Spain's Secular Sacraments

España

   "Well, I never been to Spain," chants Three Dog Night.  Was also true of us, so we went.  The tour we were on centered on Andalusia and included a trip to Morocco.  Therefore we ventured not only to an unvisited country but to a new continent.  And then we had a couple of days in Madrid before heading home.

    You're never allowed to come back from a trip uninformed and unillumined so I asked my brain what it learned and it answered me this: religious identity in a "Catholic country" may weaken but the last practices to wane are performances and expressions that partake of ritual. I choose to call these "secular sacraments."  The ones that stood out for me were the flamenco dance, the bullfight, and the art masterworks at the museum temples, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and the Prado.

     Flamenco is a dance for the hale and hearty and the fleet of foot. It is apasionado--unremitingly so.  In the performance I attended I was struck by one dancer in particular who was dramatically pregnant.  It slowed her down not at all.  And when she wasn't dancing she was singing with a volume that would tumble a wall.  There is an unusual stylized eroticism in flamenco that some people see carried over into the corrida de toros.  I do not.  The bullfight is bathos and brutality.  It has declined in popularity in recent years and been banned altogether in many places in Spain. That's all to the good.  The mythology and faux artistry surrounding this slaughter has been abetted over the years by writers and artists who tried to make high art out of a crude chthonic bloodlust.  Hemingway, of course, interminably so, and Lorca in his turgid and puerile  "Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias."  Picasso was rapt as well, especially in his early pastels but at least he could see the bull and horse destruction, and he used that in a complex way in "Guernica."

     We heard a ludicrous lecture by an old toreador who lauded the mystique of himself and his mates.  No more significant ritual (according to him) in the whole cultural landscape, than the killing of the bull. Pathetic. 

     And then the art, specifically the paintings.  I was overwhelmed by "Guernica."  There is such a difference between mass-produced reproductions and the original work.  As we sought to make our way to the room in which Picasso's huge masterwork is displayed, I noticed that the area we were still a distance from had people grouped only on one side.  Of course.  They were focused on the other wall because on it hung the canvas.  You almost gasp when you see it.  It is merciless in its depiction of the intensity of suffering inflicted by war. 
     Everyone viewed the painting in silence.  The canvas was flanked by two museum staff who halted people who tried to get too close.  There are always those who think they are entitled to special access. 

     Later, in the Prado, we viewed paintings by Velasquez and Goya. These Spanish artists preceding Picasso nonetheless are joined with the modern in rendering the rending of crucifixion. But their focus is on man crucifying God while Guernica sees man crucifying man.  Visual art embodies its own kind of "literacy."  You read the text of a painting by attending to compositional elements of color, form, placement, and countenances caught in a state of calm or conflict.  Either can be revealing, depending on the overall gestalt. 

     These "secular sacraments" conform to the definition of "an outward sign of an inward grace" (or "disgrace" in the case of the bullfight).  They are way stations on the trek to transcendence.  Either that or "our long fool's-errand to the grave," as Housman termed it.  Take your pick. 

Northern Africa





   

     If Spain both meets and mocks your expectations, Morocco will leave you dumbfounded. A different continent and a different world.  Whether up close and personal with the camels, riding on their backs, or moving through the medina, the old marketplace, you feel you have no clue about how to tune in to "a world elsewhere."   Of course, that's why you're there.  To enter into that which you do not know, and by doing so, to grow.