The teeming many and the stately few

Two weeks ago I received a collection notice from the post office in my area in South West Dublin: I expected the international letter to contain the ballot papers for tomorrow’s general election in Spain. Getting the vote when you live abroad is a complicated and hazardous process for Spanish migrants. Register with the embassy and, as a result, lose your rights to universal health coverage in Spain; then follow a process of inscription in the electoral census for migrants and ask for your vote every time there is an election; finally, if you are lucky and you get your papers, as I did this time but not for the last regional elections, vote by post or at the Spanish Embassy.

I have been bemoaning this paean to red tape cynically calculated by PP to hinder the migrant vote, which would be overwhelmingly against them, since it was introduced, turning what was a straightforward procedure into a Kafkaesque process. But I must admit that this time it has served me well: the journey for the vote has been illustrative of longer roads and more difficult journeys. You see I cycle everywhere: I cycle when it is windy and I cycle in the rain and I cycle early in the morning and when it is close night and I cycle past hoodlums and, sometimes, past the so-called genteel. Cycling I weave in and out of the many paths of this city, some dark and some bright, some narrow and some wide, and I get to know it at a ponderous pace unknown to the speed of cars; and I get to know it with a sense of invulnerability, unknown to the lone pedestrian. We all should cycle through our city: we all should travel through the unfamiliar and disquieting now and then.

My journey to the vote began with my cycling in the close darkness of a December night fighting the damp Dublin winter chill uphill to the Collection Office in Crumlin, my local Post Office. Crumlin is expansive but tightly built. Clusters of two bedroom terraced houses rendered in pebbledash with a short drive and small back garden built as social housing for tenement dwellers and the deserving working class. In Crumlin you have no choice but to rub elbows with your neighbours and at Christmas squint at the brash displays on windows, walls, or roofs. The area smacks of grit and hard earned comfort punctuated with the Baroque decorative efforts of the working class: white ladies displaying their marmoreal charms on window sills, scallop blinds shading a vase with iridescent plastic flowers; a Doric porch fronting a 60 metre square house. Here live taxi drivers, deliverymen, plumbers and bricklayers and, increasingly, since the days of the Celtic Tiger property boom, interlopers, like me, who paint their doors Farrow and Ball grey and remove all ornamentations from their front windows. I feel quite at home here: Crumlin is not far removed, allowing for striking architectural differences, from the area I lived in as a child growing up in Madrid. In electoral terms this is a section of the vote that needs to be conquered, no doubt, but is not pandered to by majority parties. The aspirations and prospects of its dwellers are largely in the shadow of that middle class that apparently represents everybody and ends up being a faceless zero in an unworkable political equation.

When I finally arrived in Crumlin Village shortly before the Post Office was due to close, I was welcome by a waft of hot air carrying the succulent smell of coronary-inducing chips. The smell reminded me of my granny’s own very working class street in Madrid and of the couple who ran an old fashioned crisp frying and peanut roasting shop. I pictured myself standing there against the mint green tiles on the walls, holding a gifted and very greasy bag of crisps straight out form the oil vats at the back; my grandmother and aunt exchanging pleasantries with the owners, Bernardo, a stocky man with a shock of wiry grey hair, and Pepita, whose size oddly matched her name to my child’s ears, “little peep”. This was a rare olfactory memory for me and it made me wonder whether everybody has one and about the Poustrian smells of the upper classes. And I am unable to imagine what smell, haphazardly experienced in a public place, makes them travel back in time. I think of the forbidding fortresses they call homes and of lives where public space is only a space of transit between private spaces designed to keep the great unwashed away. I cycle home with my ballot papers safely in my bag. On my bike sometimes I feel like I can do anything. Perhaps this time we can, Podemos. But this is only the first part of my journey. The vote, I think, will be secured when I take it to the Embassy the following week.

