LEZAMIANS (FROM OPPIANO LICÁRIO)
It made us think of a whale that secreted a thread like a spider, capable of tracing a living scale between the depths of the earth and the extinct lunar tides, of establishing a new causal relationship between the seed and the mysterious weight we feel on our backs.
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Everything was on hold, and those organic clocks continued to secrete into empty space. The secular instantaneousness, the temporal seizure of the question granted by the ideogram of the answer, resembled the leap of the spider and its web to see the faces of the visitors and scatter its blood over that starfish. Cemí didn't have the sensation of Licario's absence, but rather an infinite approach of the figure and the image; the vibrations spread throughout the Pythagorean triangle continued, but they were like successions or cottony vibrations, like the waves released from a flat blow on wood. The relatable world, of vertical succession and horizontal scattering, of the relationships between the center and the vibrations of a sphere, was working incessantly in a spider's breeding ground. It was reduced to dust, but that dust endowed with the most voracious molecules, where the spider's leap was secretly and very much alive, swallowed the blood again, as if the dust of the spiders maintained all the resources of its work in life. And the influence of the lunar whiteness on the yagruma leaf, communicating a calm, an unalterable repose, as if that prodigious the hemostatic now needed blood to appease it, its voracity first and its calm later, as if the blood, upon being swallowed by those powders, lost all its determination, like a stream of water blocked by a stone. It was the best image of Licario's repose in death. Infinite interweavings, underground rivers ending in sandbanks, the steaming of blood demanding its embodiment, the inaugural revival of dust, forming a dance of mushrooms at the beginning of metamorphoses, but with an opposite sign, that is, the shadow engendering the body, the body strolling through the subterranean dwellings, and the double sitting in a park awaiting the return of its body's excursion.
The light advanced like the metal bowl of a spear........................
ResponderExcluir.........................that upon touching objects it subdivided into what we could consider the pulp of light, for if anything resembles light it is the pulp of a pineapple; it seems like frozen light, as if by some magic gently ordered by the voice the light were transformed into a cloth. The light, the pineapple pulp, the cerebral matter resembled each other as if they coincided on a sandbank. The sun, scorching the earth with excessive abruptness, then formed a whirlpool, which in its deepest dimension was the defeat of chaos, the skeleton of a cyclone, each granule of light a desiccated eye, ready to revive again with the iodized humidity of the bay.
ExcluirLezama Lima from Oppiano Licário
Postscript
ResponderExcluirhttps://teoriadelentusiasmo.blogspot.com/2011/03/apocrifas-morellianas-5.html
THEORY OF ENTHUSIASM
The Hidden Side of HOPSCOCK. By Jorge Fraga
March 24, 2011
Morellian Apocrypha (5)
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By posing the problem in this way, we completely step outside of literature. Or, better yet, we pit those who refuse to step outside of it against those who see in Rimbaud a unique invitation to transcend it. The former admire the Illuminations simply as a beautiful work; the latter are attached to it for more secret, more exceptional reasons: they believe they see a radiance of Truth shining there.
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Jacques Rivière, Rimbaud
"Around the Observatory," by Diego Zeziola
Excluirhttps://teoriadelentusiasmo.blogspot.com/2011/03/en-torno-al-observatorio-de-diego.html
I welcome Diego Zeziola as a guest writer on this blog. With his permission, I am reproducing the prologue to his translation of Prose of the Observatory, a prologue that has previously been published online (at www.temakel.com). Below I add my own commentary.
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Around the Observatory
The book we translated is a central text in Julio Cortázar's work, and it is so in several ways. First, because the author crystallizes much of his thought in it. Prose simultaneously exposes a poetics, a politics, a humanism, and a cosmology. It ultimately proposes that the poetic is the deepest and most elevated dimension of the human.
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In a somewhat mythical sense, Prose is central like any mystery. The avatar of the Minotaur in The Kings, it awaits hidden in the center of the labyrinth for the reader-Theseus who dares to confront it. But until now, there have been few, very few Theseuses for this literary monster (to put it bluntly: almost no one knows him or has read him); this is what this translation, which we hope will serve as Ariadne's thread, partly seeks to remedy.
