Searching for Gaudi

Searching for Gaudi

Recently I took the trip of a lifetime. I guess
thats what this is, and at its end, after the story is told, the line will
hopefully mean something. You cannot tell of the trip of a life at its
beginning, where inception holds its discovery in the boundless measure of its
unrealized years. You must start at that point where the poignancy of the
meandering path of time has its hold on you, and you wake from the dream of
redundancy, that needle edge where everything you came to believe meant
nothing, suddenly means everything. For me, it came in Barcelona.

 The name
of the city still spills off my tongue as any poets plea of words could ever
hope to inspire. How do I tell you of this city? Where do I begin the lyric
that will make you understand? I must, for the sake of my sanity, start in
redundancy.

This was supposed to be an extravagant vacation,
a surprise given by my wife on the eve of my retirement. For her Im sure she
hoped that the trip and exploration of different cultures would appease my
troubled soul and release me from the arduous loneliness of each blank page I
have faced. She explained that we would be travelling with another couple,
lifetime close friends that she trusted would add a sense of companionship both
for her as well as me. In the spring of 2015 we would land in Barcelona, where
after renting an apartment for a week, would explore the city as well as rent a
car and travel the countrysides of Spain, France and Italy.

I waited impatiently as any child might, counting
the days to our departure. We finally left on April eighth and touched down in
Barcelona the next day.

 The
apartment we rented was quaint, tiny by my western standards, with a two-burner
flat top stove, no oven, limited hot water and just enough room that defined
friendships. I loved it. The smallish third floor balcony overlooked the
bustling activity of Los Ramblas, a major street in the Gothic quarter. At any
given hour it was steeped with the voices of pedestrian tourists shouting words
heavy with their homeland accents. As the day waned and the street lamps
ignited I could see from my perch and spy on the night-time stumble of
partiers, hookers, scurrying police and sidewalk hawkers. With the gift of jet
lag, and unable to sleep, I watched them all for the entire first day.

On the second day we began our walking tour,
sampling local foods and shopping at the very large open market. We purchased
fresh fish, a species unknown to us, but did so based on the contagious
enthusiasm of the female fish monger behind the counter. The market was
saturated with the convection of warring aromas. In one alley I was assaulted
with the smells of fish kidnapped from their waters, tripe freestanding on
wooden tables and slow moving crabs oblivious to the ice beneath their bellies.
In another I was perfumed by the essence of ground spices, melted formed
chocolates, candy covered pastries, hanging cured meats and coffee.

After depositing our items in the apartments
stunted refrigerator we visited nearby cafes, trying our hands at tapas, while
at the same time tying them to the unknown language, spitting sentences
deciphered from the few words we had come to learn. Most of what we said was
misunderstood, and we laughed when our orders arrived as the same mysterious
elements in which they were requested. That evening we strolled the Gothic
quarter, enthralled at being immersed in the atmosphere of timeless age,
feeling the buildings and shaded narrow streets crush us in proximity. The
experience left us feeling claustrophobic, the few ants among the many,
entranced and encircled by the facades 
of churches and sin, poetry and song, food and wines. We were, at the
end of the second night, the excessive breach of the unwritten eleventh commandment.

Redundancies.

I apologize. But as I said earlier, everything
that you may have thought was unimportant in your life sometimes becomes very
clear in its relevance. I can only surmise it is the same for everyone who
accidentally holds their eyes open for the extra millisecond it takes. For
those first two days I was the typical tourist, keeping to the caricature of
what was expected, staying in the waked dream as I had done on so many
occasions. Until the third day.

Before i tell you of it I must first explain
somehow of where I was. Be assured and comforted that this is not a lamentation
of new found faith, or the tired diatribe of some sidewalk zealot spitting God
and the end of days. I dont know if I believe in God, well, not the way most
people do. Maybe my resistance to the divine idea has been tainted by what I
have come to know of organized religion and the crush of power they have held
on both history and its people. Perhaps, for me anyway, there exists in my mind
a paradox of faiths leaders. It comes when they speak of creation and
forgiveness, while at the same time, bind, judge and hang the outspoken
creativity of humanity.

But that is the left side of my brain. The right
side is in contrast and there has always been a battle within me to find the
balance. I do believe in the divine spark. I have seen it, lived it and
breathed it. I know that a simple word, an idea, can rise in its flame and
spread through a house. From there, that same small spark can be fanned from
the bellows of wordsmiths and artists until it rages in strength from the home
to the village, to the country and region. More than once it has left
continents in the rubble and ash of change. Wether it is war or civilization
redone, flowerbeds or crematoriums, a childs giggle or the tortured scream of a
mothers loss, there is something both tragic and beautiful in humanity. For me,
that spark, is the truest touch, the blessed condemned thumbprint of the
divine.

