Finishing my commentary on Varela's Libro de barro.

XIX "You rang the empty bell three times and nobody responded." Can you still make music in the absence of human throat and ear? Can you "translate silence." In other words, what is at stake here are the grounds of communication. The speaker call for god to exist and to illuminate an imaginary cavern, a blue darkness.

XX The newly born moon is a "mutilated ear of silver." The speaker and an unnamed oyente are unable to hear the music, and there is a goddess who is somehow inaccessible.

XXI We've shared a table, sat down at the table, but not at the same time. So experience is shared, but not communicated. "I don't know how to give names to these things." The sequence as an urgent, anguished tone at this point. The last three poems have been about missed chances for communion.

XXII This next to the last poem, rather than the last poem, feels like a conclusive ending to the sequence. The poem is defined as an attempt to find "the border between what isn't and what won't be." The specifically female imagery (blood between nubile legs) is surprising, since only a few poems have identified the sex of writing up to this point.

XXIII No more "anecdotes." "These were its [your life's] letters.

Now that I've taken these very sketchy notes I can write a bit about this book in a chapter I'm writing. What I've discovered here is that Varela is closer to Gamoneda than to Valente.

Continuing my notes on Libro de barro.

XV "Amado objeto mío." There is an unnamed object, identified with the speaker, who turns inward in the second paragraph. Her pupils are stars that go on and off in the darkness. In the 14th and here in the 15th section of the sequence the speaker emerges more clearly and explores her own inner world, which before was projected unto a landscape.

XVI Two hands, one holding madness and storm, the other a "rigorous, mortal stone." So is there an alternative, a choice between these two hands? Next we find a spiderweb "secreting salvation over the abyss." In short, the metaphors become denser here, more charged. "Every center is a a mistaken road." The center contains nothingness and silence.

XVII A search for a sexless or virginal biological state, "without uterus or testicle, "an original and virginal beach."

XVIII The idea of salvation appears (first mentioned in XVI). Anything at all can be "the plank of salvation." But the speaker doesn't understand what salvation means, what it is for, when it will occur. It is "iron-hard nonsense."

We are near the end of the sequence now, with five poems remaining. No clear narrative has emerged, no intrinsic reason why one poem has to follow or precede another. There is coherence in the set of themes and motifs that has emerged, in the poetic language itself. There have been no false steps, aside from a few metaphors that are perhaps excessive in their hermeticism.

(to be continued)

Continuing from the day before my notes on Blanca Varela's Libro de barro.

IX. The Gamoneda convergence becomes even more marked: "¿Qué dice ese cuerpo inmóvil en su movimiento?" Or "I say isle and think see I say sea and think isle." A dialectic between mobility and stillness, isle and sea, plenitude and emptiness. This is the shortest poem in the sequence so far, the most cryptic and intense.

X. Another very short text. "Infinite isles in an interior sea." An attempt to recapture lost time in the presence of death.

XI. "Wear decrepitude like a flower or crown." We should envy Autumn and Winter, embrace snow and silence. There is wisdom in an "absence of shadow," perhaps due to an absence of light?

XII. An attempt to define poetry itself, as the "silent hubbub of the heart." Poems are "objects of death." Poetry is compared to bodily fluids, urine and blood.

XIII. "Pain between two walls is no longer pain." The body seems separated from itself, somehow, a foreign object: "zona inexplorada de la carne íntima" [unexplored zone of intimate flesh].

XIV. Here we return to theme of god, who is also alien to himself, sitting at his own right hand. The speaker has created him in her own image. She identifies herself as a woman for the first time in the sequence: "A poor woman with sad hair who takes evil off herself by the fistfuls and washes herself a thousand times and is herself the indelible mark on the blade of the knife." The word for blade here (hoja) also means leaf and page of paper (hoja de papel.)

(to be continued.)

Notes on El libro de barro.

These poems by Peruvian poet Blanca Varela were written from 93-94. There are 23 of them, none longer than a page. None has a title, so that the overall effect is one of unity. They are written in prose and/or long lines of verse that push the limit between prose and verse. Varela's later poetry showed a marked convergence with that of Valente and Gamoneda, two Spanish poet with whom her name has been associated. Like these two poets, her poetry became even more interesting in her later years, so that a poet born in 1926 writes a lot of her most interesting work in the 80s and 90s. Gamoneda contributes an epilogue to Varela's collected poems in which he rewrites her motifs in his own style.

Although the poems are not numbered in the text, I am identifying them by Roman numerals for convenience:

I. In the first poem the speaker finds a vertebra in the sand and then loses it immediately. The scene is a beach, where, on this side of the ocean, the foam is darker, more sinister. The style is quasi-surrealist, with an emphasis on landscape.

II. "Columns of dust hold up the afternoon sky." We seem to be in the same landscape, the same imaginative space, as in the first poem. The fossil bone reappears: "To find the fragile little bone of the race by chance and to lose it."

III. "The hand of god is bigger than himself." A huge cosmic force, whose effect on reality, his touch, is larger than his own presence.

IV. "The blood of the African lamb is indelible." We remain within this quasi-surrealist rhetoric. Bones, harps, eyes. The lamb is the sacrificial animal par excellence. To say that the blood is indelible (a word usually used of ink), is to say that the trace of the sacrifice can never be effaced. We have music produced by a wind blowing through bones. These lines could almost be by Gamoneda: "Ojos susurrantes se abren y cierran donde ni cal ni arena fueron sino edades y cenizas del corazón."

V. Men are "bleeding in the book of mud." The first explanation of the title of the sequence. "The history of history is the sea." The theological theme persists (gods, crucifixion, paradise). The only elements that have appeared in the sequence so far relate to the natural world, the human body and human emotions, and this theological discourse.

VI. Now the speaker is god, or god speaks. "Write it down in your book," he or she says. "It would be absurd not to celebrate this treasure."

VII. "The child looked at himself in the mirror and saw he was a monster." Now writing becomes a way of digging up (desenterrar) childhood--a childhood seen without sentimentality. Although the themes seem to change here, the language and rhythms do not, so that we feel continuity even in the absence of discursive coherence.

VIII. A mysterious answer comes in the wind. The moon and the stars shine, but give very little light. The body is a bow and arrow.

(to be continued)