ESSAYS

As an adolescent girl, I thought I inhabited a landscape refracted in another landscape. In the first, I was inarticulate, struck mute. In the second, I had a language and a story and a history born of legend. This other place was peopled by young women like and unlike me—reticent and rebellious, rattled and undaunted, good and beleaguered.

I must have imagined this because I lived as if it were true. There was my life story—an Hispanic girl born in Santa Fe in 1961, descendant of Spanish conquistadores, well-taught to speak proper English, follow the rules of the Catholic Church, and behave modestly at all times. Our particular plot of land was a one-bath, two-bedroom, brown stucco house on San Ildefonso Road. Like other families, we cultivated turtles and pet dogs, ping-pong tables and tether-ball sets in the back yard. Six siblings laughed and spat in English. Now and then we’d hear our parents and maternal grandmother speak Spanish on the kitchen phone to a friend or relative of their generation. We snacked on peanut butter sandwiches, warm tortillas, potato chips, and chicharrones. We ate pecan pie and sweet cow’s tongue empanaditas during the holidays. Our report cards were filled with E’s and O’s and A’s.

Then, as they do, coincidence and bad luck cruised down San Ildefonso Road in the form of a white Chevy and a Shell gas station patch on a shirt pocket. I parked my blue bike and hesitantly approached the driver-man who was asking for directions. In that blue lightning I fell through the roof and floor of my story. Into the other ones.

Talk backwards. There is this edge

Of course, I had not lived in an historical vacuum. The knowledge and force of opportunity, greed, brutal ignorance, predation, and violence are borne on the bones of our ancestors. It was simply that I had not felt them, hadn’t known them yet. And then, how much would I have believed, having grown up with the ancestral privileges of Hispanic people in the southwest? What happened to me, victim of a pedophile when I was seven years old, laid the bones bare. I saw into the perforated worlds and forever considered myself “other.”

And so I turned to secret journals and daydreams and poetry. Better these than the terror of being in one’s own body, of being seen to be in it, duped again. And so the poems (from then until now) did not and do not narrate that girl-child’s story nor the story of ping-pong tables, family dinners, first holy wafers. Impossible. They go through the roof, through the floor--where the metaphors are.

This is why, sixteen years later, Joy Harjo’s She Had Some Horses thundered into my life with such remarkable force.

...Now, (as we move forward in poetic time) let’s shift from Romanticism to Modernism, and toward the poem (and image, for that matter) as artifact. The image is important in Modernism for a host of reasons and, depending on the particular movement, from Surrealism to Imagism. But there is a great deal of emphasis on the work of the image, in Modernism, and this work strikes me as iconic (i.e., sacred). Let me start with the idea of metaphor.

When a (the image) represents b (a correlative), it rises. If it’s not to the altar of a religious figure, then let’s say it’s to a pedestal—from mental image to representation: likened to something other, larger than itself. There is reverence, the gesture which poetry knows inherently—an attitude of respect and awe.

According to García Lorca, metaphor was composed of two elements—the “form” and the “radius of action:

A central nucleus and the perspective surrounding it. The nucleus opens like a flower, startling us with its strangeness. But within the radius of light we learn the name of the flower and get to know its perfume.” (Deep Song 65).

The nucleus is the image as metaphor, the “radius” the aureole of light that allows this strange knowledge and intimacy with the image. Here are two from his “Ballad of the Moon Moon” (translated from the Spanish by Christopher Maurer):

Here, we learn that the moon, with its shadows and shapes, can indeed look like a figure, that the wind can be sharp and hard—we come to know the “nucleus” of the images (the moon and wind) better. But there is much much more, the strangeness of the ideas that the moon is female, adorned with spiky ears of grain and fragrant with ointment, and that the wind (also female) is Amazonian, lewd and pure and dangerous. In this we see the metaphor resonate and radiate. It is reverent, radiant. From Ezra Pound’s famous “Petals on a wet, black bough” (Norton 750) to Robert Frost’s oven bird (Norton 702) to Millay’s “Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe” (Norton 796), we see the image’s reverence for the thing it represents.

In High Modernism, we also see an emphasis on allusion, the power of the image to refer not only outside itself, but to a particular reference and, often, to references inherent in the allusion—a kind of double representation. And the French Symbolists had a wide range of influence in Modernism, honoring the image with its power to evoke a deep and complex nest of meanings. In this, we see the image working even more expansively, radiating like an aureole.

