Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are clearing
off the desk, pushing aside the clutter, and
focusing on a singular massive figure. And when
I say massive, I don't just mean he wrote a lot
of books, though. I mean, he certainly did that.
Oh, he did. We are talking about someone who,
well, who stands like a colossus over the intellectual
landscape of the entire 20th century. It is a
pleasure to be here. And colossus is absolutely
the right word. We're talking about Octavio Paz.
Yes. You know, to simply call him a writer feels
like a drastic underselling of what he actually
was. Right. Because when I started digging into
this stack of research, you know, the biographies
and Nobel citations, the literary criticism,
it felt less like reading about a man and more
like reading a history of the world from 1914
to 1998. That's a great way to put it. He wasn't
just an observer. He was in the room where it
happened again and again. He was a participant.
Exactly. He is the prism through which we can
view the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil
War, the rise of surrealism in Paris, the post
-colonial shifts in India, and of course, the
fall of Soviet communism. He's a poet, a diplomat,
a philosopher, and a political polemicist who...
and this is key, managed to irritate just about
everyone at some point. He really did. Because
he refused to stay in a neat little box. That's
the hook for me, too. I think the mission of
this deep dive isn't just to, you know, list
his books or his awards. It's to try and figure
out how one human brain managed to synthesize
things that seem totally contradictory. I mean,
we're talking about a guy who blended Marxist
revolution with Aztec circular time and then
mixed in French surrealism with Buddhist silence.
Right. How do you even begin to mix those ingredients?
It sounds like a recipe for, well, for chaos,
doesn't it? It does. But in Paz, it became this
singular, powerful voice. It did. And as the
sources point out, his life's work was essentially
a dual project, explaining Mexico to the world
and the world to Mexico. Which is a tall order,
a very tall order. It is. The critic Ilan Stavins,
his biography is excellent, referred to Paz as
the quintessential surveyor. I like that. And
also a Dante's Virgil. He was a guide. He was
a Renaissance man in an era of specialists. While
everyone else was narrowing their focus, Paz
was just constantly widening his. So we have
a long road ahead of us today. We're going to
map this out chronologically because his life
really does build on itself, kind of like layers
of sediment. That's the only way to do it. We'll
start with his origins, which, spoiler alert,
are incredibly dramatic, then move to his awakening
as a young radical. Right. Then we'll cover his
time as a diplomat in Paris, and that's when
he writes his masterpiece, The Labyrinth of Solitude.
Then we have to go east. We'll talk about his
transformative years in India, which leads directly
to the trauma of 1968 and his resignation from
the diplomatic corps. A huge moment. And finally,
we have to wade into the messy, heated waters
of his political life, where he made enemies
on both the left and the right before we can
even get to his Nobel legacy. It's a journey
from the library to the battlefield and, in many
ways, back again. So where do we start? Let's
jump right into part one. The Visigoth and the
Revolution. When I was reading about his childhood,
I just kept thinking, this house must have been
the most tense place on earth for a holiday dinner.
You are probably not wrong. To understand Paz,
you have to understand that he was born literally
into the fire. 1914. Exactly. The Mexican Revolution
is tearing the country apart. But the conflict
wasn't just outside his window. It was, you know,
inside his living room. It was in his blood.
Let's break down the family tree, because this
is just fascinating. You have these two dominant
male figures in his life, and they represent
completely opposing versions of Mexico. Precisely.
On one side, you have the grandfather, Irenio
Paz. A patriarch. The patriarch of the household
where Octavio grew up. Irenio was a formidable
man, a journalist, a liberal intellectual, a
novelist. He had fought against the French intervention
in the mid -19th century. A real liberal hero
of his time. But by the time Octavio is born,
Irenio has sort of... He's become a staunch supporter
of the establishment. And specifically, he was
a supporter of Porfirio Diaz. Okay, so for the
listener who might need a quick refresher, Porfirio
Diaz was the president, and I'm using air quotes
here, basically the dictator who ruled Mexico
for over 30 years. The Porfiriato. Right. His
regime was all about order, progress, European
-style modernization. And keeping the indigenous
population firmly under control. He represented
the European civilized face of Mexico. So the
grandfather stands for order, tradition, and
the Eurocentric elite. Correct. Now you contrast
that with Octavio's father. Octavio Paz Solorzano.
