OCTAVIO PAZ INVENTS HIS OWN REALITY
Author: By Robert Taylor, Special to the Globe
Date: Friday, October 12, 1990
Page: 29
Section: LIVING
Octavio Paz, who yesterday won the Nobel Prize for literature, has been
described as "a man in love with silence who can't stop talking" -- a probing
intellect whose 40 volumes of prose and poetry examine the web of time and
history and human solitude.
Seeking the identity of Mexico is, in his works, a way to decipher the
world. The most cosmopolitan of Latin America's poets and critics, his work
synthesizes diverse influences: from the French Symbolists, Rimbaud's colored
vowels; from the Surrealist movements of the '20s and '30s, the notion of
Surrealism as an aspect of spiritual liberty; from English and German Romantic
poets, a belief in the transcendental power of the word; from Mexico itself,
the baroque rhythms of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz; from India and his studies
of Tantrism and Buddhism, a vision of the regenerative energies of physical
and metaphysical love.
And yet, although he abstains from local color or regionalism, Paz remains
fundamentally the most Mexican of writers. "The Labyrinth of Solitude" (1959;
English translation, 1961) is an acute analysis of Mexican society that traces
what Paz calls the "invisible history" of Mexico -- that of the pre-Columbian
cultures which continue to influence the modern state. "To become aware of our
history," he writes, "is to become aware of our singularity." In the more
recent "One Earth, Four or Five Worlds," he enlarges upon this: " 'Third
World' is an expression that there is good reason to abolish. The label is not
only inexact: it is a semantic trap. The Third World is many worlds, all of
them different."
Paz has also occupied a pivotal position at the literary-intellectual
center of Mexico for nearly 60
years through the literary reviews he founded and edited.
The earliest was Barandel, in 1931, but by far the most influential is
Plural, established in the 1970s. As a fledgling poet, his adolescent lines
had a limpid lyric simplicity; but the originality of his voice only began to
emerge in the volume "Under Your Clear Shadow," the result of his visit to
Spain in 1937, a Marxist student and advocate of the Republican cause.
His Marxism did not last. Instead the Surrealist group under Andre Breton
in Paris inspired Paz to revalue and reaffirm the role of the poet in the
contemporary world. The Surrealists were dedicated to the imaginative
transformation of experience, to social activism, to the integration of life
and art. The clearest exposition of Paz's methods, perhaps, may be found in
his remarkable study titled "The Bow and the Lyre" (1973), in which he
proposes a poetics built on his belief in a pure time uncontaminated by
history, to which a poet has access.
"For Paz," states Helen Vendler, "poetry is a brink, a precipice, an abyss,
where silent before a void, the poet leaves historical time to reenter the
time of desire, a time always with us, for which our myths of the Golden Age
are only a representation."
The mysticism inherent in this view was probably augmented by Paz in his
1962-'68 period as Mexico's ambassador to India. During these years he put
aside European traditions for other approaches to poetry. One was the renga, a
Japanese form of short, unrhymed syllabically controlled stanzas improvised by
four different poets in four languages.
Paz has never published fiction, although he did write a one-act play,
''Rapaccini's Daughter," based on the story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Poetry and
criticism in Paz lead out of colonial regionalism, returning to a life created
and moved by the image. "Spanish-American literature is an enterprise of the
imagination," he has said. "We are resolved to invent our own reality: the
light at four o'clock in the morning on a greenish wall in the outskirts of
Bogota; the vertiginous fall of darkness on the city of Santo Domingo don't
think so. lk(in a house in the center of town a revolutionary awaits the
arrival of the police); the hour of high tide on the coast of
Valparaiso (a girl undresses and discovers solitude and love); the cruel noon
day in a village in Mexico's state of Jalisco (a farmhand has dug up a pre-
Conquest sculpture); tomorrow he will go to the city; (an unknown woman is
awaiting him there and a journey . . .). To invent reality or to rescue it?
Both."
SIDEBAR
SELECTIONS FROM PAZ'S WORK
The following are excerpts from the work of Octavio Paz.
From "Sun Stone"
willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
tree that is firmly rooted and that dances,
turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
arriving forever:
the calm course of a star
or the spring, appearing without urgency,
water behind a stillness of closed eyelids
flowing all night and pouring out prophecies,
a single presence in the procession of waves,
wave over wave until all is overlapped,
in a green sovereignty without decline
a bright hallucination of many wings
when they all open at the height of the sky . . .
the sun has forced an entrance through my forehead,
has opened my eyelids at last that were kept closed,
unfastened my being of its swaddling clothes,
has rooted me out of my self, and separated
me from my animal sleep centuries of stone
and the magic of reflections resurrects
willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
tree that is firmly rooted and that dances,
turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
arriving forever . . .
From "The Labyrinth of Solitude"
"History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man
consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance
of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the
nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of
reality -- if only for a moment -- by means of creation."
''With Eyes Closed"
With eyes closed
you light up within
you are blind stone
Night after night I carve you
with eyes closed
you are frank stone
We have become enormous
just knowing each other
with eyes closed
From "The Labyrinth of Solitude"
"Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great
stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is
very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract
world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts. In the Valley of Mexico
man feels himself suspended between heaven and earth, and he oscillates
between contrary powers and forces, and petrified eyes and devouring mouths.
Reality -- that is, the world that surrounds us -- exists by itself here, has
a life of its own, and was not invented by man as it was in the United
States."
From "Return"
We never say
the words of the poem
The poem tells us
BERTRA;10/11 CORCOR;10/12,23:03 PAZ12
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