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Scuba diving with Pablo Neruda

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny. Pablo Neruda.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), whose real name is Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, was born on 12 July, 1904, in the town of Parral in Chile. I have read his poems and its gorgeous prose poetry:

(........)

Estranged to myself, like shadow on water,
that moves through a corridor's fathoms,
I sped through the exile of each man's existence,
this way and that, and so, to habitual loathing;
for I saw that their being was this: to stifle
one half of existence's fullness like fish
in an alien limit of ocean. And there,
in immensity's mire, I encountered their death;
Death grazing the barriers,
Death opening roadways and doorways.
The Poet (1950)

What am I? If not a poet and a writer, what else? A clumsy dancer and a singer of sorrowful songs, estranged to myself by habitual loathing. But in meeting Death of fish in the ocean I get a glimpse of paradise, of doorways, of new horizons. I seek new worlds, green odorous grass where I can lay my head, stretch my limbs to inhale life, breathe and write. Just that.

Years ago I learned how to scuba dive in the ocean. It brought me an experience of a totally new world. Everybody who has swum underwater knows what I am talking about. The colors of blues and greens and the silence of another nature is overpowering, it’s memory everlasting.

I wrote a poem back then, my awkward dance:

Deep Sea Diving
Diving, diving, deeper deep
No black, no hole
But gliding down along the cables
Drifting almost too slowly
Just too quick to avoid
That nothing determines the subject
Confession is not an option
Inevitably floating here
The slogan is method and technology
(Epistemological model known)
But averted rhymes without holes
Zeal that comes to nothing
Doesn't matter, no contribution
To anything? There defecates a word
into which you stir and ingredients
Found, a wind burps over it
A child is as gullible.
The smell disappears after times
Stirring with a stick. Then pouts
the poet and cleans the mess
up. That is called Deep Sea Diving
In this land of living. For a while
you dive deeper without air
and sigh at floating to the surface
Give a hand to a sailor
And think of the eel that
today again is not captured
Stayed on shore, takes a leak.
(translation)