On another level—metaphysical, spiritual—this text possesses the essence of full artistic creation; it bears the traces (it is the very traces) of an act of total presence of being, of an encounter with poetry. The poet is the one who reestablishes the lost contact with natural, divine, and cosmic powers; he dives into the depths of the sea to enter the veins and arteries of humanity; he looks to the night to guide man in his search for heaven on earth. As an example of a unique act of consciousness, like all poetic contact, this Prose is central; that is, it emerges from the center and always returns to it.
ExcluirThe immaterial embodiment of this search is the poetic image, the bridge that the poet-shaman builds between the heights and the secular. Julio Cortázar traces this image in words, and thus they are transformed into bridges of bridges, once again acquiring the power of drawing; they are sign, key, door, threshold. It is clear that Julio seeks to reveal, to elevate the reader to a plane of discovery and wonder. Other prose pieces by Julio are more explicit in their intention to form a complicit reader, a comrade. This one requires it without exhortations; it needs someone willing to reestablish connections, to redraw the ideogram, to cut through chance once more, to "go out into the open." The function, the ultimate will of the text, is to achieve identity among Jai Singh, Julio, reader, humanity, eels, stars, night, and ocean, to recover the unity of the distinct and the distant.
ExcluirThe opening to the magical level of unexpected coincidences and perceptions is literally realized through the word. Cortázar's words are that window that opens and opens us to another reality, to the real and true reality, to a world rediscovered by a new man. The many meanings contained in each word are a logical consequence of that illogical and Adamic groping that Julio ventures in his semantic trance. Classic by definition, by plurality and possibility of meanings, Cortázar's words and works are timeless, valid for all times and spaces. More than inviting, they compel constant rereading.
ExcluirThe Others, the Same
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We already mentioned that Prosa del observatorio hasn't received much attention; not to mention that (forgive me for insisting) Cortázar's work in general hasn't been interpreted as it deserves. Jaime Alazraki, who did understand the Enormísimo Cronopio quite well, agrees with us when he opines that "Prosa del observatorio is perhaps the least known and least studied book of Julio Cortázar's work. However, it constitutes the text that most concisely and intensely summarizes his worldview." (1994, p. 261) We are familiar with several of the very few articles on Prosa, but even these miss key points about the text. For example, Rosario Ferré's opinion, who in an otherwise quite lucid essay states that Julio "does not recognize the importance that Lugones's cosmogonic poem probably had for him" (1990, p. 160), and insists on this point. Well, in a brilliant paragraph from Prosa, Julio speaks of taking the side of the stars, like some poet from our southern lands, in clear allusion to Leopoldo Lugones, who concluded the most famous poem in Las montañas del oro (The Mountains of Gold), from 1897: “And I decided to take the side of the stars.” (1947, p. 14)
Let's take this opportunity to briefly mention some of the influences that converge in the text. The most obvious are Novalis, Allan Poe, Keats, and Lugones. Novalis, a late 18th-century German Romantic poet, wrote Hymns to the Night, which share with Prose the fervor for the magical and eternal night. The literary father of Cortázar's short story, Allan Poe wrote a great cosmogonic poem called Eureka, ignored in its time as Prose but considered by its author to be his finest work. Julio, Edgar's literary son, not only "devoured" his work as a young man, but later translated it, in an act of profound love and admiration for the master. He did no less for the English Romantic poet, to whom he dedicated a brilliant 600-page volume called The Image of John Keats (published posthumously).............
Excluir..............The idea that something “is what it is and not what is said” is present in Zen Buddhism (so present in Hopscotch), in Julio's stories (cf. “Axolotl”), and in Keats: “…or if a Sparrow comes before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.” (quoted in Cortázar, 1994, p. 48). In addition to the aforementioned poem, Lugones included an “Essay on a Cosmogony in Ten Lessons” in the 1906 short story collection Las fuerzas extrañas (Strange Forces). There he progresses from “The Origin of the Universe” to “Man,” two extremes that Cortázar unites in his own cosmogonic essay, Prosa del observatorio (Prose of the Observatory).
