Man is his visions. So sang Octavio Paz, the poet who discovered man and his many worlds in his visions. He was this century's wayfarer of a poet, singing through the forking paths of civilisations, adding adjectives to cultural polyphony, and, at the end of each journey, withdrawing into solitude and silence: "Perhaps to love is to learn/to walk through this world./To learn to be silent/like the oak and the linden of the fable". He wrote on love and death, art and memory, as the restless traveller in a world submerged in secrets. He was a kind of chosen stylus, a medium for the ballads of history, for the love songs of humanity: "In your breath I hear/the tide of being,/the forgotten syllable of the Beginning".Paz, poet, essayist, polemicist, culture critic, the ultimate cosmopolitan, chronicled the passions and poetics of the world in the language of a humanist. He was the quintessential Latin American poet-diplomat (Pablo Neruda before him, Carlos Fuentes after him). His traveller's tales, in verse orprose, have become a rare, resonant passage in the text of imagination.India was a transit point in Paz's journey. For six years from 1962, he was Mexico's ambassador in India. And before that, ten years ago, he was for less than a year a middle-level diplomat in the newly opened Mexican mission in Delhi. During the first stint itself, he had the vision, in a tiny, empty mosque in Delhi: "I saw the world resting on itself.I saw the appearances. And I named that half hour: The Perfection of the Finite." This perfection, a poet's privilege, as is so eloquently evident in his India book in prose, In Light of India, is the cumulative effect of a million imperfections. In this book not of knowledge but of love, India is an "island weathered by incessant time," a land of endearment, steeped in the solitude of history. In East Slope (1962-'68) poems, India is a celebration of images. The mausoleum is "silence's architecture". The painter J. Swaminathan (Paz's good friend) "with a rag and a knifeagainst the jinxed idea". "The disheveled gardens". The vultures of Himachal Pradesh: "They've eaten so much they can't fly". When Paz wrote from India, perhaps it was like this: "I draw these letters/as the day draws its images/and blows over them/and does not return".The Paz poetry is meditative, is larger than the geographical space its creator occupies, is as erotic as the girl who "turns into a fountain, her hair becomes a constellation." But Paz the essayist is a conscience-keeper of the world. A refugee from the realm of Marxian ideology, Paz was a relentless dissident, a passionate enemy of despots, of the politics of hate. As he wrote in one of his essays, "Tyrannies and despotisms need the threat of an outside enemy to justify their rule. When such an enemy does not exist, they invent one. The enemy is the devil. Not just any devil, but a figure, half real and half mythical, in which the enemy without and the enemy within are conjoined." In high-voltage prose, Paz sought out the enemy, the madman of delusions, and put them in the daylight of truth, outside the falsity of revolutions. "I too am written," Paz wrote, "and at this very moment someone spells me out." But what you have written will always be spelt out by the living.
