The Word Renders Account of the Silence it Builds

December 16, 2006 Man is clay filled with words. When we speak we go out to meet language. When we write we enter into language. Speaking is going towards another, towards the other. Writing is going towards oneself, and, always, I am the other.

The infinite purpose of the passion of reading is to be read. The book was once within us and was expressed as a voice. We were in the book and we expressed ourselves in silent ink. Yet “to exist in the book is to be absent”.

Writing is the gesture that prolongs us. Death may take away the instrument, but it leaves the song behind.

The poet doesn’t write what it is convenient to write, he doesn’t expose his reasoning, he has no desire to convince anyone. He doesn’t exploit the fantasy used by narrative. Fantasy is an escape from reality in order to access the ghost. It is not a coincidence that fantasy and phantom share the same root.

The poet writes to uncover the nature of the mystery, the time of the miracle. The power of life is that it happens even where we are not.

How much imagination we need to perceive the world! What is reality without its imagined memory? 

Imagination is not an avoidance of reality. Imagination is a responsible (and committed) re-entry into reality, and in that re-entry the poet adds his poem to pre-existing reality making the poem a reality in itself.  In this re-entry Carlos Vasquez’s poetry assumes a foreign state of language, and for this reason it produces wonderment. In spite of the fact that the words he uses are in common usage and we understand their meaning completely, the wonderment continues — Carlos acheives simplicity by way of complexity.

In a strict sense, no writing is closed no matter how hermetic the text. The word itself always contains other possibilities. Thus the text constantly overflows its immediate points of reference. It remains present more due to the promise of the word than to its memory. Because memory here is memory without nostalgia, without recollection. It is never a mouldy record of the past, but a legitimate form of imagination.

Carlos is notable in his capacity for dispossession, for forgetting. One only needs leaf through his books of philosophy (which I consider ‘essays’ due to their freedom and poetry) to gain the measure of his renunciation. Forgetting has nothing to do with ignorance — forgetting is the path to innocence through knowledge. Forgetfulness is loaded with memory; ignorance lacks any form of memory. “Abandon the different forms of wisdom and move into un-knowing, this is what is convenient”, recommends San Juan de la Cruz.

Forgetfulness does not corrode memory, it fashions the word: forgetfulness is seminal.

As water bores into the rock, as Henry Moore finds the space inside the rock, so Carlos finds silence in the seed of the word, not suppressing the word, but speaking the silence through the word itself. 

It is like Beckett writes:

... Silence,
to speak of silence
before entering into it,
every instant I am in it,
every instant I leave it,
see that I speak of it,
I leave it to speak,
speaking I am in it,
if I am indeed the one who speaks,
and it is not I,
I proceed as though it was I ... .

To write poetry is to begin beyond all knowledge. One paints to see, one writes to hear. “One paints to know what painting is”, one writes poetry to know what poetry is. The storyteller writes about what he knows, the poet writes to know. Poetry is the most extreme experience of language, and the requirement of maximum yield from the word takes place at the frontier where there is a tear in language itself.

There is nothing picturesque here. An absence of color does not imply an anemia of the word, it is that here the word is transparent, as transparent as crystal. If you see something blurred it’s your own breath that, when you draw close, fogs up the writing making it hard to read. Here water is written about on carved crystal.

Here the word doesn’t act, there are no histrionics. There are no costumes, nor lighting effects. There is no staging, no show, only a naked putting into words. Besides, this word is not a cantabile, it doesn’t even invite verbalization: here writing is the warm voice of the word. Here, the word renders account of the silence it builds.

In this space there is no room for historic time. This is another space: the space of writing. This writing happens inside, in this cloister. Again Beckett:

... open on the void,
open on the nothing,
I've no objection,
those are words,
open on the silence,
looking out on the silence,
straight out,
why not?
all this time on
the brink of silence, I knew it,
on a rock lashed to a rock,
in the midst of silence,
its great swell rears towards me,
I'm streaming with it,
It's an image: those are words,
it is a body, it is not I,
I knew it would not be I,
I am not outside,
I am inside,
I'm in something,
I'm shut up:
the silence is outside,
nothing but this voice and the silence all round,
no need of walls?
yes, we must have walls:
I need walls,
good and thick,
I need a prison ... .

A cowardly, lying and lazy society such as ours tries to hem in exacting, intelligent and independent men. Truth, health and the naked word fertilize a shoreless loneliness. And if we know that truth is part of talent, we also know that “the boundaries of truth are always torn” (1). We eat from the same plate the leftovers that loneliness leaves us.

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1. Braque