Kultur and Quixotism; epistemology and esthetic, comic and cosmic

I can't  even explain it,

 and don't have the right and rapt metaphor for it,

but reading Unamuno in English

                       --as rewarding as it is--

                              

pales compared to reading the original Spanish.

(I've been that way ever since I was in the Spanish Musical at Liverpool High School, and wrote my first Poe-ish limerick en espanol ..It's  St. Bobbi's fault).

Es una menita como una catedral...
                                                                         .ese.


I must agree that all translation is largely messianic, betrayal...
                           and AT WORST is actual  messianic betrayal.

Translation is inevitably una mentira  como una catedral, ese.

(for fun, see these links on my misadventures in  bilingual life:

Eye See Two Gringos, 

Mary Rocks! and 

"this is only a test")

See this section below, for example..


I love Unamuno's insights on Quixote
 (BTW, how ironic...quixotic, rather... that after 17 years of false strarts and endings, the famous/infamous Quixote film is finally finished),

 So here it is, a loaded section in Unamuno, From "The Tragic Sense of Life, pp 288-87 (or better yet,  en espanol at the click:"Del Sentamiento Tragico de La Vida" pp, 265-66):

Don Quixote journeyed alone, alone with Sancho, alone with his solitude.  And shall we not also journey alone, we his lovers, creating for ourselves a Quixotesque Spain which only exists in our imagination?

And again we shall be asked:  What has Don Quixote bequeathed to Kultur?  I answer:  Quixotism, and that is no little thing!  It is a whole method, a whole epistemology, a whole esthetic, a whole logic, a whole ethic—­above all, a whole religion—­that is to say, a whole economy of things eternal and things divine, a whole hope in what is rationally absurd.

For what did Don Quixote fight?  For Dulcinea, for glory, for life, for survival.  Not for Iseult, who is the eternal flesh; not for Beatrice, who is theology; not for Margaret, who is the people; not for Helen, who is culture.  He fought for Dulcinea, and he won her, for he lives.

And the greatest thing about him was his having been mocked and vanquished, for it was in being overcome that he overcame; he overcame the world by giving the world cause to laugh at him.

And today? Today he feels his own comicness and the vanity of his endeavours so far as their temporal results are concerned; he sees himself from without—culture has taught him to objectify himself, to alienate himself from himself instead of entering into himself—and in seeing himself from without he laughs at himself, but with a bitter laughter. Perhaps the most tragic character would be that of a Margutte of the inner man, who, like the Margutte of Pulci, should die of laughter, but of laughter at himself. E ridera in eterno, he will laugh for all eternity, said the Angel Gabriel of Margutte. Do you not hear the laughter of God?

The mortal Don Quixote, in dying, realized his own comicness and bewept his sins; but the immortal Quixote, realizing his own comicness, superimposes himself upon it and triumphs over it without renouncing it.

And Don Quixote does not surrender, because he is not a pessimist, and he fights on. He is not a pessimist, because pessimism is begotten by vanity, it is a matter of fashion, pure intellectual snobbism, and Don Quixote is neither vain nor modern with any sort of modernity (still less is he a modernist), and he does not understand the meaning of the word "snob" unless it be explained to him in old Christian Spanish. Don Quixote is not a pessimist, for since he does not understand what is meant by the joie de vivre he does not understand its opposite. Neither does he understand futurist fooleries. In spite of Clavileno,[68] he has not got as far as the aeroplane, which seems to tend to put not a few fools at a still greater distance from heaven. Don Quixote has not arrived at the age of the tedium of life, a condition that not infrequently takes the form of that topophobia so characteristic of many modern spirits, who pass their lives running at top speed from one place to another, not from any love of the place to which they are going, but from hatred of the place they are leaving behind, and so flying from all places: which is one of the forms of despair.

But Don Quixote hears his own laughter, he hears the divine laughter, and since he is not a pessimist, since he believes in life eternal, he has to fight, attacking the modern, scientific, inquisitorial orthodoxy in order to bring in a new and impossible Middle Age, dualistic, contradictory, passionate. Like a new Savonarola, an Italian Quixote of the end of the fifteenth century, he fights against this Modern Age that began with Machiavelli and that will end comically. He fights against the rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century. Peace of mind, reconciliation between reason and faith—this, thanks to the providence of God, is no longer possible. The world must be as Don Quixote wishes it to be, and inns must be castles, and he will fight with it and will, to all appearances, be vanquished, but he will triumph by making himself ridiculous. And he will triumph by laughing at himself and making himself the object of his own laughter.  Unamuno

feliz locura and "life as the bullring writ large"

From Silent Music:  The Life, Work, and Thought of St. John of the Cross by R. A. Herrera

" No life can be understood in a vacuum. Individuals are known only in relation to their backgrounds. A life must be viewed within a framework that exhibits a multiplicity of factors: the historical, the religious, the sociological. The life of St. John of the Cross presents special difficulties as its backdrop is (to contemporary readers) both captivating and strangely alien. In words that were uttered during the Spanish Civil War, García Morente observed that the Spanish conception of life is grounded on the superiority of the concrete over the abstract, the individual over the species, and the private over the public. This was no less true for the sixteenth century than it is for today.

Spanish mysticism tilts to action rather than speculation, experience rather than abstraction. One recalls Hilaire Belloc's astonishment at hearing the Salve Regina sung in a small Spanish village: harsh, full of battle and agony, strikingly different from anything he previously experienced. The same attitude is reflected in Miguel de Unamuno's preference for the "Spanish Christ," livid, squalid, bruised, bloody, and ferocious:

Yes, there is a triumphant, glorious, celestial Christ: the Christ of the transfiguration, the ascension, the Christ who sits at the right hand of the Father ... this is when we have triumphed.... But here ... in this life which is nothing but a tragic spectacle, here the other Christ, the livid, the bruised, the bloody. 

This notion of life as a tragic spectacle, life as the bullring writ large, is etched indelibly on the Spanish psyche. This taste for high drama, exaggeration, extremism in all its forms, is found in a heightened form in the monarchs, warriors, poets, and mystics of Spain's Edad de Oro (Golden Age). Its mysticism is ardent and militant, an affirmation of the power of a will that surrenders only to a higher, transcendent will. This irascible Christianity displaced knighthood from the military battlefield to the higher battlefield of the spirit prodded by that "divina extravagancia" and "feliz locura" which persuaded humankind to forget the world and live completely for God. 

This enthusiasm for divine chivalry inspired works such as La Caballería Celeste and La Caballería Cristiana. Combined with the strong attraction exercised by both the New World and the "Indies of the Spirit," this fervor blunted the impact on Spain of the hermetic aspect of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. The cultural explosion of the Golden Age marched to the beat of a different drummer. Though perhaps rightly accused of being the only region in Europe choosing the past over the present, Spain kept the colorful brilliance of the Catholic festival and did not succumb to the lure either of the classical past or of the cold and denuded churches of the north.  full chapter

Unamuno on believing in God

"Those who believe they believe in God,

but without

passion in the heart,

without anguish of mind,

without uncertainty,

without doubt,

and even at times without despair,

believe only in the idea of God,

and not in God himself.

~Miguel de Unamuno

ht-Brian Zahnd