被爆八十年

Hiroshima day, 80 years on, and 89 seconds before midnight.

DIY

Have I mentioned that I'm teaching a new First Year seminar this coming semester? I'm taking the Lang 40th anniversary as an excuse to reconnect with some of the folks who've taken our classes over the years. In general I think incoming students will really appreciate meeting alums and seeing where they might be in a decade or two. But for this topic it makes especial sense, as these alums have lived the changing realities of religion and spirituality of our time. The new students will interview many of these alums, but I'm also asking about a half dozen of them to come lead our class, reflecting on what they learned here and since, what they wish they'd known, what's changed and what hasn't... I expect to learn a lot too!

In my court

 

Back among friends.

Chalked up

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I missed this year's ChalkFIT when they went up, but some are still there, if a little faded. Apparently the theme this time around was "Reflection."

QR mission

The bulletin for our church's Sunday services keeps getting thicker. What started as a brief section on ways one might support those affected by the war in Palestine/Israel (with QR codes) has grown and grown. 

Spain 2025

First trip to Europe in seven years complete! Over eleven days, putting down anchors in Ansó in the far west Pyrenees, Zaragoza and Sant Cugat in the outskirts of Barcelona, we saw a lot. My already ambitious plan was to cross paths at least with legacies Roman and Islamic, romanesque and gothic, baroque and modernismo, but we got even more - starting with neolithic dolmens and ending with a still-growing sci-fi cathedral. And a plan for high mountains and plains grew to include several waves of Pyrenees, Montserrat and a short trip to seaside Sitges, too! 

What impressed itself on me also was that no spot (with the possible exception of the Castillo de Loarre) belonged to just one era. Why should it? Even as empires and their dominant religions change, most people stay, useful and powerful sites remain useful and powerful, and many building materials lend themselves to reuse. But of course the story is more complicated than this irenic description would suggest.

Take Zaragoza, which today celebrates its "four cultures" - Iberian, Roman, Muslim and Christian. These exquisite arches are part of the 11th century core of one of its marvels, the Aljaferia, highlight of the UNESCO World Heritage Mudejar Architecture of Aragon, reconstructed after half a millennium's absence. These "cultures," while doubtless at every point more cosmopolitan than cultural nationalists today can imagine, really name chronological eras, each of which coopts or effaces its predecessors in its story.

Zaragoza's lovely cathedral La Seo sits on the site of the city's main mosque, which in turn replaced the central temple of the Roman city of Caesaraugusta - which surely built on something yet older. Today's it's presented as an almost teleological sequence. The "mudejar" brickwork of part of the cathedral, constructed by Muslim artists who stayed (what the 19th century neologism mudejar means) when the Christian era began, makes it seem an almost friendly transition. But its prominent chapel for Saint James, patron saint of the Reconquista, is framed by huge 17th century statues of Moorish-looking prisoners writhing in chains. 

None of this is new, or should be surprising. What I needed to return to Europe to remember is that, for all the violence of historical conflict and usurpation, there is a sense of historical depth in which the older constellations remain in some obscure way present, whether acknowledged or not. Call it karma, or just history? To me the four huge towers at the corners of Zaragoza's enormous baroque Basilica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar (the towers constructed only in the last century or so) make it look mosque-like, though that was certainly nobody's intention. This would be a pleasing irony for a place which, as the site where Jesus' mother Mary is said to have appeared to the apostle James in 40 CE, has asserted Christianity's special claim to Spain from before there even was an Islam - or Christianity!

Reflecting on it now, this all seems interesting but unsurprising. I tell students stories all the time about the enduring effects of historical and cultural context and about the constructedness of historical narratives pretending to transcend this messiness. Surprising is the touristic naivete of which it made me aware. How could I have thought one could dip into distinct centuries in distinct places? Any old cathedral presents you with the cohabitation of many centuries at once! Yet it took me a while to get over irritation that each of the places we visited had been built and rebuilt multiple times, to accept and enjoy that there was never one authentic form for any of these significant places.

