by Otis Haschemeyer
The Greek mystery rituals evoked a connection with a death-like and dark underworld, giving initiates the feeling, the knowledge that they were passing supernatural tests that spoke to truths beyond human terms. Susan Cole examined archeological artifacts found at gravesites from the 5th and 4th Centuries BCE, small golden tablets inscribed with instructions for the dead upon entering Hades. In her essay, “Landscapes of Dionysos and Elysian Fields,” Cole writes that these were, “lines of poetry in more of less dactylic hexameters” that gave “directions for a scripted performance at the door of Hades’ domain.” The written poem, and this must be one of the earlier instances of one, provided “the itinerary for the journey and a script for recital, the little gold tablet give[ing] precise instructions about where to go, what to do, and what to say in order to reach a place like the sunlit meadow, where Aristophanes’ chorus of initiates dance for Persephone.”
The text of one such tablet, found in a woman’s grave in Hipponion near the Italian town of Lokroi reads:
This is the task of Memory; when you are about to die. . . ----------------[ line missing?]--------------------------
into the broad halls of Hades, there is to the right a spring; and standing next to it a white cypress tree;
arriving down there, the souls of the dead grow cold.
Do not go near this spring at all.
But in front of it you will find the cold water flowing forth from the lake of Memory; and guardians pass above.
But they will surely ask you, with their crowded thoughts,
for what reason you seek out the darkness of dank Hades.
Say: “I am the child of Earth and of starry Sky,
and I am parched with thirst and I am perishing. But give me quickly cold water to drink from the lake of Memory.”
And above all, they will announce you to the king under the earth.
And above all, they will give you to drink from the lake of Memory. And what is more, when you have drunk, you will travel a road, a sacred road, which other famous mystai and bakchoi also tread.1
The importance of the poem for initiates cannot be overstated. It secured for the initiate a preferential treatment in the underworld, a way to avoid a gloomy eternity, lost in an underworld without distinction, animation, or, most importantly, ego: the quality of “self,” built upon the notion of distinction.
Homer’s underworld, as depicted in the Odyssey, was just such a vague place, where heroes, commoners and kings alike wandered around in a perpetually gray world, empty husks of themselves, only animated by ritual blood. Homer’s underworld represented the notions of an oral culture where death meant a return to a common chaos, a place without memory or ego. There, distinction was only perpetuated in patriarchal lineage, in the heroism of sons still living and the living memory or the hero’s own heroic reputations—this dependence on lineage is one of the reasons patriarchal control over women’s bodies was so intensely important to men. To perpetuate the masculine ego and identity, women needed to be subjugated and controlled, particularly sexually, in order to insure a blood-lineage for men.
This masculine anxiety, a fear of ego extinction, was likely exacerbated by the apparent capacity for women to be a “life giver” rather than the masculine, “life taker.” Women could make, whereas men could only appropriate. Establishing unequal “rules of law” which in turn created value systems embedded a misogynist culture that was doubly effective in both relieving male existential anxiety and supporting a warrior culture necessary for masculine (and territorial) aggrandizement.
Later, written language changed the Greek conception of the underworld. Greeks saw the possibility of retaining a sense of egotistical identity even in death, even in all of eternity. Written language gave people the sense that complex ideas, particularly having to do with hierarchy, could persist. If epitaphs could be written on tombstones, then distinctions could also be carried with the souls of the dead to secure a privileged immortality. The mystai and the bakchoi are the initiates to the bacchic mysteries of Dionysos, and we see at the end of the Hipponion poem that if the individual recalls, posthumously, all the priest’s directions and performs them accurately, then he or she will be allowed to “travel a road, a sacred road, which other famous mystai and bakchoi also tread.”
Here is the very birth of heaven and hell, as we see that this sacred road is not for everyone. In the poem from Hipponion, memory is the essential ingredient to retaining a worldly hierarchy, and therefore, to be able to remember was a key to retaining an individual identity that held distinction over others. Certainly we can imagine Greeks witnessing daily those individuals who did not remember, individuals wandering around on the streets of the town subject to age and dementia. The people’s imaginary visions of the afterlife mirrored those they saw on their own streets. The loss of memory meant the loss of self, identity, and position in society, meant a misery of helplessness and destitution. Something to be feared, true, but retaining memory in the afterlife was an esoteric skill that the initiate must acquire. Those who held the knowledge commodified
that knowledge. The poem at Hipponion was etched into gold, a metal whose value lies in its persistent luster, and like the rites themselves, gold’s cost made it available only to a few; inclusion in the mystery cults was exclusive—the esoteric knowledge shared there: deadly secret.
