News That Stays News

Antipodes December 20, 2012

First things first: I had never seen traffic swirl around a rotunda in both directions at once, and would not have credited the truth, had I heard tell of it.  I get it though, unlike the oppressive obsequiousness that permeates this over-saturated behemoth, home of a $30 dinner that you’d have to work hard to pay less than $20 for in the US.  There is room for disagreement among reasonable adults as to whether backpacking in hostels or lounging in a 5-star (self proclaimed) more closely approximates the ideal of human virtue, but backpacking in a 4-star (as close to objective truth as I can come without my wings melting), makes no damned sense, at all.

Perhaps it is redundant to claim so, but the mediterranean is a beautiful sea.  It was wonderful as seen from the mild breezes and sour orange-trees high on the Castle of Montjuic, and it was radiant from the air.  At noon I rushed through a museum, sweeping a few generalizations behind me like newspapers on a six-lanle highway: ‘Picasso was a decent landscape painter but a world-class portraitist before he went crazy’,  ‘cubist portraits happened to him gradually; successive paintings of the same subject like running moonshine through the still again until it’s harsh and unrecommended, but also strong’, ‘somehow, he could make a woman old and drawn without any single feature I could prove betrayed a year past twenty-five’.  By four, I’d washed my hands with a warm hand towel, in economy no less, (bless Emirates), and my eyes turned to the water.  Within a few hours, the ocean was a fan of crepuscular rays, blue glimmering with orange, then vast but fading embers, and somewhere past Corsica a garden of clouds as might befit a giant.  At night, between the pleasant murmurs of Chris de Souza and the call of some ancient Byzantine chorus, a pack of dragons west of Crete: flashing swiftly through their great canyons, roaring tempestuously in the open clearings, and once, just once, leaping free of the clouds altogether.  As slow as ‘Prometheus’, but with more interesting action scenes and less phallic imagery and wanton death.

Gaudi!  We walked in near sunset, half bathed in gold, half in what accoutrements of hue one hundred and thirty years of construction have sufficed to place in the window frames, and beheld a vast weirdness, a maze of passages and balconies, and a herd of tourists.  Rode the elevator up the nativity facade, stood on a bridge between two great honeycombed cylinders of concrete and lunacy, and stood talking long enough to get a tip on a salsa joint for a Tuesday night.  Spoiler alert: this story moves backwards through time, though the scenes move forward.  Came slowly down a spiral staircase of so many turns that a peer into its central well produced in me only the intuition of numerical value, and not the desire or the capacity to count.  Parted ways with our friendly backpacker, walked into the museum,  and received a somewhat suspect lesson on basic geometry.  Wandered back into the nave whose electricity had just barely outshone the setting sun, and saw it soaring columns again, the preposterous roundness of its joints, its windows , its ceiling panels.  Saw again the counterintuitive rectitude of its angles somehow conveying a sense of awe that the 6-euro-an-entrance Barcelona Cathedral and its videotaped primers on religiously accommodation attire can no longer deliver.  Wandered beneath a discarded mound of cubes unneeded in it soaring geometry, and descended into the other museum.  Gaudi drew straight, then askew, then went wholly mad, and then the dreams and scale models were lifted anew and begun again.  It is nice that someone remembers when a city could hold a project clear in mind for a half a dozen generations, when a hundred and thirty years of construction was only a handful of lifetimes, and a cathedral (the old one in Barcelona!) might, at that point, still have four hundred years to go before it was done.  Walked out of the recorded dreams and back up into the nave, now cavernous where darkness had swept through the unfinished windows and washed the (other!) tourists into the streets and overflows.  Saw the dream of humanity, of individual people willing to begin what they could not finish, that one day, it would cry out ‘something is bigger than man’.

Struck out on foot, baguette in hand, past the the castle of three dragons (who had not deigned to roost there), columns of a Roman temple (unnoticed!), and a starbucks to the old cathedral.  Paid up, walked in, listened to Vivaldi’s four seasons pouring in from the street.  Saw a great spiralling fountain a mere forty years younger than the stones it sat on, and wondered if madness had been lurking here all that time.  Took in a guided tour of passable art, playing guessing games with the century of a particular act of spiritual devotion logically inferred rather than felt.  Wandered up the elevator (still playing the four seasons), and walked out onto the roof of the cathedral.  Looked around and noticed the craziest thing I saw anywhere in Barcelona.  Not the fort, the pretty, gracefully aging national museum of Catalan art (!), some great cucumber of a modern building, or a stack of dull, grey, distant bundled corns cobs that turned out to be Gaudi’s basilica.  Not a statue of Columbus, striding peacefully, map in hand, atop a great pillar, or a statue of another guy with a sword in hand, looking at him from across the rooftops.  Not the teleferic easing transit from the jews’ hill to a seemingly randomly selected point in space, to which someone had had the good graces to build an elevator, nor the children playing on a rooftop, nor the inexplicable colonnades atop neighboring buildings, nor the sign that said something like ‘Alcaldamientro Culpa Vota’, nor even the violinist who had apparently forgotten how to not play the four seasons.  Atop the spire, on 8 sides, a great square buttress ends in a peaked roof with a majestic eagle perched atop it.  But right above the nave, right behind the eighth and unsuspecting eagle, right where it cannot be seen from the ground, stalks a monstrous snail.  I walked down, I walked out, walked past the violinist (still playing the same damned thing),  and forgot to eat a Paella at any point in my stay.