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.

Love Sorrow

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,

what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so

utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment

by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,

as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.

"Love Sorrow" is a poem by Mary Oliver, from the book, Red Bird, that was given to me last summer by my long time sweetheart, just as our love got lost. Funny. He is a poet, and learned to love her poems because I began to love them. Part of kissing an old love goodbye is welcoming sorrow and grief and that wounded child, too, that shows up all pouty out of the blue. Mary Oliver, whose work sustains me over and over, describes just what I have been trying to do.

What a surprise to find this poem only tonight, seven months later, in the book he gave me. Maybe that is love after all. The gift of these healing words is just that.