Posadas

     Dear Fran,

     Yesterday I was in Posadas. I was taking photos of the town because I intend to propose to the town hall an exhibition of some of the corners that have caught my attention.

     I have brought home nearly a hundred photographs of the place, of which I will have to select 27, as I have already done with the Guillena exhibition and with the one I hope to do in Gibraleón. Therefore, I still have two years to choose the images that I will later transfer to the canvas.

 

In my opinion, one of the most charming places in Posadas

     As is my habit, I have preferred to look for the corners that go unnoticed during an express visit. Humble houses, streets far from the centre of the town that, however, make up the most genuine picture of the place, the orchards of the Barrancas del Molino, the back of the church, the Casino de los Señoritos...

     You may have already guessed that this series of paintings is also part of my Fagin project.

     Y. a.

     Mary

      I am like those insects

     I am like those insects that you discover when, still very early in the morning, they are attached to the tiny stalks of herbs, waiting for the sun to inject a little heat into their cold wings so that they can abandon their lethargy and begin to flutter through the fields in a new day.

     Fran, I need some time, when I get up, to warm up my fingers and my brain and take the brush.

     Y. a.

     Mary

Wednesday, 6 November 2019 

 New emperors

 Celebrities like Trump, Putin and some Trump and Putin trainees have in common a self-esteem beyond doubt that rests primarily on the conviction that they belong to a select race and a country that deserves its Lebensraum - nowadays economic - because 'all nation needs enough space to meet its growth and ensure its survival.’ 

Read more:

http://towerscross.blogspot.com/2019/ 

 Glasgow  

There was a Spanish poet who found Glasgow ugly and sordid. Now that I´m living in this warm and open land, understand perfectly why he said that.

It´s not the same to travel to a city for the mere fact of being retired and freely use your time as you please, than to have to go jumping from city to city because a civil war has been declared and you have to save your skin. You leave behind not only the bullets but the most retrograde ideas of a country that had been blown up. This is how Luis Cernuda appeared in the Scottish city.

He, who is taken by British on more than one occasion, had a hard time adapting — and it seems that he couldn´t — to the climate that reigns above 55º N. We must not forget that he was born and lived his first years in Seville. If to this we add the love disappointment that was dragging on, it´s quite easy to suppose that not even the most trained spirit would endure a new uprooting.

I write this because I have seen a documentary dedicated to the trajectory of the Sevillian where — among all the things that were said — it startled me that the poet and professor said, felt, that Glasgow stood out for its ‘ugliness and squalor’. If you have ever been there, you will have seen that it rains a lot, in all seasons of the year, that the stones of many of its buildings have a strong nineteenth-century smell and that people are imbued with their tasks...

The way I see it, no city is ugly. It's a matter of humour and finding the right angle and seeing it cast in 'a silver grey shade'.

From my Borstal.

LDR

 Predestination

It was in the Borstal that I heard for the first time about that German monk who dared to challenge Rome and the entire Catholic Church.

From what is seen, he was an individual with very clear ideas and a strong character. Today it could be said of him that he had high self-esteem.

If I put aside — which is a lot to put aside — the treatment he gave to the Jews, the figure of Luder has been a recurring image in my mind in recent years and it´s helping me to understand some things.

In my adolescence I was able to understand that this monk was against the wealth of the princes of the Catholic Church — something that Mike and I shared —, but that of the salvation of our souls only with faith escaped me. What happened then? That a person, whatever he does, if he fully trusts that God has noticed him, will meet with the 'righteous' and live eternally enjoying the goods promised by the Maker?

This didn´t enter my head. It's the truth. Nor was it a matter of discussing it with Mike because he was not a mate of staying focused on the same topic for too long. He was my friend, I know, but if my intellect is short, his was even shorter.

And I say this because for some time now I am coming across examples that could support the theory of the first Protestant. I have realized that when someone dies, in the circle of those closest to them, mistakes or vices that the deceased may have committed are not taken into account, but that there will always be a kind of forgiveness in their family and closest friends, clean slate, settling in all of them the desire to justify the life of the missing person.

On the other hand, there will be people who, having known the subject in question first-hand, will remember the swindles that the deceased committed and will lower him, at least, to the scoundrel that he was in life.

In both cases, family and acquaintances, act as mediators of the Supreme and grant, or not, their 'grace'.

From my Borstal.

LDR

 Ho,ho,ho,ho

The risk that anyone runs on these dates is not being clear about the gift that you are going to ask Santa Claus.

When they asked me what I needed, back on December 14 — then they would ask me again, as a last chance, on December 23 — I answered that I didn´t need anything, that I couldn´t think of anything that I could wish for at that time, and that was my fatal error.

In this situation prior to December 25, it has become a repetition, something like a kind of deja vu in the last twenty years. Sometimes, to make it easier, I have suggested something to them and it was when the  pack of interior shirts was accompanied by a neckband shirt or a Tito Paris CD, but this time, the truth, as I said, I was missing nothing in particular.

This year, Santa Claus has been presented with a couple of interior shirts and with Breath: The new science of a lost art by James Nestor.

My friend, if I had come face to face with Santa in the middle of the night, ho, ho, ho, ho, I would have traded the book for a pair of boxer shorts.

From my Borstal.

LDR

 Man´s Search for Meaning (4)

Failed Suicide Cases

If you read the passage from F's dream, his illness and death, you will understand that this is what happened to Mike's father when his wife died: he no longer had — or he believed he no longer had — reasons to live, so the leukaemia, which was lethargic, suddenly appeared.

Shocking, on the other hand, is the reading of two cases of attempted suicide. Lager laws forbade the rope of the person who wanted to hang himself to be cut. Therefore, if you wanted to save the life of a potential suicide, you had to act before the noose was placed around his neck.

To introduce us to the phase after liberation - what V. Frankl calls the Third Phase - the psychiatrist compares a prisoner in a concentration camp to a diver:

 

Just as a diver — subjected to atmospheric pressure — would be in danger if his diving suit were suddenly removed, a man suddenly released from psychological tension can suffer damage to his mental health.

 

Page 120 of the book is very rich and we should not read it without stopping a little longer than we have been doing it.

After liberation, our doctor only feared God.

From my Borstal.

LDR

Viktor Frankl.- El hombre en busca de sentido. CTE. Herder Editorial. Barcelona, 2015

P.S.- The second part of the book is all dedicated to some 'Basic Concepts of Logotherapy' and that is a garden in which I don´t want to get involved. However, I don´t want to stop recommending, dear friend, the reading of the case of doctor J that appears in the last pages.