Love and contingency: “Todavía recuerdo”, “Nuestro amor” “Dueña por muchos años”

Unpacking the poems in Epigramas is long work.   They are deceptively short.  My original strategy to use Achúgar´s syntactic approach by going poem by poem is probably not going to work for the thesis itself.  Nevertheless reading each poem carefully and commenting on each one has given me a lot of insight into this text, so I am going to continue doing this, but I will try to reduce the observations.

After “Yo no canto” and “Tú has trabajado” we come to three poems which focus on love primarily, with no reference to the Somoza regime whatsoever.  This seems to be a purposeful maneuver on the poet´s part.  Having belittled and willfully rejected monumentalist  political ambition in the name of love, the poet then goes on to commit the three following epigrams to reflecting on a love that is, as a continuous slap in Somoza´s face, fundamentally contingent, temporal, due to pass or having passed already exists only in the poet´s memory.

In “Todavía recuerdo” this contingency is expressed by focusing on a single moment caught in the flow of time which the poet recognizes as having already passed. The poet constructs this moment as a scene of both visual and auditory elements, the full moon glimpsed between radio wires, the sound of a distant radio, yellowish streetlights, the sound of a distant radio, a clock tower striking eleven, and the vision of gold light streaming from the open door of the poet´s beloved.  The full import of this scene is left unspoken in the poem.  The poet´s reasons for “remembering” this scene are never explored, what we are left with is a Poundian imagistic flash in which the moment is caught by the poet in its passing.

Monumentality and contingency play with each other in this poem.   Time that is distant, flowing in the past is also simultaneously present due to its existence in the poet´s memory.  The phrase that opens the poem “todavía recuerdo” collapses time.  The act of remembering, or meditating on the past,  takes place in the present, echoed by the temporal adverb “todavía” meaning “still”.  Michael  Swan´s “Practical Guide to English Uses” describes “still” as “used to say that something is in the present, not the past – it has, perhaps surprisingly, not finished”.   “Recuerdo”  uses a present tense verb to describe the act of reflecting on the past, drawing it into the present. The ability to bring past into present is another instance of the poet drawing on his privileged relationship to monumentality in order to enshrine contingency.

Related to this, If time is simultaneously contingent and monumental in this poem, it is also simultaneously stopped and moving.  The only verb other than “Recuerdo” which occurs in this poem is used to describe the clock striking eleven.  In this case the poet uses the imperfect tense “La torre de La Merced que daba aquellas once” .  It´s interesting that the imperfect tense is used in is what is essentially a preterit  moment.  A clock marking the hour is generally something instantaneous and quick:  “the clock struck eleven”.  Cardenal expands this moment, however, by using what functions in Spanish as a progressive tense:  “the clock was striking eleven”.  By using the imperfect Cardenal emphasizes time as something in motion, in progress, even as it is captured in the frame of the poem.  (another temporal reading might suggest that this moment was not a singular time-freeze, but a repetition of a scene enacted over and over again, which the poet remembers clearly because he has done it many times. “Daba” could also mean “would strike eleven” or “used to strike eleven”.   Circular temporality would tie this poem into the following one).  The notion of frozen and moving time, besides related to imagism also recalls one of the motifs of 17^th Century baroque visual art.  John Rupert Martin in his study of the period notes that visual art tried to capture the sense of temporal contingency, which the Copernican revolution had provoked, by representing its subjects in a dynamic state, frozen in motion.  Baroque art, responding to the crisis in the human understanding of the universe as the result of Copernicus´ discovery of the earth and the bodies of the universe in existing in a constant state of motion, nursed an obsession with the contingent time, mortality, mutability and the idea that all things will pass and become dust.  A moment in time caught in it´s passing, tells of its passing and of the sure fate that awaits all human beings.   Similarly the enlightenment´s slow dismantling of the role of religion in human knowledge began calling into question the given idea of eternity.   The realization that “all things will pass” could no longer be counterbalanced with surety by the idea that humanity would not.  For Cardenal, however,  as in the other half of Christ´s phrase “my words will not pass away”.   Poetry is intemporal.

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