paz 2010, 34), as is resignation. In the “Dialectic of Solitude,” Paz recapitulates the theme very suggestively. He once again insists that solitude is not something that belongs only to the Mexican people but is a fundamental human condition. Man is the only being who knows himself to be alone, but also in a search for the other. Consciousness reveals this condition, as well as the need to articulate in deep dialogue with each other, something that Hegel showed with absolute conviction. Consciousness cannot be enough on its own, without relationships, without being part of a movement that alienates itself and retrieves from the strangeness. For this reason, it is “nostalgia and search for communion.” As noted, the feeling of solitude has a starting point in rupture, separation, dropping into a strange, hostile environment that represents the genesis or beginning. Such sentiment is something made up, a selfawareness and a desire to get out of it. Love will guarantee this communion after the atonement of loneliness. We will have to wait for a moment of life where opposites—life and death, time and eternity—concur. In the face of loneliness, love is a clear example of that “doble instinto que nos lleva a cavar y ahondar en nosotros mismos y, simultáneamente, a salir de nosotros y realizarnos en otro: muerte y recreación, soledad y comunión” (“double instinct which causes us to dig deeper into our own selves and, at the same time, to emerge from ourselves and to realize ourselves in another: death and re-creation, solitude and communion”) (Paz 2010, 219). Years later, in his notable essays on sexuality, love, and erotism, La llama doble: amor y erotismo (1993), Paz addresses many details of love. For example, he argues that love is creation, but also transgression, the experience of the limit; it is the great subversion of the West. In it, a negation of the very autonomy of the subject happens to accept the

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other, which is not an ephemeral or abstract negation but a “carnal and spiritual reality.” Transubstantiation (I see, I hear, I speak with the other, I can even “drink his words”) allows Paz to hold that all love is a Eucharist—it reveals the mystery of the person in communion. Love is a state of art where the moments that characterize loneliness are reconciled. It is an instant of life where opposites merge—life and death, time and eternity— just to give us a “piece of real life,” a “perfect state.” A pesar del testimonio de mis sentidos, el tiempo de allá, el de los otros, era el verdadero; el tiempo del presente real. Acepté lo inaceptable: fui adulto. Así comenzó mi expulsión del presente. (Despite the testimony of my senses, time there, the time of others, it was the true time; the time of the real present. I accepted the unacceptable: I was an adult. Thus began my expulsion from the present.) (Paz, speech when receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature)

Certainly, a predominant theme within Mexican culture is death. Rite, iconography, deep feeling—death is the eternal companion of the self. In 1950, Octavio Paz (2010, 64) denounced the lack of a response to death among Mexicans. It was a situation that seemed to him supportive of the little interest that the Mexican has for life—“I don’t worry about death if I don’t care about life,” seems to him a common expression. The Mexican could not have a conception of death that would simultaneously entail a responsibility to life. Paz’s diagnosis was a severe consequence of modern times—death has lost its original sense, as well as personal life. As it is well known, this condition has been reinforced recently in Mexico because of the horrific, seemingly endless drug wars. Indeed, Paz’s modern conception of death is characterized by not having a significance that transcends it or that can be referred to other values—it is the inevitable end of a natural process. In a world of facts, death is one more fact among others, and not a trivial one, since it puts into question all our conceptions concerning the meaning of life. It is why Paz considered that “death is a mirror that reflects the empty gestures of life.” We read in the poem “Ejercicio preparatorio” (1987): “[. . .] la muerte que yo quiero/ lleva mi nombre,/ tiene mi cara./ Es mi espejo y es mi sombra,/ la voz sin sonido que dice mi nombre,/ . . ./ Es mi creación y soy su criatura./ Poco a poco, sin saber lo que hago,/ la esculpo, escultura de aire./ Pero no la toco, pero no me habla./ Todavía no aprendo a ver,/ en la cara del muerto, mi cara” (“[. . .] the death that I want/ bears my name,/ it has my face./ It is my mirror and my shadow,/ the soundless voice that says my name,/. . ./ It is my creation and I am its creature./ Little by little, without knowing what I do,/ I sculpt it, sculpture of air./ But I don’t touch it, but it does not speak to me./ I have not yet learned to see,/ in the face of the dead, my face”) (Paz OC, VII: 643).

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Life and death are inseparable, opposites that complement each other to form a higher life that is barely glimpsed. It is a sense of death that Paz also takes from Rilke, basically in his Octave Elegy—“With all its eyes the creature sees the open.” In this Elegy we find a distinction between what man is in his finitude and what is represented in animality, as well as what is presumed to be the common factor—the longing for the origin. While man “faces the world,” and therefore has a destiny, i.e., has limits, the animal “sees himself in everything, and cures forever”—its being is boundless “unfathomable and without a view of its condition, pure as its outward gaze” (Rilke 1964, 122). As we have said, in El laberinto de la soledad Paz noted the absence of a deep sense of death in the modern Mexican society, given its disregard for life and because in modernity life has ceased to be a transit, an access to another life that is “more life than ours.” After a synthetic presentation on the meaning of death and life in pre-Hispanic culture, where both form part of a greater cosmic cycle, Paz said that, for the Mexican, perception seems to have been rooted in a feeling of indifference, perhaps shared by other cultures but with the peculiarity of not hiding it. Mexicans “contemplate death face to face with impatience, disdain or irony,” and he aggregates a fragment of a popular Mexican song, dating from the revolutionary times—“if they have to kill me tomorrow, they could kill me right now.” The cult of death must be also of life, in the understanding of a unit that has been lost. Perhaps, says Paz, the fascination that it holds among us, the arbitrariness with which a life is torn from its roots through crime, for example, is due to an ambiguous personality of the Mexican and the “fury with which we break it”—“La presión de nuestra vitalidad, constreñida en expresarse en formas que la traicionan, explica el carácter mortal, agresivo o suicida, de nuestras explosiones” (“The pressure of our vitality, constrained to expressing itself in ways that betray it, explains the deadly, aggressive, or suicidal nature of our explosions”) (Paz 2010, 63–64). While we symbolically eat death in desserts or breads, we celebrate it, laugh at its presence in everyday life as an irreplaceable partner in “corridos” and celebrations, in gambling and in cantina fights; it remains something of what the Mexican has not “opened” enough of, always outside, strange and indomitable. It is a death, therefore, that does not engender anything. It is sterile, bare of significance and eroticism, a “mirror” that reveals the Mexican consideration of life. The current prevalence of crime and murder in Mexico contributes to the devaluation of life, the loss of its uniqueness and the subjugation to the rules of mass annihilation and extermination. Under this perspective, the drug wars are an industrialized system of death. In Mexican poetry, Paz found one of the two central attitudes toward death—“to die is to go back to where we do not know,/ where,/ without hope, we wait.” On the one hand, death is a fascination with nothingness, like nostalgia for the limbo. Such would be the case of Xavier Villaurrutia

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and José Gorostiza, both Mexican poets belonging to the “group without group” or “archipelago of solitudes” called “Contemporáneos,” 28 which only confirms the judgment already sustained by the Mexican poet Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera in 1882, in the sense that our race is “essentially esthetics” (Monsivais 1976, 178). The other attitude understands death as creation, and according to Paz, among Latin American writers, only César Vallejo has sustained: “Born to live our death!” (Vallejo 1975, 227). Moreover, the issue is present with Paz in his famous poem “Piedra de sol,” where we can find some differences in his thinking from 1950, as we shall see. At some point, Villaurrutia understands the “hug” of death as eternal. The “opaque body of life,” shadow of shadows, acquires the purity and consistency of a diamond in death. Death is a lethargy that keeps us in life, in another form of life, one in which human time does not exist but blends with the event of the cosmos. For this poet, dying is a return to the origin where there is nothingness, which is everything. With death, life is open to eternity without form. And since nothing or no one is waiting for it, and it arrives unannounced, Villaurrutia (1990, 73) argues that there is no time when anyone could not die. Death lives in us as a reminder of what we wanted, but also as a strange presence that has to do with the wind and anonymous voices, like a “voice that silence expresses.” To die, then, is to open the eyes to the night and silence. A question that could be added in Villaurrutia, and could strengthen Paz’s appreciation in the sense of recovering the personal nature of death, is that it is an intimate event, a death for which multiple identities are tested, an individual death—“Siento que estoy viviendo aquí mi muerte,/mi sola muerte presente,/mi muerte que no puedo compartir ni llorar,/ mi muerte que no me consolaré jamás” (“I feel I am living my death here,/ my own present death, / my death that I cannot share or lament, / my death for which I will never console myself” (Villaurrutia 1990, 60). On the other hand, Paz considered the magnificent poem Muerte sin fin (1939), by José Gorostiza, as “quizá el más alto testimonio que poseemos los hispanoamericanos de una conciencia verdaderamente moderna, inclinada sobre sí misma, presa de sí, de su propia claridad cegadora” (“perhaps the highest testimony we Hispano-Americans have of a truly modern consciousness, leaning on itself, captured by itself, by its own blinding clarity”). It is an intense poem representing a funeral hymn singing the death of God and of universal consciousness, but also of the temporary and the written word. With the image of water contained in the transparency of a glass, Gorostiza recreates a vision of the deep struggles of the human condition. At some point in the poem, the content is the body and the vessel, the form, the soul, consciousness, or an elusive God. In this way, the soul is the incandescent body, the instant of eternity to which we can aspire. It is a form that freezes time and lifts us up like transparent statues, as Villaurrutia also wanted it—reflections of the sur-

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roundings, mask of all things. In addition, Gorostiza presents our powerlessness towards life and death, and the drama of the intelligence thus lived. Intelligence, “soledad en llamas” (“solitude in flames”), “páramos de espejos” (“deserts of mirrors”), is only a simulation of this contradictory and insoluble relationship, unless life is “morir a gotas” (“dying by increments”). Intelligence repeats, emulates, but nothing can face the artistic creation that leads to death in her womb. Life and death match at the source, which is why death in Gorostiza is alive. It is a relentless dying that the desperate are awaiting. It is also a God who dies in his creatures but who will never die completely, a God who is still present “como una estrella mentida/ por su sola luz, por una/ luz sin estrella, vacía,/ que llega al mundo escondiendo/ su catástrofe infinita” (“like a star lit/ only by its own light, by a/ starless light, empty,/ reaching the world hiding/ its infinite catastrophe”) (Gorostiza 1983, 143). Paz’s “Piedra de sol” (1957) is a poem regarded by literary critics as being of the same scope as Muerte sin fin and Sor Juana’s Primero sueño. Paz considers death as nothing, with life being almost ours; it does not belong to us completely. The dead are “already nothing forever.” Every minute is nothing forever. The idea of death is linked to a conception of the moment as eternity, to such an extent that it could hold that this is a poem of the instant, a joyous exploration of time understood thus— “mientras el tiempo cierra su abanico/ y no hay nada detrás de sus imágenes/ el instante se abisma y sobrenada/ rodeado de muerte, amenazado/ por la noche y su lúgubre bostezo,/ amenazado por la algarabía/ de la muerte vivaz y enmascarada/ el instante se abisma y se penetra, [. . .]” (“while time folds its fan shut/ and behind its images there’s nothing/ the moment plunges into itself/ and floats surrounded by death,/ threatened by night’s lugubrious yawn,/ threatened by death that is masked and alive/ the moment plunges into itself [. . .]”) (Paz OC, VII: 226). For Paz (OC, VII: 235), there is no doubt that we are ephemeral; that the common thing that inhabits us is, as we have seen, a non-being that tends to be in a rush in the return to the origin, towards a unit from which we were separated in time, but also because we can never be entirely alone, torn from the whole, from the community that makes us, from the otherness that is installed in one before being—life that seeks outside itself, beyond itself, to transform itself permanently, for which one has to exhaust each and every one of his possibilities. Paz (OC, VII: 593) considered that there was the possibility of a third state between nothingness and being, between the passage of time, between what happens and remains, as is indicated in the poem “Pasado en claro” (1974)— “being without being, empty flatness [. . .] no presence: his premonition.” In the poem “Piedra de sol” the affirmation of radical otherness is essential for understanding life—“nunca la vida es nuestra, es de los otros,/ la vida no es de nadie, todos somos/ la vida—pan de sol para los otros,/ los

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otros todos que nosotros somos—/ soy otro cuando soy, los actos míos/ son más míos si son también de todos, / para que pueda ser he de ser de otro,/ salir de mí, buscarme entre los otros [. . .] la vida es otra, siempre allá, más lejos,/ fuera de ti, de mí, siempre horizonte,/ vida que nos desvive y enajena,/ que nos inventa un rostro y lo desgasta,/ hambre de ser, oh muerte, pan de todos, [. . .]” (“life is never truly ours, it always belongs to the others,/ life is no one’s, we all are / life—bread of sun for the others, / the others that we all are—/ when I am I am another, my acts/ are more mine when they are the acts of others, / in order to be I must be another, / leave myself, search for myself in the others [. . .] life is other, always there, further off, / beyond you, beyond me, always on the horizon,/ life which unlives us and makes us strangers, / that invents our face and wears it away,/ hunger for being, oh death, our bread, [. . .]”) (Paz OC, VII: 235). In the poem “Pasado en claro” we again find a link between time and death, but the dissolution of the self in history is represented by language—“Desde lo alto del minuto/ despeñado en la tarde de plantas fanerógamas/ me descubrió la muerte./ Y yo en la muerte descubrí al lenguaje” (“From the moment’s peak flung down/ into an afternoon of sexual plants/ death discovered me./ And in death I discovered language”) (Paz OC, VII: 592). Insofar as it is our own death, it also concerns others. This is an important change with regards to the ideas Paz held in 1950. Whether it is to be born, live, or die, we need others. In this way, we are ourselves and we are the others. Life will always require something more inexhaustible, namely what I am not, an existential consideration that Paz found in Rilke. Death is something internal and external at the same time. It is not something fatal but represents the consistency of the ephemeral. Finally, and despite Paz’s judgments on Sartre, we can see how these considerations on death are both the poet’s and the existentialist’s. Like Paz, in 1943, the year when Being and Nothingness was published, Sartre held that Rilke and André Malraux (death transforms life into destiny) considered death as a personal matter due to its “individuation”—death is a phenomenon of my personal life. According to Sartre (1993, 556), Rilke “strives to show that the end of every man resembles his life because his unique life has been a preparation for this end.” In the case of Rilke (1964, 62), the reconciliation with death is at stake—“I am the rest between two notes/ which are somehow always in discord,/ because Death’s note wants to climb over—/ but in the dark interval, reconciled,/ they stay there trembling./And the song goes on beautiful.” Similarly, Sartre takes account of the “Heideggerian being relative to death” i.e., death as Dasein’s possibility of being really existing, and considered that it was Heidegger who had shaped philosophically this humanization of death. Death lost its absolute character to reveal only the human and nothing more than that. However, that loss acquires a sense

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of the absurd, and therein lies Sartre’s view, critical of Heidegger and Rilke. According to Heidegger, strictly speaking it is only lawful to attribute death as an empirical certainty; it is an undeniable “experience fact.” It will happen to us, but we do not know when. This “certainty” is more original than any other we have in the world of objects, even in the formal world. Hence, the sense of possibility that Heidegger gives to death—“true and at the same time indeterminate, that is, possible each instant.” It is why it represents the most peculiar, irreverent, certain possibility, and as such, is indeterminate and unsurpassable for Dasein. It is a possibility that is located far away from anything real, that is, that does not give anything to “perform” to Dasein—“Death is the possibility of impossibility of any existence at all,” said Heidegger. For Sartre, the possibility of death means only that, from the biological point of view, I am a relatively closed, isolated system, indicating my body’s membership to all of existing beings—death is a fact among others, as we had already seen in Paz. It is something that will happen to us sooner or later. For this reason, Sartre believed that we could not be waiting for it to come. We cannot wait for our death because this waiting contradicts the freedom in which the human project resides. To the extent that death is looming, unforeseen, precise, and obeying randomly, it cannot be considered chance, since it simply destroys all possibilities. As Sartre (1993, 560, italics in original) said, death is “an always possible nihilation of my possibilities, which is outside my possibilities.” Given that Sartre characterizes “being for oneself” as being insofar as it temporizes, i.e., insofar as human reality is significant, in a way that what is is revealed by what is not (life is to-come-of-itself), and to the extent that our life is nothing but waiting for the realization of our goals, but above all waiting for ourselves, death removes all significance of life; it becomes, as Paz said, absurd. Sartre’s “being for itself” is always claiming a “later” because of what it builds over time, as we have seen. Death removes any possibility for our lives to have meaning. 29 While life contemplates its own sense, it is always in postponement and has, in essence, a power of self-criticism and auto-metamorphosis. For the “dead life,” instead, the dice are already cast, nothing will happen, except its sense that can be modified from the outside. In this way, my death is absurd; others will make of my life a “posthumous existence,” as Sartre called it, i.e., it will have another meaning. Death is not only an annihilation always possible from my possible, which destroys all projects and is a project that destroys itself, but is also “the triumph of the point of view of other over the point of view which I am towards myself” (Sartre 1993, 563, italics in original). We must pass, as well as at the moment in which we secure the death of others. What we have been, regardless of what we wanted and carried out, will depend on those who survive us. My death ends up being, in appreciation of the other, a collective, integrated into the story that it deems. On the contrary and in an-

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other moment of the foregoing, the past becomes responsibility for those who live, since it depends on the value of their events. The past is part of our memory, like we are part of the memory of others. In a word, and as Sartre (1993, 567) surprisingly stated , he who is alive decides the death of others—“to die is to be condemned [. . .] to exist only through the other, and to owe him one’s meaning and the very meaning of one’s victory.” Sartre believes that the relationship with the dead is an essential structure of the fundamental relationship called “being-for-others.” For this reason, death is both a single issue and a collective one. My death comprises necessarily something different from me, totally contingent on the existence of the other. NOTES 1. In the book Árbol adentro (1988), we find the poem “1930: Vistas fijas,” whose first verse reads “¿Qué o quién me guiaba? No buscaba nada ni nadie, buscaba todo y a todos” (“What or who was guiding me? I was not looking for anything or anyone, I was looking for everything and everyone”) (Paz OC, VII: 624). Aurelia Valero (2015, 371) is mistaken when stating that José Gaos introduced existentialism in Mexico, when Paz, and in general the group of poets called “Contemporáneos,” already knew about it. The Mexican philosopher Emilio Uranga equal noted the same in the 1950s. Otherwise, unlike the group of Mexican intellectuals called “Hyperion,” encouraged by José Gaos and Samuel Ramos, Paz never embraced the proposals of Sartrean existentialism, as we shall see later. In his first writings, Sartre would have followed the Germanic model of his masters, i.e., “philosophy like a tongue-twister,” said Paz. Either way, Paz did not fail to recognize Heidegger and Sartre’s influence on existentialism, but his admiriation for Albert Camus and his recognition of Maurice MerleauPonty were something else entirely. 2. Enrico Mario Santí has documented the arrival of the first translations of Heidegger’s books in Mexico, especially during the 1940s, in the well-known Seneca publishing, which Paz surely consulted, since it is where he would publish the controversial anthology of modern poetry in the Spanish language, Laurel (1941), in collaboration with Xavier Villaurrutia, Emilio Prados, and Juan Gil-Albert. In 1997, Santí (2016, 270) notes that there has not yet been a good chronology of events of the “Mexican connection to Heidegger.” Seneca published the Heideggerian text that appeared in “Cruz y Raya” in 1941, while Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry was published in 1944, followed by The Essence of the Foundation, translated by David G. Bacca (Gaos discusses Bacca’s ability as a translator in his prologue to his translation of Heidegger’s Being and Time). 3. It is interesting to note that Paz read Heidegger’s text long before Sartre, who would read Corbin’s translation in 1939 (Hayman, 1987). Sartre’s biographer claims that conditions were present for this event to occur; readers must understand the links between history and destiny. At that time, Sartre was interested in the Heideggerian notion of “creature of distances” to refer to the human being, as we shall see later in this chapter. A later translation of this Heideggerian text was done in 1932, for Raimundo Lida in the magazine Sur, in Buenos Aires, and Paz was also familiar with it. 4. Louis Panabière (1996, 308) has demonstrated the precise relationship that exists between Being and Time and Cuesta’s poem “Canto a un dios mineral” (1942)—“Husserl and Heidegger taught this generation that it was still possible to think outside the relationships of production and outside of enlightened mysticism. The encounter with the being-there, facing time, against the death of language, represented for Cuesta a whole discovery.”

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5. Paz (OC, VIII: 666) confesses that at the time of writing El laberinto de la soledad he had not yet read the essay by Ramos but had instead read some essays by Borges on aspects of the character and language of the Argentines. In contrast to Ramos’ psychological analysis, Paz proposed a “book of social, political, and psychological criticism” within the French tradition of “moralism.” He wanted to make a book of “moral critique” that “descubriera el mundo de represiones, inhibiciones, recuerdos, apetitos y sueños que ha sido y es México” (“discovered the world of repressions, inhibitions, memories, appetites, and dreams that has been and is Mexico”). 6. Perhaps extremely resentful of Carlos Fuentes’ mockeries of ontological language in the late 1950s, Uranga (2016, 141), in his rant against Sartre on the occasion of his death in 1980, compared him to the Mexican writer, seeking to lower the measure of his celebrity—“But there is still more, Sartre is a writer, like Fuentes, but also a great writer, meanwhile he is not, neither was, nor will he be except for the torrential volume of his ‘works’, I mean, of his ‘leftovers’.” Fuentes declared in turn that Uranga had become an official spokesman for the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) in 1969, in a letter to Paz in which he labeled him a “cockroach,” referring to his publication the “Móndrigo,” where he criticized several intellectuals and writers from the half-century generation who were “non-aligned” (Sheridan 2017, n.p.). 7. In an interview with Cesar Salgado, “Poetry of Circumstances” (1998), Paz indicates, perhaps misremembering, that he first met with Heidegger’s works in Spanish in France, and that Gaos’ Spanish translation of Being and Time was the first into another language, which is not correct; the first traslation into another language was in 1942, into Japanese. 8. In the short text “Homage to a Starfish,” Cortázar held that Paz was precisely a “starfish that condenses the reasons for our presence on Earth,” besides being a “presocratic in the most daring sense of a term that will bring a smile to those who bathe too much in the river of history and of ‘progress’,” so “Paz’s thinking ascends towards the total song of the Being, like his poetry is an obstinate search for the extreme sense of things: woman, bird, Mexican destiny, the future of Latin America” (Cortázar 1988, 29). 9. Paz once commented that he became Gaos’ student. “Conversaciones con Octavio Paz/surrealismo,” https://youtu.be/_8XxKzKx1Yw (consulted on 03-15-2018). 10. Emilio Uranga’s testimony (2016, 69) reveals how German thinking went downhill in the late 1950s among the members of the Hyperion Group. He says so based on his experience in Germany, where he attended Heidegger’s “courses”—“I read Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking?, and Husserl’s tome in Krisis. But I read everything as one who reads an old love story already hopelessly over.” The time of ontology had come to an end, and the Mexican thinker pointed out that the time for politics, morality, and the “pollution” of philosophy on the street, among men, was set in confusion. All this essentialist philosophy would have remained, at best, as a memento, a “museum past,” while what is kept alive goes “creating a painting, making verses, or writing a novel and an autobiography.” In less than a decade, interest in the German thinker, as well as in French existentialism, fell apart, and the enthusiasm that Gaos’ translation of Being and Time had provoked withered. Interest in Heidegger in Spanish would return in the mid-1970s, thanks to the dissemination of the hermeneutical work of one of his most prominent disciples, Hans-George Gadamer, and to postmodern thought in the hands of Gianni Vattimo, the North American philosopher Richard Rorty, and the German thinker Jürgen Habermas. 11. Aurelia Valero (2015, 325) details the garagantuan task José Gaos undertook in his translation of Being and Time. It took almost 24 years, according to Uranga, when the Spaniard had to determine the meaning of the verb “to be” to better understand the central notion of “Dasein.” Work was done line by line, and each line was tested at conferences and courses, including feedback from discussion with his students and the insertion in advance of the sonority of Heideggerian expressions in classrooms at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (see also Gaos 1996, 11). Gaos created neologisms that were instilled for life into Spanish, linked to “temporary,” and “exis-

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tential,” in unison with the translated work. Moreover, in the introduction to the Heideggerian work, Gaos placed an extensive “index of translations” which shows the complicated terms of this “philological” or “linguistic” philosophy and the “agreements” of meaning to which he came. Uranga (2016, 42) recognizes that without this task by Gaos, Heidegger’s essential work would not have been translated into Spanish for years. 12. The interspersed quote is a Heideggerian phrase. 13. Even though there is the concept of “negativity” in Heidegger, Paz did not analyze it. Perhaps it would have changed his view of the “Hegelian dialectic.” Julia Kristeva (1974:101) shows brilliantly this concept and its implications for the literary avant-garde of the twentieth century. In Hegel, the principle of organizational process is equally distinguished from denial, like “nothingness.” It represents mediation, the overcoming of the “pure abstractions” that are being and nothingness, its “overcoming in the concrete where the two are only moments.” The same should occur with all categories that form a contemplative or speculative system. Ultimately, negativity becomes a “free subject” in the ethical order; it produces a subject in process—“A subject immersed in negativity ceases to be an entity exterior to objective negativity, a transcendent unit, a specifically regimented monad, but is situated as the ‘most interior and the most objective moment of life and of spirit’” (Kristeva 1974, 103, the interspersed quotes are Hegel’s). Kristeva points out that this principle’s maximum performance is when materialism transforms it, in a limited way, in any way, a concept of revolutionary human activity, and in the concept of the objectivity of social and natural laws. 14. Heidegger (2002, 158) could not agree that boredom or wariness (he calls it “undisturbed equanimity,” “the inhibited discontent of everyday heedfulness”) can be approximations to the nothingness he theorizes; in these conditions the Dasein “becomes tired of itself” and is assumed as “burden” in the sense of “delivered to existence.” 15. Paz’s poem (OC, VIII: 623) dedicated to surrealism, included in Árbol adentro, is entitled “this and this and this,” and reads “El surrealismo ha sido el escupitajo en la hostia y el clavel de dinamita/ en el confesonario y el sésamo ábrete de las cajas de seguridad y/ de las rejas de los manicomios [. . .] El surrealismo ha sido el clavo ardiente en la frente del geómetra y el/ viento fuerte que a media noche levanta las sábanas de las vírgenes [. . .] El surrealismo ha sido las botas de siete leguas de los escapados de las/ prisiones de la razón dialéctica y el hacha de Pulgarcito que corta los/ nudos de la enredadera venenosa que cubre los muros de las/ revoluciones petrificadas del siglo XX [. . .].” (“Surrealism has been the spit on the communion wafer and the dynamite carnation/ in the confessional and the open sesame of safe boxes and/ on asylum bars [. . .] Surrealism has been the burning nail in the geometrician’s forehead and the/ strong wind that at midnight raises the sheets of virgins [. . .] Surrealism has been the seven-league boots of those who escaped from the/ prisons of dialectical reason and Tom Thumb’s axe that cuts the/ knots in the poisonous vine that covers the walls of the/ petrified revolutions of the twentieth century [. . .]”). 16. Paz turns to Baudelaire insistently on this subject: “The highest and most philosophical of our faculties is the imagination,” the French poet would have said. Imagination has created “at the beginning of the world, analogy and metaphor.” With “kneaded materials and arranged according to rules whose origins can only be found in the depths of the soul, it creates a new world, the feeling of the new” (Baudelaire 1980, 751). Imagination is the “Queen of Truth,” being the possible one of its “provinces.” Moreover, it is positively “linked” to infinity. 17. Even so, Stanton says that at the end of his life, Paz came to regret a “negative view of the technique that still had weight in 1956.” 18. In fact, one of the first cultural programs on Mexican television, in the 1950s, was “Mexican Talks,” where the legendary intellectual José Vasconcelos, the promoter of Mexican muralism and the creator of the Public Education Agency, and a candidate for the Mexican presidency in 1929, offered his opinion on several domestic issues,

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some of them very controversial, such as the issue of the Mexican oil industry, which can be seen on the site https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwW30IktLFA19. This poem reads “Óyeme con los ojos,/ Ya que están tan distantes los oídos,/ Y de ausentes enojos/ En ecos de mi pluma mis gemidos;/ Y ya que a ti no llega mi voz ruda,/ Óyeme sordo, pues me quejo muda.” (“Let your eyes listen to me,/ Since your ears are so far away,/ And distracted anger/ In echoes of my pen my groans;/ And since my rough voice doesn’t reach you,/ Listen to me deaf one, since I complain silently”). 20. These reasons contrast with those offered by Santí, since it is what Paz sought and secured, after all, in a humanistic sense. 21. See analogous judgment in Itinerario (1993), a schematic retelling he did of his own life. 22. It is interesting that Paz, who appreciated the topic, did not highlight two works that Sartre dedicated to the imagination, evidently inspired by Kant and Hegel— Imagination (1936), and The Imaginary: Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (1940). 23. Karl Löwith (2009, 9) had the same appreciation for the French poet. “It was mainly for the Cahiers that it became clear to me that the poet and writer Valéry is a thinker, and that he is an absolutely free thinker, absolutely independent of all traditions rooted in and converted into conventions. Valéry realized that these traditions no longer withstand critical analysis and indignation or indefatigable skepticism.” 24. In fact, the subject does not date from a Hegelian “dialectical” philosophy of history but from one formulated a century earlier, in the version of enlightened optimism—a new “faith” about the idea of progress, already formulated by someone like Turgot in 1750, as Camus noted (1978, 180) in his lucid essay, to which Sartre objected—“When you are sure that tomorrow, within the order of the world, will be better than today, it is possible to have fun in peace. [. . .] To the slave, to those whose present is miserable and they do not find consolation, they are assured that the future, at least, belongs to them. The future is the only class of property that masters willingly accord to slaves.” As we can see, in this vision, the now, the moment, is also denied, for the sake of a future full of uncertainties, yet “inevitable.” Camus pointed out that it is all a consequence of nineteenth-century bourgeois thinking, a divinization of history—and pariah after all—in which the proletariat is a “redeeming Christ,” capable of embodying the whole of humanity through its extreme dispossession of itself, so that one day it will be and have everything. The criticism of Camus (1978, 193) is similar to Paz’s—against the prophecy of the establishment of a future benefactor for all, by whatever means, there is no momentary suffering “In that noisy Jerusalem of wonderful machines, who will remember but the voice of the flayed one?” 25. In one of the most memorable photos of the French philosopher, he is seen walking through the desert of North Africa with the sun behind him, so he seems to be walking into his shadow. 26. “The idea that there is a unique subject in national history—‘the Mexican’—is a powerful cohesive illusion; its structuralist or functionalist version, which thinks less of the Mexican as a subject and more as a specific texture—‘the Mexican’—is also part of the cultural processes of political legitimation of the modern state. The definition of ‘the Mexican’ is rather a description of how it is dominated and, above all, of the way in which exploitation is legitimized” (Bartra 1996, 20). 27. Paz (1990, 51) has never been based on the notion of “postmodernism” (“denominación equívoca y contradictoria [. . .]. Llamarse posmoderno es una manera más bien ingenua de decir que somos muy modernos”) (“a misleading, contradictory denomination [. . .]. To call ourselves postmodern is a rather naive way of saying that we are very modern”). The truth is that his critical approaches fit in well with the postmodern idea of the presence of the past in the present. 28. For details about the differences and similarities between Paz and the “Contemporáneos,” see the critical adjustment that Paz made in “Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y obra,” a foreword to the anthology that Paz wrote for this Mexican poet,

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the author of Dama de corazones (1928); and in the essay “Contemporáneos,” from the book Generaciones y semblanzas. Modernistas y modernos (1989). 29. Paz remembers his reaction when he learned of Villaurrutia’s death—“We cannot say anything in the face of that which says nothing. Death is the universal insignification, the great refutation of our languages and our reasons.”

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Paz was overwhelmingly fascinated by the avant-garde artistic movements, in which he found the possibility of finding both an aesthetic and a language. He discovered “an erotica, a policy, a vision of the world, an action: a lifestyle.” By embracing the avant-garde, Paz intended to transform rather than interpret reality. For Paz, it was a direct incorporation of Karl Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. This passion would split into two seemingly contrasting yet inseparable directions—magic/poetry, and politics. One of Paz’s controversial within the avant-garde movement was Leon Trotsky. Well known and scrutinized for his political musings, Trotsky was also a lover of art and avant-garde poetry. Paz’s text on Trotsky as an intellectual Soviet politician facing the suicide of Esenin seems exemplary because it displays clearly the condition of the contemporary poet facing irrational, absolute power, but within the contradictory condition of a hegemonic political party. It is the poet’s fundamental contradiction at a time when he was to be marginalized, harassed, enclosed, and killed, as were many poets in the former Soviet Union. Paz (OC, I: 384) saw in the USSR something not only exceptional but exaggerated, a country where “contradiction took on an abominable nature”—“los poetas que no fueron asesinados o que no cometieron suicidio fueron reducidos al silencio por otros medios” (“poets who were not murdered or who did not commit suicide were silenced by other means”). For example, Paz believed that Trotsky considered Mayakovsky as a tragic Bohemian who betrayed his subconscious feelings towards nature, the city, and the world. For Paz, Mayakovsky was not a socialist revolutionary; rather, his works were linked to futuristic trends that exalted technique, scientific organization, machine, and planning.

