Between Going and Staying

 

 Between Going and Staying

By Octavio Paz

Translated by Eliot Weinberger

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.


Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz was incontestably one of Latin America's greatest poets. I personally consider his poem , “Sunstone” (beautifully translated into Malayalam by our cult poet Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan) , as one of the ten greatest poems of the last century.  Indians are proud of him as he was our Mexican Ambassador and his book, “Light on India” is still one of the best books on India written by a Non-Indian. Paz was influenced in turn by Marxism, Surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. In the poetry of his maturity, he used a rich flow of surrealistic imagery in dealing with metaphysical questions. Paz's poetry is a seismograph of last century’s turbulence, a crossroads where East meets West.

One of the main reasons for success of poetry of Octavio Paz is that it can be meaningful without being inaccessible and highly refined in form without being meaningless. The demands on the reader are therefore greater when reading his poems. Some of the common themes in Paz’s poetry are time, circularity of many aspects in life and nature, bridges (between humans, cultures, spaces)  etc.

The above is a deeply meditative poem.  The moment wavers first between day and night. There is then stillness, a pause. Then the moment scatters- a visual -dynamic image.The visual and metaphorical  elements in the poem are striking and  warrant a close look:  ”transparency” ,”circular afternoon”, “All is visible “, “shade”, “throbbing” “ghostly theater of reflections”, “stare” ,”scatters”, "Middle of an eye" , "blank stare". Still life with occasional dynamic images.”paper,book,pencil,glass/rest in the shades of their names”. Mark the light turns the indifferent wall into a theater of reflections. Even within the deep stillness, there is an ever-present trembling, pulsation, changing nature to our experience. There is a sense of the mystery of existence in the poem, the tenuousness of what we experience (the "ghostly theater of reflections"), the wonder of the inner life (inside the eye watching himself). How wonderful! The ending is masterful rendering the raconteur as a pause in the journey between the going and staying.

Time is continuous, never ending, infinite. It is always present, without exceptions, without limitations. It has power over us, for we can never hope to control it. Because of this, time is the mystery of life, because the end of our life is always inevitable, death: but the start is just the same, birth.

 Despite the complexity, the poem has a calming effect. It fills us with pure feelings about life, death, earth, time, space  and state of mind.

after

after

By Octavio Paz 

Translated by Eliot Weinberger

after chopping off all the arms that reached out to me;
after boarding up all the windows and doors;

after filling all the pits with poisoned water;
after building my house on the rock of no,
inaccessible to flattery and fear;

after cutting off my tongue and eating it;
after hurling handfuls of silence
and monosyllable of scorn at my loves;

after forgetting my name;
and the name of my birthplace;
and the name of my race;

after judging and sentencing myself
to perpetual waiting,
and perpetual loneliness, I heard
against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms,

the humid, tender, insistent
onset of spring.


Octavio Paz is considered as one of the greatest Latin American Poets of Twentieth Century. A Mexican poet, he was the former Ambassador to India and Nobel Prize Winner for Literature.

The imageries in this poem are guttural, and the violence highlights the lengths we will go to in isolating ourselves. It could be read as a kind of confession and late realization of someone who has inflicted many inner lacerations in life. Our adamancy, unwillingness to accept faults, negation of all hands of help, neglect of one's own voice, wallowing in toxic waters can finally lead to our own perpetual confinement and desolation.

This poem depicts the state of those of us who invite misery and alienation due to our own actions. Very often the sense of humiliation, hurt, shame we experience may be our own doing: the judging and sentencing, the perpetual waiting and lowliness that criticism inflicts. But even after we have forgotten our names and the places of birth, the heart still has the capacity to open again to love.  

When these things occur, when people square off against one another in angry debate, when someone closes down in hurt or discloses a trauma too horrible to imagine, reading this poem can be a restorative act.  Even if we abandon ourselves, lose our hope, and push others away, there is still, within us and around us, the formidable persistence of “spirit”.

The winter has been long and cold. Where are the cracks that you can widen in yourself, to let in the spring? You belong in the sunlight, it insists. The image of spring at the end points to hope, optimism , salvation and possibility to redeem ourselves .

A Wonderful, inspiring  poem!