What follows is the English translation of “José Martí: la totalidad imposible” by Rolando Prats, originally published in print form on El Caimán Barbudo, Year 23, Issue 266, [Havana, Cuba], January 1990, back then with original illustrations by Raúl Martínez. A digitalized version published on 27 January 2017 is available here.

The publication of this translation, undertaken by the author of the original text, coincides with the 130th anniversary of the death in combat, in Dos Ríos, Oriente province (Cuba), on May 19, 1895, of “the most universal of all Cubans,” the poet, essayist, and revolutionary José Martí, Apostle of Cuban Independence, him whom Gabriela Mistral called “the purest one of the race;” that is, of the entire human race; and about whom Fidel Castro stated to have been “the intellectual author of the assault on the Moncada barracks.”

Quoting José Martí is the most heretical of fidelities: we fragment such totality, and the fragments, isolated, are at odds with each other. Hence it is only as a total body that he awaits us behind each of the irritated hermeneutics. For it is only as a totality not yet won that José Martí is still substance of resistance, after the gradual and foreseeable expiration of his onerous deliveries.

– Rolando Prats

“I occupy a place in once-occurrent Being that is unique and never-repeatable, a place that cannot be taken by anyone else and is impenetrable for anyone else. In the given once-occurrent point where I am now located, no one else has ever been located in the once-occurrent time and once-occurrent space of once-occurrent Being. And it is around this once-occurrent point that all once-occurrent Being is arranged in a once-occurrent and never-repeatable manner. That which can be done by me can never be done by anyone else. The uniqueness or singularity of present-on-hand Being is compellently obligatory […] This fact of my non-alibi in Being, which underlies the concrete and once-occurrent ought of the answerably performed act […]”

Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act[1]

In the apologue that the Bakhtin of Vitebsk (1920-1924) had ordered for an initiation that would find itself on hold for fifty years, we can apprehend the response by the cosmic man – absent the gods capable of sparing him the vertigo of the choice – extending Socrates’ discipleship through the very gates of the city, where he knows himself to be alone in front of two abysses. Knowing oneself ceases to be an act of pure volition in the interstices of being, through which being is accessed only by anamnesis or prophecy. The “uniqueness” of being that Bakhtin echoes, once re-cognized, places us in a temporal space that is no longer ontic for the totem, nor gnostic for the dualisms of he who has lost the thread of the seed, but which is instead “participatively experienced.”[2]

José Martí, who has been to Echecrates’ and has witnessed there Phaedo’s moved testimony, has ended up forgetting the circumstances of that dialogue – or the figure engendered by those circumstances – and only knows that he was, that he will be: “And I know that I was, because there are things new that are not new to me. And I know that I will be, because I feel the need to be more than what I am, and which I cannot be here.”[3]  […] Or perhaps it had not been at Echecrates’, his reverential curiosity counterpointing the ensuing void: then we see José Martí waiting for the ship that had sail set to Delos, antiphonal holder of the keys handed to him by the master to go through the gates. Or throwing himself into the sea, his body pierced by the bowshot that would have anyway been destined for him in the chorus, forever gone, condemned to the alibi. Then we see him return over the waters – he comes from the southern sea as if he were returning from having taken his deputation to Apollo – all along adjourning his own sentencing, we see him at last enter into the land, once and for all in possession of an image in which – as in a flash of lightning– he has seen reunited all his fragments.

José Martí, in his cyclical approaches to the gravitational center that has called out to him from within himself, insists on the Socratic injunction, repeats it by making it concentric, as if to conjure in those circles the evanescence of the umbilical: “To enter into myself, I have to enter by myself […] It is necessary that I, placed in myself, see myself by myself.”[4]  And yet as what we witness is more an incantation than an appeal, less a quest than a reminiscing, he immediately reaches, at the very edges of the door he touches, the opening in the wind of he who recognizes the maternal home: “What I am, I do not owe to myself. I was not born of my own will. I did not give myself what I am worth. What is in me is mine, insofar as it is such temporarily in me. I am what I am, without my being responsible for a spirit that could not choose: without my being able to boast of a soul that I did not create.”[5]  Sentences of he who has seen the other side of the moon, they will once again insinuate themselves to us in Vitebsk, half a century later: “That which can be done by me can never be done by anyone else.”

