Palimpsest: (noun) something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.
Underneath the flying buttresses of Seville cathedral is a mosque. Radiating out from that centre, the mosaic geometries of Moorish architects give shape to this whole city, where Catholic iconography is lain thickly overtop like paste.
At the centre of town, the Casa de Conception houses thousands of filing boxes of contracts: documents that officially sanctioned kings, merchants and ‘conquerors’ to seize lands and peoples in the name of a God whose son’s main message was : “renounce wealth”.
Bit of an irony.
Now, Seville’s jewel-box lined streets glitter with glam brand logo shops, interspersed with prismatic graffiti. It’s splendid and awe-inspiring but I can’t help but feel the many invisible sorrows that are manifested here. Like the carcasses hanging in every butcher’s window – the raw reality of conquest also dangles in this light.
In the fine art museum… Catholicism’s punitive, shame-drenched mythos seems like the logical psychic corollary to the brutality of colonialism. That brutality is what I see portrayed in these agonized Christs and mortified saints .. the religious propaganda made at the time of the plunder of the Americas is pitch-dark and foreboding. A mirror held up to the soul of colonization.
In it I see the brutalizations of the land, too : in this way of seeing, the wooden cross not a background prop but the centre of the story, our own wild spirits’ death at the hands of fanatics & inquisitors who neglected to notice heaven, right here on Earth… who forgot their connection to their mothers, and Mother…. men who were threatened by freedom, ashamed of sex … apologists for rigid hierarchies that eschewed pleasure, fraternity, beauty in THIS life … exchanging it instead for the promise of no-death. The cross: a crucifixion of rainforests, a separation of the world into duality, a fixed frame on which to pin our longings, and watch them wither.
But.. through the cracks, the wildflowers bloom. Tangled up in depictions of lordly Popes and bloody prophets are the brushstrokes of mystics, who knelt to paint the cerulean sky. What song, or mantra, kept steady the hand that carved, again and again and again, a pattern of interlocking stars on this ancient ceiling? And.. this very afternoon, amidst the corporate trappings of Empire 3.0, a busker sits in a monastery doorway and strums a gypsy tune. At night, though dressed in miniskirts and platform Doc Martens these days, the dark, hot lustre of flamenco moves along the streets and swishes through people’s hips like a flickering torch.
What I’m saying is : the force that through the green fuse lights the flower just IS. Faith is no prerequisite to falling on your knees or better still, twirling for joy.
With or without a single unifying fairy tale, we are compelled to beauty, and to the sifting through shadows. Inshallah/hallelujia/however-the-hell-you-holler: the Guadalquivir river I walk beside carries both the blood of battle and the milk of human kindness. It flows on and on and on.
To all the mad, wondrous, tormented chroniclers who’ve left their fingerprints on this city: I’m disturbed. Altar-ed. and : grateful.