Who goes in the complete opposite direction.
Radically opposite. The father wasn't just a
sympathizer with the revolution. No, he was in
it. He was an active agent for Emiliano Zapata.
Zapata. I mean, that's the legendary revolutionary
of the South. The man fighting for land and liberty,
fighting specifically against the class of people
that the grandfather supported. Exactly. The
father was a lawyer for the Zapatistas. He was
involved in agrarian reform, trying to get land
back to the peasants. He was often absent. Riding
with the revolutionaries, drinking, fighting.
A chaotic figure. A very chaotic figure. His
life was turbulent and violent, and he eventually
died a violent death. He was run over by a train,
heavily influenced by alcohol. A tragic, chaotic
end. So you have the grandfather, order, books,
European culture, and the father. Revolution,
guns, indigenous rights, chaos. Young Octavio
is stuck right in the middle of that. Literally.
He is the synthesis of that conflict. He's living
in his grandfather's house in Mixcoac, which
was just a village then. Now it's a bustling
part of Mexico City. And the house itself is
this crumbling mansion, almost a symbol of the
old order falling apart. And because the father
was away so much fighting the revolution. The
grandfather became the primary father figure.
He was the one who was there day in and day out.
There is a story in Enrique Krauss' biography
that I think we have to tell because it just
visualizes this identity crisis so perfectly.
It's the Visigoth story. It's a classic anecdote.
It tells you everything you need to know. So
set the scene for us. Okay, so imagine the scene.
The father, the Zapatista, comes home for a visit.
And he brings some of his revolutionary comrades
with him. These are not the grandfather's friends.
Not at all. These are hardened men. wearing sombreros,
carrying rifles. They're, you know, the true
face of the Mexican earth. They're dusty, they're
weathered. And then runs in little Octavio. Yes.
And Octavio, interestingly, took after his mother's
side of the family physically. He had light skin,
fair hair, and piercing blue eyes. He didn't
look like the revolutionaries his father was
with. He looked like the landowners they were
fighting against. So one of the revolutionaries,
a man named Antonio Diaz Soto -Igama, who is
a serious intellectual of the movement, not just
some random soldier, he sees this blue -eyed
kid and is just shocked. What does he say? He
looks at Octavio's father and shouts, Caramba,
you didn't tell me you had a Visigoth for a son.
A Visigoth. Wow. That is such a loaded word.
It's incredibly heavy. I mean, think about it.
The Visigoths were the Germanic tribes that invaded
Spain. So in the Mexican context, calling someone
a Visigoth is emphasizing their whiteness, their
foreignness. Their role as the conqueror. It's
saying, you are not one of us. You are the other.
You are the invader. Imagine hearing that as
a child. Your dad is fighting for the people,
but the people look at you and see the enemy.
It must have left a deep, deep scar. It did.
Paz later wrote about this feeling of exclusion.
He said, And this is a quote that's just heartbreaking.
I felt myself Mexican, but they wouldn't let
me be one. Wow. That one sentence. It sets up
a lifelong struggle. How can I be Mexican if
I don't look Mexican? What does it even mean
to be Mexican? Is it blood? Is it culture? Is
it a choice? Is it history? And since he couldn't
find a sense of belonging in the faces of the
people around him, he went looking for it somewhere
else. He went to the library. The grandfather's
library. Yes. This is really the third character
in his childhood. His grandfather, his father,
and the library. It was this massive room filled
with thousands of books, classic Mexican history,
French novels, Spanish poetry, everything. I
love the image of this kid while the country
is literally exploding in revolution outside
the walls, just sitting there in the dust, devouring
books. It's a complete refuge. It was his cave.
It was the one place that made sense. And it's
important to note what he was reading. It wasn't
just random stuff. No, he was very deliberate.
In the 1920s, as a teenager, he discovered the
Spanish poets of the generation of 27 and the
generation of 98. Writers like Gerardo Diego,
Juan Ramon Jimenez, Antonio Machado. Yes. And
why were they so important to him? Tell us. Because
these were writers who were reinventing the Spanish
language. They were modernists. They were trying
to strip away the flowery, pompous 19th century
style. They wanted to find a pure poetry. A pure
poetry. They were showing him that language could
be a tool to explore reality, to cut through
the noise, not just to decorate it. And for a
boy trying to figure out his own reality, that
was a powerful idea. And he didn't wait around
for permission to join the conversation. I mean,
he started publishing incredibly young. Extremely
young. Almost unnervingly so. He published his
first poem, Caballera, in 1931 when he was 17.
