Fernando Paz Castillo: Nuestro poeta metafísico / Rafael Arráiz Lucca

Fernando Paz Castillo: Our Metaphysical Poet

Fernando Paz Castillo was a Caracas native and this, though it might seem trivial, is important for understanding his work. He sees the light of the world on April 11th, 1893 in the valley presided by Mount Ávila. From a young age he suspects that mountain will be a guardian angel of sorts throughout his very long life, regardless of how many periods of time he’ll spend far from the mountain, taken to other metropolises by the fate of the diplomat.

Thanks to his life in Caracas, he studies at a French school, where they combine a religious education with the language of Voltaire. There he develops a friendship with his future companions in a band of poets: Enrique Planchart and Luis Enrique Mármol, with whom the fire of friendship will keep growing under the flame of the poem’s candle.


The Poet and the Circle

But before the capital event of his formative period, Paz Castillo frequents, like all his generational companions the Circle of Bellas Artes. Already, the painters Manuel Cabré, the Monsanto brothers and the rebellious Armando Reverón were battling with the palette, the legendary Circle had broken with the academicism of Don Antonio Herrera Toro, the director of the Academy at that time, they’d taken their colors and had gone into the open air to paint landscapes. The young Paz Castillo formed part of that period of very close relationships between painters and poets, and there actually are some who suggest that the idea for the name of the Circle is the poet’s, rather than one the painters.

The Circle has contact with the members of the Alborada group: Rómulo Gallegos, Enrique Soublette, Julio Rosales and the enormous poet Salustio González Rincones, when he was in Venezuela. But the painters are also in contact with the members of the poetic Generation of 1918. Perhaps the most significant of poetic generations to have existed during the Venezuelan 20th century.

Paz Castillo is a protagonist of that generation, along with his previously mentioned elementary school friends and Jacinto Fombona Pachano, Andrés Eloy Blanco, Rodolfo Moleiro and the uncomfortable José Antonio Ramos Sucre. The year 1918, as we know, refers to the days when these young men offered public recitals and a poetry collection by Enrique Planchart was published. But Paz Castillo doesn’t lose sleep over the magic of publication. His first poetry collection, La voz de los cuatro vientos, was published in 1931, when the year 1918 was already a memory, and its members were scattered across the national and international geography. The poet was thirty-eight years old when he decided to reveal his poems to the public, although many of the texts in that collection had been read in periodical publications and newspapers.

The following year he travels to Spain, this being the first stop abroad in his journey, but the diplomat still doesn’t begin his functions. It was under the government of General López Contreras that Paz Castillo is sent as Consul to Barcelona, to then become secretary for the Delegation to Paris, and afterwards to Argentina and Brazil. Between 1936 and 1938, four countries receive his luggage, in the exhausting routine of the diplomatic functionary. Later on come London, Mexico, Belgium, Ecuador and Canada, until from 1959 onwards he retires and settles his destiny in the city that saw him born.


The Door That is “The Wall”

During his long and exhausting diplomatic itinerary he never stopped writing and publishing, but his best work doesn’t emerge during those years. Maybe the minutiae of his job are a distraction from the poems of longer breath that await him, maybe the careful attention toward his family distances him from the poem. Once he returns to Venezuela the poet occupies himself seriously with his work: he not only gathers and organizes his substantial production in newspapers but he also saves it from oblivion housing it in books. His valuable reflections on the plastic arts, regarding the making of poems, about the figures of our republican history are saved from the ocean of newspapers. Enthusiasm invades the man who seems to live as though he had regained his freedom, and it’s then the poet’s gift reaches its peak. What had been gestating since his second collection, Signo (1937), and had found its nearly definitive course in Enigma del Cuerpo y el Espíritu (1956), precipitates magnificently in “The Wall” (1964).

This text, which I judge to be one of the best in Venezuelan poetry, is the most finished, the most profound work by Paz Castillo. I don’t disdain the ones that came later, but they can’t be explained at all without the door the poet opened with “The Wall.” From his later period a startling poem shines in particular: “Misterio,” included in the collection Pautas (1973), and also resounding in their depth are the texts that make up Persistencias (1975), a collection in which the cleanness of the verses reaches its purest state. But “The Wall” is the sun of the poet’s planetary system. Curiously, it was written and published when the Caracas native was nearly seventy years old and already considered a poet with an exalted oeuvre.

Everything happened slowly with Paz Castillo: not just the beginning of his literary life, when he first published at the edge of being forty, but also the glory of his major poem arrives when he’s in his seventies. His life, seen from a distance, seems to have been structured by the premonition of its expansion.


