Angel, muse, duende, and...

Black sounds, part 2. 
Part one is here.

H. R. Giger, Birth Machine, 1910.
Wikipedia + Creative Commons license

If we look at the sort of narratives that reach across the face of America, we find that Lorca's muse, angel, and duende are all missing. Perhaps this is no surprise. Studies have shown us that the majority of people don't engage much in written stories, the descendant of our most ancient around-the-fire way of engaging in explaining ourselves to ourselves. Many people who attend college no longer read books after they graduate. Of course, people gossip and tell anecdotes about those they know, although a recent article in The Atlantic suggested that conversation itself is under threat in a technological age. But for most, the art form where they encounter the told story is the movie. And the movie that reaches big screens in the hinterlands where I and many others live is the most popular movie of all, the one that is pushed by marketers, thrust on the populace, and that sells the most tickets.

For many decades now, we have lived in a world where marketers choose what most people read and watch. We have relinquished to them the power of creating our own culture by exploration and affirmation of what is true, good, and beautiful. This mode of establishing the direction of the main stream of culture has curious results.

If we take a look at The Hunger Games, the Twilight series, or some superhero saga like the latest Captain America: The Winter Soldier, we may believe that we find some clever, well-made movies of their kind--I'm not going to jump into an argument about individual films--but we also find an absence of muse, angel, and duende. Instead, there is a rejection of the powers of inspiration that come from Lorca's angel and muse, as well as an evasion of soulfulness. We find a strong insistence on the individual's ability and power to take control of his or her own life and wrest it away from the terrible structures made by human beings, as well as from the powers of death and God. Appointed deaths are ducked for the hero and heroine in The Hunger Games. Death dies for the central characters in the Twilight stories, and the risk to the soul no longer has any meaning. Vampires in Forks have little trouble with the burden of great, lonely age; they all have equal partners to console them for the endless cold. Captain America? In The Winter Soldier, Captain America shares with the old-fashioned vampire a burden of age that outlives mortal love. In all these cases, the one thing the protagonist must come to accept is friendship and the need to renew and make connections in order to survive.

Lorca's vision of the storyteller's trinity of possible inspiration--the angel who brings light and grace and thorn-crown of fire, the muse who may dictate and brings shapeliness and intellect to the work, and the earth spirit who burns in our blood and brings a baptism in dark water--is simply not needed or wanted in these Hollywood stories. They are ruled by another power entirely, the time ghost, the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist. And that is in great part why they are so popular. Matthew Arnold, coiner of the term, thought of the zeitgeist as a force that powered events, and from which we might want to take refuge.

The zeitgeist so evident in these and many other blockbuster movies is composed of interlocking parts like a toy transformer--technological, apocalyptic, and conspiratorial. A sense of overwhelming technological progress broods over the movies, and even invades places that could possibly be a wild refuge. Even what used to be raw and wild is internet-connected, and the powers of characters take on a technological edge. (Indeed, it's hard not to be frequently aware of the wonders of CGI when viewing most movies these days.) The wind of the zeitgeist blows through a landscape that is as violent and cruel as the killing grounds of the 20th century, but now the spirit of the age as seen in popular story is entangled in webs of conspiracy. Inside our filmic governments and powers are elaborate, subterranean schemes and initiatives that ordinary people are helpless to understand, even if we sense them or glimpse what we are allowed to see of them. The idea of widespread, powerful conspiracy rules the movie world, and tends toward the making (and unmaking) of apocalyptic events. Dread is the atmosphere we breathe. The human soul is in peril, liable to destruction or reduction.

In the face of such threats in movie land, our human (or once-human) characters do the thing that good capitalists do: they network. They make a counter-web to set against conspiracy and destruction. Our created blockbuster characters tend to give up all concern for the soul in their cornered efforts to survive the whelming technological and human plots against them. It's not so different from our daily lives, surrounded from waking with technological connections and pelted with disturbing news about the institutions intended to keep people safe. In our everyday life, we are bombarded with trivia and threats, distracted from depth and reflection.

Bernini, the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, c. 1660. Apse of
St. Peter's Basilica. Wikipedia Commons, public domain.