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An Elusive Work
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Julio, at Casa de las Américas, Havana, 1978:
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“Throughout my life, I've written poems. I've published very few because from a very young age I accepted that kind of literary classification that others make, more than oneself. From the beginning, I was considered a short story writer or a prose writer, and later a novelist, but poetry, which was always a personal constant for me, never figured in those classifications, and I grew accustomed to them… to the point that poetry is a somewhat secret, somewhat personal exercise for me.” (1978, track 6)
Prosa del observatorio is a poem, an essay, a travel diary, a logbook, an open letter, a short story, a manifesto… It's pointless to persist in categorizing the cronopio, who always got his way, who always went off the rails. In a way, the recent effort by a Spanish publisher to publish Cortázar's Complete Works in nine or ten neatly arranged volumes is laughable: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Theater… Poor cronopio, if only I could see it. Is Hopscotch a novel? And the poem Hopscotch, and the essay Hopscotch, and the thesis Hopscotch? Except for Twilight, is it a book of poems, and not an autobiography? But enough already. It's enough to know that a few months after the volume of Stories was published, another story appeared; that after the serious and carefully curated volume of Poetry, more poems appeared; that previously unpublished photos and videos filmed by Julio appear here and there; that the sea of letters he wrote continues to overflow... in short, that no generic or academic floodgate can contain the torrent of slippery eels the writer unleashes from a past that is constantly being reconfigured. Trying to classify, label, or incorporate such a work into the academy and academic world can only be done by someone who didn't understand it.
ExcluirTo get lost in the task of cataloging this and Cortázar's other texts is to miss the cronopio's knowing nod, calling "Prose" something that, already in the first line, cuts off after a comma to go down, to dive into another oceanic layer. On the other hand, to think of the text only as a poem is to ignore its role in the excellent tradition of the Spanish-American essay. And so on. The fact is that all these levels, these genres, if you will, occur together, at the same time; the text slides from one to another, ebbs and flows like the tide it describes, opening itself to any discourse that might enrich it.
ExcluirPoetic Reality
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A deep-rooted attitude in Cortázar, wonder at reality is the source from which the spring of Prose is born. Other writings emerge more from playfulness, from the desire to transgress conventions, or from the need to translate dreams into literature; this one is based more on the fascination aroused by reality. Prose of the Observatory is born in part from the need to criticize and correct a certain vision of reality: that of science, which refuses to broaden its field of vision and persists in an ultimately ignorant reductionism. Faced with this objectivism that sees no further than the surface, Julio reacts by giving birth to a text that springs from the subjective, the unconscious, chance, the subterranean rhythms and pulses of blood. Science is man's bandage, not his beacon in the darkness, when it invades the territory of poetry. (Let's not forget that science and magic were originally one and the same: when, at what bend in the road, did we lose our wonder?) Julio takes us to the countryside where things shed imposed labels and shine once again with their own light. The long-awaited "paradise regained" is first and foremost a verbal conquest, and in the new beginning, it is a new verb.
Continue in one minute
ExcluirWonder and surprise are, then, both the cause and consequence of the text. It is the attitude Julio adopts toward the mystery of vital forces, toward the magic revealed in the night, toward the significant and symbolic coincidences that keep him awake. This stance seems to generate more coincidences, and it is not far-fetched to think that Julio actually happened to step on an eel on a Parisian street (other, much stranger things happened to him). The migration of the eels is an example of the mystery of life and nature; the observatories of India, of the essentially human desire to elevate ourselves to other planes of being and knowledge. The poet observes the eels and swims in the observatories, and his acceptance of both mysteries, of the mystery that underlies everything, allows him to step outside of time and space, to be simultaneously in India and Paris, in South America and the Atlantic, in the 18th century and the 20th, and in the possible future—all of which is to say, the mystery of life and nature. superimpose states and strata, achieve the amalgamation of man, world and cosmos.