We see the “lake of memory” alluded to several times in the poem, but memory in the Hipponion poem is not only important in its content, but in its form. The poem reflects, line by line, a series of chronological events that include complex calls and responses between the “guardians” with their “crowded thoughts” and the individual. Though the individual’s specified performance and the geography of Hades itself differed between mystery cults, each initiate believed they had to perform the ritual exactly right. While the content of the poem suggest the treacherous difficulty of the rite where so very much is at stake, the form of the poem assists the memory, like the formulaic devices that aided the memory of the oral poets who came before.
According to Susan Cole, drawing connections from archeological artifacts, “certain repeated themes and images nevertheless stand out, especially the anticipation of a journey to the underworld, a confrontation with the divine gatekeeper, a landscape with trees and water, and formulae for ritual responses.” Cole writes:
The conclusion to be drawn from the total collection is that those who took such texts to the grave (or their relatives) had confidence in entitlement to special treatment after death. In one way of another, the texts assume that eligibility was established by ritual and confirmed after death by recalling or reciting esoteric information that could have been learned only through that ritual experience.
The poem etched in gold that the dead carried to Hades might be considered a crib sheet, according to Cole, a just-in-case measure for those who might forget their lines once in the dark and unknowable underworld.
The true and truer preparations for this journey were the mystery cults themselves. Both memory and esotericism were served in the rituals through the key elements of repetition and secrecy. Remembering exactly what to say to the divine gatekeeper of Hades was crucially important, and the initiates memorized their roles through the repetition of ritualistic call and response that would suggest the strophe and antistrophe, refrain and epode of later poetic forms. The secrecy of the cult insured the necessary hierarchy in death, which denotes privilege and secured the power of its priest, the true gatekeepers to that privilege. Esoteric knowledge had no value if it was democratized, and privilege was not privilege if all shared it. In fact, such a democratization suggested a return to the homogenized gray underworld of Homer—and no one in a position of privilege wanted that. The people had found a way, they thought, to preserve selfishness even in death.
To insure the successful negotiation of the death experience, the priests had to prepared initiates for the surreal entrance into another world. The confrontation with the gatekeeper, the rituals of call and response, had to be preformed and enacted with as much authenticity as possible. It is possible to imagine that the bacchic rituals, the orgiastic ecstasies were meant to simulate the experience of death, as the priest understood them. It was not enough to remember the ritual call and response in the calm light of day, but each must be able to perform the ritual in the ecstasy of death: drunk, clamoring, and groped by fellow souls.
This was the dithyramb, and the formulaic poetry that arose from these ecstatic death knells had a powerful cultural importance—secretly, for the individual, it was through these that each wrestled with his or her fear of unavoidable death. From this ecstasy, the wild and passionate choral hymn, the dithyramb, was not a ranting, but an important and necessary communication of the individual to their God, the gate-keeper of the immortal realm, as the individual confronted his or her own mortality, and secured a place for themselves in a vague dark realm.
Lorca’s “duende” is a “mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains.” In his essay, “Play and Theory of the Duende,” Lorca goes on to say the duende, “is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched the heart of Nietzsche, who searched in vain for its external forms on the Tialto Bridge and in the music of Bizet, without knowing that the duende he was pursuing had leaped straight from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz or the beheaded, Dionysian scream of Silverio’s siguiriya.” In Spanish, the duende is a dwarf or a homunculus, and in Lorca's meaning the duende retains some of this connotation but speaks to more, speaks to a confrontation the artist has with her own dark soul, a confrontation that finds expression then in a moment of artistic perfection in a perilous world.
In the essay, “In Praise of Antonia Merce, La Argentina,” Lorca describes the dancer Antonia Merce as having to “fill a dead, gray space with a living, clear, trembling arabesque, one which can be vividly remembered.” The dancer, and in a larger sense a poem or any temporal artistic practice—must fill “a dead, gray space,” with a “living, clear, trembling arabesque,” to be “vividly remembered.” Here echoes the dithyramb, the primal confrontation with the gatekeeper, the moment of calling out: I wish to remember—remember me.
A poem is never the written poem. It is an act of creation, drawn from air and recreated in reading. The poem’s action exists amidst peril. For Lorca the dancer “battles the air around her, air that threatens at any moment to destroy her harmony or to open huge empty spaces where her rhythm will be annihilated.”
This also describes the realms of poetry and all true arts. Only one action is exactly right and in harmony with the rest, and every other is not. The dancer, further, must be in possession of her own self, her body, and all it does—the spaces she occupies must be in the dance and those she doesn’t, outside the dance. The poem also flirts with this nano-membrane of interior and exterior, the harmony of each right word clashing against multitudinous missteps and the world of annihilation.
