Dust in Love
Marie-José and Octavio Paz
Sexuality is the fire; love and eroticism are the two flames emanating from that fire. This is the theme of Octavio Paz’s last book The Double Flame, Love and Eroticism.
Paz died in 1998 and La Llama Doble, Amor y Erotismo (whose English translation is The Double Flame, Love and Eroticism) came out in 1993. It was his last book of essays to come out before he died. It may seem odd that an old man’s (Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico) last work is about sexuality, love and eroticism but that would just be reflecting, as García Márquez argues, the fact that sexuality of old people is a taboo.
Paz is known for his voluminous writing which includes many books of poetry, incisive analyses of the Mexican identity, critique of the intellectual French Left, erudite essays about Hinduism and Buddhism, his sweeping texts on literary and art criticism. He was also known for his illustrious career as a diplomat and a political activist.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to literature in 1990.
As a young man growing up in Dhaka in the late 1980s I didn’t know who Octavio Paz was. But I loved (and still do) Samuel Beckett as a playwright. One day I came across a selection of Paz’s poems in my favourite bookshop Zeenat Book Supply. The introduction to the book was an essay by Paz titled ‘Poetry and History’ and it had been translated from Spanish into English by Samuel Beckett. I was a cash-strapped student at that time and I had very little cash left in my pockets after spending it on tea and cigarettes. But I immediately parted with whatever money I had to snap up the book, arguing that if Sam Beckett thought this guy was worth translating then I should read him.
It is a decision I have never regretted. That short but powerful essay in which he argued that poetry was the other voice of history is one of the first things I translated from English into Bengali. It is an idea that still holds strong sway over my thinking and it is perhaps one of the key primary sources of disagreements I have with many scholars who claim primacy over their interpretation of art and history. That art can be its own epistemological and ontological category is lost on many in academia.
That book of poems by Paz opened up a beautiful world in front of me. I was captivated by the lyrical, erotic, and epic beauty of his long early poems; haunted by the prose poems of his middle stage. Many years later when I was working as a theoretical physicist in the U.S., his thin volume of essays Alternating Current became the lens through which I decoded much of art, life, and literature. Much of my thinking has been shaped by readings and rereadings of Paz.
But it was towards the end of my graduate-student days at Cambridge that I picked up The Double Flame. The thesis that love and eroticism are the central values that have shaped modern European thought and artistic tradition is the beautiful thesis that Paz puts forward in that book. It is a thesis that only a poet such as Paz, who was deeply steeped in the many intellectual traditions, occidental and oriental, of the world could have put forward. Paz was one of the last examples of intellectual synthesis of the twentieth century.
Perhaps what I found most beautiful in The Double Flame was his observation about the role of courtly love in the Western tradition. Before the courtly love of the troubadour of the middle ages, women did not have the status of a person in the Western world. Thus one can argue that modern feminism has its roots in courtly love which put the woman at the centre, thereby granting (however imperfectly) the woman personhood for the first time in European history. This much is well-known but what astounded me about the book was that it traced the songs of the troubadour to the songs and poems of the Islamic Sufi mystics. In waging war with the Islamic world Christian Europe borrowed the language that sowed the seeds of modern feminism. The division between what is from within Europe and what is from without dissolves in Paz’s writing. (As it also does in Borges’ writing.)
Paz is a product of the 20th century, an era that dawned after the Death of God (his essay ‘Forms of Atheism’, included in Alternating Current, is an insightful essay on comparative religion). And Paz found common grounds between love as the supreme value and the enquiry into existence that is at the heart of the modern European tradition of literature. The ‘Europe’ in this discussion has little to do with the political entity we call Europe, or even the cultural one. Susan Sontag’s homages to Europe make it clear what Europe stands for here. It is the Europe of the mind which gave birth to the novel and the enlightenment which resulted in much of what we now recognize as liberal modernist literature around the world. That the flourishing of this Europe was supported by colonialism and the slave trade is not something that this literary tradition ignores, nor does that dark history nullify the importance of that tradition.
Although he doesn’t say it explicitly much of what he wrote about about sexuality was inspired by his thirty-year long marriage to Marie-José Tramini. A very beautiful testament to their relationship is the collaborative book Figures and Figurations. (Milan Kundera, as an homage to them, chose one of Tramini’s works as the cover for his novel Ignorance.)
Paz sums up Europe’s obsession with its modern sense of love with a poem by Quevedo:
Love Constant Beyond Death
— Quevedo
The final shadow may close my eyes,
carry me off from white of day,
unchaining my soul at the hour
of its anxious obsequious desire;
but it will not leave the memory
of that other shore where once it burned:
for my fire can swim me through the frigid water,
regardless of the strictures of law.
A soul once imprisoned by an entire God,
veins that brought fuel to such flames,
marrow that so gloriously burned:
they’ll leave this body, but not its cares:
ash they’ll be, yet still aware;
they will be dust, but dust in love.
‘[D]ust in love,’ expresses the only sense of transcendence allowed to us in a universe bereft of god.
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