Tumgik
#silvionatural
zorelle · 2 years
Text
Blue Unicorn - Unicornio azul
So we all… know who the unicorn is, right.
This song is about losing him.
Tumblr media
Unicornio is a song by the great Cuban poet singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez. Silvio is one of the most renowned artists in his genre, la Nueva Trova Cubana, the musical Cuban expression of the counterculture/anti-establishment phenomenon in the 60s and 70s around all of the Americas and parts of Europe. Silvio is it for me like so many of his songs fuck me up I grew up listening to him, a lot of my first approach to politics came by asking about his lyrics … To thread a loose parallel to my non-Latinx readers, you could place him next to Bob Dylan, as in he´s one of the protest singers in Latinoamérica and that whole thing was huge here, still is.
So the song is actually just called Unicorn but everyone knows it as The Blue Unicorn so you know when the derangement hit months ago… and then Y yo a ti happened (!!) … Like this is one of the songs that made me do the playlist. (btw here's the playlist). This one is not as long as the last one, but I still think we should discuss it under a cut.
Ok… here we go.
That Destiel shot
Originally I thought about this song for the Purgatory arc, and I think it still fits by the lyrics, but the more I listen to it I think about the widower arc or I see Dean crying in despair… the song has this deep melancholic feeling that penetrates you, this sense of loss and hopelessness and like sweet awful grieving... So. In general, this is from Dean's POV and it's about every time he thought he'd lost Cas forever. Listen to it and you'll get a better vibe from this whole post, I swear. And yes, by a better vibe I do mean a sorrowful one. So go listen to it while Dean cries aklashdkjffvfth.
Tumblr media
Blue Unicorn
— as translated by me.
My blue unicorn got lost from me yesterday
I left him grazing
and now he's disappeared
If there´s any lead or tip…
I'll pay for it well.
The flowers he left me
I lost him yesterday,
are refusing to speak.
my blue unicorn
I don't know if he ran out
or if maybe he got lost…
And I have nothing left
but a single, blue unicorn
If anyone knows anything of him
I beg you to tell me,
100k, a million, I'll pay it.
…My blue unicorn.
I lost him yesterday,
My unicorn and I, we built this friendship
He left…
A little bit on love,
a little bit on truth.
He would fish out songs with his indigo horn
And then he knew exactly
Yesterday, I lost my blue unicorn
how to share them.
And this may have started to sound
like an obsession, to you
But I've got nothing more than a blue unicorn
Even if I had two,
I only want him.
I'll pay for any, any tip…
…My blue unicorn.
I lost him yesterday.
He's gone.
That Destiel meaning
–––
I could start waxing poetics about Dean's grief and loss, but really the song already accomplishes that so much better when you listen to it and think of him. I think what I want to talk about is how the song belongs on the playlist, not only by Dean's POV in the story but by us. Because I think the way the show was handled forged this open wound on a lot of people where we never got a moment to actually say goodbye properly, to Cas. So the audience had to go through this grieving without closure.
A few days ago the spn fandom (the guys I follow anyway) were talking about how Castiel felt real to them and I think that's very powerful and true, like… I balled my eyes out recently when Misha said he believed Cas felt loved before the Empty took him. like I KNOW I understand he's not real… but it felt like Misha was the last person who saw a friend in common who I didn't get to see and lost forever, and he was sharing that my friend had felt loved before he died. I know it may sound weird to outsiders but I'm sure you understand. Our mind doesn't recognize fictional characters as fictional. If we care about them and we lose them, then real or not it's gonna hurt bad, and actually, this whole tumblr experience has been partially about healing that wound for me. The ending felt like a symbolic act of violence to a lot of communities I identify as part of and that's why I rewatched spn to catch up but I came to care about these characters and their fates, and it hurt like a bitch in the end because they didn't get a respectful closure, and it felt almost hateful to Castiel.
So yes, it is about Dean losing Cas and the uneasiness and grieve and obsession over finding him, but I think it could also be about the spn fandom wanting to see our fictional best friend again and the despair of not having that moment to say goodbye or to not know if he's happy wherever he is now.
