Duende

Flamenco lives on the knife’s edge.  The discipline or the study of flamenco doesn´t have a clear resting place within the faux-marble halls of Academia. Neither completely literature, nor dance, it also borders cultural studies, history, anthropology, sociology, perhaps even tours Medicine or the natural sciences.  In a word, flamenco is transient. 

Literary Philosophy, too, is passing through a series of foster homes.  Not quite at home with literature after Derrida read Lacan and declared the word itself to be unstable.  Recently, though not too recently I can say I have just discovered a new philosopher, the quest for stability found the figure of the gesture.  Gesture, physical gesture, gesticulación, gesto.  The use of the body to express an emotion or meaning.  Giorgio Agamben offers a fascinating study of the gesture in the book Means Without End; A study in which the theory of gesture itself is placed as central to the study of meaning.  What a tickling thought, the semiotics of gestures. 

Giorgio Agamben proposes that gesture is “mediality” of being-in-action: the embodiment of being a means of communication. In gesture, we enter into ethics, because the gesture is being in the moment of being in the moment of speech. “The gesture is, in this sense, communication of a communicability. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality” (Agamben 58,9). 

Is the idea of the gerund, or the "ing" in "communicating", "walking". The gesture is meant to collect the meaning, before the spoken or written word. This is why the presentation of Federico García Lorca studiously presents duende. The duende is the time of delivery, to change the "what?" the "aha!!" of the "how?" to "olé!!". You could say, perhaps, that the idea of duende itself is alien to the actual presence of the duende.

The study of duende is like that of British biologist arriving in Tibet, dangling from his lips the question, "Have you seen a yedi?" Yet, while many people in Tibet claim to have seen a Yedi, whether they can be proven to exist is an entirely different question.  For the spectacled British biologist just as for the modern Myth-Buster, the Yedi functions within the Tibetian society by means of spiritual necessity—it allows the supernatural to communicate with the natural world.  They must exist, there is a need for them to exist.  Yet physical existence aside, a Yedi simply is. 

To ask a flamenco performer about duende will provide a variety of answers. In one of my interviews, I spoke with a performer in Barcelona, an excellent dancer and well-known internationally, who said to me that he learned about flamenco from Cuba, Cuban Santería to be exact. My knit brows questioned him as he described the embodiment of spirit in flesh in the ceremonies of Santería and Palo Monte, his breath quickened as he moved on to flamenco.  For this artist, flamenco itself is as spiritual as, well, a religion.

In 1931, Federico García Lorca describes the concept of duence in his conference Teoría y Juego del Duende.  Quoting Paganini, García Lorca describes duende as a " 'Poder misterioso que todos sienten y que ningún filósofo explica'. Así, pues, el duende es un poder y no un obrar, es un luchar y no un pensar."

(Mysterious power that all feel and no philosopher explains. So, as it is, duende is power and not working, it is fighting and not a thinking.)

If it is, in itself, unable to be described, why does Lorca continue? If it cannot be described, what can a poet give that a philosopher cannot? 

Return to Agamben, slightly out of context, and apply him to García Lorca's study is revealing.  Perhaps we have been mis-interpreting duende.  As Agamben states, gesture has nothing to say in and of itself; it is the "being-in-language" of human mediality. Perhaps duende is the same.  Duende itself has nothing to say; no secret found in the stale stomach of a dancer; nothing particularly innovative in the sound from the cantaor's scratched voice.  Perhaps that is the secret.  Duende doesn´t say anything.  It just is.  It is the state where the gesture is no longer being interpreted.  The ra-ca-ta-ta doesn´t mean, "Hey!  Look at me!"  Nor is the ría-ría-pi-ta saying, "Hey, look at that gorgeous man!"  When the people say afterward that there was duende--that´s all you can say.  There are no words. 

If duende is when the mediality of the gesture is embraced and exalted; then without the klinking of glasses of watery sangría, the gesture is not limited to the performer.  The camarero, the bar-tender, the old grandmother with her face powder, and the young naïve couple in the audience forget.  They forget to speak.  The plates and forks stop fighting each other, and gesture triumphs over speech.  "[Duende] is, in this sense, communication of a communicability. It has precisely nothing to say because what is shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality" (58,9). It is a gag, in the true sense of the word--it impedes... no, it stops language.  

Perhaps this is why, for so many duende is described in spiritual terms.  It is poetically given a form that travels through space and time. Metaphorically, poetically, Lorca concludes his conference with a image of duende.  Is a wind that travels through the cemetary, resting only temporarily in certain places, constantly looking for new landscapes and ignored accents, it can be found within the crushed herb, a child's spittle, a jellyfish. It heralds the constant baptism of the things newly-created. 

"El duende... ¿Dónde está el duende? Por el arco vacío entra un aire mental que sopla con insistencia sobre las cabezas de los muertos, en busca de nuevos paisajes y acentos ignorados: un aire con olor de saliva de niño, de hierba machacada y velo de medusa que anuncia el constante bautizo de las cosas recién creadas."