The Tiny Darkness Analyzation
The Tiny Darkness is the first poem I wrote that conveyed the depth of meaning I could feel but not yet express. It was my ‘breakthrough’ poem. In it I discuss the strange blending of spirituality, the supernatural, and writing, though it may not be apparent at first.
The title is derived from another name for the duende, which is the Spanish (old Spain) spirit of dark and dramatic art. It is the fevered force behind great poetic recitation or flamenco dancing, and was popularized by Frederico Lorca in the early 1900’s. This term, ‘the tiny darkness’ captivated me with a feeling almost tangible in my mind. I could almost feel this small spirit in my hand like a creature, could almost feel my palms cupping this heavy, magical shadow.
That feeling reminded me strongly of a story which is most definitely true, but whose main character is fuzzy in my mind. I believe it was the cousin of my mother, a young Swedish woman named Osa, who had this event happen to her, though it could have been a story I was told later. The story goes like this:
When I was a young child in Washington state, in the summer we could feel by the heaviness in the air that a storm was coming. Sometimes my family would sit on the concrete front steps, looking down over the field and across to the mountain, and wait for the storm, wait for the warm rain. The way I see it in my head, one summer afternoon Osa, who was visiting with us from Sweden, was sitting on those concrete steps reading a book, when a baby possum wandered out from the side of the house, dehydrated and overheated. It plopped down by her, almost dead, so she brought it some water, which greatly refreshed it. Exhausted from the near-death experience and its long, motherless walk, the baby possum slept in her hand for an hour before waking up and moving on.
This strange interaction with a feral creature is tied up with an old adage hard for me to comprehend at that age, that we cannot call God’s creatures our own, nor tame them, nor cage them. Still, it is a heart-breaking thing for a young child to see something beautiful and wild and free, and not be able to claim it and keep it and have it be ours.
Having the infant wild, this ‘feral baby’ come up to a human and trust it, touch it, sleep in its hand, is nothing short of amazing. This interaction became tied with the interaction between writer and muse, condensed down to me and the duende. In The Tiny Darkness, the duende alights rarely and briefly, like God’s presence or gifts. The summer storms represent God in this fashion, with their powerful and deep approach.
The parenthesis on either end further the notion that you cannot call magic; it must come to you. The phrases were taken from a character in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, which explores its own strange magic. In A Passage, the character speaks of an Indian god whose return is prophesized and awaited anxiously. The character says that he urges the god to, ‘Come. Come, come, come’, but the god, ‘does not come.’
No matter how much we ask or beg or pray, gifts from God or the muse come on their own time, and our begging or pleading cannot hurry them even one second.
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