After the Rare, Strangeness

IT WOULD BE IMMATURE TO AFFIRM THAT, LIKE AN OBSTACLE OR A JOKE, Cuban poetry has had to assimilate itself to the partial and demagogic solution of making an exfuturity out of tradition. Far from being able to utilize the delight of a potentialized memory, we have been obliged to use prophecy. However, prophecy's own impotence to penetrate a past which does not exist has burdened and pestered it with an irony which is resented more than it is elaborated. This irony was more a slowing of the frenzy than a calm space equidistant from resignation and assault. Milosz ends a poem by telling us, Witold (the old chamberlain of the castle) is right there with the keys. In doing so, he does not dispel tradition, which is flowing through his memories, fragments of the most vibrant and adventurous sort. Tradition resolves for him the offerings of a signed material for the lantern which questions, flashing into the basement. For the man of today toward whom an adequate and vivacious substance approaches, these prophetic scratchings, these apocalyptic candelabras which emerge with their perilous breakers when the past has stopped being anything but a desolation which does not show so much as a ghost haunting it, these scratchings could stain Cuban poetry with an extemporaneous infantilism if it were not for the fact that it, many times elaborated by an intelligence which did not reject the alchemy of oblique modes, displayed in its own blindness—a possession, an unfamiliar necessity which slowly began to weigh upon us like the castle which tumbles over our shoulder in a nightmare. When one operates with memories it seems as though an oil stain were being set imperatively in a textile of ungraspable turbulence. But in this oily stain, poetry can achieve its first foundations. I know that some bourgeois, raté professors, dressed up like Lautréamont or Kafka, will smile at the expression "oil stain," because they languidly abandon the intensity that they attribute to the flame. If, on the contrary, we use a mouthpiece of prophesy, taken right out of the box, since there is no instantaneous center but rather a turbulence which multiplies through its desperate and ridiculous identity, what would seem like the final ashes would be the surrealist discourse sounded out below the sea. But the mode of prophesy expands more tastefully, pronouncing that time has been destroyed, end of ends, the last corner, the who I am, the where I am, of the ire which changed into a fainting spell:

Quién soy hacia lo eterno de estos búhos
Trocando selladas melodías por aldeas,
Por marinos ponientes como un cerebro fúnebre.

[Who am I toward the eternal of these owls
Exchanging sealed melodies for villages
For setting mariners like a funereal mind.]

But more than in this somewhat funerary sumptuousness, in this song for mutilated warriors, prophesy appears diminished by a desire to alight upon, to recognize in another body our own best-served fidelity:

. . . Quisiera que me oyerais, ¡oh, sonámbulos!
En las nupcias del astro con el alma.
Y en otra parte yo perdido.
. . . Oh, lucidos heraldos, deseos, pescadores,
hojas, aves de infausto pico.
Pero qué inútil desposorio. [. . . I wished you would hear me, oh sleepwalkers!
In the nuptials of the star with the soul.
And elsewhere, I, lost.
. . . Oh, magnificent heralds,
leaves, sad beaked birds.
But what a useless wedding.]

That element of which tradition is the present is also a demagogic affirmation. Only a dip in the intensity of the present offers always at least the luxury of its creation, the statue of the beautiful gesture or the display of its consummation. This attitude in poetry would like to break all relation between the poem already released...