49  

–– knights of the rueful countenance ––

– VERTIGO –

  50  

  51  

“The limit is the line and frontier that allows mutual access between those ‘two worlds’; and

therefore sanctions its irremediable distance. Emotion registers such duality and such junction

in different ways. The most genuine of them all is vertigo.

Vertigo has the prerogative of emotionally ‘contemplating’ that double direction and their

mutual dialectic and liminal overlapping in the infinite. Vertigo is spontaneously produced

once the line, which is the limit of the world, in inhabited. It is the ‘natural response’ to the

position the subject acquires once the limit is inhabited. He contemplates at the same time what

it seems to be parting from – home – and that what he is attracted to – the abyss –. He wants,

at the same time, to keep the foot inside the world and put a foot in the ‘non-world’ (access to

the other world). Wants, at the same time, persevere into the being (in the world) and spread

or disperse into the space-light which surrounds him like an inaccessible transcendence.”

––– THE LIMITS OF THE WORLD, EUGENIO TRIAS

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– INTERMISSION –

[KNIGHT speaks]

Now you can watch them, risking all

In frail timbers on treacherous seas,

By routes never charted, and only

Emboldened by opposing winds;

Having explored so much of the earth

From the equator to the midnight sun,

They recharge their purpose and are drawn

To touch the very portals of the dawn.

They were promised by eternal Fate

Whose high laws cannot be broken,

They should long hold sway in the seas

Where the sun makes his purple entrance.

––– OS LVISIADAS , LVIZ VAZ DE CAMÕES

After all previously entered and seen, which took the almighty forms

presented to me by the Amazonas and its feverish dreamer, now I proceed,

like the voyager, poet and man Luiz Vaz de Camões, to recharge my purpose

and be drawn to touch the very portals of the dawn. Before I am given the

pleasure to take you, reader, further into the vision pursued by my Knight, a

link or shared intelligence shall be overlooked in order to understand the

presence of that impossible construct, what I may call an architecture

subjected to life. A presence that silently rests on those portals of the dawn,

above the limit, caressing the frontier…horizon.

The surgical dissection of the recurrent ideas that have been sprouting over

the past two years or so, will be presented, of course unanimated, or frozen,

so their, often, ungraspable viscous character can be articulated without

being concerned of their escapist dizzying tribulations.

  53  

Now I ask:

{if questions are the very piety of thinking, this may mean that the pilgrimage is

overlooked by the architecture named by man: God – and I come down and wonder:

[KNIGHT speaks]

Dear mother:

You fill the land with your beauty.

You reach to the end of the world.

––– How shall I seek you?

Show me your face.

You, the great river that never runs dry.}

––– Where am I riding towards?

––– Isn’t it something that stretches the mortality of my shell beyond its

limits…an awakening perhaps, or a vision scented by the fullness of the

journey, a vision of madness: his life, our life? Is this life we inhabit truly a

dream? What kind of space, or even better architecture is the vision of the

Knight allowing me to describe and search? How could we imagine the

intense magnetic expression that is displayed by this line the horizon

appears to be, dragging the searcher into the feverish dream and embroiling

him at last into vertiginous sensations similar to the ones that destroyed

good willed Blaise Pascal: [KNIGHT speaks]

Man’s disproportion – {This is where our innate knowledge leads us. If it be not true, there is

no truth in man; and if it be true, he finds therein great cause for humiliation, being compelled

to abase himself in one way or another. And since he cannot exist without this knowledge, I

wish that, before entering on deeper researches into nature, he would consider her both

seriously and at leisure, that he would reflect upon himself also, and knowing what proportion

there is…} Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty, and

  54  

turn his vision from the low objects which surround him. Let him gaze on that brilliant light,

set like an eternal lamp to illuminate the universe; let the earth appear to him a point in

comparison with the vast circle described by the sun; and let him wonder at the fact that this

vast circle is itself but a very fine point in comparison with that described by the stars in their

revolution round the firmament.

But if our view be arrested there, let our imagination pass beyond; it will sooner exhaust the

power of conception than nature that of supplying material for conception. The whole visible

world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We

may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space we only produce atoms in

comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is

everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest sensible mark of the

almighty power of God, that imagination loses itself in that thought.

––– BLAISE PASCAL

My imagination also looses itself in that thought. Yet, this whole work may

only be about that thought. This last and first ‘thought’ {considered by a

Saint that I will later meet while on the search, as an intellectual vision}, is

seen as the key to unlock the series of images that flood the Knights mind

while galloping towards the impossible. Images that all together could make

the silent construct visible through flashes of revealing light.

I continue this INTERMISSION by introducing some of the figures

encountered by the searcher, wanderer: the Knight of the Rueful

Countenance, in honour to the voyager of voyagers, Don Quixote. In him

there is a drive we all share, a dream we all live through and a tragic feel that

is suffered once we’ve pondered through depths where impossible questions

echo without pauses. What is this pilgrim going towards once fever drove

him into the journey? Fever, as a physiological reaction of the body and at

the same time, if understood through spatial terms, the gate that signals the

entrance into the crystal dream; a maddening torrent of sensations, maybe of

tragic consequences, yet forever projecting itself. The multiple scenes

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described by the previous section, FEVER, aim to find routes for grasping

the transition between two completely differing spaces, which being but the

same are perceived as two different worlds. One constructed a priori, the

other slumbered by an innocent, yet intensely liberating gaze. The Knight

turns errant once this fever drives him off the yoke that burdens his vital

eagerness onto solid arid grounds (repressive and castrating terrain where

nothing grows but thistles).

––– Why did Homer send Ulysses away? Was Ulysses Homer’s fever? Didn’t

a modern Ulysses yearn to a platonic lover, which could easily be Homer

himself, vertiginous words belonging to an eternal vision of impossible

character? What was seen once he turned his gaze back? :

[KNIGHT speaks]

When I return, it will be with another mans’ clothes, another mans’ name.

My coming will be unexpected. If you look at me unbelievably and say,

You are not here.

I will show you signs and you will believe me.

I will tell you about the lemon tree in your garden.

The corner window that lights in the moonlight.

And then signs of the body.

Signs of love.

And as we climb trembling to our old room, between one embrace and the next, between

lovers’ calls,

I will tell you about the journey, all night long.

And then all the nights to come. Between one embrace and the next. Between lovers’ calls.

The whole human adventure. The story that never ends.

––– ULYSSES GAZE, THEO ANGELOPOULOS

So, the suffered fever signals the entrance into the space delimited by the

pilgrimage. What the previous section was concerned by is the way all those

feverish sensations express themselves in articulate acts that beckon the

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passage into that wander. I was looking at all those affairs from an outside

point of view, now in this upcoming section, VERTIGO, I will continue

from the inside, as inhabitant of the vision, seeing what the eyes of the

Knight see and feeling what his heart feels. His sensations and gestures will

be designed in order to make them accessible and not just rueful rushes of

madness. Try to find formal parallels, similar passions and drives,

architectures that allow me to visualize the entirety of a space, seen from

within, that has been constructed by a life stretching towards the perfect

celestial sphere, searching for the limits of our world… aren’t we those

limits?

The Counter-Reform, particularly the Council of Trent and the, even seen

as terrible, immoral intelligence that derived from them, will be one of the

historical realities I will take on, always moving in Z axis tracking shots,

avoid indulging with their distant character, highlighting textures, scents

and above all the visceral beauty of their gestures. However, do not think of

this as a deviation from the pursue of the voyager, the imagination of that

impossible pilgrimage, which takes an infinite character in the form of the

horizon line, is what drives forward the dream. A dream deeply rooted in the

fundaments of living in our world, as the human condition of being, of

wanting to rise and see… I am looking at the forms that primordial

liberating desire takes. A desire of conquest, of touching what is dreamt

through ones eyes; what is the architecture of that dream!? Is it something

stretching the life spans of our memory? What do we see once looked

beyond… we used to see God, which is nothing but the architecture of our

immortality. The Baroque era, specifically just after the Council of Trent

(1545-1563), is passed through in order to look at a formal intelligence that

was always aiming to reach what lies above and beyond. Images served to

God. Spaces scaled for God. Visions of God.

