Day 23. Step by step, line by line ...

Cantares… (Songs….Machado’s Testament)
Antonio Machado

All goes, and all remains,
but our task is to go,
to go creating roads
roads through the sea.

My songs never chased
after glory to remain
in human memory.
I love the subtle worlds
weightless and charming,
worlds like soap-bubbles.

I like to see them, daubed
with sunlight and scarlet,
quiver, under a blue sky,
suddenly and burst…

I never chased glory.

Traveller, the road is only
your footprint, and no more;
traveller, there’s no road,
the road is your travelling.

Going becomes the road
and if you look back
you will see a path
none can tread again.

Traveller, every track
leaves its wake on the sea…
Once in this place
where bushes now have thorns
the sound of a poet’s cry was heard
‘Traveller there’s no road
the road is your travelling…’

Step by step, line by line…

The poet died far from home.
Shrouded by dust of a neighbouring land.
At his parting they heard him cry:
‘Traveller there’s no road
the road is your travelling…’

Step by step, line by line…

When the goldfinch can’t sing,
when the poet’s a wanderer,
when nothing aids our prayer.
‘Traveller there’s no road
the road is your travelling…’

Step by step, line by line.

------------------------

(Today I walk through Collioure, where Machado is buried)

Day 21. Lucky.

The dark wasn't only dark but also wet and very windy. I got caught in the storm just under the top on the Spanish side. I managed to put up my tent and slept with the wind hauling and the rain gushing down surrounded by my wet and muddy things. But I was warm and well fed and comfortably solitary with the complete darkness and nature as my only companions.

in the morning the sun was out and by now everything is sort of dry again. I can walk wherever I want. I am so much luckier than all the people who walked this trail in the past. Not only Walter Benjamin but many forgotten refugees from both sides of the border, fleeing Spain during the Spanish Civil War and France during or shortly before the second World War.

I will cross the border today and might not have easy internet access for a few days until I managed to find a French simcard. Also my iPad is refusing service now and then so if you need to reach me and I don't respond here, send me a text message on my phone.

Thanks for all your support! See you here soon again.

Day 19. The day of the dead.

Sunday, 1 November 2015

The sea was loud on the day of the dead. The beach where I had sat early morning yesterday was inaccesible now. The waves reached  almost until the small wall. I sat on top of the wall and looked out, to where the water was framed by rocks on both sides.

I had thought it would be a good idea to stay here in Portbou for another night to spend the day with the ghost of Walter Benjamin. I had even tried to find the hotel where he spend his last night to see if I could book a room there but the hotel Francia doesn´t exist anymore and it is hard to find the place where it once was situated. I went to the information office to ask questions but it was closed until the middle of November and every time I tried the door of the Benjamin Foundation, it was locked as well. The big beautiful building which they had announced triumphantly many years ago to become the new home to the archive and be a new memorial space for research and contemplation hadn´t moved away from its rundown state apart from one big space with a glass door that was empty.

It is unknown where Walter Benjamin´s body is. He isn´t under the stone in the graveyard which reads:


"Es ist niemals ein Dokument der Kultur, ohne zugleich ein solcher der Barbarei zu sein"

"There is no document of a civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism"

- Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen, VII


I walked up to the monument again, the long metal stairs going down into the earth, the portal into the sea and back up into the sky and read again what I had already read before I came here on my iPad, browsing through my Benjamin library:


"Schwerer ist es, das Gedächtnis des Namenlosen zu ehren als das der Beruhmten. Dem Gedächtnis der Namenlosen ist die historische Kunstruktion geweiht.¨

"It is more difficult to honour the memory of the anonymous than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the anonymous."

- Walter Benjamin, G.S.I., 1241


I realised his spirit wasn´t here but in his writings. And that it would make more sense to spend the day here with all the ghosts of the people who died in a strange country like Benjamin did after they passed through Portbou to flee their home, in both directions, to France during the Spanish Civil War and to Spain during the second World War. With all the people who died in a violent sea recently. With my own dead.

And that is what I did.

I had brought some stones here from the Barcelona beach to put on Benjamin´s grave but I walked back to the sea again and threw them in the waves where they joined all the other stones that continuously were being washed upon the shore and drawn back into the water again, while making a sound you can only hear when you stand close the water. Stone on stone on stone on stone. Changing each other´s shape like human beings change each other´s shape by getting close to each other. But so much slower.

Day 18. The cricket.

Saturday, 31 October 2015

The cricket sang as if his life depended on it. It was after midnight already. The day of the dead had started. I was about to fall asleep.

