Counter Points of Nature: An Attempt to Contradict Rodolfo Hinostroza’s Contra Natura

ReviewsPoetry

Jun 4

Though there may currently be no room for literary revelry, I think there is one book a centennial of which we should be, if not celebrating, at least actively contemplating – more than Ulysses, more than Duino Elegies or My Sister, Life, even more than The Waste Land – albeit surely where we are, full circle and back at – is César Vallejo’s Trilce, which hit the world the same year as the abovementioned celestial bodies, and, although less heeded, it might yet prove to be the Poem of that century, and the poem for our own arrested day. But maybe all the works I dropped the titles of, seemingly related by the year of their publication (and the poem we are celebrating in this text, and will get to in a bit, is the poem written by a poet-astrologer, so there can be nothing merely seeming about the dates in our current contemplation) are the works of the counter-nature, Contra Natura, in their contradistinct and unique ways, shedding light on the condition of the human Soul’s alienness to this Earth (Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden, in the words of Georg Trakl, words that seem to epitomize the modern man’s twisted vision of soul’s counter-nature condition).

Whether a man in his solitude, contemplating the core-shaking unresponsiveness of the angels – where are we, as human souls, among the grand ordering joints of things, if the angel-stuff of the World will no longer speak to us? Are we out of it? – or another man’s epiphany of Summer overflowing with Life, sending his verse circling round the mysteries of Personal Memory, while the very spirit of Time, torn out of joint by Pluto rising, breathes destruction in the very sense of Personal; or a man’s mythocomic, egregorous tempotopic drift among the multitudes of the subsumed, unwakeful city crowd-walk media-rite; or a man in his prison cell – a conditio contra hominem natura if there ever was one – his personal desolation rent cosmic in its proportions, hearing angelic and most wakeful bemols in gathering of his prison mates’ farts. These are some of the axes of the counter-natural drift of the soul that the modern poet tries to chart. Vallejo’s compatriot, Rodolfo Hinostroza knew his way around charting, even unto horoscopes and natal astro-maps, even unto varied nuptials of the spirit, and decided to take the very concept of Contra Natura and make a poem out of it.

That it is a supreme poem, a supreme act of loving attention by Anthony Seidman, poem’s translator, is beyond question to me. Instead of beating myself against the evident, I have decided to converse with the poem and its now two-headed creator upon several points raised within, if not the work, at least my reading of it (and not only the poem but the invaluable introduction that Anthony Seidman provided for the publication). The points raised may well be of cosmic and original proportions. But our conversation will remain amicable.

But if allowed for yet another moment to stick to this all too fleeting parallelism between Hinostroza and Vallejo, and the great poems that each man wrote, I would turn to the very opening lines of both, and see how such attention outlines the essential difference, not the similarity, between the two poems. Processual poems both, they approach the process in two categorically distinct ways. The terrifying, suffocating power of Trilce which resists its analytic, canonizing and academizing downfall, is not in its verbal diarrhea (which the analysts, canonists and academists tend to otherwise eat up), but, simply, plainly, in its diarrhea. Not to distaste you, reader, but it is not for nothing that the poem opens with the prisoners defecating and, for the next dozen lines of its pivotal opening section, builds a whole chain of fecal metaphorics, the human droppings becoming islands becoming (let us here follow Clayton Eshleman’s translations) “the guano,” “the simple fecapital ponk” and finally resting as peninsulas – this much for substance, while the accompanying winding instruments variously take shapes of “hyaloid squalls” or “grandiose b-flats.” The image of poem-making as defecating is never quite dropped throughout the poem’s 77 tough bits, until the opening poem’s will-making, lingering “islands” end up “on the coast still without sea.”