Between Light and Penumbra

The poet’s ghosts gather in “The Wall.” Death arrives punctual and plants the flag of doubt. The anguish of uncertainty also plants its flag: what will happen to us once we cross the wall, the wall of death; what is there on the other side of life. A bird, this time a vulture (maybe Poe’s raven) passes from one side to the other with no difficulty. We, who aren’t made for flight, remain facing the dividing line, giving shape to the clay with our hands. But the wall, more than an arrow of certainty, is the figure that inquires, the one who asks a single question on this side. The poem cites that other column in Paz Castillo’s work: God, the sacred meaning of existence and, alongside that, the afternoon, the poet’s favorite time of day, the ambiguous zone between light and penumbra. As we see, in “The Wall” he not only manages to express his philosophy of life but also gathers all his ghosts, all the pieces in the labyrinth of his work.

I want to think, and nothing stops me from this conjecture, that the wall in the poem is Mount Ávila, the guardian mountain of the poet’s childhood and youth. For us Caracas natives who love the mountain and, especially, its silhouette drawn by the light of the afternoon, the mountain seems to us like a dividing line, like a wall that preserves us from the world, like a wall capable of building our urban region, like a hulk that separates us from the sea and, in doing so, makes the sea the horizon’s only scene. We don’t know if we’ve learned how to see the mountain in the manner Paz Castillo’s “The Wall” has taught us or if, instead, when we read the poem we think of the city’s mountain. It doesn’t matter what came first: what is significant is that between nature’s creation and the poet’s, the matrimony is reconciled indissolubly.

There are lives that offer extraordinary similitudes: Cabré, ninety years old, devoted to the mountain; Paz Castillo, eighty-eight, a demiurge of the mountain’s metaphysical possibilities. Both sons of the glorious moment of dialogue: the Circle of Bellas Artes and the Generation of 1918.


A Poet is a Reader

Borges alluded countless times to the pride he felt about the books he had read, more than the ones he’d written. As far as I know, Paz Castillo never affirmed something similar, but he could have, since he was a voracious reader. He didn’t just read the words that books offered him, he also understood the grammar of painters. Reading, though this might not seem true, hasn’t been an extensive habit among Venezuelan writers. This is still the case. Venezuela is a country so slack in some paths, that it’s perfectly possible to be an academic of language and to read a book every time a pope dies, or to be a professor of literature and, deep down, to hate writing and hold up The Poem of the Cid as a contemporary poem and yet be considered a writer, or also, a poet, a word for which slackness is absolute. It was rare then, and it continues to be, for a Venezuelan poet to love reading. The majority affirm, with naive brazenness, that they prefer writing to reading. Contrary to that, Paz Castillo’s oeuvre is the work of a reader.

From the confession where he manifests himself as a devotee of Don Quixote, read several times throughout his long life, until the poetry of Antonio Machado, the universe of readings in Spanish of the Caracas poet include Darío, Manrique, Unamuno and, most particularly, St. Thomas Aquinas. In Shakespeare’s tongue, he drank from the pages of Whitman, Wordsworth and Keats. He stopped in Verlaine, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Breton, Éluard, manifesting a particular interest in French poetry. He was no stranger to the work of Nietzsche and of the Prague native Rainer Maria Rilke. He was also an attentive reader of his generation. He was able to maintain a writer’s life, no matter how many hours the affairs of the office might steal from him. His reading was guided by pleasure, on the one hand, and by the trembling of a search, on the other. His poetry is marked by the anxiety of discovery: from perplexity, the poet elevates a prayer toward the heights seeking an answer. He was touched by the fervor of the awakened.




{ Rafael Arráiz Lucca, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 29 March 2015 }

Rafael Cadenas y la otra voz / Rafael Arráiz Lucca

Rafael Cadenas and the Other Voice

Throughout the nineteenth century very few of our poets ventured into the reflective waters of the essay. I think of Andrés Bello and Rafael María Baralt, but not even these writers developed what the Germans call a lyric of thought (gedanken lyrik). Nor did such a distinguished author as friar Juan Antonio Navarrete, throughout the eighteenth century. If memory does not betray me, the first among us to inhabit these spaces was José Antonio Ramos Sucre. He did this not only with his prose poems but also with a series of corrosive epigrams that he titled with precise irony, Granizada, and published in 1929 in the magazine Élite.

