CHAPTER 3: DEATH AND PERMANENCE
4. Full Human Consciousness after Death
The final category of poems that express Rosenmann-Taub’s conception of life after death propose that life after death may have a fully developed consciousness, no different than that of a living being. The poet expresses this conception in two different ways. The speaker may be dead, but nevertheless demonstrates his consciousness as his voice is heard in the poem. We have already observed this in poems such as “Otras voces reclaman otras voces…” and “Conjuro.” Alternatively, the speaker addresses an interlocutor who is dead, and either through the act of addressing the interlocutor or through the content of his address it becomes apparent that the interlocutor possesses the consciousness of a living being. This has already appeared in
poems such as “Tú, rumor, atisbas…,” “¿Posteridad?” and “Canción de cuna.” We focus specifically on these conceptions of afterlife consciousness in the poems that follow.
The last poem from Auge and the first of Quince, “El Desahucio” conveys many of the poet’s ideas of being and non-being at the same time that the speaker manifests his
consciousness even after death. I
El Desahucio The Eviction
Del edificio de departamentos From the apartment building – ocupo uno mediano, - I occupy a middle one,
en el segundo piso, on the second floor,
desde tanto ajetreo since such a coming and going que no recuerdo that I don’t remember
cuánto – when -
el propietario, the landlord, firme, tempranísimo. firm, very early. Yo no lo conocía. I didn’t meet him. Nos dió a cada inquilino He gave every tenant diferentes motivos different reasons
para que nos mudáramos. to leave.
Salí a comprar el diario I went out to buy the paper “Tu Pasquín” - . - “Your Lampoon” - Buscando los arriendos, Looking for rentals,
eché de ver I glanced at
la fecha: el mes y el día the date: the month and the day
vibraban bien; corresponded;
aberración, el año… aberration, the year… Entonces comprendí (19). Then I understood.
In this poem, Rosenmann-Taub employs a quotidian and “non-poetic” language instead of his more typical poetic language, along with a simplified and shortened versification instead of his more typical hendecasyllabic and heptasyllabic patterns. He uses this everyday language to place normal reality into a new context, as he compares man’s birth, life and death to his
poem, instead of using poetic language to describe a familiar reality, the poet reverses that scheme. Speaking of the process of “defamiliarization,” in Structuralism and Semiotics, semiotician Terence Hawkes proposes that
We very readily cease to ‘see’ the world we live in and become anaesthetized to its distinctive features. The aim of poetry is to reverse that process, to defamiliarize that with which we are overly familiar, to ‘creatively deform’ the usual, the normal, and so to inculcate a new, childlike, non-jaded vision in us. The poet thus aims to disrupt ‘stock responses’, and to generate a heightened awareness: to restructure our ordinary
perception of ‘reality’, so that we end by seeing the world instead of numbly recognizing it: or at least so that we end by designing a ‘new’ reality to replace the (no less fictional) one which we have inherited and become accustomed to. (47)
The metaphorical representation of the human condition in life in the first stanza and in death in the second stanza defamiliarizes that condition conceptually rather than semantically. Contrary to, Hawke’s concept of defamiliarization stated above, Rosenmann-Taub employs non-poetic and colloquial language to describe an unfamiliar and shocking reality, in order to achieve his desired effect.
The poem itself is comprised of three stanzas: the first with nine lines, the second with ten lines, and the last with one line. However, closer examination reveals that the lines are in actuality a combination of heptasyllabic and broken hendecasyllabic verses. The first stanza is comprised of one full and one broken hendecasyllabic line, and four full and one broken heptasyllabic lines. The second stanza is in actuality comprised of four heptasyllabic and three broken hendecasyllabic lines. Thus, with this versification, both stanzas contain seven lines. The poet connects the third “stanza”, only one heptasyllabic line, with the second stanza by means of the ellipsis at the end of the second stanza; the silence between the two stanzas and the one-line stanza at the end both create dramatic suspense and call attention to the revelation of that last line.
Read literally, the first stanza describes the speaker’s lodgings, the uncertain
circumstances in which he arrived and the oddity of a landlord whom he has never met. The second stanza recounts his notice to move and describes his search for new lodgings in a tabloid paper. The third stanza, consisting of only one line, portrays a sudden insight by the speaker as to his condition: “Entonces comprendí;” and the impossibility of reading the poem at the mimetic level and the necessity for a hermeneutic reading immediately becomes clear.
The speaker’s insight at the end reveals that the poem in its entirety is a metaphysical conceit. The speaker’s apartment is his body, in an apartment building that represents the cosmos, and the poem metaphorically portrays significant truths about human existence. Mankind’s existence in the multiverse is “mediano:” his state of being and consciousness is higher than vegetable and animal life, but lower than that of other as yet unknown life forms. Neither the speaker’s body nor his life nor his consciousness is his own, but instead “rented” to him for an unspecified period of time, by a “landlord” (God?) whom he doesn’t know, but who certainly predated his existence; he doesn’t know when he or his world came into existence, nor who created him, nor the time of or reasons for his death.
