The Duende?
From out of the alchemically green-gold valleys and hillsides of Andalusia, Spain, comes the myth and aesthetic experience of the duende. From “duen de casa” or, Master of the House, the duende is reminiscent of the Trickster, said to bring havoc and interruption when the home is upended with internal strife. More, this figure relates to the Self with a mysterious, chythonic-infused passion for both life and death. The duende can be that very center and circumference of psyche: irrational, earthy, present to death, and possessing a “dash of the diabolical.”
Federico Garcia Lorca
An admixture of Gypsy, Moor, and Middle-Eastern influences, this Spanish hobgoblin took on a new character through the verse and prose of poet, Federico Garcia Lorca. In Lorca’s imagination, the duende is embodied by song, dance – both lyrical and the particular pattern formed within the confines of the bullring – and the literary arts. “Black tones,” or the “cante jondo” (Deep Song), as Lorca described them, rose from within the soul of the performer, enfolding the witnessing audience. As was often heard in these moments of collective participation, the excited shout, “That had much duende!” would descend over the crowd.
These occurrences of duende give an embodied example of shared empathy: when groups and communities enter a mythic consciousness, recognizing the profundity of a personal or cultural grief. In the Andalusian psyche, this grief has a beauty sublime, black, and yet verdantly green. From Lorca’s Deep Song and Other Prose: “These black sounds are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that gives us the substance of art…. The duende, then, is a power, not a work; it is a struggle not a thought” (43).
