[In the following essay Hirsch offers an overview of theme and use of language in Paz's poetry.]

Octavio Paz practiced poetry like a secret religion. He dwelt in its mysteries, he invoked its sacraments, he read its entrails, he inscribed its revelations. Writing was for him a primordial act, and he stared down at the blank page like an abyss until it sent him reeling over the brink of language. The poems he brought back are filled with ancient wonder and strangeness, hermetic wisdom, a dizzying sense of the sacred. They are magically—sometimes violently—uprooted from silence. They are drawn from a deep well. Here is his three-line poem “Escritura” (“Writing”): “Yo dibujo estas letras / como el día dibuja sus imágenes / y sopla sobre ellas y no vuelve”:

I draw these letters
as the day draws its images
and blows over them
                                                                                                    and does not return

Paz started writing poems as a teenager and never let up until the end of his life. Lyric poetry was for him a core activity, at the root of being, and for nearly seventy years he was driven by invisible demons to try to connect to himself and to others through the sensuality—the rhythmic fervor—of words. Inspiration was for him not a static entity, but a forward thrust, an aspiration, the act of “going beyond ourselves to the encounter of ourselves.” Paz wrote poetry with a sharp awareness of being oneself and, simultaneously, someone or something else. He called this “the other voice.” He experienced the merging of voices as a submersion, a type of flooding. “We still keep alive the sensation of some minutes so full they were time overflowing, a high tide that broke the dikes of temporal succession,” he writes in The Bow and the Lyre, a sustained defense of poetry Shelley himself might have cherished. “For the poem is a means of access to pure time, an immersion in the original waters of existence.” He also defined the poetic experience as “an opening up of the wellsprings of being. An instant and never. An instant and forever.”

Paz was—and in his work he remains—a seeker, and the quest for a moment to abolish linear or successive time is one of the driving forces of his aesthetic, a defining feature of his pilgrimage. Poetry is a wayward siren song calling him to a perpetual present, to an erotic consecration of instants, and to a superabundance of time and being. “Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present,” he says in his Nobel lecture, “In Search of the Present.”

The fixed present, the endless instant, the eternal moment—the experience is for Paz something to be attained, like reality, like being itself. “Door of being, dawn and wake me,” he prays near the conclusion of his circular masterpiece “Sunstone”:

allow me to see the face of this day,
allow me to see the face of this night,
all communicates, all is transformed,
arch of blood, bridge of the pulse,
take me to the other side of this night,
where I am you, we are us,
the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined,
door of being: open your being
and wake, learn to be …

If you can get to the present, there are presences, Paz suggests, and he trusts poetry's capacity to deliver those presences through images incarnated in words, through words flowing in rhythm. “The instant dissolves in the succession of other nameless instants. In order to save it we must convert it into a rhythm,” he writes in Alternating Current, where he also defines rhythm as “the reincarnation of the instant.” Rhythm serves the poet as a means of access—a reliable guide—to originary or pure time.

Paz needed lyric poetry as a primary mode of crossing, of rendering the self diaphanous, of becoming “a wind that stops / turns on itself and is gone” (“The Face and the Wind”). The words themselves become a way of seeking others that also links him back to the spaces opening up inside himself. “Between now and now, / between I am and you are, / the word bridge,” he declares in his short poem “The Bridge”:

Entering it
you enter yourself:
the world connects
and closes like a ring.

Language becomes a form of practical magic as the word becomes a bridge, a juncture, a span of connection. “Everything is a door / everything a bridge,” he proclaims in “Sleepless Night.” Words are transfiguring and have a threshold power. They are portals to the other side. “Words are bridges,” he writes in a refrain that reverberates through his poetic cantata, “Letter of Testimony.” They are a form of a linkage, a way of reaching out, reaching across, that is also a means of reaching in:

Let yourself be carried by these words
toward yourself.

(“Letter of Testimony”)

The words become the only way for him of attaining himself, attaining a truer identity than social identity—a shadowy, psychic truth, a mode of being. “I'm not finished with myself yet,” he declares in his prose poem “The Besieged.” “I am the shadow my words cast,” he concludes in “A Draft of Shadows.” It's as if he doesn't have that real self, that hidden or shadow identity without the word, the syllable, the poetic act. The word bridge, the wordbridge, becomes the site of a poetic crossing into true being. As he puts it in “Pillars”:

Between the end and the beginning
a moment without time,
a delicate arch of blood,
a bridge over the void.

