All That Has Dark Sound Has Duende: Federico Lorca Garcia, Bobby Byrd, Lloyd Brown, Roy Orbison, Ronnie Milsap, Openness & Sustainability

When The Clock Stops, This Will Be Timeless, 

wood, pastel, acrylic, clock and lettering, 14 x 15 3/8 x 1 3/4 inches, 1997 by Lloyd Brown

Earlier, I was reading from Bobby Byrd's new book of poetry, Otherwise My Life Is Ordinary while on the can, which is fitting, as he says in "Message to Grandkids"--

Toilets are eloquent.
And speak the truth.
Remember that.

I wanted to write about his poems, how the simplest of language and images unfold miraculously beautiful like Pound's line "petals on a wet, black bough."

I was reading, "Channeling Garcia Lorca in Van Horn, Texas," which opens with a quote from Lorca:

All that has dark sound has duende
that mysterious power that everyone feels
but no philosopher can explain.

The poem then goes on to explain that "One reason to go to Van Horn is to make poems," asserting "you can't miss."  I've been to Van Horn.  I don't think I made a poem, but I wanted to.  And I do remember I made photographs--oh so beautiful photographs of the blue-black dawn, a ragged, rocky horizon and the spiky silhouette of a tree yucca.  So, maybe I made a poem of another sort.  I had to.

Why?  What is special about Van Horn?

Bobby says "The town is trying to decide if its living or dying."

Perhaps that is duende, extreme uncertainty.  I love that not only does the town not have the ambition to live or die; it can't even decide.  It has to try to decide.

There is an honesty there, an integrity.

Bobby continues--

And the trucks going east and west on I-10
Like there's always somewhere else to be
Someplace that is real like TV is real
Like Phoenix is real
Or Dallas or even the American Dream is real...

These all lack duende, that extreme uncertainty that is the integrity of existence.  It's not nihilism.  It's not even unbelief.  Perhaps it is the core of all knowing, that void that makes the concrete real.

The mall has no meaning without it.  With it, the mall becomes sacred as does the 7-ll or the car parked next to a vacant park in the sprawling suburbia of Dallas, Texas.

I once wrote a poem for Bobby's daughter, for her wedding.  Special occasions perhaps are not the place to flaunt duende.  I think I committed a social faux pas.  I use to do that a lot.  But, I came across the poem again a month or so ago and though most of what I wrote at the time doesn't hold up, "An American Poem for An American Couple" is perhaps one of my best.  I simply took a refrain, "Susie is getting married" and grafted it to news events, what was happening in my life, and possible outcomes for her future children:

Susie is getting married.
I chlorinate urinals at the mushroom factory
and scrub moss off concrete block
where boiler-water runs down the wall.

Susie is getting married.
Jurors at the Simpson trial are being denied
the chance to see Mark Fuhrman.
He is long-faced and invoking the Fifth Amendment.

Susie is getting married.
I drop by to see Melody.
She accidentally ironed her elbow
and took the skin off the back of her legs
while shaving.

What I was trying to describe then but didn't have a name for is that life is meaningful specifically because of duende--that dark void at the center of all knowing.

Susie is getting married.
The center shrinks.

Packwood's resignation
is only one of the changes
that could produce a sharply different Senate:

more partisan, more polarized.

Susie is getting married.
I read love letters to Hitler
while eating a cheese sandwich.

"My dear, sugar-sweet Adolf,"
writes a German woman in 39,
"I look at your pictures constantly
and give them a kiss!"

Oh the extremes we go to in order to fill that void.  We build Phoenix.  We build Dallas.  Chrome.  Glass. Palms.  Swimming pools.  McMansions.  We write love letters to Hitler.  We become addicted to alcohol. We become addicted to porn.  We can't decide whether we want to live or die.

This is where I got myself in trouble.  I crashed a wedding with an inappropriate date, Duende, open to all possibilities.

Susie is getting married.
Man has sex with corpse.
Raleigh.  John Bill Whitehead,
former funeral home employee.

In my enthusiasm to be open, I even imagined two scenarios for Susie's future children--ones as strong and moral as Susie and ones in opposition to those dreams:

Susie is getting married
Some day there could be kids,
statistically, 2.5 are possible.
Maybe a boy, maybe a girl.
Maybe he wants to run The World Bank,
maybe he wants a pregnant pink Chevy on hydraulics,
painted WIRED ON WEED, OH BABY!

And maybe the daughter--she wants to run UNISEF,
then again, maybe she wants a cute little uniform
and pom-poms--DEFENSE!  DEFENSE!
Maybe she can even be found in the frozen vegetable section...

I go on to describe a woman much like Joy on My Name is Earl who can "be found in the frozen vegetable section" bending over for the viewing pleasure of the stock boy.

I don't know how I thought such a present could be appropriate for a wedding.  It's funny now.  But although my life was a mess, I did get some substantial truths that most don't, namely that life is messy. The void is huge and we drive ourselves crazy trying to fill it.  Most fail.

Christ got that.  It was his main message.  Be kind, be open.  Some of you will get through beautifully.  You may run The World Bank, you may head UNISEF.  But it's hard out there.  Be kind to those that fail. Duende is all around.

Philosophers may have failed to name it.  But I think perhaps my mother did what they couldn't:

Once she said, "I think the loneliness we all feel is the desire to return to our Heavenly Father."

I think perhaps she is right.

Duende perhaps is nothing more than being homesick for whatever existed before we shot out into this cold, bright all-too concrete world.

When I'm at my best, I long for what, according to P.M.H. Atwater, most people with near-death experiences witness--one God, one people, one family, one existence, one law--Love, one commandment--Service, one solution--Forgiveness.

Bobby, Susie, Eddie, a late sorry--sort-of.  Sorry I didn't have better social skills back then.  Hymns to the Silence was probably a far better choice for a wedding present.

But though I was probably drunk and despising life the night before (as I often was), I was clearly at my best when I wrote "An American Poem for an American Couple."  At the moment I wrote it, I clearly understood duende.

How could I not?  I learned from the best.  Thanks Bobby for being my mentor.  I could have lived just fine, I think, had you never come directly into my life, even as much as that has meant.  But if your poems had never somehow found there way to me that would be quite another thing.

Words do change people's lives.

Here's to duende.

Here's to that soft, dark openness.

Here's to Christ.  Here's to Buddha.

Lorca.

Byrd.

My brother, Lloyd.

As I have been writing this, Marci has been playing Roy Orbison and Ronnie Milsap.

Here's to them too--for duende in all forms.

And here's to Marci--

my lover, my friend, my new beginning--
joy all the more real because duende is hiding in the shadows.