La naturaleza clásica empieza a ser humanizada cuando Heráclito
dice que el universo está en tensión y esta tensión es resultado de una
conciencia y de una presencia: el hombre está en la naturaleza, es
parte de ella, pero no se somete ciegamente a ella. Gracias a esto, el
universo sabe que su permanencia es su cambio y su cambio su
permanencia; como en el gran soneto de Quevedo, «sólo lo fugitivo
permanece y dura».
On the one hand, Fuentes suggests a desire to subsist with nature but an inability to do so. When nature becomes "humanized" it simultaneously falls apart, leading us to beautifully frightening lines from Quevedo about tempus fugit. The ability to classify zoologically becomes esthetically unbound and fantastic, resulting in a different kind of divide between civilization and the state of nature (the outside). It's uneasy and overwhelmed to the point that any dwelling with nature becomes dizzy and even sick. This is what Lezama has in mind when he states the Latin America has landscapes in monstrosity.
On this view, landscape refuses to remain a backdrop for the pleasant waltzes of human behavior. Instead, it infiltrated poetics (on both sides of the Atlantic) creating what Fuentes aptly describes a kind of panic, an inability to honestly distinguish human projects from their backdrops. This panic results in a rupture famous in baroque architecture, a division between the interior of a cathedral, for instance, and the wilderness outside: "cómo contestar al desaflo de la naturaleza, ser con ella pero distinto a ella?" Baroque thinking makes things worse because it wants to absorb the alien exteriors, as Lezama describes:
Here again we note a manifest tension, as if in the midst of this abundant nature, this absorption of the forest by the argumentative stone, this rebellious and unbridled nature, our Baroque gentleman wished to establish a little order while at the same time refusing to exlude anything, an impossible victory in which the defeated are free to indulge the demands of their pride and extravagance.
The response to panic is absorption but one that will ultimately fail to assimilate its surroundings. Lezama's "baroque gentleman" (el criollo) fails to find his order. While Lezama seems to constantly dream of redeeming this absorption (albeit in a different poetic order), Fuentes accepts a tragedy outside of merely esthetic questions. Beyond architecture and poetry, the humanization of biodiversity ends up mangled and devoured. Citing Adorno, Fuentes assents that any kind of reconciliation might be impossible (what I have called the impossible situation of nature). His solution lies in the imperative to narrate these tensions and tragedies, tracing these failed steps and possibility pointing to something new.
