The Sky Opened

Getting out of Madrid it was like the sky opened up, the earth opened up, to even more colors and flavors, if that was possible. One full day and in Seville and I'm glad I made it to the Real Alcazar, where the halls and the gardens got me tangled up in their beauty. For my tourist/explorer schtick, I'd thought initially that going to the Cathedral was enough. It was a lot: at Colombus's tomb I felt the power of that story like I never have, and walking up and down the Giralda was something else...the tower remaining from the mosque that was there before and offering lovely views of the city, but but but the tourists at the top were jammed in like sardines and the main narrative of how the Catholic bells triumphed over Islam felt too true...so glad a little voice in my head pushed me to the Alcazar, still an active palace--and, like in Toledo, a site first brought to prominence by the Visigoths and then to glory by the Ummayads--is something else, is other-worldly, almost felt like China, the looping narrative and paths impossible to follow, impossible not to savor; something deeper there rings true, something about looping paths, so many interpretations...

Toledo and Text

Two days ago, a bullet train zapped me from Madrid to Toledo (80km) in half an hour, as if by future-techno-magic. Then, by the grace of an opposite-seeming force, I walked out of the neo-Moorish style train station, across a bridge over a moat, and up a number of steep stone stairways, through stone arches cut into thick stone walls of the old medieval city that was named a world heritage site in the 80´s. Raised up on a small hill and separate-feeling from the world, it is a truly special place, a miracle that it exists. People live there, but it´s hard to say what they do besides catering to the tourists who visit. There are a few chain stores near the main square, a scattering of nice restaurants and hotels and cafes and bars, some artisan shops, and then so many holy shrines—many active and many turned into museums. I went first to the two remaining ancient mosques. Both quite small, which had been transformed to churches, and now remain museums. Quranic inscriptions were carved on the face of the tiny Mezquita de Cristo de la Luz, and inside Christ hung on the cross amidst a room of Muslim arches and a mysterious patch of Arabic script in a kind of calligraphy I´ve never seen before. The second mosque had a row of even more dramatic arches, with an ancient Visigothic column (with Christ´s face, effaced) holding up the last. Then I found the two synagogues still standing, one with its gorgeous wood ceiling restored and turned into a museum about the history of Jews in Spain, which tells the story of them thriving under the Muslims and kicked out finally alongside the Muslims and by the Catholics with the famous 1492 decree and the second one of the most gorgeous rooms I´ve been in, and one of the oldest synagogues standing in Western Europe. Interesting the explanatory language in all these sites, interesting too the fact that the (ancestors of the) Sephardim have been invited back only recently in an act of official reconciliation, interesting how Islam has (not) been embraced similarly. Interesting the connections across all three monotheistic faiths, both in teachings, in stories, and also in these ancient buildings, ancient buildings I can only say I was lucky to experience, each one letting the light in a certain way, each one lovingly restored, each one demanding I look up, up, up.

With only the anchor of Toledo´s grand cathedral at the center, I proceeded to get lost over and over again as I traced Toledo´s twisted streets. Unlike the streets of Madrid´s centro, which tend to twist and turn but lead somewhere new eventually, in Toledo I often found myself back where I started or stuck in a dead-end. I read somewhere that these dead ends point to the sensibility of the Moorish people who occupied Toledo during the 700 years that various Muslim rulers were in power there. The idea was they built their cities in this way in order to allow for the privacy of their families. I wish I could remember where this notion came from because I´m not quite sure I buy it anymore, or at least I want to return to the text and understand it more deeply. I have been reading a lot of different things since I got to Spain, and I´ve not done so well at keeping track of what comes from where. When embarking on this project/journey that I proposed for the support to get me here (thank you, New York University Global Research Institute!), I thought I´d really only need the same things I used to write about China—Wikipedia and my own two feet—plus a bilingual edition of the Quran. Wikipedia is obviously not a great source, but a useful, easy one and enough for now (consider it a gateway, I always tell my students!) if my reading and my experience are really my material here. But, it´s been quite a boon while in Madrid to be assigned to an office at the NYU campus here with Abigail Balbale, who has been great company and also a shared a wealth of recommendations and knowledge on the intersecting areas of academia, Islam, Quranic translation, Arabic language, historiography regarding religion and Spain and whatever else with me.

