Part 19 (1/2)
Afterword.
G.o.d grant that the essential monotony of this miscellany (which time has com- piled, not I, and into which have been bundled long-ago pieces that I've not had the courage to revise, for I wrote them out of a different concept of litera- ture) be less obvious than the geographical and historical diversity of its sub- jects. Of all the books I have sent to press, none, I think, is as personal as this motley, disorganized anthology, precisely because it abounds in reflections and interpolations. Few things have happened to me, though many things I have read. Or rather, few things have happened to me more worthy of remembering than the philosophy of Schopenhauer or England's verbal music.
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a s.p.a.ce with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, s.h.i.+ps, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
J.L.B. Buenos Aires, October 31,1960
In Praise of Darkness (1969).
Foreword.
Without realizing at first that I was doing so, I have devoted my long life to literature, teaching, idleness, the quiet adventures of conversation, philol- ogy (which I know very little about), the mysterious habit of Buenos Aires, and the perplexities which not without some arrogance are called meta- physics. Nor has my life been without its friends.h.i.+ps, which are what really matter. I don't believe I have a single enemy-if I do, n.o.body ever told me. The truth is that no one can hurt us except the people we love. Now, at my seventy years of age (the phrase is Whitman's), I send to the press this fifth book of verse.
CarlosFriashas suggested that I take advantage of the foreword to this book to declare my aesthetics.My poverty, my will, resist that suggestion. I do nothave an aesthetics. Time has taught me a few tricks -avoiding syno- nyms, the drawback to which is that they suggest imaginary differences; avoiding Hispanicisms, Argentinisms, archaisms, and neologisms; using everyday words rather than shocking ones; inserting circ.u.mstantial details, which are now demanded by readers, into my stories; feigning a slight un- certainty, since even though reality is precise, memory isn't; narrating events (this I learned from Kipling and the Icelandic sagas) as though I didn't fully understand them; remembering that tradition, conventions, ”the rules,” are not an obligation, and that time will surely repeal them-but such tricks (or habits) are most certainly not an aesthetics. Anyway, I don't believe in those formulations that people call ”an aesthetics.” As a general rule, they are no more than useless abstractions; they vary from author to author and even from text to text, and can never be more than occasional stimuli or tools.
This, as I said, is my fifth book of poetry. It is reasonable to a.s.sume that it will be no better or worse than the others. To the mirrors, labyrinths, and swords that my resigned reader will already have been prepared for have been added two new subjects: old age and ethics. Ethics, as we all know, was a constant preoccupation of a certain dear friend that literature brought me, Robert Louis Stevenson. One of the virtues that make me prefer Protestant nations to Catholic ones is their concern for ethics. Milton tried to educate the children in his academy in the knowledge of physics, mathe- matics, astronomy, and natural sciences; in the mid-seventeenth century Dr. Johnson was to observe that ”Prudence and justice are preeminences and virtues which belong to all times and all places; we are perpetually moralists and only sometimes geometers.”
In these pages the forms of prose and verse coexist, I believe, without discord. I might cite ill.u.s.trious antecedents-Boethius'Consolation of Phi- losophy, Chaucer'sTales, theBook of the Thousand Nights and a Night, I pre- fer to say that those divergences look to me to be accidental-I hope this book will be read as a book of verse. A volume,perse,is not anstheticmo- ment, it is one physical object among many; the aesthetic moment can only occur when the volume is written or read. One often hears that free verse is simply a typographical sham; I think there's a basic error in that statement. Beyond the rhythm of a line of verse, its typographical arrangement serves to tell the reader that it's poetic emotion, not information or rationality, that he or she should expect. I once yearned after the long breath line of the Psalms1 'in the Spanish version of this Foreword, I deliberately spelled the word with its initialp, which is reprobated by most Peninsular grammarians. The members of the Spanish Royal Academy want to impose their own phonetic inabilities on the New World; they suggest such provincial forms asneuma forpneuma, skologia forpsi- cologia,andsiquicofor psiquico.They've even taken to prescribingvikingoforviking. I have a feeling we'll soon be hearing talk of the works of Kiplingo.
or Walt Whitman; after all these years I now see, a bit melancholically, that I have done no more than alternate between one and another cla.s.sical meter: the alexandrine, the hendecasyllable, the heptasyllable.
In a certainmilongaI have attempted, respectfully, to imitate the florid valor of Ascasubi* and thecoplas of the barrios.
Poetry is no less mysterious than the other elements of the orb. A lucky line here and there should not make us think any higher of ourselves, for such lines are the gift of Chance or the Spirit; only the errors are our own. Ihope the reader may find in my pages something that merits being remem- bered; in this world, beauty is so common.
