This year I could not come out yet to greet you and, as I feared, because of this delay and a strong wind storm, when I reached the Segarra countryside, all of you had no flowers left. It was getting dark when I found you, the flowers waiting at dusk.
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In the cemetery post, I said that no life was insignificant and that all of them deserved a biography. But most lives are anonymous. All lives, what would this mean? I can think of a project-installation showing short imagined biographies for all the people that have ever existed, around 107 billion according the Population reference Bureau estimates. How big would it be? If we assigned a 10×10 cm card in thin bible paper for each one, a deck 1 cm wide would contain around 1000 people (a small village), in a 1 m row, the 100.000 that populate an average city; a million in 1×1 m drawer (in less than 3 drawers, the population of Barcelona). In a cubic meter chest, with 10 drawers, 10 million biographies. In columns with 5 chests, 50 billion, and every 20 meters we would have a billion of cards.
If we would set them in galleries 100 m long, 5 m wide containing two corridors, our imaginary museum would have 11 galleries, 100×100 m, about the same size of a city block. Every year we have 140 million new cards corresponding to newborns, 14 archives, almost 3 columns) and 57 million people deceased have their cards filed forever.
If we wander around the blocks looking at some labels, we notice that most of the cards of the last corridor correspond to people alive. The people living today suppose around 7% of all the people that have ever lived. On the other side, for thousands of years, the earth was populated by a small number of people. The population of thousands of paleolithic generations would fill just a bit more than a 20 meter block (PRB estimates 1.187 million people born since the beginning of the human species to 8000 BC). What kind of stories would we read in that section? Something like Jean Marie Auel’s? Most of the lives in this period would be children; life expectancy was very low, around 10 years. And for many generations people would not have a name. By year 1 CE, some 46 billion new people would be born, and 38.000 more until modern era.
We could also devise this imaginary museum proportionally along time, 3 meters for century. Instead of a compact city block, our archive-museum would extend for 1.500 meters and, most of it, it would be quite narrow, just a meter wide. Until 26.000 BC we would not reach a million people born in a century, a drawer. And not until 14.600 BC a chest with ten million would be filled. Around 7.500 BC, about 1200 meters, we would have 50 million people born in a century, a column 5 m high. From this point on, the museum would increase its width reaching 1.000 million (a 20 meter corridor) by 1.600 BC; 2.000 million in the first century CE and a 120 m gallery to acommodate all the people born in the 20th century, more than 6 billion.
I imagine, for an instant, holding the thin sheet of paper of my own card, just one among so many lives. I read others, those of my daughters, still a draft, my parents, people I loved. IF I walk backwards, and explore at random tpicking one corresponding for the four or five generations in every century, after 60 meters I would have walked 20 centuries to the beginning of the common era, I would have read around 100 cards. What a diversity of circumstances! although I guess that from a certain point, most of them must have been farmers. How many of them could read? What kind of beliefs, hopes did they hold? I go on for 450 m, and thanks to the Genographic project, at 13.500 BC I find Haplogroup V where there was a woman with the same mitochondrial mutation that my mother transfered to me, and somewhere in the following 500 m, between 30.000 BC and 13.000 BC, in some place in the near east, a man from Haplogroup G, with the m201 mutation of cromosome Y that I received from my father. 600 m backwards, around 45.000 BC, its ancestor in haplogroup F, and R, in the near east, the second trip out of Africa, starting the journey to colonize the globe. We are not quite sure when to locate mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam in east Africa where, during many generations the initial small group of homo sapiens survived.
Leaves
Shadows
Green and yellow
Pool
Leaves and water
Mirror
Some cemeteries in Barcelona offer tombstones with qrcodes so that visitors can learn more about the deceased just following the link in their smartphones.
Sometimes when wandering along niches in a cemetery, I read the names, dates, and I wonder about the lives of the people who are buried there, unknown names. When it is the case of a young boy or girl, or a child, I can not help thinking that they had to leave “too early”, perhaps because of a disease or an accident. All the others, what sort of life did they have? What did they do, what kind of events happened to them? No life is insignificant or worthless. Every one of them could have been the subject of a biography that no one wrote.
