Empathy is cultivated through participation mystique. Denied of the experience, the heart is at risk of being rendered a cold citadel of angst and paranoia. Without empathy's agency, passion cannot be transmuted into compassion. Sans the sublimation of the heart's hearth, psychical fires threaten to become a raging wildfire of collective madness:
"Putin's neo-Cossack hacker squads have invaded my hard drive; Iran craves nukes; North Korea is a coiled, nuclear viper of seething crazy; Antifa roughens are through the looking glass Nazis." -- Such thoughts can be read as, the inverted soul's dark fantasies of release from ego-ossified bondage by means of the agency of death:
"The duende, by contrast, won't appear if he can't see the possibility of death, if he doesn't know he can haunt death's house, if he's not certain to shake those branches we all carry, that do not bring, can never bring, consolation." *
Therefore, it follows, as we are witnessing: The threatened extinction of the human species; blanched coral reefs, scoured of life; dying oceans, gagging in plastic particulates; the sky burning, the ashes of charred forests stippling the wind.
Concurrently: The surging, inundating flood of the media age, churning and cresting with fleeting yet inundating imagery and jejune text, drowns out and sweeps away from the psyche -- this:
"The magic power of a poem [of art, of music] consists in it always being filled with duende, in its baptising all who gaze at it with dark water, since with duende it is easier to love, to understand, and be certain of being loved, and being understood, and this struggle for expression and the communication of that expression in poetry sometimes acquires a fatal character." *
Yes, these auguries are freighted with darkness but, as Lorca reports:
"Dark sounds, behind which in tender intimacy exist volcanoes, ants, zephyrs, and the vast night pressing its waist against the Milky Way." *
Lorca refers to an all but lost way of seeing that, at our extreme peril, we have forgotten:
"Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. 'Dark sounds' said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a definition of the duende: 'A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained." *
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"The true struggle is with the duende." *
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"The arrival of the duende presupposes a radical change to all the old kinds of form, brings totally unknown and fresh sensations, with the qualities of a newly created rose, miraculous, generating an almost religious enthusiasm." *
In order to remember and restore what is crucial, one must, by force of will, if necessary, return to and explore the breathing landscape of the unfolding moment. But, by all evidence, has been forgotten, by me, in my frequent, less than stellar moments, and by my fellow, bipedal land mammals as well.
Appropriating the mythopoetic imagination, this question arises: What realm of the godhead is social media located? Hermetic, perhaps"but only manifesting the god's trickster aspect thus is devoid of autochthonic imperative. Mephistophelian, absolutely -- i.e., the emptiness of knowledge devoid of participation mystique.
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