J.L.B. Buenos Aires, June 24,1969
The Ethnographer
I was told about the case in Texas, but it had happened in another state. It has a single protagonist (though in every story there are thousands of pro- tagonists, visible and invisible, alive and dead). The man's name, I believe, was Fred Murdock. He was tall, as Americans are; his hair was neither blond nor dark, his features were sharp, and he spoke very little. There was noth- ing singular about him, not even that feigned singularity that young men affect. He was naturally respectful, and he distrusted neither books nor the men and women who write them. He was at that age when a man doesn't yet know whohe is, and so is ready to throw himself into whatever chance puts in his way-Persian mysticism or the unknown origins of Hungarian, algebra or the hazards of war, Puritanism or orgy. At the university, an ad - viser had interested him in Amerindian languages. Certain esoteric rites still survived in certain tribes out West; one of hisprofessors, an older man, sug- gested that he go live on a reservation, observe the rites, and discover the se- cret revealed by the medicine men to the initiates. When he came back, he would have his dissertation, and the university authorities would see that it was published.
Murdock leaped at the suggestion. One of his ancestors had died in the frontier wars; that bygone conflict of his race was now a link. He must have foreseen the difficulties that lay ahead for him; he would have to convince the red men to accept him as one of their own. He set out upon the long ad- venture. He lived for more than two years on the prairie, sometimes shel- tered by adobe walls and sometimes in the open. He rose before dawn, went to bed at sundown, and came to dream in a language that was not that of his fathers. He conditioned his palate to harsh flavors, he covered himself with strange clothing, he forgot his friends and the city, he came to think in a fas.h.i.+on that the logic of his mind rejected. During the first few months of his new education he secretly took notes; later, he tore the notes up- perhaps to avoid drawing suspicion upon himself, perhaps because he no longer needed them.
After a period of time (determined upon in advance by certain practices, both spiritual and physical), the priest instructedMurdockto start remembering his dreams, and to recount them to him at day- break each morning. The young man found that on nights of the full moon he dreamed of buffalo. He reported these recurrent dreams to his teacher; the teacher at last revealed to him the tribe's secret doctrine. One morning, without saying a word to anyone, Murdock left.
In the city, he was homesick for those first evenings on the prairie when, long ago, he had been homesick for the city. He made his way to his professor's office and told him that he knew the secret, but had resolved not to reveal it.
”Are you bound by your oath?” the professor asked.
”That's not the reason,” Murdock replied. ”I learned something out there that I can't express.”
”The English language may not be able to communicate it,” the profes- sor suggested.
”That's not it, sir. Now that I possess the secret, I could tell it in a hun- dred different and even contradictory ways. I don't know how to tell you this, but the secret is beautiful, and science, our science, seems mere frivolity to me now.”
After a pause he added: ”And anyway, the secret is not as important as the paths that led me to it. Each person has to walk those paths himself.”
The professor spoke coldly: ”I will inform the committee of your decision. Are you planning to live among the Indians?”
”No,” Murdock answered. ”I may not even go back to the prairie. What the men of the prairie taught me is good anywhere and for any circ.u.mstances.”
That was the essence of their conversation.
Fred married, divorced, and is now one of the librarians at Yale.
PedroSalvadores
ForJuan Murchison
I want to put in writing, perhaps for the first time, one of the strangest and saddest events in the history of my country. The best way to go about it, I believe, is to keep my own part in the telling of the story small, and to sup- press all picturesque additions and speculative conjectures.
A man, a woman, and the vast shadow of a dictator* are the story's three protagonists. The man's name was PedroSalvadores;my grandfather Acevedo was a witness to his existence, a few days or weeks after the Battle of MonteCaseros.*There may have been no real difference betweenPedroSalvadoresand the common run of mankind, but his fate, the years of it, made him unique. He was a gentleman much like the other gentlemen of his day, with a place in the city and some land (we may imagine) in the country; he was a member of the Unitarian party.* His wife's maiden name was Planes; they livedtogether onCalle Suipacha,not far from the corner of Temple.* The house in which the events took place was much like the oth- ers on the street: the front door, the vestibule, the inner door, the rooms, the shadowy depth of the patios. One night in 1842, PedroSalvadoresand his wife heard the dull sound of hoofbeats coming closer and closer up the dusty street, and the wild huzzahs and imprecations of the horses' riders. But this time the hors.e.m.e.n of the tyrant's posse* did not pa.s.s them by. The whooping and shouting became insistent banging on the door. Then, as the men were breaking down the door,Salvadoresmanaged to push the dining table to one side, lift the rug, and hide himself in the cellar.
His wife moved the table back into place. The posse burst into the house; they had come to getSalvadores.His wife told them he'd fled-to Montevideo, she told them. They didn't believe her; they lashed her with their whips, smashed all the sky blue china,* and searched the house, but it never occurred to them to lift the rug. They left at midnight, vowing to return.