The Sacred Beasts

by Bev Jafek

  “I would say that his beauty is that of inevitability, completion; beyond this we do not ask or conceive. We only smile. Though broken tiles have been strewn over his body, he does represent a unity. It is that of cosmic laughter and human delight. He says that joy and the love of life are spiritual and possess power in the world. It’s ironic to me that the dragon is associated with evil in Western art, a thing to be speared to death by an armored saint. Gaudi follows the concept of the East, where the dragon is the symbol of cosmic energy and author of the universe. Needless to say, this is all very familiar to me, that ancient pagan glove that fits so well. Now, I have pontificated enough. It’s your turn. My love, what do you see?”

  “Your pleasure pleases me so much that I want to wander through Wonderland with my beloved. This park is a found paradise. Let’s see the rest of it.” They went up the stairs, sat on colorful, circling benches, and saw Barcelona in a panoramic view. “I want to know everything you think and feel. You are now most dear to me of all,” Ruth said.

  “Your pet dragon?”

  “Oh, no, Sylvie might have been my dragon, but you are the queen of my heart.”

  “Then our paradise has indeed been found. We are lovers in Wonderland.”

  “And what does it look like?”

  “Benches that undulate like the sea, covered with nature’s forms and forces in their highest states of energy—the sun, wind and sea creatures with swirling tails present in all patterns. Like the dragon, they’re embodied in broken tiles, the more colorful and fragmented the better. The principle of organization is symmetry created from asymmetry. It’s the same cosmic order as all of Gaudi’s other buildings, but here it’s used purely in play. After sunlight and water, only earth is left. So, we find viaducts and stations of crosses that look like crumbling pillars, rough-hewn and of only one color like dirt, as though the earth had thrust them up and the artist had left. The earth, it says, is only material: we are the strivers after meaning, the designers. We are the creators of Gaudi as he gives us our Wonderland.

  “Have you ever seen a photo of Gaudi? Does he look like a crazed sea scallop?”

  “No, he looks like the repressed, tormented Victorian that he was.”

  “Let’s see more of the Guell buildings. I want to know where this ingenious race of tormented Victorian sea scallops lived.”

  They drove to the Guell Pavilions and Palace as well as the Guell crypt in a village outside Barcelona, and then visited Gaudi’s huge, unfinished Church of the Holy Family. It took all the hours of the morning and afternoon, and they were too tired to exchange their thoughts; rather, they were silent lovers looking out at the world together, which pleased them equally. They returned to the harbor for dinner and, after coffee, wine and food subtly seasoned with nightfall and the Mediterranean, they became animated and talkative again.

  “We’ve seen a lot of Gaudi now, enough to exhaust us,” Monserrat said. “It’s your turn: what did you see?”

  “The buildings are beginning to merge in my mind, and Gaudi is becoming a single point of view that fascinates me as a scientist. He’s an artist who seems to incorporate my life’s work, a reflection of my mind. He says that the spirit is to be found in animal life, whose origin is the sea, and he asserts this against Catholicism as what is no more than the delight of your child’s heart. All that we can know and experience is present in nature and animal life. It’s human wonder, complete spontaneity, dream consciousness.

  “I was struck by the gateway to the pavilions, which was designed as an enormous moving dragon. The Guell Palace adds a huge crustacean that seems to be dancing up a wall it nearly covers. They remind me of La Pedrera, which is the most oceanic of his buildings, that wave-like, undulating line present everywhere, ultimately creating an entire building in a spiral like the Nautilus. And, I think it was there we saw that huge, iron grillwork doorknob resembling a bouquet of spider webs with a snake darting into its center.

  “Most amazing of all to me was the Guell Palace’s central hall with that parabolic perforated ceiling, allowing natural light to fall into the room. As I looked up, I felt that I was seeing through the eyes of a great oceanic being, the mother of us all, watching the universe or even the night sky from the bottom of the ocean. It seemed to be Gaia looking upward, waiting for its errant creature, humans, to evolve sufficiently to live on another world that would become Gaia’s first child. If the earth is a living being, it’s subject to evolution as we are. After we’ve seen all the surfaces, patterns and forces of nature, we pass directly into the mind of Gaia. That was the relationship I saw to the Gaia hypothesis, and there’s more scientific influence in the concept of symmetry created from asymmetry. It reminds me of the concepts of quantum physics, in which chance extends to infinity at the subatomic level but nonetheless comprises our larger, more orderly dimensions of space and time that exhibit Einstein’s four cosmic forces.”

  “You make science sound like a realm of the marvelous,” Monserrat said.

  “It is,” Ruth said, “and your home is a city of the marvelous. I am honored to reflect it back to you. My pontificating is done. It’s your turn, my love. What did you see?”