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God = the limiting construct

Above all of the constructions that were realized during that time, I am

beholding one. The jewel of the Counter-Reform to many. To others an

organ of political and religious repression and a fortress of faith inhabited by

a tormented king. San Lorenzo of the Escorial, a monastery palace built

during the dawn of the XVI century, silently resting on the foot of Mt.

Abantos at the Sierra de Guadarrama. There, all that was born during the

series of meetings first called by pope Paul III and closely overlooked by the

crown of Spain, take the form of a building complex, where the moral

ambitions of a king are given a specific expression. A building scaled for the

heavens, always looking up, brightness emerging from the dark. Rooms in

the form of dim corridors that run forever. A basilica, whose pillars rise up

not unlike the Kapok trees of the Amazonian jungle do over the forests’

canopy, stands above all else, overlooking the distant Madrid.

An errant spaceship wandering across the dream, dreamt by a king madly

impassioned about this liminal horizon? Is the architecture of the Escorial,

the stoic palace, a pilgrim in itself? The legacy of someone that was eager to

travel forever? Phillip II, the pietistic king, to some accounts some kind of

haunted hermit, whose search for God derived into him being the architect

of this scheme. The architect of his journey towards his God.

I do not wish to enter into those eventful thoughts yet. It is too soon.

However, in order to show the reader signs of the vision, one must be able

to pass through what is already at hand. Maybe all these moments lost in

time, yet rendered in stone or paper, are figures that share the same vital

drives I feel and chase; those of my Knight, uneasy about the space he lives

in, and obsessed with what he sees far beyond reach. Once again, what I am

aiming to ‘design’ or tell, is the architecture the searcher inhabits while on

this aimless pilgrimage. The Baroque, which formal intelligence emerged

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while the solidity of the institution, by then guarded by Paul III, collapsed,

is something of extreme importance here, due to the visual language it

developed. Over-expressive, burdened by the impossibility of reaching

beyond; its space, liberated from any moral dogmas (and here I am very

conscious of the ironical paradox), and after all Anti-ethical… There is

nothing grounding it to earth but the weight of gravity. Baroque sprouted

after an intense fever, and as proof, just look and notice the expressions on

the faces of all that is depicted, and you will see.

The Escorial will fade into another construct that only exists on paper and

words. Both of them I see, parallel to each other. Devised under the

patronage of Phillip II, an architect and scholar, follower of St. Ignatius of

Loyola (founder of the order of the Jesuits), ex-pupil of Juan de Herrera, late

architect of the Escorial, comes out after many years of development and

study with a book he named: Ezechielem Explanationes (1604). Here, Jerónimo

del Prado and Juan Bautista Villalpando, trace the vision of prophet Ezekiel

in the Temple of Solomon. The revelation is not to be introduced yet, but

just quickly mention the creation of an architecture speaking the language of

the celestial horizons, a work that struggles with notions that belong to

spheres in conflict with one another.

Like the Escorial, the building also culminates with a lifting space, whose

height is directly linked (according to a geometrical calculus derived from

the religious readings of the time) to the diameter of the spherical Universe

and more precisely of the heavenly mansion of God. It goes by the name of

Sancta Sanctorum and reaches up to 64.776 m, 120 (sacred) cubits.

Once again an obsesive desire to reach beyond is encountered, an act of

devotion to the creatures of the outer sphere, of the space where our gaze

and imagination get lost. This construct could be understood as a stationary

mediator between the two limiting spaces our human character inhabits.

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This craving to expand the frontiers of the dream can be found at many

stages of our history. If I were allowed I would reach as far as today, and the

errant-knight of our era, which is now drifting across interstellar space,

sending signals to a computer every 16h or so. Sharing the mediatory

ambitions of the Temple of Solomon, Voyager 1 and 2, are twin spaceships

that relentlessly travel towards unknown lands only intuited by science and

its astronomical calculations.

As I see it, both Voyager and the Escorial (and the Temple of Solomon) are

both part of the same desire to reach beyond and see where the imagination

of our thoughts get lost and diluted into some kind of vital loneliness; and

that may be the capital sin, the original guilt… that is why the Knight,

liberated from its burdens through fever, madly, yet passion-hearted,

dreams towards it, and builds, through the eventful voyage, a life destined

towards eternal projection, the immortal desire to live.

This is a book that if pictured actively would take the forms of a fishing ship

advancing through a wavering ocean in contempt, showing no mercy,

violently harming the hull, who is determined to keep on floating no matter

what. The coxswain drives forward, while the crew, helpless, trust the

steadiness of their ship, slowly advancing into the stormy waves, whose

foamy crests are being swayed away by speeding winds. What I am aiming to

capture with this last image is the way, you reader, takes part in the journey

of the Knight. Trust my Knight like those Atlantic fisherman trusted their

ship. The wavering ocean obscures the linearity of the voyage by hiding the

horizon. Distracting the Knight from the vision that made him leave and go

beyond, search for the frontiers of space. However, the determination of the

dream shines through all obstacles encountered along the way.

All I am trying to do, with my many ventures across time, through lyrical

fictions and rushed images of nature and men, is to search and define a

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space the notion of life as the ceaseless struggle between the futility of being

and the presence of impossible character that drives the feverish dream

forward, creates in the life lived by the searcher, the dream-infected Knight,

the trustful sailor… the individual that feels questions, which now seem

dumb and unscientific laughable blasphemy. Questions presented by life

and its journey, its dreamy voyage, the human adventure. A way of reasoning

that disposes itself from set finalities, or exact results leading towards safe

monotony. As an architect I use architecture as the spatial structure where I

can construct ideas bounded to pure abstraction. Architecture is the voyage

that the knight inhabits, and also the impossible, yet radiant resonant wall

the horizon symbolizes.

I am fully conscious that a torrential rain of words falls down due to my

dizziness. Because the images, at this preliminary moment in the text, are

not clear depictions, just intuited thoughts or learned/borrowed instruments

from friendly voices. For this, I apologize in advance. Nonetheless, my

passionate Knights of rueful character will ride on, with or without approval,

unstopped, and in him I find truth in what my architecture is aiming to

portrait and construct. In his dream, entered through fever and confronted

through vertigo, I see my own dream reflected on his armour; therefore I am

inside, looking through the eyes of my creature, being bathed into that

purple sunset beautifully described by Camões, holding sway in the seas of the

pilgrimage, but always gazing forward, and withholding that promise by

eternal Fate.

Now, let this INTERMISSION end. Has been far too long and, honestly, I

am craving for action, for the eventful histories to light up the fast paced

galloping wanderer, casting a shadow that stretches over all those pasts. But

remember, like for the good Hollywoodian cowboy, the purple sun, source

of all light, is in front of ones vision, blinding and blurring the obvious,

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enhancing the dream-like quality of the voyage. Consequently, if this logic is

followed, the shadow is always behind, dragging feelings of sceptic doubt

and disbelief.

Let trumpets play! We, now, march:

[KNIGHT speaks]

Good Night, Good Night.

Parting is such sweet sorrow.

That I shall say good night ’ til it be tomorrow.

–––ROMEO & JULIET, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

                 

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1.

–– GESTURE ––

Salvum fac populum tuum, / Oh Lord, save thy people:

Domine, et benedic hereditati tuae. / And bless thine heritage.

–– TE DEUM / THEE, OH LORD, WE PRAISE

It was a Sunday 13th of December 1545.

Europe: convoluted by religious uprisings, raged by wars and rivalries, and

corrupted from within its foundations. It is no surprise Niccolò Machiavelli

published his The Prince during this time under the consent of the Medici

Pope Clement VII.