I'm struck by how many of Paz's poems seem to unfold and take place in liminal spaces, in pauses and intervals, odd crossings, interrupted movements. He is poetically empowered not just by bridging, but also by moments when bridges go up, by disconnection. He finds a poetic space opening up in gaps and ruptures (“Poetry is the crack / the space / between one word and another,” he announces in “Letter to León Felipe”), in the transitional realm of the betwixt and the between. Think of the slippage in his well-known poem dedicated to the linguist Roman Jakobson, “Between What I See and What I Say …”:

Between what I see and what I say,
between what I say and what I keep silent,
between what I keep silent and what I dream,
between what I dream and what I forget:
poetry.

Paz takes up the essential ambiguity—the elusive clarity—of such marginal or liminal moments in his poem “Interval”:

Instantaneous architectures
hanging over a pause,
apparitions neither named
nor thought, wind-forms,
insubstantial as time,
and, like time, dissolved.
Made of time, they are not time;
they are the cleft, the interstice,
the brief vertigo of between
where the diaphanous flower opens:
high on its stalk of a reflection
it vanishes as it turns.
Never touched, the clarities
seen with eyes closed:
the transparent birth
and the crystalline fall
in the instant of this instant
that forever is still here.
Outside the window, the desolate
rooftops and the hurrying clouds.
The day goes out, the city
lights up, remote and near.
Weightless hour. I breathe
the moment, empty and eternal.

Paz is trying to nail down the cleft and interstice, the fissure in temporal process, the brilliant weightlessness of what Wordsworth calls “those fleeting moods / Of shadowy exultation.”

It seems crucial to Paz to keep affirming that the real self is achieved in such intervals, luminous moments, fluid states. These states are utterly essential: they are perceptions of reality, modes of transparency. Moreover, it's as if we all exist most fully in these spacious intervals, these widening gaps and eternal pauses, which are perceived as a true condition of the world itself. What seems like a struggle attained in bridging over the self in some lyrics becomes a canny reconnaissance about the world in others. Such a perception seems to inhere in the poem “Between Going and Staying”:

Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

The lyric exploration is for Paz always epiphanic, always precarious. Such key or luminous moments (it is “Within a Moment: A Pulsation of the Artery,” Blake writes, “When the Poets Work is Done”) are by definition sudden, unexpected, revelatory, unconscious. They are dangerous breakthrough experiences. Such “Moments of Being” (the phrase is Virginia Woolf's) are also transitory and difficult to pin down. They usurp the social realm and create their own sense of eternity. They also create ruptures in ordinary experience, pockets of emptiness, holes in time. They defy time-bound narratives. Think, for example, of the playful, paradoxical, quasi-philosophical way that Paz traces the struggle between temporal process and the atemporal instant in “Into the Matter”:

it's not time now
                                                            now it's now
now it's time to get rid of time
now it's not time
                                                            it's time and not now
time eats the now

Paz structures and arranges his poems in such a way—in a non-narrative manner—to create disjunctions that deliver how epiphanies derange and rupture chronological time. I'm thinking of the spatial arrangements in his poems, the length of his lines and minimal use of punctuation, the associative drift of his surrealist attention, the sonorousness of his Spanish, his trust in circularities (“Sunstone”) and white spaces (“Blanco”), in presences that defy narrative closure. They are structured for immediacy, to approach and hold a moment. And they try to create a space in which “the present is motionless” (“Wind from all Compass Points”). Like Joseph Cornell boxes, they become “monuments to every moment” and “cages for infinity” (“Objects and Apparitions”).

Paz was a restless innovator, and he was continually seeking forms that would create a house for being, consecrating a stillness. That stillness was something he desperately sought, something he spiritually needed, and as a result he was willing, even eager, to cross thresholds and risk an annihilation he could embody in poems. At times he seems cut off from the moment itself, lost in a dire, chaotic, threatening form of inner exile. His lyric access produces a kind of terror. I suspect that's why so many of his poems are filled with shadowy tunnels and traps, elemental passageways, vertiginous heights. They move through endless “corridors terraces stairways” (“A Wind from all Compass Points”). “I crossed through arches and over bridges,” he writes at a key moment in “Coming and Going”: “I was alive, in search of life.” But the restless search for life also becomes, paradoxically, a search for death. “The sun of the high plains eats my remains,” he concludes: “I was alive and went in search of death.” Life and death are held together in a single weightless moment beyond time.

