At Barcelona Airport
With steady hand the sun
drags its brush against
the mountain landscape.
Names of cities(more…)
sprawl like possibilities
scrawled in a journal.
Tag: Barcelona
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Barcelona, City of Metaphors
Arc de Triomf, Barcelona. I didn’t know what to expect of Barcelona before I arrived. All I knew was that it’s Spain’s second largest city; that it lies somewhere on the western edge of the Mediterranean; that its residents mostly speak Catalan; and that it’s home to one of the world’s most successful football clubs (which is, of course, mès que un club). Granted, this is probably more background info than I would’ve needed to explore the city regardless.
Now that we’ve been here for two days, though, I realize that everything we’ve seen—well, almost everything—resembles someplace else I’ve been. Like the train ride here from Madrid, I keep experiencing déjà vu, seeing sights and features in Barcelona that look as though they’d been transplanted from another of my travels. The Arc de Triomf? You know it’s spelled with a -phe, right? The Passeig de Gràcia? Isn’t that Catalan for “Champs Elysées?” That beautiful wrought balcony—haven’t I seen it in Brussels before…
And on it goes, with almost every passing moment, until I start to wonder: what if Barcelona were a city of mirrors? Or better yet: what if it were a city of metaphors—a record of reminders where I’ve been, a sprawling repository of familiar sights in new settings?
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Cranes in Flight
At the Sagrada Familia, for S. L.
It’s such a strange structure,
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this tower built by the ‘archi-
tect of God,’ that the mixture
and mess of wrought sculpture
defying every law of nature
conceals what’s in the picture
and isn’t—the birds.
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Field Notes: On the Train from Madrid to Barcelona
Interior of the Madrid Atocha station. I’m not one, typically, for narratives. Sequences matter, and causes can do much to explain effects. But on principle, I place more trust in the randomness of events, and I prefer to see my life (as I once told G. C.) as a series of happy accidents. To stay within the realm of the literary just a little bit longer: this is what drew me to the realm of lyric, that way of understanding and expressing a state (an idea, an emotion, a memory) in a given moment.
These days, however, the coincidences and correspondences I see around me feel too interrelated—too convenient—for me to dismiss as mere random events. Traveling and living in three different regions of the world over the past year, it seems, has a way of compressing time and space so pointedly that metaphor (this reminds me of that one time…) is the only way to process some of the stranger familiarities I’ve encountered.
All of which, I guess, is a long way of saying that there was something uncanny—and ultimately moving—about the train ride my family and I took from Madrid to Barcelona yesterday morning.
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Between Two Rivers 