After a fairly unknown Augustinian monk posted his 95 theses on the door

of the Wittenberg cathedral, highlighting that faith was justified by faith

alone, the political and spiritual reactions of the world would put in danger

an institution that had monopolized belief in Europe for the past one

thousand years. An institution that created images of heaven on earth. A

language deriving from the celestial above, constellations of saints

manifesting themselves through monastic orders carrying their names.

Relics containing traces of divinities were being sold all over the Christian

world. And on that 31st of October 1517, for some reason, these theses

sparked the reaction against a faith hitherto taken for granted by most.

Now, this movement is known to us as the Reformation. Reacting against

works of faith, opulent religious imagery, lustful lavishness, and above all

the figure of the Pope. It carved a permanent ethical niche in Europe.

Nevertheless, let put our selves into action. This (hi)story will be told from

within the events that passionately reacted against heretic reformers. An

‘illegitimate’ criticism towards the Holy Catholic Church was substituted by

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a legitimate one that was set to take place in Trent under the fearful

supervision of several popes, being its creator Pope Paul III.

Sunday, 13th of December 1545, the cathedral of Trent is celebrating the

opening of, what is to be known as the Tridentine Council. The nave and

transepts of the cathedral are occupied by forty-two theologians, several

diplomats accredited to the council, and a number of local notables,

including women. On the chancel, apart from Bishops and powerful figures

of the Holy See, three Benedictine abbots are present while mass is about to

be imparted on the altar. Emerging as the head of the three cardinal-legates

of the council, a 58 year old Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte, future Pope

Julius III, clothed under a traditional ceremonial vesture comprised by a

cassock or soutane, dragging in length down to his feet, around his waist, a

fringed sash worn, the fascia; then softly resting on his shoulders, the iconic

cappa magna, possibly made out of ermine, however this last one, beautifully

soft as it is, might have been left behind, maybe in the ambulatory. Del

Monte gazes over the altar, before gasping the words of Psalm 63:2

O God, you are my God Whom I seek; for You my flesh pines and my soul thirsts.

Words that will spark the creation of multiple mandatum set to unleash

spatial notions scented by mad passions whose gravitational force pushes

upwards, tearing the heart of the tragic figures forming and delimiting those

celestial rooms, scaled for an ideal architecture, a construct that belongs to

the liminal lands signalled by the horizon far beyond reach.

Cardinal del Monte, now wearing over his previous outfit the liturgical

vestment pluviale (in English Cope), embroidered in gold or any other

precious material and depicting biblical scenes, possibly, the figure of the

fish or the Eucharistic communion; commences celebrating the Mass of the

Holy Spirit. This particular Mass requests guidance from the Holy Spirit for

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all those who yearn for justice, and offers the opportunity to reflect on what

Catholics believe is the God-given power and responsibility of all once faced

to incontestable truth. If reflected upon the primary purpose of the Council,

this opening Mass already sets an attitude for all that will come after. As if

there is a bitter fraternal feeling searching to peach the reformer heretics to

a shared father, overlooking from his heavens. It is a dogmatic council

echoing the above.

The opening ceremony progresses. For about one hour and a half, cardinal

del Monte sheds light on the issues there to be discussed under the disguise

of biblical rhetoric intoned through prophetic voices. After communion and

the transubstantiation of the wine and the bread into the blood and body of

Christ, he proceeds to close the Sunday with a Te Deum. This prayer found

in the Breviary and in thanksgiving to God for a special blessing such as the

election of a pope, the consecration of a bishop, the canonization of a saint,

or the publication of a treaty of peace is sung signalling the closing of the

beginning. The Council of Trent officially ignites, and the following words,

last intonations of the final prayer, will linger all the way through:

In te, Domine, speravi: / O Lord, in thee have I trusted:

non confundar in aeternum. / let me never be confounded.

–– TE DEUM / THEE, OH LORD, WE PRAISE

This first Session would be followed by 24 more during the next eighteen

years of the Council. In between each Session, General Congregations were

set in order to discuss what was going to be voted. Hundreds of heated

discussions took part. The political interests of many nations were put at

stake. As tantalizing as this may sound, I do not wish to get into the complex

melee taking place while the Roman Catholic Church was at the verge of

breaking apart into many irreconcilable spiritual trends. All those power

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struggles will be fed, in one way or the other, into images my writing will try

to portrait. Scenes, like the one above, searching to be witnessed live by the

one that reads through them. The entirety of what was put into paper by the

Council, now seen as immobile historical data, I wish to set fire to. The

formal result of the Counter-Reform as an idea hoovers well above all

mundaneness. Do not forget that a mind blurred by the purple sun, hanging

low in the heavens, is the one that journeys across the words, gestures and

ideas of all those cardinals, bishops, kings and the three Popes, Paul III,

Julius III and Pius IV. Remember, that all the Knight strives for are visual

and tactile fields, and I, the one that gallops with him, am the provider of

such forms. This Council I see as terribly important here, because it formed

that coarse pearl: Baroque, whose conceptual seed was conceived in Trent.

Nevertheless, I do not feel the necessity of explaining why, or how. I rather

live through it. As I have done while passing by the solemn opening

ceremony, the justification of how the necessity for Baroque expression is

progressively formed during theological and dogmatic meetings, takes the

appearance of a set of eyes that witness the present of what is now past. And

in those eyes the witnessed world expresses itself through delicate gestures,

scents, and touches, all of them intensified by the look, framing it.

Essentially, my description of the meetings at Council of Trent are a

legitimate pretence to tell and broadcast the formal language of gestures

they sparked by using their historical reality as a canvas where the brush of

my Knight paints them alive. Like the bloodless heart that is made throb

once again by injecting a kind of plasma into it, I dramatize their now long

gone present with a visual and aesthetic precision worthy of its expressive

legacy.

Yet, I pause and let me get back in.

  67  

During this First period of the Council (1545-1547) a specific set of doctrines

are first taken: The Holy Scripture, Original Sin, Justification, Sacraments,

Baptism and Confirmation. The canons and decrees resulting the

discussions and voting have to be previously approved by the Pope, in this

case Paul III. All those primary doctrines are stating the differences between

what the Reform had set thirty years ago and what was discussed during the

multiple General Congregations. Just to clarify, the atmosphere is electric at

moments, yet tediously relentless. Agreement in all those fundamental

canons is constantly jeopardized by either French prelates, closely attached

to the interest of their king, Francis II, or by any other external issue,

including Papal paranoia.

Nonetheless, years pass by. Prelates come and go, and agreement is not

always found. Kingdoms become inpatient. The reformers gain terrain in

Northern Europe to such an extent that Emperor Charles is forced to wage

war against many of them. Europe shakes while in the hall of Giroldo

Palace, where the plenary sessions of the Council are held, voices from the

high authorities of the Church of Christ echo without any concern of time.

In 1549 Pope Paul III gives way to Julius III, former cardinal del Monte, with

him the Second period of the Council (1551-52) goes by. First of May 1551,

Trent prepares to reopen. The necessity and hope for conversation is

truncated by the sudden victory of Maurice, Elector of Saxony over the army

of Emperor Charles V. The threat of a Protestant army invading the city of

Trent is seen as a major worry due to the proximity of Maurice’s troops, who

marched victorious into the state of Tirol, one year later, the 28th of April

1552.

The Council is frozen, and the hope for its reconvention seems like a distant

mirage. After the death of Julius III, anti-Protestant pope Paul IV is elected,

negating any need for the re-thinking of the fundamental structures of the

Catholic Faith. Meanwhile tensions grow within the Church and the

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primordial image of the enterprise is waning over ill-blooded reactions

lacking of vision, including Paul IV’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Pauline

Index). During this ten-year (1552 – 1562) period, the papacy plunges into the

abyss of a self-inflicted insanity and doom.

