Username or email addressOctober 18: in the Mayan calendar the year had 18 months and the Pyramid of Kukulkan, in Chicen-Itzá, has nine double terraces that add up to 18. Octavio Paz was there in 1937, 77 years ago.The poet with the soul of an astronomer who was Octavio Paz would have liked to know what date this October 18 (second day of the II International Festival of Mayan Culture) corresponds to in the ancient Mayan calendar as well as what forces were concentrated during the two moons —65 days—that he was here.October 18: day that in my calendar corresponds to the feast of Saint Luke, writer, doctor and, like me, evangelist.It is an appropriate day for offerings.October 18: I do not come here before you, to this Great Hall of History of the Government Palace, to fulfill a profane official job or assignment.Rather, I come to give a personal and filial testimony, to try to honor and enliven the memory, the remembrance of an extraordinary and exceptional person —he was one of those intelligences that only rarely occur in a country every century— and who touched me lucky to meet and treat from 1974 to 1998, almost 25 years.This October 18 I still come to give an obol for that debt.When I met Paz in 1974, I was 22 years old, the same years he was when he came to Yucatan, and Paz was sixty;We both returned from a long trip, or he from that odyssey that had taken more than twenty and that had begun precisely here, in Yucatan, in the spring of 1937, to later take him to Valencia, Madrid, Paris, Mexico, San Francisco, France again, India, Japan, Switzerland, Mexico, France, India —where he met Marie José Paz and where he resigned from the embassy in 1968—, England, the United States, France, Mexico.Octavio Paz was the poet, author and essayist of The Labyrinth of Solitude, The Arch and the Lira, Sun Stone, East Hill, The Grammar Monkey, Quadrivio, Conjunctions and Disjunctions;the friend of Rafael Alberti, Pablo Neruda, Alfonso Reyes, Jorge Cuesta, José Gorostiza, Carlos Pellicer, André Malraux, André Breton, Robert Frost, Julio Cortázar, Blanca Varela, Luis Rosales, Tamayo, los Revueltas, Efraín Huerta: the man in his century that he shared with this one, the illusions and disappointments of the Revolution and history, the fireworks of the avant-garde.I, the son of Jesús Castañón Rodríguez, born in 1916, had just returned from a one-year trip through Europe and the Middle East that I most likely did with my own means and in which I had made a pilgrimage to Greece, Israel, Turkey, Italy, France , Spain, 22 years old, poor, young, bold.There was a current of sympathy.Octavio Paz was in Yucatan for 65 days, from March 11 to May 15, 1937. When he left, he was twenty-two years old and, when he returned, twenty-three, which he would fulfill in that foothill of Mexico adjoining, on one side, the Caribbean , and, on the other, with the deep past of Mexican history: that cenote where the limpid waters of the Mayan civilization merge, the rocks of the colony and the desert plain that recalls certain places in India, as Marie José knows Peace and Elsa Cross.He left as a teacher of an official secondary school in the company of his friends Octavio Novaro and Ricardo Cortés Tamayo, the latter carrying a credential that identified him as a member of the Communist Party in which he was a member, like José Revueltas and Efraín Huerta, also friends of Octavio Paz.It was the first time that the young poet took a plane;it was an old plane from the Mexicana de Aviación company in which he landed after long and noisy hours that left him almost deaf and it was also the first time he had been absent for so long from his house, now half empty.His father had died on the fateful afternoon of March 11, 1935, torn to pieces by a train, a year and three days before the trip.The young Paz was overwhelmed and oppressed by Mexico City, despite the fact that he parted with her, a girlfriend with whom he was dangerously in love (Elena, the theosophist Garro's daughter), despite also the fact that he had published in September 1936 a poem entitled They will not pass!and that shortly after he had published a book of exalted love poems Raíz del hombre.If the first poem had been applauded by his communist friends and had traveled the world and arrived in Spain, it had also been received with disdainful coldness by the poets of the Contemporary magazine (in a note "Poetry and rhetoric", signed with the initials of his pseudonym Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, in number 1 of Letras de México, without quoting Octavio Paz by name, underlined certain coincidences between Paz's poem and Pablo Neruda's “Galope muerto”).Paz Lozano felt uncomfortable in the tense literary city of that time.In a certain way, the city unfolded in him, his loyalties were divided: on the one hand, towards his left-wing militant friends;on the other, towards his teachers and, in the long run, his tutors.The young