LIFT ALL AT ONCE; WAIT, A CRY

 

A tricky, yet compelling, subject stands before me: yesterday’s delicate powering of very heavy, religious imagery, down and up steep and narrow street while saetas—sung cries and poems—occasionally break out.

The subject is even more powerful since I could not be there to see it or experience it. I only remember what I witnessed last year as well as my conversations and reading about it since then.

Even yesterday, the Rubia, the heart of my neighborhood, warned me as I stood in front of her to pay for a Mountain Dew and some vegetables, that I should not even think of going to see it.

She felt I was likely to be jostled and potentially knocked down. Given my bad knee that could have serious consequences.

“You can watch it on TV, just do not go to see it, please. We need to look out for each other.”

I am afraid I did not watch it on TV—I have just lost theTV habit.

But I did read and look at images and videos online. I also listened.

Last year, I was moveded when suddenly the entire procession came to a halt as a cry came out. I have no idea from where, maybe from a balcony or from within the procession. The cry developed as cries do in Flamenco song, a wordless statement of feeling and emotion.

Words broke out, each one modified to stand out by vocal ornamentations and fit with the prior vocalizations.

I could not understand more than a word here and there. But I was overwhelmed by the power of that woman’s voice, its stopping the entire procession while she sang, before it continued.

It felt kind of random, but I kept the feeling that something significant had happened.

It challenged my ordinary way of seeing and thinking about processions. I will admit I am still new in Spain, after a year and three quarters, so it is bold to talk about an ordinary way of experiencing processions.

Though I’m new in Spain, I’m not new to processions, or parades for that matter. My experience was molded by my years in Bolivia and Peru, as well as my childhood in New Mexico and El Paso, Texas.

Song—and music more generally—does something that is hard to articulate at a time when everyone has pods in their ears and carries around a personal play list of tunes that rotates around them through each day. Music becomes ordinary that way.

Yet when I lived in a fairly isolated, rural community in Bolivia, just off Lake Titicaca, before the time of boom boxes, CD players, or even cassette recorders (yeah, I am that old), sounds were of the wind, the little birds in the harsh bunch grass, and the rustle of livestock and neighbors living. Music was not ordinary.

When men—because they were only men—would come together and play their flutes to drum beats, it would break through the ordinary, punctuate it as Durkheim might say, as raw sound. It seemed to be a burst of feeling, wordless and available. It would draw me in.

This breaking of the ordinary is one way of talking about the sacred and what it does. It is a voice crying from a balcony, piercing the ordinary muttering of life or the rumbling of a procession. It is charisma to the holy ordinary of fiesta spirituality.

Of course there is another discussion of the sacred following from Durkheim, that of collective effervescence. This is the moving together when a kind of trance of common motion takes people out of their individuality and into something greater while time seems displaced. In that is feeling and deep emotion even if not the wailing, roll-on-the-ground type .

This is the sacred feeling in the women dressed in mantillas and finery walking together—sometimes with pinched feet, sometimes bored. At times, a friend calls out to them from the sidelines causing them to break frame, yet the frame calls them back and they rejoin the slow movement of a procession in which they have put themselves, body and even soul in something larger, the Hermandad (the Brotherhood), as well as in a heritage, pieces of a larger culture.

The same thing can be said for the men who port the holy images on the absurdly heavy thrones.

Yesterday, while in a modestly long cab ride from the clinic where I saw my doctor to my home, i had a conversation about this. The driver, a man from Allicante in the middle of middle age described how he had become a costalero, a bearer for perhap the heaviest of the images in Alicante, the Last Supper—a carved, greater than life-sized representation of Jesus and his disciples at the table setting up the final passion of Christ.

This monster of a religious scene, the men-as-a-team carry on their shoulders together in discipline and unity. They take on that key moment of Christian theology, literally. It is no longer an idea, words, sounds in the air, but a physical and heavy weight that they can only lift and bear together.

The driver said it never felt heavy, though he said sometimes people were hurt if they broke discipline. You had to do it all together. And in that, he felt a passion. It was overwhelming.

In that is the word emotive, that is constantly used in Alicante to describe the processions. Not everyone will feel it, for example the audience, but the people carrying the weight or marching together, the men and women will. The audience spectates and sometimes is drawn in to it.

One final concern, back to the saeta. This musical form came from Andalucia and is most developed at performed in the Hermandad de la Santa Cruz, the one going down and then climbing up the steep hill Benacantil on which old Alicante sits.

That connection with Andalucía requires thought, but I will save it for another time. However, in that relationship is a religious order, the Franciscans, who—it is argued—brought the saeta to Alicante as part of their religious devotion to the Stations of the Cross. They spread this devotional form throughout the world and, as part of it in Andalucía, they would sing saetas which besides the emotive vocalizations, included verse, poemlets of adoration and devotion.

For now, I shall set down this task, let it rest on the ground. There is something important here. Just as the Rubia told me not to go see the procession yesterday, I must acknowledge I am not ready to tackle this task, though I am getting there.

More to come