I now forward this (hi)story to January 18th 1562. One day earlier Catalina of

Medici consecrates the freedom of conscience and cult for the French

Protestants, the Huguenots. There is a light of hope pinning through the

cloudy period of phobia. This brightness is put down forty-three days later

after more than eighty Huguenots are massacred by Francis, Duke of Guise.

Those European events will again taint the opening and course of the

Tridentine Council, creating a series of instabilities and rushed decisions.

It is again a Sunday. Seventeen years have passed by without clarity or

future. What has been happening gives way to a climate of extreme anxiety,

fear, intolerance and insecurity. If I were to be a fearful cynic, I would rest

my search upon the political direction that has dissected human emotion

since ever. My madness is my faith, as a consequence, my position with this

council strives to comprehend the passions and fine broken gazes that the

Baroque will later display and shine out. A Baroque not bounded to

opulence or formal voluptuousness, but to a deep intellectual desire to make

peace or war with a condition all human beings suffer. Inhabit the liminal

‘mansion’ of our life. Split in two, questioning appearances and looking

upwards and beyond in order to find meaning and somehow, an

omnipresent love that guides our hearts.

[KNIGHT speaks]

The baroque style always arises at the time of decay of a great art, when the demands of art in

classical expression have become too great. It is a natural phenomenon which will be observed

with melancholy—for it is a forerunner of the night—but at the same time with admiration for

its peculiar compensatory arts of expression and narration. To this style belongs already a

choice of material and subjects of the highest dramatic tension, at which the heart trembles

  69  

even when there is no art, because heaven and hell are all too near the emotions: then, the

oratory of strong passion and gestures, of ugly sublimity, of great masses, in fact of absolute

quantity per se (as is shown in Michael Angelo, the father or grandfather of the Italian

baroque stylists): the lights of dusk, illumination and conflagration playing upon those

strongly molded forms: ever-new ventures in means and aims, strongly underscored by artists

for artists, while the layman must fancy he sees an unconscious overflowing of all the horns of

plenty of an original nature-art: all these characteristics that constitute the greatness of that

style are neither possible nor permitted in the earlier ante-classical and classical periods of a

branch of art. Such luxuries hang long on the tree like forbidden fruit.

–– HUMAN ALL TOO HUMAN, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Thus I have embarked through time, under the shadow of my Knight, to

revisit an idea that is as much heart as it is mind. That forbidden fruit being

hit by Caecias, the north-eastern wind. It might all be a form of expression

that sways, balancing from side to side. Baroque for me means she who sways.

A state of spirit in constant swaying. Striving to caress what rests on its right

and left.

[KNIGHT speaks]

When I was a child, and wondered about the name of a flower, I’d be told, ‘rose’ or ‘daisy’.

I always questioned the answers I was given, I was after more details.

Why a rose?

Aunt Augusta used to get upset as though I had asked her to justify God’s existence to herself.

You are stupid.

‘That is the way it is, and that’s that,’ she’d reply.

To her, God was implicit in everything, and she’d avoid that sort of dialog.

I later learned that in the Brahman language, rose means swaying, or she who sways.

Nice image for a flower, high above on her stem,

caressed by a tender gust of wind,

and ready to soon allow for her petals to fall.

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Why rose?

If upon the first gentle breeze she is no longer a rose.

In the sway, she is a flower… and at once, she is flower no more.

–– VAL ABRAO, MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA

Now, please, go and tell me if the gestures of Bernini’s’ Santa Teresa of

Jesus in her ecstasy don’t evoke it all. Her lips, eyes, vest and hands. The

dim light bathing her, the arrow about to pierce through her heart and the

rays of celestial light falling from above. It is more than simple articulated

nonsense in the shape of sculptural excellence. In her own words, that

ecstasy is seen as an intellectual vision. A Spiritual Betrothal that gives way to

the Spiritual Marriage her broken rueful heart dreamt in forms of ingénue

beauty.

[KNIGHT speaks]

We might say that union is as if the end of two wax candles were joined so that the light they

give is one: the wicks and the wax and the light are all one; yet afterwards the one candle can

be perfectly well separated from the other and the candles become two again, or the wick may

be withdrawn from the wax.

But here (Spiritual Marriage) it is like rain falling from the heavens into a river or a spring;

there is nothing but water there and it is impossible to divide or separate the waters belonging

to the river from that which it will find no way of separating itself, or as if in a room there

were two large windows through which the light streamed in: it enters in different places but it

all becomes one.

––INTERIOR CASTLE, SANTA TERESA DE JESUS

That Sunday, Santa Teresa, a Spanish nun belonging to the Order of the

Brothers of Our Lady of Mount Carmel or Carmelites was wide-awake. She

was 46 and undertaking a reform within her own Order.

Miles away at Trent, the Council finally opens with a solemn ceremony in

the cathedral of Saint Vigilius, which constitutes the first Session of this

  71  

period (session 17). Present are four of the legates, the duke of Mantua, one

hundred archbishops and bishops, five abbots, four superiors general of

mendicant orders, and over fifty theologians. Now cardinal Angelo

Massarelli takes over the role firstly occupied by the later Julius III. He

presides an opening ceremony that runs smoothly.

The Council grew in size, as a consequence congregations move away from

the Palazzo Giroldo, main building for the discussion previous to the

Sessions. Santa Maria Maggiore, built between 1520-1524 is chosen for the

General Congregations to take place. Inside the nave of this basilica, built

thanks to the will of prince-bishop Bernardo Clesio, a fundamental

contributor for the early organization of the Council in the city of Trent, an

amphitheatre made out of oak has to be erected in order to host the large

amount of prelates arriving from all the corners of Europe. This stage

witnesses some of the most vicious arguments between not only individual

prelates, but the interests of crowns and visions of the manifestations of a

faith being pushed in from the frontiers up north. This last period of Trent

is dominated by an urge of resolution, but also a desire of shaping a new

visual strategy that could speak to the skies, and transcend the shadow of

man, solidly casted by Luther and his 95 theses thirty years ago.

Trent was bursting at the seams, with lodging ever less available and ever

more expensive. May 18th French prelates arrive after the inevitable war

with the Huguenots. By June 6, the number of bishops has grown to almost

150, the theologians to about 70. It is at this point when the plenary meetings

of the council move to the amphitheatre of Santa Maria Maggiore.

Debate over the five articles on the cup begins as usual with the

Theologians’ Congregations, which consumes the rest of June. As the days

move on, with the same arguments repeat again and again, sometimes at

great length, the number of bishops in the council hall thin considerably.

  72  

Housing becomes so expensive that makes impossible for prelates coming

from distant dioceses stay and take part on the questions being addressed.

All the remaining canons and decrees set in 1545 are examined, studied and

in some ways performed by the members of the council. In that

performance, which test the formal results of such precepts and how to

didactically visualize their outcome in space, is fecundated what later will

see the light as Baroque. This manner of expressing visions of ethereal

character is born out of necessity and fear, an agonising fragility that is now

being suffered by a taciturn church. The Holy See, forever grounded onto

the tactility of forms that take on a human character so viscerally vivid that

their gestures project upwards. All those facial expressions later to be

depicted on sculpted façades, frescos and oil paintings I see as results of the

spirit of Trent. A spirit not easy to describe through a rational or pragmatic

methodology due to its character, rooted in a passion transcending moral

dogmas. Its dominating concern travels far beyond the mortality of man, it

reaches outwards, gazes at what is envisioned in a ecstatic dream, a horizon

upholding some kind of pastoral landscape stretching beyond all

imagination, and displaying a vital intensity that could have never been

achieved if chained to equations whose results always equal finite numbers.

Those canonical thoughts are undoubtedly inspired by the artistic visions

that set the foundations for what is now implemented as protocols to display

and broadcast this faith. Those depictions, which are now, in Trent, used as

if reality they were, will later develop into atmospherically voluptuous re-

enactments filling the spaces set to echo preachings devised by the council.