Paz had recently been accepted by that closed circle of the Mexican intellectual aristocracy of those years, known by the name of "Contemporáneos": Xavier Villaurrutia, Carlos Pellicer, Jorge Cuesta, Salvador Novo, Jaime Torres Bodet, José Gorostiza, Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano… supporters, all of them, of the Republican side in the imminent Civil War in Spain;all of them more or less critical of Marxism and of the prevailing official revolutionary discourse in that Mexico governed by Lázaro Cárdenas, almost all of them critics forced to roam the outskirts of Cardenismo.Octavio Paz was surely uncomfortable with this situation.The stormy relations with his girlfriend and his family did not help the serenity of the young poet.Hence, when he finally got off the plane, and had recovered from the trip, he had the feeling of waking up from a long dark dream.He woke up in Mérida like someone coming out of a long station.The two-month trip (two long moons) to Yucatan would be drawn in the memory as a privileged cycle and in which, in a certain way, his destiny and trajectory would be miniaturized.Those eight weeks would represent a mandala-moment, a talisman-pause in which the different threads of his subsequent itinerary would intertwine.Lázaro Cárdenas governed Mexico, whose revolutionary government had organized some educational missions.Naturally, Paz would join them.However, let us remember that we are in Mexico, although the trip was flagged by the banner of President Cárdenas, the three young missionary writers would be forced to face difficulties with that bureaucracy that was, in more ways than one, municipal;the mystique of those three musketeers, as Efraín Huerta would describe them, would collide with the suspicion of the local professors, who saw the residents of the capital with evasive eyes.This initial journey was a journey of initiation;There he would begin, to say it with Paz, an Itinerary that would take him first to Valencia, Spain, Madrid and Paris in 1938, to San Francisco in 1945, again to Paris in December of that same year, and from Paris to a planetary climb: India, Tokyo, Geneva, Paris, Mexico, United States, Paris, India, Afghanistan;parallel to the odyssey in verse and prose that his work completes, which ranges from poem to essay, from translation to political criticism, from lyrical vignette to philosophical, critical and historical essay, from Piedra de sol to Mono grammático, from The bow and the lyre to The children of slime.The young poet who landed in Mérida in March 1937 had read Aldous Huxley and DH Lawrence —whose work was not literature for him, but a kind of prophetic vision that he himself shared and even practiced, as he would confess later—, Paul Valéry , to André Malraux, —whom he would soon meet in Valencia—, to André Gide, whose ideas and positions critical of the Soviet Union were familiar to him —although he still did not share them— although they were the subject of conversation between those writers older than him and who, in a way, had adopted the young poet who had lost his father a year ago;Paz had some readings under his arm, medieval Spanish poetry and the work of TS Eliot, particularly The Hollow Men.The trip to Yucatan has for this young writer, who has already been in full possession of his critical and poetic faculties for some years, the premonitory value of a magical season, a talisman-moment, an ulterior vision shaped later, for example , in The Labyrinth of Solitude, as shown in these “Notes” dated here, in Mérida, 77 years ago:I got off the plane slightly dazed.A dense wave of hot air greets me.Suddenly, touching ground again —a land that is not yet “mainland”— I also touch another ground, close and endearing: I submerge, as if wrapped in a secret and invisible wave, in the warmest childhood.How to associate this fiery atmosphere with the mist of childhood?How to recognize in this cruel mist, in this dry nudity, a soft breath, a murmuring river of memories?I don't know, but for an instant the summer afternoons in the Valley of Mexico, the bright and warm middays of the school, spring up inside me.I don't know.The truth is that it exists and that, once again, I am a terrestrial man and not a man of clouds and air.A man besieged by the land that greets me and the past that recovers me, surrounded by violence and a nature that he rejects.So I get in the car.The asphalt, clean and steely, shows off a restrained splendor that ranges from gray to violet.The city is at this time a beautiful light that crosses the streets and ends in a mysterious place, of which I still do not know except the tremor and the recondite freshness.And all the streets, it is sensed, lead the light to the same place.But, first, the light touches a resplendent wall, makes swords sprout from a balcony, vibrates through the atmosphere... It is not a city made of volumes but of the play of light in the air and