In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

MALE = FEMALE (GENDER TROUBLE) 395
This convergence of implicit homosexual attraction with the theme of
loss and recuperation of precarious intellectual certainty is by no means
exclusive to Mann's story. Having spent the previous summer with Salvador
DaH and feeling increasing physical desire for him, Federico Garcia
Lorca publishes a long, complex ode to his friend in the April issue of
the Revista de Occidente (Etherington-Smith, 62ff.). It contains no overt
reference to the poet's homosexual longings, but from the outset it is
filled with images of geometry, measurement, and transparent order: "A
rose in the high garden that you desire. / A circle in the pure syntax of
steel" (Garcia Lorca, 618). Gradually the reader becomes aware that this
motif points to something which has been lost and is urgently needed:
A desire for forms and limits defeats us.
Here comes the man who sees with the yellow straightedge.
Venus is a white still-life
And the butterfly collectors flee.
(Garda Lorca, 619)
Lorca's admiration for DaH the painter-and for DaH the beloved who
fails to respond to his love, yet does not reject it-is manifested as praise
of an artist who, rather than pretending that he has found certainty,
never gives up his search for guideposts and limits, and who continues
in full awareness of the endlessness of this quest:
0, Salvador DaH, of the olive voice!
I do not praise your imperfect adolescent paintbrush,
Or your palette, which haunts the color of your time,
But I praise the yearning of your imperfection.
I sing your beautiful striving for Catalan light,
Your love of what cannot possibly be explained.
I sing of your astronomical and tender heart.
(Garda Lorca, 619, 621)
From a thematic viewpoint, no text could be more different from Mann's
"Unordnung und fruhes Leid" and Garcia Lorca's "ada a Salvador
DaH" than T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a voluminous
account of the effect of the Great War on Arabia. Nevertheless, the