The Deep Song of Our Lives by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz, Nov. 8, 2009

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Story for All Ages

         Do you believe stones can talk?

        Wait! I think this stone is saying something! What’s that? It wants to talk to the children.

        Can you hear?

        “Dear children,” it is saying. “I want to tell you about my life. “For a long time I was buried in the earth. For many, many years.”

        What’s that?

         “The happiest I was, was when I was the roof on the nest of some ants!”

        Imagine that! This stone was the roof on a home for ants!

        “The ants thought I was the sky!” Isn’t that amazing? But I suppose if you are born an ant and you grow up an ant in the same nest underground, that what’s over your head is the sky, and that was this stone!

        “The ants were so certain that I was the sky that I believed it myself!”

        Oh stone. You thought you were the sky!

        “Now I know that I am only a stone, and this memory is my secret. Don’t tell it to anyone.”

         OK – we won’t tell it to anyone!

The Deep Song of Our Lives by Rev. Mary Ganz Nov. 8, 2009

        Her daughters are weeping, grieving the death of their father, but Bernarda Alba sweeps onto the stage and demands, “SILENCIO!” She screams it again at the end – “SILENCE!” – to keep the truth from being spoken.

        This play, “The House of Bernarda Alba,” was completed by Federico Garcia Lorca just two months before his own voice was silenced, by bullets. He was assassinated by Fascist Forces in Spain in 1936, as the Spanish Civil War was just beginning. Thereafter his works were banned in Spain, and the circumstances of his death were kept secret for 40 years by the regime of Francisco Franco.

        Lorca’s life and death were bound in the politics of his time, yet he himself was not a political man. He was, in his brother’s words, “a man whose nature was to love and be loved.” Of himself, he said, “I have no vocation other than the emotions of things.”

        Why was this gentle poet, this “magical and golden” man – those are the words of the poet Pablo Neruda – what made him so dangerous?

        The story I told earlier – the one about the stone that thought it was the sky -- that was one of Lorca’s stories. He told it to some children on a beach once when he was on a holiday with the painter Salvador Dali.

        Why would the Fascist army want to kill a man who makes up fanciful stories for children? – a man who draws fanciful drawings, like the one on the cover of our Order of Service?

        Lorca has been in the news this week. People in Spain, like people our civil rights accompaniers meet in Guatemala and like people in so many places in the world that have seen horrific violence, are on a search to end the silence – to unearth the truth of loved ones who disappeared so many years ago. Last week the state went digging for Lorca’s bones, and whatever is found in that tragic mass grave in the olive grove, I believe there are lessons for us today in Lorca’s life, his poetry, and his death. In this decade, in post-9/11 America, new plays have been written on the subject of Lorca, and as Anna Deveare Smith said, theater is “life made urgent.” It is more than coincidence that these plays arose during the years our country was undergoing what the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history” – including torture, Guantanamo, and spying on Americans under the Patriot Act. I believe Americans will be digging for the truth of these times, perhaps into the next century.

        Lorca’s life spanned the brief peace between the Spanish-American War and the Spanish Civil War. There is an excellent video about his life on our new website, if you want to know more. Briefly: he was born in 1898, just as Spain’s colonial empire was ending. He was the eldest child of landowners in rural Andalusia, in the south of Spain; when he was 10, the family moved to Granada, the Andalusian capital. He grew up in the shadow of the Alhambra, palace of the Islamic dynasty that ruled the south of Spain for 800 years.

        1492 is a date that every American schoolchild knows, of course, and when Lorca was growing up, every child in Granada knew it too. It was the Spanish monarchs who financed Columbus’ journey to the New World. And in the same year that Columbus began the conquest and subjugation of native peoples on this continent, Ferdinand and Isabella’s armies marched into Granada, conquering the last Muslim stronghold in Europe. Just a few months later, the newly unified Spanish monarchy ordered all the Jews in Spain – 20,000 of them who had lived in peaceful coexistence with the Muslim rulers of Anadalusia – to convert, or leave. Soon after, the Inquisition began its brutal work enforcing that order.

        It is impossible to overstate the impact of this hideous history on Lorca’s thinking and his poetry. The memory of exile – the Jews and Moors who were driven away, the Roma people who were oppressed -- broods over that green land, and this is why we sang the great Jewish psalm of exile, “By the Waters of Babylon,” this morning. Children in Granada were taught 1492 as a high watermark for Spanish nationalism. Lorca, like many children of the wealthy, was raised by gypsy nursemaids who sang songs of exile by his crade. Unlike most children of the landed classes, Federico did not forget them once he was grown.

        Later, when he visited New York as a struggling poet, he would connect most strongly with African Americans living in Harlem under American apartheid. Being from Granada, he would say then, gave him a “deep fellow feeling for all those who suffer. Thy Gypsy, the Black, the Jew, the converted Moor, that we all carry inside.”

        Lorca’s poetry – that “deep song” from the center of one’s being – channels the experience of exile, of anguish, of the excluded other. Could it be this that made him a danger to the state?

        The poet had startling empathy with the lives of women. In “The House of Bernarda Alba,” he writes about social conventions that confined the sexuality of women. We can only imagine how difficult life must have been for Lorca, a gay man living in early 20th Century Spain, the land of machismo. Lorca believed that humans’ only chance at happiness was in “living one’s instinctual life to the full,” and this he was not able to do openly. Lorca would have agreed with Martin Luther King: “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

        Lorca adored the surrealist painter, Savador Dali. He was drawn to Dali’s rebelliousness, his absolute disregard of convention. Dali, he said, was “consumed by desire / for an eternity with boundaries.” It’s a phrase that could apply equally well to Lorca and his poetry. Could this be why he was so very dangerous to the state? The idea that humans could reach for “an eternity with boundaries” resists the commodification of identity which is so much a part of our media-bounded lives.