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The incongruent outbursts of mysticism from poets living at the time of the socialist revolution seemed to occur because poets felt they were channeling old religions while also challenging them, i.e., the Christian and pre-Christian spirit before the dismantling of Christianity, operated by critical philosophy. Religious influence fed the cultivation of analogy, alchemy, magic, syncretism, and personal mythologies. Modern men reacted against religion (and themselves) using irony. Paz found these contradictions in Trotsky, who emphasized the religious aspects in the works of the majority of the Soviet poets and writers of the 1920s. To these writers, the revolution was not a revolutionary fact but Russian facts that were inserted into the traditional and religious world of peasants and their old mythologies of witches and spells. Trotsky was referring to Pilnyak and Blok. Paz believed that the Soviet literature of that time was a rift between “witches’ incantations” and the satire of the futurists. Trotsky recognized such, but he also condemned it for the sake of modern criticism, which is unable to understand how the ambiguity of the poets allowed us to see in magic and the revolution two parallel paths to change the world. Paz (OC, I: 386) noted that Novalis and Rimbaud had already raised the point—“La vocación mágica de la poesía moderna, desde Blake hasta nuestros días, no es sino la otra cara, la vertiente oscura, de su vocación revolucionaria. Este es el nudo del equivoco entre revolucionarios y poetas, un nudo que nadie ha podido deshacer” (“The magic vocation of modern poetry from Blake to our own time is nothing but the other side, the dark aspect, of its revolutionary calling. Here lies the basis of the misunderstanding between revolutionaries and poets, which no one has been able to clear up”). Paz saw two deadly risks; if the poet denied the magic half, he would become a servant and propagandist, but at the same time, magic could devour his faith and lead to suicide. Paz (OC, I: 383) believed that the surrealists would be heirs to the romantics and to the Gnostics of the fourth century. Romanticism and the avant-garde, son movimientos juveniles; ambos son rebeliones contra la razón, sus construcciones y sus valores; en ambos el cuerpo, sus pasiones y sus visiones—erotismo, sueño, inspiración—ocupan un lugar cardinal; ambos son tentativas por destruir la realidad visible para encontrar o inventar otra—mágica, sobrenatural, superreal. (both are movements of the young; both rebel against reason, its constructs and its values; both grant a cardinal place to the passions and visions of the body—eroticism, dream, inspiration; both attempt the destruction of visible reality in order to find or invent another one, magical, supernatural, and more than real).

Both movements grew from and were torn apart by resounding social and political moments. The French Revolution, the Jacobin Terror, and

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the Napoleonic Empire made way for romanticism, while the historical avant-garde preceded the Russian Revolution, the purges, and the bureaucratic Caesarism of Stalin. In both cases, the “self” defended himself in the world through irony or humor. Both time periods reflected a modernity that would be denied and affirmed at the same time. These ruptures refused to keep the tradition alive; only in the vanguards would it linger, to close that tradition. Paz (OC, I: 388), considered that the opposition between the revolutionary and the poetic spirit is part of a greater contradiction—the linear time of modernity versus the rhythmic time of the poem: “Abolición del ayer, el hoy y el mañana en las conjugaciones y copulaciones del lenguaje. La literatura moderna es una apasionada negación de la era moderna” (“Abolition of yesterday, today, and tomorrow in the conjoinings and couplings of language. Modern literature is an impassioned rejection of the modern age”). Like the romantics and the symbolists, twentieth-century poets have opposed the linear progression of time and history—“el tiempo instantáneo del erotismo, el tiempo cíclico de la analogía o el tiempo hueco de la conciencia irónica” (“the instantaneous time of eroticism, the cyclical time of analogy, or the hollow time of ironic consciousness”)—and made possible the prevalence of image and humor. Paz (OC, I: 389) said that, like for romanticism-era poets, the history of contemporary poetry had been one of “subversiones, conversiones, abjuraciones, herejías, desviaciones” (“subversion, conversions, abjurations, heresies, aberrations”), words that have a cruel, painful counterpart— “persecución, destierro, asilo de locos, suicidio, prisión, humillación, soledad” (“persecution, exile, insane asylum, suicide, prison, humiliation, solitude”). Paz knew of Victor Serge, whom he had met in person. Lenin had appointed Serge as secretary of the Third International, and Stalin sent him to Siberia. He was responsible for translating Trotsky’s works into French. To other sources that Paz read on the Soviet reality of the 1930s, we can add an important article published by Serge (2010) in 1938 in Partisan Review, “Puissances et limits du marxisme,” which certainly had an effect on him, according to Guillermo Sheridan. After denouncing the bureaucracy of the Soviet state and the way in which Bolshevism was “totalitarian, despotic, immoral and intolerant,” Serge argued that socialism needed to regain its democratic, libertarian meaning, including the validity of traditional democratic freedoms, because, We have seen, we still see the indescribable spectacle of the black terror, permanently established in the USSR. We have seen the cult of “the Beloved Leader,” the corruption of the intellectuals and the workers’ organisations abroad, the systematic lies broadcast by a huge journalistic apparatus which still calls itself Communist, the secret police of Moscow murdering or kidnapping its adversaries as far away as Spain and Switzerland. We have seen this gangrene spread throughout revo-

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Like Tina Modotti, the famous communist Italian photographer, Serge reportedly died of a heart attack in Mexico, but both were surely annihilated by the political fury they denounced. The duality of linear time and cyclic time come into play alongside the dualities of magic–politics, love–humor, and art–life, all essential components of the surrealists. Erotic statements and ironic denials are exemplified in the book Paz dedicated to Marcel Duchamp, whose resolution is called “meta-irony,” “a kind of suspension of the mood, beyond claim and denial.” Unlike irony, which finds interest in devaluing the object, meta-irony is interested in its symbolic functioning. More than a reversal of values, meta-irony is a “liberación moral y estética que pone los opuestos en comunicación” (“moral and aesthetic liberation that puts opposites in communication”). Duchamp closes romantic irony similarly to Joyce, “another poet of comic-erotic cosmogony,” says Paz. For both poets, the exercise in criticism becomes creation. Irony is a critique of the subject that looks, and of the regarded object, whereas meta-irony is a “critical language and what speaks in language: the myths and rites of man.” Both artistic styles represent the limits of the tradition of modernity, its extreme condition, its end—“con ellas y en ellas la modernidad, al realizarse, se acaba” (“with them and in them, when modernity is achieved, it is over”). This exercise in meta-irony frees “a las cosas de su carga de tiempo y a los signos de sus significados; es un poner en circulación a los opuestos, una animación universal en la que cada cosa vuelve a ser su contrario. No un nihilismo, sino una desorientación: el lado de acá se confunde con el lado de allá” (“objects from their burden of time, and signs from their meanings; it sets opposites in circulation; it is a universal animation in which everything turns back into its contrary. Not nihilism but disorientation: the side facing us is the side away from us”) (Paz OC, I: 391). In many ways, Paz learned from Hegelian thought about opposites and contradictions: the presence of the absolute in the relative and the movement that encompasses them, the way in which these opponents arrive at a superior synthesis. If the traditional logic of the Aristotelian style has served to formulate properly arguments and general scientific knowledge, ways of thought such as the Heraclitean–Hegelian dialectic serve as a means to think through the processes of image construction and reception not exhausted by the so-called Marxist dogmatic “dialectical logic.” Paz considered that Hegelian logic explains partially what happens in the poetic image, since what results from an opposing relationship is not always something that exceeds tension in a successful synthesis. The first contradictory term may have “devoured” the second, or the second may have neutralized the first, or there is a third possibility

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that the two hostile elements are “face to face,” irreducible. For this reason, “a pesar de que muchas imágenes se despliegan conforme al orden hegeliano, casi siempre se trata más bien de una semejanza que de una verdadera identidad” (“even though many images are displayed according to the Hegelian order, it is almost always a resemblance rather than a real identity”). There is no denial of reality for the sake of abstraction, simplification, and totalization. Poetry best preserves ambiguity and contradiction, the wide versatility of meanings. It represents the best perspectivist angle that does justice to the plurality of points of view on reality, referring to its deepest dynamic nature—to be in constant transformation or mutation. It reflects a conversion of what it is into something else, never a complete reality resting in the eternity of the existence of divinely created things. Therefore, it is the poetic image that cannot be reduced to what Paz identifies as “Hegelian logic,” which seeks to preserve the principle of contradiction—“a visible inability to digest the contradictoriness of reality.” The poem achieves the preservation of opposites feeding each other, still existing in themselves and undefeated in the merging into a greater reality, although it puts an end to their final identity. They exist at the same time as themselves and as what they oppose. Paz calls it a “reconciliation,” a notion that is very important not only in his poetry but also in his ethics—and is present in his first essays and poems. Understanding that this dynamic does not simplify opposites, nor subsume them, nor reduce them to each other, nor alter their uniqueness in the relationship established between them, was something Paz believed Western thought could not fully achieve. For Paz, reconciliation was a “wall” that Western thought was not able to “jump over or punch through.” According to Paz, the art–life duality takes on other forms, such as the antagonism between the absolute and the relative, or between the word and history, without which it may be resolved or dissolved. Borrowing ideas from surrealism, Paz recalled that there was duality in the works of Arthur Rimbaud. For Rimbaud, the “alchemy of the verb is a poetic method to change human nature,” meaning that the poetic word comes before an historical event, is “a multiplier of the future.” Thus, poetry not only produces new psychic states, or free nations (such as revolutions) but, like with romanticism and surrealism, also has the mission of inventing a new eroticism and changing passionate relationships between men and women. Poetry is presented as a bridge between utopian thinking and reality. In Platonic and Hegelian terms, it is “the embodiment of the idea.” For this reason, poetry comes to be the real revolution, putting an end to the discord between history and the idea. Historical, artistic avant-garde demanded the necessity of creating a new art, although its richness and diversity lies precisely in how it is understood. They agreed on the act of the rupture, radical change with the past, and inaugurated what Paz did not hesitate to call an “auroral

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aesthetic,” as the text “Rupturas y restauraciones” (1994) exemplifies. Vanguards coincided in time—the first third of the twentieth century— but disagreed on styles, materials, and purposes. Still, they represented an artistic and spiritual revolution. Paz talks about a vision in each of them—intended to be an “absolute rupture and absolute beginning,” they were debtors of past visions (Breton appropriates several artists from the past as examples of the debt or continuity of surrealism). Paz did not hesitate to place the events of the avant-garde at the core of the transformations and crises that modernity would suffer beginning in the second decade of the past century, marked by the “fading” on the horizon of the “star of progress and the future,” which ceased to be a promise and became something “impenetrable and reporting,” capable of taking “all forms and none.” That is to say, Paz did not let go of the theme of a rupture with the past and the collapse of an understanding of linear time, or the emergence of other visions of it, where there would be a place for the presence and intensity of the present in detriment to a future full of false promises. The events of time, history, and postindustrial societies marked new milestones for understanding culture and art in general. Paz quotes Baudelaire, who founded modern art “not on eternal or metahistorical principles but on temporality.” Art seeks the new, and the unusual is part of the tragedy of modernity, which “se identifica con el movimiento y la mutación, sabe que es hija del tiempo y, al saberlo, tiene conciencia de su mortalidad” (“is identified with movement and mutation, knowing it is the daughter of time, which makes it aware of its mortality”). Therefore, modern art ends up being more alive and more moving precisely because it is the movement’s form. In modern art, we find the “transcript of life” in ceaseless mutation—art linked to liveliness, relativity, and finitude. TEMPORALITY In addition to the idea of a rupture from the past, the notion of art is linked with the exploration of the unknown. New territories in the arts were discovered in the past century, then spread and colonized until they were widely disseminated, which contributed anyway to their present decline. Indeed, avant-garde art meant breaking with tradition immediately—characterized by violence in attitudes and programs, and radicalism in its works (as we have seen, it was Sartre and Trotsky’s major objection to this artistic movement). Paz saw the exasperation, the speed with which avant-garde artists reached their limit and clashed with themselves, wearing themselves out in less than half a century. Each new limit was followed by a transgression, until it reached its consummation. The breaks and shifts that happened over several generations also occurred in the individual lives of the artists. Each artist embodies his time, speaks of

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his time, which is why the avant-garde have been an “intensification of the aesthetics of change.” What resulted was a questioning of the very notion of rupture and change, as well as the notion of a work of art. Temporality is a feature of the avant-garde artists that Paz highlighted. These artists radicalized and exaggerated “the central note of artistic modernity.” While the romantic stands on the contemplation of the past—present in ruins—the futuristic artist praises “imaginary architectures of the future.” Paz (OC, IV: 77) refers to Baudelaire as key to understanding the most revolutionary feature of the avant-garde—time lacking ground and goal, which is nothing more than a “corriente ciega que, sin descansar nunca, hace, deshace y rehace mundos” (“blind flux that, never at rest, makes, unmakes and remakes worlds”). The avant-garde artist can be faced only with the possibility of being. What he is looking for is a “metaphor of time,” i.e., the movement, which paints in its most extreme form, such as speed and acceleration. He uses a “static art” that seeks to pause, “making visible the secret logic that unites or contrasts lines, volumes and colors.” Feeling and logic brought forth the first vanguard and explained his abomination for the “new” in a frenetic search for the future, showing his preference for the unknown, the surprising and unusual. Paz (OC, II: 154) notes that, for the avant-garde, time is not understood as a sequence or succession but “como la presencia constante, aunque invisible, de un presente inocente” (“as the constant presence, although invisible, of an innocent present”). The future is only interesting as a territory of the unexpected. Therefore, the destruction of the world could only lead to an expected emergence of real time, natural time governed by desire. This type of approach fueled the idea of a communist–libertarian society in which there would be no contradiction between myths and utopias, poetry and revolutionary programs—the most ancient past and the distant future joined naturally in the spirit of surrealism. Paz notes that, while abstractionism and cubism reached beyond visible forms that embodied archetypes and timeless essences—“time ceases to flow in these compositions, which are a kind of artistic syllogisms”— surrealism, the last of the avant-garde movements, referred to the temporality of human passion—“Man possessed by desire” and “its delirious constructions”; the axis constantly creates and destroys itself. Yet these artists existed in the demands of the now; they made art of the now. The cult of the new was the result of the radical break with tradition inaugurated by the Renaissance (and the discovery of non-European, even more primitive cultures; Picasso and Gauguin—who influenced Diego Rivera—and Breton, were attracted by primitive art manifestations). According to Paz, it explains why they ended up destroying the human figure and its centrality in artistic representations, as well as the vision of the landscape. The avant-garde puts into doubt the presence recreated by the Renaissance, sensitive and ideal, to the extent of destroying it. Presence

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and appearance shall never again coincide. It was destruction that was at the same time creation, a revelation of the unknown side of reality and the incorporation of other marginal cultures—“En suma, arcaísmo y futurismo, esencialismo y descenso a las cavernas del inconsciente: el abanico entero de la temporalidad” (“In sum, archaism and futurism, essentialism and a descent into the caverns of the unconscious: the full range of temporality”) (Paz OC, IV: 78). In the end, Paz seems to think that what the avant-garde were looking for was a new basis for time—different from the ideas that had come from antiquity—the non-time of eternity. Artistic and spiritual revolution set off an approach toward an absolute break and a new beginning. Paz remembers that Baudelaire did not like the term “avant-garde,” preferring to employ neutral terms such as “modern” and “modernity.” The Mexican poet was thus able to differentiate avant-garde from modernity, the first being an aspect of the second, without causing confusion. Baudelaire saw “restorations,” ruptures from and continuities of styles from the past that the vanguard movement no longer tolerated, even when such returns could have been real beginnings. Contemporary social revolutions like the one in Russia ended up becoming despotic, and the aesthetic revolutions of the avant-garde ended up at the academy and the museum, and on the financial market (speculative art), as well as in mass culture. Paz considered that what put an end to the avant-garde was both commodification and the emergence of consumption societies. The autonomy of painting ran parallel to the birth of contemporary museums and the consolidation of the critic as a profession, as well as the development of the collector, such as Peggy Guggenheim, the creator of the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Duchamp advised Guggenheim on the purchase of some of the first surrealist artworks (the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska offered this testimony, although relayed via literary fiction, in her 2011 book Leonora), which led to one of the first exhibitions of the avant-garde. Nothing could stop the revolutionary avant-garde from entering the art market, which began to consolidate by the end of the 1940s. The individual character of the artwork corresponded to the radicalization of individualism that began invariably to orient contemporary art, leading to the possibility of a strong subjective appraisal, which then led to the exclusive enjoyment by wealthy elites and collectors who gave the works a monetary value. Prior to this situation, works of art had been quoted as high. Art then became “transportable,” says Paz, adding to the scope of what is consumable; objects “already seen,” “read,” and “reviewed.” In this sense, and for the common spectator, the knowledge of artwork is part of a journal or index that makes up part of the visit to any museum. It creates a desire that one must see but not necessarily fully understand the work. It is something that the avant-garde sought, but it has had the negative consequence of turning art into an accessory in a

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magazine or cultural supplement. The deliberate misunderstanding included in the works has effectively made them representations of the only puzzle of our time, their translation into money: Ambivalencia del cuadro: es arte, objeto único; es mercancía, cosa que podemos transportar y colgar en esta o aquella pared. Nada más natural que una sociedad que adora las cosas y que ha hecho del intercambio económico la forma más alta de la comunicación, edifique museos y multiplique las colecciones privadas: son la contrapartida de los bancos y los almacenes. (The ambivalence of the painting: it is art, a unique object; it is a commodity, something that we carry and hang it on this or that wall. Nothing more natural in a society that adores things and has made economic exchange into the highest form of communication, build museums and grow private collections: they are the counterpart to banks and stores) (Paz OC, IV: 47).

Paz judged less harshly the relationship between contemporary societies and the artist, stating that the idea of art as an interchangeable market good should not be met with shock and condemnation but rather with exaltation—“Nuestra sociedad exalta al pintor y a sus obras a condición de transformarlos en objetos de cambio” (“Our society exalts the painter and his works, transforming them into objects of exchange”). Despite radical criticism, it is the essence of the avant-garde movement—the works ended up on the collectible art and museum market. Paz celebrated the open gate that ushered in the surrealist spirit, with its reclamation of the sense of liberation; one’s relationship with life, and even personal revelation seemed to end behind the last avant-garde. Consumerism seemed to isolate surrealism from the continuum of life and the energy of societies, so a critique of the modern aesthetic cannot be separated from a critique of the consumer society and its commercialism. Unique artwork fell into a pattern of reproducibility, thus annihilating the enigma of art. As Walter Benjamin denounced in his criticism of the changing paradigms in photography: changes that prove to be the end of a medium or work of art result in a “relocation” of thought, creating shifts and new endings for certain ideas about art and imagination. The “end of art” is the result of its objectification, echoing one of Hegel’s notions of that. According to Paz, the reification of art, a result of its becoming a “fetishism of things,” or “only fanaticism for things,” occurred when the art viewer also became its consumer, and therefore its co-creator. The experience and modern aesthetic reception causes a spectator to interact in the “game” of artistic creation, as is seen in the hermeneutic insight embraced by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. For Gadamer, the new foundation of truth in art brings forth the idea that a viewer becomes a part of the artwork through appreciative and interpretive games. In this sense, art brought back to life, and seen as it

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should be viewed, can only be “resolved in the fiesta,” according to Paz, who introduces a new anthropological dimension of art through the emergence of fiesta, play, and games. The theory is similar to the one presented by Gadamer, who relied on this contemporary condition of art in general in his book The Relevance of the Beautiful: Art as Play, Symbol and Festival (1977). Thanks to the principle of analogy, and to the experience of contemplation, a work of art can become an open sign that each viewer complements. Art creates a situation that tends to fill the void of loneliness in a “solitary society.” The artistic sign becomes a point of departure into another reality, “be it the presence of emptiness,” says Paz. Thus, the end of the avant-garde, signified by artwork as an object, led to the idea of art as a way to search for meaning. Art migrated from its status as an object to become a bridge between the viewer and that presence that always refers to it “without ever naming it at all.” The work of contemporary art would tend to disappear for the sake of mediation between the viewer and that reality–door–bridge–imagination to which it has always referred. 1 Fiesta and game refer to the question of time, since they are ways of being beyond the cumulative, sequential sense of modern time, “hijacked” and “improper,” in the Heideggerian meaning. If the avant-garde wanted to return to primitivism as a way to undo some of the foundations of modernity, by slowing down and embracing the idea of a fixed, immemorial time, current time should seek a “forma colectiva de consumir y consumar el tiempo” (“collective way to consume and consummate time”) (Paz OC, IV: 48). In this case, the meaning of fiesta would not be the primitive one—a ritual devoted to the celebration, or worship of the commemoration of a date, or a return to the original time—but, according to Paz, the “dissipation of time, production of oblivion” (italics in the original). Paz believed it could be achieved in those years, relying on a literary communitarian utopia, very close to the communist ideal. The resurrection of the fiesta is one of the outcomes of contemporary art because it suppresses several traditional oppositions within modernity, such as presence and representation, timeless and historical time, sign and object meaning. The fiesta is thus “una presentación, pero asimismo es una consumación: la presencia encarna sólo para repartirse y consumirse entre los comensales” (“a presentation, but also a consummation: the presence is embodied only to be distributed and consumed among diners”) (Paz OC, IV: 48). It is not far removed from the Catholic ceremony of the Eucharist, where the faithful share and assimilate the incarnate presence of God. Art creates the presence of eternity within the temporary or transitory in the absence of religion in contemporary societies. During his time in post-World War II Paris, Paz wrote his unforgettable El laberinto de la soledad, which includes a chapter on the ceremonies

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and rites, duels, and parties that allowed the lonely Mexican to open up briefly to others. The title of the book is the name for a moment in time. Fiesta breaks with a person’s solitude, allowing for an avenue of communication from one person to another and within oneself—it is spontaneous vivid poetry. In it, anything can happen, and with it comes an unexpected surprise. Fiesta deviates from reason, common sense, morals, and conventions and sends poetry to act. Essentially, it is poetry in action. Like poetry, a fiesta offers immediate release. It is a revolt of pure life, a return to recreation and participation, which inaugurates an enchanted world reinstating the pleasure principle. The events of the fiesta show how we can live when we suspend history—“el tiempo deja de ser sucesión y vuelve a ser lo que fue, y es, originariamente: un presente donde pasado y futuro al fin se reconcilian” (“time ceases to be succession and becomes again what it was, and is, originally: a present where past and future are at last reconciled”) (Paz 2010, 52). Space and time are transformed to make existence lighter, ethereal, and weightless. They are left levitating in the bustle of a community metamorphosed by moments. Space and time are not altered; they become impossible. For Paz, even a logic, or morality, in an economy of expenditure that does not exist in other social moments and is not confused with luxury, governs the hoarding, meaning the wastefulness of the celebration, the abundance or change from one season to another, beginning and end renewed in a mythical, sacred space. Paz (2010, 56) reiterates Rimbaud’s idea that time remains suspended, space is transformed into another site, order opens to chaos and ruptures identity, becoming a total derangement of the senses: Todo se comunica; se mezcla el bien con el mal, el dia con la noche, lo santo con lo maldito. Todo cohabita, pierde forma, singularidad, y vuelve al amasijo primordial. La Fiesta es una operación cósmica: la experiencia del Desorden, la reunión de los elementos y principios contradictorios para provocar el renacimiento de la vida. (Everything is connected; good and evil, day and night, the holy and the cursed are all mixed together. Everything cohabits, loses its shape and uniqueness and returns to the primordial jumble. A Fiesta is a cosmic operation: an experience of Disorder, a meeting of the elements and of contradictory principles to cause life to be reborn).

Fiesta, Paz continues, “denies society as an organic set of forms and different principles, but affirms it as a source of energy and creation.” At the fiesta, society “agrees with itself”; everybody dissolves into a personal “whirlwind.” Paz recognizes that in the Mexican male culture, the transgression that the fiesta represents is often frenetic, violent, and noisy. This belief creates a reaction of silence and isolation that resides in the “other days.” One becomes withdrawn into himself in apathy, reserva-

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tion, and distrust. He is hidden, masked, and becomes “a being of simulacrums.” Fiesta leaves him naked and creates an abyss within him, forcing him to the limit of confusion with his thoughtless or irrepressible impulses. It creates an urge to forge one strident voice that scares in the night yet sings to the beloved. The fiesta “cruzada por relámpagos y delirios, es como el revés brillante de nuestro silencio y apatía, de nuestra reserva y hosquedad” (“full of lightning and delusions, is like the shining opposite of our silence and apathy, our reservations and sullenness”) (Paz 2010, 54). Paz says that a nighttime fiesta can also become a “night of mourning,” and only a very sad nation could feel such throughout the year, almost every day. Each time we want to come out of ourselves, we are liberated from the impossible, allowed quick access to laughter, excitement, and luminosity. It becomes a way to forget about ourselves. A fiesta can also be recognized in any expression or communication with ourselves that turns out to be violent, harrowing. To the extent of unleashed violence, Paz guesses the nature of the Mexican, whose intimacy has unrecognized “embarrassing or terrible folds” and is made better by the fiesta that confronts death. Death is another reality of the Mexican that Paz has referred to in an unsurpassable way, recalling the meaning it has had throughout Mexican history, including in contemporary times when organized crime in the country has embodied a disregard for life in the modern world. The contemporary killer carries out technological and military genocide, indiscriminately and on a smaller scale. Paz notes (2010, 66) that this type of criminal is located mainly in the city. As he contemplates the criminal panorama, he also “experimenta veneno, desintegra cuerpos con ácidos, arde en cenizas, y su víctima se convierte en objeto” (“experiences poison, disintegrates corpses with acids, burns to ashes, and his victim becomes an object”). Paz concludes that the fiesta, like a free crime of passion, is the result of alterations to a weak balance that keeps us on edge. We are either wrapped or masked, locked inside ourselves in a moment of tearing that ends up denying us at the end. This weak balance sustains a solitude that is impossible to bend, like an orphan, who is the product of personal ruptures (“separation from parents, from the mother or native land, the death of the gods or acute self-awareness”). It is a purgative, cleansing, loneliness in any way. Like fiesta, poetry is a celebration, a participatory ceremony, a ritual of communal and spiritual wisdom. Fiesta is an embodiment of the poem in collective life. In 1954, Paz said that the world would be ordered according to the values of poetry. This approach is like the avant-garde’s pretensions of an “aesthetic utopianism.” The idea already existed in romanticism for someone like Nietzsche. The difference is that it would not consist of raising life to the height of art or making life a work of art, but of going beyond the life that art points out to the discovery of another “reality.” Art is no longer modeling existence. For Paz, life is improved by a search

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guided by art into what it has never ceased to announce. This view of art corresponded to modernity in an awakening that has been its end—“en busca de la presencia, no como si nada hubiese pasado sino como si hubiese pasado todo—ese todo que es idéntico a la nada” (“a search for the presence, not as if nothing had happened but as if everything had happened—that whole that is identical to nothingness”) (Paz OC, IV: 49). Paz attempted to create a new religion, or a new sacred object, like the surrealists, because he believed that poetry provided transitional moments of revelation that enriched and transfigured one’s present life. The poetic experience, as with love and religion, allows people to go outside of themselves. It can be a deadly turn into a higher realm where people become something other than themselves. On several occasions, Paz (OC, VIII: 573) established the nature of this “sagrado extra-religioso” (“extrareligious sacredness”), describing it as a “constelación de imágenes, mitos y obsesiones” (“constellation of images, myths and obsessions”), “territorio eléctrico en el que los opuestos se fusionan o se devoran” (“electric territory where opposites merge or are devoured”), which would be formed by an “incandescent triad: freedom, love, and poetry.” It is a conception of sacredness contrary to the “political religions with which political parties and states debase the peoples.” What Paz valued the most in surrealist poetry was that it placed inspiration at the center of creative activity. He was against the idea of passivity, inspiration without awareness; the poetic act was what made it possible to think and imagine everything. The act of poetry is about the reintegration of man with his deepest self, the part of the self that constitutes otherness. It is where it is possible to find the “other voice.” It is the voice that emerges from within during the act of going beyond ourselves in order to find ourselves again. The act of creation is a dual movement of exit and return, separation and reunification, assembly and communion. Man recreates himself through resignifying the event of creation. The poet can be seen as a mystic who seeks to immerse himself in a state of absolute receptivity, “desiring nothing,” as in San Juan de la Cruz. For Paz, this notion of nothingness actually becomes activity due to the strength of desire. It is not an experience of silence and emptiness but “momentos positivos y plenos: del centro del ser fluye una corriente de imagenes” (“of fulfilled, positive moments: from the being’s core flows a stream of images”). For Paz, there are certain kinds of dualities present in the poem. On the one hand, a voice reveals the imagination or mythical reality, while on the other, the poem is written in a visible, everyday world. Time is finally embodied in rituals. Poetry, which is also a revelation, goes against the religious word in a way that is the creation of “man by image.” Religion is an interpretation, while poetry is the main building block of the human. The Holy Scriptures are written in poetic word, and both are experiences of constituent otherness—“La poesía nos abre la posibilidad de ser que entraña

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todo nacer; recrea al hombre y lo hace asumir su condición verdadera, que no es la disyuntiva: vida o muerte, sino una totalidad: vida y muerte en un solo instante de incandescencia.” (“Poetry opens up to us the possibility of being that is intrinsic in every birth; it re-creates man and makes him assume his true condition, which is not the dilemma: life or death, but a totality: life and death in a single instant of incandescence”) (Paz OC, I: 151). A MODEL OF INSPIRATION At some point, Paz declared “I belong to a generation that emerged from the vanguard.” As a diplomat in Paris in 1945, he came into close contact with André Breton. Before those meetings, Paz had remained distant, not even paying much attention to Breton’s visit to Mexico in 1938. At the end of December 1937, Paz and his first wife (the famous Mexican writer Elena Garro) were already in Veracruz, back from the Congress of AntiFascist Writers in Valencia, Spain. Paz did not seem interested in meeting Leon Trotsky, who had already been in Mexico, and if he attended any of Breton’s conferences, he did so incognito (Dominguez 2014, 110). It was only in 1948 or 1949 (Bradu says 1946) that Paz admitted to knowing Breton through Benjamin Péret in Paris. Péret died in Mexico and was considered by Luis Buñuel as the “deepest and most surrealist of the surrealist poets.” At one point, perhaps at the insistence of his friend Jorge Cuesta, Paz stated that he refused to meet Breton during his summer in Mexico because he was a Trotskyist. Trotsky was anathema at the time to those who considered themselves in communist ranks. Cuesta had already entered into deals with the father of surrealism during his short stay in Paris. 2 The French and Mexican communist parties boycotted Breton’s visit. In 1954, Paz was presented as a surrealist in Mexico during a talk called “Estrella de tres puntas: el surrealismo.” Two years later, his impressive book on poetics El arco y la lira was published as “an unorthodox aesthetic of surrealism” (Domínguez 2014, 145) that, according to specialists, disagreed with Breton’s notion of literature by rejecting automatic writing and the “preponderance of the hidden over the sacred” (Dominguez 2014, 145). Despite the fact that he was late to the “surrealist bonfire,” not in time but “against time,” avant-garde movement allowed him to avoid the presence and influence of the dogmatic European trends of thought that were becoming reductive. It served him to confront “a los venenos de esos años: el realismo socialista, la literatura comprometida a la Sartre, el arte abstracto y su pureza estéril, el mercantilismo, la idolatría de los grandes tirajes, la publicidad, el éxito. Contra el tiempo: contra la corriente. Aprendizajes y desaprendizajes [. . .] (“the poisons of those years: socialist realism, Sartre-like engaged literature, abstract art and its

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sterile purity, mercantilism, the idolatry of large print runs, advertising, success. Against time: against the current. Learning and unlearning [. . .]”) (Paz OC, IV: 26). His recognition of Breton included “su actitud de reverencia y nostalgia ante la lejanía otra: el antiguo espacio sagrado poblado de seres cambiantes, territorio de la metamorfosis” (“his attitude of reverence and nostalgia for others’ remoteness: the ancient sacred space populated by changing beings, the territory of metamorphosis”). Although Paz came to the movement late, many still considered that it was in time for him to “warm his bones” and ignite his imagination with surrealism. Domínguez Michael argues that Paz’s “late” conversion to surrealism in the late 1940s is more significant than his refusal to meet Breton in Mexico. In the 1940s, Breton published his mature works— Arcano 17 (1943) and Ode to Charles Fourier (1947). During this time, a poem by Péret that Paz deeply admired, Mexican Air, was also published. It is noteworthy that ¿Aguila o Sol? (1951), the most surrealist book written by Paz (Domínguez 144), was from the years 1949–50. The poetry book La estación violenta (1958) was like other poetic works developed from 1948 to 1957. Additionally, Salamandra (1962) fit in with works from 1958–1961. All mentioned works are from this period of confluence with the avant-garde movement. Paz (OC, VIII: 633) considered surrealism to be a “síntoma del vacío de la cultura de Occidente y una rebelión contra ese vacío” (“symptom of the emptiness of Western culture and rebellion against that emptiness”). Hence, it was and still is an important criticism of modernity. Several of Paz’s surrealist poems were published in surrealist magazines (Domínguez 2014, 147). “Mariposa de obsidiana” was included in the Almanach surréaliste du dem-siecle (1950); “Trabajos forzados” was published in the magazine Le Surrealisme, Même, edited by Breton. Signs, with Breton and Peret, anti-Catholic manifestos (1951), and Haute fréquence includes “Carta a una desconocida”; likewise, the catalog of the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1959 provided three articles for the concise lexicon of eroticism. Paz was included in Vingt-ans du surréalisme 1939–1959, and in the official anthology of the movement, La poésie surréaliste (1965). In an interview with Robert Vernengo (OC, VIII: 572), Paz again insisted that surrealism was something more than a mere sensitivity; it is a poetic and aesthetic matter, and “se puede definir como el último, más completo y violento intento del espíritu poético de encarnar en la historia” (“it can be defined as the final, most complete and most violent attempt of the poetic spirit to incarnate in history”). It has been said that what is found in Paz’s surrealist poems is often the scream, despair, frustration, and the impossibility of finding expression—the difficulties of expressing the ineffable. Words act as assailants, depersonalizing the poet. In the imaginary, words are aligned in a fantastic battle, while on the page they suffer technical twists and distortions, remaking all of their components to achieve their ends.