But the image can do even more than metaphor, more than represent. For example, take a look at the famous beginning of Eliot’s “Prufrock:”

Here, the image as simile stretches the bounds of representation. Eliot’s evening is spread out “against the sky” like an etherized patient. So evening does not equal sky, here, but spreads itself out on it “like” a patient. What is evoked is the sensation of evening as human and, strangely, numb. The reader sees the atmosphere and time of day, at some distance, and yet it resonates inside (as a sensation) because the patient, like the reader, feels through the body. Even so, that body is hauntingly numb, devoid of physical feeling. Notice how the “resembling” is quite complex, here, beyond any equation.

When the image represents, in this way, García Lorca and his “deep image” come clearly to mind again. The image has a mighty and profound glow, and representation moves beyond what the human mind can know and analyze. And thus we return to the image as icon.

For Lorca, the deep image moves beyond metaphor. Here’s an excerpt from his “Sleepwalking Ballad” (again, translated by Maurer):

I [can only] tell you that I saw [those tambourines] in the hands of angels and trees, but I will not be able to say more; certainly I cannot explain their meaning. And that is the way it should be. By means of poetry a man more rapidly approaches the cutting edge that the philosopher and the mathematician turn away from in silence. (Deep Song 111-123).

The philosopher, unable to analyze the image, and the mathematician, unable to compute its meaning, must fall away from rational thought. It confounds them. Maurer, in his introduction to Lorca’s Collected Poems reflects on the same image thus:

It is lines like these that metaphor crosses paths with the Creationist image. A new phenomenon—the “crystal tambourines”—seems to have been added to nature. A riddle, both auditory and visual, seems to have been posed. Are the “tambourines” the stars? Rain? Perhaps the silvery leaves of poplars or olive trees. The crystalline sound of running water, “wounding” the otherwise silent dawn? We are staring at the ghost of an analogy, a sort of poetic trompe l’oeil: a riddle unable to yield a convincing solution. The reader—the reader Lorca wanted to have in 1928—responds with faith rather than reason. (García lx-lxi)

Notice the phrases that Maurer uses: a riddle unable to yield a convincing solution, a reader who must respond with faith rather than reason. There is an act of reverence that happens, with the deep image, an act of faith.

It’s worth addressing Creacionismo, or Creationism, the poetic movement mentioned above. Creacionismo was a South American artistic movement (originating with Vicente Huidobro of Chile 1893-1948) that rebelled against representational art. According to Huidobro, the poet’s role is not to imitate nature, but to create another kind. In his “Ars Poetica” he wrote, “The poet is a little God” (Twentieth 118). He argued: “Let us make poems as nature makes a tree, “I have the right to want to see a flower that walks or a flock of sheep crossing a rainbow” (García liv). Here’s a passage from Huidobro’s “Altazor” (translated by Eliot Weinberger):

The work of the Creacionismo writers, like Huidobro, allows the image to move beyond the bounds of representation (symbol and metaphor) to the image as creator, without verisimilitude. The poem (“violaceous violin”) performs the sacred act of originating, of calling into being.

Lorca was influenced by other 20^th century avant-garde movements including Surrealism, Ultraism, and Futurism—some at the heart of Modernism, others on the edge of postmodernism. In all, it’s apparent that there is a powerful belief in the work of the image—its ability to radiate is enormous and thus extremely reverent.

In Surrealism, the image invites us into the realms of the irrational and subconscious; it is able to make those realities manifest. The image (whether metaphorical or not) has the power to create a more complete and true universe of experience. Here’s an excerpt from Andre Breton’s “Postman Cheval,” translated by David Gascoyne:

We are the birds always charmed by you from the top of these belvederes
And that each night form a blossoming branch between your shoulders

and the arms of your well beloved wheelbarrow
Which we tear out swifter than sparks at your wrist
We are the sighs of the glass statue that raises itself on its elbow when man sleeps
And shining holes appear in his bed
Holes through which stags with coral antlers can be seen in a glade
And naked women at the bottom of a mine (Breton)

Notice how the image attaches itself to what the logical or conscious mind might consider apart or other—a bed with shining holes behind which stags in a glade and women deep in mines can be viewed. Here is integration, a force toward wholeness or completion that confounds western systems of categorization and schism. The image (indeed as icon) performs the sacred task of creation and then restoration.

