The Far Province

The Far Province
May 2021

Galicia is a remote Spanish province – once thought to be the end of the world, it still sometimes feels like the end of the world, a world where one is still at the mercy of nature, her wild waves (it’s no coincidence that the Costa de Morte, the coast of death, is located here) her endless rain and storms and the gigantic piles of cumulus clouds she sends racing across the sky. In times like these, water creeps into your house and makes the windows cry, and with it the cold creeps into your bones and doesn’t leave for weeks and months, and no fire is enough to warm your fingers.

Nature, having invaded your home and your bones, drives you out of your house right into her arms, and you walk along black rivers seamed by shipwrecks and into a forest of dark, wet trees. You pass by houses made of stone that have been abandoned for an eternity, houses in pain, taken over by gravity and ghosts and moss, and on your way back home you pick some pink camellias from the three trees that grow next to the old monastery, that beloved flower only blooming in winter, contradicting the very gloom that brings her to life. Looking up the trees you notice that the blossoms are already yellowing; it is a sign that warmer times are coming soon.

And then, finally, as announced by the dying camellias, spring comes and rewards those who endured winter with fragrant forests, and the dark indigo in the bays turns turquoise, and the clouds become light-weight and white, travelling through the sky like sailing ships.

The strangers on the street are not hiding behind their umbrellas anymore; the sun shining into their faces makes them talkative now, and they start to tell you the secrets of their now blooming country, of what lives in their villages and forests, and in the worlds in between, and they talk about the mystical islands in the South, islands that really exist, although you don’t dare to believe in them.

On days like these, you don’t want to go back home anymore, you almost don’t want to go to the printmaking workshop anymore, where, still, the dark images of winter wait to be brought to light by you.

Those are the days when you don’t want to go home and you almost don’t want to go into the studio anymore, days that almost make you wish you were a flower seller, you want to roam the forests for days, looking for flowers and branches out of which you will make bouquets and wreath which will tell from your walks through the hills, and you want to sell them on the big square, together with the market women, who come down from their gardens on the hills twice a week, carrying baskets full of eggs, home-made cheese and huge loaves of dark bread, and the last lemons of the winter, which are so big that you need two hands to hold them.

For the forest, only the narrow hours between the end of the day and the beginning of the night have been left, you step into a light forest and you leave a dark one.

But you know that the days are getting longer now…

Die Ferne Provinz 

Galizien ist eine abgelegene Provinz in Nordspanien – einst glaubte man, hier läge das Ende der Welt, und manchmal fühlt es sich noch immer so an – eine Welt, in der man der Natur völlig ausgeliefert ist, eine Natur, die ruhelos ist und erratisch, die haushohe Wellen gegen die Küste wirft und Wolkenmassen über den Himmel jagt und als nächtelange Stürme rastlos durch Wälder und Dörfer wühlt, begleitet von endlosem Regen. Es ist kein Zufall, dass die Costa da Morte, die Todesküste, hier liegt, in einem Winter wie diesem muss sie ihren Namen wohl bekommen haben.

An Tagen wie diesen dringt das Wasser durch die klammen Mauern in dein Haus und bringt deine Fenster zum Weinen, und mit dem Wasser kriecht die Kälte in deine Knochen und geht nicht mehr weg, für Wochen und Monate, und kein Feuer ist warm genug, um deine Finger zu wärmen.

Dieselbe Natur, die in dein Haus eingedrungen ist, treibt dich jetzt hinaus aus deinem Haus, direkt in ihre Arme. Du gehst an schwarzen Flüsse entlang, die von abgewrackten Booten gesäumt sind, und durch den Wald voller dunkler Bäume, die, obwohl die Wolken schon weitergezogen sind, immer noch voller Regen sind.

Du gehst an Häusern vorbei, in denen längst niemand mehr wohnt, es sind sterbende Häuser, mit herausgebrochenen Fassaden, Häuser, die im Fallen begriffen sind, bewohnt nur noch von Geistern und Moos und dem ewigen Regen.

Auf dem Rückweg pflückst du einen Strauß pinker Kamelien von den drei Kamelienbäumen, die auf der Straße vor dem alten Kloster wachsen. Die Kamelie, diese wundersame Blüte, die nur im Winter blüht, und die in ihrer Üppigkeit und Fleischlichkeit der Schwermut, in der und in der allein sie gedeiht, widerspricht. Dir fällt auf, dass einige der Blütenblätter bereits am Rand vergilben: Ein Zeichen, dass bald wärmere Zeiten kommen.

