On FREDERICO LORCA
Frederico Garcia Lorca. Born, Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca, 5 June 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a small town a few miles west of Granada, southern Spain. He was a musician, dramatist, artist, and above all, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. In the earliest part of his life he was devoted to music, then to poetry, in which he quickly became celebrated, whilst in later stage of his career he was drawn to theatre. Tragically his life was cut short during the Spanish Civil war, under the rise of fascism, where was arrested and executed for his liberal political views. Like most writers, his life was filled with lots of travel, and he lived not only in various parts of Spain but also in Cuba and New York city where he lived in Manhattan in the early 1930s before returning to Spain. Lorca naturally had a great fascination with Greek tragedy. His own tragic plays were written during his mature years although he says of himself that he had always been so far a novice and was yet to reach his mature period. It has been said that Lorca was a poet of desire, of impossibility, which went unsatisfied. I believe, on the contrary, that he was a poet of possibility in the face of impossibilities. And that his works were not melancholy expressions of unreachable yearnings, but that they are mirages that one can never reach, that disappear once we approach, and when we arrive to where we headed there is yet still much more beyond. His is a poetry of boundless possibilities, that therefore never grasp their yearnings, but always fall in to new mirages, as dreaming in to dreams. His lyricism plays on this, and I admire his lyricism more than any other writer. He uses words which point away from themselves. He uses words together to allow the reader to grasp something beyond them that he means to direct you to, visualised and felt through his combinations of words. They are triggers, and alarm bells, that have meanings outside of themselves, in the effects they inspire in the reader. As such his work is deeply lyrical and not rhetoric. He fills us with sensations and images, but not information. He shows and doesn’t tell. He embosses lyrical pictures into us that only a capacity for imagination can rework into description. His work was consistently influenced by poetry he retrieved that had been forgotten and lost of influence, he always looked backwards to move forward with his work, looking for absent styles in his search for inspiration. I believe no doubt that he turned to Greek tragedy - and his insistence that Europe rediscover its roots - because it was a poet’s theatre, other than the Naturalism of staging and writing that had developed out of the nineteenth century. He felt closer to these poets, whom poets shared his own artistic talents. The lyricism in his own plays, particularly Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, both listed as tragedies, evokes the lyrical quality of his standalone poetry in the mouths of his characters. He seemed to search, not for the poetry in the mundane as the realists had done, but to find the poetry as a means to manifest more marvellous truths. His characters speak unnaturally - and musically - they speak out in poetry. And this allows them to say more than one would in real speech. As if speaking out of the air and music around them. It also allows the play to show more, and to communicate more line by line. It’s a lyricism that doesn’t evoke the tragedies of Lope de Vega of the 16th Century, but more akin to the lyrical plays of Japanese Noh drama. And it’s not unlikely that he would have encountered them, in the growing European fascination with Orientalism, as shorter forms of poetry such as the haiku were being explored in the poetry of his own day in the work of Imagist poets. In Britain, the English poet W H Auden was a huge admirer of Japanese Noh drama, who wrote lectures on the art as well as crafted his own plays through his fascination with them. I’m unsure how much philosophy Lorca read to shape his particular perspective of tragedy, such as Heraclitus, but I do know he studied philosophy and letters as a student. But in his lecture essay on the duene (meaning to have a soul, a heightened sense of expression, emotion, and authenticity - not far removed from the sense I mean of ecstasy in this zine), he says to have duene one must be fully aware that death is possible. Tragedy features closed horizons. Life’s circumference is clear and inevitable. He says of Spain, “Spain is unique; a country where death is a national spectacle” he is of course speaking of the bull fight, and that “music, dance, song or elegy, the arrival of duende is greeted with vigorous cries of ‘Allah! Allah!’ so close to the ‘Olé!’ of the bullfight, and who knows whether they are not the same?” His ideas parallel the German philosopher Heidegger that only through awareness of death can man envisage his authentic freedom. It is facing the present with full-sight of ability to be in the moment. He argues most art is created out of hindsight or foresight, but duence is made impulsively in the present moment, with full sight of the circumference of life as though it shoots up out of the blood. “All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds the greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them.” The duende as Lorca expresses it in his lecture seems to bare resemblance to that ecstasy that the maenad women of Greek myth would experience under the mystic influence of Dionysius. Lorca had read Nietzsche and no doubt had experienced his Birth of Tragedy, discussing the Dionysian aspect of Greek tragedy. That it represented the music, the unculturalising and anti-intellectualism of man, freeing him from the bonds of everyday in to the eternal and nature-returned. Lost in the frenzy of wine, song, dance. All which were combined dualistically with the Appolline of poetry, which constructed character, gave eloquent wisdom, visual action and physical form. Together Nietzsche believed they created an artform which was as much Dionysian as it was Apolline, as much irrational frenzy as it was intelligent beautiful form, as much the abyss and the figure of it, as much the horror of life as the individual which confronts it. Lorca’s duende is the artistic inspiration that rouses artistic creativity. An intoxication, but a spirit of the blood, that is shot in to a chosen art. His plays were no mere Greek revival but, like his poetry, seem to reach to yearning possibilities. His lyricism of dialogue lifts out of realism in to musical language, drawing the characters not in to the fantastical, but with the exotic truth. Mouthed from a lyrical plane of expression. Lorca described the theatre “as a poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair.” And described poetic theatre quite simply as any play written by a poet. The acclaimed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote of Lorca in his memoirs: “What a poet! [of] grace and genius; when did a winged heart and a crystalline waterfall, ever come together in anyone else as they did in him. Federico Garcia Lorca was the extravagant “duende,” his was a magnetic joyfulness that generated a zest for life in his heart and radiated it like a planet.” Lorca presents his plays like a dream. Stanley Kubrick said of cinema “with film, you don’t photograph the reality, you photograph the photograph of the reality.” I think that’s what Lorca does too. His dialogue is so gifted with poetry that it takes us to a perspective of the world that is the photograph of the photograph of reality, where art is articulating art to tell the truth. Rider’s Song is one of Lorca’s earliest poems. It narrates the journey of a rider to Cordoba, who believes he has a long way and will never reach his destination. It is the sentiment of ambition, Lorca’s own ambition, that he believes he may never quite reach. An ambition that may have been to restore European poetry to its former height of excellence. It’s a philosopher’s poem, a metaphor for his own journey, and it’s also a poem of a young man. The journey of himself, not to personal maturity, but an artistic maturity. Lorca continuously borrowed from the absent, and it’s no doubt that his ambition included the absent which Lorca consciously sought for by his art. Lorca writes elegiacally of human existence, and perhaps wrote of the experience of existence more lyrically and vividly in poetry than almost any other poet. By photographing the photograph, he allows us to feel what we already know in the experience of language. I want to end this segment with my favourite poem of his;
Floating Bridges
Every step we take on Earth brings us to a new world. Every foot supported on a floating bridge.
And I know there is no straight road in the world - only a giant labyrinth of intersecting crossroads.
And steadily our feet keep walking & creating --like enormous fans-- these roads in embryo.
Oh garden of white theories! garden of all I am not, all I could & should have been!
