Duende and Delight

I was a sad nineteen-year-old taking my first poetry workshop when I first read Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Theory and Play of the Duende.” In this piece, he discusses a concept he sees as vital to poetry and yet never fully defines. He calls it duende; in English, we might call it passion or inspiration, although I don’t think this encapsulates the idea entirely. I call it spirit for two reasons. First, duende can also mean a literal spirit or ghost, and I enjoy the double meaning (it makes me picture myself in conversation with something else when I’m writing). Second, Lorca makes it abundantly clear that duende goes beyond being inspired. He compares his idea of duende to a Muse, which sends inspiration, but rejects her as necessary or even helpful:

The Muse dictates, and occasionally prompts. She can do relatively little since she’s distant and so tired (I’ve seen her twice) that you’d think her heart half marble. Muse poets hear voices and don’t know where they’re from, but they’re from the Muse who inspires them and sometimes makes her meal of them, as in the case of Apollinaire, a great poet destroyed by the terrifying Muse, next to whom the divine angelic Rousseau once painted him. The Muse stirs the intellect, bringing a landscape of columns and an illusory taste of laurel, and intellect is often poetry’s enemy, since it limits too much.

It doesn’t really matter what you call it—duende is the quality of feeling art, that nebulous thing you can’t get to with form or technique or formal training alone. So of course, chasing after it is a bitch. I’ve been writing since I was five, but in all that time, I’ve only written a handful of things that I think crackle with potential in the way that Lorca describes. At the time, none of them had been poems. I was a pretty bad poet, I thought, out of my league in a workshop with older students who were all really good at this. I was also haunted by the last time I’d shared any poetry with a group of people, at an open mic night during my freshman year at my favorite coffee shop. It was a warm and noisy environment; whenever someone read a particularly good line, people would stomp, holler, or snap their fingers in appreciation. I had something more personal than I usually would have shared, but everyone seemed so welcoming that I decided to go for it anyway.

Bad idea.

When I was done, no one made a sound. No clapping or snapping or stomping. Silence.

The shame of that moment still lingered. I took Lorca’s words as a challenge and set out trying to find the magical thing that poem had lacked. I had a word for it now, and more importantly, an idea of how to get there.

He tells a story about watching an immensely talented singer, La Niña de Los Peines, perform in a tavern. For whatever reason, La Niña is having an off night. When her usual techniques don’t work and her audience is unmoved, she scorches her throat with alcohol and sings with her throat on fire. She was in immense pain, and objectively, she did not sound good, but she had found her duende. I read the line, “La Niña de Los Peines had to tear apart her voice, because she knew experts were listening, who demanded not form but the marrow of form, pure music with a body lean enough to float on air,” and went, Oh, okay. I have to tear myself apart.

I proceeded to do a bang-up job. It wasn’t hard. Because of COVID restrictions, I lived by myself in a suite originally intended for four people. I felt the absence of those people keenly. The rooms were cold and sterile, even though I tried to fill the space. The walls were peeling and beige; the floor was unfinished concrete that would be cold under my feet even when spring arrived. Eventually, I convinced myself that I wasn’t alone, because my dorm was haunted. Never mind that I lived in the newest building on campus (since it had only housed students since 2014, it was unlikely that anyone had actually died in there). Campus itself was supposed to be crawling with ghosts, so I could feasibly live with one. I heard voices in the neighboring room that stood empty during the day, but at night, when I was tucked up into my lofted bed, I heard slow, dragging footsteps across my bedroom floor. I couldn’t ever bring myself to check and see if there was anything there. Maybe I was being haunted by my own isolation—I remember thinking at the time that at least this ghost was company. To add to my loneliness, I would have two not-relationships in quick succession, both of which would end badly. When my best friend told me she was worried about me, I shrugged her off. I distinctly recall saying, “At least I’ll be able to write about it.”

And then, once I was emotionally flayed, I did write about it. If you think this is the part where I say that I made something beautiful out of my pain, it’s not. My good work was mostly accidental. For the most part, I was too insufferably enamored with my own sadness. I worry about the consequences of telling people that the key to art is pain. Not to say that art can’t come from those feelings, but that it’s not something we should be chasing after. I realized that summer, back in my childhood bedroom and reunited with my family and friends, that not only had I been miserable, but my misery had been absolutely senseless. Life will give me enough grief to create from on its own. It’s seeking out happiness that’s sometimes hard—but much more worthwhile.

I thought of this again in a poetry class I took the fall semester of my senior year. After two days of reading everyone’s work and giving them feedback, someone said, “You all are so goddamned sad! Your poems are, I mean. Are you all okay?”