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Paz also wrote a text in defense of Buñuel’s film Los Olvidados (1950), on its exhibition in Cannes in 1951, which he distributed at the theater’s entrance. Together with a commemoration with Albert Camus of the fifteen years of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, it cost him a move from the embassy in Paris to the one in New Delhi. This diplomatic change led to one of his greatest spiritual experiences. Curiously, one of Breton’s talks in Mexico was about Dali’s exhibition and Buñuel’s film Un Perro Andaluz (1929). Surrealism was essential in three of Paz’s fundamental books of poems, ¿Águila o sol?, Estación violenta, and Salamandra, in three central aspects—a conception of the word; the treatment of an image whose displacement served as an expression of “state of mind” (which binds to itself and to the universe, an issue implicit in the first aspect); and finally, the figure of the other as “the open,” stated in Heideggerian terms. This chapter serves as a way to link them to the theme of inspiration, while the issue of language will be addressed next, when we refer to the Mono gramático. It is interesting to note that shortly after Breton’s visit to Mexico in 1938, Paz started Taller magazine, which would run through 1941. Paz’s poem “Noche en claro,” which opens the book Salamandra, is dedicated to Breton and Péret and recalls an atmosphere of the visions of a poet enlivened by memory and desire. It is where the autumn “with a thousand arms with a thousand feet of fog” can be seen, and where the poet feels what will happen. Paz pays tribute to them by incorporating the playful, vital glide of the images that transcend everything as time stirs events—“Se abrió el minuto en dos/ leí signos en la frente de ese instante/ Los vivos están vivos/ andan vuelan maduran estallan/ los muertos están vivos/ oh huesos todavía con fiebre/ el viento los agita los dispersa/ racimos que caen entre las piernas de la noche [. . .]” (“The minute was split in two/ I read signs on the forehead of that instant/ The living are alive/ walking, flying, maturing, exploding/ the dead are alive/ oh bones still fevered/ the wind rustles and scatters them/ clusters that fall between the legs of the night [. . .]”) (Paz OC, VII: 303). The poem’s central focus is on a couple of adolescent lovers for whom nothing stops in their intra-external transformation and who appear just when the voice of the poem begins to be ignored in the faces located by memory. These lovers are the expression of palpable desire that has barely awakened and is reflected in the preservation of eternal youth. Appearing halfway through the writing’s reflection, the poem creates an environment that has been reflected in so many surrealistic works and serves as a bridge, or a door that leads to the “other shore”—“mira abajo correr el rio de los siglos/ el río de los signos/ Mira correr el río de los astros [. . .] La noche se abre/ mano inmensa/ constelación de signos/ escritura silencio que canta/ siglos generaciones eras/ sílabas que alguien dice/ palabras que alguien oye/ pórticos de pilares transparentes/ ecos llamadas señas laberintos [. . .]” (“Watch the river of centuries flow/ the

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river of signs/ Watch the river of the stars flow [. . .] The night is opened/ immense hand/ constellation of signs/ writing silence that sings/ centuries generations eras/ syllables that someone says/ words that someone hears/ doorways of transparent pillars/ echoes calls signs labyrinths [. . .]”) (Paz OC, VII: 305). The lovers and friends that gathered that autumn day disperse and flow through the time that has made them possible; there are only sensations of what has been lost and won in a journey like this one. It is a journey attended by endless tragedies and the dawns of return—“Año de hueso/ pila de años muertos y escupidos/ estaciones violadas/ siglo tallado en un aullido/ pirámide de sangre/ horas royendo el día el año el siglo el hueso/ Hemos perdido todas las batallas/ todos los días ganamos una/ Poesía” (“Year of bones / pile of dead years and spittle/ violated seasons/ century carved in a howl/ pyramid of blood / hours eating away at the day the year the century the bone / We have lost all the battles / every day we win one/ Poetry”). Paz’s chapter in El arco y la lira on “poetic revelation” offers a helpful assimilation of surrealism with the subject of inspiration, which allows Paz to have in-depth ideas based on mystery or the supernatural. He does so to face the challenge of understanding other bases for the central principle of the uncertainty of modernity, namely consciousness. In fact, Paz considers that modernity could be understood from this need to know the secret of poetic revelation. For Paz, modernity is need turned into folly, a recognition that delves deeper into consciousness as the last stronghold of the sacred, or as the last station before the disappointment of the self—a last loss or disenchantment. At the heart of the modern consciousness is the unattainable, which causes more troubles in an unstable life ranging from firm romantic cliff rock to the distance of the ethereal merged with the horizon. The crisis of this consciousness has characterized modernity and restated the problem of inspiration. Surrealism corresponds to this spectacular moment. For Paz, surrealism was a way of transforming life into poetry and operated as a decisive revolution in spirits, customs, and social life. Like romanticism, it appealed to subjectivity and to the disintegration of objective reality. It included the subject in the object and granted a central place for women regarding love as an erotic freedom associated with the belief in a unique love. “La mujer abre las puertas de la noche y de la verdad; la unión amorosa es una de las experiencias más altas del hombre y en ella el hombre toca las dos vertientes del ser: la muerte y la vida, la noche y el dia” (“Woman opens the doors of night and of truth; the amorous union is one of man’s highest experiences and in it he touches both sides of being: death and life, night and day”) (Paz OC, I: 223). The differences between the two artistic movements are no less important. Surrealism was less metaphysical, though its historical consciousness is clear and deep, and its relationship with the world was more direct and daring.

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In its most general sense, surrealism was a “radical tentativa por suprimir el duelo entre sujeto y objeto, forma que asume para nosotros lo que llamamos realidad” (“radical attempt to suppress the duel between subject and object, the form assumed for us by that which we call reality”) (Paz OC, I: 163). As the heir of romanticism, surrealism was proposed to carry out the “superior logic” of Novalis, which should have destroyed that old antinomy that caused a rift. While the world “evaporates and turns into an image of consciousness,” it should have become a reflection of it. Under the surrealist perspective, there is no self or creator but “a sort of poetic force that blows where it wants and produces free, inexplicable images.” The poetic act takes place at the expense of the subject and his consciousness. It would have to occur as a kind of suspension of that consciousness, of all the securities that surround the existential comfort that modernity designed for it. The poetic act is “involuntary,” a “negation of the subject” or, to be more precise, as Paz said, a transformation or metamorphosis. The “surrealist object” is an example of something that exists not as what it is. It never stays stable in any identity, or it ruins all of it endlessly. An object that reflected the transformations of the surreal consciousness was in perpetual mutation—“es una cama que es un océano que es una cueva que es una ratonera que es un espejo que es la boca de Kali” (“it is a bed that is an ocean that is a cave that is a mousehole that is a mirror that is the mouth of Kali”) (Paz OC, I: 164). Anything that can happen to the object becomes the subject within a poem. Surrealism did not want to be the consciousness of the world, nor the world of consciousness; it wanted the imagination “flying through the roof.” 3 Thanks to the inspiration, we imagine, dissolving the object and the subject, “we dissolve ourselves and suppress the contradiction.” Surrealism taught us to reconcile opposites. It not only remained at one extreme of fatality, it promoted mind states where one abandons the perception of realities as contrary or opposed, such as life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, communicable and incommunicable, and the high and the low. “Es el hombre lanzado a ser todos los contrarios que lo constituyen” (“Man is thrown to be all the opposites that constitute him”) (Paz OC, I: 151). Otherness is what exists within us even when we do not know it. Life is an ambiguous, contradictory existence, a way of being that is close to the limits. For Paz, the manifestation of this otherness is what poetry presents all the time—to glimpse what Nietzsche called “the incomparable vividness of life,” an otherness, or other “sources of the self.” It represents a here and now where existence anchors, an instant where all and everything will happen. “Never” and “forever,” says Paz, is where we are united with what we are, were, and will be. It is the instant in which we are everything. For Paz, surrealism was a poetic style that sought to understand the poetic act and its source, inspiration, in a different way. Although it is indebted to previous approaches in the history of arts and literature, it is

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an inspiration, an internal rush, something that shakes the unity, identity, and fiction of the self. It is a revelation of one’s self in the intangibility of the deep. It is why the surreal vision of the world is founded on “disrupting and recreating inspirational activity.” The significant contribution of surrealism should be understood as not only being inspired by an idea but having an idea of the world. As an idea, inspiration will not collide with the rest of the beliefs yet ceases to be an “indecipherable mystery, a vain superstition or an anomaly.” What mattered to Paz (OC, VIII: 571) was that surrealism sought to reposition poetry in the bosom of society and history, and “transmutar al hombre y convertirlo en lo que, al final, él mismo es: deseo, imaginación creativa” (“to transmute man and turn him into what, in the end, he himself is: desire, creative imagination”), as he stated in an interview with Roberto Vernengo. Surrealism was an eminently collective effort to make a collective “world ruled by imagination and desire.” In that same interview, Paz summarized what he had admired and learned from surrealism. He saw it as having been a collective spiritual adventure. For him it was a “desperate attempt to incarnate in times and make poetry the appropriate nourishment for society,” a “statement of desire and love,” and the “continuous project of the imagination.” The third statement was made regarding the approaches of Heideggerian ontology, which seemed to challenge him and were required as a starting point for future reflections on the theme of inspiration and the poetic act. Paz (OC, VIII: 574) said to the interviewer “¿No te parece que, en cuanto tentativa de radicalizar la creación poética, el surrealismo corre paralelo con la metafísica de la libertad de un Heidegger, por ejemplo?” (“Do you not think that, in the attempt to radicalize poetic creation, surrealism runs parallel to Heidegger’s metaphysics of freedom, for example?”) Reflection and creation ignited each other, as did Heidegger with Tralk, Hölderlin, Rilke, or Mörike. Making a rapid assessment of surrealistic techniques, processes, and stages, Paz stopped at the Hegelian notion of “objective chance” that Breton had read in Engels and which he had discussed vividly with Trotsky when he had the opportunity to visit him in Mexico. Faced with the persistence of the will, chance includes circumstances, distractions, or coincidences, “negligence” or omissions, in great discoveries and the encounter with the truth. Chance includes moments when the unexpected is near to us or connects with what we are and are not; it is encounters with otherness. Chance is where the “other voice” surfaces, the concept that Paz linked to the creative act, borrowed from surrealism. The hypothesis of the unconscious for the purposes of artistic creation was left overrunning. Paz held that Breton resisted it. If the surrealist confessed to knowing little of this magnetic area of unexpected meetings where inspiration occurred, Paz (OC, I: 166) said that something had to have been known, and that whenever it happened “parece que nos oímos

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a nosotros mismos y vemos lo que ya habíamos visto” (“it seems that we hear ourselves and see that which we had already seen”). The approach of the other voice seemed to correspond to a kind of ancient Platonic memory that was to be heard in moments of inspiration, or circumstantial gaming in which the incidental would explode and reflect back on ourselves, reminding us of what we are, have been, and will be. This voice was seen as a nostalgic voice that stands opposite to the famous “oblivion of being,” ruled by Martin Heidegger as a sign of Western metaphysical crisis. Memory is the recovery of ourselves; it is a voice that reminds us, that expects to be heard when we least expect it, looking accidentally like something else, an eruption of otherness. At the conference “Estrella de tres puntas: el surrealismo” (Michael Dominguez says it was given in 1954 as “Estrella de cinco puntas”), published in Las peras del olmo (1957), a year after El arco y la lira, as part of a cycle organized by the UNAM, Paz takes up the theme of objective chance noting that the answer Breton gave to the notion could not satisfy him. Still, Paz insisted on the issue’s importance and the enigma within it for casual events where the unexpected happened. For Paz, that meeting that the surrealists wonder about in the unexpected capital event is love. Love is able to grab us decisively with its “golden claw.” It is a combination of freedom and destiny, chance and necessity, and is free choice of the highest form of need. This notion of love is defined in Breton’s L’Amour fou (1937), a book that Paz devoured in his youth as a “delirium of absolute presence in the bosom of reconciled nature” (Breton cited by Paz OC, II: 143). Love and poetry are both present in the same creation processes and are the union of opposites—life and death reconciled, in agreement, and melded. Love and poetry exist only in the here and now. If there is a possibility that surrealist inspiration is supported by the unconscious, then poetry is its revelation, and there is still a reference to the subject’s will. Paz decided to coin a very interesting notion that seems more relevant and that even uses the sense of the Heideggerian “dealing with useful,” as well as some of Husserl’s phenomenology thesis. Paz called it “pre-meditation,” which takes part in “pre-reflection.” Paz called such action the “defining feature of the act of creating and what makes it possible.” Without this pre-meditation there is no inspiration or revelation of otherness, which is prior to will, or want, or any other inclination. The basis of this action is the “being of man.” Heidegger has shown that, from birth, man is “un querer ser, una avidez permanente de ser, un continuo pre-ser-se” (“a wanting to be, a permanent yearning for being, a continuous pre-being-himself”) (Paz OC, I: 167). Ultimately, it was surrealism’s contribution to the topic of inspiration, and it dealt with psychological or voluntary reductionism, made it an idea “acclimatized” to our time, “made visible the very heart of the problem: otherness.” Paz recognized that spontaneity and automatism are building blocks of premeditation or inspiration.

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Paz’s evaluation of surrealism was that it oscillates in the sense that it never breaks off at all with the hypothesis of the unconscious, even having the possibility of managing a kind of “unconscious collective.” For Paz, the poem is a collective voice because that is what language is. The task of creating poems implies a “socialización de la creación poética” (“socialization of poetic creation”), which would be clear to the aesthetics of the hermeneutical reception a decade later. Inspiration is a common good, and surrealism recurred also to dreams and to the “dictation of the unconscious and the collectivization of the word.” We are all poets, and the avant-garde movement questioned the notions of subject and object, or reality, but also the idea that artwork is nothing but an attempt—an essay in response to the being of man, which, under the surreal demands of the link between life and art, also becomes an artistic achievement. It is not the humanization of the self but its poetization: “We all can be poems,” said Paz. What a human does is not dissociated from the poetic work, as he would say many years later in his poem “Decir: hacer”; poetry lives “Entre lo que veo y digo,/ entre lo digo y lo que callo,/ entre lo que callo y sueño,/ entre lo que sueño y olvido,/ la poesía (“Between what I see and say,/ between what I say and keep silent,/ between what I keep silent and dream,/ between what I dream and forget,/ poetry”) (Paz OC, VII: 602). For this reason, surrealism has not proposed “the creation of poems but the transformation of men into living poems.” It is automatism that asserts the sovereignty of language, but also its collective sense. Even when he recognized the claims of one of the tricks of surrealism to make one thing poetic inspiration and life, such as writing using automatism, or “automatic writing,” Paz remarked on its difficulties. Once “destruida la cáscara del yo, rotos los tabiques de la conciencia, poseído por la otra voz que sube de lo hondo como un agua que emerge” (“the shell of the self is destroyed, the partitions of consciousness are broken, possessed by the other voice that rises up from the depths like a water that emerges”), he returns “a aquello de que fue separado cuando nació la conciencia” (“to that from which he was separated when consciousness was born”) (Paz OC, I: 225). Paz saw in it just the first step for the restoration of a “golden age” where “pensamiento y palabra, fruto y labios, deseo y acto son sinónimos” (“thought and word, fruit and lips, desire and act are synonymous”). Yet he envisioned that if it were achieved, it could only lead to silence insofar as unity, identity, or coincidence, and would abolish language, which lives precisely by not identifying between desire and reality. Language represents an imperfect relationship between man and reality, and only poetry rescues the possibility of not abolishing the uniqueness of things. In Los signos en rotación (1965), ten years after El arco y la lira, Paz relates the automatism of surrealism to the tasks of disengagement of consciousness raised by communism. The idea was similar to Walter Benjamin’s, who declared, in his brilliant essay Surrealism, the Last Snapshot of

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the European Intelligence (1926), that they (the surrealist) had been the real communists, in the sense expressed in Karl Marx’s The Manifesto of the Communist Party. In the middle of the 1950s, Paz was not familiar with the work of the philosopher from the Frankfurt School (apparently he did not use a single quote in his Complete Works). Either way, Paz (OC, I: 226) considered that surrealism became the “poetic voice of the revolution” and, in that same measure, its “failure”: El automatismo es otro nombre de esa recuperación de la conciencia enajenada que postula el movimiento revolucionario. En una sociedad comunista, el trabajo se transformaría poco a poco en arte; la producción de cosas sería también la creación de obras. Y a medida que la conciencia determinase a la existencia, todos seríamos poetas porque nuestros actos serían creaciones. La noche que es un “eterno poema” sería una realidad cotidiana y a pleno sol. (Automatism is another name for the recovery of alienated consciousness proposed by the revolutionary movement. In a communist society, work is gradually transformed into art; the production of things will also be the creation of artworks. And as consciousness determined existence, we would all be poets because our acts would be creations. The night, which is an “eternal poem” would be an everyday reality in broad daylight).

Since surrealism identified revolution with poetry, Paz pointed out that the “new communist society would be a surrealist society, where poetry would circulate through social life like a perpetual creative force.” However, this ideal could not be achieved, and the Soviet society became more bureaucratized, wrapped in the terror of a Stalinist state with diabolic forms of censorship, massive extermination, and social and political prohibition. It led to surrealism facing the same fate as other poetic adventures in history—becoming a semi-secret society, as Sartre would understand. Paz summarizes that Breton continued asserting the identity between revolution and poetry, but that his influence in the social and political field was rather sporadic. Even so, his major themes of freedom, love, and the meaning of poetry had a decisive influence on contemporary poetry. Paz insisted several times that surrealism should be considered not as a relic, not as a winner of two World Wars, and of a profound spiritual crisis, but as a survival in the proposal of a “direction of the human spirit.” It is akin to romanticism without wearing down its own styles. On the contrary, surrealism revitalizes others or dispenses any of them to become simply a “search inside method.” The contemporary human being has remained outside poetry, and loneliness keeps encouraging it. Aesthetic utopia, promoted by romanticism and surrealism, has perhaps meant other outcomes for the good of consumerist societies, but they are not as intense, revolutionary searches as those raised by the avant-garde movement. This dilemma has been established among the

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beings that live outside of poetry, or those who intend to live on earth poetically, like Hölderlin’s verse proclaims, in alienating societies that limit human existence to an anonymous machinery of consumption. Paz’s dictum (OC, I: 227) never changed in more than sixty years—“La poesía no ha encarnado en la historia, la experiencia poética es un estado de excepción y el único camino que le queda al poeta es el antiguo de la creación de poemas, cuadros y novelas” (“Poetry has not been incarnated in history, the poetic experience is an exceptional state and the only way still open to the poet in the old way of the creation of poems, paintings and novels”). Paz valued surrealists not for their techniques, some of which had moved by mid-century into a comfortable currency of literary creation. Some may have even considered surrealism a tiresome platitude, a sect or school, even a poetic, religious, or political party, because of its links to communist militancy. Surrealists have tried to make poetry a revolution in itself—considering it an “attitude of the human spirit,” perhaps “the most ancient and constant, the most powerful and secret,” persistent and unfinished. Rather than being based on theories about reality, or doctrines of freedom, it was more like a concrete exercise in freedom where the search for the reality of being itself is independent of what one should think. Surrealism was a movement that sought to put into action “la libre disposición del hombre en un cuerpo a cuerpo con lo real” (“man’s free will in a hand-to-hand confrontation with what is real”), given that poetic knowledge is a transformation of reality, an act that transforms what we know, and what exists is the recovery of a “magical operation.” It is an attitude that refuses to evaluate the world from a Manichean ethics of Christianity, and one that refuses to consider, in an anti-capitalist way, reality from an instrumental perspective. It seeks to reject finally the idea of objectivism, which postulates a “reality in itself,” where the subject is, regardless of what surrounds him and without the capacity to intervene according to his desires, emotions, experiences, or feelings. Faced with this massive, industrialized object, surrealism proclaimed and created its own subjectivations of the object, referred to as an “obscure object of desire” by the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel. In a revision that Paz (OC, II: 773) made of surrealism in Mexico, he stressed his admiration for Los Olvidados, Buñuel’s most important film that was a surrealistic “departure” or “outcome,” since the Spanish filmmaker would have found “una vía de salida de la estética surrealista al insertar, en la forma tradicional del relato, las imágenes irracionales que brotan de la mitad oscura del hombre” (“a way out of surrealist aesthetics by inserting, in the traditional storytelling format, the irrational images that emanate from man’s dark side”). Paz says as much in the text “Cannes, 1951: Los Olvidados,” published in 1982, where he tells the story of how he met Buñuel and how he asked him to present the film at the famous film festival. According to Paz, Buñuel developed a “synthetic imagination”

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involving “totality and concentration.” Paz wrote the essay “Poeta Buñuel,” which was reproduced in mimeograph and distributed at the entrance of the theatre the day of the films’ premiere, as we have said. He did so as a form of solidarity and support, because it had received negative reviews by intellectuals, journalists, and Mexican officials who saw in it a “denigration” of the country. According to Paz, this attitude combined two “infections with our progressive intellectuals at that time: nationalism and socialist realism,” and affected other literary works from those decades. In this text, he spoke about the reason for the subversion of the poet, the entrance of poetry in movies. The revelation of the essence of man as desire is another reality humiliated by civilization; it is a realism that confronts reality. The poet’s work, “tiende a provocar la erupción de algo secreto y precioso, terrible y puro, escondido precisamente por nuestra realidad” (“tends to cause something secret and precious, terrible and pure to erupt, something hidden precisely by our reality”). Buñuel’s artwork reflects the descent to the core of man, “to his more radical and unexpressed intimacy” (Paz OC, II: 765), where “dreams, desire, horror, delirium, chance, and the night portion of life” take place. It is an ultimately unbearable reality that explains why man “kills and dies, loves and creates.” FROM THE UNSPOKEN, THE REALITY OF DESIRE In the preface to the second volume of his Complete Works, collected texts dedicated expressly to André Breton, Paz (OC, II: 15) notes that there are elements in the area of the “unspoken” that might influence him and expresses where writing is coming from. He refers to authors, artworks, and philosophers about which Breton did not write an essay in particular but which are certainly present in his writing. It includes readings and learning that are not designated explicitly or are not direct references in his texts—“Lo no dicho es una zona invisible como la mitad sumergida del iceberg y está hecha de lo vivido y lo pensado, lo leído y lo olvidado” (“What is not said is an invisible zone, like the submerged half of the iceberg, and is made of what has been lived and thought, read and forgotten”). These compilations of Paz’s essays brought together texts written about authors and works published in the form of forewords, introductions, notes for literary magazines, journalism, and criticism, and constitute “a map of the voyages of a Mexican poet who begins to write around 1935.” In particular, surrealism is appreciated as the return “of the underground tradition of the West”; it is revolution and tradition present at the same time. We read again that surrealism represents a rupture and continuity that began with Gnostic sects in the early centuries of the human era, and continued into the Neoplatonic Renaissance

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and the Enlightenment that spanned the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the conference called “Estrella de tres puntas: el surrealismo,” Paz (OC, II: 135) said that this artistic movement had put into “radical doubt” what until then had been considered immutable in societies and at the same time was a “desperate attempt to find a way out of it.” While Western civilization turned into a robotic prison, a “bloody labyrinth,” or “collective slaughterhouse,” surrealism opposes the “ghosts of desire always willing to incarnate in a woman’s face.” Even as surrealism had been declared dead, Paz (OC, II: 136) held that the “corpse was alive”— “tan vivo, que ha saltado de su fosa y se ha presentado de nuevo ante nosotros, con su misma cara terrible e inocente, cara de tormenta súbita, cara de incendio, cara y figura de hada en medio del bosque encantado” (“so alive that it has jumped out of its grave and presented itself again before us, with its same terrible and innocent face, a face of sudden storm, a face of fire, the face and figure of a fairy in the midst of the enchanted forest”). Surrealism sustains the notions of imagination and desire, echoing other traditions yet feeding on the era that it was born into. Human beings become a projection of desire and thus an image of the universe, transcendentally, unwinding in a game of mirrors—“cuerpos que se deshacen y recrean infatigablemente bajo el sol inmóvil del amor” (“bodies that are destroyed and recreated tirelessly under the still sun of love”). An evident example of surrealism, dreams display a subversion of reality, as do madness and other “altered states of consciousness” (as Paul Valéry used to call them). They are interruptions, breaks, and rearrangements of our vision of reality, where humor is not absent and where consequences seek to abolish reality as we know it, thanks to powerful images that come from the unpublished, unusual, and even inexpressible actions of rupture, chance, circumstance, concurrency, unpredictability. It is all achieved in a miraculous coincidence between the authenticity of reality and the human being—certainly moments of truth—“en algún momento privilegiado, la realidad escondida se levanta de su tumba de lugares comunes y coincide con el hombre” (“in a privileged moment, the hidden reality rises from its grave of clichés and coincides with man”) (Paz OC, II: 138). The world ceases to be something real and becomes a “magnetic field,” similar to the title of one of Breton’s books, that speaks or creates signs. “Los objetos y las palabras se unen o separan conforme a ciertas llamadas misteriosas” (“Objects and words come together or separate in accordance with certain mysterious calls”). There is a magical reality again converted into a spell, enchanted, immersed in the “forests of signs,” as Baudelaire used to say. It is a living reality that transforms itself based on its own powers. While this transition happens to the object, the subject is “disintegrating” and becoming something “other,” something more than itself and

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someone it should be. It is also known as fluidity of the self, its course through a thousand and one trails, where someone such as Apollinaire had to “wait for himself,” or needed to have time for himself and to be himself once he discovered he had changed. The desire to be what one hopes while one still has time in life—nourishing what is not yet into something that is now—is an idea that Paz had discovered in Buddhism as “a congregation of feelings, thoughts and desires,” a kind of identity and personality crisis. Incidentally, Paz again criticized the purpose of automatic writing, noting its unachievability because it requires a state of innocence and a state of absolute freedom, which is impossible. Still, he saw it as an attempt to go beyond the knowledge of the ways of thinking about the self to find one’s being. All men are linked to the destruction of the self in the poet, not an attempt to destroy the personality but to open and convert it at the point where the subjective and the objective intersect, equivalent to the idea of a collective poetry—the voice of all, made by all, being all. Due to the nature of language, poetry is not reserved solely for the poet but is subjected to a “collective communion.” Through it, Paz sought new forms of creation. He meant that this collective creation might at least occur in an emancipated society, where the release of man would have been total. Therefore, surrealism’s attempts to link itself to the communist movement—as Breton’s individual political experience could show—might never have fit. The maximum surrealist aspiration explains it—“Asistirá el hombre entonces a la reconciliación del pensamiento y la acción, el deseo y el fruto, la palabra y la cosa. La escritura automática dejará de ser una aspiración: hablar será crear” (“Man will then tend to the reconciliation of thought and action, desire and fruit, the word and the thing. Automatic writing will no longer be an aspiration: to talk will be to create”) (Paz OC, II: 142). Paz accepted this ideal of a poetry “embodied” in the history of surrealism, an idea already mentioned by Lautréamont (who was one of the predecessors of the movement), in the sense that one day everyone would write poetry, and the reader would also be involved as a creator. Paz (OC, II: 146) concludes that surrealism contributed to shaping the sensibility of our time, through poetry embodied in history, willing to transform the world “con las armas de la imaginación y poesía” (“with imagination and poetry as weapons”). It also brought about a new extrareligious sacred object consisting of the triple axis of freedom, love, and poetry. Despite everything that could oppose it, surrealism, like other great hidden influential traditions, has been an “invitación hacia la aventura interior, al descubrimiento de nosotros mismos” (“invitation to the adventure within, to the discovery of ourselves”). It is also a “signo de inteligencia, el mismo que a través de los siglos nos hacen los grandes mitos y los grandes poetas. Ese signo es un relámpago: bajo su luz convulsa entrevemos algo del misterio de nuestra condición” (“sign of intelligence, the sign that through the centuries makes great myths and great

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poets. That sign is a lightning bolt: under its turbulent light we glimpse something of the mystery of our condition”). OTHERNESS In Los signos en rotación (1965), the epilogue to the second edition of El arco y la lira, Paz linked the understanding of otherness with surrealism, and recalled the words of Breton “la veritable existence est ailleurs” (“true existence is elsewhere”). This “elsewhere” is not the dark, remote, intangible beyond of religions, but the here and now of everyday life where otherness is a flash that does not require exceptional states of consciousness (denoting a change in relation to his position on the inspiration theme as it is treated in El arco y la lira), found in the most insignificant, unexpected moment. There is not a more authentic life than that which opposes others who are living without heroism, in the most absurd reality of the everyday. Otherness is made of the fabric of daily events and thus is not spiritual at all, but is also not entirely material: es ante todo percepción simultánea de que somos otros sin dejar de ser lo que somos y que, sin cesar de estar donde estamos, nuestro verdadero ser está en otra parte. Somos otra parte. En otra parte quiere decir: aquí, ahora mismo mientras hago esto o aquello. Y también: estoy solo y estoy contigo, en un no sé dónde que es siempre aquí. Contigo y aquí: ¿quién eres tú, quién soy yo, en dónde estamos cuando estamos aquí? (it is first and foremost the simultaneous perception that we are others without ceasing to be what we are and, without ceasing to be where we are, our true being is elsewhere. We are elsewhere. Somewhere else means: here, right now while I do this or that. And also: I’m alone and I’m with you, in an I-don’t-know-where that is always here. With you and here: who are you, who am I, where are we when we are here?) (Paz OC, I: 239).

Otherness, which is often confused with religion—although it is wider ranging than that—is what we can find in poetry, love, and other related experiences, something “irreducible, elusive, indefinable, unpredictable and constantly present in our lives.” The idea of otherness has been removed with the notion of divinity, or has at least been minimized to small samples of religiosity in the West. When an experience allows us to rise beyond the human being, with no remains of being godlike in the absence of gods, it goes against the idolatries of the self and property, assuming that “the other” is not a possession of the self. It becomes more of a liberating idea of the self, the figure of its poetic fate, which occurs in disenchanted and abysmal times: El árido mundo actual, el infierno circular, es el espejo del hombre cercenado de su facultad poetizante. Se ha cerrado todo contacto con

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When addressing access to the divine idea of “the other,” to what rationalism has been reduced in the human being, and the decline to the region that connects us with the other, Paz recalls a judgment by Heidegger, “expressed in an admirable manner,” in the sense that “We arrived too late for the gods and too soon for the being,” and adds “whose started poem is being.” Man is an unfinished being, albeit comprehensive in its incompletion. Returning to surrealist ideas, he points out that man is a poem in a way that “he is always in the perpetual possibility of being fully and fulfilling in his no-finishing.” The death of the gods has sprouted atrocious fetishes, says Paz, such as the deification of the leader, the cult of the Scriptural word, the deification of the political party, idolatry of the self. “Too early to be” means “the core experience of letting ourselves go towards the meeting of our true presence.” It is why man walks “lost among things,” and our thought patterns seem “circular,” just to perceive something that emerges “with no name yet.” This otherness encompasses the two extreme notes of a given rhythm between separation, which is expressed as a fall—a feeling of being alone in a strange world—and reunion or “accord with the whole.” In the fall it is possible to glimpse the “being” beyond its forms, especially human forms, leading to a different point of view that is opposed to the one that separates life from death, only to see in them an indissoluble tie. Accepting other ways of being is equivalent to assuming that death is transitional, which Paz (OC, I: 242) obviously does not equate to salvation or perdition—“En cualquier caso, aspiro al ser que cambia, no a la salvación del yo” (“In any case I aspire to the being that changes, not to the salvation of the self”). Consequently, poetry does not intend to comfort before death, “sino imaginar que vida y muerte son inseparables: son el todo” (“but to envision that life and death are inseparable: they are the whole”). Hence the possibilities of concrete poetry that unfold in everyday life, or in another life that is involved in it. “Recuperar la vida concreta significa conocer la vida-muerte de la pareja, recuperar uno en el otro, el tú en mí, y así descubrir la figura del mundo en la dispersión de sus fragmentos” (“Retrieving concrete life means meeting the couple’s life–death, regaining one in the other, the you in me, and thus discovering the figure of the world in the dispersion of its fragments”), says the poet. In the extraordinary sonnet poem dedicated to his friend Jorge Cuesta, “La caída,” from

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the collection Libertad bajo palabra, we find the tragedy of the self dissolved in the eternity of the moment, using surrealistic themes and ontological jargon: “¡Vértigo del minuto consumado!/ En el abismo de mi ser nativo,/ en mi nada primera, me desvivo:/ yo mismo frente a mí, ya devorado” (“¡Vertigo of the consummated minute!/ In the abyss of my native being,/ in my first nothingness, I indulge myself:/ myself looking at myself, already devoured”). Later, “Mana el tiempo su ejército impasible,/ nada sostiene ya, ni mi caída,/ transcurre solo, quieto, inextinguible” (“Time flows its impassive army,/ maintaining nothing, not even my fall,/ it passes alone, quiet, inextinguishable”). In this poem, there is little left of this being that has thrown itself into nothingness; it falls within itself, immersed in itself, which again is the condition of the poet in “times of penury,” as Heidegger pointed out regarding Hölderlin. This great poem by Paz (OC, VII: 67–68) ends with “El espejo que soy me deshabita:/ un caer en mí mismo inacabable/ al horror de no ser me precipita” (“The mirror that I am vacates me:/ an endless fall into myself/ plunges me into the horror of not being”). THE LANGUAGE OF PASSION, PASSION FOR LANGUAGE In 1967, Paz published “André Breton o la búsqueda del comienzo” in the Nouvelle Revue Française, and in Corriente Alterna that same year. There, he highlighted Breton’s inheritance of the joy of writing with passion. The passion for language, and the language of passion, is possible because the power of the word is not different from passion itself. It is in poetry where passion in its purest form is the most evident. The surrealist movement was a search for “the beginning word,” the man before men and civilizations. This search developed into a passionate, loving desire directed toward a convergence of the origin and the end of times—“the day before the beginning and after the end,” says Paz, so he distinguishes Breton from Georges Bataille and Jean Paul Sartre. First, for Paz, eroticism, death, and sin are interchangeable aspects whose combinations “repiten, con aterradora monotonía, el mismo significado: la nadería del hombre, su irremediable ab-yección” (“repeat, with terrifying monotony, the same meaning: the triviality of man, his irremediable infamy”) (Paz OC, II: 147). Second, man is the son, either in a historical or ontological curse. Bataille and Sartre are both rebellious children of Christianity. Breton’s lineage is different. Paz believed he was closer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (although Paz doubted that Breton had read him), and to Meister Eckhart, the Marquis de Sade, and Sigmund Freud. Breton was against the idea of sin, since it is opposite to man’s dignity. For Paz, it was important to celebrate love before eroticism, which had to be immersed in love, so he found Breton’s passion for Sade unintelligible. Love as mediation between man and nature is a “site that crosses