For a moment I thought he was in the room, so loud did he tsjirp. A single one. I hadn´t expected to hear them anymore so late in the year. I love the sound, it makes me think of summer, it makes me feel warm.

I opened to door to my balcony, I am in hostel in Portbou, 72 steps away from the beach, 72, the year in which I was born. I opened the door and the sound got even louder. He was outside. Probably living in the wasteland I can see from my balcony, so different from the view to the other side where I can see the waves crashing on the rocks. There are cars parked on the land where once a building stood. On what used to be the first floor the bathroom tiles are still visible. A pale yellow. It is situated in a small quiet street where no traffic is allowed to enter. There is a terrace in front of the wasteland, it belongs to the hostel. There are usually some people drinking coffee or beer. I am lucky finding peaceful places inbetween the tiresome walking days.

I fell asleep with the cricket singing and in the morning I woke up with the sound of loud waves. I walked to the beach and stared at the waves, at the sea that has been the only witness to many people dying in its merciless embrace. When I returned from my beach walk to sit on the balcony the cricket was there again, singing his song with the same power. I felt at home.

I took the book, the only paper book I´ve got with me on my walk and found the page with the cricket.

"We live in cities, in professions and occupations, in families. But the place we live in is not really a place like that. The place we really live in is not the one in which we pass our days, but the one in which we hope - without knowing what we are hoping for - the one in which we sing without understanding what makes us sing."

"The nature of the cricket is to love its song and to take so much pleasure in it that it does not look for food and dies singing."

- Christian Bobin, The Very Lowly, p. 35

Day 17. Finding words.

The first night since many that I don´t sleep under the stars. I am in a hostel in Portbou, a room of my own. I went outside on my small balcony to look at the sky. I was cold. You get used to the comfort of a warm room quickly. I tried to find Orion, the Great Hunter but he was out of sight. I couldn´t see the moon either. I didn´t recognise any of the star signs in sight - there is still so much to learn. But when I looked up I saw a shooting star. The first time on my journey and it isn´t that I spend little time looking at the sky. 

I made a wish.

There is a tv in my room. I went through all the channels and it was mainly nonsense. But there was a nice item on TV5Monde Europe about two Syrian musicians, playing metal, who had fled Syria. About their music and how it was hard to make people understand their music genre at all but even more in a country where there is a war situation, where the dark side of it doesn´t go well with everyday life. They fled to Turkey in the back of van filled with people with hardly any space to breath, with only a few holes to let fresh air come in and afterwards they managed to get a place on a boat to Greece, almost being caught by the Turkish coastguards. From there they travelled to the Netherlands and the item stopped there. I would have liked to hear more about how they were managing in my home country. If they were still making music.

I tried to clean my hands but I´ve been living outside for too long. I ate grilled squid and salad and drank a draft beer. I checked out all the places in town and chose the noisiest one, with all the locals engaged in passionate conversations.

But first thing I did after I showered was visiting the Walter Benjamin memorial. It was just after sunset. It took my breath away. I´ve never seen a more impressive, beautiful, simple monument to pay tribute to somebody, connecting the traces of past pain, memory and exile, with the possibility of a renewed future.

It is situated on the edge of town, on a terrass overlooking the sea. There is the sky and the waves and a big olive tree There is a metal portal, a simple triangular shape and when you enter it you see the long metal stairs going down into the waves. The passage stairs. There is a glass wall almost at the end and already when you enter the portal you see yourself reflected down there. You walk down, towards yourself, towards the waves, 65 steps more or less until you reach the glass wall where the steps continue but where you can´t go any further and there it reads: 

"Schwerer ist es, das Gedächtnis des Namenlosen zu ehren als das der Beruhmten. Dem Gedächtnis der Namenlosen ist die historische Kunstruktion geweiht.¨

"It is more difficult to honour the memory of the anonymous than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the anonymous."

Walter Benjamin, G.S.I., 1241

You spend some time down there. You read the text in all the languages, in Catalan, in Spanish, in French, in English, but most of all in German, in his own language. Then you turn around, to walk back. And you look up and all you see is the sky at the end of the stairs. And that is where you walk to. 

You didn´t take photos. Why would you if the memory of what you saw will be with you forever. Why would you if you can take the time to find the proper words.

Day 15. Small earthquakes.

Wednesday 28 October 2015

The water is slowly closing in on me. Earlier on, when I moved here after having spent a wet hour waiting for the rain to stop under an oak tree surrounded by big cows, I could still sit in the comfortable niche with my back against the wall. I never slept under a bridge before.

