Salon Media Circus | The labyrinth of Paz


T A B L E_.T A L K Newspapers: Just another business? Discuss how local papers can balance their coverage and financial needs in the Media area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Brad and me By Steve Altes A humble stand-in discovers that after being mistaken for His Blondness by packs of drooling girls, the rest of life is the Pitts (04/24/98) Hollywoodland By Catherine Seipp In the hellish world of celebrity journalism, the ninth circle is inhabited by publicists (04/24/98) The Hollywood Inquisition By Charles Taylor "Two Girls and a Guy" director James Toback on the film industry's "voluntary" ratings board (04/23/98) Tabloid mud wrestling! By Christopher Rodell What's sleazier -- my Elvis diet stories or your Vince Foster ravings? (04/22/98) The best little ass-kicking columnist in Texas By Carol Lloyd When Molly Ivins slaps leather, corporate fat cats, welfare slashers and arrogant media stars bite the dust (04/21/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE MEDIA CIRCUS ARCHIVE		________The labyrinth of Paz UNITING A FEROCIOUS INTELLECT WITH A POET'S SOUL, OCTAVIO PAZ WAS THE LAST OF THE GREAT SURREALISTS. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY SCOTT McLEMEE \| If not for the Nobel Prize for Literature, would the death of Octavio Paz have been noticed by the norteamericanos at all? To pose the question is, I'm afraid, to answer it. Over the past week the American press has labored to cram Paz's enormous figure into the pine box of the obituary page. And the spectacle is rather melancholy to contemplate. He was the last of the great surrealists, for whom poetry and eroticism alike were manifestations of the most powerful force in the universe, namely the human imagination -- that principle conduit to the sacred, even (and perhaps especially) in a world in which God is dead, his blood still warm on our hands. The element of mysticism informing his poetry was joined, in Paz's countless essays, to a critical intelligence of considerable learning and analytical power. A difficult writer to take the measure of, in other words, even if Americans read poetry or philosophical discourses -- which, mostly, they don't. So the reporting has focused on the landmarks of Paz's public career. His father was a leading supporter of Zapata. He began to publish poetry in his teens. Paz was active in the left in his 20s, and went to Spain to fight fascism, though he was never mobilized. After almost a quarter century in the diplomatic corps, he resigned from his position as ambassador to India in 1968, in protest of the Mexican government's murderous repression of student protesters. "The Labyrinth of Solitude" (1950), Paz's meditation on Mexican history and cultural identity, was enormously influential, and eventually became a textbook. Besides his own writing, Paz was extensively involved in translating poetry from around the world. The most erudite of talking heads, he made frequent appearances on Mexican television, so in later years he was recognized in the street by people who never read VUELTA, the eminent cultural journal Paz edited. These, at least, are facts. They are concrete things, easily cited, quickly understood -- unlike, say, Paz's "Blanco," a complex poem invoking the cosmic passions unleashed by writing and making love. Admittedly I'm being cranky about this. But for an admirer of Paz's work, the fact that he won the Nobel in 1990 is the least important thing about him. It's hard to mourn when you are angry at constantly being reminded that otherwise well-read people seem barely to have heard of Paz, much less read him. This is even more bewildering, given all the public debate summed up in that clumsy and leaden term "multiculturalism." His work is a museum of world culture, organized according to the logic of a dream. There, you will find an Aztec sundial ... maps of utopia drawn by the French visionary Charles Fourier ... the structuralist diagrams of anthropologist Claude Levi-Straus ... the sexual yoga of Tantric Buddhism ... Marcel Duchamp's readymades ... a working model of the Gulag Archipelago. This is not the superficial encyclopedism of a dilettante. Still less is it some bureaucrat's idea of "cultural diversity." For sheer diversity of learning, the closest analogy might be the work of Jorge Luis Borges, or maybe (heading way out into left field on this one) Thomas Pynchon -- but only if you imagine them rewritten by the pornographic philosopher Georges Bataille. To read Paz is to explore hidden corridors running beneath the surface of various civilizations, past and present. The experience is mind-blowing, and also somewhat humbling, as I learned when first discovering Paz. I was 17, and had somehow come across "Alternating Current" (1967), the book of essays that turns out to have been the best place to begin. It was exciting; I did not so much read the first 100 pages as devour them, wanting to get as much of Paz's universe into my head as rapidly as possible. But it soon became exhausting. You cannot stare too long at something that brilliant. It hurts. Though his prose often seems powered by sheer intellectual exuberance, Paz was by no means a purely cerebral writer -- in his poems, least of all. He had little to say about the "magical realist" school of contemporary Latin American novelists, in which specters and miracles routinely intervene amid ordinary life. But Paz did once write: "Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past. These powers are not ours." The effect, in Paz's own verse, is not spooky and vague but, rather, vivid and highly charged: A virgin who talked in her sleep, my aunt taught me to see with eyes closed, to see within, and through the wall; my grandfather, to smile at defeat, and, for disasters: in affliction, conviction. (This that I say is earth thrown over your name: let it rest softly). Between vomit and thirst, strapped on the rack of alcohol, my father came and went through flames ... I could never talk to him. I meet him now in dreams, that blurred country of the dead. We always speak of other things. This, from the autobiographical poem rendered by Eliot Weinberger as "A Draft of Shadows" (1974). Shortly before Paz's death, a new work arrived in English, "An Erotic Beyond: Sade." It gathers a poem and two essays about "the divine Marquis" (always a hero to the surrealists) composed between 1947 and 1986. The second and longest of the three texts is a brilliant statement of his philosophy of sex: "Catacomb, hotel room, chateau, fort, cabin in the mountains or an embrace under the clouds, it is all the same: eroticism is a world closed to society as well as to nature. The erotic act erases the world: nothing more real surrounds us except our ghosts." We monoglot gringos have lucked out, incidentally. Paz worked closely with a few translators who seem, in turn, to have been very devoted to making his work available. A great deal of his prose was in English, even before the Nobel arrived. And the poems, even after translation, are still poems -- not something that happens all that often, unfortunately. A poem, Paz thought, abolishes time. Or rather, transforms it, and the world with it. And so the final stanza of "A Draft of Shadows" comes to mind, more precise in defining the man than any cluster of facts: I am where I was: I walk behind the murmur, footsteps within me, heard with my eyes, the murmur is in the mind, I am my footsteps, I hear the voices that I think, the voices that think me as I think them. I am the shadow my words cast. SALON \| April 28, 1998 Scott McLemee is a contributing editor at Lingua Franca. He is a regular contributor to Salon.