University of Salamanca, founded in 1218. Two centuries later, in 1402, the crown of Castile settled on the coast of Rubicon, in Lanzarote. Six centuries later, I travel through the Castilian lands and, at the end of the trip, I go to the Rubicon and live in a cave the size of the coffins of those kings. And I drink from the water of the Norman wells where those Castilians drank. Six centuries later, in Salamanca, I look out to the other side of the well. Equinox, September 22, 2017. Miquel Barceló, doctor honoris causa.
Delving into the magic of life, into the magical, which is the way I have of transiting this time in which I now find myself - in the same way that, in other obsessively magical times, I stirred in the mechanics and physical understanding of the world - I suddenly find myself in Salamanca. The shaman, the only shaman I know in my life, summons me there for the day of the Equinox, to conjure something that I don't know what it is. And of which he does not speak to me. And I don't know if he knows. I should be among my stones observing with ancestral senses the moment when night and day reach their equilibrium. But I'm going.
I am summoned by the being who is closest - and very far from the others - to those who thousands and thousands of years ago painted and engraved in the depths of the caves of the planet. And, suddenly, everything is compressed as if trying to write the history of the Western world on a page of the Divine Comedy. Everything tells you that your spiral is going to turn, to centrifuge your time. To the center. And, as always, the conquests, the conquered, the victors and the vanquished, whether Arabs, Christians, Mahos or Aztecs, Sapiens or Neanderthals, are the fuel of the history of time. The bonfire always present with its lights and shadows, with its shelter and its terrors.
But, then, when the blood stops running, when the dead are buried or eaten by vultures, when the spoils are distributed and the hunger, the genocides and the future violations are adjudicated, then art appears and cleans everything. It covers it up, the bad one, or gives secret faith, the good one. Miquel, the shaman, captures this with overwhelming clarity. He only needs a tomato or a fish or everything that Camarón is capable of listing before losing his senses. The act in which culture, science, knowledge, recognize the shaman and the shamans in his name, is spectacular. As only a university with 800 years of history could capture, but it doesn't matter; I am also in an Aztec temple and the act is even more mesmerizing, they have even more experience; or in Guinea, which even surpasses the liturgies of the others in time and knowledge; or in the deep interior of a cave, where for thousands of years they have accompanied the gestures of the ritual, until freezing it.
To be present, I always need to have awareness - not knowledge - of everything that has happened to get there. That's why I have no memory, because memory is the past and I can't make anything pass. I always have guts in my hands, sex in my mouth, hunger, illness, passion, love, rage and compassion. The day passed, between the sense of the act in the Paraninfo of the University, the flocks of children newly arrived at that machine of making professionals, painted, shouting, singing, running through the streets. Which, in reality, are not streets but veins of a very, very old bug that swallows children and turns them into professionals to spread their vision of the world, their power. In his childhood, the shaman only lasted there, inside the bug, for a few days; he left his seed deep inside and left. Now he was there, looking the bug in the eye as an equal. That's why they respect each other deeply.
I don't know what I went there to do, but, that night, in the middle of the Equinox, it was already in bed one of those nights that you know that if you come out alive, you come out to something new. My guts were twisted for many hours waiting for a single moment of distrust on my part. When I was about to give up, I remembered that, many years ago, an old 'witch' in Catalonia saved my life with an unexpected tonique Chiquet - the modernity of an old Catalan witch, the modernity without which Castile knows that it returns to the catacombs of time; to which it fears with all its being, but has iron arms that, even if it wants to, it cannot twist; everything that it is and has, it did with a sword. I went out, had a bar opened in the middle of the night, took my tonique and returned to the palace. To the torture. Confident in that healing witch.
In the morning, a new crab without the old shell, as I left, just as I left, the shaman was also leaving and in that cloister with the median light of the 'first day just like the night' we greeted each other and talked about football and things like that. He, of course, attentive to Sasa. In his temple, in his cave, in a place of honor, there is a carnival costume made by her. Like one of those wonders of African art. But Sasa is not an artist, it is the art of life. Another shaman. I only know that they both understand each other. I keep learning. Life has insisted on assigning me teachers. She will know...
I then allow myself to remember that if you want to be an heir to the shamans of the caves, or an artist as they call them now, you are at this moment thousands of dark years away from achieving it. Passionate journey, then, that awaits you. Worthy of the greatest sufferings, of the greatest doubts and very, very close to what the eagle likes to eat the most: the ego.
So know that you have all the numbers to be swallowed. My advice? Wait seated, maybe I'll come up with one. I have very little experience, I only know one who survived. And he could look the bug in the face. And continue being the child that was not swallowed.