WEBVTT

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He published his
first book at age 23

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and two years later he
produced a puppet play

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for which he designed the sets.

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He began to paint
around this time

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and he'd already composed Poem
of the Deep Song and Gypsy

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Ballads about which
more in a moment.

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Everything later you see
that's very typical of poetry.

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Everything later and some
of it may not happen.

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So before 30, he is
Spain's most popular poet.

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And he will be dead
in eight years.

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But wait, after his popular
successes in Madrid,

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he moves to New York.

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Why?

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Because with youth and success
came the greatest depression

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of his life.

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He wanted typically something
more than fame, something

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deeper.

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He travels from New
York to lecture in Cuba

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before he returns to Spain.

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Perhaps it's a
coincidence, or perhaps he

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returns because he knows that
at this moment in history,

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there's a wave of enthusiasm
for citizen rights

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and cultural
exploration in Spain.

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Our Lorca is appointed a
director of the traveling

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theater group, La Barraca.

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A name which he chose
for its meaning,

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the makeshift wooden stall
used in puppet plays.

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He arranges ballads for
the plays he produces.

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He revitalizes the old
style Spanish drama

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made of poetry, music,
dance, and design.

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And by 1936, he has himself
finished a new folk tragedy.

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News of a Moorish
insurrection in the capital

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reaches him in July.

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He returns home, he takes
refuge in a friend's house.

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The fascists enter the house.

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The fascists take him away.

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The fascist shoot
him the next day.

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He's dead at 38.

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My love affair with Lorca
began with his poems.

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And has extended now into
reading about his life

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until it ends down that road
of red Earth in Andalusia

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where he's murdered.

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And then beyond to his legacy.

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It's Lorca's destiny
that he be confused

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for a political poet in
that his art caused his life

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to be cut short.

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I can't explain that
life nor his art to you.

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And it's not my wish to
record his accomplishments

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and bury him ceremoniously.

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I hope to give you a
glimpse of him again risen,

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up prowling about, tweaking
our consciousnesses and our art

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practice.

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Lorca, who identified with
outsiders, Blacks, Jews,

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gypsies.

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Lorca a man utterly
alive, energetic,

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like the fleas, butterflies,
and howling dogs

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he loved, like a pest,
a black pony, a wasp,

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or like the moon, or one of
his favorites, the hummingbird.

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"Nobody understood the perfume
of your belly's dark magnolia.

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Nobody knew how you
tormented a hummingbird

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of love between your teeth."

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You can always tell when
the lecture stops and Lorca

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comes in and the language
goes through the roof.

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Let me read that again.

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"Nobody understood the perfume
of your belly's dark magnolia.

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Nobody knew how you
tormented a hummingbird

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of love between your teeth."

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Lorca wrote that in his 20s.

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Let's pick him up there,
vibrant, traveling

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the Spain of small villages
serving as ethnologist

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and preservationist
to record local folk

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songs from an
illiterate and spiritual

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Spain, a melancholy Spain,
Catholic Spain, where

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as he says whoever wants
to jump into dream,

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wounds his feet on the
blade of a barber's razor.

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From the start for
the Spanish child

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life is not without monsters.

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Children aren't protected.

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And he identifies
powerfully with them.

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He most certainly
always believed

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in little fleas
and little fairies

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that he sees in his childhood.

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He remained familiar all
his life with the Coco.

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The Coco's hairy and
dark, a vague figure

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who terrorizes children, you
know the one under your bed,

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or in your closet.

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The cradle songs he collected
are inventions of struggling

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women, more often than not
made wretched by poverty

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and the lyrics they
make are tough.

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The lyrics are cruel.

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For example, Lorca
discovered in his exploration

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that the characters in the
songs rarely show their faces,

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or else mother and child will
go on a journey in a song

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and no sooner do they
depart, dangers arise.

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They must make themselves small.

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They must make themselves
nearly disappear.

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"If we can, will live inside
an orange, you and me,

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even better inside a grape."

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Those who find these words
charming or delightful,

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must recognize how terrifying
they are to a child.