With such a zeitgeist stirring the world, it's no wonder that a movie like Aronofsky's Noah headed straight for controversy; for once, a movie that pursues angel, muse, and duende has reached the hinterlands of America. The film turns its face away from technology and conspiracy and explores creation, obedience to divine will, and old apocalypse. Here is the creator God, making the universe in six periods of time before the time of rest, stirring a seed, raising a forest, and unlocking the extravagant fountains of the deep. Atheist he may be, but Aronofsky restores meaning to the word awesome. And here are we mortals, shown as the pluckers of the apple and in silhouette as slayers of Abel, a murderous tribe, generation after generation.

The lost drama of salvation returns in Noah, and the soul strives to grasp God and divine intention. In that realm, everything human beings do again matters and is of the very highest moment. The effort to understand God and do what is demanded can push a man to the teetery brink of madness. Oh, the movie has flaws, like some passages that seem pilfered from Peter Jackson's version of Middle Earth battles and from Jackson's mountains that step out as stone giants. But Aronofsky wrestles with the power of the angel and calls forcibly to the muse. He invokes the black sounds of duende  and Lorca's baptism by dark water through the creation of a Noah of anguish and the fear of abandonment and death, through the man's passionate courting of heaven, and through the force of the blood tie of family that, in the end, saves the world a second time.

Angel, muse, duende: these are the three who battle the zeitgeist on our behalf, wielding their strange, piercing weapons. Perhaps they will yet bring us to fresher, truer, stronger stories, if we can only hand down the memory of what Melville called "deep diving," and the knowledge of how to read and see.

"Muses Sarcophagus," The Louvre
Roman, 2nd century A. D.
Public domain, via Wikipedia

Black sounds: 5 readings

Henri Rousseau, La Muse Inspirant le poète,
1909. Guillaume Apollinaire with painter
Marie Laurencin. via Wikipedia, public domain.

from Federico Garcia Lorca, "Theory and Play of the Duende"(1933)
translation by A. S. Kline - read the full version here

   For every man, every artist called Nietzsche or Cézanne, every step that he climbs in the tower of his perfection is at the expense of the struggle that he undergoes with his duende, not with an angel, as is often said, nor with his Muse. This is a precise and fundamental distinction at the root of their work.
   The angel guides and grants, like St. Raphael: defends and spares, like St. Michael: proclaims and forewarns, like St. Gabriel.
   The angel dazzles, but flies over a man’s head, high above, shedding its grace, and the man realises his work, or his charm, or his dance effortlessly. The angel on the road to Damascus, and that which entered through the cracks in the little balcony at Assisi, or the one that followed in Heinrich Suso’s footsteps, create order, and there is no way to oppose their light, since they beat their wings of steel in an atmosphere of predestination.
   The Muse dictates, and occasionally prompts. She can do relatively little since she’s distant and so tired (I’ve seen her twice) that you’d think her heart half marble. Muse poets hear voices and don’t know where they’re from, but they’re from the Muse who inspires them and sometimes makes her meal of them, as in the case of Apollinaire, a great poet destroyed by the terrifying Muse, next to whom the divine angelic Rousseau once painted him.
   The Muse stirs the intellect, bringing a landscape of columns and an illusory taste of laurel, and intellect is often poetry’s enemy, since it limits too much, since it lifts the poet into the bondage of aristocratic fineness, where he forgets that he might be eaten, suddenly, by ants, or that a huge arsenical lobster might fall on his head – things against which the Muses who inhabit monocles, or the roses of lukewarm lacquer in a tiny salon, have no power.
   Angel and Muse come from outside us: the angel brings light, the Muse form (Hesiod learnt from her). Golden bread or fold of tunic, it is her norm that the poet receives in his laurel grove. While the duende has to be roused from the furthest habitations of the blood.
   Reject the angel, and give the Muse a kick, and forget our fear of the scent of violets that eighteenth century poetry breathes out, and of the great telescope in whose lenses the Muse, made ill by limitation, sleeps.
   The true struggle is with the duende.
   The roads where one searches for God are known, whether by the barbaric way of the hermit or the subtle one of the mystic: with a tower, like St. Teresa, or by the three paths of St. John of the Cross. And though we may have to cry out, in Isaiah’s voice: Truly you are a hidden God,’ finally, in the end, God sends his primal thorns of fire to those who seek Him.
   Seeking the duende, there is neither map nor discipline. We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles and makes Goya, master of the greys, silvers and pinks of the finest English art, paint with his knees and fists in terrible bitumen blacks, or strips Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer stark naked in the cold of the Pyrenees, or sends Jorge Manrique to wait for death in the wastes of Ocaña, or clothes Rimbaud’s delicate body in a saltimbanque’s costume, or gives the Comte de Lautréamont the eyes of a dead fish, at dawn, on the boulevard.
   The great artists of Southern Spain, Gypsy or flamenco, singers dancers, musicians, know that emotion is impossible without the arrival of the duende. They might deceive people into thinking they can communicate the sense of duende without possessing it, as authors, painters, and literary fashion-makers deceive us every day, without possessing duende: but we only have to attend a little, and not be full of indifference, to discover the fraud, and chase off that clumsy artifice.

