1) From Huidobro: "Si aceptáis las representciones que un hombre hace de la Naturaleza, ello prueba que no amáis ni la Naturaleza ni el Arte". "Creacionismo". There will be more to come on creacionismo but I do want to observe that Christopher Travis deals with "the environmental dialectics" in creacionismo. For me, this epigraph (of his) hinges on the word "aceptáis" - it could mean: 1) that human representation in general always short circuit (s/c) 2) we need "better" "representations"...
2) It has been many years since I dealt with Valle-Inclán's Luces de bohemia: I really enjoyed its parodic function when matched against the sincerity of Unamuno or Azorín. I later found the same to be true with Baroja. The so-called quijotismo of Unamuno in the attempt to find some type of remainder or excess after the cogs of history roll through modern Spain becomes totally absurd in these texts. In Ldb, the scene with Rubén Darío drinking absinthe with a blind poet becomes ridiculous - incrementally so as they enter further into their verse.
Inversely, this is the esthetics of esperpento - to found at the bottom of a glass (al fondo de un vaso). Earlier, Max, the blind poet deals with the young Modernists, who behave like animals. And maybe not only in a way demeaning to animals. Valle-Inclán's observation about the connection between the natural world and the artifice praised by modernism. Darío talks about Nature not as a forest, but rather as a carved up piece of landscape, in Spanish: boscaje vs. bosque. Even if it seems like these poets escape the traps of Romanticism, "Nature" comes back to haunt them. Or more in line with some great thinking from OOO (object-oriented ontology) - objects never really leave the modernist space. Whatever Darío's praises of the Exposition Universelle, there is always something horrifying about it.
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