Divine Madness

CHAPTER VI: Divine Madness Very little has been written about the theme of madness in the work of Antonio Machado although it appears in some of his poems and is an important aspect of his metaphysical thought. In spite of its importance for Cervantes and those writers who have been inspired by Don Quijote, madness is not a frequent topic in Spanish poetry, and looking at Machado's work from the point of view of this unusual perspective will permit us to clarify some important aspects of his religious and philosophical thought. Most people would regard a "madman" as a lunatic who has lost his mind and they would say that "madness" is state of insanity resulting from the loss of reason. Normally, the loss of reason or irrational conduct is a mental state that should be avoided. But that is not the case in Machado's work as we see in these words of his apocryphal philosopher, Juan de Mairena: "Among us the weakness is our reason, perhaps because the most robust and virile condition is, as Cervantes recognized, a state of madness."1 This may be the reason why Mairena himself had "the reputation for being a madman" (OPP, p. 499), and it has also been said of Machado's other apocryphal philosopher, Abel Martín, that "he must be crazier than a loon" (OPP, p. 503). In Machado's poetry and in the Apocryphal Songbook madness symbolizes the attitude of the person who rebels against the limits of reason and allows himself to be governed by his non-rational consciousness: intuition, idealism, poetic thought, etc. We will see, moreover, that in some of Machado's poems madness is equivalent to the fundamental energy of the universe and that during moments of intuitive awareness he has felt the divine madness which is the essence of all that is. According to Machado's pantheistic metaphysics, "God is defined as absolute being" (OPP, p. 336); the world is part of God and the divine spirit which Machado symbolizes as "madness" is the essence or the foundation of all existence. In order to examine the importance of this topic in the work of our poet, we will begin with a study of several poems from the first edition of his earliest book, Solitude. 1. MADNESS AND DIVINE CREATION A FORGOTTEN TRIUMPHAL MADNESS The poem "Twilight" does not appear in Machado's published works after the first edition of Solitude in 1903, but it contains some of the same ideas that we will see in poems from Solitude, Galleries and Other Poems and in his later poems. In the beginning lines of this poem Machado describes a state of intuitive consciousness when he recalls the origin of the universe in the mind of God: ____________ 1Antonio Machado, Obras: Poesía y Prosa, 2nd Edition (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1973), p. 537. 134 I traveled toward a summer afternoon to burn, beyond the blue of the mountain, the poignant myrrh of a distant love in the wide, flaming horizon. Red nostalgia filled my heart with vermillion dreams that in my soul burst out of the immense unconscious, as from a chaotic and somber region where burning stars floated like formless clouds in a milky sky. I traveled toward the glorious sunset, the agony of summer, reminiscent of the infinite, mysterious rhythm of a forgotten triumphal madness. Of a dormant madness, the first that comes to the soul and then leaves it, and the only one that ever reappears if the bitter wave of yesterday flows back. Solitude, the muse that reveals to my soul, in beautiful syllables, the mystery, like the notes from a hidden psalter, brought back to me the first phantoms of my mind, when it could, above the sprightly meadow or the dry wild thicket, transform the arid landscape into smoke, an ember of the radiant sunset. And the immense theory of victorious gestures of the afternoon broke open the reddened anguish of the clouds. And traveling silently over the plain, enveloped in sun and dust in a confused jumble, the summer burned its purple incense (OPP, pp. 38-39). One can see why Machado did not wish to keep this poem in the later editions of his poetry, but it contains some ideas we have discussed in the previous chapters and it offers the first reference to the concept of "divine madness." It begins with the description of a journey toward the "afternoon," the end of the day and, by extension, the end of life. And this approach to the conclusion reminds him of the beginning of his journey, when his heart was filled with the "red nostalgia" which Michael P. Predmore has called "the nostalgia of paradise."2 He feels "the poignant myrrh of a distant love," which his soul felt during the moment of its origin and which it longs to recover at the end of this life. In poem LXXVIII, Machado also remembers this primordial love when he feels "the white shadow of his first love" (OPP, p. 123), and then in poem LXXX he anticipates the love which awaits him in the final moment: ____________ 2 Michael P. Predmore, "The Nostalgia for Paradise and the Dilemma of Solipsism in the Early Poetry of Antonio Machado," Revista hispánica moderna, XXXVIII, 1-2 (1974-1975), pp. 30-52. 