Where are we going?

The future development of Mythico-Ritual axes more complex than those of Human Law (the one we are living in) seems to point to narratives of open identity for different social, individual and collective masks. The history of our myths is the general narrative of the emergence of social personae, their associations and conflicts, in growing circles of action that have given rise to new identity masks. On this journey, Humans cross thresholds of identity transformation, liminal moments in which old identity masks are left behind and replaced by new ones more harmonious with the vital experience of the present. These moments of paleopsychology have been reflected in traditional mythical narratives. A fascinating moment in our development occurred when we stopped sacrificing on the altars of the Gods in search of a more Universal and unified principle on which to base the Universe.

In a hymn from the Rigveda (I.170), the god Indra, lord of the storm, dialogues with the rishi Agastya, and reproaches him for his intention of going beyond him, of not considering him as the final exomorphic representation of the Universe: the Supramental Intellect. It is a reflection on the limits of the King-God narratives, and the symbolic need to construct increasingly more complex myths, in this case, those of Universal Law, in order to give meaning to the experience of the Universe. The hymn expresses deep epistemological content from the start. The God Indra speaks:

Why, O my brother Agastya, art thou my friend, yet settest thy thought beyond me? For well do I know how to us thou willest not to give thy mind. (Mandala I.170)

The text has different layers of interpretation. I am not going to analyze here the epistemological reason for Indra's reproach, but only to show the threshold that the seer Agastya crosses from the anthropological point of view. The steps towards a materialization of human life, a final grounding in the physical human experience, follow the path towards the monism of the Universal Law that will open up the way to philosophy first and then to science. Indra asks Agastya why does he want to beyond him, beyond the Old Pantheon that proved to be so fruitful. The social context is the power dispute between the priestly and warrior castes in the first Vedic period (beginning in India around 1500 BC), when royal power begins to establish itself. The old myths are insufficient to organize the new economic actions that the Aryans carry out in the Gangetic plain, for which a more universal principle is needed but mantaining the basic social structures in order to avoid chaos.

The pastoral myths of Indra in the Rigveda do not include agrarian rebirth, and only later, with the Upanishads, will an ethical theory of dharma and reincarnation be developed that unifies the moral and natural order. The emergence of Universal Law, which absorbs the myth of Indra and the storm gods into a more complex symbolic representation, as at the time the myths of the creator-king-god absorbed the emotional constructions of meaning elaborated in the narrative planes of the anima mundi, meant the emergence of a semantic reference on which new, more complex forms of mythical axes were based. However the turbulent threshold of change threatens to produce a collapse.

In the Hymn of the Rigveda, Agastya finally understands that he cannot dismiss the past as an error at a stroke and agrees to continue on the path of Swar, an intellect that balances the world of life experience on earth and the world of the unintelligible and unknown that represents the principle that exists beyond the Gods, Brahman.

Seen from our historical moment, it is a story of identity transformation that sheds light upon our own liminal time. We cannot forget what we have been, nor simply despise the errors and miseries of yesterday, without producing a nihilistic, schizoid and self-repressed person, confronted with life. This type of priestly social person or social mask has already been constructed by the great religions in the figure of the sinful debtor, and proved to be a neurotic mythopoetics. However a total rupture of identity entails a danger of psychological disintegration, at the individual and collective level.

