Yerma

Lorca in 1914

Theatre is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair. FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA

I adore the theatre but hardly ever seem to go there these days. Which is why it was such a treat to see a staging of Lorca's Yerma in the West Yorkshire Playhouse the other evening. I'd seen the play before - at Manchester's  Royal Exchange in 2003 - and was impressed by its soaring lyricism and passionate intensity. This new production by Róisín McBrinn was equally engaging. McBrinn is an Irish director, born in Dublin, and the dialogue was spoken in Irish accents throughout. Surprising, you might think, for a play set in the heart of Spanish Andalusia. However, this transposition from rural Spain to rural Ireland did work well. Just consider the universal parallels between the two societies (particularly eighty years ago when Lorca was writing): Catholic repression, a traditional macho-male and subordinate-female hierarchy, rigid sexual mores, malicious village gossip. All these themes intermingle in this intense and poetic play.

The plot tells the story of Yerma, a childless woman desperate to have a child ('yerma' means 'barren' in Spanish). Yerma becomes increasingly alienated from her husband, Juan, who is more interested in tending his fields than responding to her psychic and sexual needs. She rejects the luke-warm advances of Victor, the love of her childhood, as she believes in keeping faith with her marriage. Finally, still childless, estranged from most of the gossiping and abundantly fertile women of the village, and descending deeper and deeper into mental turmoil, if not madness, she strangles her husband. Put prosaically like this, it sounds ridiculous. But, caught up as a member of the audience in the lyrical beauty and passion of this play, you are considerably moved by the emotional drama and Yerma's ever more plangent laments.

Kate Stanley-Brennan played a compelling Yerma - barefoot on an almost bare stage. Above the boards hung a large tilting disc, which stood for the sun and the moon in turn, and also seemed to symbolise a womb and a Catholic communion wafer and probably other things too. As well as the troubling, dominating forces of Catholic dogmatism, primitive superstition and male chauvinism (making of Yerma an existential outsider figure with nowhere to go), I also detected an even more sinister and prescient undertow to the play: for in 1936, only two years after Yerma was written, Franco's conservative Nationalists - supported by the Church - attacked the socialist Republican government. This was the start of the Spanish Civil War with its horrendous atrocities and executions - leading to the establishment of Franco's authoritarian regime in Spain which lasted well into the 1970s.

Lorca's other two rural tragedies, Blood Wedding and The House Of Bernarda Alba, are two more examples of his passionate and poetic art brought to the stage. Do see them if you ever have the opportunity.

Lorca was assassinated in 1936 at the outset of the Spanish Civil War. The circumstances of his death are shrouded in mystery: some think his murder had as much to do with homophobia as it had with politics. He was only thirty-eight years old.

Nouvelle 55: Dawn After The Wreck



JMW TURNER Dawn After The Wreck (1840)

It ended badly:
the sextant smashed,
the rocks rearing,
the storm’s screaming furies,
the ship lashed and wrecked.

Later, an insubstantial watery dawn,
with little trace of those few dark hours:
only some ragged clouds,
a worn-out, ravaged sea,
both sand and sky opaquely mirroring
a troubled calm,
a dog
howling at the crescent moon.

(This is my attempt at a nouvelle 55, a piece of flash fiction written in only 55 words and based on a work of art. Thanks to Ruth over at synch-ro-ni-zing for the inspiration! For an explanation of what flash fiction or micro fiction is read this.) 

Lawrence: Firebrand And Feminist

My heart soared when I read Rachel Cusk's eulogy to DH Lawrence in yesterday's Guardian Review. Can  a writer ever have been more reviled, misrepresented and misunderstood? I clearly remember having heated arguments about him with ardent German feminist teachers in the early 1970s (I was a student teacher in Frankfurt at the time). They seemed convinced Lawrence was a filthy-minded male chauvinist pig. Never in history could a particular literary view have been further from the truth. His writing is nearer to the sacred than the smutty. He's male, certainly, but in The Rainbow and Women In Love - his two greatest novels - he reveals himself not as a chauvinist but actually as a proto-feminist.

