It is because of the most elemental contrast of ages across generations that transmission from parents to children—family memories, accumulated culture, acquired friendships—becomes an event of multiple facets and unexpected paths; an event always enriching for young people who arrive in the world of the written word eager to read everything. Such transmission, which works in both directions, would mean reading the intellectual and cultural history of a nation as a chain of filiations, and beyond the repeated Freudian scheme: Father-son-death of the Father…
From such a dynamic I owe to my father the knowledge of two people whom I consider fundamental to my formation. One of them revealed to me the great lyric poetry in the Spanish language when I was twenty. The other, the essayist and musicologist Leonardo Acosta, although I re-encountered him in 1989—also in my twenties—I had known since I was a child and my father would visit him on certain weekends at his apartment in Vedado. It is of Leonardo, who died in Havana in August 2016, that I speak in these pages.
More than thirty years have passed and yet I have not forgotten those Sunday walks through Vedado when my father—who by then was already living in San Miguel de los Baños (Matanzas)—would suddenly say: “let’s go visit Leo.” It was also through my father’s comments that I learned certain things about him—things I later confirmed personally: that he had a difficult character; that he had published several books of essay of great penetration; that he was an extraordinary connoisseur of music, especially jazz; and that, in a general sense, he had read a great deal and possessed an immense culture. Later, as I grew older and no longer went out with my father on weekends, I stopped seeing him for several years until, again in my twenties, we went back to visit him at his apartment. There, my father made an almost formal introduction, saying to him: “Leo, this is Nansen, you remember him, don’t you? He likes to read; I’ve brought him here so you can guide him…”
Despite my shyness, on the next visit I went alone. I remember the apartment on 19th Street, in Vedado, the first one in which I visited him, where at the time he lived with Michi, his wife of so many years: the narrow, dark staircase leading to the first floor; the small living room turned into a study and always in half-light because the balcony looked out onto trees; and the several bookcases with his library, already reduced but very select; all of them working books, with notes and bookmarks.
In that semi-darkness, I, a young man in need of knowing which indispensable authors I should read, tried to decipher the titles in his library. There too was his worktable, full of handwritten and typewritten papers, books, and several pens; and his tiny typewriter—which he never exchanged for a computer—whose clatter of keys I would hear when I arrived at the door of his apartment: a sound of keys, or silence, that told me whether I should knock or simply not disturb him while he was writing. On the table there were always different kinds of sunglasses, with lenses more or less dark, which he would put on when he went out depending on the hour of the day and the severity of the sunlight.
When we were left alone, and faced with my silence, he asked: “so what wave are you on?” Stammering, I replied that I was into religions, theosophy, occultism, but always in relation to poetry and literature; and when I told him that I had just finished reading Historia de las religiones, by the Soviet historian and ethnologist S. A. Tokarev, he replied—at a stroke abolishing forty years of difference in culture and knowledge: “first of all, don’t address me formally; look, we are on the same wave, but I must tell you that this reading does not give you much. I will tell you what Carpentier told me when I met him: read everything you can by the Romanian Mircea Eliade; there is everything you need to know; there is an order there, a capacity to make universal connections that you will not find in other scholars.” Another moment of that rare transmission occurred when, lending me Rilke’s novel Los cuadernos de Malte Laurids Brigge, he said: “read carefully the pages about the death of Charles the Bold.” And I say transmission because, when I read his evocation of Lezama, Leonardo had written the same thing. That is: forty years earlier, Lezama had told him to read the same passage carefully.
If memory does not fail me, for more than twenty years have passed, that day I left his house with the Tratado de historia de las religiones, by the Romanian, and with the first of the many, many books he would give me in the years that followed: Psicología y religión, by Carl G. Jung, another of the authors who, as he told me, he read a great deal in his youth. Needless to say, I immediately read the scant 130 pages of Jung’s complex book; and, of course, understood almost nothing. When I told him so, he smiled and said: “take it slowly, you will understand.”
Another moment in which I appreciated his intellectual “simplicity,” his forgetting of intellectual hierarchies, and his Zen-master-like responses to a situation, was when he lent me Ulises, by James Joyce, in the Santiago Rueda edition of 1945. Previously, and for a better understanding of the voluminous novel, he had lent me the penetrating text that the German literary critic and erudite Ernst Robert Curtius devotes to Ulises in Ensayos críticos sobre literatura europea, and the detailed study of the work by the English critic Stuart Gilbert, exegete and personal friend of the Irishman.