The anima mundi, the gods, universal law, human law, any of these narratives can claim a preferential position within mythopoetic evolution. The totems that populate the animated forests or the prairies, the gods of any of the pantheons that have reigned over the great civilizations, the theorems of mathematics that mimicked the abstract way of being of something invisible, the human will to establish from the earth The conditions of life, with their irrepressible desire to awaken to their own identity, can claim for themselves, as they have, to constitute the greatest achievement of our checkered history. To do so, they have to subordinate or deny the other mythical planes through a narrative of domination directed towards other axes. But in doing so, in separating themselves from the mythopoetic process with absolute determination, they reduce themselves to being no more than a partial achievement. As an alternative we could try something not yet done: a myth of open identity, voluntarily settled in our liminal condition: we are the soul of the world, and the gods themselves - in our best ideals and our darkest nightmares of domination -, and we are the thought of a cosmic order, as well as the desire of the free anthropos who designs his existence with the traces of a human science and an art overflowing with life. The narrative of continuous rationality does not stop at the mythical plane of human law: it opens backwards to common life with other species, and forwards to the semantic emergence of increasingly complex vital scenarios. This continuous process was never up to us, if by us we understand the narrative we have constructed of homo sapiens. It does not seem risky to affirm that if we disappeared as a species, life would once again find paths towards intelligence. In any case, we can contribute with some verses to the poem that life writes about stellar magma, to this action whose blind movements end up generating self-contained fleeting identities, immersed in a deep nostalgia for the Unknown.

Physics and Metaphor

When science steps out of isomorphic functions embraces the misty world of metaphors, for its codomains become under-determined by the structure of the domain and the rule which constitutes the function. Codomains are the epistemological pain in the neck. Say that we construct a function, φ, which pairs a theoretical object with an empirical one. Such epistemological function has proven to be surjective, in  simple terms: is what the duality wave-particle shows. Thus, φ has not inverse, ergo there is not an isomorphism between theory and fisis. Physics is nothing but a well-organized (at best) set of metaphors, useful metaphors projected upon an apeiron by the pseudo-subject of our contemporary science.

The Spanish Narrative of Identity

What is the meaning of being Catalan, or Spanish, or English for that matter? It is evident that the correspondent narratives of political identity express both a particular historical inertia and the very basic need for a group identity in order to function in an economic milieu. Those basic needs have deep roots in human emotional nature and imply old narratives fully equipped with hard metaphysics. And so we heard, in a not too distant past, of a unity of destiny in the universal in relation to Spain, or of a manifest destiny in relation to the British Empire.

A nationality expresses, unavoidably, a set of metaphysical beliefs, for the very concept grew up in the middle of a particular European milieu, linked to particular Institutions. To declare oneself Spanish or Catalan, would be merely the expression of a belief in certain Institutions, a rather accidental question related to the place where one happens to be born or live. However, in modern Europe, and even more so in contemporary EU, the notion of the distinct and unique identity of the people living in one of its territories fails to make sense beyond  local gastronomical variations, and even that has disappeared in the cities. The question of the linguistic differences simply veils the common roots of most of its languages and what is more important, the common roots of its main myths and economic actions both in the European continent and abroad.

The freedom to choose a political identity is a corollary of the Human Rights Declaration. Such statement implies that, somehow, the one that makes the choice has a definite identity previous to the choice, something which in turn implies that there is a unity in such identity, but this is senseless in political terms, and can only be derived from the imposition of a political majority to the rest of a society. Thus, the independence obtained by secession can never be more than an act of violence, and the minority forced to independence is the victim of such aggression. On the other hand, if political unity can only be achieved at the price of repressing the will for a metaphysical self-determination, such unity will be weak and unstable, furthermore will violate fundamental principles of Human Rights.

Will Spain be able to elaborate a new narrative of collective identity that could include the metaphysical aspirations of its different people?  Despite the fact that the EU is failing as a political project, the people of Europe (and Spaniards and Catalans certainly are Europeans) are condemned to understand each other or to succumb to Asia’s momentum.

The Strength of Freedom

In moments when Europe has its fundamental values tested by the recalcitrant narrowness, cruelty and ignorance of religion, I recall Pericles’ Funeral Oration, as recorded by Thucydides, amazed by its relevance: "We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality..." (Perseus Project translation of Peloponnesian War). The barbarians, those that do not believe in the myths of the human law and impose their nightmares to others, are now forcing us to close our borders, and what is worst, to close our minds, and change our beliefs for a dream of security that could never be fully guaranteed. Thus we are caught in a web of terror and lose our identity to a poor and sad trivialization of our democratic political foundations. In liminal times, basic emotions take control over the neocortical enaryzed symbolic constructions that we made with those basic protocols of survival.

The strength of democracy is based on the ideal of freedom. Freedom has not only a transcendental meaning, but is the possibility for the construction of any human meaning for our life. It is related to ends and goals, but not limited by them, for freedom has an instantaneous dimension, a here and now nature which does not postpone, which escapes from the delays of vacant promises. Freedom is thus inextricably related to creation, to poiesis, of the individual and of the social persona of the group, and for that reason is felt strongly in relation to art. However, the creations of freedom are not related to a this or a that, but are instead the processes of unfoldment of our life awareness, the awareness of its limited span and the need for an instantaneous fulfillment of its potentialities, the extension of our individuation into the complete movement of life on earth.

In this fight, psychological individuation is at stake, together with our ideal of a society founded on human law. We cannot have one without the other. Let’s then hold to our ideal of Liberty (political and juridical freedom) for there lies our strength. Our European wealth is not measured by mere physical standards of living, those are the symptoms of a society involved in the transformation of the material milieu, but by the political liberties which allow the grounds for our personal human freedom, our dearest narrative of identity. This means, as Pericles knew, that we have more to lose than our barbarian enemies, and thus, that our involvement in the fighting will not be small.

Fuente Primitiva, Fuente de la Verdad

Es frecuente encontrar en la obra de Lorca alusiones a lo primitivo y arcaico como origen del fundamento, como el lugar donde está depositado el sentido.

Bernarda. Los antiguos sabían muchas cosas que hemos olvidado.[1]

La sabiduría se encuentra en el pasado y el tiempo la desdibuja en el olvido.

Me siento muy lejano de la actual descomposición poética y sueño con un amanecer futuro que tenga la emoción inefable de los cielos primitivos.[2]

El presente es vivido como proceso caótico frente al ordenado y armónico pasado, y el futuro alcanza su significado en la medida que repita la emoción original, la única portadora de sentido.

La intuición del tiempo como algo que se mueve hacia delante, que progresa y cambia hacia lo distinto y lo nuevo con irrefrenable impulso, que va desde el ayer hasta el hoy para después convertirse en un mañana distinto, corresponde a una cosmovisión humana relativamente moderna. Tal intuición es sólo parcialmente refrendada por la física contemporánea, que sobrecargada por la ontología atemporal de la matemática no se decide a declarar en todos los ámbitos de la realidad natural la imagen del tiempo como una flecha irreversible que surca y atraviesa la vida y el universo de parte a parte. Nuestra percepción personal corrobora el cambio y el deterioro, la fugitiva naturaleza del acontecer vital, a la par que notamos el carácter cíclico en el que la línea del tiempo se inscribe, constituyendo una espiral en la que cada ciclo supone una variación de lo anterior, por muy mecánica e ínfima que esta pueda llegar a ser. La idea de ciclo resulta confusa: la repetición difumina el presente, que sólo puede ser entendido desde el pasado. En este sentido, los ciclos se vuelven sobre el pasado, gravitan hacia el ayer, se retiran hacia el depósito de la memoria, no como una flecha temporal inversa, sino como una prolongación indefinida del pasado en el presente y el futuro, como si presente y futuro sólo tuviesen sentido en el pasado. Es interesante observar cómo esta mitologización del tiempo es común a las llamadas sociedades frías[3]. Como fósil epistemológico ha sido recogido por la lengua swahili en sus conceptos de Sasa y Zamani.

En principio, el concepto de Sasa, parecería equivaler al nuestro de presente como lugar donde acontece la experiencia, si bien, se trata de una experiencia no acabada y fijada pues no conlleva aún una valoración, es una experiencia que no ha sido inscrita en la narrativa mítica grupal generadora de sentido. El tiempo se mueve dentro de esta cosmovisión desde el imperfecto Sasa hacia el Zamani, el pasado, si bien un pasado autocontenido que incluye sus propios momentos pasados, presentes y futuros. Sasa es un tiempo microlineal basado en la intuición de cambio producida por la experiencia de las acciones económicas cotidianas, mientras que Zamani es el tiempo narrativo o tiempo mítico en el que surgió el significado para la experiencia. Sasa no sólo está condicionado por, sino que queda aniquilado en el Zamani: lo que acontece en el presente no es sino una mera propuesta de significado, una hipótesis de acción a la espera de ser corroborada y validada por la tradición interpretativa mítica. Hasta cierto punto, Sasa funciona como un buffer de seguridad en el que el carácter impredecible de la experiencia es diferido para su ulterior valoración. Zamani es la temporalidad mítica, una construcción valorativa autocontenida en la que se genera la realidad social y se crean los criterios de verdad. Es en este sentido como creo que debe interpretarse la afirmación lorquiana.

En las poéticas de las sociedades frías, el tiempo mítico de Zamani dinamiza una peculiar concepción espacial y material que unifica el mundo bajo el abarcante concepto de anima, de una fuerza vital que sostiene a todos los seres animados e inanimados, que los produce como particularizaciones suyas. Lorca llamó –confusamente- panteísmo al anima mundi, reconociéndolo como voz fundamental de la poesía arcaica, cuyo arquetipo él cree encontrar en el cante jondo, al cual considera el primitivo canto andaluz.

El cante jondo se acerca al trino del pájaro, al canto del gallo y a las músicas naturales del bosque y la fuente.[4]

Todos los poemas del cante jondo son de un magnífico panteísmo, consulta al aire, a la tierra, al mar, a la luna, a cosas tan sencillas como el romero, la violeta y el pájaro. Todos los objetos exteriores toman una aguda personalidad y llegan a plasmarse hasta tomar parte activa en la acción lírica. [5]

El anima mundi no es una concepción panteísta, al contrario, se trata de un antropomorfismo cósmico como el que encontramos en los mitos de Purusha, Ymir o el Adam Cadmon en el que el universo es visto como un gran ser humano. La consulta de la que habla Lorca es siempre un diálogo con la objetivación humana del universo, hecha posible a partir de la idea de un anima mundi que sintetiza como vida lo orgánico y lo inorgánico en un único movimiento existencial. Como primer eslabón de la cadena generatriz de los seres se encuentra el antepasado-tótem, un primer ser humano andrógino que animó creativamente todos sus vástagos, humanos, animales, plantas, orografía y orbes estelares. El antepasado-tótem, luego identificado con la figura del rey-civilizador, es el que Lorca representa trágicamente en su poema El rey de Harlem, travestido con su traje de conserje, despojado de la dignidad de antepasado, y esclavo en la farsa de la ciudad blanca, una ciudad de violines sin cuerda para un rey de escarchada cabeza que se encuentra atrapado en el Sasa con su tosca cuchara de cocinero.

No obstante, la primitiva fuente, el Zamani que rigen los ritmos de los antepasados, no es en Lorca tanto un objeto de anima mundi como una proyección panteísta, más estética que teológica, que el arte europeo practicó desde finales del siglo XIX sobre los mitos de los pueblos no europeos. Se trata de una estética impregnada de una clara conciencia histórica con pensamiento lineal que nada tiene que ver con el Zamani, aunque mantiene la mística del antepasado-tótem como generador de sentido.

Lorca, siguiendo las ideas de Falla y Pedrell, hará una mitologización del flamenco como antiguo canto andaluz similar en muchos aspectos a la de Yeats, inventando una identidad lírica andaluza que va más allá de las raíces de Al-Andalus para perderse en un pasado meramente mítico. Lorca ve Andalucía como el resultado de un difícil equilibrio entre un Oriente fabuloso y una geometría romana no menos imaginada[6]. El concepto de Volk, traducido por “lo popular” y aplicado directamente a la realidad andaluza, aparece en Lorca importado directamente de Alemania a través de Robert Schumann, vía Falla, si bien en una reconstrucción un tanto alucinada en la que Lorca hace que el compositor ruso Mihail Glinka beba en el sur de España la sabiduría oriental que habrá de cambiar la escena musical europea de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. El concepto de lo popular aplicado a Andalucía como lo hace Lorca presupone una identidad inmutable que procede por debajo de las culturas que han poblado el territorio del sur de España, una raíz más profunda que las lenguas que se han ido superponiendo sobre tal identidad. El sinsentido es tan patente como en el caso alemán, y expresa una ontología esencialista de corte transcendentalista común a las diferentes variantes de los nacionalismos europeos.