Paz's poems are filled with moments of bewildering quest, with a lost searching. He could at times “engrave vertigo” (“Tomb”). He vacillates between isolation and connection, solitude and communion, doubt and rapture. He had an uncanny feeling for the inner spaces that keep opening up in poetry and his poems can induce a kind of mental slippage and dizziness, a sense of travelling down interminable corridors. “I follow my raving, rooms, streets, / I grope my way through corridors of time, / I climb and descend its stairs, I touch / its walls and do not move,” he writes in “Sunstone”:

I search without finding, I write alone,
there's no one here, and the day falls,
the year falls, I fall with the moment,
I fall to the depths, invisible path
over mirrors repeating my shattered image,
I walk through the days, the trampled
          moments,
I walk through all the thoughts of my shadow,
I walk through my shadow in search of a
          moment.

What made Paz such a deep initiate of connection was the psychic truth that so much of his poetry was elaborated out of a radical sense of human estrangement and exile, a feeling of unreality. He considered the experience of being born “a wound that never heals”—it is “a fall into an alien land”—and he sought through poetry to reunite with others, a way back toward the maternal Other. “I am living / at the center / of a wound still fresh,” he writes in “Dawn.” Always he was seeking to heal a human cleft, an irreparable sense of division, a fissure in being. He universalized the experience (“The consciousness of being separate is a constant feature of our spiritual history,” he said), but it was a generalization experienced on his pulse, in his own body, which is why it motivated, both consciously and unconsciously, so much of his poetic production.

The same lyric practice that gives us moments of annihilation also gives us moments of ecstatic union, fusion with the glorious Other. They salvage and deliver back to us the enormous moment when we glimpse “the unity that we lost” and recall “the forgotten astonishment of being alive” (“Sunstone”). Paz had a skeptical intelligence, but he was never really a cerebral poet, as has often been suggested. Rather, his poems are driven by a sometimes anguished, sometimes joyous eroticism. Most of his poems seem shadowed by the obscure absence or presence of the beloved. When the beloved is absent from the poem he feels acutely cut off from nature and from himself, delivered back to his own estranging desires, and to the linear flow of time. But when the beloved visits the poem he feels the overflowing circularity of time, the dance of being, the affirmation of an eternal moment. Poetry becomes a means of attainment, the reconciliation of opposites, a way of participating in an abundant universe. It becomes a form of creative love that moves beyond the duality of subject and object, annulling the temporal world, offering up the mysteries of carnation. Here the moment widens into eternity:

all is transformed, all is sacred,
every room is the center of the world
it's still the first night, and the first day,
the world is born when two people kiss,

And:

the two took off their clothes and kissed
because two bodies, naked and entwined,
leap over time, they are invulnerable,
nothing can touch them, they return to the
          source,
there is no you, no I, no tomorrow,
no yesterday, no names, the truth of two
in a single body, a single soul,
oh total being …

(“Sunstone”)

“Being is eroticism,” Paz affirms. In his splendid book on love and eroticism, The Double Flame, he explicitly links the erotic act and the poetic act through the agency of imagination. “Imagination turns sex into ceremony and rite, language into rhythm and metaphor,” he writes. “The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities, and rhyme a copulation of sounds; poetry eroticizes language and the world, because the operation is erotic to begin with.” I am moved by Paz's suggestion that love, like poetry, “is a victory over time, a glimpse of the other side, of the there that is here, where nothing changes and everything that is, truly is.”

Paz's poetry of attainment fulfills the Sufi or mystical maxim, “The Beloved and I are One.” He defines—he defends—the creative moment when two people merge and thereby protect their share of the eternal, our ration of paradise.

                                                                                                                        To love:
to open the forbidden door,
                                                                                                    the passageway
that takes us to the other side of time.
The moment:
                                                            the opposite of death,
our fragile eternity.

(“Letter of Testimony”)

“The poet endeavors to make the world sacred,” Octavio Paz declared (The Siren and the Seashell), and in his restless search for the present, the contemporaneous, he never lost sight of poetry's irrational power and sacred mystery, its archaic roots, its spiritual audacity. “Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment,” he declares at the outset of The Bow and the Lyre. He treated lyric poetry as a revolutionary emotional activity, a spiritual exercise, a means of interior liberation, a quest for transfiguration. His poems inscribe a quest and an attainment as they hold together what he calls “life and death in a single instant of incandescence.” Here is a poetry that seeks to return us—to restore us—to the totality of being. It is a living poetry that leaps over time and delivers inscriptions of timelessness, time without limit or measure, the emptiness and plenitude of a moment “forever arriving.”