Lastly, I wanted to say this song interests me in the latinenatural sense because… if we consider Latinenatural beyond the funnies, I think the treatment of the story would change drastically under a Latinx lens. Some parts actually do change under our consumption of the media as viewers. There's a lot of despair and grief and horror in Latinoamérica… So the setting of losing and searching for someone by a Latinx lens I think wouldn't necessarily have Dean chopping heads as to show how much Castiel means to him, I think it would maybe focus, even on a fantasy setting, on the horrible journey of searching obsessively for someone who disappeared. Or at least that's what I'd do with it. I would talk about the disheartening horror of losing a loved one and not knowing what happened to them.
Something more like Unicornio. Because the song, corny as it may sound talking about a magical beast, is written in honor of a disappeared friend.
About the song
¿Cómo pudisteis cantar infamemente a las abstractas rosas y a la luna bruñida, cuando se caminaba paralelamente al litoral del hambre y se sentía el alma sepultada bajo un volcán de látigos y cárceles, de patrones borrachos y gangrenas y obscuros desperdicios de vida sin estrellas? — Roque Dalton, Canto a nuestra posición.
There's a bunch of theories around the meaning of the song. This is partially Silvio's fault bc he's been changing his answer on interviews for decades now, sometimes he has talked about how everyone has a unicorn so it's left for interpretation, other times he straight up says he actually had a unicorn and lost it… So people have come up with theories like 'he used to have a unicorn toy when he was a child' or 'he means unicorn as in the artistic inspiration, the muse', the most bonkers one is 'he lost a pair of jeans he really liked'… I'm here to tell you I've done my research and they're all wrong. I caught you, Silvio! I did my homework and I gotcha now! (actually, all I had to do was read the reference for the cd booklet)
In 1982 while presenting his album, Unicornio, Silvio says "everything started with a good friend I made called Roque Dalton, he was from El Salvador and besides being an amazing poet, he was a great revolutionary, which would ultimately cost him his life (…)"
Tumblr media
Roque Dalton was recognized by a lot of people, he was admired by big names like Julio Cortazar and Elena Poniatowska, as much for his revolutionary spirit as for his rare natural ability to thread words in beautiful ways either be it poetically or narratively, which people recognized it also had to do with how close he was to his story and his people, the care he had for his country. Because of that, he got arrested a lot by the right-wing regime in El Salvador and ultimately had to exile himself in Mexico. From there Roque went to all the hot spots in the Soviet bloc and then settled in Cuba, where he met Silvio… and Cortazar, actually. Cortazar said he met him when Roque was getting in an argument about gun usage with Fidel Castro at a party. Like, imagine that. (x)(x)
So Roque is Silvio's unicorn, and the song is partly about his disappearance. He was killed by his own mates on the revolutionary forces, which really... I think is so fucked up. El Salvador didn't open any investigation, no one was ever charged for his death, and his body was never recovered.
Some articles on Roque Dalton: x x x x x x x x
The other inspiration Silvio talked about was actually Roque's son, Juan José Dalton, who also made part of a guerrilla and, young as he was, had already been persecuted, captured, and tortured by the time Silvio and he spoke again. On that occasion, he had told Silvio that when he lived as a combatant in the mountains, he used to see a blue unicorn grazing in the distance from time to time. I guess that reminded him of his friend, forever lost to him and all of us.
Wouldnt it be nice to think of the people we love and lose as magical beings at peace, grazing around mountains, partially covered by the morning fog?
Anyway, this post is part of a set of rants I'm (slowly) writing about my playlist, Destiel en español, on Spotify. I wrote this one particularly in celebration of @tootiredmotel 's 500 followers, she planned 3 prompts each day for 4 days, I wanted this post to be ready on day 1 for "blue", but I'm like 2 days late 😬.
However, I hope you still find me sexy when I tell you I can fit it in today's prompt which is "reunite"... In order to reunite them on a good note and close this full circle, I choose the words of Roque Dalton to take us there, he says:
"Cuando sepas que he muerto no pronuncies mi nombre, porque se detendría la muerte y el reposo"
"When you know I've died don't say my name, for that alone would stop all death and stasis"
Tumblr media
That´s it for now, my heller friends and latinenatural vibrs. I hope you enjoyed it. 👐🏾✨
🦄 Destiel en Español 💙
<< Previous
53 notes · View notes