Intimate Microscopy
Microscopía Íntima

A book of poetry written in English and Spanish by a tutor at St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM. Jorge Aigla is an MD who examines the slides of his life, expressing its beautiful moments and its ugly moments. He expresses both with strong emotions.

$15.00

Microscopia ĺntima / Intimate Microscopy by Jorge H. Aigla (Farolito Press, $15.00)

                Beginning with Sublunary in 1989, and continuing through The Aztec Shell and The Cycle of Learning, Jorge Aigla developed a unique poetic vision that draws from a richly textured life, his scientific training, his philosophical studies, the practice of Karate-Dō, and deep roots planted in the Latin American poetry of Octovio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, and others.

                His newest bilingual collection, Microscopia ĺntima / Intimate Microscopy confirms Aigla’s poetic brilliance and marks him as one of the finest poets writing in the American Southwest today. What makes this book an even finer event is that Farolito Press released Intimate Microscopy in both Spanish and English, allowing the reader to encounter Aigla’s superb imagery in both languages – a sadly declining tendency in book publishing.

                In his introduction to Sublunary, poet Charles Bell notes that in Provencal, Aigla’s name means “eagle.” While Bell goes on to shape a metaphor on poetic flight, I would like to focus instead on an eagle’s keen vision. Aigla’s sharply perceptive view of life began in the streets of Mexico City. Born in 1954, Jorge Aigla grew up in poverty, and his father died when Aigla was but a boy. Yet his mother managed to support him through the public grades and Catholic high school. In 1971 he began studying medicine at the National Autonomous University, but he soon became involved with student strikes.

Leaving Mexico for San Francisco, Aigla completed a B.S. at Saint Mary’s College in 1975 and a medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco five years later. During this time, the potent San Francisco poetry scene seized his imagination, and he began haunting coffee houses and writing poems and stories for small-press literary journals.

Upon completing his medical training, Aigla landed a position at the San Francisco coroner’s office, a strange and dark counterpoint to the pediatric practice of another doctor/poet, William Carlos William. Aigla then attained a series of teaching positions – first at City College of San Francisco, then at St. Mary’s College, and finally, in 1985, in the Great Books program at St. John’s in Santa Fe, where he has been ever since. As a St. John’s tutor, Aigla teaches all the academic subjects, along with the college’s Karate- Dō program. This in turn has influenced Aigla’s poetry, in which he combines his vivid experiences with the boundless channels of philosophy and literature.

In the preface to Intimate Microscopy, Aigla writes, “Our world is mostly peripheral, with a radius of about five meters. Occasionally, we expand our vistas to what is far from us, and only rarely do we look within into what is certainly Nature’s privilege: the intimate realm. This latter act of perspective is introspection: an attention to the structure of awareness, to the anatomy of the self and of self-examination.” Thus the title Intimate Microscopy – for microscopy is, according to The American Heritage Dictionary, “an investigation employing a microscope” – and Aigla uses his poetry as a microscope to go within, to explore “the anatomy of the self.”

The poems in Intimate Microscopy form four distinct categories – the personal, the political, the philosophical, and the surreal.

In the personal poems, Aigla mines scenes from his life for their imagistic potential and emotional power. These are strongly felt moments, filled with love, joy, and sensuality; or pain, struggle, and tragedy; or with a heady combination of all these elements.

For instance, two poems about his youth – “Un Pañuelo” (“A Headscarf”) and “Bicicleteando” (“Bicycling”) – reveal a childhood steeped in poverty, and yet beautiful and captivating. In “A Headscarf,” Aigla learns a key lesson about poverty. He is four, and he and his mother are shopping in the open market of Cuernavaca. She has a chance at buying for a reasonable sum a scarf in her favorite color, magenta, and need only raise her hand first to gain it. But Aigla, fearful that he would be left alone in the mob, prevents his mother from raising her hand, and she loses the scarf to another. Aigla writes, “This veil revealed something to me: / we were poor, and amongst the poor / the battle for things is swift and cruel.” And yet, despite the lesson’s harshness, Aigla’s fills the poem with a warm nostalgia for a lost world: “Into her basket of rope / and hemp (no longer made) / I used to help her place vegetables, / fruit, tortillas, eggs, rice, / beans, and sometimes even meat. . . . / She always bought me / a twenty cent toy / and I, happy, holding her hand. / strolled in a world / full of mysteries.”

 “Bicycling” again explores Aigla’s nostalgia for the lost magic of Mexico City, and for a childhood that was both difficult and delightful. He recalls how his family was too poor to purchase a bicycle, and so every Sunday his father would take young Jorge to the park and rent a bicycle from Don Teókino: “I used to travel and get lost / through fresh jungles, tangled / and humid in the green Parque España, / while my father, alone, / would read the newspaper on his bench.” Aigla goes on to describe that the bench is no longer there, Teókino’s business has shut down, his father is dead, and the park is in ruins. Finally he writes, “when at last I got / my own bicycle, / I rode through many trails / in infinite circles, / looking for something far away / that I was never able to find again.”

