Neruda, page 19
There are many positive references to opium in Western literature that Neruda must have read, yet his experience was negative. Once again, there is a disjuncture between what he wanted from Asia and what he found in its reality. “I had to experience opium, know about opium, in order to provide my testimony . . . I smoked many pipes, until I knew . . . There are no dreams, no images, no paroxysm . . . There is a melodic debilitation, as if a smooth, infinite note lingered in the atmosphere . . . There’s the fainting, a cavity within oneself . . .” He felt how the slightest movement of the body or a distant noise from the street “enter[ed] to form part of a whole.” While that form was “an overflowing joy,” with the experiment complete, he supposedly made the judicious decision to stop: “I did not return to the opium dens . . . I already knew . . . I had become familiar . . . I had touched something beyond reach . . . hidden deeply behind the smoke.” He makes it clear that he is in command of his will.
However, there is evidence both in his correspondence and his poetry from the time that his usage may not have been as limited as he describes in his memoirs. “Pablo sleeps, pulls an opium pipe, and only wakes up to take care of his official duties,” Hinojosa scribbled in a postscript to a letter Neruda wrote to Eandi. What had started out as exotic allure became an escape from his “banishment,” self-medication for his incessant isolation, depression, and frustration. Opium went beyond a connection to Baudelaire and became a way to leave behind his suffering.
He describes the setting in the sixth of the twelve dispatches he wrote for La Nación back home. Titled “A Day in Singapore,” it is dated October 1927:
There are blacksmiths who squat to forge their metal, street vendors selling fruit and cigarettes, troubadours who make their mandolins quiver. Hair salons where the clients’ heads transform into a hard castle, varnished with lacquer. There are [exotic] fish for sale [for food] inside jars; passageways and shaved ice and peanuts; puppet shows; howls of Chinese songs; opium dens with their sign on the door:
Smoking room.
Blind beggars announce their presence with clanging bells. Snake charmers coo their cobras with their sad, intoxicating pharmaceutical music.
Not surprisingly, while at first seeming to form communal bonds with the Singaporean opium users and the culture that surrounded the drug, he’d later write about them with repulsion. In the end, the only community he was interested in connecting with through his opium use was the predominantly European literary community that preceded him. He never discovered the way to do that.
It’s impossible to understand how Neruda’s use of opium exactly affected his writing, if at all. Yet examining a few of the poems, it does seem, as Professor Francisco Leal puts it, that opium’s “exercising effect on his body, the senses and the perception of time” is apparent in some of the poems’ visions—“visions at times horrible and surprising.”*
Most opiate writers craft their words once they’re down from their dream states, but lethargy and other hangover effects of the drug can hinder the writers’ ability to garner the will and energy necessary to articulate what they experienced while under the influence of “enhancements,” as Coleridge described it. Nonetheless, Neruda did show that, despite his mental withdrawal, he was motivated enough to paint those images and sensations in a framework that holds up on the page.
There are five prose poems in the first volume of Residence on Earth. They allow Neruda the room for more narration, to relate what he sees from a distance, as opposed to the verse poems in the book that are so often based on internal observation. Three of them seem to describe experiences and settings related to opium.
In the poem “Nocturnal Collection” (which had been the working title of the book), the speaker, apparently alone in the world, has come upon the “angel of sleep.” “He is the wind that shakes the months, the whistle of the train.” He is “perfumed with sharp fruits,” “a repetition of distances,” “a wine of confused color.” The angel’s “substance” is “prophetic food he propagates tenaciously.” In the seventh stanza, that substance is referred to as the “bland fruits of the sky.” As Roanne Kantor, lecturer in comparative literature at Harvard, points out, the images “all seem to refer to a comestible substance associated with an altered state of consciousness beyond mere sleep.” The substance, furthermore, is delivered to the speaker in a “black hamper,” just as the black resin of opium usually comes in a dark casing. In one line we see two qualities: “he gallops in the breath [nausea] and his step is kiss-like [addictive enticement].” Toward the end, the speaker breaks from the nocturnal and emerges into the collective of other opium users, and then he turns his attention to the city he is in, far away from the embrace of the angel of sleep where he began.
“Contradicted Communications” depicts someone in an opium-induced state with corollary images and senses. The poem defines the atmosphere in which he’s living now, a world opaque with opium’s “milky” smoke, surrounded by a mute and motionless chorus, his bones supported by a cement armchair, subdued, where he awaits “time militarily with the foil of adventure stained with forgotten blood.”
“Nocturnal Establishments” is the third prose poem that is clearly influenced by opium. The “establishments” are neither whorehouses nor bars; they are opium dens, with distinct wooden floors, no decoration, no noise. (Neruda never used the word “opium” in these poems.) “With difficulty I call to reality, like the dog, and I too howl,” the poem begins, almost as an evocation, carrying his efforts to conjure up something for his mind to hold on to from “Dead Gallop” to the opium dens. He’s submerged in his own confusion and needs something to help him move forward, out of the milky haze of his mental state.