The fecal poetics of Trilce need serious consideration (Un poco más de consideración, as the author asks us, looking up from amid the fecal metaphors), if one is to read the poem at all, as it is through this opening chain of metaphors that the abovementioned processual nature of Vallejo’s poem is framed: not only is the poem given birth out of the human body, it is given birth not as a child, but as feces. It is dark, black, negligible, a waste, an end-matter. And this sense of poetic creation no longer being comparable with birthing but with defecation, is principal to Vallejo’s vision of Contra Natura-ness of the relation. To pick up the metaphor I placed at the beginning – if Rilke moans the absence of the angelic response from the modern poet’s vocation – for, pronouncedly at least since Dante, angels are the name given to the agents of the poem – Vallejo instead bemoans their incessant racket, he can hear them, but the sounds that convey them are anal squalls. And do you hear, attentive reader, an ominous adherence between Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich… and Quien hace tanta bulla…?

Anselm Kiefer. *für Robert Fludd*. 1996. Woodcut, acrylic and shellac on paper, mounted on canvas. 302 x 102 x 3.5 cm.

Whereas Vallejo begins his processual poem with defecation and is solely and entirely interested in the processes of the body – the ways of the poem are the shortcomings of the body, like a body imprisoned it picks and drops and short-circuits, and the functions of the poem are made the dysfunctions of the body – Hinostroza takes another route. If Trilce is a unique metapoem in that all of it reflects – and reflects upon – the body that is writing it, Hinostroza’s process strikes me as almost purely mental (the notion of purity being instrumental to the poem), an abstract thing, maybe a work of abstraction – and to disallow these adjectives to sink into abstraction, I will draw on the opening section of this poem: far from the stark gesture of Vallejo’s tortured body-poem, Hinostroza’s mind poem begins with the game of chess, and a smirky gob at that. The agony unveiled in launching the poem by a watched-over, forced collectively squatting line of prisoners in Vallejo’s opening poem is one of the most harrowing experiences I have had with modern poetry, and the lines take on the intensity of human bowels. Now Hinostroza picks up his poem midsentence, or, rather, midway through the game: And I continued… and the very first line of the poem breaks with P4AR – a chess opening move. Poem is many things, but primarily it is a game, and not a childish game of clumsy, angelic bodies, not a hopscotch or a hide-and-seek, but a serious, brainy, abstract game of chess. And the moves of that game become meta reflections on the movements of the poem, planted very much within the mental, not the physical, processes of the poet. This raises at least two interesting points. The first relates us to Pound, for Ezra Pound is surely the first name, more than all those I have dropped so far, that the title Contra Natura evokes, but in truth not only the title but the whole poem, its shape, its field-composition, its dense referentiality, multilingual and visual, ideogrammatic or hieroglyphic forays – all of these are maybe too evidently linked with Pound and his Cantos. Nature of the relation is very complex, even on the level of the title alone, and we shall get into at least some of it in due time, but for now, I want to suggest that Hinostroza’s very relation to Pound and his poem is that of contra-, of countering, and therefore his choice of the high abstraction of chess game as the field and the setting of his poem might have been a conscious choice in more ways than meet the eye. It was Pound’s ferocious don’ts that prohibited (maybe falsely, maybe rather easily) Abstraction from the poem, and all serious North American poetry seems to have reared from that (maybe false) assumption, that poetry does not favor abstraction. In contradicting Pound, Hinostroza applies a smirk of a player, a Duchamp smirk a bit, maybe the Cheshire, and breaks his first line with a chess move. The beauty of abstract act-causation is allowed to reenter the poem. And this I find beautiful, for contradicting – addiction to the rote, not abstraction, being the nemesis of poetry – one’s Masters is what every poet would be wise to do. Let’s talk living / dialectics, or the spirit’s alchemy. About these dialectics and this alchemy (an aethereal, or aery, alchemy of abstract intellection, not the dark and luminous alchemy of Trilce’s discarded matter made to sing) the first section of the poem, King’s Gambit, has many beautiful things to say.

