Angel In Vortex — Image by kenne
“The angel comes with windy upward drafts, with transcendental longings; the duende arrives with demonic undertow, with downdrafts of emotion. Both are fundamental inner disturbances, fissures of being, ways of putting the self at risk, liberating figures. They are extremities of human imagination. There is a place on the endangered shoreline where they seem to meet, and where they may be indistinguishable from each other.
. . . Rilke wrote: ‘Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.”‘
— from The Demon and The Angel; Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration, by Edward Hirsch
“Man’s ability to measure the spiritual, earthbound, and cosmic, set against his physical helplessness is his fundamental tragedy. The tragedy of spirituality.”
— Paul Klee
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