Semana Santa: Eeriness and Exaltation

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.

Concierto en el Matadero

Last Wednesday a few friends and I went down to the Matadero Madrid to see a show.  The musician was Francesco Tristano, who was there participating in the Red Bull Music Academy (readers of Spanish, here’s a blog on the academy written by Abel Hernández, protagonist of El Hijo, a Spanish indie group that I like).

The first thing to be said is that the space was fantastic. The Matadero is the old public slaughterhouse of Madrid, now transformed into an open space for artistic creation, exhibitions, etc. [A phenomenon in some ways similar to the fascinating community arts/culture space that is La Tabacalera, the old tabacco factory, not far away.]  The concert took place in the old nave.  Imagine this with a stage in the middle and lots of lighting patterns playing off the architectural structure:

The slight eerie awareness that beef used to hang from those rafters was played off with a whimsical detail of two bulls and some music notes cut into a metal cube hanging over the stage.

Tristano’s music was a great fit for the setting.  Comprised mainly of repetitive chords and rhythms on the piano, it started off as something like techno—but produced by a person, whose vitality (in contrast to the sterility of much of the techno you hear in discotecas around here) was visible in the movement of his body, practically dancing off the piano bench.  Soon it was, indeed, bolstered by synthesizers and became a true hybrid of electronic and solo piano.  But without the usual mind-numbing effect of techno. 

Something that I often don’t like about electronic music is the sense of manipulation: it seems like beats are being accelerated and slowed to produce a certain reaction in me.  Not so here.  I was captivated by the music but I felt more intrigued than hypnotized.  We were dissecting and penetrating into the possibilities of contemporary music—a great moment in the concert was when Tristano actually leaned into the grand piano to pluck the strings and drum on the lid.  Here's the youtube video: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzPTkHCFl70&feature=related

Throughout, the concert had me thinking about this use of repetition in music to create a new sense of awareness, to heighten the audience’s observation. The last song Tristano played involved several other musicians (a saxophonist, guitarist, and several dj’s at laptops) who were added one-by-one to create a symphonic effect.  It reminded me a little of the sweeping arch of the first movement of Górecki’s 3^rd Symphony—a piece that affected me in a similar way when I played it in college.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDNfQ4ok8EY

All in all, a fantastic experience. Can’t wait to get back to the Matadero and check out more there!

Poetry, Religion, and the Reparative Value of the Spoken Word

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here.  The last couple of months have been shaded by stress—dissertation and other various deadlines have been hanging over me like the damp gray clouds that often fill the sky in late fall in Castile.  I haven’t been as attentive to things good and beautiful as I would have liked.  I’ve felt disjointed—as if my intellectual and mental preoccupations had split me in two: a floating head and a neglected body.  Ugh.  I hate that feeling, when the realms of lucidity seem so far away from earth.

Happily, the clouds started lifting a couple weeks ago.  I just got back from a second trip to Salamanca, where rain early in the week gave way to purified blue skies and sunlight that seems warm on the gold stone of the buildings even in mid-November.  

And I got to read and listen to poems.

Poetry is my antidote to floating-head syndrome.  This may seem counter-intuitive.  But for me, poetry’s attention to language as a physical thing (words on a page or, even better, sounds spoken by someone’s mouth and reverberating in my ears, or spoken by my mouth), is centering.  I find myself, my whole, unified, flesh-and-bone-and-thinking-being self, when concentrating on-experiencing?-a poem.

So, last week in Salamanca I read manuscripts of poems, and I went to a presentation of a new book by a poet I know there.  I had read part of his book already, but really enjoyed hearing him read his work aloud.  

The main thing about this particular poet –I think he would agree with me-is that he is a Christian, and a Protestant at that. (Protestant poets, as you might imagine, are rather scarce in Spain.) He’s very vocal about his faith, and his poetry is filled with Christian imagery and direct reference to, well—Jesus.  Such directness is a bit unsettling for modern-day intellectuals and artists, whether they are believers or not, who tend to have an allergy for such bluntness, or effusiveness.  (I confess, I have often shied away from his poems, thinking them prolix.)

But when read out loud, and with this man’s undeniable passion, the effect is noticeably different.  He spoke his meandering, run-on sentences with a genuineness that is often hard to find in people, poets included.  As he read poems about his parents, his home, his wife, his God, his voice rang out clearly, his hand gesticulated in the air.  I came away from the reading with a greater admiration for him—for him as an artist, but even more, I think, for him as a whole person.  And, I came away amused by a secular commentator’s efforts to fit this poet into the bounds of literary-world propriety when he referred to “a subtle reference to the sacred” in the book.  There was nothing “subtle” about the religious element in the book!

