Ten piedad para el ciego; no hay una pena mas profunda que ser ciego en Andalucia

"Ten piedad en el ciego; no hay una pena mas profunda que ser ciego en Granada."
"Take pity on the blind man; there is no deeper shame than to be blind in Granada."

The same really could be true of Andalucia.

Surrealism, the famous art and literary movement had its start here in Andalucia, and it is no accident. The Spanish relationship with reality has been touch and go since the time of Don Quixote, but modern Spain all the more so. To the untrained eye, Spain appears as an undifferentiated pillar of Western Europe: Another faded glory integrating itself yearly more and more deeply into the Holy Trinity of Modern Europe: The EU, Xenophobia, and Secularism. However, here on the ground, I have to admit I feel like reality is much thinner here. After being here longer than a week, you start to get the sensation that things aren't really as they seem. After another week, you begin to have the feeling that you're REALLY missing something. Soon, there's a quiet voice warning you that if you look closely, the facade could crumble around any corner at any moment. A lot of the sensation has to do with the realization that Spain isn't a real country.

Not real in the sense of France or the U.S. Spain is an amalgam of several different petty kingdoms, cultures, and languages. Even 500 years after unification, the bruising experiences of the Civil War, the dictatorship, the Inquisition, and the various uprisings, insurgencies, and foreign invasions that have been the sad, long story of this country since the Roman period have left a tell-tale mark on this land. No place more so than Andalucia, the poorest corner of Western Europe. Andalucia, where New Christians were especially targeted by the Inquisition, based in Cordoba in fact, and pork-eating was seen as a social declaration of your faith. In this place, where out of my window is a Carthusian monastery that was a former mosque, and I pass beneath the shadow of one of the mightiest memory palaces in the world every morning. The surreal is going to the Grand Mosque and being struck by the absurdity of graceful Muslim arches being adorned by plaster cherubs. Even within the walls of the Alhambra, the heart of the complex was razed and rebuilt as a palace for the Emperor Charles V. Not only is it jarring to see such an ostentatiously neo-classical edifice in what is obviously a Muslim structure, but it doesn't mitigate the sense of something amiss to find script from the Qur'an adorned on every wall.

The Grand Mosque is a good metaphor for Andalucians. The polish and veneer of Castillianess is not only completely unconvincing, but even a casual glance reveals the ineffectiveness at the attempts to remake Andalucia into just another version of Castille and Leon. It did not end even by the 20th century. Whereas in the 1500's, the good Catholics of Seville, Toledo, and Granada had to wonder if their neighbors were secret Jews and Muslims, in the time of the Franco dictatorship, the modern religions (fascism and communism) did battle, with the good old Guardia Civil wondering if the pedestrian who had just spat in their direction was a secret Republican sympathizer. (3 guesses which province Franco drew the most support from, and its definitely not here. I have never seen so much anti-Fascist graffiti in my entire life). It is telling that the hero of Granada isn't a general; its a gay playwright from the 1920's-30's who was killed by a fascist Falangist follower of Franco. The even named the airport after him!

(Is it any mistake that Don Quixote's windmills aren't in Castille and Leon, far to the north and the traditional heart of the Kingdom of Spain, but instead on the road between Granada and Madrid?)

Anyway, enough ruminating.

I wanted to share some thoughts with my readers on where I'm living; these past 2 weekends, I did some traveling around the province, to Jaen, Cadiz, and Jerez de la Frontera. Jaen, I doubt you've ever heard of. It deserves its obscurity. Cadiz is a bit more famous, as it has the distinction of both being the oldest continuously inhabited city in Western Europe, and as being the place where Columbus first set sail for the New World. Jerez de la Frontera is famous not because of history but because of its very name: most people in the English world know it as Sherry, the home of the eponymous wine. Additionally, Jerez is the home of Flamenco, and the famous Andalucian stallions. However, the "de la Frontera" part is important too. For 250 years, Jerez was on the border between the Castillian state and the rump state of Granada, the last Muslim emirate in Europe. Thus, if you travel in that region of Andalucia, almost every town bears the suffix "de la Frontera"= of the border.

I'll give a more detailed account of my travels tomorrow. Also, dear readers, this Thursday, I will once more be paying homage to Catalonia and I will fly to Barcelona Thanksgiving night.