Since last spring, when I last maintained my publishing practice, I've been on a long, sometimes challenging, often beautiful journey.
"My life turned completely upside-down," is how I just yesterday described it here.
I live now among mountains and new friends.
My life turned upside-down, I said. Could it also be true that for the first time in a long, long time, my life is actually turning right-side-up?
It's been almost a year since the last time (but for one) I published anything here.
The last time (but for one) I published, I was in Rome.
That day, I wrote, "The person I was when I left [on that trip] will not be the same person who returns."
Little did I know.
Three days later, my life began to turn completely upside-down.
It's been nearly two months since I last put up a Refill. I've done a ton of drafting, but I backed away from publishing as my life went crazy.
It's still crazy. It looks like it's going to stay crazy for a long, long time. Like I better get used to some long-term crazy.
If crazy is my new normal, it's no excuse for not publishing. I guess I'll just be writing about all the crazy.
Today marks more or less the halfway point of my trip. That's kind of amazing to consider. I feel like I've been gone a long time already. Were I to hop on a play this afternoon and return to the States, I would feel that it was an amazing trip, well worth my money, time, and energy. I'd tell stories of my experiences and feel that pride that comes when you believe you've done something really cool and worth telling about.
That I still have three-and-a-half weeks to go tells me that in the final analysis, I'm likely to find--pretty much as I expected to when I put the trip together--something transcendent about the experience. The person I was when I left will not be the same person who returns.
If you want to get a positive and somewhat skewed first impression of Rome, do as I did and arrive on a Sunday afternoon. After the almost aggressive energy of Madrid, Rome felt pleasant and peaceful.
I have since discovered that Rome's natural state is one of unmitigated and unrepentant chaos--but on the seventh day, they rest.
Wednesday afternoon, 9 May 2018
This afternoon I again, after all these years, got to wander the halls of the Museo del Prado. I took an art history class during my time in Spain, and we met every Friday morning at the Prado. There was something wonderful about getting to know a great museum that way, visiting for a few hours every week. There was never a sense of needing to see it all at once, which is always an impossibility at every great museum. Try to see too much and you might effectively see nothing at all.
I wouldn't get to have weekly visits this time around, and so I went walking through the halls with a certain focus, looking to find my old favorites.
I made my first stop at Velázquez' Las Meninas. All these years later, and it still struck me as amazing, even radical, almost post-modern in its treatment of subject and object and its relationship with the viewer.
And El Bosco's Jardín de las Delicias had only become more surreal, both in its treatment of subject and in its very existence. It's like 400 years ahead of its time, as though El Bosco and Salvador Dalí had been contemporaries, influencing each other.
I went to the far south end of the museum to see Goya's Pinturas Negras. They display them a bit differently now, to the paintings' detriment I think (or is that just the resistance to change that comes with nostalgia?), but I had forgotten just how somber and haunting they really are. They feel more mysterious to me now than they did back then, for I have lived many more years, and I no longer have my whole life ahead of me, and so I can somewhat better comprehend the mind that chose to create works like this.
But it was perhaps Velázquez' "Cristo Crucificado" that moved me the most. I'd forgotten about it completely. It is both a genius' study of the human form and a profound spiritual meditation. Christ, crucified, glows as though from within, and there's nothing in the painting but the man and the cross against a black background. It projects from within itself a vast silence, a story of suffering, and the end of suffering.
Welcome back, old friend, the paintings said. We've been waiting for you.
It's good to be back, my friends. Oh how I have missed you.
Links to some of the works I mention:
Las Meninas
Jardín de Las Delicias
Pinturas Negras: El Gran Cabrón
Pinturas Negras: Saturno
Cristo Crucificado
Prior to the vast changes in my life that occurred after I started working with Jerry back in 2014, the happiest time of my life was the five or so months I spent in Spain, mostly in Madrid, back in college. When I left, I made myself a promise: I would return after graduation.
That I let my fear talk me out of keeping that promise was the greatest mistake of my life.
When I arrived in Madrid on Sunday, I got off the train and said to myself, "I'm in Madrid." A smile spread across my face like light spreads across the horizon at dawn.
It took almost twenty-four years, but I'm back in Madrid.
I find a city where much has changed, and much has remained the same, and as I walked the city that first afternoon (first over by the Prado, and then to the Reina Sofía, and then through the Parque del Buen Retiro), I also found--within my heart--the first tentative golden glow of a dawning self-forgiveness.
Thinking back on that distant conversation with my host sister:
As an American, I had pretty much a knee-jerk reaction against authoritarianism of any sort, believing without any particular examination that democracy was clearly the best system. At the time, I saw no reason to fight with my host sister's assessment--better to listen and try to understand how people feel than interject my own feelings into a conversation about (and within) a culture that is not my own.
But I'll never forget that particular choice of words, "Superbuenas." During my stay, I'd heard the line about how when Franco was alive, at least the trains ran on time. And maybe they did. But during his rule, Franco imprisoned and executed hundreds of thousands of people. So I'm guessing there were and remain a whole lot of people who wouldn't have minded that the train schedule be bit less precise, and really didn't find things superbuenas at all.
A conversation with my host in Barcelona made it clear that Franco has not yet ceased to be a polarizing figure in Spain, notwithstanding that he died over 40 years ago. Despite the liberal nature of the monarchy--in which the king remains head of state, but all the real power of government vests elsewhere--I learned that for some people, there remains a strong association between the present-day monarchy and Franco's dictatorship.
The placards on the tower in San Sebastián spoke only a little of the civil war, and seemed to consider Franco's summering in the city as a positive thing. I wondered if Franco's affection for San Sebastián is now built into the rivalry between Bilbao and San Sebastián on the soccer pitch, if, as with Barcelona against Real Madrid, there are strong political undercurrents underpinning the mutual antagonism.
I found myself thinking back to something my host sister told me all those years ago. She and I were talking, and she was sharing her perspective about the current (at that time) situation in Spain, how some things had moved forward and others hadn't. Freedom was great in its way, she said, but she noted that when it came to a sense of thriving, people tended to struggle a lot. She said this to me:
"A la gente no le gustaban Franco porque era dictador, pero las cosas estaban superbuenas mientras estaba vivo."
("The people didn't like Franco because he was a dictator, but things were super-good when he was alive.")
The climb up the tower featured on the tower's interior walls many old photographs from the past hundred or so years in San Sebastián, as well as some placards that gave a history of the city and its environs.
One of the placards mentioned that Franco had summered in the city from the end of the civil war until his death in the autumn of 1975. It had never, ever occurred to me that summering would be a thing a fascist dictator would do. Wasn't he too busy, you know, executing people and stuff?