aside on dragon smoke

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    This morning i listened again to Linda Ronstadt’s live cover of "Hurts So Bad"--already a great song, she breaks & bathes it in atomic fire--& i thought, this has duende. (So might the sorcerer know when his efforts to evoke have been crowned with success.) And it reminded me of that other great singer & song, Melanie Safka’s "Candles in the Rain" (IMHO the very pinnacle of 60s rock--), which would surely have lifted up the Pentagon itself, had a bright god & not the Demiurge been in charge of stuff like that.

    All its occurrences, isolate like lightning strikes, nilpertain sheer artistic excellence: even, contemptuously so. Lorca says as much in his famous essay. Bly calls it "dragon smoke" & that’s as good a name as i can think of in English. (Never mind that no one can smell it & there aren’t any dragons.)

    I started to think of instances from various media. Of course, the things i like i like for different reasons, & even famous masterpieces aren’t necessarily famous for having that quality. Recently Keats’s "Ode to Autumn" came up in a discussion; the ending of that, & especially his "Ode to Melancholy." Somehow that reminded me of my own poem, "The Dead King Hunts and Eats the Gods,"--not something i often have achieved, but in that one i do (& it feels like someone else wrote it). El Greco’s View of Toledo & just about anything by Van Gogh, but I would single out his Night Café with Pool Table.

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    Unexpectedly, Rudyard Kipling: "Epitaphs of the War: The Coward"—in only two lines. And those lines from "Au Lecteur" by Baudelaire that have always haunted me, "Chaque jour vers l'Enfer nous descendons d'un pas,/ Sans horreur, à travers des ténèbres qui puent." Likewise, "Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,/ That here, obedient to their laws, we lie" --Simonides, as translated by William Lisle Bowles. Strictly speaking, haiku are supposed to not be haiku unless this happens. (One can wish.)

    The "shower of gold" chess game… (--i almost think there is more duende in chess than in English poetry.) Cliché as it has become, the beginning of "Scheherazade" by Rimsky-Korsakov. (Then his orchestral training kicks in.) But is there duende in greater-length works, except for at moments? I will grant much of the Aeneid, Book VI; "Of Being Numerous"; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (alas, more than his Duino Elegies--!). And just about anything by R A Lafferty, who seems to have it at his fingertips. All six of Bartok’s quartets, & even moreso Berg’s Lyric Suite.

    Concerning the latter, i have many times told the story of how i first encountered it. I was in Vienna, at a classical concert, starting to nod off after a day spent walking around the city. Suddenly the air changed, as if a storm wind had entered that close chamber. I sat up bolt-upright & felt like i’d just drank three cups of coffee. It was the most amazing thing i had ever heard. (After that, i went to the first record store i could find & bought my own copy, lugging it around with me in my suitcase till I returned to the US.)

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    It wasn’t much different when I wandered into the one-man show of Master Shen-Long at the Trammell Crow museum. There are marks, & there are marks. But perhaps our pockets these days are empty of gold coins to fling, or we no longer expect to find excitement in anything that our artists & bards can come up with. (The Zeitgeist is not without consequence.) I wouldn’t say that it’s even wise to make that one’s chief artistic ambition. (Vincent again.) Yet to take up the vocation without that awareness, would be ridiculous. The openness that precedes, yes, that can be cultivated, up to a point...

    Perhaps it is best to think of it as one of the hazards of the job.