Just for an instant, I imagine that, suddenly, these rows of niches become the shelves of a library, with volumes of biographies, and perhaps personal diaries, and photo albums. Wandering among the aisles and shelves, I could open up a volume at random.
In a brief biography there could be something like:
In a diary or memoirs, perhaps there could be something like “I was twelve, and our class had been visiting the zoo. I was going back with a friend, walking along the harbor, when a woman that was selling tickets at the “Golondrinas” booth (boats in Barcelona’s harbor), called us and offered us free tickets for a ride because it was her birthday. I would always remember her kindness to us.”
There is no such a thing as an insignificant life. For every person we watch, we can imagine his past or his future (Post about four ages). In every instant, so many things happen that no biography nor memoir could fetch all this wealth. Not even the most compulsive diarist could record everything. For example, the joy that we feel when commuting to work, just because the wet heat of the summer is over and the first fresh autumn breeze arrives.
And even if they could exist, these infinite memoir volumes, no one could ever get to read even the most small fraction of them. There would be too many and too little time. Not even each of us about ourselves! We cannot keep track of everything that happens. It is sane let things go, as if we travelled with a small backpack, with room for the daily needs and just some light souvenirs, instead of a huge warehouse where all can be stored forever.
Anyway, I like the idea that no one is insignificant and uninteresting, and that these biographies could have been written and I could browse them.
Some graffiti are just dirty walls, the result of a mislead anxiety about leaving an imprint behind. But often we can find graffiti that are quite remarkable (an example, those of Besós cathedral), and when I stumble upon one of them I take a picture of it. In my neighborhood in Barcelona, el Poblenou, some years ago, in a plot of a demolished building leaving the naked interior walls visible, a line crossed all the missing rooms connecting two messages that said “+amor”. There was also a big heart. I was like contemplating some strange Pompeii frescoes from a neighborhood archeological site.
I wondered whether actually there was a love connection between some neighbors, living in that place, time passing, and the line depicted exactly that connection.
Later I discovered more graffiti that could be attributed to the same author, or project, simple messages that, despite their obviousness were not perceived as too “sugary” but as an appeal or invitation to take into account. Big letters at Pujades/Llacuna:
Love … your partner, children, parents, friends, coworkers, aubergines, primary colors, clouds, rain pools … Some human figures at Taulat-Bilbao seem to say “Stop! +amor!”:
And more at Pere IV and a window at Dr. Trueta, 142.
At Panoramio the locations are plotted. Some of them do not exist anymore.
In some TV series, such as Heroes or Misfits, we find supernatural powers in marginal neighborhoods. I like the idea of these graffiti as frescoes with special powers. Perhaps the locations where there were situations with a lot of love involved, emit a kind of energy that can be perceived by the artist and compels him to paint something. Perhaps later, when someone passes by and takes a glimpse of it, undergoes a transformation that enables him to recover the lost ability to love, at least for some time. I can envisage a scene where a character wanders through the streets, looking in vain for that graffiti that changed his life, missing that ability to feel, or to care for. He starts meeting graffitists, trying to discover who was the author of “+amor”. Never mind … speculations for a script of an inexistent TV episode.
Back to reality, goggling for +amor uncovers who stands behind those graffiti, a Brazilian artist, tom14, democraciaurbana who explains his projects in an interview.
Thank you, Tom14.
I “discovered” Morton Feldman when reading Alex Ross book “The rest is noise” about the music in the last century. I listened, fascinated, the sounds suspended in time of Triadic Memories or Palais de Mari. It is a music of stillness, a music that doesn’t want to reach a destination; in the sense that usually, musical phrases, by melody, rhythm, harmonic progression, seem to move from one place to another. This strange music, full of silences, barely moves, it seems like it is synchronized with our inspirations and expirations, accompanying a meditation.
Quoting Ross: “In the noisiest century in history, Feldman chose to be glacially slow and snowily soft. Chords arrive one after another, in seemingly haphazard sequence, interspersed with silences. Harmonies hover in a no man’s land between consonance and dissonance, paradise and oblivion. Rhythms are irregular and overlapping, so that the music floats above the beat. Simple figures repeat for a long time, then disappear. There is no exposition or development of themes, no clear formal structure.
