ATDTDA (14) p 391 (a)

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

-- oh, wait, before 391, a Spanish cadence in 
El Espinero's speech:
"You go north.  We do, too.  Let us go together
for a while.  With permission.  You may find something
you have been looking for."
with permission - "con permiso"
(like when Gaston Villa says, 
"Please, don't preoccupy yourself" on p. 315)

----------
391 - nopales - prickly pear cacti

duende - used to mean either a faery creature (gnome,
sprite, elf), but also an indefinable "something" 
animating art, especially flamenco dance.

Garcia-Lorca's Lecture "Theory and Play of the Duende"
http://tinyurl.com/jvu56
woo-hoo - great stuff!

Longish excerpt:
Those moon-frozen heads that Zurbarán painted, 
the yellows of butter and lightning in El Greco, 
Father Sigüenza’s prose, the whole of Goya’s work, 
the apse of the Escorial church, all polychrome sculpture, 
the crypt in the Duke of Osuna’s house, 
the ‘death with a guitar’ in the Chapel of the Benaventes 
in Medina de Rioseco, equate culturally to the processions 
of San Andrés de Teixido, in which the dead take their places: 
to the dirges that the women of Asturias sing, 
with their flame-bright torches, in the November 
night: to the dance and chanting of the Sibyl 
in the cathedrals of Mallorca and Toledo: 
to the dark In recort of Tortosa: and to the endless 
Good Friday rituals which with the highly refined 
festival of the bulls, form the popular ‘triumph’ 
of death in Spain. In all the world only Mexico 
can grasp my country’s hand.

          When the Muse sees death appear 
she closes the door, or builds a plinth, 
or displays an urn and writes an epitaph 
with her waxen hand, but afterwards she returns 
to tending her laurel in a silence that shivers 
between two breezes. Beneath the broken arch of 
the ode, she binds, in funereal harmony, the precise 
flowers painted by fifteenth century Italians and 
calls up Lucretius’ faithful cockerel, by whom 
unforeseen shadows are dispelled.

          When the angel sees death appear 
he flies in slow circles, and with tears of 
ice and narcissi weaves the elegy we see trembling 
in the hands of Keats, Villasandino, Herrera, Bécquer, 
and Juan Ramón Jiménez. But how it horrifies 
the angel if he feels a spider, however tiny, 
on his tender rosy foot!

          The duende, by contrast, won’t appear 
if he can’t see the possibility of death, 
if he doesn’t know he can haunt death’s house, 
if he’s not certain to shake those branches 
we all carry, that do not bring, can never bring, consolation.

          With idea, sound, gesture, 
the duende delights in struggling freely 
with the creator on the edge of the pit. Angel and Muse 
flee, with violin and compasses, and the duende wounds, 
and in trying to heal that wound that never heals, 
lies the strangeness, the inventiveness of a man’s work.