May be this lifting echo the real achievement of such a relentless canonical

zigzag?

The last and final session of the Council was now approaching. Meanwhile a

deputation of bishops goes to work and on August 6 presents to the council

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a draft document of 4 chapters and 12 canons, in which Christ’s sacrifice on

the cross is represented, its memory recalled, and “its saving power applied

to the forgiveness of sins that we daily commit”. The document then asserts

that at the last supper, Jesus offered his body and blood to the Father under

the forms of bread and wine, which identifies the meal as a sacrifice directly

related to the sacrifice of the cross. This, hanging there by its own means

nothing but some kind of theological technicality. I rather look beyond.

What does this mean to what preceds the council? How does this seemingly

redundant technocratic document, speculative, yet highly imaginative, help

propel the conceptions of form givers in the years to come? Let us imagine

this proposition as an image of artistic vision.

I travel 38 years forward in time. 1601, year the Jesuit Matteo Ricci becomes

the first European to enter the Forbidden City during the Ming Dynasty in

Beijin and the year a 30 year old, carrying a first name that resonates the

highest ceilings of the mansions of artistic delicacy finished a painting, now

known as Supper at Emmaus. Michelangelo Merisi o Amerighi da Caravaggio,

or simply Caravaggio is the author of this 141cm x 196.2cm oil on canvas

depicting the a biblical passage found in the Gospel of Luke 24:30-31:

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it

to them.

Their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight.

It can be seen how a resurrected and radiant Christ in incognito reveals

himself to two of his disciples, Luke, wearing torn, unwashed, robes and

Cleopas, clothed under the scallop shell pilgrims display on their way to

Santiago of Compostela, in the town of Emmaus. The way the action is

imagined resembles the canonical attitudes set by the discussions at the

council. The expression of the hand gestures, which had been developing

for more than a century (since 1420 more precisely), take a new emotional

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dimension. During Mannerism there is a sense of serenity, not close to the

Greek mien, but a stance where the fibers of the body are still holding each

other. Of course there was the same suffering and burdening guilt, however

the bodies were stoically contradicting what the faces were starting to depict.

This can be clearly perceived in Michelangelo and his sinuous, asymmetrical

at times, meandering silhouette, curvilinear, biomorphic figures,

voluptuously displaying some sort of vital athletic oblivion.

Now, back at Emmaus, my eyes are fixated on the countenance of this

central figure that is meant to be Christ – eyes looking down in a reflective

form, right hand index finger pointing towards the distance of what is being

preached –all lit up by a light source coming from the left. His pale skin

blushes under the strong contrasting red tunic, matching the ruddiness of

his lips. Left hand about to pose itself over the bread. This latter is

overshadowed by a right hand softly caressing this intellectual vision that rests

on the table, which fullness is worthy of Dionysius himself, in order to

enlighten the way of those two pilgrims, Luke and Cleopas. And yet, those

men, astonished and hypnotized by the image of the son of God, can not see

nor touch what lays in front of them, what the stranger has created so they

can voyage beyond and touch an external substance that rests within. Such a

sad scene, and if Christ then vanished was as a consequence of the

disappointment of preaching blind Tobitesque characters.

Shall I not be distracted from this draft presented by the bishops, after all

the Council yearns for visual fleshy tactility, highlight or backlight the

notion of the transubstantiation, strongly rejected by Martin Luther. The

blind belief on the materialistic impact Jesus has, might be one influential

formal resolution born from the Concilium Tridentinum and then explored in

its depth by the elaborate painting that has been inhabited while the figure

of my Knight still casts itself over the amphitheatre of Santa Maria Maggiore

and the nervous crowd of counter-reformers awaiting its closure.

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We are men, not angles.

––GIOVANNI MORONE, 1563

With all this in mind, Session 25 will be now entered, and discussed not

unlike the Supper at Emmaus was passed through.

December 3rd, 1563 Santa Maria Maggiore houses a large amount of prelates

coming over from nations such as the Papal States, Crown of Spain, France,

Portugal, the Italian kingdoms and northern kingdoms such as Bavaria. The

closing awaits after well over a decade tainted by une guerre á outrance. An

impression of dissatisfaction can be perceived behind the seemingly jubilant

faces of hundreds of men of God, dressed for the ceremony and ready to

intone the final prayer with enthusiasm. Has the Catholic Church found a

way forward, a path enlightened by a revitalized faith sculpted in the form of

human gestures transcending their physicality? Couldn’t Santa Maria

Maggiore be the first product of the thought of Baroque? Its space

impregnated by the human passions that today, Wednesday, are being

conducted by Angelo Massarelli, later to be bishop of Bologna. Those

dreams, heavily soaked in political ambitions, are the first real traces of an

expression that will materialize itself from now onwards. If I were to cast all

I have seen through my eyes while being escorted by the dreamer of

dreamers in stone and light, it would resemble a tumorous pearl whose

coarse surface has being formed after its carrier protected itself against a

threatening irritant that could injure the inner viscosity of the mantle tissue.

That is the product of the Council of Trent {Baroque / pérola barroca = coarse

pearl} after eighteen years of sessions acting as an irritating defence

mechanism against the exterior Protestant threat.

Session 25, the day finishes and there is no conclusion yet. Exhaustion

haunts all, the martyrdom of consensus fall upon all present. Thursday

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opens smoothly; the morning light gives way to the cold twilight of

December, thuribles filled with burning incense try to cover up the smell of

aging sweat which emanate out of the pores of exquisitely dressed Cardinals

de Guise and Madruzzo, bishops, archbishops, legates, patriarchs, abbots

and superior generals of religious orders.

Once the last decree is approved, Giovanni Morone, the legate presiding,

rises to his feet and declares the council concluded under the words:

To go forth in peace.

––GIOVANNI MORONE, 1563

The French prelate and cardinal Charles de Guise steps forward to lead the

assembly in a litany of acclamations celebrating all those associated with the

council since its beginning. The litany pays tribute to the three popes closely

followed by Emperor Charles V, and finally other rulers, the legates, and so

forth. All these people had made possible the resolution of the Council,

either through political action or warfare.

De Guise concludes the litany and sits down so the eager crowd occupying

the entire amphitheater can intone the closing prayer, which is identical to

the opening one in 1545.

Now, Thursday evening 4th of December 1563, the hundreds present rise

preparing for this closing prayer, once more the celebratory Te Deum. After

the silence prior to intonation, a mass of unisonous voices sings the same

first Latin verses their predecessors sung eighteen years ago.

Te Deum laudamus : / We praise thee, O God:

Te Dominum confitemur. / we acknowledge thee to be the Lord

Santa Maria Maggiore resonates with the more than two hundred voices

singing a prayer that clearly reflects on their duty towards faith but also

asking the favours of God.

  77  

Meanwhile this phantasmagorical storm of grave pitched voices recite the 41

(31 + 11 Psalm) verses comprising Te Deum, a thought sparks in me allowing

the door of a vision of space to appear on the mirroring surface of my

Knights cornea. And while opening it I rapidly see myself galloping against a

toasted light that bathes the landscapes forming the vision. Vast landscapes

where the seeds planted at Trent have now grown and are swaying under

gusts of a wind pushing them and me forward. The thought has pondered

into the spatial essence of the forms devised under the manners, pace,

textures, scents, looks, gestures and existential attitudes that the participants

of the Council left behind while exercising them with their own bodies, who

inhabitant the ideas formulated by their actions. And against all

interpretations of the Catholic faith, I now see a tremendous immoral

tendency the spaces, rooms and forms, all children of Trent, gloriously

display. Why immoral if all the Council is for the reinforcement of Catholic

ethical dogmas? But is it? What the thought allows to see is a vital expression

that disposes itself of any ethical questions because all it strives for is to

caress, not unlike the Jesus already transformed into Christ does at the

Supper at Emmaus, the architecture of our immortality, the inhabitant of the

celestial sphere, of the horizon. Unlike in previous periods, particularly the

Romanesque, Baroque is not diagrammatic, nor didactic. Baroque is this

high desire, that through the exhausting of art aims to reach a father

contested by her newly born brother, the Protestant. Hence, morality is

given up in favour of ascension.