In 1971 Morton Feldman wrote “Rothko Chapel”, basically a dialog between a viol and a choir with some percussion, dedicated to his friend, Marc Rothko, who committed suicide a year before, when still working on the murals for this project, a meditation space, a commission by John and Dominique de Menil, open to all religions without adhering to one in particular. I haven’t seen before those fourteen big murals almost monochrome that took six years of work, applying patiently stroke after stroke in order to create “an impenetrable color fortress”. In the opening, Dominique de Menil said that “We are cluttered with images and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine”.
When looking at the pictures, I was reminded instantly of Joan Miró’s triptych “Painting on White Background for the Cell of a Recluse” (in the sense of solitary), one of my favorite works and the main reason to keep returning to Fundació Miró. If I am lucky and there is no one else around I can seat in front of the three big canvasses and it is like being in a cell, meditating.
Rothko Chapel, Miro’s space, both have a particular quality that I would dare to call secular spirituality –it’s not the same as atheist-, unbound to any concrete religious aesthetics. We may wonder whether this quality is related to the experience of vastness and void, a big space or surface without anything, but with something that makes it different from nothingness. In Rothko’s case it is layers of monochrome color; in Miró’s triptych, the line walking the canvas (In the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid there is a beautiful similar work, “Pájaro en el espacio” -bird in the sky- and whenever I see swallows crossing the sky, I think of them as sketching lines).
The void in music would be the silence. Music that allows space between notes. If it’s a piano, it’s an opportunity to listen to the vibration of the string in the air, after the stroke, if the pedal makes stops the felt from interrupting the resonance. Other than Feldman, a musician that allows to listen to strings vibrating is the catalan composer Frederic Mompou, perhaps because he remembered the sound of bells manufactured in his family foundry. It’s remarkable that one of his best known works has the title “Música callada” – Silent music. Lionel Salter described Mompou’s music as “the voice of silence … like Saint John of the Cross”. Again, the spiritual and the meditation.
In terms of picture shots, our common perspective would be, probably because of practical reasons, a medium shot. Void and silence allow to extend this in two directions. On one side we can look farther, up to the horizon, a vast extension of space and silence; and at the same time, it brings us to the detail of a close up shot, a simple stroke, a texture, a note or a chord, something that would be missed if mixed in an excess of information of forms and sounds. It is perhaps this kind of perspective that attracts mystics to the desert or solitary mountains?
We may wonder why this void, surfaces without forms in space, silence in music, can be a trait of the spiritual. May be it is because it creates a space where a different experience can take place? For some, it will be the presence or hint of the transcendent. When setting aside the sounds, the noise, objects, forms that fill our field of experience, there is room for a kind of presence that until now could not be perceived. For others, instead of the transcendent, it will be to locate what we know in a vast nothingness, the experience of the ephemeral in an infinite void (a void glossed by Nabokov and Bellow in two enthralling texts).
If void in space, or silence in music, ease a profounder experience, then, what would be the equivalent regarding human activity? Perhaps to stop and remain immobile doing nothing? Would this be meditation? And the equivalent of elaborating color masses in Rothko, or Miró’s simple lines, could be the work in order to attend the right posture in zazen?
When I was a boy, I read a book about young Christiaan Huygens, who was to become an outstanding scientist. Young Huygens built a harpsichord for his sister, using pieces of glass for covering the keys. I found it fascinating, would I ever be able to build an instrument? Years later I played recorder and cornetto in an ancient music group and enjoyed the sound of harpsichords and spinetts. But building an instrument remained something far beyond my skills and budget.
So, when I saw at the Renaissance Workshop, an affordable kit for an Ottavino Spinett, based on a true 1595 Ottavino, I decided to try.
It has been a long and humbling process, committing and correcting many mistakes, overcoming frustration and clumsiness.
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| Base board | Balance rail, framework |
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| Jack register | Soundboard, bridge |
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| Casework | Tuning |
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| Keys | Jack, plectrum, bristle |
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| Finally, an imperfect but playable Spinett! | |
I haven’t heard the music of the whistles used by street knife sharpeners for a while. But there must be some of them still, as some sound hunters capture them and upload those little jewels at freesound.org, that sort of Flickr or Picasa for sounds. Quite often sound conveys an ambience better than pictures; Freesound is an excellent collection of soundscapes.