ExcluirGiven the perspective offered by the poetic method, it is implicit that the Western world, with its science, its objectivism, its logos, has followed a wrong path. If Jai Singh is a model to imitate, today's scientists are pathetic laboratory workers; narrow-mindedness is the cause of human regression. Science has remained limited to words, concerned with labels, with cataloging the world; on the contrary, poetry intuits the forces that beat beneath words and migrates across the page aboard the rhythmic current, the cadenced tide. Each sentence produces waves of meaning, and meaning is found between what is said and what is unsaid, between lines and curves, interspersed with nonsense. (Sometimes it is like Andrés Amorós says about chapter 68 of Hopscotch: “The psychological impression is of a series of waves: they all advance in the same direction, but each one is a little longer than the previous one” (“Hopscotch, new reading”, Annals of Hispanic American literature, no. 1))..............
Excluir............Language pursues an ever-elusive reality, knowing that if it were to capture it, it would no longer be reality, leaving its traces behind us. Written writing is paradoxical because it signals both a failure—speaking doesn't reach being—and a victory—the intuition that being can be found in what is suggested.
ExcluirPoetic inspiration springs, as with the Romantics (to cite an example dear to Julio), from eternal natural elements: the night, the starry sky, the sea, water, stone, the marble of the observatory. Almost hidden, the dawn that has yet to rise is also present in that brilliant image of "the red-haired night." On a more intellectual level, the prose writer Julio resorts, as in much of his work, to intertextuality with classical myths. An expert in classical mythology, Cortázar plays with Endymion and Selene, with Actaeon and Diana, as he plays on so many other occasions with the gods and demigods of antiquity ("Circe," The Kings, etc.). But an important part of the text is based on the free association of ideas and impulses. A lightning rod for the eccentric and the unusual, Julio summons—sometimes in the same paragraph—things from entirely different worlds: Pabst, Delhi, guerrillas, leptocephalus, caresses, moons, professors, and Hölderlin coexist in a dreamlike reality. From the beginning of Prosa, it's evident that Cortázar is a surrealist. His is an original surréalisme (supra-realism) that seeks a higher reality.
ExcluirOnly the poet, a true explorer of new worlds, unites the disparate, brings the ordinary and the exotic together. His weapon is the unexpected analogy, the hypnotic metaphor. Uniting opposites and capturing the relationships between seemingly unrelated things is the activity of genius. Ultimately, the proposal of Prose remains that of Hopscotch: "...perhaps words wrap this like a napkin wraps bread, and inside is the fragrance, the flour rising, the yes without the no, or the no without the yes, the day without Manes, without Ormuz or Ariman, once and for all, in peace, and that's enough." (Hopscotch, chapter 73)
ExcluirProse of the Observatory culminates with the expression of a desire, of an ambition: the conquest of poetic reality. It will take work, blood, sweat, and tears, but within it, human beings will be free. This is where the "political" comes in, so to speak, the social manifesto that is Prose, published the same year as Manuel's Book: The Red-Haired Night: this being-in-the-world, this full existence, must be achieved for and by humankind. In this sense, the poet is a kind of enlightened one because he points the way. But Cortázar is above all a great humanist, for whom Lautréamont's dictum must one day be fulfilled: "Poetry must be made by all." The Course of Eels is poetry in itself; the struggle for freedom, against oppression, is one facet of poetry; there is poetry in Jai Singh's gaze; there is poetry in the entire world. Poetic reality will be magical, open, revolutionary, fluid, surprising, erotic, playful, sensual, dreamlike, rhythmic and, ultimately, human.
ExcluirSymbols
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There are many symbols in Prose. The most important is the Möbius ring, which appears as a metaphor in the text but is also a description of the text itself. The Möbius strip or ring symbolizes the eternal, the cyclical (hence the life cycle, creation, the natural and cosmic order), the two sides of the coin (which are one), the union of verse and obverse (the uni-verse), and much more. In turn, by association with eels, those sea serpents, it refers to another marvelous symbol, the ouroboros. The serpent biting its tail is something that is closed and open at the same time (it shows and hides its face simultaneously), the impossible made real. This fantastic ring is the bond that ties together everything disparate, everything that at first seems irreconcilable. The figure traced by the eels is a horizontal Möbius strip; the sultan's study of the stars is a vertical Möbius strip. The curves of the observatories form rings where light and shadow coexist, and the eels twist and knot themselves into a primordial mass of aquatic ribbons.