One day I was browsing in a used bookstore in Knoxville Tennessee, when I came across a 1966, Paris Review. On the cover was a nicely stylized Christmas tree and inside was an interview with Allen Ginsberg. I sat down in a corner. The store’s black cat meowed and then lay down next to me. I hesitate to admit, but I’ve always liked cats.
Ginsberg said, “It’s the ability to commit to writing, to write, the same way that you. . .are! Anyway! You have many writers who have preconceived ideas about what literature is supposed to be, and their ideas seem to exclude that which makes them most charming. . . because they think that they’re gonna write something that sounds like something else that they’ve read before, instead of sounding like them.”
I was in a Ph.D. program at the time and taking poetry workshops and I knew what Ginsberg was talking about. I knew all about bad poems, poems that seemed to have an English accent and too many allusions. I read endlessly epiphanic poems, countless gritty Joe-blow On-the-Waterfront poems, in short, I read every manner of not quite right poem. Missteps were everywhere, but what were the right steps? I certainly saw it in other people’s works—that was easy, but more so I felt it in myself.
How could I make the right choices?
Now, reading the Ginsburg next to that cat, I saw what I already had felt. If I was making choices, I was already stepping out of time. The poet, Ginsberg felt, must be the way “you are!”
Lorca’s dancer finds duende through self-possession, perhaps self-inhabitation. We might call this “self-possession” by many names: authenticity or voice, but no static name truly captures the feeling of truth in the fully integrated act of creating. It is an ecstatic gesture, closer, perhaps, to the cult ritual of the dithyramb because it excites the psyche in a profoundly totalizing struggle against death.
I once saw Neil Young at a party in Montara California, on a farm in a crease of the Santa Cruz mountains where I was living in a gutted Airstream. I recognized Mr. Young immediately even though he was much taller than I’d thought him to be. I didn’t go up to him and gush. I let him go about his business, catching up with his old hippy friends. I later I found out he’d jammed for hours with people inside Richard’s cobbled shack. I’d missed it all.
What had I been doing?
I’d been stoking the bonfire with eucalyptus limbs with Adam Johnson. And, as I was informed, we were making it smoke.
After I read the Paris review interview, I realized Ginsberg was a hero of mine, too, in much the same way as Neil Young. I’d never seen Ginsberg and I wished I had. I felt that I’d missed something, and I felt about Ginsberg the way I can feel sometimes about Neil Young—sure he made some bad albums, but he’s spent a lifetime jumping in with his whole heart. Ginsberg’s honesty—well sometimes he hit the mark and sometimes he didn’t, but Ginsberg, Neil, even Antonia Merce, I suspect, don’t always have duende. But sometimes they do. At the end of the Paris Review interview, Ginsberg says,
Sometimes I feel in command when I’m writing. When I’m in the heat of some truthful tears, yes. Then, complete command. Other times—most of the time not. Just diddling away, woodcarving, getting a pretty shape; like most of my poetry. There’s only a few times when I reach a state of complete command. Probably a piece of Howl, a piece of Kaddish, and a piece of The Change. And one or two moment of other poems.
The interviewer asks, “By command do you mean a sense of the whole poem as it’s going, rather than parts?” and Ginsberg replies, “No—a sense of being self-prophetic master of the universe.”
I feel Ginsberg’s “self-prophetic master of the universe,” Lorca’s duende, and the ecstasy of the dithyramb converge at the very edge of madness, at a juncture of death and life.
To discover the path, to what Lorca calls, “deep song,” everything “precious” needs to be destroyed. Ginsberg asked, “So then, what happens if you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your Muse?” Inevitable death obligates us to recognize the vanity of our own precious constructions and artifice.
Lorca writes that duende “burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned, that he smashes styles, that he leans on human pain with no consolation.” Any poetry meant to sway a god must articulate a truth that steps beyond our worldly conventions.
Lorca suggests that duende might come as a wind through an empty arch, “a mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby’s spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things.”
Since Pound famously said, ”make it new,” many have latched onto the “new” but ignored the “making,” though it is the “making” that is of primary importance. The newness describes not so much the thing but the act of creating the thing, that originality connecting to an exquisite moment in time. This act of original creation is paradoxically new and age old.
Newness itself does not resonate. Certainly in the workshop I read and wrote many poems that, mercifully, had never been written before. Instead it is the authentic creation of newness that finds sympathetic resonance with our age old and universally inarticulate tongue. Lorca’s image of duende blowing over the heads of the dead, finding truly inspired art in the paradox of a “constant baptism of newly created things,” suggests as much.
