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Tag Archives: Chaos

La Múa

09 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by Davíd Lavie in In English, Non-fiction, Original, Prose

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Chaos, Flamenco, Kung Fu, Union, Women

She is shaped like an athletic amphora, a black Spartan vessel of elegance and fury.

Seconds in, she goes a capella; no guitar roulades needed to accompany her. She’s a force of nature and she stands alone, except that she doesn’t stand for a moment.

She is boyish and wears hip-hugging pants, but she is woman – oh so woman because two years ago she was still a girl, one can sense it, but she’s crossed into womanhood and is firmly in it – yet there is no dress, no folds, no castañedas, even, and if they are there, they’re tiny, concealed in her palms, and even the movements of the arms are different: there’s less waving about and self-hugging and more pure output of energy. How majestically and scarily controlled it is.

She could rightly be called a reactor; she is that incandescent; except that it’s the wrong word, because she doesn’t react – she creates; creates a maelstrom. She’s a black hole, with her own event horizon and firewall that vaporizes you as you breach it. She requires her own vocabulary, she is that much of a phenomenon, and in the absence of it, we’re borrowing from the discipline that attempts to understand stars, galaxies and universes – physics.

And she is physical beyond theory, but in the gossamer way of a tungsten filament, thin and burning and giving off blinding light. At times she stomps, lightning-quickly, from the knees, with pronated shins, so that she seems a child, a beautiful, severe girl in black, with a crown of hair, a bell of hair… And then she throws her head back and around with a checked violence, a great nuclear nanosecond of release, – and everything escalates beyond possibility or ability to keep up.

We are now at another level of concentration – on her and her new flamenco, and at that level she’s indifferent to everything around her except for rhythm and the exquisite torment of the performance – the creation of high art in real time; indifferent to everything but indifference; she won’t tolerate it! She will draw you in and make you care, make you stop breathing you’re so drawn in.

And then she slows it down by degrees, reducing the rhythm from a proud, rolling rage to a strict, strict staccato, a pitter-patter, and then attenuated rocking caresses of the stage with her exquisitely small, heartbreakingly heeled leather shoes.

She tictocs minutely.

She is 17 years old.

This year she turns 70, a contented grandmother, her shooting star of a career long behind her.

The tragedy is that we have precious little of her talent to console ourselves with. The miracle is that Antonia Singla Contreras – La Singla – one of the great flamenco dancers of modernity, a hurricane of grace and uniquely feminine power, was brought into this world a deaf-mute. La Múa the neighborhood kids used to call her.

Now, tell me: is this a cruel place? Or is it a wonderful world after all?

Antonia Contreras__La Singla

 

The Fall of Rome

03 Thursday Nov 2005

Posted by Davíd Lavie in From English, Poetry

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Tags

Chaos, Money, Pestilence, Rome, Women

The Fall of Rome
by W. H. Auden

(for Cyril Connolly)

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

Падение Рима
У.Х. Оден

(Сирилу Конноли)

Таранят волны валуны.
Ливень в поле каравану
Не даёт дойти до стана,
Пещеры беглецов полны.

Всё ярче платьев хоровод.
В регионах ревизоры
Насильственно проводят сборы
Налогов за прошедший год.

Тайные обряды в храме
Усыпляют всех гетер,
Львы литературных сфер
Светскими не ходят львами.

Горазд Катон – муж головастый –
Хвалить величие аскезы,
Наёмники-головорезы
Зарплату требовать горазды.

На императорской гулянке
Чиновник мелкий пишет смело
КАК ЖЕ МНЕ ВСЁ ОСТОЧЕРТЕЛО!
На бледном ведомственном бланке.

Мор вселенский созерцая,
Алолапчатые птички
Греют пёстрые яички,
Всё моргая да моргая.

Где то далеко лишь, туча
Северных оленей мчится
По просторам золотистым,
Очень быстро и беззвучно.

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