Repetition and Acquisition
A pleasant day, if one that is philosophically suspect: Susan and Rob and I went in to Barcelona, and walked and shopped and talked and ate and drank....
What is odd about it is that almost everything was familiar from previous visits: lunch was again at Santa Maria, a mild example of molecular cuisine – really it was just good fusion, lots of odd combinations and ideas in about ten small courses (one small but significant modification – with the pan-fried duck liver (!) they now give you a small glass of muscat, which seems like a great relief at the time but of course can't be all that welcome to your liver); the Museu de la Xocolata, where I finally bought those chocolate liqueurs (which now present an interesting problem in packing and bubble wrap, to be solved in the next six days); a couple of bowls that match the deep blue bowls I've got at home from Caixa del Fang (a pottery store run by a nice older blonde woman who looks like someone's mother – not at all as though she should be named Fang – but perhaps I've misunderstood something in the translation – "Cardinal Fang – bring – THE COMFY CHAIR!!!"); and five big fat slabs of torrone, in the chocolate, egg and almond paste varieties, which I always buy when I'm here, at the same little sweets shop on the corner in front of the fountain.
Thus: lots of stuff I already know... which is okay of course, but perhaps indicates certain limitations. As does my irritability yesterday, as does my continuing shyness of the gay scene here and of the beach, as does my tendency to focus on Acquiring More Objects. Not to mention the triumph of capitalism, of consumerism, of Buying More Stuff... at one point, trudging after Susan and Rob up the Ramblas towards the train station at the Passeig de Graciá and lugging my amazingly heavy purchases, I thought: here is your punishment, you bourgeois pig.
None of these things is really dreadful in themselves (even the capitalism, even from a Marxist point of view – don't all the Marxists I know have credit cards, and don't most own their homes?). But they all suggest certain improvements to be made in one's life: shouldn't one's focus be higher, brighter, more unexpected, more adventurous, more – authentic?...
Oh well. I had fun anyway – and how could you not have fun, shopping and eating in Barcelona. But ah, how my feet are aching....
•••
Luxurious despair
Three books I brought with me: Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (the jury's still out on this one); Terry Pratchett's Thud (great fun, one of his better ones I think – finished it late last night); and Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, his collected prose in the meticulously graceful Penguin edition.
I continue to feel, as I did when reading parts of it back in England, that the Pessoa is beautiful, of course. However, what is rather fun is the more Latin, more southern European sense of the book I get while reading it here: he is getting such passionate enjoyment out of his own depression, such sensual pleasure from his constructed misery –
"Silence emerges from the sound of the rain and spreads in a crescendo of grey monotony over the narrow street I contemplate."
Beautiful. And very Portuguese (as it could also be Spanish, Italian, even perhaps Greek). The richness of seeing oneself as terribly sensitive and poetic – the sheer self-indulgence of his feelings, which criss-crosses with the ruthless forging of beautiful language, is thrilling, especially as he is himself not unaware of the irony, the comedy, in the whole situation he has made for himself. Pessoa also seems sort of a godfather to the blog – to any kind of fragmentary, personal, loosely constructed or unconstructed writing, that is nevertheless written to be read by someone else: with its endless tangle of coy and/or self-deprecating narcissism, irony, distance, closeness.
His self-indulgent rigor makes me think – not of the late Bergman, but of the equally late Antonioni (astounding that they died the same day, which must have been a shock for cinéastes): especially L'Avventura, my favorite, which I saw when far too young to understand anything about it except how striking and disturbing it was.
Of course the advantage of reading Pessoa, over watching Antonioni, is that one realizes: you don't have to be fabulously rich, and dressed in current Italian fashions, to be luxuriously depressed....
•••
Small dinner
Because lunch was so lavish (Susan didn't plan on eating any dinner at all after having it), but I must take my usual medications, I'll have a small dinner made up of fragments of food from the grocery: a sliced Roma tomato, a few fresh anchovies, some bits of goat cheese filed among the tomato slices. Ending with: a fresh fig.
(A necessary and appropriate reaction to the smells pouring through the kitchen window, which opens onto a vertical shaft between several apartments: an hour ago it was garlic, roasted I think; later someone's cologne, after they took a shower; and now I distinctly smell some kind of sweet wine.)
Yet another kind of indulgent Iberian indigence: exceptional food – but eaten as though one were poor....
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