By reviving the abstract, winning some, of course one also loses some. This is another major point that we should attempt to look into, surely to try to contradict ourselves as much as the poem, but for now I must say that my first sense of Contra Natura is that it is a disembodied poem, really a chess game, and for this reason all its grand bodily gestures, all its lovemakings and rolling heads, its charnel tents and nocturnal sweat lodges fell a tad flat to my ear. All bodies here are paper!, I would despair at times – birth in it is a horoscope, fucking is a countercultural slogan writ across some banner. All this might not be quite as I say it,

but – to let the poem speak instead – by then Reality was / an impetuous phantasmagoria.

Spanish Edition of Rodolfo Hinostroza’s *Contra Natura*

Towards what the Reality of the poem, now an impetuous phantasmagoria, a mind game of chess, makes its very first move is History. And it is obvious at the first glance at the poem that to an essential degree we are in the presence of a Poem of History. No necessity to r/evoke Pound’s definition of an epic, personal and vague as it stands, except to say that rather than merely including history (for what does not include history? What piece of writing, what human act eludes this inclusion?), an epic poem, maybe lately called long poem, momentarily concludes history. This Olson and others have ferociously rebelled against, and done marvels with their rebellion, but the simple act of human will of committing history to the page would seem to me to render their rebellion futile. Heroic ever being futile. Futile love, and equally futile the art of conclusion-reaching, the equal folly of that rather than mere inclusions. But this futile strive makes up the fabric of the long poem, say Hinostroza’s. The poem, we must admit, hands thrown up, our dance sitting down, remains that primal magical operation: an act, if not a fruit, of coherence. But, in a bit, I would like to inquire in what ways the poem does not cohere (precisely because of its conclusions?), wondering if it may shed me some light on why no great modern poem is allowed to cohere.

Romantics are the first our chess player (chessboards here seem to function as historic or textual place-times, maybe the locus of the whole poem, both its hive queen core-structure and its crystal dome) pays visit on his way to poetic coherence of history – the first dangerous move of the poem, its opening, is from the Romantic school. And a trope for history becomes “an incessant search for a crystal dome” and this crystal dome one among the cornerstones that make the poem revolve. Shelleyan image, this “dome of many-coloured glass” and so the history too is “at once the Paradise, / The grave, the city, and the wilderness.” Go thou to Rome, indeed! for in Hinostroza’s poem, history comes out most readily equated with the Power of the Empire (while it seems to be the ethereal, now-here Present that blooms most in the poem when the bodies, youths, loves are cast a net), and the historical dispatches are ever addressed to Caesar (and the presents, shells and touches, are for the lovers).

Or not? History having no place to happen in but the present (to turn slightly one phrase of one Duncan), and (as Pound knew and let us in on) poetry having to do not only with history but also news, and present being the one that, ever arriving, never arrives, they – History, Poem, and Chessboard – become for Hinostroza a search engine of sorts. History becomes the Akash of the poem. And fairly so, for as I have tried to suggest, I see Contra Natura as a relentlessly Mercurial poem, the long poem of intellection.

Anselm Kiefer, Ladder to the Sky, 1990-1991. 330.0 x 370.0 cm.

But as fluid as the present may be, History is not only a record of time, but also of matter. Time may be a watery emotive center of soul’s workings with the soil, but soul’s drift will have to make cosmos with the soil’s. And here my trouble with this Mercurial poem reappears. The search engine gives data, but the data is immaterial; for what I keep missing in the poem, as I read and reread it, is the quality of flesh. It is this quality of flesh and blood that weighs the sublunar spiel of history, not the dispatches to the Caesar. And even the greatly erotic passages of the poem (See the gorgeous ones in “Celebration of Lysistrata”) struck me as too fleeting, as if the bird only sang “from a point in mid-air” – and although mid-air is the place to be for the one with ankles winged, a place “where the entire labyrinth reveals itself and explains itself” still there are things one misses from that vantage point, unless one got there first having drilled through the dense green rounds and brown mute disks of matter.

