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ОглавлениеWONDER AND EXILE
Mystical and Prophetic Perspectives
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colonel Aureliano Buendía is born with his eyes wide open, as the author himself, Gabriel García Márquez, was reported to have come forth from the womb.1 This image of a wide-eyed child—eyes swollen and enlarged, looking like a full moon—will serve us nicely in considering the theme of wonder in the New World. From the time of the Discovery through the twentieth century, representations of this previously unknown continent would resemble these bulging eyes, pregnant with an extraordinary capacity for wonder. Wonder was on the tongue of explorers and writers of these lands to the point of excess, and they would use its language with Baroque-like extravagance and with a frequency rivaled only by appeals to exile. One Hundred Years of Solitude has remained something like scripture in Latin American literature because it captured these wide-ranging moments of life in the New World, wonder and exile alike.
As I see it, then, representations of the New World are often close to the spirit of this great novel, somewhere on the border between wonder and exile, sometimes with one more than the other, but more commonly, with an ambiguous and messy mixture of both. Whatever the case, the language of both wonder and exile is as common to the Americas as the experience of dispossession; in fact, they are one with dispossession, different manifestations of it. In the course of my study, I examine this claim thoroughly, that wonder is an experience of dispossession in the order of knowledge, while exile means dispossession in place and location. Though wonder and exile are universal experiences, my study argues that they reach a point of saturation in the momentous events surrounding the Discovery of the New World and in the bewildering events that follow. The New World, thus, gives us an intense case to study, one that is as profuse and extravagant with its wonders as it is with its agonies.
The focus of the book is with poets and writers of the New World and, more specifically, with their theological inclinations. When exploring these figures, then, my attention will turn to the mystical and prophetic trajectories of these writers to see what they can teach us about the language of wonder and exile. At times, my concentration will be on the space between wonder and exile (e.g., the shared experience of dispossession) and, at other times, my concern is with the distinct accents of wonder and exile, mysticism and prophecy. In this regard, I claim that the mystics have a special fluency when it comes to the language of wonder, and the prophets, an unmistakable and tortured familiarity with exile—and both of them, a proficiency with the strange and wondrous concept of God. As unbelievable or impossible as the idea of God is to some moderns, I find it equally impossible to neglect the question in a study devoted to the wonders of the New World. I am following the lead of Jorge Luis Borges when he insisted that any anthology of fantastic literature must include the theologians: “I compiled at one time an anthology of fantastic literature. I have to admit that the book is one of the few that a second Noah should save from a second flood, but denounce the guilty omission of the major and unexpected masters of the genre: Parmenides, Plato, John Scotus Eriugena, Albertus Magnus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Francis Bradley. In fact, to what do the prodigies of Wells or Edgar Allan Poe amount . . . confronted by the creation of God?”2
The book before the reader owes much to a claim of this kind and, for this reason, is distinct from strictly literary or cultural accounts of the themes of wonder and exile. My book, too, denounces the guilty omission of the name “God” from studies of fantastic, magical literature. There is nothing more uncanny, nothing more unsettling and fantastic than the thought of God, and to banish the theologians from the wonders of this genre equals the wrong done to the poets when Plato exiles them from his republic. So much is lost in this banishment, so many dreams and emotions—and so many wonders. Whatever else it is, wonder owes much to this strange and curious name that cannot be spoken.
Wonder and Mystical Languages of Unknowing
Wonder is a natural bedfellow of mystical language. It comes to mystics with the suddenness and burning passion of a new flame that sets one’s heart on fire and reduces the tongue and mind to silence. Like mystical speech, wonder is always a form of communication, but it reaches for what is unsayable over what can be said, for the unknown over what can be known—in theological terms, for what God is not more than what God is. Rather than leaving us self-assured, wonder disrupts our certainties and presumptions, leaving us mystified and bewildered, lacking in absolute confidences, with more questions than answers. In this way, wonder is an experience of apophasis—literally, a speech of unsaying—because it undoes and negates known and predictable suppositions. It is an experience, instead, of the indeterminate and surprising, of something so novel and strange that it overwhelms and dazzles the most familiar categories of human knowledge and understanding. It has the power to stun and shock and to leave its recipient speechless, in awe. It makes its appearance when the mind is faced with the unfathomable and ineffable. When shackled by certain horizons and foreseeable principles of knowledge, wonder cannot emerge, or if it does it is a tired and false version, an idol posing as an icon.
