A Trail of Breadcrumbs (My Barcelona Journal)

3/7/10
Kent Hayden

Through the Sea
It is 2:11 AM and my mouth is dry. All around me, the people sleep. On the little screen in front of me, our plane is represented as a white shape in a field of blue. There is nothing solid on the map as we slice through the Atlantic. Our only connection to reality is the red line of where we have been – a path of past leading to the foot of this flying cross, suspended over the chaos of the dark and the deep. The thin red string is rooted in a place distorted, a place I sometimes have to try hard to recognize.
Two months ago, I was living a different life; isolated, hiding from loss. Last month, I didn't know Grant's name. Two days ago, he and I decided to take this trip to Barcelona on our final reading week of our Princeton Seminary careers. It is terrible to be so free, terrible to live between. It is terrible to look out and see the darkness of unregulated possibility broken only by the incision of your past. But terror can be exciting, and freedom sometimes leads to discovery. And there is green creeping onto the right of the screen.

Details
To begin to tell a story is to commit perjury. You cannot tell the whole truth. The circumstances and decisions which led to my presence on this plane are too large and mysterious to be interesting to you or known to me, so I will lie to you and say it began a few nights ago at the BT Bistro.
We were drinking, and so generating some great ideas. (This is not irresponsibility, but rather a deeply rooted and important aspect of the human tradition. Herodotus describes the ancient Persian practice of making community decisions when drunk, then confirming them when sober. In the cases when someone was uninhibited enough to think of a good idea sober, the leaders of the community would get drunk to confirm that the idea was good. So there.) The first of our great ideas was to take my El Camino to the Jersey shore and camp in the back of it. This soon evolved into a road trip to someplace a bit warmer, which in turn inspired the idea of booking a cheap flight somewhere tropical, which led to a mutual decision to explore last minute flight deals when we got home from the bar. Abra Cadabra: Barcelona.
I am somewhat ignorant of Spanish history and custom, and my knowledge of Barcelona itself is limited to a vague interest in La Sagrada Familia. But I do have some high school Spanish and a genuine interest in people and places that are different. I also have a need to explore my own person and his place in the world.
Shortly after boarding the train to NY, we hit some metallic debris, causing quite a bit of clanging from the belly of the steel beast and some shouting from the belly of its conductor. “WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT!?” The brief surge of adrenaline served as reminder of the danger of leaving home. It felt good. The man in the Phillies hat summoned all of his powers of deduction to ask me “Was that not normal?” A few minutes' delay at the next station and we were off.
Check in around 8:40 for a 9:55flight. We were hungry but the only food to be had past security was at a refrigerated kiosk. I paid 21$ for a tuna salad sandwich, a muffin, and a drink. Fuck supply and demand.

Unlearning Time
3:14 AM Princeton time: I just cracked my window to trigger an explosion of light. Time travel. It is 9:15. I am no longer without a context. I am in a new place, where the Sun doesn't recognize my claims on its patterns.
A trip through space and time separates you from your world, which is so far imaginary that upon reentering it, something as fundamental as the rhythms of the Sun are destabilized. It is not we, who can explain the processes of planetary physics, who truly understand the Sun. It is our ancestors, who could explain that the Sun might not rise tomorrow, and who mourned its death each night and celebrated its birth each morning.
The insight here is not the rather mundane observation that we are ultimately ignorant, or that truth is contextual. It is that our life-long striving to hide from death is not only vain, it is misguided. Death is neither eternal nor purely destructive. It is also creative. Resurrection is a real possibility. Being without time and space, suspended on this flying cross, I have been forced to uncouple my experience from the temporal progression of my narrative. I have been forced to drive a wedge between time and life. But I have also been forced to reunite them. I have learned to see the seam where they almost touch. On the other side of such an experience, there is hope. The hope that I have a lot to unlearn.


Because we are Tourists
We arrived by cab at our little ho(s)tel yesterday around 4 and checked in. The room is tiny, has two beds, a broken tv, a wardrobe, and a tiny bathroom with a beday. It is not nice, but it was 33$ a night, so I am content. We unpacked our stuff, got showers, and went out around 5. We got tapas for dinner because we are tourists. We ordered two Estrella Damms and the waiter asked if we wanted larges because we are tourists. We said yes, and he brought us two 40oz mugs. We also ordered mussels in vinegarette, bread with tomato, churizzos, and mozzarella.
We then went out into the rain to try to find a nice bar. Paul the bedredlocked Canadian works at a little bar above an ice cream shop that we fled to for refuge. He had graduated high school and moved to Barcelona to find himself. He seemed happy. We ordered cava, the Spanish equivalent of Champagne, which was served with a strawberry on the rim because we are tourists. The ensuing Jagerbombs were served with a shot of rum. “Know what would make this shot better? A shot.” I was running on 2 hours of sleep. Not running; zombies can't run.
We ventured forth to a have a beer at few little bars before landing in a nice Irish pub because we are tourists. The British guy with the Ducati helmet owned a Disco in Barcelona and the other helped run it, but it was only open on the weekends, so we were unable to take them up on their offer to have us there as their guests. Too bad. We had the best Irish coffee I have ever tasted.
We then walked down to the waterfront looking for a disco because we are tourists. (Apparently a club here means a strip club. Thanks Paul.) But the combination of the early hour (10), the rain, and the day of week (Sunday) meant we were about the only ones in the area. Apparently night life here starts around 2. I was less than a zombie. We fled the rain and found a nice hole-in-the-wall on a side street somewhere. I drank Red Bull and Coffee. Zombie antidote. Today, we slept. It is snowing beautifully. I'm going to go walk.

