Almond trees blossom 2007

Although this winter has been very warm, in the beginning of March we found almond trees in full blossom, this time near Capafonts in Prades mountains.

capafonts
When seen from some distant point, along the dry mountain, they look as little clouds of mist placed regularly on the hill slope.
I wonder when they were object of contemplation for the first time. Japanese parties to celebrate cherry blossom are documented in Heian era, but they can be traced as far back as the Nara period when they reached Japan from the Tang dynasty in China.
florsvas
Along human evolution, when was it that a hominid stopped his daily run, pursuing a prey or trying to avoid becoming one, to look at a flower in an absolutely disinterested way, and not only as a hint of near season weather change. It is probably a question as hard to answer as when someone laugh for the first time.
I can’t remember either when was the first time that I interrupted something I was doing to look at a flower, or an ant. Pure contemplation is not rare among children, they hold their ability to wonder, and the ability to pure play, like a young cat with a hank. Perhaps later we only look where book guides tell us to.
That’s why I like to watch people in a contemplation state, children absorbed in some little mystery in the street, an expression of wonder in the visitor of an art exhibition. Some mornings when I cycle to work along the beach I can see someone sitting on the sand, looking the sea at dawn, probably without knowing that they could be used as a introductory example in Burke’s or Kant’s treatises on the beautiful and the sublime.

Golden light afternoons

As we approach the winter solstice, the sun, as if trying to compensate somehow his daily premature retirement, gets closer: His rays reach us in a more horizontal angle, as if the lightning technician switched the zenital light for a lateral focus, pointing at us right from one side of the stage.

post

I hurry back from work and all the way along I can see the shadows increasing in lenght as the sun lows down.

Mbn

I know that this complimentary show doesn’t last long. When I reach home, about four, it’s been running already for an hour. A golden light fills generously the living room and bedroom. I enter as if it was a pool of light.

On weekends we can afford to be on time for the beginning of the show and make it coincide with lunch. Then, the light wave reaches the table, it spreads across the white table linen and the dish with the salad shines full of colors like a coral reef.

ensiam

I amuse myself looking at the shadows of the glas full water, turned a prism.

vas

Afterwards my bed invites me to a nap; receiving the sun it is like a bathtub full of light instead of water. I lie down, close my eyes and perceive the tangent winter light almost like a tactile sensation…

llit

 

A Visit to fall foliage exhibition

Every year when this season comes, exhibitions and galleries about colour change, from green to yellow, ocre, brown, are offered to the public interested. Here we don’t have catalogues as are provided in other places but it is not difficult to make a good guess if Montseny or Garrotxa are chosen as destinations.


This time we decided to do a walk around Grenys hill, at the NW of the massif, departing from Santa Fe.

The first rooms proposed a big surface covered by sienna leaves, trunk colons at both sides and the ceiling canopy still green. Mist, soft light, a scent of wet wood, the sound of footsteps on the fallen leaves. Firs, maples, chestnuttrees, beeches.


Extraordinary composition out of chestnuttree leaves.


A monumental sculpture? the big chestnuttree called “Roter”.


A note about literary suggestions that was not there could have pointed out that these forests might stage a scene of epic adventures, the search for the Holy Grail or the quest for the fountain of life and eternal youth.

A second missing instructive note would tell us that the reason deciduous trees decide to change the colour of the leaves is not because it gets colder but because there are more hours of darkness. due to the descent from the temperature as well as for the increase of the times of darkness at night. This stops the process of renewal of the green chlorophyl that has been concealing the golden colours that were already there. Ah! Perhaps the trees wisely cover their golden shine when the light is too intense and only reveal it when illumination conditions are appropriate.

 

 

Enjoying puddles: cycling in the sky

After many weeks of drought it has rained a lot.

Now we can enjoy clean skies, dramatic cloud scenery and rain puddles.

Probably the first time we enjoyed puddles we were young children and splashed in them with rubber boots, transforming a quiet surface into an ephemeral ornamental fountain.

Now, as a cyclist, there is a new way. There are thin puddles, a wet surface on asphalt that act as mirror and reflect the image of the sky and canopy leaves. When we pass over them riding a bicycle, during a brief lapse of time we have the feeling of pedalling in the sky, over clouds and trees. If the terrain is flat and we move without effort it is like flying.

So, on my way to work, I look for those puddles that allow me that kind of experience.

Rain puddles set sky tiles on the pavement, and while they do not dry out we have different lights, colours and shapes on it. Escher captured this wonderfully in his engraving of 1952.

 

 

 

Three gates to worlds of wonder

Do streets, news look boring, worn out? Three sites explore and recover the feeling of curiosity and wonderThe museum of Lost Wonder

Discover forgotten things in the world around us
Recover forgotten things in the world within you
Uncover forgotten things in this world at all
lostwonder

 


The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society… to perpetuate the sensibilities and pursuits of the late Athanasius Kircher, SJ. Our interests extend to the wondrous, the curious, the singular, the esoteric, the arcane, and the sometimes hazy frontier between the plausible and the implausible. kircher

 


The Museum of DustProviding sanctuary for the misplaced, the forgotten and the misbegotten since 2006dust


 

 

Shoal of time

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’ld jump the life to come.

shoal of timeNabokov and Bellow have compared life to a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. I’ve just found out that in Macbeth, I vii, Shakespeare compares it to bank of sand, a shoal of sand. The sea, as a symbol of infinite chaos, around a fragil and narrow sandbank upon we will start on all fours, then running happy, walking tired later, until we sink at the other shore. But, nevertheless we will be able to lay for a while, and look at the stars, eat a banana.

