Excerpt from The Metaphysics of Juan De Mairena in Antonio Machado’s

EXCERPT FROM THE METAPHYSICS OF JUAN DE MAIRENA IN ANTONIO MACHADO’S APOCRYPHAL SONGBOOK

Mairena: So, my dear Meneses, what do you foresee for the future of lyric poetry? Meneses: Soon the poet will have no choice but to put away his lyre and devote himself to other things. Mairena: Do you think so?... Meneses: I am talking about the lyric poet. Individual feeling, better still: the individual core of feeling, which is in every man’s heart, is starting to lose its appeal, and it will continue to do so. From the Romantic decline to our own times (the age of symbolism), modern lyric poetry has become a somewhat excessive luxury of

Manchester man, of bourgeois individualism, based on private property. The poet parades his heart with the boastfulness of the newly wealthy man fl aunting his mansions, his carriages, his horses, and his mistresses. The poet’s heart, so rich in tones, is almost an insult to the tone-deaf ear of the masses who are enslaved by mechanical labor. Lyric poetry always originates in the central area of the psyche, which is where feelings are located. There is no true poetry without feeling. But feeling must be general as well as individual, because even though there is no such thing as a generic heart that feels on everyone’s behalf, and each man carries his own heart and feels with it, all feeling is directed at values that are, or aspire to be, universal. When the radius of feeling is reduced and confi ned to the isolated, bounded self, off-limits to others, it becomes impoverished and ends up ringing false. Such is bourgeois feeling, a failure, it seems to me; such is the result of romantic sentimentalism. Ultimately, there is no true feeling without sympathy; mere sentiment does not have a heartfelt function, or an aesthetic one. A solitary heart—as someone or other said, Mr. Platitude perhaps—is not a heart; because no one feels anything unless he feels with another, with others... why not with everyone? Mairena: With everyone! Careful, Meneses! Meneses: Yes, I understand. Like a good bourgeois, you believe in the myth of the elite, which is the most plebeian myth of all. You are a snob.

Mairena: Thank you. Meneses: You think that if you feel with everyone, you will be swallowed by a crowd, by an anonymous mass. The opposite is true. But let’s not digress. There is a crisis of feeling that will affect poetry, and its causes are very complex. The poet tries to sing of himself because he fi nds no themes of universal communion, of true feeling.

Concomitant with the collapse of romantic ideology, a whole world of feeling has been destroyed. It is very unlikely that a new generation will continue to listen to our songs. Because what goes on in the little corner of your heart that feels, which is starting to be incommunicable, will end up being nothing. A new poetry requires a new type of feeling, which in turn requires a new set of values. A patriotic anthem will move us provided our homeland is something we value, otherwise the anthem will seem empty, false, trivial, or tacky. We are starting to attribute insincerity to those declamatory romantics, men who pretend to feel things that they have perhaps not experienced. But we are being unfair. It is not that they do not feel these things, but that we cannot feel along with them. I don’t know if you can understand this, my dear Mairena. Mairena: Yes, I understand. But don’t you believe some form of intellectual poetry is possible? Meneses: That seems to me as absurd as the idea of sentimental geometry or emotional algebra. Perhaps it is what the disciples of French Symbolism might achieve. Mallarmé already had within himself the dark scholar who could attempt it. But this road leads nowhere. Mairena: So what is to be done, Meneses? Meneses: We must wait for the new values. In the meantime, to pass the time, as a little game, I will start up my poetic mechanical organ, my “versifying machine.”

The purpose of my modest apparatus is not to substitute or supplant the poet (although it could easily replace and improve on the teacher of rhetoric), but to objectively measure the emotional or affective state of a human group, large or small, just as a thermometer registers the temperature, or a barometer registers atmospheric pressure. Mairena: You mean quantitatively? Meneses: No. My device does not use numbers or translate the ambient poetry into quantitative language. Rather, it gives us its entirely objective, unindividuated expression in the form of a sonnet, a madrigal, a jácara, or a rondeau, which the machine composes and recites to the astonishment and applause of all who hear it.