Und dann, endlich, wie von den sterbenden Kamelien angekündigt, kommt der Frühling und beschenkt diejenigen, die im Winter ausgeharrt haben, mit duftenden Wiesen und Wäldern, plötzlich ist Licht im Meer, die Sonne kommt an Land, und das dunkle Indigo in den Buchten verwandelt sich in helles Türkis, und die Wolken werden leicht und weiß und ziehen durch den Himmel wie Segelschiffe.

Die Fremden auf der Straße verstecken sich jetzt nicht mehr hinter ihren großen Regenschirmen: Die Sonne, die ihnen ins Gesicht scheint, macht sie gesprächig, und sie erzählen dir die Geheimnisse ihres jetzt blühenden Landes, davon, was in ihren Dörfern und Wäldern lebt und in den Welten dazwischen, und sie erzählen dir von den mystischen Inseln im Süden, die wirklich existieren, aber an die zu glauben du kaum wagst.

An Tagen wie diesen willst du nicht mehr nach Hause gehen, und fast willst du nicht mehr in die Druckwerkstatt gehen, wo, immer noch, dunkle Bilder des Winters darauf warten, von dir ans Licht geholt zu werden.

An diesen Tagen wünschst du dir, eine Blumenverkäuferin zu sein, du willst tagelang durch die Wälder streifen, Blumen und Zweige suchen, aus denen du Sträuße und Kränze bindest, die von deinen Spaziergängen durch die Hügel erzählen, und sie auf dem großen Platz zu verkaufen zusammen mit den Marktfrauen, die zweimal in der Woche von ihren Gärten auf den Hügeln herunterkommen, die Körbe voller Eier bringen, selbstgemachten Käse und riesige Laibe dunkles Brot, und die letzten Zitronen des Winters, die so groß sind, dass du sie in beiden Händen halten kannst. 

Für den Wald sind dir nur die engen Stunden zwischen Tagesende und Nachtbeginn geblieben, du betrittst einen hellen Wald und verlässt einen dunklen.

Aber du weißt, dass die Tage nun länger werden…

Burning island

In nature, green is not a color, green burns everywhere
(Blanca Wiethüchter)

You woke up for a Sunday like all the other Sundays on the peninsula, a Sunday that was like its sky, vast and greyish, a Sunday that only belongs to you, where you stroll around all day near the ocean and at sunset disappear with a book into one of the old bars in the Casco Viejo and have a glass of wine and a piece of tortilla and forget everything around you until the darkness fills the old streets and reminds you that no Sunday is eternal. 

But this Sunday has just been born, and it belongs to you.

You live only a few steps away from the sea. On this day, as you step out, the sky and the ocean are enormous, you walk between them, there is nobody else in this great nothing, just some ships far away. 

You walk on a mural near Praia das Lapas, the small beach between the Aquarium and the Tower of Hercules, thinking that you are too old to walk on murals, thinking that you are never too old to walk on murals, when you notice it: You notice that the grey of the sky is not the same grey as usual, that it has a strange orange hue. Why do you feel so hot on this October day?
You think of these enormous Sahara storms that every couple of years carry sand up until the Alps and soak the country in an intense foreign hue of orange, when for a few days, the Alps share their sky with Africa. 

Later, at night, some friends invite you to the cinema next to the port. You watch Suspiria, terrifying and beautiful. And then, when you step out of the cinema, it rains ashes on your heads. The sky is completely black now, there are no stars, and the sailboats in the port are softly clanking, just as every night. What is happening? 

You didn’t know? your friends ask, you didn’t hear about the fire? 

You go have some beers in a bar in the Casco Viejo, sitting outside between the trees, and thick chunks of ashes fall on your arms from the sky. You hold them in your hand, you weigh their fragile shape and ask yourself what they once might have been – a leaf, a branch, a log from a house? 

As you step inside the bar, you see the television blazing in a corner. There is a map of Galicia, ocean and forests, spangled with little orange fire pictograms. It looks beautiful and scary. On the map, you find yourself on an island between fire and water. 

You remember your orange morning, and you realize that you did not first learn about this fire from your friends, nor from television: You knew it before, you experienced it from afar. You never saw that fire, but there, by the ocean, you felt it in your bones. Your skin felt the sky that was burning far away, and what the fire had eaten was raining onto you. Your body knew before you knew.

Only a few times in life we get grazed by the notion of being an animal, for one second, a few times in a lifetime, sometimes, when you break through the margins of the parallel world that humans have created for themselves, that synthetic world of safety on whose margins natural disasters, horrible accidents and the improbabilities of statistics are waiting.

It can happen when you get lost in a Canyon in an Arabian desert, or above the Atlantic ocean when turbulence wakes you in the plane at night, or when a thunderstorm surprises you when you reach the top of a mountain late in the day, or when you’re on a small boat and loose sight of the shore. 

