El objecto, aquello que se presenta a los ojos o a la imaginación, nunca aparece tal cual es. La forma de aparición de la presencia es la representación. El ser es invisable y estamos condenados a verlo a traves de una vestidura tejida de símbolos. El mundo es un racimo de signos. La representación significa la distancia entre la presencia plena y nuestra mirada: es la señal de nuestra temporalidad cambiante y finita, la marca de la muerte. Asimismo, es el puente de acceso, ya que no a la presencia pura y llena de si, a su reflejo: nuestra respuesta a la muerte y al ser, a lo impensable y a lo indecible. Si la representación no es abolición de la distancia - el sentido jamás coincide enteramente con el ser- es la tranfiguración de la presencia, su metáfora.))
(paz, el signo y el garabato, joaquin moritz, p. 33)
The object, that which presents itself to the eyes or to the imagination, never appears the way that it truely is. Its presence is an appearance formed by a representation. Its true being is invisible and our limited perception of it is by virtue of symbols that have been woven together into its veil. Reality is itself an association of symbols. Representation signifies the distance between a complete presence and what we are able to perceive: it is the sign of our own temporality, mutable and finite, the mark of our mortality. At the same time, it is the point of encounter, not with a real presence of some reality-in-itself, but with its reflection: our reply to existence and to death, to what is unthinkable and unsayable. If representation is not the abolition of the distance, in which the meaning coincides completely with the presence, it is the transfiguration of the presence, its metaphor.
(translation mine)
The first page to corriente alterna, contains one of the keys to what I am attempting to address by cobbling together this essay. Paz begins that book by mentioning that there is an underlying similarity between poetry, eroticism, and mysticism. He doesn't immediately go on to make explicit what this might be, but the anaysis of "the object" presented above, shines a light on how that similarity might be interpreted. The object of poetry that is language. The object of eroticism which is some other person. The object of mysticism which is the world itself. And the practice of all three of these pursuits: to regard their objects by virtue of fashioning an expression which contains within itself the recognition of its own fallibility- its own inadequacy.
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