Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) Read Online Free Page B

plot to a secondary role and coming up with characters that might serve as mouthpieces for/of his aesthetic and other ideas. This, after all, is what the French short story was at the time, and the short story often written in English when Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville were active. Such is the case of “The Deaf Satyr,” also in Azul . . . , a Greek story set on Mount Olympus, in which the poet Orpheus sings his songs in the woods. Orpheus, the poet, “sickened by mankind’s misery,” decides to seek refuge in the woods, “where the trees and rocks might understand him and listen to him in ecstasy, and where, when he played his lyre, he might make all things tremble with harmony and the fire of love.” He sings his song to a deaf satyr, who, following his ass’s advice, exiles Orpheus from the woods. Again, the portrait of the artist is disheartening: the poet, seeking communion with nature and community, finds only rejection.
     
    In the preceding pages I have spoken, time and again, about the Modernista revolution. Let it not be confused with the term Rubenista, which means a follower of Darío. Modernismo was an ambitious way of reappraising the world. But what was it really about? And why should the term be written in Spanish and italicized? What constitutes an artistic movement? Should Modernismo be considered such a movement? These questions, particularly the latter ones, have, again, an embattled quality to them, in tune with the critique Darío faced in life as a Modernista . For intellectuals of his time—and scores of others since then—have often suggested that Darío’s poetics encapsulated impossibly disparate ambitions. A new bourgeois sensibility like the one Darío was announcing, an interest in occult religion, a Pythagorean understanding of music and the spiritual realm, and a desire to write Spanish following French syntax are efforts so disparate in their very nature that it seems impossible to bring them together under a single rubric. No wonder Miguel de Unamuno complained in 1918: “I don’t exactly know what this business of Modernistas and Modernismo is. Such diverse and opposing things are given these names that there is no way to reduce them to a common category.” Others have agreed with Unamuno, arguing that almost a century after Darío’s death—and thus, after the demise of the overall intellectual and social upheaval he expounded—today we still have no clear vision of what it was all about.
    But these complaints are unjustified. In recent years there has been an effort to conceptualize Modernismo in ways unattainable to Unamuno. Clearly, Modernismo was, more than anything else, a metaphysical pursuit by a cadre of intellectuals disenchanted with institutionalized religion and with the ideological currents available. In Darío’s case, he was influenced by Pythagoreanism, a view (adapted by Spinoza in the Renaissance) suggesting that the entire universe is permeated by, and manifests, the divine. An essential ingredient of this worldview is the concept of harmony. God is a harmonious entity and so is nature, made of eternal male and female elements. The Pythagoreans sought a unity of life based on their faith in a universe that was orderly, intelligible, and logical, and on the need to find balance between the masculine and feminine sides of the self. The search for unity leads to the concept of a mirror between the microcosm of humanity and the macrocosm that is the universe. The Modernistas sought to understand their surroundings through theories such as this one. They perceived the poet to be a biblical character of sorts, whose talent, much like that of the prophet, lay in his ability to perceive the layers and connections that make reality what it is. The poet was able to communicate with the higher spheres through his intellect and song, and he (for these were male-dominated times) needed to offer those gifts to the people even if the message might be