And so, the second leg of the journey begins on a much milder night and it is an easterly journey to affluent Sandymount, passing through even more affluent Ballsbridge. Two well-heeled and very kind ladies direct me along the way when I am forced to stop and squint at nearly invisible street signs perched a top remote walls in the dark. Steep stairs at the end of wide and pebbled drives lead up to austere Christmas wreaths: no garish displays of seasonal cheer here. Money knows that money is not secured through public ostentation but through private deals: a truth that escapes the cruelly-termed “chavs” and “knackers” who think that glitter and horsepower will act as lucky charms for prosperity. The signifiers of wealth are as elusive as the closed circles of the very wealthy and they are constantly changed to leave us behind. The Lutheran sobriety of the unadorned facades of the stately houses in Dublin 4 is a smack on the face of the Baroque pretensions of their Dublin 12 counterparts. Don’t be fooled by sentiment: their inhabitants will never be visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past.

It is unsettling to cycle through unknown parts of town: in narrow alleys you can be jolted by unsavoury looking characters ducking in and out of the road. Dublin 4 is also unsettling but in that post-apocalyptic and semi-feudal barrenness that lone pedestrians or cyclists, stranded or forced by circumstance like I was, experience when moving through the deserted streets where the very rich live. Front windows are high and cinematic in scope but mostly reveal airy rooms with high ceilings and subdued lighting; I can only guess the comforting warmth of a fireplace beyond eye reach. The houses I pass are the size of at least six or eight Crumlin houses. I think of an old and depressing trait of humankind: some have to make do with their slice on their terraced road, and that is, to my mind, doing pretty well, in a world where millions starve or are blown apart or both; a minority, though, believe they need more. They have to be at the centre of a very wide canvas, commanding a large space, territorially announcing their dominance. Other paintings are teeming with life moving with the insistence of tingling ever flowing blood just awakened. This is not one of those pictures. There is an eerie stillness to the deserted streets that makes me think of wolves and turrets hiding invisible bowmen. The air smells of nothing.

I was approaching the Embassy with my vote already in its envelope and I thanked them for putting me through this journey, which turned out to be a fable and a parable, like most journeys once they are committed to paper. After forty minutes cycling to get to the Embassy, I realised that my vote directly addressed the disparity that I had witnessed, that I was voting as if to say my eyes are open and I see these differences and although my street is narrow my mind is wide and is not up for the taking. With a bit of luck, tomorrow Spain will be awash with the faces, light, and smells of its people voting for change.

Happy Christmas!

The time of the ant. The time of the wolf

Sometimes I feel like a blank canvas, sparsely blotted by experience. There are days when I take the steps through my section of the maze of this gigantic formicary and I barely register my surroundings. Days where life is perched on the bare bones of subsistence, as we know it in post-capitalist societies. The senses are dulled, vacuum packed, the knife with which I slice time has a blunt edge. They are days where temperature is tame; colour is cream, brown fading into beige; all music turns into static; eating is only registered because my plate is suddenly empty and my hand suspended in the act of driving nothing to my mouth.

The world is a poorly sketched backdrop and if I get close to you and you and you, I will see you have no features on your hastily drawn faces.

They are days without smell.

Not tonight. Tonight the air was grater-sharp as I rode my bike uphill to an unknown part of town. Rows of houses reeled before me: the peaks of their neo Tudor roofs promised Poe-like disturbances behind their walls. It was dark and damp with the slate sheen of a close Irish night. I turned round to look at the oncoming cars and they rode by spectrally: headless drivers behind the wheel. I knew nobody and nobody knew me. The world was menacing but new for all that. I felt hunger and cold, I barely knew where I was going. I had to pay attention. On a bike in this dark damp god-forsaken night in an unknown part of town, I was a fragile body.

This is how lambs feel in the company of wolves, a trembling catastrophe.

There is a moment, on a night like this in an unknown part of town, when you turn round to go home and the path is new and the familiar to which you move is fire and shelter.

Tonight I turned towards home and in that moment, wheeling my bicycle in the darkness, I smelled grease and potatoes wafting out of a chip shop.

And then I remembered.

That old chestnut

You want to be somebody else. You are cycling through the city, it is dark but not late and gentle dregs of humanity cross your path as you head towards the canal on your bike. You don’t want to be somebody else because you are unhappy with who you are: who you are is evanescent; who you are has flown into ether in good company and fine spirits. You are so confident in who you are that you could shed it like a tunic made of silk: you could drop your whoyouaredness as easily, knowing that it would still be there in a few hours for you to pick it up and lightly put it back on.

