Duende

[This is a continuing series of posts that reflect on Nathaniel Mackey's Songs of the Andoumboulou, a series of poems that Mackey has been working on through three books. His latest book with Andoumboulou poems in them, Splay Anthem, won the National Book Award. I take into consideration his allusions, Mackey's prose, interviews with him, and critical discussions of his work. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. To access all of the posts, click on "Nathaniel Mackey" in the list to the right.]

[I am currently discussing Mackey's book Whatsaid Serif. If for some reason you cannot buy it (and I sincerely hope you do), many of the poems can be found here. Also, Mackey reads 10 of the poems with musical accompaniment on an album entitled Strick.]

Christopher Maurer in his preface to Lorca's In Search of Duende, notes that Lorca, after writing his original essay on "Deep Songs" in 1922, met a number of professional cante jondo and flamenco musicians. He could see from observing that these people wrestled with duende at their most intense artistic moments.

As a result, he stripped his theory of some of the more Romantic elements: flamenco is bad, cante jondo is good; city is bad, rural is good, etc. Granted, Lorca did not work with these dichotomies in a uselessly oppositional manner, but his thinking did become sharper.

In his 1933 essay "Play and Theory of Duende" Lorca sees duende as a fertile, grounded source that all art needs to contend with in order to generate true power. It is more important than technique or craft:

"La Niña de los Peines had to tear her voice because ... she had to rob herself of skill and security, send away her muse and become helpless, that her duende might come and deign to fight her hand-to-hand .. Her voice was no longer playing. It was a jet of blood worthy of her pain and her sincerity" (53).

The dichotomy in this essay is not between flamenco and deep song, but between duende and the shallow art that emanates from heartless, bloodless skill.

Lorca does connect duende with some types of religious feeling in this essay. However, the religiosity is grounded and dramatic, not at all transcendental. And, I wonder if Mackey makes much use of this aspect of Lorca's theory.

"Song of the Andoumboulou 17" begins with a direct quotation from this essay: "the rim of the well." Here is the wider context:

"The Duende, on the other hand, will not approach at all if he does not see the possibility of death, if he is not convinced he will circle death's house, if there is not every assurance he can rustle the branches borne aloft by us all, that neither have, nor may ever have, the power to console.

With idea, with sound, or with gesture, the Duende chooses the brim of the well for his open struggle with the creator. Angel and Muse escape in the violin or in musical measure, but the Duende draws blood, and in the healing of the wound that never quite closes, all that is unprecedented and invented in a man's work has its origin.

The magical virtue of poetry lies in the fact that it is always empowered with duende to baptize in dark water all those who behold it, because with duende, loving and understanding are simpler, there is always the certainty of being loved and being understood; and this struggle for expression and for the communication of expression acquires at times, in poetry, finite characters."

Loving and understanding are simpler with the duende only because of the ongoing struggle with it. And this struggle is of darkness, blackness, from the earth — loam.

Towards the end of the speech Lorca makes a nationalist plea for duende. He claimes that bullfighting is the ultimate struggle with duende, and that virtually all of Spain's important artists have encountered duende. He ends by once again distinguishing duende from the muse and from the angel.

"The Muse keeps silent; she may wear the tunic of little folds, or great cow-eyes gazing towards Pompeii, or the monstrous, four-featured nose with which her great painter, Picasso, has painted her. The Angel may be stirring the hair of Antonello da Messina, the tunic of Lippi, and the violin of Masolino or Rousseau.

But the Duende - where is the Duende ? Through the empty arch enters a mental air blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, seeking new landscapes and unfamiliar accents; an air bearing the odor of child's spittle, crushed grass, and the veil of Medusa announcing the unending baptism of all newly-created things."

The duende is almost diabolical. It never ends, is restless, is immanent in the material process of things, a process that takes baptism from the church and places it in this immanent realm of endless creation, where baptism touches each new thing not with transcendence but with the dirt, loam, the struggles, and the complications.

Mackey's use of Lorca: The feeling of Duende

[This is a continuing series of posts that reflect on Nathaniel Mackey's Songs of the Andoumboulou, a series of poems that Mackey has been working on through three books. His latest book with Andoumboulou poems in them, Splay Anthem, won the National Book Award. I take into consideration his allusions, Mackey's prose, interviews with him, and critical discussions of his work. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. To access all of the posts, click on "Nathaniel Mackey" in the list to the right.]

[I am currently discussing Mackey's book Whatsaid Serif. If for some reason you cannot buy it (and I sincerely hope you do), many of the poems can be found here. Also, Mackey reads 10 of the poems with musical accompaniment on an album entitled Strick.

Mackey focuses less on the "Deep Song" essay of Lorca's and more on "Play and Theory of the Duende," which was published in The Poetics of the New American Poetry. A great Andalusian singer, Manuel Torre, claims that "'all that has black sounds has Duende.' These 'black sounds' are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art." (In Search of Duende, New Directions, 1998.)

