Dialogue with Roger Santiváñez Eucharist (1)
José Ignacio López Soria
For me, a layman in the ars poietic, poetry is above all a feast of language. The poet, struggling with the word, celebrates, first language, and, if done with wisdom, achieved not only predictable but that did not invite him to a dialogue that is open to different worlds of meaning, images and symbols .
Of the various readings to which convenes Eucharist the recent collection of poems by Roger Santibanez, I will choose today, the religious, while recognizing that the poems also invites a reading in secular and even desecration of beliefs and icons of religious tradition.
start with the name, Eucharist, with which the poet christened his collection. The term comes from Greek, but comes to us wrapped by the Judeo-Christian. Etymologically, "eu-Caristie" means "good grace" or "thanksgiving." In the biblical story, played by Christian tradition, the Eucharist is a sacrament or sign of an effect sensitive internal or spiritual, invisible, God works in souls. According to Christian belief, the sacrament of the Eucharist was instituted by Christ at the Last Supper, when it, before the sacrifice, took leave of his disciples, sharing with them the bread and wine and recommending them in his memory, repeat this action . Under this tradition, institutionalized by the Catholic Church not without theological controversies, the priest, saying the ritual words, consecrates the bread and wine that is produced by the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
I wonder what does the Eucharist the Christians in the Eucharist poems. To answer this question I will focus, on the issuer of the word, ritual and poetic language, compared with their counterparts in the case of religious consecration.
The poet is like the priest but also differs substantially from it. For the word becomes sacred and produce the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ is essential that the issuer of that word is a priest, ie someone who has been previously consecrated, anointed or ordained another to offer the sacrifice of the mass. The priest preexisting condition to the pronunciation of the word and, therefore, the word becomes sacred to be spoken by the priest. The words of not consecrated, but are the same uttered by the priest, transubstantiation occur. The poet, however, makes this the pronunciation of the word. Arguably, therefore, that the poet is spoken word. And so, if someone who was not a poet pronounces the same or similar words also becomes a poet. Put another way, the language is poetic because it has been issued by a poet but the poet is so because it is expressed in poetic language. And it is the language of poetry, the poet recreates rearticulates, creating beauty. Also here is a true transubstantiation: that was not beautiful becomes beautiful in the word. It is not uncommon, therefore, that the poet relies on the background Christian culture to express the transubstantiation produced by the word.
Another important difference between priest and poet is that the former is set once and forever. His consecration gives it character, is marked with a label that no one can erase. His word is always sacred, though he has renounced his own consecration. The poet, however, is never a set. Growing need to deploy their creative skills to come up with the poetic word.
In religious tradition, transubstantiation is the canonical or ritual repetition of the Last Supper. Enough that the priest pronounced the keywords in the conditions defined by rite and with intent to devote to produce the consecration and transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Poetic creation, however, is not itself a product of a rite or ritual but rather an agonizing struggle and so new to the language to make it say what is not predictable.
Finally, the language of the Eucharist is, from the title, full of terms from the religious culture. Parade through the poems and biblical characters of the Christian tradition, God, Adonais, Christ the Lord, Adam, virgins, angels and saints and even the Lord of the Earthquakes. Often referred to passages of history Sacred: Creating, salutation (which precedes the announcement), parabola, passion of Christ, died for us, wound set, resurrection. Are recalled sacred places and objects: sky, coelis sanctus, Eden, Paradise, altar, altars consecrated shrine, Oratorium, chapel, sanctuary, relic graveyard. It draws on religious attitudes and behavior: worshipers of summer, or crosses like me, an atheist, ethereal purity, purity, pure, pure passion, pure, religiously, kneeling, kneeling virgin confiteor, Moors destroyed. Devotions and prayers are remembered: Stella Maris, full grace, give us the kingdom, we pray, we raise a song to you, oratio in soul. And it turns, finally, other remnants of the religious culture: sunset under God, the sacrament, virgin I feel you, I climb into the sky, religion, religare, soul, holy inspiration, vox Dei, sacred paradise, corde pudibundu, divine hole Siena sacred, sacred will, divine peace, mystery, miracle, song immaculate, sacred poetry, music, mysterious, mystical, profane, etc.
Whatever the poet's use of religious tradition, the truth is that just using it as a poetic device, even to desecrate, states belonging to the Christian culture, whose language the poet speaks and which is spoken. Eucharist recalls the tradition that is more mystical than the ascetic. Asceticism emphasizes the sacrifice as the way to salvation in the extent to which proposes a set of rules and practices for the liberation of the spirit and the attainment of virtue. The mystique is a contemplative experience of the divine, understood as mystery, as not rationally understandable, therefore, not logizable, ineffable. Before the mystery can be the alalia (silent or dumb), but who takes refuge in her resignation to communicate his mystical experience. To communicate it is necessary to fight with language, trying to say what not rationally predictable using symbolic language, parabolic paradoxical paralogism, etc. and daring to transgress the bounds of sanity and closer to the realm of absurdity and madness. To account for the mystery not disclose it, without reducing it to concepts intelligible, it is necessary to break with the tradition of what is said and explore new ways of language hardly decipherable.
In Eucharist find the traces of this quest, first, the frequent recurrence in terms of linguistic (Greek, Latin, English, Italian ...) which are beyond our everyday language, and second, the use of expressive which is not collected or popular speech or speech cultured and splicing, without following them with expressive traditions that come from Oquendo de Amat, Vallejo and Martin Adam, and third in the open character of the writing.
briefly expand on this last idea. Christian transubstantiation is operated exclusively by the word of the set, then owned by the faithful in communion. Against the word of consecration there is no debate or doubt or partial acceptance. The faithful can only accept or reject. The pronunciation of the word from the set closes any possibility of dialogue. The frequent use of the preachers to their assigned carrier status of the divine word is but a manifestation of the closed nature of his word.
In Eucharist, the word is open because it is a summons to the dialogue. I do not know if the word conveys knowledge Eucharist awakens feelings or promotes a certain action. What I do know is that Eucharist is above all the message, a message that comes from someone whose cultural background share and, therefore, to talk since I do speak from us, from a community of life and speech that makes possible the communication in a dialogue that is open to enjoy the beauty and invites expressed at the same time, to continue the struggle with language to continue producing the transubstantiation of the profane into sacred beauty of everyday life.
I twisted my Eucharist dialogue about the comparison between transubstantiation religious and poetic creation. I have to end up concluding that the open character of the language of the Eucharist, rather than the desecration of sacred icons, definitely unlike the poems of Roger Santiváñez of all sacred word.
Notes (1) Note Santiváñez, Roger. Eucharist. Buenos Aires: Ed Tsetse, 2003, published in the online magazine: Compass International. Bulletin of Latin American Writers Institute. New York / Peru, vol. 1, No. 4. See: www.geocities.com / hibrido_literario / brujula.html
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