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

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 – 

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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.

The Mariscadora

The mariscadora has learned to speak the language of the sea early; her fingers have read thousands of shells, her hands have searched the unspeakable mud until they started to read signs in it. The mariscadora is a farmer, a farmer of the sea; she sows her fields and harvests them: her fruit are called almejas and berberechos.. 

Unlike the man, who proves himself against longitudes and latitudes, she is driven by curiosity – and curiosity is a form of love of life: She learns to read the moon and the tide; she reads the holes in the mud, she now knows where the shells hide; she bows under the sun, the whole day, her feet and her hands in the sea. Her body becomes the bridge between the land and the sea. She walks in the mud against an eternal, untouchable horizon. Often there is rain, and almost always there is wind. Treasure hunting is hard work. 

The mariscadora is never alone, she is always surrounded by sisters who have arrived with the low tide. When her bucket is full, she helps to fill her sister’s. Mariscar – it’s a work that only can be done by hand, and is done best with lending each other a hand. 

Where her man, navigating through the unknown, lets himself be guided by the stars, she turns into the moon. The sun and the wind draw lines and light in her face; the light and the salt make her what she is; a being of two worlds. During the day, she is the sister of the fish; tied to the rhythm of the tide, she only returns to the land when the sea rises: She has another garden there, high up on the rocks, where another kind of fruit grows.

And so she spends her days, always under the open sky – and what would be her brown eyes, if they didn’t turn blue like the ocean every day, and what would be her hair if she didn’t let the wind play with it?
Like the tide she’s moving back and forth between the land and the sea, a rhythm that finds an echo in the songs she sings, sometimes, when the wind blows goosebumps over her arms.
The songs she sings you don’t hear on the stages of this world and also not in the taverns on the island. They are songs without beginning and without end, songs that are call and response, the continuation of a rhythm that appeared somewhere, the tearing up of clouds or a gust of wind, the call of a bird, the leaping of a fish, the opening of a sea shell.
These are songs that belong to nobody, that belong only to themselves. Being an expression of the moment, they themselves become the moment, the becoming of a nameless sensation.
Songs that are picked up by the wind and carried out to the sea, far out, where they finally die away, already inaudible, and where sound mingles with light and water in myriads of particles. The wind carries the song away from the mariscadora, but nothing in nature is ever lost. Also the invisible, the intangible, the inaudible like the scattered song of the mariscadora writes itself into the big circuit; it gets dissolved, like everything else, in the swirls of the great song of the world.
It will reappear for us, that song, somewhen, in fragments, maybe in the first cry of a newborn on the island, or in a light, soft swell that wakes somebody who fell asleep in a boat in the port, and it will, without doubt, flashes up in the eyes of a young sailor far out on the sea who, for the first time after many weeks, in the first light of the sun, sees the coast again.

(I learned about the mariscadoras at the Illa de Arousa staying at La Platanera, the artist residency of Andrea Rodriguez, who comes from a family of mariscadoras)

The image below is a monotype I made inspired by the mariscadoras. You can watch a print reveal here.

The Mariscadora is available as fine art print.

