Seeking harmony in the gutters of Lisbon.

Every nation must come to terms with the cultural riches born in times of error. Witness the debate in the U.S. regarding current day efforts to censor Mark Twain’s  “n-word”, or the controversy surrounding the cinematographic innovations of Reni Riefenstahl during the 3^rd Reich. 

In Lisbon, there is the former Colonial Garden, later called the Overseas Garden and now offically named the Tropical Botanical Garden. It was decreed into existence by the penultimate King of Portugal, Dom Carlos I, known, variably, as The Diplomat, for his love of travel, The Oceanographer, for his love of science and the sea, The Martyr for his demise by regicide. 

The Garden’s riches include the XVIII century Palace of the Counts of Calheta:

The Macau Gate

http://macauantigo.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/pavilhao-de-macau-na-expo-de-1940/)

and innumerable statues of less than modern sensibilities 

vestiges of the Exposition of the Portuguese World, 1940

organized by the fascista dictator Salazar (http://www.leme.pt/imagens/portugal/lisboa/exposicao-do-mundo-portugues/0001.html).

The internet rightfully said that this garden is not heavily visited. Sounded like the perfect place to test my new camera.  

I found quiet,

the beauty of entropy:

And a wrought iron gargoyle:

I wish I’d been granted a glimpse of the colossal stone pachyderm that Salazar ordered thrown into the Tagus on the day after the Exposition, following its decoration by anti-colonialist vandals. We can only hope it is still entertaining the fishes.

___

P.S. More tiles and gutter pipes carryng fresh rainwater to the elephant under the waves.  

Walked 30 years in Lisbon today.  On my way to Penha da França I strolled Alto da Pina, where I’d lived as a fairly young bride. Discovered blocks I’d never known. Street August the 4^th, named for the death of Hans Christian Anderson?  Marie Curie?  Streets named for date of death?  Neh. The birthday of … Louis Armstrong?  The Queen Mother (she lived to be 101 you know, a longevity prize perhaps)? Yours truly? or that fellow we see on TV a lot who is fighting reduncacy real hard, Barak Whatzit?? 

Research called for.

Circled back around to snap this one, Recycling, Portuguese style. Was musing on how the Portuguese have so little in the way of a second-hand market when I passed a hearse: recycling inevitable. 

Stepped into a used furniture shop to see who was making a liar out of me. Two antique mirrors later, I climbed to the top of Penha da França and then down to Arroios, across the Almirante Reis Avenue and toward Estefânia.

Reminisced on very first trip to Lisbon. Though I found it small and dark after the humid exuberance of East Tennessee and Brazil, the turn of the century architecture, the tiles, particularly, enchanted. Thirty years later and entropy seems to have won.

Flowed down onto the Avenue and discovered that the ravages have spared, yet, some of the Arte Nouveau.

That afternoon, went to fetch my mirrors. Another stroll revealed a new passion: centenary tiles and gutter pipes, carrying the rains toward the sea. Let me share my collection.  

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                                                                                            Turning, a familiar smell summonsed me back to the present. Ah, despite the 86º degree heat, the first of October is signalled by the roasting of chestnuts. Autumn is here. Perhaps that explains my preocupation with entropy, recycling. Humans composting.

Drifting through the evenfall skirting the Tagus. 

Soul soothing on the Douro.

Paço de Lumiar

Estrela

Campo d’Ourique

“Escrever é esquecer. A literatura é a maneira mais agradável de ignorar a vida.” Fernando Pessoa, quoted from a wall. I have no idea which of the imaginary friends penned this insight. 

The light robbed me of quality images of the Casa Museu Amália Rodrigues but let me assure you her Strange Form of Life resonnated. Especially the entropic patterns on her banister. I covet those images.  

Not quite enough left-overs for lunch so after Security Council level negotiations about the children’s choice of dishes, I opened the fridge and looked, saw and innovated. And let me share:

One small onion, a red one. Chop it in medium-to-small bits and massage it with sea salt, Turkish-style to release the essences and tone down its bite.

As many cherry tomatoes as I had in the fridge. Flashback:  I had almost given up eating tomatoes in Portugal. The local preference is for tomatoes firm, tart and half-way between green and red. Not my tradition. Until the Hungarian co-mother (see previous posts) had a visit from her long-term vegetarian Hungarian scientist father who commented:  the only Portuguese tomatoes worth eating are the cherry tomatoes. Voilá! I began experimenting and today I can enjoy tomatoes once again. Usually the Spanish discount market can guarantee the best quality year round. Being as its early June, however, the Portuguese, re-branded bargain-yet-with-quality grocery chain does pretty well. These were little, sweet yet tart enough that I dispensed with vinegar.

