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Journalism of Courage
Man is his visions. So sang Octavio Paz, the poet who discovered man and his many worlds in his visions. He was this century8217;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: quot;Perhaps to love is to learn/to walk through this world./To learn to be silent/like the oak and the linden of the fablequot;. 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: quot;In your breath I hear/the tide of being,/the forgotten syllable of the Beginningquot;.
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 traveller8217;s tales, in verse orprose, have become a rare, resonant passage in the text of imagination.
The Paz poetry is meditative, is larger than the geographical space its creator occupies, is as erotic as the girl who quot;turns into a fountain, her hair becomes a constellation8230;quot; 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, quot;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.quot; 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. quot;I too am written,quot; Paz wrote, quot;and at this very moment someone spells me out.quot; But what you have written will always be spelt out by the living.
