Where a Geranium Blooms

 Miles are a measure of distance in space; they do not accurately measure connections of the heart or the soul. 

I’m perched, having migrated to retire, on the edge of the Mediterranean, very close to Africa though within Europe.  Large ferries depart from the port near my flat several times a week for Algeria. Everyday, I cross paths with Algerians and Moroccans; often women in beautiful scarves, although there are also men with families and men alone, as well as numerous sylph-like youths who show great soul. I also see and hear Europeans of every type on the streets around me, many tourists, others refugees, and some retirees like myself.  The majority of people, like the National Police having breakfast across from me, are from here, Spain, a rich and varied country with its own terrors as well as rich political traditions and joys. 

Still my heart and soul are tied to people on the other side of the Atlantic, and to the vast country that used to uphold vast ideals and dreams to humanity, It saw itself as a torch lighting the way, a vision of hope for humanity. Now most everyone shakes there head and wonders what happened. 

Those things tear at me. More so, the recent assassination at Utah Valley University. It has filled me with a generalized anxiety, interrupting sleep and demanding my days, and I am across the world, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and Iberia. 

This morning, the television news is filled with images of police attacking protestors who interfered with a major, international bicycle event’s final in Madrid. Yet my heart cannot escape what happened, the faces of my students, and a governor’s tears when he realized his state and people were not a safe haven but a part of a vast and cruel world. He would reduce it to the influence of social media and the dark web, but it is so much more. 

My questions here are not what happened. We know the bullet and the name of the assassin and the fallen. We know their backgrounds and we even know what is engraved on the bullet’s companions.

My desire is to find peace, for myself and others, and move past this event. I wonder how to strengthen and cultivate that peace in my soul and among those with whom I associate. 

My name is not Polyanna—far from it. I have never been an optimist. Storm clouds are simply storm clouds and a riot a riot.   

For self preservation, I need that peace inside. 

I think of people that to me are images of peace and how it accompanies them like robes moving in the air.  It also emanates from them like a wonderful and fragrant perfume where, when you walk by, you smell it for a moment just feel good. 

Were I a religious leader or a guru I could propose a path to it for other people, a kind of nirvana. I cannot, That is not my path nor my reality. 

However, to find it, I turn both outward and inward. Though the TV blasts images of violence in Madrid and in Gaza, I see green plants and flowers around me. I look into the heart of the flowers to see the multiplicity of colors inside and dream of the bees that may have visited them. 

I lift a basil leaf or a mint leaf, rub it and smell it.  Its redolence fills me and calms me as I focus on it.. 

I see the beauty of the sky—though I am also aware of how quickly that can turn. Still I see it and let it inside, where I also hold to the majestic sea with its calm waves lapping at the beach and the feet of children and their elders. 

But I also turn inward to create peace.  For me that involves writing. But, according to a conversation I had yesterday afternoon, it also involves cooking: the satisfaction of preparing ingredients—even pungent onions that make me cry, seeing the cook and smelling them on the stove, and then serving homemade food to my friends. 

In the conversation it also came out that many people crochet or knit, mostly women but increasingly men. Manual arts like that focus the body and can also calm themind and the heart. 

I go out and walk. While moving I focus on what I am seeing, including something out of the ordinary to photograph and perhaps post on my social media. 

And, I pay attention to my breathing, the how the oxygen enters my body and flows through my blood relaxing tension inside me. 

This is no manual. It is simply a list of practices and desires. Though anger and anxiety may visit, I shall do little more than greet them, hear them, and bid them farewell. 

Today, I shall work to cultivate peace and till my garden where it is planted and grows next to bougainvillea and geraniums as well as hot peppers. 

UVU and a New Saint

Utah Valley University and I have a close relationship. 

I walked its halls for twenty-two years as a professor. I appreciated my job and had great students. Nonetheless, it always felt strange: a hybrid that has learned to function. 

Though I am retired and live thousands of miles away, I could not help but be very moved by the assassination of Charlie Kirk in a patio I often tread and in which I sat and read or just conversed.

UVU, formerly UVSC, was a technical school that became a university, an officially secular university in a highly religious county, a university of open enquiry in a dogmatic and extremely ultra-right wing count, an open enrollment school in a valley with strong academic elitism. 

