by Octavio Paz
All poems say the same thing and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others and each part is different. As I began these pages I decided to follow literally the metaphor of the title of the collection that they were intended for, the Paths of Creation, and to write, to describe a text that was really a path and that could be read and followed as such. As I wrote, the path to Galta grew blurred or else I lost my bearings and went astray in the trackless wilds. Again and again I was obliged to return to the starting point. Instead of advancing, the text circled about itself. Is destruction creation? I do not know, but I do know that creation is not destruction. At each turn the text opened out into another one, at once its translation and its transposition: a spiral of repetitions and reiterations that have dissolved into a negation of writing as a path. Today I realize that my text was not going anywhere—except to meet itself. I also perceive that repetitions are metaphors and that reiterations are analogies: a system of mirrors that little by little have revealed another text. In this text Hanumn contemplates the garden of Rvana like a page of calligraphy like the harem of the same Rvana as described in the Rmyana like this page on which the swaying motions of the beeches in the grove opposite my window accumulate on this page like the shadows of two lovers projected by the fire on a wall like the stains of monsoon rains on a ruined palace of the abandoned town of Galta like the rectangular space on which there surge the wave upon wave of a multitude contemplated from the crumbling balconies by hundreds of monkeys like an image of writing and reading like a metaphor of the path and the pilgrimage to the sanctuary like the final dissolution of the path and the convergence of all the texts in this paragraph like a metaphor of the embrace of bodies. Analogy: universal transparency: seeing in this that.
Nude, photographic proof taken by an electronic process, 1968,Leon D. Harmon (artist) and Kenneth C. Knowlton (engineer), (University of California).
29
The body of Splendor as it divides, disperses, dissipates itself in my body as it divides, disperses, dissipates itself in the body of Splendor:
breathing, warmth, outline, bulk that beneath the pressure of my fingertips slowly ceases to be a confusion of pulses and gathers itself together and reunites with itself,
vibrations, waves that strike my closed eyelids as the street lamps go out and dawn staggers through the city: the body of Splendor before my eyes that gaze down on her as she lies between the sheets as I walk toward her in the dawn in the green light filtering through the enormous leaves of a banana tree onto an ocher footpath to Galta that leads me to this page where the body of Splendor lies between the sheets as I write on this page and as I read what I write,
an ocher footpath that suddenly starts walking, a river of burned waters seeking its path between the sheets, Splendor rises from the bed and walks about in the shadowy light of the room with staggering steps as the street lamps of the city go out:
The palace of Galta (18th century), (photograph by Eusebio Rojas).
she is searching for something, the dawn is searching for something, the young woman halts and looks at me: a squirrel gaze, a dawn gaze that lingers amid the leaves of the banyan tree along the ocher path that leads from Galta to this page, a gaze that is a well to be drunk from, a gaze in which I write the word reconciliation:
Splendor is this page, that which separates (liberates) and weaves together (reconciles) the various parts that compose it,
that which (the one who) is there, at the end of what I say, at the end of this page, and appears here as this phrase is uttered, as it dissipates,
the act inscribed on this page and the bodies (the phrases) that as they embrace give form to this act, this body:
the liturgical sequence and the dissipation of all rites through the double profanation (yours and mine), the reconciliation/liberation, of writing and reading
Cambridge, England, summer, 1970