huidobro

Notes on Altazor, by Vicente Huidobro. Preface and Cantos 1, 2, and 3.

There are seven Cantos in Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor. Seven cantos like the seven days it took to create all that is. The coincidence is no coincidence. The Preface to Altazor describes an origin. “Nací” (“I was born”): this is the poem’s first word. It is a verb, unsurprisingly, for this poem advances quickly, its activity unceasing. “I was born at the age of 33 on the day Christ died; I was born at the Equinox, under the hydrangeas and the aeroplanes in the heat.” His birth marks a succession; it happens the day of Christ’s death. There is no three-day waiting period, no Easter Sunday. Rather, the resurrection of Christ is eclipsed by the birth of the poet.

Descriptions follow, again in the past tense. “I had the soulful gaze of a pigeon, a tunnel, a sentimental streetcar.” “My father was blind and his hands were more wonderful than the night.” And then a quick change to the present. “I love the night, the hat of every day. / The night, the night of day, from one day to the next.” And then back to the past. “My mother spoke like the dawn…” My father had hands like the night. I love the night. Night and day, night announcing the day. “My mother spoke like the dawn.” The poem progresses through associations. An approximation of night becomes Night becomes Day becomes Dawn. The chain of signifiers pushes us down the page quickly, in the same way that the poem itself presents itself as a long fall (“a Voyage in a Parachute” is the subtitle”). It is the same strategy that we’ll see enacted later on, in Canto 3. “We already know how to dart a kiss like a glance / Plant glances like trees / Cage trees like birds / Water birds like heliotropes / Play a heliotrope like music,” etc. Huidobro goes on like this for thirty-something lines, all of them predicates to that clause, “We already know how to…” The succession takes place on the ashes of an older knowledge—how to make a simile, perhaps—just as the poet’s birth would coincide with the birth of Christ. This seems, later on, to have some historical basis. The poet, now named Altazor, says in Canto 1: “My eyes opened in the century / When Christianity died / Writhing on its cross of slow death / It has yet to heave its last sigh.”

The following verses ask a question (“And tomorrow what will we put in its place?”) and offer a tentative answer (“A dawn or a sunset”), a suggestion followed by yet another question (“Must we replace it at all?”). These lines refer us back to another text by Huidobro, his famous manifesto Non serviam (from 1914). That text also begins with a birth, or an awakening at least. “[A]fter a night of precious dreams and delicate nightmares, the poet stands up and yells at mother Natura: Non serviam.” That cry is now “inscribed [grabado] in a morning of the history of the world,” the “result of a whole evolution,” and it is meant as a cry against not only nature but the demand that poetry imitate nature. As in Altazor, here there is a strict temporal division. We must not imitate nature, or if we do, it must be an imitation of the original rhythmic trembling that gave rise to the world “when Nature was young and full of creative impulses.” It is in light of this diatribe against the representation of nature that we must read those lines, “A dawn or a sunset / Must we replace it at all?” Sandwiched between two questions is the assertion, “A dawn or a sunset.” How are we to take this suggestion, the suggestion that these idyllic images are adequate substitutions for Christianity? Is the suggestion serious? Or is it a foil, a set-up for the real suggestion, framed as a question, that we replace it with nothing at all? Perhaps it is a simple contradiction, a possibility that the poem would seem to admit. The poet is “[l]onely as a paradox / A fatal paradox / A flower of contradictions dancing a foxtrot.” Or perhaps it is meant to embody a dialectical progression, just as in Non serviam it was nature itself—fated to be overcome—that gave the poet “his” voice.

