Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
- T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”
It’s the evening of Holy Saturday, “Sábado de Gloria,” as I’ve learned it is called in Spain. And I’m just back from Seville, where I got to witness some of the many processions that fill that city’s streets during Semana Santa. They are certainly fascinating spectacles to take in, these long processions of hooded penitents (called “nazarenos,” they are members of various brotherhoods – hermandades and cofradías – that form a central part of Seville’s religious and social life), which usher figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary slowly from the various churches to the cathedral and back again.
They are impressive, first of all, because of their attire, which inevitably holds a sinister resonance for North Americans, who will think of the Ku Klux Klan…
Even having some sense of the traditional background and the awareness that the anonymity provided by the hoods is meant to protect the identity of the person doing penance, and to keep that person from affect in their task, I must say I was at times repulsed by these figures. And by the fact that there are so many of them: the long, even rows of hoods pointing like so many spears towards the sky suggest a military march, and the deep intertwining of religion and politics in Spanish history up to the recent present makes this an ominous, oppressive scene to an outsider. (Side note: During the few days I was in Seville I would often see a single nazareno, hood and all, walking down the street toward a procession, and the image seemed powerful to me. An image of intense loneliness. When displaced from its context, what does that pointy hood, with its impassive eye-holes cut in the cloth, signify? I’m sure the person inside the hood was not at all thinking along these lines—for all I know he or she was texting on his or her iPhone—but it made an impression on me and some of the people who were with me.)
The power of these processions is, in a word, aesthetic. And if the spectacle of the seemingly endless line of hoods strikes me as stifling and a little terrible, the representations of Christ and Mary are striking, most of them several centuries old. The candles, the smell of incense, and the music that accompany them enrich the experience of beauty. I won’t deny that beauty, and its power to move a spectator.
At one moment on Thursday night the oppressive side of this aesthetic ritual really got to me. We were watching the procession of Jesús del Gran Poder come out of its home church and head toward the cathedral. This particular procession was especially grave, and carried out in silence. I think this was part of what made it so eerie for me, for it seemed to increase the showy-ness of the procession, it’s nature as spectacle rather than communal practice. The seriousness imposed by the silence (other processions, like that of the “Bella Macarena,” involve the crowd calling out to the figures, especially directing calls of “¡Guapa!” – “Beautiful!” - to the Virgin) intensified the division between "performers" and "crowd" --legitimate terms, I think, in the sense that many of the onlookers in Seville during Semana Santa are tourists. I was thankful when a female singer began to sing a plaintive flamenco melody, toward the end of the ordeal. The sound of that voice made me able to appreciate the entire event much more.
I’ve been thinking about what it was that creeped me out so much while watching that scene two nights ago. And, in a way, I think it has to do with the slow, progressive motion of the procession in silence. That motion came to represent to me, I think, the motion of history, the plodding on of human events, the monotony of mistakes repeated, the "banality of evil," whether on the level of the Holocaust or the Inquisition - or on the personal level, the ways that our individual lives mimic the pitfalls of nations and institutions. This is part of the problem of humanity’s historical condition, our condition within history, to which Eliot refers in The Four Quartets as “Time past and time future.” Without accompanying music or human voices, this historical weight seemed unbearable, implacably stretching on.
Yet in “Burnt Norton,” Eliot’s consideration of the incarnation of Christ presents this condition as necessary. A “release from action and suffering, release from the inner / And the outer compulsion” is what we long for, a respite from cause and effect, from the concatenation of occurrences and consequences, from our awareness of mortality, perhaps, or sin. From death. Yet, Eliot reminds, redemption must proceed through historical reality, through lived life:
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
The images of the garden and the arbor in the poem recall, I think (I don’t have a commentary on hand to cite, but it seems this way to me) the events of Maundy Thursday - the Mount of Olives, the betrayal and trial of Jesus. If that is the case, Eliot tells us that the remembrance of these moments is bound up in the redemptive action of the narrative that leads to the cross and then to the empty tomb. And if that is the case, then time is an essential part of its own restoration. This is where the music comes in – music, an art form particularly dependent upon time - and humanizes the repetitive march of history, the procession of hooded penitents. The beauty or “ecstasy” of a woman’s voice sent out into a Spanish night, resolving a horror that is, within the Easter narrative, only partial.
One of the processions in Sevilla is named “La exaltación”: the exaltation of Christ. Which now makes me think of Eliot's Erhebung. Though my feelings about this Semana Santa experience are still mixed, this point of contact helps me to consider it in relation to the theological context, a transcendence of history through history. Time conquered through time.