Ultraismo, or Ultraism, the movement Jorge Luis Borges brought to Argentina from Spain (in 1921) argued for the poetic “commitment to ‘the greatest independence’ for the metaphor as a ‘primordial’ mode of knowledge and connotation” (Twentieth 13).

“The greatest contribution from the ultraist movement was a new treatment of metaphor, also called "image", without the habitual nexus of the classic metaphor…In Argentina Jorge Luis Borges was prominent especially for his work in diffusing the movement along with Oliverio Girondo…” (Padín)

In his poems, Borges (according to Stephen Tapscott) “vividly reinvents Buenos Aires and the pampas as resonant oneiric metaphors outside the field of traditional cause and effect” (Twentieth 13):

Here, somewhat like Surrealism, the image has the ability to establish a continuity between air, water, and earth. It is an impulse toward the primordial mud (so to speak)—that which precedes human consciousness and then encompasses it. The speaker enters this “dark friendliness” which returns him/her to the “crossway” of eternity, that which precedes and follows. A sacred space.

"Diversity, Understanding, & Reconciliation in Santa Fe"

Valerie Martínez, Santa Fe Poet Laureate

Published in La Voz de Nuevo Mexico

March 24, 2008

Yesterday, as I drove to my office at the College of Santa Fe, I realized that I almost always take the same route from home to office, so much so that my body leans left and right, forward and back, and so habitually that the path must be ingrained into muscles of my body. On the way, I see the same daily bicyclers and morning runners, the same train tracks, the same horizon of townhouses on Zia Road. At work my days are routine, for the most part, and I interact with many of the same people each day.

All of this changes on Fridays and Saturdays, when I travel to Cuba, Torreon, and Ojo Encino, New Mexico to collaborate with public school students and a large group of community residents. Twice a week, eight artists from Santa Fe and Albuquerque (part of a Littleglobe, Inc. team) travel to the Cuba area to partner with “ordinary people” to create art. Driving to the Cuba area, I cross several county lines and drive through some of New Mexico’s most magnificent landscapes—lizard-shaped earth formations in red and brown, pale-beige mesas, the unfolding llano. And, in the process, I cross all sorts of invisible lines, too.

Cuba is a town of 9,000 with a largely Hispanic population. Even so, Cuba High School, where we work on Friday mornings, is about 80% Navajo, serving the outlying areas—Torreon, Counselor, Ojo Encino—and their largely Navajo populations. On Saturdays, I gather with 45 people across the geographical, socio-economic, ethnic, and generational lines that usually divide us. There are children ages 6-11, high school students, 20-30-somethings, and others aged 40-75. We are White, Navajo, Hispanic, Pueblo, Irish, Black, Japanese-American, and Mixed-Blood/Mestizo. Most have lived in the area for their entire lives. Many moved to the area many years ago. Few know each other very well.

It is safe to say that every one of us, in this gathering, has taken a risk to be together. And it’s intimidating, sometimes. I feel the force of history upon me, both pride in my Spanish ancestry and the historical reality of Spanish oppression and violence. I feel embarrassed when I answer a Spanish-speaking native in my half-fluent Spanglish. I’m afraid to offend the Navajo elders in the group, not knowing enough about Navajo etiquette. I make mistakes.

But, with time, fellowship does happen. We sit next to each other, eat together, sing, paint, write, laugh. Now, two and a half months into a five month project, we are just beginning to have conversations about some of the historical and contemporary tensions and issues that divide us. We are beginning to understand each other. It was not possible before this moment; we had to give each other time..

Back home in Santa Fe, I see that we, too, are struggling with the invisible lines of language, culture, socio-economics, ethnicity, and history that separate us. We grow increasingly diverse and, often, increasingly separate. We sometimes feel like strangers to each other, in our own home town. At the least, we feel isolated; at the most, hostile.

Because of this, and because most Santa Feans express their desire to bring our community together, we are going to have to take some risks. We need to step off the beaten path, walk across invisible lines, and spend some time with people we don’t know. It will be intimidating. We will make mistakes. It will take time. But I believe this is the first step in moving our complex, deeply-layered, and diverse city toward fellowship, understanding, and reconciliation. Si se puede.

Valerie Martínez