Des chaussures sur le Promenade du Danube

María Zambrano écrit dans Le rêve créateur (1965): «Plus que jamais, il est maintenant nécessaire d’une plongée lucide dans la folie et le crime.»

"Des chaussures sur le Promenade du Danube"
(G. Pauer y C. Togay)
© Viajeros Blog

Sur l'une des rives du Danube, à Budapest, tout près du Parlement dont l’image rend célèbre la ville hongroise dans le monde entier, il y a une sorte de sculpture métallique qui reproduit plusieurs paires de chaussures.

Des chaussures reliées entre elles par des lacets. Des chaussures vides, sans être humain à l’intérieur. Seulement les chaussures, comme témoignage de la sinistre tuerie des Juifs durant l'occupation nazie. Oui, on les attachait deux par deux, en nouant les lacets de chaque chaussure. Ensuite, on tuait l’un des membres de ce couple si pathétique; l’autre, celui qui restait encore en vie, se noyait dans le Danube. Je ne suis pas sûre que le mot terreur soit suffisant.

(Marifé Santiago Bolaños: "Diótima de Mantinea et la naissance de l'Europe", Antígona. Revue de la Fondation María Zambrano, n° 5, 2010, p. 162).

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Profundizando en la autoconciencia

 En El País de hoy:

© Martín Elfman

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Presentación de "Almagro y su Corral de Comedias"

 

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GRANADA, THE ROARING CITY

 

From the heights of the Alhambra, I hear the city roar in the distance on these Christmas days, besieged by hordes of tourists eager to look, to experience, and to consume. All drink from water bottles that will become mountains of plastic; all swallow without pause; all speak into their smartphones and immortalize the moment with photos that immediately turn into waste in the nodes of the networks. Herded behind a guide with a banner or clustered around an immersive spectacle of light and sound advertised as sustainable—when none of this can be sustained, if one gives even a little thought to the limited resources available, to the vulnerable limits of human physical and mental health, or to the indecent margins of the galloping inequality among brothers, unworthy children of Gaia.

The airplanes at the airport, which I can see from here wrapped in toxic clouds, vomit incessantly. The tourist trains, the taxis, the buses loaded with abundant human flesh leave no room for the residents who, through their daily labors, have sustained the city for centuries. All of them growl in frenzied races to reach lunch or dinner at the overcrowded restaurant where more drink than advisable will be consumed, more meat and fish than is fitting, more sugar than is permissible. And the leftovers are thrown into landfills that, already full, overflow down torrents of hunger, along steep slopes climbed by the legions of the world’s hungry.

The city roars in its temples of consumption, in its Nevadas Shopping. Heretical names, for they take in vain the good name of the sacred place: Sierra Nevada, a biosphere reserve, a refuge of silence, of pure air, of fragile blades of grass, of freshly fallen white snows, of balances as natural as they are miraculous, of peace and withdrawal.

Christmas, the fulfilled revenge of the merchants expelled from the temple by the whip of holy wrath wielded by the one said to have been born with nothing.

Will a battlefield roar like this? Is this the thunder of a war?

The city that cradled the Cántico of San Juan, the Immaculates of Alonso Cano, the ideas of Ganivet, the music of Falla, the words of Federico, or the sounds of Morente and Cano—the city of duende and the murmurs of irrigation channels—writhes, wounded. The city where “In the leafy bower of love the nightingales burst forth, / drunk on so much night, on so much melody.” The city of the concave sky that reflects the flowers, while “the gentle breeze curls them with joy.”

Along the Camino del Avellano, the roar gradually fades. The hill of the Sabika, a vertiginous screen, keeps intact the murmur of water, the music of the Darro in its peaceful course along the bank from which the Sacromonte drinks.

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La mirada contemplativa

 

María Zambrano en Madrid (1932) 
https://poesiamaspoesia.com/241-poesia-mas-poesia-maria-zambrano/

   En "La aparición del confín", de su enigmática y poética obra De la Aurora (1986), escribe María Zambrano: «La aparición de la Aurora unifica los sentires, transformándolos en sentido (…) Como les sucede a otros lugares inviolables del humano pensar (…) a los que habría que dejar nacer, ante todo, sin arrancarles del lugar de sus raíces, sin extraerles del sacro único lugar en que han de nacer y vivir. Serían siempre de la Aurora estos tan elegidos pensamientos, frutos del humano pensar (…) ¿Anunciará acaso la Aurora, en su retirarse, la multiplicidad de los tiempos?»