Art and Worship
3/8/10 11:56. It is snowing in Barcelona. We left New Jersey behind with its inches and puddles evaporating into spring. Today it is in the 50s and sunny in Princeton. But it is snowing in Barcelona. The only thing that is different here is the dark journey that preceded it.
We passed the Universidad de Barcelona and stopped at a superlative tapas bar. We sat by the window watching a dense snowfall over the center of the city. We left when a few heavily drunk Germans stumbled in and began singing “Sweet Caroline.”
After getting Grant some new shoes to handle the wintery weather, we found ourselves moving towards the Cathedral to the South-East of our Hotel. It is 12th century, the oldest and probably most impressive cathedral I've seen. It felt right as I removed my hat. I walked around looking for interesting angles to photograph the architecture, wanting to save this place for my future, to claim it as part of my narrative. But the occasional echoes of a lenten service in a side chapel pulled me out of my analysis and into relationship with the space. Time was absorbed by the present. This is the function of worship at its highest, the function of art at its most basic. It communicates flashes of the ultimate.
Walking in the sacred space looking for “art” can yield nothing but images. Art is an experience of losing ones' self, not finding a shot. Art is stepping into lent and climbing onto the cross; not for an ism, not for beauty, not for truth, but simply for the view.
From Golgotha you can look up and see leviathan and Behemoth in all their chaotic glory, and hear God say “consider these... I am like these... You are like these...” From Golgotha you can look down and see your feet, broken and pierced, and remember all the places you planned to go someday. From Golgotha, you can look out and see the Temple, and hear the echoes of old women's voices, mourning the death of their God. But I wonder how the owners of those voices experienced them. And I mourn that for most of my life I will continue analyzing the angles and singing Sweet Caroline.

Truth in the Gaps
Back in a University. We sit in an ancient garden in the Antic Hospital de la Sta. Creu. We walked from a somewhat typical ethnic suburb, crammed with kabob and hair products. To the right, an arch opened upon a canopy of orange trees, dropping their children onto centuries of footprints. Princeton aspires to such graceful decay. Here it is almost unremarkable. But I will remark.
Late medieval bricks are crammed into the gaps where ancient stones have crumbled. The hands that hewed the stones and those that spread the mortar are joined in the gaps. The workers' efforts are absorbed into their shared purpose. The beauty of such a place is in the seams. There is something like truth in the unions that such a place generates; not eternal, but lasting.

Spanish insomnia.
I rose around 6 and walked through a dead city. The only others were characters from a graphic novel; laborers unloading trucks, bicycle mounted drug dealers, a group of youths clinging to last night. I walked on and came to the port. A sanitation worker dragged his broom as he passed another American tourist, dirtying his city. I sat in the cold and waited for dawn. Its arrival was a subtle thing, heralded only by the gulls. The horizon was all masts and hotels, but the moon glowed in the half-light.


2:22 am.
Last day in Barcelona. I cannot sleep with so many thoughts. I have begun to know this place. I have begun to form it into the background of my narrative. But In a few hours, I will be torn from the friendly bartender at Bar International, from the crumbling stone I touched outside the Cathedral, from the dealer on La Rambla whispering “hashishishish.” I will be launched from these things that have constituted my reality, and they will cease to be. My story will go on without them, and their images in my mind will fade. The more meaningful encounters I have had will remain with me for a while, but just a while. And the ripples of my presence here will widen out into calm. Barcelona will forget me, as it should. Another tourist, at best glancing up from his beer to see something of the life of this place.
My story is a thin line through the infinite. If it is worth telling, it is only as a parable; a case study of an instance so small and so common, that it constitutes one of the building blocks of being. And yet, it is everything there is. From where I sit, I can see clearly only the point of my present, moving through the void. Mathematically, a point occupies no space; it has no being. And so, I imagine my narrative, a line from an arbitrarily chosen beginning to an imagined end.
But sometimes truth sneaks into the gaps in my storytelling. Sometimes, my narrative is revealed to be merely a particle; so small that it has no mass, and so important that it constitutes all things. Sometimes a lenten dirge sung in a Romanesque cathedral forces me to look up and catch a glimpse of the sacred. Such an experience shakes my consciousness free from itself and allows it to see the whole. Truth ceases to be linear, and my story becomes unsettled. The red line of my narrative becomes a trail of breadcrumbs, blown by the wind and consumed by the beasts.
These encounters are terrifying. They force a simultaneous consciousness of the infinite smallness and infinite importance of my life. They encourage and disturb, leaving me absolutely free.

And then I gather myself, and I carefully drop another crumb.