200 grams of Portuguese fresh cheese. Imagine cottage cheese solidified. This was the equivalent of 2% cheese, neither full fat nor low-fat. Chop it into half inch cubes, or as close as you can get because the cheese comes in cylindrical shapes.  (alimentacao-mais-saudavel.blogspot.com)

This being Portugal and practically the eve Lisbon’s huge Santo António festival, add in half a roasted, red bell pepper, skinned. Mine was bought at the aforementioned grocery store. Better, of course, if you have grilled and preserved your own. I shall blame condo-living for buying mine.  (clickgratis.com.br)

The crowning touch, the most serendipitous ingredient … permit me to maintain some suspense.

I had spent a good part of the last four years hankering after a good pepper grinder. I had managed to ruin my mother’s years before (so I assumed; I have the neurotic habit of accruing blame for sins for which I do not always bear responsibility) by trying to grind red pepper grounds in it. You can now buy black pepper in Portugal in a bottle with its own disposable grinder (this is new fangled; when I first came I had to content myself with previously ground pepper) but it seems so anti-ecological that I had been keeping my eye out for a good, affordable grinder. Of course, as Carolyn’s beautiful crystal implement attests to, price and grinding quality have a fairly low level of correlation.

So at Christmas, I took the girls to a fairly small shopping center and turned them loose: their first independent shopping adventure. Before the release, however, I paused to lavish esthetic appreciation on a little golden pepper grinder. 

It turned up in my Christmas stocking. Thanks Kathleen!

So back to said bargain(ish)-priced slightly above quality grocery chain to search for peppercorns without the plastic disposable grinder.

Now, mind you, my Portuguese is not terribly bad. I mean I’ve spoken it longer than more than one published poet (Miguel Alain, for exampe) and my insatiable curiosity helps enrich my lexicon. But I got to the peppers and was stymied. Finally, I bought one that said “Pimenta Something or Other”. I mean it looked like Black Pepper and just ‘cause it had a fancy name after it, I figured it was just another somewhat improved form of the same.

I waved the new grinder over … I remember not the dish. What I do recall was  …  joy! What an aroma! Sweet and spicy, only slightly peppery.  Internet dictionaries provide most of our answers (will the income eked out by translations be soon stolen by Google?):  All Spice.

Wonderful! Magnificent! Few recipes have come to my awareness regarding the savory application of this cousin of the Pepper plant, but let me proffer one: 

Serendipitous Salad

8 oz Portuguese fresh cheese, neither full fat nor low-fat

I small, red onion, chopped into small bits and massaged with sea salt

Portuguese sea salt, q.b. (Portuguese for “to taste”)

150 grams cherry tomatoes (if they are too sweet, add a dash of Red Balsamic Vinegar)

½ grilled, peeled red bell pepper

Generous amounts of fresh-ground All-spice

Preferentially, negotiate a cease-fire among warring children. Enjoy.

SEARCHING FOR THE THIRD DIMENSION

Is awareness of death necessary in order to fully love life?  Absolutely not. Observe the joy of a two year old toddling off into adventure’s way, the voluptuary respiration of our feline masters. No need of fear to stoke the passion of life. Incontrovertible, yet, the boon of waning, late afternoon. It brings our world into focus, into darkness, into relief.

The boss preferred to be thought of as Boss: intimidating, impersonal and commanding. An inveterate traveller, he knew more museums at home in Tennessee than I did, though born in Australia and resident in Europe. One fine afternoon, while marking time in the staffroom, one of his scutes temporarily lost hold, curiosity won out and a smidgeon of small-talk ensued:

“Katie, when you go to a major museum, which section do you visit first: painting, drawing, prints, sculpture, photography, decorative arts?”

 My inability to answer had less to do with my shock at The Boss asking me a question of substance than it did my lack of resonance with the options presented me.

 “Let me think about it and I’ll tell you later.”

The next day, in fact, I walked into his office and announced, “My favorite part of the museum is, invariably, the museum itself. Architecture is my favorite form of art.”

 Only recently have I come to realize why: it’s the third dimension.

Art framing one…

confounding… 

imprisoning …

enfolding.

Twenty-one year old angst and my therapist had me do a Rorchadt test. All I remember is his saying “You haven’t mentioned texture.” The tone suggested something akin to disappointment, pity.

