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Article Excerpt
Written at Each Instant
To Pedro Lain
To invent God, our word
searches, within the heart, its own likeness and does not find it,
like the waves of the tranquil sea, one after one, the same, seek the exactitude of the infinite to measure, as they sing in sequence ... And God's name without letters, written at each instant by the foam,
is erased at every instant rocked by the music of the water; and an echo remains alone on the shores.
What infinite number Does the heart tell us? Every beat, is once again more sweet, and again and again; once again blindly from within is going to say God's name.
And once again thought shadows over, and the voice does not find it. it is within the heart.
We are your children, although we never know how to tell you the word, precise and Yours, that repeats in the soul the sweet and fixed turning of the stars. (2)
Escrito a cada instante
A Pedro Lain
1 Para inventar a Dios, nuestra palabra busca, dentro del pecho, su propia semejanza y no la encuentra, como las olas de la mar tranquila,
5 una tras otra, iguales, quieren la exactitud de lo infinito medir, al par que cantan ... Y Su hombre sin letras, escrito a cada instante por la espuma,
10 se borra a cada instante mecido por la musica del agua; y un eco queda solo en las orillas,
?Que numero infinito nos cuenta el corazon?
15 Cada latido, otra vez es mas dulce, y otra y otra;
otra vez ciegamente desde dentro va a pronunciar Su nombre.
Y otra vez se ensombrece el pensamiento,
20 y la voz no le encuentra, Dentro del pecho esta.
Tus hijos somos, aunque jamas sepamos decirte la palabra exacta y Tuya,
25 que repite en el alma el dulce y fijo girar de las estrellas.
There is perhaps nothing less theological than the treatment of God in poetry. If, for theology, one's point of departure is certainty with respect to God, via what is called faith and belief even outside of any experience of the divine, in poetry the direct experience of God carries the questioner beyond the opposition between certainty and uncertainty regarding divinity. This is affirmed by Plotinus, by San Juan de la Cruz (night of feeling and soul), by Holderlin ("What is God? Unknown, rich / in particularities is, thus the aspect / that the heavens offer us of him"), by Rilke, and by Simon Weil, the latter with decisive clarity: "On God's part, creation is not an act of self-expansion, but of withdrawal and renunciation" (87) (3)--creation is decreation. Poetic language, in the trans-symbolic sense that we will be giving it here, develops the problematic of an infinitely absent and withdrawn God. Mystical experiences do not restore presence; on the contrary, they emphasize absence, in relation to which mystical experience itself is a strange and singular event (4). And for what reason does this take place in poetry? A simple reflection suffices as a response: The infinite withdrawal of God immediately poses the problem of God's name or nameability, and poetry--as in our century Blanchot, Derrida and Paul de Man, among others, have endlessly pointed out--does not cease to stress the distance between linguistic and phenomenal reality. In this impasse, poetic language and the infinite distance of God are brought into an encounter. However, since it cannot be said that God is a phenomenal reality, since God's distance is infinite, the problem of the distance between linguistic reality and what is named by that reality is therefore elevated to an equally infinite power, assuming the form of what would be a truly odd catachresis. Leopoldo Panero's poem, which stages what we have been discussing, could therefore not have begun any other way:
Para inventar a Dios, nuestra palabra [To invent God, our word]
Had the poem spoken of "naming," "designating," "signifying," etc., it would have erred by falling into the trap of simple theology. The attempt to name God would have simply taken God for granted, situated God in a "there" on the level of phenomenal reality, casting God as the figure of the father, the Father-God, a natural God, with white beard and triangle included. But the poem does not commit this error. Conscious of the infinite distance of God, it begins by affirming that God cannot be other than an invention, not because God does not exist and man must invent God, but rather because God's way of existing is absolutely unthinkable, and in this sense saying "God" is no more than the ingenuous and misleading proximity that responds to the tricks and paradoxes of language paradoxically denounced by Lewis Carroll. The phrase "the car passed at full speed" is wholly similar to the phrase "time passed at full speed," yet the first is a phatic statement, while the second is contraphatic. Treating the two phrases as if they were the same type of statement is normal, but not epistemologically recommendable. To speak, says Blanchot, is to be sustained on a tomb, since the announcement and realization of our intimate relationship to...
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