By: José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra
In the opposite pole to innocence is, as Blake taught us, experience. In this essay I want to think about certain songs of experience. I will call them songs of improper experience. I begin to explain from the collection of poems by Damaris Puñales Alpízar, No vine a hacerme la inocente (2023). Already the title arms my panoply. Its nine syllables announce a disenchantment that enchants: an enunciation from experience. I can no longer be innocent and I am not interested in playing innocent. Who speaks then is not a female Adam pronouncing for the first time the perfect names of things. One might think that she is perhaps an Eve. But this is not the case either. There is memory here, repetition taken advantage of.
As I did not come here to play the Sybil, I jump to a quotation. This is the first poem of the book:
Mi tercer marido
era muy parecido al primero:
tenía pies pequeños,
suaves como los de un bebé.
Mi tercer marido
era tan buen amante
como mi segundo amante:
desataba en mí
un torbellino multiorgásmico.
Mi tercer marido
era tan incoherente
como mi tercer amante
y casi tan fiel como el cuarto:
me olvidaba al doblar la esquina.
Mi tercer marido
escribía poemas a otras
como mi primer y segundo amantes
y como el novio que tuve
antes de tener el primer amante o el primer marido.
A todos les escribí también
algún verso
y a todos olvidé
––incluso al segundo marido
a quien nunca conocí.
[My third husband
was very similar to the first one:
had small feet,
soft as a baby's.
My third husband
was as good a lover
as my second lover:
unleashed in me
a multi-orgasmic whirlwind.
My third husband
was as inarticulate
as my third lover
and almost as faithful as my fourth:
who would forget me around the corner.
My third husband
wrote poems to others
like my first and second lovers
and like the boyfriend I had
before I had the first lover or the first husband.
I wrote poems
for all of them
and all of them I forgot
–even to the second husband
whom I never knew.]
The poem oozes black humor, but it also touches the center of the coordinates I want to propose: throughout the contrast and compare of boyfriends, lovers, husbands, among all this that has happened to me, among all these men that have been in my body, something that has not happened to me sneaks into these lines. There is something that troubles because it is meant to be troubling. That which has not been experienced in the usual sense of the term, as a verifiable fact of the outside world, made me smile the first time I read the poem and, as I progressed through the book, it demanded my return.
Before explaining a return to what, I shall retrace the walk through the book I had to take before arriving again at the final lines of this poem: “even to the second husband / whom I never knew”.
In No vine a hacerme la inocente, there are registers produced from contact with different languages. With English, this one appears:
After getting drunk
with poetry and alcohol
the poets will fuck
until they pass out.
The poetry is still the same bad shit.
A manner that is outside the diction of the poetic persona in Spanish. I say and am myself differently in English than in Spanish.
But there is a Damaris who is not in either of these two languages, who goes through the world in another way, whose nuances surely escape me since I do not know Russian:
Todos los pueblos pequeños son iguales,
pero este paisaje
se escribe en otro idioma.
Las isbas
distribuidas casi simétricamente
pueden confundirnos,
hacernos sentir por un momento
en casa
(¿qué es casa, después de todo?
¿adónde ese lugar para existir?)
[All small towns are the same,
yet, this landscape
is written in another language.
Isbas
distributed almost symmetrically
can confuse us,
make us feel for a moment
at home
(what is home, after all?
where is that place that allows existence?)]
It is precisely from the experience of Russian that another poem comes: “Para Anna Ajmátova, tras los pliegues del tiempo” (For Anna Akhmatova, through the folds of time):
Pero podríamos juntas recorrer la avenida Nevski,
cruzar todos los pequeños puentes y canales
que llevan
del Neva a tu puerta,
saludar a tu vecina que aún no te devuelve
los cinco rublos que pidió prestados,
y sentarnos, finalmente,
en un café cualquiera cerca de la bahía,
protegidas acaso por estos pliegues en el tiempo
donde habitamos.
[But we could together walk along Nevsky Prospect, cross all the little bridges and canals that lead from the Neva to your door,
greet your neighbor who has not yet returned
the five rubles she borrowed,
and finally sit
in a café near the bay,
perhaps protected by these folds in time
we inhabit.]
