Day 11. The magic.

Saturday, October 24

I woke up in Salt. It was a misty morning. From my window I could see a pale sun rsing behind the thin clouds. When we walked here last evening in the dark, Jorda, my kind host, had explained me the meaning of the word "salt" in Catalan. This used to be a village with a river running through it. Every summer the river would turn into a small stream and when it gathered its strength again later on in the year, it would change its course. It would jump. The village was called "where the river jumps", "salt" being Catalan for "jumps". Only the last word remained and in due time people would control the river and now it doesn´t jump anymore and the village became part of the city of Girona but the area is still called Salt. A lot of immigrants life there, there used to be big factories that attracted people from different parts of Spain, from different countries, and apparently the immigration worked well here. Jorda told me organisations from other countries visit Salt to see how they managed to do that.

Jorda made me breakfast, like he had been doing in the hostel where I had met him and where he was doing the nightshifts. On my first night there, when I had been up until early in the morning to do some writing, we had talked for a long time and the second night, when I was thinking about staying for a third night because I needed more time, but wasn´t sure if I should spend more money on a comfortable sleeping place, he had asked me if I was doing couchsurfing on my trip and he offered me the free room in his appartment.

We drank tea and ate toast and talked about our art projects. He was a bit worried about not producing anything at the moment because his job in the hostel took up most of his time but he would be leaving there by the end of the year to have all the time in the world to develop new things and go back to old ideas. He told me about something he had started but never finished, an idea that started with a facination for old trees, trees over a hundred years old. How the reason why they had managed to become that old was that probably they were situated in a good place, a peaceful place. He told me people can move when they don´t feel safe or when their living circumstances are bad but trees can´t. He had learned about trees and spend nights sleeping next to old trees.
After midnight he had showed me another project, a finished one, a collaboration in which he had been doing research about goats being fearless about hights, grazing on steep hills, being completely at ease, he had compared it with human dealings with heights, there were interviews with walkers he had met while filming the goats, people who told him about their own dealings with heights, with vertigo. The video didn´t only show footage of goats but also two people who were trained in the martial arts and were using the goats´movements and tactics to feel comfortable on ridges, overhanging rocks, climbing but also standing still and making slow movements. I guess somewhere I knew but wasn´t aware of the fact that most martial arts are inspired in their movements by the movements of animals. It was a beautiful video and a wonderful idea.

I said goodbye, set off, made a small detour to look at the river that looked so small and contained after the stories I had heard about it. I slowly walked back to the Girona city center, it felt like autumn. The sidewalks were filled with leaves in all colours and at some point I passed a square where they had lit fireworks last night, I had heard the sounds from my room. The remains of the firecrackers matched the leaves well.

The center was still quite empty but I heard drums and whistles and when I walked in the direction of the music I saw a giant golden bird with a crown dancing in the small street of the Jewish quarter. I walked on, passed a man carrying wooden spoons that were more than half his size. It seemed to be a magic day. A magic day after two full days, days filled with sunshine and wanderings through narrow streets, bookshops with books from decades ago, wine on the hostel terrass overlooking the river and the old city center, two days in which I had planned to write a lot but that had been mainly filled with long talks. With Camilla, with whom I shared a room and who had been reminded by David Foster Wallace´s famous Commencement Speech to Kenyon College class of 2005 "This is water" when in the morning, during breakfast, we were lining up in front of the toaster with the conveyor belt inside, letting the bread run through its insides and toasting it. She also mentioned Danny Wallace´s book "Yes man", I think after I gave her some tips because she was on her way to Barcelona where these days there is the Influencers festival with, among many others, the Yes Men presenting their work and tactics. Danny Boyle´s approach is a different one though and he is a Yes Man because for a full year he only said "yes" to everything and he wrote a book about it (and then a movie was made after it with Jim Carey in it).

I spent time with Jackson who was from France but was named after a boy his older brother had played with on the beach in the US when his parents were on holiday there and were enchanted by this image of their son playing with this younger kid named Jackson, they were already seeing their  own future son playing like that with his brother in this scene so they named him after the boy. Jackson was a biologist, just coming back from a science conference, still being bedazzled by all the science talk for seven days on end. We talked about evolution and ecology and he told me about his Phd, doing research about computer programs being of help in predicting how our evolution will evolve. We talked about history showing us how we never learn and we keep moving around in circles. He mentioned a small book written by Paul Lafarge who had married Karl Marx´daughter Laura, "The right to be lazy" and I added it to my readinglist that is getting longer every day. He also told me about a French comic and utopian movie "L´An 01" (by Resnais among others) in which the population decides on a number of resolutions beginning with "We stop working" but later on start producing again but just for their own use, to have water to drink, electricity for reading at night. They say "This is not the end of the world, this is Year 01, a new era. " It covers such diverse topics as ecology, negation of authority, free love, communal living, rejection of private property and labor.
When I tried to find the movie online I bumped into another interesting one: "Les Statues meurent aussi", Statues also die, by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, a film tracing the devastating impact of French colonialism on African art, showing what happens when art loses its connection to a culture.
Talking to him Geerat Vermeij came to my mind, an evolutionary biologist and paleontologist who can see more with his hands than other people do with their eyes or microscopes even. He  studies marine molluscs both as fossils and as living creatures. His books include Evolution and Escalation: An Ecological History of Life, Privileged Hands, Nature: An Economic History, and The Evolutionary World: How Adaptation Explains Everything from Seashells to Civilization. He has an amazing memory and can quote things he read/heard years ago. In an article I found about him, his wife says that a student of his once said that spending time with him is like spending time with a search engine.
What struck me most about my talks with Jackson though was something he said the first morning I met him, shortly before 10 when I was just finishing my breakfast and he walked in, straight from his conference and being somewhat frustrated about this specific focus on science only all week, day and night. He said: "I want to have more time" and by the way he said it, I knew he was serious about it and he was going to make sure he would have it.

The mariner was a completely different story. Straight out of the navy after 4 years of service he was struggling to fit into the world but also very happy about being out of his old one. He missed the comradery of his navy friends and he was looking for company in the hostel. The first evening I talked to him, he made plans straight away to buy walking gear to join me on my walk, but the next day, when he had cooked a wonderful pasta with local mushrooms and Jackson joined us for diner, he talked about flying to Paris, where Jackson´s friends were organising a small party to celebrate his return. In the end he flew to London, like he had planned a long time ago, he was a planner, he had been trained well, he had the navy still in his system, you can´t just stop being a mariner, but he was practising dreaming and he was doing it well. It would take a long time though to become the different person he wanted to become, studying, living a healthy life, having great goals. I asked him why he had joined the navy and his answer was the regular one, the scary one: money, carreer opportunities. I am afraid they will keep directing him. But you never know. I didn´t ask him for his age but Jackson did. He was 22. He still had a long way to go.

As do I. I would like to write some more about the other people I talked to and the things I discovered in bookshops. About Italo Calvino and his story "Smog" I found in Spanish and when I researched online what it was about, read about the environmental awareness in his early works and his attitude regarding nature and culture, believing them to share a relationship of exchange. But I will do that some other time. The afternoon has already started and the road is long. Or at least I hope it will be.