MARIA ZAMBRANO (1904-1991)

THEMES ON THIS PAGE:

1. CLEARINGS IN THE FOREST	2. WHY DO WRITERS WRITE?
3. EXPERIENCE OF LIFE	4. THE VIOLENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

 

Maria Zambrano (1904-1991) was a Spanish philosopher whose philosophy was highly poetic. She studied with the philosopher Ortega y Gasset, then taught philosophy at the University of Madrid. She was involved in the Spanish Civil War, and when Franco rose to power she went to exile in Mexico and other locations in America. After World War II she moved to Paris and other European cities, and in 1984 returned to live in Spain, where she received awards and recognitions.

Maria Zambrano’s philosophy is poetic not only in style but also in content: She believes that poetic thinking is necessary in order to understand the deeper aspects of human existence. Her work can therefore described as poetic philosophy.

TOPIC 1. CLEARINGS IN THE FOREST

 

Zambrano’s writing style is highly poetic, her sentences complex, her texts not always clear, and they can be given different interpretations. But her book Clearings in the Forest (1977) is probably the most obscure and difficult to understand. It should be read more like a philosophical poem than an essay, with several layers of meaning. The texts below (translated by Ran Lahav) are adapted and slightly simplified.

The book attempts to characterize a way of thinking and philosophizing that is different from rational thinking. This is a way of understanding which emerges from the world of dreams, imagery and delirium, and which for Zambrano is more fundamental than the world of rational thinking. In the texts below, Zambrano uses two important metaphors to explore this kind of obscure understanding: first, the UNDERWORLD; second, the CLEARING IN THE FOREST.

We can understand the first metaphor, of the UNDERWORLD, by comparison to the world that is above ground. Above ground we find a visible world, a world illuminated by light, where every object is clearly seen, identified, defined and distinguished from other objects. This is the world as seen through the light of reason. For Zambrano, however, this is not our primordial reality, because it is simplified and organized in the sharp lines of the intellect. In order to go to the deeper primordial understanding, we must close our eyes to the light of reason – to “fall asleep in the light” – and open our eyes to what is normally dark and hidden, and which is not illuminated by reason. We must “wake up” to the darkness, listen to this dream-like reality that is obscure and vague, and see the underground light of dream-like understanding. This kind of understanding is no longer “violent” – it does not impose methods and concepts like rational thinking.

  

From Section 3. METHOD

One must fall asleep above in the light.

One must be awake below in the intra-terrestrial, intra-corporal darkness of the various bodies which terrestrial man inhabits: that of the earth, of the universe, of his own.

Down there in "the depths," in the underworlds, the heart watches, is kept awake, is reawakened within itself. Up above, in the light, the heart abandons itself, surrenders. It collects itself. It finally falls asleep no longer in pain. In the welcoming light where no violence is suffered, one has arrived to that light without forcing any door and even without opening it, without having passed through lintels of light and shadow, without effort and protection.

 

Zambrano’s second metaphor, which is the central metaphor in this book, is that of CLEARINGS IN THE FOREST. In unexpected moments, the seeker suddenly finds an opening (a “clearing”) that promises him a new understanding. It appears for a short time, it cannot be controlled, and it cannot be captured by reason or fixed methods. It resembles a dream or a spiritual vision. You can only receive it as an unexpected gift, as opposed to the “violence” of rationality which imposes on reality its logic. “No need to search for it” – and if you nevertheless try to search for it and capture it, you will find nothing, only emptiness. Yet, we cannot fully realize this kind of understanding, because the ecstasy would break every structure of our thought, and would be too much for us.

The passage ends with a reflection on the philosophical quest, which hints at Plato’s philosophy, but also changes it: The philosophical seeker follows the invisible power of Eros, which does not satisfy the seeker’s yearning but produces a never-fulfilled, wounded love.

    

From Section 1: CLEARINGS IN THE FOREST

The clearing in the forest is a center where you cannot always enter. You look at it from the edge, and the sight of some animal footprints does not help you step inside. It is another kingdom which the soul inhabits and guards. Some bird warns and calls you to go to where its voice indicates. And you obey it. Then you find nothing, nothing but an intact place that seemed open for that single moment and that will never be again. No need to search for it. No need to search. This is the immediate lesson of the clearings of the forest: No need to go look for them, not even look for anything related, anything determined, foreseen, known.

  [...]

And there remains the nothingness and the void which the clearing of the forest gives as an answer to what you searched for. But if there is nothing you searched for, the gift will be unpredictable, unlimited. Because it seems that the nothingness and the void – either nothingness or void – must continuously be present or dormant in human life. And in order not to be devoured by the nothingness or by the void, you must make them within yourself, or you must at least stop and remain in suspense, in the opposite of ecstasy.

  [...]