We will have to re-encounter him who feels “the need to be more than what he is” and who “could not be as such there.” This is the lesson that is becoming indispensable – as if it were constituent – in the face of every challenge: because José Martí continues to be our supreme possibility of synthesis between the secular that has disintegrated and the withheld whose ranks are closed by “invisible continuous links,”[6] we will have to keep on extending the necessary contemporaneity, the natural modernity of he who – tutelar and unfinished – accompanies us, we will have to find again, without macerating it in readings of a satisfied finalism, the crux of his double destiny: one, mythical; the other, historical. The former acting upon the latter, adding layers under which the gods’ fire is given in museable ashes; the historical, surprising us through the gaps between the bronze and the marble, with its new advance notices accumulating.

Because in José Martí such a crux – all his utopian pathos seems to emanate from that very acute awareness of his uniqueness, which nourishes his ethos and even the agonic curve of the inscription of his style – is the only one that can put us in possession of the totality of his cipher: that of he who envisioned – historically –   the incarnation of the utopia as a possibility engendered – causally –  by the action of the image of balance: the island in the pointer of America and the World becomes the telos of utopia. Nothing but such totality – its unresolved figure – will be able to yield the sum of its antinomies: “Nothing is to be. Nothing is predestined to be. Everything in the world, except itself, is the effect of chance.”[7] / “The real is rational.”[8]  “What I am, I do not owe to myself.”[9] / “I was born of myself, and from myself the tree of the world sprouted in my eyes, which warmed it like suns.”[10] / “Sometimes, I confess to myself that I am good. Sometimes, I angrily chastise myself and I get exasperated for I believe that evil and selfish thoughts spring from me.”[11] / “How I rejoice when, turning back my eyes, I realize that I have not conceived a single thought, nor spoken a single word of intransigence or hatred […]!”[12]. Only the impossibility of that devouring totality will allow us to grasp the essential agonizing sense of José Martí’s life and death, and of his predestined and continuous resurrection: one which is twice necessary for only one reason: José Martí will always be an impossible totality.

For José Martí, first, is an ontic impossibility: he inscribed himself at once in myth and in history, he knew himself to have fallen heir to a disinherited logos, a mythical telos, but he had settled in the realm of that which is conditioned, of that which comes to be only causally, he felt the vertigo of his terrible solitude – his solitude was but the other side of his greatness – and thus, once officiated the mystery of the parable between the flower of the gunpowder and the bee of the statutes, he wanted but to lean “on the last trunk, on the last fighter: to die in silence.”[13]

And he is, then, a gnostic impossibility: he has left us only the terms of his transit, not the transit between his terms. We can dabble in the concluded or fragmentary text, his only juridical inheritance, tested by himself between the guardian of the seed and the king-in-the-antechamber who orders the composition of a Spirit (for when he will be “living-dead”[14]), but we have forever lost the singular counterpoint  – a cellular one through the protoplasm concealed by the membrane – of each sentence of his, the whole intonation of his word, what Bakhtin describes as the “valuative attitude toward the object”[15]. If, from Heraclitus onwards, dialecticians have been piercing our eye so that it sees the simultaneous other of each pole, that which is and is not at the same time, in José Martí we have lost the mediation between the unrepeatable living event and the repeatable letter: now this letter continues to occur, it rewrites itself and is rewritten in dialogue with its other circumstance: a filiation that comes from its unfinished futurity and its incited resistance.

That is why quoting José Martí is the most heretical of fidelities: we fragment such totality, and the fragments, isolated, are at odds with each other. Hence it is only as a total body that he awaits us behind each of the irritated hermeneutics. For it is only as a totality not yet won that José Martí is still substance of resistance, after the gradual and foreseeable expiration of his onerous deliveries: José Martí the writer, José Martí homme politique, José Martí hagiographer and object of hagiography. For as long as we do not reach that impossible body – a Pascalian body insofar as what concerns us is the continuous search for it and not the seizure of a profile as a plumb line for the assuaging of doubt -, and for as long as in it we do not take possession of that which is gravitational – at all moments that which is one with itself and continuously indecipherable –, we shall surrender our touch to the deceitful synecdoche: that is why he, from his walking death, surprises us every time we think we have exhausted the extension of his substance.