17. By 18, he founded a literary review called
Brandel. At 19, he published his first collection
of poems, Luna Silvestre, Wild Noon. 19. At 19,
I was primarily concerned with where to get pizza.
He's founding literary journals. It's a different
level of precociousness. But there's a specific
essay he wrote even earlier at 16 called Ethics
of the Artist that really caught my eye. It sounds
way too mature for a teenager. Right. What's
he grappling with in that? He's already exploring
the central tension of his life. The tension
between pure art, art for beauty's sake, and
social art. Art that serves a political purpose.
Part of thesis. Art of thesis, exactly. And what's
fascinating is the language he uses. It's a strange
mix of religious and Marxist vocabulary. He's
already asking, does the poet have a duty to
the revolution or is his only duty to the poem
itself? A question he would spend the next 60
years trying to answer. And that is the perfect
segue to part two, awakening and disillusionment.
Because that theoretical question, what is the
duty of the artist, was about to get very, very
practical for him. Okay, so the timeline here
is the mid -1930s. Indeed. It's 1936. Paz is
studying law at the National University of Mexico.
He's on the track to be a typical member of the
elite, a bureaucrat, or a politician. But he
feels this pull. The pull of his father's world.
To do something real. to connect with the Mexico
that he was told he didn't belong to. He felt
like a fraud, studying law while the country
was still dealing with the fallout of the revolution.
So he drops out. He abandons his studies and
moves to the Yucatan, specifically to the city
of Merida. He takes a job at a school founded
by President Lazaro Cardenas for the Sons of
Workers and Peasants. The Yucatan in the 1930s
was not a tourist destination. I mean, it was
rough. It was a different world, a different
country almost. The economy there was driven
by Henneken Seisel. the fiber used for rope.
And it was a brutal industry. Brutal. The indigenous
Maya workers were living in conditions that were
barely a step up from slavery. They were beholden
to the landowners, trapped in a system of debt
peonage. They were born in debt. They died in
debt. So Paz, the bookish, blue -eyed poet from
the capital, is suddenly confronted with the
raw, grinding poverty of the rural South. And
it shocks him to his core. It radicalizes him,
but it also inspires him poetically. It gives
him a subject. This is where he writes a long
poem called Entre la piedra y la flor. Between
the Stone and the Flower, yes. I've seen this
poem described as his first major work. What's
going on in it? Why is it so important? It's
fascinating because you see the influence of
T .S. Eliot. Paz had read The Wasteland, and
it just blew him away. He takes Eliot's modernist
techniques. The fragmentation, the shifting voices,
the bleak imagery, the despair. And he applies
them to the Mexican -Henneken fields. So he's
not writing a folk ballad. No, not at all. He's
describing the peasant's life not with romantic
folk songs, but with jagged, difficult, high
modernist imagery. He's basically saying this
suffering is not some quaint, timeless thing.
This is modern. This is part of the 20th century
wasteland. So he's finding his voice. He's blending
the social concern of his father with the high
literary culture of his grandfather. He's forging
the synthesis. And then just as he's doing that,
the world calls. The Spanish Civil War breaks
out. 1937. This is the defining moment for his
generation of intellectuals globally. It was
the last great cause. It was a clear cut battle.
Or so it seemed. The democratically elected Republican
government of Spain was being attacked by General
Franco's fascists. Who were being openly backed
by Hitler and Mussolini. So the line seemed very
clear. It was democracy versus fascism. And the
intellectuals of the world flocked to Spain to
support the Republic. It becomes this romantic,
heroic cause. It does. And Paz goes to Spain
for the second International Writers' Congress.
And the roster of attendees is just insane. Just
a who's who. Andre Malraux. Ernest Hemingway,
Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, Stephen Spender.