It happens when you are exposed to the elements and you realize that you are an element as well, nothing but. When you, for a moment, lose hold the thread of Ariadne which, you like to believe, leads you through the labyrinth of life, that succession of events, because you are an inhabitant of the world of statistics and probabilities, of regulations and insurances, the walls are made of stone, you can’t fall out of the frame, but you didn’t know there were abysses in the labyrinth, but yes, there are, and you fall and you realize that you’ve always been falling, that you can’t cling on that thread. Your hands are empty now, something is burning on your mind, and now, now you are an animal. 

If you have been living the life of a metaphor, the life of cities and streets, now you are real. Now you have been given birth to, in another world, the world beyond good and bad, the world that is. A world that seems harsh and cruel to you, a world of injustice, but really it is a world of justice. 

For some people, this falling becomes the moment of their death. Other ones almost die. And some just feel for the first time the fragility, and with it, the preciousness, of their lives.  But all of us, before we die, we become an animal, we learn what it means to be an animal. 

We might have led a life of lies, but we all become real before we die.

You slip back on our human dress, you go back to our house, to your bed and sleep, you sleep while the flames stand high around you. You know that someone will take care of you, because as opposed to the animal, who knows what it knows, you have a belief: humans have the fire brigade, and they have god, and this is our great comfort, even though – and we like to forget this – these two entities sometimes do seem to have opposite intentions. 

I slept well during these days of the fire, but something in me did not. It was the animal inside me, locked between water and fire, that stayed awake all night to sniff the burnt air and to be alive, while I was asleep elsewhere. In the middle of the city, without leaving it, you are thrown out of the city and thrown into a forest, a burning one. 

I still sometimes dream of that night where I became animal, and of that burning forests that I later stepped into, and they were green again, they smelled like life, but everything that smells like life smells like death, too, and now the flowers and the trees have become more fragile and more precious, because you know that these flowers that bloom can wither slowly or burn fast. 

Image: Lanzallamas (flamethrower) aquatint etching. Available here

The arrival of the Buraq

Sometimes there are things that come to us, from the outside or the inside, and stay with us for some time – in some cases forever. Thoughts, words, sounds, stories, creatures. They occupy us and our thoughts; they become the horses we ride in our dreams. In my case, it is the winged horse that I have been riding for some time: The Buraq. 

I remember where it came from – I saw it on a painted tray in the dining room of a house in Lahore. It was a primitive painting, painted with primary colors – bright red, yellow, green – in the style of Pakistani truck art, which itself is a universe to explore.

There it was, flying in a deep indigo sky spangled with delicate, transparent white stars, each brushstroke a ray of light, there it was, the beautiful Buraq, with its horse body decorated with golden jewelry, with its impossible wings and a dreamy face, flying forever in the square sky on the tray. It was marvelous. 

This is how I found the Buraq*, this mystical creature on whose back the prophet Mohamed rode through the skies to the Al Aqsa Mosque** in Jerusalem on what is known as the Night Journey.

I’ve seen the most precious miniature paintings in the galleries of the Lahore Museum, noble women flying kites under the stars in nights long gone, Hindu warriors fighting colorful and intricate wars against spiritual beasts, medieval princesses and princes mesmerized by early fireworks, I’ve seen the archaic smiles of the first Buddhas in Peshawar and in an antique shop in Islamabad I fell for a tiny portrait of Mumtaz Mahal painted on an oval piece of ivory – but the Buraq stood out of all the treasures.

I was so fascinated by it that later I commissioned a Buraq tray for myself in the same workshop, where a group of men painted all sorts of objects with dazzling and narcotic-smelling colors, and when they gave it to me after a week, we all noticed that the painter had given the Buraq my face – which was curious because the painter and I had never met. 

So I know where the Buraq came from. But still sometimes I ask myself why it stays with me and makes me paint it over and over. Where does it carry me? As clear as it is that these images want to tell us something, as unclear is the language in which the images are speaking to us, a language which, the more we try to grasp it with the clarity of language, withdraws into the nebulous, the unseizable. But unseizable does not mean incomprehensible.

Still, it’s hard to tell what they want to tell us. Some are too blunt not to be placed, and I also like these. Others reveal themselves in retrospect only, when all falls into place. And sometimes, other people see things in my artworks that I cannot see, because I am too close to them. And sometimes one simply enjoys this wandering wondering, where arrival is not a category, just like it isn’t a category in a dance.

Some things don’t want to be understood; they exist is beyond the duality of question and answer. And so, the Buraq remains part of a family of things that have a meaning not in the sense of something to be understood rationally, but to be felt, like music, which is a language we understand in a way that makes our concept of “understanding” obsolete. There are some things the head doesn’t know, but the heart knows. It’s a meaning that is talking to a part of our being whose beauty lies in its evasiveness and its darkness. It is hard, impossible to capture, and it is not supposed to be captured – just like a winged horse. 

