watching the Spaniards

the above image belongs to the upper paleolithic period and it is believed it was painted by Magdelenean artists in the UNESCO World Heritage, Altamira

the image below is the well known and much loved/hated Toro de Osborne which advertised brandy until in the early 90's were to be taken down for Spain outlawed billboards on national roads, the Spaniards protested, the bulls were painted black and left to guard the hillsides becoming a national symbol

circa 18.500 years separate these two bulls

what I saw in Cambodia

what I saw in Picos de Europa

el sol se pone en el fin del mundo

Finisterre derives from Finisterrae in Latin which means "Land's End", and it had been, indeed, the end of the world for many centuries until Columbus altered things. I read in the Confraternity of Saint James’ website http://www.csj.org.uk/ that there are various explanations as to how Finisterre became a continuation of the pilgrimage, one such is that is was based on a pre-Christian route to the pagan temple of Ara Solis, erected there to honour the sun.
In any case this photo, taken literally at the end of the world, does it justice.

Modern pilgrimage

A woman prays in ecstasy in front of a statue of Buddha


Pilgrimage is widely considered a ritual journey of purification. Whether taken in a metaphorical sense or not, modern pilgrims agree that peregrination is inherently different from other types of travel. Placing its meaning in the actual walking, for the modern pilgrim there is not just one end, but rather there are many. These are attempts to make a visible manifestation of contact between the human and the divine, where personal transformation lies at its centre.
This summer I had the privilege of seeing two apparently different pilgrimages, one in Cambodia, the other in Camino de Santiago, Spain.

A statue of Saint James is being embraced from behind by pilgrims

object or mirror?

Whitney Chadwick argues in her book ‘Women, Art and Society’ that ‘Among the founding members of the British Royal Academy in 1768 were two women…. (yet)… women were barred from the discussions about art and the study of the nude model which formed the academic training and representation from the sixteen to the nineteen centuries.’
And she continues: ‘…binary oppositions of Western thought- man/woman, nature/culture, analytic/intuitive- may have been replicated within art history and used to reinforce sexual difference as a basis for aesthetic valuations.’
A lot has been said, and a lot more has been wasted in misunderstandings and extrapolations, yet still today if you type the words women and art in your internet searcher, quite possibly you’ll be directed to something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUDIoN-_Hxs&mode=related&search=
How many of these beautiful creatures were painted by men? How many of them had been painted by women?

Calendar of the Soul

21st week, August 26, 2007 - September 01, 2007



I feel strange power, bearing fruit
And gaining strength to give myself to me.
I sense the seed maturing
And expectation, light-filled, weaving
Within me on my selfhood's power.


(English translation by Ruth and Hans Pusch)

understanding The Other, Cambodia

In Ta Prohm, a Buddhist monastery built around 1186, nature holds the ruins together with massive tree roots, framing doorways and covering stones in velvety algae

In Cambodia pigs are transported on motorbikes to be sold in the market

One is expected to become a monk (to 'enter the Sangha' or monkhood) for a short period in one's life. Monks practise meditation and chanting, study Buddhist scripture and philosophy, do not wear personal adornments neither do they eat after noon. They need to go out into the community daily and it is common to see monks collecting food in their bowls or bags

Decades of war and intense poverty have left Cambodian people and their environment in a fragile state. Although tourism has grown dramatically in recent years, very few tourists venture into wider Cambodia. For some ideas for a richer travel experience visit http://www.stay-another-day.org/

understanding The Other, Thailand

Would you say that you 'go to the market' or rather 'the market comes to you'?





Does Buddha have fingerprint on his toes?




How can one play draughts without pieces?

watching the English

Cambridge is celebrating the Town Bumps this week, in which, unlike the College Bumps, local rowing clubs compete.




In a bump race a number of boats chase each other in single file, each boat attempts to catch ("bump") the boat in front without being caught by the boat behind. The race last several days and each day the boats line up bow-to-stern with a set distance of one and a half boat lenghts' between each boat. At the start signal each crew starts to row, attempting to catch the boat in front while simultaneously being chased by the one behind.

As the name suggests, damage to boats and equipment is indeed common during bumps racing!

Once a bump has occurred both crews pull over to the riverbank and take no further part in that race, it is easy to tell which is which as there is a certain gloomy air in the boat which got the bump whereas the ones who bumped show off their newly acquired status by sticking tree leaves in their hair or around their necks.