Everyone answered at once, mostly saying, “Yes,” with a few scattered and (hopefully) joking no’s; I said, “It’s complicated,” and the girl sitting next to me nodded emphatically in agreement. What can I say? Your senior year of college is a hectic time—I experienced every human emotion possible every week. She seemed satisfied by our answers, though she did ask for some happier reading material, but I kept thinking about it.

I’ve noticed a tendency towards the melancholy, not necessarily in personality, but certainly in what we write. Perhaps this is just the writers I’ve been surrounded by. In a nonfiction workshop, someone commented on how sad all of the readings had been, and as a result, how sad our influence pieces had been. “Are you okay?” she asked my professor.

“Of course,” he said. “I don’t think it’s generally a good idea to try to judge someone’s mental state from their reading or writing.” She seemed a bit ashamed of the question. “Just wait,” he told us. “Next week, we’re starting Book of Delights, and that will be totally different.”

I didn’t necessarily agree that everything we’d read was sad—obviously DMZ Colony, a book about South Korean colonization, was not a cheery, feel-good read. But generally, they were just about the complexity of being alive. Certainly there were moments of sadness in them, like Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, in which she reconstructs her life after divorce. But there were also moments of joy, particularly with her daughters and her friends. After reading a scene in which Levy cooks dinner in her new apartment and has the people she loves over, I was so overcome that I had to lie down for a bit. The sheer want that punched through me–for a space of my own and people to fill it with–made me want to cry.

So no, not sad, but complicated. A book of things that had brought the author joy sounded like something I probably needed to read. Gay lays out in the preface what the rules of the game were:

One day last July, feeling delighted and compelled to both wonder about and share that delight, I decided that it might feel nice, even useful, to write a daily essay about something delightful. I remember laughing to myself for how obvious it was. I could call it something like The Book of Delights. I came up with a handful of rules: write a delight every day for a year; begin and end on my birthday, August 1; draft them quickly; and write them by hand. The rules made it a discipline for me. A practice. Spend time thinking and writing about delight every day.

What a discipline, right? How much better would I be if I tried to think of something that delighted me every day? I remember that once upon a time my mother had a blog called Joie de Vivre, and I remember her attempt years ago to do One Hundred Days of Gratitude, which was a spectacular cheese fest. I did not do one hundred days. But I have tried to emulate him—short pieces about things that made me happy, written by hand, and this is my addition, written outside, or at the very least, not in my apartment. This piece was written in a number of different places, like the local cemetery, my favorite coffee shop, in the publication studio between classes, or in the park.

I’ve found that my delights tend to repeat, as Gay’s do. I’m easily pleased by a good cup of coffee. I think a lot about books. I think a lot about my body, and my sexuality, and my relationship to both (which is sometimes a joy and sometimes a sadness). The outdoors. The neighborhood cats. The sky. My professor had remarked jokingly when he introduced the book that he was often delighted by food, and then wondered aloud if that was bad. I didn’t think it was, but I’m biased, because one of my greatest delights is cooking, and it must follow that I then eat what I’ve cooked. Even now, the list is growing, something that Gay said happened to him: “Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”

Book of Delights isn’t necessarily as simple as a list of things that made the author happy, though. I don’t think I’d like it if it were. I think, and I believe that Gay would agree with me on this, that joy is a more complex emotion than happiness or contentment. He understands that sometimes there is darkness in that light. In one chapter he recounts how he used to always greet his friend on the way home, but that friend had been murdered. He does not change his route home, and he remembers his friend every time he passes his old house. What makes his book work for me is that even when a memory has a little edge of pain or awkwardness or anger to it, Gay still chooses to find delight in it.

I don’t think that Lorca is entirely wrong in trying to define duende, but I think his conception of it is overly restrictive. He perceives it as struggle, an elaborate and grandiose dance informed by the knowledge of your mortality. Maybe that’s how he wrote, but it’s not the only way. In reading Gay, I found another form of spirit. The way to duende isn’t necessarily pain. It’s sincerity. And now that I have been sincere in my sadness, I try to be sincere in my delight as well.

Eve Clark is an MFA student in Fiction at Georgia State University. She earned her B.A. in Creative Writing from Agnes Scott College and is originally from Florida. Her work primarily focuses on the experiences of queer women and religious trauma with a supernatural twist. She loves old horror movies, fiber arts, queer fantasy and speculative fiction, and her stupid orange cat, Freddie.

Photo courtesy of the author.