A much darker world emerges from Aigla’s years of studying medicine. In “Cirugia Canina” (“Dog Surgery”) he describes Mexico City’s medical students stalking the streets for stray dogs on which to practice operations and leave sutures shaped like their initials. Though their instructors said this was correct behavior – “better to learn on a dog than man” – Aigla writes, “no, it was not, I now know, / and wonder at the effect of our incisions / and their depths on the victims and our souls.” In “Pacientes” (“Patients”), Aigla as a young intern works on a man over eighty with congestive heart failure and a heroin addict who is only 22. A week later he finds them side by side awaiting autopsies: “The alchemy of my silver blade readied / to open the Gargantuan riddle / those of us remaining / feel confidently entitled to.”

And yet there are moments of uncomplicated joy, as in “Ser Vestido” (“Getting Dressed”) in which Aigla, laid low by a fractured hip, describes the sweetness of his son helping him on with his socks; or in “Observando a Mi Esposa Lavar Ventanas” (“Watching my Wife Wash Windows”), which expresses Aigla’s enchantment at studying his wife’s “breasts undulate ellipsoidally” behind the glass.

Not surprisingly, Aigla’s political poems grow from his childhood encounter with poverty. In “Ciudad de México” (“Mexico City”), he states, “To see this again – / all of this again, / demands a courage / at times beyond oneself. . . . / Everyone’s roots / are in the soil of the people / entrenched tenaciously / amongst the poor: / if they do not fare well / our centers cry out / and starve.” In another poem, “Un Oasis” (“An Oasis”), and another city, San Francisco, Aigla rails against the rampant monster of unchecked capitalism. After describing a cityscape bereft of humanizing elements like “pawn shops, used bookstores, and small coffee houses,” he notes that no one will stop talking on their cell phones to respond to his inquires: “Consumerism is their weapon / against thinking. / How right Plato was when he equated / business with warped souls.” In “Hambre” (“Hunger”), Aigla calls for open rebellion: “The Wealthy Power grows, / the weak are trampled on, / rancor and resentment now / must have their sacred role.”

Politics is ultimately a form of applied philosophy, and many of the poems in Intimate Microscopy have a philosophical or metaphysical subject. The poem “Muerte” (“Death”) explores that ultimate mystery through the writings of Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Confucius, Chang Tzu, and Cesar Vallejo; and the mythologies of ancient Greece, Israel, India, and Babylon. “El Tiempo de Nuestra Vida” (“The Times of Our Lives”) performs a similar examination of time, but in this poem through the words of Proust, Kierkegaard, the Buddha, St. Augustine, Freud, Mann, Patanjali, and Unamuno. In the end, Aigla embraces the Buddha’s route of detachment from life’s dualistic illusion as indicated by these closing lines: “Memory, conscious or unconscious, / is the weapon of time. / Better a life / in which nothing ever happened, / in which nothing happens.”

However, I believe the strongest poems in Intimate Microscopy are those which plunge into the realms of the surreal, the dream-states of the unconscious. In these works, Aigla places himself in the prophetic traditions of Latin American poets like Octovio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges, or in the Beat era San Francisco surrealism of Philip Lamantia and John Hoffman. Two of the finest examples of Aigla’s surrealism can be found in the back to back poems “El Peso de la Realidad” (“Reality’s Weight”) and “Nuestra Condición” (“Our Lot”). In the former, Aigla sends his reader into a strange urban maze plagued by subtle contradictions: “I came near the alley / where one does not fare well. / I found the salesman of dark fame / now faceless and broken-souled. / I espied the found girl / by another, and already lost. . . . / I saw a red sun / woven by a black sky. / I offered a coin to a blind man / and another one to a man without an arm, / and I stole their smiles.” In “Our Lot,” Aigla weaves a vision of the world’s final, apocalyptic abandonment straight out of a Borges tale: “First it was the whiteness / surrounded by the cold and dark, / and one could then perceive / forlorn gardens, gutted / high-rise dwellings / with broken pipes, distempered walls / and windows raped by wind and storm.”

Microscopia ĺntima / Intimate Microscopy is a sojourn across space and memory, a grand quest for truth and inner being through the lens of Jorge Aigla’s poetic microscope. While it is an interior journey, the fire of Aigla’s language and experience reveal an external cosmos, a remarkable individual’s world shaped by a lifetime of vivid experiences and intellectual adventures.

The final poem of the book, “Sapientia” (“Wisdom”) is a set of aphorisms that begin with the line, “IN SLOW HASTE TIME EATS THE WORLD” and ends with, “AFTER DARKNESS I AWAIT LIGHT.”

To meditate on these lines is to complete the cycle of entropy and regeneration.

And, indeed, what more remains to be said?

-          John Nizalowski