Category: Archives

Enter La Basílica de la Sagrada Família Past the glories of art and color and light There is a tower It is dark inside, and the path is difficult

A hummingbird quivers near the open window— a brown violetear, Colibri delphinae, flashes glimpses of its emerald throat, dips into flowers—buries itself in a trembling bloom while I answer the phone.

Gaudí tapped me on the shoulder in the nearly-finished Casa Batlló and asked me if I liked the center atrium. Having been raised in a farmer’s stucco house, I thought I’d say it was beautiful. Artists always seek beauty, right? Before I could remember how to say beautiful in Catalan, he started up again about…

You can smell it like a snake, from miles away— this Eden made of benzene, naphthalene and gasoline. The smokestack garden never rests; it works through day and night like any forest does. It turns the blood of earth into the fuel that makes it sing this dusk chorus of whistles, bells, and whooshing flame.

… something beyond themselves, beyond words. -Celan-   There’s a scent that can’t be defined like breathless painting, music, dance unplowed yet into sentient fields,    graphic grey-mists hovering water,   that won’t be read or turned to tongue