The Mire and the Muse

It’s mid-May, and I’ve been hibernating for a month now—waging a quiet battle with a new book idea and the fear that inevitably accompanies it. In my creative life, this is the natural course of things: an idea invades from nowhere, I scoff, it persists, I resist, and so the dance begins. Eventually—inevitably—I surrender. That moment has come, and with it, the tremor of fear that rises whenever I leap into the unknown.

In moments like this, I’m reminded of what the great (and often maddening) literary critic Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence—a tension that weighs on every poet who has ever dared to write. (Shakespeare, he noted, was exempt, and hence Bloom confined his theory to those who came after.)

But it’s not just poets who wrestle with influence. Any artist striving to make something original must contend with the echo of giants. How do you write a novel after James Joyce, who broke every rule with such brilliance that he made it difficult to imagine literature differently? In the operatic world, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, with its haunted chord and archetypal gravity, changed the art form so radically it’s unclear whether opera ever truly recovered.

In a speech I imagine was improvised—because only something spontaneous could contain such beauty—Federico García Lorca spoke of duende, the mysterious force that animates any great performance, poem, or composition. The artist loses herself in the work, and something elemental takes over. Artist and audience alike are transformed.

Lorca tried to define the indefinable:

Manuel Torre, a man who had more culture in his veins than anyone I’ve known, on hearing Falla play his own Nocturno del Generalife, spoke this splendid sentence: “All that has dark sounds has duende.” And there’s no deeper truth than that.

Those dark sounds are the mystery—the roots that cling to the mire we all know, yet often ignore—from which art takes its very substance. “Dark sounds,” said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini offered this: “A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.”

So, then, duende is a force, not a labor; a struggle, not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: “The duende is not in the throat. The duende surges up from the soles of the feet.” Meaning: it’s not a question of skill but of something alive in the veins, born of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.

Lorca goes on—spiraling through metaphor, touching the heavens, descending again to the mire. Perhaps only poets and musicians can move so easily between heaven and earth. But I have seen it in actors, dancers, even athletes—those moments when the spirit enters, the mind vanishes, and body, soul, and presence merge.

This mystery returns me to a mythic theme that runs through all great stories—from Uranus and Cronus to the death of Darth Vader. It’s essential because it’s archetypal. Scientists know it, too. Their best work often arrives in their twenties, before the burden of convention dulls the edge of rebellion. To slay the father is to push beyond what is currently known. It’s what propelled the physicists of the 1930s to reshape the world—and what drove Joyce and Wagner into their respective exiles, misunderstood but undeterred, carving new languages from the husks of the old.

The Tao Te Ching tells us the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step—but that first step is always the hardest, whether it’s toward a novel, a symphony, or a canvas. Still, when duende begins to wake you at night, when the vision will not leave you—then the time has come.

Lorca understood it perfectly:

The duende I mean, secret and shuddering, is descended from that blithe daemon, all marble and salt, of Socrates, whom it scratched at indignantly on the day he drank the hemlock—and from that other melancholy demon of Descartes, diminutive as a green almond, who, tired of lines and circles, fled along the canals to hear the singing of drunken sailors.

And so, you pick up your pen (metaphorical now, as the pens have vanished into keyboards) and meet the duende head-on, hoping to survive the encounter. Herman Melville, accused of writing merely a tale of a man and a whale, left behind something that speaks to me at moments like these:

For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-lived life.

Duende lets you glimpse that Tahiti, even if only for a moment. And for that moment, everything is brighter. Everything is alive.