Amidst the tumult of the twentieth century only a few have cultivated a lyric of thought. Our poets have tended toward another type of poetry. Within this solitary lineage we find passages from the work of Juan Liscano, Guillermo Sucre, Armando Rojas Guardia, Miguel Márquez and, evidently, Rafael Cadenas. I prefer not to venture into the realm of fiction writing with these ruminations because red lights would appear and we would lose sight of the exit. Let us return to poetry. It is no coincidence that these poets have been, in their own manner, exceptional essayists. In addition, trying to specify in what genre they excel is an arduous task. In truth, today it is impossible to conceive of a great poet, complete and authentic, who lacks critical means. What is more, it is impossible to think of a significant poet whose work does not enact philosophical and critical instruments for understanding the world. Modernity invalidated the relevance of simple expressions developed without epistemological complexity. No one doubts the value of many poetic expressions, but there are very few of them that distinctively assert themselves within history's currents.

One of the most important poetic oeuvres in Venezuelan history belongs to Rafael Cadenas. And if this statement is not news for specialized readers, it could be for many of those who frequent these pages. That is why I affirm it in this manner: a commonplace remark for some, a revelation for others. And in these extremely sad times for Venezuela, when we have descended to the basement where ignorance and idiocy walk hand in hand, it is helpful to celebrate the gems of our patrimony.

For almost a year now, Cadenas’s Obra Entera [Complete Works] has been circulating. It has been published by Mexico’s Fondo de Cultura Económica, thus consecrating his work within Latin America’s most influential publishing house. But this crucial edition is now accompanied by a compilation of interviews edited by Orlando Barreto for Ediciones de la Oruga Luminosa in San Felipe. The book, with its very Cadenasian title, Entrevistas, gathers the best conversations that the author has engaged in with writers and journalists, from 1966 up to the present.

Whoever ventures into the labyrinth of these pages will be able to examine some of the recurring threads in the thought of the poet from Barquisimeto: his condemnation of nationalism, the ego as the center of human dilemmas, the obsessive search for humility as an organizational and catalytic vortex, the defense of the individual above any collective intent to impose limitations, the fascination with Christian mystics and, last but not least, the assimilation of Asian philosophy within the West itself.

One of the most substantive interviews is the one he sustains with Guillent Pérez in 1966, published in this newspaper. In the interview he affirms: “I belong to the Western tradition, the land where the sun sets, and there is no avoiding this. I have tried to mold myself within that heritage. But I began to correct myself a few years ago. I studied, and study, the works of Buddha, Suzuki, Krishnamurti and others. And yet they remain inaccessible to my own experience. They pointed me once again toward the mystics of the West. Jung has been important for me and someone, I won’t say who, brought me back to earth without eliminating the soul.” A paragraph with no dross, followed by another moment, a few lines later, which has an electrifying effect: “Who would dare to ask one of our social, political, academic, artistic or literary luminaries, one of our honourable men, to abandon his or her I?”

When a person has descended to the bottom of the well, the source of what Octavio Paz calls the “other voice,” he or she has experienced the most profound event. The one that can only be attained through silence, where words degenerate into mere fireworks: “What our intellectuals are lacking most is humility. It wouldn't be a bad idea to establish schools where that virtue could be taught. One of the courses that would be imparted there, by mute teachers, would be Pythagorean silence.” I don’t have enough space here to continue citing, so I refer you to the book. Since Plato, we know that a dialogue can be as enlightening as a monologue. If you look for Rafael, you will find him in the place least frequented by Venezuelan writers: any one of Caracas’s bookstores or, also, in one of the buses that ascend from Chacaíto to La Boyera.




{ Rafael Arráiz Lucca, El Nacional, 27 July 2001 }

“I exist as though I’m in Dante’s Inferno.” / Arturo Uslar Pietri

A central figure in twentieth century Latin American letters, Arturo Uslar Pietri was born in Caracas in 1906. Although his name is not as familiar to American and European readers as are the writers of the Boom (Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, et al), Uslar Pietri’s death in 2001 left an irreplaceable gap in Venezuelan cultural and political life. Uslar Pietri first came to prominence with the publication of his novel Las lanzas coloradas in 1931. Throughout his long career, he published poetry, fiction, and essays, while also serving as a minister in various administrations, and working as a teacher and journalist.

After completing doctoral studies in Political Science at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, Uslar Pietri spent several years in Paris, working as a cultural attaché for the Venezuelan embassy, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was during this period in France that Uslar Pietri befriended Miguel Angel Asturias and Alejo Carpentier. The three writers spent many hours discussing each other’s work, alongside their hopes and ideas for the literature of their respective countries, and for Latin America as a region. These conversations led to some of the first theories about what Uslar Pietri would later call, in one of his essays of the late 1940s, “el realismo magico.”

Their initial theories about “realismo magico” were influenced as much by the French surrealists as by an interest in how the concept of mestizaje in the Americas could be developed within Latin American literature. Uslar Pietri would return to the theme of mestizaje throughout his career, seeing it as a central aspect of Venezuelan culture.