And then, in the clearing of the forest, in what is hidden and within reach – which has been leveled by the fear of ecstasy – appears a trembling of the mirror. And the trembling announces the end of the plenitude which did not occur: the appropriate vision while looking both awake and asleep. The clearing is now seen as a mirror that trembles, a fluttering clarity that barely shows any shape, and even blurs. And everything alludes, everything is an allusion and everything is oblique, the light itself that manifests itself as a reflection is given obliquely, no longer smooth as a sword. The light bends slightly, dragging time with it.

And you will never forget that the bending of light and of time is not a punishment, or not always so. It is a testimony and a partial representation of the bending of the universe and of life, and of the tremor of the shining light that keeps descending and bending into every dark crevice. And it is only suggested indirectly in this way because it cannot be allowed to enter directly into our last corner of defense without overwhelming violence.

  [...]

And the distant vision of the barely-visible center, and the vision offered by the clearings of the forest, seem to promise not just a new vision, but a means of visibility in which the image is real, and in which thought and feeling are identified, without the cost of one being lost in the other, or canceling each other. A new visibility, a place of knowledge and of life without distinctions – this seems to be the magnet that has led this whole journey, analogously to a method of thought.

  [...]

All of this does not lead to the classical opening question of philosophizing, the question of "the being of things" or of "being" alone, but it irremediably raises from the bottom of that wound which opens inwards, towards being itself, not a question but an awakened call to that which is invisible and only passes by: "Where did you hide?..." You don’t go to the clearings of the forest in order to ask, just as in fact neither does the good student in the classrooms.

And so, the one who absent-mindedly left the classrooms one day, ends up going through forests clearing after clearing, drawn by pure presentiment, following behind the teacher whom he was never given to see: the One, the one who asks to be followed and then hides behind the clearing. And when he gets lost in that quest, he may be allowed to discover some secret place in the hollow that accumulates wounded love, always wounded, when he will collect it.

 

 

TOPIC 2. WHY DO WRITERS WRITE?

Why do writers write? This issue is discussed by Maria Zambrano in her short essay “Why does one write,” which appeared in 1950 in her book Hacia un saber sobre el alma (“Towards knowledge of the soul”), a collection of essays which she had published in various magazines in Spain and South America during her exile, between 1933-1944. The text below, slightly adapted for ease of reading, is the first part (about one-fifth) of the essay. (Translation by Ran Lahav)

Zambrano explains here that by writing we free ourselves from the continuous avalanche of stimuli (or “circumstances”) that constantly attack us, moment after moment. The words create some distance between us and the circumstance around us, and thus free us from our need to react to it automatically and immediately. Yet, SPOKEN words are not enough, because they are momentary – they appear for an instant and immediately disappear in the next moment. In contrast, when we WRITE we create a separate inner space, a solitude that is protected from the flow of time.

 

Writing is defending the solitude in which you are. It is an action which sprouts only from real isolation, but a communicable isolation, one in which your distance from all concrete things makes it possible to discover the relations between them.

But it is a solitude which needs to be defended, which is the same thing as needing a justification. The writer defends his solitude by showing what he finds in it and only in it.

Since we have speech, why write? But that which is immediate, that which sprouts from our spontaneity, is not entirely in our responsibility, because it does not come from the totality of who we are. It is a reaction that is always urgent, pressured. We speak because something pressures us, and that pressure comes from the outside, from a trap with which the circumstances attempt to catch us, and the word frees us from it. Through the word we are made free, free of the moment, free of the harassing instantaneous circumstance.

But the word does not collect us, and therefore does not create us – on the contrary, when we use it too much, it always produces disintegration. We defeat the moment through the word, and then we are defeated by the [next] moment, by the sequence of moments that keep carrying away our attack without letting us respond. It is a continuous victory which, at the end, transforms into a loss. And from this loss – an intimate, human loss, not of a particular person but of the human being, the need to write is born. One writes in order to re-conquer the loss that is always suffered when we have spoken for a long time.

And the victory can come only at the place where one has suffered the loss, in the same words. In writing, these same words now have a different function: They are not at the service of the oppressing moment; they no longer serve to justify us against the attack of the momentary. Rather, coming out of the center of our collected being, they defend us from the totality of the moments, from the totality of the circumstances, from the whole of life.

There is in writing a retaining of words – just as in speaking there is a releasing of words, detaching ourselves from them, which may be detaching them from us. In writing we retain the words, they become our own, subject to rhythm, sealed by the human control of the person who handles them like that. And this is so, independently of the fact that the writer takes care of the words, and that in full consciousness he chooses them and places them in a rational, known order. Aside from this, it is enough to be a writer, to write from this intimate need to liberate the words, the need to overcome the defeat suffered in its totality, in order that this retention of the words would be realized. This desire to retain is found already at the beginning, at the root of the act of writing, and it permanently accompanies it. The words thus fall into place, precise, in a process of reconciliation by the person who freed them by retaining them, who says them in a restrained generosity.

Every human victory must be a reconciliation, a renewal of a lost friendship, a reaffirmation after a disaster in which man had been the victim. It is a victory in which there can be no humiliation of the opposing force, because this would no longer be a victory, that is, glory for man.