 

Japan

I’ve been wanting to go to Japan for a long time.

Last April I went there.
Fascinating, diverse … and not expensive.

Useful links for those going on their own.

Itinerary planning

Japan | Frommers.com, helps to establish priorities if your time is limited.

Japan Tourism website, with excellent PDF printable guides.

General Information.

Our itinerary (15 days): Tokyo, Nikko, Hakone, Takayama & Ogimachi, Okayama & Kurashiki, Hiroshima, Matsuyama, Imabari & Shimanami cycling, Takamatsu, Himeji, Koyasan, Osaka, Nara, Kyoto.

 

Transport
Jalpak The best flights I’ve found and they can get you the japan rail pass

You will need the timetable to plan your trips inside japan.

You won’t need this, but for rail lovers it contains pictures of all stations for all the lines.

 

Accomodation
Japaneseguesthouses.com : Traditional japaneses hotels aka Ryokans and Minshukus. I strongly recommend to spend some nights in one of them provided you can arrive early enough to take a bath before dinner (usually excellent) at 6. Reliable website.

http://www.japanhotel.net/ Comfort hotels at a very reasonable price. Reliable website.

 

Other

For cycling lovers Shimanami route, 70 km between Honshu and Shikoku, bridges over the Sea connecting islands.

Kabuki Theater. Be brave and give it a try, what is as traditional as Noel Coward for japanese ears will be as advanced as the most vanguardist contemporary music like Ligeti or Boulez for yours.

Budget

Flights Barcelona – Japan: 700-900 €

two week Japan Rail Pass: 300 €

Accomodation: 60-100 € double room/night

Meals: 7-15 €

 

 

My one turn to live

SAUL BELLOW

RAVELSTEIN

My feeling was that you couldn’t be known thoroughly unless you found a way to communicate certain “incommunicables”-your private metaphysics. My way of approaching this was that before you were born you had never seen the life of this world. To grasp this mystery, the world, was the occult challenge. You came into a fully developed and articulated reality from nowhere, from nonbeing or primal oblivion. You had never seen life before. In the interval of light be tween the darkness in which you awaited first birth and then the darkness of death that would receive you, you must make what you could of reality, which was in a state of highly advanced develop ment. I had waited for millennia to see this. Then when I had learned to walk-in the kitchen-I was sent down into the street to inspect it more closely. One of my first impressions was of the huge utility-pole timbers that lined the street. They were beaver-colored, soft and rotted. On their crosspieces or multiple arms they carried many wires or cables in an endless falling relay, soaring, falling again and soaring. On the fixed sag and flow of the cables the spar rows sat, flew off, came back to rest. Along the sidewalks, the faded bricks revealed their original red at sunset. You rarely saw an auto mobile in those days. What you saw were hansom cabs, ice wagons, beer drays, and the huge horses that pulled them. I knew people by their faces-red, white, wrinkled, spotted, or smooth; smiling or violent or furious-their eyes, mouths, noses, voices, feet, and gestures. How they bent down to amuse or question or tease or af fectionately torment a small boy.

God appeared very early to me. His hair was parted down the middle. I understood that we were related because he had made Adam in his own image, breathed life into him. My eldest brother also combed his hair in the same style. Between the senior brother and me there was another brother. Senior to all of us was our sister. Anyway … this was the world. I had never seen it before. Its first gift was the gift of itself. Objects gathered you to themselves and held you by a magnetic imperative that was simply there. It was a privilege to be permitted to see-to see, touch, hear. This would not have been impossible to describe to Ravelstein. But he would have answered dismissively that Rousseau had already covered the same turf in his Confessions or his Reveries of a Solitary Walker. I didn’t feel like having these first epistemological impressions anticipated or dismissed. For seventy-odd years I had seen reality under these same signs. I had the feeling, too, that I had to wait for thousands of years to see, hear, smell, and touch these mysterious phenomena- totake my turn in life before disappearing again when my time was up. I might have said to Ravelstein, “It was my one turn to live.” But he was too close to death to be spoken to in such terms and I had to surrender my wish to make myself fully known to him by describ ing my intimate metaphysics. Only a small number of special souls have ever found a way to receive such revelations.

 

A crack of light between two eternities of darkness

Vladimir NABOKOV

Speak, Memory

The craddle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged-the same house, the same people-and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, an croaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

Such fancies are not foreign to young lives. Or, to put it otherwise, first and last things often tend to have an adolescent note-unless, possibly, they are directed by some venerable and rigid religion. Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage. I have journeyed back in thought-with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits. Short of suicide, I have tried everything. I have doffed my identity in order to pass for a conventional spook and steal into realms that existed before I was conceived. I have mentally endured the degrading company of Victorian lady novelists and retired colonels who remembered having, in former lives, been slave; messengers on a Roman road or sages under the willows of, Lhasa. I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues; and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare’s works) and its bitter, little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.