Die Mariscadora

Die Mariscadora hat früh gelernt, die Sprache des Meeres zu sprechen. Tausende von Muschelschalen haben ihre Finger aufgelesen, bis sie sie lesen konnte, und sie hat den stummen Schlamm durchsucht, bis sie begann, die Zeichen in ihm zu verstehen.
Von ihrer Mutter und ihrer Großmutter hat sie gelernt, den Mond und die Gezeiten zu lesen, sie liest die winzigen Löcher im Schlamm, die keine Löcher sind, sondern Fenster, Münder, Augen, Kontaktstellen zu Außenwelt für die Muschel, die im Dunkel des Schlammes schläft und wächst und darauf wartet, oder vielleicht auch nicht, dass sie gepflückt wird von den Fingern der Mariscadora, die jetzt wissen, wo sich die Muscheln verstecken.
Die Mariscadora ist eine Bäuerin, eine Bäuerin des Meeres. Der Strand ist ihr Feld, das sie bestellt, und die Früchte, die sie erntet, heißen Almeja und Berberecho, Venusmuschel und Herzmuschel. Anders als ihr Mann, der sich jede Nacht selbst beweist, indem er sich mit Längengraden und Breitengraden anlegt, ist sie von Neugier getrieben, und Neugier ist eine Form der Lebenslust, eine Form der Liebe zum Leben.
Das Feld am Meer kennt keine Jahreszeiten, nur Gezeiten. Sobald Ebbe herrscht, erscheint, wie ein Naturgesetz, die Mariscadora, mit ihren hohen Stiefeln, Eimer und Rechen in der Hand. Den ganzen Tag arbeitet sie gebeugt unter der Sonne, Regen und Wind, das Wetter im Rücken, die Füße und Hände im kalten Wasser. Schatzsuchen ist harte Arbeit.
Ihr gebogener Körper wird zur Brücke zwischen Land und Meer. Bis das Wasser wieder ansteigt, geht sie im Schlamm, einem endlosen, unberührbaren Horizont entgegen, sie gehört zum Bild der galicischen Küste wie die Möwen und die Felsen und die duftenden Wälder, die direkt am Wasser beginning.
Die Mariscadora ist nie allein, sie ist immer umgeben von ihren Schwestern, die mit der Ebbe gekommen sind. Wenn ihr Eimer voll ist, hilft sie ihrer Schwester, deren Eimer zu füllen. Mariscar – eine Arbeit, die nur von Hand durchgeführt werden kann, wird am besten Hand in Hand erledigt.
Wo ihr Mann sich beim Navigieren durch die Unbekannte von den Sternen leiten lässt, wird sie zum Mond. Die Sonne und der Wind zeichnen Linien und Leuchten in ihr Gesicht, das Licht und das Salz machen sie zu dem, was ihre Bestimmung ist, ein Wesen zwischen zwei Welten. Während des Tages ist sie die Schwester der Fische. Gebunden an den Rhythmus der Gezeiten, kehrt sie nur aufs Land zurück, wenn das Meer ansteigt. Dort, oben auf den Felsen, hat sie einen anderen Garten, wo andere Früchte wachsen.

So verbringt sie ihre Tage, immer unter dem freien Himmel – was wäre ihre braunen Augen, wenn sie nicht jeden Tag blau wie das Meer werden würden, was wäre ihr Haar, wenn sie nicht den Wind darin spielen ließe?
Wie Ebbe und Flut bewegt sie sich hin und her über die Grenze zwischen Land und Meer, ein Rhythmus, der ein Echo findet in den Liedern, die sie singt, manchmal, wenn der Wind Gänsehaut über ihre Arme streift. Es sind Lieder, die man nicht hört auf den Bühnen dieser Welt und auch nicht in den Tavernen der Inseln.

Es sind Lieder ohne Beginn und ohne Ende, Lieder, die Ruf sind und Antwort, die Fortsetzung eines Rhythmus in der Umgebung, das Aufreißen von Wolken oder ein Windstoß, der Ruf eines Vogels, das Schnellen eines Fisches, das Aufgehen einer Muschel.  
Es sind Lieder, die niemandem gehören außer sich selbst, ein Ausdruck des Moments sind, die selber der Moment werden, die Werdung einer namenlosen Empfindung. 
Lieder, die der Wind aufnimmt und hinaus aufs Meer trägt, weit nach draußen wo sie endgültig ausklingen, unhörbar schon, und wo sich der Klang mit Licht und Wasser vermischt in Myriaden von Partikeln.
Der Wind trägt den Gesang fort von der Mariscadora, aber nichts in der Natur geht je verloren, auch Unsichtbares, Ungreifbares, Unhörbares wie das verwehte Lied der Mariscadora fügt sich ein in den großen Kreislauf, wird aufgelöst wie alles andere in den Wirbeln des Großen Ganzen, das große Lied der Welt.

Es wird wieder auftauchen für uns, das Lied, irgendwann, in Fragmenten, vielleicht im ersten Schrei eines Neugeborenen auf der Insel, oder in einem sanften Wellengang, der jemanden weckt, der am späten Nachmittag in einem Boot im Hafen eingeschlafen ist, und es wird, ohne Zweifel, eines Tages Aufblitzen im Auge eines jungen Seemanns draußen auf dem Meer, der im ersten Licht der Sonne die Küste zum ersten Mal nach vielen Wochen wiedersieht.