IN SEARCH OF THE PRESENT

I begin with two words that all men have uttered since the dawn of humanity: thank you. The word gratitude has equivalents in every language and in each tongue the range of meanings is abundant. In the Romance languages this breadth spans the spiritual and the physical, from the divine grace conceded to men to save them from error and death, to the ****** grace of the dancing girl or the feline leaping through the undergrowth. Grace means pardon, forgiveness, favour, benefice, inspiration; it is a form of address, a pleasing style of speaking or painting, a gesture expressing politeness, and, in short, an act that reveals spiritual goodness. Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift. The person who receives it, the favoured one, is grateful for it; if he is not base, he expresses gratitude. That is what I am doing at this very moment with these weightless words. I hope my emotion compensates their weightlessness. If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement. And also an indefinable mixture of fear, respect and surprise at finding myself here before you, in this place which is the home of both Swedish learning and world literature.

Languages are vast realities that transcend those political and historical entities we call nations. The European languages we speak in the Americas illustrate this. The special position of our literatures when compared to those of England, Spain, Portugal and France depends precisely on this fundamental fact: they are literatures written in transplanted tongues. Languages are born and grow from the native soil, nourished by a common history. The European languages were rooted out from their native soil and their own tradition, and then planted in an unknown and unnamed world: they took root in the new lands and, as they grew within the societies of America, they were transformed. They are the same plant yet also a different plant. Our literatures did not passively accept the changing fortunes of the transplanted languages: they participated in the process and even accelerated it. They very soon ceased to be mere transatlantic reflections: at times they have been the negation of the literatures of Europe; more often, they have been a reply.

In spite of these oscillations the link has never been broken. My classics are those of my language and I consider myself to be a descendant of Lope and Quevedo, as any Spanish writer would ... yet I am not a Spaniard. I think that most writers of Spanish America, as well as those from the United States, Brazil and Canada, would say the same as regards the English, Portuguese and French traditions. To understand more clearly the special position of writers in the Americas, we should think of the dialogue maintained by Japanese, Chinese or Arabic writers with the different literatures of Europe. It is a dialogue that cuts across multiple languages and civilizations. Our dialogue, on the other hand, takes place within the same language. We are Europeans yet we are not Europeans. What are we then? It is difficult to define what we are, but our works speak for us.

In the field of literature, the great novelty of the present century has been the appearance of the American literatures. The first to appear was that of the English-speaking part and then, in the second half of the 20th Century, that of Latin America in its two great branches: Spanish America and Brazil. Although they are very different, these three literatures have one common feature: the conflict, which is more ideological than literary, between the cosmopolitan and nativist tendencies, between Europeanism and Americanism. What is the legacy of this dispute? The polemics have disappeared; what remain are the works. Apart from this general resemblance, the differences between the three literatures are multiple and profound. One of them belongs more to history than to literature: the development of Anglo-American literature coincides with the rise of the United States as a world power whereas the rise of our literature coincides with the political and social misfortunes and upheavals of our nations. This proves once more the limitations of social and historical determinism: the decline of empires and social disturbances sometimes coincide with moments of artistic and literary splendour. Li-Po and Tu Fu witnessed the fall of the Tang dynasty; Velázquez painted for Felipe IV; Seneca and Lucan were contemporaries and also victims of Nero. Other differences are of a literary nature and apply more to particular works than to the character of each literature. But can we say that literatures have a character? Do they possess a set of shared features that distinguish them from other literatures? I doubt it. A literature is not defined by some fanciful, intangible character; it is a society of unique works united by relations of opposition and affinity.

The first basic difference between Latin-American and Anglo-American literature lies in the diversity of their origins. Both begin as projections of Europe. The projection of an island in the case of North America; that of a peninsula in our case. Two regions that are geographically, historically and culturally eccentric. The origins of North America are in England and the Reformation; ours are in Spain, Portugal and the Counter-Reformation. For the case of Spanish America I should briefly mention what distinguishes Spain from other European countries, giving it a particularly original historical identity. Spain is no less eccentric than England but its eccentricity is of a different kind. The eccentricity of the English is insular and is characterized by isolation: an eccentricity that excludes. Hispanic eccentricity is peninsular and consists of the coexistence of different civilizations and different pasts: an inclusive eccentricity. In what would later be Catholic Spain, the Visigoths professed the heresy of Arianism, and we could also speak about the centuries of ******* by Arabic civilization, the influence of Jewish thought, the Reconquest, and other characteristic features.

