Between truth and history

What guided him, actually? Passions of history? Suppressed voices of cultural ancestry? The whirling forms of desire and memory? What, what was it that propelled Octavio Paz 1914-1998, the poet who defied frontiers and sang the freedom of the seeker? Everything. Everyone. Paz reached out to the distant, with the intimacy of a humanist, with the energy of a hungry traveller. In the solitude of his poetic space, the world was reduced to anagrams of discoveries.

He was poet as polymath. But his knowledge was counterbalanced by love. He, the Mexican, the quintessential Latin American burdened by the legacy of ransacked liberation, used his own inheritance as a touchstone for his civilisational finds. For, While I am reading in Mexico City,/ what time is it now in Moscow?/ It8217;s late, it8217;s always late,/ in history it is always night,/always the wrong time. Paz quite often found himself at the transit stations of history, which the poet has paraphrased as 8220;a spiral that never ends.8221;

It is a familiar literary tradition mostly found in Latin America and Europe: the writer as the unelected conscience-keeper, the writer who turns his page into a public space of argument and involvement. He sang in the words of ancient energy, words that reduce the distance between the text of emotions and the passage of history. He was the poet who compensated for the silence of God: I read in a poem:/to talk is divine./But gods don8217;t speak:/they create and destroy worlds/while men do the talking./Gods, without words,/play terrifying games.

Paz never stopped talking, defying gods and their terrifying games. A refugee from the false dawn of revolutions, let down by ideology, Paz dreaded the grand deceptions of history. Calling him a disillusioned Marxist is a simplification. Idealism was there within him, till the very end. The remains ofideology had transformed into a series of questions 8212; questions that he had never stopped asking from the podium of humanism. As he wrote in one of his piercing essays, 8220;ideology converts ideas into masks: they hide the person who wears them, and at the same time they keep him from seeing reality.8221;

Hence, as one of his poems says, 8220;Stalin had no soul: he had history.8221; He was 8220;evil unmasked8221;. Stalin apart, there are other evil parodies of revolutionary romance who march across the pages of Paz. Khomeini8217;s divine retribution led him to write: 8220;In Iran sacrifices have been and are numerous, though they have not had the impersonal character of the mass murders of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, who applied the efficient methods of industrial assembly lines to the process of exterminating their fellow humans. The cruelty of Khomeini and his clergy is archaic. In sacrifice, as in the rite of the foreign devil, political usefulness and ritual symbolism go hand in hand.8221;

For a Latin American, this rite ofsacrifice is rather easy to follow. He has seen and lived the evolution of the liberator. The loneliness and disillusion of Simon Bolivar continue to be renewed by history. Paz himself was quite familiar with the Mexican jackboot. The words of Paz, like the fiction of Marquez, Llosa, and Fuentes, are steeped in the great betrayal of liberation. The writer is the stylus for the sorrows of his homeland. As Paz wrote in Latin America and Democracy, 8220;the relationship between society and literature is not one of cause and effect. The link between the two is at once necessary, contradictory and unpredictable. Literature expresses society; by expressing it, it changes, contradicts, or denies it. By portraying it, it invents it; by inventing it, it reveals it.8221; In Latin America, this literature-history axis has always been turbulent, and inventive.

When Paz travelled, this particular Latin American self was on full display. The friend-of-India Paz was a good example of this. He first came to India in 1951to take up a middle-level diplomatic position at the newly opened Mexican mission in Delhi . It took only less than a year for him to come to terms with the 8220;perfection of the finite8221;. In 1962 he returned to India as the ambassador of his country, and quit the job six year later as a protest against his country8217;s suppression of the student uprising. The many colours of India, its many voices, its art and music, its mythology and history, migrated to the poet8217;s imagination. His Indian poems in East Slope are the celebration of a civilisational enigma. His India stretches from the ruddy plains of Mysore to the verandah of the Cecil Hotel in Ootacomund to the Christian cemetery of Cochin to the studio of his painter-friend J. Swaminathan. The painter: With a rag and a knife against the triangle/the eye explodes a water-jet of signs/the serpentine undulation advances/tide of imminent apparitions/The painting is a body/dressed only in its naked enigma.

In his last prose work, In Light ofIndia, he had so eloquently captured the civilisational delirium of India. Invasions and indoctrinations; colonisation and nationalism; caste and rituals, Islamic heritage and Hindu progression 8212; a million imperfections of India become a revelatory passage in this book, the scholarship of which is subordinated to the love of the observer. For instance, behind the perfection of Islamic architecture, 8220;a geometry made of variations that regularly repeat themselves,8221; lie the imperfections of the Mughal empire. Pluralistic Hinduism, in Paz8217;s view, is an 8220;enormous metaphysical boa8221;, slowly and relentlessly digesting 8220;foreign cultures, gods, languages, and beliefs8221;. Paz8217;s India is a 8220;cosmic matrix8221;. Both Hinduism and Islam failed to initiate a religious Reformation or a cultural Renaissance, essential for modernity. 8220;Imperialism introduced modernity to India 8230; The Independence of 1947 was the triumph of British ideas and institutions without the British.8221; And Hindu nationalists refused to argue withthe poet when he wrote in this book that 8220;the idea of nation is incompatible with the institution of caste8221; which is the product of Karmic law.

But Paz, poet, polemicist, culture critic, the ultimate cosmopolitan, never stopped arguing with himself, with everything, with everyone. This man of letters 8212; in the true sense of the term 8212; forever stood for the freedom of Everyman. 8220;To talk is human,8221; wrote the poet. Octavio Paz: the humanist who talked to redeem, to liberate, to repudiate, to live the truth in an age of lies.