A Poem By Octavio Paz

The series of my new work, titled ‘Heads of State,’ was inspired by the following poem by Octavio Paz -

The world stretches out before me,

the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium.

Universe of kings and presidents and jailors,

of mandarins and pariahs and liberators and liberated,

of judges and witnesses and the condemned:

stars of the first, second, third and nth magnitudes, planets, comets,

bodies errant and eccentric or routine

and domesticated by the laws of gravity,

the subtle laws of falling, all keeping step,

all turning slowly or rapidly around a void.

Where they claim the central sun lies,

the solar being, the hot beam made out of every human gaze,

there is nothing but a hole and less than a hole:

the eye of a dead fish, the giddy cavity of the eye that falls into itself

and looks at itself without seeing.

There is nothing with which to fill the hollow center of the whirlwind.

The springs are smashed, the foundations collapsed,

the visible or invisible bonds that joined one star to another,

one body to another, one man to another,

are nothing but a tangle of wires and thorns,

a jungle of claws and teeth that twist us

and chew us and spit us out and chew us again.

No one hangs himself by the rope of a physical law.

The equations falling endlessly into themselves,

I rise, fall, expand, contract forever. Forever.