“Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery,” writes Federico García Lorca. In “The Mystical Catholic Tradition of Jon Fosse,” an essay in The New York Times, Christopher Beha writes, “I sometimes think that the modern world’s true cultural divide is not between believers and unbelievers but between those who think life is a puzzle that is capable of being solved and those who believe it’s a mystery that ought to be approached by way of silence and humility. I am a problem solver by disposition, but in my heart I am strongly on the side of the mysterians.” In a lecture titled “The Theory and Function of the Duende,” given in Havana and Buenos Aires, Lorca addresses his audience Ladies and Gentlemen, and hopes not to bore them with “the terrible blowfly of boredom which strings together all heads with a thin thread of dreams and which puts in an audience’s eyes little bundles of pins.” The lecture that follows, indeed, is not boring. Lorca does not invent “duende,” but it is Lorca who extends it past the Spanish arenas of bullfighting, flamenco dancing, to poets and painters, and to artists of any country, not only Spain. What is duende? It is Dark sounds, behind which in tender intimacy exist volcanoes, ants, zephyrs, and the vast night pressing its waist against the Milky Way. Lorca writes, “Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes what is real in art.”
-Morgan English