What Is a Monster?

Here's an article I found by Ray Loriga, Spanish author of literature and cinema. If you have the time to hear his thoughts on Madrid, I think it's worth the read. Hope you enjoy:

There was a time when Madrid was everything. No more. Between the insulting fascist architecture and the elegant Madrid of the Austrians, between the long line of movie theaters on the Gran Vía and the twisted streets of the center, between the age-old trees of Retiro park and the vast expanse of sky (there's no city with more sky above), between the women selling roses and the white taxis slashed with blood-red lines, there are other dreams of Spain that ain't necessarily so.

When I was a child, Madrid was everything and appeared in all dreams. Now Madrid is also Berlin and Bangkok, New York and Prague, Tokyo and Havana. I've spent a lot of time away from here in recent years, and it's well known that the one who leaves and comes back never comes back to the same place. One man packs the bags and a different one unpacks them. If the person who returns is not the same, then neither is the city. Only those who stay remain alive forever, trapped in old photographs. Those who go, die in some pictures only to live again in others. They die in one city while living in another, and, on returning, they are surprised to find their own remains scattered between their mother's house and the courtyard of a former school. Returning to Madrid now is like returning to a dream you have already dreamed. In between, as I've mentioned, there are other dreams, other lives, other different days.

For one not born in this land, the weight of Spain is impossible to imagine. Spain is dragged like a chain, carried like a wound; it hides and surfaces like absurd shame or pride. Like the name of your own mother. And like the name of your mother, it explains everything and nothing at the same time. It subtracts and adds. Destroys and presses forward. Captains every single victory and every single defeat. Spain is the violent land that mortally wounds and at the same time makes you all but indestructible. A harsh and luminous land where nothing grows easily and where nothing can be easily uprooted.

It's not possible to forget Madrid. In the empty plains of Castile every tree is there to be remembered. This dry land intermingles with the blood of history.

History is the genetic code of nations. The rest is fantasy, or rather lies, but it is precisely the lie that is the proper terrain of art. Individual truth as opposed to collective truth.

The difference between an artist and my grandmother, who is from Jaca (Aragón), is that my grandmother does not doubt what she sees, while the artist does not doubt what he imagines.

I remember that in my first novels I was hardly able to write the name of a street. Everything here seemed painful to me. When I shot my first movie, I sidestepped everything familiar, avoided anything of mine in every shot to such a degree that the entire picture seemed filmed in no place, or in any place. One writes to flee, especially at first, just as one swims to get away from the shore and does not really think of returning until all strength is gone. A swimmer who always returns is a defeated swimmer. Or at least that's what I thought then. Now, as the years pass and more and more my travels take me farther away and for longer periods of time, I realize that one also returns to make peace, to close the old wounds.

Madrid is not Spain, just as New York is not the United States. But like New York, Madrid has the country around it as well as inside it. A person is not only the place where he was born, but he's not entirely any other thing either.

It's impossible to understand Spain without thinking about what it was and what it is, and sometimes even that doesn't help. Old Europe is measured by the weight of history, and beneath that weight the future seems impossible. However, the future is here, everywhere. While the great majority of American cities prolong their adolescence, like old children, European cities have now reinvented themselves almost completely. Madrid is still the city of Galdós and Baroja, but it is also part of a Europe that is disappearing, buried by the tide of unity and development. The Europe that arose out of nothing, like that miraculous Berlin, which thinks it exists from one day to the next like a rabbit pulled out of a hat. Transformed by the dazzling architecture of the new millennium. Constructed by the imagination. Invented.

In part, Madrid is the solemn silence of the Las Ventas bull ring and every one of the Christ figures in every one of its churches, but it is also all the people who travel in the rapid bullet trains. Madrid is my grandmother resting on a metal bench in the middle of an airport as shiny as a carp's back. Madrid is the impossible jungle of the Atocha train station and the noses of single women pressed against the show windows of the monstrous commercial centers. There are at least two cities. One that advances, not always in the right direction, and the other that's always looking over its shoulder. Like those characters in Tati's Playtime who still distrust the embrace of the new but try to adapt to the signs of the times. Two cities that approach each other like a timid child and a cowardly dog. You never know who will end up biting whom.

In Madrid, one meets young fascists and grotesque Internauts, the processions of Holy Week and the drugs of the future, chorizo and anorexia.

The answers offered by technology are and always will be incomplete answers. One can invent everything except the past. We are the central axis of Junger's scissors. Scissors that don't cut. The hinge between yesterday and tomorrow. And that position, as opposed to what is visible, turns us into today. Turns us into nothing.

The tragedy of contemporary Spanish art, as well as its strength, lies in this battle to escape the illustrious shadow of the centuries, dark and brilliant in equal parts. Spain has always been aghast at the vanguard movements, keeping a grasp on tradition like a guardian jealous of past glories. That is why in Spanish art, leaps either do not exist or are mortal leaps. Nothing has ever been gained in this land by peaceful means. Spanish art at the end of the century is still fighting battles that were won decades ago in the rest of the Western world. Here the right to dream different things is not given; it must be taken. And it is almost always taken at the cost of blows.

I've been late in understanding how this country functions, noisy and silent, straitlaced and obscene, passionate and icy. I've had to go far away to be able to reconcile myself to this absurd friend. Spain is a strange and fascinating monster. Now, at last, I believe I understand how this disconcerting machine works. Here nothing is easy and nothing is impossible.

Loriga, Ray. "Images of Spain (That Ain't Necessarily So)." Aperture 155 (Spring 1999): 72-74.