With those preliminary readings—the second made in my deficient English—I entered that labyrinthine block called Ulises: I barely managed to finish it and I think I understood almost nothing. When I told him this he replied: “don’t worry, I’ve read it four times and I haven’t understood it either,” and immediately burst out laughing. This, of course, was not true, and was one more of his peculiar sallies. The essay he devoted many years later to Lezama, to which I will refer at the end of these notes, proves the contrary convincingly.
Returning to Jung and Eliade, I must note that over the years I inherited several books by these great scholars of religions and of the “phenomenology of the sacred” in general, as well as other authors of Spanish and Protestant Christian mysticism, Far Eastern, Nahuatl, and pre-Columbian mysticism in general. All of them books which, with his underlinings and perceptive annotations, I still keep. He went so far as to lend me the first editions of Analecta del reloj and Tratados en La Habana, by José Lezama Lima, when these books had not yet been reissued in Cuba; both books with the very beautiful dedications that the poet from Trocadero wrote on the first page, alluding to Leonardo’s condition as a musician as well. I remember this as the only time he urged me to take care of the books. I must say that, for fear they would come apart in my hands, I read them barely opening them. I never again asked him to lend them to me so I could reread them.
With time, and as I began to acquire books, I was able to reciprocate his noble gesture. Thus, among my books, he read several on Buddhism—specifically in its Zen variant—which was the one that interested him most. From the several times he asked me to lend it to him, one of the books he read very carefully was the collection of essays—on very specific technical aspects of Zen mysticism—that the Japanese master Daisetz T. Suzuki gathered in his book El ámbito del Zen.
This brief book, originally my father’s, ended up becoming a traveling book, for it went from my father’s hands, in San Miguel de los Baños, to mine, in Playa, and from there to Leo’s, in Vedado, only to return later to my father’s with new notes and underlinings, and so on infinitely, like the alchemical serpent, Ouroboros, biting its own tail: in the end one no longer knew whose underlinings and notes were whose; and my father, with his characteristic sense of humor, would say, laughing, that it was fine that way, because it enriched Suzuki’s book.
I remember his joy when I told him that in a secondhand bookstore I had found Ensayo de contra conquista, by the Mexican Gonzalo Celorio; and that, in the study the Mexican devotes to the Baroque as an emancipatory and resistant art, as an “art of counter-conquest,” there is a reference to his essay “El Barroco de Indias…”. What escaped me, in my desire to give him a small joy, was that Celorio’s reference to the thesis of his essay on the “Barroco de Indias” as an ideological art of Spanish colonization and cultural conquest in America was critical; a fact that, incidentally, reminded him of the tense polemic with the Venezuelan professor and scholar of Carpentier’s work, Alexis Márquez, on the “American Baroque.”
When I visited him several days later he received me sadly, though not annoyed with me. I remember saying something like: “Leo, this man, from Mexico, what he does not understand is the epoch, the Cuban historical context in which your essay was written; he does not understand all the epochal contradictions running beneath that writing.” He looked at me, I felt his gaze as a reproach, but he said nothing. However, years later, and to my satisfaction, I learned that there existed a no longer so new discipline called “intellectual history,” committed to explaining a text not as something self-sufficient and enclosed in its own referentiality, but as an object of culture that cannot be understood if separated from its historical context.
For this vision of the text and of culture in general, the text is also a social event; and in the same way, the social event that breaks with homogeneous temporality and produces a “point of bifurcation” can be read as a text. Thus there are no completely erroneous or true texts; there are historical epochs, and therefore intellectual ones, that mark what is written or said, the way it is done, and, above all, who receives it and puts it into action.
Today, in these times of “consumers and citizens”—as Néstor G. Canclini says—I do not know whether Celorio is or will be right forever; what I am certain of is that Leo, in the era in which he had to live and write, was also right. To conclude with the Mexican, and if I did not misunderstand his essay, I do not understand why—if Modernity is a critical era, an era that, because it has not fulfilled its promises, has not yet ended (J. Habermas)—and if criticism is the consciousness of the limit of our representations, criticism on this side of the Atlantic should be confined—according to Celorio—to the narrow frames of novelistic writing. Incidentally, Leonardo’s criteria on the Barroco de Indias coincide, to a great extent, with those that the Uruguayan critic and scholar Ángel Rama would set out in his classic text La ciudad letrada (1984).