Now, honestly, is there a better way of spending your long summer days?

Morris Dance

Last Saturday on our way to a concert at Ely Cathedral we bumped into a sight of 'middle-aged men bedecked in ribbons and bells, capering and jigging and clacking sticks in the air' or, in other words, Morris Dancing aficionados. As Jemima Lewis claims from the pages of The Independent, 'Morris Dancing is not like other hobbies. It inspires a unique mixture of horror, hilarity and bewilderment. Why aren't they embarrassed? Don't they know how mad they look? All the characteristics that we now think of as typically English (self consciousness, irony, a certain cool) are subverted by this least beloved of national traditions.' But then in a stroke of genius she turns 180 degrees as she goes on saying 'Yet Morris dancers have much to teach us, not at least about ourselves' and as we read on we learn that the English were once, before bureaucrats rationalised and modernised the country, a nation of 'prancing yokels' and that Morris dancers are to be regarded as 'fifth columnists, defending English eccentricity from within, heroes of the ancient and anomalous, in the citadel of the bland.'

I did enjoy watching them and their display of awkwardness, they gave our daughter a badge and explained to her that with such a badge she could be naughty all day. She was delighted.

I wonder whether we, Spanish people, would have the same courage when it comes to analysing our traditions with a critical eye.

What do you think?

gay pride and Sotheby's

Saturday day in London, went to see the family painting that is going to be auctioned at Sotheby's to-day, the school of Seville 'Saint Joseph and the Christ Child'. Good to see the 'Old Masters' special two day auction, mainly built around a Velazquez that went yesterday for more than £8 million and a Turner's lot that went for 11 (yes, millions).

On the way to the exhibition we saw the gay pride parade, which made the whole experience seriously funny.

Indeed, there are as many Londons as we dare imagine.

shakespeare

summer is here again and what can be better than to celebrate midsummer solstice with tea and Shakespeare at The Orchard in Grantchester?

http://www.orchard-grantchester.com/index.html

'One of Shakespeare's most popular works, ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ follows young love’s escape into a magical forest. While Oberon tries to help love along, his not so able assistant Puck manages to confuse the whole affair. Lovers profess affections for the wrong person, and the fairy queen herself falls in love with, well, a donkey!'

the theatre company is called Mouth to Mouth and they're absolutely bananas, any purist out there?

check their website and their forthcoming performances at http://www.allmouthandaction.org/

great-grandmother's sayings

El que mal anda, mal acaba (don't start off on the wrong foot)

Dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres

Al major cazador se le escapa la liebre

El buey lerdo toma el agua turbia

Oveja que bala pierde bocado

Habiendo pan y cueva, dejalo que llueva

En boca del mentiroso, lo cierto se hace dudoso

A rey muerto, rey puesto (The king is dead. Long live the king!)

El zorro pierde el pelo, pero no las manas

La mentira tiene las patas cortas

Es mas el ruido que las nueces

Angelitos al cielo y trapitos al arca

El que siembra viento recoge tempestades

No por mucho madrugar se amanece mas temprano

Contigo pan y cebolla

Mariquita, si quieres que te den, estira la mano y da tu tambien

Casamiento y mortaja, del cielo bajan

Maria tapa el pozo despues que se cayo el nino

El que mucho abarca poco aprieta

El perro del hortelano, ni come ni deja comer al amo

A su tiempo maduran las uvas

gestures in Spanish language

esta entrada ha sido inspirada por el blog de emilio http://makelele.wordpress.com/ acompanada por unchistesobreespanoles y el ya famoso clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEGamVBeeOc&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fmakelele%2Ewordpress%2Ecom%2F

There was this Spanish lady, walking home carrying two bags of shopping, one in each hand, and a car pulled up next to her and asked the way to the post office, the woman sighed and looked up to the heavens rolling her eyes. Very carefully put the two bags on the pavement, straightened up, looked at the motorist, shrugged her shoulders and opened her palms saying ‘I’ve no idea’

workshop in newcastle!