  “I should begin by telling you that Gaudi incorporates natural lighting into all of his buildings, not just Guell Palace. That seashell shape of La Pedrera is the ideal form to enhance natural lighting along with its obvious archetypal associations. For me, the crypt of Guell is another myth or universe, like your ceiling of Palace Guell. It was intended as a church, but Gaudi only finished its base, the crypt. In the columns, I see the torsos of giants and great trees, a merging of plant and animal, as you found in Gaudi’s dragon. The ceilings then become the powerful arms of giants and the boughs of gigantic trees, all holding up the world. The high stained glass windows are then the fruit of these cosmic trees and the spiritual consciousness of the giants. They are mindless but like no others, since rounded shapes are intrinsic to their order, ultimately creating a design that looks like flower petals. As a crypt, it’s so full of life that it nearly denies the reality of death, all from a perspective outside Christianity, as you observed, though Gaudi considered himself a devout Catholic.

  “This merging of mythic humans and the plant kingdom to create a world reminds me of your Gaia. Gaia is also implicit in the leviathan structure of Casa Battló and La Pedrera: you’re inside a sea mammoth in both of them. Both buildings had attics like the skeletal arches of a huge animal’s backbone or the ribbed roof of a mouth. They’re both designed to be lit by natural light as well as Casa Battló’s huge crystal lamp with its hanging appendages like a giant octopus or a jellyfish.”

  Monserrat suddenly looked down and was silent. Then she looked quietly up at Ruth for a long time. “I’m avoiding a very difficult question: why were your eyes full of tears inside the Church of the Holy Family? It happened just as we were leaving.”

  Ruth sighed and was silent. “I had hoped you didn’t see that. At first, I was very excited there. I felt an affinity again: that this building resonates with what I’ve discovered as a scientist. It’s a temple that reaches to the sky, predictably, but it does so in the shape of a honeycomb, with the Christian cross as a heraldic flower, which surprised and delighted me. The spiritual is completely embedded in the organic, in nature. You see the same strategy when you ascend the stairs and then look down to realize that everywhere you have passed forms the spiral of a Nautilus. The unfinished glory facade, similarly, looks like a forest canopy. The cosmic reach, then, only leads to the structure of trees, flowers and animals. In fact, we come first from the sea and most recently from the trees of Africa.

  “The nativity facade, with its sculptures of the holy family as well as angels, human believers and animals, are unlike any religious art I’ve ever seen. Their faces show only wonder, awe, tenderness, spontaneity, dream consciousness. Those that are reaching out or playing musical instruments are in what is clearly a trance. The spiritual is to be found, then, in the wellspring of c
onsciousness, below thought, where all is understood intuitively. This is the reverse of any formal religion, which is full of laws, prescriptions, threats, rituals of obeisance, reasons for fear, shame and loathing, dichotomies of good and evil, etc. Rather, it tells me that the cosmic is perfectly natural. It tells me how to live and strive, as religion does not in any real sense.

  “And then, I imagined it under water before its completion, as it will be if not behind sea walls. I felt the terrible disparity between the best and worst in human beings. I’ve felt this many times during this trip to Spain and probably for the last several years of my life. The more I seek, study, think, feel; the more I’m led to this disparity. I think Gaudi has been ahead of his time up until now, the twenty-first century. We are the people to whom this art is intended to speak; we are the most receptive; and we are the people, equally, who will destroy it before it can be completed.” Ruth’s eyes were full of tears again.

  “Then we have to talk this out more,” Monserrat said. “I shouldn’t have let you go last night.”

  “You’ll only hear the old professor talking. I’ve taught college students for so long that it has taken over my language. You don’t want to listen to an essay.”

  “I’m ready. I completely accept you as you are. I know what you’ve been, and you never bore me! You need to talk this out.”

  “Well, in the two most powerful players, the U.S. and China, there’s too great a divide between rich and poor. It has been growing in the U.S. all the time I’ve been teaching at the university as an American citizen. The middle class is under siege, unable to understand the real issues and too weak to use the political process. A tiny fraction of the upper class, far-right conservative, is now a danger to all life on the planet; they are immoral, mendacious, oblivious, ignorant, coarse and unstoppable. The people have been electing Republican presidents for decades, and the present Republican Party has become more and more conservative. The spending of such a small group can’t create a mass market; only a powerful middle class and a strong safety net for those below can do that. So, the economy stagnates and there are too few jobs to support the population.

  “The vast majority has been manipulated by this dangerous upper-class with arguments about the need for some abstract notion of freedom, when it’s only the freedom to be controlled and impoverished by the upper class. Evangelical religious groups are equally manipulated into violating the word and spirit of the New Testament, which surely testifies against the selfishness of elites more than any other written document with which they have regular contact. Further mendacious arguments involve the value of weak government and salvation through a free market, when these ideas have always been proven false by our own economic history and that of other countries.

  “Any solution must involve strong government and more ethical industry that meets the needs of labor, and people in the highest positions of American industry are hopelessly decadent and will accept no higher goal than profitability, albeit criminal and immoral. In the long term, American industry will stagnate and then be destroyed by foreign competition. The final leg of so many Republican presidents and congresses and so much corrupt influence is an economic depression. You can see it in steps—less and less taxation of the wealthy, less government control and regulation of industry, big budget deficits for the sole purpose of cutting if not destroying Social Security and Medicare, then financial collapse and massive job losses yet continued profitability for that pernicious fraction of the wealthy.