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terrestrial and spiritual magnetism.” In the act of love, the body of the man and of the woman are unique altars before which any type of offering falls. It is a unique, unrepeatable, singular moment in which the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness expire. It is life and death, time presented without time, “fluid and undecided” borders. According to Paz, Breton experienced several deaths, broadening his existence toward the other. They were untouchable experiences, invulnerable and beyond time, death, and ourselves—“Saberlo me reconcilia con su muerte de ahora y con todo morir” (“Knowing it reconciles me with his death and with all dying”) (OC, II: 156). It is also essential to assess surrealism’s achievements in the importance attached to language, which is what makes us human. Paz (OC, II: 148) recognized the power of language, which is what makes us talk and, occasionally, like in poetry, dissolve consciousness—“La poesía no salva al yo del poeta: lo disuelve en la realidad más vasta y poderosa del habla. El ejercicio de la poesía exige el abandono, la renuncia al yo” (“Poetry does not save the poet’s self: it dissolves it into the more vast, more powerful reality of parole. The exercise of poetry requires abandonment, renouncement of oneself”). Paz regretted that Breton had no interest in Buddhism, which also proclaims this dissolution of the illusion of self, although it favored silence rather than language, since silence continues to emit meanings. Paz also mentioned “verbal automatism,” something that brings surrealism close to asceticism insofar that it is more of a mental exercise than a poetic method. For Paz, asceticism is a clear example of passivity and abolition of both criticism and self-criticism. It represents a radical disapproval of criticism, seeking to call the conscience into question in a purgative way, a “método de negación tendiente a provocar la aparición de la verdadera realidad: el lenguaje radical” (“method of denial that tends to cause true reality to emerge: radical language”). There is emphasis on the importance of the major texts of the mystics, such as San Juan de la Cruz. Breton’s “system,” as Paz understood it, is a language with almost magical powers. Poetry has powers that are able to change reality. It is a force, an energy, an autonomous power, an erotic substance whose system of signs is governed by the double act of affinity and opposition, similarity and otherness. Thus, words and their building elements are “energy fields.” The attraction between them is not unlike that of the stars and human bodies. The analogic vision, in which nature is language and energy, is a replication. It is why to “recobrar el lenguaje natural es volver a la naturaleza antes de la caída y de la historia: la poesía es el testimonio de inocencia original” (“recover natural language is to return to nature before the fall and before history: poetry is the testimony of original innocence”) (Paz OC, II: 149). Surrealism is based on the assumption of identity between thinking and talking, something that Paz did not consider as far-fetched, since “talk is thinking.” The problem is that lin-

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guistic expressions are ambiguous and frequently have more than one meaning or interpretation, which makes them difficult for thinking tasks, unless we adopt other criteria for thinking. Ideas change based on language modifications. Assuming that Breton was influenced by Rousseau, Paz said that for Rousseau, the “social contract” became the “verbal, poetic agreement between man and nature, word and thought.” Therefore, surrealism represented a total liberation movement, not just a poetic one. Poetry is the deed of man’s foundation—“el surrealismo es revolucionario porque es un regreso al principio del principio” (“surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of the beginning”) (Paz OC, II: 150), and what Rousseau thought, with radical emphasis, was precisely nature as a beginning. Surrealism did not propose an “artistic life” or a “vital art” (something Nietzsche would have launched into the future as part of his annihilation of aesthetics and art). Rather, it stated a return to the origin of the word (missing only one letter to say “world”), to the moment when talking is synonymous with creating. It gives Paz (OC, II: 150) the opportunity to go through the sweet, accurate, beautiful, joyful word—“Esplendor verbal y violencia intelectual y pasional” (“Verbal splendor and intellectual, passionate violence”). Poems are an alliance between prophecy and aestheticism and are at once beautiful, spiritual testaments. Paz stopped at the oft-used word “revelation,” adding a nuance—“Decir es la actividad más alta: revelar lo escondido, despertar la palabra enterrada, suscitar la aparición de nuestro doble, crear a ese otro que somos y al que nunca dejamos ser del todo” (“To say is the highest of activities: to reveal what is hidden, awaken the buried word, give rise to the appearance of our double, create that other who we are and whom we never allow to be at all”). A revelation is exposure, initiation, rebellion, and subversion. Word evokes ritual and ceremony that opens to otherness and denies the “illusory consistency and security of our consciousness”; creates innocence and wonder. It is why “children, women, lovers, the inspired and even fools are the incarnation of the wonderful.” It is innocence as expressed by Rousseau. This set of beings represents “signos dispersos de un lenguaje en perpetuo movimiento y que despliega ante nuestros ojos un abanico de significados contradictorios—resuelto al fin en un sentido único y último. Por ellos y en ellos el universo nos habla y habla consigo mismo” (“scattered signs of a language in perpetual motion that deploys in front our eyes a range of contradictory meanings—settling finally on one final meaning. Through them and in them the universe speaks to us and to itself”) (OC, II: 151). As we have seen, it is one of the essential poetic lessons of surrealism; in spite of everything there is a continued search for the deep relations of identity among love, women, and nature, which is none other than the principle of analogy. The couple acts as a metaphor for excellence, since the couple has reconquered time before time, the magnetic center of attraction as Paz came to experience when he was writing about

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Breton—“en muchas ocasiones escribo como si sostuviese un dialogo silencioso con Breton: réplica, respuesta, coincidencia, divergencia, homenaje, todo junto” (“I often write as if I were in a silent dialogue with Breton: reply, answer, agreement, discord, homage, all in one”). In 1967, Paz published the article “El pacto verbal y las correspondencias” which was also published in Corriente alterna. He discussed the possible influences of Rousseau on Breton. He assumed that the social contract was, above all, a linguistic matter made on a poetic basis, also known as a verbal pact. Paz presumed that there were numerous affinities between these two intellectual figures. Some foreshadowing of surrealist ideas of language can be found in Rousseau’s book Essai sur l’origine des langues (1781), and therefore in Paz’s poetical thesis, where he acknowledges that he had not read Rousseau prior. 4 Everything came about as a result of his reading an article written by Ernesto Mejía Sánchez, “El pensamiento literario de Rousseau,” in the book that was a tribute to the philosopher published by the UNAM, Presencia de Rousseau. A Los 250 Años de su nacimiento y a los dos siglos de la aparición del Emilio y El Contrato Social (1962), where José Gaos wrote about Rousseau’s novel Julia or the New Heloisa, to which Paz, surprisingly, paid no attention. The Rousseau–Breton relationship can be understood as a coincidence or influence in that they considered language as a non-utilitarian mechanism that was destined to be the satisfaction of passionate or moral needs. They also considered the metaphor as a primary word, the connection between passion and verbal image—“Pasión, lenguaje primordial, metáfora: las ideas y preocupaciones de Breton se encuentran ya en germen en el Essai sur l´origine des langues” (“Passion, primary language, metaphor: Breton’s ideas and concerns are already germinated in the Essai sur l´origine des langues”). Paz points out that language is external and internal to societies. First, language is society’s foundation, and second, it exists inside of societies and unfolds in them. Language is located on the border between nature and culture; it “does not appear in the first and is the condition of the second.” 5 Paz believed in two versions that “explained” the emergence of language in the human being. One corresponds to Rousseau, which argues the intervention of a non-human power, the divine. The other is from Lévi-Strauss and refers to another external power relative to nature. Ultimately, the thesis that convinces him is “La facultad de hablar es una manifestación particular de la comunicación natural; el lenguaje humano es un dialecto más en el sistema lingüístico del universo. Podría agregarse: el cosmos es un lenguaje de lenguajes” (“The ability to speak is a particular expression of natural communication; human language is another dialect in the linguistic system of the universe. You could add: the cosmos is a language of languages”) (Paz OC, II: 159). As a result, the kind of materialism that Paz was considering at the end of the 1960s was not historical, nor dialectic, nor biological, but “mathematical, linguistic, mental,” i.e., a combination

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of physio-chemical interactions where matter is understood as a communications system, a system of relations—“Antes nos regia una Providencia o un Logos, una materia o una historia en perpetuo movimiento hacia formas más perfectas; ahora un pensamiento inconsciente, un mecanismo mental, nos guía y nos piensa. Una estructura matemática nos determina—nos significa” (“Before, we were governed by a Providence or a Logos, a matter or a history in perpetual movement towards more perfect forms; now an unconscious thought, a mental mechanism, guides us and thinks of us. A mathematical structure determines us—gives us meaning”) (Paz OC, II: 159). In accordance with Rousseau, as Paz (OC, II: 160) assimilated into his ideas at that time, language is not designed to satisfy needs but rather passions, and artificial or illusory entities such as “tribe,” “state,” “family,” and “religion”—“un sistema de signos producido por las células cerebrales y que no es diferente a los otros sistemas de signos de la naturaleza, de las estrellas a las partículas atómicas” (“a system of signs produced by brain cells that is no different from other sign systems in nature, from the stars to atomic particles”). Rousseau saw as faint the borders between nature and culture. It was something that disgusted Christians and Marxists alike, who considered human beings as unique, historic, and singular, when it was more an example or case of events of another order. We are symbols against symbols that form systems and universes, so “el pacto verbal es algo más y algo menos que un hecho histórico: es un símbolo de símbolos. Alude a todos los hechos y todos los hechos lo satisfacen, lo realizan” (“the verbal pact is something more and something less than a historical fact: it is a symbol of symbols. It refers to all facts and all facts satisfy it, perform it”) (Paz OC, II: 161). 6 ARCHAIC FLOW In Paz’s Los hijos del limo (1972), Breton is one of those who found primitivism in the objects of previous civilizations as a means to illustrate another face of modernity. It was an emergence of what is different, not what is new or a presence that has implicated ruptures, or at least a form of criticism it has fed—“Ungido por los mismos poderes polémicos que lo nuevo, lo antiquísimo no es un pasado: es un comienzo. La pasión contradictoria lo resucita, lo anima y lo convierte en nuestro contemporáneo” (“Consecrated by the same controversial forces as the new, what is very old is not a past but a beginning. Our passion for contradictions resuscitates it, breathes life into it, and makes it our contemporary”) (Paz OC, I: 309). “Archaic Flow” is the name Paz gave to it. Its reappearance means rupture, change, a meeting point or inaugural return. The history of modern art in the West is also “the resurrection of the arts of many lost civilizations,” which embodies momentarily the critical denial of moder-

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nity and enrolls it in the tradition of rupture. In an interview with Anthony Stanton, “Genealogía de un libro: Libertad bajo palabra,” Paz recognizes that it was thanks to surrealism that he was able to understand preHispanic art. In the same book, Paz says that his interest in Charles Fourier was also marked by “indications” of Breton, who ranks him as one of the “magnetic centers of our time,” and he quotes a sentence from Arcane 17 in which Breton insists on the influence of hidden hermetic tendencies in romantic and modern poetry. Enlightenment, analog vision, and metrical reform are all themes present in Latin American literature. Paz was surprised that this literature had not been studied enough, considering that rationalist or Christian prejudices have hindered it. Breton also cultivated trends towards occultism. Surrealism has been compared with Pierre Reverdy’s imaginative simultaneism. Poetry is not a construction but an experience. It is not something we do but it creates us and reverses us, is something that happens to us, is a passion. For surrealism, poetry is an instrument of transformation of the world and of men, a metamorphosis. Meanwhile, Reverdy argued that the ultimate aim of poetry is contemplation of the verbal object, the poem, in which we recognize ourselves. From this observation, Paz (OC, I: 403) considered that the method of automatic writing, the “dictation of the unconscious” (which looks like a revival of the idea of inspiration, where he had previously seen a negation of it) constituted a break with simultaneism, ruining the “concepción del poema como sistemas de relaciones hechas de equivalencias y de oposiciones” (“conception of the poem as systems of relationships made up of equivalences and oppositions”). Thanks to it, surrealism reinstated syntax, an idea of linear order, since dictation is successive, even when the content of surrealism has been a subversion of reason, morality, or everyday logic. For Paz, automatic writing meant a “regression.” Simultaneism, or “poetry of convergences” as Paz called it, is also presented in El laberinto de la soledad. Cultural criticism has not hesitated to refer to it as surrealism. What he put there is not simply the anecdotal historical substrate of Mexico, reflected in Mexican muralism and realistic art but, according to Paz, the “sustrato psíquico donde coexisten y se combinan el mito y la realidad” (“psychic underground where myth and reality coexist and combine”), so that we can consider modernity as “the oldest antiquity,” not as a chronological age, of course, but being present in the now that exists within each of us. In the field of Paz’s poetry, one example where surreal sensibility and vision are presented is the remarkable poem “La casa de la mirada,” dedicated to Roberto Matta, a Cuban surrealist painter whom the Mexican poet admired. The analytical introspection is carried out extraordinarily, and there is nothing more than the emotionality and the encounter with all that is; it is a sense of identity that Paz had already exposed in El

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laberinto. The poem states “vas y vienes entre el infinito de afuera y tu propio infinito. [. . .] Afuera es adentro, caminamos por donde nunca hemos estado,/ el lugar del encuentro entre esto y aquello está aquí mismo y ahora,/ somos la intersección, la X, el aspa maravillosa que nos multiplica y nos/ interroga,/ el aspa que al girar dibuja el cero, ideograma del mundo y de cada uno/ de nosotros” (“you come and go between the infinite outside and your own infinity. [. . .] Outside is inside, we walk where we’ve never been,/ the meeting place between this and that is right here and now,/ we are the intersection, the X, the wonderful blade that multiplies us and/ interrogates us,/ the blade that when turning looks like a zero, the ideograph of the world and of each one/ of us”) (Paz OC, VII: 663). Later, he insisted on this condition that refers to a surreal space–time formulation—“los hombres somos la visagra entre el aquí y el allá, el signo doble/ y uno, ˄ y ˅,/ pirámides superpuestas unidas en un ángulo para formar la X de la Cruz,/ cielo y tierra, aire y agua, llanura y monte, lago y volcán, hombre y mujer [. . .]” (“we men are the hinge between the here and there, the double sign/ and one, ˄, and ˅,/ pyramids one on top of the other at an angle to form the X of the Cross,/ heaven and earth, air and water, plain and mountain, lake and volcano, man and woman [. . .]”). Ultimately, in the different recapitulations that Paz (OC IV: 28) made of his intellectual life, surrealism is underscored as one of the most powerful analogical visions of the human condition. It is that lucky relationship between Baudelaire and Breton that led him to “la exploración del túnel de las correspondencias, la excavación de la noche del lenguaje, la perforación de la roca: la búsqueda del comienzo, la búsqueda del agua” (“the exploration of the tunnel of correspondences, the excavation of the nighttime of language, the drilling of the rock: the search for the beginning, the search for water”). In this way, surrealism turns out to be a strange expression of the “tragic joy of existence.” It also offers a Nietzschean affirmation of life that opposes “systems, their officials and their executioners,” as Paz held in 1984, in the essay “Constelaciones: Breton y Miró,” published in Hombres en su siglo y otros ensayos. We find one of these recapitulations in a text written in 1973, as a protest against the catalog of the exhibition El arte del surrealismo, organized by the MoMa in Mexico, because it defamed Breton, and because surrealism was amputated of its critical character not only in the face of capitalism but of socialist societies. Paz (OC, IV: 329) summarizes what was for him a sensitivity or lifestyle, refusing to consider it a mere movement or artistic school of the twentieth century, the most important, by the way—“El surrealismo fue una rebelión vital que intentó unir en una sola las dos consignas de Marx y Rimbaud: cambiar al mundo/cambiar al hombre” (“Surrealism was a vital rebellion that attempted to unite as one two slogans by Marx and Rimbaud: change the world/change man”). The “text” with which he collaborated for this catalog was called “Poema circulatorio”; he wanted to show the “visión surrealista de México y el

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carácter de insurgencia total del movimiento frente a la civilización burguesa contemporánea y ante la tradición judeo-cristiana de Occidente” (“surrealist vision of Mexico and the completely insurgent nature of the movement against contemporary bourgeois civilization and Western Judeo-Christian tradition”). Paz (OC, IV: 331) insisted on identifying surrealism as a way of life, meaning he saw it as a subversion of sensitivity and the imagination, encompassing art, love, morality, and politics—“En el surrealismo se cruzan las vías de la imaginación poética con las de amor y con las de la revuelta social” (“In surrealism the paths of the poetic imagination crisscross with those of love and social revolt”). Paz points out further that the surrealists were the first to denounce “the bureaucratic degeneration process of the October revolution.” Therefore, his criticism coincided with Trotsky’s, despite his explicit differences with Breton, who also did not believe in a proletarian literature and art, for the simple reason, says Paz, “that he believed that in socialism, the end of classes would also end up being the culture of classes.” As evidence of this affinity, Paz quotes the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art (1938), written by Breton and Trotsky when they met up in Mexico, which he considered “capital.” In “Poema circulatorio,” painted in a spiral on the wall of a gallery leading to the exhibition, Paz plays with notions of “insurgency,” “resurgence,” “convergence” and “divergence.” The poem “walks” on the sediment of goddesses and pre-Hispanic sites that fall within the day and night as rites of the stars that dance both in the sky and on Earth. With it, Paz sought to prove that surrealism is something that exists in Mexico but is hidden, life-buried by colossal “marmomerengue” (bitumen marble) buildings, as he describes in El laberinto de la soledad. It is not appearances, or novelty, that is important to surrealism but what is linked to the past. The surrealists who visited, lived in, and created in Mexico surprisingly admitted as much: Antonin Artaud, Benjamin Péret, Luis Buñuel, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Wolfgang Paalen, Günter Gerzo, Frida Kahlo, Alberto Gironella, César Moro. For Paz, surrealism not only dwelt in such “depths,” as he demonstrated in his “architectural poem,” but with such momentum that it was able to open the wing halls of the exhibition so that it could run free. Such a poem was a “convergence of insurgencies” that denied the insulating exhibition space for breaking up with fugitives, in the “theatre of free eyes” which, when closed, are in fact open, because there is no inside and outside. What is wonderful sings in the “forest of prohibitions”; it appears to be desire and the desire of appearance. This “space poem” became a place that did not belong to here or there but to the “between here/there.”

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COSMIC RHYTHMS Another valuable general appreciation of the surrealist movement can be found in the prologue to the first volume of Paz’s Complete Works, published in 1990. It notes that, in 1945, the surrealists were “un grupo de poetas libres en una ciudad intoxicada por teorías e ideologías que exacerbaban la pasión ergotista pero que no iluminaban a las almas” (“a group of free poets in a city intoxicated by theories and ideologies that exacerbated egotistic passion but did not illuminate souls”) (Paz OC, I: 22). Paz confessed that, before living in Paris in the mid-1940s, he felt admiration for them and their attitudes, “su rebeldía, su intransigencia ante el estalinismo y otras perversiones políticas, su irreverencia frente las instituciones y los poderes constituidos (iglesias, gobiernos, partidos, academias, honores, premios)” (“their rebelliousness, their intransigence in the face of Stalinism and other political perversions, their irreverence in the face of institutions and the power system [churches, governments, parties, academies, honors, awards]”), and pointed out that “es notable la medianía de las obras literarias de ese momento, sobre todo en el dominio de la poesía” (“the mediocrity of the literary works of that time, especially in the domain of poetry, is remarkable”). Like many other judgments he had formulated at the beginning, Paz made partial use of what he criticized. For example, he showed a revindication of automatic writing when he talked about the poem in El arco y la lira—which is not at all condemnatory (as noted in the book), and where he appreciates the sense that one can have a spontaneous relationship between words and images, such as in sleep, delirium, hypnosis, and “other states of relaxed consciousness.” At the end of such an experience, one can grasp a “unit” to which the poet is silent. These units are images or words and are the river of time that lead to the vast ocean of eternity and to unity—fusion with the whole. In other words, they only tell us how we came to be, what we are not, that glimpse of the “other” or the “other shore.” We go with the words that the river of time transports to the boundaries of the knowable. It is a tide that makes consciousness hesitate: Arrastrados por el río de imágenes, rozamos las orillas del puro existir y adivinamos un estado de unidad, de final reunión con nuestro ser y con el ser del mundo. Incapaz de oponer diques a la marea, la conciencia vacila. Y de pronto todo desemboca en una imagen final. Un muro nos cierra el paso: volvemos al silencio. (Drawn by the river of images, we touch the shores of pure existence and divine a state of unity, of the final reunion with our being and with the being of the world. Incapable of setting dikes against the tide, consciousness vacillates. And suddenly everything issues in a final image. A wall looms up before us: we return to silence) (Paz OC, I: 66).

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Automatic writing, perhaps Paz’s most controversial topic regarding the surrealists, becomes a spell. It is a delirious, spontaneous sequence of words called and invoked, where the work of thought also slips with cadence, lined with frugal appearances of ideas that sneak into the consciousness as if attracted by some magnetism. They are “phrases from heaven” that must be a result of concentration and understanding, of an “acute feeling of language,” of “diálogos en que las inteligencias chocan y brillan, galerías transparentes que la introspección multiplica al infinito” (“dialogues in which intelligences collide and shine, transparent galleries multiplied to infinity by introspection”), all said in a definitely platonic sense. Yet not everything that is spontaneous or circumstantially random requires a desire to fall free. Paz believes reason must be expired, leading towards that “harmonious zone.” A clear example is the famous poem “Mariposa de Osidiana,” one of the Mexican poet’s most surreal, published in Libertad bajo palabra. Breton published the poem in France; it is the voice of a female deity who says: Estoy sola y caída, grano de maíz desprendido de la mazorca del tiempo. Siembrame entre los fusilados. Naceré del ojo del capitán. Lluéveme, asoléame. Mi cuerpo arado por el tuyo ha de volverse un campo donde se siembra uno y se cosecha ciento. Espérame al otro lado del año: me encontrarás como un relámpago tendido a la orilla del otoño. Toca mis pechos de yerba. Besa mi vientre, piedra de sacrificios. En mi ombligo el remolino se aquieta: yo soy el centro fijo que mueve la danza. Arde, cae en mí: soy la fosa de cal viva que cura los huesos de su pesadumbre. Muere en mis labios. Nace en mis ojos. (I am alone and fallen, a grain of corn plucked from the cob of time. Plant me between those shot to death. I will be born of the eye of the captain. Rain me, sun me. My body plowed by yours should become a field where one is planted and a hundred are harvested. Wait for me on the other side of the year: you’ll find me like lightning lying at the edge of autumn. Touch my breasts of grass. Kiss my belly, sacrificial stone. In my navel the whirlwind calms: I am the fixed center moved by the dance. It burns, falls on me: I am the lime pit that heals the bones of its sorrow. Die on my lips. Be born in my eyes) (Paz OC, VII: 186).

The ideas, the thoughts and rhymes are echoes, calls. Thinking is also an exit, which supposes the existence of “that which speaks” to what we are told in enlightenment, and cadences that situate us in a future of movements of strangeness. The “other” is what speaks to us, either through the unconscious (a notion Paz never agreed with and a point of contention with surrealism, which adhered at times to this notion), or through the tension and dialogue between ideas and reason. It is a literal, emotional, ontological “being out of,” which is no stranger to love and eroticism: Los diálogos amorosos muestran el mismo carácter. Los amantes “se quitan las palabras de la boca.” Todo coincide: pausas y exclamaciones,

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risas y silencios. El dialogo es más que un acuerdo: es un acorde. Y los enamorados mismos se sienten como dos rimas felices, pronunciadas por una boca invisible. (Amorous dialogues show the same character. Lovers “take the words out of each other’s mouths.” Everything coincides: pauses and exclamations, laughter and silence. The dialogue is not merely an accord: it is a harmonious chord. And the lovers themselves feel like two happy rhymes, uttered by an invisible mouth) (Paz OC, I: 66).

Paz never believed that chance was the only factor in putting words together, what attracted them and made them appear next to each other unpublished, but rather an order of affinities and repulsions, a rhythm in the background of all verbal phenomenon. There are rhythmic principles that preside over the poetic creation and, given what has been said, behind thinking. They are movements of attraction and repulsion, oscillating rhythms that imitate, emulate, mimic the rhythms of life or the cosmos. The latency of a poem is nothing more than the vibration of this continuous plexus of existences that tell each other their closeness or distance—“La creación poética consiste, en buena parte, en esta voluntaria utilización del ritmo como agente de seducción” (“Poetic creation consists, to a marked degree, in this voluntary utilization of rhythm as an agent of seduction”) (Paz OC, I: 67). We should add the force of the inner search that the poetic creation represents, akin to magic work, which extracts from its own something that is already in the poet. Paz insists that the search does not resemble introspection or analysis; rather it is a psychic activity “capable of provoking the passivity that is appropriate to the emergence of images.” In the end, the poet awakens “secret language forces” and “enchants language through rhythm.” The poem is and is not a set of phrases, a “verbal order, rhythm-based” as stated in the following excerpt from “Trabajos del poeta” (1949), in the book ¿Águila o sol?: Ninguno a la vista. Todos de mil modos, todos vestidos de inmundos apodos, todos y uno: Ninguno. Te desfondo a fondo, te desfundo de tu fundamento. Traquetea tráquea aquea. El carrascaloso se rasca la costra de caspa. Doña campamocha se atasca, tarasca. El sinuoso, el silbante babeante, al pozo con el gozo. Al pozo de ceniza. El erizo se irisa, se eriza, se riza de risa. Sopa de sapos, cepo de pedos, todos a una, bola de sílabas de estropajo, bola de gargajo, bola de vísceras de sílabas sibilas, badajo, sordo badajo. Jadeo, penduleo desguanguilado, jadeo. (None in sight. All a thousand ways, all dressed in filthy nicknames, all and one: None. Worn out outward, grounded from your groundwork. Scratch Achaean trachea. The grouch scratches the crusty scab. Mama mantis jam, Tarascan. Winding, drooling whistling, to the treasure with pleasure. To the ash well. Sea urchin shrieking, iridescent, bristling, frizzy. Sip soup, clamp plank, all to one, scouring ball of syllables, ball

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Another moment of this brilliant text refers to the endless transformations of the writer’s body into images in the immense infinity of the big and small. The uncertainties are radical and everything sinks into a relentless rhythm from one extreme to the other, between the symbolism of civilizations. These are aspects that Paz (OC, VIII: 150) develops beyond the surreal “momento,” in a book that literary critics deem as bright as it is bad, Mono gramático, to which we will return in the next chapter: Me tiendo en la cama pero no puedo dormir. [. . .] Me quedo quieto en medio de la gran explanada egipcia. Pirámides y conos de sombra me fingen una inmortalidad de momia. [. . .] Me incorporo: apenas es la una. Me estiro, mis pies salen de mi cuarto, mi cabeza horada las paredes. Me extiendo por lo inmenso como las raíces de un árbol sagrado, como la música, como el mar. La noche se llena de patas, dientes, garras, ventosas. [. . .] Me encojo lentamente. Cruje la cama, cruje mi esqueleto, rechinan los goznes del mundo. Muros, excavaciones, marchas forzadas sobre la inmensidad de un espejo, velas nocturnas, altos y jadeos a la orilla de un pozo cegado. Zumba el enjambre de engendros. Copulan coplas cojas. ¡Tambores en mi vientre y un rumor apagado de caballos que se hunden en la arena de mi pecho! Me repliego. Entro en mí por mi oreja izquierda. Mis pasos retumban en el abandono de mi cráneo, alumbrado sólo por una constelación granate [. . .] (I lie in bed, but I can’t sleep. [. . .] I am still in the midst of the great Egyptian esplanade. Pyramids and cones of shadow look like a mummy’s immortality. [. . .] I get up: it’s barely one o’clock. I stretch, my feet leave the room, my head breaks through the walls. I stretch in the immensity like the roots of a sacred tree, like music, like the sea. The night is filled with legs, teeth, claws, suction cups. [. . .] Slowly, I limp. The bed creaks, my bones creak, like the hinges of the world. Walls, excavations, forced marches on an immense mirror, night candles, halting and panting at the edge of a cesspit. Whisper swarm of swells. Copulate copied couplets. Drums in my belly and a muffled buzz of horses sinking in the sand of my breast! I step back. I go into myself through my left ear. My steps echo in the abandonment of my skull, lit only by a reddish constellation [. . .]).

In the last article that Paz dedicated to Breton, “André Breton: la niebla y el relámpago” (1996), just two years before his death, he recalled that he did not meet Breton when he went to Mexico in 1938, to visit Trotsky and Diego Rivera. What kept him away at that time was Breton’s criticism of the Third International policy that “strengthened our enemies and weakened the Spanish Popular Front and the Republican cause.” He would consider it as an ideological mistake years later. As is noted, Paz joined surrealism when it had ceased to be a flame: it “was a thinking that could ignite the imagination and warm the spirit in the dry years of the cold

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war.” Above all, as we mentioned, it was a passionate triangle, a threepointed star, shaped by poetry, love, and freedom, concealment and revelation (in El arco y la lira he had shown his skepticism about surrealism’s call to the occult in an attempt to protect inspiration from psychoanalytic reductionism, unless it led precisely to the “revelation” the occult uncovers). That article exalts Breton’s figure and temperament, the contradictions he experienced as a poet but that let him live longer than most. Enthusiasm, generosity, and warmth are some of the adjectives with which he dismisses him as a “Man of remoteness: Nordic mist or sunset mirages in the desert.” The man who celebrated the city also recalls, following in the footsteps of Baudelaire, corners, squares, rivers, streetlights, nights without end. Therefore, Breton was inhabited by opposites—city and jungle, past and future, the beyond and the present. Nostalgia for the past and avidity for the future were felt with the same intensity. He was a man of divinations of poems and poet who was alone even in company—“his life spent between illumination and abatement, exaltation and despair.” THE OTHER NON-PSYCHOANALYTICAL VOICE The “other voice” is something “unknown” and endearing that calls us (Paz uses metaphors of forests, trees and branches, “green and gold thicket”). It is a voice that refers to strange findings of a presence before our current being, which summarizes the passage of time from the mineral ages to what we are in desire—love and eroticism as high summits of material organization. It is a voice that calls us to be what we have been in the continuity of the chain of being and asks us to return to the being, to the original moment undivided that only analogy and magic correspondences can glimpse. There is a memory that poetry recovers and that corresponds to the presence in everything and the whole of the presence, of the journey through human ages and through reunion in the loving unit. There is no way to synthesize what for the poet is the best way of understanding the poetic image: Más lo desconocido es entrañable y por eso sí sabemos, con un saber de recuerdo, de dónde viene y adónde va la voz poética. Yo ya estuve aquí. La roca natal guarda todavía las huellas de mis pisadas. El mar me conoce. Ese astro un día ardió en mi diestra. Conozco tus ojos, el peso de tus trenzas, la temperatura de tus mejillas, los caminos que conducen a tu silencio. Tus pensamientos son transparentes. En ellos veo mi imagen confundida con la tuya mil veces mil hasta llegar a la incandescencia. (But the unknown is familiar and therefore we do know, with a knowledge of memory, where the poetic voice comes from and where it goes. I was here before. The rock of the homeland still bears the traces of my footsteps.

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Chapter 3 The sea knows me. That star once day blazed to the right of me. I know your eyes, the weight of your tresses, the temperature of your cheek, the paths that lead to your silence. Your thoughts are transparent. In them, I see my image confused with yours a thousand times a thousand to the point of incandescence) (Paz OC, I: 172, italics in the original).

As we have seen, the “phenomenon of otherness” is a central aspect of Paz’s poetry in which the self is always experienced as another. We can agree with Janson Wilson (1979, 5), in the sense that “otherness” is the metaphor Paz uses as “the reality of the aspects of the whole of the self that are ignored or repressed.” Yet Stanton points out that the idea of poetic inspiration, part of the topic of otherness, does not come properly from surrealism approaches, which still owe their ideas to romanticism and the idea of the “unconscious,” but from an “ontological interpretation derived from Heidegger.” Paz says so, even though in another moment of his study he emphasizes the importance of the avant-garde, such as when he considers the poetic act as revolutionary. This judgment should be balanced with the aforementioned Wilson—to specify the topics of “the other”—the poetic-loving utopia Paz had with surrealism, and the appraisals he made of the avant-garde in general, and of Freudian psychoanalysis. According to Paz, Breton’s notion of “the other voice” provides evidence of the resistance to a psychological interpretation of inspiration. It is already in the programmatic Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930), designating an unexplored “logical field,” something different “to what we think we are thinking,” present in all expressive need as what interrupts “to talk about something else”: “No one, when he expresses himself, does anything more than come to terms with the possibility of a very obscure reconciliation between what he knew he had to say with what, on the same subject, he didn’t know he had to say and nonetheless said” (Breton 2016, 83). Paz links this notion of “objective chance” to the surrealist magnetic field as a result of what “encounters” are achieved from that which emerges in the suspension of consciousness, and does not refer to the notion of the unconscious. It is what returns to us in the space of a certain remembrance of the “already seen,” in short, memory. This approach is similar to the way Heidegger characterized “mood states,” as we have seen: Con una fascinación que no excluye la lucidez, Breton ha tratado de desentrañar el misterioso mecanismo de lo que llama “azar objetivo,” sitio de encuentro entre el hombre y lo otro, campo de elección de la otredad. Mujer, imagen, ley matemática o biológica, todas esas Américas brotan en mitad del océano, cuando buscamos otra cosa o cuando hemos cesado de buscar. [. . .] cada vez que oímos la “voz,” cada vez que se produce el encuentro inesperado, parece que nos oímos a noso-

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tros mismos y vemos lo que ya habíamos visto. Nos parece regresar, volver a oír, recordar. (With a fascination that did not exclude lucidity, Breton tried to unearth the mysterious mechanism of that which he called “objective chance,” meeting place of man and the other, field of choice of otherness. Woman, image, mathematical or biological law, all those Americas sprout in the middle of the ocean, when we look for something else or when we have ceased to look. [. . .] each time we hear the “voice,” each time the unexpected encounter is produced, it seems that we hear ourselves and see that which we had already seen. It seems that we return, hear again, remember) (Paz OC, I: 166, italics in the original).

Michel Onfray (2006, 66) created a wonderful summary of this aspect of the surrealist poetics that so excited Paz. The objective chance is one that is available for events that the “advent” raises; it is to be available for the world to come up with a sign and the appearance of a “pagan epiphany,” to open up to reality and “offer oneself as a fruit decided to be offered.” In synthesis, it placed the body toward the disposition of the ineffable and the unutterable that, metaphorized in impulses, in emotions, becomes immediately in meaning and culminates in words, images, icons, designs, colors, traits—in a stroke that transfigures the effervescence of an experience in expressive incandescence.