Most of its students and maybe a majority of its faculty were conservatives, though that latter is hard to know. Its administration certainly tended to the right, though we saw little in the way of overt politics from them. 

We lived the various jeremiads that Kirk exemplified, created, and led against the main stream university in the US. His world of of struggle against entrenched supposed academic left-wing ideology imposed on students always seemed a fantasy and far removed from any reality we lived. 

Perhaps I and many of my colleagues were naive. We misunderstood the degree to which. most of mainstream humanities and social sciences were defined by Kirkians and allies as left wing in opposition to the new nationalist world of Trumpian-style patriotism. 

Their’s seemed a John Birch dream-verse.

Well, after Wednesday a family has been left fatherless and a school traumatized.  A new martyr has been born for what still seems to me a Taliban-style cause against foundational freedoms and intellectual rigor. 

As with most popular saints, as long as there is social value, St. Charlie, will continue to gather adepts. A myth, a sacred story, what we academics call a hagiography, will be created around him and the event whose point is less truth, than truthiness.

Pamphlets and books will appear. Devotional documentaries, reels, and Tik Toks will appear like flies and vultures near a cadaver.

While skeptics like me may wonder if the assassination wasn’t an action from within the factions of the Right, as long as there is Trump and Trumpism—or this strange American Right with international connections—St. Charlie will continue to grow. 

Pilgrimages will appear, as people come to participate in the sanctity of where he died. 

Ritual to expel the demon, envisaged as the assassin and all the mentally unbalanced leftists (demons) who enabled the murder, will abound. 

A cause will take greater form and expand. 

But I worry about those left behind. A university president who just lost her husband and who has spent body and soul working to make UVU a better and more successful place.   Deans and Department Chairs who have spent decades developing this University into the fine place it is / was. 

I worry about the students who were there or simply part of the community who have now had terror driven deep into their hearts with an image of blood spurting from an ivory neck. They are marked and will live with this forever. 

In whatever happens in this case, whether they find the assassin or not, I hope people can spare some time and effort to help a community and University heal and regain its quality, value, and aplomb.

They and it deserve your compassion and concern.  

The More Things Change: Celebration and Partying

 

Monday evening, a friend of my age insisted in a street cafe while traffic circled close to us, that he and I are of a generation raised to be more selfless and with a sense of responsibility to future generations. He contrasted that to today’s adults and younger who live more for themselves.

Maybe. I think my generation was pretty selfish, but that aside, his observation made me think of the French phrase: the more things change the more they stay the same. (et plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose). 

Both change and kinds of continuity are all around us; they constitute us and our lives. 

There is no denying that roundabout on whose sides we met under umbrellas on a drizzly evening was not always there. We have photos with time marked that witness the changes to us. We can see how Alicante expanded and how city planners laid out that space and the streets that met there, seizing it from fields, gulleys, and more rustic constructions than the mid rises today.

Yet people were there. They ate fish and rice, as people do today. My friend had a beer. Chances are that people then rarely if ever drank beer. I had a “mineral water” and I doubt glass bottles of water ever appeared then on tables even if there was a cafe or bar near there.

Of course, there are many traps in this. For one, it is all a matter of what you focus on. Looking at physical objects—tables, drinks, streets, people—is one thing.  Looking at something like moral qualities, especially when spoken as defining characteristics is so much harder. They are mostly invisible unless attached to physical qualities we can see. 

OK, Knowlton. Stop. You are waxing professorial and terribly abstract. Take a sip of that acqua and get back to something easier. 

In June, this roundabout looked very different. The monument in the middle was blocked away by protective boards, while chain link fences seemed to be everywhere. Fantastic sculptures in bright fantasy colors and themes punctuated the scenery, as did ephemeral bars, and cafes. You could smell grilling meat everywhere, along with the redolence of urine. 

Alicante was living its month long celebration called Hogueras o Fogueres, named for how the sculptures would erupt in flames at the celebration’s end on the vispera, the night before the Day of St. John an ancient night of burning stuff in this part of Europe and in the Andes—La Paz, Bolivia—where I have lived.

