The Duende of the World

We have said that the duende likes the edge, the wound and approaches places where the forms unite in a yearning greater than their visible expressions
Federico Garcia Lorca.

How do we sit and be before this world?

Daedalus in his prison is contemplating the forms of nature to rise himself above the walls to creative freedom in thrall to the Muse.

How do we act and give blood to this world?

His son, the child of his mind, is reaching for the hand of the Angel that Rilke warned us is terrible - this false whitening before the dominions of the World.

Breugel shows us that the earth does not give a shit for another fallen Angel.

Are we now Daedulus before this made world, this spectacle? Can we free ourselves from the prison of our energy crisis, the great extinctions that loom like dark Rorschach nightmares on the horizon? Do we try to hitch a lift on the waxy truth of an Angel's wing?

Angel and Muse come from outside: the Angel gives light and the Muse gives shape
the Duende, though, must be awakened in the deepest dwellings of blood
Federico Garcia Lorca.


This murdered voice staining our blood like glass from beyond the unmarked grave. This midnight flute firing, this shocked truth bullet-breaking in the crystal skull, the fragments the hologram of a life lived in the dust, the ash of a million fires, the fire of a million lives ended in the dust, mixed with topaz, smeared onto time, as art lives, he lived, by lining the avenues with embers.

This voice crying; an ancient child crying before the wound we were never meant to heal, for it is the duende of the world. It is Rubedo, the blood that survived the burning of our final hope.

(translations of Lorca by Merryn Williams, Selected Poems (Bloodaxe 1992) )

Mark Jones

Image:Icarus and Daedalus by Charles Paul Landon (1799).