Wonder and Exile in the New World. Alex Nava
is something terribly wrong. The evidence is in their eyes, eyes that suffer blindness for being flooded with tears. When distinguishing the poet from the philosopher, Federico García Lorca captured beautifully the principal meaning of the prophet: “And I tell us that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of the kind whose bodily senses were shaped in a world that is not our own and that few people are able to perceive. A poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink.”34 The prophets are poets of this kind, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to death than to philosophy. Their proclamations are evocative of imploration and blindness rather than vision, apocalypse instead of enlightenment. If one understands anything about the Bible, it should be how much the prayers of the Bible are bathed in mourning and lamentations, dirges and cries. Derrida picks up on this theme:
By praying on the verge of tears, the sacred allegory does something. It makes something happen or come, makes something come to the eyes, makes something well up in them, by producing an event. It is performative, something vision alone would be incapable of if it gave rise only to representational reporting, to perspicacity, to theory or to theater, if it were not already potentially apocalypse, already potent with apocalypse. . . . To have imploration rather than vision in sight, to address prayer, love, joy, or sadness rather than a look or gaze. . . . Contrary to what one believes one knows, the best point of view is a source-point and a watering hole, a waterpoint—which thus comes down to tears.35
The biblical prophets do not give us theory or systems, they do not look or gaze—they implore. Their bodies and spirits are embodied apocalypses, they put on the garments and sackcloth of mourning, they become walking dramas of Israel’s impending doom. Their words are mournful revelations that announce the death of the old before the new can be envisaged. Jeremiah will literally put on the oxen’s yoke to forewarn the Israelites of the Babylonian might. Isaiah will strip his body naked and wander the desert for three years to call attention to the fate of the nations at the hands of the Assyrians (Isaiah 20). Ezekiel is commanded to prepare an exile’s bag and to cover his eyes to characterize the impending days of darkness that will fall hard on this nation of wayfarers. In each case, the prophets become one-man shows in a peripatetic theater that has the dispossessions of history as its main act (Ezekiel 12). With feverish histrionics, they cry out, denounce, censure, bewail, bemoan. And above all, they shed tears of blood for the omens of death they notice everywhere.
The prophets are, in fact, obsessed with death, and they succor death as if it was their own beloved who has died, marching arm in arm with him, bemoaning his death, grieving and wailing, singing the blues. Some tremble to name the ghastly specter of death for fear of reprisal or curse, but the prophets are not reserved in this regard. Because they announce the end of all that presumes to be inviolable and unending, death is always a key theme in the prophets, if not their most beloved companion, their most steadfast love, as Octavio Paz once wrote about Mexicans.36 The funeral they enact is for Israel, of course, or the Temple, or for the dead consciences of the people. Whatever the case, there is no doubt that their pronouncements are peopled by the ghosts of the dead.
And for the prophets, this familiarity with death is impossible to disentangle from their experience of exile. Exile is a break and disruption with death-like features, a wound that can be fatal. As an omen of death, exile takes and strips away all that is dear and life-giving; it peels away our soul, leaving us denuded and bare. It can be catastrophic, this much is clear in the Hebrew Bible:
I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void;
and to the heavens and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,
and all the hills moved to and fro,
I looked, and lo, there was no one at all,
and all the birds of the air had fled.
I looked, and lo, the fruitful land
was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins.
(Jeremiah 4:23–26)
In fact, most of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible prophesy and describe the great catastrophes that befell the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The prophets are chroniclers of these violent episodes in Israel’s history. As speaker’s of God’s word, they call out and denounce the bloody machinations of world powers: the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Persians, Syrians, and Romans. And closer to home, they see with great clarity and honesty their own nation’s sins and injustices. They are harshest and most unforgiving when it comes to Israel’s own ethical-political offenses. They jolt the memory of the people when they are likely to forget that that they, too, were once strangers in the land of Egypt (Deuteronomy 10:19). They excoriate the guilty for “crushing the poor into the dust of the earth” (Amos 2:7), for turning away widows and orphans, for not welcoming the strangers of the land. And they are hostile to practices of worship and sacrifice that accompany such acts of injustice and violence. The Hebrew prophet surely wants sacrifices and offerings from the people, but ones that give life to the poor and dying, sacrifices that answer Pablo Neruda’s hopes: “the poor hopes of my people: children in school with shoes on, bread and justice being spread as the sun is spread in the summer.”37 They want offerings, in other words, that will be spread evenly, generously, justly. Anything else seems to only invoke their fury.
And there is plenty of sound and fury in their voices. They speak with the same violence and outrage as a tornado, causing all in its path to quake and shiver. Indeed, it is quite natural to associate prophets with the most awesome forces of nature—earthquakes, tornados, blazing fires—because they are possessed by the same earth-shattering power, the same seismic activity. When they speak, we should beware and prepare for an eruption and upheaval that leaves nothing unaffected.38 In their desertlike speech, a voice cries out, unsettles and terrifies us, and always forces us to remember the exoduses and dispossessions of human history. The prophet would have no vocation, no calling, then, if exile didn’t create the desperate need. Without exile, there would be no tears and no prophet needed to speak on behalf of those who shed so many tears.
The condition of exile is, in short, the definitive feature of the Hebrew prophets and it provided them with an unenviable privilege: a cognitive insight and awareness of human fragility and insecurity, danger and pain. In this sense, exile proved revelatory for the prophets, a disclosure of wisdom gained by combat with the calamities of history. They shunned any other version of religion—no matter how beautiful and seductive—if it did not locate God’s face in the naked and tormented face of the poor and oppressed. And this certainly holds true for the understanding of wonder: no version of wonder will pass their scathing judgment if it does not channel the terrible throes of the dispossessions of history. Wonder will always include these raw, sorrowful realities after passing through the hoarse throats of the Jewish prophets. It will always sound different from those without any contact and solidarity with the wretched of the earth.
Wonder and Exile in the New World
Though I have opened with a general discussion of mystics and prophets, I hope to show in what follows the echoes and reverberations of these themes in the figures of the New World. The subjects of this study carry the memory of these voices deep in their hearts and consciences, and when they do not channel them, they at least echo them the way a great jazz musician echoes the sounds and beats of the past while adding their own improvised sound. In this way, the subjects of my study recall the themes and sounds of mystics and prophets, but add their own accent on wonder and exile, an accent that was profoundly shaped by the unprecedented discoveries and conquests of the year 1492.
María Rosa Menocal describes well these new accents and sounds post-1492 when speaking of the mystical significance of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (the date was changed from July 31 to August 2 by the appeal of Isaac Abravanel). The date of August 2 was preferred because it fell on the ninth of Ab in the Jewish liturgical calendar, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple. The new date would provide a new occasion for ancient sorrows, a new diaspora in perfect liturgical and kabbalistic continuity with the original diaspora. True to the purpose of ritual, Abravanel and his contemporaries sought to recapture and re-enact an