In terms of taste, I do still prefer the less overt approach to faith in art, I think.  I’ve just been re-reading some poems by Ledo Ivo (not, as far as I know, a religious poet)—“Uma busca incesante” [“The Unceasing Search”] and “A neve e o amor” [“Snow and Love”]—that resonate profoundly with my own faith. (Maybe more on this later.) These poems speak to me directly from the page, and they make me want to read them aloud myself.  In any case, that centering force of the spoken word in poetry has been a wonderful thing for me this week. 

Add to the spoken word the sung word, and I am feeling like a whole, integrated person again.  I stayed after church this morning to prepare advent songs with a small choir.  We sang “Fruto del amor divino” aka "Divinum Mysterium.” Amen and amen.

Brasilian poetry and a Spanish documentary

Madrilenian live has been busy lately! I'm trying to throw myself into work (going to the library a lot, getting a lot done, but also realizing just how much there is to do...) and still take advantage of what the city has to offer: go to exhibitions, see some film, eat some tapas, drink some tinto de verano, sit on the terrazas before it gets too cold to eat outside. I've shared some great meals, and enjoyed the balconies and terraces of friends. This last week was particularly full, with lectures and a film club and an antique book fair, plus a few lovely long nights in the centro. A couple of highlights:

On Tuesday I made my first (unofficial, i.e., not work-related) trip up to the Residencia de Estudiantes, to check out a conversation with their current poet-in-residence there, Brasilian writer Ledo Ivo. The discussion was lead by a Spanish professor of Brasilian literature, Antonio Maura, and included two of the Spanish translators of Ivo’s work. The conversation (held in both Portuguese and Spanish) revolved around Brasilian-Iberian relations, poetry in translation, and the idea of the literary generation (Ivo is linked to the Brasilian “Generation of 1945”), and included a reading of one of his newest poems (which I loved—wish it had been published already so I could find it and copy it here.) It was wonderful. I picked up one of the books for sale and I’m hoping to head back to the Residencia next Wednesday to listen to a reading of Ivo’s work.

As we were leaving, a woman I met at the talk reminded me to go and check out the dormitory room that the people at the Residencia have recreated to resemble a room of one of the 1920’s residents (Lorca? Dalí?). Cool, huh? I’m so excited to be able to visit and do research at the very place where the writers I’m working on lived and worked themselves! 

And then... how I became a star of Spanish documentary film.

The next day in the Biblioteca Nacional a man approached me and asked if he could interrupt me for a moment. It turns out that he wanted interview me for a documentary they’re making for the 300^th anniversary of the library. (Hey, I’m there every day.) I am a sucker, so I said yes, little knowing what I was getting myself into. Not only did he interview me, but then the cameraman filmed me in the main reading room, both walking around it AND reading from Unamuno’s essays out loud (which you are NOT supposed to do in there!). I got lots of stares, and had quite a time of it trying to read with all of those people (grudgingly) listening. It was a challenge, between trying not to pronounce anything wrong and trying not to laugh!

Well, in any case, this documentary is going to air on Spanish television in December!

A Re-reading in Translation

While sorting through a stack of used books at an outdoor bookstand the other day, I came across a copy of the latest issue of Revista de Occidente, a journal dedicated to arts and culture that holds a fair amount of prestige in Spain (it was founded in 1923 by philosopher José Ortega y Gasset). This particular issue caught my eye because it includes an interview with Adam Zagajewski, a contemporary Polish poet whose work (as translated into English by Clare Cavanagh) I have become familiar with over the last few years. Following the interview the journal includes five of Zagajewski’s poems in Spanish translation.

Zagajewski has become quite well known in the U.S.—he currently teaches at the University of Chicago, and before that he taught at the University of Houston. His poem, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” [“Spróbuj opiewac okaleczony swiat”; in Spanish “Intenta alabar al mundo herido”] appeared in The New Yorker on September 15, 2001, providing a timely (though unplanned) response to the events of 9/11. (You can read Cavanagh’s English translation here.) The tenth anniversary of that day will find me in Spain, and therefore it seemed fitting to read Zagajewski’s poem again, this time through the lens of a different language.

The first thing that strikes me is the beauty of the Spanish sounds. In the English, I love the repeated hard “a” of “praise” and “mutilated”—the echoed stress drives home, from the first line, the imperative character that runs through the poem, as it asks the reader to “try” and to “praise.” In Spanish the vowels are more rolling, joining syllables and communicating this necessity of “praising” by making the words aurally contingent upon one another: “Intenta alabar al mundo herido” sounds “In-ten-tal-a-bar-al-mun-dohe-ri-do.”