Tomorrow I will discuss Mackey's specific take on duende. But here, I think we can use Torre's claims to identify one of the most original contributions Mackey has made to contemporary poetry.

He is writing a poetry of immanentist reflection.

Immanentism, as I am using it, is a metaphysical term meaning radically within, and is generally contrasted with a metaphysic that asserts there is another, transcendental realm.

Most reflective poetry in the Western tradition has been transcendental. It has used the iambic pentameter line (or a close equivalent) to discuss experience from an authoratative place separate from it. (Think Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach.") The feeling I get from all of Wallace Stevens' major reflective poems is that he is taking an outside view, he is the observer. It follows, then, that Stevens must allow for some sort of transcendence that allows him this outside perspective to reflect as he does.

For Mackey, there is no transcendence.

This claim may seem crazy when applied to a poet so interested in religion. However, his verse is concerned with moving through "the roots fastened in the mire," and is a reflection on that movement. That is one of the reasons Mackey is so hard to pin down: in the immanent realm, all is qualified, all is mitigated. A direct approach to understanding will only cover over "the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art."

Lorca describes the muse "as distant and so tired." Distant. This smacks of transcendence.

If Mackey does not allow for this transcendence to complicate his notion of immanence, what does he use?

The answer is borders. Mackey is consistently interested in the culturally excluded or ignored: The Dogon, African-Americans, Andalusians and their disparaged music, the heretical Gnostics, heterodox islamic mystics.

A relationship with an angel or muse is infinitely easier than a relationship with the duende: "The true fight is with the duende," insists Lorca.

In the metaphysics of immanence, their is no escape. Any attempt to escape only lands you in the complications of cross-cultural contact, because there is always a border. I have earlier described border as a good word to use in considering Mackey's cross cultural poetics because a border is not absolute — it is not a wide fissure — and the feeling of "crossing a border" is often not rigid and plays over a stretch of land on either side of the demarcation line.

For instance, going from California into Tia Juana would give us a feel of being in border territory, but 250 miles into Mexico and this feeling of border would evaporate, and we would need to come to terms with the specifics of Mexican culture.

It is also important to note that 250 and 500 miles and so forth into Mexico are other Mexican /American borders, ones that ring resort areas. Similarly, for Mexicans there are neighborhoods in almost every American city where a sense of border would come into play.

We are in the immantist world of misdirection, nuance, mitigation, and projection.

It can never come to us whole.

Mackey's relationship to "Deep Song"

[This is a continuing series of posts that reflect on Nathaniel Mackey's Songs of the Andoumboulou, a series of poems that Mackey has been working on through three books. His latest book with Andoumboulou poems in them, Splay Anthem, won the National Book Award. I take into consideration his allusions, Mackey's prose, interviews with him, and critical discussions of his work. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. To access all of the posts, click on "Nathaniel Mackey" in the list to the right.]

[I am currently discussing Mackey's book Whatsaid Serif. If for some reason you cannot buy it (and I sincerely hope you do), many of the poems can be found here. Also, Mackey reads 10 of the poems with musical accompaniment on an album entitled Strick.]

Because the early poems in Whatsaid Serif are so indebted to Lorca's notion of Andalusian "Deep Song," it seems imperative to return to his ideas. I will sketch out Frederico Lorca's comments on it today, then look more closely at them tomorrow, in addition to working with Mackey's essay on the topic, "Cante Moro."

Frederico Garcia Lorca was fascinated by a type of folk song native to the Andalusian region of Spain. Called "Cante Jondo," or "deep song."

A handy New Directions Press book from 1998, In Search of Duende, gathers Lorca's essays and speeches on this subject. In the first essay, "Deep Song," Lorca makes a sharp distinction between the Cante Jondo and the better known flamenco.

The Andalusian folk songs are primitive and filled with simple truth. They resulted from the combining of original, pre-deep song Andalusian music with gypsy musical tendencies, after the travelers had arrived.

The "deep songs" are also maligned, considered debauched and dirty -- in a way similar to the blues in the U.S.A. context?

Meanwhile, Flemenco is considered Spanish, not Andalusian, and it is a celebrated, civilized derivation of the more true and primitive folk songs.

It is important to see that Lorca is not creating a simple dichotomy and lauding one half of it. He hardly sees the "deep songs" as culturally pure — rather, they are an accident of history, the result of various musics coming together because peoples came together.

However, this accident has created a cultural form with a unique ability to confront the largest issues of life with a directness and simplicity that creates overwhelming awe and almost unendurable intensity.

Lorca notes some great European musicians, most notably Debussy, who have commented favorably on the "Cante Jondo" and even incorporated some of its aspects into some music.

Tomorrow, on to how Mackey makes use of Lorca.