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

Ignatius of Loyola directs mimetic and histrionic kittens to play religiously on stage: copy-catechism

pic credit

From The Idea of a Theater by  Fergusson
 
The Histrionic Sensibility: The Mimetic Perception of Action

The trained ear perceives and discriminates sounds; the histrionic sensibility(which may also be trained) perceives and discriminates actions.Neither form of perception can be defined apart from experience but only indicated in various forms of its use...

Kittens in their play seem to be using something like our histrionic sensibility. They

directly perceive each other’s actions: stalking an imagined quarry; the bluff and formal

defiance which precedes a fight; flight in terror; the sudden indifference that ends the

play. Their perception of each other’s actions is itself mimetic, a sympathetic response of

the whole psyche, and may be expressed more or less completely and immediately in

bodily changes, postures, and movements.  The soul of the cat is the form of its body; but to some degree the soul is actual in different ways in different moments, depending upon what the cat believes, or make-believes the situation to be...When kittens perceive and imitate the actions of grown cats, the histrionic sensibility is being used for educational, moral (or by analogy) religious purposes: to explore the potentialities of the cat nature and the dimensions of the world in which the cat finds itself...

The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola  would seem to be far removed from the play of kittens; yet their purpose is to reveal, through the techniques of make-believe, the potentialities of human nature and the realities of the human situation, as Loyola understood them.   When he explains to the devout how to make present to their feelings and imaginations as well as their reason, scenes from the life of Christ, he  sketches a technique like that which the Moscow Art Theater used to train actors. His immediate purpose is similar: to reveal a scene significant on many levels, and a mode of action capable of evoking a mimetic response of the whole being pp 236-238, The Idea of a Theater, Fergusson

No results found for "duende in the Bible"...yet

Google says:

No results found for "biblical duende".

            No results found for "duende in the bible".

Hmmm, time to start writing.

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

saying 'adios' ("A Dios") to my bullfighting earthsuit o' lights

LINK

I see the suit of lights that  Bono (literally)said "Goodbye" at the end of many shows, a powerful reference.intertexting to:

• -Of course:  the line in  the band's older song, "Gone" :"Goodbye...you can keep this suit of lights.  I'm going up with the sun (Son)"
• -Elvis Costello's song, "Suit of Lights" 
• -fame/earthsuit/stage persona
• -death to life
• "suit of lights" as a name for bullfighter's uniform? (hmm, think of the bullfight Bono and Edge often do in "Until The End of the World," think duende..)
• the band Suit of Lights(?)
• -what else?

Check it out at 3:33ff in this video.  And if you don't see a cross on top of the steering wheel /life preserver microphone, you don't know U2 (:

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This was supposed to be a pic of Bono's "suit of lights" after it has been raptured..,,a regular part of the show during "With or Without You" (video here. at this link, see 3:35ff..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxplKNc2GaY) ..,,but I didn't grab the camera with the zoom in time, so i got this with my cell phone.  I had always wondered if you could see it hanging up there if you were close enough to see inside the claw/stage...well i was close enough in Oakland to find out: you can see it, but not in this photo...at least very well. I tagged it, so you can spot it if you hover for the tag.... looks like a dead body (: This always feels a very prophetic part of the show as he often says "goodbye" to his suit/celebrity (based on an older song "You can keep this suit of lights, I'll be up with the Son")  ·  ·  · Share · Edit · June 15, 2011

Allah=Olé?

Of course MeWithoutYou is stirring up controversy (No surprise, see "I didn't buy cigarettes at Berean, but I did find this.."), closing concerts with lyrics praising Allah.
So much of their concert experiences, like this filmed at Cornerstone, include interactive, Sufi-like, Dhikr-ish dancing and singing.

Check this:

The arrival of the Duende always presupposes a radical change in all the forms as they existed on the old plane. It gives a sense of refreshment unknown until then, together with that quality of the just-opening rose, of the miraculous, which comes and instils an almost religious transport.

In all Arabian music, in the dances, songs, elegies of Arabia, the coming of the Duende is greeted by fervent outcries of Allah! Allah! God! God!, so close to the Olé" Olé! of our bull rings that who is to say they are not actually the same; and in all the songs of southern Spain the appearance of the Duende is followed by heartfelt exclamations of God alive! - profound, human tender, the cry of communion with God through the medium of the five senses and the grace of the Duende that stirs the voice and the body of the dancer - a flight from this world, both real and poetic, pure as Pedro de Roja's over the seven gardens (that most curious poet of the seventeenth century), or Juan Calimacho's on the tremulous ladder of tears.

-Lorca

(More in duende)

"You have a voice, you know all the styles, but no duende."