Wikipedia tells me that in Toledo there are still traces of the ancient Romans, who built a circus there and in 400 held a church council there. Then this part of Rome fell and the Visigothic people--Goths, Celts, Arians who had been living there under Roman rule--came to power for two centuries during which they made it their kingdom´s capital, devoted themselves to Christianity, holding many more church councils there, and built important libraries. This is to say, the Muslims were not the first to make Toledo a center of learning and devotion to a higher calling. But then the Muslims did come and as a way to mark those 700 years, I have been familiar with the narrative of Convivencia (or "Coexistence"), of Christians, Muslims, and Jews living side by side, peacefully. It is perhaps a useful (if cheap) story to conjure today. To be sure, Muslims, Jews, and Christians did coexist there--whether peacefully or not, it was a setting fertile with new knowledge in a way that has been rarely rivaled in human history, with Toledo´s role as translation capital, where math, science, religion, art, culture and everything else were transmitted between Arabic, vernacular Castilian, and Latin by armies of linguists, philosophers, scribes, and translators. This is something I read in Toledo, over coffee, then over lunch and over afternoon beer and croquettes, in the scan of a chapter of a book Abby shared with me (which she co-authored).

As I´m sitting down and gathering these thoughts today, I´ve decided it´s time to make some better effort to track sources than simply keeping them in email and on my kindle, so I´ve drawn a source chart, based on a research assignment I have guided my students through for years but have never done myself. That´s the final image here. I like having the Quran at the center of the bullseye. It fits with so much of what I have been reading and experiencing regarding the way it functions as a text and in this place where it has existed, in people´s minds, on their tongues, both very much alive and alive, but forgotten, put away. On that note, two quotes to end, one from Bruce Lawrence´s book, "The Quran": "...while the Qur´an itself is a unitary, coherent source of knowledge, there is not a single Qur´anic message."

And finally from a translated interpretation of the Quran itself, done by Thomas Cleary that Lawrence uses:

Say, even if the ocean were ink

For (writing) the words of my Lord,

The ocean would be exhausted

Before the words of my Lord were exhausted,

Even if We were to add another ocean to it. (18:109)

Faces in the Wall

The name Madrid comes from the Arabic word al-Majrit, or the water-source. This name was given to this place when Muhammad I of Cordoba built a small castle here in the 9th century, around which the Moors built a citadel. So far, the most substantive remains of this memory I have found is a section of the old Muslim City wall about a hundred meters long that was excavated in 1985 and sits in a lovely park hidden under the grand Cathedral Almudena. The park has been closed both times I´ve gone by, but it´s small and easy enough to get the point from the outside the gate. The signage around it is weathered but informative, most interesting to me a metal map showing the Muslim city walls and the (much larger and more recent) Christian city walls--both existent and former--in relief. The notion of the Christians building on top of what they took from the Muslims is a familiar one I know I´ll see repeated in my upcoming travels across Andalusia, and of course it´s not unique to this place or to these two cultures/peoples/groups/whatever. It´s a tale as old as time: to make new and our own the thing that was here before us. The story, the reality can be beautiful and also there is a sadness, of course, and can be a lot of pain in the ways we remember, and don´t, what we have lost; because whether or not as a physical body, what has been lost is still here.

Back to Almudena--which, due to the "al" that one finds tacked at the beginning of many names here and many Spanish words, is of course a vestige of the Moors in some way, too--it is the seat of the arch-diocese of Madrid and its side which does not face the Muslim City walls faces the Palacio Real, one of the most visited sites in the city. The cathedral itself is full of tourists (and worshippers) too, and inside I found that looking up at the ceiling helped me imagine the mosque that must have been on this spot, as did some of the explanatory signage inside, about how the Christians who conquered the city in 1083 found "the face of the Virgin Almudena hidden in the old Muslim wall" and consequently built a church. Walking back down to the Muslim city wall, which is a substantial downward incline from the cathedral, and, as I said, somehow hidden by the shade and the way the roads have been preserved, I was floored by the site of the newer parts of the city spread out beyond, and the mountains in the distance. This helped me imagine what it must have been like when there was a mosque here, too, when there was nothing past the wall.

I walked down and up this edge towards the area south of the city center, and La Latina, guided by Lonely Planet´s directive to find the old Moorish part of the neighborhood and ¨strain [my] imagination a little" to catch "a whiff of the North African medina"--their words both annoyed me and attracted me... Anyway, I think I missed that corner, but I did find an old friend, a smaller cathedral with stunning frescos, and plenty of delightful tapas and beer. I´m glad I will be here for another week, that I have time to go back and work a little harder to find them, those old Moors who were expelled, forcefully, completely, in 1492, which was a hell of a year for the world, I guess.

