The Art of Flight

by Sergio Pitol

  If anything gives unity to the account, it is the process of constructing a will and the incessant exercise of that will in shaping a destiny. “Will can move mountains” is the motto of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, a character with whom Vasconcelos identifies on more than one occasion. They are wedded by the use of a superhuman power to forge their destiny. Both conceive of themselves as creators of a personal future outside the normal where even chance is a product of energy itself. “The art of bravery in act, is this: to stand with choice-free foot amid the treacherous snares of life.”28 That statement by Gynt seems to govern the entire existence of our Ulysses, and he employs it consciously in the organization of his memories.

  Like characters in Stendhal—an author whom he loathed with the same intensity with which he despised Proust, Flaubert, and Mallarmé—Vasconcelos knew, very early, that will is all that is opposed to reality no matter how steely and impenetrable the latter may be. And he builds his life around this conviction. If reality conquers him, his will ignores the defeat. The result: an unpredictable personality even for himself. He never imagined, for example, that his autobiographical books would, from the moment they appeared, reduce the rest of his work to nothing. His Aesthetics comes out the same year as Creole Ulysses. He is convinced that this treatise is the culmination of his philosophical thought. He places all this faith in it and not in Ulysses. However, the autobiography rendered dead that collection of reflections on art and nature. It could not be otherwise: an egotist of such dimensions could only capture all of his powers in the story of his life.

  “Vasconcelos’s biography,” writes Jorge Cuesta in an article published shortly after the appearance of Ulysses, “is the biography of his ideas. This man has had ideas that live, ideas that love, suffer, enjoy, feel, hate, and become inebriated; those ideas that only think are indifferent and even odious. Creole Ulysses is, for this reason, the book in which Vasconcelos’s philosophy discovers its genuine, authentic expression. Those books in which he has expounded it in a purely doctrinal mode are almost unreadable.” And then he adds: “As inconsistent, as poor, and as confused as his doctrine is when it is viewed as thinking, it is even more vigorous, impressive, and fascinating when viewed as living.”

  In the first preface to Creole Ulysses, the author not only explains the reasons for the title but also introduces a theme that will become a constant throughout the tetralogy, eventually constituting an axis and assuming an obsession in all his latter endeavors: criollismo as the Mexican nation’s only possible zone of regeneration. “The title that has been given to the whole work is explained by its content. A destiny that soars like a comet, blazing across the sky, before burning out during long periods of darkness, and the turbulent atmosphere of present-day Mexico justifies the analogy with the classical Odyssey. As for the adjective criollo, I chose it as a symbol of the defeated ideal within our homeland…Criollismo, that is, culture of a Hispanic type, in its ardent and unequal struggle against a counterfeit indigenismo and an Anglo-Saxonism that dresses up in the rouge of the most deficient civilization known to history; those are the elements that have waged battle in the soul of this Creole Ulysses, as in that of each of his countrymen.”

  Creole Ulysses reflects the character’s life from his birth until the military coup of Victoriano Huerta, and Vasconcelos’s preparations to participate once again in revolutionary action. This is the story of a long march toward his personal depths; it begins with the immediately postnatal state from which emerge his oldest memories, wrapped “in a caressing and melodious feeling, a physical extension, a section barely cut off from a warm, protective, almost divine presence. The voice of my beloved mother guided my thoughts, determined my impulses. One might say I was tied to her by an invisible and voluntary umbilical cord that lasted for many years after the rupture of the physiological bond,” until the moment of affirmation of an independent personality. The rupture of the aforementioned cord took longer than necessary to occur, which comprises almost all of the book’s pages. They were years marked by his love for his mother and despair for her loss; then by the temptation of the flesh and the subsequent feeling of condemnation, of abjection, of horror of the body and atonement mitigated only by the certainty that “glory” awaited him in a still imprecise future; years marked also by the astonishing discovering of his own country during his travels and also by his participation in political life, which causes him to discover the weight of the Porfirian dictatorship and the paths to fight and defeat it. All this is but a glimpse, the preamble to the apotheosis to which he would later arrive. Apotheosis in action and in thought. And also of the flesh.

  All these things and more nourish this first volume, a suggested point of departure and waiting period before the arrival of the fatal revelation that he will seek to develop and demonstrate obsessively at the end of his memoirs and will not abandon for the rest of his life: the bitter conviction that Mexico is a vile and irredeemable country. Between the two options proposed by Sarmiento for our continent, Vasconcelos had wagered with all the strength he could muster in favor of civilization and against barbarism. He had believed in a ferocious, delirious, and messianic way that a person’s will, his own in particular, could move not only well-worn mountains but also souls—an enterprise that was much more difficult and complex than expected. He fought to become the Quetzalcoatl that would defeat forever Huitzilopochtli, the eagle that in the end would finally devour the snake. Of course, he failed.

