In Search of Duende (2): Must We Burn?

Was there freedom in madness. I knew there was, I had believed there was, I had always been certain, but I suddenly doubted madness. I doubted not the existence, but the realm of madness. I realized that despite the popular usage of the term, which was vulgar, plain, I never felt aloof from it, not to say I was crazy, but I had always felt bored by normality, so I had without giving it much thought, assumed madness was normality, which was obviously not how most people meant it, when they said, you are crazy, or that's insane, and I didn't know what to reply, I just stared at them with a numb wit, scrambling to understand what they meant, losing my ground, what precisely of what I had just said did they think was insane? It was as if they believed there was a reality of concrete matter and a world of mental madness, which separated from the reality by a wide moat and an unbreachable wall. True, I couldn't tell anymore if I was on the inside or the outside, and if I was on the inside would I liberate myself by breaking out of this castle on the cliffs, and was madness in fact a prison, was I like De Sade locked up inside the Bastille, shouting at the masses, they are killing the prisoners, but then why had the defense walls been erected, in defense of what, as if madness was a prize, a tribute of war, the holy grail of sanity and the masses storming it on it outside, slowly losing their minds in the frenzy of blood hunger, smelling the power of madness, losing oneself, becoming god, or was I on the outside of the walls, and was madness the loss of perspective, without space, being able to follow the horizon in every direction and never approaching it, and was sanity the prison, like the asylum where De Sade found freedom, a safe harbor from the roaming infinity of madness. It was pitch dark. I couldn't tell if I had been dreaming or thoughtfully awake.

In Search of Duende (1): The Deep Song

They say the city never sleeps, but the street was quiet and dark. I held my breath and tried to hear the deep song of the city, could I hear the heartbeat of the soul, but I heard little, only the rustle of the wind in the gossip of the night. I felt disturbed, uneasy, annoyed perhaps, by this void, by the absence. I yearned for a jolt of madness, but just now when I was in search for it, the madness seemed to evaporate at every turn. A young girl in the corner possessed the inflamed, black eyes of a gypsy, her luscious stares tortured me, but when I approached her, her eyes turned flat and dull, and I lost my taste for her. The muscles of her olive colored calves contracted, I felt her gentle, pointy breasts screaming, I was haunted, but when I pulled her close to me, her body collapsed, her fatty arms released my captivation, her heavy torso disgusted me, and I lost my appetite. This madness, to possess, this physical need to enforce myself upon the helpless creature who had surrendered herself, this need to impose myself by force of will, it rose from within, it came out, and hang there in the air, motionless, pointless, aimless. Dawn rose. Normalcy rose. Bodies responding to their habitual, biological cycle woke up and filled the streets of day. I was engulfed by this tide, and I too disappeared into the day, sane, normal, all without madness. It was then, that I could hear the echo of the deep song.

"I will die
in the roses
they will kill me"