A whistle sample here, and another one here.
The interest for the sounds of the street has an illustrious precedent. Proust, in The captive speaks about the music of cries of tradesmen in the street, as “lightly orchestrating the matutinal air, with an ‘Overture for a Public Holiday. Our hearing, that delicious sense, brings us the company of the street, every line of which it traces for us, sketches all the figures that pass along it, shewing us their colours.”Proust finds traits of gregorian chant in a cloth seller, or a farmer describing his artichokes. When listening to this, Albertine wants to taste some of the food, and would like Françoise to go out and buy some, “it will be so nice to eat all these things together. It will be all the sounds that we hear, transformed into a good dinner”.
In Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Act II, Scene 3, there is another excellent piece of art inspired in the music of the street.
Simon’s Rattle version, the vendors arrive at Catfish Row in 5’10” of the clip:
STRAWBERRY WOMAN
Oh dey’s so fresh an’ fine
An’ dey’s jus’ off de vine
Strawberries, strawberries, strawberries
There is the honey man and another offering devil crabs:
CRAB MAN
I’m talkin’ about devil crabs
1’m talkin’ about devil crabs
I’m talkin’ about de food I sells
The voices of Louis Armstrong selling crabs and Ella Fitzgerald with strawberries are beyond description:
You can recognise its origin in a vendor shout, and at the same time, perceive the fascination of the melody as pure music. Check this in Miles Davis version (at 2’19”):
Another version, by Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, in latin rhythm.
In 1900 Proust complained already that he was going to miss the cries of street vendors if he had to move from his aristocratic quartier to another more modern.
In the 1980’s I remember listening, in a corner next to my home, a fruit vendor that shouted gaiely:
Hay sandia meLOne!! [watermelons, melons]
meLOne! MeLOne!,
melo CO TO NEEE !! [peaches]
with a crescendo in the “meloCOTO ne” that sounded as an explosive expansion of the “melone”
A Watermelon vendor song could have been the inspiration for the famous Watermelon man by Herbie Hancock and a popular latin version by Mongo Santamaria:
Probably, the happy Calypso Coconut Woman by Harry Belafonte, has a similar origin:
And we can’t forget the “peanuts” of Antonio Machín, “El Manisero”:
What sounds are left to us? Perhaps the metallic percussion of gas cylinders distributors. May be there not coconuts anymore in the beaches, but while sunbathing we can listen to the resigned melody of refreshments vendors “selvesa, cola, agua, bier …”. Some inspired musician could use this in chillout remix.
A bike ride to Llobregat delta has given me the chance not to miss my annual apointment with almond bloom, although I’ve only found a couple of them:
A country house near El Prat
After almond trees, reeds and marshes:
The quiet Llobregat waters …
… near the mouth.
The third book is about love and religious melancholy, or unhappiness related to love or religion.
The first section is about love in general, its definition in terms of desire , beauty as a cause, the possible objects of love according Augustine (God, the neighbor and the world); different kinds of love according the Aristotelian view on the soul, vegetative (in plants or stones), sensible love among beasts (each one for those of the same kind (sus sui, canis canis), and rational love , proper to men, angels and God.
There can be many kinds of love, women, the pleasures of fine foods, idols. Would it be possible that we loved virtues, wisdom, honesty, compassion? The observation of human nature turns Burton into a pessimistic, “ but this we cannot do “, man seems to have been born to hate, he says in an excellent piece of rhetoric: Where is charity ?
The second section deals with romantic love, or “heroical love”, a disease of the soul, according Avicenna and Arnau de Vilanova . It can affect the heart, liver, testicles, brain. (We have now research trying to find what happens in brains of people in love . )
What are the causes of love melancholy? How does it work? Visus, Colloquium, Convictus, Oscula, Tactus , sight, conversation, companionship, kissing, touch. We haven’t changed that much, it’s just that some modes of visus, colloquium and convictus can be carried out through facebook and twitter. We fall in love with “a little soft hand” or “ a small foot, a well proportioned leg ” or we fall under the effect of a sight. There is some ground in the many metaphors of sights that trespass ( Theory of the effect upon the soul by the eye ).
