without the double echo toward which we reach out our hands?
Humberto Díaz Casanueva, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo
Neruda, Pablo de Rokha, Rosamel del Valle
I realized that the desire for union was present in every cell of my body, in every manifestation of my spirit. This was not a matter of imagining bonds, but of realizing that they already existed: I was tied to life and bound to death, tied to time and bound to eternity, tied to my limits and bound to infinity, tied to the Earth and bound to the stars. Joined to my parents, my grandparents, my ancestors, united with my children, my grandchildren, my future descendants, joined to every animal, every plant, every conscious being. United with matter in all its forms, I was mud, diamond, gold, lead, lava, rock, cloud, magnetic field, electric spark, soil, hurricane, ocean, feather. I was anchored in the human and joined to the divine. Rooted in the present, united with the past and the future. Anchored in darkness, united with light. Tied to pain, joined to the delirious euphoria of eternal life.
After joining in this manner I decided to look at what was driving me to separate: the voice of the dead father resonating for years throughout the house; millions of tiny silver eagles rising up from half-dollar coins and flying up into the stratosphere to devour satellites; the tiger’s skin, having lost the Buddha who used to meditate on it, tells a murderer to use it as his cloak; in the land of the decapitated, the last hat is publicly burned. When all living things perish, the roads moan, thirsty for footprints.
I had the idea to materialize the abstract. Hatred: a cornucopia inside a chest to which we have lost the key. Love: a road where our footprints go in front of us instead of following behind. Poetry: the luminous excrement of a toad that has swallowed a firefly. Betrayaclass="underline" a skinless person who jumps into another’s skin. Joy: a river full of hippopotamuses, their blue mouths gaping open to offer diamonds that they have taken from the mud. Confidence: a dance without an umbrella in a rain of daggers. Freedom: a horizon that detaches itself from the ocean, flying up to form labyrinths. Certainty: A lone leaf turned into the shelter of a forest. Tenderness: a virgin clad in light, hatching a purple egg.
Thus I devoted myself for a long time to conceiving of techniques to develop my imagination. For example, how to overcome the laws of nature (how to fly, how to be in two or more places at once, how to draw water from rocks); how to reverse qualities (fire that cools, water that burns, salt that sweetens); how to humanize plants (a tree grows lottery tickets), animals (a gorilla becomes faculty chair of the philosophy department), and things (an army tank falls in love with a ballet dancer); how to add what has been taken away onto something else (put an octopus’s tentacles on the Venus de Milo, the head of a fly on the Winged Victory of Samothrace, an elephant’s eye as the apex of the Pyramid of Giza); how to extend the qualities of one being or thing onto all beings or things (a log on fire, a cloud on fire, a heart on fire, a saxophone on fire, a moral judgment on fire).
One night, seeking to enrich my view, which was usually in the horizontal plane, I threw my head back as far as I could to see what it would be like to see along a vertical line. I was distracted by the sight of a cobweb on a lamp: at its center, the web’s weaver crouched, waiting. A fly buzzed around the lamp. Instead of feeling sorry for myself, seeing the neglected state of my room — which Sara grudgingly cleaned once a month to satisfy the critical eye of her mother, who complained of the stench of Matucana when she came to visit us — I imagined the different degrees of a story, organizing them into a scale ranging from the lowest to the highest level of consciousness. At the lowest degree, not conceiving of change, striving always to remain what they think they are, the fly spends its life trying to avoid the spider while the spider spends its life trying to catch the fly. At a higher degree the fly, perceiving the spider’s carnivorous desire as an input of energy, loses its fear, accepts that it is food, and sacrifices itself. The spider, meanwhile, learns to put itself in the place of the fly and decides to give up trying to catch it, even to the point of starving itself to death. At a third degree, the fly voluntarily enters into the sticky trap and when it is devoured by the spider invades its cells, its soul, and transforms it into a luminous being. The two creatures, thus amalgamated, are a new entity: neither fly nor spider but both at the same time. At a fourth degree the spider-fly, realizing that the light that inhabits it is not of its own making, that it is a servant whose master is an impersonal inexhaustible energy, breaks free from the web and, attracted by the light, rises up until it is immersed in the sun. At the fifth degree, similar to the first, the spider waits in its web, hoping to catch a fly. But now the spider is not crouching, it is showing itself openly, without greed, and the fly, without distress or unnecessary buzzing around, flies directly toward the web. Change, transmutation, and adoration have submerged the menacing reality in a bath of joy. The hunt has become a dance in which continuous death is accompanied by continuous birth.
Suddenly, without any movement of the legs announcing it, the spider let out a long thread and made as if to drop down on me. I gave a cry of fear and dodged it, my armchair tipped over, and I fell backward onto the floor. I grabbed my shoes, put them on my hands like gloves, and with a single clap crushed the innocent creature. I felt sorry, not for it but for myself. Thanks to the derelict state my room had fallen into I was able to realize that in spite of these imaginative pleasures I did not feel any better emotionally. The images I created might be jewels, but the chest they were kept in, which is to say myself, was worthless. I was using my imagination in a limited form. I had dedicated myself to creating mental representations. This technique certainly opened up dreamlike paths, showed the way to sublime ideals, and provided elements for making works of art, but it did not change the incomplete manner in which I perceived myself. My body still appeared to me as a ghastly enemy, no more or less than a nest inhabited by death, and I was afraid to use it to its fullest extent. My sex organs were filling themselves with shame in order to dissimulate the fear of creating. My heart was immersing itself in malice and indifference to the world in order to avoid developing sublime feelings. My mind was invoking human weakness in order to ignore its power to change the world. Anything infinite, however well I could imagine it, gave me visceral dread. My animal side wanted a small space, a lair, a short amount of time, “I’ll only last as long as my body,” an opaque consciousness, relegating me to a life in the shadows avoiding responsibilities, an unvarying life bolstered by rigid habits in which change was considered a hidden aspect of death. I decided to free myself from these images, this mental celebration that concealed an avoidance of my organic nature, and to investigate a form of creation by means of my sensations. I thought, “When I hear sad news, I have no desire to move; I feel heavy, dense. By contrast, when the news is good, I want to dance; I feel light, agile. The facts that I know from words or visual images do not change my body, but they do change my perception of it. It must be possible to transform my perception of myself by my own will!”
I began an intense series of exercises. At night, once the insults and occasional blows between my father and mother had ceased, once my sister had stopped playing Chopin exercises on her white piano and the silence spread like balsam over a wound, I sat naked in my wooden chair and began to relax my muscles in order to concentrate and meditate. Unfortunately, several times during each night, trains passed directly below my window with deafening whistles. This noise, like a lance, left a bloody gash at the center of my spirit. I struggled for several weeks not to defend myself, to let the sound traverse my consciousness without retaining it, to pay it no attention and continue with my exercise. When I achieved this, I was able to immerse myself in my meditations without any apprehension. I conquered the flies, which were even more of a nuisance than the trains, in the same manner. Even though I closed the curtains and plunged myself into darkness, those insects never ceased buzzing and circulating, irritating my skin as they walked on it. Added to this, the apartment where we lived had no heating or air conditioning, and the heat and cold were intolerable at times. All these difficulties sharpened my capacity for concentration.