So, for wonder to emerge and thrive, it must disrupt and confuse any system of totality, any version of knowledge that is absolute and smugly certain. Wonder breaks through the hardened shell of definitive and unconditional claims to reveal new queries, new problems, new doubts concealed within a system that once seemed so impregnable to uncertainty. It seems to me that something like this happened to the legacy of the Enlightenment, once seemingly secure and certain in what it achieved, now stained with more difficulties and puzzles than answers. What was once a picture of assurance now looks like a tattered picture of misgivings. In a sense, one might say, wonder entered the picture and uncovered a deeper and more ancient image beneath the modern one, an image that was much more at ease with mystery than was the Enlightenment portrait.
If one took a famous figure of the Enlightenment, Descartes, for instance, the natural inclination would be to assume that he fits perfectly within the self-assured version, and that wonder would be hard to find in the pages of his books, so closely aligned is he with the search for absolute and certain foundations of truth. In fact, it’s impossible to deny that Descartes is anxious in his search for certainty, and that he puts a sacred trust in the power of reason to achieve this. And yet . . . Descartes is never as self-assured as many caricatures might suggest. Indeed, when Descartes takes up the question of wonder, for instance, he speaks with a different tone and suddenly sounds more modest and reserved about the powers of the human mind.
In Descartes, wonder is described as a “sudden surprise of the soul” in the face of something new, unusual, or strange.3 As Stephen Greenblatt explains regarding Descartes, this sudden surprise in the experience of wonder is the quintessential response to a “first encounter”: “Wonder—thrilling, potentially dangerous, momentary immobilizing, charged at once with desire, ignorance, and fear—is the quintessential human response to what Descartes calls a ‘first encounter.’”4 As a first encounter, wonder has so much force that it causes a momentary paralysis of the intellectual faculties (and, thus, for Descartes, occurs strictly in the brain). At best, the mind will grasp one side of the object of wonder, it will get only a glimpse. “One can perceive of the object,” he explains, “only the first side that has presented itself, and consequently one cannot acquire a more particular knowledge of it.”5 One might say that the mind reaches an impasse in wonder because passage to the other side is blocked. Because of this limitation in wonder—an experience of ignorance—there is something unsettling about wonder for Descartes, as if it introduces doubt and equivocation into his most cherished convictions.
No wonder, then, that Descartes is ambiguous about wonder, expressing both fear and delight about it: fear, because it is loaded with ignorance and this philosopher wants to pass through wonder to reach the other side, the Promised Land of certainty; delight, because it provides us with the opportunity to learn about something “of which we were previously ignorant.”6 In the former instance, Descartes warns of the potential perversion of reason in the free play of wonder, especially when it turns extravagant and excessive. In excess, he writes, wonder “prevents or perverts the use of reason” and thwarts the acquisition of knowledge.7 For this philosopher, wonder has to be a momentary paralysis of the mind, as thrilling as it is, because he is after a solution to the puzzle of human understanding. He wants to pluck the heart out of the mystery of wonder in order to advance scientific knowledge.
As Jean-Luc Marion argues, however, there are numerous moments in Descartes when this project is significantly interrupted by phenomena outside the control of the human mind. When Descartes stops to consider the thought of infinity, for instance, the surprise and thrill of wonder suddenly returns to suggest something enriching. When discussing infinity, his language suddenly sounds a lot like the apophatic language of the mystical traditions. It is this opening in Descartes that gives us his more passionate and soulful side—and his capacity for wonder. Since infinity is strictly incomprehensible for Descartes, human thought can only “touch it,” not comprehend it.8 In the face of infinity, even Descartes’s beloved and proud “cogito” appears rather impotent. The gaze of the cogito cannot “take hold of it as much as surrender to it,” an experience that is closer to dispossession than possession.9 And most significant for our purposes, when Descartes describes the human gaze looking toward God, he speaks of the failure of comprehension as an experience of wonder. The gaze is stunned by the appearance of wonder: “I should like to pause here and spend some time in the contemplation of God, to reflect on his attributes, and to gaze with wonder and adoration on the beauty of this immense light, so far as the eye of my darkened intellect can bear it.”10
These instances when Descartes concedes the weakness and submissiveness of the cogito, when he describes the intellect as darkened and blinded by “this immense light,” are the precious cracks in Cartesian philosophy that Jean-Luc Marion wants to expand and deepen. Marion deepens these cracks so that they become gaping chasms, and wonder has a part to play in all of this. Indeed, Marion considers amazement a paradigmatic case of the mind’s response to a “saturated phenomenon”—that is, something inescapably inaccessible and incomprehensible, something that forever remains in the dark no matter how much brilliance is brought to the matter. When confronted by an amazing phenomenon, the soul is bedazzled by a phenomenon so saturated with novelty, splendor, and otherness that it is unbearable and overwhelming to the human gaze.11 The mind is flooded by a tidal wave of meaning, leaving the subject flabbergasted and unsure. The object of wonder is stranger than anything that can be imagined or foreseen and, thus, impossible to possess, like trying to palm the wind or touch the sky. The object of wonder, in this sense, is an impenetrable mystery: it comes in an enigmatic guise, unrecognizable, incommensurable, and unfathomable to all categories of knowledge.12 Baffled by so much surplus, the mind finds it futile to control and assign it a determinate meaning. The mind is ravished, awed, stupefied, undone.
