The Street By Octavio Paz

by Hector Fernando Burga

La Calle

Es una calle larga y silenciosa.

Ando en tinieblas y tropiezo y caigo

y me levanto y piso con pies ciegos

las piedras mudas y las hojas secas

y alguien detrás de mí también las pisa:

si me detengo, se detiene;

si corro, corre. Vuelvo el rostro: nadie.

Todo está oscuro y sin salida,

y doy vueltas y vueltas en esquinas

que dan siempre a la calle

donde nadie me espera ni me sigue,

donde yo sigo a un hombre que tropieza

y se levanta y die al verme: nadie.

The Street

A long and silent street.

I walk in black and I stumble and fall

and rise, and I walk blind, my anxiety

stepping on silent stones and dry leaves.

Someone behind me also stepping on stones, leaves:

if I ho-hum down, he slows:

if I run, he runs. I turn: nobody.

Everything dark and doorless.

Turning and turning among these corners

which lead forever to the street

where I pursue a man who stumbles

and rises and says when he sees exist: nobody

La Calle, "The Street" by Mexican poet Octavio Paz, ever offers me a unique reading experience. Somehow, I always return to its reading much like its enigmatic protagonist returns to detect.... what exactly?

Paradoxically, this poem is a compass for me among my daily (east)motions. In conversations with colleagues, in books almost cities and walks around places, in memories and absences, I return to La Calle and breath its riddle.

I don't think when or where I commencement read information technology. I remember remembering frontward - Is this possible? - knowing that in its reading I would notice the dimensions of an inquiry that would always bulldoze me: What is the Urban center?

Then I render to "La Calle" regularly. Is information technology a clue to a method? A theory? A practise of the city? Mayhap a lucid fragment? Or maybe a totalizing representation? A coded master-plan? An aesthetic whimper amongst the clamor of chaos?

Much can be said well-nigh its gendered gaze, its alienation and its subtle predictability, perhaps even nigh its vulgar simplicity. But this poem makes me consider alternative genres, ways of telling, marking, recording and finding urban space and life. Its simultaneous clarity and obfuscation teaches me a simple lesson.

La Calle "The Street" is a monument in the mural of urban thought. A moment that reminds me (frontwards) that the city will always exist unattainable and whatever truth I merits for information technology will be shaped by a shadow before me: a frame of my own making.

Credits: Image of Callejon by Javier Samper.