For Paz, the result of this chance is an astonishing encounter, “extraordinary and disturbing.” He sees it as a “region close to enlightenment or mystical revelation.” Breton is considered to have studied it first, “situating it accurately and drawing the first map.” It is, in fact, an area of “manifestations highly exalted to the spirit” that can be found in both objects and people. As noted, Breton highlighted the Hegelian provenance of this notion, whose impact resulted in the works of Mallarmé or Apollinaire. It is in poetic language where the presence of synthesizing dynamism, resolved into unity envisaged by Hegel, becomes sensitive; it is there that “se resuelven algunas de las antinomias más serias, más secretas y opuestas al progreso humano” (“some of the most serious, most secret antinomies that go against human progress are solved”), says Paz. For this reason, the Mexican poet would be “aligned with Hegelian thought when facing the reproaches of Marxism,” and because he believed that the history of modern poetry, “however undisciplined it may seem,” has only fulfilled Hegel’s desires, or rather, justified all his forecasts. Paz (OC, IV: 605) makes a peculiar use of “objective chance” in the field of visual arts, in an assessment of David Alfaro Siqueiros’ pictorial technique. In an interview on Mexican Muralism, published in 1978 in

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the supplement “Sábado” of the newspaper Unomasuno, he referred to the “use of accident,” using Breton’s terms: Hay un momento maravilloso en el que el artista, guiado por lo que llamamos la casualidad, pero que es, sin duda, algo más antiguo y misterioso, se encuentra de pronto ante una conjunción entre lo externo e interno, es decir, entre aquello que es del mundo de afuera y aquello que viene de la intimidad más profunda. Su voluntad y la del mundo se cruzan. En ese momento [. . .] el artista [. . .] se da cuenta de que él mismo no es sino uno de los elementos del proceso creador, el canal de transmisión de la energía universal. (There is a wonderful moment in which the artist, guided by what we call chance, but which is certainly something more ancient and mysterious, is suddenly faced with a conjunction between the external and internal, i.e., between what is the world outside and what comes from the deepest part of ourselves. His will and the will of the world intersect. At that moment [. . .] the artist [. . .] realizes that he is but one of the elements of the creative process, the transmission channel for universal energy).

Such an accident refers to the fortuitous combination or “absorption” of two overlapping colors, which, according to Siqueiros’ excited review, quoted by Paz (OC, IV: 605), produce the most fantastic and wonderful ways that the human mind can imagine; something that does not seem but the geological formation of the earth, the polychrome veins and polyforms of the mountains, the integration of cells [. . .]. In short, the synthesis, the equivalence of all creation of life, that organized thing that comes out of the depths of mystery, who knows why through terrible laws.

It is precisely the “other voice” that manifests the emergence of otherness, above all by means of another inheritance from surrealism collected by Paz, the symbolism of the figure of woman understood as “mediator, the open communication between man, himself, and nature” as Wilson (1979, 35) puts it and whose significance for the Mexican poet is wideranging. Symbolism is a transgression of the self, an extra-religious search for the sacred, a return to the origin or unity, and in the end, is secular self-transcendence, communion, loving passion, and erotism, all experiences that share the vitality of the poetic. The “other voice,” paired with the otherness approach and the recovery of an idea about love and erotism, the recovery of the “principle of pleasure,” gave Paz an exit strategy against the rationalism and nihilism of his time and the impossibility of an absolute return to the origin, or nothingness, a recovering of the freedom denied by history and culture (Domínguez 2014, 173). Indeed, Paz considered that both the Nietzschean Will to Power and the Eternal Return of the Same, like Marxist dialectic materialism, were two

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forms of nihilism with difficulties, because they contributed to a subversion of the values “that lightened and tempered us,” but had lost their virulence, especially Marxism, which worked as an ideology in Latin American countries, where it had fatal results. The “more” of the will would have been realized not in thought but in technique, which would have brought about that investment of promised values. Socialism would have become an ideology in the end, a kind of new form of alienation, while Paz (1996, 577) noted that the Nietzschean Übermensch would presently be a mixture of Prometheus and Sancho Panza, something akin to the “typical American” who “no conoce el juego sino el deporte; arroja bombas en Vietnam y envía mensajes a su casa el día de las madres, cree en el amor sentimental y su sadismo se llama higiene, arrasa ciudades y visita al psiquiatra” (“knows not the game but the sport; throws bombs in Vietnam and sends home cards on Mother’s Day, believes in sentimental love and his sadism is called hygiene, razes cities and goes to the psychiatrist”). To be more precise on the mention of Freudian psychoanalysis in El arco y la lira, Paz refers to what the Mexican poet calls the “nocturnal” aspect of being, to what reason, morals, and customs despise or hide, and that correspond to the mystery of poetic creation. Paz’s references to Freud reinforce the idea that nothing in consciousness—be it dreams, unconscious, or mental pathologies—is meaningless, even if it is not immediately recognized, and is different from common or logical meanings. Yet he objected to the notion of “purpose” that Freud employed, since it inevitably implies consciousness. Maintaining a phenomenological approach, it seemed to him that it was better to come to a certain “premeditation,” as we have mentioned, before the will or want or “any other inclination,” conscious or unconscious of the spirit, to explain inspiration—“La pre-meditación es el rasgo determinante del acto de crear y la que lo hace posible. Sin pre-meditación no hay inspiración o revelación de la otredad” (“Pre-meditation is the determinate trait of the act of creating and that which makes it possible. Without pre-meditation there is no inspiration or revelation of otherness”) (Paz OC, I: 167). As we have seen, Heidegger shows an original condition from which it is possible to understand how there is “a wanting to be, a permanent avidity of being, a continuous pre-being-self,” which explains poetic inspiration. Premeditation is essential to the act of creating, to inspiration or the revelation of otherness. Revelation—the emergence and creation of the other—is important to this conception of poetic inspiration. Man discovers that he is another and, in this way, finds others and “the other.” Premeditation thus reveals otherness, where one hears the enigma of “the other voice,” a substrate of poetic inspiration which we believe specialized literary criticism has not analyzed enough. In the background of this topic, Paz (OC, I: 168) rediscovered the incessant movement of death and life—a unit that is resolved in otherness to “recompose into a new

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unit.” In such a movement, man is a “flecha tendida, rasgando siempre el aire, siempre adelante de sí, precipitándose más allá de sí mismo, disparado, exhalado, el hombre sin cesar avanza y cae, y a cada paso es otro y él mismo” (“arrow extended, always tearing the air, always ahead of himself, throwing himself beyond himself, shot, exhaled, man ceaselessly advances and falls, and at each step he is another and he himself”). Detachment from the self is equivalent to “throwing oneself into the void.” In this process, everything remains in question in a kind of Cartesian or phenomenological attitude toward the world, in which the poet has moved away in a methodical, prudential, provisional way (the Cartesian attitude, before its method, is something that poetry vindicates). The “bow and the lyre” turn out to be the moments when a rope is tense and propels forward—the arrow thrown out to reach the target of oneself, and the song that it turns out. From Breton’s ideology, or even romanticism in the example of Novalis, poetic creation is an operation in which certain words are extracted from the interior, like a treasure to be found, such as “stars and serpents, jewels and viscous animals.” Paz summarized what he had understood from Heidegger and the phenomenon of flight and fall into oneself to insist that it is a creative, projecting action in which one is another who dies and is reborn, rather than a mere conscious search. Paz (OC I: 167) found that the Heideggerian idea of being-toward-death could be applied to the surrealist idea of poetic inspiration: La crítica de Heidegger al maquinal e irreflexivo “ocuparse de útiles”— en el que la referencia última, la pre-ocupación radical del hombre: la muerte, no desaparece sino que, encubierta, sigue siendo el fundamento de toda ocupación—es perfectamente aplicable a la doctrina surrealista de la inspiración. (Heidegger’s criticism of the machinal and unreflective “occupying oneself with tools”—in which the ultimate reference, man’s radical preoccupation: death, does not disappear but rather, hidden, continues to be the foundation of every occupation—is perfectly applicable to the surrealist doctrine of inspiration).

NOTES 1. Another interesting solution that Paz found to the crisis of the avant-garde, and industrial art in general, was the emergence of the handcrafted object, whose condition is linked with his recovery of Charles Fourier’s utopian vision. Faced with the mass production of replicas of the identical, and with massive recycling, endorsed by postmodernism, craftsmanship stands as a semi-forgotten field of human relations, abandoned by progress and the modernizing career. Even more, against the insistence on uniqueness of artwork, and on the insatiable reproduction of massive, ephemeral products, craftsmanship is presented as a mediation between the utility of the former and the beauty of the latter. Paz granted them great value and continued to maintain

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links with avant-garde movements because they fostered the appreciation of cultural forms of past civilizations, i.e., André Breton taking boxes of handicrafts in Michoacán, after his visit to Mexico, and signing, with Diego Rivera, the famous Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art. Craftsmanship forms are governed not by utility, not by “useless beauty,” but by pleasure, “which is always an expense and has no rules” (Paz OC, IV: 65). 2. Discover the enjoyable recreation of that visit in Elena Poniatowska’s Dos veces única (2015), a fictionalized biography of the one-time wife of Diego Rivera and Cuesta, Lupe Marin, and the written testimony of that visit, collected in the authorized book Breton in Mexico (1995) by Fabienne Bradu. 3. It is impossible not to call to mind one of the most interesting scenes from the novel Pedro Páramo (1956), by Juan Rulfo, in which the incestuous brothers dwell in a half-destroyed house with a broken roof through which the imagination actually flies, but at the expense of breaking moral laws. The sky is also the vanishing horizon of the character of Susana San Juan—full of silent imaginative freedom wrapped in an unspeakable eroticism for Father Rentería, and unattainable due to the power that Pedro Páramo represents. 4. In fact, the only reference to the Genevan philosopher prior to 1967 is found in El arco y la lira, where Paz recognizes him as the founder, being a prose writer, of modern French poetry, along with Chateaubriand (Paz OC, I: 92). 5. In “Lectura y contemplación,” which is part of Sombra de obras (1983), Paz (OC, I: 553) places Rousseau next to Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist who rediscovered Humboldt in the 1930s, and who can be considered as one of his greatest influences in his conception of language, after Mallarmé and surrealism. It is again the thesis of the verbal pact that founded societies, which he had already dealt with in his idea of a literary utopia but had not recognized existing in Rousseau until then. It is in this approach where he recognizes having felt vertigo—“Sin lenguaje, no hay sociedad; sin sociedad, no hay lenguaje. Este es, para mí, uno de los grandes enigmas de la historia humana. Mejor dicho: el enigma” (“Without language, there is no society; no society, no language. This is, for me, one of the great enigmas of human history. Rather: the enigma”). 6. In Los hijos del limo, Paz repeats what we highlighted in our previous note— although he makes Rousseau appear as a critic of modernity in his novel—about which Gaos wrote—and in those of his followers, where there is a fierce struggle between prose and poetry to the benefit of the latter, which makes up the essence of the novel—“el triunfo de la prosa convierte a la novela en documento psicológico, social o antropológico” (“the triumph of prose makes the novel a psychological, social, or anthropological document [. . .]”) (Paz OC, I: 331-32). It clarifies Domínguez Michael’s already mentioned thesis, in the sense that Paz took from surrealism the rejection of the novel. No less important is Paz’s note that Rousseau is also the carrier of the dream of an “egalitarian and free community,” reclaimed by German romanticism with Hölderlin and Novalis. Rousseau nurtured a type of romanticism that surrealism inherited—a process that would be duly reconstructed and studied in the essays in Paz’s book La otra voz. Poesía y fin de siglo (1990), where Rousseau is mentioned alongside Herder. The basic thesis of the aforementioned Essay on the Origin of the Languages is that language responds “no a las necesidades materiales del hombre, sino a la pasión y a la imaginación: no es el hambre, sino el amor, el miedo o el asombro lo que nos ha hecho hablar” (“not to the material needs of man but to passion and imagination: it is not hunger but love, fear, or something wonderful that has made us talk”) (Paz OC, I: 344). Finally, in La otra voz, Rousseau is mentioned along with Diderot, Sade, and Laclose (his direct contemporary literary disciple) as a critic of customs and as an example of reflections on passions, sensibility, and sexuality—an antimodern philosopher. Paz also quotes one of the stellar moments of Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1754), in which Rousseau affirms the origin of injustice in the emergence of property, when someone said simply “This is mine.”

FOUR The Writing on Desire

Paz’s El mono gramático (1974) has been referred to as “poetry in prose, antinovel, essay” (Domínguez 2014, 270), or as “unclassifiable” work (Castañón 2014). It was published originally as a translation into French in 1972. It follows the path a poet takes to Galta, a ruined city on the outskirts of Jaipur, in Rajasthan, India. This voyage is tied to another, a conceptual path—“a room enabled like a cave of Eros and a Tantric stage where Splendor officiates, born of the sweat of the demiurge Prajapati, a fabulous woman who shares ten deities and has just been confused with the poem” (Domínguez 2014, 270). Splendor is a goddess who returns everything to the origin so that it can be reintegrated once it has been distributed among the gods. In the words of Adolfo Castañón (2014, 271), the monkey grammarian is “the animal that believes in God, the beast that drools sense. With grammar it disguises its apelike condition—calls this masquerade: poetry, culture, religion,” such that this poetic prose is a “reflection on the ephemerality of language before which poetry ends up rising [. . .],” even as it stands as a work that denounces the inadequacies of this language. Castañón does not hesitate to call the book one of Paz’s “greatest works.” The monkey grammarian is a figure Paz has taken from Hindu literature, related to Hanuman, the monkey chief who was able to fly and whose vicissitudes are told in the Ramayana, where it is said that “it jumped from India to Ceylon in a single movement; he plucked trees, carried the Himalayas, grabbed the clouds and performed many other prodigious things” (Castañón, 2014). Above all, no one equaled his erudition, “nor his ability to decipher the meaning of the scriptures (or to modify them at will)” (Paz, as quoted by Castañón). It is well known that Hanuman was the ninth author of the Grammar. Paz (OC, VII: 512) summarizes the poetic questions related to it: 147

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Chapter 4 Ideograma del poeta, señor/servidor de la metamorfosis universal: simio imitador, artista de las repeticiones, es el animal aristotélico que copia del natural pero asimismo es la semilla semántica, la semillabomba enterrada en el subsuelo verbal y que nunca se convertirá en la planta que espera su sembrador, sino en la otra, siempre otra. Los frutos sexuales y las flores carnívoras de la alteridad brotan del tallo de la identidad. (An ideogram of the poet, the master/servant of universal metamorphosis: an imitative simian, an artist of repetitions, he is the Aristotelian animal that copies from nature but at the same time he is the semantic seed, the bomb-seed that is buried in the verbal subsoil and that will never turn into the plant that its sower anticipates, but into another, one forever different. The sexual fruits and the carnivorous flowers of otherness sprout from the single stem of identity).

El mono gramático, says Castañón, is not focused only on evoking the king of the monkeys but on “recreating Hanuman himself and writing a book in twenty-nine chapters that could be read as a rewriting and a virtuous translation of the Ramayana and other Sanskrit books and classical literature from India.” In the end, it is “a composition inspired by saga IX of the ‘Sundarakanda’, called ‘Hanuman inspects the gynoecium’,” a scene in which the presence of woman stands out. It is not a mere translation, Castañón continues, but “an inspired exercise in translation and paraphrase of the spectacle offered to Hanuman by clusters of women who are in turn mirror and reflection of nature.” It is possible to say that all the chapters of the book are variations of certain insistent phrases that surround the human possibility of saying something. THE PATH WRITING TAKES In El arco y la lira, Paz (OC, I: 47) had already settled that “la historia del hombre puede ser reducida a la de las relaciones entre las palabras y el pensamiento” (“the history of man could be reduced to a history of relations between words and thought”), taking Nietzschean ideas that “cualquier periodo de crisis es iniciado o coincide con una crítica del lenguaje” (“any period of crisis begins or coincides with a critique of language”). In particular, he saw in the poetic image the “figure of the human condition” in a way that brings “opposite realities, indifferent or distant from each other,” closer, defying the logical principle of contradiction. Hence, it cannot aspire to the truth but to what it may be, to the Aristotelian “impossible plausible,” and to a synthesis in which opposites do not disappear to the extent that they are “something else,” defying and violating the laws of thought—“El poema no sólo proclama la coexistencia dinámica y necesaria de los contrarios, sino su final identidad” (“The poem not only requires the dynamic, necessary coexistence of opposites

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but their final identity”) (Paz OC, I: 106). Paz contrasts the West’s ferrous, logical principles of identity and non-contradiction with the mystical, esthetic principles of the Eastern world. Facing the Western principle of “this or that,” Eastern thought would have said “this and that” or “this is that”—the principle of the identity of opposites, a logic of analogies and correspondences that Paz also appreciated in the surrealist proposals, as we have seen—magic, poetry. Paz quotes a fragment of the Upanishad, whose sense and form will be repeated in several of his poems—“Tú eres mujer. Tú eres hombre. Tú eres el muchacho y también la doncella. Tú, como el viejo, te apoyas en un callado. . . Tú eres el pájaro azul oscuro y el verde de ojos rojos. . . Tú eres las estaciones y los mares” (“You are a woman. You are a man. You are the boy and also the maiden. You, like the old man, lean on a silence. . . You are the dark blue bird and the green of red eyes. . . You are the seasons and the seas”). This coincidence or transformation of the contrary is always occurring, at every moment, each giving birth to the other, tirelessly being one, becoming time itself— “Ahí, en el seno del existir—o mejor, del existiéndose—piedras y plumas, lo ligero y lo pesado, nacerse y morirse, serse, son uno y lo mismo” (“There, in the bosom of existence—or rather, in the bosom of existing— stones and feathers, the light and the heavy, being born and dying, being oneself, are one and the same”) (Paz OC, I: 108). Paz (OC, I: 109) knew how to take advantage of Taoist and Tantric tendencies, where the body is conceived as a metaphor or image of the cosmos—“Los centros sensibles son nudos de energía, confluencias de corrientes estelares, sanguíneas, nerviosas. Cada una de las posturas de los cuerpos abrazados es el signo de un zodiaco regido por el triple ritmo de la savia, la sangre y la luz” (“Sensitive centers are knots of energy, intersections of stellar, bloody, nervous currents. Each posture of the bodies embracing is the sign of a zodiac ruled by the triple rhythm of sap, blood and light”). El mono gramático is a display of poetic virtuosity. In this book, scarcely commented on by critics, Paz continues with his inquiries into poetic language and how it relates to image, as well as into the transcendental experience of desire. Paz had previously experienced the European avantgarde, and his contact with and knowledge of the Hindu culture would liberate him from certain obsessions of the West, related to the impossibility of linking poetry and religion, eroticism and a sense of community as incarnate word. Paz produces a mythological story that becomes a lyrical recovery of a place in ruins—temples inhabited by monkeys where silence reigns, shadows that light up the night with the glow of unexpected bonfires, and strange witnesses or prophets of time immersed in meditations, barely discernable as humans. Paz seeks to evoke a mental image with the word emanating from the avalanche of memories circulating through his mind, very close to his thoughts. The book is, among other things, a deep meditation on language reflected in the memories of a ruined city—time preserved in matter and in language. The ruins serve

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as testimony of the passage of time and of immobility, but also as a stopover on the road to the return to pre-human origins. Reflecting on change and impermanence, Paz felt a romantic fascination with ruins, dispossession, a return to the beginning or the origin, nature’s revenge against civilization’s irrational advance. Perhaps no one could appreciate the end of civilization quite like the romantics. Ruins do not magnify but rather declare the defeat of a civilization brought to the extreme, an antinatural turn. Ruins and survival represent the actions of insensitive elements such as wind, the gradual degradation of the living, the invasion of the uncontrollable such as monkeys, gurus sunk into misery, civilized periphery attached to an ancillary religion where they continue to celebrate the mysteries of creation. Misery, innocence, the deafening silence of the circles that move the universe, all prevail here. Paz’s description of the visit to these ruins is nourished by all kinds of auditory, fragrant, tactile sensations, but above all it is a view that runs through a desolate landscape of abandonment, able to capture the minimal movement of a stone moved by a lizard, the humming of flies, the flight of butterflies, even the “invisible presence of the cobra,” and at the same time—not escaping the sensitivity of that particular memory—of the “other presence,” the “shadow of our thoughts” that never leaves us and that are “el reverso de lo que vemos y hablamos y somos” (“the reverse of what we see and speak and are”) (Paz OC, VII: 472). The odd chapters of El mono gramático recount the memory of the visit to Galta and the visions recreated in an omniscient scripture that revives the past in an impossible transparency, while the even chapters refer to the poet’s present and his reflections on his art, language, and sense of image. Step by step, Paz reiterates the suspicion that language hides something the poet is unable to glimpse, that betrays him and—when it arrives to crush him—is still unknown. A distrust of language can be found in the works of Nietzsche, whom Paz read, as a critique of values, particularly in the Genealogy of Morality. 1 Nietzsche’s influence on the Mexican poet is also evident in El laberinto de la soledad. In part 4 of El mono gramático, Paz, like Nietzsche, questions the relationship between rhetoric and morality, where any use of language compromises the spirit because it accepts meekly what rhetoric proposes in a “devious,” veiled, or surreptitious manner. Hence the need to put language in a “bread and water” category to prevent it from corrupting us, even though it is impossible to do so, since the same inquiry about its nature compromises us with images, metaphors, expressions made of words, as if it mocked autonomously any attempt at understanding, hiding in what reveals, in what becomes visible, even alluding—tragically—to what is not like it but which seeks to turn into its own nature. Never language, never reality enunciated. It is a language that converts reality into its secret, impossible to decipher; if it were deciphered, it would cease to be (the disease of being). Thus, it seems to Paz that it is futile to move from one meta-

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phor to another, as if one could “weave” language, wanting to look for what “encloses” words and “reality,” still one of the major metaphors created by language. Any expression articulated via language will be subject to the same sequence of suspicions, with the importance falling on the search for its intentionality or sense—“¿La realidad será el reverso del tejido, el reverso de la metáfora—aquello que está del otro lado del lenguaje?” (“Can reality be the reverse of the fabric, the reverse of the metaphor—that which is on the other side of language?”) (Paz OC, VII: 473). The answer is not expected, in an exhibition sequence in which the poet is rectifying his thoughts at every moment, as an intellectual diary—“Language has no reverse, no opposite faces, no right or wrong side.” While reality is just a metaphor, things are nothing but words, metaphors of other things. In the end, language would not be talking about reality or things but about itself, a perpetual dialogue with itself that nevertheless grants what we call “reality,” a shared existence—“¿Con quién y de qué hablan las cosas-palabras?” (“With whom and of what do word-things speak?”) (Paz OC, VII: 473). 2 These metaphors commune, creating communities of beings and things. In the same way, if reality is a linguistic invention, there are “realities” that cannot be enunciated but can be “shown” (Paz was seemingly taking a cue from Wittgenstein)—realities that do not enunciate or say, but say, beginning by themselves, since they cannot say of themselves without presupposing the saying. Paz (OC, VII: 474), halting his argument and putting the search for this understanding of language in parentheses, points out that “(Aquello que se muestra en el lenguaje no es el silencio, que por definición no dice, ni aquello que diría el silencio si hablase, si dejase de ser silencio, sino. . .)” (“(What is embodied in language is not silence, which by definition says nothing, nor is it what silence would say if it were to speak, if it were to cease to be silence, and instead be. . .)”). Paz meditates, unable to conclude but continuing to show this perplexity. What is said in language, in the end? What it says is what is silent, but not what comes from silence, which has already been ruled out; it says what it does not say in what it says, that is, between what it says and as it says it (or it is said)—a certain “between saying” as we can say—while I say it, I stay quiet, or it is this “silence” that I tell you and say. What language says is its quiet, silent speech, its “stranding,” like a ship that runs aground when it hits a shallow bottom near the mainland, leaving the navigator word, oscillating, unstable, leaving language, and the quiet word. What language says is what it does not say, and what it really says. Paz again puts the sentence in parentheses, in another moment of meditation. What silences language is “(lo que entre una oración y otra, en esa grieta que no es silencio ni voz, aparece)” (“[that which makes its appearance between one phrase and another, in that space that is neither silence nor a voice ]”), which is also momentary, to the extent that saying grows again temporarily. What is not voice or silence is the reality of the inter-

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mediate, or the “in between” that we have found in a thesis on eroticism and otherness—the frozen moment of transformations. It is just a moment, a sense that will fade away, a denial that will be denied by the river of language. Paz believed that the other side of language is the reality it normally denies, but wrapped in visions of immoderation where there is no difference or differentiation, literally unbearable and maddening. It is a world that exists before language and towards which all scripture must be directed, refusing itself—“el camino de la escritura poética se resuelve en la abolición de la escritura: al final nos enfrenta a una realidad indecible” (“the path of poetic writing leads to the abolition of writing: at the end of it we are confronted with an inexpressible reality”) (Paz OC, VII: 512). This vision makes man and language possible, doing nothing but note our “banishment from the universe,” the distance between us and things, the measurement of the exile that makes us be. All poetry is measurement, proportion, number, turned on itself with the mission of making visible “lo otro, lo sin medida, el basamento vertiginoso, el fundamento abismal de la medida. El reverso del lenguaje” (“what is other, what is without measure, the dizzying foundation, the unfathomable abyss out of which measure is born. The reverse of language”) (Paz OC, VII: 513). All scripture is, therefore, a double exercise in the search for meaning and its dissipation. It is an allegory of mortality—“Esto que digo es un continuo decir aquello que voy a decir y que nunca acabo de decir: siempre digo otra cosa. Decir que apenas dicho se evapora, decir que nunca dice lo que quiero decir” (“What I am saying is a continual saying of what I am about to say and never manage to say: I always say something else. A saying of something that the moment it is said evaporates, a saying that never says what I want to say”) (Paz OC, VII: 513). The vision offered by poetic writing is therefore that of its dissolution. Yet in this dissolution of language we witness the drama of a time that remains behind the flow of its images and the escape from its moments. Paz confesses never to have ceased to be surprised by the possibility of “glimpsing” (one of his essential words, like any good poet) immobility, eternity, or fixity behind the images or metaphors of time, as Plato had already noted in Timaeus. Poetic language is emptied to the extent that the present gives away the vision that has to do with a certain motionless “presence,” the present in the non-present. It is a time that underlies and manifests itself as a continuity or constant presence that amalgamates and melts moments without giving up being, like in Borges’ image of the Aleph, or like the image of ruins, and since “To contemplate ruins is not to make a journey in history but to live the experience of time, of pure time” (Augé 2003, 45)—the overlapping of times, infinite moments that are not confused, that do not renounce being, melted in a “pure time,” such as how Paz describes Galta’s ruins:

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Miro a Esplendor y a través de su rostro y de su risa me abro paso a otro momento de otro tiempo y allá, en una esquina de Paris, entre la calle de Bac y la de Montalembert, oigo la misma risa. Y esa risa se superpone a la risa que oigo aquí, en esta página, mientras me interno en las seis de la tarde de un día que invento y que se ha detenido en la terraza de una casa abandonada en las afueras de Galta. (I look at Splendor and through her face and her laugh I am able to make my way to another moment of another time, and there on a Paris street corner, at the intersection of the Rue du Bac and the Rue de Montalembert, I hear the same laugh. And this laugh is superimposed on the laugh that I hear here, on this page, as I make my way inside six o’clock in the afternoon of a day that I am creating and that has stopped still on the terrace of an abandoned house on the outskirts of Galta) (Paz OC, VII: 514).

The vision is certainly disturbing and abysmal, albeit astonishing. Paz appears to be somewhat outside his own mind in what he imagines and remembers, in what he ceases to be and not to be, at the same time with himself or out of himself, and “with each other,” outside and inside. He constantly recognizes himself at different times and places, with an unprecedented feeling, established from common places: Aunque no me muevo, siento que me desprendo de mí mismo: estoy y no estoy en donde estoy. Extrañeza de estar aquí, como si aquí fuera otra parte; extrañeza de estar en mi cuerpo y de que mi cuerpo sea mi cuerpo y yo piense lo que pienso, oiga lo que oigo. Lejos, ando lejos de mí, por aquí, por este camino de Galta que invento mientras escribo y que se disipa al leerlo. (Although I haven’t moved, I feel that I am coming loose from myself: I am where I am and at the same time I am not where I am. The strangeness of being here, as though here were somewhere else; the strangeness of being in my body, of the fact that my body is my body and that I think what I think, hear what I hear. I am wandering far, far away from myself, by way of here, journeying along this path to Galta that I am creating as I write and that dissipates on being read) (Paz OC, VII: 515).

The absolute forcefulness of the present unfolds before his gaze and senses, with nothing to hide, with no shadows or backgrounds, “neither hole nor failure,” like a surface into which he can sink his hands: Admirable superficie a un tiempo inconsistente e impenetrable: todas estas realidades son un tejido de presencias que no esconden ningún secreto. Exterioridad sin más: nada dicen, nada callan, solamente están ahí, ante mis ojos, bajo la luz no demasiado violenta de este día de otoño.

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Chapter 4 (A magic surface, at once insubstantial and impenetrable: all these realities are a fine-woven veil of presences that hide no secret. Exteriority, and nothing else: they say nothing, they keep nothing to themselves, they are simply there, before my eyes, beneath the not too harsh light of this autumn day) (Paz OC, VII: 515).

He reflects on events from the past that have reality in the present. Paz’s observations lead to the body as the goal of writing and meaning, which it is to overcome. But it is a body that exists in the same way as the word; it exists to cease being, to be what it is not, that is, distributed in clusters of concentrated sensations and plastic kinesthesia, a body that is distributed and blurs, that is lost and confused, becoming intangible—abstract corporality, embodied notion, described, wrapped in the bliss of the saying that transforms it. Language is a path that draws gradually a destiny of emotions and sensations; it is the route, the map through which memory passes. Yet it is also the recovery of the instant, of what opens it and populates it with memory, the memory of an instant. It is evidently not a path drawn in advance, but each written word is part of a path that is being traced, writing as the memory of an adventure that is surprised to have found the unexpected, a walk that finds and then is not sure what it has found—“No me hacía preguntas: caminaba, nada más caminaba, sin rumbo fijo. Iba al encuentro. . . ¿de qué iba al encuentro? Entonces no lo sabía y no lo sé ahora” (“I didn’t ask questions: I walked, nothing else but walked, no fixed direction. I was going to meet. . . what was I going to meet? Then I did not know and I do not know now”) (Paz OC, VII: 467). Perhaps what Paz (OC, VII: 468) was waiting for as he walked “to the end,” as he says, was the revelation of the word, the one that he would find in the memory exercise, which would “assault” him at the turn of the years, in the “now” that he writes. He would “clash” with this revelation as he returned to traverse the road where “imágenes, recuerdos, las figuraciones fragmentarias—todas esas sensaciones, visiones y semipensamientos que aparecen y desaparecen en el espacio de un parpadeo, mientras se camina al encuentro de. . .” (“images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms—all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the blink of an eye, as we walk to meet. . .”) took place. Language has something evanescent; everything seems to be in it and with it. Beyond it, we can only consider a restart with the word, returning from silence to continue making it possible. Meditation on the road leads Paz to another path, where he returns to the speculation the Greeks had already made about movement and the instant. The first cannot be understood without the second; it is actually a “nostalgia” for it. The instant, or every fixity, is an “unusual equilibrium” between one change and another, between the “thirst” for transformations that encourages what exists. Wisdom will be found in “the dialectic

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between them.” Desolation, the ruins of Galta are monuments of time, the frantic sway of balance and change, momentary balances broken by the alteration caused by the wind, light, time that passes noticeably, until it flows into a new equilibrium. Augé declares that (2003, 46): The landscape of the ruins, which does not entirely reproduce any past and which, from the intellectual point of view, alludes to multiple pasts and is, in a way, doubly metonymic, proposes to the gaze and consciousness the double evidence of a lost function and of a total present although free.

