Residencia en la tierra I: Pablo Neruda and the Tyranny of Despair

This is another in a series of essays on the poetry of Pablo Neruda.

The subject of these essays is Neruda's Residencias en la tierra (translated usually as "Residence on Earth"), an enormously influential set of poems published in three batches -- Residencias I in 1933; Residencias II in 1935 and Residencias III in 1947. All of the poems are drawn from the excellent translations in Pablo Neruda, Residence on Earth (Residencia en la Tierra) (Donald D. Walsh, trans., New York: New Directions Books, 1973; ISBN 0-8112-0467-7).

The first of these essays, Residencia en la tierra I: Pablo Neruda Between Past and Future Part I, May 15, 2009, considered one aspect of the congruence of the poetry and political culture in Latin America.

This essay considers another poem from Residencia I--Tirania (Pablo Neruda, Residence on Earth (Residencia en la Tierra), supra, 36).

Oh dama sin coraz'on, hija del cielo,
auxíliame en esta solitaria hora
con tu directa indiferencia de arma
y tu frío sentido del olvido.

Un tiempo total como un océano,
una herida confusa como un nuevo ser
abarcan la tenaz raíz de mi alma
mordiendo el centro de mi seguridad.

Qué espeso latido se cimbra en mi corazón
como una ola hecha de todas las olas,
y mi desesperada cabeza se levanta
en un esfuerzo de saltoy de muerte.

Hay algo enemigo temblando en mi certidumbre,
creciendo en el mismo origen de las lágrimas
como una planta desgarradora y dura
hecha se encadenadas hojas amargas.

This is a reverent spiritual journey. He starts with the invocation of what is beyond his reach-- "Oh dama sin coraz'on, hija del cielo, auxíliame en esta solitaria hora" ("Oh hearless lady, daughter of the sky, help me in this solitary hour" Id.). Yet he veers off track immediately after the invocation. He is not seeking union, the raising of the soul (or the body), but its opposite--he invokes her "directa indiferencia de arma y tu frío sentido del olvido." ("direct armed indifference and your cold sense of oblivion." Id.). That indifference and oblivion opens the door, not to to a vastness of the infinite, but to the smallness at the center of his being, the "stubborn root of my soul" ("la tenaz raíz de mi alma" Id.). Within that little space a "time complete as an ocean" ("Un tiempo total como un océano" Id.) and a wound, naive and innocent like a newborn ("confusa como un nuevo ser" Id.) alive and "biting at the center of my security." ("mordiendo el centro de mi seguridad" Id.).

But rather than a voyage of the soul (or the man) from solitude to a delirious union with God (or woman), there is only a pathetic release to despair and bitterness. But there is release as well-- a release like that of the love death (liebestod, for the music itself follow this link) evoked by Wagner in Tristan und Isolde--sexual, physical, spiritual, etc. But that release is pointed down and in rather than up and out. The language, indeed, suggests this inverted transformation. "What a heavy throbbing beats in my heart like a wave made of all the waves, and my despairing ead is raised in an effort of leaping and death" ("Qué espeso latido se cimbra en mi corazón como una ola hecha de todas las olas, y mi desesperada cabeza se levanta en un esfuerzo de saltoy de muerte" Id.).

Neruda ends his journey as alone as he started--all the more bitter for the experience. For now that perversely and inverted divine release has brought him to consciousness of sorts. But this is "something hostile trembling in my certitude" ("algo enemigo temblando en mi certidumbre" Id.). And it is nurtured by the bitterness from which release was sought in oblivion, "growing in the very origin of tears" ("creciendo en el mismo origen de las lágrimas" Id.). There is no union, but disunion; there is no movement to unity but rather a return to the self.

The journey acquires it power derivatively. It invokes the form of ecstatic voyages of the soul to union with the Divine, a form brilliantly elaborated in the work of St. John of the Cross. See, e.g., San Juan de la Cruz, Noche Oscura, in Vida y Obras de San Juan de law Cruz 618 (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores cristianos 1972) (before 1582) (for an English version, see, e.g., "The Dark Night," THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD, revised edition (1991)). Neruda here exposes the modern dilemma--invoking the old forms of comfort and union exposes the dissipation of their power. Thus powerless, they invoke a perversion of sorts--not union with the divine, but rejection, solitude, despair "creciendo en el mismo origen de las lágrimas como una planta desgarradora y dura hecha se encadenadas hojas amargas" ("growing in the very origin of tears like a harsh clawing plant made of linked and bitter leaves" Id.). And thus the tyranny--as something unnatural, an inversion, an oblivion bound up in the passion of a liebestod centered on the self. But that is political tyranny as well ("a monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only" Aristotle, Politics, 1279b6-7, discussed in Roger Boesche, Theories of Tyranny from Aristotle to Arendt 49-60 (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995)). That is the dilemma of Latin America as well.