They're all there. It sounds like the most intimidating
cocktail party in history. And it's happening
in a war zone. It was incredibly heady. Paz was
the youngest delegate. He was treated as a sort
of mascot or a little brother by people like
Neruda. He was swept up in the romanticism of
it all. But while the public face of the Congress
was all about unity against fascism. The reality
on the ground was much, much darker. And this
is where the disillusionment part of this chapter
hits hard. Yes. The Republican side was a very
fragile coalition. Democrats, socialists, anarchists,
and communists. But the Soviet Union was the
only major power sending weapons to the Republic.
So the Stalinist communists were gaining more
and more control. And they weren't just fighting
fascists. No. They were purging their own allies.
Anyone who didn't tow the Moscow line anarchists,
Trotskyists, independent leftists was a target.
A friendly fire. Or not so friendly fire. And
Paz experienced this personally. He discovered
that a friend of his, Jose Robles, had disappeared.
He was a leftist, right? Absolutely. Robles wasn't
a fascist. He was a leftist academic. But he
had disagreed with the Soviet advisers. Paz started
asking questions and he learned the horrifying
truth. Robleses have been murdered, executed
by the Stalinist secret police. That moment seems
to be the pivot point for his entire political
life. It's the original sin for him. It is the
absolute key. It's the moment he realized that
a regime could claim to be for the people, could
use the language of the left, and still be a
murderous totalitarian state. And evil wasn't
exclusive to the right. Exactly. He saw that
the dogma of communism could be just as repressive,
just as violent as the dogma of the church or
the fascists. He didn't stop being a man of the
left immediately, not by a long shot, but he
lost his faith in the party. He realized that
the revolution could eat its own children. He
keeps that doubt tucked away, though, for a while.
And on his way back to Mexico, he stops in Paris.
Yes. And if Spain gave him a dose of hard, ugly
reality, Paris gave him a dose of the unreal.
Surrealism. He meets the surrealists, Andre Bretto
and the others, and this just changes his aesthetic
DNA. Completely. So for the listener who might
just think surrealism equals melting clocks.
What did it mean to Paz? Why was it so important?
It wasn't just an art style for them. It was
a moral philosophy. It was a way of life. The
Surrealists believed that Western rationalism...
Logic, capitalism, rigid order had led the world
directly into the slaughter of World War I. They
saw reason as a trap. As a death trap. They wanted
to liberate the human mind. They wanted to access
the subconscious, the dream state, the irrational,
the marvelous. They saw poetry in the chance
encounter, in the absurd. So for Paz, surrealism
was a form of freedom, a different kind of revolution.
Precisely. It was a tool to break the masks of
society, to get to a deeper reality. When he
returned to Mexico in 1938, he co -founded a
journal called Taller, which means workshop.
And what was the goal of Taller? He wanted to
bring this new vitality to Mexican literature.
He wanted to merge the political revolution,
the fight for social justice, with this surrealist
revolution, the fight for spiritual and psychological
freedom. And we should mention his personal life
here because he wasn't alone in this journey.
He married Elena Garo in 1937, right before they
went to Spain. Yes. Elena Garo. We could do a
whole separate deep dive on her. She is arguably
Mexico's greatest female novelist of the century,
a genius in her own right. They met at university.
Yes. They went to Spain together. Yeah. But their
marriage was, let's call it combustible. Two
geniuses in a small house? That sounds like a
recipe for drama. It was. It was fraught with
professional jealousy, infidelity, and intense
passion. They had a daughter, Helena, but the
marriage eventually collapsed under the weight
of their two massive intellects and egos. They
divorced in 1959. But in these early years, they
were a real power couple. Intellectually inseparable,
even if they were emotionally volatile. Absolutely.
Okay, let's move to part three. The Diplomat
and the Labyrinth. Because now Paz enters the
phase where he becomes, for many, the national
voice. Right. The story moves forward. In 1943,
he gets a Guggenheim Fellowship and goes to the
U .S., specifically to UC Berkeley. This is his
first real immersion in the United States. And
like so many exiles and writers, being away from
home allowed him to see his home more clearly.
He gives you perspective. He's looking at the
Puchos, the Mexican -American youths in Los Angeles,
with their zoot suits and their defiant slang,
their unique culture. He's fascinated by them.
They're not quite Mexican, not quite American.
There's something new. Another identity crisis.
Another identity crisis, exactly. And then, in
1945, a major career shift. He joins the Mexican
diplomatic service. He gets posted to Paris.