Love can benefit from artificial allurements , gifts, dance, voice, love potions. We can assert the existence of love from kissing, or when we can’t stop watching the beloved (as Frankie Vallie said Can’t take my eyes off you ). Burton avows that in those matters he is a novice and relies on readings and observation.
The cure. How can love melancholy be cured? While acknowledging his little experience, Burton tries to dissuade us from falling into the trap of love with a funny argument, suppose she is pretty, then she will be a fool, or anyway, old age will turn a venus into an Erynnia. Examine all parts of body and mind and some defect will be found. Finally, the advantages of being single: if you are young then match not yet , are you old, match not at all.
It doesn’t seem to take the issue very seriously because after having argued against love and marriage, he says that the last and best cure of Love-Melancholy,”is to let them have their Desires”, there is no joy like that of a good wife . An exercise in scepticism finds the same reasons for and against love.
_1. Res est? habes quae tucatur et augeat.–2. Non est? habes quae quaerat.–3. Secundae res sunt? felicitas duplicatur.–4. Adversae sunt? Consolatur, adsidet, onus participat ut tolerabile fiat.–5. Domi es? solitudinis taedium pellit.–6. Foras? Discendentem visu prosequitur, absentem desiderat, redeuntem laeta excipit.–7. Nihil jucundum absque societate? Nulla societas matrimonio suavior.–8. Vinculum conjugalis charitatis adamentinum.–9. Accrescit dulcis affinium turba, duplicatur numerus parentum, fratrum, sororum, nepotum.–10. Pulchra sis prole parens.–11. Lex Mosis sterilitatem matrimonii execratur, quanto amplius coelibatum?–12. Si natura poenam non effugit, ne voluntas quidem effugiet_.
Section there is about jealousy and infidelity.
Religious melancholy
In the introduction Burton warned against religion “in excess”; what ought to be love to God becomes superstition and idolatry, an infinite ocean of incredible madness and folly . We love the world too much, God too little . In the opposite, love divine “in defect” we find libertines or impious.
Where there is any religion, the devil will plant superstition. Burton offers a look at all known religions in the 17th century , Christians, Jews, Muslims; all of them, in their infinite variations, do what Machiavelli advised: use religion in order to control people. Priests manipulate believers to get privileges, superstitious pilgrimages are promoted to make advantage of ignorants. We do not know whether to laugh, with Democritus, or to weep, with Heraclitus. The Catholic Church, and their Pope are harshly criticized, for trading with relics, encouraging superstition to saints, miracles, apparitions, a whole “subterraneaous geography” just to frighten, and a lot of absurd theology (is it possible for God to be a humble bee? Can he create another God like itself?)
What is the cure for religious melancholy “in excess”? Tolerance , everyone can be saved if honest “because God is immense and infinite, and his nature cannot perfectly be known”, so different kinds of faith and religions can be accepted.
While the critics of religious melancholy “in excess” has been harsh, religious melancholy “in defect” is milder treated. It seems as if Burton formulates its own doubts: a possible pantheism, the determinism of stars (instead of astrology now we would speak of physics determinism), the problem of Evil , si not sit Deus, unde bona? si sit Deus, unde mala?
Despair
Burton’s long book concludes with some reflections on despair. It is legitimate to wonder whether Burton’s melancholy has its roots in his religious doubts. Despair, this sickness, this murderer of the soul , is agravated when there is a disposition to melancholy , as the power of imagination becomes a curse when conscience is turmented by some sins induced by de devil who, after making us believe that they were something light, now produces an exaggerated remorse. The symptoms are terrible, sadness, fear, anger … a summary of hell. When speaking of the tendency for sinning, Burton switches to the first person, as if he really was making a bitter confession: “I persevere in sin, and to return to my lusts as a dog to his vomit, or a swine to the mire […] I daily and hourly offend in thought, word, and deed”. He accuses himself of faith doubts , not believing in God and just pretending to meet what is expected from him.
Where is comfort to be found? The mercy of God that, like a mother that tenderly takes care of her sick and weak child, instead of rejecting it or punishing him. [Christian’s have always pictured God as a masculine figure, a father, it is nice that here Burton thinks of a feminine figure, a mother.]
Be not solitary, be not idle.
Unhappy, hope, happy be cautious
Sperate miseri, cavete felices