From what has been noted above, it should not be thought that his relationship with culture was mediated by mysticism, Eastern or Western religions, or some form of irrationalism of the left or the right. He had a critical vision of all these problems. Thus he gradually moved away, for example, from authors such as Jung, who had interested him in his youth, and drew closer to authors and theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, the young Marx, and scholars of mass literature and ideology such as Umberto Eco and Ariel Dorfman; critical psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and Franco Fornari; and sociologists and analysts of so-called mass culture such as the Americans Thorstein Veblen, David Riesman, and Charles W. Mills; and, in another order, the studies of popular culture by the Russian Mikhail Bakhtin, the Colombian Jesús M. Barbero, and a very long etcetera. With these last two authors, he found a broad referentiality and points of contact with his reflections on popular culture versus mass culture (another of his preferred subjects), popular music, jazz and its history, a field on which he left several essays and books of indispensable consultation for scholars.
Thus, once in conversation, after hearing me express an irrational, pessimistic, anti-Enlightenment judgment—one I suppose was related to my recent readings of Cioran—he said to me: “be careful, what you are saying is close to fascism.” At that moment I did not understand his comment, and I must say it even hurt me. Only many years later did two readings illuminate the problem for me: La carne, la muerte y el diablo en la literatura romántica, by the Italian art critic Mario Praz, and an article by the philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek on the German documentary filmmaker and film director Leni Riefenstahl.
Praz’s book on European Romanticism and fin-de-siècle Decadentism could be read, above all, as the history of a certain state of social mood reflected in the literature of the period and leading into the fascisms of the first half of the twentieth century. Žižek’s article, for its part, attempts to explain the work and personality of the German filmmaker by separating them from her conscious ideological preferences, but doing something more drastic and more serious: subsuming her work, pre-Nazi and post-Nazi, into a “fascist vision of life,” into a vital drive that would necessarily lead to a fascist aesthetics and action.
In this way I understood that there existed a form of fascism that could disguise itself and show a human face, be spiritual and consubstantial with the virtues of our everyday personality and vital need for beauty; and that, in the same way, this fascism could do without swastikas and antisemitism, without the figure of the charismatic leader, without perpetual war and everything we associate with that political, social, and cultural movement.
With respect to contemporary or post-structural thought, he read and assimilated everything he could, that is, whatever resonated with his intellectual formation. In fact, he brought the first Spanish edition of Las palabras y las cosas (Siglo XXI Editores, 1968) from Mexico in the 1970s. I know that this book by Foucault, and Vigilar y castigar—books I inherited—he read with great attention. However, of another fashionable Frenchman, Jean Baudrillard, I heard him comment: “he has one brilliant idea and then another that one does not know where it comes from. Octavio Paz’s phrase can be applied to him: more than ideas, he has occurrences.” Near the end of his life, a book of mine, Imposturas intelectuales (1997), by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, confirmed that he was right in many of his ideas when he referred to a certain area of so-called postmodern thought.
Before ending this page I want to refer to a special moment, one of those memories that only with the successive passing of years gains a luminous density that accompanies us forever. I speak of the moment when, in his house, he read me his essay: “Tiempo de contar: heterodoxia de Lezama” (revista La Siempreviva, 4/2008, pp. 34-46). One day he told me he was writing something on the heterodox and secret Lezama, and needed to complete the information he possessed with whatever I could obtain for him on Gnosticism, Hebrew Kabbalah, Persian Sufism, alchemy, and in general the so-called “hermetic” or occult sciences… On such an arduous subject I gave him everything I had, which was not much either. And with that information, and all the cultural wake that a text of such magnitude necessarily entails, addressing essential themes of the “Tradition or Second Vision,” he wrote his essay.
