The God Paper

1
“Había gigantes en la tierra en aquellos días y también después que se llegaron los hijos de Dios a las hijas de los hombres y les engendraron hijos. Estos fueron los valientes que desde la antigüedad fueron varones de renombre”.
Génesis 6, 4

At a forgotten cliff the
Ballerina draws imaginary birds with her
Hands. I am the bird and you
The imaginary

I have been trying to write poetry since age 10 (1963), first in response to love letters from a girl who used to ride the school bus with my elder sister. From her modest collection of books, which included many basics from “The Shoes of the Fisherman” to “Travel to the Moon”, my mom lent me a book by Gustavo Adolfo Bequer, “Rimas”, which I carefully copied, then adapted, and finally modified to please the unknown soul of a mysterious girl. She kept the collection like an apothecary in a bookcase behind which I met my extra-terrestrial friends, who revealed to me my true origins: I had been planted on earth by them as an experiment. The year before I had taken my First Communion (it was the Catholic School of La Salle Christian Brothers) so as a Christmas gift I asked for a book with The Life of Jesus, which my mom again promptly facilitated. That year I had been watching the TV shows “Star Trek”, “The Outer Limits”, and “The Twilight Zone” (all in Spanish in my native Nicaragua). So I asked my father for a book about space. The vague petition made my father produce “The Inventions of the 20th Century”, where travels to the stratosphere by little Laika, and to the depths of the ocean in small submarines, and to the Moon in futuristic space ships, where depicted. Being an electronic engineer my father always found ways to entertain me with magnets, electricity, silver drops of mercury taken out of a thermometer and merged into his golden wedding ring, and the arcane books on calculus carefully aligned inside his dresser.

The priest writes a final
Curse
Unto the encrypted page. Blank
Becomes red with blood and
The drummer dies in a fast beat to spring
Out of existence

My mom was the mystic, the one who taught me to pray and play games on telepathy, drawing and painting. The one who promoted me to play in the space ship under the open stairs to the second floor, fight the pirate aliens inhabiting the mango tree, and rescue the prisoners from the invading fire ants spitting acid and terrifying gamma rays (the same one that had transformed Hulk –in Spanish he was known as La Mole- into the green gentile monster). This mix of God, Woman, and Country (I always dream with the same barrio with dusty streets, had a natural inclination to assist the poor, and got into political troubles with governments of the left and of the right for defending my own views and refusing to be anybody’s puppet), this amalgam of experiences, I believe, placed me in the direction of mysticism intermingled with science fiction, love and politics that peppers my writing.

Inside of us all
Our own big bang
Our own big crunch
Mothers closing the eyes before the
evidence that their children are
the murderers, that the world is not one
that they gave birth to co-existing pairs of
cruelty and goodness
freedom and bondage for the
invariable Law of Change to hold

I didn’t truly start publishing until the 1990s, but it was in both, English and Spanish. The hard oficio of the writer was only really uncovered to me when I entered the MFA Program at UTEP, El Paso in 2007. One class per semester –and not all semesters- has stretched the completion for me for far more than I anticipated. Yet, it has been worth every single second. My first collection, “Antologia de Tarde” (Miami, 1990) contained many of the poems I had written in Nicaragua with themes that could be described as mysticism, lovelore, and the fight for justice. My last two years of high school were heavily marked by mathematics, music, and literature. In mathematics, the subjects of analytic geometry, imaginary numbers, derivatives, and calculus were an eureka experience on the mystery of numbers revealed to me. The history behind calculus was as marvelous a discovery as the mechanics of the techniques themselves. In literature the Pleiades of writers, from Poe’s Eureka to Cardenal’s “Praying for Marilyn Monroe”; from Borges’ “El Aleph” and “El Sur” to Baudelaire “Les Fleurs du Mal” (that was our exam text in French) never ceased to stir all sorts of fires in my imagination, all sorts of sensations in my body. When coming to the United Sates, all is left behind, except what you have read and lived; what you have experienced and created. Other collections followed in Miami: ”Genesis y Otras Fantasias” (1991), “Return to Guatemala” (1992), “Dead Souls” (1997, “God, Woman & Country” (2000), and finally “Dona Nobis Pacem” (2006). But something was lacking. Like most Nicaraguan writers, I was made on the go, a poet that was street smart, self-made, with no technique, no theory, no formal education, and with a lot of information but no formation. That is when I applied to the MFA at El Paso.

In another Universe
Bizarre laws are correct and all we know
Breaks down into seemingly
Incomprehensible illogical paradoxes
To each one his own Law
To each one her own Death

The formation received since 2007 has been enormous. At times, most of the time, to abandon old habits is impossible, to differentiate technique from voice, to separate the lecture-type tone from the natural experiential exposition, is difficult. To engage the reader and co-create with her demands the erasure of the self, the reinvention of the poet, finding the essence and let it be herself through poetry and fiction. This course on Physics and Imagination has gone a long way in nurturing the formation I sorely lack.

Throughout the years, my fascination with science and the fiction behind it (as well as the other way around) has taken me to amass a collection of 1950s SiFi movies, the entire Start Trek motion pictures, and books on the formation of the universe, space, time, a subscription to Scientific American, and three of my journals filled with musings on metaphysics, science, and a combination of the two. This course uncovered, recovered, or discovered for me entire deep mines on the subjects that wait to be written, re-written, or over-written in more ways than one.
I had read “A Brief History of Time” (Bantam 1988) and “The Universe in a Nutshell” (Bantam 2001) as soon as they were published, re-reading them was refreshing: they are not the same when approached with the curiosity of an aficionado than with the magnifying lens of a writer in formation, the challenge off an instructor, and the support and incredible commentary and varied viewpoints of peers walking the same path to creativity in the MFA. BHT stopped being the story of black holes and the beginning of the universe (in my book the portrait of a much younger Stephen Hawking is missing, my daughter cut is out for a report on black holes she did in middle school) to become an everyday language approach to otherwise complicated matters on cosmology and physics for most lay people. The diagrams are not as good as that in The Universe in a Nuthshell, which brims with colors and graphics. Hawking’s explanations of the expanding universe, the Uncertainty Principle, elementary particles, and his ideas on black holes, the origin and fate of the universe, the direction of time (which is referred to in one of Star Trek Next Generation episodes) and the God Paradox, acquired a new meaning with this second reading. Poetry and fiction stopped being the liberation medium, an expression tool, a deliverance tool, an explication of self, and started being an explanation of Reality, a creation of realities, a modus operandi, the essence of self, the inevitable point from which all vectors emanate and all vectors converge, like the continuing pulse of God we call Big Bang-Bing Crunch continually recurring ad infinitum. That is to me the Eternal Return: the infinite coexistence in infinite levels within and without.