The Buraq aquatint etching is available here.

______________________________________________

*Its name is etymologically linked to Arabic barq, meaning “light”, “bright”, or “emitting light” or the Middle Persian barag, “riding beast”.
** Also called the far mosque, about whose spiritual nature Rumi has written a beautiful poem

Forbidden trees and nameless flowers

It’s the first of May, and you have a coffee on the square and then go for a walk into the forest. It is already late, four o’clock. 
You step into the forest and into the fragrance of the eucalyptus that welcomes you like a hug from a loved one. You breathe in, but it feels like breathing out.
You love the eucalyptus, but you also feel a bit guilty about it. Because you know it’s a bad tree, a tree that causes wildfires. But how can a tree be bad. It’s just a migrant, like you. And it’s just living its truth, like you do. Like you try to do. 

The fern that seams the forest path now stands so high that it almost reaches your collarbone. You walk up Talai and across the hills to Armea. You love the sound of these places almost as much as you love the smell of the eucalyptus trees. You walk through Talai and Armea, and one part of the enjoyment of going there is their beautiful names and to have the occasion to think them, to say them, to feel them, to live them, now I am in Talai, now I am in Armea. Talai and Armea, in the hills, silent houses with shut windows and empty flower gardens here and there, and vegetable gardens where sometimes you meet an old woman bent under the sun, and always, at some point, like an explosion, the hysterical bark of an invisible dog behind a fence that one day, you are sure, will give you a heart attack. 

One path, a secret path right through the forest, has become overgrown, and you can’t walk there anymore. It’s a path you remember well, and also with whom you walked there, seven years ago, in those nights where the forest was a dark book full of ephemeral and precious moments, where you watched the shooting stars above the trees and saw the fox flashing through the thicket and where you ripped your favorite silk dress in the thorns of the blackberry bushes and you didn’t care. 

You walk down San Xiao. You know that this means Saint Julian in Galego, but you also know that it must mean something in Chinese. You become curious, and you look it up, it means lots of things, but it means nothing to you and your green hills. 
On the way, you collect a bouquet of wild mint, forget me not, and other flowers whose names you don’t know. You plan to look their names up, you always plan it. But you never do it. One part of you wants to know everything, but there is another part of you that finds pleasure in being surrounded by nameless things. 

The forest ends for you where you encounter the first people, and you put your mask back on. A few corners later, there are drunkards, drunken men without masks, screaming across the street. It’s the first of May, and it’s Saturday, and the bars and cafes are crammed with people. It’s seven now, and people are having their party night early, while the sun is still high, because at nine, all bars have to close.  

You go home because that’s what you do when you are tired. You replace the withering bouquet on the wooden chest with today’s flowers. You realize that every day, your home becomes more forest, more meadow, more mountain.

The wreath of laurel and mimosa in your living room, the white flowers in your bathroom, the perfect little eucalyptus wreath above your bed, a gift from the friend who taught you how to wind wreaths. You look out of the window, where you see the grey walls of the inner courtyard. 

You want to go outside again – 

_______________________________________

Ser Silvestre is a miniature etching inspired by the forests of Galicia. it is part of the series The Far Province, inspired by Galician mythology. It is available in my shop.

Countermagic

Countermagic

1. Countermagic is the name of this etching and also of the album by Nym I’ve been listening to up and down last week while working on this and other etchings. I hadn’t heard this marvellous, strangely satisfying word for a while and I still keep turning it around in my head. Aside from witch tales, the term “magic” now is mostly (and I’m also guilty of that) used and possibly misused to describe something wonderful.
When I was a child, I did not associate the term magic first with something wonderful (it was that scary element which made the word fascinating), as an adult, I definitely do. Now, when something is called “magic”, we know it must be amazing and we generally don’t associate it with something scary. It has lost its ambiguity to an extend that now it’s even used to sell things.
And so I like how the term countermagic breaks and expands this narrow meaning of “magic” how we use it today and brings it back to its full force and its wholeness, which contains good but also evil, light but also darkness. And funnily enough, in this sense, the term “countermagic” becomes countermagic to the term “magic” in the sense of the narrowed concept the latter has become.

2. A while ago in the little Spanish village I live I was waiting for the traffic light to turn green and on the other side of the street there was an old lady waiting. She was holding two terriers on a leash, one standing in front of the other and blocking my view to the second one until that one stuck out his head, so that from my perspective for a short (and magic, here we go!) moment it looked like a two-headed terrier, and that was the inspiration for that two-headed creature in this etching.

Countermagic is available in my shop