Preparing Paradise
What follows are the words of the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, speaking at the Almost Island Dialogues, February 2015. What Zurita offered were utterings, with a natural break created by the pauses required for translation into English by Anna Deeny. The poet’s tone came almost at an angle to everyone else, from far within himself, and Deeny’s voice translated as if moved by those depths she was looking at so closely. The listening of the people gathered there was so silent that in the recording there are only exhalations, shifts of the arm and hand on the table, and once in a rare while the pouring of some water into a glass.
Poets at this session included Kutti Revathi, Joy Goswami, K. Satchidanandan, Vivek Narayanan, and Rahul Soni, the musician Baha’ud’din Dagar, and the Baul singer Parvathy Baul.
Yesterday I was listening to Parvathy Baul [1] and I got the impression that there was an emotion there before words, before language. Perhaps there was a form of universal communication that existed in the past, in cultures and religions, a point when we actually understood one another. And that point is what eventually became art, poetry. A point that recalls when we understood one another.
The task was not to write books or to paint paintings, it was to make life a work of art, and that is the task that is still at hand.
I think that poems are the forms in which the earth cleanses itself of human pain. That poems are the dreams of the earth, the earth dreaming of cleaning itself of human suffering.
The greatest aspiration of art, of poetry, is to disappear, because it would mean human life itself would become the greatest work of art.
But up until this moment that has not happened. So that distance between a poem that I write and paradise, that distance is what’s called the world.
I don’t think that someone can impose something or say what poetry is, that is you cannot define poetry nor can you fix it to a series of ideas. For me the purpose of all I’ve done is the construction of a paradise on earth. I believe that is the purpose of art – the construction of a paradise on earth.
Nicanor Parra, an incredible Chilean poet, he can speak of himself but when he makes an extraordinary poem he asks what can be done after that. He doesn’t know, but others know what can be done after that. When he says that, I think to myself, Zurita knows. That is, the other knows more than I do. The other person knows more than I know.
There’s not one path, but I have tried to do something that erases the classic Western frontiers of art.
I have tried to make works that are not fragmentary. But let me say first that we have spoken a lot about the exaltation of the fragment. Everything is a piece of the real. But I tried to make works that are not fragmentary. No one thinks of his or her life as a fragment. For each his life is a totality.
I think that is the difference between poetry and religion, at least monotheistic religions.
So poetry is dictated by the muses. There is a poem called “The Theogony,” by Hesiod and the muses go to a poet and they treat him very badly. You’re a rustic, a peasant, they say, all you can do is eat. We tell many lies that look like the truth, and say truth when we feel like it.
So in the name of poetry we cannot injure anyone, we cannot touch one of their eyelashes, because poetry comes before truth. But in the name of religion, in the name of God because God is supposed as truth, what is not that must be punished. The history of religion is full of blood and that is not the history of poetry.
When I speak of religion it is very general. Poetry is before religion, it is the first response a person has when he realises he is going to die. Religion is very much after, it is when a system appears. But when you write a poem, in the beginning it is not a system. The system happens after.
I will tell you a fable: I imagine a being that suddenly trembling, lifts his hands from the ground and looks at the sky in the night and sees the stars. And he understands that the stars will be there after his death. And at that point he realises he will die. The first response to that is the poem. We are children of death and we are children of the poem.
I don’t know well how one writes. When you start to express yourself in a language or write in a certain way, it is as if another person intervenes themselves in you, it is as if another person is writing there. The question is who speaks when one speaks?
I believe that in a poem there are all of our ancestors, they are present in the language. Not just that one body that speaks at that moment.
I come from a territory that was conquered. The conquerors spoke Spanish. It was imposed by them. If there is a language that is all Catholicism it is Spanish.
Because of this language it is impossible that a Latin American poet not touch religion. Neruda, who is an atheist, his greatest poem, “The Heights of Machu Picchu,” is a hymn to the resurrection.
It is necessary to express all of the darkness, all of the cruelty there is in oneself and also in the world. And only from there can new things be made.
The difference between a Christian saint, an illuminated Buddhist and a poet, is this. Temptations appear to the saint and he must overcome them. To the Buddhist the demons are visions he can dissolve to become illuminated. The poet needs to look at the demons and the temptations, neither dissolve them or overcome them. His task is to speak of them.
I think that poetry speaks of what is possible as much as it can. When two people meet and they have very strong feelings for one another, at that moment words are not necessary. It may be a dream but I imagine a world where we do not need words any more.
In Hesiod’s myth, at the beginning the sky is bound to the earth in endless copulation. The earth is filled with children that can’t be born and she is tired. She asks her children, who will castrate the father, the sky, and all of them say no except Chronos. So Chronos castrates the sky and at that moment the sky and earth separate so that the children can be born. But the problem is that creates distance between sky and earth. And the only way to pass through that distance is with words.
Words save us from the aleatory, from the inferno of what is unfinished, but inevitably they are born of that act of violence, of that separation, so with words we can never be happy.
When two human beings meet and there is a real encounter then distance is eliminated because in that moment the sky and the earth come back together again, but that is only for one moment.
Sometimes I think something like this: illumination is the union of earth and sky with all that exists.
We are a humanity of the living and the dead, that is why we are responsible for everything. All of the massacres and all of the injustices that precede us. We are also responsible for those.
I thought at one moment in my life, that was part of a trajectory, that I had outlived the dictatorship, that I had outlived my own destruction. The darkness of my life came together with Chile’s history. And I had an image of what I wanted to do. In that image there were poems being written in the sky. To my surprise it was done. But what I had imagined was more beautiful than what was realised. The forms never make a difference. Everything is possible, you can use all of the elements or more. But hopefully you will lie as little as possible. So for me there is no difference between the written and the visual elements in a poem.
Within what I do is not the idea of a book as a collection of poems. All the books create a totality. This is a totality that has a parallel existence to one’s own life and they will come together at the end of both, in death.
The most recent thing, the last thing I wanted to do is write lines of poetry on the cliffs that are only visible from the sea. As if it were something one had seen in one’s life. It is an image of nightfall. I don’t know if I can do it, because it is very difficult. But in the same way that I had an image of writing poems in the sky, I want to die with the image of lines being written on the cliffs.
Landscapes appear permanently in what I “do.” There are many rivers, beaches, mountains, the Pacific. Sometimes I think that landscapes are huge screens that we ourselves fill with the passion of traversing life. In any case landscapes are images of human passion. I think we are all children of the deserts, because deserts have all the colours of human faces.
It is not celebrating nature or singing to it, rather it is becoming one with nature.
One is a horrible reader of oneself.
I’ve had two or three ideas for my whole life. And because they are so few I have pursued them obsessively. And that obsession makes them arrive. It is not that I choose these things naturally, the things choose themselves. I have an idea of the totality. But I don’t know how it is done, it always surprises me, how they appear.
I have always been impressed by Kafka’s novel in Spanish, with its character, K. Kafka wanted to say that he was there, that was his mark. With this mark I think he wrote with the only dream that someone would cross through the bandages that were his words, the bandages that was the book, to reach his heart. All who write one way or another dream with someone who breaks through that physical thing to reach them. The page of a book is like a square, a town square, where two people will meet. The difference is that when they meet, they don’t mistake time or place, they meet. But at the moment of contact their experiences diverge.
When Whitman says reader you are not reading a book you are touching a person, what is so forceful about that is that it is a lie. They are touching a book. And there is the trauma of existence.
[1] Parvathy Baul comes from a medieval tradition of mystics in Bengal whose expression of faith comes through their singing and performances.
Raúl Zurita Canessa (Santiago de Chile, 1950) is one of Latin America’s foremost and celebrated poets. He studied Civil Engineering at the Universidad Santa María de Valparaíso. Along with other artists, in 1979 he founded CADA, Colectivo de Acciones de Arte, an art action group dedicated to the creation of public and political art that would resist the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. His literary works include Purgatorio (1979), Anteparaíso (1982), El paraíso está vacío (1984), Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985), Canto de los ríos que se aman (1993), La vida nueva (1994), Poemas militantes (2000), El día más blanco (2000), INRI (2003), Mi mejilla es el cielo estrellado (2004), Los poemas muertos (2006), Los países muertos (2006), Las ciudades de agua (2007), Poemas de amor (2007), Zurita/ In Memoriam (2007) and Zurita (2011). In 1982 he directed the sky writing of the poem “The New Life” over Queens, New York, and in 1992 he bulldozed “ni pena ni miedo” (“no shame no fear”) into the Desert of Atacama. Zurita has been awarded the Premio Pablo Neruda, the Premio Nacional de Literatura de Chile, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. From 1990-1995, he served as the Chilean cultural attaché to Italy. His works have been translated into English, German, Russian, Italian, Swiss, Chinese, Bengali, Turkish and Hindi. He now lives in Santiago and teaches literature at the Universidad Diego Portales.