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Suddenly, these familiar fruits,
things a child knows and eats

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has seen in a bright
bowl on the table.

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Suddenly these are
gigantic and frightening.

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Or the mother pretends to be
a child, very disorienting

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to the child.

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Or the child's left
alone in the lullaby,

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or the one in which the
mother complains bitterly

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about the father.

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Or the one in
which the mother is

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arranging a rendezvous with
a man not the child's father.

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Or the child is
in a song in which

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he has no importance at all.

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He's a pretext.

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He's erased.

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Or how about this
one, and by the way

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Lorca set this one
to music, remember

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these songs are not
sung to newborns

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but to children who understand.

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"This little turtle
dove has no mother.

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A gypsy bore him and
put him in the street."

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Besides collecting and
studying lullabies,

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which became the soul
of his Gypsy Ballads,

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besides composing at the piano
and presenting puppet shows,

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in addition to his poems and
his plays, which he directed

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and the travel
pieces, he gave us

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brilliant absolutely modern
lectures on other artists

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and on aesthetics.

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There are lessons
for all of us here

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in terms of how
deep one ought to go

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in studying our culture,
rather than ourselves.

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Chief among his
interests was a desire

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to preserve the
primitive Andalusian

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music called deep song.

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A term you may be familiar
with, although many of us

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have misunderstood it.

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It is the song
whose sound came out

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of the church's adoption of
Byzantine liturgical chants,

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arrival in Spain of bands
and gypsies around this time.

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According to the great
composer, Manuel de Falla,

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whose music you
heard earlier, it's

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a music that's restricted
to the reiterative, almost

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obsessive use of one note.

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A procedure proper to certain
formulas of incantation.

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Although gypsy melody is
rich in ornamental turns,

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they're used only
at certain moments,

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like sudden gusts of wind.

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These gypsy songs
Lorca tried to save

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from being diluted all over the
bars and whorehouses of Spain.

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They're not merely
expressions of emotion,

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so much as raw sounds
with roots in birdsong

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and in the cries of animals.

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Just listen to
Lorca's gorgeous prose

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as he praises not only the
strange melodies of deep song

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but also the poetry
of the gypsies,

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a form of deep
song in syllabics.

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"Deep song", he
says, "is truly deep,

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deeper than all the wells and
seas that around the world,

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much deeper than the single
present heart that creates it

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and the voice that sings it
because it's almost infinite.

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It comes from remote
races, crosses

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the graveyard years, and
the fronds of parched winds.

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It comes from the first
sob and the first kiss.

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Is this exaggerated?

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Or can poetry move us as deeply
as life itself can move us.

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You will knock at my door, I
will never get up to answer.

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You will have to hear
me cry from outside."

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Here it is again.

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So pretty, three lines.

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"You will knock at my door.

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I will never get up to answer.

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You will have to hear
me cry from outside."

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We don't know who
the people are,

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what the circumstances, whether
it's deserved, what door,

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where's the door,
just three lines.

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Very beautiful.

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Here's some more.

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This is for lines.

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He's really going
out of his way now.

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"I'm not afraid to row.

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If I wanted to
row, I would do it,

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I'm just afraid of the wind
that comes out of your bay."

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From the marvel of the
deep song, elemental

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and repetitious,
Lorca prophesies

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of atonal music, synthetic
music, combinations of Eastern

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and Western scales, and loop
music in grand poetic metaphor.

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Next to the idea of deep song,
like a brother nearby in bed,

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or nearby in one's thoughts,
is the Spanish concept

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of the duende, a physical
presence, not a feeling.

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As Lorca presents it,
duende is a power.

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It is a struggle.

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Because Catholic Spain is
a country open to death,

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as Lorca claims, everywhere
else death is an end.

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Death comes and they
draw the curtains.

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But not in Spain.

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In Spain, they
open the curtains.

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Many Spaniards live in
doors until the day they

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die and are taken out
into the sunlight.

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"A dead man," he
says, "in Spain is

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more alive as a dead man than
anyplace else in the world."

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