At certain outposts or tourism traps of New York City they sell laminated iron oxide for the door of the refrigerator. Commemorative magnets that tell any visitor where you’ve been or what you remembered.
“Love is so short, forgetting is so long,” is one of these magnets. Men or children sell them off of one way streets at busy intersections, they’re sold alongside knock off designer wrist bands and snow globes entombing lady liberty. The magnet seems an ancient proverb, but is authored by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who is canonized in 20th-century literature for distilling amorous emotion to its purest form. His words are not written in sanskrit on tablets found in the hidden caverns of a mountain pass, yet rightfully they hold similar regard. Neruda was fortunate enough in his teenage years to meet poet Gabriela Mistral, newly a school teacher in his remote, densely forested hometown of Temuco. This well-timed and fateful introduction would provide Neruda with the confidence to begin submitting soul’s inquietude to local newspapers and magazines, though under pseudonym. “I remember that it bothered my father very much that I wanted to write. With the best of intentions, he thought that writing would bring destruction to the family and myself and, especially, that it would lead me to a life of complete uselessness...It was one of the first defensive measures that I adopted—changing my name.” His first volume of poetry is an ode to earth and the erotics of calf love, while adjusting to life retching every which way post WWI. “I go so far as to think you own the universe / I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains / bluebells dark hazels and rustic baskets of kisses / I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees / You, cloudless girl / question of smoke / corn tassel / You were what the wind was making with illuminated leaves.” At a young age he knows the poet, much like the politician, deals in acknowledgments, social structures and new world order. He philosophizes, to some extent, the advent of surrealism and the means in which an “ordinary man” can access ambition to change heart versus stultify it. Upon meeting Neruda, Garcia Lorca describes him as, “A poet closer to pain than to intellect, closer to blood than ink.” Neruda, a self-proclaimed communist and activist, takes aim at corporations exploiting plantations in his native land explicitly as his writing gains notoriety; the Spanish civil war further radicalizes him left, and he spends the remainder of his life advocating for causes in good faith with varying results. By the 1960s he is blacklisted by the US government, with playwright Arthur Miller smuggling him into Manhattan to deliver a speech on the state of South American crisis, reading his epic poem Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu before International Pen conference. He is nominated for presidency in Chile in 1971 and graciously offers his support to Salvador Allende, perhaps contending with the distinction diplomacy wills in one’s life. “In my country, poets have always intervened in politics, though we have never had a poet who was president of the republic. On the other hand, there have been writers in Latin America who have been president: Rómulo Gallegos was president of Venezuela...I almost always finish (a political speech) by reading poetry. If I didn’t read some poetry, the people would go away disillusioned,” he says. He is forever the young man among fuchsia, begonia and ivy crooning, “In you the wars and the flights accumulated / from you the wings of the songbirds rose / you swallowed everything like distance / like the sea / like time / in you everything sank.” One properly reads Neruda lamp lit by one red bulb, believing what society deems insignificant will become perfect bound in due time.
-Katie Calderon