And it's there, sitting in a cafe in post -war
Paris, surrounded by existentialists and surrealists,
that he writes the book that defines him. The
Labyrinth of Solitude. If you read only one book
by Paz, this is it. This is the one. Published
in 1950, it is a collection of essays, but really
it is a psychoanalysis of the entire Mexican
nation. That is such a bold, almost arrogant
concept, to psychoanalyze a whole country. What
was his diagnosis? He starts with a simple question.
Why is the Mexican character defined by solitude?
Why is there this wall, this distance? And he
introduces the central concept of the mask. Let's
unpack the mask. What is it? Paz argues that
the Mexican is an instinctive nihilist who hides
behind a mask of indifference and ceremoniousness,
a mask of stoicism. Okay. He says that in Mexican
culture, to open up, to show your true feelings,
is to be weak, to be vulnerable. The ideal of
manliness, machismo, is to be closed, invulnerable,
impenetrable, never crack. And where does this
come from? He traces it all the way back to the
conquest, and he uses a very specific, very vulgar
verb to explain this history, doesn't he? He
does. The verb. Chingar. Chingar. It implies
violence, violation, aggression, domination.
He says the entire history of Mexico can be understood
through this one word. And he connects it directly
to the foundational story of Mexico. Yes. He
talks about Lama Lynch, the indigenous woman
who's Hernan Cortez's translator and mistress.
For centuries, she was seen as a traitor. But
Paz sees her as the symbolic mother of Mexico.
He calls her La Chingada. the violated one, the
opened one. This is heavy, heavy stuff. He's
saying that the modern Mexican is the product
of a historical violation. The Spanish father,
who is El Chingon, the violator, and the indigenous
mother, who is La Chingada. Exactly. And because
of that foundational trauma, the Mexican feels
illegitimate. He's an orphan. He rejects the
Spanish father, the invader, but he also feels
a kind of shame for the indigenous mother, the
one who was violated. So he is left alone, suspended
between two worlds belonging to neither. And
so he... Wow. That is such a powerful, if incredibly
bleak, way to look at a national identity. It
was seismic. It was a bombshell. It gave Mexicans
a language to talk about their own history that
wasn't just dates and battles. It was psychological.
It was poetic. And it influenced everyone who
came after him. Everyone. Carlos Fuentes, for
example. You can't understand the Latin American
literary boom of the 60s without understanding
that Labyrinth of Solitude laid the intellectual
groundwork. It became the handbook for understanding
Mexico. But Paz wasn't just writing essays. His
poetry was becoming just as ambitious. In the
mid -50s, he travels to India and Japan as a
diplomat and then returns to Mexico City in 1954.
And this is when he writes, Piedra de Sol. Sunstone.
His poetic masterpiece. If Labyrinth is his great
work of prose, Sunstone is his great work of
poetry. Published in 1957, it is one single long
poem, 584 lines. And that number, 584, is not
random. Not at all. It is precise. It corresponds
to the synodic period of the planet Venus in
the Aztec calendar. Venus, the morning and evening
star, was incredibly important to them. So the
structure of the poem itself is rooted in pre
-Columbian cosmology. Deeply. And the poem is
circular. The last six lines of the poem are
identical to the first six lines. So the poem
is a loop. It never ends. Exactly. It mimics
the Aztec concept of time, which is syphical,
not linear like Western time. A snake eating
its own tail. But the content of the poem isn't
about Aztec gods. No, the content is pure surrealism.
It's a torrent of images about memory, eroticism,
the female body, the Spanish Civil War. modern
life. He's fusing the ancient Aztec structure
with a modern European surrealist consciousness.
It's the ultimate expression of that Renaissance
man synthesis we talked about at the beginning.
It truly is. So by the late 50s, he is an undisputed
star. He has written the definitive essay on
Mexico and the definitive poem, but his career
as a diplomat is about to take him to a place
that will change his soul. And that brings us
to part four, the Eastern Slope. In 1962, Paz
is appointed the Mexican ambassador to India.