Long-standing readers of this blog will know how highly I rate Lawrence in my own personal pantheon of artists. Lawrence was a ground-breaking, revolutionary writer in his subject matter, in the way he wrote and in the language which he used. And in The Rainbow he documented the end of the Victorian era and the birth of the modern age in a manner so brilliantly original that no one else, in my opinion, came close to rivalling it.

One of the things I love most about his style is how he juxtaposes the spiritual and the earthy, and marries a kind of ecstatic, Biblical, mystical language with a more modern tone of rawness, exactness, almost brusqueness. He rejects those emblematic, 'universal' characters we encounter so often in Victorian fiction, and champions a more rounded and rough-edged individuality. He rescues the sensual body from its rigidly intellectual Victorian straitjacket and sets it free. He sees the future of women as one of liberation from drudgery, domestication and male domination, and envisions for them a new world of education, meaningful work and independence of thought. Much of his fiction explores this excitingly fresh emotional relationship between men and emancipated women. Though, at the same time, his view about the modern era is complex - for he's also pessimistic about growing industrialisation and our subsequent alienation from nature and agrarian life.

Cusk quotes this passage from the opening pages of The Rainbow. I think it captures well the lyrical muscularity and provocative intensity of Lawrence's writing: They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds' nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and inter-relations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were shorn away. The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it. Anyone else detect stylistic echoes of the King James Bible here?

It's a term to be used sparingly, but I would have no hesitation in calling Lawrence a 'genius'. One of the things I find most remarkable and inspiring about him is how he achieved artistic greatness from such humble origins: his father was a miner and he was brought up in an ordinary Nottinghamshire mining town. (Pretty much all the leading literary figures of his day - many of whom he later got to know - were from highly educated, upper-middle-class backgrounds.) And instead of disguising or rejecting his working class roots (though it must be said his mother had been a schoolmistress, and was far more educated than his barely literate father), he celebrated them through the vitality and imaginative power of his writing.

Rachel Cusk ends her article like this: But Lawrence possessed the bitter knowledge born of his own experience: that originality and truth will always meet with rejection by the common mind. It was to the individual that he addressed himself, for it is as individuals that we recognise truth, and as individuals that we read. This is why Lawrence was a writer; and why reading him remains a subversive, transformative, life-altering act.

(A two-part adaptation of The Rainbow and Women In Love will be broadcast on BBC4 on Thursday 24 and 31 March.)

Perigee Moon

Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth. BUDDHA

Tonight we returned home at 7 pm after visiting our son and his girlfriend. Before going indoors we looked to the east and saw a huge, blood-red moon beaming through trees just above the horizon. It was fantastic. Now, at 9 pm, the moon has climbed higher in the sky, and has diminished in scale, returning to radiant white - but it still seems much bigger and brighter than usual.

Checking on the Internet I read that on 19 March 'a full moon of rare size and beauty' will rise in the east at sunset. Apparently it's a super 'perigee' moon, the biggest in almost 20 years (the 'perigee' is the point nearest the earth's centre in the moon's orbit) - and it's at least 14% bigger and 30% brighter than a moon which occurs on its orbital 'apogee' (ie when the moon is furthest from the centre of the earth).

Go take a look!

Being Wrong Is Being Alive

The distance you feel from those around you should trouble you no more than your distance from the farthest stars. RILKE Letters To A Young Poet

One last extract from Being Wrong: Adventures In The Margin Of Error by Kathryn Schulz. Here she quotes Philip Roth:

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be ... and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them: you get them wrong while you're with them and then you get home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misrepresentation. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill equipped are we to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we are alive: we're wrong. PHILIP ROTH American Pastoral

That's how we know we are alive: we're wrong. I wonder if anyone feels the same surge of recognition on reading this as I do? The number of times I have 'got people wrong', and have had to revise my opinion because of a particular bias, prejudice or prejudgement. Sometimes it's hard to read another's mind, hard to come to a properly informed and meditated opinion about someone: so we rely on snap judgements and gut instincts which may be way off the mark (though not always).