The first images are repulsive, reflecting the general atmosphere. The inhabitants of the opium joint that surround the poet-speaker are animallike and grotesque: “how many frogs accustomed to the night, whistling and snoring with throats of forty-year-old human beings.” He wants to engage them, “to establish the dialogue of the nobleman and the boatman, to paint the giraffe, to describe the accordions, to celebrate my naked muse.” Instead, he condemns them. There is no mention of salvation from the depths of these confusions: “Execration for so many dead who do not look, for so many wounded by alcohol or misfortune, and praise for the night watcher . . . surviving worshiper of the heavens.” When his trance is broken, he tries to separate himself completely from the other users.
Opium is the subject of the poem that begins the section of poetic reflections on his time in Asia in his autobiographical Isla Negra (1964). The title is the site-specific “Opium in the East.” This is not Coleridge and Baudelaire’s European drug. The richly written poem opens with the same conceit of exploration seen in his memoirs, written later: “I wanted to know. I went in . . .” He was surprised by the silence. There was only the crackling of pipes. From their “milky smoke” came “an ecstatic joy”:
Opium was the flower of idleness,
immobile pleasure,
pure activity without movement.
Everything was pure or seemed pure,
everything sliding oily and hinged
until it became existence alone,
nothing burned, no one cried,
there was no room for anguish
and there was no fuel for anger.
But at this time of his life, turning fifty, Neruda was projecting himself to be a champion of communism, and he and his comrades condoned such drugs as an escape from reality’s contradictions. From this vantage point, Neruda does not speak of how this “one single existence” became a part of his life and work while he was constantly consuming “Opium in the East” himself. His political posturing never places the onus on himself at that time, but instead lyricizes—idealizes—the notion of the “opiate for the exploited” (by the imperialists, that is):
I looked: fallen poor,
peons, rickshaw or plantation coolies . . .
Here, after their wounds,
after being not human beings but feet,
after being not men but beasts of burden,
after walking and walking and walking and sweating and sweating,
after sweating blood, and no longer having a soul,
here they were now,
alone
With their hunger, each “had bought / an obscure right to pleasure.” After “having searched for it all their lives,” they finally were “in repose,” “respected, at last, on a star.”
In his memoirs, Neruda ends his discussion of his experiment with opium with a radical condemnation and closure: “never again” will he return to the dens or smoke this Oriental venom, for now he knows not to confuse his art with the narcotic, nor mix the poems of the singular poet with that of the junkies. It is not for him; it’s for the others. Writing his reflections in the 1960s, he seems to borrow from Karl Marx’s quote “Religion . . . is the opium of the people,” asserting: “Opium was not the paradise of the exotic that had been painted to me, but rather an escape for the exploited.”
Although Neruda would later champion the exploited people he found in the dens—“the men who pull and pull the rickshaw all day long”—when he was among them in the late 1920s, he saw nothing in them to champion. He reduced the women to sexual objects and the servants to the stroke of a ticking clock, when “every ten minutes a servant like Ratnaigh would come by to fill my glass.” Just after the “escape for the exploited” remark, in the lines that follow it’s as if, even three decades later, he still condemns the den dwellers for not living up to that “exotic that had been painted” to him by European literature: they were not just poor, but “poor devils.” Then, in the same paragraph: “There was no embroidered cushion, not the slightest hint of even basic luxury . . . Nothing sparkled there, not even the smokers’ eyes, barely open.”
Neruda found a disappointing dead end in his experience with Eastern spirituality. He was a curious intellectual immersed in a Buddhist society, a new realm for him, while at the same time immersed in his own spiritual and mental depression—and one can imagine the effect of being surrounded by people working on a path toward the end of their suffering, to enlightenment, to nirvana. He began to learn about the details of the Buddha’s life and philosophy. When he was in Burma, he had ventured to the striking ancient city of Pagan, where he saw perhaps the largest, densest collection of Buddhist temples and monuments in the world. In Ceylon he traveled through the jungle to five “mysterious Sinhalese [ancient Buddhist] cities,” as he wrote in a La Nación chronicle. At Anuradhapura, with the night lit by a full moon, he was struck by the immense pagodas in shadows, “filled by kneeling Buddhists and the old orations returning to the Sinhalese lips.” In a letter to Eandi, he enclosed a photograph of the “strange hungry Buddha, after those six years of senseless deprivation.” “I live surrounded by thousands or millions of portraits of Gautama in ivory, alabaster, and wood”; he adds, “They accumulate in every pagoda, but none has moved me like this one of the thin penitent.”
Facets of Buddhism appealed to him but challenged him at the same time. As he would tell an interviewer many years later, though his mother was devout, his father was an atheist, and this combination gave him a blend of curiosity and skepticism in approaching mystical traditions. There’s a certain honesty in his approach to examining the philosophy and the practice, and it shows up in some of his writing. In “It Means Shadows,” a deep and fascinating poem, probably written in Colombo toward the end of 1929, he shows a good grasp of samsara, the Buddhist idea of a continual cycle of birth and rebirth,* one that would captivate many Westerners in the future.
In the poem, the speaker is enthralled to be in the cycle of reincarnation: attached to “vital, speedy wings of a new dream angel” installed on his “shoulders for perpetual security”:
in such a way that the path through the stars of death
be a violent flight that took off many days and months and centuries ago . . .