At five, when the pitch black sky had caught up on me, when the rain started and the lightning was getting too close, I had spotted the bridge and the narrow ridge underneath it already but I was still hoping for a farmer´s shed to appear or something else with walls and a roof. It didn´t and the oak tree seemed a good option but the rain got heavier and heavier and when there was a small break inbetween the showers I took my wet things and walked to the bridge. The ridge was big enough for my mattress and I cleared the rubbish away but the water is leaking through the walls and by now the ridge is completely wet as well. The last option is a lower concrete level, not completely flat and overgrown with thick blackberry bushes but I found a long metal rod and managed to trim them down so there is enough space for my inflatable bed. The area might be wet later on as well, but that is a later worry. If necessary I just sit up all night and write and get going before the sun comes up. It was a sunny day, the solar panel worked at top speed, my iPad is powered and the spare battery is full. There is even a good internet connection here. I´ve got food and chocolate and I found an almost full pack of cigarettes on the road. I´ll be fine.

It was a day of extremes with the most beautiful morning I experienced in a long time. I woke up in a bird observatory where I had moved to unplanned because my sleeping place of choice was also the rather big wild boar population´s favorite hang out. There was an amazing full moon, I saw it rise out of the sea from my window first and later on it moved slowly through the clear sky, lighting up everything. I slept a few hours on the wooden floor in my sleeping bag, woke up with Orion, the Great Hunter staring at me. I sat up for a few hours and went back to sleep.

I was at the beach, not even a minute walking from my shelter, before sunrise. There was still a big moon hanging in the sky opposite of the sea. The mountains underneath it were coloured in an unreal shade of blue. The sea was ferocious, big waves. The sky turned pink and yellow and then it happened, like it happens every day but I rarely see it and I never saw it under these conditions. An empty beach, the sun and the moon on both sides of the sky, noisy sunlit waves, mountains in all directions apart from where the sun came up.

I ate my breakfast, I am still not tired of chestnuts and wallnuts and pomegranates. The little red seeds that fell on the sand shone like diamonds.

In the far distance two big boats were balancing on the horizon. I remembered how before I left Barcelona, before I had even made a decision to go on this walk, I had read my fortune in the coffee remains of my coffee cup. My Turkish friends had shown me how to do it. Drink the coffee, put your cup upside down and wait for a bit, then turn it around again and look carefully. I had seen a long sea journey.

My original route didn´t go along the seaside but I decided to get back to the old Mediterranean path and although I first wasn´t sure if it was a good decision, passing a lot of industrial buildings in the beginning and then fishermen with cars along the big river everywhere, once I saw the sea I was happy about my choice.

The sun was out all day, I was in a birders paradise. Once I started walking, now and then one or two people with huge camera lenses passed me, ready to catch what they saw. There were wooden boards with pictures, showing what animals and trees were around. Wild boar -but I knew that already-, foxes, big deer.

Yesterday I had felt lonely and I thought about my last months in Barcelona. The dancing, the walking along familiar streets, eating dinner with friends, drinking vermuth at a local bar, talking through the night. Barcelona had forgotten about me but it didn´t matter.
I was hoping somebody else would sit on my favorite stone in the sea now and then and I was sure my silent Muñoz friends, legless and unmovable in their cagelike house at the square in front of the beach, would have other visitors. I hadn´t forgotten about Barcelona but I have to admit the city I love isn't in my mind always either.

But people sense it when you are lonely and in the middle of the night I read new messages coming in from a new friend who suggested walking with me for two days in the weekend, an artist friend from the UK had send me a donation and told me she was looking forward to tell her daughter about my walks when she would be old enough to understand. I was touched. Two years ago, on my first long walk, I had walked with her virtually on a late summer day on my way to the South of France. Rowan wasn´t born then yet and that day my friend took a day off from her worries about putting a child into this world and was going for a walk along the seaside. I would walk at the same time in a different country and think about her unborn child. I did. We "met" at one 'o clock, thinking about each other. And today, last night, she wrote me a message again and in the morning, when I was staring at the amazing sunrise, I thought about her. I collected some small shells for Rowan, the child with the name of a tree that attracts birds.
There was another message from a Facebook friend whom I hadn´t known for a long time and who was keeping an eye on my journey, asking me if she could help me in any way. And today a wonderful message came in from one of my sister´s old schoolfriends, a girl I remember as always smiling, still living like my sister in the village where all of us grew up. She sent me money to buy chocolate to keep me going and she wrote that she somehow understood what I was doing but not completely. I liked that a lot. Sometimes I don't completely understand it either but I guess that is one of the reasons I am doing this.