This holds even for the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which is celebrated as the work of Antoni Gaudí but is less and more than that. Gaudí took over a project already underway (now the crypt) and developed a concept for the new edifice which went through several iterations during the decades he devoted to it. But he knew cathedrals take a long time, and that only part of it could be completed in his lifetime. (The current plan is to complete the work by next year, the centennial of Gaudí's death.) Would he have approved of the expressionist sculptures Josep Maria Subirachs - working with Gaudí's original sketches - carved for the Passion Gate in the 1990s? Or Joan Vila Grau's luminous tapestries of stained glass, even more recent? I'm pretty sure he'd be psyched that there's a 3-D printer in use in the workshop, helping make the remaining towers even more diaphanous.

I wonder what will happen once the construction finishes, fifty or one or two hundred years after that. As a living thing, Gaudí wouldn't want his cathedral to be preserved in amber, would he? The karmic residues of distant and half-forgotten pasts, encountered in the built environment all around, make the future here a more complicated and less foreign prospect than it seems in the ahistorical presentism of the "new" world.

Sacred grove

The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, its nave completed since my first visit 22 years ago, conveys the excitement the first gothic cathedrals must have evoked when they were built: structures so tall and light-filled that the only analog was not other work of human hands but a forest. (I note with satisfaction also that Gaudí's treelike columns look pollarded!) If you resist the symmetry, the skylight-spangled ceiling's forest-like too!

Taste and see

Care for a caramel? These are souvenirs of the Basilica of Nuestra Señora del Pilar in Zaragoza, the wrappers depicting the signs left by the Virgin Mary on her miraculous visit to a discouraged Saint James here in AD 40 - before her own Assumption! The shape you see is a small statue of Mary holding the infant Jesus atop a stone pillar, the pillar wrapped in bronze and silver and, since the 16th century, adorned with a conical manto (mantle), the statue radiating a golden crown. (There's a little window on the far side of the radiant baroque chapel below where the 

devout can kneel and kiss a small patch of the pillar.) Medieval Catholics told how the power duo of Mary and James consecrated Spain as of special significance right from the start. Today Mary of the Pillar is also the patron saint of Hispanidad - the whole Spanish-speaking world. The end of the long square in front of her basilica has since 1991 boasted an enormous fountain like a melting glacier meant to represent Latin America from the Yucatan down, though its shape is discernible only from the air, and even then doesn't really make a lot of sense (except as an extreme representation of terra nullius!). It's a lot to suck on.

Alpine delight

Flower meadows beneath the high peaks of the Pyrenees take me back to summer hikes in the Alps as a child. Even found one ripe raspberry!

Beyond words

Vertiginous experience: a neolithic dolmen at Aguas Tuertas

Folk ways

I love when things line up in unplanned ways. Two great alignments today, which started in the museum of traditional costumes of Ansó, the village in the Pirineo Aragonés where we're staying. The dress for special occasions was the most interesting (the pic above shows stages from children's baptism - the one suspended in the air - through first communion, gender undifferentiated still at confirmation) but I was glad we paid attention also to work clothes, amazed at the stiff leather mocassins the men tied around thick woolen socks to work the fields, forests and pastures, and the spindles women used working wool. 

One alignment came at dinner, when our local wine - a Pyrennean kind called Somantana - turned out to be named after those very worker's shoes. Vintner Otto Bestué chose this name for one of his better wines, the label explains, because the workers in the vineyards his family has worked since the 17th century used to shake their sandals at the end of a work day to get the soil off. To them perhaps dirt but to him every grain of this land is precious! (The wine was delicious.)

The other alignment was more unexpected. At San Juan de la Peña, an ancient monastery built into a huge cliff of fist-sized conglomerate stone, we marveled at the (reconstructed) free-standing 12th century cloister. When the monks left this monastery for a big new one on the top of the hill after a fire in the 17th century, locals made off with many of the stones of the old monastery but not the capitals, which survive.

Among the motifs, a scene of Adam and Eve after the fall, Adam tilling the soil with two oxen and Eve making wool yarn with a spindle!

Fire and ice

A great discovery: cafe con hielo (or in Catalan: cafè amb gel)