La mitologización del primitivismo obedece sin embargo a una queja contra el ultracivilizado y demasiado consciente arte europeo que busca en otras formas compositivas, teóricamente más simples, un ideal de pureza, de vitalidad y de instinto creador perdido, estancados en la densa estructura social que hacía posible el grandilocuente arte europeo. Sin embargo no podemos pensar que se trata simplemente de la vieja disputa sobre el papel de la inteligencia en el arte (que podría ser trazada hasta Platón), en la que la componente de experiencia mística de la estética reclama su autonomía con respecto a la crítica. Lo primitivo, erróneamente pensado como lo popular, o mejor, mitologizado como "lo popular" se convierte en el elemento necesario sobre el que se pretenden fundamentar identidades políticas y económicas nuevas. La fascinación por el arte primitivo no europeo simplemente muestra la exportación de la categoría estético-política, la necesidad de insuflar no sólo al arte sino a la vida social en su conjunto una nueva sabia conceptual vestida de supuestas identidades ancestrales, pero en ningún caso hay una vuelta a un pensar temporal del Zamani.

---

[1] La casa de Bernarda Alba. Acto 3. O.C.A.II.p.1049.

[2] Carta a Melchor Fernández Almagro.Número 6. O.C.A.III. p.716.

[3] Término de Levi-Strauss.

[4] El cante jondo. O.C.A. III. P.197.

[5] Ibid.209.

[6] Como expresa en su Lectura “Romancero Gitano”. OC:A:III p.342.

Antigone

There is an interpretation of the myth of Antigone based on the concept of civil disobedience, i.e. in terms of the tension between myths of the human law and myths of the universal law. Has the universal law or law of the gods (the God) prevalence over human law (civil law)? The question is so confusing that it barely makes sense. Curiously enough the universal law is so embedded in our most basic valuations that we mistake it to express the essential human nature, and feel human law as a mere human all too human appendix of the profane ways of the meaningless modern world. From this point of view, just like Thoreau did by refusing to pay taxes to a Government which condoned slavery, Antigone refused to comply with a law which condemned the corpse of her brother to be the plaything of the crows and a banquet for the dogs. The primitive or metaphysical determination which orders the burial of corpses clashes against the functional or economic determination that denies any entity and identity to the enemies of the city, of the group. Very often ethical problems have no consistent solutions since, like old cities, gather within their walls contradictory codes for action corresponding to different space-time scenarios of the life of the group. And so, Creon and Antigone count both with arguments in favor of their actions.

The myth of the Oedipus saga expresses better than any other Greek myth the implications and contradictions of the narratives of immortality which started under the mythico-ritual axes of the universal law. They are today completely relevant, for the individuation problem has been barely understood. Antigone and her family are the living examples of the precarious nature of individuation, the fragility of the more basic social persona, father, mother, son, etc. which can be tangled in the most confusing way when the dice of the gods rumble freely over the table of the world. Antigone wants for Polyneices, and for herself, the narrative of an identity, only complete and closed at death, but at a meaningful death, a death with a tomb, and a name, a death which fades an existence in the short vibration of the social memory. Tebas wants to dissolve the memory of the Oedipus family in the womb of the earth burying Antigone alive in a cave, where she faces the liminal nature of life: existing betwixt and between light and darkness, flower of one day, a mystery for itself, deprived of a narrative beyond the basic and blind impulses of the animal emotions.