The Cricket and The Duende
Six days ago, a small dark cricket started broadcasting its spring mating calls from under my sink. The calls were faint at first like a tiny hobgoblin's song, but now that the cricket has gained momentum, I've got a symphony going on.
So far, the cricket's song has found its way under at least three phone conversations over the last couple of days. My friends on the other end of the line have said, "Is that cricket I hear getting under your skin?" Each time I've said, "Yea, that cricket's driving me a bit crazy. But what can I do? It's a smart cricket hiding behind the cracks."
Why does the cricket's nightly chirping remind me so much of The Duende, which Frederico García Lorca discusses in his essay Theory and Play of the Duende? Well, here's what Lorca says. "The Duende is not in the throat: the Duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet. It's of the most ancient culture of immediate creation."
When you think about it, isn't the cricket as much part of the most ancient culture of immediate creation as anything else? John Keats says as much in his poem The Grasshopper and the Cricket.
The Poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's—he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.
Back in the early 90s, when I was touring the country as a spoken word artist, I would often perform The Grasshopper and the Cricket for elementary school students. Of course, the teachers considered it a children's poem. True enough. But when you know about"the Duende's endless baptism of freshly created things," it's easy to understand how Keats' poem speaks to what's bubbling under the surface there where the moon shines on the living and the dead; there where the children are, and we are too.
The Cricket is still singing, and I'm still listening. If you'd like to know more about the Duende, read Lorca's essay, Theory and Play of the Duende, HERE . Listen to a terrific reading of Lorca's essay HERE.
