LORCA'S TRAGIC KNIFE
"What glass splinters are stuck in my tongue!"
Lorca, Blood Wedding
Blood Wedding,
Federico Garcia Lorca's 1933 tragedy, better than other examples of the genre,
induces an appropriate state of mind for dealing with contemporary global terrorisms. Terrorism is always implacable. Even if it were possible to offer it a Pacific
Ocean of blood, its thirst would not be satisfied.
Our nations furiously
rave
together then and
now.
Our clocks mishandle
messiahs.
Lorca's brother Francisco aptly informed us in 1955 that
"the final value of Federico's theatre, and the one which most
characterizes it, is the fundamental attitude of an author who liked to live,
that is to say, to suffer and enjoy life's course as an inevitable universal
drama" (Three Tragedies. New
York: New Directions, No. 52, 1955).
What is the final value of lynching, the fate of Emmett Till in
Mississippi in 1955?
The cycles of our
mother's bone-houses
always attending the
birth-burial
of the blood weeded
fetus.
Lorca knew something about cycles and human beings which seems
to inhabit the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Book of the Dead, Sophocles, Marlowe and
Shakespeare, Voltaire, Goethe, Arthur
Miller, and Amiri Baraka Perhaps before
the 20th century , terrorism was so disguised as audacious , raw, heroic
warfare or "Yahweh-, God &
Jesus & Holy Ghost- , Allah-blessed"
crusades that it could not be x-rayed it for what it is. The Enlightenment
misspelled its name, the West being arrogantly ignorant of what the South and the
East knew for several thousands of
years. After WWI, the Emperor of Cream
and the White Witch disrobed and mooned the world.
The transgendered
Western fathers of invention
adorned themselves in
designer sackcloth,
photographed
themselves in the Passolini poses of Petronius-Fellini's Satyricon.
In Lorca's time,
disguises were translucent; his exquisite poetic sensibility enabled him to
know what Goya and Picasso knew, what later Francis Bacon and Jean-Michel
Basquiat discovered in paint and Romare
Bearden, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Morrison
, in or on paper: tragedy is encoded in
each human being. In the womb, the fetus feeds the Satanic spider and learns the death-grip of
the tragic knife.
Lorca did not retreat into excuses of fear and pity, false
assurances of balance and restoration (catharsis), certainly not in Blood Wedding. He simply
recognized the passionate, fractal amorality of life.
Deflecting selective sympathy to a so-called tragic hero or
to the collective victims of Nature-sponsored events is a learned (and ultimately
cowardly, anti-existential) habit of response to tragic forms; the quest for excuses and explanations is an absurdity of the human imagination.
There are no reasons or clarifying theologies.
What is at any time, is.
ISIS is Hitler, Pol
Pot, and Idi Amin Dada much improved; it
is, in our time the enhanced KKK or the sublime Mafia.
Terror and terrorism
are manifestations of Cain's blessing Abel with the Kafka motions of Lorca's
tragic knife.
They shall be forever beyond destruction.
"The moon
sets a knife / abandoned in the air/ which being a leaden threat/ yearns to be
blood's pain."
(Blood Wedding,
Act 3, Scene 1)
Lorca's tragic knife
turns your flesh to stone as your blood renews the Earth.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
November 17, 2015
