fFlamenco & pansory- caves of the heart11

Flamenco and pansory

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​1.

These days Inu sometimes paints Portland, a city of the Oregon State in his mind canvas as a landscape, with Pioneer Square located in the center of the downtown of it. Below the square is drawn Hotel Central Plaza he stayed in when he visited this city roughly 20 years ago, and above is placed the 4- story stone building in the classical style of Central Library whose ivory-white marble stairs are impressively conspicuous. on the right side of it is the 2-story wooden house of Powell Book he dropped by to enjoy reading books over coffee in the cafe of it at that time. He still remembers the odor of coffee which fascinated him whenever he entered it. Cross the Broadway is Pearl District, what is called, Art Village where artwork galleries showig Oriental pottery, Traditional Chinese paintings line side by side. In the distancce ahead Willamette River depicted through the birs'-eye view runs horizontally.

The river was 5 or 6 minutes away on foot from Pioneer Square.

In no time he follows Chagall over the Pacific Ocean toward Portland , reaching Pineer Square in the sunny highnoon where some youths are playing together and others taking their rests on the stairs of the square. And in the cool evening there he is dazed to see a black youth dancing wildly with violent drum accompaniment.

It was in the very Pearl district where The August Festival of Portland was open that Inu happened to meet an exotic vegabond troupe dancing and singing flamenco completely unfamiliar but irresistibly fascinating. He flied to Poland the next year again t to see only the flamenco, which as a result gave him a chance to encounter Helena

Inu still has remembered a day of September in the past when he sat on the stone stair of Pioneer Square imagining in advance the 'Aire' flamenco show prepared by Helena and her flamenco group due to be open two days later. It was getting rather chilly at sunset. He sat alone on the stairs looking down at the ground of it where no children playing with pegeons and no couples of youths whispering to each other were to be seen any more. It was empty with no sounds. All of a sudden the calmness of it was beginning to sting him on the heart who has walked on the air For a month or more in anticipation of the ' Aire ' flamenco performance where he was due to be introduced by Helena herself as a special performer, because he turned a Korean song 'Morning Dew' into English which she was scheduled to express as a flamenco baile on the stage. The voidness in Pioneer Square at the moment overwhelmed him so deeply to drive him to realize who really was and that on the night of 'Aire' passing, he would say 'goodbye' to Helena and run alone by Greyhound to Atlanta as a common foreign traveler. And another imagination was continued that he would pull out the precious pebble of illusions in the pocket he kept fingering with everynight for a month and throw them into the Willameatte river one by one.

In Portland a man named Lear liked to join with Inu.Both happened to share the same large room with other several roommates in a hostel near Pioneer Square. A homeless white citizen of The USA , he often said that he already forgot the word of 'family'. About 190metre tall in hight , he let his blondy hair much longer than common women . He always stayed alone with a pair of sunglasses reading the Bible on his bed . He was, what is called, a social stranger nobody there wanted to talk with.

Once at daytime he stirred up a trifling disturbance getting roommates uneasy in the room by carelessly cutting his long hair by his own efforts with scissors in his hand, which made him seemed to be more abnormal psychologically there. After the disturbaance Inu tried to keep him company sharing cigarettes with him. Between us, He offered to Inu a piece of Marijuana which he enjoyed smoking. He would often said that he had a dream of escaping on someday from the earth of The USA , according to him, comtaminated so heavily with cruel crimes and dirty evils.

Strange to say, Lear began to call Inu 'my little Hyung Nim' in Korean ( elder brother ) and before long to be his private English tutor by advising him to correct his wrong ｅxpressions or explaining to him what was the meaning of the strange words which he met on reading a book. At that time', in his memory, he was reading a paper book, 'on The Road' by Jack Kerouac, which a young roommate named Tyler from Boston gave him as a present.

Again according to what Inu said, he sat impatiently in a cafe , talking with Lear over coffee 2 hours before the opening time on the very day of 'Aire '. Then Lear handed to him a bottle of Cola, saying ' This is Rum mixed Pepsi Cola.' Inu asked," What is it for?" He answered, " Drink half of it before standing on the stage. It is a kind of tranquilizer I made." Inu replied , "Really? Thank you, Lear." And needless to say, Inu for sure added another note that Lear corrected errors on the paper of a speech for Inu to deliver on the stage of the the performance.

Now Helena kept dear and beautiful in Inu's mind since the year of 2001 is going to be a dim being to be neither seen nor heard. She actually has lived in a remote PLlace 9 yours or so by airplane far away from him. Their correspondences between the two are not frequent any more. In rare emails they have exchanged was there just courteous greetings.Furthermore he was disappointed to read her rare emails where there were no words of flamenco to be seen any more. Judging that she really left flamenco, he was unhappy for it, as it meant that he lost a dream that she would got more and more successful as a beautiful flamenco dancer.He said to himself again:

Oh, I lost the last dream of mine.