Why is the poet dancing a foxtrot? Because this dance exemplifies modernity. If there is one constant in Altazor it is Huidobro’s enthusiasm for everything modern. Hence those aeroplanes, hence that sentimental streetcar, both in the Preface. Hence also that scene a few pages later, when the poet encounters the Virgin Mary. Seated on a rose (that which the poet must “make bloom within the poem”), she tells him, “Look at my hands, as transparent as light bulbs,” and then asks, “Do you see the filaments where the blood of my pure light flows?” The light of the Virgin is an electric light. She is a cyborg, but an old one. Her halo has “a few cracks in it, a proof of [her] antiquity.” So much in this poem is filtered through this sort of technological vocabulary. Thus the end of Christianity is explicitly tied to new technologies of war. “A great cannonade puts an end to the Christian era / Christ wants to die accompanied by millions of souls / [. . .] A thousand aeroplanes hail the new era / They are its oracles and its flags.” A legitimate question to ask is whether Huidobro is excited, like Marinetti, about these machines of death. The aeroplanes contain the secret of the new era, and they hail its arrival. Christ’s 33 years of life are assimilated to the almost 2,000 years of Christianity, his death coinciding with the horrors of WWI, his death coinciding with the dawn of a new era on the backs of these dead.

Technology is one supplement for the becoming of the poetic subject. (The other is woman; I’ll get to his below.) This subject begins, as does subjectivity in general, with a call to self-consciousness. A voice cries out, “you’re alive and you don’t see yourself living.” This call coincides with a fall from grace—the entire poem relates this fall. “[W]hy did you lose your young serenity?” asks the first line. Why did you wake up, it could have asked, echoing the beginning of Non serviam. Strangely, following this is the image of an angel, an evil angel, with a sword in its hand, resting on the entrance to the poet’s mouth. The implication, as I see it, is that the loss of serenity coincides with the cutting out of the tongue. This is not how the story usually goes, for it is the entrance into language, into the symbolic, that is the modern correlate of the fall from grace. How might we explain this apparent contradiction? I think it has to do with the idea of poetry that is presented in Canto 3. “Poetry still and poetry poetry / Poetical poetry poetry / Poetical poetry by poetical poets / Poetry / Too much poetry.” This comes on the heels of what is, up to this point in the text, the most conventionally written section: a series of couplets, most of them conventionally hendecasyllabic with assonant rhyme. The loss of the poet’s tongue is perhaps the loss of this sort of poetry, the kind that, to return to a formulation mentioned above, we know how to do. A certain form of language has died; the poet must resuscitate it. “All the languages are dead / Dead in the hands of the tragic neighbor / We must revive the languages / With raucous laughter / With wagons of cackles / With circuit breakers in the sentences / And cataclysm in the grammar.” Death, again, demands life, the emergence of language (not languages), “the pure word and nothing more,” on the ashes of poetry. The new poetry must become “play,” “ritual,” must become song: “my voice is only song and can only come out in song.” This song would crystallize the centuries that “come howling through my veins / Centuries that teeter on my song / That slowly die in my voice.” This is the clearest crystallization of the emergence of the poetic subject, one that is constantly affirmed throughout the poem (“It is I who speak in the year 1919”), as the bearer of the new communal truths, of the truth of centuries past.

The other supplement to this voice’s emergence is, unsurprisingly, woman. If Canto 1 relates the birth of a sort of Adam, the second one gives birth to Eve. The gender of the poetic voice becomes clear at the end of Canto 1. “I don’t want the bonds of star or wind / Moon bonds are fine for the sea and women.” This rejection of the female reappears in Canto 2, this time as the acceptance of a necessity. Like nature, like history, the female must be channeled through the voice of the male poet. She is “mute,” her voice is actually “heartbeats,” something like the original rhythm that, long ago, exercised a different sort of creation. This distance in time is echoed in the formulation that she is “the depths of every thing,” which is to say something that must be deciphered. She does not speak but rather is spoken to: “The stones knocking talk to you for (por, also “through”) me / The waves of skyless birds talk to you or me / The color of windless landscapes talks to you for me / The flock of tight-lipped sheep sleeping in your memory / Talks to you for me.” In the most perverse and revealing verse, the poet ties this muteness to his own pleasure: “My joy is watching you when you listen.”

There’s much more to say but I can’t say it now. I’m off to teach this poem.

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