  Upon remembering the past fifty years later, the recent political defeat behind him, we find that Ulysses, the child, is already aware that the nation has two enemies, one external—the Yankees—another internal: the Indians. His first memories are situated in Sasabe, scarcely more than a hamlet, an enclave in the Sonora desert, a border post with the United States, where life passes by in perpetual fear; whether of the Americans, who appear out of nowhere to lower the Mexican flag and raise the Stars and Stripes, forcing the Mexicans to retreat and accept the imposition of a new boundary line; or of the Apaches who show up from time to time to loot and destroy the few villages in the region. Later he will glimpse his only salvation, port, and hope when he comes into contact with the mainland, where the Hispanic presence becomes visible.

  After recalling his adolescence in Campeche, he notes: “In the beautiful tropical garden the band still brought together families for open-air concerts, but the beautiful girls of languid carriage, light complexion, and black eyes became increasingly rare. The beautiful, sensual caste yielded to the crude natives of the interior who in hushed groups listened to the concerts from a distance as if waiting for the moment to occupy the homes that the whites abandoned.” In the Vasconcelos universe, the Indian is everywhere, lying in wait at all times. He is just around the house, in the garden weeds, under rocks, shape-shifted into a vine, water, thunder. He is backwardness, the embodiment of brutal gods, cunning patience, evil calculation, lightning and punishment. “Within Durango and the main district centers,” he writes later, “the population is criolla, but it barely leaves the city limits; the Indian lives in conditions similar to those known in the times of Aztecs. It is for want of spirit and organization that the Indian continues in its backwardness.” The tone becomes almost frantic in the last volumes. When evoking the archaeological discoveries made in Uxmal and Chichén Itzá when he was Secretary of Public Education, he will say years later: “As the digger’s pick advances, there appear year after year new wonders: but everything is uniformly barbaric, cruel, and grotesque. No sense of beauty; the decoration is nothing more than simple paleographic work. Since they had no efficient alphabet they used drawing and relief as language, which distorts and delays the possibility of a disinterested musical development, which is the essence of art; utilitarian decor that, as such, elicits no aesthetic emotion, only the astonishment of their guesswork and the aberrations of the human soul.” He came to detest archaeologists and scholars of pre-Hispanic cultures of any kind. “Petty scoundrels” at the service of Yankee interest
s to reduce the footprint of European culture on the continent, the fruit of an abhorrent mestizaje, the result of mixing of two detestable races: Indian and Jewish.

  “In Veracruz and Campeche the vigor of the race had become so weak that it allowed Indians and Blacks to become part of Europe’s vitality,” he states, and evoking a trip to Oaxaca and the visit he pays to two elderly sisters of his mother, he was distressed by “the plight of those old ladies, the vestiges of a generation exhausted by their own creative effort and ultimately defeated by the harsh environment, absorbed by markedly inferior races.” In the decline of those old women, he sees “all the drama of the defeat of the white man of Spanish race, replaced gradually by the mestizo and threatened by the return of the Indian.”

  This is too much, I know. However, Vasconcelos never uttered these outrages during the time in which he situates his autobiographical novel. His work offers us the greatest proof. In 1920, in Hindustani Studies, he states categorically that only mestizo races were capable of great creations; in 1925, in The Cosmic Race, he glimpsed the future of humanity in the emergence of mestizaje that was shaping Latin America. This region of the world was the custodian of a new spiritual energy, which renewed ancient myths and recreated the Dionysian spirit. In 1926, in Indology, he makes a confession that refutes the racial resentment that, little by little, grew increasingly more virulent. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I have no black blood, but I possesses a small portion of indigenous blood, and it is to it that I believe I owe a greater sensitivity than that of the majority of whites; I have the seed of a culture that was already brilliant when Europe was still barbaric.”

  Creole Ulysses is also the record of an initiation into the world of culture, of the handling of ideas, of a spiritual journey, in short, of a path to the stars. If on other subjects his pronouncements were at times retroactive and he made them appear valid at a time when they were not, there was one on which his thought was always consistent: his contempt for what he considered unnecessary stylistic frills. He explains at the beginning of Ulysses that after learning to read, the only thing that interested him was content, not form. This statement will become an irrefutable principle, strengthened by the certainty that his fate would infallibly lead him to glory. “At ten years old, I felt alone and unique and called to lead…A certain disposition of my temperament and the habit of translating since childhood has left me with this indifference and lack of talent for form.”