In 1936, Uslar Pietri published an essay called “Sembrar el petroleo” (To Plant Oil), in which he advised the Venezuelan government to invest the profits from the recently-discovered oil fields, so that Venezuela could establish a solid financial structure. Over the decades, this essay was frequently cited but its concept was never fully adhered to by any Venezuelan president.

In 1948, while teaching at Columbia University, Uslar Pietri published an excellent critical history of Venezuelan letters, Letras y hombres de Venezuela. From that year until 1998, Uslar Pietri wrote a weekly newspaper column for El Nacional. He also hosted a series of television lecture shows that offered interpretations of Venezuelan history and literature for a general audience. I remember, as a child, flipping through the TV channels sometimes and wondering who the boring, old man sitting at a desk and talking interminably might be. Uslar Pietri’s now-famous opening words for each show were always: “Bienvenidos, mis amigos invisibles…” (Welcome, my invisible friends…).

Toward the end of 2000, two years into Hugo Chavez’s presidency, the poet and critic Rafael Arráiz Lucca, interviewed Uslar Pietri at his home in the La Florida neighborhood of Caracas. This turned out to be Uslar Pietri’s final interview, and it was eventually published as: Rafael Arráiz Lucca, Arturo Uslar Pietri: Ajuste de cuentas (Caracas: Los Libros de El Nacional, 2001). Below are excerpts from that interview.

The pessimistic tone of Uslar Pietri’s commentary on Venezuela’s current crisis should be read within the context of his battle against cancer at the time. However, his critiques do carry the weight of an entire lifetime spent in the effort to build a Venezuelan literature and culture. At 94, Uslar Pietri continued to challenge his fellow Venezuelans to live up to the highest of standards.

*

“I went to Paris in 1929 and I stayed there, fortunately, during four and a half years that were very important to me. I discovered the world, I left a Venezuela that was very backwards, isolated, very ignorant, and I was let loose amidst that feast, like Hemingway described it. A feast during a very rich period, what they now call the interwar years, the period of surrealism, of the Russian revolution, a very productive period full of innovations, of motivations. It was the moment when Sartre appeared.

The journey was epic. The ship left from the port of La Guaira, touched down in Carúpano, then in Trinidad, Barbados, Martinique, where it took on coal and the steam would fill up with dust, then through Guadalupe, until we finally reached Le Havre twelve days later. In those ships, that shook so much, there was always a little orchestra and people danced.”

*

“To be honest, I was very lucky because when I arrived in New York as an exile, there was a very unique man, a Spaniard, Don Federico de Onís, who had been a very distinguished figure at Spanish universities, and who in that period was the Chair of the Spanish Department at Columbia. I arrived without resources, to see what I could do, and at one point I even considered going to Argentina. But as soon as de Onís heard that I was there, he called me and offered me the job at the university, so I ended up staying in New York. I began by teaching summer courses on Venezuelan literature and I later became a part of the department. Germán Arciniegas was there, and we developed a life-long friendship. Once I was settled, then Isabel and our sons arrived, we lived in Riverside, and I would walk to the university. I shared a cubicle with no less than Don Tomás Navarro, one of Spain’s greatest philologists, and this was wonderful for me, since I was lucky enough to develop a friendship with that respected, learned man.

RAL: During your years abroad, did you ever consider staying in the States permanently, or did you always plan on returning to Venezuela?

AUP: Always. I never considered expatriating myself, never. I remember when I ran into José Rafael Pocaterra, who was living in Canada and working as a journalist and teacher, he said to me: ‘But Arturo, haven’t you thought about settling in the United States? There’s a country where your children are going to thrive, it’s a powerful and well-organized country.’ No, José Rafael, I answered him, I dream of returning to Venezuela.”

*

“Someone should do a study of how Venezuelans have conceived Venezuela. In colonial times this was a very poor country, a country that didn’t produce hardly anything, and after independence it continued being a poor country, a country of adventurers, of searchers of El Dorado, of mines. This region didn’t even have a name until very late. This was referred to as Tierra Firme until the name arrived quite late, that curious name, which is completely a pejorative term, it’s the name of the little Venice, the ridiculous Venice. This was, during most of the colonial period, Tierra Firme, the first dry land that they came across.

RAL: The natives called it Paria and Macarapana.

AUP: On the coast they did. Remember, there was no generic name, since there was no internal unity and there was never any indigenous organization here. This didn’t have a name or a center, it was populated by various tribes, all in different stages of development; some war-like tribes, like the Caribs, or some agriculturally-based tribes. This was not Mexico, nor Peru, and it wasn’t even at the level of what could be found in Bogota.”

