duende

Having just purchased Harold Bloom's Genius,
all 814 pages remain unopened at my elbow
during a late-afternoon Lebanese lunch with S.
I am listening to him talk about life-between-bites.
Why am I not at home, like all 'gorgeous girls',
cooking for a husband, he exclaims.
To which I am reminded of Calvino, the Italian fabulist.
Calvino's Fantastic tales, of Sister Theordora,
nun of the order of Saint Columbia,
retelling her tale;

"We country girls, however noble, have always led
retired lives in remote castles and convents;
apart from religious ceremonies, triduums, novenas,
gardening, harvesting, vintaging, whippings, slavery,
incest, fires, hangings, invasions, sacking, rape,
and pestilence, we have had no experience."

Unfallen Eve and Adam, indeed.

In turn, I ask S what specific century he just stepped
out of. But even with such idle banter, I still expect
a little Shakespeare. Afterall,
"Only an inventor knows how to borrow.",
writes Emerson.

While S orders, I open a page that promises to reveal
all the secrets of divine character and personality
contained-in-print. And there, within some grandly
arbitrary confluence, is what I am searching for.

The definition of someone who stands alone:
a little Durrell, a little Dante and a little Miles Davis,
all folded into someone contiguously well-travelled,
who sprouts wings-at-will while passing through
the many labyrinths-of-transformation that maintain
an inward motion, thereby insuring complete
inaccessibility (but in an endearing kind of way).
Someone who touches others with the farthering force
of their wholly ideosyncratic isms.
One who is of and above (t)his age.

Caught in the abyss of self but with an original lustre.
With the kind of shine that one imparts while
juxtaposed within a flux. And filled with the
intoxication of originality. Someone who reflects a room
while also maintaining their own original form.

S attends to the bill while I turn the page.
I find Federico García Lorca's duende.
Duende, meaning 'a power and a struggle';
He writes;

"The duende is not in the throat;
the duende comes up from inside,
up from the very soles of the feet."

Shadowy-black sounds that have the odd charm
of a flamenco-ed surrender to intensity.

After saying goodbye to S,
I wander into R's storefront space, which is always filled
with the smell of time and age. He has no new-old mantle
clocks to show me. But we talk. Before leaving, he points
out a small rose-coloured perfume bottle at the back of
a shelf. Hand blown in Vancouver, circa 1988 and signed.
Not old, but filled with charm. Small and round.
Something about the way it captures the light, and weighs
heavy-and-cold against the skin. The entire room
reflected in its stopper; duende in the light.
This little bottle reminds me of Lorca's words
and the notion that genius still awaits us all.
So I purchase it to remember his poem by
and walk out of R's shop,
reciting this verse;

"Why was I born amoung mirrors?
The day walks in circles around me,
and the night copies me
in all its stars."
(Federico Garcia Lorca)