Night repair, legs, boots

After so many trails walked my boot’s worn out soles broke. They lasted more than was reasonable to expect, I could no ask for regeneration.

My poor dear legs, after a day walking for 8-10 hours, are weary and worn out too. In the evening, after an early dinner, I lay on the rest pad and, while rewinding images from the day, paths, cols climbed, I feel a pleasant of tingling in muscles and joints. It looks like a process of regeneration and repair is in progress. I feel like if an army of little men, maintenance people, are working intensely to substitute injured parts, repair damages, lubricate articulations. Thanks to their job, those weary legs tomorrow will walk and trot happily again among pines and rhododendrons. This ability to regenerate is amazing, isn’t it?

 

Notes from Peru (2). Inka stonework.

When you see an inka building, the first thing that strikes you is the inward slope of walls, a feature that made buildings earthquake resistant. If I were peruvian, I would register a patent for a “Lego” trapezoidal bricks. Simple buildings are made of small stones without polishing, nobler ones use carefully cut uniform stones.

And sometimes, and this is what caught my interest, all the stones are different, maintaining their original form, they have been polished just to match perfectly with their neighbours. The result is of exceptional beauty and originality and as far as I know, unique. Stonemasons do not cut stones into uniform blocks, they have find out how to place them in order to fit without altering them very much. They do not supply like uniform brick blocks, but rather unique pieces, sometimes almost sculptures. We don’t have like a lego set here but a 3D puzzle. And again, if I were peruvian I would register a patent for a wall scale model.

These walls and stones could be a beautiful metaphor about the group and the individual, the whole and its parts, in the sense that, in order to contribute to the general structure, there is no need to cancel the individual particularities, just to adapt a little. Small stones are not discarded for not reaching the standard size of a block, bigger ones are not fragmented in order to obtain uniform blocks. The inka stonemason tries to respect the natural size and shape of each stone.This attains the category of the sublime in some parts of the Machu Picchu complex where it seems precisely that the artist “reads” and “interprets” the form of the rocks and, with some kind of dialog, complements them, as in the Sun Temple or Condor Temple.

This “reading” of the natural form and the respect for her implies that symmetry has little or no importance at all. It’s worth admiring an obelisk, a column, a pyramid, but it is hard to overcome the elegance and originality of the Intihuatana Stone in Machu Picchu, which besides its astronomical and ritual functions is in itself a superb work of art. We won’t find a similar abstract expressiveness until 500 years later in some works of Eduardo Chillida or Henry Moore.

 

Notes from Peru (1). Qorikancha’s altar

If one visits the Convento de Santo Domingo in El Cusco, Peru, one will find the remains of the ancient Temple of the Sun (Inti kancha) or Gold Temple (Qori kancha). Besides admiring the walls built by the Inkas, there is a copy of the sketch of the gold panel over the altar, drawn by Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacutic in 1613. This panel depicted in a concise way the andean cosmology.

It is remarkable how everything was included: between two constellations, the sun, the moon, the evening star and the morning star, there is an ellipse representing Viracocha, the god demiurge that assembles the universe. Below there is the normal world and some sources of change:  The seasons of the year, summer symbolized by a group of stars (perhaps the Pleiades) and winter with clouds, meteors like lightning at left and  hailstorms at right associated with the small feline quwa. Mother earth “Pachamama” (still today many people perform the rite of burying some coca leaves, part of snacks, or spill the first drops of a drink, as a tribute), is under a rainbow, it has a river and “Apus”, sacred mountains; at its right the symbol of the primordial ocean encompassing everything. At the center, man and woman, at their left “the eyes of all kind of things”, as seeds or energy inside the earth that are the origins of all living beings. At right, a tree symbolizes the ancestors. The grid at the bottom corresponds to the faring terraces.

I wonder what would we draw if we had to illustrate our view of the universe in one of the main buildings of our city today.

The idea of a god creating and ordering things has been substituted by a universe expanding since the big bang. In a remote corner of that universe, and by a very unlikely chance, matter has changed to become complicate structures, living things that have evolved until a species that can speak. Our life still has the influence of the seasons and weather, but it depends also on absurd economic cycles, or what becomes fashionable. So, in that modern version of the Qorikancha altar, besides the agricultural seasons, there would be too screens showing the stock exchange index, CNN news, the most viewed at Youtube, the items most searched for in Google. Poor “mother earth” is not in very good condition, its resources almost exhausted, global warming, dump and waste …

 

People Watcher ( and III), four ages

While travelling on metro, there is a young man seated in front of me and I wonder, how will he be at 40? How different will be his future from the one he imagined? Maybe this unconformist student will become a financial executive, or on the contrary, he is attending a business school and later he will become shepherd. Or that gentleman, big and solemn, how was he like when a little boy playing soccer at the schoolyard and collecting beetles in a shoe box? Or, if there is a girl, with a dreamy look, how will she be at sixty? What sort of experiences will she have been through, what partners, who will have loved her, who will have made her suffer?