And, conversely, no wonder we ourselves often feel unappreciated, misrepresented and misunderstood: for other people have the same problem with us. How easy is it for them to divine our innermost thoughts and feelings, to plunge into our souls? No, not very easy. It's amazing we ever manage to communicate at all. But communicate we do - maybe haphazardly, maybe inadequately, maybe in trial and error: yet always with fresh hope in making that human, empathic connection.   

Positive Negative

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand. PICASSO

One perverse pleasure of art is the pleasure of being lost, in the sense of being confused or in the dark. KATHRYN SCHULZ

Art is an invitation to enjoy ourselves in the land of wrongness. KATHRYN SCHULZ

In the last chapter of her book Being Wrong: Adventures In The Margin Of Error Kathryn Schulz riffs fascinatingly on the close productive relationship betwen error and art. Victorian art and literature focused on recreating the world with as much verisimilitude as possible. But the aftermath of World War I and the arrival of modernism changed all that. At its most extreme, culture had become anarchy, and anarchy culture. Tristan Tzara, the Romanian poet who founded Dadaism, urged his fellow artists: Let us try for once not to be right.

If error is a kind of accidental stumbling into the gap between representation and reality, art is an intentional journey to the same place, Schulz writes. The idea is not new. One hundred years prior to World War I the Romantic poet John Keats embraced the positive value of the irrational, and of error, doubt and uncertainty, in a letter to his brothers which contained this famous passage: ... and it at once struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

I remember the excitement and sense of personal and literary freedom I felt when first reading this momentous remark by Keats about the importance of Negative Capability, this ringing endorsement of subjectivity. Hey, yes - it was OK to experiment, to be unsure, to get things plain wrong from time to time! In other words, to be a human individual, myopic and fallible. Indeed, only out of doubt, questioning and open-mindedness, out of wrongness, does great art emerge, I firmly believe. If an artist knows the right answer from the start, what need of the artistic quest? Keats's idea led me directly to cubism, expressionism, existentialism; to Picasso, Eliot, Virginia Woolf; to the twentieth century, in short.

Schulz goes on to quote the Candian poet Anne Carson - What we engage in when we do poetry is error - and infers from this that Carson means these things: The first is that poetry is made of words, and, as we've seen, words have error built into them from the get-go. Every syllable is a stepping stone across the gap, an effort to explain something (train tracks, thunder, happiness) by recourse to something it is not (a word). The second is that writing, whether of poetry or of anything else, involves a certain amount of getting it wrong, - an awareness that truth is always on the lam, that the instant you think you've got it pinned down on the page, it shimmers, distorts, wiggles away. Last, but possibly most important, I take her to mean that poetry, like error, startles, unsettles, and defies; it urges us towards new theories about old things.

The Transformative Potential Of Being Wrong

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. GANDHI

Some more observations from Kathryn Schulz's terrific book Being Wrong: Adventures In The Margin Of Error - a book in which she defends the freedom to make mistakes and explores the positive side of wrongness. Here she writes that being wrong, if we learn from that state, can transform our life ...

It takes courage to leave our past selves behind. But it takes even more to take some token of them with us as we go: to accept that we have erred, recognize that we have changed, remember with compassion our caterpillar past. As difficult as this can be, the dividends are worth it. 'The main interest in life and work,' said Foucault, 'is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.' Such transformations don't only come about through wrongness, of course - but wrongness is always an opportunity for such transformations.

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning ...

And here she argues that accepting our own fallibility can bring about a greater compassion for ourselves and for others ...

