“All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present.” - Federico García Lorca "When we acknowledge duende, when we allow … Continue reading Arts require a living body to interpret them: Lorca on Duende
The Secret Alchemy of Poetry – Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be “the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world” 1—and he considers the faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in…
View original post 952 more words
The Theory and Play of Duende – Federico García Lorca
In his brilliant lecture entitled “The Theory and Play of Duende” Federico García Lorca attempts to shed some light on the haunting and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art.
“All that has dark sound has duende”, he says, “that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain. […] All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The…
View original post 4,535 more words
The use of Nature imagery in the works of Federico Garcia Lorca
One of the most-viewed posts on my blog
Federico Garcia Lorca
In his Ode to Walt Whitman, Lorca asks “Whose perfect voice will sing the truths of wheat?”
Throughout the poem, he is lamenting the absence of men of the calibre of the “lovely Walt Whitman”. The truths of wheat… Federico Garcia Lorca uses symbolic, nature imagery throughout his work.
Whilst addressing sexuality in his Ode to Walt Whitman – he and Whitman were both homosexual – Lorca is here also addressing the hypocrisy of what is considered natural and unnatural.
He writes of the world of industry:
“Ninety thousand miners taking silver from the rocks
and children drawing stairs and perspectives.
But none of them could sleep,
none of them wanted to be the river,
none of them loved the huge leaves
or the shoreline’s blue tongue”
It is a theme he explored often; human sexuality, morality, and how people either deny themselves, or indulge themselves…
View original post 315 more words
Santiago de Compostela – Iacchus and The Green Language of the Camino – Ars, Arte et Labore
Innumerable and symbolic personalities: the Crow and the Swan, the Lion and the Dragon, the King and the Queen, etc., each of which poses their particular enigma for him to solve. It is only after having understood the secret meaning of these symbols that the pilgrim will finally see rise, shining in the heart of … Continue reading Santiago de Compostela – Iacchus and The Green Language of the Camino – Ars, Arte et Labore
The Language of Birds in Old Norse Tradition
Reblog re The Language of the Birds, The Green Language
Special individuals capable of understanding the language of birds are spread throughout the medieval Icelandic literary corpus.This phenomenon has received surprisingly little academic attention and is deserving of detailed, extensive, and interdisciplinary study.Capable of flight and song, birds universally hold a special place in human experience. Their effective communication to people in Old Norse lore offers another example of their unique role in humanity’s sociocosmic reality.
Huginn and Muninn sit on Odin’s shoulders in an illustration from an 18th century Icelandic manuscript
Birds consistently offer important information to individuals associated with kingship and wisdom. The wide chronological and geographical range of this motif will be explored as well as the fascinating theoretical questions regarding why birds are nature’s purveyors of wisdom. With their capacity to fly and sing, birds universally hold a special place in human experience as symbols of transcendence and numinous knowledge; Old Norse tradition reflects this…
View original post 28 more words
The Language of the Birds and the Book of Thoth.
Reblogging a few old posts on The Language of the Birds & The Green Language
My interest in the esoteric began in earnest when I was studying Egyptology and came across some literature from the Ptolemeic period of Ancient Egypt; stories about one of the sons of Ramesses II, who had lived centuries earlier. This prince, Khaemwaset, was already a fascinating historical character, as among other major works, he had overseen the founding of an important library in honour of his father, (the Ramesseum) and restored several pyramid complexes, including those at Giza which were already a couple of thousand years old when he was alive, and has led to him being hailed as the world’s first archaeologist, historian, and restorer of monumental architecture. So to discover that he should have been immortalised in stories as being the greatest magician that ever lived, in having discovered the Book of Thoth, and having travelled to the Underworld while still alive, suggests an oral history…
View original post 546 more words
The Bone Setter of Anglesey: the mystery of the shipwrecked boy of 1745 and his legacy
In the 18th Century, a mystery boy who could not speak a word of Welsh or English washed up in Anglesey after a shipwreck - and helped to revolutionise Western medicine with never-seen-before bone-setting skills. The boy was one of two who found themselves the only survivors of a shipwreck off the north Anglesey coast, … Continue reading The Bone Setter of Anglesey: the mystery of the shipwrecked boy of 1745 and his legacy
The Uncanny Art of Léon Spilliaert via Apollo Magazine, with link to virtual tour of current exhibition at Royal Academy of Arts
From Apollo Magazine 25/03/2020 It is the sense of the uncanny working hand in glove with the familiar that sets Spilliaert apart from Symbolist precursors such as Edvard Munch or Odilon Redon. Spilliaert was close to the Belgian Symbolist poets in his younger years. In 1903 he was commissioned to illustrate by hand the publisher … Continue reading The Uncanny Art of Léon Spilliaert via Apollo Magazine, with link to virtual tour of current exhibition at Royal Academy of Arts
The allegory of the Cave of the Nymphs in the Thirteenth Book of Homer’s Odyssey
"High at the head a branching olive grows And crowns the pointed cliffs with shady boughs. A cavern pleasant, though involved in night, Beneath it lies, the Naiades delight: Where bowls and urns of workmanship divine And massy beams in native marble shine; On which the Nymphs amazing webs display, Of purple hue and exquisite … Continue reading The allegory of the Cave of the Nymphs in the Thirteenth Book of Homer’s Odyssey
Nehalennia
Nehalennia is known from more than 160 votive altars, which were almost all discovered in the Dutch province of Zeeland.
Ars, Arte et Labore 
You must be logged in to post a comment.