from Edward Hirsch, A Poet's Glossary (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)

Lorca

uses the word duende in a special Andalusian sense as a term for the obscure power and penetrating inspiraton of art. He describes it, quoting Goethe on Paganini as "a mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains." For him, the concept of duende, which could never be entirely pinned down or rationalized was associated with the spirit of earth, with visible anguish, irrational desire, demonic enthusiasm, and a fascination with death...
   Duende, then means something like artistic inspiration in the presence of death. It has an element of mortal panic and fear, the power of wild abandonment. It speaks to an art that touches and transfigures death, both wooing and evading it...
   Duende exists for readers and audiences as well as for writers and performers. Lorca states: 'The magical property of a poem is to remain possessed by duende that can baptize in dark water all who look at it, for with duende it is easier to love and understand, and one can be sure of being loved and understood."

David Bowman Jr. for Addie Zerman

   To paraphrase “Play and Theory of the Duende,” García Lorca said that great art depends on connection with a nation’s soil, a vivid awareness of death, and an acknowledgment of the limitations of reason.
   Lorca believed that what makes a poem powerful comes from a specific orientation, one that springs from suffering and from the earth, one that privileges imagination to lead us beyond mere reason.

Nick Cave on duende and song at everything2

   The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil - the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here - so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.

Tracy K. Smith on duende at poets.org 

   I love this concept of duende because it supposes that our poems are not things we create in order that a reader might be pleased or impressed (or, if you will, delighted or instructed); we write poems in order to engage in the perilous yet necessary struggle to inhabit ourselves—our real selves, the ones we barely recognize—more completely. It is then that the duende beckons, promising to impart "something newly created, like a miracle," then it winks inscrutably and begins its game of feint and dodge, lunge and parry, goad and shirk; turning its back, nearly disappearing altogether, then materializing again with a bear-hug that drops you to the ground and knocks your wind out. You’ll get your miracle, but only if you can decipher the music of the battle, only if you’re willing to take risk after risk. Only, in other words, if you survive the effort. For a poet, this kind of survival is tantamount to walking, word by word, onto a ledge of your own making. You must use the tools you brought with you, but in decidedly different and dangerous ways.
   If all of this is true, and I believe it is, this struggle is not merely to write well-crafted and surprising poems so much as to survive in two worlds at once: the world we see (the one made of people, and weather, and hard fact) that, for all of its wonders and disappointments, has driven us to the page in the first place; and the world beyond or within this one that, glimpse after glimpse, we attempt to decipher and confirm. Survival in the former is predicated on balance, perspective, rehearsal, breadth of knowledge and experience. It’s possible to get by as a poet with those things alone. Many do. A healthy ego doesn’t hurt. But for someone fully convinced of the duende, it’s the latter world that matters more. The world where madness and abandon often trump reason, and where skill is only useful to the extent that it adds courage and agility to your intuition.
   Practically speaking, this dual reality translates into something very simple for the poet: talent only goes so far. Talent only leads up to the door where the real reason for writing—or continuing to write—resides. Talent will get you there and raise your hand to the knocker. After that, what pulls you inside and keeps you alive can only be need. The need for answers to unformed questions. The need for an echo back from the most distant reaches of the self. The need to stop time, to understand the undecipherable, to believe in a What or a Whom or a How. The need for a kind of magic—Lorca’s "miracle."