We venture inward, then, for the same reasons we venture out: to fill in the unknown places on the map and correct our misperceptions about what's going on there. In the process, we get to know ourselves better - but, ideally, we also get better selves. The goal of therapy, after all, isn't just to help us understand why we feel and act as we do. It's also to help us change the way we feel and act: to foster a set of beliefs that is less rigid, more functional, and more forgiving, towards ourselves as well as those around us. The same could be said of all the other practices, from prayer to twelve-step programs to Buddhist meditation, that push us to accept our fallibility.Like therapy, and for that matter like travel, these practices help us weather challenges to our worldview with patience, curiosity, and understanding.

This is one of the most powerful ways being wrong can transform us: it can help us become more compassionate people. Being right might be fun but, as we've seen, it has a tendency to bring out the worst in us. By contrast, being wrong is often the farthest thing in the world from fun - and yet, in the end, it has the potential to bring out the best in us. Or rather: to change us for the better.

... a set of beliefs that is less rigid, more functional, and more forgiving, towards ourselves as well as those around us ...

A Literary Smorgasbord

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in! SCHOPENHAUER

A few posts ago I mentioned I'd been reading John Sutherland's 50 literature ideas you really need to know. In his final chapter he writes about 'literary inundation', and reflects on how to deal with the flood of literature and information overwhelming us today. Sutherland guesstimates that in Shakepeare's time there were only about 2000 volumes in print. So the 'well-read' men of his period (few women, sadly) could have read everything worth knowing. Nowadays the amount of printed matter has rocketed to stratospheric proportions. There are 15 million books available on-line thanks to the Google Library Project. Three times as many new books are published each year as were published even as recently as the 1980s. How do we cope with all this stuff?

Sutherland suggests three possible solutions:

1. Just continue to read within the limited area of your own personal 'comfort zone'.

2. Discriminate and rigorously select, if you can, only the 'best' books: the classics, the cream of new writing, the books by the leading 'authorities' in their field.

3. Read, or more accurately surf, the whole ocean of literature. Kind of indiscriminately. Treat it as a vast, ever-to-be-replenished smorgasbord of wonder and delight.

I must say I identify with, and indeed subscribe to, all these three strategies:

1. I'm at home with my own literary likes and dislikes - liking above all poetry, fiction and travel; and biographical, philosophical and spiritual books. I like things that are authentic, well-written, inspirational. I don't like money-making celebrity autobiographies, self-promoting and self-excusing political memoirs, manipulative self-help books, dishonest bestsellerdom-seeking non-books, badly written genre novels.

2. As you get older, you have to discriminate somehow. There just isn't the time to read everything. In fact we can only ever read a tiny fraction of even the good stuff out there. I do read and love the classics - and, my God, there are so many more to read - and I do read some book reviews (particularly in Saturday's Guardian). These reviews inform me about what is potentially my bag, what may be important, what I can afford to disregard.

3. This appeals to me: the vast, suck-it-and-see smorgasbord approach to literature. Of course, it risks superficiality, dilettantism, a knowing-a-little-about-a-lot mentality. However, I think that by keeping a broad and open-minded attitude you can encounter surprising, unexpected treasures - gems you would not have come across had you simply kept within your own literary 'comfort zone' or stuck only to the classics.

Some books I've read fast (Julian Barnes: Before She Met Me), some I've read slow (Tolstoy: War And Peace), some I dip into all the time (The Penguin Krishnamurti Readers), others I dip into now and then (Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters), and many above me here on the shelf I fear I'll never read at all. Does it matter? Not a lot, probably.

Though I really do love a good book. It's one of the joys of my life. I've just begun Gerald Brenan's South From Granada, which is shaping up to be the best book on Spain I've ever read ...

I wonder how all of you deal with this age of over-information and superabundant expression?

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

WH DAVIES

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no notes or coins to spare?

