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Ulises Lima’s books were: Manifeste électrique aux paupieres de jupes, by Michel Bulteau, Matthieu Messagier, Jean-Jacques Faussot, Jean-Jacques Nguyen That, and Gyl Bert-Ram-Soutrenom F.M., and other poets of the Electric Movement, our French counterparts (I think). Sang de satin, by Michel Bulteau. Nord d’été naître opaque, by Matthieu Messagier. The books Arturo Belano was carrying were: Le parfait criminel, by Alain Jouffroy. Le pays où tout est permis, by Sophie Podolski. Cent mille milliards de poèmes, by Raymond Queneau.
Later we met up with Ernesto San Epifanio, who was also carrying three books. I asked him to let me make a note of them. They were: Little Johnny’s Confession, by Brian Patten. Tonight at Noon, by Adrian Henri. The Lost Fire Brigade, by Spike Hawkins.
Our situation (as far as I could understand) is unsustainable, trapped as we are between the reign of Octavio Paz and the reign of Pablo Neruda. In other words, between a rock and a hard place.
Then I read William Burroughs until dawn.
Don Crispín gave me Ocnos, by Cernuda, and urged me to study it, because Cernuda was also a poet with a difficult disposition.
All poets, even the most avant-garde, need a father. But these poets were meant to be orphans. He never came back.
He had some Peruvian friends who gave him work occasionally, a group of Peruvian poets, probably poets in name only, since as everyone knows living in Paris wears you down and erodes your vocation if it isn’t ironclad.
At the time I was reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and everything I saw or did only heightened my sense of vulnerability. I remember that I got sick and spent a few days in bed and Claudia, always so perceptive, took the Tractatus away and hid it in Daniel’s room, giving me instead one of the novels that she liked to read, The Endless Rose, by a Frenchman called J.M.G. Arcimboldi.
humanity, as we well knew, was a conglomeration of weaknesses.
He had the look of an intense, serious, distrustful, violent person, which is to say, nobody you would associate with poetry, although I know perfectly well that there’ve been poets who were intense and serious and distrustful and even violent,
Mexican literature, probably more than any other Latin American literature, was like that, a strict sect.
If the numbers wouldn’t come to me, I’d go after them in their den and drag them out by hook or by crook.
Quetzalcoatl’s ship, the nighttime fever of some boy or girl, Captain Ahab’s encephalogram or the whale’s, the surface of the sea that for sharks is the enormous mouth of hell, the ship without a sail that might also be a coffin, the paradox of the rectangle, the rectangle of consciousness, Einstein’s impossible rectangle (in a universe where rectangles are unthinkable),
At night we used to write. He was writing a novel and I was writing my journal and poetry and a movie script. We would write facing each other and drink lots of cups of tea. We weren’t writing for publication but to understand ourselves better or just to see how far we could go.
When she got back from work we would talk for a while, but what did a man of letters and a mailwoman have to say to each other? I would talk about what I’d written, what I was planning to write: a commentary on Manuel Machado, a poem on the Holy Spirit, an essay taking its first sentence from Unamuno: Spain hurts me too. She would talk about the streets she’d been on and the letters she’d delivered. She talked about stamps, some of them very rare, and the faces she’d seen in her long morning carrying letters.
one day the Peruvian might write pages of revolting propaganda and the next day an almost illegible essay on Octavio Paz full of flattery and praise of the Mexican poet. For a Maoist, that showed a certain lack of seriousness. It wasn’t consistent. Actually, the Peruvian had always been hopeless as an essayist, it didn’t matter if he was playing spokesman of the dispossessed or extolling Paz’s poetry.
“The Vampire,” by Octavio Paz, translated by Samuel Beckett, from Anthology of Mexican Poetry,
