[Photo by Leonardo Noguera for El Universal]
To speak with the Venezuelan poet Elizabeth Schön is a privilege because of the peace and simple wisdom her words transmit. And her most recent book, Visiones extraordinarias, reflects these sensations. A book in which two themes constantly reiterate themselves: God and love.
“That over there”—Schön points to the book—"is true. I was sitting in this chair, I had a star beside me, and when I turned around I had another star on the other side. My eyes were open, because I wanted it to be real, not a fantasy. I saw myself standing over an enormous zinc leaf, and I was told: ‘You are in the present, in the future and the present; in the infinite and the finite.’ ” Schön adds it was a voice she heard. “I wasn’t scared, and suddenly I returned to my bed again.”
She says she suddenly felt noises, as though someone were walking around at midnight. The noise was so insistent she sat up in bed, and then asked: “Who’s there, why won’t you let me sleep?” “And do you know what the answer was? ‘I am God.’ Yes, it was a beautiful little voice, a sweet man’s voice. I lay back down because I was so surprised. Then, I realized I was in the sky, and from above I saw the Earth rotating, and the stars. I stayed within the immensity, alone. What will become of me? No, I’m going to my room, and when I made that effort I found myself in my bed again, and my little dog was there, looking at me, as though she were asking me, where were you?”
After those visions, Schön wrote the book. “They were visions I had.”
To accomplish her written task she took up pencil and paper, because “no one knows how important pencil and paper are: they resist against the word, because the word is the greatest thing man has ever made.”
For those who don’t know Elizabeth Schön’s poetry, this story will seem strange. However, her work is suffused with that spiritual, mystical depth, with its closeness to God. “It’s always been like that, since I was four years old. I don’t believe things are born, but that instead they’re always there, from the time one is very small and they eventually develop within you.”
This is why the author sees this publication differently, “because I had never dealt with God, and I like for the things one says to come from within, from where one doesn’t know what that within might be, which gets lost in the infinite. I’ve been sick for two years (thrombosis) but my mind keeps creating.” And she agrees with all her vehemence that “poetry is what transforms all of reality, even the quotidian one, all of that is transformed in poetry. Poetry is what makes everything beautiful, because we’re accustomed to saying: ‘That’s ugly.’ But why? Look at it for a while, calmly, and beauty continues to appear on its own. There are no ugly things, because nature is beautiful and one comes from there, from nature.”
{ Ana María Hernández G., El Universal, 3 October 2006 }
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