Niño de Elche, singer and writer: «Today those who most defend the existence of God are scientists»
Monday, January 20, 2025, 00:02
A multifaceted and disconcerting artist, Niño de Elche overflows with spirituality and is now immersed in the mystics. Francisco Contreras, as his ID says, has just published a new collection of poems, ‘Conversations with a wooden monk’ (Espasa), in which he engages in a dialogue with a carving sculpted by the poet and theologian Ernesto Cardenal, who was Minister of Culture during the Sandinista revolution. To illuminate these poems, many of them in prose, he has immersed himself in reading Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa, Saint Ignatius, Saint Benedict, Saint Augustine and a whole rosary of saints, while at the same time he has delved into the monks who They have boldly pursued silence.
–How did this book come about, what is its origin?
–When I acquire this figure of Ernesto Cardenal, the sculpture becomes a monk with whom I converse, and that catches me in a moment of profound spirituality. I understood that this monk came to start conversations like the ones we have had.
–Do you feel enlightened?
–I dedicate myself to the artistic world, which means I have a certain connection with spirituality and with other energies that have nothing to do with it. Every person who has a relationship with art has, whether they like it or not, a relationship with spirituality, with the inexplicable, with the mystery of existence.
–Is it a book that draws on the Spanish mystical tradition?
–To write this book I have immersed myself in many others, especially those related to monastic practice. Much of the reflections are taken from there, but apart from that, there is also a lot of tradition or texts that are related to silence.
–Should we live every day as if it were a miracle?
–Yes, that’s how I live it. It is one of the great learnings of spirituality. Not so much understanding it as ‘carpe diem’, but as the gratitude that is felt for every miracle. An author who has helped me a lot is Christian Bobin, who said that you have to be attentive to the daily miracle that God has in store for you. From that listening is how I believe you have to face life.
«If being a classic means anchoring yourself in a conservative static canon, I am not one»
–Is the aspiration of every artist to become a classic?
–I have a radio program, ‘The classics await us tomorrow’, on RNE, and there I understood that one of the meanings of the classic is that which is worthy of imitation, which seems positive to me. If being a classic means anchoring yourself in a conservative static canon, no.
–And what does the Trappist monk sculpted by Ernesto Cardenal tell you?
–It is an a priori crazy conversation, because one of the receivers and senders relates from silence, so one of the virtues of this conversation is listening from the silence that he emits. That’s why many times in the book I wonder where the sender and the receiver are.
–And do you feel like a Trappist monk?
–Very little, very little. But well, a while ago I had my birth chart read from the Vedic perspective. My life is always between the extremes of the demon Raju and the monkish. It is something that I have been told a lot, and in my experience I live it like this every day.
–To seek spirituality is it necessary to lock yourself up in a monastery?
–No, and not to seek silence either. The poet and musicologist Ramón Andrés teaches us that silence is above all an awareness.
–Do you believe in God, how do you imagine him?
–Well, I could say that I believe in God, yes. For a Catholic, God shapes human beings in his image and likeness. But in other religious traditions it is not thought that way.
–And your convictions are made up of scraps from different religions? Is it dogmatic?
–I am a person of rituals, of those everyday rituals that have to do with everyday life. Science must be taken into account in everything. Today those who most defend the existence of God are astrophysicists, scientists, especially in the 20th century. There is a wonderful book, ‘Divine Planet’, by Antony Flew, the great atheist philosopher who later converted to deism, which claimed that his entire scientific and philosophical basis was to prove the existence of God.
–Do you believe in the vow of chastity? Does sex make us free or does it fool us?
–I have experienced that one of the great virtues of the human being, and I say this because of that monastic demon thing that they say I have in my past lives, has to do with self-control. And that self-control also has to do with sex. But hey, I am a very sexual person and I understand that God is also there, of course. Ecstasy has to do with that too, with the ideas of Saint John Cross, who reached orgasm only with the passion of love for God.
«It is delirious to identify the Church with the State. The Church must be a counterpower”
–Once Ernesto Cardenal, liberation theologian, knelt before Pope John Paul II and he scolded him.
–Prostrating before institutional authorities is usually humiliating. It is one of the things that spirituality and many of the people who were related to the Church teach us precisely. The delusion is to have understood the Church as an institution close to the State or even within the sphere of the State. The Church would have to be understood as a counterpower.
–Ernesto Cardenal didn’t mind cleaning toilets when he was a Trappist monk. He said that humility and simplicity gave him perfection when writing. Would you go that far?
–I think that goes through your way of writing and being. Buddhists have the ritual of cleansing associated with spirituality. My friend Andoni Luis Aduriz, one of the great Spanish chefs, who runs the Mugaritz restaurant, taught his workers, including his chefs, to fold the cloth millimetrically. When one reaches that virtue, to that point, things are much easier, although at first it seems somewhat banal.
–And do you practice those rituals to meditate?
–In many things, yes. At breakfast time, for example, I do a series of rituals to arrange things in a non-geometric way. And order and rite are etymologically sister words. It’s all about finding a state. I have never sung at home, nor will I, because the state of the home has nothing to do with what I need to activate my voice.
–He says in his collection of poems: “love is what fuels the fire of poetry, and everyone who sings with their soul burns in flashes through their mouths.”
–For me, singing is like burning, like lighting something. And it has to do with the maximum meaning of love..
