Watching at Windows

She is punctual.

She turns the corner at 3.05.

Bent forward in a stride

that has no grace;

her gaze inward,

there’s no reading of her face.

She never smiles

as if that might delay her.

Always the same deliberate pace,

unhurried but not slow,

arm swinging wide,

hair moving side to side.

Winter and summer

only the clothes change,

her square cut style the same.

And then she’s gone.

Somewhere a bus or train

awaits her now,

a mother, husband, friend …

Who knows

where she comes from

where she goes.

But …

She is always punctual.

And alone.

For any writer, the city offers daily possibilities of conjecture, fleeting portraits of people as they pass. A girl in a red hat becomes the heroine of a short story or a novel. A snatch of conversation overheard  between two people on a pavement becomes the seed of a drama. An artist that I knew of used to sit at his window and watched a street where people passed and were gone in less than thirty seconds, then he tried to capture the character of that person in a sketch.

For the writer, at least, these portraits are a thousand times more rich, ambiguous and lasting than a photograph, which I say with the greatest respect to the art of photography which I both love and admire in its own right. But the imagination has its own rules, and captures “photographs” altogether more subtle and malleable which have the potential to flower into totally conjectural worlds.

The creative openings of these non-encounters are multiplied endlessly if you see the same person in the same place at a certain time, and this is what I have tried to capture in the piece above. The repeated sighting of an unknown person simply lends more and more mystery, more and more questions arise, more and more imagined scenarios present themselves to be played with in that garden of musing where creativity lives and works.

The Spanish novelist Javier Marías enjoys this creative conjecture in a thread running through his Negra Espalda del Tiempo, where a girl and a man seen regularly from his window at a bus stop below become more and more involved in possible histories, both known and unknown.

Puede ser esa mujer que veo desde mis ventanas en este amanecer que me encuentra despierto, esa mujer no muy joven que espera el autobús con su temprano cansancio y a la que hoy se ve sonreír levemente …

Just a hint of a smile can open the treasure chest of inquiry and speculation, a process in which the writer can come to know his or her “character” better than they know themselves.

 

CJM June 2012

“Art, maths, science, poetry, jazz, billiards” ... and football

I just plucked this selection of words out of the first commentary posted by El País’s Ramon Besa in the early hours of the morning after Barça’s solid victory at Camp Nou  over the Madrid team Getafe (result 4-0). Art, maths, science, poetry, jazz, billiards – all contributing, as his article proclaims, to El partido perfecto del Barça (Barça’s perfect game).

I don’t think I’ve ever read such an ecstatic piece of writing about sport. Besa was clearly still on a high at that hour (his piece the following evening was more measured and analytical), having admitted that it was impossible to take your eyes off the pitch during the game in case you missed some exquisite detail of the play.

I managed to see the last fifteen minutes or so, and caught the virtuoso dance performed by Messi as, finding his way to the goal blocked, he turned about and went off on a meandering course right to the side line and back again, defenders left reeling behind one after another, and so found his way again to the goal mouth to deliver a shot just deflected by Torres’ head.

Such good football demands good writing, and here prize-winning Besa delivered a delightfully well written piece, defying exact translation, written in the grip of euphoria and enthusiasm. Look out for the extended geometry metaphor. Here is a taste of it:

El arte es un misterio y como tal se muestra en situaciones insospechadas, como ayer en el Camp Nou, en una noche desapacible por el frío y el agua, ante un contrario que tiene por costumbre responder o negar al Barcelona como es el Getafe. No parecía el mejor día para arrancarse a jugar al fútbol y, sin embargo, a Pep Guardiola le dio por juntar a Iniesta, Messi, Xavi y Busquets y los azulgrana se marcaron una actuación excelente, a ratos excelsa, tan precisa que merecería ser interpretada por un matemático si no por un poeta, nada que ver con la épica futbolística y, en cambio, muy propia de la mejor estética.

Los triángulos y las paredes, el rombo y el cuadrado y las elaboraciones y las combinaciones se sucedieron como repertorio de una ciencia exacta. El fútbol del Barcelona fue de salón. Muy técnico, riguroso con el cuidado del balón y, al mismo tiempo, con momentos de una admirable improvisación. Igual que la mejor banda de jazz. La noche fue tan solemne que no se reparó ni en el marcador ni en la clasificación, sino en el compás de Busquets, el cartabón de Xavi, el lápiz de Messi y la luz de Iniesta. Había que mirar al campo, se imponía no perder detalle, convenía memorizar cada jugada desde que se supo el once titular.

Art is a mystery and as such it arrives unannounced, as it did yesterday at Camp Nou, on such an unpleasant night, cold and wet, with Barcelona facing a rival like Getafe with a record of being able to respond and frustrate. Not the best day to throw yourself into football, yet Pep Guardiola chose this evening to bring on Iniesta, Messi, Xavi and Busquets, and the azulgranas put on an excellent show, at times superlative, so precise that it would need a mathematician, if not a poet, to interpret it, in practice nothing to do with the story of football but rather to do with the highest aesthetic.