 

 

TOPIC 3. EXPERIENCE OF LIFE

Throughout her life, Maria Zambrano was fascinated with states of consciousness beyond normal wakefulness, especially the dream. Dreaming, she believed, represented a more primordial state of being than wakefulness. Her last book, Dreams and Time, first published in Spanish in 1992, is an investigation of the relationship between the world of dreams and the world of wakefulness.

The following text is adapted from the first essay of the book, “Life: Dream-Wakefulness,” from the section “The experience of life” (translated and adapted by Ran Lahav). Here Zambrano argues that our experience of wakeful life is an experience of unity with ourselves, but of conflict with life: Unity – in the sense that I experience myself as somebody, a united subject, and I make an effort to maintain myself as one. Conflict with life – because my life is always beyond me. I am never a full owner of it, because I do not fully control where it is going and what it contains. Life always drags me forward towards a future, but at the same time I also move back to myself, to my origin, my full being, whenever I act freely and creatively. This is a constant movement away from myself and back to myself. It is a kind of “eternal return,” like the hours of the day that always return to their starting point.

In contrast to wakeful life, as Zambrano says later in this essay: “Falling asleep is like returning to the fundamental place of life, to the initial place of life from where the non-human animal wakes up to feed life, to fight for it, to continue it. It is as if life is immersed in the dream, which has to be maintained for the awakening.”

 Experience is an inexhaustible process, because it can never reach its full result, its completion. Because if a subject's life was completed, it would be present to him in the order of depth and in the order of time. Nothing new would ever happen without immediately entering the crystalline sphere of his experience. The subject would become the complete owner of himself, he would appropriate his own life, which would be entirely his, without any trace of the two conditions which seem to accompany human life: ambiguity and a certain alienation. Because in man there is a conflict – of tragic essence – between his life and himself, the subject of that life. The subject is enveloped by his life because he does not possess his life completely, because he barely possesses it and is always in danger of being possessed by it.

 Life has an invasive character, and it appears to colonize, to take possession of a space and to bring time with it, a flow of time which seems to consist, above all, in an eager movement that devours and even consumes, a movement that drags with it the living being that is its center. Because life is always the life of somebody, of something or somebody whom we tend to call “a living being.” In reality, we do not know life, but rather living beings.

 Thus, it is not possible to separate life from the living being to which it belongs, since the subject is never the same as life, but rather the being and the owner of that life. And so, life – invasive, devouring, impetuous and transcendent – always has an owner, like a field that is inhabited [by somebody], and the first thing you feel when you pass from the non-living to the living is that the living has an owner. An owner is present here. Life refers to its owner and thus appears as the unity of a LIVING BEING.

But in man the opposite happens, because man, before he feels himself a living being, feels himself as himself, and only then as he appears in life. Life appears to him as something a little strange: the astonishment of being alive. In view of the fact that he is alive, he may feel amazement, enthusiasm, or fear. He may feel life as something which happens to him, which is superimposed on him and even hides him, which takes him beyond himself and even separates him, as if life is a race that takes him away from where he would be going spontaneously. And even if initially life goes to meet him, later life turns out to be a strange road that deviates, that curves in obedience to a strange force, or to its own law, in a direction that needs to be corrected, like a wrapping that needs to be unwrapped. The fight for life is first and foremost a struggle with life, and to live it is to have to un-live it a little.

In man, living is something that originates in its owner, the subject who continuously corrects life’s spontaneous and strange direction. And this correction has two poles: one is the future, the purpose to reach if he has declared a purpose; or, more simply, something towards which he initially started moving. The other pole is undeclared, not revealed as something present. From the divergence between what he seeks (the first pole) and the autonomous direction of life, man returns – he must turn – towards the second pole, towards the beginning of his living. This is not exactly the chronological beginning, the first moment of life he remembers, but rather the origin that is realized again and again whenever he makes an original act, an act that is spontaneous, free, creative.

It is as if for man, living was originally going to create, going to convert himself and find himself, going to realize himself absolutely in one single movement. This is not a movement of traveling the distance that separates you from some given purpose to be reached, but a movement in which you open up like an enclosed unit that now manifests itself, like a day that begins and, instead of passing the hours one after another, becomes a total single day, the day of the whole. And then, from this single day, the hours fall one after another, relative, sooner or later along the race, in a passage that ends without reaching its end, and that has to be repeated, returning to its origin.

But that origin, the moment in which the day starts, is present in every hour, in every moment of that race; it situates the race, it makes it appear. And so, every hour, every moment opens to an image of that unity towards which the first instant of everything opens. A unity which is unattained, which is assumed, which acts as origin and cause, from which a journey is derived. Put this way, this would certainly be the eternal return. It is the eternal return which can be of nature, the original time seen as an orbit of a journey that does not advance, as a freedom that contains only spontaneity.

  […]

 And so, the human being finds himself dragged and diverted from his first starting point – which he would call life – by living, and by the reality which he has to discover. Because reality is given to him and it happens to him, just as life happens to him.