Duende (Writing Task)

This weeks writing task was on "Duende". Duende is a term coined by Federico Garcia Lorca to describe a certain spiritual intensity of a creative performer. This intensity comes often from a very dark place and goes beyond any concepts of artistic proficiency. It lifts the observer to another place, beyond the physical realm. The only way to truly understand the concept of Duende is to experience it. So here's my piece.

Duende

Duende happens. Duende surprises. I sit enjoying a drink at a milonga chatting to my friends. There are no expectations, no idea that something spiritual is going to happen. I mean how can an atheist experience the spiritual?
Waiting for a tango orchestra to start, I'd heard them before, at the markets in front of the church. The piano was out of tune, the sound was tossed and broken on the wind. I had no expectations. I even hear one of the bandeneon players practicing at 11am in our apartment building when I'm debating getting out of bed.
The orchestra starts, the piano is still out of tune, but they have duende.

Risk (Writing task)

This is the continuation of the writing tasks that I am doing as part of being involved in a writers group of ex-pats while living in Buenos Aires. This weeks topic was risk, and I am a risk averse person, so here's my take.

 

Risk

The taking of a risk for a risk averse person is only done after much planning, a lot of forethought and a number of attempts at removing said risk.By the time the risk is taken, it almost seems as though there is nothing that could possibly go wrong, and the act of taking a risk reduced to a few simple formulas all with known outcomes. Serendipity still seems to have the last word though, it is the constant in the formula you never bothered to find the real magnitude of because you mistakenly believed it to be insignificant.

Independence (Writing task)

I am currently living in Buenos Aires and have hooked up with a group of ex-pat writers who are meeting once a week to discuss their current work and generally help and inspire each other. One of the benefits is that we get to hear some really awesome pieces of work in progress literature, and comment on them. Another great thing, although I must admit a little scary, is that we usually do a writing exercise. We are given a topic, or some other form of inspiration, and asked to do a 5 minute stream of consciousness writing on the theme. Last week was both American Independence day (4th of July), and Argentinean Independence day (9th of July), so the theme was independence. I approached the task from the negative (ie how dependant I am). This approach I blamed on being the only Australian in the group, and Australia not really having an independence day as we are still bound to Mother England by an umbilical chord that refuses to be cut. I thought I'd start posting the writing tasks on this blog, just becasue no-one reads this blog anymore, and I figured I may as well.

 

Independence

I am a geek. I have every gadget known to mankind, and even a few that aren't. Over the oast few weeks one of the gadgets that I love most started to die... my phone. It's not just a phone, it's my calendar, my notepad, email and internet access, GPS guidance system, link to the world. Not being able to trust this pandoras box has made me realize just how dependant I have become on this piece of technology. I contract out to it many functions that in the past would only require a good memory. Phone numbers addresses, dates,  meeting places etc.... I am totally dependant.