On Lorca: Perceptions of a Poet
On Lorca: Perceptions of a Poet
Essay (Part 3) | The Lost Language of the Imagination in Spanish Surrealism
This piece is part of a collection of essays I am writing on the Imagination in different cultures and schools of thought. And so this essay is best understood when read as part of this series, as I may make references to concepts mentioned in previous essays.
Please note: All Lorca references and quotes are my translations.
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I am currently visiting my family in the peninsula of Granada, in southern Spain, where Federico Garcia Lorca’s short life began, and where it ended. And because this Sunday’s piece is on Lorca, I have come to write it from the courtyard of the house where he spent the last days of his life. Now a hotel, the kind doorman has given me permission to perch at a wooden table by the fountain in the central courtyard (pictured below). And in the background I’m playing Claude Debussy, the French composer that Lorca so loved and whose songs I imagine kept him company that last month of his life during the time he was here, in hiding, with his books and his poems and his piano.
From where I sit, I can see the stairs that lead to the room with the piano, where he would hide with the women of the house when the bombs went off; and I can see the hallway that leads to the backdoor and out onto the narrow alleyway - where they took him away.
The air is still, the courtyard a confessional booth still waiting to hear the sin, unable to grant atonement until it is spoken; what it means when the village kills its poet.
It is an acutely experiential affair. To be here. The place of Lorca’s eleventh hour. To look down that hallway to the door that lead to his death. To draw back the hand of time to August 1936; the pounding on the door; the quickened beat of heart and breath and the dread, the impotence, the doom. I wonder if a record was left playing Debussy in the living room, an immortal lament that resounds, still, in the soul of this place.
I wonder how he felt, what he thought, what he dreamt, those last days in hiding. And the last hours when they came for him; that drive out of the city. I wonder if he could see or if they’d blindfolded him; if he spoke to the other prisoners, or with the gunmen, or if he left his last words with the immortal laments.
I wonder if they beat him, or if somewhere amidst the chaos he received a gesture of humanity that held him through. Most of all, I think about the moments right before they opened fire. I wonder if he held his breath, or prayed with words half-forgotten for being religious in his own way. I wonder if he evoked the face of his beloved one last time.
I dipped my fingers in a glass of wine and paid libation to him, the poet; to his life and to his death.
And in the courtyard it is silent, the kind of silence Lorca knew inclines the forehead to the ground.
And even passing children know to speak in whispers.
The Irresistible Beauty of All Things
It is the perception of the poet that knows of beauty; knows of its restoration when humanity enters the domain of the most ugly. Rilke wrote ‘…for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to bear.’
And in the onset of the ugly - for there are few things uglier than a civil war - essentially, humans turning on each other and settling family feuds with herd mentality, under the pretext of political aspirations - I’ve often wondered why Lorca stayed in Spain on the onset of the civil war - why he didn’t flee for Paris with Dali and Buñuel, and other friends from the Generation of the ‘27. Staying meant possible, or, perhaps more accurately-put, certain death. And yet stay he did. Why?In an essay I wrote on him back in 2009, I aligned with the popular belief that he stayed for his convictions. That he chose to take a political stance by not fleeing.
But the other day, whilst having a beer with my father in the village plaza in the mountains just outside the city of Granada, we re-questioned this. Why did Lorca stay?
And that night it dawned on me. What is the one thing that people throughout the ages have risked it all for? The one thing whose cost is highest of them all and yet is always worth the price?
Love.
Lorca stayed for love.
I found articles on his hidden love for the art critic and journalist, Juan Ramírez de Lucas. It seems that Lorca and Juan wanted to flee together. But being only nineteen years old, Juan wasn’t allowed to leave the country without his parents’ permission. And so Lorca chose to wait until he turned twenty-one and could leave of his own free will.
But just one month into the civil war, he was taken. They came for him at night. And he was executed along with two anarchist bullfighters and a school teacher, and left in a ditch. The Nationalist firing squad did the dirty work for Franco and were given a reward of 500 pesetas per suspected left-winger they killed. They justified Lorca’s execution by deeming his views dangerous.
The memory of Lorca goes hand in hand with the Spanish civil war. But that’s not the route I want to go today. My grandfather and great-grandfather fought for Franco. Our family legends say the latter shot himself in the thumb to come back from it. His wife, my great-grandmother was a peasant, and she hid him under the barn, facing both the Republicans and the Nationalists who recruited him to fight for them. Writing about the civil war would require an entire dedication to it. And that’s not my intention here.
I want to remember Lorca; the Lorca before the war; the poet who spoke of the irresistible beauty of all things.
Poetic Perception
I’ve been courting Lorca for just about half of my life now. When I was fifteen years old, my family moved to New York City from a small village in France, and my father gave me Poet in New York, Lorca’s book of poetry that he wrote during his time in the city. Having left Spain for France, and then gone on to visit the Big Apple, his route mirrored mine and I found myself taking great solace in his vision through it all.
‘New York,’ he wrote, ‘where the aurora arrives but no one tastes it because there is no tomorrow and there is no hope, […] where people wander, without knowing where, sleepless as though freshly emerged from a bloody shipwreck.’
The displaced poet kept me company when the city threw my adolescent spirit to the dogs and slit the throat of my naivety. Some days I would skip classes and make a den in a hidden corner by the East River, light a cigarette, and set sail in the bottomless seas of Lorca’s imagination. I wanted to see through his eyes. To see through the eyes of the poet in a desperate attempt to find meaning in a world whose monotony and falsities I found stifling. I suppose I’ve been trying to make sense of the world though that poetic vision ever since.
It is through the imagination that we can access this type of poetic perception. This was intimately understood by the nineteenth-century Romantics. From English Blake to French Baudelaire, with the latter describing the imagination as ‘an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.’
