Some of the images of
Illuminations are narcotic, delirious, they trail a meek schizophrenia. Such affections can even be preached further of a text such as
Poeta en Nueva York: a quivering and broken line connects both books, while it increases its thickness, invigorates, as we come closer to the
North American metropolis (mind the intervening years and the change of scene:
London in 1873 was perhaps the first modern city; there is no doubt, in 1929, that with
New York we entered, long before theorists coined the term,
postmodernism). The technical development of anti-utopian counterparts, that great octopus that extended its tentacles reaching all areas of knowledge-power, intimately embedded or co-determinaning the increase of repressive forces, also played its role in the urban (dis)planning. By urban (dis)planning we do not only refer to the set of concrete blocks that characterize the physiognomy of modern cities (in the West), but we want to highlight the internal logic and the own sensibility that govern the genesis and growth of a population. That''s to say, it is pointed out a concept of the city which, inevitably, depends of the material conditions of existence as well as regulatory ideas (conscious or not) of the society in a particular historical moment. The speculative madness is the visible correlative of the capitalist madness. Thus, if many of the autochthonous and traditional symbols of poetry - the Moon, the bird, the child - are reused in Illuminations in an original way, deterritorialized first and then referred to an unusual domain absolutely not trite, they preserve, despite everything, their old sacred taste of holiness, of purity (even if it tries to subvert it), so to speak, of meekness.
Lorca, on the other hand, attends terrified their transformation into cannibals beings; in the best of cases they have already been violated on a lot of occasions. More usual, however, is that they themselves are an active part, the agents of violation. Violations, moreover, aren''t just literary resources, style games or dives in the density of the metaphor. It''s a real, terrible voracity. Although the author seems to keep distance and safeguard himself in a small corner of his solipsism obscure chamber, the monadic internal space, the "speech" of the city has to be filtered ineluctably (the poet''s loneliness has never been hermeticism) devouring his own madness subtly organized, devouring his own wild but lifeless vision, his own metal and homicidal tachycardia. In the Illuminations, the wreck of an aristocratic class of ancient men can be recognized, weakly. Such a work is not defined by a single geography but, nevertheless, at least one of the tours---from any sweetness of soul and, why not say it, from some form of nobility---means areas of softness, that no collusion, where the challenge of tears has still the possibility of breaking unexpected, surprising us. Who cries in New York? Who dares to mourn in the Lorcan New York, but the victims, daily undermined in the deepest of their existence, the underclass proletariat?