Un Chien Andalou

Buñuel has made a little shit of a film called
The Andalusian Dog, and the "Andalusian dog" is me.
Ferderico Garcia Lorca

Lorca sat silently as he was being introduced. Neither man in a hurry. One had the stage, the other seemed not to want it, busied himself writing in a notebook but drawing the audience towards him by his actions until they had only half an ear on the moderator, both eyes on the poet. The introduction finished, Lorca rose silently, closing the notebook & leaving it on the chair. Waited for the applause to soften before he started.

"Whenever I speak before a large group I always think I must have opened the wrong door."

Polite laughter. There was less laughter, less polite, as he continued.

"It is not my fault if you cannot understand what it is I am going to be talking about, if you lack the duende necessary to understand my poems on the run."

He spoke of stammering with the fire that burnt inside him. That from the stage. The words from the chair were clearer, a letter to his "Dear Family" detailing the most recent adventures, some real, some imagined, some modified just enough to ensure he came out from them unscathed & appearing in command.

He recited the first of the poems he was including in his lecture, one that described a childhood as a solitary wanderer. His other self sat behind him, bemoaning the lack of servants, reviling the Jews, the Armenians, recounting an idealized & stereotypical vision of Black Americans that went no further south than Harlem.

Some of this in the poems, but diffused, more stylized, keeping well away from the raw comment of the letter left half-finished on the chair. "These Protestants in New York are ridiculous & odious," Lorca had written there, a statement that reinforced his view that there is only the one true God & He is Spanish. "My Spain alone is pure; everywhere else is full of faggots."

Wandering the stage he was a gypsy. In the chair he was nailing shut a door he refused to open, afraid he might find himself sitting silently in the audience on the other side.