Every dream I have reared has gone away one by one

like water mist at the moment of sunrising in the morning.

TI had lost the first target of mine

and also after the second one went away,

the last is going to follow it soon.

Her dancing has been to me flamenco itself I really have loved.

Now nothing was left for me any more.

How Futile it is!

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Portland in Inu's memory is a town under the high blue sky without a speck of cloud , with the downtown in the morning filled with the coffe aroma and the city's countryside giving off the fragrance of blackberries offensive to the nose.

In the downtown of it there was Pioneer Square which reminded Inu of the open-air hall of Yunsei University he in his youth graduated from, and subsequently an ancient Greek theatre in the open-air and semi-circle form where Electra, one of Greek tredigies must have been performed. In his memory there stand still the Willameatte, the steel bridges over the river and the old building of NW Hostel.

On the one hand, In Inu's mind Helena is still a fascinating flamenco bailaora as she used to take hold of the large audienceon the night stage of performances. To him one time she was the world of flamenco itself. As he has often referred to Helena on talking with his acquantances, there are many in his hometown to know her by name itself. And also not a few painters doing thier artworks in the ChangDong Art Village in Masan know her by name through Inu who has been known to then as a writer in love of artworks and flamenco. In the book titled ChangDong in Blue written by him the readers of it can read not only his critical writings on diverse paintings, but also encounter dozens of modern painters, flamenco dancers and Korean Pansory singers.

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According to Inu, both flamenco and 'pansory ' was in substance means which a few alienated group of people could express their their resignation or social resisitance. In case of flamenco, gypsies in Andalusia who was the first beginners of flamenco were slaves to a social system that reduced their life to meanlessness. In short they lacked integrity, indiviuality and freedom.

Many gypsies was a part of the underprivileged class of Andalusian society; poor and with few educational opportunities. They live in the slums of the 'barrios'. At the heart of their social orinzation are the family and the clan.

The pansory singers of Korea were, in a sense, in the same position as the gypsies of Andalusia in Spain.

Most of pansory singers lived in the Junra territory of South Korea as an alienated clan of the lower class of society . They were ,as it were, the poor troupers wandering along the seaside area who made their livings by singing pansory and showing their troupe.The feeling of being victimized gypsied in old days are thought to have undergone and the feeling of alienation pansory singers are believed to have suffered would be regarded in essence as the same things viewed in the light of their unhappy lives. Hhe was somewhat surprised , once he said, at the fact that as gypsies had a disdainful word of 'payos' in their dialect meaning non-gypsy flamenco artists in their dialect, so 'JunraDo-born ' pansory singers called unfavorably as 'bigabi' singers.

Both people , Iny added, hadcommonly a kind of the consciousness of resignation as their fate, thinking that they could not be from pain of life , suppression, and poverty. Both flamenco and pansory ,he concluded, were products from ther life styles of each other. In case of flamenco, the fact that song or dance of it went out beyond the traditional limitatation of gypsies to the ocean of univeral emotion throughout the world was a meaningful background on which many people outside Spain have enjoyed flamenco shows

It was well known that famenco cante was continued orally without any sheet music from generation to generation . In case of the pansory song of Korea it was haned down also by the same way. For example It was said that there were not a few pansory singers unable to read and write Korean Language!

In short, both flamenco and pansory were artistic forms of ｅxpressionism, which were the sublimates of human laments and consciousness of resignation bursting out as if the daybreak began in the east. TThen actually there was an important difference between them. It was that flamenco art has been mainly composed of two essential elements, that is, cante and baile , while pansory has had only songs. Then Inu was thought to prefer flamenco, especially cante to pansory, by what he had said as below:

"I love flamenco more as it yearn for the earth, not the heaven.

Cante runs toward the earth, baile turns down toward the earth. "flamenco is down; Ballet is up", the words of Robbin, flamenco guitarist sums up well this meaning of it.

Sometimes the voice or the the gesture calls to mind the little sea I had spent my boyhood by, the surface of which is filled with silvery twinklings.

Now I'd like to read aloud the poem , titled ' the death of Ignasia Sanches' , by Garcia Lorca, hearing Camaron singing Solea of flamenco .

Most of all I'd like to write email to Helena who danced Morning dew'.

Her dazzling solo dancing one day turns the little sea with the surface rippled at dawn, and another time the grey sky at sunset of the mountain I had spent 5 years in my youth as a TB patient . I have loved her dancing as if it were the essence of flamenco itself."