Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

Whatever your religion, whatever your bag, celebrate it with all your worth and all you have.

Always w/ love,

Sue

Unconscious Love and the Path to Duende

In some sports and other physical activities when someone hits a streak of perfection they are thought to be unconscious.  In basketball especially.  A player can shoot lights out for a quarter and he’s having an amazing game.  If he shoots lights out for an entire game, has double digit assists and rebounds he is unconscious.  The idea stems from the player attaining a visceral plane of existence beyond themselves, beyond the limitations of their own body.  He has in essence abandoned his own form and become in those moments the game itself.

Flamenco

In dance and music the Spanish refer to it as Duende. Its most commonly associated with Flamenco. With their attempt to quantify this elusive concept they describe a nature that creates something to aspire to.  It carries the power of a dark goddess and an insistent muse inciting liberation from all forms.  The spirit of evocation.  What makes music move us to become it in the form of dance, or when singing or playing an instrument.  It is the tapestry of human will, emotion, thought and form where all pours into and out of the spirit and soul at once.

Christopher Mauer the editor for “In Search of Duende” has isolated it to four key elements, irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical.  The Duende is not a possessor but a foe.  It flashes the artist a glimpse of the Universe, life, death and the beyond forcing them to acknowledge the primal forces civilization has attempted to weed out. For to create something of a Duende nature you must drink from the fountain of the divine.  With ambrosia on your lips the art is force of creation reshaping the artist, the viewer and in that moment the fragments of time and space themselves. The artist battles with the dark, the opus, to try and harness it’s power with their own will. The nature of it is to consume and the will of the artist must fight to prevent being lost to it because then it is misspent force producing only destruction.  The terms are simple; you either create or be destroyed. The force cares not which one is the result, only that the show, the dance, the song go on.

Beyond

Duende, being unconscious, are states of love.  Instant blind unquestionable moments of human connection to the will of creation.  Built in a second yet somehow lasts an entire lifetime.  When you hear the plaintive whining, words of desperation, pain, elation, humiliation in the verse, the chords, the pull of a song like Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.  The untamed temerity, angst, dark lord rise of Ravel’s Bolero.  The soul shattering burn of desolation, delusion, and degradation of Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves aWoman. You are in its presence.  Its seat its foundation its very will empowered by love, of a concept an idea and even upon occasion an actual person. Our love and ability to feel and pursue it is a myriad of self-serving justifications of our own selfish desire to know joy and joy alone.  However we forbid the whole story choosing to determine the measure of that love, only the joy, only the sweet, only the succinct. 

The beast will not abandon parts of itself to humor your earthbound delusions. It is a full serving, a full course that has to be taken in as it is whole and unbound. It will show you suffering and revel in it knowing how sweet that next climax of joy will now be.  It will bury you under your own filth knowing the elation that freeing yourself from it will bring.  It knows love in ways that only subjugation can embody.  The will of the spirit is not a benign entity but a ravenous specter.  A poltergeist of your own creation that hungers for the fight because in battle alone can it reveal its true face.

Instinctively we seek the ones that will bring us the fight.  We seek the ones that will embody our spirit, empower, provoke, goad so we can rise to the fight again.  Know our true faces. FEEL.  The pain, the rage, the fear, the hope, the rise, the push, the ease, the release, and the fall.  Always it begins and ends with the fall, pain the catalyst and the affirmation of life, of love. Search through those dark, dark, dark spaces.  Love lives even there.  Love sees itself clearly there. It settles with the comfort of an old friend, for in the dark all is free. Stare into its phantom less eyes and know the wonder of the creation of life again and again.  All rises from the darkness and that’s where all shall return. 

Flamenco Courtesy of http://www.ebsqart.com/Art/Portraits/acrylic/599088/650/650/DUENDE.jpg

Beyond Courtesy of http://library.manoa.hawaii.edu/about/exhibits/images/portrait.gif