I think what I have missed in life has been the duende. I am always looking for it, but have not seen it lately. Not in years, in fact. The duende is not something you can appreciate in the virtual world. It must be clear and present. You must live within the duende's atmosphere to experience it, and I think we are seeing it right now, as a high-duende system moves into the Baltimore region.
Call me the duende meteorologist. Or at least allow me to indulge this duende business again because it has been years for me since I last mentioned it in this space - and what I see happening with Baltimore's professional football team ... I think this is the duende.
I am not talking about winning.
Winning has something to do with it but not everything to do with it. To say duende is about winning is to belittle the word.
And about the word, please allow me to pull from some earlier columns so that you might better understand. Duende is not a word to be used casually and, from what I have seen in the American press over the years, it is not - and probably because it takes too much explaining each time.
Let me try again.
Duende is a potent elixir of charisma, passion, panache, flair, chemistry, soul, style, grace under pressure and star quality. Duende, wrote the late jazz critic George Frazier, "is heightened panache, or overpowering presence ... that certain something."
We look for it in the arts and in sports because duende is a living thing, a spirit that dances in the imagination and ignites the soul.
Duende is what separates talent from genius. It is probably what lived in Mozart. Frazier heard duende in the horn of Miles Davis. A sports fan, Frazier once put it this way: "[Duende] was what Ted Williams had even when striking out, but Stan Musial lacked when hitting a home run."
It is what Muhammad Ali had even in defeat.
We are in the realm of the metaphysical, friends.
While the literal Spanish definition of duende is "hobgoblin" or "ghost," the Spanish expression tener duende means "to have what it takes." Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet and author of Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter, called duende the "energetic instinct" that no flamenco dancer or matador could be without.
"To help us seek the duende there are neither maps nor discipline," Garcia Lorca wrote. "All one knows is that it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, that it rejects all the sweet geometry one has learned, that it breaks with all styles."