In English, what jumps out at me are the images of this poem—things that the poet incites us to appreciate: “wild strawberries, drops of wine,” leaves eddying over “earth’s scars,” “the grey feather a thrush lost,” the “gentle light.” However, reading this Spanish translation I notice—probably due to the fact that I have taught Spanish grammar for the last few years—the way the poem builds its imperative, from the somewhat passive “try to praise” (“intenta alabar”) to “you must” (“debes”) to “you should” (“deberías”), and finally, the outright command: “Praise” (“Alaba”).

As I recognized these different modulations in Spanish, particularly the subtle shading of "debes" vs. "deberías," the translation deepened my appreciation of its urgency, its sense of necessity: praising this mutilated, wounded (“herido”) world needs to happen. I think the poem suggests that this is (in part) art’s responsibility; art must extol, edify, and rejoice over this world despite its brokenness, it must eddy—a lovely word choice by Cavanagh; it makes me wish for the Spanish equivalent, arremolinarse, in Elzbieta Bortkiewicz Morawska’s translation—over the earth’s scars.

What about praising a mutilated America? A country that makes mistakes, goes into wars hastily, one whose actions in the world have often been imperialistic? A country whose Congress has lately been dysfunctional? I confess, being in the honeymoon period of my stay in Spain, I can find this hard to do at times. (Although, to be honest, many of the same charges can be leveled at Spain.) Zagajewski’s words in the interview provide a helpful perspective. When asked about the differences between Europe and the U.S., he responds:

En Europa todo el mundo está ¡tan cansado por la historia!... América, por el contrario, tiene la fuerza de su relativa juventud, los americanos aún están dispuestos a luchar. A menudo se equivocan, porque cometen grandes errores; sin embargo, el mero hecho de que los ideales de Homero—como, por ejemplo, la defensa de la patria—sigan estando allí tan presentes, hace que para ellos el tener que defenderse sea algo perfectamente posible y vigente, algo asumido. Y es eso lo que me maravilla.

[In Europe everyone is so tired by history! America, by contrast, has the force of its relative youth, the Americans are still willing to fight. They are often wrong, because they make big mistakes; however, the very fact that the ideals of Homer—like, for example, the defense of one’s country—continue to be so present there makes having to defend oneself, for them, something perfectly possible and valid, something assumed. And that is what astounds me.][my translation]

PS. On a tangential note, the title of Zagajewski’s poem in English shows up in this song by my favorite band, Over the Rhine--"All My Favorite People Are Broken." The picture in this video is dark, but the audio’s pretty good. 

Reading Photography: Cristina García Rodero "Transtempo" and Ruth Matilda Anderson "Atesorar España"

After a friend and I visited a photography exhibition in Valencia last Saturday, we saw a book in the gift shop entitled Como leer la fotografía [How to Read Photography].  We agreed that it was a book we would like to read.  I can’t say I’ve studied very much about photography, but I love to “read” photographs, more or less in the same way that I interpret paintings, considering the positioning of the elements in the picture, the light and shadow, expressions on faces, and focus (maybe akin to brush strokes in painting??).  I don’t know much about technique, but I do have some theoretical ideas.  To me, the exceptional thing about photography is that the image is captured instantaneously; it snatches a second from real time and freezes it, makes it endure.  There is something magical or mystical about this.  C. S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters that “the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”  A photograph captures that encounter of the temporal and the eternal.  When it freezes time, photography can point out the miraculous in the present.  We could also say that, by preserving a past moment as present, it unlocks a kind of “redemptive” potential in the past, revealing a new understanding of a historic moment, giving us an inside look at how things “really were”—things that tradition and textbooks might have missed or gotten wrong.  (Here I’m thinking of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who writes about photography frequently in his Arcades Project and elsewhere.)

So there’s a little bit about my “theory” of photography.  All this to say, I find it spectacular when I come across an artist who has a knack for snatching seconds out of time: when someone has the eye, the instinct, the ability to plan these moments—or, more likely, plan for them, and grab them as they fly by.  

In the last week, I’ve seen two exhibitions that got me thinking about all of this.