Because wonder comprises these features—uncertainty, obscurity, inscrutability, alterity—there is something in wonder fundamentally at odds with “Enlightenment” models of knowledge, if only because it dwells in shadowy and foggy conditions instead of the light of the sun. “The eye apperceives,” Marion writes, “not so much the appearance of the saturated phenomenon as the blur, the fog, and the overexposure that this phenomenon imposes on its normal conditions of experience.”13 As a saturated phenomenon, wonder steals up in the fog or cloud of unknowing.
In this case, the alliance between wonder and darkness is expressed nicely in the Spanish verb asombrar, to wonder, carrying within it the word for shade or shadow, sombra. Something wondrous can be seen only through the haze of shadows, as a blur, like the fleeting and vanishing passing of the Lord God before Moses (he is permitted only a glimpse of God’s back, not the face as he desired; see Exodus 33:23). Wonder is this partial glimpse, never the fullness of God’s face, never the fullness of knowledge. Even as an object of wonder appears and reveals itself, thus it shrouds itself in darkness (obscuridad) to remain obscure and hidden, concealed in its beauty, a black beauty of sorts. The truths that hold us spellbound are, in this sense, wondrous because of their lack of transparency and intelligibility. They are shadowy epiphanies.
To be lost in wonder, consequently, would describe the moment when the mind is suddenly lost and confused, when the racing mind is stilled and paralyzed, when something so different and fascinating appears to startle us enough that our habitual and predictable patterns of thought and action are disrupted. The mind is then driven beyond itself into a condition of ecstasy where shadows and their uncertain ghosts dwell in lieu of clear and evident truths.
Many of the classic Jewish and Christian mystics knew these ecstasies of wonder. Their encounters with otherness always carried them outside themselves and beyond—beyond the ordinary, beyond reason, beyond being, beyond God. For them, wonder was a bridge to transcendence, to a larger domain outside the fixed truths and confining borders of reality. It was a bridge across the river, through the fields, and into the vast and infinite ocean. Because it would carry them to the infinite depths of the ocean, mystics were always deep sea divers, exploring the mysteries of life and God in all their most peculiar, odd, and startling manifestations. Though wonder is surely not the sole property of mystics, it is, nevertheless, a particularly intense and concentrated case of it.
Though this elusive term, “mysticism,” has been subject to a wide variety of nonsensical and inane interpretations—fueled by the “New Age” movement—it is clear that the early Jewish and Christian sense of this term is synonymous with a strategy of apophasis. In contrast to kataphasis, or positive language about God, apophasis is the undoing of positive predications about the divine, or more precisely, all predications about the divine, positive or negative. Apophasis is a strategy of language that turns on itself, that deconstructs any and all concepts, images, and experiences that presume to capture the totally other and incomprehensible God. Apophasis is our guide in how to remain silent while still speaking, how to use words while saying nothing. Mystical apophasis, then, is speech about God that is a failure of speech, or theology in light of our ignorance of God.14
The masters of this genre—Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, John the Scot Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa—one might say, were experts at saying nothing, and they did this in ways that do not fit the simple alternatives of atheism or theism. They would challenge every- one who claims to know God, as Eckhart puts it: “A master says: if anyone thinks that he has known God . . . he does not know God.”15 Or with Aquinas: “The ultimate point of the human knowledge of God is to know that we don’t know God.”16 To say the very least, mystical theology is a threat to all who are certain and confident in their understanding. To the dismay of atheists, it remains part of a tradition of religion and spirituality, and to the disappointment of theists, it radically contests and threatens all systems of theology. Nicholas of Cusa calls it “learned ignorance”: “According to negative theology, infinity is all we discover in God. . . . In the shadows of our ignorance shines incomprehensibly the truth. . . . That, then, is the learned ignorance for which we have been searching.”17
In modern times, I love Fernando Pessoa’s description of the peculiar position of mystical language in both affirming “God” and denying “God”—or rather, beyond both: “Every sound mind believes in God. No sound mind believes in a definite God. There is some being, both real and impossible, who reigns over all things and whose person (if he has one) cannot be defined, and whose purposes (if he has any) cannot be fathomed. By calling this being God we say everything, since the word God—having no precise meaning—affirms him without saying anything. The attributes of infinite, eternal, omnipotent, all-just or all-loving that we sometimes attach to him fall off by themselves, like all unnecessary adjectives when the noun suffices.”18 For Pessoa, God is this slippery and unfathomable name, on which all adjectives slide off and cannot hold. We embrace the name God the way a bird embraces and gathers the wind beneath its wings, helping it rise, keeping it aloft. And yet the wind falls through and away from the bird’s grasp, never settling and confining itself to this one creature. Mystical speech is something like this, a confession of faith in a name without precise meaning, indefinite and impossible, and yet with the power to bear the soul into ethereal heights. For the mystics, faith is this journey to the unfathomable other that we affirm without saying anything.