For the present, being the great never-quite-here, is also, literally, that which is present – that single unrepresent, unfathomable, invisible angel of the Poem, the one Rilke dared not yell at, the one that Spicer, after Lorca, somnambulated as real dissolving fabrics of the real stuff of life. And I keep getting back at the lack I feel, that not enough of the bodily is included (in History), or simply that I feel cheated when the poet placing a shell over his sex can only result in make love not war. Or, as in one of his own riddlers, from one of the dispatches to the Caesar: and we will make love on the paper / and not war / and her body will undulate / and she will be distanced from it all

What does “it all” stand for? And how distanced will she be?

All this lack that keeps welling up in me might have to do precisely with that making love not war. Or the inability of making love not war. And Hinostroza, the poet-astrologer, the connoisseur of the celestial anatomy, would know this. On most days, Venus and Mars will share the bed, an imperial boudoir maybe, a gem-set chamber, and without the other one does not seem to come.

And that, to my reading of this poem, is more essential than the problem of history-news, or that of the mind-body. For it seems plausible that time can fail poetry in that news that don’t stay news becomes slogans – it should have been poetry but with time print and glue will wear off from years of rains and suns and it will not stay news – but also plausible that maybe one day it will turn again and – out of out-of-season – come back again, made new again, as poetry.

Now the fix of Venus and Mars seems as persistent as the famous, changeless “will to change”, and it remains essential, and might remain so despite the tides of news and histories, pasts and presents, written as though in the stars. And one’s choice of what to deem natural and what to discard as counter-nature might not dissolve the essence. If we accept the translator Anthony Seidman’s view, in his introductory piece, in positing “the centrality of love as a divine weapon to wield against the landscape of abusive power and destruction” in Hinostroza’s vision, as well as his suggestion that “it isn’t Pound’s Usura that is Contra Natura, but love and eroticism themselves,” the latter two being not natural but “the artifice of human imagination,” we might get an idea, go figure how wrong, of what this game that’s played upon the Chessboard is all about: Caesarean Empire of Nature, with its abusive power, its natural residence in the works of destruction, against the Freedom-Loving Fountain of Youth, which, somehow, is counter-nature, dealing in the artifices of human imagination and offering a weapon against Caesar’s power. But how is this power so forceless if it is of natural forces? I shall question these notions a little further down the line, but for now what I address is the possibility of such a clearcut division between the destructive (natural?) power of Caesar and the constructive (artificial?) power of Love. It is in this, I think, that Contra Natura, a sublime and excellent poem in most ways, is lacking in subversion. Queer youthful lovers get all the loving while Caesar gets all the hatred. I almost wish some of the letters to the Caesar were love letters, and I sure wish some of the letters were responses from the Caesar. I wish the Mercurial chessboard would at least conjure a phantasmagoria of connection, between the powers, between Mars and Venus. For one thing that the imagination employed in this poem does not counteract, nor contradict, is the State of Things, for on this board the good counters the bad, the beloved and beautiful counter the ugly and odious. And if that is not challenged maybe neither is Power, and no Nature has been countered. Oh I do wish this invisible Caesar would respond! I wish this poem, rich in interferences as it is rich in connections, would attempt the disconnected ends. And what on earth could this Emperor’s response be? Or does it matter? Maybe only a smirk, maybe while looking at the Horoscope.

1992? But that would be another story, maybe another nature.

Chaim Soutine, *Still Life with Rayfish*. 1924. 81.3 x 65.1 cm, Oil on canvas

The Earth within Seven Celestial Spheres, from Bede, *De natura rerum*, late 11th century

And the song? What will ultimately connect all the disparate moves, all the swerves of what the poem must account for is, of course, the Song. For Hinostroza’s poem is just that, a Canto, or a motet, a book of canti. That part of the nature of the game, too, remains unperturbed. And we learn from the introduction that “Hinostroza defined himself as a ‘classical poet’ and spoke of ‘prophecy’ and ‘inspiration’ in his work.” I take the bare-throated bellbird that first flutters through the dense hallways of the poem in the seventh line of it and does not utterly leave till the end, until it is allowed to rise towards the aureate sky and there sing for the last time, to be the figure of that song, that prophecy and inspiration, the very figure of the agency of the classical poet. Time and again, throughout the poem, she will be invoked, time and again she will open her mouth and say the wisest and sweetest things the poem has to say.

