Myth of Arrival

Tonight I am calling upon the spirit of duende to help me through with this reading at the Creole Gallery, 7:30 pm. You know all about duende, even though it goes by many different names depending where you live. It is the soul of the Blues, the funk of "funkadelic," it is the silence everyone in a concert hall makes when the diva stops singing and all two thousand people suddenly realize they have been holding their breath.

Every step that an artist takes towards the tower of his perfection is at the cost of a struggle he maintains with a force, a spirit we call duende … The great artists of southern Spain know that no real emotion is possible unless there is duende … It is not a matter of ability but of blood; of ancient culture … The duende has to be aroused in the distant-most chambers of the blood … The duende surges up from the soles of the feet. This mysterious power that everyone feels but that no philosopher has explained is in fact the spirit of the earth.

Those are the words of Federico Garcia Lorca. I will be reading from some translated poems of his, from The Gypsy Ballads I do not mean to call upon duende discourteously; I really am in pain. Two nights ago I pulled a muscle in my shoulder blade at work, or pinched a nerve in my neck, it is one and the same. I can hardly turn my neck and when I do my fingers tingle like they are asleep. I have been gobbling up ibuprofen like candy drops. The down side of pain killers is that while I can function I am also a bit number than wild performances call for.

One must burn, even if they can't swivel the head very far.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Poetry News & Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.