For its daring and eccentric discourse, mystical theology has proved alluring to a wide variety of contemporary intellectuals. Called one of the “greatest audacities of discourse in Western thought” by Jacques Derrida, apophatic theology is oddly familiar to deconstruction: “This apophatic boldness always consists in going further than is reasonably permitted. That is one of the essential traits of all negative theology: passing to the limit, then crossing a frontier, including that of a community, thus of a sociopolitical, institutional, ecclesial reason or raison d’être. . . . This thought seems strangely familiar to the experience of what is called deconstruction.”19 In this way, apophasis crosses all kinds of frontiers and behaves like an illegal immigrant in its audacious and transgressive ways, walking across borders with all kinds of wild hopes and dreams. Heedless of human laws, apophasis follows higher, transcendent laws, like justice or God, but whatever the case, we know for sure that it wants to go farther than anyone thought possible.
It is true that mystics must speak and interrupt their preferred condition of silence, but they do so with metaphors suggestive of silence or emptiness—hence, their affection for bare metaphors like the desert, nothingness, the One, and so forth. Whether their language is reticent or profuse, they are indicating the inexpressible the way a nightingale’s song indicates the night. Take the case of the desert: for Derrida, the image of the desert illustrates “negative theology,” with the absolute aridity of the desert serving as his metaphor for the aridity and barrenness of apophasis. As a perfect image of divine nothingness or emptiness, the desert is an apophatic image par excellence, one that describes the barrenness of all our intellectual and cognitive presuppositions about the unknown. In bare and unadorned beauty, the desert is an icon of anti-iconic art like Islamic calligraphy. Apophasis, in this sense, is a “desertification” of language, a kenosis of discourse. “‘God’ is the name,” Derrida writes, “of this bottomless collapse, of this endless desertification of language.”20 Mystical theology, he tells us, is literature for the desert and for exile: “This literature forever elliptical, taciturn, cryptic, obstinately withdrawing, however, from all literature, inaccessible there even where it seems to go, the exasperation of a jealousy, that passion carried beyond itself; this would seem to be a literature for the desert or for exile.”21
With a focus on the New World, I will defend this claim throughout this study and insist on the relevance of mystical theology—this cryptic passion carried beyond itself, as Derrida puts it—for the desert and exile. For centuries, Jewish and Christian mystics made the desert their home and went there to retrace the wandering steps of the Israelites. For many of them—Philo of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Pseudo-Dionysius, for instance—Moses was their spiritual guide through the vast and perilous lands of the desert; and if they had any hopes of achieving wisdom, they knew it would be nothing more than what Moses got, a glimpse of God hidden by a dark cloud or burning bush. The narratives of exile and divine hiddenness shaped their mystical theologies.
Take the remarkable case of Dante’s mysticism of exile, for instance. Though Dante is narrating a mystical journey of the soul to God in The Divine Comedy, the poem is also haunted by the personal exigencies and terrors of Dante’s own desert experience of exile from his beloved Florence. When Dante writes of the character Romeo, for instance—an infamous wanderer exiled in the thirteenth century from the courts of Provence—he surely has himself in mind:
Romeo, proudly, old and poor, departed.
And could the world know what was in his heart
as he went begging, door to door, his bread.22
And when Dante meets his ancestor Cacciaguida, he is told of the agonizing future that will come to him, the heavy weight of exile that he must carry with him until the end of his days:
While I was still in Virgil’s company,
climbing the mountain where the souls are healed,
descending through the kingdom of the dead,
ominous words about my future life
were said to me—the truth is that I feel
my soul foursquare against the blows of chance . . .
