The history of night

Historia de la noche

A lo largo de sus generaciones
los hombres erigieron la noche.
En el principio era ceguera y sueño
y espinas que laceran el pie desnudo
y temor de los lobos.
Nunca sabremos quién forjó la palabra
para el intervalo de sombra
que divide los dos crepúsculos;
nunca sabremos en qué siglo fue cifra
del espacio de estrellas.
Otros engendraron el mito.
La hicieron madre de las Parcas tranquilas
que tejen el destino
y le sacrificaban ovejas negras
y el gallo que presagia su fin.
Doce casas le dieron los caldeos;
infinitos mundos, el Pórtico.
Hexámetros latinos la modelaron
y el terror de Pascal.
Luis de León vio en ella la patria
de su alma estremecida.
Ahora la sentimos inagotable
como un antiguo vino
y nadie puede contemplarla sin vértigo
y el tiempo la ha cargado de eternidad.

Y pensar que no existiría
sin esos tenues instrumentos, los ojos.

-Jorge Luis Borges, found on this site

Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
they sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhuastible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn’t exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

Concierto para bandoneón y orquesta

A piece by Astor Piazzolla. Here is the last movement, though I am not crazy about this particular performance of it. I still think, however, it was the best concerto written in the 20th century.

The Feminine Dyad

At the most fundamental level, the Monad is the Primordial One and the Indefinite Dyad is Primordial Matter, because Prima Materia is the indeterminate, formless, quality-less foundation of all being; She is Sub-stance — She who stands underneath. Like the One, Primordial Matter is ineffable, obscure, dark; therefore They are both called Abyss. Thus, the Goddess of Matter is also called Silence (Sigê), because Silence must precede the Word, the in-forming Logos, embodying the Ideas of the Craftsman. Her role as Mediator between the Father of the Gods and the Demiurge is confirmed by the Chaldean Oracles:

between the Fathers is Hekate’s Center borne.

-John Opsopaus, from A Summary of Pythagorean Theology

On the Popular Canonization of Entertainers

As a follow up from last week’s post, I present to you a few notes on “folk canonization” of singers in Latin America. The first is the already mentioned Carlos Gardel, whose tomb in the Chacarrita cemetery of Buenos Aires is a popular shrine complete with ex-votos thanking the deceased singer for “favors granted”. To be fair, I was reading that such ex-votos only began to appear about thirty years ago, so it may be a more “modern” phenomenon.

One author summarizes Gardel’s appeal with a very succinct formula:

Carlos Romualdo Gardés, conocido como Carlos Gardel, presenta dos de los rasgos esenciales para constituirse en un santo popular: murió joven y dramáticamente.

Carlos Romualdo Gardés, known as Carlos Gardel, has two of the necessary qualities that constitute being a folk saint: he died young and dramatically.

One personal anecdote: the way one porteño friend in seminary spoke of Gardel and his music, I found such a “popular canonization” hardly surprising. And this was in an ultra-correct, Lefebvrist religious house. I am kicking myself now that I didn’t go out of my way to visit Gardel’s tomb when I was down there.

Another Argentine artist “canonized” by the populace is the cumbia singer, Gilda, as you can see from this program on South American television:

According to a report from a couple of years ago from the Mexican newspaper, La Jornada, some believe that the tomb of Mexican singer, Pedro Infante, who also died quite young and tragically, is also miraculous. The face of Pedro Infante was grafted onto the early 20th century outlaw, Jesus Malverde, leading to an indirect popular canonization of the singer by those devotees.

I sort of experienced this phenomenon when people in my predominantly Mexican-American hometown “freaked out” when Selena was shot by one of her fans back in the late 1990’s. Since she was a Jehova’s Witness, I don’t think many of her fans “pray to her” the way some Argentines would pray to Gilda or Carlos Gardel, but given another context, such a cultus would hardly be surprising.

La Juana Figueroa

This time from Salta, Argentina:

According to sources such as Felix Coluccio’s Cultos y Canonizaciones Populares de Argentina and a folklore site from Argentina, Juana Figueroa was the wayward wife of Isidro Heredia, who was beaten to death by her husband during an argument about her infidelities. While by no means a woman of virtuous life, her “martyrdom” made her a “miraculous soul” especially for housewives in unhappy marriages. Her traditional day of veneration is Monday, and people gather around the shrine seen above and ask for a miracle.

It all seems like a the sacralization of a telenovela, but such spectacles are not uncommon throughout Latin America. As I have shown before, from Tucson to the pampas of Argentina, violent death is seen to have a canonizing authority all its own. Coluccio, however, tries to see a deeper cultural and religious significance in this cultus:

“Poor thing! How much she must have suffered! Who knows what really went on in their house! What do men know about women’s problems?” These and other expressions flowed in answer to my questions , one Monday afternoon next to the devotional tree, where I went as a curious observer. Before the popular feminine sentiment that forgives and overlooks a shameful fall, I could not but help think of the goodness of the Lord as He looked over the Magdalen: “Thy sins are forgiven… go in peace.”

Bandoneón

me jode confesarlo
pero la vida es también un bandoneón
hay quien sostiene que lo toca dios
pero yo estoy seguro que es troilo
ya que dios apenas toca el arpa
y mal

fuere quien fuere lo cierto es
que nos estira en un solo ademán purísimo
y luego nos reduce de a poco a casi nada
y claro nos arranca confesiones
quejas que son clamores
vértebras de alegría
esperanzas que vuelven
como los hijos pródigos
y sobre todo como los estribillos

me jode confesarlo
porque lo cierto es que hoy en día
pocos
quieren ser tango
la natural tendencia
es a ser rumba o mambo o chachachá
o merengue o bolero o tal vez casino
en último caso valsecito o milonga
pasodoble jamás
pero cuando dios o pichuco o quien sea
toma entre sus manos la vida bandoneón
y le sugiere que llore o regocije
uno siente el tremendo decoro de ser tango
y se deja cantar y ni se acuerda
que allá espera
el estuche.

-Mario Benedetti

Gauchito Gil

A radio report from some years back on the popular Argentine bandit and folk saint, Gauchito Gil.

(Found on this page in case you are having difficulties downloading the report.)

El Señor de la Peña

A video from the Argentine province of La Rioja, about a rock shaped in the face of Christ: the object of pilgrimage during Holy Week

Don Rufino Tibaldi

This is the tomb of Don Rufino Tibaldi (+1976), in the town of Irarte, in Buenos Aires province in Argentina. He is said to have been a railway worker from Germany who was known for his religious talks and general help for the poor. He was also said to have had the power of healing, and was persecuted by the local doctor for practicing medicine without a license. Many people continue to make pilgrimages to his grave, and leave ex-votos as signs of a miracle granted by the folk saint. More information on this saint can be found at the following links:

Simplemente… historias de dos buenas personas de Iriarte

Rufino Tibaldi… Un santo popular

Why tyranny can be good for the soul

So anyway, I was in this taxi cab in Buenos Aires, crammed in with five other seminarians on a Sunday afternoon. On the radio, the Boca vs. River Plate game was blaring, and at one point, a news break was played during an intermission. Hugo Chavez was very much in the news back then (around 2002), and the direction of the conversation in the cab was steered towards politics. The taxi driver, in the midst of the country falling apart one more time*, said that he wished the dictators would just come back to restore order.

“At least it was safe to walk the streets at night back then.”