And this wasn't just another posting for him,
another cushy job. Yeah. He fell in love with
India. He stayed for six years. And this period
marks a distinct shift in his thinking and his
poetry. How so? If Paris was about surrealism
and the anxiety of history. India was about Buddhism
and the search for presence. For the now. How
did that show up in his writing? He began to
move away from the obsession with history and
identity that defined Labyrinth. In Buddhist
philosophy, the self is an illusion. History
is an illusion. The only thing that is real is
the present moment, this instant. So he's letting
go of that past trauma? He's trying to. He wrote
books like The Monkey Grammarian and the poetry
collection Ladera Este, Eastern Slope. His poetry
became more visual, more contemplative, less
frantic than his surrealist work. More about
silence. He also found a new community there,
right? He did. He connected with the hungry generation
of writers in India. These were young anti -establishment
poets in Bengal who were challenging the caste
system and the literary elite. So even as an
ambassador in a suit, he still had that revolutionary
spark. He felt a kinship with these rebels. He
saw them as doing in India what the surrealists
had tried to do in Paris. And crucially, on a
personal level, he met his second wife there.
Marie -José Tremény, a French artist. They met
in 1965. This was the great love of his life.
She was his partner until his death. Yes. He
wrote incredible, luminous, erotic poetry for
her. She gave him a stability and a happiness
that he hadn't really known before. Their partnership
was central to the second half of his life. So
he's happy. He's highly respected. He's the ambassador.
He's found love and a new spiritual path. Things
are good. But then comes 1968. The year the world
caught fire. It's hard to overstate how intense
1968 was globally. You have the student riots
in Paris, the Prague Spring, the assassinations
of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy
in the U .S. And in Mexico City, the Olympics
are about to begin. Right. The government of
Mexico, which for decades had been ruled by the
single party state of the PRI. The Institutional
Revolutionary Party, a perfect oxymoron. They
wanted to use the Olympics to show the world
that Mexico is a modern, stable, first world
country. A success story. The Mexican students
were in the streets. They were part of that global
68 movement. They were protesting the authoritarian
nature of the government. They wanted real democracy,
not the PRI's facade. The government was terrified
of being embarrassed on the global stage. So
on October 2nd, just 10 days before the opening
ceremonies, they made a horrific decision. The
Tlatelolco Massacre. The army surrounded a massive,
peaceful student demonstration at the Plaza de
las Tres Culturas. The open fire, snipers on
the rooftops, soldiers on the ground. We still
don't know the exact death toll, but it was in
the hundreds. Men, women, children. And the government
immediately tried to cover it up, claiming the
students fired first. But everyone knew it was
a lie. It was a state -sponsored slaughter. Paz
is in New Delhi. He hears about this. He is the
official representative of that government. Imagine
the moral dilemma. He has reached the pinnacle
of his career. He's an ambassador. But the government
paying his salary has just slaughtered its own
children. The very people, the students, that
Paz had championed in his youth. So he does something
that almost no one in the Mexican system ever
did. He quits. He resigns in protests. And you
have to understand, in the PRI system of the
time, loyalty was everything. Resigning wasn't
just quitting a job. It was a profound political
act of defiance. It was burning a bridge that
could never be rebuilt. He was blacklisted. He
saved his moral integrity, but he lost his position,
his status. He became a hero to the students
in the intellectual class. He proved, when it
counted, that he wasn't a sellout. So he leaves
India, he spends some time teaching at Cambridge
and Harvard and other places in the U .S., and
then he returns to Mexico in 1969. But he can't
go back to being a diplomat. He can't work for
the government. He needs a new vehicle for his
ideas. This begins the magazine era. Yes. He
realized that if he couldn't shape politics from
the inside, he would shape culture from the outside.
He founded the magazine Plural in 1970. And when
the government... in a roundabout way, shut that
down. He wasn't deterred. He immediately founded
Vuelta in 1976. And Vuelta became the most important
intellectual magazine in the entire Spanish -speaking
world for the next 20 years. It was his fortress,
his platform. But this fortress is where he started
launching attacks that confused and angered a
lot of people. Which brings us to part five,
political thought. The slippery ideology. Slippery
is the perfect word. The critic Yvonne Grenier
said Paz was very slippery for anyone thinking
in rigid ideological categories. And as he got
older, he just refused to fit into the binary
of left versus right. OK, so let's explain the
context. In the 1970s and 80s, the Latin American
left was surging. You had Fidel Castro firmly
in power in Cuba. You had the Sandinistas overthrowing
the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. And the
intellectual class in Mexico and across Latin
America was largely united in supporting these
revolutions. They were seen as the great hope
against U .S. imperialism. And Paz, the man who
resigned to protest a right -wing government's
massacre, stood up and said, wait a minute. Because
he remembered Spain. He never forgot Spain. He
saw the seeds of Stalinism in these new revolutions.
