The Tracks: Gitano

(gypsy; recuerdo; memento; consagración; consecration)

Untitled (Self portrait: after sunrise). Nr Vilobi d’Onyar, Spain, 2023.

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The third day. A Tuesday, AM:

Free—this new day in Spain—from the variable tyranny of the saddle of my motorcycle. Not needing to measure or conserve my energies for motorcycling, I was free: to reflect; to enlist new influences into being. Free to embody my Gitano spirit; free to find out what might occur next.¹²

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Embarkation on this journey was assuming a healing quality; the quality of the lifting of a curse; one incantation—that of a journey—supplanting another: a series of trials. It was as though I’d needed those trials: the organisational (and other) bullying; loss of livelihood; loss of home: the penury; the exhaustion of trucking in the pandemic; the confinement; the deaths and near death experiences—in order to not just feel, but to embody this freedom, this liberty.

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My would be attenuators had now fallen aside: the imaginal process conceived and developed in my doctorate had kicked in and kicked me into being a gypsy character. In an apparently alien yet strangely familiar world, I felt at home in an area only visited—physically—three times previously. My nomadic, free-spirited character had previously drawn in—apparently unsolicited by me—anchors, attenuators, disrupters. Free, at last, of these inhibitors and saboteurs, I was also free to attend to my own inhibitions; including my tendency to attract unhelpful influences.

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At Mas Estrellas I had pitched up into good company, fellow (possibly in some cases partially attenuated) creatives. Enlisting reciprocal support was easy, almost automatic. I had with me a series of pictures—edited and collected over a year previously—and a large sketchbook, a left over from a couple of previous lives ago, complete with a Luton price tag. I sat outside at the large wooden table covered with blue tablecloth, forming a loose structure for my book, Prit-sticking photos into it. My compadres on the retreat kindly appended commentaries. It took me a couple of goes and most of a morning; and, as with many long deferred tasks, completion felt like a release; another phase of the healing process, perhaps?

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There were multifarious photos: from the magical days of the Alder Altar ritual; follow-on images: of flowers, of skies; of moments grabbed while trucking. All merging into mini-epiphanies—antidotes to malign influences: Covid and long Covid; trucking in the winters of the pandemic; Direct-Debit Debbie; the dysfunctional, toxic functionaries of the The Leviathan; alongside other—more subtle and long-lived malignancies, from previous lives. These forces convened now, here, in Northern Spain on the edge of the Pyrenees—into one, joyous, releasing. A letting go: a ‘Fuck ‘em’, if you will.

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This action—consecration—punctuated by the falling of a photograph onto the blue table cloth, beside a delightfully imperfect tomato.³ The photograph—made in a middle of the winters night trucking shift, undertaken to offset the financial toxicity of Direct-Debit Debbie—juxtaposed with the tomato grown in this garden. The image drew out a line of renewed aesthetic energy: benediction-by-juxtaposition. A third effect morphed into play: a reverse execration, the lifting of a curse.⁴

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Untitled (Afternoon mementos: Tomato; Photo [night trunking 01.03, Lymm, December 2017] ). Nr Vilobi d’Onyar, Spain, 2023.⁵

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Notes:

1. gitano | dʒɪˈtɑːnəʊ, Spanish xiˈtano | noun: a Romani man or boy from Spain; a male Spanish Gypsy. ORIGIN: Spanish.

2. gypsy | ˈdʒɪpsi | a member of a people originating in South Asia and traditionally having an itinerant way of life, living widely dispersed across Europe and North and South America and speaking a language (Romani) that is related to Hindi; a Romani person. a nomadic or free-spirited person. DERIVATIVES gypsyish (also gipsyish) adjective ORIGIN mid 16th century: originally gipcyan, short for Egyptian (becauseGypsies were popularly supposed to have come from Egypt).

3. consecrate | ˈkɒnsɪkreɪt | verb [with object] make or declare (something, typically a church) sacred; dedicate formally to a religious purpose: ordain (someone) to a sacred office; informal devote (something) exclusively to a particular purpose. ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin consecrat- ‘dedicated, devoted as sacred’, from the verb consecrare, from con- (expressing intensive force) + sacrare ‘dedicate’, from sacer ‘sacred’.

4. execrate | ˈɛksɪkreɪt | verb 1 [with object] feel or express great loathing for: they were execrated as dangerous and corrupt. 2 [no object] archaic curse; swear. DERIVATIVES execration | ɛˈksɪkreɪʃ(ə)n | noun execrative | ˈɛksɪkrətɪv | adjective execratory adjective ORIGIN mid 16th century: from Latin exsecrat- ‘cursed’, from the verbexsecrari, based on sacrare ‘dedicate’ (from sacer ‘sacred’).

5. memento | mɪˈmɛntəʊ | noun (plural mementos or mementoes) an object kept as a reminder of a person or event. ORIGIN late Middle English (denoting a prayer of commemoration): from Latin, literally ‘remember!’, imperative of meminisse.