In this fragment, I want to emphasize that the poet is apostrophized. The city shared by Akhmatova and the I of the poem in two successive centuries makes this interpellation possible. Yet there is more: the work of imagining Akhmatova in such affectionate detail moves from a series of charming details to a co-living, as it were, that escapes its chronological impossibility. This way of being together connects with the text with which my long detour shall end. There are poems that require research, such as those by Ezra Pound or Gerardo Deniz. This is the case with “Un mensaje en Abydos” (A Message in Abydos):
en la penumbra del polvoriento templo
Dorothy se orienta
por un recuerdo antiguo que la guía
a través de los oscuros pasillos
[In the dim light of the dusty temple
Dorothy finds her bearings
through the dark corridors
guided by an ancient memory]
I must confess that when I first read these lines, I imagined Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz on an Oriental and Orientalist adventure. I admit that I still like the image of the ruby slippers shining in a dark temple. A literary text is also the inferential strolls it suggests, as Umberto Eco called them; even if they are later ruined or ignored. A literary text, but especially a poem.
Now, I like “A Message in Abydos” better, with its corrected Dorothy. Dorothy’s last name was Eady, she was born in the South of England in 1904. After falling down a staircase, she began to have visions (or revelations) of a previous life. At first vague, but from the beginning demanding a return home. This home was revealed with further detail in a visit to the British Museum. In the interminable Egyptian rooms, little Dorothy recognized her ancestral home in Abydos.
Her life is a long journey, which she understands as a return. She learns to decipher the hieroglyphics of the ancient civilization and manages to find a useful Egyptian husband, whom she later, already living in Egypt, exchanges for a second, even more useful one: an archaeologist. She has a son and names him Seti, after the pharaoh who visits her in her dreams. This leads her neighbors to call her Omm Seti: Seti’s mother, as is customary in Egypt.
Once in Abydos, a team of scholars, naturally composed exclusively of men, challenges her conviction that she is at home, and Dorothy, the one from the poem, knows how to find her way through the labyrinths of the ruins.
In the end, she manages to reunite with Pharaoh Seti, who visited her in her dreams. With this information, the poem becomes less obscure:
Omm Seti regresa a casa
tres mil años después todo sigue igual.
El farón amante la espera
en la penumbra del polvoriento templo
Dorothy se orienta
por un recuerdo antiguo que la guía
[Omm Seti returns home
three thousand years later, everything remains the same.
The pharaoh lover waits for her
in the dim light of the dusty temple
Dorothy finds her bearings
through the dark corridors / guided by an ancient memory]
Yet Puñales Alpízar does one more extraordinary thing, because she knows, through the magic of verse, how to leave the third person and become Omm Seti:
Hemos nacido el mismo día
Seti y yo.
Solo a mí me cuenta
lo que alguna noche
dentro de tresmil años
susurraré al oído del faraón
acariciando con mis dedos
el polvo de un mensaje
escrito en Abydos.
[We were born on the same day
Seti and I.
Only to me does he tell
what one night
three thousand years from now
I shall whisper in the pharaoh's ear
caressing with my fingers
the dust of a message
written in Abydos.]
In the end, the poet is a seer, allowing herself to be possessed (enthused) by the divine voice, by the restlessness of the daimon, by the memory of the conventionally unrememberable, becoming a vehicle. This is my true home: the poem.
From here I return to the skein of my beginning. The second husband, the imagined one, the one she never met, with whom the poem ends, is (or I let him be) Pharaoh Seti. Allowing ourselves this possibility matters. I shall now try to explain why. This collection of poems, which leaves innocence behind and sings of experience, proposes not only realistic experience—which underlies the moral reading of innocence in philosophy, as Elizabeth Wolgast proposes—but also the possibility of an experience that is lived through the intensity of the imagination.
So, the cornerstone is that it is possible to access the experience of another person. Further, I would also venture to say that precisely the attention required by poetry is a very powerful way to access this experience. It should be added that, as the poem, if if it remains a poem, is never revealed in a single reading. Rather, it shows more of its layers when we read and reread it collectively. The other members of the group show me different ways of activating these verses, of entering their stanzas, to echo Agamben’s expression. By reading and rereading, the experience encoded in the poem is combined with my experience of going through it, of desiring and surrendering myself to it: of surrendering my self and attempting to be her, the I of the poem; but also allowing the experience suggested by those who read with me: experiencing (and experimenting with) several selves.
I want to supplement my reading of No vine a hacerme la inocente with Santa Teresa de Jesús (2001 and then revised in 2022) by Olvido García Valdés. There, one of the greatest poets of the Spanish language attempts to understand an unshared experience. Santa Teresa de Jesús remains unsatisfactory as a biography when compared to the volumes produced by English or US historians. These robust volumes that, due to their exhaustiveness, often leave their readers exhausted. In contrast, García Valdés’s book has many gaps in its chronology, as it focuses much more on the mystical and the best part of its energy is concentrated on co-creating a voice. It allows the enchanting and free voice of the saint speak (and above all that of the woman who faces real dangers in her journey to sainthood), whom he characterizes as follows: “Who was this woman, an often sick nun, in whose texts we hear a Spanish comparable only to that of Don Quixote, with which she tells us of experiences as exalted as those of St. John of the Cross, and who at the same time founds convents, leads a religious reform, and confronts influential castes and powerful ecclesiastics?”
