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Summer 2009 - Juan Gelman Tribute Issue, Summer 2009 Poetry

Two Juans: A Knowing Beyond Knowledge

Paul Pines

Two Juans: A Knowing Beyond Knowledge

“. . . i recognize your face\ like memory in every face . . .” Argentine poet Juan Gelman reaches out to San Juan de la Cruz in Commentary XXVIII, a poem addressed to the 16th Century Spanish mystic whose vision detailed the transformation of the soul through suffering.  San Juan defined what the psalmist, David, called the Valley of the Shadow, which must be crossed on the way to a unitary experience beyond earthly knowledge.  Both Juans, the grandchildren of conversos, are psalm-singers in this tradition.  San Juan called this journey “the Dark Night of the Soul,” because it stripped the soul of all familiars, landmarks and attachments to leave it engulfed by a pain that can’t be explained or addressed by reason.  As Juan de la Cruz tells it in Dark Night of the Soul: “One dark night, / fired with love’s urgent longings / . . . I went out of my house / unseen . . .”

No one details the transformation of the soul through suffering like Juan Gelman, with the possible exception of San Juan de la Cruz.  No poet speaks of the failure of knowledge to comprehend this transformation like San Juan, with the possible exception of Juan Gelman.  The Argentine poet finds himself mirrored in the Spanish mystic “like a look in your eyes / where i see myself remembered.”  What they share is the soul San Juan describes as “conscious of this complete undoing of itself in its very substance.”  And so, dark night speaks to Dark Night as inevitability, each returning to the fire that burns off assumptions, leaves even the most profound connections to the known world in ashes.

San Juan stripped down his Carmelite order to create a “calcinated,” barefoot one.  Juan Gelman speaks of a “calcinated language,” one so stripped down it refers to a point behind the language, a finger pointing at a landscape without a vanishing point.  Imprisoned in 1577 for his reforms, San Juan suffered weekly public lashings, and severe isolation.  He wrote his Spiritual Canticle in a cell just large enough for his body before escaping after nine months.  Political forces that swept down on him in the Argentine coup of 1976 imprisoned Juan Gelman in loss — the loss of his son, Marcelo, his daughter-in-law, Maria Claudia (both 20) and the child she bore in captivity before being murdered, Andreíta; the loss of country (twelve years in exile) and, finally, the loss of the world as it had been before he was overtaken.  “I was never the owner of my own ashes, dark faces write my verses . . .”  (Arte Poética).

“There are losses,” says Gelman.  “The important thing is how returning to them transforms them into something new.”  The crucible of an Argentina that nurtured the tango and then disappeared its people produced Juan Gelman (the lapis exiles ), whose poems move through a “cloud of unknowing” to embrace what the mind can’t bear.  Some dark nights, San Juan points out, can last for years.  Gelman’s canticle, composed over decades in the jail of absolute loss, strikes a chord in the hearts of those who hear it, a bell whose resonance remains for a lifetime, that nothing can un-ring.

What links the two Juans, and draws me to them, is their ability to suspend certainty, to arrive at the attitude of “knowing through not knowing,” and thereby transform the pain that reason can’t address into the healing breadth of the open heart.  Here, (hear!) the mystic and poet give voice to the voiceless, “like feet crushing / sadnesses on the edge of what it is about to sing . . .”

Summer 2009 - Juan Gelman Tribute Issue, Summer 2009 Poetry

The Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi

Martín Espada

The Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi
          Santiago, Chile

Beyond the gate where the convoys spilled their cargo
of blindfolded prisoners, and the cells too narrow to lie down,
and the rooms where electricity convulsed the body
strapped across the grill until the bones would break,
and the parking lot where interrogators rolled pickup trucks
over the legs of subversives who would not talk,
and the tower where the condemned listened through the wall
for the song of another inmate on the morning of execution,
there is a swimming pool at Villa Grimaldi.

Here the guards and officers would gather families
for barbeques.  The interrogator coached his son:
Kick your feet.  Turn your head to breathe.
The torturer’s hands braced the belly of his daughter,
learning to float, flailing at her lesson.

Here the splash of children, eyes red
from too much chlorine, would rise to reach
the inmates in the tower.  The secret police
paraded women from the cells at poolside,
saying to them: Dance for me.  Here the host
served chocolate cookies and Coke on ice
to the prisoner who let the names of comrades
bleed down his chin, and the lungs of the prisoner
who refused to speak a word ballooned
with water, face down at the end of a rope.

When a dissident pulled by the hair from a vat
of urine and feces cried out for God, and the cry
pelted the leaves, the swimmers plunged below the surface,
touching the bottom of a soundless blue world.
From the ladder at the edge of the pool they could watch
the prisoners marching blindfolded across the landscape,
one hand on the shoulder of the next, on their way
to the afternoon meal and back again.  The neighbors
hung bedsheets on the windows to keep the ghosts away.

There is a swimming pool at the heart of Villa Grimaldi,
white steps, white tiles, where human beings
would dive and paddle till what was human in them
had dissolved forever, vanished like the prisoners
thrown from helicopters into the ocean by the secret police,
their bellies slit so the bodies could not float.