1
The Baroque strives to incorporate things into its barbaric substance. It attacks perception and, therefore, ethics. It corrupts reality. It wants us to bathe in all the rivers of the world at once. The Baroque is not just a matter of exaggeration. (Only reality is exaggerated, which surpasses us: once they took away several of our eyes, when we could see with superabundance). If my instantaneous eye says, “there a tree, there a soliloquy of boxwood tablets, in that corner a horse standing in splendor,” Baroque writing manages to weave the topoi into the same fabric. Then one recognizes the power of signs that emulate matter.
The experience of the Baroque writer is similar to that of the alchemist: he tries to petrify successive surprises. Only what is possible in continuous revelation gives rise to the “ten thousand things of reality.”
Baroque prose: the delirium of the writer advancing through the verbal tangle, the night closing in. The livid face with which he emerges carrying a conch shell that dictates his opera in its dalliances with the wind, his clothes tattered, merging the way back with his frozen pupil at the mouth of the tunnel.
2
I believe that our prose (for the moment) cannot be baroque, totally baroque. Neither of the stony fixity of Carpentier, nor of the torrent of Lezama that oozes waters from the Ganges. I believe that the key lies in a certain exaltation of Martí: in the final ellipses of his Diary and his death, in closed syntax. Or in Calvert Casey’s leap from a building in Rome, breathed by his prose.
3
“Language destroyed by irrational negation is lost in verbal delirium; subjected to deterministic ideology, it is reduced to a slogan. Between the two lies art” (Camus).
Verbal delirium: the efforts of the magician or the madman in the dark.
Deterministic ideology: that which clarifies the passage of men on earth, with their belongings and dominions.
The password: the tension of language to become particular, the history of this secret, solitary, failed (but always restarted) enterprise.
4
F. once said to me: “There is something about the insularity of Cuba that smells like a camp.” I assumed, from F.’s words: “In a camp, trafficking reigns. Thought is replaced by exchange. We have not had true metaphysics, nor, of course, thoughtful prose, but rather offices and ports ready for business, and a scarce trade in words. Furthermore, in the absence of myths, we have practiced patriotism and carnival. Perhaps this is why we have generally had chroniclers of camps rather than prose writers of truths in the making.”
5
I agree with Glissant (Breve filosofía del Barroco) that we live the diversity/unity of the world. But I disagree that there is a “naturalization” of the baroque.
Glissant confuses the mirroring of different languages with what might be suggested as “cycles of entropy.” Order and disorder alternate.
If I wake up and see myself transformed into a monstrous insect, I would assert that entropic processes are accelerating in a bad way. If I get up and shave and think I am more or less the same, I know that entropy is working well. The latter is usually the case (except for a friend of mine who assured me that he woke up one day as the Count of Monte Cristo with a dog’s head, on a morning of bad entropy for him). The alternation of entropies—natural and degenerate—would be ways of being-in-the-world, not by extension, but in each “particular.”
6
For Lezama, novelistic spatiality stems from the visible/invisible dialectic erected by God and his heretical approximations. New prose writers will have to specify the visible/invisible at every turn with Promethean forces (as in an effort lost in the dawn of paganism, where one entered death kicking, longing for a vague, dark God, or entering like a dog invoking some Dog…).
Some objectives of this “heroic” prose:
to glimpse the theomunculus;
to obtain the apparatus for measuring “godliness” in earthly things.
7
According to Descartes, the place of a body is known according to its situation in relation to the nearest bodies. This reasoning is based on the confidence offered by geometry. (Pascal did not have such confidence: he was terrified of infinite spaces because he did not perceive “his” situation in relation to those spaces.) For the poet, non-causal thinking prevails in his different attitudes.
8
(vision of the tokonoma)
He crawls. The streets of Prague stain his gray cloak with snow. He continues crawling and leaves the synagogue behind. The man from Prague crawls and writes in the snow, his frozen nails breaking the paper of the world. He writes: “I am only terribly afraid of pain.” The other, immense, clumsy, runs his hand over his icy lapel and says: “I’m not waiting for anyone, but I insist that someone has to come,” and his fingernail scrapes, scrapes. The first erases the signs in the snow, continues crawling, his body leaving a long trail, like a willow tree being whipped by a dog’s tail. The other, in the wound of the scratch, scraping, surprises an edge of the Paseo del Prado in Havana: child/sky/cat: sudden fragments. The one surrounded by high school students with snow-covered banners rummages, creating an infinite void, the frozen forest; while the one in Havana, among tables piled with books, scratches at the wall with his fingernail, the plaster falling like a piece of the shell of the celestial turtle, he continues scratching, he sees that the other, there in Prague, is crawling, his hard insect shell scraping the snow from the sky, howling, both of them howling…
