The Mexican poet Octavio Paz (1914-1998) is an undisputed master poet and essayist, who, along with César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, are the three great South American poets of the twentieth century. Although Mexico features prominently in Paz’s work. his exploration of Mexican existential values enabled him to open the door to an understanding of the universal human condition – our desire for love, our existential angst over loneliness, our fears of the unknown. Los Angeles Times contributor Jascha Kessler called Paz “truly international.” World Literature Today’s Manuel Duran felt that Paz’s work transcends cultures. “What began as a slow, almost microscopic examination of self and of a single cultural tradition widens unexpectedly,” Duran continued, “becoming universal without sacrificing its unique characteristic.” Paz won the Nobel Prize in 1990 and died eight years later at the age of 84. His passing was mourned as the end of an era for Mexico.
Born in 1914 near Mexico City, Paz grew up under poor circumstances, but access to his grandfather’s library sparked his interest in literature at an early age. He wrote poetry as a teenager, making his literary debut with the poetry collection Luna Silvestre (Wild Moon) in 1933. Beginning in 1946, he served as a diplomat for 20 years, during which period he published numerous collections of poetry and prose. One of his best-known works is El laberinto de la Soledad (1950) (The Labyrinth of Solitude), a beautifully written and deeply felt discourse on Mexico’s quest for identity. In his later works, love and eroticism were prominent themes.
THE WORDS OF OCTAVIO PAZ
On the mystery of language
“I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket’s saw, the star’s blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?”
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On Loneliness
“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature … consists in his longing to realize himself in another … Therefore, when he is aware of himself, he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.”
“No one behind, no one ahead.
The path the ancients cleared has closed.
And the other path, everyone’s path,
easy and wide, goes nowhere.
I am alone and find my way.”
“Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion.”
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On Pursuing Modernity
“We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses, yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.”
Remarks – To put this quote in context, Paz wasn’t against modernization but the blind pursuit of modernity to the extent of displacing other human beliefs. He devoted much of his work from the 1930s to the 1990s to describing and denouncing the pernicious effects of modernity on human life. For him, modernity in most societies have become a misplaced faith in the unmitigated triumph of reason over religion, myth, and ritual. This belief, to him, was as irrational as any other belief because it fails to satisfy the human hunger for the sacred.
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On the Richness of Diversity
“What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us.”
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On the Purpose of Poetry
“This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry – to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there: the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.”
Remarks – From his youth, Paz was tormented by the question of whether it was worthwhile to write poetry, and out of this need to explain himself he grew into a wonderful apologist for poetry itself. He never lost sight of poetry’s irrational power and sacred mystery, the uncanny power of words to liberate and transfigure the soul. He wrote much of his poetry out of a sense of estrangement and exile, a feeling of unreality, “a wound that never heals” as he put it. Poetry, was a means of salvation, providing him with the interior space to roam between dark crossings and giddy heights of momentary joy.
An Existential Poem by Octavio Paz
Between Going and Staying is a poignant poem that Paz wrote in which he explores the complex nature of human existence and the passage of time. Read the full poem below after this music interlude.
BETWEEN GOING AND STAYING
Between going and staying
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.
~ Octavio Paz, from The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987, translated by Eliot Weinberger. New Directions Publishing, 1991.