One day when I visited him, he was waiting for me with the issue of La Siempreviva in which the essay had been published. Since it is not the purpose of these pages to gloss the text, much less to attempt its exegesis, I will only say that there lie some of the fundamental keys for a hermetic, heterodox, and heretical understanding of the poet from Trocadero: the correlation between Creation and Fall; apocatastasis—which includes rebellious, dark, and unredeemed matter also called Devil—and in which man has a capital role, by virtue of his responsibility to eliminate the Chaos established in the Universe as a consequence of the Fall; the inevitability of this Fall and man’s responsibility to carry the Light from terrestrial exile toward the Origins; the centrality of the shaman-poet and Thracian bard Orpheus, human and divine figure at once and “pre-Christian intuition,” and the importance of the poetic word and harmonizing song of the Thracian god in the “imaginary eras” and in Lezama’s “poetic system of the world”; the existence in the Universe of an “intermediate zone,” Hurqalya, between the world above (celestial) and the world below (infernal), which, besides being a space of mutual circulation for angelic entities and spiritual beings, visionaries, initiates, and poets, is a space governed by Shekhina, “the tenderness of God,” feminine incarnation of the Divinity. This para-reality, this Celestial Earth or Hurqalya—could it not be our very planet Earth?—is what, according to Leonardo, Lezama sees as “Tibetan city of total wonder,” a city in the distance with its golden domes vanishing into the sky.
As the close of the essay and as its “cornerstone,” there is the parallel Leonardo establishes between Paradiso and Ulises—something he had already done, years before, with Bajo el volcán, by Malcolm Lowry, and Los pasos perdidos, by Carpentier. Because of their themes and modes of expression he classifies these two works, coming from insular spheres that shared a long tradition of colonial subordination, as Gnostic novels. For that reason, some of the central categories of Gnosticism have such relevance in these masterpieces: masculine and feminine as opposed and generative poles of Creation; copulation (always in the manner of alchemical royal weddings); generation and filiation, that is, the Son-Father relationship, or the search for the lost Father, whether Telemachus seeking Ulysses, or the adolescent and orphaned poet José Cemí, who finds in Oppiano Licario not only a spiritual father, but the possibility of total and complete knowledge; or, in other words, Gnostic knowledge in its highest incarnation.
Seen from temporal distance, today I feel that reading as a fleeting and at the same time almost magical moment, for, since we had shared the reading of more or less the same texts (mystical, hermetic, and heterodox)—but he with a greater capacity to synthesize and to find deep and unexpected connections—as the reading advanced, I almost guessed the phrase or the content that would come next, I would say it to him, and he would look at me impatiently and burst out laughing.
Near the end of his life, our relationship unfolded according to the “iron script” almost prefixed for these cases, in which some leave the world of the living and others remain in it: I would resolve to go see him again and again, and in the end I would not go, a fact for which there are always justifications related, always, to the struggle of harsh everyday life.
In a conversation we had by telephone he reproached me with words that, in my susceptibility, seemed harsh, cold, cutting—although I also knew that he was upset about something else and that I was calling him at an inopportune moment. Thus I went without seeing him, without calling him, and without knowing anything about him for about a year, although I did not stop remembering him with a tenacious feeling of guilt, telling myself that I had to go to his house… Finally I called him toward the end of August (2016), to tell him that in September I would go see him without fail. Through the telephone I could feel his distant voice, very distant: a voice that came from the other shore and almost detached from its warm, bodily sheath; and I do not know why, the next day—today I know it with certainty—I remembered the expression in partenza, with which María Zambrano refers to the state of mind that enveloped Calvert Casey months before his death.
Leo died in the month of September of that same year, and everything that four years earlier I had not cried with my father’s death I cried with his; I suppose it was a matter of strange crossings and still stranger filiations, for, as I explained at the beginning of these notes, if in the end my father had placed me intellectually in his hands when I had barely turned twenty, it was logical that now, at the end—or, in reality, the beginning?—the two figures should enter into a complex symbiosis.
Although he was an atheist “by the grace of God,” as the musician Julián Orbón called it, I end these quick recollections with two phrases by Plotinus that I found copied in his own handwriting on the first page of the masterful study Émile Bréhier devotes to the highest figure of Alexandrian Neoplatonism, and which Leo gave me when I told him I had just finished reading Las Enéadas: “if the eye were not of a solar nature it would not see the sun”; and another, more beautiful still and perhaps a reflection of the most intimate human desire: “I am trying to reunite the divine in me with the divine in the Universe.”