So, here we are, the third day, when the rock
was rolled away and my eyes stayed open for that extra millisecond that
captured the new light and cleaved it from a very old day.

That morning we woke, showered and began sharing
suggestions on what to visit, see and experience. Sometime after my second
strong and thick coffee, my male counterpart Lain turned from the sink where he
was drying dishes and broke into the conversation. He informed us that there
was a church he would like to see. He told us that the architect was a man
named Antonio Gaudi, that the church had been under construction for the past
one hundred and twenty years and was still not completed. His plea to visit yet
another church was delivered with a different level of enthusiasm than we were
used to, so in the interest of peace both his wife and mine agreed to include
it in our day. Personally I held no interest in what he was describing. For me,
up until that point, it was simply another church, another pompous decree of
statuesque wealth built on the rape and poverty of its followers. But I also
agreed, feigning enthusiasm to fit in with the four of us, as I dressed
casually and bored, saddened at what I was sure to be waste of a day.

Redundancies. The bus ride crammed with locals
and tourists. The smells of Barcalona when the doors opened and I stepped to
the sidewalk. The stench of sewer steaming from the grates. The slow shuffle of
the morning crowds. The young man on rollerskates and wearing a headset who
almost sent me tripping into oncoming traffic. The habitual reach inside my
pocket everytime someone brushed against me, just to assure myself that my
wallet was safe and my mistrust of people was still intact. The unmoving dog,
splayed against the building and away from the sun, as much oblivious to the
passing people as they were of him. The distant police siren screeching amid
the ringing church bell.

Redundancies. The long line up that snaked its
Disney distance three quarters way around the building, covered in planks of
hording that efficiently blocked my view of everything except the animated
sentinals of  people in front of me. The
journey only took a mere thirty-five minutes, but to me it felt like as long as
the exodus from Egypt.

At the ticket kiosk the girl told us, in that
rehearsed tone of tired politeness, that the noon showing was full and the next
available tickets were for two-fifteen. We bought the tickets and set forth to
find something that would keep us occupied for the next three hours. Up until
that point I had seen nothing.

We walked a few blocks further, down a side
street and then another, until we found an outdoor cafe that gave us a perfect
stage to view the people as they passed by. It was decided that while our wives
had decided to spend some time shopping, Lain and I would remain in the cafe
and wait for them. We were both, I think, privately though it was never said,
overjoyed at their decision.

I ordered a cognac, leaned back in my chair and
breathed a tell-tale sigh of relief as the stress left me and freedom came.

I reached for my glass and as it rose, so too
did my eyes, open for the extra millisecond it took to murder all the
redundancies in my life. I first looked to the roadway, then to the people
moving across the street, higher yet to the space above their heads where the
storefronts and buildings spilled shade to the sidewalks, the many of them
rising from the floor of their concrete ocean to stand firmly in the noon sun.
And then my hand froze, the glass halfway to my lips.

At a distance of five blocks, towering over
everything on its earth, was the 'Segraddia de Familia' and the vision of
Gaudi.

My tongue turned to leather, bleached and
tanned, dry as any cobblers shoe.

Beside me I was dimly aware of Lain, speaking
french to someone at the neighbouring table.

I suspect the waiter came once more, but I
couldnt see him, nor hear whatever words he spoke.

I was transfixed with what I was seeing, so much
so that my breath was held, captive in my throat and compressed, like a motors
piston waiting for its ignition so movement would be possible.

Speechless.

I looked to the spires climbing into the sky, unfinished
yet beginning to embrace the underbelly of the thin line of clouds. I could
make out the workers, anchored by web like lines and hanging against the face,
appearing like drops of dew clinging to the ends of their webs thread. The
inset of statues, the pointed story of each rushed into my mind. It was not
just a colossus of creation, but an exclamation of the human artistic soul. And
it was unfinished. A hundred and twenty years of plans, interpretation, faith
and its judgement stood at the cusp of completion. To say, in the limits of my
existence and vocabulary, that I was mesmerized would be an understatement and
childish.

I dont know when it was, but I felt Lains hand
on my shoulder as he said, "I see you have found Gaudis beautiful
mess."

I couldnt answer him properly. His statement
bothered me as a simplistic impression of the conundrum before me. It was as if
someone, anyone, were standing next to me, staring at the Mona Lisa and
commentating on what nice hair she had.