Of course there are living, breathing Muslims here now, including me, including tourists who are obviously so in the center of town, one Arab-looking family with a head-scarved woman slurping water from underneath her niquab (the heat persists) and others that stand out to me. Also there are those who live here, men working in the stores of neighborhoods like La Latina and Lavapies, the families that run the strip of Arabic restaurants (with names like Palmyra and Habibi) I just came upon not so far from where I am staying last night--of perhaps they are Christians, but now we must acknowledge the way the label Muslim is used is and has been problematic since the Moors. There are also the people who go to the Islamic Center a couple miles east of El Centro. It´s a large marble edifice which I felt too strange to go inside, silent as it seemed, and ringed in a green fence, its only open entrance manned by a guard in a guard house and a sign saying that people entering were not allowed to carry their bags inside. I sat in the park outside it for a while, content to take in the people gathered there and thought, somewhat anxiously, about organized religion and socio-politics, but then I walked around the neighborhood, where I heard a lot of Moroccan Arabic and went into a bar/restaurant called La Pasha and had a my most delicious piece of Spanish tortilla so far.

Hot Stuff

Shanghai to Madrid. Late June. I am hot stuff. From one end of the Eurasian landmass to the other--though I did fly around the other side, over the Pacific and home to NoVa, to NYC for a week's stop over before crossing the Atlantic on one of those liminal, overnight flights. I am not working this summer, not teaching or advising, only writing, reading, wandering. I proposed a project (which I'll tell you about soon) and got a travel grant to NYU's beautiful study-abroad campus in Madrid, at an edge of Chueca, in a beautiful old building with amazing light. Shanghai to Madrid. A dramatic transition, but certainly a charmed one, and every moment is a transition and so? / I am hot stuff. I AM hot, we all are, we are melting, the millions of us here in the center of Madrid, this proud proud city during the week of Pride. There is a heatwave in Europe, and temperatures here have topped out at 110 degrees. Still, people are filling the Plazas all day and all night, scantily dressed and fully covered, fanned and sweaty, and cool as cucumbers and red-faced, tongues out... Close by in Toledo it is hotter still and agricultural land is spontaneously catching on fire, spreading, all those trees... There have been deaths reported in France, in Italy, in Spain. / Here in Madrid, I don't know. I walk around my new neighborhood in circles, getting lost, my head is buzzing so much faster than my body can go. My back aches from the memory of those trans-oceanic flights, so many different beds, picking up the niece I had not seen in months; she'd grown more than I could have known over the Internet. Here in Madrid, I find a massage by looking up reviews on line (cheap for here but so much more than I ever paid in China). She says my back feels like it is full of rocks, her hands sliding down me like biking across cobble stones. Still, it feels so good, an hour where a stranger calmly forces me back in my body (like it is her job, her work). / Madrid, of course, is amazing. The streets are ancient and bright and alive, the food delicious and cheap, people talking excitedly everywhere, as if there is so much to ponder in this life. / I walk tentatively, slowly, wanting to open my mouth but unsure. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, I blend in on streets, in restaurants, and before I begin people speak Spanish to me and I stutter, I do my best to reply, and yet... My knowledge of Spanish is both awkward and deep; I can barely speak it but due to learning French for five years in school, having a Mexican boyfriend for a few years, living with him in Mexico some, after ending him traveling in the Spanish-speaking world over the years--due to lots of following, listening, lots of leading around my family and friends when I was the one with more Spanish, strangely, now I know what is going on. But it's been a while; I've been absorbing Arabic, Chinese... Not like Arabic, which feels much more mine, or Chinese which I would let wash over me with pleasure, here, things stick, and I try, but it feels hard all of my own volition, no one translating for me, no one to translate for... / Once you finally get your order right, it's so easy to overdose on bread, on cheese, on wine, when you have been in China without these things, when they are ubiquitous, cheap, sublime. / If every moment is a transition and transitions are hard, then does that mean every moment's hard? I don't think so, that it has something to do with the shifting tension between perception and reality, of course, but ah... / Lucky me, I have time, I had a dear cousin here for a conference this weekend from another far away land, I have an old, dear college friend living close by with a beautiful and sweet family. I don't have work, but I have so much work to do and finally I feel like I have gained some measure of stillness in this new place, the work has begun, at my temporary desk in a bright white office and the half moon table temporary home with a very old, yet sturdy a/c.