It would seem that Teresa is saying, “I didn’t come here to seem whole,” reminding us that saints are only saints in retrospect, once their trial of residence in this world is complete, having convinced the devil’s advocate. In order to better complete her comprehension, García Valdés needs to build a textual bridge to Saint Teresa that traces her own via negativa through Simone Weil, Clarice Lispector, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These bridges are necessary, as she confesses to being agnostic and, thus immune to the voices of mysticism.
Now, I believe it is necessary to characterize what No vine a hacerme la inocente (a book by a Cuban author living in the United States, published in Spain) and the biographical essay on Saint Teresa (by a Spanish author, published in Mexico) have in common. This can only be achieved through what we can call improper experience, privileging what Lacan called the feminine position. Lacan, reading with perverse attention Hegel’s schlecht Unendlichkeit, bad infinity: a set whose proliferation is not closed because it lacks an exceptional element that manages to close the series, because it does not belong to it. In the words of Jean-Claude Milner:
Lacan distinguishes between S1 and S2. S1 is the signifiant-maître; as indicated by its index, it is structurally first. Each utterance of S1 functions as if it were unprecedented. S2 ,on the other hand, is knowledge, le savoir; as indicated by its index, it is structurally second. S1 functions as the signifiant-maître as long as it is excepted from knowledge; by uttering that signifiant, the subject asserts that it is the name of everyone’s ignorance, including his own. Among the verbal tenses, it is disconnected from all past tenses. S2, by contrast, is crucially connected with a past tense : it is still already known.
Thus, what is avoided in the female position is the founding appearance of S1, which can ignore all previous readings (of the poem) and interpreting it definitively. The feminine position accumulates traits and possibilities, but it is not capable of finishing, of determining, of being categorical. And when I say poem, I could also say the other: Dorothy Eady or St. Teresa: I try to understand them, but always from a knowledge that remains partial, but which, in its effort, allows me to access the improper experience that remains inaccessible to S1, which can only settle in the proper.
Now, I want to rethink this by proposing another vocabulary, returning to our initial binary. I would like to give a name to the need of continuous accretion of knowledge that characterizes my experience of the experience of my fellow human, she whom I feel close to and at the same time insurmountably mysterious and distant. I want to name this curiosity, which opens me up to a way of reading and imagining, innocence.
Experience, that experience I have here called improper, therefore requires a return to innocence. Not playing innocent, but actually being innocent, admitting that my personal experience has limits, that it does not reach what another person lives or has lived. Another person who is akin to and simultaneously radically alien to me, and that is precisely why it is interesting to approach them.
That which surprises me with its radical strangeness and speaks to me very closely is the definition of poetic diction. Anna Akhmatova or Saint Teresa of Jesus, force (seduce) me into their strangeness to draw closer to them. More often than not attracting a constellation of other affinities (which have in common their unique diction: San Juan de la Cruz or Clarice Lispector) that allow me to reconstruct, or more exactly, to continue reconstructing (without ever finishing) the experience I have intuited.
The poem compels me to reread it, but more than anything else, to share it, to initiate others into its endless expressing radiation, into that which insists from the strange accuracy of its verses. The intersubjective field is—in addition to the twist produced by two voices coexisting in the space of the poem—a hospitality for listening, for reading. A reader is necessary to complete the “us.”
Now, in this spirit, I want the group that forms around a poem (a collection of poems) not to exhaust it (as the phrasal verb “explain away” so rightly expresses in English). The obligation is not to turn the poem into an analytical shorthand of what it “means,” what it “symbolizes,” its genealogies; but rather to keep the embers burning when those questions have already been answered (and forgotten). In that sense, the position of the group reading the poem is also one of innocence: we have not finished experiencing the poem. And that is what it is all about.
Works Cited
García Valdés, Olvido. Teresa de Jesús: un ensayo biográfico. Prol. Tania Favela. UNAM, 2022.
Milner, Jean-Claude. “The Prince and the Revolutionary” available at https://www.crisiscritique.org/storage/app/media/2016-03-29/milner.pdf
Puñales Alpízar, Damaris. No vine a hacerme la inocente. Liliputienses, 2023.
Wolgast, Elizabeth. “Innocence” in Philosophy, Jul., 1993, Vol. 68, No. 265 (Jul., 1993), pp. 297-307.