Altamira
The horse head symphony of Grotte Chauvet in the Ardèche drawn as early 32,000 BP
Cave painting has been the most indelible artistic tradition of all, continuing through the end of the ice
The bison images at Altamira and other caves in the region were painted between 16,400 and 13,500 BP
Toward the dwindling of the universal cold
In the grand Magdalenian
The Cantabrian climate of Altamira fifteen thousand years ago could have been like central Norway’s now
Decades ago in Hedmark three or four cow belled free ranging stubby fjord horses would come trotting down the mountain, heads tossing, snorting stopping by the hytte seemingly to approve and be approved
Between Altamira’s cave mouth and the Bay of Biscay a few thousand meters off four or more horses pastured behind a portable single strand electric fence on the empty green slopes and gullies
Bay duns recalling Poitous horses, bred since the Bourbons south from the Vendée north on the Atlantic coast
“Enthusiasts claim Poitous descent from the horses painted on the cave walls of Lascaux”
Those near Altamira now, as pleasant and human linked as Hedmark’s horses had been
Unkempt coats and thick manes, one cropped black tail, all blunt muzzled high strong faces and foreheads, almost free as though still herded for their meat here fifteen thousand years ago
The aspect remains at Altamira
The cave’s roof covered with bison figures first engraved and then painted in red and black, the other animals are horses, and a red deer, the solitary figure on the ceiling
The Altamira images, immensely commanding nestled near one another as variations on a theme of Paleolithic bison, brilliantly colored and subtly limned in perspective and scale, one to another
There on stone as if tumbling from above
Hand prints, and smaller sketch paintings on ceilings and walls of adjacent caverns
At discovery flint chisels, charcoal pencils, fragments of iron and manganese oxides, and bird bone blow pipes were found in the epochal litter below Altamira
People lived there
In the cold
With their cave fires
Lives similar in unnumbered caverns for many thousand years there all the way around the great Atlantic bay
All they were except their art is gone
But they were us without wheels, munitions, lighter than air, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, other rancorous dogmas
Had no good footwear, semiconductors, longevity
But with amazement, awe, insight and delight
Not far away to Santander’s Avenida del Far to the Playa del Sardino watching the surf
The unalterable immensity of the Atlantic and the astonishing presence of the Picos de Europa setback from it here in splendor
Asturias and Cantabria north of Castilla y León
In a quarter century the Guggenheim Bilbao’s cladding has weathered to the color of the inside of a tin can
Its gargantuan interior space of cables, ramps, bolted and riveted junctions of beams and massive supporting trusses pristine as if the welders, steel wielders, cranes and scaffolders had recently gone home
Sliced silos spaced in hanger scale segments flushed in light
The deep intelligence of it
It is magnificent
And if it were there for nothing more than itself and Jenny Holzer’s Instalación para Bilbao that would suffice
Across the flat of La Rioja Alta vinyards, eleventh century Santo Domingo de la Calzada where the Camino de Santiago pilgrims come walking straight in and straight out
Nájera’s eleventh century church east, then south and by Bobadilla the vinyards have gone to oak brushed hills
All these places over a thousand years ago were the great trek to Santiago
Follow Brieva’s track, a big trout stream, through the mountains and down deforested steeps to Villanueva de Cameros (pop. 102) and the road to Soria
There at that mountain road and river junction, the explosive emergence of a spectacular Gitana, who in another place could be anything to which she aspired, appearing to tend her gas pumps bubbling ebullience and lore
La Rioja and many Spanish things personified
Few things in life that match being on the road
Evidence is that across northern Spain is the life-balancing reason for being a thousand years of Santiago pilgrimages have left on its partakers
He vuelto a ver los álamos dorados (Antonio Machado, “Campos de Soria”)
Poplars were golden as it was in Soria along the Duero this October
Before October 7th Israel thought European life between Lebanon and Gaza was possible
Agreement between being born there, or what you went there for, now in another realm than you assumed the commitment would be
“Without the courage to assert the imperative of justice and the urgency of humanity, the left suffers the worst fate that any movement can contemplate: becoming indistinguishable from its enemies.” (Fintan O’Toole)
Fall to winter, the Gaza War’s tactics displaces two million Palestinians and increasingly destroys their country
More deaths in their region than any military event since the Second World War
Sit near Puerta del Carmen in Zaragoza imagining Nationalists goose stepping through
Aragon, the Ebro
The Republicans floundered here in 1937
All well past eight and a half decades on for this rich car congested city of nearly a million with its Mudéjar architecture allowed to endure
There are people who remember and lost relatives then to be found here now
Anecdotes, family stories, snapshots
But it does not matter
