piski

Still shiny and blood-spotted. But oh, how I love it.

From "The Duende," Fredrico Garcia Lorca:

"These 'black sounds' are the mystery, the roots that probe through the mire that we all know of and do not understand, but which furnishes us with whatever is sustaining in art. Black sounds: ... 'A mysterious power that all may feel and no philosophy can explain.'

The duende, then, is a power and not a construct, is a struggle and not a concept. I have heard an old guitarist, a true virtuoso, remark, 'The duende is not in the throat, the duende comes up from inside, up from the very soles of the feet.' That is to say, it is not a question of aptitude, but of a true and viable style - of blood, in other words; of what is oldest in culture: of creation made act....

Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form.... But the Duende on the other hand, must come to life in the nether-most recesses of the blood....

The Girl with the Combs had to mangle her voice becuase she knew there were discriminating folk about who asked not for form, but for the marrow of form - pure music spare enough to keep itself in air. She had to deny her faculties and her security; that is to say, to turn out her Muse and keep vulerable, so that her Duende might come and vouchsafe the hand-to-hand struggle. And then how she sang! Her voice feinted no longer; it jetted up like blood, ennobled by sorrow and sincerity, it opened up like ten fingers of a hand around the nailed feet of a Christ by Juan de Juni - tempestuous!

...The magical virtue of poetry lies in the fact that it is always empowered with "duende to baptize in dark water all those who behold it, because with duende], loving and understanding are simpler, there is always the certainty of being loved and being understood; and this struggle for expression and for the communication of expression acquires at times, in poetry, finite characters."

As it's about aritstic inspiration, it's on my right wrist (my writing hand) in my own handwriting. Yes... I am a nerd.