Piecework

But there are even other versions of Octavio Paz. There is the practical public servant who spent decades in his country’s foreign service, living in Tokyo, New York, San Francisco, Paris, and New Delhi; it is hard to imagine such assignments being granted to Robert Lowell or even Robert Penn Warren. There is the public philosopher, the courageous man who has worked so long and hard to create a language for political discourse that would break the century’s ideological ice jams. I was in Mexico once in the 1980s when that Paz was hanged in effigy by a few self-righteous relics of Stalinist romanticism. They objected to paragraphs such as this:

Ideological militance of whatever kind inherently disdains liberty and free will. Its vision of the otherness of each human being, of his unlike likeness to us, is simplistic. When the other is a unique being, irreducible to any category, the possibilities of winning or netting him vanish; the most we can do is enlighten him, awaken him; he, then, not we, will decide. But the other of the militant is a cipher, an abstraction, always reducible to an us or a they. Thus the proselytizer’s concept of his fellow man is totally lacking in imagination. Imagination is the faculty of discovering the uniqueness of our fellow man.

Anybody who has ever heard a Klansman discuss blacks, a Black Panther speak about whites, an ACT UP militant describe Catholics, or Jesse Helms bellow about homosexuals knows the truth of what Paz is saying. He added: “The fusion of belief and system produces the militant, a warrior fighting for an idea. In the militant, two figures are conjoined: the cleric and the soldier.”

Paz has long been a witness to the calamitous results of that fatal union. As a young man in Europe in the 1930s, he rallied to the cause of the Spanish republic, traveled to Madrid, and saw the cynical maneuvers of the Stalinists. Their ruthless assaults on anarchists and socialists cooled his youthful embrace of the Marxist poem, but not his intellectual respect for Marx himself. “Each generation has two or three great conversational partners,” Paz says. “For my generation, Marx is one of them.”

The mature Paz evolved his own clear-eyed view of the world, rooted in a healthy skepticism about all Utopias, all the iron geometries of the state, all social systems imposed by force. “Every system,” he says, “by virtue as much of its abstract nature as of its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life.”

Finally Paz appears in this New York auditorium, clutching his speech. The crowd roars, standing and applauding, shouting “bravo.” He seems at once embarrassed and pleased; in Mexico, those who know him well say that he is not without his small vanities.

“On August 13, 1790 …” he begins. And we know that we shall hear the Paz who is a brooding student of his country’s history, myths, ironies, and contradictions. He speaks about the discovery, reinterment, and rediscovery of a colossal statue of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, and how her passage from temple to museum reveals the changes in our societies over the past four hundred years. The lecture is brilliant, learned, dense, and to some, incomprehensible. “I don’t know what I expected,” one woman says to me later, “but it wasn’t that.”

But still, this is Octavio Paz. A winner of the Nobel Prize. When he is finished, the audience applauds, long and warmly, as much for the prize as for the talk.

Paz remains behind to talk to a few reporters. He’s asked what the end of the Cold War will do to poetry and to Octavio Paz.

“There are two possibilities,” he says. “Countries will organize themselves in regional terms. The model could be the European community of states… Or we could go back to the old nationalist fanaticism — that would be a very devious and bloody solution. But poetry has to face this authority, whatever it is… Poetry is not identical with history, but poets who are leading the struggle know that there are no special answers. The answers are always instantaneous, spontaneous. That is one of the most important things about this great debacle, this great collapse of the communist system. It was based on a great theoretical scheme, and now we know it doesn’t work—”

He seems uneasy with a question about the role of writers and artists in Latin American politics. “Writers and artists should take part in the public life of their countries, as citizens. That’s all. But I don’t think poets or artists have special duties, or a special role. Of course, many of our greatest poets have been very interested in politics, but the best part of their work is not about politics.”