A Walk into Shadows

Last evening, while leaving a sadly closing bookstore I love, I had an intriguing conversation. IN my stroll to my path home, I walked a ways with a colleague from my writer’s group. He is a film-maker and is seeking stories from Alicante.

As we walked in the now dark streets—amazing how quickly the sun sets now and how late it rises—I was struck by the lugubriousness of the street. 

Even in broad day, there is a strange quality to these streets, or maybe it is just in the eye of this beholder. I do not know about the latter and so will just give you my observations. 

Alicante was heavily bombed during the Spanish Civil War by Italian bombers (although I believe Germans were also involved) in alliance with the fascists who carried out a coup against the elected Republican government. 

People talk about the market bombing—I wrote a poem about it, I was so. moved when I found out—when at the height of shopping for lunch, the bombers dropped their load on the public market and killed some 300 people in one fell swoop. 

When I think of that, the images that come to mind are immediately those of warred-out cities in the Middle East, including horribly Gaza. But I also think of the core of Berlin and the places they have left unreconstructed as memorials, such as the missing dome of the Reichstag, the congress building.  

Yet I did not hear about how the market bombing was just one of hundreds of explosions in this city as part of the war effort. 

I noticed the shed-looking, small metal buildings with gates to stairwells. These go down to bomb shelters; people can take tours into them. I did not realize that there were many more entrances and bomb shelters; a network in this central part of the city. I read somewhere that at the time, they could accommodate most of the residents of the city.

However, during the long Franco dictatorship whose victory over the republicans ended the war, the shelters languished and decayed. Many have still not been restored. Though I do not know, I imagine others disappeared in the construction of the web of parking lots under parts of the city’s center.  

I imagined these underground spaces, dank and filled with cobwebs and probably rats, maybe even bats. They seemed eerie to me, witnesses to a past preferably forgotten and hidden.  

It seemed likely that over the decades youths and maybe unsheltered people had entered them for their own ends: residence or spaces beyond control for parties or to just be for a bit. That reminded me of graffiti-ridden decaying buildings in other cities, like the bombed out spaces the anarchists took in Berlin to make cooperative living spaces and government-free spaces. 

This made me recall the bat is an important symbol to Valencians. Called the Rat Penat, it is an official heraldic symbol of Valencia. 

Legends tell of how bats, which the Arabs used to control the inevitable mosquitos in the very swampy land of Valencia’s capital city and hinterlands of the same name, turned against them and enabled Christians to become victorious. As a result, the bat is seen as a protector and vanquisher.

I assume as a symbol it can switch and also speak as a denizen of the night. 

to the dangers of official power.

Alicante has a castle above it, on whose slopes the Arabic city was built. Of course there are stories, such as of the king who had a beautiful marriageable daughter. He set up a contest among two suitors to see who could build a canal to bring water to this ultra-dray place. One of them won, but also lost as the princess died leaving the space of epic in which to construct adventures. 

However, the city bravely expanded away from its walls and down the coast into the domain of fisherfolk. I do not know these tales but I am sure the people had many about the sea. Some probably remain today. 

Houses were not built, unlike today, to maximize views of azure waters and the expansive sea.  People constructed with uninterrupted back walls to the sea for protection. Only in the nineteenth century with the fall of Tangiers did this change. The result is a small warren of narrow and odd angled streets. 

From the sea, before this, came pirates to steal cargo and crops, murder and rape, as well as enslave Alicantinos. Many Spaniards, not just Alicantinos were captured, enchained, and taken to the Maghreb in north Africa.  

I am sure there are (or were) amazing stories about the pirates, the pirate wars, and family members captive among the Arabs

Today the pirate wars are a key part of the celebration of Moros y Cristianos, Moors and Christians, a feast and drama that is central to festivities throughout the region. Sword fights with the pirate king occupy a key place in the re-portrayals.

In fact, the cinema’s of the city have just opened Amenabar’s new film—the Captive— just opened in this city. It relates how the great writer and icon of Spain, Cervantes, as a young man was enslaved in Algiers. This work marks a change in Spain’s portrayal of self and its understanding of masculinity, just as Cervantes’ Don Quixote does if read and examined. 

With the destruction of the Alicante’s walls, one of which ran along the coast, the city built a  modern fin-de-siècle town, simply called El Centro today. From a hundred and fifty to maybe forty years old, these constructions are either decaying or being restored. One see abandoned buildings, or gaps where buildings were with their tiles still pasted against the neighboring building’s wall. 

Each of those has stories and is source material for stories, along with the prison camps and the mass killing of Republican captives not quite a century ago. 

One can only imagine the despair of Republicans gathered in Alicante’s port for transport out of Spain as the war came to a bitter end. Surrounded by fascists, Italian and Spanish, weapons raised, they were never rescued and their bodies now occupy mass graves around the city. 

This is a city of stories, many unheard and untold though they leave traces for those who wish to read them. 

 

My colleague and I parted company, he to seek stories and tread on in the domain of film, and I towards home and the shadows of my anthropological mind.

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.