This poem from José Emilio Pacheco’s volume Los trabajos del mar (The Labors of the Sea, 1978–83) describes urban pollution. Mexico City has only one river that has not been turned into a sewer and covered by concrete. That river, however, is heavily polluted, and the sighting of a fish in it, even a half-dead one, defies expectation and leads Pacheco to reflect on ecology, life, and poetry.

The first four and a half lines of A Linear Equation with This Single Unknown Quantity introduce elements of surprise in the sudden incongruity, and even more powerfully, the hallucinatory visual illusion, or error, of seeing a fish alive in the fetid water. The adjectives describing the water (obscene) and the air (lethal) signal a sense of moral outrage and despair. Traditional considerations of nature’s elements as life-giving undergo an inversion when water and air cause poisoning and death. The end of this first sentence in the middle of line five, a caesura, creates a strong poetic pause, the equivalent of an exclamation point.

In contrast, the second half of line five and the next six lines start with an exclamatory word (literally, “What sick frenzy…!”), use shorter phrases with no verbs (in the original Spanish), and foreground a new sense of urgency and anxiety. The observation of frenzied movement in the fish’s lips repeats the disturbing image of its gasping mouth and anticipates the mobility of the round shape (“the zero of its mouth”).

At this point the poem shifts meaning to another level, since the gasping mouth is perceived as a nullity, with all of zero’s symbolic meaning, spelled out as perhaps a mouth of no significance or (for even greater despair) as a trope for no potential communication, for a message that cannot be expressed. This nothingness (or unutterable word) is ironically the ultimate (which can also mean the last) voice of nature in the Central Valley of Mexico. Who can hear that voice?

The situation of the fish is hopeless, but the poem is not just about the fish, which is anthropomorphized as having a choice, implying free will, but really referring only to the inevitable consequence of selecting one of two ghastly options, both leading to death: stay in the water and die, or breathe the air and die. Both the land and the aquatic worlds are trapped in a single environment of pollution.

The poet is disquieted by the double “agony” (which also means death throes) of the water and of its living being. The poem suggests that the river, as giver of life to the fish, tragically suffers not only from its own noxious state, but also from contemplating its creation, its child fish forced to come to the surface to escape its dying life matrix and find only another form of death.

From line 14 on, the poet’s denotative, detached description is abandoned, for the experience has evolved into the subjective and personal. The observer becomes the observed, as the sighting of the fish by the poet is returned to him in the fish’s staring back. The inexpressible word suspected in the moving O of the fish’s mouth now has become a plea from nature, its will as a living being to be heard: to have its irrevocable sentence heard, or to have its irreversible (death) sentence understood.

The poet appears to admit failure in line 19, in not knowing what the fish wished to say, but, of course, the voiceless has been given a voice, for the poet understood the inexpressible word uttered in the “omnipotent” and irrevocable “tongue of our mother death.”

For readers of the poem in Spanish, the “voiceless fish,” el pez sin voz, replicates a conventional phrase about a man with no voice or vote, el hombre sin voz ni voto, meaning an individual who, having no voice and no vote, is ignored during governmental decision-making processes. Political connotations are suggested in the poem’s metaphoric distortion.

The last three lines, comprising a single sentence, generate a paradox: “I shall never know what it wished to tell, / that voiceless fish, speaking only / with the omnipotent tongue of our mother death.” Since death appears here as the final word in the sequence of negative signifiers (never, voiceless, only, death), it is obvious that death itself is impregnated with the connotations of the sequence.

Death (the commonality we share with the fish), therefore, is determined as a lack of recurrence (never), as a sociopolitically powerless status (voiceless fish), and as a handicap or limitation (a fish only capable of speaking the language of death). Death, not nature, is defined as our mother. Therefore, our common nature (death) is social as well as spiritual; it defines us as lacking power and also makes us incapable of reaching out to other creatures to understand them.

Pacheco has taken an ecological issue to an existential level, since he recognizes the incompetence of death as latent in all that exists, or at least in all that exists now in our endangered or already destroyed ecologies and societies.

Another message of the poem is that humankind’s destructiveness affects us at the spiritual level and impedes us from reaching out to or communicating with what is different, yet shares our basic conditions of life and mortality. The tragedy presented to the reader is complete, for the poet can describe the devastation caused by human actions, but he feels he cannot interpret nature.

Hispanic poets of Pacheco’s generation frequently express the notion that poetry has abandoned the romantic idea of the visionary or prophetic poetic voice. The claim that the poet is an ordinary citizen, who shares with the rest of us the common and unremarkable experience of living in pragmatic and technically oriented societies, was established in the Hispanic world during the 1960s.

Pacheco’s nostalgia for the poetry of romanticism has to do not with the authority the poet enjoyed as a prophet, but with the loss of some presumed qualities, such as, in this case, the ability to understand nature. Contemporary Hispanic poets have lost metaphysical empathy with nature, and Pacheco perceives this loss as a handicap produced by so much destruction in our world; for poets are also human and connected to their own human environment.

Just as human beings lose compassion or are trapped by indifference in relation to their surroundings, so poets become impoverished, their interpretive and communicative faculties diminished.

In its formal aspect the final tercet integrates the suffering and shortcomings of our present condition into a uniform verse form and a graceful, clear, and simple sentence. The line pauses also coincide with the logical grammatical pauses and deliver meaning in a straightforward manner.

Therefore, the form of the tercet builds a semiotic value, that of harmony, in opposition to the semantic content, which is disconnection and destruction. The tension between form and content was clearly explored in 16th- and 17th-century Spanish baroque poetry and in modernism at the turn of the 20th century in Hispanic America.

But Pacheco adds a dramatic contrast between the final three lines and the more contemporary irregular expression in lines 6–11. By doing this the poet seems to imply that poetry is a complex instance, capable of absorbing and integrating extreme forms of communication and representation; perhaps he is telling us that at least through poetry, we can reinvent or “recycle,” and therefore save a world that is in the past. Unlike the politics of ecology, poetry is capable of such miracles.

Bibliography
Pacheco, José Emilio. Selected Poems. Edited by George McWhirter, translated by Thomas Hoeksema, George McWhirter, Alastair Reid, et al. New York: New Directions, 1987. Poem A Linear Equation translated by George McWhirter, 168.

Categories: British Literature, Latin American Literature, Literature

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