In the second stanza, the speaker has to move out of his apartment and begins to search the want ads of the local tabloid for new lodgings. If the apartment is his body, then his “eviction” means that he is to die. In searching the want ads, he happens to notice the date, which doesn’t make sense: although the day and month are correct, the year is incorrect. However, in the final stanza the speaker understands: since the year in the paper’s date doesn’t correspond to the present year in which he is living, he suddenly realizes that he is no longer alive.
The poem’s tenses validate this interpretation. The first stanza uses the present tense, and even the imperfect tense of the verb “conocía” in the last line refers to a past action that
continues through the present. On the other hand, the verbs of the second and third stanzas are almost wholly in the past tense. Beginning with the verb “salí”, the speaker leaves the interior space of his apartment (that represents his life) to look for a different place (the space that he will occupy after his death). Everything that follows in the poem now takes place in the past. The speaker relates the story now in the past tense, from the perspective of a protagonist who, noticing the anomaly of the newspaper’s year of publication, suddenly realized that his life is over.
The title of the poem also confirms this interpretation. The “desahucio” is an eviction: the end of the individual’s stay in his habitation. But also, the “desahucio” is the doctor’s diagnosis of a terminal illness. So this secondary meaning indicates that the apartment does indeed refer to the individual’s life, and that the eviction refers to his death.
The uninterrupted quality of the narration implies that the speaker’s consciousness and self-consciousness in the last stanza are no different than they were in the first, when he was still alive. This interpretation parallels that of the poet in his own commentary on this poem in Quince, especially when he observes that the energy of being exists simultaneously with that of non-being. For Rosenmann-Taub, appearance and disappearance are the same, and being and non-being merely two different aspects of the same thing (30). Describing a version of life after death where the individual retains his full powers of consciousness, including his own personal self-awareness, the poet asserts that consciousness can indeed transcend the death of the body.
The next poem to be examined also comes from Quince. Poem VIII, with the same quotidian language as “El Desahucio,” is entitled “Noailles” and its subject is the French poet Anna de Noailles.
VIII Noailles
¿Un lirio de relámpagos? ¿Un dátil An iris of lightning? A date
de sed? of thirst?
¡Oh, sí, condesa: Oh, yes, countess:
pase usted! come in!
Qué gentileza How kind
la suya: ¡haber venido of you: to have come a mí salón prohibido, to my prohibited salón,
ahora! Aguarde, pues, now! Wait, then,
a que la limpie de su perlachés. for me to clean you from your Père Lachaise. No se merece, juvenilversátil You don’t deserve, youthful/versatile
Ana, Ana,
que la vean así por la mañana. (127) to be seen like this in the morning
The countess Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was a widely recognized poet and writer of fin-de-siècle Paris; she also achieved fame as a hostess for one of the most important literary salons in Paris of that period. The poem is a homage to her in which the speaker addresses her as if she still posesses consciousness.
Consisting of ungrammaticalities at the mimetic level of reading, the first two lines of the poem are a metaphorical description of the poetess at the hermeneutic level of reading. The metaphor “lirio de relámpagos” describes the poetess and her poetry as on the one hand as fragile as a flower, and on the other hand as brilliant as a lightning bolt. The second metaphor, the “dátil de sed,” portrays Anna and her poetry as a succulent fruit that satisfies, and for Anna in particular, a fruit that itself has an insatiable thirst. Since Anna de Noailles both wrote and hosted literary salons, this thirst must be for knowledge: she satisfies the intellectual thirst of her guests and has an “unquenchable” thirst for knowledge herself.
The speaker addresses Anna: he welcomes her to his salon, prohibited to her now that she is dead, just as her current “salon,” the cemetery, is prohibited to him since he is still alive. In his commentary to this poem in Quince, Rosenmann-Taub writes, “…recibo esta flor-eciente fogata primicial que perfuma e “ilumina”, y la hago pasaral salón de mi mundo, prohibido, para ella, como, para mí, el polvoriento salón en donde ella “habita” (131). (“ I receive this primital blossoming bonfire that perfumes and ‘illuminates,’ and I have her enter the salon of my world, prohibited, for her, just as, for me, the dusty salon where she ‘lives.’”) He asks her to wait until he can clean her shroud from the dirt of the cemetery, and tells her that with her youth and versatility, she doesn’t deserve to be seen in the morning as she is.
The poem’s initial metaphors describe Anna’s persona, and the speaker continues this description in the final lines, noting her courtesy, youthfulness and versatility. All these qualities may be why she was able to retain her consciousness and exit the cemetery.
Internal and hidden words inform the meaning of the poem as well. As noted in previous poems, the poet uses words within words, combinations of words and parts of words to amplify his meaning. Here the technique surfaces in a number of lines, and Rosenmann-Taub clarifies the significance of these internal words in his own commentary. In the line “¡Oh, sí, condesa!,” the sound of the first three syllables, combined as one word – “Oh – si – con,” produces the word “hocicón:” snout or muzzle. In his commentary, the poet uses this image to evoke the image of the skull with its dentition, the classical image of death (131).