Thirty years neigh, a ghost recently came to mentor me, since January 20^th, 2011 to be exact. I am obsessed with a graveyard, you see (see posts Pottersfield Monologues 1 and 2). It was visit two when it revealed itself to me, amidst late modernist monotony, a tomb crowned with a magnificent bronze neo-realist Pietà. The tomb sported little information save the man’s name, dates and profession “Sculptor”. My initial fantasy was that, just as my great-great grandfather had carved his own casket, trying it on for size, so too might this unidentified sculptor have crafted his own memorial: planning for his own demise. My curiosity was sucked into a sort of thrall from which I’ve yet to research my way out.

Visit number 3 to the Cemetério de Benfica revealed to me children’s flower-bed, where the babies are offered up to the worms, literally. But I neglected to memorize the sculptor’s name.

Visit number 3 or 4 (the spell confounds my math) and I managed to remember the name: José Dias Coelho.  Google provided the story. “He died as a secret worker of the (Portuguese Communist) party when he was assassinated by PIDE, the political police of the Fascist regime, on the 19th December 1961 on Lusíadas street in Lisbon. In 1972, Zeca Afonso released a song titled A Morte Saiu à Rua (Death is out on the Streets), a homage to Dias Coelho.” A Portuguese legend, even I had heard of: right across the street.  (For a slightly more up-to-date interpretation of the song which almost single-hanedly symbolized the tyranny of the regime, see

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp37KWkAmq4&feature=related)

Tears ensued. Curiosity flourished. Shall I speak of kudzu?

http://mattsnell.blogspot.com/2011/05/innovative-ways-to-deal-with-invasive.html 

Several weeks later, I followed Dias Coelho’s electronic footprints to the Museu de Neo-Realismo de Vila Franca de Xira in search of his opus. Few of his works in exhibition.

Visit number 4 or 5 to the tomb (which, incidently, 49.5 years later is permanently decorated with fresh flowers) reminded me to study the piece itself for clues. There I found the signature: Vasco da Conceição, dated several years after the murder.

Vasco da Conceição and his wife Maria Barreira had shared a sculpting studio in Lisbon with the younger Dias Coelho before he and his wife had given up their art to go underground in the anti-fascist efforts of the Partido Comunista. Unless Google has misled me, they took their three young children into hiding with them. My fascination became how do you give up your art in search of your goals of community and freedom? How do you conduct innocents into that sacrifice with you?

Going on five months after the first Apparition, I followed the ghost’s melody to the small town of Bombarral last week-end. My reward, a plethora of 3 dimensionality: a trove of texture. The collection of Vasco da Conceição and Maria Barreira exposed in tender neglect, and yet, extant.

Her Dancers:

His Serenity.

—-

Their collection might fall have into beautiful platitudes had not my limited knowledge focused my sights on their more political pieces. His Flight produced just about time Dias Coelho and his wife, Margarida Tengarrinha, fled into clandestine activities:

Her Protection:

Mother placing her body as a shield between child and a world of threat, eternally peering over her shoulder.

For more on the Sculpting couple: http://vlapy.no.comunidades.net/index.php

___

Temporizing the return to my 1 dimensional, text-imprisoned world, it occurred to me that the countryside might offer literal relief. So I awaited (expectant anticipation) waning rays which I knew would summon the texture from the midday’s glare.

My reward, engorged peace, virescent sculpture:

And the grapevines marching fearlessly downhill toward my lense:

The following morning I assailed the dimensions of the capital.  Seeking “Old Lisbon” I ended up in a Lisbon older slightly than that of Benfica: slightly more worn, considerably hillier, sporting fewer graveyards, more “character” and the river, offering itself southward, westward, eastward.

Nearing the end of my meander, I pause on Rua Nossa Senhora da Glória. A small, flat, gray cardboard folder apprehended my glance, its brownish-gray not so terribly distinct from the hue of Lisbon’s cobblestones.  The contrast, rather, was that flatness of the paper frame against the rough-hewn facets of the same.

“I know those crafted folders. There is history here.”

A young woman with cropped hair challenged me from within paper bedecked in Art Nouveau.  A Portuguese flapper.

How to return an unidentified, lost family photo? 

As I walked I composed in my head: 

 “Lost: Grandmother/Mother/Sister/Aunt/Unrequited Love”

—Anonymous icon encountered amid the drumlins of Graça. Seeks an album in which to rest from the tumult of the Third Dimension.

tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?

It isn’t human, I’m afraid. It was an amphibian. A large, green member of the Anura order, imortalized in sculpture, turned green. As high as an adult knee, it must have reach to my 6 year old waist as it stood guard over the massive wooden planked door that blocked the entrance to the Murphy’s kitchen, protecting the precious fountains of water therein, I suppose. Fear, my first memory. Unnecessary fear, I’m glad to say.