He started publishing articles in Volta, criticizing
Castro's human rights record, the lack of free
speech, the political prisoners. He exposed the
dark side of the Cuban Revolution when it was
very unfashionable to do so. Very. And he did
the same with Nicaragua. While everyone else
was cheering the Sandinistas, he was criticizing
their censorship of the press and their growing
authoritarianism. And the reaction from the left
was... Not polite. It was vitriolic. You have
to understand, criticizing Fidel Castro in a
Mexican university in the 1970s was like swearing
in church. It was heresy. So what did they call
him? A traitor. A reactionary. A friend of Ronald
Reagan. A CIA agent. A sellout. Students who
had cheered him in 68 were now burning effigies
of him outside the U .S. Embassy. And this political
rift destroyed his most famous friendship. The
feud with Carlos Fuentes. A true tragedy. Carlos
Fuentes and Octavio Paz were the two towers of
Mexican literature. They were best friends for
decades. But Fuentes was a staunch supporter
of the Sandinistas. A passionate supporter. Paz
saw the Sandinistas as budding totalitarians.
The rift grew and grew, and then the final straw.
Paz allowed a brutal critique of Fuentes to be
published in Vuelta. Written by his protege Enrique
Kraus. Yes. The article tore Fuentes apart, calling
him a guerrilla dandy. Basically accusing him
of being a champagne socialist who romanticized
revolutions from his comfortable apartment. And
Fuentes felt betrayed that Paz, his friend, would
publish something so personal and vicious. He
did. They stop speaking. They never reconcile.
It's one of the great tragedies of literature
to giants who let politics kill their friendship.
But Paz's core point was consistent, right? He
was simply anti -totalitarian from any direction.
Consistent to a fault. Yeah. He was influenced
by people like Albert Camus and George Orwell.
He believed that a dictatorship is a dictatorship.
Whether the dictator wears a right -wing military
uniform or a left -wing Che Guevara t -shirt.
He valued freedom above revolution. And for many
on the left, that was an unforgivable sin. He
also took a nuanced and for many a controversial
stance on the Spanish conquest that angered people.
Yes. He pushed back against the black legend,
the idea that the Spanish were just evil monsters
who destroyed a paradise. He didn't deny the
violence. Not at all. He acknowledged the brutality,
but he argued that the conquest also brought
things like the rule of law, the Spanish language,
and a connection to Western culture that, for
better or worse, unify the disparate peoples
of the region. He said that without the Spanish
influence, Mexico would just be a fractured collection
of warring tribes. which many on the left felt
was an apology for colonialism. They saw it as
him siding with the conquerors. And then the
final painful irony, 1994, the Zapatista uprising
in Chiapas, the EZLN. History rhymes, doesn't
it? Paz is an old man now. In his 80s, suddenly
an army of indigenous peasants rises up in the
South, led by a charismatic pipe -smoking figure,
subcomandante Marcos, demanding land and rights.
And they call themselves Zapatistas. His father
was a Zapatista. You'd think Paz, of all people,
would be thrilled. But he wasn't. He criticized
the uprising. He felt that in a modern democracy,
which Mexico was, however, imperfectly trying
to become, violence was not the answer. He believed
in ballots, not bullets. By that point, yes.
He even signed an open letter supporting the
government's use of military force to restore
order. The son of the Zapatistas supporting the
army against the new Zapatistas. That is a complicated
legacy. It is. Many people never forgave him
for that. They saw it as the final proof that
he had become a conservative old man. But Paz
would argue he was defending the fragile institution
of democracy against the chaos of armed rebellion.
He did get one moment of pure vindication, though.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Yes. In
1990, just after communism collapsed in Eastern
Europe, he organized a massive conference in
Mexico City called the Experience of Freedom.
He invited intellectuals from all over the world.
Casio Mios, Mario Vargas Llosa, dissidents from
the former Soviet bloc. It was his victory lap.
