01 Jun A tree within

Reading through Paz’s poetry I get the buzz of connection on most pages. There are references to fairytales, to Alice in Wonderland, exploring the connection with artmaking and make-believing. But sparking most brightly is a reference to the work of Paz and his poem Vrindaban. I had bought a book of his poetry – having never heard of him before – but sadly, this poem isn’t in it. I struggled to find this poem in its entirety. I’m still looking, the bits I have found are teasingly aligned with what I am researching and working on in my project.

I am a history

a memory inventing itself

I am never alone

I speak with you always

you speak with me, always
I move in the dark

you speak with me, always

I move in the dark

I plant signs

It is contained in a longer work set in India. Thinking back to the very beginning of my journey into this project the very first works were from a brief trip to India. An early attempt to represent more than the visual. To show the dirt and dust and frenetic energy. The heat, the smog, the rush, of being so Other. Memories of India are rushed, wrapped in protecting my daughters, and overlaid with creating the images afterwards when I had more time to think.

Like Borges, Paz speaks of time. In an interview[i] he talks about the haiku and Japanese expressions of time. “The instant is a window to the other side of time – eternity.” He speaks of Nietzsche and of the particular being universal. So much more to read…

Paz worked concurrently with Twombly on a work of poetry and paintings[ii], and describes Twombly’s work as trying to “recover life and its appearance, its movement, its chance, through the act of painting”. He speaks of the importance of time, of instances and of memories provoking images. He describes images as showing the passing of time in their erasures and of capturing moments. Works that don’t make a new reality nor depicting allegories, but work that capture and depict a moment that exists in time.

The Paz book I did buy is called A tree within. I couldn’t resist. The poems move in circles, they breathe, the metaphors mix and shift near and far. Distance/proximity.

Outside the window, the desolate

rooftops and the hurrying clouds.

The day goes out, the city

lights up, remote and near.

Weightless hour. I breathe

the moment, empty and eternal

Paz, O. Interval

The poems contain references to time, to the indifference of the subject, to the projection of outside onto the inside, the dissolution of self into the moment, imagery of reflection.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats

the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,

I stay and go: I am a pause.

Strangely, headaches aren’t far away here either.

[i] Gardels, (2009), West Turns East at the End of History

[ii] Octavio Paz/Fight Poems, Cy Twombly/Ten Drawings (Cologne: Udo & Anette Brandhorst, 1993) and Octavio Paz, Cy Twombly (Bonn: Kunstmuseum, 1993)