. . . neither more yours than anyone’s
neither
more yours than nobody’s
I have no rope nor rein
nor handsome guy who will defend me
and I come and go in my own air . . .
—Javier Ruibal, contemporary Flamenco composer and musician
Greetings from Granada, where I hope to see some flamenco this evening.
On my last night in Madrid I had the good fortune to see Sara Baras and her company perform a flamenco Carmen. When I think of duende, that untranslatable word, I think first of flamenco.
Photos by José Luis Alvarez & Pepe Claudio
Sara Baras has duende because she understands how to make her body into a vortex of passion through the rhythms of clapping and stamping. Their inexorableness. There is a world of difference between American tap-dancing and Spanish Flamenco. The former is “singing in the rain,” “happy again.” Happy is too light for Spaniards. The Spanish light is so bright that it demands shadows. Tap is closer to flying. Flamenco closer to a body in its death throes or in the frenzied throes of passion. Baras’s use of shawls, flounces, and capes, are all veils, really. Flamenco is not subtle; it is veiled and open.
As Lorca writes: “The duende works on the body of the dancer as the wind works on sand.”
And isn’t duende that necessary ingredient I am striving for here in my poetry? Isn’t that why I came to Spain?
If New York, where I write and live, is a city of glass and brick and steel, Al Andaluz is a region of mist and wind and sun so strong it always requires its shadow. Unlike the Brits, who have come here in droves to retire in Mojácar because of its bright sun, I have come here to pull something out of its shade.
The closest thing to duende is the spirit of the Dionysian as elucidaed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. But here, there is no counterbalancing Apollinian.
The last time I was moved by flamenco it was in New York,
many years ago. I remember telling my lover that the male dancer had duende—had
that mixture of passion tinged with Death. Three days later, my lover died, an
accidental suicide. The tragic ironies of life. And for more than a year I
wrote poems out of that deep grief. Of course, this was not the kind of duende
I had been hoping for. And now, whenever I watch flamenco, I think of him,
about the passionate intensity of his life and his death. At a certain age, I
find that memory impinges upon nearly every experience, no matter how new.