He'd been warning about Soviet totalitarianism
for 50 years while his critics called him a reactionary,
and he lived to see it crumble. It's a powerful
moment. But before we close the book on him,
we need to remember that underneath all the political
fighting, he was an artist. We can't lose sight
of the poetry. Part six, aesthetics, poetry,
and themes. The critic Ramon Girard said, Paz's
poetry leads into the realm of silence where
true language lives. Okay, that sounds beautiful,
but what does it mean? It means that for Paz,
Poetry wasn't just about stringing together pretty
words. It was about creating a space, a moment
of intensity, where the reader could experience
otherness, the other person, the other time,
the other reality. And what were his big recurring
themes? Love and eroticism were absolutely paramount.
Paz believed that the erotic act, true union
with another person, was the one moment where
humans could step outside of time, outside of
history. It's a rebellion. It's a revolutionary
act against the machine of society. When you
are truly in love, time stops. You aren't a worker
or a voter or a citizen. You are just a being
in the present moment. He was also obsessed with
the visual arts. A huge fan of modern art. He
wrote brilliant essays on Marcel Duchamp and
Joan Moreau. He saw a deep connection between
the visual image and the written word. He treated
poems almost like verbal sculptures. And we have
to mention his huge work on Sor Juana, The Traps
of Faith. A monumental biography, a masterpiece
of historical scholarship. So Juana Ines de la
Cruz was a 17th century nun in colonial Mexico.
And she was a genius. An absolute genius. A mathematician,
a theologian, a playwright, a poet, a feminist
before the word even existed. But the Inquisition
and the church silenced her. They saw her intelligence
as a threat and forced her to give up her books
and her studies. And Paz saw his own reflection
in her. Completely. She was the intellectual
trying to survive and create in an authoritarian
dogmatic world. Writing that book was his way
of honoring the long lineage of Mexican thought
and resistance. And finally, part seven. Recognition
and legacy. After decades of being a controversial
figure, the world finally gave him his due. The
awards started piling up in the 80s. The Miguel
de Cervantes Prize in 1981, which is like the
Nobel for the Spanish -speaking world. The Neustadt
International Prize in 1982. And then the big
one. 1990. The Nobel Prize in Literature. The
first and still the only Mexican writer to win
it. In his acceptance speech, he spoke beautifully
about his lifelong search for the present. It
was the perfect culmination of a life spent bridging
gaps between Mexico and the world, between East
and West, between the pre -Columbian past and
the modern future. He died in 1998 in Mexico
City. From cancer. He was given a state funeral.
His ashes are kept at the Coligio de San Ildefonso,
the very building where he went to high school,
and the birthplace of the Mexican muralist movement.
In the end, he returned to the center. So let's
wrap this up. We've unpacked the busy goth. The
Zapatista's son, the surrealist, the diplomat,
the critic. What does this all mean for us? Why
should a listener today care about Octavio Paz?
I think for me it comes back to the mask. From
the labyrinth of solitude. Yes. We are living
in a time where identity is everything, yet we
often feel more isolated than ever. We curate
our lives on social media. We build our own digital
masks. Paz teaches us that this feeling of solitude
is part of the modern human condition. But he
also shows us the way out. Connection, love,
eroticism, but also conversation. And criticism.
He teaches us that we don't have to be just one
thing. You can be proud of your roots and be
a citizen of the world. You can be a feared critic
of your own side. You can and should change your
mind. That intellectual flexibility, that willingness
to be slippery, is something we are sorely missing
today. Absolutely. He showed us that a society
without criticism, especially self -criticism,
is a society that is dying. He wasn't afraid
to stand alone if he thought he was right, even
if it cost him his friends. I want to leave the
listener with a quote from Paz that really stuck
with me during this research. He wrote, there
can be no society without poetry, but society
can never be realized as poetry. Sometimes the
two terms seek to break apart. They cannot. That
is the beautiful paradox of his life's work.
Society is the structure, the rules, the prose.
Poetry is the dream, the rebellion, the freedom.
They are always intention. but they need each
other to survive. So here is the question for
you to mull over as you unplug today. In your
own life, or in this fractured world we're all
living in, what is the poetry that holds the
structure together? What is the thing that keeps
the machine from crushing the human spirit? That's
the vital question. Thanks for diving deep with
us.