2 ?b90

102
de Oppiano
Licario
... que significa el 'Eros de la absoluta lejanja!... "
6
In a letter to his "queridas y buenas hermanas" Lezama refers in a similar
way to the novel: "es la exaltaci6n de la familia, el nacimiento del Eros,
el conocer en la infinitud. "
7
The process involves those phenomena to
be found near at hand, that is, family relationships; the widening horizon
of school days and new friendships leading to unknown desires; and firully
an exploration of phenomena whose roots lie far beyond the physical rea-
lity and geographical limitations of Latin America, in the labyrinths of
the human mind
itself.
Since Lezama's chosen weapon for his duel with "lo invisible" (11,891,
and above) is the image or poetry, it is reasonable to assume that Cemi
will also be a poet and that he, like Lezama, is the child who "puede
tener a su lado el tao" (Ibid), that is, the awareness of creative power
in himself in the midst of a silent void. Jos6 Cemi undertakes, in
Paradiso, a quest whose goal is an image: "Su espera cred una imagen y
esa imagen va a resultar sorprendentemente creadora en la muerte" (Ibid),
a quest for an image of permanency, eternity or Being, as opposed to mere
existence. Lezama has laid the trail for the journey already in the
Michelena episode, where there is a struggle between immutable Being
(symbolized by the Chinaman in his ancient coral chair) and existence
(symbolized by the manatee, lurching clumsily towards the Chinaman at
whose hand she becomes a sacrifice in a ritual which breaks down the
barriers between historical and sacred Time). Cemi is driven to seek
the image of eternity by personal tragedy. The reader must not expect
the text to be littered with youthful dabblings in poetics, for Lezama's
deepest concern is with the quest as the cultivation of a certain state
of mind in which the developing poet is predisposed to look beyond the
material towards the spiritual. The poem itself is almost a by-product
of the quest, hence we have no examples of poems in the novel offered as