Beware of too much intelligence, Lorca says: “Intelligence is often the enemy of poetry, because it limits too much, and it elevates the poet to a sharp-edged throne where he forgets that ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head—things against which the muses that live in the monocles and in the lukewarm, lacquered roses of tiny salons are quiet helpless.”
Lorca also disparages the muse, and certainly we can see many artists who evoke the muse only to pander and gather laurels. Because of this, Lorca favors the duende because the duende does not pander. Lorca draws distinctions between the Muse and the Angel and the Duende,
The muse and the angel come from outside us: the angel gives lights, and the muse gives forms (Hesiod learned from her). Loaf of gold or tunic fold: the poet receives norms in his grove of laurel. But one must awaken the duende in the remotest mansions of the blood. And reject the angel and give the muse a kick in the seat of the pants. The key element of duende is that it is dark and that there be struggle—to kick the muse in the seat of the pants.
This internal struggle needn’t be pretty—in fact it has nothing to do with pretty. Describing the singer, La Niña de los Peines, Lorca writes, she “had to tear her voice because she knew she had an exquisite audience, one which demanded not forms but the marrow of forms, pure music, with a body lean enough to stay in the air. She had to rob herself of skill and security, send away her muse and become helpless, that her duende might come and deign to fight her hand-to-hand.” This beautiful and somewhat natal suggestion: to “tear” her voice and to rend herself insecure, to have a body “lean enough to stay in the air,” these were the necessary requisites to encourage the duende, the dark homunculus in hand-to-hand combat. The darkness does not possess a quality of either “goodness” or “badness.” Rather, I think, the darkness flies in the face of human constructs to realities more elemental. The duende’s “‘black sounds’ are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art.” It is from inevitable confrontation that the poem arises, but to suggest that these black sounds are possessed of some evil would be incorrect, I think. Darkness, and death for that matter, should no longer be equated with some kind of badness or evil. Those antiquated ideas should pass into history. Instead darkness should
be seen as a spirit of art that is rooted in the ground, in earth, and in a sense, from the place we have sprung—and where we will return. In the same way, poetry, through the dithyramb, embraces the mystery of death through a soul rendered vulnerable, lost, and above all dead—with nothing—at the gates of Hades. Lorca writes, “The duende’s arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old places unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm.” In duende, as with the dithyramb, we find no truer moment, or fuel for our poetic truth, than this confrontation at the deepest place of our own psyche.
Lorca’s duende has its roots in the ecstatic rituals of the dithyramb. Though born out of hierarchy and a desire for egotistical distinction, the dithyramb, and the poem, finally rise from our fear of death, an acknowledgement of our own loss, and rise in an ecstatic ritual confrontation with the divine gatekeeper. Our plea, our expression, our poem, against such forces, must ring true—I remember, remember me. 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.’ Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.”
Our equation is a merger of oppositions, and the poet should never be too far removed from that, or our absurdity, the possibility of an “arsenic lobster falling on our heads” the looming, deadly, reasonless epiphany, the self prophetic, merger with the universe, the deep song, the dithyramb, the possibility of which defines us, imperils us, and enlivens us—draws us to struggle with the demands of making the mirror that is art.
The poet usurps the power of the priest—must—not to enslave but to elicit and evoke a deep resonance with the primordial, perhaps inspiring, as Ginsberg writes, the poet’s own and the reader’s apotheosis to “self-prophetic master of the universe,” while the poem, each good one, risen out of this murky psychic tradition of life in death, drawn from the poet’s darkness, and brought to light in the “constant baptism of [a] newly created thing,” challenges God with its own imperiled life.
1 From Susan Cole’s “Landscapes of Dionysos and Elysian Fields, p 200. She notes: translation established by Sacco, G., 2001: “Ges pais eimi, Sul. V. 10 della laminetta di Hipponion,” ZPE 137, 27-33.
Bibliography
Cole, Susan G., “Landscapes of Dionysos and Elysian Fields,” Greek Mysteries: The Archaeology and Ritual of Ancient Greek Secret Cults, edited by Michael B. Cosmopoulos. Routledge, London and New York: 2003 (193-217).
Ginsberg, Allen, “Interview,” The Paris Review, vol. 37, Spring 1966. (13-55).
Lorca, Frederico Garcia, “Play and Theory of the Duende” and “In Praise of Antonia Mercé, La Argentina,” In Search of Duende, New Directions: New York 1998.