A Tale of Two Gardens

by Paz, Octavio; Weinberger, Eliot

• ISBN13: 9780811213493
• ISBN10: 0811213498
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-04-17
• Publisher: New Directions

Summary

Despite having written many acclaimed non-fiction books on the region, he has always considered those writings to be footnotes to the poems. From the long work "Mutra," written in 1952 and accompanied here by a new commentary by the author, to the celebrated poems of East Slope, and his recent adaptations from the classical Sanskrit, Paz scripts his India with a mixture of deft sensualism and hands-on politics.

Table of Contents

Introduction	9	(4)
I. MUTRA	13	(8)
Mutra	15	(6)
Muriel Rukeyser
II. EAST SLOPE	21	(44)
The balcony	23	(4)
Eliot Weinberger
The tomb of Amir Khusru	27	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
The religious fig	28	(2)
Eliot Weinberger
The mausoleum of Humayun	30	(1)
Charles Tomlinson
In the Lodi Gardens	31	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
The day in Udaipur	31	(3)
Eliot Weinberger
The other	34	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Perpetua encarnada	34	(3)
Eliot Weinberger
On the roads of Mysore	37	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Ootacamund	38	(2)
Eliot Weinberger
The effects of baptism	40	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Cochin	40	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Madurai	41	(1)
Paul Blackburn
Happiness in Herat	42	(2)
Eliot Weinberger
The Tanghi-Garu Pass	44	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Sharj Tepe	45	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Apparition	45	(1)
Charles Tomlinson
Village	45	(1)
Charles Tomlinson
Himachal Pradesh (1)	46	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
The face and the wind	46	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Tomb of the poet	47	(3)
Eliot Weinberger
Daybreak	50	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Nightfall	50	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Exclamation	51	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Distant neighbor	51	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Vrindaban	51	(6)
Lysander Kemp
Release	57	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Concert in the garden	57	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Writing	58	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Concord	58	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Sunyata	58	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Youth	59	(6)
Charles Tomlinson
Kavya: 10 epigrams from the Sanskrit	60	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Apparition on the riverbank	60	(1)
First meeting	60	(1)
Confidence: confusion	60	(1)
The seal	61	(1)
The oblique invitation	61	(1)
The pedagogue	62	(1)
Without fanfare	62	(1)
Rhetoric	62	(1)
Posterity	63	(1)
The tradition	63	(2)
III. TOWARD THE BEGINNING	65	(32)
Wind from all compass points	67	(6)
Paul Blackburn
Madrigal	73	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
With eyes closed	74	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Passage	74	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
With you	75	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Sun on a blanket	75	(2)
Eliot Weinberger
Maithuna	77	(5)
Eliot Weinberger
The arms of summer	82	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
The key of water	82	(1)
Elizabeth Bishop
Axis	83	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Altar	84	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
Sunday on the island of Elephanta	85	(1)
Eliot Weinberger
A tale of two gardens	86	(11)
Eliot Weinberger
Notes	97	(14)
Nagarjuna	111

Excerpts

CHAPTER ONE

MUTRA

Like a too-loving mother, a terrible mother of suffocation,

like a silent lioness of sunlight,

a single wave the size of the sea,

it has arrived noiselessly and in each of us has taken its

place like a king

and the glass days melt and in each breast is erected a

throne of thorns and live coals

and its dominion is a solemn hiccup, a crushed breathing

of gods and animals with eyes dilated

and mouths full of hot insects uttering one same syllable

day and night, day and night.

Summer, enormous mouth, vowel made of fumes and

panting!

This day wounded to death creeping along the length of

time and never finished with dying,

and the day to come, now scraping impatiently at the

no-man's-land of dawn,

and the rest waiting their hour in the vast stables of the

year,

this day and its four pups, morning with its crystal tail

and noon with its one eye,

noon absorbed in its light, seated in splendor,

afternoon rich in birds, night with its bright stars armed

and in full regalia,

this day and the presences that the sun exalts or pulls

down with a simple wingblow:

the girl who appears in the street and is a stream of quiet

freshness,

the beggar raising himself up like a feeble prayer, a heap

of garbage and whining canticles,

red bougainvillea black through darkness of red, purple

in accumulated blue,

women bricklayers carrying stones on their heads as if

they carried extinguished suns,

the beauty in her cave of stalactites, the sound of her

scorpion's scales,

the man covered with ashes who worships the phallus,

dung and water,

musicians who tear sparks out of daybreak and make the

airy tempest of the dance come down to earth,

the collar of sparkle, electric garlands in equilibrium at

midnight,

the sleepless children picking fleas by moonlight,

fathers and mothers with their family flocks and their

beasts asleep and their gods petrified a thousand

years ago,

butterflies, vultures, snakes, monkeys, cows, insects

looking like madness,

all this long day with its frightful cargo of beings and

things slowly being stranded on suspended time.

