The Secularity of Jose Marti

JOSÉ MARTI WAS FOR ALL OF US THE ONLY ONE WHO MANAGED TO PENETRATE into the house of the alibi. The mystic state, the alibi, where the imagination can engender the event and every act is transformed into the mirror of enigmas.

His imagination has become zenithal and mysterious and has penetrated into its mission with the conviction that whoever flees from the frost runs into the snow. He faced up to that frost; he hitched his horse to the trunk of body and oil, and he happily penetrated into the house of the alibi. The final words of his Diary, one of the most mysterious sounds of words that exist in our language, are enough to fill the house and their strange interruptions faced with time.

In the sovereignty of his style, the morning of the hummingbird can be perceived, the somber majesty of the pitahaya and the arterial nests of the cedron. He could speak, Rubén Darío says, before Odin, surrounded by kings.

His undeciphered permanence continues in his immense memorials directed to a sequestered king: the hypostasis or substantivization of the happy mysteries of his people. In his letters he described to us, for his first secularity, an untouched land, symbols that we have not yet figured out how to decipher as operant historical forces.

Et caro nova fiet in die irae. He will take new meat when the day of hopelessness and of just poverty arrives.

The majesty of its law and the gravity of its accents remind us that for the Greeks "martyr" means "witness." Witness of his people and of their words, he will always be a closed impediment to insignificance and banality. And if we can only believe, according to Pascal's strange sentence, the witnesses who died in battle, it is in the decisions of their death—where our form as a people acquired its splendor when it unified the testimony with its absence—to give a substantive faith for the things that do not exist, or to the earthly gravitation of the most obscure images.

Orígenes collects a group of writers who revere Martí's images. It surprises in its first secularity the living fertility of his force as a historic impulse, capable of jumping over the stubborn insufficiencies of the immediate, to watch for us the cupolas of the new acts that are just now being born.