Malta hija gzira sabiha – Malta is a beautiful island 

 Kemm tiswa biex tasal sal- _____? —How much does it cost to get to _____?

Tista’ turini fuq il-mappa? —Can you show it to me on the map?

Arab rule  (870 to 1091) left just the latest of Semitic strata (following much earlier settlements by the Phoenicians and Cathaginians). Many waves of conquest later, the Maltese language is a meld of largely Semitic syntax and vocabulary of a plethora of influences . The young explain that they speak Maltese among themselves almost exclusively, except for the numbers. English numbers are easier.

Unlike St. Paul, unlike Ulysses, I sought Malta out. My quest: burning away of the extraneous parts of myself. I petitioned the aid of a mage whose lair lay there. He the Calypso, I Ulysses, wrought supplicant, prisoner of my own design for 7 days in Zurrieq. The tethers were generous and I saw many of the islands’ jewels.

Valletta. Like all the isles, its buildings all in honey colored, soft globigerina limestone. Its color lent by the wooden window boxes. Museums, Gardens, the Maltese Montepio, the harbor with frigates from Canada, South Korea, Germany and Sweden, awaiting events in Tripoli, 221 miles away. Memorials to warships lost when Malta was the most intensively bombed spot during WWII. The Palace Armoury with its vestiges of the might of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John, the Knights of Malta. Born of religious strife, first as Hospitallers then Crusaders in Jerusalem, transplated to Malta, they left myriad testaments to the beauty of the spirt. St. John’s Co-Cathedral is the epitome, its gilt resplendent, its Saints Jerome and John. The endless puzzle of over 400 tombs paving the church’s nave pieced together of inumerable chips of pietra dura, each the design of its future perished Knight. 

Marsaxlokk.The Phonecian Eye is everywhere. Geneticists have concluded that 50% of Maltese men “may be” carrying a Phonecian Y chromosome. “I want to visit a boat graveyard,” announced my host, yearning “for the soul of the dead machine.”

Rabat/Mdina The DomVs Romana. The cave where St. Paul took refuge after his shipwreck on the island in 60 AD. Malta lacks the paperwork to be officially consecrated as an Apostolic See, although a relic in the form of a godly forearm lends credence to their claim. Next door are St. Peter’s catacombs, 2 square kilometers of early Christian tombs. The old walls of Mdina. Its Madonnas, its chocolate cake.

Gozo. A 30 minute ferry journey followed by a short drive past countryside with city-sized basilicas led us to Xaghra, where the Temple of Ggigantja, one of the oldest temples in the world still stands 5000 years later.  The Giantess supposedly came, with the help, no doubt, of the Neolithic peoples (supposedly from Sicily) and erected mammoth coralline stones without the use of wheels or metal instruments. Nearby the lair of Calypso, where she kept Ulysses prisoner for seven years entertained by idyllic views. Atop another hillside, the Cittadella overlooks verdant terraces. Its prison held many a disgraced Knight, though not, if memory serves, the painter Caravaggio.

By the late afternoon, waves of black ink washed against the Azure Window pulling limestone crumbs off toward a tepid sun sinking into its watery tomb.

Il Birgu/ Vittoriosa. The austere beauty of the Inquisitor’s Palace with breathtaking grafitti left by prisoners. The succor of the Grand Harbour.

What essence did I discover? Malta is sediment built upon layers of deep corelline limestone, covered by layers of soft golden globigerina limestone, more correline, blue clay, green sands. Just as the waves of conquerors came: 

Neolithic peoples left the Giantess’s temple.

Bronze Age Tarxien peoples left shrines weightily dignified with Fat Ladies, tombs and textiles.

The Phoenicians left their Eyes and their Y chromosomes.

The Romans left mosaics.

The Arabs left their wealth of consonants, difficult numbers and just one frieze.

St. Paul left an intense Catholicism.

The Swabians, I remember not.

The Aragonese brought the Hospitallers.

The Hospitallers left a wealth of beauty (and at least 3 Portuguese Grand Masters).

Napolleon ended the Inquisition.

The Italians left a marvelous cuisine.

The English ended censorship and left war memorials.

Now Malta is Maltese and a testament to how a place can and must maintain its own intense culture identity, despite the global village, in which the Maltese, you might say, have been living since somewhere around 5000 B.C.

The maids’ dresses were the color of globigerina, as was the gilt on the bride’s roses.

The lesson I take away?

That we should struggle to fashion what we believe in, leave beauty behind us and plan for our own demise by living with the passion of Carravaggio. I, personally, can do without his ferocity. My jihad: that my life should sparkle like a few of the gemstones set in the intarsia of the nave. Any nave.