All-out Art: Invoking the duende

For me the ultimate incarnation of La Gitana – and example of the interface of the Spanish and Romani cultures – is the flamenco dancer (watch one here), also a symbol of achieving a state of ecstatic inspiration, of being carried away by the moment, of transcending the here and now. But how is this state achieved? An inspired exploration of this question is found in Edward Hirsch’s book The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration. The opening chapters focus on Spain and the poet Frederico Garcia Lorca, who wrote, “[t]he great artists of the south of Spain, whether Gypsy or flamenco, whether they sing, dance, or play, know that no emotion is possible unless the duende comes.”

John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo, 1882, oil on canvas. More info here

For Lorca, invoking the duende (a kind of mischievous, devilish muse) opened doors for creative inspiration for both performer and audience, allowing us to experience the arts with the utmost immediacy, unfettered by intellectual restraints. An essentially mysterious power beyond rational explanation, duende, as viewed from Lorca’s Andalusian perspective,

was associated with the spirit of the earth, with visible anguish, irrational desire, demonic enthusiasm, and a fascination with death. It is an erotic form of dark inspiration. Lorca liked to repeat the legendary Gypsy singer Manuel Torre’s statement, “All that has black sounds has duende.” (Hirsch p. 10)

Torre, famous as a singer of cante jondo (deep song), was also the dedicatee of Lorca’s “Flamenco Vignettes.” Listen to a sample of deep song here. According to Hadia’s concise online Flamenco Dance History, the primary element of flamenco music has always been and remains cante (singing), with a percussive accompaniment of handclapping or knuckle-rapping. The guitar was not added until the 19th century. The influences in the development of flamenco music are diverse, and include Punjabi singing of India, Jewish Synagogue Chants, Arabic song forms, Andalusian regional folk forms, and elements introduced via Western African slaves. Listen to Dolores Agujeta, known as the "Daughter of Duende," singing Cante Gitano here.

Hirsch finds similarities between duende and the Portuguese word saudade, hearing this persistent “dark nostalgia” in Portugal fado (fate) music. (Listen to Manuel de Almeida sing “Fado da Despedida” here.) Even without an exact English equivalent for these Hispanic words, we recognize and respond to “art that touches and transfigures death.” In Deep Song Lorca asserts that “[t]he duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible.” Hirsch concludes that duende can be defined as “something like artistic inspiration in the presence of death,” and can be seen as central and what Pedro Salinas called the Spanish “culture of death.”  Here the even darker vision of the Czech-French writer Milan Kundera returns to me. Writing about the twisted self-portraits of artist Francis Bacon, Kundera characterizes ecstasy as a state of fulfillment that is in fact a state of forgetting. All…and nothing. For me duende is what makes this ecstasy of leave-taking, of both fulfillment and forgetting, possible for both artist and audience.

While Lorca found duende most fully expressed – and perhaps most vitally necessary – in performing arts (music, dance, poetry reading, even bull-fighting) requiring “a living body to express them,” he believed that it could be achieved in all of the arts. The constant interweaving of the arts is one of the delights of The Demon and the Angel, a book that “brings together Lorca’s black sounds and Emerson’s white fire” and incorporates ideas from other “creative spirits” such as Rilke, Yeats, and Klee.  Musically, Hirsch’s search of metaphors for artistic inspiration eventually take him to the underworld of blues and jazz. This beautifully-written book both reveals and instills the duende that reaches out from the strikingly eloquent prose, and is densely populated by works of art that beckon to be experienced on their own terms. The extensive topic-based lists for further reading, viewing, and listening further expand the potential of The Demon and the Angel as an all-embracing aesthetic experience.

But what does this to do with Bulgaria? In revealing “the hidden spirit of disconsolate Spain,” Lorca, in Hirsch’s words, acts as a “Saint John the Baptist, its trumpeting messenger.” Today is Ivanov den, the day of Ivan (e-VAHN), the Slavic equivalent of John. In a kind of reenactment of John’s baptism of Jesus, the traditional Bulgarian ritual on Jan. 6 (the day of Jordan) involves a priest-led procession to the nearest river, where a cross is thrown into the icy water and the men in attendance jump in after it in a race to get to the cross first. (The low water temperature isn’t the only motivational to do this quickly – a cash prize is often offered.) Following the ‘vadene na krusta’ everyone kisses the cross and receives a blessing with holy water in the manner of a baptism. Lorca also sensed the duende in Christian rituals – another kind of performance requiring “a living body” – and their connections to the pagan past.

At the Dunav (Danube) River near Silistra, Svetlin Ivanov got to the cross first, again.

(As reported by Darik Radio)