The Theriomorph is reading Lorca:
I share Lorca’s passion for bearing witness with specificity, grief, and love, to disappearing peoples. Sometimes deep listening is the most powerful activism there is; it keeps alive what nothing else can.
Lorca’s beloved “cante jondo” — the deep song to which Ms. T’morph does her deep listening — informed and nourished a life’s work spent chasing a thing that can be described succinctly in Spanish, but in English only with dissertations:
Duende.
“Thus duende is a power and not a behavior, it is a struggle and not a concept. I have heard an old master guitarist say: ‘Duende is not in the throat; duende surges up from the soles of the feet.’ Which means it is not a matter of ability, but of real live form; of blood; of ancient culture; of creative action.”
— Lorca, La Teoria y Juego del Duende, lecture given in Havana, 1930
There are attempts to reduce the translation to one English word. Inspiration. A demon. A goblin. Authenticity. My understanding of the concept is limited, but it seems that all of the above apply, as one might give separate names to each facet of a carved onyx. The definition that seems most apt to me is the one I heard first, a long time ago, words burned into my memory by dark eyes and dim candles, from a pianist who fairly brimmed with the stuff herself. It was three hours before the sun rose, and we were idling, and we were talking about flamenco, and she called duende “the memory of the homeland the Gitano never knew.”
That seems like a good take to me.
I feel sometimes as though all of history and physics demands my attention in an instant, the nervous system of the earth surging up through my soles, all the grief and terror of a billion years charging each breath, each swallow, with beauty the result. This may seem an odd assertion in a time when the word “sublime” is used to praise a slice of cheesecake, but those who remember its older sense of “wondrous beauty of which terror is a crucial component” will understand. The Tetons in winter are beautiful. The Tetons in winter as the ice cracks beneath your feet crossing a half-frozen lake? Sublime.
If Whitman turned up no “foul meat” with his plow and spade, it was only for lack of seeing what was plainly there. Authenticity comes of burying what you love in the ground, a connection that cannot be rent through years of exile. A deep song lived here with me and is buried now, its component notes feeding the apple trees and we will eat them in the coming year. And then what is left when you lose that loss?
Duende is what is left. It does not translate precisely into English, but there are languages that will serve better.
Love that wolf howl. I got to go through Wolf Park back in 1999, and loved seeing them. This howling, though ... beautiful!
I love the beat-note that happens when two nearby wolves howl simultaneously, and my mind toys with faint suspicions that the beat-note itself carries some sort of biological advantage within it. Does it carry farther? Or maybe only contain the message “More than one wolf here”?
I was walking in the nearby park a few days ago, passing by the Canada geese, who were milling around looking agitated. Small groups of them began running and then launching into the air to fly off together. I realized they were simply moving to some safer place for the night.
For the first time ever, I actually listened to their voices as they moved around. And it seemed to me that every voice I heard, though I’d characterize the noise they made as “honking,” was distinctly different. The attack, sustain, decay and timing of the vocal break of each goose’s honk seemed calculatedly individualistic.
Damn, I never thought to actually listen to them before. What else am I missing, what else are we humans missing, though simple self-centered obtuseness?
Before I pressed start I wondered “is this Zeke?” A video we’ve not yet seen? It could be; they are certainly relatives. Zeke and Tristan would understand each other.
Though it’s entirely projection on my part wolf howls evoke such sadness and longing. I listened to Tristan, ran to the bathroom, locked myself in and cried like a sentimental fool. I can’t listen to a Tristan without being reminded of the restrictions we impose on their movement, of how we view them as nuisance animals, something to be controlled, sometimes by culling and more often by caging and relocating as we see fit (relocation being the humane option, albeit still traumatizing).
By the way, a lovely woman named Melissa Ray Davis blogs about wolf rescue among many other things from Swannanoa Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Western North Carolina. She has two lovely wolf-dogs named Monty and Rose (both rescues). They are impossibly sweet. Her blog entries have been few and far between in the last year since she had a baby, but she’s definitely worth a visit.