Certain Places (Algunos Lugares)

Certain places, from the moment I have heard their name and learned of their particular geographic and orographic conformation, have exerted a strong attraction in me, which has provoked in me an impulsive yearning to reach them. As a whole, they possess a summoning power. That makes me fall into the illusion that they bring together the most mysterious correspondences. Their location is like a delicate and vigorous voice, and it appears to me as the unspoken voice of the place, exciting in me the idea, perhaps naïve, that there is something there. To that location is linked my reverie with the finding in its most inspiring domain, and which only a posteriori I have been able to discern: “deterritorialization”. By this I mean that the situation of this or that place has come to superimpose itself in my spirit as a Nemeton of the unheard of, a point of confluences of telluric currents with the deepest requirements, a strangeness that becomes independent of the territory that comprises it. Nevertheless, something leads me to think that my sympathy for certain places, if it is initially related to their particular location, does so because they are also susceptible to provide a response to a type of predominantly pre-conscious internal request. It is as if the location triggers a kind of secret pre-communication between the desire to reach them and what, on the ground, tends to plunge me into a certain secondary state, from which a relationship with the spirits that inhabit them comes into play.

On the other hand, it has happened to me to return to the same place on different occasions, generally consecutively -although equally in times distant from each other-, yielding to a design whose origin, I know, obeys the capacity it had to awaken in me, not only the sensation, but the truth of finding a habitat where there is room for the renewal of the dazzling, a psychological comfort, and a force of attraction that suspends certainties and encourages powerful emotions. This is a habit that has been repeated to me and that I have deliberately cultivated. A habit that reaches a modestly ritualistic character, which, far from constituting a sterile reiteration, sets in motion a way of life that tends to resolve itself, as partially as you like, in a fertile marriage between the inner journey and the outer journey. This pairing rekindles an intense passion for a true life that, even in nature, had not been absent.

The places of which I speak, which may satisfy imprecise requirements -as I have been suggesting- I have come to perceive them as witches/sorcerers (brujos). If this can mean that I perceive them as bewitched places, it is so insofar as they present themselves to me -even beforehand- as witch-places that work their spells, which I locate in their potential animism. It is not necessary to insist too much on the fact that the latter shakes the foundations of the prefixed mental structures; and that the body and the spirit experience, in the form of a mute ceremony, and therefore intimate and confidential, the fullness of detachment, which is the consequence of being possessed by the genius of the place.

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I have been assiduously accompanied by an appetite for reaching isolated enclaves, and, once there, the most secluded corners. Those are objectively so, although, when difficulty hinders, I then look for the hiding place that imbues me in such a situation. I indulge in it with undisguised joy. I do not have too much difficulty in finding them. And, undoubtedly, they help me in the hours of abandonment, those in which, according to delegated and accepted customs, they remain free of their commandments and I can, for that very reason, maintain with places and time relationships that oscillate between the simple, the customary and the renewed. I should add that I am fortunate enough to be able to choose times of the year when human affluence is limited -and, not infrequently, non-existent-, which contributes to my pursuit of seclusion. And even so, different vicissitudes of practical and social life can lead me to have to share those spaces in less favorable periods.

But the question is, in the last case, whether one can bear or wants to remain for a very long time in a kind of detachment, under a climatology that, being beneficial in the beginning, can become both detrimental and unbearable. I admit my inclination towards all this, and that this is due to what, having remained in me since childhood, dictates that I can continue to indulge in a gain of life that comes, precisely, from a waste of time as I live it, so often – and let the vagueness serve – against the grain/off time, if I am to measure experience according to the verdicts of chronology. Decongested of the mental calendar that prescribes the practical and social life, which does not cease to point out the hours, minutes and seconds of the experience even in the beyond, I restore for myself the time of the spirits of the place and, frequenting with the body a hard peace, reviving the open reptilian brain, I become animal on a ground that anoints and calms. Thus I offer my body to the climate, in an abandonment which is action, in a state of laziness which is knowledge.

This is how I stayed around five hours in the rocky promontory where the remains of the Castro de Baroña, belonging to the Concello do Porto do Son (Galicia), stand. It is a massif of light in which erosion shapes the fable of the place, where the rock gives voice to the sea and in the echo the word and its shadow are abyssed. It is a palace of outdoors/exposed to the elements (intemperie), tenebrous and vast in its extreme innocence, an incorrigible luxury for the eyes and everything else. There, the whole reality, formidable under the zenithal light, ceases to be a mirage because it is embodied as a certain presence: a girl who walks on the rocks and carries in her hand a quartz crystal attracts the power of the telluric verb, renews the mineral language. I recover these words, adapted, that I wrote for my book of poems Mal de confín, because I will not be able to say again anything similar to what I perhaps achieved then in my eagerness to make present, no doubt in a partial way, the impressive physical and mental stimulus that caused me, since the first time I met him -and throughout more than two decades- a pronounced Atlantic stretch that came to provide me with secondary states and to have, punctually, hyper-lucidity.

In the Castro de Baroña, one month of July, the alternative contemplation of the glare of the ocean water, wonderfully bright, aroused in me the darkest reveries, so that under its excess of light and the insistence of an irreducibly altering wind, I could imagine how from the sea emerged the voices that its dead pronounced to communicate with each other, as if it were a choir of angels in the depths purging their innocence. This seclusion, in a place entirely exposed to the sun and sheltered, I, in the shade of a rock, was followed by a siesta under the protection of the one and the other. I cannot say how long I slept, although I have the impression that it was not prolonged. What is certain is that, in that way in which one wakes up because, even when asleep, one notices a presence beside him, I opened my eyes momentarily to see, a meter away from me, standing, a girl who was watching me carefully while she was moving in circles a stone of what seemed to me to be quartz, which was hanging from a rope. I sat up and looked at her, drowsily. She was smiling. I lay back down to continue my sleep. It didn’t take me long to wake up completely, or so I remember. Next to me, about two or three meters away, the girl was still there, sitting with her quartz stone.