As Hippolytus was forced to flee from Athens
by his devious and merciless stepmother,
just so you too shall have to leave your Florence.23
In The Divine Comedy and other writings (the Convivio, De Eloquentia Vulgaria), Dante would not only use language to convey silence like a mystic, but also to convey exile like a prophet, as a voice crying out in the desert.24 It is not surprising, then, that Dante would turn to the biblical narrative of Exodus to make sense of his own refugee condition. Although Dante does not name God with desert language, Israel’s bitter exodus through the desert becomes one of the most important narratives that define the Divine Comedy.25
With this image of the desert before us, we can see why Bernard McGinn insists that the mystics are wrestling with the absence of God as much as presence: “If the modern consciousness of God is often of an absent God (absent though not forgotten for the religious person), many mystics seem almost to have been prophets of this in their intense realization that the ‘real God’ becomes a possibility only when the many false gods (even the God of religion) have vanished and the frightening abyss of total nothingness is confronted.”26 If mysticism entails a confrontation with the abyss of nothingness, as in this description, then it seems profoundly appropriate to our modern age, as if the mystics had foreseen and divined the desertlike desolation felt by modern man and woman. The mystics knew that one had to face the wastelands before one could enter the gardens of life. They are our guides through the deserts of discourse where all our preconceptions, ideas, and images are consumed in a blaze, like idols thrown into the furnace of the desert sun. Only after our discourse is emptied out, only then, heart to heart, can we pray for the other to come, the other that we will meet in the stranger and refugee.
Prayers of this sort are common among the mystics and they are synonymous with the experience of wonder, reverence, and awe. When John the Scot Eriugena calls God the “divine desert”—the first to explicitly name God in this way—he was praying in unexpected ways, no longer naming God, but de-nominating, to borrow the language of Marion again.27 He was developing a theology of absence that is awesome in its sparse and vacuous symbolism: “A more profound interpretation understands it (the desert in Exodus) as the desert of the divine nature, an inexpressible height removed from all things. It is ‘deserted’ by every creature, because it surpasses all intellect, although it does not ‘desert’ any intellect.”28 Eriugena’s “divine desert” is equivalent to nothingness or emptiness, but of a peculiar sort, an emptiness that is over-full, a nothingness that is everything, a super-saturated presence that appears as absence. It is neither this nor that. Eriugena takes aim at formlessness the way Jewish or Islamic artists would remain faithful to the prohibitions of image and visual representation (considered idolatry).29
Whether in Eriugena or others, wonder appears frequently as the footprint of their language of unsaying. Eriugena bequeathed this strategy to many others, including the French Beguine mystic Marguerite of Porete when she would consider the nothingness that is God and the nothingness that dwells in the darkest recesses of the human soul: “They are amazed by what is from the top of their mountain, and they are amazed by the same thing which is in the depth of their valley—by a thinking nothing which is shut away and sealed in the secret closure of the highest purity of such an excellent Soul.”30 To be amazed by thinking nothing: perfectly said and perfectly representative of the desertlike apophasis I am pursuing in this book. For many mystics, amazement is the summit of theology and it takes us to inconceivable heights where language falters and where metaphors like “nothingness,” “desert,” “emptiness,” and “nakedness” point us to the other side. When reaching these summits, wonder or related experiences—admiration, awe, reverence—gain in potency as reason begins to falter and the mystic loses her mind and ego in the arms of the other. No wonder madness has so often been attributed to the mystics: they are out of their mind, distraught and hysterical, and they go to the desert in search of their Beloved like Majnun once did for his darling Layla, with reckless desperation and despair, tearing his garments, smearing his face with dirt, hopeless in love. The result may be madness, but a madness that is a blessing of God.
If nothing else, our brief conversation with the mystics teaches us one fundamental fact about the place of wonder in apophatic discourse: as much as it takes away and deconstructs all concepts and images that have turned idolatrous, it maintains a reverent posture before the bare, denuded metaphors that it loves so much. These metaphors—”nothingness,” “emptiness,” and so forth—should not be construed as a form of nihilism, in other words. The origins of modern nihilism may lurk in these thoughts, but mystics are too exuberant to succumb to a total annihilation of faith. They are fond of negations and denials, for sure, but resounding affirmations, loves, and pleasures are their salvation, the yes of their “negative theologies.”
For this reason, wonder is not reducible to human ignorance in the mystics. Wonder is generated by something affirmative, call it a “presence of an absence” if you will, but it is an absence like no other, something infinitely alluring, something that reveals in and through its withdrawal, that loves in and through its renunciation. In this sense, the experience of wonder in mystical apophasis remains at odds with the cynicism of the modern age. While mystical unknowing is a prefiguration of modern skepticism, it is different insofar as there remains for the mystics a formless beauty like infinity summoning and seducing the soul. For the mystics, infinity can surely be terrifying, but it is also an overflowing goodness, a spring “that gives itself to all the rivers yet is never exhausted by what they take” (Plotinus), the vast sea at high tide spilling onto the shores, the super-saturated excess of love and justice, the wide and immeasurable desert.31 Wonder is the response of the soul to these kinds of surprising beauty, experiences of the plenitude and surplus of infinity. Or it is the response of the soul to the strangeness of itself, to the foreign mystery dwelling deep within.
