This is a travel sketch I wrote about my time living in Seville, as an assignment for a travel writing class.
This is a collection of Kodachrome still slides from the Parque María Luísa. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. This is a box of old film, intaglio prints, and little blocks of linoleum, those that are carved smoothly with a knife and pressed in ink to render an image. When I press my ear close, I can hear running water, rushing from the background (allá) and chirping parrots imported from Argentina.
This one is a shadow of a single date palm branch. It seems almost too graphic to be a photograph, but at its course edges the tips begin to simmer into the foreground. We can see no part of the tree but three millimeters of sweeping palm frond pushing itself into the extreme background. It’s a sudden beat of rigid parallels; like a Kandinsky painting, the palm frond shadow gives itself to the rigid sweeping motion of a rectangular reflecting pool. The palm shadow is the counter piece. I can’t tell if it’s a print or a photograph.
Here’s one of a blooming hibiscus bush and an antique orange Fiat with a sunroof. This one is original yet familiar. It has precedents, with bougainvillea bushes, old cars, and blue doors. This one lacks a clear sense of grandeur; the wheels are cut out of the frame, it was taken quickly. It lends it a sense of action, and the image shudders with shivering motion.
Three palm trees on this panel. Their stair-step level heads tell us they’re in perspective, but they’re ungrounded, and could continue downward forever. It’s tricolor, almost a four color composition—either a Kodachrome or a reduction print, mounted the same so I can’t tell—but so tricolor that I almost feel them melting into a black and white silhouette. Navy blue, almost black; the whisper of an edgy, dusty green; orange; a breathless blue, almost white. The colors are labels of light, reflections of the sun out of frame on which everything depends. The orange is the slender fingers of the palm fronds, the navy constructing the heavy trunks and abstract shadows of the actual palm of the leaf. I read them like hands: navy is the palm, Rorschach ink blots that cloud life and heart lines. The green, the fingers. Slender orange finger trips disappear into the sun-drenched sky.
Lots of these unplaceable prints/Kodachrome stills in the box. Shoebox. Ibercaja. That’s the name of a bank; it means “Iberian box.” A shot from the middle of a crosswalk peeks down an alleyway to an out-of-place apartment complex, a Sarasota Modern outlier. It’s all angles and lattice, marked by a date palm, hiding early winter sun behind its upper floors.
A stationary moped man, in red that matches his moped.
A woman in a hot pink hijab blooms like a camellia, waiting at the bus stop.
In this box there’s a persisting continuity—all detached, no clear sense of up or down. The view upon which we look is skewed; our perspective not just shifted but completely disregarded.
Here’s another, the corner of a white house with yellow shutters at high contrast with silhouettes and lanky shadows of two Chilean wine palms hiding the sun.
Or how about this one: the flat face of a white building with yellow trim, two yellow spires piercing a tranquil manganese sky. One window is draped with a turquoise awning. Across the frame the seed pods of a Chinese persimmon are lanky downward-pointing fingers that suggest frozen fingertips in the winter sun.
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Marching up the street past a Starbucks, El Archivo de Indias, and hordes of tourists, I can see the Cathedral, and as I’m perpendicular to it, it is flat, its Gothic spires two-dimensional as paper snowflakes cut out of the gray sky. It reminds me of Roman city planning, and though it is beautiful, it probably takes away from the full effect of its glory that it appears as flat as a piece of cardboard as you approach.
Today is one of the few gray days we’ve had here in Seville, a depressing alternative to its usual brilliant fauve landscapes. I cannot stop seeing this city in two contexts: an artistic one, and a religious one. Hay aquí mucho catolicismo, y nada de religión, goes that Ezra Pound poem; here there is much catholicism, and no religion. I think of him staring at the stars through the hole in his tent, imprisoned outside in the Colosseum in Rome after supporting Mussolini. I find it harder to not be religious when basking in this great and glorious beauty.
Aquinas says that one’s existence as a part of a whole, substantiating itself, is intrinsic to existence as a corrupted being. Summa Theologica says “…everything, by its natural appetite and love, loves its own proper good because of the common good of the whole universe, which is God.” (Aquinas, 984). “God leads everything to the love of Himself.” Even our desire to pursue and love God is tainted by the corrosive motive of self-interest. What to make of that?
It goes on, but that part reminded me so much of my Seville bible study. Summa Theologica references to original sin, laying the foundation for the need for modern salvation. The fault in my Christianity is my Methodist impulse to rationalize, and there are so many logical inconsistencies that caused me to drift in and out of belief for several years. I joined a bilingual Bible study in Seville for the community; little did I realize I’d rediscover religion in the faded out blue room of Iglesia Dios es Amor, a little church I rode the metro to on Wednesdays and Sundays.
We’d covered paradox in the study before (la paradoja), but now the question our pastor, a young, fit guy fresh out of seminary named Kyle, posed was “Can a person rationally believe in paradoxical doctrine?” We debated in small groups, occasionally standing to grab bread and sweet, ripe tomatoes Kyle's wife had brought for the group. We tossed around phrases like “divine incomprehensibility” and discussed the divine sources of Christian doctrines; on the whole it was brilliantly inconclusive and productively frustrating. Finally, Kyle ended us with a question to mull over for next week: “If divine incomprehensibility gives us reason to think that some of our theorizing might be enduringly paradoxical, doesn’t that suggest that the paradoxes at the heart of the Trinity and the incarnation might be real?”
I theorize too hard on the metro back to the city center, and by the time we’re sipping icy glasses of tinto de verano, my sweet American friend stops me. “Is it not enough to just have faith sometimes?” I hadn’t thought about it that way, had never let myself be consoled by the thought of endless grace. Thinking back on it now with Aquinas in mind, I am relieved; I would rather be broken contributing to the greater good of the universe than hovering indifferently above, perfect and uncorrupted. This is the human spirit, to strive to glorify God, and if that makes us corrupted beings, then I’ve found peace with that. I long to be a part of this whole of corruption striving for glorification.
I’m now standing in El Archivo de Indias after my last exam on my final day in this beautiful place. I’ve just created a life here, made some friends, grown some roots. The exhibit is in honor of the 500th anniversary of the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan, the craziest of all the conquistadors, the one that sailed around the entire world. The end of the exhibit has one unattributed quotation: The passage of this ship was the most novel occurrence since God created man. What is it about being here, at the very beginning of it all? Standing where he stood, where he kicked them off the stone bulkhead, headed to explore the frontier? The very last paradigmal shift?
In search of a trade route…our AP history teachers drilled into our heads: In search of God, gold, and glory.
I live in gold.
I find God.
Despite the corruption of my being, I am glorious.