Saying that is fine. It is a broad connection and pattern but the history of Fogueres/Hogueras insists it was created at the beginning of the twentieth century on the model of Valencia’s Fallas for the sake of tourism and city pride. 

That is a nice statement though I am not convinced since I have not gone to the archives to see the loss of earlier forms and the appearance of Fogueres full grown from Valencia. What happened to San Juan’s feast with its bonfires and such?  It was not simply folded into Fogueres.  

Every midday, the roundabout hosted the mascletá,  competition and show of fireworks and explosive sounds. During the rest of the day and into the nigh the area of this roundabout, called Luceros, was a staging ground for parades that left here and marched down the Alfonso el Sabio Avenue before turning downtown towards the coast by the old city.

Many events, a huge chronology of formal goings on, moved the city during this period.  Along with the sound of music from the ephemeral (just for this month) bars and cafes) as well as marching bands in parades and just processing seemingly seemingly at random through the streets, the city filled with noise from people talking, shouting, singing, fighting as the days continued. 

It was intense, huge, and overwhelming. The calm afterwards was almost as loud and intense in its silence and calm. 

There you have it.  Change in time. While living it, you are there immersed and only in reflection can pull yourself from it. 

This all came back to me when I read an article involving a different meaning of change and a different kind of turning back, reflecting. 

The Barcelona version of El Nacional published on September 7 under the byline of Marc Valle the following. “The Catalan word in Danger of Extinction that AI considers a symbol of Barcelona, An Expression Rooted in ordinary Barcelona that AI Claims is at Risk of Disappearing.”

Like Snail Darters, little fish in the US West declared at risk of extinction, and then delisted as new populations were found far away from the Western Rivers of the original declaration, all under a regime of US environmental law and politics, statements of this nature should be taken seriously and also be seen as suspect even if we do not have soace here to fully consider it. 

The word is Xerinola. It describes a good part of that crazy month in Alicante. Valle defines the term as “Traditionally connected to collective joy, the noise of fiestas, and the environment an uninhibited celebration.”

Valle also contrasts it with the spontaneous, sui generis partying of fiestas when he says the word “is not just an expression of fiesta, but a means of understanding the relationship between neighborhood and community.” It is when peopple take over the space of the neighborhood—the town, city—and make it their own. By implication, Valle contrasts that with governmentally or commercially organized celebration. 

He is critiquing the formality of top down nature of the official fiesta such as Fogueres. To be sure this level of organization is often more formal and structured on paper than in its realization. At even moment, people intervene and celebrate. The feast itself tries to contain this in fenced-in spaces, many by invitation only, though all that falls apart as people experience xerinola.

Very quickly, since I am out of space, this reminds me of a common word in Peru to describe fiestas. That is algarrabía. It is most easily translated as noise but as a symbol of fiesta it begins to encompass so many more meanings. 

The word is from the same one as flamenco and is Iberian Arabic in origin. It point is to pick up the sonorous and sensory aspects of celebration and especially celebration as worship as people come together and legitimate themselves even in the absence of official recognition and acceptance. 

Valle suggests change—the loss of that, while I see both change and continuity. 

Valle must locate a potentially catastrophic loss in order to revalidate the words as a symbol, a new name for celebration in Barcelona not too far north of here and in a language close related to the Valencian of Fogueres. 

In parting, let me—the professor—just say that, though unmentioned, Durkheim is somewhere haunting this for me with his notion of collective effervescence.  

Ok.  Enough.  Good by and cheers.   

 

War and Rumors of War

Sunday morning, the gray sky spits random drops. I am told that tomorrow it will rain, but for now the cloudiness is a strange relief for eyes and skin from the bright sunshine of this White Coast of Spain, a name that sounds strangely like cataracts.

While sipping my morning coffee, I read the news—and sometimes the anti-news of Instagram and TikTok online.

This morning El País, Spain’s great daily, wrote about Trump’s missile shake just off the coast of Venezuela—a baboon like display of reddened, macho missiles to dominate male challengers. 

Of course this notice includes a mass of fictitious fantasy about some drug cartel led by Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela who continues in power even though he lost the last elections, something Trump dreams of. 

Maduro also shakes; he flies his planes and organizes his military in a pounding-the-chest display of bravery against the combover-ed, spray-tanned Trump. 

