Ladies and Gentlemen, I have raised three arches and with clumsy hands placed within them the Muse, the angel and the duende."

"The duende….Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: a wind with the odour of a child’s saliva, crushed grass, and medusa’s veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things."

#LorcaDavis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6xhmOwaqEo

"With idea, sound, gesture, the duende delights in struggling freely with the creator on the edge of the pit. Angel and Muse flee, with violin and compasses, and the duende wounds, and in trying to heal that wound that never heals, lies the strangeness, the inventiveness of a man’s work."

"Dark sounds, behind which in tender intimacy exist volcanoes, ants, zephyrs, and the vast night pressing its waist against the Milky Way."

#LorcaDavis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdrAzpYdOYs

"When the Muse sees death appear she closes the door ..."

"When the angel sees death appear he flies in slow circles ... how it horrifies the angel if he feels a spider, however tiny, on his tender rosy foot!"

"The duende, by contrast, won’t appear if he can’t see the possibility of death, if he doesn’t know he can haunt death’s house, if he’s not certain to shake those branches we all carry, that do not bring, can never bring, consolation."

#LorcaDavis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGsVqF-URXc

"Spain is, at all times, stirred by the duende, country of ancient music and dance, where the duende squeezes out those lemons of dawn, a country of death, a country open to death.

In every other country death is an ending. It appears and they close the curtains. Not in Spain. In Spain they open them. Many Spaniards live indoors till the day they die and are carried into the sun. A dead man in Spain is more alive when dead than anywhere else on earth ..."

#LorcaDavis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MAduMT_J2g&t=1218s

"Years ago, an eighty year old woman came first in a dance contest in Jerez de la Frontera, against lovely women and girls with liquid waists, merely by raising her arms, throwing back her head, and stamping with her foot on the floor: but in that crowd of Muses and angels with lovely forms and smiles, who could earn the prize but her moribund duende sweeping the earth with its wings made of rusty knives."

#LorcaDavis

Saeta

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MAduMT_J2g&t=1458s

"So, then, the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought."

"The angel guides and grants ..."

"The Muse dictates, and occasionally prompts."

"Angel and Muse come from outside us: the angel brings light, the Muse form."

"... the duende has to be roused from the furthest habitations of the blood."

"The true struggle is with the duende."

#LorcaDavis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MAduMT_J2g&t=984s

"Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. ‘Dark sounds’ said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a definition of the duende: ‘A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.’"

Solea

#LorcaDavis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MAduMT_J2g&t=1770s

"All through Andalusia, from the rock of Jaén to the snail’s-shell of Cadiz, people constantly talk about the duende and recognise it wherever it appears with a fine instinct."

"And Manuel Torre, a man who had more culture in his veins than anyone I’ve known, on hearing Falla play his own Nocturno del Generalife spoke this splendid sentence: ‘All that has dark sounds has duende.’ And there’s no deeper truth than that."

#LorcaDavis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsWidlDldVk

Play and Theory of the Duende

Federico García Lorca

Translated from the original Spanish

This essay consists mostly of floridly described examples of duende. Excerpts here focus on the sparer, more searing passages.

Assuming, you're of a mood to be seared.

"It has no English equivalent," he explained, but it denotes "the ability to transmit a profoundly felt emotion with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of restraint. Miles Davis has duende."

— Nat Hentoff/Kenneth Tynan

#LorcaDavis

"The arrival of the duende presupposes a radical change to all the old kinds of form, brings totally unknown and fresh sensations, with the qualities of a newly created rose, miraculous, generating an almost religious enthusiasm."

— Federico García Lorca, Play and Theory of the Duende

#LorcaDavis

"Every species eventually hits a juncture where it either adapts to changing conditions or goes extinct. All signs indicate that we are rapidly approaching that juncture currently. If we make the necessary adaptations, they will look like a change in our relationship with thought."

— @Caitoz

"And I suspect that if we ever get there, it will feel very familiar. Very old, and very familiar."

— @Caitoz

#LorcaDavis

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/01/10/weve-been-dominated-by-narrative-control-since-the-dawn-of-civilization/

https://maly.io/@Caitoz@mastodon.social/109667754324223270

Starting a new hashtag with a couple quotes from @Caitoz, and the first of several from Federico García Lorca.

Just go with it.

Focus is on a cultural quality (once?) known in Spain as the duende. Other themes include transformations of consciousness past and future, both culture-bound and universal. Oh, and death.

Plus there's music.

Mostly Miles, some Mingus. No Monk.

#LorcaDavis #duende