Miguel de Unamuno

Tragedy is when you take a side
that is not one side or the other,
but entirely your own, and suicide
is the result, whether you smothered

from your brazier fumes, or the maid
heard you scream twice, before the visitor
departed. A Professor of Greek’s trade
is surely to teach the Inquisitor

that the tragic for an individual,
is tragic for neither side, but the sheet,
which origami made residual,
when the folder pressed repeatedly

one person into a shape not their own.
Much onomatopoeia in a groan.

Woodford Halse - 18 February 2026

The Spanish philosopher and poet and origami-exponent Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo ( 1864 - 1936 ) who was Professor of Greek at Salamanca University, and came to a strange end under Franco during the first autumn of the Spanish Civil War.

In 1913 he published his famous text, The Tragic Sense of Life, or in Spanish, El sentimiento tragico de la vida. I have been influenced by his writing on Don Quixote for almost 40 years now. He got himself banned by the Catholic Church, by the Spanish Republic, which had its ideological repressions too, and by Franco who placed him under house arrest.

I come from a country with the highest youth male suicide rate in the world, a high late mid-life male suicide rate, and yet no sense of the tragic among the European population, not as Unamuno or the Greeks understood it; and certainly there is no sense of that towards Maori either, as they were/are colonised. Yet undoubtedly the tragic is folded into the very fabric of the paper, or pajarita, as the Spaniards call it the origami figure.