Neither could probably go a round or two against each other in a ring.  Much better is playing each other’s enemy to strengthen Maduro and give Trump so called “penis-points”. The Urban Dictionary defines these as “bonus points given to someone of the male gender for being a person of male gender.”

Trump needs to prove that to himself given his Vietnam War draft dodging, his insults to purple heart holders, and his declaration now of a Department of War whose purpose is to win. To Trump the basis of masculinity is a person who never apologizes, often cheats, and always wins. By definition. 

In any case, Trump spouts about drug shipments but seems to have destroyed a  migrant boat. Many legal analysts are calling an act of simple murder.  Meanwhile his minion, the red-eyed and wimpy voiced Hegseth declares that a Department of War, in its focus on winning cannot follow the law.

Sounds like the whine of losers to me. 

Unfortunately, genital rattling of this sort can lead to accidental explosions even from the most experienced edger.  

And then we end up with the messiness of death and mayhem which will require decades and a fleet of swift-boat, Hollywood writers and film makers to gain a narrative that is less one of lack of control. 

As sadly pornographic as all that is, a different couple of article snagged my attention. 

I read about a Danish man of Syrian origin who had spent three years in a Spanish prison, condemned as a terrorist for ostensibly fighting with ISIS in Syria, his parent’s homeland. It turns out that he did not do so but rather was in Syria as a Danish spy. The article notes how difficult it has been for Denmark’s spy agencies to come clean about this and how insulated justice officials, in Denmark and in Spain are from the machinations of their various spy agencies. In this case, it is amazing a couple of Danish spy-masters came clean in public. 

This made me reflect on how intelligence officers, in the spheres of Trump, Maduro, or in this case Copenhagen and Madrid, poison ordinary social waters by creating double purpose in individuals. 

You meet and interact with someone. They me be who they seem but they also may be agents of some other interested party and you might be compromised. 

To many of you this might sound like a “yeah-sure, David” moment.  

I get that. But you must remember my father’s graduate student at the University of Utah (who later became a Mexican congressman and met me at the airport in Mexico City when I flew through there on my way home from Bolivia after two years) was a KGB spy when a college student, something my father never knew. The congressman worked for the same agency that formed Vladimir Putin. 

With that messiness of the world—and not being able to trust people to be who they say they are—in mind, I read another article about the mercenaries who fight for Russia in Ukraine.  In this case, the article spoke of subsaharan Africans, but I was reminded of Colombians.

Next door to Venezuela and one of the countries liberated from Spain by Simon Bolivar in the early nineteenth century, Colombia is like a gorgeous person internally mangled by violence and poverty, as well as the interests of larger powers, such drugs.

While most Colombians are amazing and charming with accents that seduce, the country suffers from the disappearance of young men who are forcefully recruited into criminal gangs, military service in which young men fight against their own people, and the growth industry of working as an underage assassin, a sicario. 

The country has produced a veritable army of men seared by violence without reasonable options for employment. Among many other paths to exit the country and get better wages is that of mercenary.

Many men are well trained from their military years but find closed doors at home. It is tempting for them to leave their country and swim the international waters of floating mercenaries. 

One day, some months ago, a friend from Colombia brought someone to my home. He had met him among the mass of immigrants here in Alicante (where Colombians are the largest group of Latinos). When this guest and I talked he mentioned he had just come from fighting as a mercenary for Ukraine. 

I now hear he has returned to the battlefields in Ukraine as a means of sending money home for his daughter who soon will be a teenager.

The war in Eastern Europe is not so far away nor is its reality. Alicante also has a large number of Ukrainians, Russian and Ukrainian speaking. They are all seared by that conflict. I talk with Ukrainians every day as I also do with Syrians, Palestinians, Venezuelans and more. 

The pages of news, with Trump’s fantasies of defeating with his masculine energy the Tren de Aragua that he has fictionalized into something it is not, and now the made-up Cartel de los Soles; the massive missile attack on Ukraine this weekend, and the inhumane violence in the Middle East become very real ever time I step into the streets and go to a café.

I live on the White Coast of Spain without cataracts—they were surgically removed. It is peaceful here, but the fogginess of a violent world is in Alicante’s sunshine