Well, we leave behind the world of coherence and launch full-force into the nebulous realm of the avant-garde with Huidobro’s Altazor o un viaje en paracaidas. Avant garde poetry is good for showing what language can do (though not necessarily what it should). In the case of Huidobro its an attempt to turn language from mimesis to creation itself, apply to poetry the cubist obsession with representing a figure from multiple perspectives simultaneously, to put the Spanish language into a particle accelerator and launch it outward towards the speed of light just to see what happens, and to turn the poet into a godmaker. All well and good, but the outcome is still unintelligible. I would never read Huidobro to my boyfriend in the afterglow or a moment of passion, or quote from him to put the seal on an important point. I wouldn’t sleep with a copy of one of his books under my pillow to read in moments of sorrow, or use him in a political speech to mobilize the masses. The readers of Huidobro are initiates already. This isn’t a statement against the quality of the work, but rather its limited scope. It’s the same problem which one finds in the avant-garde as a whole. Not only is it is writing for writers, and it is also writing which, in my view, lacks any ability to transcend the moment which spawned it. , Although the deconstruction of language is something which was necessary and novel at the time, once it was done it became a creative dead-end.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but like Huidobro because, at one time in my life, I to was fascinated with space, time, technology and the creative potential behind the laws of physics, In Canada and the United States we call that being a sci-fi geek:
Ah yes Scott Bakula rules…
My obsession with the idea of space and time travel even got me into a physics course, and the creative potential behind Einstein’s theories kept me from dropping out when I realized that my math-challenged brain could barely manage a C- in it (physics involves math? whoduthunkit!) In Einstein’s theory of special relativity, he speed of light is a constant in the universe and is theoretically unreachable for three reasons: As a particle approaches the speed of light its mass increases, its length reduces and its temporal relationship with other particles becomes altered. Thus were a particle to reach the speed of light, its mass would become infinite, its length would become zero, it would require an infinite energy source to reach this speed as well as infinite time.
Huidobro’s Altazor, thus postulates a poetry (or poet) accelerating through einsteinian space and time, progressively approaching lightspeed, gaining infinite momentum and fragmenting into a cubist structure in which multiple physical dimensions are seen simultaneously, in which all temporalities exist at once. Altazor becomes a type of god, a divine being outside of time and space and yet at the center of it, a space that is non-space where flying and falling are the same type of motion, a time that is non-time where all events occur simultaneously a la Borges’ biblioteca de babel. The question of whether Altazor is a God, a Poet, Huidobro or Poetry itself, hangs over the work. It is my belief that Altazor is all of those things, that Huidobro’s God is a God of monism, in other words all and one at the same time.
The question of motion thus becomes an interesting one to examine in the light of Huidobro’s poem. How is it possible for a God to move at all? in Einsteinian space up and down are the same, thus it is only possible to gauge motion by reference points, things passed by. In Thomas Aquinas’ theory of God as the prima mobilae, motion is considered to be the sign of existence. Everything is moved into existence by something else exerting force on it, except for God who initiated the chain of motion. God is omnipresent, He occupies all points in space at all times, thus motion would not be possible because to move means to exit one point in space and enter into another. In Huidobro’s poem, however, Altazor is essentially a body in constant motion, neither away from nor toward anything.