All who are listening will recognize the song produced by the machine as their own, even though none would have been capable of composing it. It will be the song of any human group before which the machine operates. For example, at a gathering of drunks, lovers of cante jondo, in the somewhat serious revelry of Andalusian men on a night out, the device will register the dominant emotion and translate it into four essential lines, which are its poetic equivalent. At a political assembly or a meeting

of soldiers, moneylenders, teachers, or sportsmen, it will produce a different but no less essential song. What the machine will never give us is an individual’s song, even a very typifi ed individual, as in: “the executioner’s song.” On the other hand, it will give us, if we choose, the song about those who enjoy watching capital executions, etc., etc.... Mairena: And how does this poetic mechanical organ or singing machine work? Meneses: It is very complicated and diffi cult to explain without a visual aid. Besides, that is my secret. Be content, for now, to know what it does. Mairena: What about its operation? Meneses: It is easier to operate than a typewriter. This kind of phonograph-piano has a keyboard divided into three sections: positive, negative, and hypothetical. Its phonograms are words, rather than letters. The group for which the machine is operating chooses, by majority vote, the noun which it considers to be most essential at that moment. For example, man, and its logical, biological, emotive, or whatever, counterpart, in this case, woman. The verb used in all three sections— except when the operator deliberately replaces it—is always the verb to be in its three forms: to be, to not be, to be able to be, or rather: is, is not, could be. In other words, the verb in its positive-ontological, negative-divine, and hypothetical-human forms. So you see that the machine already has the crucial elements for creating a stanza: is a man, is not a man, could be a man, is a woman, etc., etc. The most logical words to rhyme (in Spanish) are hombre (man) and mujer (woman), which rhymes with puede ser (it could be). Only the word hombre remains without a rhyme. So, of the consonants, the operator chooses the phonogram that sounds most similar to hombre, which is nombre (name). Combining these elements, the operator tries out one or more stanzas, by trial and error, with the help of his audience. And it starts like this: They say (the subject is usually impersonal) a man is not a man. This inherently contradictory statement is produced mechanically as a result of the noun man moving from the fi rst to the second section of the keyboard. My device is not a thinking machine like Llull’s is. It registers life experiences, feelings, and desires, and its contradictions can only be solved psychologically, not logically.

That is how the operator must approach it, using the only two elements that are still available to him: name and woman. And this is when the noun name comes into play. The operator must place it in the most essential relation to man and woman, which could be either: the name of a man spoken by a woman, or the name of a woman spoken by a man. We now have the structure of two possible lines of poetry to express a very basic feeling in a male gathering: the absence of the woman, which gives us the psychological reason that explains the logical contradiction of the fi rst line. A man is not a man (he is insuffi ciently so) for a group that defi nes manliness in terms of the sexes, either because of the lack of a woman’s name—the name of the beloved, which each man can speak—or the absence of a woman on whose lips each man’s name can be heard.

For the sake of brevity, let’s say that the mechanical organ gives us this stanza:

“They say a man is not a man / until he hears his name / from a woman’s lips. / It could be.” This “it could be” is not mere padding, a pointless afterthought, or an empty end of the stanza. It comes from the third part of the keyboard, and the operator could have omitted it. But he leaves it in, at the urging of those present, who, after a moment’s introspection, fi nd in these words an expression of their feeling. Once the stanza is produced, it may be sung in unison.

In the prologue of his Mechanical Verses, Mairena heaps praise on Meneses’s device. According to Mairena, the mechanical instrument is one way, among others, to rationalize lyric poetry without lapsing into baroque conceptualism. The sayings, refl ections, and aphorisms contained in his verses are inevitably linked to human feeling. The poet, inventor, and operator of this mechanical device is a researcher, a collector of basic emotions. He is a kind of “folklorist,” an impassive creator of popular songs, never lapsing into a pastiche of the popular. He disregards his own feelings but records those of his fellow man, and then (seeing them recorded objectively on his device) he recognizes in himself the same human feeling. His machine is neither long-winded nor pedantic, and it can even be full of surprises, registering strange emotional phenomena. It goes without saying that its value, like that of other mechanical inventions, is more didactic or pedagogical than aesthetic. In short, the versifying machine can entertain the masses and start teaching them to express their own feelings, while awaiting the arrival of the new poets, the singers of a new sensibility.