We all go declining with the day, we all enter the tunnel,

we cross through endless galleries whose walls of solid

air close behind us,

we imprison ourselves in ourselves and at each step the

human animal pants and topples,

we fall back, we give our ground, the animal loses the

future at each step,

that which is erect and hard and bony in ourselves finally

gives way, falling heavily into the mother mouth.

Within myself I crowd myself, in my own self I press

myself and as I crowd myself I overflow,

I am extended and I expand, the full one, spilling and

filling myself,

there is no vertigo nor mirror nor nausea facing the mirror,

there is no downfall,

only a being, an overflowing being, full to the brim, and

adrift:

not like the bow that curves and arches on itself to let the

arrow leap straight to the mark,

not like the breast that awaits it, on whom hope already

draws the wound,

not concentrated nor in trance, but tumbling from step

to step, spilled water, we return to the origin.

And the head falls on the breast and body falls on body

without finding its goal, its final body.

No, take hold of the ancient image: anchor existence and

plant it in the stone, base of the lightning!

Some stones never give way, stones made of time, time

made of stone, centuries that are columns,

assemblies singing the hymns of stone,

fountains of jade, obsidian gardens, towers of marble,

high beauty armed against time.

One day my hand brushed against all that constructed

glory.

Stones also lose their footing, stones too are images,

and they fall and they scatter and mix and flow with the

flowing river.

The stones also are the river.

Where is the man who gives life to the stones of the dead,

the man who makes the stones and the dead speak?

Foundations of stone and of music,

the factory that produces the mirrors of discourse and

the poem's castle of fire

entwine their roots in his breast, rest in his head; his

hand sustains them.

Under the breastplate of rock-crystal I searched for the

man, groped for the imperceptible opening;

we are born and the rent is no more than a scratch and it

never scars over and it burns and it is a star giving off

its own light,

the little wound never quenched, the sign of the blood

never erased, through that door we go down to the

dark.

Man also flows, man also falls and is an image that vanishes.

Marshes of lethargy, accretions of algae, bees in cataracts

over half-open eyes,

a feast of sand, hours chewed, images chewed, life

chewed centuries

with no existence other than ecstatic chaos which floats

among the sleeping waters,

water of eyes, water of mouths, wedding waters lost in

contemplation, water of incest,

water of gods, copulation of gods, water of stars and

reptiles, water-forests of burnt bodies,

beatitude of fullness, overflowing itself, we are not, I do

not want to be

God, I do not want to grope in the dark, I will not return,

I am a man and man is

man, he who leapt to the void and since then nothing

has sustained him but his own wing,

the one who let go of his mother, the exiled, rootless,

with neither heaven nor earth, a bridge, a bow

stretched over nothing, in himself unified, made whole,

and nevertheless split from the moment of his birth,

struggling

against his shadow, always running behind himself,

blundering, exhausted, without ever reaching himself,

condemned from childhood, alembic of time, king of

himself, son of his own works.

The ultimate images overthrown, the black river drowns

consciousness,

night doubles over, the soul gives way, clusters of confounded

hours fall, man falls

like a star, the clusters of stars fall, like overripe fruit the

world and its suns fall.

But in my head keep vigil adolescence and its images,

the only treasure not ravaged:

ships afire on seas still unnamed and each wave striking

memory in a storm of reminders

(fresh water in the island cisterns, fresh water of women

and their voices sounding through the night like many

streams meeting,

goddess of green eyes and human words who planted in

our breast her reasons, a lovely procession of lances,

the calm reflection before a sphere, swollen with itself

like an ear of wheat, but immortal, perfect, sufficient,

contemplation of numbers that join like notes or lovers,

the universe like a lyre, a bow, the victorious geometry

of gods, sole abode that is worthy of man!)

and the high-walled city that on the plain glitters like a

jewel in pain

and demolished watch-towers and the champion defeated

and in the smoking chambers the treasure of

women

and the hero's epitaph stuck in the road at the narrow

place like a sword

and the poem rising and covering with its wings the

embrace of day and night

and the straight tree of discourse planted in potency in

the middle of the city

and justice in the open air of a people who weighs each

act in the scale of a delicate spirit sensitive to the

weight of light;

acts, the high pyres burnt by history!

Under these black remains asleep, truth, who roused the

works: man is only man among men.

And I reach down and grasp the incandescent grain and

plant it in my being: it must grow one day.

Delhi, 1952

Copyright © 1972,1973,1996 Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger. All rights reserved.