And From Your Lips She Drew a Hallelujah?

Today so far there was no random reading. I woke up, drank some Diet Coke, checked my email and could think of nothing but Lorca's 'Thamar y Amnon' before work. I just had repeating in my head the ending lines:

'Y cuando los cuatro cascos
eran cuatro resonancias,
David con unas tijeras
cortó las cuerdas del arpa.'



Well, it is a haunting finale, with the alliterative, diminishing hoofbeat of cuando cuatro cascos, and I think it's a masterful, powerful poem, but the last two lines always really get to me. In the poem, Lorca weaves the story of Amnon's rape of his half-sister Thamar together with references to David's sins and other earthly repercussions for the house of David. Everything happens together, and Thamar is Bathsheba bathing on the rooftop, while Absalom murders Amnon, the arrows killing Urias shoot from David's own palace walls and Amnon's lust murders his sister's innocence. Wanting to read it and being lazy, and realizing that moving my mouse is easier than moving my body, I just looked the poem up online. By putting in 'David unas tijeras' (in hopes of getting a page with the entire poem, instead of a site only about the poem) in the search form, I got this site, and got, along with the poem, a commentary that included this: '

'This is a highly problematic poem, for what Garcia Lorca does here, I argue, is to present us with a sympathetic view of Amnón, that it was his overpowering sexual desire that caused him to rape Thamar. Federico is not the first or last person to argue that sexuality has a dark side, that it can and will take on a barbarous, even suicidal persona; however, by entering into the debate by claiming Amnón just couldn't "help himself," that Thamar's own beauty "forced" her half-brother to violate her, Lorca is simply presenting a tired old chestnut that has been used since time-immortal; in short, that there is no such thing as free will, that men are simply slaves to their own libidos.'

So I felt compelled to write about it, because I don't think Lorca was doing that at all. Amnon is portrayed as lusting heavily - and as (perhaps overdramatically, or perhaps genuinely, in fear of God and more divine retribution on his clan) asking for some kind of relief from it.

"Cut out my eyes, Thamar,
with your fixed dawn.
The threads of my blood
weave ruffles on your dress."

There are two separate issues: temptation and sin. Lorca was well aware of the distance between the two, and the lack of causal relationship. In 'Lucia Martinez' from three years earlier, the poet's predatory narrator baldly describes his intent:

'Here I am, Lucia Martinez.
I've come to devour your mouth
And drag you off by the hair
into the seashells of daybreak'

and his chilling, egoistic rationale of the act he intends to commit:

'because I want to and I can.'

And, the story of the later poem - whether David's, the House of David's, or solely Amnon's, has a vastly different meaning if David or Amnon or Absalom does not choose to sin. Canonically, the story goes that the Christian God will not allow us to be tempted more than we can resist. Literarily, not only is David the most complex and most fully-developed character in the Bible (and the 'first human being in world literature' according to Baruch Halpern's David's Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King), but this poem would be about something else altogether had it simply been foreordained, destiny, or some law of nature (or human nature) that Amnon would rape Thamar. David would not be the same rich character if he were simply forced to do all the great good and bad things he did, and if Shakespeare likewise had written about automatons instead of tormented heroes in his tragedies, would anyone bother reading (let alone memorizing, filming, studying, restaging, and continuing to tease out new meanings from) him all these centuries?

Yes, Amnon was overcome by temptation. That is the point. Temptation as a plot development, spiritual crisis, or moment of growth or decline has no content if it is not hugely desirable. If I have no lust for money, offering me a million dollars to do something unsavory will not sway me: the payoff is insufficient to the task. In other words, I am not tempted. The plot, of the book or of my life, does not move forward. If I do not have lust for my sister, I will not rape her. And the gravest transgressions are not only the ones with the strongest pull but the ones both rationality and our conscience most vehemently cry out against. Our conscience, together with social mores, perhaps, and common sense, human decency, fear of secular or heavenly punishment, empathy, logic, and the like, urge us not to rob the bank, not to drive drunk, not to hit our spouse, and not to embezzle those funds it would be so hard to trace...