  Regarding his membership in the group of intellectuals who formed the Youth Athenaeum (Antonio Caso, Alfonso Reyes, Luis Martín Guzmán, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and Julio Torri, among others), he has serious reservations: “For my part I never valued knowledge for knowledge’s sake. On the contrary: knowledge as a means to reach the supreme essence; morality as a ladder for glory, without empty stoicism, such were my standards, and they were firmly directed toward the conquest of happiness. There was no cult of worship for that which is half or in-between; all my vehemence was directed toward the conquest of what is essential and absolute […] My colleagues read, cited, compared for the mere love of knowing, I selfishly peered into all knowledge, all information, material useful for organizing a theory of being in its entirety. Using a botanical term much in vogue in our country, I took for criticism only what it could contribute to the eclosion of my personality. I myself was the sprout immersed in the elements and eager to flower.” A credo that is equivalent to carrying with arrogant pleasure a heavy stone tied around one’s neck. The limitations of some philosophical texts come from this permanent blindness in which he took pride. There is never in him a disinterested, contemplative attitude toward language, nor toward ideas. Nor is there emotion or surprise for literary achievement. Rather there is something akin to outrage in his contempt for form, in the non-recognition of the intrinsic value of word or thought, but instead a manifest calling to utilize any element that will allow him to attain power, salvation, and glory. “Due to the contagion of the literary-esque environment, I took on the thankless task of writing descriptions of each of these dances [those of Isadora Duncan]. I read these pieces in the Athenaeum, and they were poor and faulty in style. They did not reveal what I had wanted to put into words. No literature would have sufficed for an essay into which I poured the echoes of the Cosmos. Someone assured me: ‘Your subject would require the style of Mallarmé.’ It is impossible to convince them that a Pater, a Mallarmé, interpreters of decadence, cannot bear the weight of a new, vigorous, and complete vision of the world. I did not lack style, rather accuracy, and clarity of concept. My concept was so great that when it unfolded it created its own style, built its own architecture. In turn, I thought: my literary colleagues will one day say that Pythagoras’s writings need to be retouched by a Flaubert […] Many of them were the precursors of those who today disdain Balzac for his neglect of form yet support the follies of Gide or Proust, which proves that the professionals of style eternally ignore the brilliance of messages that contain spirit.”

  Vasconcelos is enamored of his shortcomings; he is obsessed by them. This personality type by nature imposes its ideas on others. However, they in no way hinder him from accomplishing the cultural program that he outlined and undertook when he was appointed Secretary of Education. A program that, plainly speaking, can be described as titanic. For this period of wonders alone, his name deserves to go down in history. To discredit him, some within the United States press and all of the conservatives in Mexico accused him of a Soviet-style educational and cultural program with Bolshevik intentions. The brilliant educational reform and cultural renaissance that he began always were, at the time and for many years after, plagued by misunderstanding, undermined by suspicion, envy, and the mistrust of his inferiors. Nevertheless, his energy prevailed. To achieve his goals, he surrounded himself with the most talented writers in the country, not only those committed to his educational ideals but also those devoted to the cult of form, as well as musicians, painters, and architects of all ages and movements, even those who admitted to not understanding, or who openly did not share them. In this regard, he was absolutely ecumenical. During his tenure, almost every writer who formed our literary avant-garde debuted; and the first murals—to the horror of people of reason, the “culturally Hispanized”—were painted. He called on all artists to collaborate with him, without turning them into bureaucrats. And that in itself was a miracle.

  Much has been written on Vasconcelos’s educational and cultural crusade. It will suffice to quote a few lines of Daniel Cosio Villegas, an intellectual known for his skepticism and even a certain coldness toward his peers: “So, yes, there was an evangelical zeal to teach others to read and write: then, yes, every Mexican felt in his heart of hearts that the educational effort was as urgent as quenching thirst or appeasing hunger. They then began the great murals, monuments that aspired to depict for centuries the country’s anguish, its problems, and its hopes. There was a faith in the book, and in the book of eternal quality…”

  Creole Ulysses covers the first thirty-three years of the author’s life. It closes with the murder of Francisco Madero. For many years his relationship with women and with ideas had been contentious and incomplete. But it was much more difficult for him to live without them. His dealings with the former were stained with subsequent feelings of abjection. His relationship with ideas had been until then merely a necessary catalyst for getting rid of the positivist thought that permeated the era. It seemed that everything he had lived—from his childhood to the end of his university studies—was waiting for something to unify him. Harmony would only come to him through the Revolution: his support for Madero; his activity during the anti-reelection campaign; victory over the Porfiriato; the dawn of a new Mexico; and, in the end, the first defeat. This period of political activity reaches in the book a brilliance, a mythical aura unrivaled in our literature. Here, the long awaited harmony is glimpsed. All the threads lead toward the unity of being: the triumph of the flesh—free now of anguish and recrimination—politic
al success; the cosmic link. “As surprising as he has been and continues to be,” Cuesta says, “and as incomprehensible the causes that motivate him are, Vasconcelos’s thought is so intimately linked to the revolutionary movement that it is impossible to consider one separate from the other.”

  Thirty-five years have passed since the death of our Ulysses. By the end of his life, he was a mere shadow of himself. There remains little trace of his philosophical thought; his battles, his fury, his contradictions, and his unpredictable changes of allegiances have ceased to stir passions. Of him there remains, above all, a testament of insubordination. The example of an individuality that refused to submit to any rule imposed from without. There remains the splendid faith of an apostle who saw salvation in the spirit and who turned the book into his favorite instrument. There remains the splendor of his prose, which illuminates all of Creole Ulysses and many other fragments in the other memoirs. There remains the image of a man who, wanting to save everything, becomes lost completely. There remains the memory of his redemptive power. And for all this, in a world where submission is the rule, we will never be able to thank him enough.