As a consequence of this thought I plan to mimic this drive and be

conducted by he who is my Knight of the Rueful Countenance into the journey

whose form was first envisioned and inhabited in these last closing canticles,

echoing the whole nave of Santa Maria Maggiore:

[KNIGHT intones joining the rest of voices]

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In te, Domine, speravi: / O Lord, in thee have I trusted:

non confundar in aeternum. / let me never be confounded.

–– TE DEUM / THEE, OH LORD, WE PRAISE

Blind Hope.

Then, they parted and their shadow followed; meanwhile I close my eyes

into their darkness.

  79  

2.

–– CROSSING ––

THE DIE HAS BEEN CAST

–– ‘ ãlea iacta est ’ ––

Steps of a wandering pilgrim are these,

the verses my sweet muse dictated to me:

in perplexing solitude

some lost, yet others enlivened and inspired.

–––THE SOLITUDES, LUIS DE GONGORA

– foreword I –

{The following wishes to be read as fragmented, non-cohesive ravings sprouting out of

a tongue eroded by a life of fever-dreaming towards the conquering of an impossible

vision. Such melancholic vision remains locked far beyond reach, guarded by a

bottomless mirror-gate that once gazed at, it finally returns back the gaze, causing a

self-questioning force to paralyse a body of, until now, unshakeable faith.

Vertigo !

A sort of bucolic sleep awaits.}

Lead me from darkness to light.

Shall I look out?

Look out and see.

But my pupils pine.

Yet my hands feel the warmth of the glass.

Open the curtains covering the window.

Source of all light.

A river flowing…

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A figure in a bed waiting for extreme unction {Pax huic dómui}…

Am I awake? Now.

Serenaded by horns.

a) –RESPICE POST TE! HOMINEM TE ESSE MEMENTO –

The blinding abyss of time softly fades into green pastures sprinkled by the

morning dew, the early riser; saliva of mute stars. I recall its smell, freshening

the first rays of morning sun finding their way into every of the tiny water

drops dressing all life; all that stretches once brightness caresses its

shrunken cellular body. I can now feel the tips of my fingers. I let my palm

hoover over the grass which soaks in the thick woollen socks protecting the

nakedness of my tired feet from the worn leather of my caligae. Voices start

building their way up towards me, yet they are suddenly muted by the

fecund caudal of a crystalline river. All stops, the grass stays still, unmoved,

frozen under the incessant flow of water making its way down to the Atlantic

Ocean, end of the world. If you only knew how many lands have been

crossed, how many seas have been sailed, how many loves left behind. Mile

after mile, mountain after mountain, desert after desert. And now a river

whose flow is muting it all, even the necessity to pursue the voyage

embarked while still a young man is silenced. The river runs oblivious of

memories, refusing to revere in front of men willing to touch the same

cyclical eternity those waters were cursed into by Nature on the day of its

birth.

The riverbank is a fortress protecting me and the fearful voices from the

passing waters. Relentlessly eroding away the solidity of shores,

transforming the hardest rock into the finest of sands, destined for a

dispersive Oceanic errantry. All that was one becomes powder, the unity of

time clouds up into the skies; therefore the futile corpse of these

  81  

mesmerized men will be gone without memorial and only embraced by gusts

of wind and the fall of autumn leaves. Such a brooding display of natural

delicacy sparks in me a fear of mythological dimensions.

Where has this primordial vital desire to rise up, look out through my eyes

and reach beyond lead me? What price shall I pay for such an honest human

sin?

Is the pilgrimage, the self imposed exodus, the awakening from the dream,

some kind of doomed search into the purest, dangerously fertile, depths of

life?

The poison of romance:

Put this in any liquid thing you will

And drink it off; and, if you had the strength

Of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight.

–––ROMEO & JULIET, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

This is river Lethe, innocently flowing by the green pastures of Gallaecia.

One of the five rivers born in the underworld, dominion of old Hades. The

river of unmindfulness, of oblivion, of forgetfulness.

I can now look back at my eyes and recognize my features. A dark haired

figure guarded by a tanned leather coat and tightly holding onto the

handgrip of his Gladius Hispaniensis. Gaze fixated into the waters of the river,

hypnotized by fear. Behind his back a legion of confused soldiers awaits for

an order that seems now obliterated by the magnetism these untouched

waters exercise over the consciousness of all these men.

It is 135 before the birth of Christ, Year of the Consulship of Flaccus and Piso.

The dark haired figure, which I departed from, goes by the name of

Decimus Junius Brutus, Roman General of this legion of soldiers. Their

destination appears to be Finis Terrae, the end of the world, last frontier,

final earthly horizon. However, all determination has been put at stake by a

  82  

fear, a superstition that outlives a Roman Empire now under the tight hand

of Emperor Antoninus Pius. River Lethe, anyone that bathes into its waters

will have his life reset and memory erased. This river of forgetfulness

confronts these pilgrims as if a monster displaying all kinds of overpowering

violence it was. What would be the voyager without the port he departed

from? Without the scents of his fields, the morning kisses of his love, the

sounds of his herds during the night…

All these memories, diamond bullets, transform into emotions that fuel

super human passions allowing the flickering flame of discovery to keep on

guiding the footsteps of the pilgrim.

Tears unnoticed under rain. Without the image of home there is no

destination. Without loss there is no movement forward, there is no sense of

direction or ambition. Hence, river Lethe is a threat of colossal dimensions

for all these homesick men. Its water carries the sedative poison that would,

once again, put to sleep these sleepwalkers yearning for the eye-opening

mana of awakening. Such a mana lies ahead, dreaming on top of the line the

horizon appears to be.

A rushed flash of brightness and I can look out through my eyes again. Feel

the body I fleeted from and looked from the outside. Feet tipping over the

edge of the riverbank. The silence is now broken.

Retire now to your tents and to your dreams

Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth

I want to be ready

–––CELEBRATION OF THE LIZARD, JIM MORRISON (THE DOORS)

The monstrous myth is now being battled. My body precipitates into the

rushing waters. I shall look back fearing this is the last time I will see it all.

My home, my past. Why did I leave? Was it so I could chase where the sun

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dips after a long day arching over the heavens? I had to wake up from it all,

the dream of monotony, of time and banality… of mortality. I came

searching for the crystalline purity promised by a unidirectional emotion

that thirsts, piercing like an arrow through all logic. How ironic if all the

journey has ever been is a dry thirst, since now, once my lips kiss the water,

I will have plenty to drink. My nakedness is being clothed over by this cold

fluid, and my eyes, wide open, struggle to define the obstacles sunk at the

bottom of the river.

Once I ascend to gasp, time is restored and all previously felt rushes in

confirming my victory over Lethe and his threat of oblivion. One look up, I

see known faces; one look in, I keep on traveling having the obstacle of

doubt weakened my blind faith. And while rejoicing into victory, a shy voice

walking below my waist cynically expires the unforgiving words that will

follow me until the final awakening into darkness is reached:

Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento / Look behind

you! Remember you are man.

And I can tell you

The names of the Kingdom

I can tell you

The things that you know

Listening for a fistful of silence

Climbing valleys into the shade.

–––CELEBRATION OF THE LIZARD, JIM MORRISON (THE DOORS)

  84  

*

– foreword II –

{The former image of River Lethe illustrates the encounter with the mirror-gate for

the first time. Self-doubt and scepticism put at stake the projective shine of the vision.

