Poetry and Mystical Heterodoxies: Leopoldo Panero

	Escrito a cada instante	Written at Each Instant
	A Pedro Laín	To Pedro Laín
1	Para inventar a Dios, nuestra palabra	To invent God, our word
	busca, dentro del pecho,	searches, within the heart,
	su propia semejanza y no la encuentra,	its own likeness and does not find it,
	como las olas de la mar tranquila,	like the waves of the tranquil sea,
5	una tras otra, iguales,	one after one, the same,
	quieren la exactitud de lo infinito	seek the exactitude of the infinite
	medir, al par que cantan . . .	to measure, as they sing in sequence . . .
	Y Su nombre sin letras,	And God's name without letters,
	escrito a cada instante por la espuma,	written at each instant by the foam,
10	se borra a cada instante	is erased at every instant
	mecido por la música del agua;	rocked by the music of the water;
	y un eco queda solo en las orillas.	and an echo remains alone on the shores.
	¿Qué número infinito	What infinite number
	nos cuenta el corazón?	Does the heart tell us?
15	Cada latido,	Every beat,
	otra vez es más dulce, y otra y otra;	is once again more sweet, and again and again;
	otra vez ciegamente desde dentro	once again blindly from within
	va a pronunciar Su nombre.	is going to say God's name.
	Y otra vez se ensombrece el pensamiento,	And once again thought shadows over,
20	y la voz no le encuentra.	and the voice does not find it.
	Dentro del pecho está.	it is within the heart.
	Tus hijos somos,	We are your children,
	aunque jamás sepamos	although we never know
	decirte la palabra exacta y Tuya,	how to tell you the word, precise and Yours,
25	que repite en el alma el dulce y fijo	that repeats in the soul the sweet and fixed
	girar de las estrellas.	turning of the stars.2

There is perhaps nothing less theological than the treatment of God in poetry. If, for theology, one's point of departure is certainty with respect to God, via what is called faith and belief even outside of any experience of the divine, in poetry the direct experience of God carries the questioner beyond the opposition between certainty and uncertainty regarding divinity. This is affirmed by Plotinus, by San Juan de la Cruz (night of feeling and soul), by Hölderlin ("What is God? Unknown, rich / in particularities is, thus the aspect / that the heavens offer us of him"), by Rilke, and by Simon Weil, the latter with decisive clarity: "On God's part, creation is not an act of self-expansion, but of withdrawal and renunciation" (87)³ —creation is decreation. Poetic language, in the trans-symbolic sense that we will be giving it here, develops the problematic of an infinitely absent and withdrawn God. Mystical experiences do not restore presence; on the contrary, they emphasize absence, in relation to which mystical experience itself is a strange and singular event⁴ . And for what reason does this take place in poetry? A simple reflection suffices as a response: The infinite withdrawal of God immediately poses the problem of God's name or nameability, and poetry—as in our century Blanchot, Derrida and Paul de Man, among others, have endlessly pointed out—does not cease to stress the distance between linguistic and phenomenal reality. In this impasse, poetic language and the infinite distance of God are brought into an encounter. However, since it cannot be said that God is a phenomenal reality, since God's distance is infinite, the problem of the distance between linguistic reality and what is named by that reality is therefore elevated to an equally infinite power, assuming the form of what would be a truly odd catachresis. Leopoldo Panero's poem, which stages what we have been discussing, could therefore not have begun any other way:

Para inventar a Dios, nuestra palabra [To invent God, our word...