For the next hour and a half I sat in silence,
trying my best to segregate individual parts and gain the definition and
clarity of each. As the time approached I found myself in an impatient
enthusiasm to move closer, to walk through its doors and feel my fingers on the
stone, to brush my palm across the skirted marble of Madonna, to reach and
caress the crucifixion, to finally ring the bell within me. I counted the
minutes with each individual exhale I took, counting down until the women
returned.

WE paid our bill, and I truly tried my best not
to run, but in my rush I dodged and weaved my body around the turtles in my
midst until I was back at the ticket kiosk, waiting again with the new dance of
me silently firing through my veins, as the casual stroll of the others finally
brought them to me.

Ten minutes later I was walking up the steps of
the "Segradda de Familia" and ran headlong into the purgatory of art,
where rationality marries its unappreciated jealous partner.

I stopped in the arched entrance and tried to
take it in, all the impossibilty, the pretentious violence of what I believed
to be a troubled mind, and felt the honest beauty of it. On each side of the
massive doorway were sculpted scenes recessed into the walls. They depicted the
glorious birth and judgement, the horror of Herrod, the weapons of nails
defined as much as swords and ignorance. At the far left a Roman soldier was
holding an infant raised high in his left hand, while his right held a
centurion blade. At his feet another infant lay lifeless, and although it
depicted only two, I felt the many. Clinging to his right thigh was a kneeling
mother with her face upturned. I will forever be haunted by the artists hand
that captured the soldiers contorted anger, and the lamentations of the robed
mother at his feet, her silent wailing imprisoned, jailing forever in stone
both her anguish and the fleeting seconds of faith. I listened close to the
whisper of her, over these centuries, and knew her salvation was there.

To the right was a another scene, of violent
crucifixion as i have never experienced. MY eyes travelled upward, to the
abstract spires, melting concrete and stone, to the curviture of lines and the
cradled sandstone grapes and fruit that clung to the walls. I stepped into the
doorway, feeling drunk with discovery, humbled and tiny, discarded as the most
insignificant speck.I cannot explain in one lifetime, the essence that gathered
me on the marble floors of Gaudi. There was just too much.

But the most important aspect of everything I
saw, was the light. I viewed apses and arches, physics, design and sound,
harmonic acoustics and elevated choirs. There was no peace in me I could find,
running from corner to corner, through doorways and around pillars that rose in
gentle music, designed to appear like trees completed with knotted elbows,
living each day by the nourishment provided by the song of Gaudi.

And then the light came.

Believe me when I tell you, that there is some
light that you cannot lie in. Like the dark, with only a candles lighted wick,
when your lover asks you whats on your mind. Like the blinding flourescent  light of a surgery room that cannot disguise
the resigned nod of the surgeon. The morning sun that breaks through your
window with its promise of an end to a bad dream. The dirty greasy light of a
hotel room, when their is no one at your side. Or the light in your eyes, when
you first see the same in the glee of your children.

Or in the light of Gaudi, streaming through the
stained glass, and enveloping you from your soul to your feet.

Sometimes, in the totality of experience, in the
trip of a lifetime, the most poignant moment lasts but a millisecond.

I walked by the rows of pews, around the
pillars, vaulted ceilings that rained down frescos

and stepped into the light. The audio guide was telling
me of his plan and vision, how the colors he used were representations of
water, earth and sky, of sunsets and sunrises, with the apex of each window
left blank to better exemplify the puritity of the white light of heaven. The
stained glass was extrordinary in its complexity, bleeding its transition from
deep blues to green, then from harvest orange to violet, and finally, deep
umber to blood red. The windows stretched close to the highest arches, and each
held thousands of stained panes each inset in their place of assigned hue. I
stood in awe at the genius of the puzzle, the gift of craftmanship it took to
give form to such vision that even the most simplest of minds would bathe in it
and know their share of greatness, that the gift was unique and given to the
appreciation of the uniqueness of being human.

The voice in my ear was explaining and
paraphrasing what Gaudi had said, that too much light can blind you as much as
the dark, and how the churches function was to provide balance and peace to every
soul, and further, what steps he had taken to ensure the balance of his light
and colour guided the faithful to their knees, their surrender eased in the
humble light amid the burning praise of God. I was standing in the aisle,
gazing upwards, listening to the recorded voice that a short time ago, would
have been redundant, when the sun dipped. In the waning hours of that late
afternoon the sunlight weakened and streamed through the stained glass,
dappling spots of green, orange and reds around my feet. I stared in disbeleif
as the air around me changed hue, enveloping me and those beside me in the most
calming beautiful expression of faith as I could ever hope to experience. I can
stay here forever I thought, happy and content, if I could only hang on to the
second. But the taped voice ended and the sun dipped lower and it was time to
leave. As I walked