on the facades, wandering in a street, wounding a vegetable green;the traveler feels, from the beginning (and this feeling is confirmed every day), that the city is nothing more than a calculated dance of colors, the place where colors rest, the fruit and substance of colors.Warm, timid colors of Mérida, rising from white, like a faint vapor, to pink, to cream, to the tender green of dawn.On the way, a mestizo crosses a corner, in the uninhabited atmosphere of three in the afternoon.Like a fresh flash of lightning, a vivid and sudden flash, full of white nakedness, of unexpected and candid freshness.However, it is not the sweet flame of the rebozo, nor the calm beauty of the huipil, that is moving.With this meeting I am confronted, for the first time, with a frequent and daily event in Yucatan: the presence of the indigenous, their reiterated and always decisive influence on social life.In reality, every attempt at compression starts from this meeting, every effort to get closer to what really moves the peninsula.Here what is indigenous does not mean the case of a culture capable of surviving, precariously and distressingly, in the face of the West, but rather that of the enduring and extraordinarily vital traits of a race that stains and invades with its spirit the superficial white physiognomy of a society.Mérida is a Spanish town, stately and slow.The tourist guides treat it as a “romantic capital”.The single-story, low, and spacious houses have a vegetable garden, a windmill, and moist soil brought from other places.Everything is human work: here fertility is a victory of man against dryness and harshness.At night, the city gasps;leaning out of balconies or at doors, the girls talk and their voices are like a deep river, like the dark premonition of water.Sometimes a weather vane moans dully.From a silent street grows a tumult of iron and stone and a penetrating smell of sweaty lips and limbs: a carriage crosses.At this time there is, despite the breeze that pushes the nearby sea, a drowning that oppresses and enraptures;a hidden, enclosed, contained, ferociously secret and shackled sexual life is guessed.Let us remember the beautiful pages of Cernuda about the romantic Andalusia.Cádiz: the same construction, solid and airy at the same time;the same seduction, made of horror and delight;the same nocturnal panting, desperate, warm.In the nights of Mérida, man sinks into feudal life.The word maiden has a dramatic, tense meaning.We know the secret of sighs, the violence of a perfume, the power of certain words, the nocturnal fear of children.There is a heaving chest, an obscure word, unpronounceable, behind every door, every balcony.We know that this world, as charming as it may seem to us, will disappear.That the unspoken word will be said.That a new life, a beautiful and clean life, will rescue the woman from all this and will make clear the almost supernatural relationships of man and woman, free from anguish and shadows.As the days go by, the social composition of the city is discovered.Not only are there classes divided by misery and servitude, but there is also a proud caste architecture, impenetrable and rigid.It is not just the poverty of clothes, as in Europe, nor cleanliness (everyone is neat and prodigiously white) that distinguishes men from each other.No, it is not the cut of the suit, the quality of the clothing, or even the culture, that truly separates men, but the earnings... And the color of the skin, which in Yucatan and Mexico still plays an important role. in the distribution of profits.Powerful families, with a caste spirit (wonderful creole families who speak enthusiastically of German racism) and who refuse any mixture of blood, proudly preside over the exclusive life of society.But these people, so careful about the purity of their blood, so cruelly hostile to the indigenous, speak the Mayan language.The necessities of the trade force them to use the same language spoken by those whom they exploit and reject.But it's not just the language.The entire social subsoil is deeply penetrated by the Maya;in all the acts of life it springs up suddenly: in a tender custom, in a gesture whose origin is unknown, in the predilection for a color or a shape.Taste, the sum of hobbies and repulsions, in what is most refined and genuinely aristocratic, is maya.The sweetness of treatment, sensitivity, kindness, neat and easy courtesy, is maya.It seems that from the Spanish legacy these people (not the middle class that, in spite of everything, preserves, as in the whole country, a content and sober decorum, always on the verge of being shipwrecked) only inherited rigidity, hardness.There are days when everything, for an instant, collapses;the city takes off its mask and, naked, reveals its lively guts, brave and silent: the great days of life in the streets, the days of strikes and rallies.There are days when the countryside takes over the city;indigenous