However, the most interesting thing happens at the metatextual level. There are phrases that function like closed circles, which must be read and reread, phrases that are difficult to escape but from which one ultimately emerges fascinated. Paragraphs, sections, and sentences are offered as perfect cycles, riding a frantic pace. It should also not be forgotten that Prosa del observatorio is, like Alto el Perú, Último Round, La vuelta al día en ocho mundos, Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, and Territorios, a textbook and images. The words dialogue with the images, interrogate them and are interrogated, acquiring their meaning or losing it from a photograph and vice versa. The gaze shifts from the text to the image (or rather, from the textual image to the photographic image) and thus forms its own Möbius ring. This dialectical coupling engenders other questions, which are not formulated in the prose but in the intermediate space between it and the photographs. The fact that the photos are in black and white, like the words on the white sheet, contributes to thinking of them as another textual field.
ExcluirThe night is the place of poetry. Source of primordial mysteries, refuge of the occult, it is present in height as well as in depth. It is the common habitat of eels and stars; the one above is as unattainable for man as the one below. Novalis and Cortázar equate it with the nothingness from which everything is born and to which everything returns. But when captured by an astrologer-poet, when reflected in the Atlantic, it symbolizes the universe installed on Earth. The red-haired night is the celestial feminine, the muse, the lung of inspiration. We have already noted that in the red-haired night lies the seed of dawn, which of course is the future. In this case, the future has not yet arrived; it must be won with pen and sword; for the night to burn red and for the dawn to be born, it will be necessary to contribute the red of blood.
ExcluirEels represent, on the one hand, the elusive, the inexplicable, untamable nature, and on the other, the forces of the unconscious in action, the vital drive, the being in harmony with its environment. Eels belong to the very long list of rare animals and creatures that inhabit Julio's work, a veritable bestiary. (As an example of this, Aurora Bernárdez, Julio's first wife, friend, and executor, recently compiled several writings under the title Animalia in which the cronopio plays with fauna.) Because of their perfect, patient, and astonishing metamorphosis, Julio uses eels as a metaphor for man, who in his current state is still an elver and must row upriver for a long time if he wants to become an eel or a star.
ExcluirThe observatories of Jaipur and Delhi embody the will of man in its dual aspect. On the one hand, they rise as a monument to the science that seeks to explain everything, to the thirst for knowledge that, because it is insatiable, can kill man. On the other hand, these magnificent and artistic constructions are a place of encounter, a place of openness. The observatory is a tool or artifact of the night, which serves as its arm but also investigates and incorporates it. Its curves open it to the sky like an eye that is not only a witness but also a thinking conscience of the universe: like every tool (but more than any because it is also born of the night and moves, dancing with the light), it becomes an extension of man, who is a mirror of the world. Through the human gaze, Jantar Mantar abandons its petrified, merely scientific and measured side and abandons itself to the ardent, the erotic, the immoderate.
ExcluirIts creator, Jai Singh, is a solitary figure with many facets. He can be seen as an image of all humanity as a dreamer and inquisitor of the heights. He is historically the warrior, which brings him closer to the figure of the guerrilla in the mountains (who appears toward the end). Cortázar projects his own attitudes and desires onto Jai Singh, and thus the astrologer identifies with the poet. And it is not far-fetched to think of Jai Singh in relation to the Astrologer of The Seven Madmen, both with their prophetic, revolutionary madness. The sultan serves another kind of science, a science that still retains its original magic and the charm of discovery. An architect and mathematician, he yearns to glimpse another image of the world. Finally, we could think of him as a new Petrarch who climbs his strange Mount Ventoso every night.