          Su libro pretende ser guía y confesión, dos géneros filosóficos con amplia tradición en España (Maimónides y Miguel de Molinos): «El resultado a que hemos llegado en estas breves páginas, que más breves aún querrían serlo, es que la Aurora, que no nos ha ofrecido la posibilidad de ser un conocimiento propiamente filosófico, una episteme, nos impone inexorablemente su condición de pertenecer al mundo de lo cognoscible. Desde el primer momento en que se la mira, nos mira ella a su vez, pidiéndonos, requiriéndonos, el que la miremos como la clave de la physis, del cosmos (…) Guía, pues, si por guía entendemos la aparición de algo, un suceso, una presencia que saca al sujeto de sí, de la situación en que estrictamente está apresado en una ignorancia que es inmovilidad, y la inmovilidad en el ser humano es intrascendencia. Conocerse es trascenderse.» 

        Y, siguiendo la guía del nuevo método zambraniano, dejo aquí constancia de la experiencia entrañable. Permanece en mí el recuerdo imborrable de la importancia que mis padres, desde su profunda religiosidad, concedían al amanecer como momento privilegiado del día para -según nos decían- apreciar la belleza de la creación divina y dar gracias por ver un nuevo día. “Mañana veremos amanecer” nos anunciaban con solemnidad y gozo, cuando, con ocasión de algún acontecimiento especial, debíamos madrugar para salir de casa antes de la amanecida. “¡Mirad, hijos, va a salir el sol! ¡Mirad, qué hermoso amanecer!”. Este imperativo, “¡Mirad!”, era expresión muy frecuente en mi madre. Y a Blas Zambrano, su padre, dedica María su primer libro, Horizonte del liberalismo (1930), con estas palabras: “A mi padre. Porque me enseñó a mirar”. La filósofa andaluza dice que aprender a filosofar es aprender a mirar, pero no se trata de una mirada inquisitiva o interrogativa, sino contemplativa, pasiva, que se deja atrapar por la belleza o el misterio de lo contemplado, sin más. La guía de mis padres provocó en nosotros una ferviente reverencia hacia ese momento único, mágico, del paso de la oscuridad a la luz; de modo que, con cierta frecuencia, y siempre durante nuestras estancias en la casa de la sierra, decidíamos “resistir” -al sueño, se entiende-: “Hoy vamos a resistir para ver amanecer”, conveníamos en secreto. Y, cuando lográbamos vencer a Hipnos, salíamos al exterior apenas veíamos apuntar la primera claridad por el horizonte para que la llegada del Sol nos cogiera a la intemperie. Ahí, sin la protección hogareña, sentiríamos mejor el silencio que precede al alba, la leve brisa y el escalofrío del rocío.

        Tiene la filosofía también la naturaleza de una confesión, según María: «Se le figura a la autora de estas breves confesiones que un nuevo modo de razón -por ejemplo, la razón poética- sea necesario. Un modo de razón en el que se redime la pasividad, la total pasividad, frente al conocimiento y a aquello que lo mueve y aun engendra, el amor. Una razón sin paradojas, sin agonías, sin parecerse a sí misma, casi sin juicio, mas no sin orden; y tanto como ser una razón nueva habría de ser una vita nova (…) La vida de los sentidos se ha ido reduciendo a medida que la razón occidental se yergue (…) Así, esa arquitectura que a todo iguala, la lisa pared, hasta hacer desaparecer toda curva, todo escondrijo, todo alero, donde la golondrina, y sobre todo la paloma, no encuentran lugar. Ciudades hay, cimas de civilización, que sin decretar la extinción de las palomas -¡de la paloma, Señor!- penan con decretos, decretan, con fuerza de ley, que no se deje con vida ni un solo nido, porque la presencia de los nidos afea la limpia ciudad (…) El conocimiento que aquí se invoca pide que la razón se haga poética sin dejar de ser razón, que acoja al “sentir originario” sin coacción (…) Así la aurora se nos aparece como la physis misma de la razón poética.»

        Pasividad, disponibilidad, apertura; frente a la avidez, al “ansia de captar” (“Ir a la caza de conceptos”, escribe Zambrano). «Tiene la mirada que sale de la noche -de esta de la historia también- una disponibilidad pura y entera, pues que no hay en ella sombra de avidez. No va de caza. No sufre el engaño que procura el ansia de “captar”. La tiranía del concepto, que somete la libertad con el cebo del conocimiento.»

        A poco que se piensen, son las de Zambrano propuestas revolucionarias que piden derruir nuestro renqueante edificio civilizatorio -afanoso, conquistador y apresurado- para levantarlo sobre otros cimientos. 

