I Was Born on a Day When God Was Sick. (César Vallejo, Peruvian Poet)

A few weeks ago I lost my dog. He was my companion of 14 years and I felt disoriented, out of daily routine and missing the primordial.

So, this morning, as I often do on Sundays, I read poetry and forgot the sunshine outside my window.

César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda were my choices for today. I started with a simple yet now most affectionate poem by Neruda about his dog. It read:

My dog has died.

I buried him in the garden

next to a rusted old machine

I have buried four of my dogs over the years. But never next to a rusted old machine. Yet the feeling is the same. It is the departure from a residence in the daily. Not life necessarily, but a distancing from the tempo man and dog establish for themselves.

A residence in the quotidian. The city. The mountain. The earth.

Perhaps Neruda’s most memorable poems about the human condition are in his collection titled Residencia en la Tierra or “residence on earth”. It is a collection about departure and alienation; about loneliness without knowing the void that surrounds us; and, it is about the promises we hoped earthly life would give us but no poet ever found it.

And that took me to César Vallejo.

In Black Stone on White Stone, the Peruvian poet writes:

I will die in Paris with a rainstorm,

on a day I already remember,

I will die in Paris—and I don't shy away—

perhaps on a Thursday, as today is, in autumn

Translated by Rebecca Seiferle, I love those lines somehow common to the work of many poets regarding the process of their death. Yet, Vallejo has already experienced his departure as a resident of the earth since he remembers the day he died.

Perhaps departure is different from death.

… For me Neruda has never been apocalyptic but one who celebrated lovers and perhaps love. Vallejo however, deciphered what he had not yet read – the joy of the primordial.

Instead, he navigated the catacomb of days:

There is an empty place
in my metaphysical shape
that no one can reach:
a cloister of silence
that spoke on the edge of a fire

On the day I was born,
God was sick.

And that is what my dog helped me avoid.

May 12, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2109