This who remember the David Kootnikoff post on U2 and Duende
"Music of this caliber and class feels as primal as shelter and food. U2 is keeping duende alive in their sound') will enjoy this article by Lorca.

It called to mind my previous post on cultural translation (and the messy messianic betrayal it entails), in that some words in some languages are so loaded and leaded with the zeitgeist and chutzpah (yes, I chose those words with a wink) of a culture, that they are impossible to translate intact. This can cause one to pull one's hair out, and become a raving lucanatic.
I often want to preface such vulnerable, ineffable (remember when Bono included this ineffable term in his "What I love about Jesus" sermon?) terms with "holy," as in "holy zeitgeist, batman!"
"Duende," of course, is among that number:

Whoever inhabits that bull's hide stretched between the Jucar, the Gaudelete, the Sil or the Pisuerga - no need to mention the streams joining those lion-coloured waves churned up by the Plata - has heard it said with a certain frequency: "Now that has real duende !" It was in this spirit that Manuel Torres, the great artist of the Andalusian people, once remarked to a singer: "You have a voice, you know all the styles, but you'll never bring it off because you have no duende."

In all Andalusia, from the rock of Jaen to the shell of Cádiz, people constantly speak of the duende and find it in everything that springs out of energetic instinct. That marvelous singer, "El Librijano," originator of the Debla, observed, "Whenever I am singing with duende, no one can come up to me"; and one day the old gypsy dancer, "La Malena," exclaimed while listening to Brailowski play a fragment of Bach: "Olé! That has duende !"- and remained bored by Gluck and Brahms and Darius Milhaud. And Manuel Torres, to my mind a man of exemplary blood culture, once uttered this splendid phrase while listening to Falla himself play his "Nocturno del Generalife": "Whatever has black sounds has duende." There is no greater truth.

These black sounds are the mystery, the roots that probe through the mire that we all know of, and do not understand, but which furnishes us with whatever is sustaining in art. Black sounds: so said the celebrated Spaniard, thereby concurring with Goethe, who, in effect, defined the duende when he said, speaking of Paganini: "A mysterious power that all may feel and no philosophy can explain."

The duende, then, is a power and not a construct, is a struggle and not a concept. I have heard an old guitarist, a true virtuoso, remark, "The duende is not in the throat, the duende comes up from inside, up from the very soles of the feet." That is to say, it is not a question of aptitude, but of a true and viable style - of blood, in other words; of what is oldest in culture: of creation made act.

This "mysterious power that all may feel and no philosophy can explain," is, in sum, the earth-force, the same duende that fired the heart of Nietzsche, who sought it in its external forms on the Rialto Bridge, or in the music of Bizet, without ever finding it, or understanding that the duende he pursued had rebounded from the mystery-minded Greeks to the Dancers of Cádiz or the gored, Dionysian cry of Silverio's siguiriya.

So much for the duende; but I would not have you confuse the duende with the theological demon of doubt at whom Luther, on a Bacchic impulse, hurled an inkwell in Nuremberg, or with the Catholic devil, destructive, but short on intelligence, who disguised himself as a bitch to enter the convents..

Any man - any artist, as Nietzsche would say - climbs the stairway in the tower of his perfection at the cost of a struggle with a duende - not with an angel, as some have maintained, or with his muse. This fundamental distinction must be kept in mind if the root of a work of art is to be grasped....

-Lorca, continued

Vanalesntriguing definaion

simulacra-kklesia (part 5/cinco): todo es duende y spiritual

I don't know why I like reading Watchman Nee in Spanish.

Maybe because it's knowing the work was translated from Chinese into English and then into Spanish made the product either:

-a copy of a copy of a copy at least three generations removed from the original...thus having lost much in translation

or

-by some Spiritaneous serendipity saved from "lost in translation" or simulacra, and in a sense "even better than the real thing,"

I am not the scholar to judge, but intuitively, it feels like it reads the writer's heart.

So i picked up Pascal's Pensees in Spanish. At our gathering Sunday, it was there on the coffee table as the rabbi dude and I were talking. I opened the book to a random "pensee," (#648) and read:

"Dos errores: 1. Tomar todas cosas literalmente. 2.Tomar todas cosas spiritualmente."

Translation:

"Two errors: 1. To take everything literally. 2. To take everything spiritually."

Of course, this was originally written in French, so we face a similar third gen factor.
But I bet the translation worked. Spanish is closer to French than my ruddy English, anyway.

Tweaking the language a bit, but hopefully meaning the same thing:


Either we believe

it's all spiritual

or we believe

everything is spiritual.

The second is life; the first death.