Ruins offer the fleeting intuition of a pure time without history, as we have said. Paz insists that “wisdom is instantaneous,” but there is another phenomenon that worries him even more than these moments of stillness and change, of fleeting and fragile instantaneity, and it is the very fact of the memory, of the way in which it is present over time, as if it were frozen somewhere and suddenly invaded the present. It is a kind of involuntary memory that is felt before being fully present, before it can be named or identified. There is something that announces it, goes through language, and fades as it is said. A certain “blank thinking” makes possible the prenotification of memory that corresponds to the unthinkable, to what is not said but is there, “in a crease of my thoughts.” Paz is sure that the object of remembrance, Galta, is at the end of a linguistic reconstruction, “at the end of the sentence,” the last one that has not ceased to be from the beginning, even the “previous one.” The memory is already a place among the ruins. As the ruined Hindu city appears in memory, the poet is vanishing. Augé (2003, 13) has pointed out that “Memory is built from a distance like a work of art, but as a work of art already faraway and which directly receives the title of ruin [. . .].” The vision of the ruin is one of language that wants to renew but instead has reverted to its vestiges, to what remains of it after Splendor (both the condition and the character in Paz’s narration). Paz views himself as an “artist of demolitions,” of disfigurements; writing is an undergrowth (Baudelaire would say “forest of signs”). The lines of the text are ivy in which writing is entangled, where it remains a prisoner of incessant repetitions. Everything is now “a repetition among other repetitions”—“Es eres soy: soy es eres: eres es soy. Demoliciones: me tiendo sobre mis trituraciones, yo habito mis demoliciones” (“You are is I am; I am is you are: you are is I. Demolitions: I stretch out full length atop my triturations, I inhabit my demolitions”) (Paz OC, VII: 480). Yet the city looks empty in his memory—“It waits for me to disappear.” Therefore, “Ante el vacío que produce su nombre siento la misma perplejidad que frente a sus colinas achatadas por siglos de viento [. . .]” (“In the face of the emptiness that its name conjures I feel the same perplexity as when confronted with its hilltops leveled off by centuries of wind [. . .]” (Paz OC, VII: 470). Like the landscapes of Galta that appear

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and disappear in his memory, especially the whirlwinds that raise the dust and that he considers as a type of ceremony, “malignant celebrations of aridness,” Paz considers that writing operates, a “girar de una palabra que aparece y desaparece en sus giros. Edifico torres de aire” (“turn of a word that appears and disappears in its turns. I build towers of air”). Paz notes stillness, immobility, instant, transit, alteration, metamorphosis, states of things that he associates with the condition of language and the word, which seems to be a “persistence” in the same way that things “persist under the humiliation of light.” The way things happen in this variation of conditions, of oscillating, rhythmic quietude and vibrations, leads him to understand how words are also arranged in the world in a binding way, like metaphors of metaphors of a null or void signifier. Just as everything is not alone in the universe, and the movement or stillness of one has consequences on another, “every change here causes another change there,” so words are kept in permanent resonances of meaning with each other, achieving momentary balances but slipping into new semantics, coming into agreement with the imagination or poetic creation. What astonishes the poet is how everything, words and things, tends to vanish as an essential form of being, but because there is a continuous shifting in all things, that quality of the unfinished being becomes essential. All are perpetual projections of themselves into what they are not, in order to recover a virtual non-being. Things and words (like the famous title of Michel Foucault’s book) are not to be; they lead to what they are not, like the pretext of their being (and is not every word always a pretext for being?), an enunciation of what they are not or are, but only in this way do they gain the consistency of being something while it lasts. Only in their disappearance–becoming–being another do things remain what they are not to the extent that they are. “Dialectic” is the term Paz uses between permanence and change, or, revisiting the terms employed, between the word, language, and meaning (in another moment he links this topic and the topic of the spirit and languages, between what is constant and what changes, according to peoples and cultures—between the one and its multiple manifestations). The persistence of things under the light may be the same as the word, only under “the sun of thought,” we could say, in the auroral transit of language. IN THE SHADOWS OF DESIRE In part 5 of El mono gramático, Paz establishes a new vision for the contrast between immobility and movement, permanence and transformation, which is linked to the vision of the “abandonment of the word.” There, he contrasts the mountain, in particular the Himalayas, and the sea—two irreconcilable ends where it is impossible not to think of Heraclitus, from whose ideas Paz obtained the title of his Poetics book El arco y la lira, as

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we have pointed out. The mountain symbolizes a fixed, immovable identity, a pure mountain that “hides the paths of liberation among its folds,” in contrast to the unclean sea without roads. The mountain is a space for definition, and the sea, of undefinition—the permanent mountain facing other mountains and the oscillating, unstable waves of the sea, movement and its mirages. Paz refines in parentheses—“la montaña hecha a la imagen del ser, manifestación sensible del principio de identidad, inmóvil como una tautología/ el mar que se contradice sin cesar, el mar crítico del ser y de sí mismo” (“the mountain that is the very image and likeness of being, a tangible manifestation of the principle of identity, as immobile as a tautology/the sea that endlessly contradicts itself, the sea critical of being and of itself “) (Paz OC, VII: 478). This part ends with an erotic description of a large monkey embraced by the sea in the form of “huge lascivious serpents and demons” that quieren devorar al gran mono, quieren copular con el caso simio, romper sus grandes cántaros herméticamente cerrados y repletos de un semen acumulado durante siglos de abstinencia, quieren repartir la substancia viril entre los cuatro puntos cardinales, diseminarla, dispersar al ser, multiplicar las apariencias, multiplicar la muerte, quieren sorberle el pensamiento y los tuétanos, desangrarlo, vaciarlo, estrujarlo, chuparlo, convertirlo en badajo, en una cáscara. . . (eager to devour the great monkey, eager to copulate with the chaste simian, to break open his great hermetically sealed jars full of semen accumulated over centuries and centuries of abstinence, eager to broadcast the virile substance to the four points of the compass, to disseminate it, to disperse being, multiply appearances, multiply death, eager to extract his thought and his marrow, to drain him of his last drop of blood, to empty him, squeeze him, suck him dry, to turn him into the clapper of a bell, a hollow shell) (Paz OC, VII: 479).

This erotic passage complements another one, in part 7, in which the shadows and the fire of a chimney move along a female body, between waves that cover and fertilize it. The writing is a map that regains the living space, tracing figures and recovering the incessant flickering of a vibrant fire off a wall, a golden light that shines in the shadow that slides through the water of a pond, the stage of the light of a black sun that makes the night vibrate and that throws its rays onto the pond’s clear surface. The sea in the distance melts into the sky; the fish that inhabit it are now birds. Shadows are still playing on the wall. Bubbles appear, concentric circles on the still surface of the pond, echoes, impacts, vibrations of “submerged bells,” and at the same time “Splendor,” a woman invited to the night stranded in the concert of “drifting continents,” another way of naming the spectacle. The mast of the ship on the silent horizon, alongside the moon, is now a virile member that brings to the extreme the sensations that invade Splendor through the tongues of fire

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and “rays of shadow” that run along her burning body. There are images of fire joined with fire, bodies of fire penetrating their lights and shadows, ethereal transformations, or rather conversions with the elements water, fire, and wind that whisper and put the bodies in tune on an invaded surface of desire: La luz de la hoguera se enrosca en los tobillos de Esplendor y asciende entre sus piernas hasta iluminar su pubis y su vientre. El agua color de sol moja su vello y penetra entre los labios de la vulva. La lengua templada de la llama sobre la humedad de la crica; la lengua entra y palpa a ciegas todas las paredes palpitantes. El agua de muchos dedos abre las valvas y frota el obstinado botón eréctil escondido entre repliegues chorreantes. Se enlazan y desenlazan los reflejos, las llamas, las ondas. (The light of the fire coils about Splendor’s ankles, mounts between her thighs, illuminates her pubis and belly. The sun-colored water wets her fleecy mound and penetrates the lips of her vulva. The tempered tongue of the flames on the moist pudenda; the tongue enters and blindly gropes its way along the palpitating walls. The many-fingered water opens the valves and rubs the stubborn erectile button hidden amid dripping folds. The reflections, the flames, the waves lock in embrace and draw apart) (Paz OC, VII: 481).

Paz understood writing as a river of remembrance, a map of intense erotic geographies, a transmutation of the elements in the neighborhood of bodies and conversions in the silent conversation of shadows and their lights. Writing is emanations of fire, the placidity of the undulating water that the tide of the eroticized body translates. The human figure has little time to incarnate in this sequence of elemental transformations; there is but an instant to say “ankles,” “fingers,” “tongue,” “lips,” cavities and body walls, penetrable gaps, accesses and outputs that communicate the inner fire with which water travels as a golden color, a body that is action, movement, invasion, a nocturnal mirage on a moon-laden night. The body is a form in motion that comes into contact with subtle materials, such as light, wind, water. It is a reflection, magnetization, a communicating vessel between material and ethereal implications in a harmony of external oscillations, in the gentle rise of waves that underlie the erotic body in pleasure movements, water, sea, seminal liquids, invading Splendor, foaming the virgin earth of a naked body between shadows and lights, between reflections that show it without shame, fusions of an instant. 3 It is more than a body; it is a material compound shaken by an unconscious force and reflected by a ritual game of lights and shadows. It is a body that nourishes itself with anxieties and is defined in an action, one of accepting, of surrendering at the moment of its invasion—“Sombra de un animal bebiendo sombras entre las piernas abiertas de la muchacha. El agua: la sombra: la luz: el silencio. La luz: el agua: la sombra: el

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silencio. El silencio: el agua: la luz: la sombra” (“Shadow of an animal drinking shadows between the girl’s parted legs. Water: shadow: light: silence. Light: water: shadow: silence. Silence: water; light: shadow”), light in water: suspension of time, feeling of wonder and beauty, a new mode of consciousness that is produced, like in romanticism, by a “perceptual transvaluation” or “alteration of the eye,” or sight. It is the image for an “inner eye.” Paz’s ideas are also based on Eliot’s concept of “models of moments not out of time but in time.” These transformations are possible, and language works like an infinite combinatory where the elements become equivalent and the order is completely reversible—each one is a transformation of the other, each one leads to the other, is the definition of the other; the reflection of another, its deformed mirror. Part 11 recaptures this memorable scene, adding the narrative voice that takes on another body to form a man and woman wrapped in the scenario described. The fire makes them appear as shadows on the wall, seeming to attend a darkened theatre to which other shadows add, provoked by the fire in the surrounding objects, resembling a sacrificial rite “followed by the resurrection of the victim.” The shadows make them appear to be in another story, in an astonishing fable that has nothing to do with what they are living: “El muro les mostraba la metamorfosis de los transportes de sus cuerpos en una fábula bárbara, enigmática y apenas humana. Sus actos vueltos un baile de espectros, este mundo redivivo en el otro. Redivivo y desfigurado: un cortejo de alucinaciones exangües.” (“The wall showed them the metamorphosis of the transports of their bodies into a barbarous, enigmatic, scarcely human fable. Their actions were transformed into a dance of specters, this world reborn in the other world: reborn and disfigured: a courtship of bloodless, lifeless hallucinations”) (Paz OC, VII: 489). They immerse themselves in a passionate universe that isolates them from the world, one where they are unable to decipher the shadows projected on the wall by the fire as hieroglyphics or symbols. This theatre of signs forms slowly a plot that resembles the foliage of a tree, “ramas de una arboleda o las tenazas vegetales de una trepadora” (“branches of a tree grove or the tendrils of a creeping vine”). Rather than translating their love passion, the shadows seem to shift into a narrative that is confused with myths and natural forms but is still indecipherable. They know that every gesture will be converted into another form, mostly animal, “escorpiones o pájaros, manos o pescados, discos o conos, signos instantáneos y cambiantes” (“scorpions or birds, hands or fish, discs or cones, instantaneous, changing signs”), enigmatic forms, a “sheaf of puzzles,” a theatre of black figures, signs, hieroglyphics produced by the flickering light of the fire, like in Plato’s cave. The translation transfers to another dimension where a certain “insane logic” prevails. This shadow plot, resembling a mythical or legendary figuration, also makes a poem, of course, whose word-base, its consistent elements, are

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the bodies that are loved, the clothes stripped from them, the objects surrounding them, forming analogies, rhymes, and figures that appear and disappear. The metaphors that Paz uses have a clear surrealistic background—“tijeras volantes, violines ahorcados, vasijas hirvientes de letras, erupciones de triángulos, combates campales entre rectángulos y hexágonos” (“flying scissors, violins dangling from a noose, vessels full of seething letters of the alphabet, eruptions of triangles, pitched battles between rectangles and hexagons”) (Paz OC, VII: 490). Yet they are also transformations that have to do with history, the religion of the West, the utopia of Charles Fourier, and, as we have mentioned, “civilizaciones ahogadas en una gota de tinta teológica” (“civilizations drowned in a drop of theological ink”). In the following paragraph, Paz elaborates a scene where the monkey’s member is introduced in the channel created by Splendor’s breasts until Splendor sucks it, provoking ejaculation in a violent movement when “los cojones del hombre se hinchan” (“The man’s balls swell”). 4 These erotic scenes have to do with the possibility of the body becoming a sign in its shaded projection, thanks to the assault of the reflections of the fire and the moving waters. There is an emanation and revelation of signs. Images are evoked that explode and blur the birth of others. The body that is each of its parts and the metaphor of its entirety is brought to mind. There is a symbolization of each part, which is what the narrative has been doing, linked with the perceptual or sensorial element: cada pedazo un signo del cuerpo de cuerpos, cada parte entera y total, cada signo una imagen que aparece y arde hasta consumirse, cada imagen una cadena de vibraciones, cada vibración la percepción de una sensación que se disipa, millones de cuerpos en cada vibración, millones de universos en cada cuerpo [. . .]. (each piece a sign of the body of bodies, each part whole and entire, each sign an image that appears and burns until it consumes itself, each image a chain of vibrations, each vibration the perception of a sensation that dies away, millions of bodies in each vibration, millions of universes in each body [. . .]) (Paz OC, VII: 491).

So, the body of Splendor no es su cuerpo sino el rio de signos de su cuerpo, corriente de vibraciones de sensaciones de percepciones de imágenes de sensaciones de vibraciones [. . .] nunca el cuerpo sino los cuerpos que se dividen, escisión y proliferación y disipación, plétora y abolición, partes que se reparten, signos de la totalidad que sin cesar se divide, cadena de las percepciones de las sensaciones del cuerpo total que se disipa. (is not a body but the river of signs of her body, a current of vibrations of sensations of perceptions of images of sensations of vibrations [. . .] never the body but instead bodies that divide, excision and prolifera-

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tion and dissipation, plethora and abolition, parts that split into parts, signs of the totality that endlessly divides, a chain of perceptions of sensations of the total body that fades away to nothingness) (Paz OC, VII: 491).

The erotic scene serves Paz’s purpose of insisting on a dialectic of sensations and perceptions, visions that take shape gradually, or rather, are incarnate in another body that will make Splendor disappear and appear at the same time, coming back to the current of dissipation in unison with the vibrations felt, and then returning to the forms and, above all, to the universe. It is a dissipation and appearance of bodies, a perception that is dispersion of perception which, for that reason, is able to remake the forms and manifest itself in a new body, the same that looks into the eyes of Splendor. It is a dissolution of the inner and the external, between what we see and what we imagine, like Sadhu, the priest–mystic who also appears in the story while the narrative voice recovers the description of the geography of Galta, where the defenseless skies fit, “imperturbable, indifferent and empty.” 5 There is a tantric principle that says that the body is a duplication of the universe, an archetype for the cosmic order (Kushigian 2002, 103). The tantric principle is the body. The poem is like a tantric text that releases the necessary creative force for the next step that could be the union between writing and the cosmos. It is similar to what occurred with the baroque movement, Joyce, and surrealism, the creation of one language within another. Paz’s poetics is based on dialog with the other, as we have mentioned, the search for the meaning of life, eroticism, and the sacred. This dialogical image becomes the aesthetic object of the poet’s work, evident graphically in the spatial dispositions of the verses, exotic roles and imaging. The dialogical work dissects the closed, fixes the image of the other, calling for a relationship that is non-calm, formed when opposites merge, when they separate and remerge into an antithetical movement. THE IMPOSSIBLE MOMENT Beyond the sequential order of the book, part 8 of El mono gramático offers another way of understanding writing. There, it resembles foliage, the vines of branches and leaves and the braided undergrowth, impregnable, like aerial Deleuzian rhizomes. Each line seems to be the skin, the branches that intersect and form geographies in the manner so similar to Jackson Pollock’s works of art. As a whole, writing is a mass of living, tangled branches, capable of carrying a riddle, a living image of Paz’s poetics. The memory that remembers is as accurate as the way the signs are stamped on the page, as the knowledge it has to describe, contained in previous observations. Paz recreates what appears to be an encyclope-

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dia, in a very Borgean style, on the variety of trees existing in India; his erudition is remarkable. His writing serves to classify and impose an order, thanks to the establishment of principles that give meaning where the human can have space, as is evident in another of Paz’s poems, Blanco; there, the word is the beginning of the universe as well as of the poem, which has three columns, making it possible to be read in several directions. Conclusively, memory is that abundance coming from sensations, perceptions, and emotions, and writing is what imposes an order to be understood or revealed by it. The world can be understood from the metaphor that reveals it, from the image that shows it, from the language that organizes it, words that are traces, paths, routes, ways of entering the formless, catalogues, encyclopedias, enumerations that dream vainly of containing the irrepressible—a glass that seeks to shape the water revealed in its transparency, which ends up overlooking elementary forms, as we saw in “Muerte sin fin,” by José Gorostiza. This language is at once imposition, absence of the thing, impersonation, but understanding: Hanuman sonríe con placer ante la analogía que se le acaba de ocurrir: caligrafía y vegetación, arboleda y escritura, lectura y camino. Caminar: leer un trozo de terreno, descifrar un pedazo de mundo. La lectura considerada como un camino hacia. . .El camino como una lectura: ¿una interpretación del mundo natural? (Hanuman smiles with pleasure at the analogy that has just occurred to him: calligraphy and vegetation, a grove of trees and writing, reading and a path. Following a path: reading a stretch of ground, deciphering a fragment of world. Reading considered as a path toward. . . . The path as a reading: an interpretation of the natural world?) (Paz OC, VII: 483).

The figure from Hindu mythology is embodied as a monkey who ponders these relationships and understands that the universe is written in an infinite number of signs that human writing makes a lukewarm attempt to decipher, unfruitfully and banally, as Borges would also have said. Bringing up an old Nietzschean thesis, Paz points out that “the critique of the universe (and of the gods) is called grammar.” What operation does Paz propose, then? To dismantle phrases–phases of memory, to go against the stream of language that communicates and generates senses as we speak. What he has is a series of memories, sensitive images about his visit to Galta, but they are to be said, wrapped in language. He has images that come to him named, and from which he would like to regain the sense or feeling that formed them. He wants to “deconstruct,” as he says—without having heard of Jacques Derrida at that time—language, go back to the original word of which the others are metaphor; remount the current—“desandar el camino (lenguaje que es rio, que es camino, mío) y de expresión figurada en expresión figurada llegar hasta la raíz. . .” (“to retrace the path (language that is a river,

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which is path, mine) and from figurative expression to figurative expression reach the root. . .”) (Paz OC, VII: 474). Except Paz realizes that there is no such original word, that each one is “a metaphor of another word that is a metaphor of another and so on.” 6 He calls such semantic operation “translation.” We will return to this topic that we can link to the hermeneutics of language developed by Martin Heidegger and HansGeorge Gadamer. Each word is the translation of another—“transparencia en la que el haz es el envés: la fijeza siempre es momentánea” (“transparency in which the beam is the underside: fixity is always momentary”). Behind (metaphor) each word we can find another, with no limit to this endless retrospective search, because “the metaphor has always been defined as the trope of resemblance; not simply as the resemblance between a signifier and signified but as the resemblances between two signs, one of which designates the other” (Derrida 1994, 254). Moreover, the reason Paz continues to discuss this issue is understood in theological terms, as is demonstrated below. It is the contradictory relationship between movement and motionlessness that gives Paz the opportunity to make this reflection on language and the word, since immobility is always momentary. Paz argues that an “uncertain demonstration” will occur, but only in memory. It is image, predecessor of the metaphor, that is already an announcement of translation–translating–conversion, which preserves the instant forever and stops the movement momentarily. 7 His examples of poetic images, where time seems to have stopped, are astonishing for their intensity, color, the action of light, the atmosphere, shadows that repeat on fixed scenarios—organic bodies that celebrate mineral existence. The uncertain demonstration of momentary immobility, of the impossible moment, of the gap that covers two phrases in language, is obtained with images of the present in which the writing takes place, imposed on those of the memory of Galta: El tordo plateado y oliváceo, posado en un filo de sombra, él mismo sombra afilada vuelto luz erguida entre y contra los diversos resplandores de los vidrios rotos de botella encajados en los bordes de un muro a la hora en que las reverberaciones deshabitan el espacio, reflejo entre reflejos, instantánea claridad aguzada hecha de un pico, unas plumas y el brillo de un par de ojos; la lagartija gris y triangular, espolvoreada por una finísima materia apenas verdosa, quieta en una hendedura de otra barda de otra tarde en otro lugar: no una piedra veteada sino un trozo de mercurio animal [. . .]. (Perched on a thin wire of shadow, the silver and olive-colored thrush, itself a tapered shadow transformed into light standing out between and against the various glints of broken shards of bottles set into the top of a wall, at the time of day when reverberations depopulate space, a reflection among other reflections, a momentary sharp brightness in

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Fixed moments in memory, now in the present, are confused with the reminiscences that come and go, regardless of their origin, that are transmuted into objects of varying emotional intensity. It is an impermanence whose movement is a rather emotional vibration, a sensitive, dynamic perception of colors, shapes, and dimensions. It is a frozen instant, spatial reverberation, corporal enthusiasm. It is a word that is underlain by time and recovers an emotional cluster formed by precious unforgettable moments, therefore fixed, although changeable, pollutable, sequential, able to magnetize words with each other and make reality a network of communicating glasses between its objects. It is the phrase that freezes time and keeps it waiting for the appearance of its sequences, in the state prior to the merging of images, creators of metaphors. To say that immobility is momentary is to say that it is not. It would be better to advocate accordingly for expressions that do not seek to annihilate the opposition of the fixed and the mobile but to keep them in tension, since nothing is forever, one could say. Paz recommends using expressions that in their ambivalence or indecisiveness enclose a better moment of understanding of things and language. We should not say always and never but casi siempre o casi nunca, sólo de vez en cuando o más de lo que generalmente se piensa y menos de lo que esta expresión podría indicar, en muchas ocasiones o en rarísimas, con cierta constancia o no disponemos de elementos suficientes para afirmar con certeza si es periódica o irregular [. . .]. (almost always or almost never, merely from time to time or more than is generally supposed and less than this expression might indicate, frequently or seldom, consistently or occasionally, we don’t have at our disposal sufficient data to state with certainty whether it is periodic or irregular [. . .]) (Paz OC, VII: 475, italics in the original).

TEMPORAL CONFLUENCES Part 9 of Paz’s book presents provisional conclusions about the experiment being carried out through remembering his visit to the ruins of Galta. It is a journey through time that is stamped on each of the sentences he writes—sensations, perceptions, awareness, words that denounce their emptiness since they have been nourished by something that in essence is not so much that it is dependent on the negativity

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underlying all existence. It is like time travel, a memory that moves from a present that does not cease to pass. Every moment of the present is lined with memory; it is formed magnetically, thanks to the associations it is able to generate. Each present knows how to be intense, associative, and therefore continuous with the past to which it relates unpredictably. From the author’s point of view, it is a renascent memory; from the reader’s point of view, it is a sequence of phrases and impressions going forward. Together, it presents a parade of emotions that correspond to the truth. Only reading makes possible the confluence and appearance of both. The sum is immediate; there is no way to distinguish its parts except for the analysis and composition of the text. The whole of the sentences has already been a wall on which the light of the fire and its shadows dance capriciously; it is already every event described, as well as what is happening on this side of memory, in the present that animates it. The present and memory are implied and expressed in their way—for the present, memory is an extension, an expansion of consciousness, a way to fly over time; for memory, the present is its unthinkable origin, never put into the agreement: Frases que son lianas que son manchas de humedad que son sombras proyectadas por el fuego en una habitación no descrita que son la masa oscura de la arboleda de las hayas y los álamos azotada por el viento a unos trescientos metros de mi ventana que son demostraciones de luz y sombra [. . .]. (Phrases that are lianas that are damp stains that are shadows projected by the fire in a room not described that are the dark mass of the grove of beeches and aspens lashed by the wind some three hundred yards from my window that are demonstrations of light and shadow [. . .]) (Paz OC, VII: 484).

Each thing is itself and is another in this magnetized game of associations that results in a changing state and an unstable nature, limited only by the written expression. It is a happening of time in its various “incarnations” and “desincarnations.” It is a time that flows and makes us appear in various moments, events and forms, continuities that do not know the abyss unless we seek to stop at the moment when everything deepens. For the author and the reader, one of these incarnations is precisely the word. Embodiment and crystallization make us see, reflect us in the moment, give us a temporary face and a sense of existence. But what happens in reality and writing? Paz is expressing events through a depuration of the sensory-prescriptive complex that seems literally to constitute the last word, which could coincide with the original word, the great initial metaphor from which the essentials of language have been derived. Furthermore, he realized that there is no new, we

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could say, phenomenological “reduction” that leads him to a different conclusion. Writing, while responding to sensations, perceptions, imaginations, and thoughts, is not what is ultimately “left” or matters in it. It is not something that happens in reality—on one side or the other, from the scene of its appearance, in the invisible transcripts of its essence and mystery—but in language. There is something in the action that makes it possible, which is what matters to Paz (OC, VII: 484)—a slightly sensitive thing. It is the “other side” of language that matters and that is unmentionable—“no son el otro lado de la realidad sino el otro lado del lenguaje, lo que tenemos en la punta de la lengua y se desvanece antes de ser dicho, el otro lado que no puede ser nombrado porque es lo contrario del nombre” (“they are not the other side of reality but the other side of language, what we have on the tip of the tongue and fades before being said, the other side that cannot be named because it is what is opposite of the name”). Again, it is about what is not said, not corresponding to the denial of anything in particular, nor to silence, as has already been pointed out, although it is again the “in between” that is referred to, what is going to be said and is said. Even when Paz has denied the possibility that, in substance and with regard to language, it is a sensation, he plays with the impossibility of leaving this basic element, this simple cornerstone of the structure of knowledge, binding with other perceptual elements, to deliver a sensory, sensitive, unique complex: no es el árbol que digo que veo sino la sensación que siento al sentir que lo veo en el momento en que voy a decir que lo veo, una congregación insubstancial pero real de vibraciones y sonidos y sentidos que al combinarse dibujan una configuración de una presencia verde-bronceada-negra-leñosa-hojosa-sonoro-silenciosa. (it is not the tree that I say I see but the sensation that I feel on sensing that I see it at the moment when I am just about to say that I see it, an insubstantial but real conjunction of vibrations and sounds and meanings that on being combined suggest the configuration of a greenbronze-black-woody-leafy-sonorous-silent presence) (Paz OC, VII: 484).

In Paz’s ideas, there is undeniably a phenomenology of perception (the Merleau-Ponty expressive body). There is a sensory complex prior to the appearance of the word, as if it were its synthesis but also its disappearance in the interest of a fictional unit. Language becomes a mesh of artificial (spiritual) capture that gives form to a multisensory phenomenon. Derrida (1994, 265–74) has pointed out this process with disturbing words: The movement of metaphorization (origin and then erasure of the metaphor, transition from the proper sensory meaning to the proper spiritual meaning by means of the detour of figures) is nothing other

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than a movement of idealization. Which is included under the master category of dialectical idealism, to wit, the relève (Aufhebung), that is, the memory (Erinnerung) that produces signs, internalizes them in elevating, suppressing, and conserving the sensory exterior. And in order to think and resolve them, this framework sets to work the oppositions nature/spirit, nature/history. . .which are linked by genealogy to the opposition of physis to its others, and by the same token, to the oppositions sensual/spiritual, sensible/intelligible. . .

Yet it is not this, either. Paz recognizes that language empties the reality of its fullness, its constancy and continuity, its incessant flow of transformations between one thing and another to fill itself, something like a “linguistic death of reality”—“los nombres son plétoras, son dadores, están henchidos de sangre, leche, semen, savia, están henchidos de minutos, horas, siglos, grávidos de sentidos y significados y señales, son los signos de inteligencia que el tiempo se hace a sí mismo [. . .]” (“names are plethora, they are donors, they are full to bursting with blood, milk, semen, sap, they are swollen with minutes, hours, centuries, pregnant with meanings and significations and signals, they are the signs of intelligence that time makes to itself [. . .]”) (Paz OC, VII: 485). Names revive the things they supposedly annihilate with their being. The being is the killer of language. If language is actually an emanation of reality, there will be answer to the extent that it does not stop meaning because “reality that does not speak or say is not reality,” said Paz. In the meditations Paz elaborates on the subject of language and reality in his fascinating book, there is another solution at stake. Beyond the imaginative, metaphorical ability of language to confer a name on reality and therefore, on identity—to bestow an essence—there is something that remains untouchable, inaccessible to language, despite all the possible semantic displays. It is a “reality of reality” that language strengthens with the denial that the word represents—both self-denial and selfaffirmation from linguistic denial. The word makes reality disappear even as it asserts itself more solidly beyond it, as any kind of art does regarding its substance or matter. It is a reality that continues to be “beyond its name,” beyond signs, that is “immersed in itself,” where it is not even possible to talk about differences or similarities between things. No principle of identity governs outside of language. It is an indistinguishable, indistinct reality; there is no way of naming it in sorrow to make it disappear effectively. The same applies to the reality to which language gives form. It enunciates as empty yet is loaded with meaning. It can, at the same time, annihilate and transform or conform. It is the self, or us. Under this perspective, there is no reason for us not to remain alien to any identity; we find ourselves closer to an instantaneous plurality that is scattered. We are a self that is “a state, a flicker, the perception of a feeling that dissipates,” although doubt remains with regard to who feels or perceives.

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All language is dissipation, so it is invention. It contains the possibility of a reality, even if it does not coincide with anything more than figures within. It is possible to find in language the reality that the writer wanted to show, which is the reality of the writer himself. It is even possible to assume that someone will show up as a reader and that everything will have an imaginary sense. It all makes sense while the reader is able to recreate the world in which someone called a “writer” has appeared, and this reader knows that what is said is not part of his reality—“ahora mismo mis ojos, al leer esto que escribo, inventan la realidad del que escribe esta larga frase, pero no me inventan a mí, sino a una figura del lenguaje: al escritor, una realidad que no coincide con mi propia realidad, si es que yo tengo alguna realidad que pueda llamar propia” (“at this very moment my eyes, on reading what I am writing, invent the reality of the person who is writing this long phrase; they are not inventing me, however, but a figure of speech: the writer, a reality that does not coincide with my own reality, if it is the case that I have any reality that I can call my own”) (Paz OC, VII: 486). All language is creation, while reading is over-invention, a supposed figuration that tends to regain the senses created by writing, despite the writer’s will. Paz seems to be very excited about the meta-reflective possibilities of writing and consciousness, where the reader appears. It is a consciousness that dramatizes, situating in a new space and time the experience of the writer. Located in a scene in consciousness, you cannot avoid everything that can influence you. It is akin to an exposition of extemporaneous consciousness (like two images superimposed in the cinema). It is perhaps why we are, in fact, always outside of ourselves, and consciousness is an effect of the simple being in between. It can never be an effective monologue of consciousness with itself, since Hegel pointed out that all consciousness is dialogic. Paz sought to understand this dialogue between consciousness and its reality, between the writer’s consciousness and the reader, interwoven in language. He worked towards explaining a certain phenomenology between appearance and absence: vamos y venimos entre la palabra que se extingue al pronunciarse y la sensación que se disipa en la percepción—aunque no sepamos quien es el que pronuncia la palabra ni quien es el que percibe, aunque sepamos que aquel que percibe algo que se disipa también se disipa en esa percepción: sólo es la percepción de su propia extinción. (we come and go between the word that dies away as it is uttered and the sensation that vanishes in perception—although we do not know who it is that utters the word nor who it is that perceives, although we do know that the self that perceives something that is vanishing also vanishes in this perception: it is only the perception of that self’s own extinction) (Paz OC, VII: 487).

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Paz states that beyond language, there is a reality that is not “habitable” (with clear allusions to a Heideggerian thesis), while the reality of names is “a perpetual crumbling,” so there is nothing solid in the universe. In spite of their tendency toward what is fixed, words tend toward a permanent mobility of meaning. The most solid word can also become an uncertain path. Language creates a crossroads that disorients the strongest of words and the most serious of consciousnesses. Paz calls it “perception of a sensation that is vanishing like bodies”; loss of the sense of gravity in the erotic act, a loss that is almost a cinematographic dissolution since it is “intervened” by the shadows projected on the wall by the light of the fire in the story told in El mono gramático. It is reflected in the intensity of vibration, the undulation of the waters that bathe the body of Splendor, and in the invasion of fire’s light and shadows. The shadows relate figuratively, metaphorically—impalpable, associative, and transforming. They are the vision and sensible experience of body fragmentation, the incorporation of other forms, and the imminent absence and presence of oneself, moved in time. What Paz exhibits in his text is a narrative choreography—a ritual, ceremonious, orphic, erotic act and its imaginative transformation. What language and reality can be comes at the expense of poetic experimentalism. Language can be led to a sort of disarticulation that exposes poetic experimentalism in just one in-between view; it becomes an image that separates from what is written, not as a synthesis, or as image–foundation, but an interminable error between sequences of phrases that return to themselves. The meaning can be overloaded, allowing the perception of feeling that dissipates. In this way, Paz returns to the beginning of his narration, which is also its end; it is a beginning widening with each travel or turn. For this reason, writing is conclusively a “verbal waste”—“las frases que escribo sobre este papel son las sensaciones, las percepciones, las imaginaciones, etcétera, que se encienden y apagan aquí, frente a mis ojos, el residuo verbal” (“the phrases that I write on this paper are sensations, perceptions, images, etcetera, which flare up and die down here, in front of my eyes, the verbal residuum”), so “los signos no son las presencias pero configuran otra presencia, las frases se alinean una tras otra sobre la página y al desplegarse abren un camino hacia un fin provisoriamente definitivo” (“the signs are not presences but they configure another presence, the phrases fall into line one after the other on the page and as they advance they open up a path toward a temporarily final end”). Thus, “las frases configuran una presencia que se disipa, son la configuración de la abolición de la presencia” (“the phrases configure a presence that disappears, they are the configuration of the abolition of presence”). One facet of language is the dissipation of reality, even as a more intangible version is created of what can be considered ethereal, or inaccessible. It can occur since it coincides with what the reader’s consciousness contributes. What exists beyond phrases, like the “inaccessible

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tree” (the best image of Paz for this reality, noted by Poniatowska, 1998) is also what is on the other side, “allá donde unos ojos leen esto que escribo y, al leerlo, lo disipa” (“there where eyes read what I am writing, and on reading it, dissipate it”) (Paz OC, VII: 488). An intangibility that becomes intelligibility—a long word as a train that is about to derail; it seems to Paz that nothing has a name in the strict sense, so nothing is in the permanent possibility that everything is in itself. Paz seeks to tear down the adamic fable in which things are named to give them reality, when it is the name that underlies them—“El paraíso está regido por una gramática ontológica: las cosas y los seres son sus nombres y cada nombre es propio” (“Paradise is governed by an ontological grammar: things and beings are its names and each name is a proper name”) (Paz OC, VII: 506). Because originally things have no name, someone would say that the poet is referring to the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, and that it can be deduced that they are unique. Yet this contradiction is what makes the poet speak, always exerting a certain critique of language, that is to say, he philosophizes. The poetic saying nourishes itself of this inadequacy of the name to the thing and, in its propaedeutic work, is dedicated to pluck it from where it has nested for centuries—“la crítica del lenguaje se llama poesía: los nombres se adelgazan hasta la transparencia, la evaporación” (“the critique of language is called poetry: names grow thinner and thinner, to the point of transparency, of evaporation”). Only the poet seems to carry out this task in which the world is returned to its pristine innocence, its named stripped away—a vision that is capable of making us crazy, says Paz. The world remains unchanged by names; it is beyond any sign, and all the names left it unattainable, untouchable, impenetrable in the end. The world lies in itself without the human “sin nombre, sin historia, sin sentido, sin utilidad: porque sí” (“with no name, no history, no meaning, no practical use: just because”). The name hardly comes near the presence of the order of the sacred. A world rests on itself, beyond the name, which is in the hereafter. A world is presence that, in this way, coincides with itself and therefore ceases to be what we do with the word “world.” Outside of language lies the pure presence, the transparency of things available only to the senses—“Veo, oigo, toco la paulatina petrificación del lenguaje que ya no significa, que sólo dice: ‘mesa’, ‘bote de basura’, sin decirlos realmente, mientras la mesa y el bote desaparecen en el patio completamente a oscuras [. . .]” (“I see, I hear, I touch the gradual petrification of language that no longer signifies but merely says: table, garbage can, without really saying them, as the table and the garbage can disappear in the patio that is now totally dark [. . .]”) (Paz OC, VII: 508). Things without a name lead us “on the other side,” to the “non-human aspect of the universe,” capable of seducing and maddening us, as we have said. To lose the name is to lose the “measure,” as Heraclitus says.