The first was an exhibition of photographs by Cristina García Rodero, a Spanish photographer who has taken some remarkable photographs of life in rural Spain (among many other things).  I had seen a collection of those images earlier this summer, at another exhibition in Seville, so when I learned that the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid was showing her work, I went right away.  I'm interested by a particular theme that comes up often in her work: provincial life, immersed in popular tradition and ritual, in ways that can be uplifting, comical, absurd, horrifying—and usually more than one of these at once.  In the collections I saw, many of the photos are of Catholic rituals, in which blank expressions and awkward postures reveal boredom rather than spiritual elevation, or where child-sized coffins (meant to remind the devout of their mortality) point out an aspect of rural religion that is at once very material and very macabre.  (This dark aspect of ritual seems to be a particular interest of the artist; she has also done some fascinating photographs of Haitian rituals. You can see some of them on her website.)  García Rodero’s touches of irony—kids whose attention is elsewhere during a solemn religious rite; a coffin balanced on top of bottle crates, a priest who appears bored to tears in the confessional while an old lady leans intently to pour out her soul to him, probably for the umpteenth time that week—point out the everyday, mundane, concrete, and incongruous aspects of religion.  In this, García Rodero’s approach reminds me a little of the Southern Gothic (William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor), as an artistic response to regional religious life.

The second exhibition was “Atesorar España” at the Fundación Bancaja in Valencia.  It was comprised of 345 photographs from the collection of the Hispanic Society in New York, which document Spanish life from the second half of the 19^th century and the first decades of the 20^th (incidentally, the period I work on in Spanish literature).  I was particularly impressed by the work of an American photographer, Ruth Matilda Anderson (bio in Spanish), who traveled to Spain several times in the 1920s to take pictures throughout Spain (with special attention to Galicia, the setting of García Rodero's photos).  Some of my favorites were her pictures of working women and children. In general, the images document the anonymous lives of peasants and laborers in pre-Civil War Spain.  In a couple of the photographs, the artist herself appears; her bobbed hair and modern clothing stand out, but not dissonantly, against the rustic backdrop.  

And to top everything off, in another part of the exhibition, guess who showed up?  My guy, Unamuno, posing for a portrait.  I just can’t escape the dissertation…

Los últimos días de vacaciones

I'm here! I got in to Madrid last week, arriving at 5 in the afternoon to a rather deserted city. Compared with the Madrid I left in early July, it seemed like a ghost town. August is the month of vacation in Spain, as in other parts of Europe, and lots of things slow down, or shut down completely. In a way it was a nice way to come back and get set up in my new apartment: streets and stores are less crowded, waiting time is at a minimum, the pace of life just seems slower. But it was also strange: harder to get in touch with people, shorter business hours, and several of my go-to places in the city for art, music, film, etc. didn't have anything going on.

Now that it's September 1st, things are changing. New calendars of events everywhere, the summer sales in the stores are suddenly over, there are segments on the news about how to lose the weight that you put on drinking beers at the beach. The study abroad program that I taught for this summer is opening its fall session. And I have orientation next week. Soon I'll have to ponerme a trabajar en serio [start working for real]!

I've done a little bit of reading and writing this week, and made some trips to the Biblioteca Nacional, in addition to working out bank accounts, internet, etc. etc. There has been some stress. But I've also been trying to explore, and enjoy the simple pleasures I like about daily life in Spain. Here are a few:

1) Running in the Retiro in the morning.

Not very Spanish-sounding, I know. But running is growing in popularity here, and there are always a bunch of people out jogging through the gorgeous park when I go. This summer I lived right next to it, so it was easy to get up and go for a run. Now it takes me longer to get there, but I like the little route I've chosen through the streets.

2) Salmorejo.

Salmorejo is gazpacho's slightly paler, thicker cousin, made with tomatoes, onion, garlic, and bread. You can buy pretty good salmorejo and gazpacho in the grocery store.

3) Fresh bread bought that morning from the bakery around the corner. 'Nuf said.

4) Pear yogurt. Why do they not have this flavor in the U.S.??? Yum. And kiwi is pretty good, too.

5) "Traditional" markets. I love getting groceries in the old-school, pre-supermarket "mercados." This summer I made visits to the Mercado Antón Martín in the Embajadores section of Madrid. Now that I live in the city center, I've been exploring Chueca, a very trendy part of town that has been gentrified over the last decades, especially thanks to the gay community. On one of my first days I discovered the newly re-done Mercado de San Antón. It's very Chueca--clean design, gorgeous stands with sustainable ("ecológico") produce, booths upstairs selling everything from traditional tapas to sushi, and a gorgeous "azotea" (terrace) on the roof. Maybe a little pricey for every day, but I know I'll be back...

That's enough for now. Just one last note: thanks to my friend Elena, I also got to head out to a local "feria" in her town, on the outskirts of Madrid, and confirm that it was a lot like a county fair in the States: rides, games with prizes, fair food... Oh, and then blasting music in the streets all night until it's time to run the bulls through them at 8 AM!