  “Another ominous element is the impoverishment and diminished effectiveness of the American educational system, since that is the expected route to prosperity. We need a complete focus on better education and strengthening of labor’s position relative to industry, but these are in the steepest decline in memory. Excellent public school teachers are worth their weight in gold, and they’re certainly not paid, honored and supported in proportion to their worth.

  “At the root of it all is the conflict between liberal and conservative political parties, and these represent genetic predispositions. The U.S. has too many conservatives, which might have been useful in its earlier history but is now completely destructive. They represent two different forms of justice, and each therefore regards the other as immoral. The conservatives have all the terrible traits of chimps: true spite and meanness of spirit, unending male aggression, mendacity, the crudest political oppression and rigid hierarchy that can only be challenged by violence. This leads to completely inefficient and non-functional groups and hence the nations that comprise them. The liberals have more bonobo traits, which are non-violent, nurturing and far more skillful in groups, creating more prosperous nations that hold them as citizens. But, liberals are now a minority that is unwilling to engage in the aggression, oppression and mendacity that determines the winner in the U.S. As genetic predispositions, the conflict goes to the heart of destructive human political behavior.

  “I’ll write all of this, as I’ve taught it in primatology courses for decades, but it will only be influential after the first global catastrophe. It may then be too late for civilization at its best. Civilization is as fragile as biological life and everything else determined by evolution. I don’t think I can stand to go on about this.”

  “Then it will do no good for you to talk it out. You must write your book, and if it receives a hostile reception, I’m sure you will answer questions about your thesis very well. For my part, there’s only one thing I can realistically do to save you.”

  “What on earth is that?”

  “I can love you.”

  Ruth smiled, relaxed and was silent for a long time. They looked at one another with the eyes of love and both felt saved. “That’s the best thing Barcelona has given me,” Ruth finally said. “I should thank every goddess in the pagan pantheon that you’ve even had the patience to listen to my long rants. I will gratefully and graciously shut up. Let’s go home, my love! Let me love you, too.”

  IT WAS EARLY evening before Alex and Sylvie awoke. Again, they were ravenous and had dinner at the same restaurant on the corner, then returned to Monserrat’s house, where many women’s groups were meeting, and the atmosphere was as noisy, wild and unpredictable as ever.

  “Are you afraid of meeting them?” Sylvie asked.

  “Not really,” Alex said. “Monserrat has been in process of saying goodbye to me throughout the whole thing. She said how happy she was that I was going out with you and to take a few days at a hotel. So, I have virtually been pushed into your arms, not that I needed it.”

  “Ruth, too. She said I’d throw her over the first night,” Sylvie said and thought, except that she sort of implied but definitely did not say it, and I was shocked when it happened. “Have you heard from Monserrat? You’ve got the cell phone.”

  “Oh, yes. She made a big deal about how welcome we are, to take any room in the house and for us to stay as long as we want to and particularly, for you to feel free to paint here as long as you want.”

  “That’s great because I have to do nothing but paint for many days, weeks even, all morning, all day, into the evening. I’ve had so many ideas that I can’t do another thing without it.”

  Alex looked distressed. “Don’t worry,” Sylvie said, smiling. “I’m sleeping with you every night.”

  Alex looked relieved. “Actually, it will be perfect. I’ve got to finish my dissertation. Which room should be ours? Do you want the one Monserrat gave you?”

  Sylvie suddenly looked very calculating. “We can use that to store our stuff and we can work there. It will officially be our room. But, I must sleep with you tonight in the room I shared with Ruth; and tomorrow night, you must make love with me in the room where you slept with Monserrat.”

  Alex laughed uproariously. “I never know what’s going to come out of you! Are you trying to sully the goddesses?”

  “Just disrupt them a bit.” She suddenly grabbed Alex and kissed her passionately. “Don’t you want to?”

  “N
ow I do! What will you do if they come in on us like the Guardia Civil?”

  “They won’t. They have a secret place, somewhere you’ve never been with Monserrat.”

  Alex looked at her in wonder and thought, how many secrets do you have, my love? They both smiled broadly. “Well, I’ll take you anywhere, anytime. In front of them if you like.” They both laughed.

  “No, not that,” Sylvie said. “Did Monserrat say anything about Ruth?”

  “They’re together and very happy.”

  Sylvie’s face looked conflicted, then angry. “Did you answer? Wish them well?”

  “Oh, yes! I’m really happy for them.”

  “Did Ruth say anything?”

  “No, the message was from Monserrat. Ruth’s cell phone is probably still locked in the glove compartment with yours.” Alex could see that this disturbed Sylvie and said nothing else about it. They moved their luggage into Sylvie’s room, and Sylvie began to dress. She wore another colorful, deep-necked dress that frankly revealed her body as well as low heels.

  Alex watched her, astonished again by her beauty, which seemed to show new facets and dimensions in different rooms, situations, and even times of day. Today, she was an Arab woman; yesterday, she was South Asian. At night, she was a European bombshell. “I don’t know how to tell you how beautiful you look,” Alex said. “You’ll have those people following you around again.”