He published his first book at age 23
and two years later he produced a puppet play
for which he designed the sets.
He began to paint around this time
and he'd already composed Poem of the Deep Song and Gypsy
Ballads about which more in a moment.
Everything later you see that's very typical of poetry.
Everything later and some of it may not happen.
So before 30, he is Spain's most popular poet.
And he will be dead in eight years.
But wait, after his popular successes in Madrid,
he moves to New York.
Why?
Because with youth and success came the greatest depression
of his life.
He wanted typically something more than fame, something
deeper.
He travels from New York to lecture in Cuba
before he returns to Spain.
Perhaps it's a coincidence, or perhaps he
returns because he knows that at this moment in history,
there's a wave of enthusiasm for citizen rights
and cultural exploration in Spain.
Our Lorca is appointed a director of the traveling
theater group, La Barraca.
A name which he chose for its meaning,
the makeshift wooden stall used in puppet plays.
He arranges ballads for the plays he produces.
He revitalizes the old style Spanish drama
made of poetry, music, dance, and design.
And by 1936, he has himself finished a new folk tragedy.
News of a Moorish insurrection in the capital
reaches him in July.
He returns home, he takes refuge in a friend's house.
The fascists enter the house.
The fascists take him away.
The fascist shoot him the next day.
He's dead at 38.
My love affair with Lorca began with his poems.
And has extended now into reading about his life
until it ends down that road of red Earth in Andalusia
where he's murdered.
And then beyond to his legacy.
It's Lorca's destiny that he be confused
for a political poet in that his art caused his life
to be cut short.
I can't explain that life nor his art to you.
And it's not my wish to record his accomplishments
and bury him ceremoniously.
I hope to give you a glimpse of him again risen,
up prowling about, tweaking our consciousnesses and our art
practice.
Lorca, who identified with outsiders, Blacks, Jews,
gypsies.
Lorca a man utterly alive, energetic,
like the fleas, butterflies, and howling dogs
he loved, like a pest, a black pony, a wasp,
or like the moon, or one of his favorites, the hummingbird.
"Nobody understood the perfume of your belly's dark magnolia.
Nobody knew how you tormented a hummingbird
of love between your teeth."
You can always tell when the lecture stops and Lorca
comes in and the language goes through the roof.
Let me read that again.
"Nobody understood the perfume of your belly's dark magnolia.
Nobody knew how you tormented a hummingbird
of love between your teeth."
Lorca wrote that in his 20s.
Let's pick him up there, vibrant, traveling
the Spain of small villages serving as ethnologist
and preservationist to record local folk
songs from an illiterate and spiritual
Spain, a melancholy Spain, Catholic Spain, where
as he says whoever wants to jump into dream,
wounds his feet on the blade of a barber's razor.
From the start for the Spanish child
life is not without monsters.
Children aren't protected.
And he identifies powerfully with them.
He most certainly always believed
in little fleas and little fairies
that he sees in his childhood.
He remained familiar all his life with the Coco.
The Coco's hairy and dark, a vague figure
who terrorizes children, you know the one under your bed,
or in your closet.
The cradle songs he collected are inventions of struggling
women, more often than not made wretched by poverty
and the lyrics they make are tough.
The lyrics are cruel.
For example, Lorca discovered in his exploration
that the characters in the songs rarely show their faces,
or else mother and child will go on a journey in a song
and no sooner do they depart, dangers arise.
They must make themselves small.
They must make themselves nearly disappear.
"If we can, will live inside an orange, you and me,
even better inside a grape."
Those who find these words charming or delightful,
must recognize how terrifying they are to a child.
Suddenly, these familiar fruits, things a child knows and eats
has seen in a bright bowl on the table.
Suddenly these are gigantic and frightening.
Or the mother pretends to be a child, very disorienting
to the child.
Or the child's left alone in the lullaby,
or the one in which the mother complains bitterly
about the father.
Or the one in which the mother is
arranging a rendezvous with a man not the child's father.
Or the child is in a song in which
he has no importance at all.
He's a pretext.
He's erased.
Or how about this one, and by the way
Lorca set this one to music, remember
these songs are not sung to newborns
but to children who understand.
"This little turtle dove has no mother.
A gypsy bore him and put him in the street."
Besides collecting and studying lullabies,
which became the soul of his Gypsy Ballads,
besides composing at the piano and presenting puppet shows,
in addition to his poems and his plays, which he directed
and the travel pieces, he gave us
brilliant absolutely modern lectures on other artists
and on aesthetics.
There are lessons for all of us here
in terms of how deep one ought to go
in studying our culture, rather than ourselves.
Chief among his interests was a desire
to preserve the primitive Andalusian
music called deep song.
A term you may be familiar with, although many of us
have misunderstood it.
It is the song whose sound came out
of the church's adoption of Byzantine liturgical chants,
arrival in Spain of bands and gypsies around this time.
According to the great composer, Manuel de Falla,
whose music you heard earlier, it's
a music that's restricted to the reiterative, almost
obsessive use of one note.
A procedure proper to certain formulas of incantation.
Although gypsy melody is rich in ornamental turns,
they're used only at certain moments,
like sudden gusts of wind.
These gypsy songs Lorca tried to save
from being diluted all over the bars and whorehouses of Spain.
They're not merely expressions of emotion,
so much as raw sounds with roots in birdsong
and in the cries of animals.
Just listen to Lorca's gorgeous prose
as he praises not only the strange melodies of deep song
but also the poetry of the gypsies,
a form of deep song in syllabics.
"Deep song", he says, "is truly deep,
deeper than all the wells and seas that around the world,
much deeper than the single present heart that creates it
and the voice that sings it because it's almost infinite.
It comes from remote races, crosses
the graveyard years, and the fronds of parched winds.
It comes from the first sob and the first kiss.
Is this exaggerated?
Or can poetry move us as deeply as life itself can move us.
You will knock at my door, I will never get up to answer.
You will have to hear me cry from outside."
Here it is again.
So pretty, three lines.
"You will knock at my door.
I will never get up to answer.
You will have to hear me cry from outside."
We don't know who the people are,
what the circumstances, whether it's deserved, what door,
where's the door, just three lines.
Very beautiful.
Here's some more.
This is for lines.
He's really going out of his way now.
"I'm not afraid to row.
If I wanted to row, I would do it,
I'm just afraid of the wind that comes out of your bay."
From the marvel of the deep song, elemental
and repetitious, Lorca prophesies
of atonal music, synthetic music, combinations of Eastern
and Western scales, and loop music in grand poetic metaphor.
Next to the idea of deep song, like a brother nearby in bed,
or nearby in one's thoughts, is the Spanish concept
of the duende, a physical presence, not a feeling.
As Lorca presents it, duende is a power.
It is a struggle.
Because Catholic Spain is a country open to death,
as Lorca claims, everywhere else death is an end.
Death comes and they draw the curtains.
But not in Spain.
In Spain, they open the curtains.
Many Spaniards live in doors until the day they
die and are taken out into the sunlight.
"A dead man," he says, "in Spain is
more alive as a dead man than anyplace else in the world."