Saudade, the Place of Longing, and Duende, the Inspiration of Ecstasy

Saudade, the Place of Longing, and Duende, the Inspiration of Ecstasy

"In Search of the Sky" 

"Life is something that should not have been." (Schopenhauer)

Saudade and Duende are intertwined in deep felt artistic performance. Saudade can be described as "the love that remains" after someone is gone. And as a vague and constant desire for something that does not, and probably cannot, exist. (Bell) It is unattainable love and unrequited love. Duende can be understood as experiencing deep feeling, and even if only for a brief moment, existing in a profound emotional state. Duende has inherent within itself the pure authenticity of creative expression.

Francisco Lorca traces duende to the ancient culture brought by Romani from which Iberian and flamenco traditions arise. These are the ancient Oriental songs brought to Europe through North Africa into Spain by the gypsies, who trace their lineage to the ancient Aryan of northern India. Lorca believes duende is a primeval and prehistoric motivator. It is that ancient remain of an age now forgotten in the dim mists of time. It is remembered only in the emotive aspects of song and performance.

Flamenco is the ideal vehicle for this evocation of deeply felt archetypal artistic expression. As the guitarist plays, for this brief time together, artist and listener transcend the ordinary and enter the sublime. The world around can fade in bright moments of pure bliss. A deep overwhelming primal need will find its satisfaction. An ecstasy uncoils from a hidden core. Starting deep within it blossoms like the warmest memory of all past forbidden pleasures. This is what great art can achieve. And this achievement is done in concert. Without the interaction of the two the one cannot flower. And it is in this flowering that the true intrinsic, unknowable, and unspeakable, beauty of the human situation is apparent.

Duende is the essence of suggestion. It rises from inside the human heart as a passionate response to music, dance and theater. Conversely it also uniquely inhabits the gladiatorial performance of the bullfight. Bullfighting is the sole remaining Roman blood sport within the modern world. Its origins are pagan and remote. Duende is a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive.

Four elements can be isolated in Lorca's vision of duende. These elements are irrationality, earthiness, awareness of one's own mortality, and an intimation of the diabolical. (Maurer,1998) The Duende is a demonic earth spirit who helps the artist understand the limitations of intelligence, who brings the artist face-to-face with death, and who helps him create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art.

Lorca parallels the deepest and most expressive style of flamenco "Siguiriya" to the cries of Euripides’ Pentheus when beheaded by his mother, Agaue, when she is under the primeval influence of Dionysus.  Dying Pentheus becomes the embodiment of humankind’s encounter with that primeval current which is manifest as Duende. In this birth of Greek theater Pentheus tries to tie Dionysus but he rather binds up a bull. So it is in man’s struggle with the bull, embodied in the bullfight, that death in its most ancient form is confronted. “The bull has his orbit, and the bullfighter has his, and between these two orbits is a point of danger, the vertex of the terrible play.” (Lorca)

Pentheus plunges a knife into Dionysus and the blade passes through shadow, because after all, death is the shadow of life. In the end Pentheus reaches for his mother's face pleading with her to recognize her son. He reaches out to stroke his mother's cheek and begs her not to kill him.  In his final moments Pentheus understands the full extent of Dionysus' powers, the power that death has over the living. Agaue driven mad by Dionysus proceeds to rip her son to death. Wanting to see what is forbidden traps him. Likewise it is the folly of humankind in wanting to understand its true nature in the unfolding of time, in the unending cycle of birth, life, and death, which traps us in mortality.

Duende is a dark counterpoint to Apollo's light. It is that music and song in which we hear our death calling to us.  We sense the gleam of the knife, we smell the blood.  Reflecting on key images of Western music's two-part invention – the duende of the tortoise and the radiance of Apollonian emotional geometry – we are reminded that originality is truly radical, that it comes from the root, from the mythic origins of art. In Greek myth Apollo kills a tortoise to create the first lyre. (Zwicky,2005)

We all experience within us what the Portuguese call ‘Saudade’. It is an inexplicable longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul. It is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration. It is the breeding ground for the sad song and the love song. Saudade is the desire to be transported from darkness into light, to be touched by the hand of that which is not of this world.
The love song is never simply happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain.
Those songs that speak of love, without having within their lines an ache or a sigh, are not love songs at all, but simply romantic silliness. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad. The compulsive modernity of today's artistic expression is littered with them. The true love song must resonate with whispers of sorrow and the echoes of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker reaches of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, magic, and joy of love. So within the fabric of the love song, within its melody and its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering. (Cave, 2007)

Saudade lives in the transcendence of deep song. How rightly we call it that. It is deeper than all the wells of earth and seas that surround the world. It is more profound than the heart that creates it, or the voice that sings it. This is because it is almost infinite. It comes from remote races and crosses ancient burial grounds. Its scorching wind stirs hearts across the ages. It comes from the first sob and the first kiss. (Lorca) In our darkest hours the radiant light of life shines brightest.