Hispanic eccentricity is reproduced and multiplied in America, especially in those countries such as Mexico and Peru, where ancient and splendid civilizations had existed. In Mexico, the Spaniards encountered history as well as geography. That history is still alive: it is a present rather than a past. The temples and gods of pre-Columbian Mexico are a pile of ruins, but the spirit that breathed life into that world has not disappeared; it speaks to us in the hermetic language of myth, legend, forms of social coexistence, popular art, customs. Being a Mexican writer means listening to the voice of that present, that presence. Listening to it, speaking with it, deciphering it: expressing it ... After this brief digression we may be able to perceive the peculiar relation that simultaneously binds us to and separates us from the European tradition.

This consciousness of being separate is a constant feature of our spiritual history. Separation is sometimes experienced as a wound that marks an internal division, an anguished awareness that invites self-examination; at other times it appears as a challenge, a spur that incites us to action, to go forth and encounter others and the outside world. It is true that the feeling of separation is universal and not peculiar to Spanish Americans. It is born at the very moment of our birth: as we are wrenched from the Whole we fall into an alien land. This experience becomes a wound that never heals. It is the unfathomable depth of every man; all our ventures and exploits, all our acts and dreams, are bridges designed to overcome the separation and reunite us with the world and our fellow-beings. Each man's life and the collective history of mankind can thus be seen as attempts to reconstruct the original situation. An unfinished and endless cure for our divided condition. But it is not my intention to provide yet another description of this feeling. I am simply stressing the fact that for us this existential condition expresses itself in historical terms. It thus becomes an awareness of our history. How and when does this feeling appear and how is it transformed into consciousness? The reply to this double-edged question can be given in the form of a theory or a personal testimony. I prefer the latter: there are many theories and none is entirely convincing.

The feeling of separation is bound up with the oldest and vaguest of my memories: the first cry, the first scare. Like every child I built emotional bridges in the imagination to link me to the world and to other people. I lived in a town on the outskirts of Mexico City, in an old dilapidated house that had a jungle-like garden and a great room full of books. First games and first lessons. The garden soon became the centre of my world; the library, an enchanted cave. I used to read and play with my cousins and schoolmates. There was a fig tree, temple of vegetation, four pine trees, three ash trees, a nightshade, a pomegranate tree, wild grass and prickly plants that produced purple grazes. Adobe walls. Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours' patio. Books with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through, supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors and princesses, beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sinbad and with Robinson, we fought with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid. How I would have liked to stay forever on the Isle of Calypso! In summer the green branches of the fig tree would sway like the sails of a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept by the wind, I could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon as they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within reach; time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present.

When was the spell broken? Gradually rather than suddenly. It is hard to accept being betrayed by a friend, deceived by the woman we love, or that the idea of freedom is the mask of a tyrant. What we call "finding out" is a slow and tricky process because we ourselves are the accomplices of our errors and deceptions. Nevertheless, I can remember fairly clearly an incident that was the first sign, although it was quickly forgotten. I must have been about six when one of my cousins who was a little older showed me a North American magazine with a photograph of soldiers marching along a huge avenue, probably in New York. "They've returned from the war" she said. This handful of words disturbed me, as if they foreshadowed the end of the world or the Second Coming of Christ. I vaguely knew that somewhere far away a war had ended a few years earlier and that the soldiers were marching to celebrate their victory. For me, that war had taken place in another time, not here and now. The photo refuted me. I felt literally dislodged from the present.

From that moment time began to fracture more and more. And there was a plurality of spaces. The experience repeated itself more and more frequently. Any piece of news, a harmless phrase, the headline in a newspaper: everything proved the outside world's existence and my own unreality. I felt that the world was splitting and that I did not inhabit the present. My present was disintegrating: real time was somewhere else. My time, the time of the garden, the fig tree, the games with friends, the drowsiness among the plants at three in the afternoon under the sun, a fig torn open (black and red like a live coal but one that is sweet and fresh): this was a fictitious time. In spite of what my senses told me, the time from over there, belonging to the others, was the real one, the time of the real present. I accepted the inevitable: I became an adult. That was how my expulsion from the present began.