135 Why do you weep?... Among the golden poplars, far away, the shadow of love waits for you (OPP, p. 124). As we saw in the poem "Twilight," the presence of God is sometimes felt like the sensation of fire, and this same sensation appears again in poem CLIII where he refers to "the divine flames" (OPP, p. 215), and then in a poem from "Proverbs and Songs," the poet tells us: "I dreamt of God like a flaming / forge…" (CXXXVI, xxxiii, OPP, p. 219). This image of fire has the double virtue of being both the divine substance that is the foundation of the universe, and the energy which purifies the soul by destroying the imperfections it has acquired during its existence in the world of matter.3 When the poet recovers this memory of the cosmogenesis, he dreams, or intuits, what happened when the universe emanated from "the immense unconscious," a concept which reminds us of the un-manifested God of pantheistic metaphysics. This is the first manifestation when the divine substance leaves the state in which it has always existed and begins to become active.4 Although the idea of all things has always existed in the divine consciousness, this is the Beginning, before the divine fire has begun to congeal into specific forms; it is the galaxy before order is imposed, when the incipient stars spin like burning clouds in a sky of coagulated milk.5 When he contemplates this scene in his inner vision, the poet feels the "infinite mysterious rhythm" of madness, the pure impulse of divine energy which "triumphs" in the moment of its origin. Nevertheless, from the point of view of the mind which perceives the world through the veil of the five senses, this primordial madness has been "forgotten" since the moment of the soul's incarnation in the world of matter, and it only returns as the memory of a paradise which has been lost. But not everything is lost, because Machado's "muse,"—his anima, or his intuitive consciousness—whose voice he ____________ 3 Edouard Schuré describes a similar concept of fire taken from Oriental philosophy: "Agni, the Fire hidden in all things, the original and invisible Fire, whose smoke, flame and light are but external manifestations—Agni, the creative Fire is truly the universal agent and substance"; From Sphinx to Christ, an Occult History (Blauvelt, New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1970). Madame Blavatsky also says that fire is the divine energy: "The Deity is an arcane, living FIRE… which includes and is the cause of all the phenomena in Nature"; The Secret Doctrine: Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, Vol. I (Point Loma, California: The Aryan Theosophical Press, 1917), pp. 2-3. 4 In this part of the poem, Machado expresses the same concept that, years later, he put into the mouth of his apocryphal philosopher when he describes the pure substance of absolute being: "Abel Martín thinks of substance as energy, a force which can engender movement and is always its cause; but which also exists without it… This force can be immobile—it is in its pure state—but that does not mean it is inactive. The activity of this force or substance is called consciousness" (OPP, p. 315). 5 Machado's "creation" has very little to do with the description in the first verses of Genesis; Moses describes the creation of a world, while the creation of Machado is an entire cosmos. In the Bible there are light and darkness, earth and water; but Machado speaks of fire and stars like burning clouds that spin in an immense space. In fact, one notices a curious parallel between the description of Machado and the Cosmogenesis of Madame Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine. She also speaks of a sleeping Deity who, when He awakes, forms an immense "luminous egg," where the living fire begins to congeal like "milk- white curds"; she goes on to say the "Light is cold flame, and flame is fire, and fire produces heat which yields water: the water of life in the great mother"; The Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, Op. cit., pp. 29-30. 136 hears in moments of solitude, now brings back to him "the first phantoms of the mind" so that he is able to recover the memory of his lost origin.6 Thus, thanks to the poet's "muse" and her memory of the origin, the poem ends with a suggestion of optimism.

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