If José Lezama Lima has been able to situate his death “within the Inca Pachacámac, within the invisible god”[16], or in “an Egyptian dimension”[17] (“The final words of his two Diaries remind us of the precautions to be taken in the subterranean dwellings according to the Book of the Dead. He asks for books, he asks for jars with fig leaves […]”)[18], it is because Jose Marti, himself, undertook his secular enterprise after having been all the times of man, and because his excursion through history is in him survival, a ciphered mirror where his daimon codes the signs of his otherness. Lezama’s fictional hermeneutics becomes, indeed […] a strict historical vision.

If Lezama has been able to glimpse – in the ultimate proof of the radical capacity for order and resistance by that which is imagerial in a country “frustrated in the politically essential” – José Martí’s presence in the house of the alibi, there where, in “his just undeciphered permanence he continues to be in his memorials sent to a kidnapped king, / in his letters of relation he describes to us for his first secularity an untouched land“[19], it is because he has read before in the invisible – host and guest of the “house that is going to be burned”[20] –  that “over the deposits of death flutters, as if redeeming itself  […] the light that emerges undefeated from the rottenness […] thus, from these invisible continuous links, the soul of the homeland is being woven!”[21]

We have already seen that for Bakhtin “the uniqueness or singularity of present-on-hand Being […] compellently obligatory” is the condition of his “non-alibi in Being.” To José Martí, though, being appears as his own alibi, having overcome the oppositions between the man who will “raise the world” and he who wishes to “die in silence.” His death, which can continue to be dated, grants him by its fecundity the entrance into the alibi he wanted to reach in life. Fertile death which saved him for the alibi where alone we will be able to find him once again: in that elusiveness of his magnetized presence, elusiveness that explains the secret command of the most mysterious of his prayers: “How fortunate I am that they do not understand me, and how painful it would be if they understood me!”[22]

If his first secularity is fulfilled “in an untouched land”, his second secularity – that of his death as the beginning of his second life –, lurking in a new reading of his “memorials”, of his “letters of relation”, seems to be awaiting for a sign of non-compliance, of cautious celebrations over the mutilated body that resists baptism for which “an absence of telos groans.”[23]

In his second secularity, José Martí once again “penetrates into the house: he finds the recent ashes of the recent smoke; / and the little horse stands still, for he knows that the hand that brought him / has penetrated with its joy into the house of the alibi.”[24]

It will be the liberated king’s duty to nail to the wall as the final sentence what is today a modulated insinuation: that “the best […] has taken on new flesh.”[25]

Havana, 13 November 1989.

Notes

[1] Bakhtin, M. M. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Ed. Michael Holquist, Vadim Liapunov. Translation and Notes by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993, p. 10. The first emphasis is mine.

[2] Ibidem.

[3] Martí, José. Obras Completas, Vol. 21. La Habana: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 1975, pp. 63-64.

[4] Idem, p. 68.

[5] Idem, p. 69.

[6] Idem, Vol. 4, p. 284.

[7] Idem, Vol. 21, p. 34.

[8] Idem, p. 36.

[9] Idem, p. 69.

[10] Idem, p. 167.

[11] Idem, p. 68.

[12] Idem, p. 341.

[13] Idem, Vol. 4, p. 111.

[14] Idem, Vol. 4, p. 16.

[15] Bakhtin, op. cit., p. 32.

[16] Lezama Lima, José. La expresión americana. La Habana: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1957, p. 75.

[17] Recopilación de textos sobre José Lezama Lima. Selección y notas de Pedro Simón. La Habana: Casa de las Américas, Serie Valoración Múltiple, 1970, p. 39.

[18] Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, ed. cit., p. 75.

[19] Casa de las Américas. No. 158, Sept.-Oct. 1986, p. 35.

[20] Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, ed. cit., p. 74.

[21] Martí, Obras Completas, Vol. 4, ed. cit., pp. 283-284. Emphasis is mine.

[22] Idem, Vol. 21, p. 256.

[23] Recopilación de textos sobre José Lezama Lima, ed. cit., p. 35.

[24] Idem, p. 34.

[25] Idem, p. 35.

Featured image: Juan Francisco Elso Padilla (1956-1988). Por América (1986). The Bronx Museum of Arts, New York. Courtesy of MIT’s List Visual Arts Center.

Rolando Prats