Young Woman Paints In Front of Duende Cafe in Prague; “A Walk” by Rilke (literally literary…)

Lorca writes: “The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, ‘The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.’ […] it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation. […] everything that has black sounds in it, has duende […] This mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, […] The duende’s arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm. […] All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present.

“If I told you the whole story it would never end…What’s happened to me has happened to a thousand woman.”  ~ Federico García Lorca from Dona Rosita la soltera/ Dona Rosita the Spinster 

A random discovery by a poet stranger-friend in the program. Happy he shared with a few of us who are Lorca fans!

This I randomly came across while walking! Restaurant R.M. Rilke.

“A Walk” By Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by Robert Bly.

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

And the beautiful, mysterious Prague…

Related posts:

“the work for which all other work is but preparation.” ~ Rilke “Who I am is who I could not not be.” ~ Peter Senge Some Prague Photos