Notes on Neruda

revisiting an old friend

On economics

I met you, Cristóbal, on the barges
in the bay, when the saltpeter
comes down, to the sea, in the scorching
attire of a November day.
I remember that static bearing,
the metal hills, the still water.
And the bargeman alone, bathed
in sweat, moving snow.
Nitrate snow, poured
on the shoulders of sorrow, falling
into the ships’ blind bellies.
—“Cristóbol Miranda (Shoveler, Tocopilla)”, excerpt of Canto General, Part VIII

Poetry of brute economic life. The taste and smell of the mines, the saltpeter. The sodium nitrate glittering under the desert sun like snow. Human settlement—these obscure and unlikely places, Tocopilla, Iquique, Humberstone—organized around nothing but the harsh vitality of production, its dignity, its grandeur, its injustice. The sense of the immediacy of the fundamentals of economic life, so close it spills over into the bohemian hovels of literature.  

That seems rarer now than it used to be. Once there was Dickens and Whitman and Melville, bards of industry and whale oil and child labor and soot and stevedores moving goods. Frost and his farm fields, Sandburg and his Chicago stockyards, Longfellow’s odes to sea-trade and long-haul schooners, “built for freight, and yet for speed.” In painting, Bellows’ Camden shipyards, Sargent’s glass works, Wyeth’s lumber mills, endless others.

For us there are other obstacles. For us the unshakeable feeling—hard to pin down because it refers to an absence, porous and borderless—that our own brute economic facts are so much more hidden. Shy, falsely modest, veiled behind infinite regressions of ownership, abstracted away into holding companies, shrouded beneath the ghostly paperwork of managers, secreted to faraway countries or faraway provinces within our own countries. And when close by, huddled behind walls, literal or symbolic or social. The nondescript warehouses, the unapproachable ports, the eternities of buried cables, the anonymous data centers, the temporary islands, the forgotten mines, the temples of crucial silicon. The natures of these worlds militating against casual familiarity, easy intermingling, any natural apprenticeship. This is a relief. 

The cost in our language and experience of the world is a sort of slipperiness, weightlessness, irreality. Confusion of causes and effects. A flaky lightness like pastry. A brightness and unnatural cleanliness under fluorescents, like a hospital. Obsessions with minutiae yet disinterest in details. A thin yet strained language, of comedies of manners, of vicious irony, of gossipy snippets floating through gardens, meandering bored above the furnaces of production we will never see or know. We meet no Cristóbal along our way, Cristóbal is now a child of Kolwezi, or a night-shift meatpacker, or an unenlightened trucker evading the freedom of obsoletion. The poet inveighs against United Fruit and La Despreciada but today he wouldn’t know their names. Instead of facts there are statistics. Instead there are abstractions, ghosts, gestures, wordless tonepoems of capital.

The pervading sense of unreality that leaves our arts marooned. “Let reality return to our speech,” the exile exhorts. But how, when words themselves are not signifiers of Things, but endless regression of masks. Thus the fascination with anything that promises to break through from the subconscious labyrinth of screens and into the light of logistical day: the boringly reliable tanker ships, the spidering pipelines, the tenacious blast furnaces, the clanging railroad junctions, the parades of trucks bearing frac sand through sleepy townships, the awe and foreboding of the great dams, even the trypophobic horror of the CAFOs. All these right in front of us, splayed under the sun, yet invisible. Giants in the earth, the stuff of myth and school-lessons; like the ruins we visit on holiday, so close as to escape real perception. 

Professor Neruda, our assignment. The study of economics: What in the Earth and the sea and the labor of others and the fruit of our own body is ours to have or touch or change. What is not ours. What must be renounced. Who brings it to us. To whom do we make penance. To whom do we give thanks. 

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On Eros

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
—Poem XIV, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Let us go out early to the vineyards,
and see whether the vines have budded,
whether the grape blossoms have opened
and the pomegranates are in bloom.
—Song of Songs, 7:12

I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. A line more erotic than anything produced this side of the millennium. Its power is in its multiplicity, that it can be read simultaneously in the most innocent and the most sensual light. But more importantly, it reveals this to be a false dichotomy. In the heights of a fully mature Eros there is no such distinction. There is only a creative union whose aim, whose motivation, and whose consequence is Life. Eros is love which generates Life with the other, through the other, and also in the other. 

Or in the more precise formula of poetry: Eros is that which coaxes the Beloved to bloom. 

Very different from a reading of Eros as inherently selfish, acquisitive, fallen. Surely it can be, maybe even usually it is. But the poet’s Eros is closer to the self-giving associated more often with platonic love, Agape. In this Neruda echoes Scripture—likely unwittingly, though perhaps not—which is woven through with nuptial allegory. The Church is the spotless Bride of Christ, and God is the great Lover delighting in his Beloved, Israel, in the Song of Songs. Pagan Eros is not suppressed but baptized, elevated from a mutually-exploitative intoxication to a foretaste of the ecstasy of divine love. 

The catechism teaches us that love is not a feeling but an act of will, a verb: in the formulation of the Angelic Doctor, a willing of the good of the Other. Platonic Agape is the aspect of this love always available to us, as it is not at all dependent on how the Other responds nor on our state of life. Agape can be cultivated through friendship and family or with total strangers; face-to-face or over vast distances; in the midst of mortal conflict or from beyond the grave.

Eros, however, carries additional conditions. It is more particular, if not exclusive: it requires the union of wills, a mutual submission, and an ongoing participation in an embodied life together. I want to do with you, the poet says, where a broken or immature Eros might say, do to you, or take from you. 

But it does not therefore jettison Agape nor render it obsolete. It needs it just as much, if not more, given the tribulations of love, which cause most of us to fail again and again, which is, like life itself, an ongoing failure only redeemed by grace. Benedict in his reflections on the matter says that it is Agape’s task to purify and perfect Eros. But perhaps Eros must also find a deeper expression of Agape—one intensified, glaring with all its shortcomings, by being reflected endlessly in the mirror of the Other. Perhaps it demands even more self-sacrifice, since submitting your will to a single imperfect person can be so much harder than submitting to God.

Sorrentino’s Lenny Belardo is close to this when he admits he turned to the priesthood because he could not bear the cost of earthly Eros, its guarantee of perpetual heartbreak: “Esther, I love God because it is so painful to love human beings.”

Thus the heavy duty of Eros, its allegiance to Life even at its own expense, even unto death. Contrary to both our current desiccated ideas of consent and romantic fantasies of the liberties of love, not everything is permitted to Eros. It is not a law unto itself. It voluntarily binds itself to the objective good of the other, it must do so to avoid becoming deranged.

It must respect the other’s fundamental nature, otherwise for all its might it is only a petty tyranny. It must answer for their blooming, or lack thereof.

Spring is powerful; in fact the whole world is at her command. Just look around. But in all her power she must submit to the need of each tiny bud. Indeed that humility is the source of her power, and her glory. Spring transforms, but she cannot turn the cherry into just anything; to turn it into something else entirely would be to destroy it, and Spring is no vandal. The cherry must instead be intensified, turned ever more brilliantly itself. It must become—joyfully, painfully—even more cherry, cherry aún más, again and again and again.

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