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CONTAGION OF REFLEXES In part 10 of El mono gramático, Paz returns to erotic scenes. The question, if at this point it is pertinent to ask, is what do these parts have to do in a meditation on memory, language, and time? Upon review of the treated parts, the story has gone from ruins, abandonment, human misery, the remains of a humanity that survives from fragments of mysticism, and an enigmatic adoration of humble life forms to sublime expressions of an eroticism that conjugates an emotional complex mimicked with ethereal elements such as wind, shadows, and fire that envelop without staying, a passion that dances in the silence of the night. These transitions occur effectively in a meditation on language and writing; the word acts in conjunction with the imaginary function of the reader, where the enigma of its otherness is finally resolved. Facing the ruins, eroticism is a triumph of the vitality and transmutation of elements that play in their uncertain presence in the cosmic order. It is an existence without emptiness that binds all beings in a mysterious form of continuity and transformation, mutation and contagion—an existence within the appearance of surfaces whose reflections are confused and are only revealed in poetic images. Paz sets an erotic scene where a group of women have gone through a tiring dance and have fallen asleep, immersed in deep abandonment “under the rule of wine and desire.” It is a contemplation on the remains of a victorious celebration where the body underlies the unconscious awakening to other impulses and events, including the energy to make love to each other. Some bodies are semi-clothed, others have abandoned their clothes, but all are distributed randomly, abandoned, still hot and agitated by the intensity of the dance in which they have participated. They are the final complement of a dance of stars in the firmament. 8 Aquí y allá las perlas esparcidas cruzaban reflejos lunares entre los cisnes dormidos de los senos. Aquellas mujeres eran ríos: sus muslos, las riveras; las ondulaciones del pubis y del vientre, los rizos del agua bajo el viento; sus grupas y senos, las colinas y eminencias que el curso rodea y ciñe; los lotos, sus caras; los cocodrilos, sus deseos; sus cuerpos sinuosos, el cauce de la corriente. (Here and there lunar reflections cast by scattered pearls crisscrossed between sleeping swans of breasts. Those women were rivers: their thighs the shores; the undulations of their pubes and bellies ripples of water in the breeze; their haunches and breasts the hills and mounds that the current flows round and girdles; their faces the lotuses; their desires the crocodiles; their sinuous bodies the bed of the stream) (Paz OC, VII: 488).

“Woman-river”—there is no better description of how they have gone through a feverish dance. The imagery of this open, irregular set of prostrate bodies, overlapping, fallen under the force of abandonment and

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desire, is that of an “intricate, jungled arbor,” branches of the same grove, climbing plants that “cover the tree trunks and open their corolla to the March wind.” 9 The ruin is also a stage of Splendor (the beauty of erotic actions there to testify) and of splendor (radiance). The similarity of the two words may not be accidental, since we find an allusion to what has happened to Splendor. Everything is certainly radiant in Galta: las bestias, las gentes, los árboles, las piedras, las inmundicias. Un resplandor sin violencia y que pacta con las sombras y sus repliegues. Alianza de las claridades, templanza pensativa: los objetos se animan secretamente, emiten llamadas, responden a las llamadas, no se mueven y vibran, están vivos con una vida distinta de la vida. Pausa universal: respiro el aire, olor acre de estiércol quemado, olor de incienso y podredumbre. Me planto en este momento de inmovilidad: la hora es un bloque de tiempo puro. (the animals, the people, the trees, the stones, the filth. A soft radiance that has reached an accord with the shadows and their folds. An alliance of brightness, a thoughtful restraint: objects take on a secret life, call out to each other, answer each other, they do not move and yet they vibrate, alive with a life that is different from life. A universal pause: I breathe in the air, the acrid odor of burned dung, the smell of incense and poverty. I plant myself firmly in this moment of motionlessness: the hour is a block of pure time) (Paz OC, VII: 495).

Paz wanted to understand fixity, frozen time, the intensity of vibrations in an instant, the stillness within the storm, the pause that opens a compass between two untimely movements, those moments that Gastón Bachelard (1992, 13) called the “instant of solitude.” Part 13 revisits the analogy of the jungle and writing through creating bonds (vines) that unite words, phrases–vines that draw on each side of the metaphor, or the image overlapping from one sense to another. Paz creates a figure of speech, a word that speaks for the text’s phrases as a whole, the figure of the text, an image that must certainly send the reader to the forest with its colors and forms intertwined but redesigned by the light. Paz seeks to understand the double phenomenon of language and writing. Analogy is possible through the use of metaphor: the communicating vessel of each form with the whole that underlies it. It also seeks to discover the double secret of every word, linking to others to make sentences and building background figures. We are talking about words as a whole, not just when they are enunciable, but also in their hidden and unspoken being that is mute, imaginative—a metaphorical transformation. It becomes a disappearance that is an affirmation of a tireless turning into sense. What is present is the word, not so much the image. Thus, “por la escritura abolimos las cosas, las convertimos en sentido: por la lectura, abolimos los signos, apuramos el sentido y, casi inmediatamente,

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lo disipamos: el sentido vuelve al amasijo primordial” (“by writing we abolish things, we convert them into meaning: by reading, we abolish the signs, we hasten the sense and, almost immediately, we dispel it: the meaning returns to the primordial mass”) (Paz OC, VII: 506). There are two distinguishable planes in this part of the story, as if Paz were observing some Hindu painting divided horizontally. It is a horizontal diptych, as in the great Glass performance by Marcel Duchamp, to whom Paz dedicates the book Apariencia desnuda: la obra de Marcel Duchamp (1968). The upper plane, barely adorned with sparse vegetation, is “reburned,” corresponding to vast, “ecstatic,” “universal,” “animal copulation.” From a distance, animal beings seem to change in proportion (big is small and vice versa). All animals copulate at dawn or twilight—the animation of being. Below, there is the “meadow carpet of desire,” full of colorful flowers and drawings that mimic the night sky. The image of the meadow extends, baroque-like, to the tapestry, the zodiac, the calligraphy, and the carpet, “jardín inmóvil que copia el fijo cielo nocturno que se refleja en el dibujo de la alfombra que se transfigura en los trazos del manuscrito” (“a motionless garden that is a copy of the fixed night sky that is reflected in the design of the carpet that is transfigured into the pen-strokes of the manuscript”) (Paz OC, VII: 495). One of the spaces is the image that moves to the striated space where the writing is converted. In the end, we read a sequence of transformations—the flow of the imagination between thought and writing. Flowers are signs, stars, drawings of the fabric of life, with writing at the end of everything. It is a conversion of feeling into forms whose meaning is open to understanding. We shall see (another image) that at this level, there is exception, rupture, or irony; it is a level full of irregularities that are but the indices of the violence of desire. The best way to illustrate this idea is with a “nayika,” an image of the female heroine in Hindu sacred texts, who lies precisely in the garden–carpet–zodiac–calligraphy. She is naked from the waist down, in an allusion to the nine planets of the solar system, to the nine carnal ideograms—possessed by nine different lovers—“un jabalí, un macho cabrío, un mono, un garañón, un toro, un elefante, un oso, un pavo real y otra nayika” (“a wild boar, a male goat, a monkey, a stallion, a bull, an elephant, a bear, a royal peacock, and another nayika”), the last identical to the first, “otra ella misma montada sobre ella, un consolador bicéfalo encajado en las vulvas gemelas” (“another of herself mounted atop her, a two-headed creature set like a jewel in the twin vulvas”). She is a female figure associated with water, the sky, ponds, the garden, and the page that describes it, who makes up a sign that seems to say the same but without knowing what it says. Part 14 interrupts the previous erotic cosmogony and returns to the plane of earthly reality, full of pain and suffering. Paz describes a pilgrimage to a devotional center, where innocence and joy, a result of the

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knowledge of being governed by a higher divine will, is manifest. These are human beings delivered to a repetition of something that their ancestors have done and that their descendants will continue to do. The visible crowd is part of another invisible walk through a path that cancels time depending on the continuity of the action—“Por ese camino salimos mañana y llegamos ayer: hoy” (“On that path we leave tomorrow and arrived yesterday: today”). Those who make up this pilgrimage seem to represent the whole of humanity in absence and misery, ghostly and transformed into the most abject beings, while also maintaining the stronghold of a civilization that has left the ungrateful paradise of progress and has surrendered to faith. They are the survivors of a parallel humanity who surrendered its stronghold—prayer—to ancient routes of timelessness. It is the permanent resistance of another sense of humanity linked to deities and cosmic forces, freeing them from themselves by integrating them into a higher unit. They walk with the certainty of being part of an ancient rite by which they join their dead and embody their futures—“El acto que realizaban estaba inscrito en el calendario de los siglos, era uno de los rayos de una de las ruedas del carro del tiempo” (“The act they performed was inscribed in the calendar of the centuries, it was one of the rays of one of the wheels of the chariot of time”) (Paz OC, VII: 498). Paz does not skimp on rigor, accuracy, the emotion of a Dantean/Goyescan painting—old men, couples, solitary people: los mendigos lastimosos o terribles—concorvados, ciegos, gafos, bubosos, elefanciacos, leprosos, paralíticos, cretinos babeantes, monstros quemados por la enfermedad y escupidos por las fiebres y las hambres—y los otros, los erguidos y arrogantes, riendo con risa salvaje o mudos de ojos llameantes de inspirado, los sadhúes, los ascetas vagabundos cubiertos sólo por el taparrabo o envueltos en un manto de azafrán [. . .] los cuerpos espolvoreados de cenizas humanas o de estiércol de vaca, los rostros pintorreados [. . .]. (the beggars with infirmities arousing pity or terror—the hunchbacked and the blind, those stricken with leprosy or elephantiasis or paralysis, those afflicted with pustules or tumors, drooling cretins, monsters eaten away by disease and wasting away from fever and starvation—and the others, erect and arrogant, convulsed with wild laughter or mute and possessed of the bright piercing eyes of illuminati, the sadhus, wandering ascetics covered with nothing but a loincloth or enveloped in a saffron robe, [. . .] their bodies smeared with human ashes or with cow dung, their faces daubed with paint [. . .]) (Paz OC , VII: 498).

They represent disease and the duality of the human face of death in life and abandonment (the cruelest and most direct demonstration of human nature without redemption). They also embody the periphery of the West, the other side of the world, and the everyday shadow that stands

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menacingly without any gaze of any kind in a clear awareness of life and death, as well as the face of sacred binding to all things. There are no masks to reveal and hide them at the same time, as is found in Mexican culture, as is alluded to in El laberinto de la soledad. Rather, it is the face transformed by the living that becomes the face of the Earth in a visible transfiguration identical to the passage of time. The hundreds of human voices that emerge from the pilgrimage, their cries, the sounds of their portable radios, the screams of children, the whisper of those who pray, the conversations, the oaths, the exclamations, all add to the noises of the foliage of the jungle, the noises of the monkeys, the echoes of the sea’s rumor, crows, and the wind flowing through the hills. It is a vast symphony of amalgamated sounds, though singularly generated, something similar to what Roland Barthes called “writing in the air.” There is the creation of an irregular symphony of voices and wails, noises, and chants that returns to human loneliness—“El hombre se mira y se oye en todas partes: el mundo es su espejo; el mundo ni nos oye ni se mira en nosotros: nadie nos ve, nadie se reconoce en el hombre” (“Man hears himself and looks at himself everywhere: the world is his mirror; the world neither hears us nor looks at itself in us: no one sees us, no one recognizes himself in man”) (Paz OC, VII: 499). The content of part 19 is an ambitiously clustered enumeration of elements, a multitude drawn from its colors, smells, noises, sounds, senses, amalgams, synthesis, and even interspersed word games fragmented to emerge unique from its waste. Paz first presents the colorful, undulating dresses of women, fabrics, gazes, transparencies, folds, and baroque bodies. He then moves on to the dances of men in turbans with sweat sliding down their faces and whiskers. He finalizes with a lilting enumeration of fruits, species, a rain of steps running along the path to reach the song, laughter, the prayers of beggars and the bursting of voices, and spirals of sounds that violate the name to reach the banks of the linguistic conquests in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Cortázar’s Hopscotch: babeantes súplicas de los mendigrinos, gluglú de dialectos, hervor de idiomas, fermentación y efervescencia del líquido verbal, burbujas y gorgoritos que ascienden del fondo de la sopa babélica y estallan al llegar al aire, la multitud y su oleaje, su multieje y su multiola, su multialud, el multisol sobre la soledumbre, la podredumbre bajo el alasol, el olasol en su soltitud, el sola-lumbre sobre la podrecumbre, la mutisola. (the prayers of the beggargrims, the driveling supplications of the pilgrim-mendicants, the glug-glug of dialects, the boiling of languages, the fermentation and effervescence of the verbal liquid, gurgling bubbles that rise from the bottom of the Babelic broth and burst on reaching the air, the multitude and its surging tides, its multisurges and its multitudes, its multivalanche, the multisun beating down on the suni-

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Chapter 4 tude, povertides beneath the sunalanche, the suntide in its solity, the sunflame on the poverlanche, the multitidal solaritude) (Paz OC, VII: 509).

One of these strange characters of oblivion and silence, of the past and of mythical glory, is made present in part 17, when the poet narrator walks towards the entrance of a palace in ruins. He sees a young poet in rags, whose left cheek has a hole caused by hunger, so that when he speaks, his voice is mixed with noises and whistles that make him incomprehensible. It is a singular way of showing the incomprehensible through language, from a sickness or misery that assumes the form of a comical game of words barely distinguishable from madness; he is a “poet who played with the world’s deformations and decompositions.” THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE SELF (CONCLUSION) Paz exposes in part 16 the sense of reconciliation and liberation—the dialectics of the one and the whole, of the self and the other—which makes us return from exile and reunite, in the perfect conclusion of this book, in sentences like, “volvemos al todo y así regresamos a nuestro lugar” (“we return to the whole and thus we return to our place”). It is a liberation that is a rupture of bonds and ligaments, self-sufficiency, “fullness of the one [. . .] test, purge, purification”; being with oneself or in the Being. Liberation is the “end of the self” or a return of the self, but to “sameness.” When one is with “whole,” one is banished from oneself; there is only one with “his whole”; there is a whole for each singular individual, but it seems that the singular one does not exist. Being part of others, there is no “one.” When we are alone, everything dissipates in us and returns to the indistinct in both cases—in the first case, a whole human or generality, and in the second, immersion in the ages of “one”— identity in difference. Reconciliation is “identity in concordance,” while liberation is “identity in difference,” i.e., “unidad plural, unidad unimismada. Otramente: mismamente. Yo y los otros, mis otros; yo en mí mismo, en lo mismo” (“a plural unity; a selfsame unity. Different, yet the same; precisely one and the same. I am the others, my other selves; I in myself, in selfsameness”) (Paz OC, VII: 500). Reconciliation means liberation. With these elements—a dialectic of the one and the whole—Paz wanted to understand also the meaning of the social revolutions of the twentieth century and their dogmatic and irrational ends. Revolutions tend to recover the whole, the indistinct, meaning “el comienzo (recomienzo) de la variedad y sus rimas, sus aliteraciones y composiciones” (“the beginning (restarting) of variety and its rhymes, its alliterations and compositions”). The degeneration of revolutions manifested itself in the common tendency to restore the One, the bureaucratic cessation, and the institutional idolatry

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of the líder and the System. It occurs in a society that ceased to be “un concierto plural, una composición en el sentido propio de la palabra, para petrificarse en la máscara del Uno” (“a plural harmony, a composition in the literal sense of the word, to become petrified in the mask of the One,” italics in the original). In the end, the only way to remove this dynamic between the One and everything is to recognize that there are ones and everyone, but not one that is everything, or a whole that loses one. This idea is another way of understanding the composition or conjugations of being (the plural), “la plétora incompleta, el nosotros en busca de su cada uno: su rima, su metáfora, su complemento diferente” (“an incomplete completeness, the we in search of its each one: its rhyme, its metaphor, its different complement”) (Paz OC, VII: 501). Within this dynamic, Paz recognizes the impossibility of ever being alone, of ever being able to coincide with oneself, despite being distant from others; of another being beside oneself, without ever being able to find oneself, without knowing the place where he is, where he is headed, or if he falls into it. Externality is summed up as interiority without ever coinciding, since the presence of the interior is always “somewhere else,” as we saw with André Breton. It is the relationship of a self constituted from its own absences, even from the shadow of one’s shadow, itself: Mi cuerpo y yo, mi sombra y yo, su sombra. Mis sombras: mis cuerpos: otros otros. [. . .] Sin embargo, nunca estaba en mí, y nunca podía estar en mí: siempre había otro. Siempre era otro. [. . .]. Mi previsible invisible, mi visible imprevisible. Nunca el mismo, nunca en el mismo sitio. [. . .]. Destierros: lejanías: siempre allá. ¿Dónde? Aquí. El otro no se ha movido: nunca me he movido de mi sitio. Está aquí. ¿Quién? Yo mismo: el mismo. ¿Dónde? En mí: desde el principio caigo en mí y sigo cayendo. Desde el principio yo siempre voy adonde estoy, yo nunca llego adonde soy. Siempre yo siempre en otra parte: el mismo sitio, el otro yo. [. . .]. Allá está siempre el mismo: él mismo: yo mismo: el otro. Ése soy yo: eso. (My body and I, my shadow and I, their shadow. My shadows: my bodies: other others [. . .] Nonetheless, I was never in complete possession of myself, and I could never get all the way inside myself: there was always someone else there. [. . .] My invisible foreseeable, my visible unforeseeable. Never the same, never in the same place. [. . .] Great distances away: in the remotest of places: always way over yonder. Where? Here. The other has not moved: I have never moved from my place. He is here. Who is it that is here? I am: the same self as always. Where? Inside myself: from the beginning I have been falling inside myself and I still am falling. From the beginning I am always going to where I already am, yet I never arrive at where I am. I am always myself somewhere else: the same place, the other I. [. . .]. There is always the same: himself: myself: the other. I am that one: the one there. That is how it is; that is what I am) (Paz OC, VII: 501).

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Under these circumstances, there is only “reconciliation,” about which Paz offers sequences of dazzling images where analogies—communications networks between material forms and modes of sensibility, contagions, associations and proximity, approximations, neighborhoods, and thresholds that give respite to life in its splendor—rise up. They are concentric universes summarizing Tantric visions: Reconciliación era un planeta ágata y una llama diminuta, una muchacha, en el centro de esa canica incandescente. Reconciliación era ciertos colores entretejidos hasta convertirse en una estrella fija en la frente del año o a la deriva en aglomeraciones tibias entre las estribaciones de las estaciones; la vibración de un grano de luz encerrado en la pupila de un gato echado en un ángulo del mediodía; la respiración de las sombras dormidas a los pies del otoño desollado; las temperaturas ocres, las rachas datiladas, bermejas, hornazas y las pozas verdes, las cuencas de hielo, los cielos errabundos y en harapos de realeza, los tambores de la lluvia; soles del tamaño de un cuarto de hora pero que contienen todos los siglos; arañas que tejen redes translúcidas para bestezuelas infinitesimales, ciegas y emisoras de claridades; follajes de llamas, follajes de agua, follajes de piedra, follajes magnéticos. (Reconciliation was an agate planet and a tiny flame, a young girl, in the center of that incandescent marble. Reconciliation was certain colors interweaving so as to form a fixed star set in the forehead of the year, or floating in warm clusters between the spurs of the seasons; the vibration of a particle of light set in the pupil of the eye of a cat flung into one corner of noon; the breathing of the shadows sleeping at the foot of an autumn skinned alive; the ocher temperatures, the gusts of wind of dates trees, a vermilion, hornazas, and the green pools of stagnant water, the river basins of ice, the wandering skies dressed in regal rags, the drums of the rain; suns no bigger than a quarter of an hour yet containing all the ages; spiders spinning translucent webs to trap infinitesimal blind creatures that emit light; foliage of flames, foliage of water, foliage of stone, magnetic foliage ) (Paz OC, VII: 502).

The above, traversing the infinity of a word or phrase, leads to the most intimate of loving relationships, in the intangible flight of an illusion. For Paz, it leads to the flash, the smile, the simple presence of a sunrise that makes us say “good morning.” It is all related to language, where there is no before and after. Paz ends El mono gramático by renewing his warning about the peculiarities of the word, which “moves,” walks, slides from the possibility of being transparent and makes use of resources such as rhythm and metaphor. The words “walks,” “leads,” takes us beyond it, although it also remits to all condensed times in instantaneous marvel at the vision of the transparent presence. It is as if Paz were taking advantage of his reading of Freud when he refers to this circumstance with the notions of “condensation” and “dispersion.” Poetry conceives the text “como una serie de estratos translúcidos en cuyo interior las distintas

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partes—las distintas corrientes verbales y semánticas—al entrelazarse y desenlazarse, reflejarse o anularse, producen momentáneas configuraciones” (“as a series of transparent strata within which the various parts—the different verbal and semantic currents—produce momentary configurations”). Each of the poetic realizations is crystallized time, which then condenses others. Each configuration contains others, in an apparent change that is just “repeated and always a different metaphor of identity.” In the end, poems are a “cristalización del juego universal de la analogía, objetos diáfanos que, al reproducir el mecanismo y el movimiento rotatorio de la analogía, son surtidores de nuevas analogías” (“crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies”) (Paz OC, VII: 521). Human writing, analyzed by Paz in the light of the Hindu myth of grammar, reflects that of the universe. It translates it, while at the same time acting as its metaphor. It is a dialectic of identity and difference able to explain the convergence of everything in everything, of one in the whole, reflecting the one in everything, just as poems say the same while also remaining unique. Paz embarked on a task following the path that marked his writing, to return to his present that he cannot leave, despite going beyond the word. At least he has experienced the intangibility of transparent presence with which he has looked at the “other shore,” where sense is abandoned to give way to mimicry, analogies, and convergences that make possible a unified vision of reality. It includes strange “spirals of writing” (“whirlwinds,” says surrealism), “repetitions,” “reiteraciones que se han resuelto en una negación de la escritura como camino. Ahora me doy cuenta de que mi texto no iba a ninguna parte, salvo al encuentro de sí mismo” (“reiterations that have dissolved into a negation of writing as a path. Today I realize that my text was not going anywhere—except to meet with itself”). His words resound at the end of the text—writing that was created and discontinued at a time when the poet came and went from his present to the visions of the past in a “reconciliation.” He was able to appreciate the whole of a poetic writing that knew its limits so as to transcend them—“la secuencia litúrgica y la disipación de todos los ritos por la doble profanación (tuya y mía), reconciliación/liberación, de la escritura y de la lectura” (“the liturgical sequence and the dissipation of all rites through the double profanation (yours and mine), the reconciliation/liberation, of writing and reading”) (Paz OC, VII: 523). A decade after El mono gramático was published, and more than fifteen years after El arco y la lira, in the article “Reading and Contemplation” (1982), Paz uncovers ideas about language expressed by the North American anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf, which would appear in Sombras de obras (1983). They reveal his mature approaches toward language. The text includes the section “Between One and Many,” where we can find reflections on the Spirit (one) and the many languages that exist

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between it and a supposed original language. He had to continue these reflections until the end of his life, to gain a better comprehension of himself as a poet. NOTES 1. Paul Valéry radicalized this mistrust. Philosophy as a critique of language has been developed by thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger, as we have mentioned. From the second we read in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) Proposition 4,114, that philosophy “must delimit what is thinkable and with it the unthinkable. It must delimit the unthinkable from the center of the thinkable.” 2. In the 1970s, in the realm of phenomenology, thinkers such as Michel Foucault were also suspicious of language. For example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that “the absence of sign can be a sign, and expression is not the adjustment of an element of discourse to each element of meaning, but an operation of language upon language which suddenly is thrown out of focus toward its meaning.” Foucault (1989) pointed out that “Literature is not language approaching itself until it reaches the point of its fiery manifestation; it is rather language getting as far away from itself as possible, and if, in this setting ‘outside of itself’ it unveils its own being, the sudden clarity reveals not a folding back but a gap, not a turning back of signs upon themselves but a dispersion.” 3. We can associate this scene with Susana San Juan, in Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece (2000, 79)—“The sea moistens my ankles, it moistens my knees, and my thighs; it wraps its soft arm around my waist, and flows over my breasts; it hugs my neck and presses against my shoulders. Then I dive into it; I surrender myself completely to its powerful waves, to its gentle caress, without holding back anything.” 4. If Sheridan (2016) has shocked with scatological references in some of Paz’s first texts and poems, these deeply erotic scenes should also be inscribed in an analysis of love, passionate erotism and, as we see here, transformations. The body has become a sign, described by the most complex system of signs that is language. 5. Again, Sheridan (2016, 103) is pointing out that, since his youth, Paz’s poeticerotic drive “sprouts under the leafy tree of divinity with its archaic and oriental roots, under its orphic and Platonic cup, which murmurs poems and sacred language.” It is said on the subject of the image of the “Unknown Woman,” one of the poet’s first metaphors linked to water, which the Mexican critic analyzes brilliantly. 6. Although Paz never had the patience to read his works, Derrida had already made interesting observations that would have been very useful to his reflection on the metaphor. Retaking Rousseau’s classic thesis, Derrida (1994, 251) points out that “The primitive meaning, the original, always sensory and material, figure [. . .] is not exactly a metaphor. It is a kind of transparent figure, equivalent to literal meaning. It becomes a metaphor when philosophical discourse puts it into circulation. Simultaneously the first meaning and the first displacement are then forgotten. The metaphor is no longer noticed, and it is taken for the proper meaning. A double effacement.” 7. Sheridan (2016, 114), whose precisions have been essential in this part of our study, notes that with this important oxymoron (other rhetorical figures commonly used by Paz, particularly in the work we are referring to, are the metaphor and metonymy, as well as the paralipsis), Paz “intuits the sacralizing power of language,” but above all the impossibility of feeling and thinking at the same time, the “divine reality,” as Mircea Eliade, quoted by the Mexican critic, says. This figure “erases the margin between enunciation and experience. When proposing that the movement is immobilized by force of spinning [for example], he perceives the feeling of a ‘truth’ that defies reason [. . .].” This oxymoron, as Sheridan shows, is a figure that replicates “ineffable speech”—“a mirroring equation, a mimesis sign of the awareness of know-

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ing body and soul at the same time,” which is important to our analysis because it possesses a particular erotic charge—“it is desire in action and in language, consuming each other.” Sheridan’s fascinating study relates to Paz’s early poems and observes the continuity of these fundamental images and figures as he matures as a poet. 8. Sheridan (2016, 119) points out that the image of the dancer is the human version of the oxymoron stillness in/is movement. He refers to a Goethe-like approach in the sense that “the maid’s dance is the dance of the world.” 9. Sheridan (2016, 107) recovers these binding images of woman, the river and the tree, which go back to a classical tradition in which the young man, who at that time is Paz, a “lover, lost ritually in a maternal forest, ‘surprises’ women performing their aquatic ablutions in the shadow of an axial tree,” a mythological woman of wet and arboreal femininity, representing “the soul; fertile, beautiful, sexual and nutritional,” to which the young poet aspired as an element of his own identity. According to Sheridan, the duality “stillness in/is movement” constitutes “another matrix image of his imaginative system,” which refers to the image of the woman/wave/sea dancing. The image of women in this extension of kinesthetic references is no longer just water, but sea—“A body of water, rhythm that comes and goes, that changes and is the same, thighs at rest and languid arms, body of foamy wave,” the siren, the shore between human and animal. The shore for Paz is “that privileged place in his system: the spatial appearance of the instant and threshold of revelation” (Sheridan 2016, 110).

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Zambrano, María. Escritos sobre Ortega. Madrid: Trotta, 2011. “———. Filosofìa y poesía. México: FCE, 2006.

Index

absence, 15, 24 absolute, 15, 22, 38; violation of the, 22 abyss, xiv, xv, xvi, 22, 41, 42, 48, 50; man suspended in the, 62; the seduction of the, 37 act, 6; creative, 15; deconstructive social, xviii; erotic, 59; of creation, 111; phenomenologically intentional, 10; poetic, 29, 30, 42, 54; pure Mallarmean, 22; rebellious, 11; revolutionary, xiv aesthetics, xiv, 11; new, 10; of change, 11 age, 6; Golden, 7; modern, 12 Augustine, St., 41, 80 ¿Aguila o sol?, xi, 113, 114, 137 Aguas del Abismo, 8 Alchemy, 17 Aleph, 22 allegory, xiv All that Is Solid Melts into Air, 26n2 Almanach surréaliste du dem-siecle, 113 L’Amour fou, 118 analogy, xvi, 9, 17, 22; the dynamic characteristics of the pre-Hispanic cultures, 80; the poetics of, 80; strange circularity where phenomena revolve and repeat, 80; the time of the, 18 anguish, xi, 8, 29 anxiety, 34, 41, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51; a fundamental affective capture, 47 Apariencia desnuda: la obra de Marcel Duchamp, 173 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 10, 21, 22, 123 appearances, 21; that is also a disappearance, 39 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 16 Árbol adentro, 2, 94n1 Arcano 17, 113

El arco y la lira , xi, xv, 3, 6, 14, 18, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 61, 63, 67, 68, 112, 115, 125, 135, 138, 145n4 art, xi, xiv, 4, 10, 19, 21, 29, 36, 63; an ascent through, 24; education in the, 29; end of, 107; exploration of the unknown, 104; linked to liveliness, relativity, and finitude, 103; of convergence, 12; of space, 21; of time, 21; the presence of eternity within the temporary, 108; rupture created by, 21; a way to search for meaning, 108 Art and poetry, 33 archetype, 21 artistic creation,, xiv artists, 15, 21 Aristotle, 4 Asian, 2 aspiration to be, xi, 29, 59 Augé, Marc, 152 awareness, 1, 31, 38; dramatic, 8; of the infinite, 38; of the transit of time, 76 avant-garde, xi, xiv, xvii, 8, 24, 25, 65, 74, 75, 80, 99, 100, 140, 144n1; absolute rupture and absolute beginning, 103; aesthetic utopianism, 110; aesthetics of the historical, 14; breaking with tradition immediately, 104; poetry and art, 6; puts into doubt the presence recreated by the Renaissance, 105 Aztec, xvi, 16 Bacon, Francis, 16 Barthes, Roland, 174 Bataille, Georges, 40 Baudelaire, 68 Baudelaire, Charles, 8, 9, 10, 11, 26n3, 46, 48, 68, 74, 96n16 187

188

Index

beauty, 21 Beauvoir, Simone de, xiv, 33 beginning, xiv, xvi, 3, 7, 11, 18; continuous, 1; of man, xv; of the future, xiv; return to the original, 1 being, xii, xv, xvi, xix, 2, 7, 15; arises from the experience of nothingness, 44; being-towards-death, 34; desiring, xv; different manifestations of, 29; endless process of, 58; essential heterogeneity of, 31, 60; forgetfulness of, 56; a form of, 24; human,, 7, 12, 94n3; identitarian approach to, 23; -in-the-world, 41, 47; -in-the-world with others, 61; is eroticism, 40; lack of, 41, 42; lagoons of non, 53; modes of, 6; a new consciousness for a new, xix; oblivion of, 19, 57; our, 24; Parmenidean formulation of, 23; the project of, 16; pure, 45; recovery from, 19; revelations of the, 53; thrown into, xi, 29; a vast community of, 46; the very voice of, 40 Being and Nothingness, 72, 84, 92 Being and Time, 30, 34, 36, 41, 45, 48, 63, 94n4 belonging, 24 beloved, 50 Benjamin, Walter, 107, 119 Bergson, Henri, 60 Bergman, Marshall, 26n2 beyond, 18 Blanco, xvi, 57, 64, 161 blasphemy, 8 Bloom, Harold, xvii body, xi, xiv, xvi, 6, 11, 38, 52 border, xviii; Mexican-American, 83 boredom, 46, 48 Borges, Jorge Luis, 22, 95n5, 152 Bradu, Fabienne, 112, 145n2 Breton, André, xiii, xiv, xv, xviii, 36, 55, 74, 112, 122, 128; approach, xv; objective chance, 117; primitivism in the objects of previous civilizations, 131; terminology, 6; visited Trotsky in Mexico, 75

bridge, xviii brotherhood, 19 Buddhism, 39, 128; a congregation of feelings, thoughts and desires, 123; dissolution of the illusion of self, 128; emptiness, 39 Buñuel, Luis, 112, 121; revelation of the essence of man as desire, 121 Cahiers, 69 La caída, 42 Callimachus, 4 calling, 3 Camus, Albert, xiii, 69, 72, 94n1, 97n24 care, 47 Cartesian, 10 Castañón, Adolfo, 147 Cendrars, Blaise, 21, 22 Cervantes, Miguel de, xiii, 18, 68 change, xiv, xvii; aesthetics, 12; beginning of, 12; elements of, xix; principle of, 12; value of, 19 Chants, 22 chaos, 23, 51 city, xvii; devastated, xviii civilizations, 3, 6 Claudel, Paul, 22 Coatlicue, 80 coexistence, 19 coincidence, 21 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 4 communication, 18 communist sympathies, xiii community, xiv, 14, 29; creation of the, 14; creative, xviii, 14 communion, xvii, 6, 38, 53 Complete Works, xixn2, 61, 64, 119 comprehension, 10 The Concept of Anxiety , 46 conciliation, xiv condensation, 22 confluences, 4 Congress of Antifascist Writers, 33 conjunctions, 4, 21 Conjunciones y disyunciones , xi contemplation, 16, 37, 65 Contemporáneos, xiii, 33, 83 consciousness, xv, xvii, 8, 10, 16, 19, 48, 50; curtailed, 14; expanded, 10; false,