and mestizo then give Mérida its true character.The white city becomes even whiter.The workers give it meaning, dignify it, show what is true.There is a word that alone says everything that Yucatan is: henequen.The life of the peninsula and that of the city.Also the death of many poor peasants, of entire communities of indigenous people.Monoculture (which has made Yucatan a region with its own characteristics) has given the peasant class, along with dispossession and hunger, national and racial cohesion, a sense of their destiny.But when the big landowners talk about the notes that single out the economy and peninsular life and shout the need to yucatanize Yucatan, we know that what they really want is free hands to sell the land and its products to imperialism.The landowners, they who are the same as everyone else on the globe, nationalists, regionalists!In this sense, and at this time, it seems to me deeply anti-dialectical to raise, in an abstract way, the question of "oppressed nationalities".The only true originality, the only expressive richness, with value and human and national reach (typical, let's say, to use the word) is what imprints the Mayan on the population.The language and customs, the autonomous accent in short (it does indeed have a national Yucatan accent, and it is not simply a nuance, as unique as you like, of the Mexican nation) is Mayan.And the maya is precisely what the great feudal exploiters reject with the greatest horror.Mérida, the modern city, sweet and clear, is henequen.Life.The death of the peasants.Here, as in all capitalist regimes, what is fulfilled is that man lives from the death of man.Sometimes, at night one wakes up like on rubble and blood.The henequen, invisible and daily, presides over the awakening.Merida, Yucatan, 1937[1]The previous long quote should be interwoven with three strings: on the one hand, with the two versions that Paz made of his poem "Between the stone and the flower" such as the one from 1937 and the one from 1976, secondly with the letters written by Octavio Paz to Elena Garro;[2] thirdly, with the various quotes that Octavio Paz makes of the gods, objects and sacred places of the Mayan civilization scattered throughout his work and that are reproduced, in part, at the end in an annex.An example of this knowledge is the following page that Paz wrote in 1962 in the text “Mexico's Masterpieces in Paris”:Among the Mayans, each day was a god, bearer of a favorable, disastrous or indifferent “time load”.Thanks to an ingenious combination of the calendar, every 260 years one cycle ended and another began, always on the day Ahau (sun god).Thirteen divinities successively governed the periods of 20 years in which each cycle was divided.Obsessed by the idea of ​​time, the Mayans wanted to know where each date came from, to use its beneficial "charge" or, if it was adverse, to neutralize it through rites and sacrifices.The present and the future were the fatal result of the past: not that of men but that of the stars.On a stela there is an inscription that records a dizzying date: 400,000,000 years.It was the furthest they got in their exploration of the past.The attempt was not unreasonable: it seemed to them the only way to face the present and seize the future.That immense magical-mathematical research finally proved sterile: time is unfathomable.[3]In August 1937, shortly after Octavio Paz left the peninsula, Lázaro Cárdenas traveled to Yucatán in the company of a large retinue to ensure the Agrarian Reform in situ and to try to give reality to the ideals of the Revolution that he had glimpsed during his campaign. as president.The process of fighting against the landowners had begun beforehand and in that heated atmosphere Octavio Paz would arrive in Yucatan.The revolution could have different meanings, on the one hand, the one given to it by the cardenistas, on the other, the one seen by opponents of the regime, such as, for example, José Revueltas, two years earlier, who had sent a prisoner to the Marías Islands when He was not yet of age.In those weeks of 1937 the pages of "Between the stone and the flower" would be outlined and written, an extensive "anthem among ruins" or, as Paz would later say, "weeds among rubble", whose theme, matter and subject would accompany it as an open wound throughout his longevity.The fact that in the Complete Works he himself has proposed the inclusion of the two versions of that poem that he wrote and re-wrote over thirty-nine years shows nothing else.It is obvious that between the "Notes" cited above —which in part presage El Laberinto de la Soledad— and the poem, and the poems that follow, there are bridges, corridors, echoes, correspondences.An observation should be made in passing, relative to the meaning and the very practice of re-writing a poem… Is it possible?Its viable?Is efficient?Does it make sense beyond the cathartic?Although it is true that "The mythological foundation of Buenos Aires" has been the subject of no less than nine versions by its author, Jorge Luis Borges, does the rewriting of "Between the stone and the flower" make sense? also a foundational poem no longer of the city but of the work and the very vision of Octavio Paz?How to interpret the fact that while the first version has 218 lines, the second condenses its lesson to 199, not to mention other nuances of the enunciation?Can it be said that the poem seeks to investigate the foundations and symbolic foundation of the city, and that it occupies the place of a root in the work of Octavio Paz, that it is a root poem and that perhaps it could be subtitled “Raíz del hombre”? in Yucatan?Some poems about the sacred city of the Maya remain on the banks of the river, such as “Piedras loosees”, which I allow myself to reproduce as a kind of textual atrium before entering the double patio of “Between the stone and the flower”.the stone of daystime, stone sun;time is empty of minutes,a bird has stopped in the air.light falls,we see, if the bird is invisible,the color of its song.The rain, dancing foot and long hair,the ankle bitten by lightning,descends accompanied by drums:The corn opens its eyes and grows.Carved snake on a wallThe wall in the sun breathes, vibrates, undulates,living and tattooed piece of heaven:man drinks sun, he is water, he is earth.And over so much life the snakethat carries a head between its jaws:the gods drink blood, eat men.[4]Read first the 1937 version of “Between the stone and the flower”:In the dawn of silent poisons 1we wake up snakestwoWe wake up stones,stubborn roots,stark thirst, mineral lips.5The light in these hours is steel,It is the desert lip of contempt.If I touch my body I am hurtFever and panting of slow arid hours,miserable roots tied to the stones.elevenUnder this frozen crying lightthe henequen, motionless and furious,makes visible what moves us,the silent fury that devours us.16In his quiet anger,in the tenacious self-absorbed greenness of him,the death in which we grow becomes a swordand what grows and lives and diesSlow revenge is made on the immobile.twenty-oneWhen the light extends its domainand flood white waves to the earth,trembling white waves that blind us,and the fist of heat denies us lips,a green fire near the henequen,living wall that devours and burnsto the other fire that lives in the air.that annihilates the thirst that is reborn.30Nothing but the light.there is nothing, nothingbut the light against the raging light,where the light breaks, it bleedsin sterile waves, without foam.3. 4The water sounds.Sounds.The untouchable water in his stone tomb,no way out in his air grave.of moist humble tongue, imprisoned.The secret water in his stone tombdreams invisible in his watery grave.42At six o'clock in the afternoonthe earth raises a whitish mist.Mute birds fly, winged mud.Cruel clouds ravage the sky without shores.46But at night the water groans.and the horizon trembles in the drowning.The water moans between its black bars.Man runs from death to sleep.52The henequen watches over heaven and earth.It is the revenge of the earth,the hand of men against the sky.55What land is this?what strange violence feedsin its stony shell?what cold obstinacy,years of cold fire,a fiber, a barb?63A region that existsBefore the world raised the airits flag of fire and water its crystals;a region of stoneborn before the very rebirth of death;a region, an eyelid of fever,sleepless lipsthat endlessly runs through thirst,like the sea to the slabs on the deserted coasts.72The earth only gives its fatal flower,the lives of men.76runs a thirst for sandclimbing from blind cellars,hard layers of oblivion where time does not exist.80Furious years slow, concentrated,as unshed, hidden tear,sprouting at last gloomytearing the air, pulp, drowning,soft, invisible, suffocated flesh.After twenty-five bitter yearsraises a single flower, red and still.A sexual rod raises herand remains in the air, motionless island,petrified silent foam.91only flame of this dry hell,love that is barely born dies,arises in your rigid, naked flame,to sing, alone, your death?98on this shore that thirst illuminates,sing to the man who inhabits and populates it,sing to the man that his thirst annihilates him!To man moist and persistent as rain,man like a beautiful and outraged treethat tears his birth to tears,to man like a river through flames,like a bird like lightning.To man between his ends and the fruits of him.108The fruits of the earth are the ends of man.He mixes his swollen salt with the terrestrial saltsand that salt is more tender than the salt of the seas:Adam gave him, with his blood, his proud punishment.112to the man who lives under this bitter skin!the vast hand that populates and depopulates the earth.117The man between the ends of it!the light that visits him,his agony, stone and fire in the dust.121Between the first silence and the last,between