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CR: The New Centennial Review 2.2 (2002) 29-41



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Orígenes:
The Last Cuban Avant-garde

Possible Images I
"Los imágenes posibles." Orígenes 3, no. 17 (spring 1948)

José Lezama Lima
Translated by Stephen D. Gingerich


DISTRESSED GHOST OF CONJECTURAL NOTHINGS, ANYONE WHO WAS BORN inside of poetry feels the continual weight of his unreality, his other reality. His testimony of not being, his witness to the innocent act of being born, continually jumps ship into a conception of the world as image. Image as an absolute, image that knows itself as an image, image as the last of all possible histories. The very fact of his carrying out in texts the indissoluble approximation of image and resemblance marks his unruly power and how it will always remain as the question of the beginning and of the farewell; the closer we get to an object or to the untouchable resources of the air, the more grotesquely precise will be our conclusion that it is an impossibility, a rupture without Mnemosyne of what came before. Nor is it possible that a pride which has been put out of tune as the web of the image raises it might avoid the constitution of the bodies from which it began. The resemblance of an image and the image of a resemblance unite resemblance with image, like fire and its fringe of colors. In reality, how much more elaborate and exact is a resemblance to a Form; the image is a mere sketch of its progression. And it is certain that an image undulates and disappears although it directs itself toward, or at least it manages to reconstruct, a body or an entity. No adventure, no desire where man has tried to conquer a resistance, has avoided taking its point of departure from a resemblance and an image; he has always [End Page 29] felt like a body that knows itself to be an image, since the body, when it takes itself as a body, verifies the taking possession of an image.

And the image, upon seeing itself and reconstituting itself as an image, creates a poetic substance, like a game trail or a wake, disappearing with the obstinacy of a very cohesive material. Indeed, it is only of the betrayal of an image that we can be asked to give an account and yield a profit. All of that to which man attests, he does so in response to an image, and the same bodily testimony is obliged to go to the pool where the image lies, hatching its larvae. The split between resemblance and image would presuppose a fringed body like an exercise in its impossible limits. A limit which would be an exercise, not innocence nor the orphic gift of song. And just as resemblance to an essential Form is infinite, paradoxically, the image is the only witness of this resemblance that justifies in this way its own voracity as a Form, its penetration, the only possible penetration, in the reversal which becomes fixed and established.

From this same testimony, the unfolding of body and being is situated in the interposition of the image. How the birth of this being within the body brings things together! It unites the being's surplus, the free explorations that it achieves before returning to its dwelling. How this being is able to contemplate the body forming the image or being itself reoccupying the body in order to form an object! But as much as that being is born within the body as its vicissitudes, or at times as its obscure exposition, only the image can testify to its existence. If being were to take a proportioned possession of the body or if the body were its just and absolute dwelling, the image would disappear or would inhabit a plane without any possible cognition. An entity is formed by the unperceived voyage of that being until it rests in us and its later definitive farewell. Since this entity is the body of the image, can no one pass by there again...

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