As surely it will in Gaza two and a half generations on
Scale and reconciliation
Well over twenty thousand have died or are dying now there, some hundreds died here in Zaragoza when the Ebro Front was in Aragon
And while Spain righted itself after Franco, similarity is unimaginably distant for the religion-stoked embittered who kill and die now in Israel’s present war of impacted realities and beliefs
Come to Lérida, Lleida in Catalan, from the west and Aragon
Being in Catalonia, in itself another Hispanic accommodation of the past
Carrer Major to the Plaça de la Paerla
Then one elevator after another to the grand overlook from the immense fortress and vacant cathedral plaza
Big multi-sourced cathedral and tower farther above, unapproachable, not part of the city, monumental to no monument, a Valle de los Caídos colossus
Falange flat open fascist style sun on stone
Feeling like Franco’s Spain
Standing there
To see a pair of Guardia Civil on patrol approaching, patent leather tricornios, weapons slung, gray-green-black specters stomping over to ask for ID would fit
With the Malaguena poverty consumptive cough from up the street rifling my refuse
The single tan SEAT taxi parked off the plaza, the camiones de carga down-shifting through on the Carretera de Cádiz
Working burros, stray dogs, cante jondo riffs and wails
That Fascist Spain existed only decades ago
Anti-communism, anti-intellectualism, anti-pacifism, authoritarianism, chauvinism, conspiracism, corporatism, eugenics, heroic realism, heroism, imperialism, irrationalism, machismo, militarism, nationalism, personality cult, populism, propaganda, racism, single-party state, totalitarianism
Having so recently been
A potency easily renewed, perpetually possible anywhere
Even peaceful Spain now calm as transecting the hundredth meridian in Nebraska
As in Catalan Lleida, an easy shot to Tarragona
Its second century amphitheater on the Med
Just north of proudly forlorn Cambrils then six decades ago, to a quiet pension with fine food on what was then a small harbor by an empty seafront to begin to write
There close to stately Sitges
In strong autumn afternoon sun before Barcelona
Café sitting there on the Carrer del Garraf, the trip from Huelva trip complete
Enjoying the thoughts of my shadow
In Octavio Paz’s enormous rushing at the edge of time
In this world where Israel had convinced itself that wedged between Lebanon and Gaza it was living in Sitges
Thinking of Spain’s rich Sitges centuries
Twenty since it was Roman
In twenty more what will Iberia have become
Rose-nosed parakeets (aka Krameri parrots) fly close in front
Flashing underwing blue
Directly from a palm to beach edge tiles
Parrot noisily
In thorough clarity
Brilliantly through low bright sunglare
Cave painting has been the most indelible artistic tradition of all, continuing through the end of the ice
The bison images at Altamira and other caves in the region were painted between 16,400 and 13,500 BP
Toward the dwindling of the universal cold
In the grand Magdalenian
The Cantabrian climate of Altamira fifteen thousand years ago could have been like central Norway’s now
Decades ago in Hedmark three or four cow belled free ranging stubby fjord horses would come trotting down the mountain, heads tossing, snorting stopping by the hytte seemingly to approve and be approved
Between Altamira’s cave mouth and the Bay of Biscay a few thousand meters off four or more horses pastured behind a portable single strand electric fence on the empty green slopes and gullies
Bay duns recalling Poitous horses, bred since the Bourbons south from the Vendée north on the Atlantic coast
“Enthusiasts claim Poitous descent from the horses painted on the cave walls of Lascaux”
Those near Altamira now, as pleasant and human linked as Hedmark’s horses had been
Unkempt coats and thick manes, one cropped black tail, all blunt muzzled high strong faces and foreheads, almost free as though still herded for their meat here fifteen thousand years ago
The aspect remains at Altamira
The cave’s roof covered with bison figures first engraved and then painted in red and black, the other animals are horses, and a red deer, the solitary figure on the ceiling
The Altamira images, immensely commanding nestled near one another as variations on a theme of Paleolithic bison, brilliantly colored and subtly limned in perspective and scale, one to another
There on stone as if tumbling from above
Hand prints, and smaller sketch paintings on ceilings and walls of adjacent caverns
At discovery flint chisels, charcoal pencils, fragments of iron and manganese oxides, and bird bone blow pipes were found in the epochal litter below Altamira
People lived there
In the cold
With their cave fires
Lives similar in unnumbered caverns for many thousand years there all the way around the great Atlantic bay
All they were except their art is gone
But they were us without wheels, munitions, lighter than air, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, other rancorous dogmas
Had no good footwear, semiconductors, longevity
But with amazement, awe, insight and delight
Not far away to Santander’s Avenida del Far to the Playa del Sardino watching the surf
The unalterable immensity of the Atlantic and the astonishing presence of the Picos de Europa setback from it here in splendor
Asturias and Cantabria north of Castilla y León