It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality. For us, as Spanish Americans, the real present was not in our own countries: it was the time lived by others, by the English, the French and the Germans. It was the time of New York, Paris, London. We had to go and look for it and bring it back home. These years were also the years of my discovery of literature. I began writing poems. I did not know what made me write them: I was moved by an inner need that is difficult to define. Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.

What is modernity? First of all it is an ambiguous term: there are as many types of modernity as there are societies. Each has its own. The word's meaning is uncertain and arbitrary, like the name of the period that precedes it, the Middle Ages. If we are modern when compared to medieval times, are we perhaps the Middle Ages of a future modernity? Is a name that changes with time a real name? Modernity is a word in search of its meaning. Is it an idea, a mirage or a moment of history? Are we the children of modernity or its creators? Nobody knows for sure. It doesn't matter much: we follow it, we pursue it. For me at that time modernity was fused with the present or rather produced it: the present was its last supreme flower. My case is neither unique nor exceptional: from the Symbolist period, all modern poets have chased after that magnetic and elusive figure that fascinates them. Baudelaire was the first. He was also the first to touch her and discover that she is nothing but time that crumbles in one's hands. I am not going to relate my adventures in pursuit of modernity: they are not very different from those of other 20th-Century poets. Modernity has been a universal passion. Since 1850 she has been our goddess and our demoness. In recent years, there has been an attempt to exorcise her and there has been much talk of "postmodernism". But what is postmodernism if not an even more modern modernity?

For us, as Latin Americans, the search for poetic modernity runs historically parallel to the repeated attempts to modernize our countries. This tendency begins at the end of the 18th Century and includes Spain herself. The United States was born into modernity and by 1830 was already, as de Tocqueville observed, the womb of the future; we were born at a moment when Spain and Portugal were moving away from modernity. This is why there was frequent talk of "Europeanizing" our countries: the modern was outside and had to be imported. In Mexican history this process begins just before the War of Independence. Later it became a great ideological and political debate that passionately divided Mexican society during the 19th Century. One event was to call into question not the legitimacy of the reform movement but the way in which it had been implemented: the Mexican Revolution. Unlike its 20th-Century counterparts, the Mexican Revolution was not really the expression of a vaguely utopian ideology but rather the explosion of a reality that had been historically and psychologically repressed. It was not the work of a group of ideologists intent on introducing principles derived from a political theory; it was a popular uprising that unmasked what was hidden. For this very reason it was more of a revelation than a revolution. Mexico was searching for the present outside only to find it within, buried but alive. The search for modernity led

Like probability. Fate exhibits the constraints to a more tolerable atmosphere at heart. The heart of an atmosphere, is the atmosphere functioning with a heart. Completely one sided. Never admitting who’s mentions are who. Whose opinions mattered the absolute most. Options become tiresome. Tolerable frequencies through pure hearts devoted without contract to inner self awareness. Prompting the judgment of what atmosphere has over the heart of the problem. There are problems within hearts? WHAT!! Contrary to the balance of symmetries without depth. Hearts full of many brimming effects. Only determined to sending out there resume for better times. And which one is disclosing from the standard developments rotting the better picture into ruin? Pictures printed with resumes aren’t fruitful. When dynamics in the surface, isn’t comparable to challenge. Challenge lays claims to birthing the right focus. Take charge! Listen carefully to directions! What does that all haft to do with fate being exiled? It doesn’t. Well, not conclusively anyway. Fate is a thought manufactured behind the scenes. It won’t show it’s face directly. Too imposed in everyone else’s business. A directive with no claim in its heart. An atmosphere unsocialized with parts never discovering inner desires. Concluding fate never trusting itself. Fate exiled… Means to test one’s own claims of basic will. The hint is why does fate act? Rather then think the way it’s acting? Could simply be a perspective too old for the majority to classify broadly about. Justifications rise and fall. Birthing the right assorting facts, isn’t a focus. It’s diverging away. Imprints full of empty reassurance. Concluding something different in a basic platform the majority concentrates on. Fate just stands taller than the rest. Filtering all unsuspecting protocols from the inside out. Propagating pressure with insolence. Insolence flowing in-between the rough exteriors of right and wrong. Abiding time for another surface. Triggering the inside out dynamics at large. A picture finally noticing a part of itself without deciphering what complexes itself apart from the others. All this is a much-discovered piece of evidence. But it lacks companionship. No light or dark. A patronage not as diverse as the one heeding influences out with a weapon changing velocities around left and right. Pieces of quietness is an illusion. The surface being what it is. Underneath is where fate discloses further information completely. It’s weapon of probability is just that. A surface area too big for noticing details in itself. Rather picking others to commune a wishing sentence. Hinting at probability being a fake! There isn’t probability in the logical area of flat platforms without big thinking specifics. It’s all hogwash! Fate determines exilement to rush the borderline potential awareness of others. Except that’s probability maneuvering as a mask in the light. Tricking typical surface dwellers in an area too complex for delusional purposes. Even it’s claims are full of doubt. So why does everyone bounce from one flaw to the next? Practicing what it means to put one step after the other. Exercising doubt completely as a waypoint to a better tomorrow. More like a fruitful one-minute moment of standards too gray for focuses to admit. (Tricking won’t get you anywhere, if your full of bland statements.) An assertive quote straight from someone who exiles themselves onto others for practices into the next benign claims. Resumes with a statement that’s only delusional to what tricking isn’t. Showing you exile is the right future for an atmosphere with a heart. Which functions its heart towards the atmosphere. Switches in claims divert the true knowledge around in circles. So, who is fate, exactly? What possibly could they decide amongst themselves for the better future to the surface area of majorities? Try flipping yourself inside out. You might just want to write (Exile) on the permission slip of your own determined mark. Welcome to your identity in exile!

