Returning to the Sunken Pallas Atlantis
I don’t want you to recognize me when I return. I don’t want to recognize myself.
Fly with me through the throat of the night. I’m choosing to tell you where my shadow has been only after I’ve already left. I crossed the pastel pinks of Lisbon to reach the baked red of Spanish clay. Time evaporated. The beautiful familiar meaninglessness. I have been feverishly awaiting this metamorphosis. I adopted the song of Lisboa, the burgundy aura of the breeze, dancing in and out of conjugations, barely remembering to use USTEDES. The result is that everyone is already familiar to me in a way that I can tell is unusually intimate for some. Eyes widen, smiles flutter. I am learning three languages at once: German, Portuguese, French. I already know Italian inside me somehow.
Such a silence! I’m closer to myself than ever, and I’m blissfully ignorant: my phone does not work here and the WiFi is scarce. (In Spanish you pronounce it wee-fee.) I’m skipping across the sky. What used to be my bedtime is now when I wake. And I’m quietly in such good conversation with myself that I can be completely still on the outside. I’m seeing ahead into the world, and, simultaneously, I’m seeing clearly the aura of the past.
The worst thing is to hold onto an era long after it should have ended. I never know how I feel until hindsight, so to get ahead of myself, I have no choice but to uproot everything the moment it feels comfortable and stable. I reject what I seek.
And yet I do not know the tongues spoken by anyone I really came from. Who were we before being conquered? There must have been so many beautiful traditions and expressions no one is alive anymore to practice or pass on. Am I the only one who resents having been born into assimilation?
All of my people deserve to know what this Balearic sun feels like on Black skin. The palaces of the Moors once belonged to us. At some point, one has to wonder, what is the worth of winning the war we’ve been throwing our lives into?
I have to be a father one day because there is so much I know of life I can’t tell anyone but my progeny. My ancestors on my father's side came from these lands. Once, a part of me had blue eyes and blond hair. Is it them I feel tickling the sweat pooling on the small of my back? On the bus I watch a woman's cerulean eyes slowly walk the curve of my waist and I even see her bite her lip. Then she gets off at the next stop and we never see each other again.
The sun has bleached us ignorant.
And of the instinct — the intuition — we learn to ignore it. We teach ourselves it is not real, fable and fiction and fantasy. Most of us have stitched our third eyes shut. Ancient and modern suppression: Lie, my love, lie to me and tell me I satisfy you.
From the diary of my prophetic great-grandmother Anaïs: “…I am an artist. I use analysis to orient myself, but once I have found my bearings, I take to my submarine again and plunge back into the deep, below the level of analysis, words, discussions. I am now in that realm, wherein living and writing have their source.”
…We are on a vast beach laying out amongst the searing endlessness. We are not thinking, we do not know, we only feel and savor and devour. Waves, sun, flesh. 7PM and the sun shows no sign of relenting its radiation. Some among us have skin the color of tomatoes. M. and I easily draw eyes. The air is cool, opening and closing times and prices are suggested at best. At first, I was the only one in a rush to go anywhere. Now I feel at peace with everything, except the usual dearth of my free time. That, I realize, I will have to change. Face to face with the scale of such sublimity, petty matters such as poverty have no power here.
I grin and laugh as the waves overwhelm and slap into me. Yes, I’m smiling now, and feeling great, my throat which has been itchy for days is finally clearing up, already, since I sat on the airplane and started to scrawl in my sketchbook, singing under my breath, channeling again, the stars speaking through me, and that’s where my ancestors are, not below, not under the technomarble troufants. The city and all its annihilating lights stretch out on a black canvas beneath me. I am the prince of the wasteland and the sea.
All the buildings here in Barcelona have balconies. Secrets whisper from the alleyways. The streets are clean and well maintained. Everyone wears linen, sandals, shorts, sunglasses on the crown of their heads. Few wear as much black as me. None are wearing as much jewelry as I. Many, many young people are about, they stay up and wake late. Most of them know multiple languages, scores of them are covered in colored tattoos. Hips are wide, shoulders are broad and tanned. Motorcycles dart in and out of lanes on every road, even the major highway. The buildings are modern but already overgrown with ivy. The afternoon is the morning. The prices are low and the sales abundant. The beach breeze beckons by surprise, from an alley you pass by chance. Churches appear on corners with seemingly no rhyme or reason beyond devotion. What are the people here devoted to? Style? Leisure? Sensation? Everything makes me think of New York, I compare, I contrast. We don’t have public benches built into lamps and street corners like they do here. We don’t give ashtrays at restaurants upon request. We don’t pay fairly, we put the burden of tipping onto the customer. We don’t smile at each other on the street. Here, mirrors are plentiful, naked feet are scarred and dried by sand. Plants are on every corner. Puerto Rican flags hanging from windows surprise me! This is the appeal of antiquity, a city that’s stood on the same shore for almost a thousand years: life is expected to be lived, not given away as currency.
Nothing is stopping me from emigrating here. Nothing — except the ties which bind me, ties around my hands which I tied.
Health is out. Hedonism is in. Sheer golden light contrasting white brick. Indigo sunset over peridot waves. My new jade ring shattered as soon as I landed: it protected me from something. I was identifying everything as romantic long before Charli. Call me vain if you wish. You would be right and wrong. The Greeks believed beauty is truth is moral good. The search for truth is also a futile desire. I’ve devoured Ecclesiastes enough time to digest disillusion. There is a thin, fine line between vaingloriousness and not. I safeguard my self by putting out negativity as little as possible. I rarely insult anyone's appearance, I critique institutions more than individuals, I show up for whomever I can with my full and authentic self. I never speak unkind even to myself in my own head. Such is a recipe for disaster and a broken, empty foundation.
And yes, I reap what I sow. I am a paradox, contradictory conceit: I am glorious and rich and yet I starve, I struggle, I budget. Avoidance and avarice intertwine in my arteries.
What do you see on the other side of THE DOOR at the end of your suffering?
“I am made of blue sky and golden light, and I will feel this way forever.”
At the heart of everything the resplendence. The sun on the horizon. The change coming. I welcome it. I await it with hunger. I am always evolving: a year ago my hair touched my back, today it hardly reaches my neck. I don’t want you to recognize me when I return. I don’t want to recognize myself.
Barcelona thus far has taught me there is nothing new under the sun but us. The evolution of our cities and our systems mirror our individual dispositions and directions. We are the mutating viruses under the unchanging microscope and the harsh backlight of God’s gaze. What matters, what’s different about it all, isn’t the structures around us, but what we do within them, how we change them and our understanding of them — and each other.
Paradise is sunken under the sea. Eden emerges the moment before sleep when you glimpse an angel descending between your flittering eyelids.
" My new jade ring shattered as soon as I landed: it protected me from something. " the same thing happened to me in Guatemala!!!! I shot up when I read that. And the first thought that arrived, was that it was needed, protection like you said.
Also
"Barcelona thus far has taught me there is nothing new under the sun but us" I smiled and paused through plenty of this essay, but this I immediately felt in my whole body. Enjoyed this.
someone once told me "the first sentence of your writing is a fight for your life." and I want to say that whatever it is you fought didn't stand a chance because this first line is it.