On the day Buzz died, I was in Cambridge, UK. Sadly, I picked up the phone from the boarding school network and called the teacher’s extension. George Steiner, who spoke with him a few days ago about the relationship between literature, philosophy and science. “A day as sad as few others,” he said to me, “we have left a distinguished inhabitant of the house.”
in the journal to forbid to Octavio Paz Over several years I have been able to implement a quartet of fantasy approaches, consisting of literary surprise, science fiction, technological perseverance and artistic passion. This allowed me to talk to him more than once about the links, intersections and differences in the literature between the ideas and findings of science.
Over time, I came to realize that his poetic acuity allowed him to provide a subtle view of the steps that make up an almost invisible staircase to the universe. He was bold when he explained what was happening in the universe and how it had evolved; His poetic proposals are images that illuminate mental processes, the dreams of the observer, and the fears of the forerunners.
As Steiner told me that April morning, Paz stood out among the great poets for paraphrasing Gilbert K ChestertonSome of them, in all their literary splendor, will continue to be content with sticking their heads in heaven to enrich their poetry. Others, on the contrary, more experienced and ingenious, will dare to poke their heads into the sky, no matter how many colors they end up decomposing. Such was the case with Paz.
And it is not that he resorted to the elementary trick of mentioning flasks and equations in his poems, or pretending to reproduce the events of science. Poems like “La casa de la mirada,” she wrote for the Chilean surrealist painter Roberto MattaShow us the playful spirit of an inquisitive man and the intelligence of one who knows how to recognize the game of opposites and contradictions between the subatomic and the astronomical.
An explorer of the modern word, he invited us to experiment with new concepts of light, time and space in an aesthetic way articulated with ideas emanating from scientific knowledge:
“You are in the house of the gaze, the mirrors have hidden all their ghosts,
There is no one and there is nothing to see, things have left their bodies
They are not things and not ideas: they are shots of green, red, yellow and blue,
Swarms turning and turning, spirals of disembodied hordes,
a whirlwind of shapes that have not yet reached their form.”
Knowing his earnest penchant for scientific thought, we can better understand how during these verses dedicated to Mata’s figurative expression he allows himself to disrupt the fabric of space-time and play in a dazzling way with light. The first lines of the poem read as follows:
“You walk inside yourself and the faint serpentine reflection leading you
This is not the last look of your eyes closing, nor the timid sun beating your eyelids:
is a secret stream, not of the water but of the heartbeat: the calls, the responses, the calls,
A ray of light among the tall grass and the monsters of conscience crouching in the dark.”
The poet suggests looking, observing, scanning, and perceiving the luminous bodies drawn in shadows in a perpetual dialogue with time, and extends his connections towards the universe and towards the world of subatomic particles. Since Steiner was able to identify on that occasion, this is no pun. Peace, as well as the stars, craved this almost unseen world. In fact, he even entered into correspondence with Stephen Weinbergthe Nobel Prize for his contributions to clarifying such a particular reality.
“Emotions must prevail when contemplating that inner world that is barely perceptible,” Paz told me. He opened the doors of the House of Gaze to me, and encouraged me to continue visiting the places where the origin and destiny of all things are investigated, namely, giant telescopes and colossal particle accelerators.
“They told us about those huts that tribes celebrate in their attempt to reveal the intimacy of matter, where nothing is taken for granted and everything must be tested through sophisticated experiments,” said Paz.
He maintained that the outer form determines the inner pathway, which in addition to Stephen Weinberg maintained a friendship with the explorer of the physiological wiring that underpins the human mind, also a Nobel Prize winner. Gerald M Edelman. The essential truth, the surreal, is embodied in the ideas of Saturn conveyed by Mercury.
“… By entering yourself, do not leave the world, for there are rivers and volcanoes in your body, planets and ants,
Empires and turbines, libraries and gardens,
There are also animals, plants, beings from other worlds, and galaxies spinning in your neurons,
By entering into yourself, you enter this world and other worlds.
Enter what the astronomer saw through his telescope, the mathematician into his equations:
Chaos and symmetry, coincidences and rhymes, duplications and mutations,
San Vito disease of maize and its particles, recurrent cells, and astrocytes”.
We are the hinge that facilitates particle, subatomic, cosmic motion. Later, Buzz speculates about our place in the universe, and the remarkable challenges we faced yesterday, today, and will continue to face tomorrow.
You said the earth is a man, but man is not the earth,
Man is not this world nor the other worlds that exist in this world and in other than it.
The man is the mouth that blurs the mirror of sameness and says yes
The tightrope walker who dances on the smiley tightrope,
The universal mirror that reflects another world by replicating this world that changes what it copies,
A person is not what he is, a cell or a deity, but what is always beyond that … “
Deep down, we are a reflection of sunlight, Buzz insists on the distinct idea. He plays with the idea of evolution beyond species. He suggests poetry as the last bastion that might allow us to transcend.
“… spaces flow and falter under the petrified gaze of time,
Existence flames tigers tigers tigers waves
Series of permutations, series of recurrences, time traps:
You shall give your share of light to the hungry nature,
You have to shake the rattle of rhymes to cheat the time and awaken the soul,
You have to plant eyes in the square, you have to water the gardens with solar laughter and lunar laughter,
You have to learn the tone of Adam playing the solo flute
The house of gaze must be built on this precarious space,
The house of air and water, where music sleeps, fire watches, and the poet paints.
Paz shows us how the neo-romantic notion that Gaea (some write it “Gaia,” a word referring to the earth goddess among the ancient Greeks), has squandered the expanse of space, whether we like it or not. Human time. Since terrestrial rotation was abandoned in 1950 as a measure of time for the travel of a beam of cesium atoms, we have discovered that Gaea does not direct anything and is part of a rather imprecise mechanism; According to others, we are faced with a design junkie, unable to do anything other than repeating his patterns until he runs out of fuel.
According to Paz, “thought weaves and dismantles plot”, not Gia. The sun is our hourglass, and as long as the helium flows, there will first be poetry to read, and Octavio Paz will be one of those that continue to feed the eternal clock with vital fluid.
Abdul Qadeer
