Wind, Water, Stone

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1979

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Poetic Epistemology

Octavio Paz dedicated “Wind, Water, Stone” to Roger Caillois, the 20th-century French theorist/sociologist. While Caillois’ writing encompasses a wide range of topics in sociology, philosophy, and other disciplines, the narrowness of Paz’s poem reveals where its thematic concerns intersect with—and mirror—Caillois’ own concerns. One distinctive element of Caillois’ thought concerns epistemology, or the study of knowledge (that is, how humans know and in what ways they know). For Caillois, the universe was radically connected with itself, everything “crossing and vanishing” (Line 14) with everything else. In order to obtain knowledge of this connectivity, he believed that no other method but a poetic one would suffice. For Caillois, logic, science, and math are important and useful intellectual tools, but they are insufficient when it comes to investigating or understanding certain characteristics about the universe. Poetic attention and poetic thinking can illuminate the radical way in which all things are always already part of all other things.

Octavio Paz’s dedication keys his readers in to a theme of “Wind, Water, Stone.” The final stanza’s open declaration of porous identity can arrive only after the poetic attention to the elements in the first three stanzas. It would be easy enough to simply state that the titular elements are all each other, but this would amount to nonsense without the poetic performance of this merged identity in the rest of the poem. The stanzas lead the readers through a journey in which they first experience the neatly partitioned identities of the titular elements. The short lines, repeated chorus, and minimalist approach establish both an argument for and a mood suggesting the neatly defined identities of the elements—identities that are defined only against the other elements: For example, “Water hollows stone” (Line 1), and “stone stops the wind” (Line 3). The poetic rhythms allow for a slide into identity collapse that is experienced rather than described, as when the verb first shifts to equation in the second stanza’s “stone’s a cup of water” (Line 6) and “water escapes and is wind” (Line 7). The process can only be alluded to in prose and must be experienced in poetry by definition. Whether a reader finds this convincing is another question, but Paz’s dedication to Caillois and patterned minimalist poetry certainly attempts to communicate using a unique poetic epistemology.

Homogeneity and Heterogeneity

In many ways contained in the other thematic concerns of Paz’s tightly compressed poem, the modulation between homogeneity (sameness) and heterogeneity (difference) is a structural pillar of “Wind, Water, Stone.” Similar to Caillois’ interest in poetic epistemologies, heterogeneity was a central focus of one of the important intellectual coteries of which Caillois was an important figure. The influential Collège de Sociologie group in 1930s France dedicated itself to heterology (a term it coined), or the study of all that is hidden away by the ruling order of homogeneity, or sameness. Heterology celebrated and focused on everything, in a variety of disciplines, that falls through the cracks of the established order and logic of existence.

Much of Paz’s poem seems to celebrate the neat differences in each of the elements, differences that pair together to create a kind of sameness. The “hollow[ing]” (Line 1) activity of water recalls the “carv[ing]” (Line 5) activity of wind, each of which can only manifest themselves when paired with “unmoving stone” (Line 11). As the pairings continue with chant-like consistency, the heterogeneity fades into homogeneity. It is only the introduction of a literal and radical homogeneity between the disparate elements that, paradoxically, leads the reader back into heterogeneity. Only when stone becomes “a cup of water” (Line 6) and when water “is wind” (Line 7) can Paz become a heterologist in the tradition of the Collège de Sociologie. Each element both “is another and no other” (Line 13), leaving traditional identity behind. In this brave new space outside of logic, the poem can gaze into the face of those heterogenous elements that fall through the cracks of everyday sameness.