Viva la what?

     Viva la what? Duende - the place of equally poised promise and peril where revelation and spirit are evoked. Duende is suffused with shadow. Hints of life gleam like ice crystals, all the more brilliant against a dark background. The exquisite tension and deep authenticity call up a physical and emotional response. Duende is what makes the hair on your arms stand up, gives you chills, lets you beautifully small under an inky field of stars...makes you cry from joy and sorrow in the same breath.  
     Duende is an intimate grappling match that cannot be won.  It is too big for either/or. If either life or shadow wins, it is no longer duende. The exchange has been reduced to the same old good vs. evil paradigm. Duende is neither angel nor demon. It swallows both into something infinitely larger. The duende is a wrestling match that must be fought like a dance.
     The poet, Garcia Lorca,  named this el duende, male in his Spanish native tongue. For me duende is fecund and fertile. It is a place where creativity explodes from the confluence of birth and death, creation and destruction. Duende is an aspect of the divine feminine.
   In a world that keeps gravitating toward increasing destructive polarities (right/wrong, good/evil, us/them), duende is an and. It is a paradox large enough to encompass  and transmute our smallness.
   In 1933, Lorca delivered an incredible lecture, Theory and Play Of The Duende. His skill as poet enabled him to describe something that is beyond words.  The poet, Tracy. K. Smith, wrote an wonderful essay on duende and writing poetry, Survival in Two Worlds at Once: Frederico Garcia Lorca and Duende. Her poem, Duende , embodies this process.