The triangles and the lines, the rhombus and the square, and the workings and combinations succeeded each other like the repertory of an exact science. Barcelona’s football was exhibition standard. Highly technical and controlled in handling the ball, and at the same time with moments of admirable improvisation. Like an excellent jazz group. The mood of the evening was so in awe that no attention was paid to the scoreboard or to the rankings, but all were fixed on Busquet’s compass, Xavi’s set square, Messi’s pencil and Iniesta’s lamp. One had simply to watch the pitch, it was vital not to miss a single detail, each sequence of play demanding to be remembered, knowing this was the first team in action.

Spring in Edinburgh

The collar doves are mewing in the high trees. Daffodils are like garlands along the verges of the canal, yellow, white and blue crocuses colour the parks, and the sheltered stone-walled city gardens are bright with snowdrops and primula. Green stems of tulips push up from the earth and each day as I pass, I see they have swollen a little more. The rhododendrons are fat with buds. Soon the bluebells will come into their glory and then the delicate lily-of-the-valley.

All above, that unmistakable and wondrous northern light fills the vast vault of the skies.

CJM

Edinburgh, March 2012

The power of silence

Born and bred in this alpine village, nineteen year old Mehdi lost his life at work through a typically brave and generous act. During a routine cleaning of the silo in the woodwork shop, he saw his two young companions in trouble, leaped in to help them and was tragically buried under a mass of collapsing sawdust.

The entire resident population of the village turned out for the young man’s memorial service, some fifteen hundred people filling the narrow street that ascended the hill by the little stone church. A late autumn sun gave warmth to the scene as we waited in silence while the rites were performed.

Afterwards, a way was left clear for the cortège to pass, led by a mountain rescue vehicle with Mehdi’s two fire helmets displayed on the bonnet. Here youngsters like Mehdi join up in their teens for the volunteer fire service. A keen skier, he was also a member of the mountain rescue team and his colleagues were there to pay him honour, lining the road with their trained rescue dogs on leashes.

Something remarkable was present in our gathering. The silence. A silence in which some higher spirit seemed to breathe. The very quietness emphasised the strength and dignity of these teams, who stand by to deal with emergencies of every kind that the mountains deliver. They are used to dealing with tragedies, risking their own lives to save others and to retrieve victims, often in the worst conditions. Mehdi himself was a living expression of this community ethos and as he grew up, took his place in their ranks.

I have always admired mountain people and the habitual, daily strength they develop, living in these beautiful places which hold so many dangers. There is a dramatic tension in those opposites: splendour and danger. Therein, “a terrible beauty is born”, as Yeats put it.

In silence, the beauty appears.

CJM

Homage to water

Wet sands, slipping waves,
where rims of water trace each
pebble's geometry.

La Vega, summer 2011

The moving shadow
of a cloud sails dark and free
across the ocean.


Llanes, summer 2011

A Pyrenean cascade

Water's fall, sun-filled,
silver, diamantine, tumbling
broken but as one.

CJM

As the season changes

Lace dresses the sand,
worked by the wind's fingers, flung
by a far-off storm.

CJM

Larrabasterra beach, Spain, April

Sunrise

There are rather abstract lists in diaries, calendars and ships' tables called Sunrise and Sunset, where specific times are shown and change by some two minutes a day. Here in the high mountain valley (at a magical 1111 metres) I have a different measure. Every notch and peak in the surrounding mountains is like the markings of a clock, and you watch the sunrise shifting along its annual trajectory, with the rays striking, slanting, each morning in a slightly different place. It seems that many ancient and indigenous civilisations in the Americas used mountain peaks and dips in the same way as markers of the sun's annual passage. Naturally, when the sunrise reaches the end of its run on the horizon, its point of stop-and-return -- the solstice -- this time and place can be marked in the very landscape. This is how you make a calendar of stones.

The sun not only rises higher and  higher daily at this time. It also comes nearer to you. A week ago I would not have had the sun in my eyes at this morning hour, around 8.15. I've been watching its brightness, though, for days as it crept across the grassy slopes, nearer and nearer, earlier and earlier, finding its way towards me with its blessing of resurrection after a long winter.

Needless to say, you don't have to live at the top of a mountain to live through that same warming moment in springtime, when the sun's rays arrive to brighten a windowsill or a patch of wall or a pillow. Think of the joy expressed by Puccini's music as Mimi sings of how her poor attic room high up in the city is the first to be touched by the returning sun:

Vivo sola, soletta
là in una bianca cameretta:
guardo sui tetti e in cielo;
ma quando vien lo sgelo
il primo sole è mio
il primo bacio dell'aprile è mio!

I live by myself, all alone,
in my little white room.
I look upon the roofs and the sky.
But when the thaw comes,
the first warmth of the sun is mine,
the first kiss of April is mine!

La Bohème Act 1


CJM

False spring

Where sunlight touches
frozen ground among the trees
a single primrose.

 I wrote this haiku-style a couple of weeks ago at a time when it seemed winter was over. Within days other primroses and wild flowers had shown their colours.

Now we are in deep snow again, and the flowers are hidden, something that happens often in an alpine winter. Snow can arrive any time up to Easter. The miracle is, and over the years I have never ceased to wonder at it, that the open flowers can stay buried for weeks but will emerge intact, beautiful, fulfilling their promise.

I had never noticed till just now that the words promise and primrose are almost-anagrams.

CJM