Workshop on Second Language Acquisition and Spatial Language, 10th September, 2007 Newcastle Civic Centre, Newcastle visit http://www.cocolab.org/esla/

the essence of plants

painted after that trip to China

second language acquisition

"Acquisition requires meaningful interaction in the target language - natural communication - in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding." Stephen Krashen

read more visiting:

http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/rw/krashenbk.htm

http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html

From idealist.org (action without borders) Newsletter Dec 2006:

'Seminar for INFO Nepal Volunteer program in UK Marina Velez has taken her INFO Nepal volunteer experience to the next level. After her return to the UK, she did not forget the lessons learned here, but rather has chosen to share them with other tourists and volunteers. Marina has developed a thought-provoking presentation, “Understand the ‘Other’”, in which she details the concept of ethical tourism. Through a vivid display in PowerPoint, she demonstrates how unsuspecting travellers affect and are affected by cultural relativism, climate change, cultural loss and local economies. Tourists do not have an inherent right to other cultures – it is a privilege. Travellers should always be mindful of the consequences (both direct and indirect) of their actions in addition to making the effort to understand local customs rather than condemn. “Ashirna wa akhabirna” Live with us and then judge us. We applaud her efforts to demonstrate the cultural and environmental costs behind package holidays and supply information about new ways of travelling.'

essay

our lecturer at Cambridge University ICE (Adrian, you know I am madly in love with you, at an academic level, that is) was explaining the relevance of linking Auden's poems 'Roman Wall Blues' and 'Refugee Blues' to Jazz music and he said that it 'strikes a chord' to analyse it in those terms.....
yes, Adrian, that rings a bell indeed,
anyhow, here I want to share one of the many essays we had to write:


Writers, readers and the community of literature

Marina Velez, London in Literature, Cambridge, 2007. All rights reserved.

A writer is first of all a reader

‘To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical.’
‘Labyrinths’, Jorge Luis Borges

Writers write about readers. Don Quijote is the epitome of the excessive reader, the reader who cannot (or wishes not to?) distinguish fiction from reality. Driven to insanity by books, he seeks in madness the truth and heroism he no longer finds in the real world. The power of the word is such that it elevates gallantry beyond the reach of common mortals. Words will fuel Quijote’s aspirations and words will haul him down into perdition.
Another famous reader worth mentioning is the shallow and syrupy character Madame Bovary who, as Quijote, suffers from corrupted imagination. Words must be handled carefully otherwise impressionable creatures can fall under their influence.

So why do we read. Or, equally enigmatic, why do writers write. The literary community is made of and perpetuated by readers and writers in constant interchange, establishing cultural, political, aesthetic and philosophical connections in which reality is represented in the form of language.

The inner world of the writer has to travel the insurmountable distance that separates him from his reader, and he can only begin to grasp such a spiritual and intellectual pirouette by becoming a reader himself.
So, how can we approach the paradox of the writer’s necessary inwardness and his equally necessary need to reach out for the reader? Or, as Sontang describes it, can ‘the fragile delirium which is authorship’ be also a call to literature?
Perhaps the apparently unidirectional dialogue between writers and their readers can be transformed if we admit that a writer is first of all a reader.



Between language, meaning and words

‘We perceive ourselves as subjects through inner experiences, especially through the experience of thinking. Like the experience of our ability to speak, these inner experiences are super-conscious. They are coloured and influenced by the way we experience our body. The processes of thought, however, are also shaped by the pattern of our language, which determines both the separation of the subject and object and the consequent integration of the subject into the world in the act of cognition.’
Georg Kuhlewind

Words have become symbols, we think in words. Words codify the poetics of thinking, identifying the meaning of subjects with the very dynamics of meaning itself.
The uncertainty of writing is nothing compared with the pitfalls of understanding, and yet, in various degrees of sophistication, understand we do. We understand the fog in Bleak House, the recurrent rhythm of city life in William Wordsworth’s ‘On Westminster Bridge’, the infinite desolation of Lamb’s poem ‘The Old Familiar Faces’. Like precious cargo, the meaning of what the writer had thought is all transported in words.
What was once written was alive, the writer has to carefully select the words that will best preserve this delicate life through time, until a reader reads them, warming them up once more into life. There lies both the power and the vulnerability of literature.

Sontang explores writing itself by analysing Roland Barthes’ prose: ‘That most inclusive category is language, the widest sense of language-meaning form itself………To stipulate that there is no understanding outside of language is to assert that there is meaning everywhere.’