You want to be somebody else. Specifically you want to be a couple in their late fifties walking down Leeson Street with their arms wrapped around each other’s waist. You want to be him as much as you want to be her, as much as you want to be both simultaneously. You want their ease and warmth, of course. You very much want to find out where it comes from: whether it has been earned through a steady life together, or whether it has dropped from the sky like an unforeseen catastrophe. You want to know whether they are holding each other to prop each other up or not to sink deeper. You even want to wear their indistinct high street clothing all greys and blacks and earthy browns; all really not caring for or expecting any fresh eyes to fall on their bodies.

And then, with the subtle autumn chill that tiptoes the edges of the canal, as you leave them behind, you realise that what you want is a shadow of what you had once: as a child holding your mother’s hand; as a teenager lost in the pages of a novel; as a newly wed believing in some endless wedding waltz. It is autumn and what you want to become tastes like a chestnut: earthy and hard to get to. And it has the flavour of a chestnut–the flavour of a welcome winter.

Steady diet of nothing

Although I believe restrictions can spur creativity, the richness and complexity of genre in all its forms being a point in case, I sometimes resent the self-imposed restriction of blogging about food or even writing a blog where food is an excuse to write about everything else. Some days I am not hungry and my mind is far from my stomach. Those days I think that writing can be hard enough without having to use food as a metaphor for the colourful debris that wafts in and out of my brain. Today is one of those days. This last week has been one of those weeks. As an example, here are some of the thoughts I had as I cycled home battling the wind this evening. None of these can be readily linked to food, damn it.

-We age physically but our character is set much earlier than our body. One day we realise that young bodies have drawn a line between them, and us; that we are seen as old, or older, even though relatively little of our intellectual/emotional self-image has changed. Another day, feeling particularly wearied, we realise the currency that is energy. We realise that we are not that far from the day when comfort will become our sole priority and that that day our spirit will be fully subdued by the limitations of our body; The day when the only wearable shoes will be a pair of slippers. That day we will feel as old as those who are still young see us.

-How can I use food to write about the jolt to the heart when my bike is pushed off course by a gust of wind? Or about the mundane exhilaration that follows when I regain my path and hold on to my cap about to fly off without accident or even mishap? How the hell do you write about these feelings via food?

-Why is politics so damn interesting in Spain right now and so dull in Ireland, in spite of the very necessary and well-attended marches and protests against water charges? My guess is that, like a family where its elders have avoided facing their traumas, Spain is now seeing its younger generations fearlessly question their compromises, and venality. Spain’s new party Podemos has the preternatural seriousness of adolescence, a time when we believe that, unlike everybody who came before us, we will never be weak or abject. Somehow the closer I come to explain this excitement about politics is the time I read the opening chapter of Cortázar’s Hopscotch ten times in a row, because the poetry of his prose seemed extra-terrestrial and also at some point achievable to rather limited scribes like me. That is as good a definition of youth as I can think of, the time when you still think that if you only tried/were interested/made an effort you could write like Cortázar, Yeats, or Emily Dickinson. There is no image of food that can allow me to follow this thread of thought.

-And then I thought that the challenges posed by this blog are attractive because for some reason I have the kind of brain that finds allusion, irony, symbolism, metaphor, and everything that is displacement and indirection profoundly compelling. I tire quickly of fact, of fitting the triangle in the triangle-shaped mould, and the square in the square-shaped mould, and the circle in the mould that is round. I teach and my intuition is that the hammering of facts and factoids that passes for education is linked to the perpetuation of capitalist ideology, with its utilitarian and cumulative thrust. That only the study of language, our first and most profound exercise in abstraction, can give us the critical detachment that we need to be full citizens.

-Following from this I find figurative art and realist literature far stranger than impressionist, expressionist, abstract art or poetry. The latter are close to magic, which we need, but how odd it is to try to create something so like its model.

-Somebody from Taiwan viewed this blog yesterday. I have no idea what they were looking for when they threw their little pebble to skim the surface of this virtual ocean or why it hit the bottle with the message I flung into that same sea more than a year ago. Sometimes it feels like the Internet is masterminded by Jorge Luis Borges.

-This is the point at which I get off my bike. Thanks for reading.