Index xix; limited by its finiteness, 48; a new, xix; of evil, 8; of rupture, 10; petrifying everydayness of the, xix; self, 8 contiguity, 21 continuity, xiv, 19, 22, 24 contradiction, 5, 14, 23 convergences, 2, 4; moment of, 22 Corriente alterna, 63, 127 Cortázar, Julio, xxn4, 35, 95n8 cosmos, 12 cosmogony, 18 creation, 15, 18 Creator, 7 creature, 7; amphibious, 19 criticism, xix, 2, 8; historical, 7; internal ideological, 29; literary, 69 critique, 6, 11, 18, 24, 47; modern, 7; moral, 35 Cross, John of the, 8 Cromwell, Oliver, 78 Cruz y Raya, 32, 33 cruelty, 16 Cubism, 21 Cuesta, Jorge, xiii, 33, 42, 145n2 cultural manifestations, xvii culture, xvii; change, 24; HispanoAmerican, 68; mass, 11; Mexican, 33, 34; pre-Hispanic, 80 cure, 24 Dadaist, 80 Dalí, Salvador, 64 Dama de corazones, 97n28 Dante, 4 darkness, xvi Dasein, xixn3, 45, 47, 48, 58; an eminent mode of the openness of the, 47; hidden its own power-being, 45 death, xiii, xvii, 2, 11, 29, 37, 38, 42, 43, 44; being for, 29; cult to, 85; Dasein’s possibility of being really existing, 92; the eternal companion of the self, 88; my creation, 88; of God, xii; the possibility of impossibility of any existence at all, 92; represents the consistency of the ephemeral, 92 decay, 14 dehumanization, 14

189

Delaunay, Robert, 21 delirium, 10 delusion, 10, 15 democracy, 6 Democritus, 18 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 26n1, 162, 166, 180n6 desire, xv, xvii, xix, 6, 10, 40; primitive faces of, 82; unfilled, 50; the voice of, 40 El deslinde, 35 destiny, 7 The Devil and the Good Lord, 68 devotion, 12 dialogue, 3 dialectic, 32, 44, 67; the perverse use of the Hegelian, 67; the presence of the absolute in the relative, 102 dichotomies, xviii Diderot, Denis, 7 difference, 31 Diogenes, 71 discontinuity, xiv disenchantment, xix Disney, Walt, 64 dispersion, 22 divergences,, 6 Domínguez Michael, Christopher, xiii, 32, 33, 34, 37, 68, 112, 147 domination, xix Don Quixote, 59 Dos Passos, John, 72 Dos veces única, 145n2 dreams, xvi, 10 drugs, 11 Duchamp, Marcel, 18, 102, 106 Eastern tradition, 4 ecstasy, 38; of having been, 40 eighteenth century, 7, 8, 9, 17 ephemeral, 24 Eliot, T.S., xviii, 12, 22 embellishment, xvi emotional states, 40 emptiness, xiv, 15, 39, 41 end, 7; an eternal, 19 enthusiasm, 4, 15 era, 18, 19, 24 erotic, 3, 9, 11

190

Index

eroticism, xi, xix, 3, 16, 40; instantaneous time of, 18 eschatology, 17 The essay on the origin of languages, 130 essence, xi The Essence of the Foundation, 94n2 La estación violenta, 113 eternity, xv, 22; Christian notion of, 7 epiphany, 17 exile, 6, 10, 23; cosmic, 23; from oneself and a return to oneself, 59; Spanish, 34 existence, xiv, xviii, 7; the falsehood of worldly, 24; poetic, 31 existentialism, 8, 30, 31, 33, 36, 68; decreasing the weight of anthropocentric and historic, 67; relations with surrealism, 76 experience, xv; extra-aesthetic, xvii; poetic, 31; sensual liberating, xvii; of separation and of meeting, 29; universe of, xvii La Experiencia literaria, 35 exploitation, xix evil, xvii; as a necessary moment in the realization of good, 67 evolution, 6 fall, 15, 45; into himself, 58; into the world, xi, 48; an ontological concept of movement, 45 fantasy, 10, 24 Farías, Victor, 66 fate, 14; of a whole era, 15 Faye, Jacques, 58 fear, 8 Fear and Trembling, 46 feelings, 46 fiesta, 12, 65, 108; dissipation of time, production of oblivion, 108; an embodiment of the poem in collective life, 109; order opens to chaos and ruptures identity, 108; presence and representation, timeless and historical time, sign and object meaning, 108; a return to recreation and participation, 108 First Surrealist Manifesto,, xiv finiteness of the human, 7, 34, 42

flâneur , 10 Flaubert, Gustave, 68, 74 flow, xvii; cosmic, 23 fragmentation, xviii fraternity, 12; universal, 19 freedom, xvii, xviii, 3, 6, 12, 14, 41, 59; essential human condition, 52; spiritual, xvii friendship, 16 Freud, Sigmund, 127, 143; principle of pleasure, 142 Four Quartets, 12 forgetfulness, 24, 25, 37 forgotten, 19; the reappearance of the, 79 Foucault, Michel, 26n1, 180n2 Fourier, Charles, 19, 40, 144n1, 159 Fuentes, Carlos, xixn3, 4, 33, 95n6 fulfillment, 44 future, 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 12, 16, 25; crisis of the, 11; deification of the, 18; looking for the past we are looking for the, 79; we wait for ourselves, 52 Futurism, 21 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 107 Galta, 154, 155, 163 Gamboa, Federico, 36 Gaos, José, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 42, 94n1, 95n11 Gauguin, Paul, 105 Genealogy of Morality, 150 Gibbon, Edward, 7 God, 16, 38; the death of, 63; dies in his creatures, 91 good, 7; common, 20 Gorostiza, José, 89 Greek, 44 Hamlet , 5, 13 Harmony, 35 Hayman, Ronald, 72, 74 Heidegger, Martin, xii, xiii, 19, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 66, 72, 117, 126, 140, 144; the existentialist hermeneutics, 31; diagnosis, xii; the history of metaphysics relayed, 56;

Index philosophical turn, 32 Heidegger and Nazism, 66 Heideggerian being-towards-death,, xi; being-in-the-world, 40, 74; entity of daily life, xiii; forgetfulness of being approach, xv; metaphysics of freedom, 30; Ontology, xi, 33, 39; Philosophy, 32, 36; poetic, 31 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1, 23, 87 Hegelian, 7, 43; inheritance, 8; negative, 44 Hemingway, Ernest, 72 Heraclitus, 18, 23, 35 here, 2 hereafter, 11 El Hijo pródigo, 37 Los hijos del limo, 3, 9, 11, 17, 25, 61, 131, 145n6 Hindu religious visión, xi; experiences and philosophies, 56; literature, 147; philosophies, 3; Taoist and Tantric tendencies, 148 Historicism, 34 historicity, 31 history, xvii, xix, 1, 2, 6, 7, 12, 14, 15, 17, 25, 32; incarnation of poetry in, 14; logic of, 70; personal and cultural, 22; rationality in, 6; transformations of, xix Hölderlin, Friedrich, 4, 34, 63, 66, 68 Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry, 94n2 Hombres en su siglo, 72 homeland, 24 Homer, 16 Horacio, 4 Huis-Clos, 72 human condition, xi, xv, xvii, 11, 15, 23, 29; exploitation, 14; historicism of the, 29 humanity, xviii, xix, 7 humanism, 31 Hume, David, 7, 17 humor, 18 Husserl, Edmund, 23, 31, 32, 33, 66, 94n4 Hyperion, 33 I Ching, 21

191

ideal, xvi, 10, 14 idealism, 31 ideas, xvii, xviii, 5, 19, 22; political, 12 identity, xiv, 14, 23, 53, 83 Identity and Difference, 34 ideologies,, 12, 15; Marxist dogmatic, 29; totalitarian and orthodox, 19 The Idiot of the Family, 68 idolatry, 12 illumination, xvi; and the recreation of the poem, xiv illusion, xviii image, xv, xvi, xvii, 15, 35, 39, 56; converted into voice, 2; a desperate measure against the silence, 57; incarnate, 14; mental, 19; moving, 6; of Eden, xvi; places us in the presence of the real, 57; poetic, 102; tangible, 19; utopian, xvii Imagination, 97n22 imagination, xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, 2, 4, 10, 19, 20, 22, 46, 59, 67; embodied, 12 The imaginary: Phenomenological psychology of the imagination, 97n22 Imaz, Eugenio, 33 immanent revelation, xiv impulses, 19 Introducción a “El Ser y el Tiempo” de Martin Heidegger, 34, 42 Introduction to Metaphysics, 34, 46 inauthenticity, 24 incarnation, xvi; uncertainty, 25 incommensurability, 24 India, xi, 18 infinite, xvi, 7 inheritance, 5 The Immaculate Conception, 74 innocence, xv, 38 inspiration, 8, 59, 112; poetic, 29 instant, xv, 10, 11; perpetual, 2; of plenitude, 2 intellectuals, 15; Latin American, 67 instincts, 38 invention, xvii irony, 9, 17, 21; meta-, 18, 102 Itinerario, 69 Jaeger, Werner, 34 John of the Cross, St., 58

192

Index

joy, 50 Joyce, James, 18, 161 Juan de Mairena, 60 Jung Carl G., 21 justice, 5 juxtaposition, 21 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 34, 67 Kant, Immanuel, 7, 46, 63 Kierkegaard, Soren, 41, 46 knowledge, 4, 16, 37; different fields of, 36 Krauze, Enrique, xixn1 Kristeva, Julia, 96n13 El Laberinto de la soledad, xi, xvi, 32, 34, 35, 37, 43, 54, 60, 61, 81, 82, 89, 95n5, 108, 134; psychic underground where myth and reality coexist and combine, 132; the question of Mexican identity, 83 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, 7 Ladera este , xi, 2, 18 language, xi, xiv, xvi, xvii, 2, 19, 32, 39, 48, 154; common, 35; constituted by, xviii; critique of, 18; cultural product and anthropological substrate, 29; an extension of our senses, 70; the everyday mass of, xvi; history, 35; history of the Spanish, 3; the house of being, 10; image created by, 57; image of an aspect of the world, 70; imperfect relationship between man and reality, 119; is not designed to satisfy needs but rather passions, 131; is time, 58; performed through, 19; poetic, 19, 22; private, 41; purification, xvii; reform and criticism of, xvii; the river of, 3; says what it does not say, 151; Spanish, 35, 36; temporality, 39; true, 1; undermined, 14; universal, 35; the universe’s double, 9 laughter, 13 Laurel, 94n2 liberalism, 12

literature, xviii; compromised, 68; modern, 18 literary criticism, xiv Latin American literary History, xi Lautremont, Comte de, xvii, 123 Law, 6 Lee Whorf, Benjamin, 36, 145n5 Lenin, Vladimir, 63, 101 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 31, 39, 63, 64 Libertad bajo palabra , xi, xii, xvi, xviii, 31, 42, 43, 126, 136 life, xi, xiv, xvii, 2, 11, 24, 29, 37, 42; as a whole, xvii; collective, 4; daily, xvii; an impoverishment of the level of, 14; intimate, 16; meaning and temporality, 30; poeticizing social, 14; a radical malaise, 42; seems to be a movement of untiring echoes, 53 La Llama doble: amor y erotismo, 56, 87 El Llano en llamas , xviii loneliness, 6, 8, 12, 25, 38, 50; cosmic, 53; nothingness is the abyss of, 48; a sense of community and belonging whose great metaphor is love, 81 Lost Paths, 34 love, xi, xix, 3, 12, 18, 37, 39, 41, 50, 51, 60, 62; combination of freedom and Destiny, 118; the creation of being, 52; erotic, xv; experience of, xiv; mediation between man and nature, 127; the mystery of the person in communion, 87; and poetry are both present in the same creation processes, 118; simultaneous revelation of being and of nothingness, 52 Löwith, Karl, 56, 97n23 luminosity, xvi Luther, Martin, 41 Lyric Ballads, 4 Machado, Antonio, 3, 31, 40, 52, 60 Machiavelli, Nicolas, 16 MacLuhan, Marshall,, 64 madness, 10, 13 magic, 3, 17 Malraux, André, 92 Mallarmé, Stèphane, xv, 22, 65, 72, 145n5

Index man, xv; primitive, 12 The Mandarins , xiv, 76 Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, 133, 144n1 Marcel Duchamp or El Castillo de la Pureza, 64 Marx, Karl, 16, 26n2, 34, 99; The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 119 Marxism, xix, 14; dogmatism, xi; Stalinist orthodox, 77 mask, xv, 60; civilized, xvi materialism, 6 melancholy, 13, 15; pleasures of, 16 memory, xvi, 5, 10, 12; fragile kingdoms of, 16; image and metaphor, 36; the lack of, 25; made image, 2; of peoples, 10 Merleau Ponty, Maurice, 71, 94n1, 180n2 metamorphosis, xviii, 21 metaphors, xvi, 21; as a primary word, 130; dead, xvii; presence of the past in the present, 80 metaphysics, 3, 7, 31, 47, 63; erotic, 60; every poet supposes a, 60 method, 6 Mexico, 6, 22, 29, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37; cultural processes of political legitimation of the modern state, 78, 97n26 Mexican culture, xi; the character of the, 61; countryside, xviii; enigmatic beings that had not achieved the status of abstraction, 78; religiosity, 85; Revolution, xviii; sin and death are the last foundations of human nature, 85 misery, xix, 10 Milton, John, 78 modernity, xii, 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 17, 19, 20, 24, 79; anti-modern, 18, 19; crisis of, 2, 10, 39; critique of, 2, 19, 29; disconcerting feature, 16; the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, 11; existential signs, 8; life has ceased to be a transit, 89; linear time, 18; poetic movements, 8; tradition of, 1; twilight of, 10

193

moment, xv, xvi, 24; intense, 2; poetic, xvi Monegal, Emir Rodríguez, 31 El Mono gramático , xv, 18, 36, 56, 80, 147, 149; deep meditation on language reflected in the memories of a ruined city, 149 Montaigne, Michel de, 16, 55 Montesquieu, 7 moods, 40 morality, xi, xviii, 2, 6, 16 Les Mouches, 72 movement, xvii; perpetual, 22; revolutions and Independence, 7 Muerte sin fin, 90 Murdoch, Iris, 72 music, 21; universal, 53 mystics, xvi, 17; deals with silence, 38 myths, xiv, xvii, 12, 18; Hindu, 36 mythology, 16; syncretism and personal, 17 nationalism, 29, 34 nature, 3; human, 11; immensity and strangeness, 53; strange, hostile, 12 negativity, 8; we are the foundation of a, 48 Neoplatonism, 21 Neovanguard, 66 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xvii, 34, 35, 46, 55, 63, 85; the incomparable vividness of life, 116; nihilism, 43; rhetoric and morality, 150 night, xvi; of pain and mystery, 10 nostalgia, 6, 10; for our origin, 37 nothingness, xi, xiv, 29, 32, 34, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 73, 74; being emerges from, 53; being thrown into, 47; being with, 47 Novalis, 4, 144, 145n6 now, 10, 11, 22; incarnate, 11; without dates, 12 oblivion, 24 Ocampo, Silvina, 71 occult, 19 Octave Elegy, 89 Ode to Charles Fourier, 113

194

Index

Ogro filantrópico, 66 Onfray, Michel, 141 oneself, 4, 24, 29; construction of, 16; detachment from, 24; fall into, 8; recovery of, 24; remain in, 24 Ontology, xi, 32, 40, 58, 59, 63; Heideggerian, 4, 29, 34; modern, 3; of the Mexican, 33; Phenomenological, xi, 29; temporal, 31 opacity, xvi, 35 openness, 41 origins, xv, xvi, 7, 11, 16; return to the, xiv, 19, 40 orphanhood, xvii orphism, 21 Ortega y Gasset, José, 32, 33, 67 other, xiii, xv, 6, 7, 29, 39; the fate of, 15; recognition of the, 14; shore, 25; transcendence of, xiii; voice, xi, 117, 140, 142 otherness, xi, 3, 34, 40, 41, 58, 59, 61, 125, 143; the dialectic of, 6; essential for understanding life, 91; experience of, 29; poetics of, 29; and surrealism, 125; the tragedy of the self dissolved in the eternity of the moment, 126 La Otra voz. Poesía y fin d siglo, 3, 61, 68, 145n6 Otto, Rudolf, 31, 42 ourselves, 16; recovery of, 24; return to, 24 oxymoron, 5 Pachuco, 84; nihilism projects to nothingness, 84 Parmenides, 23 Panabière, Louis, 33, 94n4 paradise, 7 Paris, 31 passions, 7, 19, 39; knowledge of the, 16 Pasado en claro, 2, 22 past, 5, 16, 20, 25; as debtors of the, 19; human, 7; reconciliation of the, 12 Paz, Octavio, xi, xii, xiii, xvi, 3, 11, 16, 23, 26n1, 31, 32, 35, 37, 42, 47, 54, 58, 63–79, 81–93, 94n1–95n8,

95n11–98n29, 102, 107, 111, 120, 132, 137, 147, 149, 153, 158; being another through poetry, 39; conjunctions, confluences, convergences, and restorations, 4; critical passion, xiv, 2; the critique of the universe (and of the gods) is called grammar, 162; the crossover between surrealism and existentialism, 30; the dialectic of otherness, 6; the dissolution of the self in history is represented by language, 92; the dissolution of the subject, xiv; the dynamic characteristics of the pre-Hispanic cultures, 80; exploration of the abyss, xv; freedom as a liberation of consciousness through a purified language, xvii; from a phenomenological ontology towards a historicism of the human condition, 29; have tried to make poetry a revolution in itself, 121; The House of Presence, 25; human language is another dialect in the linguistic system of the universe, 130; imagining a revolutionary poetic society, xvii; immobility and movement, permanence and transformation, 156; in looking for the past we are looking for the future, 79; the incarnation of poetry in History, 14; insurgency, resurgence, convergence, divergence, 134; man realizes or fulfills himself when he becomes Another, 59; man’s freedom is rooted and grounded on being nothing but possibility, 55; the omnipotence of the dream, and the disinterested play of thought, xiv; other voice, 139; the perception of the other side of reality, 18; poetry of reconciliation, 12; a poetry of reconciliation and communion, 24; a presence that is with us and is not before us, 81; reconciliation, 102; restoration of the origin, xviii; reveal what is hidden, awaken the buried word, give rise to the

Index appearance of our double, 129; the sacred reveals our fundamental original human condition, 42; thanks to the inspiration, we imagine, dissolving the object and the subject, 116; a time prior to human or historical, 80; a voice of desire, a voice that calls, the flame of eroticism, 62; a voice that is nothing more than time, 12; what is very old is not a past but a beginning, 131; we are the fruit of desire, 81. See also death; language; pachuco; poetics; poetry; solitude; surrealism Pedro Páramo, xviii, 35, 145n3, 180n3 Las peras del olmo, 60, 118 perfection, xvi, 7 El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México, 33 permanence, xiv, 12 Pereda, Carlos, 66 Péret, Benjamin, 112 Perse, Saint-John, 22 Phenomenology, xi, 31, 32, 33 Philodemus, 4 philosophy, xvii, 3, 4, 6, 16, 19, 30, 31, 36, 63; and artistic tendencies, xiv; contemporary European, 32; critical, 17; of existence, 72; of poetry, 37; political, 19 Philosophy of Martin Heidegger, 42 Piedra de sol, xi, 22 Picasso, Pablo, 105 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 64 Plato, 4, 27n5, 61, 152 pleasure, 11, 16 poem, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, 4, 14, 16, 21, 22; collective voice, xiv; creative being of a, xviii; the dissolution of all moments, 22; epic, 16; erotic substance, 128; the house of presence, 25; illumination and the recreation of the, xiv; living, 14; the prism of the, 22; rhythmic time of the, 18 Poesía de circunstancias, 39 Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión, xvii, 8, 37, 62

195

La poésie surréaliste , 113 poet, xi, xiii, xiv, xv, xix, 3, 6, 12, 15, 16, 17, 20, 29, 31, 35, 38; adhered to uncertainty, chance, and human misery, 10; ambivalence, 17; anonymous, xiv; committed, 15; contemporary, xii, 18, 29; a fallen angel, 10; image of the, 41; tragic, 13; understood as a priest, 10 The Poet and the Revolution, xixn1 poetics, xi, xiv, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, 12, 30, 31, 34, 35; communities, xviii; creation, xv, 30; experiments, 6; faculty, xii; inspiration, xi; and philosophical ideas, xiii; point of view, xii; sense, 6; thought, 2; tradition, 4; vision, xii; wisdom, xvii; word, xii poetry, xi, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xix, 2, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 35, 38; absolute, 72; bridge between utopian thinking and reality, 103; a chronicle of days, 3; contemporary, 8, 20, 22; the destiny of, 23; epistemological revolution, 30; founding, 16; French, 22; function in societies, 3; heretical, schismatic, 20; history of, 3; incarnate, 10; innocent, perverse, 20; modern, xii, 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 14, 18, 21, 24; music for an understanding, 22; of communion, 8, 20; of reconciliation, 12; of reconciliation and communion, 24; of the hermitage and of the corner bar, 20; photographic, 15; practical, 14; recreation of the human being, 56; the reintegration of man with his deepest self, 111; the revelation of life in death, 55; that aspires to communion, 55; transitional moments of revelation that enriched and transfigured one’s present life, 111; understanding of, 24; unstable, undecided, changing, endless, 31; vision of, 39 politics,, xi, 2, 6, 9, 11, 17, 29; as a public religion, 17; descent of philosophy into, 17 Poniatowska, Elena, 145n2

196

Index

Porfirism, 34 Posdata , xi, 61 Positivism, 34 El positivismo en México, 34 postmodern, 11 post-revolutionary period, xi Pound, Ezra, 66 power, 15, 16 Prados, Emilio, 94n2 pre-meditation, xi, 118 presence, xii, xv, 5, 11, 12, 22, 29, 40, 50, 52, 56; the house of, 10; is out of its Depth, 52; of the unknown, 81; plural, 11; poetic, 31; poetry of the, 12; pure, 25; resurrections of, 5; a simultaneous, 21; transfiguration of the past into living, 10 present, xiv, 2, 5; forgotten, 24; inhabitable, 10; living, 5; past navigates in the, 5 Primero sueño, 91 Principle of Reason, 34 progress, xviii, 6, 10, 14, 16, 25; crisis of the ideas of, 2 Project (ing), xvii, 19, 24, 30, 34, 39, 52; political, 19; utopian, 8 prose, 4, 10, 22; illusory architecture of, 22 prophecy, xix prophet, 16 psychoanalysis, 39 Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe , 58 The Question for the Technique , 34 Quevedo Francisco de, 8, 41 Ramayana, 147 Ramos, Samuel, 33, 49, 83 reality, xvii, 11, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23; anthropomorphic vision of, 29; the illusion of, 21; the other side of, 18; present, 4; reproduction of, 21 reason, xv, xviii, 6, 7; critical, 9, 18; goddess, 17; the rose of, 7 The Rebel, 69 rebellion, 8 recantation, 12 reconciliation, xv, 8, 14, 102 recovery, 24

recreation, 44 reductionism, 3 reflection, 6, 22 La Región más transparente, 33 relative, 22 religion, xvi, 6, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 31, 38; bloody and masked, 17 The Relevance of the Beautiful: Art as Play, Symbol and Festival, 107 Renaissance, 21 return, xv, 12, 24; eternal, xv, 63 Revel, Jean François, 15, 26n1 revelations, xv, xvi, 1, 42; inner, xvi; moment of, xvi; of ourselves in the midst of the whole entity, 46; of what is not, 6; poetic, 37, 40, 51; the poetic experience of, 55 Revista de Occidente, 32 revolution, 1, 6, 7, 12, 17, 18; aesthetic, 6; inner, 24; the presence of the past and the future in the present, 82; true, 11 Reyes, Alfonso, 32, 33, 35 rhetoric, 3 rhythm, 21, 29, 35 Ricoeur, Paul, 63 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 32, 66, 89, 92 Rimbaud, Arthur, 11, 103 rites, 18 Rivera, Diego, 105, 144n1 Romanticism, xii, 6, 8, 9, 14, 19, 63, 100, 115; sublime feeling, 53 rootlessness, 23 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, xviii, 1, 7, 36, 51, 82, 127, 129, 131, 145n6; Confessions, 51 ruins, xvii, 155 ruptures, 4, 8; the tradition of the, 25 Rulfo, Juan, xviii, 35 sacred, xi, xiv, 3, 31, 38, 40, 41; constellation of images, myths and obsessions, 111; reveals our fundamental original human condition, 42 Sade, Marquis de, 7, 127 Salamandra , xi, 113, 114 Santa Teresa de Jesús, 68 Santí, Enrico Mario, 30, 37, 94n2

Index Sartre, Jean Paul, xiv, 30, 47, 52, 53, 66, 67–78, 93, 94n1, 94n3, 127; covered up the crimes of the revolutionary Caesars, 70; did not care properly for art, 67; existentialism, xi; his frustrated political action, 78; justifies the existence of evil, 77; literature as the subjectivity of a society in permanent revolution, 70; a moralist, 76; replaced predestination and freedom, 77; Saint Genet: Comedian and Martyr, 68 Savater, Fernando, 39 Scheler, Max, 32 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 16 science, 6, 23 Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 140 seduction, 12 self, xiii, xiv, xvii; creator, xiv; denial, 11; evaluation, xiv; forgotten and repressed, xv; hermeneutical understanding of the, 40; improvement, xiii; instantaneous appearance of the, 39; poetic, 58; recovery of the, 24; representation, xiv senses, 22 sensuality, 16 El ser del mexicano, 33 sexuality, 3, 7 shadows, xvi shape, 15 Sheridan, Guillermo, 34, 180n4, 180n5, 181n8, 181n9 shore, xviii Los signos en rotación, 14, 64, 119, 125 signs, 14 silence, 19, 22, 39 simultaneity, 21, 22 sin, 24; original, 41 sing, 22, 31 singularity, 14 slavery, xix social revolution, xiv Socialism, xix, 12 society, xvi, xvii, 4, 14, 16, 24, 25; ancient, 8, 16; an autocratic, fascist, totalitarian, 70; imagining a revolutionary poetic, xvii; liberated,

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xvii; libertarian, 14; neoliberal, 19; the original language of, 1; predatory rhythm of contemporary, 19; the superstructure of, xix solidarity, 4, 12 solipsism, 23 solitude, xvii, 10, 16, 29, 38; forgetting the word that named the essential aspects of a world, 82; in company, 48; labyrinths of, xvii; primitive faces of desire, 82; purge, a test, expiation, punishment, promise, 82; ripped from the whole, the center of creation, 85; separation from the source of the past, 81 Sombra de obras, 145n5 soothsayer, 16 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 64 soul, 16, 38; force of gravity of the, 37 sound, 15, 19 sources, 24 Spectres of Marx, 5 Spanish Civil War, 33 spectre, 4, 5 speech, xvi spirit, xv, xvi; light, xvi; old Christian and pre-Christian religious, 17; poetic, 38; revolutionary, 17, 18; a sort of suspension of, 18 spiritual experiences, xiv; roots, xviii Stalin, Joseph, 63; forced labor camps, 68 stoicism, 8 Stanton, Anthony, xiv, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 67 State, 17; Soviet, xiii, 67, 71, 72, 120 states, 46; of mind, 46 strangeness, 6, 39, 43 structuralism, 31 subjectivity, xv sun, xvi; fifth, xvi; light, xvi Sur, 14, 34, 71 Surrealism, xi, xiii, xiv, 3, 9, 20, 22, 24, 29, 30, 33, 35, 39, 40, 63, 74, 96n15; automatic writing, 119, 123, 136; the beginning word, 127; collage, 21; a continued search for the deep relations of identity among love, women, and nature, 129;

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Index

correspondences, 9, 80; a direction of the human spirit, 120; disengagement of consciousness, 119; human beings become a projection of desire, 123; identity between revolution and poetry, 120; object, 116; obscure object of desire, 121; poetry embodied in History, 124; precept of being with-thespectre, 5; primitivism, 131; psychic automatism, xiv; radical attempt to suppress the duel between subject and object, 116; to reposition poetry in the bosom of society and History, 117; return of the underground tradition of the West, 122; a return to the beginning of the beginning, 128; a revelation of one’s self in the intangibility of the deep, 116; symptom of the emptiness of Western culture, 113; tragic joy of existence, 132; a way of transforming life into poetry, 115 Le Surrealisme, Même, 113 Surrealism, the last snapshot of the European intelligence, 119 technique, 6, 64, 66 televisión, 65 Les Temps Modernes, 71 temporality, xi, 3, 24, 30, 31, 39, 42, 63, 104; of the finite condition, 29 theology, 3, 4, 16; dogmatic, 17 thinking, 3, 23; Hispanic, 37; process of, 24; task, 24 thought, xvii; becoming critical of itself, 7; liberation of, xvii; political, 12; utopian, 11 time, xiii, xvii, 5, 16, 19, 22, 24, 25, 39, 50, 53; all the times of, 2; ancient, 8; as apportioned body: language, 5; being in,, 43; conjunction of, 21; contemporary, 11; a distension of the soul, 80; the erotic and poetic aspects of the present, 2; eternal, 25; fatality of, xv; finite, 7; flows unceasingly into the future, 1; fullness of, xvi; image of, 1; intensity, xv; linear, progressive, 11;

lost, 7; modern, 2; mortal fall in, 24; new vision of, 2; non-linear conception of, xv; of death, 2; of passions, love, and blood, 9; of pleasure, 2; of successive History, 9; of the beginning, 1; of the origin before history, 9; of the senses and the revelation of the hereafter, 2; of utopías, 9; origin of all, 1; present, 1; pure, 2, 11; religious, 81; the river of, 25; sickness of, 10; successive, irreversible, 1, 18; time before, 1; triple sense of, 18; a turning of, 19; vindication of, 2; a voice that is nothing more than, 12; we are the names for, 2; without history, 1 Timaeus, 27n5 totality, xiii Toynbee, Arnold, 81 Tractatus Logico Philosophicus , 180n1 traditions, xix, 9, 11, 21, 25; became aware of, 1; new, 4; of rupture, 2, 12; our relationship with, 1; plurality of, 29; poetic, 16; rebirth of, 8; speculative, 1 Tralk, Georg, 66 translations, 6 transparency, xvi, 35; clarity and, 35; dialogue of, xvi transport, 15 Trotsky, Lev, 63, 75, 99 truth, 5, 7, 24 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 12 twentieth century, 21, 25 Ulysses, 59 Unamuno, Miguel de, 41 unconscious, xi, 30; depths, xv Un coup de dés jamais n´abolira le hasard, 22 understanding, xvii, 4, 19 United States, 85; active and practice contemplation, 85; inability to reconcile the flow of life with the universe, 85 unity, xvi, 50; of the world’s being,, xviii universe, 2, 19, 48; animated, 19; cult of the mystery of the, 10; linear, 22;

Index magic double of the, 22 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 32 University, 14 unknown, xiv, 24, 39; imminence of the, 81 Upanishad, 148 Uranga, Emilio, 33, 94n1, 95n10 utopia, 2, 6, 7; the creation of a new, xvii; loving, 40 Valero, Aurelia, 32, 94n1 Valéry, Paul, xiv, 56, 69, 180n1 values, xvii; traditional, 14 vanishing, 24 Vasconcelos, José 2n18 Vernengo, Roberto, 30 verse, 22 vessels, 6 Vico, Giambattista, 1; complex set of reactions and tendencies, 78 Villaurrutia, Xavier, 33, 34, 35, 89, 90 Villegas, Abelardo, 34 Vingt-ans du surréalisme 1939–1959, 113 Virgil, 4 vision, xvi, xix, 7, 24; celestial, xvii; divine, xvi; eidetic, 31; of the future, 10; of the universe, 9; poetic, xvi; totalitarian utopian, 69 voice, xiv, 16, 19; of absence, 58; of passions and visions, 20; of silence, 13; other, xv, 12, 15, 18, 19, 29, 59, 62; speaking/calling, 62 void, 12, 43, 81 volcanoes, xviii Vuelta, xixn1, 66 Waelhens, Alphonse de, 42 The Wall, 74 wandering, 6

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Warhol, Andy, 6 The Waste Land , xviii, 22 West, xviii, 21; the spiritual history of the, 22 What is literature?, 69, 74 What it means to think, 34 Whitman, Walt, 58 Whole, xiv, 53; integration with the, 6; moving, 21; revealed by anxiety, 29; we discover all that we are in the, 53 Will, 14, 35; to Power, 63 Wilson, Jason, xv, xvi, 140 wisdom, 13; modern, 63; new poetic, 24 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 39, 64, 151 writing, 15; automatic, 35, 75; is like throwing oneself into the void, 41; poetic, 22 woman, 60 word, xiii, xv, xvi, 15, 19, 29, 38; light, xvi; lived, 14; living, 14; original founding, 1; poetic, 11, 14; pure, xv; socializing the poetic, 14 Words, 74 world, xv, xvi, 5, 7, 17, 22, 24, 38, 42, 48, 50, 56; falling in the, 29; has the character of complete insignificance, 47; invented, 14; meaningless, 41; mental and visionary, xvi; outer, xv; unknown, 24 Wordsworth, William, 4 work, 4; creative, 6; intellectual, 6 Xirau, Ramón, 30 Zambrano, Maria, 81 Zea, Leopoldo, 34 Zedong, Mao, 63 Zubiri, Xavier, 33

About the Author

Roberto Sanchez Benitez completed master’s and doctorate studies in Philosophy at UNAM, México. He is a professor-researcher at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, where he has been coordinator of the PhD in Philosophy. He was director of the Faculty of Philosophy (19961998), and deputy director of the Popular School of Fine Arts (1999-2003) of the University of Michoacan, Mexico, as well as Head of the Department of Research and Documentation of the Arts of the Government of the State of Michoacán (2005-2007). His research deals with philosophy and literature, as well as aesthetic studies. He has done research stays at the Carolina University of Prague, Arizona State University, and the College of Chihuahua. Roberto Sanchez Benitez has published the following books: El drama de la inteligencia en Paul Valery (1997), La palabra auroral. Ensayo sobre María Zambrano (1999), Visiones de Nietzsche (2000), Topología estética del ser (2006), Entre las ideas y el sentimiento. Poesía y comprensión del arte (2008), El caballero de la fe. Un paseo breve por la obra y crítica cervantinas (2008), Identidades narrativas en la literatura chicana (Villarreal, Rivera, Méndez, Anaya, Zeta Acosta, Rodríguez, Anzaldúa y Castillo (2011), Memoria, imaginación y escritura. Rousseau y la invención de sí mismo (2014), Cruxi-ficciones. Siete escrituras transfronterizas (2019).

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