I have found my sense of direction intact. The same boys tag the train stations of Córdoba as Madrid as Toledo as Bilbao. Outside Madrid, nobody lives in the middle of Spain, it’s the most desolate region in all of Western Europe. War too recent, angle to the sun too acute. Nobody leaves the train. Are those olive trees? Are those?
I’m tired, I’m proud of this exhaustion, why shouldn’t I be. It proves I will die of genetic exhaustion after hurtling myself a piddling distance through time, and a hundred years after my death, no one will ever know I existed. Which mountains are those? Suffering slight inconvenience on the principle of moneyed curiosity. I must see this country because I must see. It’s the least I can do, self-sophistication is a hell of a drug. It’s the most I can do, ever, for right now, myopic youth, learn to see with discernment. It’s so virtuous, has anybody been sainted for alertness? Discerning which is the correct receptacle in which to deposit today’s plastic waterbottle. Those sweet cows, I’ll go vegetarian for real this time, when I go home. Nodding to the homeless winos in the cellars of Toledo and then averting my eyes and blushing. Do I make the Spain better by being here? Why would I? Cross-language exchange and a successfully defended Mediterranean reputation for hospitality. Tourist dollars. The anarchist in me groans.
Do I make it worse? Environmentally, yes. But I would be consumer no matter where I am. Guilty, guilt, a byproduct of futurism, and very stabilizing, that’s why they breed it, if guilt moved us like spite did, all the governments in the world be slaughtered, for making us sin on their behalf. But then what? O science, O fiction, you are so stingy with the utopias. O life with your petty, petty victories.
If Spain didn’t exist, I would still see my own desire, a chained thing encircled by beaten-down grass. My duty to move the stake when I can. Stroke its chin. Starve it? I’m not capable of thinking of that. Yet. My pet desires!
But O I’m tired! The solar romance of Spain! Why do we get tired so easily, half a day, forty-five minutes of concentration in the shade? Futile, tragic, but what a relief, to briefly submerge. In puzzles, in worries. That’s your personal history: your bath of filthy hesitations.
I missed the lilacs at home again, as I do every year. I will have to make do with lavender in my soap, as long as it smells purple. And I missed so many birthdays. Is there anything more tragic than a grandmother waiting for you to call?
Why is it so much work to rest? I rest my case. I rest assured. A headache digging holes in my lobes, I hope it finds what it’s looking for. The rest of what it’s looking for.
I’ll invent rest. I’ll go back through recent memories, see what story I can extract and put to bed. The incense burning in the blue tiled reception. The overhead of umbrellas
the handpainted flowers. The mosque-cathedral with the candy arches, Mezquita-Cathedral de Córdoba. Brown and white. I can’t see the forest for the delight of Suess pillars on a grid.
Spin, parallel, spin, perpendicular, spin, spin, spin, arched tunnels of mathematical purity, vision therapy, the eye glides into gloworm REM behavior.
The arquitecture of the body submits to sublimity, ascends. The ten-storey foghorn organ bellows disciplines. The most beautiful building I have ever been in. The most perfect place I have been, the Mezquita-Cathedral in Córdoba.
The synagoge dressed all in white, Santa María Blanca. Ecstasy, on the creaky wooden floor, before El Greco’s thirteen apostles in an air-conditioned room.
I’d like to write a book with a potrait of each character painted by El Greco. Not that I want to write a book about the thirteen apostles. I want to write a book and have El Greco paint the characters.
The impossible always seems perverse.
Now I want a sound barrier of trees between the farm and the highway. Perverse? Need to study conflict resolution for twenty years. Need to study land back. Deeper and deeper into the books. If you love somebody, ask them a question.
A budding interest in carpentry, peeling the bark of cedars with a spoon. I want to raise from the ground a compost toilet. I want to be old in my old place and to know everyone at my deathbed. I wanted a daughter yesterday. I want to work again. The Earth is strong in those who work it. So not me.
Isn’t this why I came? To want to go back? Looking for the pleasure of anonymity, until it was no longer a novelty, wonder on, wander principle, is there anything less original. But I really did grovel and marvel at every bridge-by-Romans. Every ruins-by-Visigoths.
I dreamed last night of a weeping orchestra, a chick flick, friends clutching hats, I can see their back teeth as they say, Please let me come back. Please let me stay. I will make happiness fall out of your ears. Hugs for thank-yous, I guess that’s all I really wanted.
Then the back of a taxi, in the leering square at nightfall, yellow light on the stones. Tattoos of bears on the chest, hairy and flattered to see you looking. They bat their claws, oh stop it you. Friends in unlikely places.
Really, really unlikely, as in, guess what, tomorrow my best friend Sarah arrives in Bilbao. !!!!!!!! And we take on the fashionable cities together. Together is the cradle of comfort. Just in time, too. This season of solo backpacking is burning itself out. Yes it’s backpacking, even when I take trains. But soon, so soon, it ends. Bilbao in sight.
cdzhouse 