A word can be considered as manifestation and meaning. Meaning is the inner aspect of a word. Words have continuously changed their meaning, and by this change the understanding of human communities changes in a similar way. Spenser’s experimental poem ‘Prothalamion’ speaks to us in riddles, where a ‘bower’ is a place where lovers meet, a ‘flasket’ is a long thin basket and ‘eftsoones’ means ‘very soon’. Such words, like distant quasars pulsating their message through centuries with decreasing intensity, will have to wait in that place where time never reaches, until an obliging midwife delivers us their meaning again and as they resurface into today’s world they unlock their imagery for us once more, revealing landscapes long gone, objects no longer made, people no longer alive, customs no longer practiced. Words embody relicts of ancient wisdom. Language has a physical history and etymology can show us how words have developed.
Words can also become overwhelming, and in the case of ‘Austerlitz’, words are so evocative that they materialise into pictures.




The dialogue is still alive

Never has the conversation and interaction between writer and readers been more spontaneous and immediate than in the case of Charles Dickens. Unlike ‘Jane Eyre’ and other contemporary titles which were published in three volumes and could only be afforded by the wealthy, Dickens’ novels were published in monthly instalments, serialised in monthly magazines and could be shared and read by nearly everybody. This microcosm of picturesque characters and their cycles of incidents with London at its centre could be adapted to the way readers reacted as they were written in a ‘write as you go’ fashion.

A conversation between writers, even when it is a posthumous affair, opens up to the absurdity of being a dialogue that has to be simultaneously intimate and public. Charles Lamb addressed Coleridge in his fervent poem ‘The Old Familiar Faces’: ‘friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother’. He also in ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’ conjures up the past, which he thinks should be valued, by imagining first impressions of a countryman visiting London for the first time, by naturally quoting Spenser.
Perhaps the dialogue indeed needs time in order to find its rightful melody.



The geography of time

Writers write about people. Dickens’ characters, albeit through the milky transfiguring effect of the fog, distil the best picture of the Victorian London we could possible imagine. He succeeded in getting across the condition of England in those days. He even wanted to change people’s minds bringing to people’s attention the issues of those days. How we lived then.
Ian McEwan describes with sharp eyes what life in London is for the contemporary white middle class. How we live now.

Writers write about cities. Relocating places and people, adding and subtracting, modifying city geography. They walk and walk, as if by walking they would spin a thread that could bind city and literature together.
We experience London as outsiders seeing it through the eyes of Nazneen in ‘Brick Lane’ or Austerlitz in ‘Austerliz’. We see it through the eyes of locals, as in ‘The Old Benches of the Inner Temple’ by Lamb or Pepys’ Diaries.

In ‘Brick Lane’, the topography of one single street is turned into an inner description of an innocent anthropologist, by making the familiar unfamiliar, for it is seen through the eyes of an immigrant. Just as the realistic account of the isles that Odysseus visited makes him one of the poorest sailors in the history of navigation, tracing out the streets described by Monica Ali in her novel covers no more than a few blocks. Rather like Xavier de Maistre’s ‘Journey around My Room’, it expands the geography beyond physical limits.
The elegance of travelling by water is set forth most beautifully in Pepys’ diaries, celebrating London before the embankment by simply describing the grace of the boats coming and going up and down the River Thames.

London’s gardens can be a shelter, a place to get lost, or a square one has to cross ‘ high heels ticking in awkward counterpoint’. A tower can be an obstacle blocking the spectacular view of an imaginary comet at night. Houses can still be asleep in the early hours of the morning. Bridges can be a platform from which to bear testimony of the beauty of the city, and where its people can be described with poetic justice. Rivers can be carriers of disease, as well as agents of good tidings. The same street can be safe by day and perilous by night.

Writers delineate a geography of the city whose form is malleable by nature and that is more an individual experience than a real place. Writers do not invent the city, they just put in words what we already perceive.

There are as many Londons as we dare imagine.








Bibliography

‘Where the Stress Falls’, Susan Sontang, Picador, 2001

‘El Ingenioso Idalgo de Don Quijote de la Mancha’, Miguel de Cervantes

‘Brick Lane, Monica Ali, Black Swan, 2004

‘Labyrinths’, Jorge Luis Borges, New Directions, 1964

‘Die Logosstruktur der Welt’, Georg Kuhlewind, Lindisfarne Press, 1986

‘The Origin and Development of Language’, Roy Wilkinson, Hawthorn Press, 1992
"Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802", William Wordsworth
‘Austerlittz’, W.G. Sebald, Penguin Books, 2001
‘Bleak House’, Charles Dickens, Penguin Classics, 2003