Exile and Prophetic Language
While there are numerous moments when mystics and prophets come together like two hands joined in prayer, it is also true that they have their own signatures when writing of wonder or exile, God or the desert.32 Though wonder is the natural ally of the mystic’s purpose—called on to dramatize the unreachable heights of the divine—exile appears so frequently in the prophets’ proclamations that it is more emblematic of their identity than the olive branch is emblematic of peace. As a memory that is both wounding and revelatory, exile is a defining theme of these troubled individuals who were almost always the voice of migrants and strangers, the poor and needy, if they weren’t the migrants and strangers themselves, estranged members of an estranged people. Though prophets seek wisdom in the signs and symbols of exile, it is also nothing to celebrate, so devastating and ruinous it is, if it was not also the occasion for the prophets’ betrothal to God. The prophets carry this memory of love deep in their hearts without ever losing sight of the severe and forbidding nature of exile, every bit as cruel and inhospitable as the desert sun. Indeed, when the prophets turn to the symbolism of the desert, there is an unmistakable tone of suffering and dereliction in their appeals. While the mystics are fond of desert language for its apophatic significance, their theologies often remain confined within an intellectual paradigm about the possibilities and limits of human ideas. With the prophet, on the contrary, the desert is a perfect mirror of the desolation and destitution felt by hungry wanderers and oppressed slaves, by exiles and aliens. Different from mystical exegesis, the language of the prophet is much more tormented, frightening, existential. It captures the coarseness of human history.
Desert imagery in the prophets is, in short, a dark summary of human history. The desert signifies dispossession in history and location, the forced slavery of entire communities, the yoke and cruelty of war, the loss of house and homeland, the hunger and misery of exiles and refugees. The desert is the homeland of the homeless, the region of wanderers and pilgrims. And the desert is, as Juan Rulfo knew so well, our own century, an age that bears a striking resemblance to the town of Comala in Rulfo’s surrealistic masterpiece Pedro Páramo (indeed, in Spanish páramo means a wasteland or barren plain, which makes his novel speech from the void, speech that rises from the barren soil like a scorpion).33
To take one example of the desertlike spirituality of the prophets, consider Jeremiah. His speech is like an uncontrollable fire—his metaphor—because it bears witness to the ashes of history, to burned communities and cities, to the desolation left in the wake of war, captivity, and exile. Like so many prophets, Jeremiah is the anguished chronicler of the heavy hand of history, of the welts and bruises left on the souls of the poor and innocent. He lets loose his words to wreak havoc among the untroubled and complacent consciences of the people. His words are wild and agonizing, full of complaints and protests, sad moans and laments—and full of tears:
O that my head were a spring of water,
and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night
for the slain of my poor people.
(Jeremiah 9:1)
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more.
(Jeremiah 31:15)
Indeed, in Jeremiah and other biblical texts, tears are the most obvious sign of the devastating reach of exile. They are the most visible indication that there is something terribly wrong. The evidence is in their eyes, eyes that suffer blindness for being flooded with tears. When distinguishing the poet from the philosopher, Federico García Lorca captured beautifully the principal meaning of the prophet: “And I tell us that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of the kind whose bodily senses were shaped in a world that is not our own and that few people are able to perceive. A poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink.”34 The prophets are poets of this kind, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to death than to philosophy. Their proclamations are evocative of imploration and blindness rather than vision, apocalypse instead of enlightenment. If one understands anything about the Bible, it should be how much the prayers of the Bible are bathed in mourning and lamentations, dirges and cries. Derrida picks up on this theme:
By praying on the verge of tears, the sacred allegory does something. It makes something happen or come, makes something come to the eyes, makes something well up in them, by producing an event. It is performative, something vision alone would be incapable of if it gave rise only to representational reporting, to perspicacity, to theory or to theater, if it were not already potentially apocalypse, already potent with apocalypse. . . . To have imploration rather than vision in sight, to address prayer, love, joy, or sadness rather than a look or gaze. . . . Contrary to what one believes one knows, the best point of view is a source-point and a watering hole, a waterpoint—which thus comes down to tears.35
The biblical prophets do not give us theory or systems, they do not look or gaze—they implore. Their bodies and spirits are embodied apocalypses, they put on the garments and sackcloth of mourning, they become walking dramas of Israel’s impending doom. Their words are mournful revelations that announce the death of the old before the new can be envisaged. Jeremiah will literally put on the oxen’s yoke to forewarn the Israelites of the Babylonian might. Isaiah will strip his body naked and wander the desert for three years to call attention to the fate of the nations at the hands of the Assyrians (Isaiah 20). Ezekiel is commanded to prepare an exile’s bag and to cover his eyes to characterize the impending days of darkness that will fall hard on this nation of wayfarers. In each case, the prophets become one-man shows in a peripatetic theater that has the dispossessions of history as its main act (Ezekiel 12). With feverish histrionics, they cry out, denounce, censure, bewail, bemoan. And above all, they shed tears of blood for the omens of death they notice everywhere.
