duende
We talked about this on the MA course last week. Greg Mosse asked us what it was and I couldn’t answer. You can’t just say ‘It’s a type of car’, for instance. How to pin it down? It’s definitely dark and mutable.
I was a typical air-headed 16 year old when I first experienced duende. My wonderful Spanish teacher, Kate Hodges, took me to London to hear Pablo Neruda recite his poems. My Spanish was just about at ordering a coffee level so the actual words flew over my head. But, my God, I shuddered with the duende and have never forgotten it.
So what is it? It’s not passion. You can have passion but still lack duende. La Niña de los Peines had it. She began singing professionally at the age of 8 and became probably the most important woman flamenco singer of the 20th century, admired by Lorca. She said some experts came to hear her one night and she knew they did not desire form but the marrow of form. That is duende.
Lorca wrote a poetic treatise on duende. My favourite thing he said about it is: The duende loves the edge, the wound, and draws close to places where forms fuse in a yearning beyond visible expression. He also said that it is power and not a behaviour; it is a struggle and not a concept.
It makes me feel as if I’ve never grown up enough to have it. But I’ll keep trying.
