In Medias Res

Pretty Plaza…

As Spanish Plazas go, Plaza Ysabel the Second is relatively modest. The low-slung buildings that surround me sport a hodgepodge of historic, modern, and contemporary facades. But aglow in early morning light, Ysabel the Second shows a regal bone structure. Here and there, balconies sport iron railings, and stone structures sport elegant, older stone facades.

Few cities in the States, for all of its vast wealth, could afford to re-create all of these older, exquisite details, to create this impression of a harmony—is this possible?—of all that is new with what is older. New York, and even more so my forever hometown—from which I am twice exiled now!—Los Angeles, have many self-inflicted wounds of the disease of haste. This dooms their pasts to constant erasure, to abandonment of what is precious to ruin, or, to a deliberate embrace of Chaos, chewing up one precious bit after another of their patrimony—

Whoa! These days, dark chaos thoughts seem to chase me. Thus, I try to turn to brighter thoughts on this bright morning.

…in a Regal Barrio

The character each barrio here owes itself to the deeply ingrained sensitivity of certain peoples—Spaniards, and Latinos among them—to their surroundings. It’s as if they—we—have retained that special capacity to absorb and amplify the ambience of what’s around us. So here—every street lamp, every local seems more regal, laid back, at ease, put together, secure.

I got my last pre-Corona haircut in this barrio, a few hundred meters from here, feeling the beginnings of a sore throat, in the days when they began to speak of such things as a “lockdowns” and “new vaccines.” As I write these words, we’re in the midst of La Corona, the great coronavirus pandemic. It feels like ages ago, but it’s only been two years since the old world that I only somewhat vaguely understood, began to melt away and give rise to this chaos in which we all now live.

Perhaps it’s La Corona that is pushing these thoughts towards me. Ground yourself, I remember. Look around.

Ancient Noble Past

In the morning light, I’m surrounded by low-slung semi-ancients of stone as moving as Tolkien’s Giants of the Kings. And these ancient edifices are real. Spain is busy, new, and energetic—yet keeps one cold toe in the most ancient parts of the Old World. Everywhere, anywhere, in any Plaza, stand living symbols of a long-shared past.

As soon as I think the thought, I notice it! One of the older facades houses a museum with a careful recreation of a sixteenth-century drinking fountain that, not so long ago, sat in this square and supplied drinking water to the locals. The subject of a later post: the town water fountain. Quite a thing to make a museum of! Ah, Spain.

I think of the community of Valencia, where I’m living at the moment. The Valencian’s re-routed a thousand-year-old river to prevent the repeated Chaos of the Flood. Impossible? Expensive? Well, let’s see about that—let’s get digging’!

In Barcelona: spend a century building a Church to capture the singular, strange, but pure religious vision of Gaudi. Open your checkbook.

In Valle Teverga in the Picos de Europa: carve out a tiny cave hundreds of feet up atop a stone crag. Then, keep tiny votive candles for the Virgin—which have to be lit, daily?!!? Well, grab the matches and lace your boots. Vale la pena—it’s worth the suffering, the pain, the toil. The price.

The Old Ways Meet Chaos

Things don’t fade away here in Spain, quite so fast.

The Spanish battle the pandemic with characteristic energy and fury, digging in together against change—and in crisis, taking care of each other. Masks are everywhere: roving police enforce it on the Metro, as do Spanish malojos sent from all walks of society, old and young, male and female at unmasked scofflaws. Some choose not to wear one outside. But when I wear one, wherever I am, even if on a narrow sidewalk, passersby aren’t wearing theirs put it on, or cross to the other side.

During the lockdown, people went to their balconies to be together, laugh and sing other, raging against the dying of the light.

Consideration. Huge social costs are paid up front by everyone, because that’s what you do. Resist, the wrong kind of change that might barbarize us, at whatever cost, come what may, as best you can, all together. Keep ancient courtesy and regard for the Other, alive!

To keep ancient courtesy and civility, concern for each other, and social stability alive, Spain met Corona Chaos vi et armis—with force and with arms. Spain practices at scale, this kind, deep conservatism of the oldest, most ancient kind. If only, in my home country—wait—here they come again, those thoughts and feelings of dark swirling chaos. I look around—I am saved!

Just So Girl

Here comes by my early 20s daughter to save the day. My Just So Girl looks tired. She hands me the airline boarding pass and proof of US auto insurance that she printed for me. See, I’ve decided to head to the States from Madrid. Crazy plane transfers will happen not in some impersonal hub but within the loving embrace of Spain. I’ve had enough of time spent transiting through places that don’t care for me. Spain is cozy; the people make it so.

I lit here by high-speed train from the coast. Spending time with my daughter on my one-day layover, is an extra bonus.

Or was it the whole reason I did it, after all?

I have a moment before I have to go, so we chatter for a while about the precious daily things that nobody ever remembers later. The Just So girl who likes things just so has delivered what I asked. Her pleased eyes glint with the promise of the new day sun. I hug her goodbye and I watch her walk off. These days, I’m stronger. I no longer try to suppress the pain of the pull on the invisible thread to my heart as it snaps off broken, as she, jaunty and fresh and new like the cool Madrid morning air, floats off into a darkening world. I dare to hope that there, she will find or construct, some small place that deserves her.

Dangerous Passage

I walk to the cab stand, and decide to drink my own Kool-Aid. Do not push strong, persistent darkness away. If a demon comes for me, ask it the question, that we might part as friends. I ask Demon Chaos the question I am most afraid to have answered: why now? Why have come, these dark thoughts of chaos?

