by
Octavio Paz
View all notes
[...] To me, poetry and thought are a system of communicating vessels. The source of both is my life. I write about what I have lived and am living. To live is also to think, and sometimes to cross that border beyond which feeling and thinking become one: poetry. Meanwhile, the pages on which I had scrawled my notes in India turned yellow, and a number of them were lost in moves to new quarters and in my travels. I abandoned the idea of writing the book.
PERCEPTIBLE REALITY HAS ALWAYS BEEN A SOURCE of surprises to me. Of proofs as well. In a long-ago article, written in 1940, I referred to poetry as “the testimony of the senses”. True testimony: its images are palpable, visible and audible. To be sure, poetry is made up of words linked together, which give off reflections, glints, iridescences. But what it shows us, are they realities or illusions? Rimbaud said: “Et j’ai quelquefois vu / ce que l’homme a cru voir” (And I sometimes saw / what man believed he saw). Fusion of seeing and believing. In the joining of these two words lies the secret of poetry and its testimony: what the poem shows us we do not see with our carnal eyes but with the eyes of the spirit. Poetry lets us touch the impalpable and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia. Poetic testimony reveals to us another world inside this world, the other world that is this world. The senses, without losing their powers, become servants of the imagination and let us hear the inaudible and see the invisible. But isn’t this what happens in dreams and in the erotic encounter? When we dream and when we couple, we embrace phantoms. Each of the two who constitute the couple possesses a body, a face and a name, but their real reality, precisely at the most intense moment of the embrace, disperses in a cascade of sensation which disperses in turn. There is a question that all lovers ask each other, and in it the erotic mystery is epitomized: Who are you? A question without an answer … The senses are and are not of this world. By means of them, poetry traces a bridge between seeing and believing. By that bridge, imagination is embodied and bodies turn into images.
<3
The relationship between eroticism and poetry is such that it can be said, without affectation, that the former is a poetry of the body and the latter an eroticism of language. They are in complementary opposition. Language – sound that carries meanings, a material trace that denotes non-material things – is able to give a name to what is most fleeting and evanescent: sensation. Nor is eroticism mere animal sexuality; it is ceremony, representation. It is sexuality transfigured, a metaphor. The agent that provokes both the erotic act and the poetic act is imagination. Imagination turns sex into ceremony and rite, language into rhythm and metaphor. The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities, and rhyme is a copulation of sounds; poetry eroticizes language and the world, because its operation is erotic to begin with. Likewise eroticism is a metaphor of animal sexuality. What does this metaphor say? Like all metaphors, it points to something that is beyond the reality that gave rise to it, something new and different from the terms that it comprises. If Góngora says “blood-red snowfall”, he invents or discovers a reality that, though containing both, is neither blood nor snow. The same happens with eroticism; it says, or, rather, it is, something different from mere sexuality.
In the figure of the libertine there is no union between religion and eroticism; on the contrary, there is a sharp and clear division. The libertine sees pleasure as an aim that excludes any other. He is almost always passionately opposed to values and beliefs, whether religious or ethical, that subordinate the body to a transcendent purpose. At one of its extremes, libertinism borders on criticism and becomes a philosophy; at the other, it borders on blasphemy, sacrilege, profanation, things that are the reverse of religious devotion. Sade boasted of professing an intransigent philosophical atheism, but in his books passages of irreligious religious fervour abound, and in his life he had to face a number of accusations of sacrilege and impiety, such as those brought against him at his trial in 1772 in Marseilles. André Breton once told me that Sade’s atheism was a belief: it could also be said that libertinism is a religion in reverse. The libertine denies the supernatural world with such vehemence that his attacks are a homage and, at times, a consecration. The real difference between the ascetic and the libertine is that the eroticism of the former is a solitary sublimation, one without intermediaries, while the eroticism of the latter is an act that, if it is to be carried out, requires the presence of an accomplice or a victim. The libertine always needs the Other, and this is his damnation: he depends on his object and is the slave of his victim.
The amatory feeling is an exception within that larger exception that eroticism is to sexuality. But it is an exception that appears in all societies and all periods. There is no people or civilization that does not possess poems, songs, legends or tales in which the anecdote or the plot – the myth, in the original meaning of the word – is the encounter of two persons, their mutual attraction, and the labours and hardships they must overcome to be united. Their encounter requires, in turn, two contradictory conditions: the attraction that the lovers experience must be involuntary, born of a secret and all-powerful magnetism; at the same time, it must be a choice. In love, predestination and choice, objective and subjective, fate and freedom intersect. The realm of love is a space magnetized by encounter.
This description of the five elements that make up our image of love, however superficial it may be, does seem to demonstrate love’s contradictory, paradoxical, mysterious nature. I discussed five, but they can be reduced to three: exclusivity, which is love for only one person; attraction, which is one’s fate freely accepted; the person, who is a soul and a body. But these elements cannot be separated; they exist in constant struggle and reconciliation with themselves and with others. Contrary, as though they were the planets of the strange solar system of the passions, they revolve around a single sun. This sun, too, is twofold: the couple. There is continual transmutation of each element: freedom chooses servitude, fate becomes choice, the soul is body and the body is soul. We love a mortal being as though he or she were immortal. Lope said it better: “To call what is eternal temporal.” Yes, we are mortal, we are the children of time, and no one is spared death. We know not only that we will die but that the person we love will die. We are the playthings of time and accident; sickness and old age disfigure the body and cause the soul to lose its way. But love is one of the answers that humankind has invented in order to look death in the face. Through love we steal from the time that kills us a few hours which we turn now into paradise and now into hell. In both ways time expands and ceases to be a measure. Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity: it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always. In love, everything is two and everything strives to be one.