"It's all spiritual" is the old/new docetic/gnostic heresy. Can't go there, matter matters.
"God likes matter, " C.S. Lewis said, "he made it."

"Everything is spiritual" is good theology (See the Rob Bell videos by this title here. It's good TV, if not quite Zoo TV)and duels dualism.


I would venture that music is the primary means of
overcoming simulacratic (and socratic) nature of our times and church.
Only then will we hear and feel the need to pray God yanks us out of our commercialism and complacency.

But not just any music.

Musical metaphor that is:

1. lament (see Well-Ended Stories That Don't End Well)

2. honest
3. spiritual

as opposed the the normative and formative repertoire of church as usual:

1. happy-clappy (hear Bono speak to this is a delightful and devastating audio quote here:
   and then dare to pray Jesus' gut-wreneching prayer here: ""The Lord Be With You...Even When He’s Not")
   
   

2. untruthful (see CCM makes you lie)
3. religious (Our only real enemy, the one who came to "steal, kill and destroy" in the context of John 10:10 is not the devil...he is nowhere mentioned in that section, no matter what we preachers have told you...but the religious person/false teacher.)

All three need to be refused and defused. Maybe we can get started by reading (singing along to in full MacPhisto drag):

• Honest Liars and King's X,
  

• i preach=lie for a living

• Not (Just) About Dogs...and hangovers

Back to the top:

Maybe the Spanish language/culture is the key anyway. A careful reading of this post on

• "Es una mentira como una catedral."

might suggest that a Spanish mindset inherently "gets" that religion lies;
and that holy simulacra can lead us to the One who leads us into all truth.

The well known playful pun on the word 'papa':

--"pope" and/or "potato"--

may be telling that Sapir and Whorf were right.

One more helpful Spanish connection

At their worst, U2 comes off with bombastic pretension. At their best, they achieve what very few artists in any genre can: they create work with a sustained intensity that transforms the particular into the universal. U2 has that rare ability to communicate what the late Spanish writer, Frederico Garcia Lorca called 'duende'; that "mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains" (In Search of Duende, 1998, New Directions.)

"I have heard an old master guitarist say: 'Duende is not in the throat; duende surges up from the soles of the feet.' Which means it is not a matter of ability, but of real live form; of blood; of ancient culture; of creative action."

Searching for the duende in the music of U2 may seem like the ultimate form of sycophancy or pretension, but as Miles Davis once so elegantly riffed, so what? No other band from the past two decades has so consistently given listeners reason to believe in the transcendental power of rock 'n' roll. U2 has the primacy of duende's "creative action" to thank for it.

..Lorca believed duende recreated familiar forms:

"The duende's arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old
Planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm."

...Few other bands come close to these dizzy heights. "Sometimes" is pure duende.

Lorca also stated "with duende it is easier to love and understand, and one can be sure of being loved and understood." U2 acknowledges that "tonight", as in other moments, weakness may overcome strength, but that's OK- everyone has those moments. It's in this realization that "Sometimes" crosses from the particular to the universal, cutting deep into the heart's core to pull out an emotional response that has nothing to do with Bono's father, but everything to do with our shared vulnerability as fragile living beings.

Music of this caliber and class feels as primal as shelter and food. U2 is keeping duende alive in their sound. All we can do is listen. by David Kootnikoff ,
link

Twice the writer observed U2's movement from particular into universal, as characteristic of duende. You may remember that Wathrall noted this same progression (and its opposite) about the band and found it characteristic of post-simulacra elevation.
Maybe they're the same thing:

It's very tempting to understand U2's exemplary postmodern song (on which, in good postmodern fashion, I shall isolate and focus on here), "Even Better Than the Real Thing," as a celebration of the very postmodern condition Baudillard characterizes as the triumph of the simulacra.....but heard in this communal register, the erotic meaning of the lyric, "I'm gonna make you sing" has when...addressed to a particular lover becomes transformed, elevated into a celebration of communal singing as an ecstatic experience that transcends even the feeling of real love between individuals (This universalization of love-by which U2 seeks to transmute the entire audience into a belived--works, as Plato decribes in The Symposium by generalizing from the particular; it is thus striking that Bono sometimes performs the same gesture in reverse; by bringing a particular audience member on the stage to sing to her personally, as a particularization of the general audience he seeks to reach through her. With the very idea of an esctatic experience transcending personal love, we tread, I would suggest, into the territory of the holy.....Christianity itself was born out of such a fundamental attunement of universal love....without imposing borders. (91-93)

So more on that in parte siete of this series manana..

Oye, there may be uno, dos, tres, catorce parts to this after all.







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