True,
Figuring it out,
I like art, I like bikes, and I try to make sense of both when doing the other. When I paint I think of life and racing bikes, and riding. When I ride I relax and let my mind wander. I think about work, family, art, life, and ideas and on and on. Here is some random that happened recently.
Duende popped into my brain and I didn’t know where this word came from. I thought of an old pair of yellow cycling shoes, Duegi. Two brothers I thought? Duplicity. I let it go. Such is the way of Zen on the fly. Wear a helmet. Look both ways. Roll the stop sign. Into focus, blurry, next thought. Breathe, pedal. More thoughts. Wind. Dogs bark. Wind blows. Pedal, more thoughts. In. out. Duende? What is this word?
So later on I read, many times before, a poem by Hank Bukowski titled;” Style”. A dark lament at best.
Some of the lines; when Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun that was style.
For sometimes people give you style.
Joan of Arc had style.
John the Baptist.
Jesus.
Socrates.
Caesar.
Garcia Lorca.
I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.
Style is a difference, a way of doing, and a way of being done
Garcia Lorca. Who was this cat? I look it up. Duende. There is that word
"In all countries death is an end. It comes, and the curtains are closed. Not in Spain. In Spain, they are raised...A dead person in Spain is more alive dead than anywhere else in the world."
Garcia Lorca had style. More so now. 110 years after his death.
Any man - any artist, as Nietzsche would say - climbs the stairway in the tower of his perfection at the cost of a struggle with a duende - not with an angel, as some have maintained, or with his muse. This fundamental distinction must be kept in mind if the root of a work of art is to be grasped.
This is going somewhere. Keep riding
Rust never rests,
Caboom