the stone and the flower,you, the circle of tenderness that feeds the night.124where the earth is deathand from his death only deaths spring,you walk.An air pulse surrounds you,like leaking blood, like smoke,like water that forgets.131under the trembling of the tender sky,a slight step of an animal fleeing.136You walk.You sleep.you fornicateYou dance, you drink, you dream.You dream of other lips that prolong your dream.139Someone dreams of you, alone.in the thirsty dust he precipitates his ruin.142But it is not the dark rhythm of the planet,the rebirth of each day,the remorse of each night,what moves you on earth.146O money wheel,that neither touches you nor touches youand undoes you every day!149Angel of earth and dream,remote water that is ignored,oh pure beast between the hours of money,between those hours that are never ours,through those corridors of devouring tediumwhere time stops and bleeds.157The magical money!is the signal and the sign,the word and the blood,the mystery and the number,the sword and the ring.163It's the water and the dust,the rain, the bitter sun,the cloud that creates the lonely seaand the fire that consumes the air.167It is night and day:eternity alone and grimbiting its tail.170The beautiful money gives oblivion,open the doors of music,close the doors to desire.Death is not death: it is a shadow,a dream that money does not dream.175The magical money!On your bones it rises,on the bones of men it rises.178You pass like a flower through this sterile hell,made only of chained time,mechanical race, empty wheelthat squeezes us and uninhabits us,and dries our blood,and the place of tears kills us.185Because money is infinite and creates infinite deserts.186Give me, invisible flame, cold sword,to end it all.192Burn, gloomy, burn without flames,shoreless desert.196Burn in the vast sky, slab and cloud,under the blind light that collapsesbetween barren rocks.199Burn in the loneliness that undoes us,of frozen and thirsty roots.202as the powerless sea begets clouds,waves like rancor and stony foams.207Between my delirious bones, it burns;burns inside the hollow air,it burns as it burns in time,how time walks between death,with his own footsteps and his breath;burn in yourself, burning without flame,loneliness without image, thirst without lips.215to end it all.218Contrast with the one written more than thirty years later:We wake up stones.1Nothing but the light.There is nothingbut light against light.3palm of a stone hand.5in his chalky tomb.that says nothing.10The earth raises a steam.Brown birds fly, winged mud.a few blown clouds.14Henequen, green index,Sky without shores.18What land is this?under its stony shell,what obstinacy of already cold fire,years and years like saliva that accumulatesand hardens and sharpens into spikes?24A region that existsbefore the sun and the watera region of stonecreated before double birthof life and death.30In the plain the plant is implantedfacing the spinning sun and nomadic clouds.3. 4The henequen, green and self-absorbed,sprouts in wide and triangular stalks:is a supplier of vegetable cutlasses.Henequen is an armed plant.38A thirst for sand rises through its fibers.It comes from the realms below,push up and jumpturned into a hostile plume,greenery that ends in points.Visible form of invisible thirst.Four. FiveThe agave is truly admirable:its violence is stillness, symmetry its stillness.47His thirst makes the liquor that quenches him:it is a still that distills itself.49After twenty-five yearsraises a flower, red and unique.A sexual rod raises her,Then he dies.54Between the stone and the flower, the man:the birth that leads us to death,death that leads to birth.57on the stone persistent rainand river between flamesand flower that defeats the hurricaneand bird similar to the brief lightning:man between his fruits and his works.63green geometry lessonon the white and ocher earth.It is a perennial plant and it is a fiber,it is a share in the stock market and it is a sign.time wasted.72Thirst and the plant,the plant and the man,the man, his works and his days.75For centuries upon centuriesyou go round and roundwith a stubborn trot of a human animal:your days are long as yearsand from year to year your days mark the passage;not the banker's watch nor the leader's watch:the sun is your patron,from sunrise to sunset is your dayand your salary is sweat,daily dewthat in your daily ordealbecomes a transparent crown- even if your face is not printedin no veronica canvasnot even the one in the photoof the boss on dutyyour face is the spent sun of the penny,you speak a language they don't speakthose who speak of you from their pulpitsand swear by your name in vain,the guardians of your future,the executors of your bones:your speech is a tree of water roots,subterranean River System Of The Spirit,and your words go -barefoot, on tiptoe-from one silence to another silence;14715215716216516716817017517717918418719419619922-23.