It is therefore a struggle, a meaningful struggle, as Amnon admitted when he suggested his eyes be cut out - before they wandered again in the poem down to the ruffles his lust was weaving on her dress. If he could only stop seeing, he reasons, could no longer behold Thamar's beauty, he would have no cause to sin. Amnon's 'threads of blood' directly recall Jesus' sweat of blood as He suffered - suffered temptation, more precisely - in Gesthemani. He could have skipped his execution, and Amnon could have let go of Thamar's arm. I think Lorca evokes that familiar image and contrasts the brief moment Amnon meditates on what it is he is about to choose to do in order to make clear how deliberate the act is. Rather than struggle with the temptation for hours, turn to God, and ultimately accept His will as did Jesus in His torment, Amnon thinks about it for a few lines' worth of text, realizes the grave wrong of what he is considering - and decides that, all things considered, what he really wants right now is to rape his sister, not wait around for an angel to tell him he is strong. The 'hilos de sangre' linking Amnon and Christ serve to emphasize, not powerlessness, but how important it is to realize we do have a choice, and how serious and far-reaching the consequences can be, whether we resist or give in to temptation: in Christianity, it is through Christ's full acceptance in Gethsemani of his role as Savior on the Cross the next day that sinners like Amnon can find forgiveness and redemption.

In the Biblical story as in the poem, Thamar does not just resist physically, she remonstrates aloud with Amnon.

'Déjame tranquila, hermano.
Son tus besos en mi espalda
avispas y vientecillos
en doble enjambre de flautas.'

In the Lorca, she gives appeals to Amnon's empathy, while in the Biblical passages, she as well speaks of the moral, legal, and social aspects of the crime, and even tells Amnon if he were to get David's assent first then she could be his. But despite the fewer words of protest in the poem, surely the entreaty of his soon-to-be victim registered, along with the cries of his own conscience and common sense, in Amnon's mind. She even calls him brother, which should not merely evoke tenderness and kinship loyalty, but remind him that the crime he wants to commit is not merely rape and assault, but incest, as well.

David was chosen of God to found and lead the state of Israel, he wrote love songs to God, he sinned mightily (against Urias, Bathsheba, his people, his son, the people of Israel and, of course, against God, who is the only one we ever really sin against), repented mightily, and was forgiven due to his sincere repentance - but with Yahweh decreeing through the prophet Nathan that 'the sword will not depart' from his house, that evil will rise 'against you out of your own house,' that his own wives would be taken by others, and that the product of his adultery and the impetus for the murder to cover it up, his and Bathsheba's baby, would die. King David heartily, deeply, and sincerely regretted his actions, because he knew he could have made other choices and yet succumbed to temptation. So, too, did Amnon know his options; the charitable impulses and rationality he pushed to the back of his mind were brought to the forefront as Thamar pleaded with him while he pulled her to him. It wasn't fate, it wasn't biology; it was willful sin - with meaning and consequences as powerful as the temptation that urged it forward.

And David the psalmist, the rhapsodic lover of God, David with his unending faith and sincere contrition on a par with that of the Sufi's paradigmatic lover Iblis, Davidwho writes of the evil he has bred in the world,

'For I know my transgression,
and my sin is ever before me.
Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,
and done that which is evil in thy sight'

seeing the evil his son has done, which recapitulates his own, stops pleading,

'O Lord, open thou my lips,
and my mouth shall show forth thy praise'

and instead in the poem abandons hope, abandons praise, and cuts the strings of his harp. David the shepherd with a flock in disarray, David the King of Israel and head of a murdering and incestuous royal family, David the giant-killer who finally tamed his own demons now watching in horror at his sons repeating his crimes and, in the end, David the rapturous Psalmist laying down his harp and songs of praise on hearing the hoofbeats of Amnon's departing horse. That's the part that sticks with me!