Here the emotion of inhabiting the limit formalizes itself as an impenetrable river so

crystalline that mirrors the ones that look into its waters. The Roman General, which

is to be understood as a re-incarnation of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance,

dives into it, as if the liquidity of faith and solidity of reason enter into direct

confrontation. The clash between them two does not terminate or kill with a definite

blow, tragedy delays itself in the form of a viral disease, as a consequence, the journey

ends through progressive amnesia. The river planted a seed into the body of the

Knight and it will grow inside until it paralyses his faith and galloping madness.

Is he awake? Now. Darkness}

*

  85  

b) – NON SVFFICIT ORBIS / THE DEATH BED –

The true life is on high

beyond the earthly lie.

Until this life does die

its full savour is not night.

Death from me do not fly!

I live meanwhile and sigh

dying because I do not die.

–––SANTA TERESA DE JESUS

Exhausted, moribund Knight, now only reduced to a fading essence, has

listened for a fistful of silence and climbed valleys into a shade casted by the

moonlight of early autumn, shining in through the eight openings of a dome

topping at 92 metres over Mount Abantos. Looks up into a mass of granite

miraculously resting over his head. White light on grey stone, may the

heavens be monochrome? Such heart-sinking greyness is suddenly broken

by a golden glow emitted by four figures dressed in golden garments. All

seem to be grieving over the undressed starving body which appears

crucified onto a mahogany cross, labelled under Iesus Nazarenus Rex

Iudeaorum. Darkness is subdued by the lustre radiating from the body on the

cross and all resting below his impaled feet. The tragic portrayal of living a

life pulling itself towards the abyss of decay, this altar is nothing but the

depiction of the so-called mirror-gate locking away eternity from the one

that yearns for it in the form of prayer or action. These figures whose faces

clearly show an irreconcilable discomfort with the finite space they inhabit,

broadcast an emotion shared by he who looks up and wonders while

succumbing to the lamenting urge of lying down and taking a rest from it all.

  86  

What it used to be a thick fog blurring any definite solidity and propelling

the linearity of the journey forward is now a mirror where the Knight can

clearly perceive himself as an aging body soon to be deceased and forgotten.

My dear friend, no eternal fame will be begotten, no love conquered, no goal

achieved… only the journey is to be rejoiced, a dream of madness diverting

from the apathy of a sterile life where days passed by, weightless and

poisoned by the passive aggressions of social order. Where has this

diversion led the pure-hearted Knight? It has led the voyager into him

returning back to the bosom of nature where he was once engendered.

Exactly like the ways this overwhelming red and gold altar narrates, through

oil paintings framed by sculptural forms, the story of the crucified body’s

life: from a loving infant to a pilgrim propelled by an incandescent love and

finally the brutality of his death. All scenes governed by a child-like purity

that reduces any bitter complexity to the mandate: You shall love. The nausea

of pondering into the depths of life is redeemed through the artistic impulse

of loving. This altar, which is nothing but the final mirror, expects the

Knight to gaze into his own gaze and as a result return to his fetal state, to

the maternal matrix.

Climb up twelve marble steps and look to the right. A room, a bed. At the

end of the room there is a window facing out into the sky. The night is soon

to give way to the sun of the morning and with him the sounds of Nature’s

awakening. Dozens of candles illuminate the corridor into this bedroom,

directly linked to the previously described altar. Tenebrous tunnel, where at

the end of it a luscious bed covered by gold and red velvet sheets, appears

backlighted by the blue light preceding the sunrise. Tired, the Knight lies on

the four-poster bed. To his left the golden glow of the altar breaks through

the corridor and to his right the first signs of the sunrise show themselves

accompanied by shy chirpings. Broken in two he looks up into the wavering

sea of loomed red and gold threads comprising the tester, which sags low

  87  

supported by the four wooden posts at the sides of the small bed. The part

of the tester facing to the bed is a tapestry depicting a grotesque of Daphne

turned into a tree, inside a ferronnerie (artists’ forge); on each side of this

there is a depiction of the god Hermes holding snakes in his hands. The

decoration is rounded off with isolated vases of flowers and fruits dispersed

around the background. In the central part there is a large vase of flowers,

beneath a canopy; in its three corners a naked man and woman, sitting on

banners, hold ropes from which birds hang. In the lower part, two centaurs

are depicted, symbolizing carnal desire. Opposite this, he sees a vase of

flowers in the center with a naked child perched on top and in the lower

corners, a young man and old man, highlighting the ages of life the

bedridden Knight has journeyed through.

May this be the prelude to the bucolic dream the Knight will soon fall into?

An opulent floral dance where the shipwrecked pilgrim suddenly opened his

eyes into:

On the inconstant seacoast

–a rough-hewn frame to so large a mirror–

dawn discovered our pilgrim

–––THE SOLITUDES, LUIS DE GONGORA

Through each blink the Knight ages, weakening his body and feeding on

himself. A cadaverous figure suffering the incessant deforming attacks of

death reaches up and lays with his bony hand onto mine, hitherto thought

as inexistent. I, his sidekick, squire, the storyteller of his undying fame

stretching across time and space, splashing through centuries, landscapes,

personages, moments, gestures, looks and emotions; am the witness of his

last conscious wish, a tale.

  88  

A story of sorrowful confessions at a place named Gethsemane, which is a

rocky garden at the top of Mount Olives in Jerusalem. A troubled soul

grieved by an overwhelming sense of guilt is determined to battle and

overcome temptation. This temptation is nothing but to calm his thirst with

a cup of water, however the premonition of a back-stabbing death haunting

this gracefully wrecked figure is trying to create in him an auto-destructive

desire negating all future and subduing all signs of hope and ultimately,

love. The calming of the thirst would numb the excruciating pain of the

envisioned betrayal. And yet, he does want to feel such inhuman pain deep

down in the depths of his heart, soon to sink and paralyse. He, accompanied

by whom he calls Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, kneels down on a rock

and looks up into the cloudless sky. The look stoically confronts his fate,

which is a violent death facilitated by a friend. Hours pass and once battled

his scepticism towards an unalterable destiny he comes down. After such

terrible angst, calm, acceptance and readiness transform into a clear beam of

light that perforates his body, dispossessing all in him of any dark shades.

And to the three men that accompanied him, now sleeping, he awoke by

announcing his descend:

Are you still sleeping and resting?

Look, the hour has come, and the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners.

Rise!

Let us go! Here comes my betrayer!

–––MATTHEW 26:36-46

… and he left his cave, glowing and strong as a morning sun that comes out of dark

mountains.

–––FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA

  89  

Indeed the morning sun is now shyly shining over the red brick floor of the

waiting room next to the bedroom. Death approaches the bedridden Knight

as fast and unforgiving as the sunrise gives way to the awakening of all forms

of life, pulling off the blanket of their sleep. However, there is still time for a

last battle to be fought, a last look to be taken into the journey

overshadowing the Knight’s shattered spirit, violently struggling inside a

body that can no longer provide shelter.

And after the last of sleeps he would wake up from, with a burning fit, he

rises his head from the sweat soaked pillow propelled by a cry searching to

transgress into the ‘unknown’ he feels his self drifting into:

Blessed be Almighty God who has done such great good for me!

His mercies have no limit, and the sins of men do not curtail or hinder them.

–––MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, DON QUIJOTE

While such words are making their way out of the dance of his tongue, the

clock points 5 a.m and the preludial Aurora opens up for the morning Sun,

steadily rising over Sierra de Guadarrama. The first rays of light now stretch

to touch his pale face and eyes, completely unaware of such a tremendous

brightness, revealing the total hollowness of his stare. What is he looking at

and where is he looking from?

He is now balancing between the world from where he was and the tempting

abyss promising cosmic dispersion he seems to be going towards. What a

vertiginous cry! A cry of passage.

