The Crash

Federico Garcia Lorca, in his lecture on Poet in New York, described Wall Street in the aftermath of the Great Crash of 1929.

The Crash

The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There as nowhere else you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science, and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd who fills the street believes that the world will always be the same, and that it is their duty to move the huge machine day and night forever. The perfect result of a Protestant morality that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving. I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent crash, where they lost various billions of dollars, a rabble of dead money that slid off into the sea, and never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainters, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness. And I, who come from a country where, as the great poet Unamuno said, ‘at night the earth climbs to the sky,’ I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole shadowy defile where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings.

That is why I included this dance of death. The typical African mask, death which is truly dead, without angels or ‘resurrexit’; death as far removed from the spirit, as barbarous and primitive as the United States, which has never fought, and never will fight for heaven.

Spot on.