It is a cycle reaching back before his birth, deep into the past, and now with the angel, heading forward, toward eternity. He wants, as he writes later, a “reservation” for his “deep place” to last eternally. However, his personalized perception of this concept is in conflict with true Buddhist thought. Buddhists, in fact, seek liberation from the condition of being trapped in the cycles, working instead toward enlightenment and nirvana.
The essence of Pablo Neruda at this time of his life was his suffering—his suffering in pursuit of his ego’s desires. Buddhism advocates the release of desire in order to alleviate one’s suffering. Neruda basked even in yearnings gone by—the awe he felt under the stars in Puerto Saavedra, for example, and his pining for Albertina. Embracing Buddhism was anathema for a man who clung to his desires and clung equally to his suffering, who defined himself by them. To reject them would not have meant freedom and enlightenment, as Buddhism proposes, but death. Buddhism, he realized, while fascinating, was almost antithetical to who he was.
In “It Means Shadows,” the third of the four quatrains illustrates this:
Oh, let what I am keep on existing and ceasing to exist
and let my obedience align itself with such iron conditions
that the quaking of deaths and of births doesn’t shake
the deep place I want to reserve for myself eternally.
The crux of Neruda’s problem, according to Buddhism, is in the last line. He asks for eternal self, while the Buddhist believes that nothing is eternal. The poem, appropriately, ends in the subjunctive, a prayer for the opposite of what Buddhism preaches. He emerges confident that he wants to continue attached to his ego. Buddhism turns worthless, like every other experience: the women, the exotic, the opium. He can’t find what he needs from it and kicks it to the curb. He embraces the very cycle Buddhism seeks to release:
Let me, then, be what I am, wherever and in whatever weather,
rooted and certain and ardent witness,
carefully, unstoppably, destroying and saving himself,
openly engaged in his original obligation.
In 1964, as a strident Socialist atheist, he writes in his poem “Religion in the East” that in Rangoon he
realized that the gods
were every bit the enemies
to the poor human being as was God.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
serpent gods coiled
around the crime of being born,
naked and elegant buddhas
smiling at the cocktail party
of empty eternity
like Christ on his horrible cross,
all of them capable of anything,
of imposing on us their heaven,
all of them with wounds or a pistol
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
fierce gods made by men
to conceal their cowardice,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
the whole earth reeked of heaven,
of celestial commodities.
* * *
In 1929, nearly a year into his residence on Ceylon, Neruda was in a state of bewildering flux. “Sometimes I’m happy here, but what demonic solitude,” he wrote Eandi during a monsoon.
This storm rained hard on Neruda’s psyche. “Water that doesn’t stop . . . an evil humidity that penetrates to the bones”: it was “the saddest period in the tropics.” While it rained, he read. Along with “los Hogares,” the Argentine magazine Eandi sent him, he read English novels borrowed from Wendt.
Solitude, Neruda wrote, was becoming:
[A] humid room around me, it poisons me, because the small passing wounds become gaping: there’s no way to stop the bleeding and they hemorrhage all the way to the soul. But what a beautiful fresh day it is, after a terrible tempest last night in which my house filled with water and two coconut trees fell in the garden, struck by lightning. Today is green and transparent: the sea is thick and detained, blue.
This last sentence suggests that the psychological bleeding may have been slowing, allowing room for optimism. He was opening further but was growing tired of his life in Ceylon, worried about getting stuck within its “inactivity of death.” Fortunately, good news arrived: he would be transferred to Singapore, a much more cosmopolitan and enticing country, with jurisdiction over equally appealing Java. Animated, Neruda wrote to Eandi of stretching out his senses to finally experience and rejuvenate in the beauty of the post-monsoon mornings for the first time since he had been there. Something was “soothing him.” Somehow, Neruda seemed to emerge from his doldrums just as the 1920s ended and the ensuing global depression began.
* * *
Wellawatta, Ceylon, February 27, 1930:
The consul general of Calcutta has recommended that I go to Singapore and Java; it’d be good if they appoint me there.
Yes, naturally, sometimes I’m crazy with happiness, not because of Patsy and her ilk, but rather because I’ve recovered my health, and my skin is still young. Stretched out in the sand, alone, in the mornings I shout with joy “EANDIIII” and anything else that occurs to me, the fishermen look at me astonished, and I help them throw out their nets.
Neruda was apparently escaping the inferno at last. He departed to Singapore with lifted spirits in early June 1930, ready to take up his new post, accompanied by his “good servant Dom Brampy,” whom he referred to as “my Sinhalese boy,” who at some point seemingly replaced Ratnaigh. The consul also brought his “extremely friendly” mongoose. Upon his arrival he went straight to the world-famous Raffles Hotel and checked in. He had started to do his laundry when he got the alarming news that there hadn’t been a Chilean consul in Singapore for some time—there was nothing there for him. He ran back to the port, supposedly with his still-wet clothes, hoping that if the Singapore post didn’t exist, the Java one did. The Dutch boat he had come on from Colombo, luckily, was still there, ready to head to the Dutch colony of Batavia (now Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia). Neruda got on board.