Somehow it’s about the exercise of projecting people to the “seven ages of life”, now reduced to four. There are precedents of that exercise, in Dickens’ Christmas Carol Scrooge is presented to different Christmas in his life, or in Borges’ tale “El Otro”, a 19 year old Borges from 1918 coincides in a bench with a 70 year old Borges.

What if for some minutes, the lapse between two metro stops, actually they would coincide there, sitting on the bench, 5 year old John, 20 year old, 40 and 70 year old, and they would see themselves reflected in the window facing them? Would the old man recognise himself in the other three or perhaps would have already forgotten them? Would he consider addressing them? The 40 year old would anticipate the old man he will become? The child would not, he would stare at the others as perfect strangers.

However, despite this difficulty in connecting, I believe that we are not just our present identity and role but that we accumulate the previous and anticipate the next ones, like when in a book, the chapter we are reading now is in the company of past chapters and expectations about what will the end chapter be like (In “Albertine disparue” Proust said that humans are amphibious beings that live simultaneaously in the past and in present reality).

So, like a (double) drunkard that sees double, sometimes I see people multiplied by four, each one in the company of the other three selves in other life ages.

Postcards from the terrace, late winter 2009

There has been the white narcissus, the strawberry tree, a new pine out of a nut, the mimosa, the viburnum and, just at the beginning of spring, the cherry tree has blossomed.

So many memories
flood my mind-
cherry blossoms

(Basho)

The company of a ladybird that settled in the terrace comforted me. It doesn’t seem to be very sociable. I hope its going to eat a lot of aphids.

 

People Watcher (II), Projects in hardware stores and more

My habit of people watcher, is concerned also with people’s projects.

I’ve allways enjoyed visiting big hardware stores and stare at the exhibition of tools, bolts, planks, pipes, fabrics. It’s a mix of Technology museum and Contemporary art. And as it happened with Art exhibitions, here too I like to watch the people when they ask  the salesman for help because they do not know the exact name for the item they need “I want a piece, U shaped of about 80 cm, I need to assemble …” while they hold in their hand a sketch with the plan for a particular artifact they conceived. Suddenly I see all the people around me as little engineers, creative inventors that have designed a solution to a problem. They are going to buy the items needed, saw, screw, assemble, until is built.

It just takes a bit of imagination to visualize like a cloud over them, holding their projects. Another place where I can detect people’s projects is furniture stores, like Ikea. Here too, you can see the people around, holding a little sketch with the design for a drawing room, bedroom, or kitchen. You can see young couples perhaps about to start living together, full of hope, others, renewing their kitchen, thinking how happy they will be in it, cooking delicious meals. And this leads me to another space where you can guess about people’s projects: the food market. In front of the fishmonger people hold also a list with the ingredients of a recipe, they look at prawls, angler, cuttlefish, seafood, and anticipate a delicious dish.

Actually, everywhere people have projects in mind, in some places they are easier to guess. You could add travel agencies where that man in a formal suite reads a brochure and pictures himself in shorts in a Caribean beach, or fashion shops where young girls consider buying a particular t-shirt and imagine herselves sexy and pretty in a club.

Almond Trees Blossom 2009. Mont-roig del Camp

My anual date with almond trees blossom has been at Mont-roig del Camp, where Miró used to spend their summer holidays.

There is a lovely little route that crosses fields with almond and olive trees.
In the old church there is an exhibition about the painter and directions to the locations related with some of his works. Here is  “La casa de la palmera”.

People Watcher ( I ). Secondary exhibitions in museums

Sometimes, when visiting a museum, I amuse myself with what could be called secondary exhibition. Besides the main or “primary” collection, I observe the other visitors as a kind of living “secondary exhibition”. Mentally could label them with tags such as “Youths starting to discover to joy of art”, “Kids carried by parents against their will, bored”, “Seasoned couple, probably with a whole life behind visiting museums”, etc. Quite often a gaze expressing wonder, intelligence or amusement  can be appreciated. The sight of people enjoying art is a beautiful,

Sometimes some real people can resemble a character in a particular painting. I still remember a girl standing at the door of a museum that striked me as a Botticelli’s Flora in Spring. Now I do often try to imagine to imagine the people around in a museum room, wearing ancient costumes unde r a spectial illumination, what would they look like if depicted by Jaume Huguet or Holbein the Younger. And the opposite too, the characters in the paintings, wandering around me in jeans and runners.

 

 

Besós Cathedral

 

Some months ago there was some discussion about demolishing thetermic power plant of Sant Adrià del Besós, no longerin use, for aesthetic reasons. Well, I’ve always admired the pureelegance of the three chimneys against the Maresme landscape and, ifthe authorities were so worried about aesthetics, they should dynamite the whole “Diagonal Mar” quartier, the outcome of theworst urbanism in Barcelona since the 60s atrocities.

The building is not the only attraction of the so called “Besos  Cathedral”, anonymous artists have left there works whose interest far exceeds what can be usually found at MACBA museum.

 

More pictures here