In a quarter century the Guggenheim Bilbao’s cladding has weathered to the color of the inside of a tin can
Its gargantuan interior space of cables, ramps, bolted and riveted junctions of beams and massive supporting trusses pristine as if the welders, steel wielders, cranes and scaffolders had recently gone home
Sliced silos spaced in hanger scale segments flushed in light
The deep intelligence of it
It is magnificent
And if it were there for nothing more than itself and Jenny Holzer’s Instalación para Bilbao that would suffice
Across the flat of La Rioja Alta vinyards, eleventh century Santo Domingo de la Calzada where the Camino de Santiago pilgrims come walking straight in and straight out
Nájera’s eleventh century church east, then south and by Bobadilla the vinyards have gone to oak brushed hills
All these places over a thousand years ago were the great trek to Santiago
Follow Brieva’s track, a big trout stream, through the mountains and down deforested steeps to Villanueva de Cameros (pop. 102) and the road to Soria
There at that mountain road and river junction, the explosive emergence of a spectacular Gitana, who in another place could be anything to which she aspired, appearing to tend her gas pumps bubbling ebullience and lore
La Rioja and many Spanish things personified
Few things in life that match being on the road
Evidence is that across northern Spain is the life-balancing reason for being a thousand years of Santiago pilgrimages have left on its partakers
He vuelto a ver los álamos dorados (Antonio Machado, “Campos de Soria”)
Poplars were golden as it was in Soria along the Duero this October
Before October 7th Israel thought European life between Lebanon and Gaza was possible
Agreement between being born there, or what you went there for, now in another realm than you assumed the commitment would be
“Without the courage to assert the imperative of justice and the urgency of humanity, the left suffers the worst fate that any movement can contemplate: becoming indistinguishable from its enemies.” (Fintan O’Toole)
Fall to winter, the Gaza War’s tactics displaces two million Palestinians and increasingly destroys their country
More deaths in their region than any military event since the Second World War
Sit near Puerta del Carmen in Zaragoza imagining Nationalists goose stepping through
Aragon, the Ebro
The Republicans floundered here in 1937
All well past eight and a half decades on for this rich car congested city of nearly a million with its Mudéjar architecture allowed to endure
There are people who remember and lost relatives then to be found here now
Anecdotes, family stories, snapshots
But it does not matter
As surely it will in Gaza two and a half generations on
Scale and reconciliation
Well over twenty thousand have died or are dying now there, some hundreds died here in Zaragoza when the Ebro Front was in Aragon
And while Spain righted itself after Franco, similarity is unimaginably distant for the religion-stoked embittered who kill and die now in Israel’s present war of impacted realities and beliefs
Come to Lérida, Lleida in Catalan, from the west and Aragon
Being in Catalonia, in itself another Hispanic accommodation of the past
Carrer Major to the Plaça de la Paerla
Then one elevator after another to the grand overlook from the immense fortress and vacant cathedral plaza
Big multi-sourced cathedral and tower farther above, unapproachable, not part of the city, monumental to no monument, a Valle de los Caídos colossus
Falange flat open fascist style sun on stone
Feeling like Franco’s Spain
Standing there
To see a pair of Guardia Civil on patrol approaching, patent leather tricornios, weapons slung, gray-green-black specters stomping over to ask for ID would fit
With the Malaguena poverty consumptive cough from up the street rifling my refuse
The single tan SEAT taxi parked off the plaza, the camiones de carga down-shifting through on the Carretera de Cádiz
Working burros, stray dogs, cante jondo riffs and wails
That Fascist Spain existed only decades ago
Anti-communism, anti-intellectualism, anti-pacifism, authoritarianism, chauvinism, conspiracism, corporatism, eugenics, heroic realism, heroism, imperialism, irrationalism, machismo, militarism, nationalism, personality cult, populism, propaganda, racism, single-party state, totalitarianism
Having so recently been
A potency easily renewed, perpetually possible anywhere
Even peaceful Spain now calm as transecting the hundredth meridian in Nebraska
As in Catalan Lleida, an easy shot to Tarragona
Its second century amphitheater on the Med
Just north of proudly forlorn Cambrils then six decades ago, to a quiet pension with fine food on what was then a small harbor by an empty seafront to begin to write
There close to stately Sitges
In strong autumn afternoon sun before Barcelona
Café sitting there on the Carrer del Garraf, the trip from Huelva trip complete
Enjoying the thoughts of my shadow
In Octavio Paz’s enormous rushing at the edge of time
In this world where Israel had convinced itself that wedged between Lebanon and Gaza it was living in Sitges
Thinking of Spain’s rich Sitges centuries
Twenty since it was Roman
In twenty more what will Iberia have become
Rose-nosed parakeets (aka Krameri parrots) fly close in front
Flashing underwing blue
Directly from a palm to beach edge tiles
Parrot noisily
In thorough clarity
Brilliantly through low bright sunglare