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CR: The New Centennial Review 2.2 (2002) 19-21



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Orígenes:
The Last Cuban Avant-garde

Origins
"Orígenes." Orígenes 1, no. 1 (spring 1944)

José Lezama Lima
Translated by Stephen D. Gingerich

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ORIGENESIS NOT INTERESTED IN FORMULATING A PROGRAM BUT RATHER IN firing shots from its own wake. Since we do not change with the seasons, we do not have to justify our chameleon skin with extended appeals. We are not interested in superficial mutations but rather in underlining the taking up of being. We want to situate ourselves near those forces of creation, all of strong birth, where the purity or impurity, the quality or disqualification of all art must be sought. Every work offered within the humanist type of culture is a creation in which man displays his tension, his fever, his most vigilant and valiant moments, or else it is, on the contrary, a banal manifestation of decorative simplicity. We are fundamentally interested in those moments of creation in which the germ is converted into a creature and the unknown is gradually possessed to the extent to which this is possible and to the extent to which it does not engender a wretched arrogance. [End Page 19]

Respect is owed to the man who unflaggingly approaches this creation, whose work has to unfold within a hard-won freedom, engendering as a consequence the justice which interests us. This justice consists of dividing men into creators and workers, or, on the contrary, into arrivistes and idlers. For us, freedom consists of the absolute respect deserved by work through creation, to express oneself in the most profitable form, according to one's own temperament, desires, or frustration, starting from one's most obscure ego, from one's reaction or action faced with the beckoning of the exterior world, so long as it is manifested within the humanist tradition and in the freedom which is derived from this tradition, which has been the American's pride and craving.1 We know that whatever dualism might lead us to place life over culture, or the values of culture deprived of life-giving oxygen, is ridiculously injurious. The allusion to this dualism is only possible in ages of decadence. In ages of plenitude, culture, within the humanist tradition, acts with all its senses, feeling its way along, with the world incorporated into its own substance. When life has primacy over culture, a dualism only permitted by ingénues or people with bad intentions, it is because of a decorative conception of culture. When culture acts detached from its roots, it is a poor, twisted, and foul-smelling thing. In hoc nescio primum, nescio deinde. In these things there is no first, there is no after. Since both life and culture are one and the same thing, there is no reason to separate them and speak about ridiculous primacies. A philologist has observed that Don Quijote and La Dorotea are consequences of living literature and of literaturizing life. In the fundamental matters that interest us, all dualism is superficial. All distanciation from what is original—which does not tolerate dualism or primacies—is the work of a fallacy or of people who are under pressure and unconscious.

In music, painting, and poetry, some things have reached, among us, some clarity. For this to happen it was necessary to clear out the obstacles which were delaying our art. Fortunately, we are now far from the times when one spoke of pure or immanent art, of doctrinal art, which supported a thesis, immersed in a development which took as its starting point a simplistic causality and contented itself with an expected, imposed, and deduced ending. If the artist needs a thorough freedom for his expression, a justification would be the surrender of this same freedom in a qualitative [End Page 20] form. The fruits of this freedom will be healthy or ashen according to the quality of their nutritive juices, chosen with the exquisite freedom displayed by a tree planted under an open sky. Its purity will be, we repeat, in...

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