week5—Man as Tree; a return to Depth, Height, and Volume as necessity for the future—
reading blog #9 – Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu
I don’t know where to start. I like Neruda’s poetry and his writing. I think I am still processing it, which is taking longer than I thought. I think it is taking longer because I read it simultaneously as I myself went to Machu Picchu. It was jarring to read about a place and space that had so profoundly impacted the speaker of these poems, and then to have gone to that very place myself.
I think that Neruda’s poems outline a kind of journey into the interior, and it is through this journey to heights, through depths, and within volumes that Neruda strikes a balance within himself. It’s my understanding that in the beginning few poems, Neruda possesses no love for mankind, no love for himself, yet is these very things that he desires and envies—from whom, I do not know. He compares man to a tree, mankind to a forest of wilderness, but he “could not love within each man a tree” as he might attempt to force his “brackish semblance through a wilderness” (17, 19). He ends this 4th poem with “I paced at last alone, dying of my own death” (19). Yet, Neruda “wished to swim in the most ample lives, / the widest estuaries” (17). If man is tree, and Neruda is in a forest, is he truly alone? If the essence of life can be found in a body of water, are things truly so miserable? In spite of solitude and silence, how can one be alone in nature? I found it helpful to think of distinctions of city solitude and the solitude found in places like Machu Picchu, a solitude that brings peace rather than simple quiet.
This comparison with man and wilderness is interesting to me because it is wildness and nature that he finds at Machu Picchu—that which saves him and reignites a love for man he was searching for in the beginning. It is at Machu Picchu where Neruda forms his framework of the origins of humanity, the universe, or perhaps some other idea or concept I am incapable of feeling out in his poems. It is in his 6th poem, the first mention of Machu Picchu where a kind of transformation begins, of which he regards as the “destination of time” in his 9th poem (53). It is this transformation that takes place in and within Machu Picchu that Neruda learns to love mankind.
The fact of nature is an indispensable theme in Neruda’s poems, but it is fascinating to see that Neruda contradictingly equates man as nature, and the ‘daily deaths’ of men as the bane of his existence, whereas it is the green clarity, the green stardust, and the jungle-clarity of Machu Picchu that allows Neruda to come into his own being “to [his] own dawn, / into crowned solitudes” (43). In his milestone 6th poem, he says this about Earth:
“In you two lineages that had run parallel / met where the cradle both of man and light / rocking in a wind of thorns.” (27)
What Neruda runs away in the beginning is exactly what he seeks in the end. The thing that he so desired had been running parallel exactly with what he so desperately avoided. In eluding the grim future and present he expected and was faced with, he returned to the past and to the ‘original’ (i.e., Machu Picchu). I think this is seen also in the metaphor of [the turn of] autumn as a death, but it is also in every season that has the seed of the next. In Neruda’s journey into the past, into nature, into an original beyond himself, he prepares himself with love for the future.
In this way, I am inspired by what Daniel commented recently on one of my other blog posts. Here, I am taking it slightly out of context, but it still works:
“This pain of return works like a house with two doors: towards the future and towards the past. Seen from there, the present is a mere place of passage.”