Reasons of State Read Free

livingpresence exits in smoke; we can see it leaving the bucket as flaming swords are dipped by blacksmiths wanting razor smoothness. Carpentier constructed a double-edged tool as broad as a sword on one side, as slim and shining as a shaver ready for all wet soap or mayonnaise on the other. He decided to make a style or approach that was direct and simple-seeming, because all his variations were based on popular art, clichéd stances, and stories that were so familiar they might result in being a version of the aesthetic and mythic fact that
Moby-Dick
, after all the huffing and puffing, is no more than a fish story; but one told like those tales Jack Johnson used to befuddle reporters, because he lived in a dream world where freedom could be realized only if the dreamer was as big as the dream.
    The magnum dream drunk by Carpentier was the New World, sensibly in need of new ways to match new forms, sights, and the distance of deep thoughts, safe in the mind, if not in the air or on the earth. Fuentes writes that Carpentier called it “ ‘the marvelous reality’ of a land where ‘the unusual is a daily occurrence’ … The men and women said, America
is
, and the world has to be ceaselessly re-imagined from now on. Carpentier in his fiction made this marvelously explicit.”
    MODERN FREEDOMWAYS
    Carpentier was, in other words, alienated from nothing, having taken seriously the modern freedom of utilizing all things that could be connected to one another. Choosing that route makes him a descendent of the first great and internationally effective writer from the Americas, Walt Whitman, who swallowed all the fish in the bowl of life and spat them out as fire and brimstone, ready for war against separation, garbedin the audible mufti of celebration, that commonplace lyric sung with open arms in the graveyard, its strongest song. The man Carlos Fuentes says is the father of a vision abandoned all religion or nationalism or ideology, stationary in air-tight dictates, instead favoring recurring myth, tweaked, as they say, by the specifics—time and period, geography, the animal kingdom, tradition, and functional intelligence, none completely devoid of poetic explanation, terror, ambivalence, or affirmation.
    We know no freedom is that big, but in the universe of what seems true, or accurate, it is not at all hard to believe in extensive perception. This was Carpentier’s take on the freedom that came with and through world exploration and straight-up conquest, all inevitably destined to submission through miscegenation one way or another. Missionaries, sailors, conquistadors, naturalists, and villainous roustabouts, each type giving the close listener access to something close to thematic infinity in every direction given prelude by fanciful tales. But in this case, the Carpentier Case, much more unifies, since this writer’s knowledge, interests, and imagination were apparently liberated by masterful creation itself, juices brought through characters always contrapuntal in their relationships to one another. This foamed into the great getting-up morning of the New World. A varied bush where colonized women learned what all princesses knew the world over: they possessed lush boxes as magnetic as any opened by Pandora, come one, come all.
    NOTES OF THE GHOSTS
    Walt Whitman, along with Herman Melville, is a father of free form in American and world literature, developed alongwith what Rousseau, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the European gang threw into the boxing ring of art; both the wandering poet and the novelist seem to foreshadow the ambition at the crux of Carpentier’s fiction. The sloppily made huts, some rather neat caves, the indignant whirlpools, and his magnificent cathedrals of intellect, his branches and crevices of feeling, and all that is there, living, dead, or ghostly, appears in the introduction to the 1855 edition of
Leaves Of Grass
, Whitman coming right out of the box and leaving the stadium with the