No time to stand in B & Q,
(As if we'd better things to do):

No time to see, when shops we pass,
Where markets 'educate' the mass:

No time to see, in neon light,
Stores full of dross and tat and shite:

No time to turn at Xmart's glance,
And watch her pornographic dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Open the purse of any man?

A poor life this, if full of care,
We have no time for better ware.

THE SOLITARY WALKER

To Err Is To Wander

I err therefore I am. AUGUSTINE The City Of God

In her brilliant and thought-provoking book Being Wrong: Adventures In The Margin Of Error (2010) Kathryn Schulz claims that it's an inherent part of the human condition to err, to make mistakes, to get things wrong much of the time; and she explains - physiologically, psychologically and philosophically - why this is so. We have only to reflect a little to realise that we seem to get things wrong far more often than we get them right.

Consider the unreliable evidence of our senses, the compensatory mechanisms of the brain, the subjective nature of memory (there's a lot of scientific evidence showing how we embellish and grossly distort our memories, even making them up completely - yet we still manage to convince ourselves that they are absolutely true).

Scientists are wrong rather than right in their hypotheses most of the time - indeed, that's the nature of the scientific method. When a theory is apparently 'proved' to be 'true' and beyond all reasonable doubt, it's often overturned and superseded at some later date: look, for instance, at all the various historical conjectures about the creation and makeup of the universe.

And just dwell for a moment on all our great religions, philosophies, ideologies and belief systems. They can't all be right, can they? Indeed, are any of them right? (And what about Iraq's WMD? Were Bush and Blair right about them? Absolutely - and catastrophically - not.) The list of our mistakes and errors, false beliefs and failures of perception, is endless, and will carry on being added to forever.

The more we think about it, the more we realise there's not much we can point to as an example of pure, objective, certain knowledge; pretty much all we think we know we actually only feel we know. We live according to all-too-fallible constructs of trust and belief, and these beliefs are often misguided and shakily rooted. Yet we cling to these beliefs in unwavering certainty of their rectitude.

However, paradoxically, our constant falling into error can also bring insight, illumination and understanding. Rather than error being a shaming, embarrassing, negative thing, Schulz argues that it's both necessary and inevitable, that it can be salutory, even noble. In this extract from her book she writes fascinatingly about the origin of the word 'error':

In ancient Indo-European, the ancestral language of nearly half of today's global population, the word er meant 'to move', 'to set in motion', or simply 'to go'. (Spanish speakers will recognize it as ir.) That root gave rise to the Latin verb errare, meaning to wander or, more rakishly, to roam. The Latin, in turn, gave us the English word 'erratic', used to describe movement that is unpredictable or aimless. And, of course, it gave us 'error'. From the beginning, then, the idea of error has contained a sense of motion: of wandering, seeking, going astray. Implicitly, what we are seeking - and what we have strayed from - is the truth.

Schulz goes on to consider the idea of the knight errant - Galahad, Gawain, Lancelot, Don Quixote - then concludes Part One of her book with this inspiring paragraph:

To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying, but in the end it is static, a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling, and sometimes even dangerous, but in the end it is a journey, and a story. Who really wants to stay home and be right when you can don your armor, spring up on your steed and go forth to explore the world? True, you might get lost along the way, get stranded in a swamp, have a scare at the edge of a cliff; thieves might steal your gold, brigands might imprison you in a cave, sorcerers might turn you into a toad - but what of that? To fuck up is to find adventure: it is in that spirit that this book is written.

Canaan's Land

The lovely Kate Rusby, one of England's most beloved contemporary folk singers and songwriters, singing Canaan's Land.

The sixties were an era that spoke a language of inquiry and curiosity and rebelliousness against the stifling and repressive political and social culture of the decade that preceded it. The new generation causing all the fuss was not driven by the market: we had something to say, not something to sell.

SUZE ROTOLO (The last paragraph from her wonderful memoir of the 1960s, A Freewheelin' Time)

Farewell Suze Rotolo (1943-2011)