Some Thoughts on Duende
Or possibly svadhishthana. Stand by …
Recently, I was excited to see that a writer I know and follow, Grant Faulkner, had posted a story about duende. Duende is Francisco Garcia Lorca’s hard-to-define term for … for … well, it’s hard to define. Reading Grant’s article is a great start. Grant Faulkner is the executive officer of National Novel Writing Month, among other creative pursuits, and his piece takes a documentary about Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” as its starting point, proceeding from there to Cohen’s fascination with the concept of duende, and quoting, in several places, Lorca’s famous essay on the subject.
Grant’s article immediately caught my eye because duende has long been my word for the sensation of getting a new story idea which feels truly authentic. As if the story existed before I started to think about it, as if it came to me entire, and there’s nothing to ‘make up,’ just something to write down.
It’s one of the best feelings in the world.
I first learned about duende from Elizabeth Hand’s short story “The Least Trumps,” in which a reclusive tattoo artist finds a deck of tarot-like cards with the power to shift reality. Early in the story, the evening after she discovers the Trumps, Ivy finds her ex-lover’s paperback copy of Lorca’s writings and leafs through it. Interestingly, the…
