Another fine voice gone, a fiery liquid, and a Lorca quote or two
[ by Charles Cameron — Whitney Houston, RIP, Rumi, a broken reed, Federico Garcia Lorca, the duende ]
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Live performance — Whitney Houston singing Amazing Grace.
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Blog-friend Peter J Munson just recently tweeted this quote:
“Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead”
That’s from the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, from an essay of his that I remembered vividly when I heard the other day that Whitney Houston had died. I wrote, then:
So Whitney Houston has died, far earlier than one might have wished, and the question comes up again whether some gifts essentially “demand” a life that breaks one — as though there’s a liquid inside the anger, the pain, the hurt, that must be set free for the voice to sing.
I didn’t post that here, because it felt at the time a little too private — but Peter Munson’s quote from Lorca reminds me that I followed up that observation about the “liquid” with this:
My sense that there might be “a liquid inside the anger, the pain, the hurt, that must be set free for the voice to sing” comes from the way her voice breaks, and breaks again, as she’s singing “a wretch like me” — from about 1’45” with the liquid finally spilling at 1’51″….
in the Amazing Grace video above…
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If you’re interested in the background to that idea of mine about the liquid, I’ll admit to two sources here — the first is Jalaluddin Rumi, who compares himself in the opening of his Masnavi with a reed, severed from its roots in the marshes to become a flute:
“Ever since I was cut off from my reed-bed, men and women all have lamented my bewailing. I want a breast torn asunder by severance, that I may fully declare the agony of yearning. Every one who is sundered far from his origin longs to recapture the time when he was united with it. In every company I have poured forth my lament, I have consorted alike with the miserable and the happy: each became my friend out of his own surmise, none sought to discover the secret in my heart. My secret indeed is not remote from my lament, but eye and ear lack the light to perceive it. Body is not veiled from soul, nor soul from body, yet to no many is leave given to see the soul.
As Rumi himself comments:
This cry of the reed is fire, it is not wind; whoever possesses not this fire, let him be naught!
My second source, echoing to us perhaps from the Cordoba of the Sufis, is Garcia Lorca, in his astounding essay, Theory and Play of the Duende — from which these paragraphs, like Peter Munson’s quote, are torn:
Once, the Andalusian ‘Flamenco singer’ Pastora Pavon, La Niña de Los Peines, sombre Spanish genius, equal in power of fancy to Goya or Rafael el Gallo, was singing in a little tavern in Cadiz. She played with her voice of shadows, with her voice of beaten tin, with her mossy voice, she tangled it in her hair, or soaked it in manzanilla or abandoned it to dark distant briars. But, there was nothing there: it was useless. The audience remained silent.
In the room was Ignacio Espeleta, handsome as a Roman tortoise, who was once asked: ‘Why don’t you work?’ and who replied with a smile worthy of Argantonius: ‘How should I work, if I’m from Cadiz?’
In the room was Elvira, fiery aristocrat, whore from Seville, descended in line from Soledad Vargos, who in ’30 didn’t wish to marry with a Rothschild, because he wasn’t her equal in blood. In the room were the Floridas, whom people think are butchers, but who in reality are millennial priests who still sacrifice bulls to Geryon, and in the corner was that formidable breeder of bulls, Don Pablo Murube, with the look of a Cretan mask. Pastora Pavon finished her song in silence. Only, a little man, one of those dancing midgets who leap up suddenly from behind brandy bottles, sarcastically, in a very soft voice, said: ‘Viva, Paris!’ as if to say: ‘Here ability is not important, nor technique, nor skill. What matters here is something other.’
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