Each minute is a knife blade of separation: How to trust our life to the blade that may slit our throat? The remedy lies in finding a balm that heals forever the wound inflicted upon us by time’s hours and minutes. Ever since it appeared on earth, the human being has been incomplete whether because it had been driven out of paradise or because it is a passing stage in the evolution of life. Almost from the moment of birth, humans flee from themselves. Where do they go? In endless search of themselves. A human being is never what he is but the self he seeks. Once he catches up with himself or believes that he has, again he separates himself, leaves himself behind, continues his pursuit. He is the child of time. And time is his essence and his infirmity. The cure lies only outside time. And if there is nothing or no one outside time? Then he is doomed and forced to live with the terrible truth. The balm that heals the wound of time is called religion; the knowledge that we must live for a lifetime with our wound is called philosophy.
Is there no way out? Yes, there is: at certain moments time opens just a crack and allows us to glimpse the other side. These moments are experiences of the merging of subject and object, of I am and you are, of now and forever, here and there. They are irreducible to concepts, and we can express them only through paradoxes and the images of poetry. One of these experiences is love, where sensation merges with sentiment and the two with spirit. It is the experience of complete otherness: we are outside ourselves, hurtling towards the beloved. And it is the experience of the return to our origin, to the place that does not exist in space and is our native land. The beloved is, then, both terra incognita and the house where we were born, what is unknown and what is recognized. It is helpful here to quote not a poet or mystic but a philosopher such as Hegel, the great master of oppositions and negations. In one of his juvenilia he says: “Love excludes all oppositions and hence it escapes the realm of reason … It makes objectivity null and void and hence goes beyond reflection … In love, life discovers itself in itself, devoid now of any incompleteness.” Love does away with excision. Forever? Hegel does not say, but in his youth he probably believed so. It may even be said that his entire philosophy and in particular the mission he assigns to dialectics – an illusory logic – is simply a gigantic translation of this youthful vision of love into the conceptual language of reason.
Modernity desacralized the body, and advertising has used it as a marketing tool. Each day television presents us with beautiful half-naked bodies to peddle a brand of beer, a piece of furniture, a new model of car, or women’s hosiery. Capitalism has turned Eros into an employee of Mammon. Sexual servitude is added to the debasement of the human image. Prostitution is already a vast international network that traffics in all races and ages, not excluding children, as we know. Sade had dreamed of a society with weak laws and strong passions, where the only right would be the right to pleasure, however cruel and lethal it might be. No one ever imagined that commercial dealings would supplant libertine philosophy and that pleasure would be transformed into an industrial machine. Eroticism has become a department of advertising and a branch of business. In the past, pornography and prostitution were handicrafts, so to speak; today they are an essential part of the consumer economy. It is not their existence that alarms me, but, rather, the proportions they have assumed and their nature. Now an institution, they have ceased to be transgressions.
Clarke’s words represent a widespread way of thinking, especially among scientists and engineers. I was a devoted reader of his books, which are a fascinating synthesis of science and fantasy. With pleasure and nostalgia I remember a sun-filled afternoon more than thirty years ago: I saw him sitting with a friend on the terrace of the Hotel Mount Lavinia, on the outskirts of Colombo. The sea was beating against the shore, covering the cliffs of the tiny bay with a ragged mantle of bubbling foam. I didn’t dare to say one word to him: he impressed me as being a visitor from another planet … In the novelist’s statement about a new species there reappears, hidden beneath the science, the old speculative spirit that enlivened not only philosophy but also, more frequently, the visions of the prophets and founders of religions. Science began by forcing God out of the universe; it enthroned history, embodying it in redemptive ideologies or philanthropic civilizations; today it is replacing these with the scientist-engineer who builds machines more intelligent than their creator and possessing a freedom unknown to Lucifer and his rebel host. The religious imagination conceived of a God superior to his creatures; the technological imagination has conceived of an engineer-God inferior to his inventions.
ahh this anecdote is just pretty
There is no remedy for time. Or, at least, we do not know what it is. But we must trust in the flow of time, we must live. The body ages because it is time, as does everything that exists on this earth. I am well aware that we have succeeded in prolonging life and youth. For Balzac the critical age for a woman began at thirty; today it begins at fifty. Many scientists believe that in the not too distant future it will be possible to avoid the ailments of old age. This optimistic prediction stands in contrast to what we know and see every day; poverty is increasing on more than half the planet, there are famines, and in the former Soviet Union, in the final years of the Communist regime, the rate of infant mortality rose. (One of the causes of the collapse of the Soviet empire.) But even if the optimists are right, we will continue to be subject to time. We are time and cannot escape its dominion. We can transfigure it but not deny it or destroy it. This is what the great artists, poets, philosophers, scientists and certain men of action have done. Love, too, is an answer: because it is time and made of time, love is at once consciousness of death and an attempt to make of the instant an eternity. All loves are ill-starred, because all are made of time, all are the fragile bond between two temporal creatures who know they are going to die. In all loves, even the most tragic, there is an instant of happiness that it is no exaggeration to call superhuman: it is a victory over time, a glimpse of the other side, of the there that is a here, where nothing changes and everything that is, truly is.