        I discovered Lorca’s poetry about a dozen years ago, when I stumbled across an idea that is at the center of his work, and of all the Andalusian traditional arts, especially the flamenco music that Manuel played for us today. “Duende.” There is no precise English translation for “duende.” In literature it is a trickster kind of spirit; in the performing arts, it is the fire in the belly that, shared between performer and audience, makes a performance wholly unique and unforgettable. Duende is a struggle, not a thought, Lorca wrote; it is the spirit of the earth coming up through the soles of a dancer’s feet. It is more than muse, more than angel. It is a state of aliveness so absolute that it includes the very presence of death, or of the possibility of death. The only way to court it, Lorca would say, is to make oneself fully vulnerable.

        In Spain, Lorca tells us, the dead are more alive than they are anywhere else. When a family member dies, the body is not whisked away to funeral home or crematorium, but allowed to remain at home as long as possible. As the years go by, the dead are spoken to, included, thought of as spirits inhabiting the world and creating within us a sense of melancholy and longing. A little of this consciousness comes through the Mexican “Dia de los Muertos” celebrated last week; a little less comes through our own American Hallowe’en. It is important to see, though, that Lorca was not romanticizing death, and neither am I. As a minister I know that death, when it comes, is often not beautiful. No, Lorca was open to the presence of death because he wanted his poetry and his life to be “truly wideawake,” with “beauty and horror and the ineffable and the repugnant” existing side by side, knocking against each other in the midst of a passionate gaiety.

        I think this is why I feel so attracted to Lorca’s poetry. I want my life and heart to include it all, too. I want to be able to speak and hear the truth, even when it hurts like hell. I want this, and I’m afraid of it. In the family I grew up in, there was a long list of things we couldn’t speak about. Race. Sex. The inequities so visible to children that are woven into the social fabric. Death.

        We Americans have a death- and loss-denying culture. We keep our grief private, locked in a closet, and put on a happy face when we walk out the door. We’re like Woody Allen. We aren’t afraid of death; we just don’t want to be there when it happens. No, we joke about it. Stave it off – stave it off with botox and extraordinary medical measures. Pretend that “reality” is a television game about eating worms, not about being eaten by them. if you are president during the early days of a worldwide epidemic, as was Ronald Reagan, let seven years go by before you even speak the name of the disease that is killing so many young men. Later, as the death toll mounts in Africa, ignore the science and refuse to fund programs that mention the word, “condom.” More recently: Don’t show the coffins coming back from war; show the commander-in-chief in a flight suit on the deck of a war machine. In the context of this painful recent history, President Obama’s symbolic flight to Delaware in the middle of the night two weeks ago, to salute the bodies of American soldiers coming home from Afghanistan, was deeply moving to me.

        Lorca’s poetry screams against suppression of life, death, truth. I wonder, is showing the whole of life – including the deep song of our anguish – might this be dangerous to tyrants?

        In Lorca’s last play, Bernarda Alba locks her mother up in a room, because the old one is losing her inhibition and beginning to speak the truth. Bernarda lives angry and afraid. She curses the village, which she says is “full of wells where you drink, always afraid the water’s been poisoned.” Today, we would add, “by terrorists.”

        Lorca finished this play just before the Spanish Civil War began. For months the Fascist party had been imitating Hitler’s brownshirts, intentionally creating civil disorder and stirring up middle class fear, setting the stage for a coup that would seem to be necessary to restore “law and order.” This was the war that Hemingway, Orwell and Picasso paid homage to in some of their greatest works. When it began in 1936, it was seen as a dress rehearsal for the conflict that was soon to sweep all of Europe.

        In an age when many young intellectuals in his circle were joining the Communist party, Lorca declined. He was not a political man, he said, but then again, he did own that he was a revolutionary – in the same way, he said, that “all true poets, including Jesus Christ, are revolutionary.”

        Well, he couldn’t be allowed to live, either.

        Federico Garcia Lorca was arrested on August 16th, 1936, a month after the Civil War began. Two or three days later – no one is certain of the date – he was taken out and shot, in a grove of olive trees, by a spring named Fountain of Tears. He was 38 years old.

        The men who killed him and the men who ordered him killed are silent now, silent and largely forgotten. But on the 100th anniversary of Lorca’s birth, thousands of copies of his poems were dropped from the sky all over Spain.

        In post 9/11 America, Lorca’s life presents a dangerous choice: between a world of militarized commodification, and the Kingdom of Poetry, where we are, in Lorca’s words, “anointed with love for all things.” It’s a revolutionary idea.

        Can we allow it to live inside us?

        What will you choose? Will you make the revolutionary choice, and allow yourself to be “anointed with love for all things?” Go in peace; hold the question inside you. Know that you are held by a Love that will not let you go.

Manuel Vicens plays Spanish Guitar Music to Lorca Inspired Dance

Watch: La Solea in Spanish and the Stone Story in English

Rev. Ganz Reads Lorca's "Solea" in English

Sermon Excerpt: Deep Song of Our Lives

• Nilo Cruz, Lorca in a Green Dress
• Ian Gibson, Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life
• The poetry and writings of Federico Garcia Lorca

Wikipedia Entry on Lorca

Watch Video Documentary

Poet Robert Creeley Reads Lorca

Leonard Cohen Sings Lorca