Is the bellbird’s song contra natura? One would think not, but I find again and again that in this positive countering – we are far from Trakl in his spooky abendland, bemoaning the alienness of the human soul, far from Pound drum-beating the terrible human greed, that love for money and ensuing usury be Contra Naturam – the nature that is countered is the human nature, the Leviathic body of the Caesar, the demiurge that we all partake in. Seidman’s aforementioned thought on “love as a divine weapon […] against […] abusive power and destruction” seems to me central to how Hinostroza’s poem, his operation, albeit Poundian to a meaningful extent, is essentially counter-Poundian. It is really the question of where nature is posited and what is, in turn, posited to counter it. An argument that greed, abusive power and proneness to destruction are alien to nature strikes me as primarily misleading because it presents a hypothetical Golden Age of Humanity in which a pro-natura human being could live devoid of the above listed vices. Noble, heroic, tragic, Ezra offered the sacrifice of himself to this vision. How did Hinostroza arrive at the vision that (again, requoting Seidman) not Pound’s Usura, but love and eroticism are not natural, are “the artifice of human imagination” and thus serve the poet as the agencies of his positive Contra Natura project, is an equal mystery to me. This concept, writes Seidman, is at the core of the poem. I do not think that love and eroticism are the artifice of human imagination (pigs and dolphins both would contradict such a view, and be truer-than-us poets in this contr-addiction!), any more than abusive power and uniquely human capacity for devastation are. My push here is not towards refuting one view or backing another, or introducing yet another, of my own, concerning the first principles, but simply to suggest that if yet another Paradis Artificiel is all that Hinostroza is dealing us, then my beloved bare-throated bellbird of the poem too may well be made of so much paper, and either fall off the aureate sky or make me question the stuff this sky is made of.

I do not know the poet and the person Rodolfo Hinostroza well enough to deduce what beliefs he held – in fact, the few thoughts my mind has conjured regarding Hinostroza derive entirely from a few obsessive readings of this poem. The poem itself does not strike me as holding Love an unnatural artifice, or the abusive power and destruction, or “time and terror,” exempt from the artificial glories of the human imagination. In fact I would think that, as a poet-astrologer versed in occultism, Hinostroza would know all too well that – as above, so below – there are correspondences between the natural and the artificial, and love and power, imagination and reality, eroticism and destruction each and all are found upon “the mystical […] cosmic ladder between the terrestrial (water) and the celestial,” as Seidman points out (and I agree that this cosmic ladder is instrumental to the poem’s complex machinery). What is contra natura is the dysfunctional rapport that human beings seem to have developed with this cosmic ladder, and that may very well be the source of what’s abusive in the power – whether cosmic, natural, or human.

This “fallen” (I allow myself so much classroom theology hoping that the reader will see how it relates to the poem in question, the poem so full of trees of knowledge and cosmic ladders) state of humanity would, I’d think, be the nature (call it, if you will, the human or second nature) that the poet, and the imagination, is countering. Imagination is probably not the enemy of Nature or the natural. Imagination can gladly be the enemy of the arrested flow of energy that the poem’s Caesar, demiurge imposes upon the human state. Not in any mystical sense, but most straightforwardly and politically, it is the abusive power that needs to put a ban on imagination, needs to do that for its own preservation and long, good health. Media is Caesar’s imagination. Single-minded, coherent. Like the very shadow of the poem we write.

Nature and Imagination might very well delight in one another. And this, I think, is why the bare-throated bellbird sings.