Something hangs in the air. I search for it, by letting strange feelings wash over me. Being unrooted, unmoored, disoriented—impending chaos. I can feel the structure of my world disintegrate as I look around.

This Plaza itself has a feeling of chaos. A Metro Stop lies in its large concrete center. A taxi stand and a large traffic circle guard its corners to the north. Airports and bus stations, metro stops and taxi stands share a strange, unsettling feeling of being a kind of portal from one place to another—a feeling of chaos, but also a door to a dangerous new place. A dynamite charge of change hangs in their air, like it seems to, right here, right now. Because they are all liminal spaces.

Living Between Worlds

La Corona is such a passage. It moves us—oh, I can sense it! —from the world we all knew, into a new world. A changed world. A dangerous world.

I realize that right here, right now—I am in a hall of mirrors of liminality. I’m in a Plaza of Passing Through. I have come from a city I don’t really live in permanently. I pass through this capital city, that my dear daughter is soon leaving, for adventures of her own in the great unknown. Today, I transit to the home country where I live no longer. I’ll drive to the town where I’d planned to live, given my all to live in, but now, I might never live in, after all. Ah—that Sacred House, in an Enchanted Grove, that I brought back from ruins, but seemingly now, all for nothing. A castle built on sand laid level by waves of chaos.

I get in the cab and whisk to the airport, and return to that feeling. Finally, Chaos speaks. Something divine and powerful in the moment now presses around me. I suddenly realize why I feel this strange way. I suddenly see what my feeling sees.

In Medias Res, the Middle of Things

I am in the dark, strange “Middle of Things.”

A new adventure, in the original sense: an undertaking involving dangerous and unknown risks; a remarkable experience.

The traffic towards the sleek, modern, yellow like the sun Barajas Airport is light. My COVID tests and EU Digital passports have been preloaded. Security lines are short. Soon I’m heading towards the gate.

Kiosk Chaos

I stop at a robot Starbucks coffee kiosk, and queue up behind an elderly Spanish woman with a beautiful paisley scarf.

She fumbles with the overly complex coffee machine. Menu screens splash by, with little rhyme or reason. The graphical user interface is disastrously laid out. Available “choices” are ambiguous. What lunatic did user testing on this contraption?

She throws up her hands, saying, No, no, you go ahead, I am slow.

(I render the Castilian Spanish in italics.)

I’m not in a hurry. Actually, I wanted to study the machine more before trying. I have to face the horrible Castilian-speaking machine with only my student Spanish? Oh no! Well—let’s go!

We watch together as the machine splashes screens at me. In my head, I diagram them, explaining as I go. I find my way to my cafe solo by careful trial and error, insert my credit card, and the machine begin to splash out my coffee.

Take out your card, the machine says.

I say to the woman, I’m afraid to.
She, as if issuing battle commands to her infantry, says, I’d leave it in until you get all your coffee.

The Queen of the Scarf knows not to trust the machine. You might say “personification” —I’d call it “absolute thinking.” (More on that later.) She knows the soul of the machine is connected to the “soul” of the soul-less bean counters and graphical user interface designers who have allied against our desire for coffee.

I now am an ace champion of the Queen. My coffee in hand, I walk her through the screens, adding tips like, the instructions are defective and allow skipping the nearly hidden step of picking size but when you do, the card reader fails without explanation. She listens intently to the battle report of her champion.

At last, it pours. We cheer.

I don’t bother to explain to her the huge social mess that the use of cheap tech hidden in the so-called “internet of things” has made of our lives and brains. My Quixotismo considers for a moment a letter to Starbucks corporate about vetting their vendors better and having a rational human being check their work during quality testing. But a champion chooses his battles. I let it all go after all.

She thanks me.

No, no, it’s nothing, you are the Queen of the Coffee Machine now!

And I bow to her a full bow. She laughs and tips her imaginary crown.

Dis the Dysphoria

My polite (some would say over-) concern—for her well-being, my loopy overelaborate jokes, do not throw people here. The lively and quick to laugh minds all around me are one thing. The bigger surprise has been in Spain, how they routinely help each other. People running around lost or needing help—we can’t have that! Not that kind of chaos. Though they like their own kind of chaos, to be sure!

I strongly disagree with the reductive Spanish sociologist who in the newspaper this morning said, this traces to a social conditioning of Catholic expectations of a certain kind of behavior. Reductive dolt! It’s the insight of the Christian message made flesh, made chromosomal. We care about what happens around us to even the least of these, because, a world where we do not—well, we cannot have that. Who wants that?

There. I’m at the end of the middle. Closing remarks are in order.

Strange Travels to the Land of the Other

To travel done well is travel adventure. You leave home, the holy site of your values, your loved ones, and yourself. We travel, whether we notice it or not, to a different world. This different world is the world of the different. The Other is that alien whom I struggle to see as fully human.

What does this mean, this act of traveling with this kind of eye?

Horace teaches—I use him here, to draw out a paradox—that the alien is one about whom, nothing is alien: nihil humanus est alienus mihi, nothing human is alien to me. Horace was talking about writing. But also, he was explaining what respect means, what love means. In love, in family, in life during travel: remember that the other is the Other who has their values and their own found meanings, to which you must relate. That means that when I see something that strikes me, it should strike me for its human value. I must try to see it as the reflection of just that: a value, of the Other.

If we travel in the right spirit, we encounter the Other and their Place. Then, in the right spirit, we just might glimpse a lost, a hidden, a possible side of ourselves, lying dormant. This, to me, is the thrill of travel—the thrill of the organic growth which travel can bring.

-May, 2022.