Today I realised my Facebook posts still automatically say I am in Barcelona but I am not there anymore. Part of my heart is but it has grown bigger on the road, being fed by all the people I met, nature, the charming villages, the small pleasures of a cup of coffee, a warm meal, washing my hands with warm water. I can afford to loose my heart everywhere, or at least parts of it. The holes fill up quickly again.

And I am not more lonely here than I am in a city I live in for a while, but in a city it is masked by my social life, people kissing me on the cheeks when they see me, touching my arm when I talk to them, joining me on the dancefloor. It isn´t a sad kind of loneliness though, although it sometimes makes me feel sad. Rilke writes in his Letters to a Young Poet about loneliness, about solitude beautifully;

"And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us."

I love stumbling upon beautiful villages along the road and when there is time I sit at the village squares to take a small break or when there is a cafe, order a cafe con leche. Today there was a big village with a castle and a cathedral. There were restaurants and I checked the menu's, the last time I had sat down to order a warm lunch must have been more than a week ago. I found a cheap spinach cannelloni that was just what I was apparently hungry for. The terrace outside wasn´t meant for eating though and the waiter directed me inside, into the very fancy restaurant of the hotel. I hadn´t looked in a mirror for days and had no idea what shape my face was in but I could see my hands. They looked like I´d been living rough for two weeks. I was the only one in the room who was wearing a suit though. All the tables had expensive heavy table clothes with matching napkins folded carefully. Silverware and multiple wineglasses. The menu was in four languages and I spoke with the waiter in French. I had been thinking about a glass of wine before I went in but the wine was more expensive than the cannelloni I was going to order. Six euro a glass. Not today.

My table was only a few inches away from the couple seated next to me. I didn´t really notice them at first, being busy downloading the last three editions of the Dutch magazine I´ve got a subscription on, but when the man started talking louder and louder I looked at them. At first I thought that they were a couple with a big age difference but listening and looking at them I realized he was probably her son and they were on holiday here. He was extremely rude, told her again and again how wrong she was, how stupid she was, that she didn´t know anything. He opposed everything she said being very clearly extremely annoyed by her. She shyly tried to keep the conversation going, sometimes defending herself but it only made him angrier and more aggressive in his talking. I wanted to say something but I didn´t want to embarrass her. I think they were Swiss, talking in German, probably not realizing I could understand everything. I tried looking at the man a few times but no subtleties would stop him. I tried to eat but I couldn't. So I spoke up and told him he was being aggressive and that he was misbehaving. He shut up, not knowing what to say and the mother, like mothers do, tried to fix it, to take away the attention or maybe she was just happy to talk to somebody else. She asked me how come I was speaking German and where I was from. When I said I was from the Netherlands her son nodded his head and said "yes, of course" in the most derogatory way but I just smiled and he kept his mouth shut for the rest of the conversation. Suddenly it was as if he didn´t exist anymore and the lady, who told me just before she left that she would turn eighty this year, asked me all sorts of questions. I don´t think she fully understood why I was on the road but it didn´t matter. I think she enjoyed our little conversation and I was happy I got her out of being bullied by her son. Verbal aggression is terrible and it is always hard to know if you should interfere. When he left the table she stayed a little bit longer, we said our goodbyes and wished each other happiness and a good life. But I could see how sad she was and it was painful to hear her say that there wasn´t that much left for her, being eighty already.

I dared to order a coffee without looking at the menu, payed, left with a full belly and sat at the steps in front of the cathedral to grease my walking boots. I walked. It was late already, the days are so short and there is so much to do. I had seen the dark clouds already and I walked quickly, trying to stay ahead of them and I did for a bit. I had forgotten I was supposed to leave the old Mediterranean path for a bit to save some time but it didn´t matter. There was lightning and thunder and the mountains became invisible. I joined the cows and then moved to the bridge.

By now I have slept a bit. After I started typing I heard gunshots nearby, it is hunting season and I know I have to be careful when I am off the beaten track. There were sounds in the bushes, probably ducks or an otter. I heard footsteps over my head and decided to switch off all the lights for a bit. There is not much left to do in the dark but sleep. So I slept. And woke up in the moonlight with the Great Hunter back over my head. He makes me feel comfortable. Wherever I am, he is there to watch over me. Not even an earthquake will shake me.

It shook the bridge though and it woke me up. I couldn´t imagine it being anything else and I saw friends in Barcelona posting on their Facebook that they had felt something as well.
I checked my timeline and saw that while I was sleeping a far away friend had send me a smile, kisses and a hug, at that moment, in that order. Those things shake me up, touch me, make me realize how fragile life is, happiness is.

Dragons.

"How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet