Change or die

Strange as this public service announcement is, people are cooperating and Portugal is crushing the curve.

Today's dystopian public announcement
during the COVID-19 pandemic

Chris Hadfield's
 astronaut's guide to self isolation

Did I mention

2015
when we first visited this place.

I am now an official resident of Portugal and actually for about a month already. I forgot to mention it but it is something of a milestone. It took over a year, a lot of paperwork, getting health insurance, renting a place, etc but it's official. And it actually does, or did, feel a little different at first. The idea has since settled into its mundane context but I'm glad it's done. The next step is that I must now start learning Portuguese. It will have to be, as a friend in Florida used to say, "little by slowly".

Harbor watch for the predominately inattentive

It looks like a small city at sea, 17 smoke gray stacks against the flat horizon, and the deep voice of a fog horn taunting me with intriguing blasts. This particular freighter has been parked at the mouth of the Tagus since I got up this morning. It must be waiting for a dock to open. Generally the ships just chug by.

I keep binoculars nearby, always hoping for a glimpse of arrivals and departures. I don't have a camera these days otherwise maybe I might catch an interesting photo now and then. As you see, at this distance, my poor phone can't make much sense of things.

M.'s position is that I've never learned any of the cameras I've had so why waste the money. Ok. He's partly right. I haven't studied the technical side of photography but I do have a decent eye, plus it's something of a meditation for me and, as someone with acute ADHD-PI (PI being "predominately inattentive") I can use all the help I can use and I can use photography because it shows me how to focus exactly on what's in front of me then rewards me with a photo to see if, in fact, I did. If you're not ADHD that probably doesn't make much sense.

Checklist

Molly, Swami, and Juan Carlos

 M. Lee finally officially became a Portuguese resident today. It shouldn't have taken so long but we happened to apply for our visas in San Francisco last June just when the Consulate was changing systems. Our paperwork got lost in the shuffle for awhile. They were especially slow issuing my visa so my appointment at SEF isn't until next month.

We've been traveling for a long time and have always kept half an eye on where might be a good place to move, to make a base outside the US. In 2015 we settled on Bangkok but it's so polluted there that M. got a terrible lung infection and nearly died. After that, we made our way back to Europe but didn't get serious about Portugal until 2017. That's when we decided it could be the place, and by extension the EU. A lot of questions had to be answered, problems resolved, and a lot of changes to deal with. It's been more like changing lives than just moving somewhere and today is a long awaited plateau along the way. Well, not exactly. I'm not there yet. We'll see if SEF accepts my application. If they do, it's one more thing we can check off the list. After that it will still another five years until we can actually apply for Portuguese citizenship but this is a milestone. Between now and then, we'll have to learn Portuguese, which I'm not looking forward to, but it will be a good mental exercise to become at least transactionally literate.

Magha Purnima and song of the Rock Dove

The sea is rough this morning, agitated by last night's full moon, the first supermoon of 2020. As I write this, I can hear the wave's hoarse roar although the beach is a 20 minute walk. During calm weather it's too far to hear the surf but the full moon, especially a supermoon, creates its own kind of magnetic storm . . . bloating physical bodies, agitating emotions and churning the seas. I've read that even the earth itself swells during full moons. Supermoons, being closest to earth, have the strongest effect.

Supermoons have various names around the world. Most reflect the culture and people's experience of the season rather than the moon itself. It's the Snow Moon, Storm Moon, Hunger Moon, Magha Puja Moon, Mahamuni Pagoda Festival Moon, Chinese Lantern Festival Moon and end of the Chinese New Year celebrations, Full Moon of Tu B’Shevat, Magha Purnima Moon and so on. The term Supermoon is the most recent addition to the list. American astronomer Richard Nolle, a writer for Dell Horoscope, coined it in 1979. It has since become something of a photography contest.

I was up before the sun this morning so the moon was just above the western horizon still agitating the Atlantic ocean on Portugal's west coast. It has since set and the sea is quieter now although the rock dove still continues its simple, rhythmic three note song from a near by tree, the local version of the same sweet song rock doves have been singing on earth every day for millennia . . . doot do do — doot do do — doot do do. 

Street art in Rome and counsel from the I Ching

"Gentle words are worthless if spoken with trepidation."

Street art in Rome
2018

"This is a time of connection with another or others -- not just an alliance, but a melding of parts into a new whole."

These are excerpts from the I Ching reading I did this morning. I shall do my best to keep them in mind today.

The photo I took last December. I'm not sure of the meaning of the hand gesture. It may be the classic Greek orator's call for silence. In any case, I do think this odd, hooded fellow emerging from a pool of water in the sidewalk and today's counsel go well together. I also like they both came to me in December a year apart.

This detail is from huge wall panel of street art in this style is a mere 0.43 km from the Lupercale Shrine. According to legend, the Lupercale Shrine is the sacred place where "a she-wolf nursed Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome and where the city itself was born".

Sailors take warning
then on with the morning

Poor Barkie

She lives behind walls. Does she ever leave the compound? Does she ever see her own kind or does she only hear them passing or from afar? During the day she is mostly quiet but when night comes she begins barking at the dark. They are inside and oblivious ... eating and socializing. Do they ever glance down at her through the window? Are they are all deaf, even the children, or is her voice and her life nothing to them, no more than background movement like wind in the trees or passing cars ... something to be ignored?

About 20:00 hours she starts barking in her oddly deep voice. By 22:00 she is barking in earnest. Every night without exception she looks into the hedge wall, which is about 14 feet or 4 meters high, and barkbarkbarkbarkbarks then, still barking, walks to the other side of the compound and barkbarkbarkbarkbarks into the hedge wall there then back barkbarkbarkbarkbarking and forth barkbarkbarkbarkbarking, sometimes stopping to barkbarkbarkbarkbark in the middle facing our bedroom window, barkbarkbarkbarkbark...barkbarkbarkbarkbarking back and forth barkbarkbark...barkbarkbarking...barely pausing until at least 02:00 hours and then gradually barkbarkbark slows bark bark down bark ... bark until early dawn.

I don't hate her. I feel very sorry for her. It's her indifferent humans I resent. She is prisoner of their selfishness ... their twisted sense of what ... security, prestige, paranoia? He conducts some kind of isolation therapy in his pool in the summer. People come. He gives them an inflatable wet suit complete with isolation head gear and a breathing apparatus then, as they float on their backs in the middle of his pool, he stands beside them probably crooning some kind of relaxation meditation but, at night, his freaked out, lonely, desperate little dog barkbarkbarks and he offers no comfort at all. He's an asshole and his wife is an asshole and their children will likely grow up to be heartless assholes just like them.

When I complain to my Portuguese friends they just laugh. "Ah Portugal. This is just that way it is." Fuck that. It's animal abuse. It's anti-social. It's fucking stupid. When we first got here I thought I'd never sleep again. Now even I sleep but, for me, it will never be "ah Portugal". I don't see animals as tools and food. I respect them as sentient beings, non-human persons as so many do today. My friends tell me I can report the noise that, if enough people complain, perhaps the town will do something about it. I haven't done that yet but this story is not over.

Rainy night, Portugal

The view from my office window tonight.

Had a hell of a time focusing on writing today. My end goal is to get a few more things submitted for publication but I tend to get lost in the details. The last batch of poems I sent out was rejected but with a personal letter from the editor inviting me to submit something again for their following issue. I probably will. In the meantime, I'm looking for other journals that sound interesting but what usually happens, and it did again today, is that I end up muddling around with edits instead. At least today it lead me to finally making peace with a poem I wrote some years ago and have been arguing with ever since. It was always my idea to squeeze it into a haiku but it was never right. Finally, today, I surrendered to the fact that it is just not willing to cooperate. Words have a mind of their own.

Cnoc a' Cairn

Last October we visited a few of Ireland's famine graveyards. The first was in the town of Dingle. Our host encouraged us to visit the town's famine graveyard, Cnoc a' Cairn (Carin Hill). It's one of several such cemeteries in the country. A million to a million and a half people died in Ireland between 1845 and 1852 during what I grew up hearing was the Great Potato Famine. I have since learned it wasn't the loss of the potato crops that killed them. It was England's colonial indifference and greed.

Even in a small town like Dingle, so many people died in a day that there was no time or room to make coffins or dig individual graves. Over 3,000 men, women, and children are buried on Cnoc a' Cairn. There are no tombstones, no names—bodies were laid one on top of another in long trenches and covered with dirt. Only an occasional unmarked stone stands watch along the way. It is an incredibly lonely place.

That evening I wrote a poem about the place. It was published, with little editing, in Dingle's hometown magazine, the West & Mid Kerry Live (pg. 24).

Can't See Me

Several years ago I went through a very bad time. I was living in the hills of West Virginia and would come into town now and then to open my then husband's tiny electronic repair shop. He was a whiz that way. When I got to town the first thing I'd do was buy a bag short dogs, sit in the alley beside the shop and drink a couple. Then I'd open the shop. I didn't go in very often but as I recall we never had any customers when I was there. I played a lot of country music real loud those days. It helped. Marshal Tucker's "Can't You See" was a special comfort. I'm listening to it tonight as I write this. I don't live in West Virginia anymore. I don't even live in America anymore but it's another bad time and that song is still a comfort. This coming week I start a round a tests to determine if I have cancer.

Straigue Stone Fort 1700 years later

For years I stuck to a timeline, ever running to keep up with the present but that is changing. Perhaps traveling has helped move me off the stuck point. The past is ever with us, not only in memory and dream but effect and also quite physically. But enough rhapsodizing.

Me, Swami, and Juan Carlos
Staigue, Kerry, Ireland

Straigue stone fort in Co. Kerry Ireland was built during the late Iron Age making it about 1,700 years old. No adhesive of any kind has held it together for the last almost 2000 years. It still stands because it was built right and no hotshot developer has come in with a bulldozer to clear the land for yet another soulless shopping center, condo project, freeway etc.

Why midnight?

Naples, Italy

Every night at midnight assholes in our neighborhood let off with a barrage of fireworks. Why? WTF? The first night I joked that it must be a cover for the Camorra but it's not funny anymore. Is it some religious celebration? What?! Come on. Fireworks are bullshit. Even the seagulls complain about them. OK. Finally they're done. G'night.

Blue bucket

Naples, Italy

Why take the stairs when you have a blue bucket? Daily life in an old world.

The old man in Évora

Évora, Portugal

"Where are you going
in such a hurry traveler"
Capela dos Ossos

One of the last things we did before leaving Portugal was visit Évora, a city that's been continuously occupied for more than 5,000 years. Neolithic tribes, Celts, Romans, Visigoths, and Moors all passed through Évora, some staying centuries before being swept away by war or the changing of the age. You might think with all the different rulers, cultures, identities, and religions that have come and gone, and Évora's 15th century Golden Age being long past, it would be an empty husk but no. Évora today is considered one of the most livable places in Portugal and, because it maintains the integrity of the past within its historic center, it is also listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Swami & Juan Carlos
Évora town square
under the waxing moon

We got there early and spent the day doing our usual slow crawl, me photographing everything—medieval byways, the cathedral, paintings, gargoyles, bell towers, most of the 5000 skeletons in the Capela dos Ossos (Bone Chapel), Roman ruins, and random other details along the way. We found a friendly vegetarian restaurant for lunch and at twilight, under a waxing moon, sat on a bench in the town square to people watch while waiting for our train. Just after dark, an elderly gentleman wearing a dark topcoat and carrying an umbrella hooked over his arm emerged from a covered walkway along the square's edge. At our bench, he stopped, turned and, with a pleasant smile, bowed slightly looking back and forth into our eyes then slowly, and very deliberately, wished us boa noite and smiled when we wished him boa noite in return. Then, still smiling, he nodded, turned and slowly moved on. This, above all, is what I will remember of Évora.

Nowhere people

Lisbon, Portugal

Who are you?

“Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, “What road do I take?”

The cat asked, “Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” Alice answered.

“Then,” said the cat, “it really doesn’t matter, does it?”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 
 
For the last five weeks, and until yesterday, we stayed in a small flat on the top floor of a four story building near the top of one of Lisbon's many hills. Our flat was a comfortable place on a mostly quiet street with lots of light and a lovely view of the old city and from there we moled up and down through the narrow, twisting cobblestone streets looking for a neighborhood where we might like to live as we are planning to return next spring and establish residency. It's not that we want to live in Lisbon full time, or renounce our US citizenship, it's just that we are both, by nature, wanderers and Lisbon is a good place from which to wander. As a friend from London who is in Lisbon doing the same thing put it, "There are somewhere people and there are nowhere people. We are nowhere people."

A morning in November

Lisbon, Portugal

Morning from the balcony

Woke up today to a white fog sky, the barking of a small dog somewhere nearby, and the sound of a foghorn on the river.

Paris, France

"Art is never finished. Only abandoned."
- Leonardo Da Vinci

Following up on a post I did in August,

Dying Slave
Michelangelo - The Louvre

here are some photos I took of Michelangelo's slaves at the Louvre.

Rebellious Slave
Michelangelo - The Louvre

It was late in the day, the light was gloomy and the photos are too dark but, as the mood suits the grim subject matter, I posted them as is. Better photos here, if you're interested.

Rebellious Slave
Michelangelo - The Louvre

The work was commissioned by Pope Julius II in 1505 as part of a 16 figure series called Prisoners.

Rebellious Slave
Michelangelo - The Louvre

They were meant to adorn his free-standing, three-level tomb along with 20+ other larger-than-life figures, also to be done by Michelangelo.

Dying Slave
Michelangelo - The Louvre

Unfortunately for us all, the project was repeatedly scaled down over the years. Most of the work was never even begun although four other unfinished pieces in this same series are on exhibit at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, Italy. 

Unfinished detail - Dying Slave
Michelangelo - The Louvre

Michelangelo believed that the figure is trapped within the stone and his job was to liberate it. Seeing them with that in mind, however "undone", they are all very moving.

Tomb of Pope Julius II
source: Web Gallery of Art

In spite of being repeatedly downsized, the Pope's tomb is still very grand. It includes Moses whom Michelangelo considered his most lifelike creation. As the story goes, upon its completion he struck the right knee commanding, "now speak!". There is a scar on the knee thought to be the mark of Michelangelo's hammer.

Beyond the Pale

Ireland, starting out - five weeks - 3000 miles

We came upon this spectacular work by Caravaggio in Dublin. Of course my photo in no way conveys its perfection. I leave this here as a note in the sand. Should you find yourself in Dublin, see it.

The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio
National Gallery of Ireland

After five days in Dublin, known in medieval times as The Pale, we rented a car and began this crazy, month long drive beyond The Pale.

Tiny Ireland is barely the size of the US state of Indiana
photo source: bleemo.com

I fell immediately under the spell of the emerald isle.

One of Ireland's 10 gazillion
such enchanted passageways

Our first base was south, in Kilkenny. It's about an hour and a half from Dublin on the main road but it took us all day . . .

because we drove the single lane back roads . . .

and stopped a lot along the way.

Centre for Peace and Reconciliation,
Glencree, Co. Wicklow, Ireland

Swami & Juan Carlos
loved the dark wood.

Graveyard in Glendalough
dating back to the 10th century

Grove in Glendalough

Medieval chapel in Glendalough

We also listened to a lot of music along the way including "I Dream a Highway" by Gillian Welch which proved to be almost too much.





Later M. Lee mentioned that during the drive he'd never felt so depressed in his entire life.

Edinburgh - Queens and Guillotines

We're in Edinburgh for the week. Small as it is, this city holds some important pieces of the puzzle like Mary, Queen of Scots who ruled Scotland from 1542 to 1567.

Standing in her private supper chamber in the tower of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Mary and her tragic reign became disturbingly real. One March evening in 1566 she was dining there with friends including David Rizzio, her private secretary, when her husband Lord Darnley suddenly entered the room, sat beside her and slipped his arm around her back. Then Lord Ruthven, dressed in full armor, entered and announced to the Queen that Rizzio had offended her honor and should come with him. Understanding the situation, Mary ordered Lord Ruthven to leave. The rest, as they say, is history. A screaming Rizzio was dragged into the larger adjoining chamber, stabbed 56 times and tossed down the stairs. His body was buried soon after in an unmarked grave.


By William Allan - Guildhall Art Gallery, Public Domain, Link
Knowing she was the real target of the conspiracy, the Queen skillfully persuaded 21-year-old Darnley to abandon his alliance with the Lords. To insure succession of the monarchy to her unborn child, she needed him at the birth to confirm the child was his. Two days after Rizzio's murder, they escaped the palace together through an underground passage. Nine days later, Mary re-entered the city accompanied by three to five thousand troops and moved into the fortress of Edinburgh Castle to prepare for the birth of her son. Her enemies fled to England, everyone that is, but Lord Darnley. He stayed in Edinburgh and, over the next few months, seemed close to reconciling with Mary but many cross-currents moved below the surface. Eleven months after Rizzio's murder, the lodge where he was staying exploded. Darnley didn't die in the explosion. He and his valet were found dead in the orchard. Both appeared to have been strangled to death. Two and a half months after Darnley's death the Queen married the Earl of Bothwell, the man accused and acquitted of Darnley's murder. However, the intrigue and power games did not end there. A year later the Queen was forced to abdicate her throne to her infant son and flee to England where she remained prisoner of her cousin Queen Elizabeth I until her beheading 20 years later.

The National Museum of Scotland held another crossroads of dusty history and bloody reality for it was there we met The Maiden, Edinburgh's guillotine. We were strolling around, looking at medieval and renaissance artifacts . . . armor, swords, coin hoards, skeletons, carvings and the like when we came upon The Maiden. It stood apart from the rest of the collection like a forlorn and naked wraith trapped in the light of day. It was real like nothing else in the museum and so terribly out time and place. Looking up at it I felt like I was being sucked into a treacherous undertow. But back to the history part.

The Maiden

Public beheadings were so frequent during Mary's reign that in 1563 the official executioner's sword had worn out, forcing the city to rent one. It was then that James Douglas, the 4th Earl of Morton, suggested the city purchase The Maiden. The city magistrates liked the idea and the guillotine became Edinburgh's new official means of decapitation.

More than 150 people were publicly executed on The Maiden between 1564 and 1710. It even played a part in the drama surrounding Mary, Queen of Scots. James Douglas, the 4th Earl of Morton, the man who introduced the guillotine to the city, was (falsely?) convicted of participating in Lord Darnley's murder. Of course he denied it all, "art and part", but was executed anyway on 2 June 1581. Such is the way when leaders enjoy absolute, unchecked power. Douglas's corpse remained on the scaffold until being buried the next day in an unmarked grave. His head however, as a lesson for all, remained on a spike outside St Giles Cathedral for eighteen months.

Holyroodhouse is the official residence of the British monarchs in Scotland and, by tradition, Queen Elizabeth II spends one week there every year in the spring.

Unfinished pieces

Went to the Louvre today. My favorite pieces were two unfinished sculptures of slaves abandoned by Michelangelo, beautiful work but a grim topic for sure.