In his lecture on the Imagination in 1928 during a conference in Granada, Lorca presented a similar view on the imagination. He said, ‘For me, imagination is synonymous with discovery. To imagine, to discover, to carry our bit of light to the living penumbra where all the infinite possibilities, forms, and numbers exist.’
Rather than the modern understanding that the imagination is synonymous with fantasy and make-believe, through Lorca’s suggestion it can be understood to be deeply rooted in physical reality. Rather than inventing, it is a faculty that is drawn on to see what is already there. And this can help to develop a particular perception that is alert and vigilant, while refining a quality of total, undisturbed attention and absolute presence that Simone Weill would call prayer. This lines up nicely with Baudelaire’s view that the imagination is almost divine.
‘The poetic imagination journeys and transforms,’ Lorca observed. ‘It gives things their most pure meaning and it defines the relation between them; but it always always always operates within facts of a most tidy and precise reality.’
This helps to differentiate between imagination and its modern association with fantasy. Fantasy creates something out of nothing, a world within worlds that exists only for the creator of that world… But Lorca asserted in his lecture, ‘I do not believe in creation, only in discovery.’ He believed that the imagination is a spiritual apparatus, or device, a luminous explorer of the world that it discovers, and that through this process of discovery, it in turn animates something in us.
I really love this concept of the animating imagination. From the Spanish word “animar” and the Latin root “animāre”, this quite literally means that the imagination breathes life or soul back; it restores something to life.The imagination restores the irresistible beauty of all things. It discovers, or re-discovers, the material world, and offers the possibility of perceiving it with new eyes, in a new way - not creating something new, but discovering something that is already there. Imagination offers a way of seeing.
And this type of perception might be understood as the Islamic Mystic’s notion of the divinization of the self, as I mentioned in my April newsletter. Perhaps when we see clearly, with the fullness of ourselves, our sense of belonging in the wider world and the greater mystery is gradually restored. And we can begin to relate to the other-than-human world responsibly, no longer indifferent but as active participants. As Lorca put it, ‘Indifference is the seat of the devil.’
As I have suggested in my previous pieces, the imagination can be understood to be a bridge to a state of union and belonging in the tapestry of life, of all living things. And it is the imagination that leads to the possibility of this experience, and the direct knowledge of the Imaginal, or what Lorca calls the “invisible reality” accessed through inspiration and evasion of the self. He compares these experiences through the lives of the fifteenth-century poet Luis de Góngora and mystic Saint John of the Cross. The former - who was one of Spain’s most prominent poets of all time - Lorca calls a master of the imagination, whereas the latter - the well-known Saint John of the Cross - he refers to as being sublimely inspired; the former inhabiting the highest terrestrial summits, and the latter found in the celestial spheres, the peaks of mountains at his feet.
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Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion
Lorca proposed that there are three stages in, essentially, perceiving with the eyes of the poet. These stages begin with the imagination, which can lead to inspiration, and then, eventually, to evasion.
He understood the imagination to be the first step in this process, the step that leads to what he describes as “the ineffable gift” that is inspiration. Where the imagination is limited, inspiration moves freely and without chains. And when that space is inhabited, there is a possibility for evasion, or in other words, the experience of a state of personal freedom or union with all of life.
Lorca explained this inner progression as follows:
The poet who wants to break free from the imagination, and not merely live on the images produced by real objects, stops dreaming and starts to desire. Then, when the limits of his imagination become unbearable and he wants to free himself from his enemy – the world – he passes from desire to love. He goes from imagination, which is a fact of the soul, to inspiration, which is a state of the soul. He goes from analysis to faith, and the poet, previously an explorer, is now a humble man who bears on his shoulders the irresistible beauty of all things.
He knows the difference between imagination and fantasy, knows that they are not the same thing and approaches the imagination as a faculty to be taken seriously; the terrain not of the dreamer, but of the realist. The imagination does not make something up, or invent, and when it tries to do so, it is defeated by the beauty of reality. It is in this reality that it locates images, and he refers to this process as a hunt; one that requires particular methods and is reminiscent, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, of the initiatory shamanic journey, which I will cover in a later entry. ‘The mechanics of poetic imagination,’ Lorca observed, ‘are always the same: a concentration, a leap, a flight, a return with the treasure, and a classification and selection of what has been brought back.’
I will close today’s piece with some of Lorca’s final remarks on “the faculty divine” that is the language of the imagination:
The imagination hovers over reason the way fragrance hovers over a flower, wafted on the breeze but tied, always, to the ineffable center of its origin…As long as he does not try to free himself from the world, the poet can live happily in his golden poverty…The mission of the poet is just that – to give life (animar), in the exact sense of the word: to give soul… Poetry doesn’t need skilled practitioners, she needs lovers, and she lays down brambles and shards of glass for the hands that search for her with love.
Further Resources for fellow Lorca lovers:
Lectures: Theory and Play of the Duende; Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion
Biography on Lorca: Poet in Granada (2018) Ian Gibson
Complete Poetic Works: Poesia Completa (2013) Galaxia Gutenberg
Films: Inspired by Lorca’s play Bodas de Sangre (Blood Weddings)
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On Lorca’s love affair with Salvador Dali
Duino Elegies, Maria Raine Rilke
Poeta en Nueva York, Federico Garcia Lorca, p. 109
New Notes on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire
Conferencias, Federico Garcia Lorca, p.114
Ibid, p.115
Ibid, p.134
Ibid, p.114
Ibid, p.140
https://petalsandbees.com/2013/08/14/furthermore-as/
Gorgeous
Gabriela am crying, I needed this series so much. So healing and enlivening. Thank you for helping me fill in the spaces on my research + apprenticing of understanding what is an artist, poet and mystic.