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Exaltation of Light, Poems by Homero Aridjis, translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger. (BOA Editions, Brockport, New York, 1981. US$4.95. ISBN 0-918526-29-9. Distributed by the New York State Small Press Association, P.O.Box 1264, Radio City Station, New York NY 10101, USA.

     A number of years ago, whilst visiting a friend in Mexico City, I became intrigued by the the display, on street corners, of local tabloids. These papers invariably carried front page photographs, close up and exact, of corpses on tiled mortuary slabs - either the victims, or perpetrators, of the latest violence. My friend shrugged, amused at my reaction. He was probably right. Had I forgotten that the Festival of the Dead was still performed each year by millions of enthusiastic participants. Did I not know that the number of homicides was largely obscured by the official statistics. Only a few months earlier his wife’s brother had had to move from his province for fear of reprisals by an acquaintance whose sister he had too admiringly looked at during a party. Such threats, in Mexico, are not to be ignored. And neither is such a preoccupation, it would seem, with death. For in those cold tabloid stares, fixed forever by a mortuary’s cosmetician, surely there was recognition of an audience, an audience not unlike those invisible ancestors of Aridjis, crossing and crisscrossing the concreted walks of the city that had once been canals lost in willows beneath the gleaming sacrificial temples. And in these poems of Aridjis, if I am not mistaken, there is, particularly in the title sequence, more than the occasional attempt to outstare that inherited obsession with mortality and the cold mortuary slab, by replacing its blood and shadows with the water that speaks in pure clarity and the time that runs above the quiet light and that towers white over the weightless city.

     The majority of the poems in this volume are garnered between the opening Exaltation of Light sequence and New Fire (based largely on Sahagun’s descriptions in his History) with which the collection closes. The sequence Exaltation of Light is very much what its title suggests, an exaltation of light, and an exaltation of all things in their progress towards the infinite. And that light seems to have its source firmly in the Judaic/Christian sense of transcendence. Or should I say ascension; for to perceive this light the poet dies/his heart wakes/in a dream of space/free of the splendours/of the body and its ruins. The poem appears to locate itself between the spirituality of this light and the materiality of the body and the world. At one perfect moment of equipoise it produces this:-

There are beings that are more image than matter
more look than body

so immaterial we love them
scarcely wanting to touch them with words

from childhood we look for them
more in dreams than in the flesh

and always at the tongue’s tip
the morning’s light seems to say them

and at another moment :-

And being of the substance of the mystery
our being opens its eyes
to see the sacred immensity

space
enters our soul
at the moment we see it

while the sun
sends its rays out
over the obstinate clouds of the ephemeral

All in all it produces too little of the former and too much, for my liking, of the latter elevated kind of writing which fails to convincingly ‘consecrate’ the objects which it moves among as poetry, as that visible poem the eyes behold in a universe of trembling light.

Towards the end of the book the New Fire section sets down in impeccably detailed prose a sacred Aztec Fire Ceremony, where the anointed is led, inebriated, to the sacrifice, the adobe houses stained with bloody shadows. As he is offered up to Huitzilopochtli the priest spins the fire stick in his open wound:-

The wound is luminous, resplendent. Flames
flare in his chest. His body, living red, is
transparent, like a box of crystal lit from
within.

This is the other light, the other fire clean, mysterious, golden, shining that Aridjis acknowledges, that erupts through the body, that is sustained by it. A pre-Columbian rather than a Christian energy. And it is here, perhaps, in this tension between the twin fertilities of Mexico, between the extreme earth dominated inspiration of the Indian in which all the earthly bodies had their divinity, and European Christianity where a singular deity had taken great pains to remove himself from and place himself above those idolatrous bodies, that Aridjis’ poetry can be most profitably read.

In his desire to sing the body and to pull song from rock Aridjis seems, to me, often to sing a little too high or a little too low; and to miss that point (that Machado, for example, often succeeds in realizing in such poems as Ante el palido lienzo de la tarde) where the materiality of the body and the world unfolds revealing a meaning which ‘transcends’ them. Sometimes Aridjis’ poems seem held down by the weight of the particular; and then, particularly in the Exaltation of Light sequence, they seem to rise so quickly that there is not enough left of it. Too seldom do they, as in Window; Landscape; My Father; Signs; The Road; Lovers; Letter from Mexico; The Dead of the Revolution; Burn the Bodies and in Popocatepetl (that snowy volcano that loomed over all of the old Tenochtitlan), achieve such poise that the eye and mind seem to act as in unison:-

The mountain floats over time
like crystallized thought

white over the valley
the days don’t seem to move it

not the days that made it nor those
that will bring it down

Instead, as in the Sun set poem, they frequently embrace the object in an act that, for me at least, rather than bringing it to life leaves its potential unrealised:-

Sun set
through the window I see
grey surrendering to night
and shadows singing
in the diapason of black

A sombre fountain
darkens and bathes me
with large wet rays
speaking words
I dazzle in blackness

- the intuitive momentum of diapason of black squandered by that last line which re-routes it into self-conscious artifice. An embrace which, also, in some of the poems that draw upon the Aztec cosmogony, produces a woodenness in the inspiration, an inertness:-

The great father fell

from his head came
cold blues

and from his hands
white rivers of day

his eyes were flung
against land and seas
eagles jaguars and night

and in the air remained
his heart of all

the great father fell

(The great father fell)

I suspect it is, though, my enduring fascination with that country of high snow-capped cordilleras and foetid malarial lowlands which softens, somewhat, my dissatisfaction with these poems - as poems. For to me, despite their deficiencies, they summon up a complexity of belief and feeling (albeit often unresolved) which is identifiably Mexican and which Aridjis has absorbed from his country’s tempestuous patrimony - and which these translations by Eliot Weinberger (of two published volumes plus a number of previously unpublished poems) make eminently clear.