The prophets are, in fact, obsessed with death, and they succor death as if it was their own beloved who has died, marching arm in arm with him, bemoaning his death, grieving and wailing, singing the blues. Some tremble to name the ghastly specter of death for fear of reprisal or curse, but the prophets are not reserved in this regard. Because they announce the end of all that presumes to be inviolable and unending, death is always a key theme in the prophets, if not their most beloved companion, their most steadfast love, as Octavio Paz once wrote about Mexicans.36 The funeral they enact is for Israel, of course, or the Temple, or for the dead consciences of the people. Whatever the case, there is no doubt that their pronouncements are peopled by the ghosts of the dead.
And for the prophets, this familiarity with death is impossible to disentangle from their experience of exile. Exile is a break and disruption with death-like features, a wound that can be fatal. As an omen of death, exile takes and strips away all that is dear and life-giving; it peels away our soul, leaving us denuded and bare. It can be catastrophic, this much is clear in the Hebrew Bible:
I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void;
and to the heavens and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,
and all the hills moved to and fro,
I looked, and lo, there was no one at all,
and all the birds of the air had fled.
I looked, and lo, the fruitful land
was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins.
(Jeremiah 4:23–26)
In fact, most of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible prophesy and describe the great catastrophes that befell the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The prophets are chroniclers of these violent episodes in Israel’s history. As speaker’s of God’s word, they call out and denounce the bloody machinations of world powers: the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Persians, Syrians, and Romans. And closer to home, they see with great clarity and honesty their own nation’s sins and injustices. They are harshest and most unforgiving when it comes to Israel’s own ethical-political offenses. They jolt the memory of the people when they are likely to forget that that they, too, were once strangers in the land of Egypt (Deuteronomy 10:19). They excoriate the guilty for “crushing the poor into the dust of the earth” (Amos 2:7), for turning away widows and orphans, for not welcoming the strangers of the land. And they are hostile to practices of worship and sacrifice that accompany such acts of injustice and violence. The Hebrew prophet surely wants sacrifices and offerings from the people, but ones that give life to the poor and dying, sacrifices that answer Pablo Neruda’s hopes: “the poor hopes of my people: children in school with shoes on, bread and justice being spread as the sun is spread in the summer.”37 They want offerings, in other words, that will be spread evenly, generously, justly. Anything else seems to only invoke their fury.
And there is plenty of sound and fury in their voices. They speak with the same violence and outrage as a tornado, causing all in its path to quake and shiver. Indeed, it is quite natural to associate prophets with the most awesome forces of nature—earthquakes, tornados, blazing fires—because they are possessed by the same earth-shattering power, the same seismic activity. When they speak, we should beware and prepare for an eruption and upheaval that leaves nothing unaffected.38 In their desertlike speech, a voice cries out, unsettles and terrifies us, and always forces us to remember the exoduses and dispossessions of human history. The prophet would have no vocation, no calling, then, if exile didn’t create the desperate need. Without exile, there would be no tears and no prophet needed to speak on behalf of those who shed so many tears.
The condition of exile is, in short, the definitive feature of the Hebrew prophets and it provided them with an unenviable privilege: a cognitive insight and awareness of human fragility and insecurity, danger and pain. In this sense, exile proved revelatory for the prophets, a disclosure of wisdom gained by combat with the calamities of history. They shunned any other version of religion—no matter how beautiful and seductive—if it did not locate God’s face in the naked and tormented face of the poor and oppressed. And this certainly holds true for the understanding of wonder: no version of wonder will pass their scathing judgment if it does not channel the terrible throes of the dispossessions of history. Wonder will always include these raw, sorrowful realities after passing through the hoarse throats of the Jewish prophets. It will always sound different from those without any contact and solidarity with the wretched of the earth.