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No to the European policy of appeasement toward Donald Trump

        So far, von der Leyen and the rest of the European leaders (with some honorable exceptions) have done nothing in the face of Donald Trump’s bullying except try to placate his unpredictable and irascible character through concessions and kind words, even though we could describe their docile attitude as a form of sycophantic servility and vassal-like clientelism. And this is not the path to curb the expansionist appetite of the triumphant beast.

A. N. Chamberlain (United Kingdom), É. Daladier (France),
A. Hitler, B. Mussolini and G. Ciano
in Munich on September 29, 1938
Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R69173 / CC-BY-SA 3.0
CC BY-SA 3.0
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17264876

       It is a folly that may prove very costly, because, as any educator familiar with the most basic mechanisms of the human psyche knows, the surest way to turn a child into a monster is to indulge all of his whims. Showing a firm refusal before the demands of his will become insolent, selfish, and insatiable is the only way to socialize him.

        Recent history gives us proof of this and confirms the pathological amnesia of the human species, which drags us from catastrophe to catastrophe, turning History into something very much like blood sausage, which is made with blood and repeats itself, as Ángel González wrote.

         In September 1938, shortly before launching his war of extermination against millions of human beings and the annihilation of Europe, Hitler and Mussolini were feted by the prime ministers of France (Édouard Daladier) and the United Kingdom (Neville Chamberlain) at the Munich Conference. There, the representatives of democratic Europe accepted the annexation of the Sudetenland (territory of Czechoslovakia) by Germany in an attempt to avoid war. This was called the policy of appeasement. Hitler wanted to possess that mountain range on the border between what is now the defunct Czechoslovakia and Poland, citing reasons of national security and alleged historical rights, since, according to him, the majority of the population of that Czechoslovak region was German and the Czechs were massacring the Germans of the Sudetenland. These are similar to the arguments Donald Trump now puts forward regarding Greenland and South America, as well as those Vladimir Putin uses when he claims Russian sovereignty over Ukraine and the former Soviet republics. Incidentally, one day we will have to explain why, from progressive positions, large mobilizations in Europe against the Russian occupation of Ukraine have still not been called, four years on. Could this omission perhaps be the result of the same stale tactical thinking that led a large part of the European communist left in the 1930s not to denounce Stalin’s support for the colonial policies of the European powers in Africa—something that caused Albert Camus to leave the French Communist Party—or in the 1950s to keep a complicit silence in the face of the USSR’s expansionist and repressive policy in Hungary; or, today, to show infinite indulgence toward Castro’s Cuba and the excesses of Venezuelan Chavismo?

        The German and Italian tyrants then offered Europe peace in exchange for land. However, as was to be expected from the greedy and capricious will of a spoiled child who had risen too far, Hitler was not satisfied with the concession and violated the agreement shortly after it was signed, invading Czechoslovakia on March 16, 1939.

        But there was more, because on August 23, 1939, despite the blatant breach of the agreement and the military invasion, another great satrap of the time, Joseph Stalin, also tried to appease the Aryan beast through pacts. The Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was signed by the foreign ministers of both countries in Moscow. Just nine days later, on September 1, Hitler invaded Poland, thus triggering the Second World War.

         Trump—and, of course, Putin (and the same applies to the presidents of China, North Korea, or Israel)—must be told from Europe that powerful monosyllable they have heard so rarely: “no.” And it must be done before it is too late, although perhaps we have already run out of time. And immediately afterward, we will have to face the economic and military consequences that this “no” may entail. This requires strengthening the political and military unity of European countries—both necessary and bolder than mere economic unity—around the rules of international law, which Europe has also betrayed in the Palestinian conflict.

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Le regard contemplatif dans la philosophie espagnole

María Zambrano à Madrid en 1932
https://poesiamaspoesia.com/241-poesia-mas-poesia-maria-zambrano

Dans «L’apparition du confins», extrait de son œuvre énigmatique et poétique De la Aurora (1986), María Zambrano écrit :

«L’apparition de l’Aurore unifie les sentiments, les transformant en sens (…) Comme il en va d’autres lieux inviolables de la pensée humaine (…) qu’il faudrait laisser naître avant tout, sans les arracher au lieu de leurs racines, sans les extraire de l’unique lieu sacré où ils doivent naître et vivre. Ils appartiendraient toujours à l’Aurore, ces pensées si élues, fruits de la pensée humaine (…) L’Aurore, en se retirant, annoncerait-elle peut-être la multiplicité des temps?»

