Fast Living

In Belfast, Ireland, for an international academic conference I gave a paper, but so did a lot of other people, and my paper was a success as were many others, and in this galaxy of new people and ideas I fell in love with the little pots of tea as well as 21-year-old Bushmill's whiskey, only 10 British pounds a glass, then upon returning home my head spun as I fought to finish two long long highly detailed articles and eight short ones, and draft new poems. It's spinning now.

I loved Northern Ireland and would settle there if only because the money has a picture of the Queen on it. The rest of Ireland uses euros. Dublin is a big city, a major city, the New York City of Ireland, with suburbs and all that. Belfast is a former shipbuilding town, walkable and quite trim, and one needn't go far to find castles and fishing villages. The Titanic was built in Belfast, and I thought the Titanic Museum would be corny. Oh no. This was serious economics, business, and labor, and the portion about the sinking was terrifying. Who was it who told me--I think it was the cathedral sexton--"Even little kids, three and four years old, come here and they have heard of the Titanic." It seems basal, like a collective memory; I felt changed, as if a shovelful of spirit, or complacency, or conviction about what life is, was moved from here to there. A museum hasn't done that to me since Auschwitz in 2012.

As usual I returned home and looked around in wonder: I live here? This is my house? My home? In all the world this is my home? My first venture out was to the grocery store where I saw this car in the parking lot and knew I was back home in Missouri.

Today I took a walk, a major achievement, and admired the December sky and its sun's long shadows, like no other month's, more like moonlight because the trees are leafless: museum of shadows.

Tiles for Miles

"These people are obsessed with tiles," I thought, because in Portugal tiles are indoors and out, town and country, fronting buildings and churches, in restaurants, stairwells, kitchens, train stations, bathrooms. There are two kinds: faience, or ceramic tiles made of a special gray clay; and Moorish tiles, much heavier, made of terracotta. Both are hand-painted but Moorish are more likely to be textured and geometric (reflecting Islamic esthetics imported by the Moors who once ruled Portugal); faience is painted with just about anything, cobalt blue a favored color. Blue tile art is called azulejo and dates from the 17th century. People don't do it so much anymore.

Pictured above is an azulejo chapel ceiling (in the seaside town of Nazare; the chapel was just a hole in the wall and I went in and beheld this), and below, a restaurant front in Nova da Gaia; a bunny-themed tile in another restaurant; a doorway with atypical monochromatic tile; a bathroom in one of our hotels in the tiny town of Pinhao; and a sampler from one of my hosts' tile collections, now tiling his kitchen wall. It was I who was obsessed with tiles, and it'd be great if we could put people to work tiling things here.

 

Terra Nova

Newfoundland -- first mapped as "Terra Nova" -- and Labrador, named for a Portuguese sailor, meaning "landowner" -- look cool on the map of North America, and because they're huge, mostly roadless, difficult to access, and nobody I know has been there, and I was seeking myself because I'd lost myself--that much I knew, but not how or when--after four years of yearning to do it I chose to spend 12 days in the province in northeastern Canada that seemed to mirror me.

Towns such as L'ans Amor ("Love Cove"; formerly named L'ans a Mort, "Cove of Death," but I'm told tourists like sweeter names), with a population of 6, are common. The words for this land are "pristine" and "extreme." The green and blue ocean is clear to its bottom; icebergs and whales swan by. Winters are abrupt, long, and bitter; no fruits, vegetables, or grains grow there; except for fish there's no farming or processing; all other products must be shipped in. You eat seafood and potatoes, and pay $2.50 for an orange. Polar bears ride into tiny towns on icebergs from Greenland and ransack houses. Jacques Cartier called it "the land that God gave Cain." Yet in June, July, and August pointed black and white fir trees cover the coasts, and lakes, rivers, mountains, and wildflowers; just now the wild irises are blooming. In Labrador it was 55 degrees and fleece was my best friend.

The road in the photo, in western Newfoundland near the Gros Morne ("Big Sad One") National Park, looks nice, but half of it is under construction, impossible at any other time of year. We didn't get to Blow Me Down Provincial Park on the west side of the island. The roads in Labrador, on the other hand, are terrible, all of them, every inch, period; the partially paved Trans-Labrador Highway breaks the suspensions and axles of buses. Awesome. Extreme. With trackless sea and stone and fjords and icebergs and timber you get a sense of the entire planet. And I got a sense of my place in it and that there might be more to the story of my life.