Malinda Words: Octavio Paz and Arthur C Clarke in the stratosphere

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 221st article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

Ciaran Cosgrove described the Nobel Laureate for Literature Octavio Paz as a ‘poet of the stratosphere.’ Cosgrove refers to the poem ‘The broken water jar’ where Paz suggests that sources be sought:

‘…you have to dream backwards, towards the source,
you have to row up centuries,

beyond infancy, beyond the beginning, beyond
the waters of baptism…’

This of course did not mean that Paz focused on the past. He engaged with the present, especially in its horrific manifestations. This consideration of both temporalities, one could argue, was non-negotiable in the exercise of imagining futures that were less petty, humiliating and tyrannical.

To me, Paz is a stonemason who could make and break temporal and spatial archaeologies. In this way he releases thoughts, philosophies, fragrances, words and even ink from accidental or pernicious incarceration. They fly and as they rise above the earth, letting sunlight and rain alter shape and shine, Paz re-gathers them, arranges in particular ways and lays them out on pages from which they can escape at will with a little help from their readers.

Cosgrove may have meant something else, of course, but ‘stratosphere’ works for me. In the poem ‘Daybreak’ he confesses, ‘I rub my eyes: the sky walks on the land.’ What this means, perhaps, is that he can at will call forth sky-cloth and use it as a flying carpet. He unhinges gravity, releases earth-clamps and airlifts them all.

Flipping through ‘The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz,’ I came across many invitations to discover the faculties of flying. So I soared and found that those stratospheric heights could take me to doorways of the past. There, sitting upon a blue bench at a green table, was Arthur C Clarke, wearing the burdens of insight and indiscretion on a countenance bathed in the shimmering and yet scorching sunlight of accusation.

Judgement was someone else’s pleasure. Mine was to glance at the book that lay upon before his eyes that could no longer blink and denied the wash of tears were bloodshot: ‘The Other Side of the Sky,’ published in 1958.

‘Turn, turn the pages of time until you discover how temporality can be subverted so truth has a second chance in the stratosphere where judgment is passed,’ Octavio Paz urged me.

And so I flew back to the middle of the 1980s and arrived at the short story which first appeared in the science fiction magazine, ‘Infinity Science Fiction’ in 1955.

In this story Clarke travels with a group of space explorers from Earth who have found remains of an advanced civilisation destroyed when its star went supernova. Aware of the impending catastrophe, the inhabitants moved a representative collection of artefacts to the remotest planet of the solar system, which told the explorers the story of a gentle people who faced their terrible fate with utmost grace.

The group’s astrophysicist, a Jesuit priest, calculates the exact year of the explosion and determines the time it would take the resultant burst of light to reach Earth and recognises a terrible and faith-shattering fact: it was indeed the brilliant light that heralded the birth of Jesus Christ.
And Clarke lends the shaken priest the following words:

‘O God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?’

We do not know if he obtained succour in the received wisdom, ‘His ways are not our ways,’ or whether he considered it all as nothing more than a divine test of faith.

We could just say ‘fiction.’ It could be argued that if indeed there was a ‘Star of Bethlehem’ and it could be light emanating from a supernova, but as of now there’s no evidence of any civilisation or even any life form that was simultaneously obliterated.

All that matters is that there’s nothing to forbid the sometimes necessary subversion of time and space.

An inkstand lifts off the page and takes flight,

The ocean recedes till it is nothing but a few millimetres of rippling sand,
In the palm of a hand a grain of corn opens to reveal the flaming lion inside,
Fat drops of the milk of silence drip in the inkwell,
The multicolour tribe of poets drinks it and goes off to hunt the lost word.

So Octavio Paz observes in ‘Inks and transfers.’

And so I dream backwards along the trace of rivers overwhelmed by time and foliage, row upstream from civilisation sleeping over a civilisation betrayed which had bested another civilisation in the innumerability of rise, decay, rebirth and rise again, inching beyond infancy to womb and other unknown corporealities in unnamed constellations, looking for vaults that can be emptied and whose contents pieced together in the hope that they describe better this moment, this place, these congregation of truth and lie, and thereby reveal signs to futures that can be designed without condemning the knowing and unknowing blameless to oblivion.

13 September 2023

Octavio Paz and Arthur C Clarke in the stratosphere

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