*

“RAL: Do you think that we could identify collective virtues among Venezuelans?

AUP: I think we have very few virtues, in the traditional sense of the word. Of course, it’s not that we’re a herd of inept people or imbeciles, or bad people, but instead, that we’ve never truly cultivated collective virtues. We’ve been very dispersed, very individualistic, people of uprisings. Compare Venezuelan history, for instance, with that of our neighbors. It was truly almost impossible for Venezuelans not to commit so many foolish endeavors. The situation in the Venezuelan twentieth century has been extraordinarily unusual and corrupting, the situation of a poor country, with widespread underdevelopment and ignorance, which suddenly has an immensely wealthy State, and whose wealth is not the result of a nation’s work. […] Since independence, Venezuela has not had a managerial class. We’ve had people who catch bits and pieces from various places and who have tried to do what they can. We are very immature and superficial as a people. A mountain of resources fell on this country and we were not capable of using them wisely. One has to remember that we’ve only had a center since relatively recently. Remember that the actual structure of Venezuela, with Caracas as a center, was only consolidated during the generation that forged our independence. […]

RAL: Have we always been an improvised, disordered country?

AUP: This has been a very peculiar country, with contradictions. It is very unpredictable and it lacks a skeleton. The day when we write about Venezuelan history after the discovery of oil is going to be very frightening. This is one of the most significant and unexplainable historic events of any Latin American country. No other country was rained upon so suddenly by massive riches, the equivalent of six or seven Marshall Plans.
This is an immature country without a brain and without a managerial class.

RAL: In a state of permanent adolescence?

AUP: I wouldn’t dare call this a form of adolescence, since adolescence implies a process of maturing and I don’t see any symptoms of that here. In fact, it would seem as though we are condemned to inhabit this limbo, this falsification of history and events, which is curious. And yet, this is a country that has done important things and that has provided important figures. This is the country of [Simón] Bolívar and of [Andres] Bello, but none of that seems to have survived. We’ve always had the tendency to substitute for reality, to see things in another manner. I believe that we have not investigated fully enough the image of Venezuela, which has always been a false image and an image of thirsty wealth and a search for the magical. Since the search for El Dorado, not much work has been accomplished here. We haven’t colonized the region, instead we’ve simply occupied it.”

*

“RAL: Chávez?

“AUP: He is delirious, extremely ignorant, and he says anything that comes to his mind. What a disgrace, the country can’t seem to move forward. […] That man speaks with an arrogance and a sense of entitlement that are incredible. Certain phrases that he’s heard have stuck to him, such as “savage liberalism.” This fills him with happiness. There is no such thing as “savage liberalism,” because liberalism is the flower of civilization, the ability to tolerate difference.”

*

“I am not an optimist, I am very pessimistic. It’s just that one cannot see what will happen in Venezuela. From the point of view of chance, anything could happen. But from the point of view of a more or less logical development, it’s unclear, there are no proposals for Venezuela. There are no political parties, the supposed leaders that we have are second rate, and we are very corrupted. We can’t compare ourselves to neighboring countries. We can’t be compared to Colombia, nor to Peru itself, not to mention Argentina, Uruguay or Brazil, which is immense. I’m very distressed by what is happening to this country. This is a very evil moment, full of dangers, with tons and tons of money floating around and no orientation. Education here is a disaster, the political sphere is frightening, there is no debate, the country is heading nowhere, without a destiny, without a managerial class, with only adventurers, eccentrics, and improvisers. Now we’re speaking of revolution, but curiously enough the idea of revolution has already disappeared from the map. At this moment there is not a single revolutionary power left on the planet, except in Venezuela, of course, and in Cuba. The tragic thing about our situation is the level of those that govern us. I was listening to Chávez on Sunday. What a bunch of nonsense he spoke, and spoken with such selfishness, such arrogance. This is a very unlucky country. It would have been very hard for things to be any different, because this country has always been poor and underdeveloped. It has always been isolated, full of instability, of coups, of what they call revolutions, and besides all that the immense oil wealth appeared in the State’s hands, creating a total distortion. If someone dared to undertake a study about the idea of revolution in Venezuela, we would see that what the idea has cost us, what it has meant to us, what it contains, and what it expresses is pitiful. I tell you, I am in a very bad state of mind, I have no hopes, I exist as though I’m in Dante’s Inferno. We have nothing to hold on to here. It’s sad to see a country without a managerial class. An improvised and improvisational country. To think what this country might have been like with its mountain of resources, if only the government had had a bit of common sense.”