Duende

To log on to your own blog to find comfort is serendipidous and as crazy as it gets. Reading Mary Oliver's poem Love Sorrow was a soothing surprise.

For two days I have been experiencing waves of the deepest kind of oxygen sucking pain, deep in my chest where my breath starts. My world of photographs and music and letters and writing got lost this week, in a freak wipe out by the gods at Apple. I had no idea I would fall so hard and feel so powerfully shaken.

The power has visited me before: duende is the word that comes to mind. The Spanish say tener duende, having duende - the emotion associated with "irrationality and earthiness, one which includes a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical".

According to Wikipedia:

"The duende is a demonic earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence, reminding him that "ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head"; who brings the artist face-to-face with death, and who helps him create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art.

The duende is seen, according to Federico Garcia Lorca, as an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm (what Spaniards call "angel"), and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. Not that the artist simply surrenders to the duende; he or she has to battle it skillfully, "on the rim of the well", in "hand-to-hand combat".

In some strange way, writing this, re-writing what some good writer posted for me on Wikipedia, helps me see a little, feel a little, like this visitor will leave. And perhaps will leave me richer, stronger and maybe, just maybe, on the sunny side of death.