A mass of yellow stone floating in the blue of the clear, brilliant sky above and the turbulent Guadalquivir below – its enormous bulk made weightless by the context. Ottoman Cordoba was a univer-city, a unverse with a small “u”. A mess of cultures, sweaty cross-fertilization – exciting, faintly indecent, infinitly productive. Not the golden mean of Aristotle, not the measured path of restraint – contorted co-mingling, intertwined but not melded. The way of Socrates – clear contradiction that is growth made stone.
The beach is a special place, a narrow path between heights and depths, created by water.
Precipitous cliffs on the right – concrete, huge, looming their weight makes them feel acute and real, like pain. It’s often said that life is pain – it is, but lasting pain is only an illusion created by the myth of lasting self. But so too is happiness – same logic applies. Avoiding one and chasing after other – a looser’s game. You stop the chase and acquiesce to pain. It lays quiescent and underpins your joy.
Enormous sea on the left – deep, silent, inchoate, seamlessly transforming into sky. Three container ships in undifferentiated sea-sky, like ducks over the fireplace. Familiar, ridiculous and safe, creating anchor point for frightened gaze that’s lost in space and finding you in time – the time of progress.
So you progress – you walk along the beach, twixt depths and heights, abandon and despair, between deficiency and excess, the middle way, the golden mean of Greeks. Temerity-timidity not much to choose between – one consonant, two vowels. The trick is not to chose or compromise but merely to tread between the two, not enter the extremes, keep in the middle, create the path anew with every move.
What you really need is a thin line of firm sand, between loose dry and slippery wet, easier to walk on. Someone to hold by the hand, to not have to look down for solid footing, to see all that beauty.
Extremes are always ugly, beauty is in golden mean, in-sink and in-between, a pattern in complexity, a path that unifies variety and us.
When age is but a litany of loss, your life reduced to sorting through the dross of past achievements, when the age is grim, the time is to become a piligrim.
Pligrim-age, a chance to re-assess priorities, to re-address the mess of habits and regrets and to redress the wounds inflicted on yourself and others by you and mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers – the loved and hated ones, the ones who form you and whom you shape. The people who will mourn you day in and out, as you live and breathe they mourn who you were and what is. What might have been… one can but disappoint while one is living. Death creates a point of no return, no future and no past. No possibility of loss at last. Woebegon – for woe to be gone we stop the clock at death and then move on.
Obituaries are but tales that bend realities into the shape of stories including start, the middle and the end that banishes not sadness, but the worries and when the last uncertainty is gone piligrimage is finished. Life is done.
There is pain aplenty in the past, there is time unmeasured in the future, and the present – rough, uneven suture, tries to form a scar that wouldn’t last…
Choices are difficult. You choose life and passion – of course you do! But there, in the centre, in the shadows and folds, death lurks. Decay of complacency, lack of emotional investment today breeds the boredom of tomorrow, black mold overgrowing your passion, smothering it in a soft, furry blanket, killing it through comfort, illusion of safety, abdication of control… To keep life you have to keep choosing it every day, every hour, every minute. And you do – of course you do – until you tire and let the mold take over.
