paz

Octavio Paz’s long essay El arco y la lira works like a companion volume to Piedra de sol, one of his most important poems (it’s the first text in the bilingual Collected poems). Published respectively in 1956 and 1957, the two texts make up two sides of the same coin: prose becoming poetry and poetry becoming prose, to put it in the form of Paz’s favorite rhetorical device: the chiasmus (and that last colon too, a colon within another colon: one of Paz’s preferred punctuation marks).

Take the beginning of both texts. They each begin with a litany of names. “Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment. An operation able to change the world, poetic action is revolutionary by nature; a spiritual exercise, it is a method of interior liberation.” The first paragraph of El arco y la lira goes on like this for some time. As we advance down the page, sentences are made up of predicates alone, or rather of those predicate nouns that follow on “is”: “Prayer, litany, epiphany, presence. Exorcism, spell, magic. Sublimation, compensation, condensation of the unconscious.” Drawn from various vocabularies—Christianity, Romanticism, Paganism, Hegelianism, Psychoanalysis—the terms amplify that initial sentence beginning “Poetry is…”

Compare this to the first stanzas of Piedra de sol. “a willow of glass, a poplar of water, / a tall spout bending in the wind, / a tree firmly planted yet dancing, / a walking of a river that winds, / advances, recedes, turns a circle / and arrives always:” Here too is a list of things. The list continues and returns at various moments throughout the poem: “writing of fire on jade, / cracking in the rock, queen of serpents, / column of steam, font on the cliff, / lunar circus, / cliff’s edge of the eagles.” The reader faces a question not unlike the one suggested by Neruda’s poem “Galope muerto” (“Like ashes, like the population of seas”): to what subject do these objects correspond? We find out at the end of the poem, when it circles around and repeats those initial six lines. The subject there is the “magic of the mirrors” of “centuries of stone,” which arouses us from our “dumb sleeping,” bringing back to life those willows and poplars and other sorts of trees.

Now, what I want to point out is not just the formal similarities between the two beginnings. Beyond this correspondence in form, the two beginnings end up pointing to similar realities. All those things that poetry “is” in El arco y la lira are ultimately revealed to be nothing but a circulation of masks, a list of “formulas” corresponding to the poets who, over the centuries, “justify them and give them flesh, give them life.” This circulation is itself seen to be the quintessence of the poem itself: “the poem is a mask that hides the void, beautiful proof of the superfluous grandiosity of all human works!” Behind the masks of poetics lies nothing—and this is a dictum common throughout Paz’s writing. We find it there, at the end of Piedra de sol, when all those trees are awoken by a hall of mirrors, by the fleeting projections of the real. This is why the being of the poem is its quality as mask, because it reveals the truth of things as mirages that reflect the “centuries of stone.”

“Centuries of stone”: this sums up the vision of history present throughout Piedra de sol: “all the names are one name, / all the faces are one face, / all centuries are one instant.” This is why a number of historical periods commingle in the poem. Ancient Greece and Rome, high Aztec culture, modern Mexico and New York, Madrid during the Civil War. And along with them signal historical figures share one agony: the deaths of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, of Montezuma, Lincoln, Trotsky, Madero and Robespierre, are all the same death, “and their cry and the cry of the executioner / and the cry of the victim… / are flames [. . .] everything burns, the universe is a flame, / smoldering the same nothing that is nothing / but a thinking in flames, smoke in the end: / there is not executioner and no victim…” Years later, reflecting on the events of 1968, Paz would say something similar about the massacre of students at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas: “that afternoon visible history unfolded, like a Pre-Columbian codex, our other history, the invisible one. The sight was overwhelming because the symbols became clear.”

What does this (conservative) view of history have to do with poetry? Let’s look at El arco y la lira. Paz proceeds, like Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” by “asking” the poem what it is. Not equivalent to poetry, the poem is also not simply a literary form but rather “the place of encounter between poetry and man.” Poetry is a force beyond its concrete instantiation, and it is its “touch” that allows a given verbal construction to become a poem. This manifestation takes on different forms according to the historical period in which it takes place, variances in style becoming simple contingencies, masks behind which lies poetry, another name for a “center, vibrating transparency,” or “God, being with no name,” who is also the “plenitude of presences and names.” Poetry, if we’re to draw out the consequences of this system of equivalences, is both what is without name and also the conjunction of all presences and names. The poem, in this tall order, would be the place where this conjunction is displayed.

The “happening” of poetry is also the stripping away of everything but language. “In the poem language recovers its first originality, mutilated by the reduction imposed by prose and quotidian speech.” In this aspect, the poem would present us with something like what Benjamin called language as such, the language of creation that lies behind the languages of exchange and utility, his names for what Paz calls prose. There is an imagined historicity to this formulation, a return to the moment of Creation. Thus the reference to origins. “Man’s first attitude toward language was one of trust: sign and the object represented were the same.” Speech would have been seen as re-creation, where even the object’s doubles were the same. The creative capacity of language extends throughout time, as “like other human creations, Empires and States are made of words: they are verbal phenomena.” Or even more clearly: “Man is a being of words.” This, of course, is a widely-held tenet of mid-century Western thought, and it ultimately spells doom for that initial regime of thing-word identity. Self-consciousness, articulated through language, would impose itself between the two, giving birth to thought or reason, seen here as the exclusive province of humanity.

The return to such a state is, for Paz, what poetry makes possible. This happens in all the arts, and he imagines it as a return to the concrete materiality of the specific medium—stone speaks through sculpture not through stairs, pigment speaks through paintings not through house-paint, etc. In them, “material reconquers its nature: color is more truly color, sound is fully sound.” (Such was also the conviction of the abstract expressionists.)

I’m winding down here, the late morning is beginning to weigh on me. I need to take a stroll and buy a coffee. Just a couple more notes worth holding onto. 1) this placing into liberty of the material corresponds to the emergence of the image (and in fact, I’m soon headed to the library to read up on Imagism). And 2) In both El arco y la lira and Piedra de sol, Paz makes reference to those most Mediterranean of foods, bread and wine. In the first case, he writes, “In prose the word tends to be identified with one of its possible meanings, at the expense of others: bread is bread, wine is wine.” And in the second, “the world / is real and tangible, wine is wine, / bread tastes again, water is water.” It’s worth asking if there is correspondence or variance between the two formulations.

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