Wonder and Exile in the New World
Though I have opened with a general discussion of mystics and prophets, I hope to show in what follows the echoes and reverberations of these themes in the figures of the New World. The subjects of this study carry the memory of these voices deep in their hearts and consciences, and when they do not channel them, they at least echo them the way a great jazz musician echoes the sounds and beats of the past while adding their own improvised sound. In this way, the subjects of my study recall the themes and sounds of mystics and prophets, but add their own accent on wonder and exile, an accent that was profoundly shaped by the unprecedented discoveries and conquests of the year 1492.
María Rosa Menocal describes well these new accents and sounds post-1492 when speaking of the mystical significance of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (the date was changed from July 31 to August 2 by the appeal of Isaac Abravanel). The date of August 2 was preferred because it fell on the ninth of Ab in the Jewish liturgical calendar, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple. The new date would provide a new occasion for ancient sorrows, a new diaspora in perfect liturgical and kabbalistic continuity with the original diaspora. True to the purpose of ritual, Abravanel and his contemporaries sought to recapture and re-enact an ancient memory—as painful as that memory might be—so that some kind of meaning and order could be assigned to what was otherwise meaningless and chaotic. Menocal’s moving prose takes us back to that time and place of August 2, 1492, and recalls for us the tide of tears streaming from Jewish eyes as they wait on the docks of Spain for ships to take them somewhere else, always somewhere else:
These are the first days of August 1492. If we go down to the docks in the great Spanish port of Cádiz we are overwhelmed. . . . The throngs of people are unbearable, particularly in the damp summer heat, and worst of all are the tears, the wailing, the ritual prayers, all those noises and smells and sights of departures. This is the day, the hour, the place, of a leave-taking more grievous and painful than that of death itself, an exodus inscribed in all the sacred texts, anticipated and repeated. . . . Exile on Diaspora. And, during that summer, all roads led to the sea, to ports such as Cádiz, to the desperately overbooked ships, and they were filled with the sounds of exile, that mingling of the vernacular sorrow of the women and the children with the liturgical chanting of the men.39
If all roads led to the sea that summer, the sea also became the passageway to new worlds. In that year, the sea would carry sailors across the deep blue ocean and it would carry exile along with it. Exodus would be remembered, anticipated, and endlessly repeated in this unknown and strange world. And wonder, too: wonder would be endlessly repeated, in some ways honorable, in others, reprehensible. Soon enough, the storied splendors of the New World would attract a vast sea of explorers itching to know the remotest corners of the earth. They would be lured and charmed by the indefinite, half-attained, and unimaginable experience of sublimity that is the phenomenon of wonder, to paraphrase Herman Melville’s Ishmael. While this taste of sublimity would lead some to a modest and tolerant understanding of religions and cultures, in other cases, it would help create a new desert and wasteland.
In this regard, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would witness the different histories of wonder, the dispossession of knowledge alongside the dispossession of house and home. With a perceptive eye to the histories of both wonder and exile, Michel de Certeau spoke of the defilements of history that appeared on the mystical bodies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: “They were leading lives of exile, hounded from their land by the defilements of history. Super flumina Babylonis: the theme of mourning, disconsolate despite the intoxication of new aspirations, was endlessly repeated.”40 Certeau has chronicled well this coexistence of exile with the intoxicating dreams of New Worlds in the early modern period. The conquest of the New World, wars and economic recessions, expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain, outbreaks of famine and plague, the persecution of the “impure” of blood: all these events of the early modern period were visible stains on mystical lives according to Certeau. The theme of exile deepened in intensity in the period and came to disturb all assurances of meaning. The images of a lost paradise and an apocalyptic future—rampant in the age—made it clear that exile had forced its way into every dimension of time, beginnings and ends. There was no sanctuary or haven, past or future, that would be free of exile’s despotism. The desert of exile extended its reach into all territories of Europe and soon made its way, as we will see throughout the course of this study, across the great sea into the New World.
Following the mystical and prophetic sensibilities of Certeau, thus, I hope to explore New World poets and writers with a concentration on wonder and exile. If my focus is with poets and writers, it is because I see in them what Kierkegaard saw in Job: “In our time it is thought that genuine expressions of grief, the despairing language of passion, must be assigned to the poets, who then like attorneys in a lower court plead the cause of the suffering before the tribunal of human compassion. . . . Speak up, then, unforgettable Job, repeat everything you said.”41
In my view, it is mystics, prophets, and poets who best capture the wonders and beauties, the tears and long walks that make up the history of the Americas. It is their language of passion and imagination that enables us to be like José Arcadio Buendía and navigate across unknown seas and visit uncharted territories. And it is their language that is witness to the desert of history, the desert of exiles and migrants, the desert of privation and sorrow.