This last scene is being perceived by I, his confessor, as a painful ascension

where its illuminating beauty is beheld within the tortuous appearance of

the Knight. His passing body is the live witness of the liminal horizon he has

so eagerly sought for while still able to ride on. The pilgrim has become in

itself the destination, the last celestial room his fight against the impossible

kept locked far away from his incessant conquering attacks. Such a tragedy,

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but a beautiful tragedy, where the dreamt awakening has gained a life of its

own and turned into decaying flesh, brittle bone and steaming pus; the

invisible presence, immovable destination, has now haunted the ecstatic

body and mind of the pilgrim. He is possessed by vertigo, which is nothing

but the emotion of transgression, in this case, between living and leaving.

He is becoming the thing in itself. The city of gold, the continent, the

hidden route to the Indies, the unknown planet, Dulcinea del Toboso… he

is now becoming the architecture of such vision.

You are becoming.

What is it you think you are becoming?

The answer is in the way you use the mirrors.

What are the mirrors making you dream of becoming?

–––MANHUNTER, MICHAEL MANN

And I am standing by the side of this wicked witness of his own dream-

creature, observing it all and unable to enter into it. However, as some say,

the eyes are the mirror of the soul, inside all interiority is reflected and it is

there where I can appreciate the horrific splendour of this architecture.

At last, and with a grace worth of a large ship slowly precipitating into the

depths of the darkest of oceans, he lets go and sinks – it is 18th of

September 1598 – bells will toll for three days.

All fades into a bright darkness, a day is born while a pilgrim shipwrecks

into a garden-room inhabited by eight praying angels, a vessel and palm

trees, ceiling topping at 120 cubits (64.776 m).

In my mourning I build this garden-room where he will now dream into.

All fiction for the sake of grieving hope.

A sepulchre, a bridge.

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A hand rising into a skylight.

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c) – THE GARDEN OF TWENTY-FOUR CAMELLIAS–

From the position I stand now, there is nothing I can proof or measure,

which relates back to where the Knight has shipwrecked. Henceforth this is

all unreal, however it is relentlessly playing out inside of me every time his

spirit of mad conquest and wander awakens and waters my eyes. Such a

garden-room, pastoral, bucolic eternity, is presented to me, the chronicler,

in the upsetting form of a thick fog trapping all solidity into a white blanket

that spreads from the oceans and rivers to the forests and the mountains.

Fog, I use it as the image of the formless and mysterious ever-expanding

substance that comes and goes transforming the scenery to the will of its

expansion. This is the way the Sepulchre of the Knight of the Rueful

Countenance exists. Touching all, yet impossible to grasp or mix into the

realm of physicality where man exercises his power. The Knight is finally

transformed into what he lived to be, an idea that balances between feeling

and action. A vertiginous sensation that injects itself into the will of the one

that dreams for his awakening, an element of faith whose thirst transcends

the possible and breaks into the superhuman, or the mad. The feat! Where

reality is overcome for the sake of image. The Knight’s legacy is the will to

exercise the true metaphysical activity of man, which is the pursue of life’s

art = the voyage.

Let’s put back the spotlight of this last act on the shipwrecked new-born.

While walking through the bridge his own crossing figure embodies, an

indescribable set of movements erupt. Out of the simplicity of the most

docile garden where he, the crossing wanderer, looks, walks, climbs, lies,

sleeps, dreams… steaming geysers break out of the humid moss revealing

impossible figures accompanied by the most terribly joyous of symphonies.

All are triggered once he becomes, once he exists within the odd bucolic

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lands of his crossing. Rather than describing, let’s look at his actions and the

vital memories they elicit:

1While he looks back, doors open and all left behind is muted under

harmonies emanating out of eight resonating horns.

2While he walks on, wheat farmers burn their fields plagued by millions of

cecidomyiidae.

3While he climbs up, salix babylonica stop their weep and start their

deciduous autumn dance.

4While he reclines down, ants carry their deceased comrades into a

holocaustic pile of corpses.

5While he lies in, grains of white sand get stuck into his populous hair.

6While he listens from, grandmother cries in her sleep over her deceased

three year-old son, Albert.

7While he picks up, tailless lizards crawl under the bust of Apollo.

8While he swims to, the waveless sea turns into a salt plateau whose smell is

unbearable.

9While he sleeps back, acid gnaw and leeches suck at the tuna fish.

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10While he dreams on, God softly walks over the fields with Maria.

11While he wonders into, all eight Angels tune into Miles Davis’ Prayer (Oh

Doctor Jesus) while his two-bedroom flat leaks gas.

12While he feels at, leucocytes march down intoning thunderous songs.

13While he hits in, smoke machine smell and green lasers criss-cross his

love-struck face under the loud techno-pop of Kate Ryan’s Generation

Desenchatee.

14While he hurts back, the Devil crawls into his stomach and the night

becomes a tunnel.

15While he cries from, vomits and all city lights drag along in slow motion.

16While he laughs on, thinks all will be lost tomorrow and writes a poem

with blue marker on the wall.

17While he dances up, the moon calls and the stars haul.

18While he kills in, the dormouse bleeds out after lapidation.

19While he picks down, carnival disguises palm trees as pineapples.

20While he stops from, the car spins four times under an icy road on the way

to the birthday.

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21While he sees above, mockery hails in the shape of Staedtler Mars plastic

eraser chubs.

22While he chants to, seagulls hoover over cornfields in search of their

stolen eggs.

23While he prays in, the choirgirl’s blue eyes stare at him while he is serving

the wine.

24While he looks forward, twenty-four camellias pave the way into the towers

that today are hidden by the trees, but yesterday the stars, nocturnal lights, shone in

their battlements, when one you see here in wool wore speckles metal. They have

fallen now, and their naked stones are dressed in merciful ivy: for ruins and

devastation time knows how to flatter and grace with green.

*

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d) – A BRIDGE IN BLOOM–

I conclude with twenty-five images per second. A five minute film that aims

to be taken as a concluding voice. I have searched without pause the

singularities of a particular space. Such a space is to be understood as the

architecture our life inhabits. A life of wander, questioning, emotion, failure,

faith and action. Striving to wake up from a life veiled by the viscosity of

pessimism, which leads to auto-destructive actions with the after-taste of

tormenting guilt.

This work questions the most fundamental and primordial notion of space,

which is the vital space. The idea of space and architecture arise together

out of the necessity of God, hence of transcendence and burring the dead.

Finally, the truth one seeks so his thirst may be calmed, finds itself resting

above the limits of the world. That is why Homer made Ulysses leave to then

return and embrace Telemachus, Cervantes casted madness onto Don

Quixote and then clear-mindness on his deathbed and Goethe woke Faust

up to Ariel’s redeeming forgiveness. All fought the same crusade, longed the

same truths and ended up the same way; dark eyes of a child, such is the

depthless abyss all resolves into. The following film is my temporary

resolution. The fever of the Amazon and the striving forms of the Baroque

evolved into a search for an expression I condense within this five minute

conclusion.

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FILM

[ I ] – Crossing; I return to the port I departed from. I am awake.

This may be but a wish, a hope, a vision confessed during a

sleepless night.

A calm last breathe.

I fought from my awakening from the dream of life, which

viciously negated me of any throbbing sensation.

Numbing all incandescent eternities.

Heavy, sluggish.

I wanted to see, dear friend

I wanted to let my hand slide down the mirroring walls

delimiting the longed horizon.

There, the final room I was promised the day I dreamt it wide-

awake.

And now, while tightly holding your hand, I fervently let my

sunken eyes look beyond the swaying fields, the depthless oceans

and the barred windows.

Look into my lost innocence,... my point of departure.

The first time I gazed out through the dark eyes of my

childhood; untouched by disappointment and disbelief...

... all true and real.

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Here I was wide-awake.

Here I find my horizon.

At last... I am.

Unburdened by the torments of time.

Crystalline flow

I, a bridge, in bloom.

"Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant."

VERTIGO

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