Son livre se veut à la fois guide et confession, deux genres philosophiques de grande tradition en Espagne (Maïmonide et Miguel de Molinos):

«Le résultat auquel nous sommes parvenus dans ces brèves pages, qui voudraient être encore plus brèves, est que l’Aurore, qui ne nous a pas offert la possibilité d’être une connaissance proprement philosophique, une épistémè, nous impose inexorablement sa condition d’appartenir au monde du connaissable. Dès le premier moment où on la regarde, elle nous regarde à son tour, nous demandant, nous requérant, de la contempler comme la clé de la physis, du cosmos (…) Guide, donc, si par guide nous entendons l’apparition de quelque chose, un événement, une présence qui tire le sujet hors de lui-même, de la situation dans laquelle il est strictement prisonnier d’une ignorance qui est immobilité, et l’immobilité chez l’être humain est intranscendance. Se connaître, c’est se transcender.»

L'homme et le divin
Éditions Corti (2006) 

Et, suivant la voie du nouveau método zambraniano, je laisse ici le témoignage de mon expérience intime. Il demeure en moi le souvenir ineffaçable de l’importance que mes parents, dans leur profonde religiosité, accordaient à l’aube comme moment privilégié de la journée pour —disaient-ils— apprécier la beauté de la création divine et remercier de voir un nouveau jour.

«Demain, nous verrons l’aube», nous annonçaient-ils avec solennité et joie, lorsque, à l’occasion d’un événement particulier, nous devions nous lever avant le lever du jour pour quitter la maison.

«Regardez, enfants, le soleil va se lever! Regardez comme l’aube est belle!»

Cet impératif —«Regardez!»— était une expression très fréquente chez ma mère. Et c’est à Blas Zambrano, son père, que María dédie son premier livre, Horizonte del liberalismo (1930), avec ces mots: «À mon père. Parce qu’il m’a appris à regarder.»

La philosophe andalouse dit qu’apprendre à philosopher, c’est apprendre à regarder. Mais il ne s’agit pas d’un regard inquisitif ou interrogateur, mais d’un regard contemplatif, passif, qui se laisse captiver par la beauté ou le mystère de ce qu’il contemple, sans plus.

La guidance de mes parents suscita en nous une fervente révérence pour ce moment unique, magique, du passage de l’obscurité à la lumière; si bien que, fréquemment, et toujours durant nos séjours dans la maison de la montagne, nous décidions de «résister» —au sommeil, bien sûr: «Ce soir, nous allons résister pour voir l’aube», convenions-nous en secret.

Et lorsque nous parvenions à vaincre Hypnos, nous sortions à l’extérieur dès que la première clarté pointait à l’horizon, afin que l’arrivée du Soleil nous surprenne à découvert. Là, sans la protection du foyer, nous ressentions mieux le silence qui précède l’aube, la légère brise et le frisson de la rosée.

La philosophie a aussi, selon María, la nature d’une confession :

«Il semble à l’auteure de ces brèves confessions qu’un nouveau mode de raison —par exemple, la raison poétique— soit nécessaire. Un mode de raison dans lequel se rachète la passivité, la totale passivité, face à la connaissance et à ce qui la meut, et même la fait naître : l’amour. Une raison sans paradoxes, sans agonies, sans se ressembler à elle-même, presque sans jugement, mais non sans ordre ; et autant qu’elle serait une raison nouvelle, elle devrait être une vita nova (…) La vie des sens s’est peu à peu réduite à mesure que la raison occidentale s’est érigée (…) Ainsi, cette architecture qui uniformise tout, le mur lisse, jusqu’à faire disparaître toute courbe, toute cachette, tout auvent, où l’hirondelle, et surtout la colombe, ne trouvent plus leur place.

Il est des villes, sommets de la civilisation, qui, sans décréter l’extinction des colombes —de la colombe, Seigneur !— peinent par décrets, décrètent, avec force de loi, qu’on ne laisse en vie aucun nid, car la présence des nids enlaidit la ville propre (…) La connaissance invoquée ici demande que la raison devienne poétique sans cesser d’être raison, qu’elle accueille le “sentir originaire” sans contrainte (…) Ainsi l’Aurore nous apparaît comme la physis même de la raison poétique.»

Passivité, disponibilité, ouverture, face à l’avidité, au «désir de saisir» («Aller à la chasse aux concepts», écrit Zambrano).

«Le regard qui sort de la nuit —de celle de l’histoire aussi— possède une disponibilité pure et entière, car il n’y a en lui aucune ombre d’avidité. Il ne part pas en chasse. Il n’est pas trompé par le désir de “saisir”. La tyrannie du concept, qui soumet la liberté par l’appât de la connaissance.»