ExcluirThe figure is a fundamental notion in Cortázar, running through his entire work. Julio adds an almost metaphysical dimension to the common sense of the term: the figure is a kind of constellation, drawing, or stroke that connects seemingly free elements. 62/Modelo para armar, for example, ends [reader: don't read the end of this sentence if you're ever going to read the book] with a figure that sums up the whole story: some insects flutter around a lantern, their Brownoid movements similar to those of the characters in the novel. In Los premios, the poet Persio imagines that the ship he's traveling on might form, seen from above, the shape of a guitar. In Prosa del observatorio, the two obvious figures are the mysterious path followed by eels and the constellations discovered by Jai Singh. But as always, Julio is more interested in reality than in literature, and that's why we read in the introductory note that "the eels, Jai Singh, the stars, and myself are part of an image [read: figure] that only points to the reader." Capturing the figure, the higher order, the mysterious and unsuspected image of the world, requires a conscious effort that Julio carries out with natural mastery..............
ExcluirThe goal of Prose of the Observatory is that on the other side of the page, that Möbius strip, we too make that effort, step out into the open, and perceive the figure.
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So that the contrast between my prose and Cortázar's poetry isn't so stark, I would like to finally quote Octavio Paz, with whom Julio traveled to India:
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“A Mayan temple, a medieval cathedral, or a Baroque palace were more than just monuments: sensitive points of space and time, privileged observatories from which man could contemplate the world and the otherworld as a whole. Their orientation corresponded to a symbolic vision of the universe; the shape and arrangement of their parts opened up a plural perspective, a true crossroads of visual paths: upward and downward, toward the four cardinal points. A total point of view on the whole. These works were not only a vision of the world, but were made in its image: they were a representation of the figure of the universe, its copy or its symbol.” (The bow and the lyre)
Post script
ResponderExcluirThis is precisely the culmination of Cortázar's literary quest: Don Julio Florencio Cortázar, the shaman! Zeziola saw him in Prose, and Cortázar himself exposed him in Hopscotch: "poor white shaman in nylon underwear." The writer-shaman Don Julio—not the novelist—is the logical and necessary corollary of a creative trajectory that began with an innate openness to other planes of reality, continued with an adherence to Rimbaud's "il faut changer la vie," and finally found in Zen and the teachings transmitted by his friend Guthmann the definitive path to a transcendence of literature as it was understood in his time.
The only bad thing is that that time, from what we have seen, was not very willing to change its conception of literature. What a good shaman Cortázar would be, if only he were a good reader! Thus, what Hopscotch argues in chapter 79 still holds true in 2011:
"From the Eleatics to the present, dialectical thought has had plenty of time to give us its fruits. We are eating them; they are delicious, boiling with radioactivity."
Post script
ResponderExcluir
Excluir"When we enter a zone of enchantment, we immediately assume supernaturality. When we enter supernaturality, it seems as if we are clothed for a profession; when we leave and return to nature, we are naked," Cemí began, speaking of his things. "When they moved the library to the Castle of Force, that's when the enchanted quantity was born in me. I incessantly saw the entrance and exit of the representatives, while Hernando de Soto entered death through Florida land, Isabel de Bobadilla awaited his arrival in the rooftop tower. That agitation between what disappears in the telluric and reappears in the stellar, the image penetrating quantity, whether populated expanse or sandy abstraction, is supernaturality."
Lezama Lima from Oppiano Licário
But when that question arises, we too are already drowned. The water has deepened the underground rivers and formed black blood. The flame has become a bonfire. The bonfires have sunk through their tongues and have calcined the city. What transmigrations of the image! Like the yellow and red hawk has made its appearance, if before I spoke of a guillotined head that opens its eyes, now we tear out its tongue and see it leap high into a flame. The tongue of the flame, I feel once again calcined by Oppiano Licario. We can no longer invoke its answers, but meanwhile, the questions, the Gnostic space, penetrate our body. Licario made his answers supernatural, but you seem to be telling us that we must make all of nature a total supernatural. Your somewhat hieratic answers condemned us without fear to silence, but you, Ynaca Eco—Cemí scanned her with a slow, voluptuous gaze—tell us a joy, advise us of a happiness. But I don't want to earn their reaction by leaning too hastily into praise.
ExcluirLezama Lima from Oppiano Licário