The word “Ana” appears three times in the poem: once in the penultimate line, and twice, hidden, in the final line. In the penultimate line, “Ana” is the entire line: the poet separates her both temporally and spatially from the two adjacent lines, just as she is now separated temporally and spatially from life. In the last line, “ana” first appears in “…que la
veanasí en la mañana.” The speaker doesn’t want the others to see Anna, covered with the dirt of the cemetery, in the morning. However, again according to the poet in his own commentary, this passage takes on two other meanings when the letters are configured differently. The
configuration “que lavé a ana así por la mañana…” signifies that the speaker “washes” Ana with the light of the poem, so that Anna appears as brilliant in the poem as when she was alive. Another configuration is “Vea: nací por la mañana.” In this configuration as the speaker in the poem, Anna herself speaks: she tells the reader that she was born to give light to the morning, to bring light into the world with her poetry. In that sense, through her work, she never dies. Anna’s final appearance comes at the very end of the poem, in the word “mañ-ana.” Here, she is intimately and inextricably related to the eternal morning (132-33).
Thus, Anna’s life seems to extend beyond her physiological death. Rosenmann-Taub uses her name in different ways to indicate her presence, although she has been dead for many years. Her personal qualities—her brilliance, thirst for knowledge, youthfulness and
versatility—may be the reason behind her ability to transcend her physiological death.
In his commentaries on both “Desiertos” and this poem, Rosenmann-Taub emphasizes that just as the aptitude for death can sustain life, the aptitude for life can sustain death. In
“Desiertos,” the poet comments on its opening line “Ante la mano, seca /” as follows: “La mano –la corporeidad -, mía o de otro, “húmeda” aún. ¿Viva? Muerta en latencia: la aptitud para morir sus “tenta” la vida (101).” [“The hand – corporeality – mine or that of another, still ‘humid.’ Alive? Latent death: the aptitude for death sustains life.”] The poem begins with the portrait of an individual facing his own hand, dry: the portrait of a man consciously facing his own death, even though still alive. The poet notes that this psychological position of consciously and continuously facing death is what, perhaps more than anything else, informs and sustains the
way one lives his life, a theme that has already surfaced in several of the poems examined in the second chapter of this study. Now, in his commentary to “Noailles,” Rosenmann-Taub inverts this idea. Commenting on the image of the skull that is the metonymic image of Anna’s death, he writes: “¿Muerta? Viva en latencia: la aptitud para vivir sus“tenta” la muerte (131).” [“Death? Latent life: the aptitude for living sustains death.”] In direct contrast with the citation of “Desiertos,” Rosenmann-Taub suggests that the way one lives one’s life also informs and sustains the way one lives one’s life after death. This concept has already appeared earlier in this chapter, in the poem “Tú –rumor –atisbas,” where Jesus Christ, a man who faced his life and death perfectly is described as a “potestad azul” and characterized by the word “abundancias.” We have also witnessed the same idea expressed in the line “Después, después, un himno entre dos víboras” from “Preludio.” Now, as expressed in “Noailles” and also with the addition of Rosenmann-Taub’s own commentary, it seems that for the poet, life does exist after death and is largely determined by how one lives one’s life before the death of the body.
Originally appearing in the poet’s 2007 book Auge, the poem “En el náufrago día de mi nave más bella…” is also found in Quince. As in “El Desahucio,” the poem is an internal
monologue that apparently takes place just after the individual’s death, and is our last example of Rosenmann-Taub’s portrayal of full consciousness after the moment of death.
LVII
En el náufrago día de mi nave más bella In the shipwreck day of my most beautiful ship me encaramé sobre su mastelero I climbed its highest mast
para mirar el mar. to look at the sea.
No había mar: no había ni su huella: There was no sea: there wasn’t even its trace: no había ni el vacío de ese día postrero. There wasn’t even the void of that last day. Sólo había mirar. There was only the looking.
As with other poems in this chapter, reading the poem at the mimetic level yields only ungrammaticalities. If the speaker’s “most beautiful ship” is shipwrecked, there is no reason to climb the mast nor to look at the sea. Then, both the sea and the day of the shipwreck have disappeared. “Only the looking” is nonsensical, since “looking” doesn’t exist independently of a human being. And finally, the speaker looks at something that doesn’t exist, which is
impossible.
Accordingly, the poem must be read at the hermeneutic level. The metaphor’s tenor in the poem’s first line is unknown. However, the predominant attribute of “shipwreck” is total
destruction, and one’s “most beautiful ship” can only be one’s most prized possession. Thus, the metaphor refers to either the individual’s actual death or the death of the best part of him. In his commentary on this poem in Quince, the poet says, “…lo mejor mío – lo más venerado y fiel – : lo más bello mío fue escoger lo más bello mío: acto que me definió: mi nave más bella: el máximo ‘yo’ (83).” (“… the best of myself – the most venerated and faithful - : my most
beautiful thing was to choose my most beautiful thing: act that defined me - : my most beautiful ship: the máximum “I.”)