Si l’on y songe un instant, les propositions de Zambrano sont révolutionnaires: elles demandent de démolir notre édifice civilisationnel chancelant —laborieux, conquérant et pressé — pour le rebâtir sur d’autres fondations.

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Principio del formulario

 

Final del formulario

 

The Contemplative Gaze in Spanish Philosophy

 

In “The Appearance of the Borderland,” from her enigmatic and poetic work From the Dawn (1986), María Zambrano writes:

María Zambrano in Madrid (1932)

“The appearance of the Dawn unifies feelings, transforming them into meaning (…) As happens with other inviolable places of human thought (…) which should be allowed to be born, above all, without tearing them from the place of their roots, without extracting them from the single sacred place where they must be born and live. These most chosen thoughts would always belong to the Dawn, fruits of human thinking (…) Might the Dawn, in its withdrawal, perhaps announce the multiplicity of times?”

Her book seeks to be both guide and confession, two philosophical genres with a long tradition in Spain (Maimonides and Miguel de Molinos):

“The result we have reached in these brief pages, which would like to be even briefer, is that the Dawn, which has not offered us the possibility of being a properly philosophical knowledge, an episteme, inexorably imposes upon us its condition of belonging to the realm of the knowable. From the first moment in which one looks at it, it looks back at us, asking us, requiring us, to look at it as the key to physis, to the cosmos (…) A guide, then, if by guide we understand the appearance of something, an event, a presence that draws the subject out of himself, out of the situation in which he is strictly imprisoned in an ignorance that is immobility, and immobility in the human being is intranscendence. To know oneself is to transcend oneself.”

And, following the guidance of Zambrano’s new method, I record here this intimate experience. The indelible memory remains in me of the importance my parents, from within their deep religiosity, attributed to dawn as a privileged moment of the day to—according to what they told us—appreciate the beauty of divine creation and give thanks for seeing a new day. “Tomorrow we shall watch the sunrise,” they would announce to us with solemnity and joy whenever, on the occasion of some special event, we had to get up early and leave home before daybreak. “Look, children, the sun is about to rise! Look, what a beautiful sunrise!” This imperative, “Look!”, was very common in my mother’s speech. And María dedicates her first book, The Horizon of Liberalism (1930), to her father, Blas Zambrano, with these words: “To my father. Because he taught me how to look.” The Andalusian philosopher says that to learn to philosophize is to learn how to look, but this is not an inquisitive or interrogative gaze; it is contemplative, passive, one that allows itself simply to be captivated by the beauty or the mystery of what is contemplated. My parents’ guidance awakened in us a fervent reverence for that unique, magical moment of the passage from darkness to light; so that, rather often—and always during our stays in the house in the mountains—we would decide to “resist” (sleepiness, that is): “Tonight we are going to resist so we can see the sunrise,” we would secretly agree. And when we managed to overcome Hypnos, we would go outside as soon as we saw the first glimmer of light on the horizon so that the arrival of the Sun would find us out in the open. There, without the protection of home, we could better feel the silence that precedes the dawn, the gentle breeze, and the shiver of the dew.

Philosophy also has the nature of a confession, according to María:

“It seems to the author of these brief confessions that a new mode of reason—for example, poetic reason—is necessary. A mode of reason in which passivity, total passivity, is redeemed in the face of knowledge and what moves it and even engenders it: love. A reason without paradoxes, without agonies, without resembling itself, almost without judgment, though not without order; and as much as being a new reason, it would have to be a vita nova (…) The life of the senses has been diminishing as Western reason rises (…) Thus, that architecture which levels everything, the smooth wall, until all curves, all hiding places, all eaves disappear, where the swallow—and especially the dove—find no place. There are cities—peaks of civilization—that, without decreeing the extinction of doves (of the dove, Lord!), punish with decrees, decree with the force of law, that not a single nest be left alive, because the presence of nests spoils the clean city (…) The kind of knowledge invoked here asks that reason become poetic without ceasing to be reason, that it welcome the ‘original feeling’ without coercion (…) Thus the dawn appears to us as the very physis of poetic reason.”

Passivity, availability, openness—in contrast to greed, to the “lust to grasp” (“To go hunting for concepts,” writes Zambrano).

“The gaze that emerges from the night—also from this night of history—possesses a pure and complete availability, for there is in it no shadow of greed. It does not go hunting. It does not suffer the deception brought about by the lust to ‘grasp.’ The tyranny of the concept, which subjugates freedom with the bait of knowledge.”

Considered even briefly, Zambrano’s proposals are revolutionary, calling for the demolition of our staggering civilizational edifice—anxious, conquering, and hurried—in order to rebuild it upon different foundations.

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