Wind, Water, Stone

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.