Demon and the Angel Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration

Only Mystery I WISH I HAD BEEN IN Buenos Aires on October 20, 1933, when Federico GarcÍa Lorca delivered a lecture that he called "Juego y teorÍa del duende" ("Play and Theory of the Duende"). Lorca was testifying to his own poetic universe, as his biographer Ian Gibson has recognized. It would have been electrifying to hear him, because on that night, addressing the members of the Friends of Art Club, the spirit of artistic mystery entered the room. It moved at the speed of Lorca's voice and burned like incense in the rich air. It was palpable to the audience, as if Lorca had thrown open the windows so that everyone present could hear the primitive wing beats shuddering in the darkness outside. The floor shifted a little under everyone's feet. The lamps trembled. Thinking about it now, sixty-nine years later, I can see the stammering flames leaping off the typescript of Lorca's talk. I feel the ancient heat. (One month later, at the Buenos Aires PEN Club, Lorca and Pablo Neruda staged a happening at a luncheon in their honor. The two simpatico poets-one from the Vega of Granada in southern Spain, the other from a small frontier town in rural southern Chile-used a bullfighting tradition to improvise a speech about the great Nicaraguan poet RubÉn DarÍo, which they delivered alternately from different sides of the table. "Ladies...," Neruda began, "...and gentlemen," Lorca continued: "In bullfighting there is what is known as 'bullfighting al alimÓn,' in which two toreros, holding one cape between them, outwit the bull together." The virtuoso antiphonal performance at first bewildered and then delighted the audience as the visible spirit of praise started darting back and forth across the room. DarÍo was the enthralling inventor of Hispanic modernismo [a term he coined] who fused Continental Symbolism with Latin American subjects and themes, effecting a fresh musical synthesis-a "musical miracle"-in Spanish-language poetry. He was therefore a poet both of Spain and of the Americas, the Old and the New Worlds, and Lorca and Neruda were magically linking themselves through him, as if by electrical impulses.) Whoever speaks or writes about the duende should begin by invoking the crucial aid and spirit of this chthonic figure, as Lorca did whenever he read aloud from the manuscript of Poet in New York. The Dionysian spirit of art needs to be invited into the room. "Only mystery enables us to live," Lorca wrote at the bottom of one of the drawings he did in Buenos Aires: "Only mystery." It behooves any of us who would meditate on the subject of artistic inspiration to open the doors wide into the night and welcome into the house the spirit of inhabitable awe. Invoking the Duende THE AUDIENCE'S SENSE OF expectation as Lorca invoked the duende before a homecoming reading of his New York poems must have been running high. One imagines him sitting at a small table in front of a crowded room in Madrid-confident, charismatic, yet clumsy, vulnerable, "a solitary being for whom solitude was intolerable," as Ernesto PÉrez Guerra once put it. (Guerra also observed that Lorca was "social by will and solitary by nature.") He looks serenely at home, but also slightly disheveled, a bit askew. He is secretly preparing to do battle. He shuffles his notes for a talk that is sui generis-part lecture, part memoir, part recital-and then launches in: "Whenever I speak before a large group I always think I must have opened the wrong door," he begins disarmingly- Some friendly hands have given me a shove, and here I am. Half of us wander around completely lost, among drop curtains, painted trees, and tin fountains, and just when we think we have found our room or our circle of lukewarm sun, we meet an alligator who swallows us alive, or...an audience, as I have. And today the only show I can offer you is some bitter, living poetry. Perhaps I can lashHirsch, Edward is the author of 'Demon and the Angel Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration', published 2003 under ISBN 9780156027441 and ISBN 0156027445.