I’ve always wondered what meetings of intellectuals were good for. Aside from the very few that have had real historical significance in our time, like the one held in Valencia, Spain, in 1937, most of them are no more than simple salon entertainments. Still, it’s surprising that so many take place, more and more of them, more crowded and expensive the more the world crisis deepens. A Nobel Prize in Literature assures one of receiving in the following year almost two thousand invitations to writers’ conferences, art festivals, colloquia, seminars of all kinds: more than three a day in sites scattered around the world. There’s an institutional conference going on constantly, all expenses paid, whose meetings are held each year in thirty-one different places, some as attractive as Rome or Adelaide, or as surprising as Stavanger or Yverdon, or in some that seem like crossword challenges, like Polyphénix or Knokke. There are so many, in short, about so many different and varied subjects, that during the past year, in Muiden Castle, in Amsterdam, an international conference of organizers of poetry conferences was held. It’s not unimaginable: a complaisant intellectual could be born at one conference and continue growing and maturing at successive conferences, with no more respites than those needed to move from one to the other, until he died at a ripe old age at his last conference.
And yet it may be too late to try to break this habit that we artisans of culture have been dragging through history ever since Pindar celebrated the Olympic Games. Those were times when body and spirit were on better terms with each other than they are today, and so the voices of bards were appreciated in stadiums as much as the feats of athletes. The Romans, ever since 508 BCE, must have suspected that abuse of the games was their greatest danger. For at about that time they inaugurated the Secular Games, and then the Terentini Games, celebrated at intervals that are exemplary for today: every one hundred or one hundred and ten years.
Cultural conferences in the Middle Ages were also debates and tourneys of minstrels, then troubadours, and then minstrels and troubadours at the same time, beginning a tradition that we still often suffer from: they started as games and ended as disputes. But they also reached such splendour that, during the reign of Louis XIV, they opened with a colossal banquet whose evocation here — I swear — is no attempt at a veiled hint: nineteen bullocks were served, three thousand pies, and more than two hundred casks of wine.
The culmination of this performance by minstrels and troubadours was the Floral Games of Toulouse, the oldest and most persistent of poetic competitions, inaugurated 660 years ago — a model of continuity. Its founder, Clemencia Isaura, was an intelligent, enterprising, and beautiful woman, whose only fault seems to have been that she never existed: perhaps she was purely an invention of seven troubadours who created the competition in an effort to prevent the extinction of Provençal poetry. But her very lack of existence is one more proof of the creative power of poetry, for in Toulouse there is a tomb of Clemencia Isaura in the Church of La Dorada, and a street that bears her name, and a monument to her memory.
This being said, we have the right to ask ourselves: what are we doing here? And, above all: what am I doing up on this perch of honour, I who have always considered speeches the most terrifying of human predicaments? I don’t have the courage to suggest an answer, but I can offer a proposal: we are here to try to hold a meeting of intellectuals that has what the immense majority of them haven’t had — practical utility and continuity.
First, there is something that distinguishes it. In addition to writers, painters, musicians, sociologists, and historians, at this meeting there is a group of distinguished scientists. That is, we have dared to defy the feared collusion of sciences and arts; to mix in the same crucible those of us who still trust in the clairvoyance of omens and those who believe only in verifiable truths: the very ancient antagonism between inspiration and experience, between instinct and reason. Saint-John Perse, in his memorable Nobel Prize acceptance speech, defeated this false dilemma with a single sentence: ‘In the scientist as well as in the poet,’ he said, ‘disinterested thought must be honoured.’ Here, at least, let them not be considered as inimical brothers, for the questioning of both is the same over the same abyss.
The idea that science concerns only scientists is as anti-scientific as it is anti-poetic to pretend that poetry concerns only poets. In that sense, the name of UNESCO — United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — limps through the world with a serious inaccuracy, taking as fact that the three are different when, in reality, all of them are a single thing. For culture is the totalizing power of creation: the social development of human intelligence. Or, as Jack Lang said without much ado: ‘Culture is everything.’ Welcome, then, welcome everyone to everyone’s house.
I don’t dare to suggest anything more than a few reasons for reflection during these three days of spiritual retreats. I do dare to remind you, first of all, of something you perhaps remember all too well: any decision in the medium term made in these twilight times is a decision for the twenty-first century. And yet, we Latin Americans and people from the Caribbean approach it with the devastating sense that we’ve skipped the twentieth century: we’ve passed through it without having lived it. Half the world will celebrate the dawn of the year 2001 as the culmination of a millennium, while we are barely beginning to catch glimpses of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution. The children in primary school today, preparing to govern our destinies in the coming century, are still condemned to counting on their fingers, like the accountants of remotest antiquity, while computers exist that are capable of performing a hundred thousand arithmetical operations a second. On the other hand, in one hundred years we have lost the best human virtues of the nineteenth century: fervent idealism and the primacy of feeling: the shock of love.
At some point in the next millennium genetics will glimpse the eternity of human life as a real possibility, electronic intelligence will dream of the chimerical adventure of writing a new Iliad, and in their house on the moon there will be a pair of lovers from Ohio or Ukraine, overwhelmed by nostalgia, who will love each other in glass gardens in the earthlight. Latin America and the Caribbean, on the other hand, seem condemned to servitude to the present: telluric dread, political and social cataclysms, the immediate urgencies of daily life, dependencies of every kind, poverty and injustice, have not left us much time to assimilate the lessons of the past or to think about the future. The Argentine writer Rodolfo Terragno has synthesized this drama: ‘We use X-rays and transistors, cathode tubes and electronic memory, but we haven’t incorporated the foundations of contemporary culture into our own culture.’
Fortunately, the determinant reserve of Latin America and the Caribbean is an energy capable of moving the world: the dangerous memory of our peoples. It is an immense cultural patrimony that antedates any raw material, a primary material of multiple character that accompanies every step of our lives. It is a culture of resistance expressed in the hiding places of language, in mulatta Virgins — our artisanal patron saints — true miracles of the people against the colonizing clerical power. It is a culture of solidarity expressed in the face of criminal excesses of untamed nature, or in the insurgency of peoples for the sake of their identity and sovereignty. It is a culture of protest in the indigenous faces on artisanal angels in our temples, or in the music of the perpetual snows that attempts to exorcize with nostalgia the silent powers of death. It is a culture of ordinary life expressed in the imagination of cooking, in styles of dress, in creative superstition, in the intimate liturgies of love. It is a culture of fiesta, of transgression, of mystery, which breaks the straitjacket of reality and at last reconciles reason and imagination, word and act, and actually demonstrates that there is no concept that sooner or later is not exceeded by life. This is the strength of our backwardness. An energy of novelty and beauty that belongs to us in its entirety and with which we ourselves are sufficient; it cannot be domesticated by imperial voracity, or by the brutality of the internal oppressor, or even by our own immemorial fears of translating into words our most cherished dreams. Even the revolution itself is a cultural work, the total expression of a creative vocation and a creative capability that justify and demand of all of us a profound confidence in the future.
This would be something more than just another of the many meetings that occur every day in the world if we were able to catch even a glimpse of new forms of practical organization to channel the irresistible flood of creativity of our peoples, real exchange and solidarity among our creators, historical continuity, and a broader, deeper social usefulness for intellectual creation, the most mysterious and solitary of all human occupations. It would be, in brief, a decisive contribution to the political determination, which cannot be deferred, to leap over five alien centuries and enter, with a firm step and a thousand-year horizon, the imminent millennium.