Good evening, Sir.
Please come inside.
May I take your jacket?


1.
You've spilled ****** beer on me!
Now, come clean up this freakin' mess you made.
Now you know *how it feels....

And don't you dare feign!

(Oh, brother! Why couldn't you just
Give her the **** words she wanted to hear, huh?)



2.
Hi, the music is still in the box
Sorry you are so sore.

Please ring the bell
Then you can have the smarter option.
Better take it
For, you can barely survive your own thoughts!

Oh, just never mind.



3.
WAS IN BATH.

Deciphering public signs in Bath.
Do you read?
Depends.

Yes (public signs)

Public signs?
How'd you read my mind?

Relax, only smelt the waft of your dirt
Waiting to colonise other minds.

Get out!



4.
I am that oil you're slipping in
And you won't get a grip on me!

Are you beyond suggestive, or plain crude?


Floating further away on a raft of confusion
Again.
When will it ever end?



5.
Rest peaceful, dear one.

Just remember:
When you go carving out those corners
You so badly want,
Take care not to let tears fall too heavy
When there's no-one to impress
On those deserted highways.

I love playing in the mountains.
Can you dig it?

Perhaps we can continue watering that fragile tree
Which bears such strange yet fabulous fruits...
Yes, let's do....reciprocate generosity.

I bear much to shelter your lost soul
As you step out ...
into the unknown.

No, nobody sees you, shimmering
Behind that waterfall.



6.
Mad about p(o)ets.
It's in my blood...irrevocably.

Come on, answer the thing!
Show me some of that brave.
So powerful, you are.

Give it to me.
The answer, of course!

Ooh, such a wild cat......won't let go.
Can't let it go.
Just can't.

Unlock the claw of judgment
And slide into a gentle cocoon of......

(Swipe!)



7.
Never did that before
But ..... always a first time for everything.

Pop
Pop

The WORLD being your classroom
Don't feel for these things; one nearly killed you.

I guess Champagne is also..... a city.

Onward, soldier!



8.
So, you think you're so clever?
Hard to tell, when you're SO on a roll.
I'm not around to REALLY find out, truth be told.
Don't force to be so forceful.

You crit and spit on Mr Leary
Oh, such dark and dreary vocals
Show some respect, fool!

Oh, getting a headache, the size of a rock
And that chicken voice is killing me!
Half an angel plays dusty games in the sand
Don't blow curses so.



9.
This is really absurd!
Heard half a word, a micro-syllable
Yet enough to gain timbre.

It dawns on me that there may be
A wicked breed of people
Always on the lookout
Who prey on other folk.

Coax them into amity
Allow them to .....even fall in love a little
Then extract the core
By ruthless blackmail.

Ludicrous beyond belief.
Yet, closer to truth!

What's this about, then?
Ok.
Don't wanna spoil the mystery.



10.
There's enough ***** here.
Let's drink!
It's a cold night.

And let's witness all the magic dragons
Waiting to....lift you off.


breezes



S T, 18 April 2013