From the air over northern Spain, I see a land composed primarily of brown soil and luminous golden vegetation.
But as I step onto this terrain, I begin, quite gradually, to be overtaken by the presence of Spain’s mysteries – mysteries that disguise themselves, so cleverly hovering just above Spain’s arcane surface, that one is compelled to shed ones temporal cloth solely to give opportunity to acknowledge what is there, has always been there.
Unlike northern Europe, where the mysteries have been overlain, perhaps fatally buried, beneath logic and Freud and rules of procedure and engagement, Spain’s mysteries, unencumbered by such artificial cloaks, languorously swirl around one’s feet. They laugh at ones inability to touch them. “I am here steaming from the earth,” they tantalizingly, yet coyly announce.
I offer homage to this presence, acknowledge its viability. I am overwhelmed by the possibility of this liberating phenomenon – the notion of being able to move about with unfettered stealth and incisive vision. But my eyes still see only brown and gold.
I drop to this contemptuous earth and grovel on it. My arms and legs and face feeling its roughness – its merciless bite. I taste it, beseech it. I ask why it brought me here? Why it made me? Why it gave me words: to ponder, to puzzle over; words such as land and earth?
Why words, made of sounds and squiggles that combine solely to taunt one with questions, such as the meaning of brown and gold?
Words of value, have value, mean value, describe value; the color of one’s life. Am I brown or gold? Brown and gold?
Did I live my words or merely fling all of those misbegotten shapes into the ill-used space in front of my face, just so that I could not be seen?
Spain’s mysteries, cultivated in the aged mists of Christianity, Islam, and Judea, and the vast land that harbored them all, for a time, chuckle at my twitching face.
How can life be other than a mystifying joke one plays on oneself, discovering words only to realize, too late, their false and empty torment? Brown and gold. Earth and value.