I've been reading a literary biography of Octavio Paz, the best I've read thus far. It's by the Mexican author, fellow poet and compatriot, Alberto Ruy Sanchez (translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas -- translators don't get enough credit for bringing within our grasp the thought and poesis that would otherwise remain out of our reach -- that of another language, another culture). Sanchez is only a year older than I am, so I feel he represents my generation and I find that helpful in my own approach to Paz. Sanchez must have met Paz sometime after his return to Mexico from India in the late Sixties or the Seventies.
Paz left Mexico, where he felt high and dry in a literary sense, for a Guggenheim Fellowship in the United States in 1943. He spent time in Los Angeles, Berkeley, and New York. While in NYC he joined the Mexican diplomatic service and was transferred to Paris in 1945, where he remained through the end of 1951.
1952, then, was split. First Paz spent six months in India, New Delhi specifically, and his reaction to India was much like my first reaction to India: an instinctive, shuddering rejection of the overpowering sensory onslaught of the environment itself. I went to India six weeks after turning thirty. It was my first trip abroad. Within 45 minutes of walking out into the swirling streets of Mumbai, I had a splitting headache -- the almost psychedelic cacophony of sights, sounds, smells, colors in nonstop motion. Or the thousands upon thousands of people sleeping on the sidewalks at night. Riding in the back of an auto rickshaw in the pitch black, it took me some minutes to identify what I was seeing. The sheer rawness of life. I recall saying vehemently to my girlfriend as I stepped off the plane upon my return stateside, "I'm never going back there as long as I live!"
I was in India again a year and a half later.
For Paz, this was a case of putting his toe in the water of the Orient. Ten years later he would return a more mature man, as Mexico's ambassador to India, and he was able to fully absorb India's influences, culturally and philosophically. He also met there the love of his life, a young French woman with the curious name of Marie Jose Tramini, then married to a French diplomat. She and Paz met again by chance a year later in Europe and never spent another day apart until Paz passed in April of 1998.
But after six months in Delhi, Paz was transferred to Japan. Two countries that had been riven by conflict: India by the partition, and Japan by WWII. And in Japan, Paz spent his final bit of time with his first wife, Elena Garro (a writer in her own right). It was Paz's last attempt at the recovery of this marriage, before he was forever alienated from his first wife and their daughter Helena.
The experience of India and Japan was alienating in itself to Paz. France had been familiar, as his grandfather's library had been full of French literature into which Paz delved deeply as a child. India and Japan were foreign cultures altogether at this point. In his long exile and estrangement from his own country and culture, Paz was also experiencing a kind of alienation from himself. A line from a poem written at that time states:
"This instant has swallowed everything of childhood, and the future is nothing but furniture nailed into place."
Who hasn't felt that stuck at times within the strictures of their own life?
It took Paz many years to slowly absorb the experiences of 1952. He did it in the way most natural to him: through literature. He explored the Japanese poetic form of haiku, and translated into Spanish, with the aid of his friend Eikichi Hayashiya, the book "Paths of Oku" by the great Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho.
Paz later wrote of Japan: "In the Japanese tradition I found, first, the idea of concentration; secondly, the idea of the unfinished, of imperfection -- to leave something aside, to not finish everything." He's referring here to two main influences in Japanese literature -- the concentration borne of meditative awareness, i.e., Zen -- and Wabi Sabi, the appreciation of rustic authenticity.
As Paz says later in the same text, "...in India there's a lot of exaggeration; they write two million lines whereas a Japanese writer would condense meaning into a question mark..." Later Paz would find in India the idea of the "blank paper scriptures" and would include that tonality in his own long poem written while residing in India, "Blanco."
What I find interesting about this is the time it takes to absorb the influence of another culture. It is not instantaneous. It has to percolate down into the deeper layers of one's being, often over years or decades. I found myself asserting when I returned from India the first time, "I am a Westerner!" I wasn't going to eat rice and wear rough cotton Indian shirts. In other words, I wasn't going to take India on as an affectation. But it did gradually influence me as I returned occasionally over the years. Even today, I find myself still slowly absorbing experiences I had in India almost forty years ago.
It's funny how time and experience shape us, and alter the texture of our character and lives, over time. The goal is not to go through life and time unaltered. If you trust in the process of life itself -- however querulously -- you must finally accede to the lessons which life is trying so desperately to teach you.
