Reading-spots, part 7

 

For work-related reasons, I am currently thinking back to one of my favourite reading-spots from the past few years, namely the restaurant Taiga in the neighbourhood of Lista in Madrid, where I spent many evenings in April and May of 2023, reading, writing, thinking, and just enjoying existence. One of the reasons why this reading-spot has such a strong place in my memory is partly that the two weeks I spent in Madrid that spring were two of the best weeks I have had in the past decade, and from my sidewalk table I could enjoy the feeling of being in a familiar and beloved place - feeling at home, of sorts. Another reason why this particular reading-spot is so important to me, is that it was here that I took a huge step in a new professional direction. 

This spring, I had started focusing more on researching utopian literature, a field in which I had long been interested, and which I was now able to pursue with more concerted effort thanks to a friend and colleague with whom I began collaborating. On that sidewalk outside the restaurant, I spent long evenings reading Gabriel de Foigny's utopian novel La Terre Australe Connue (The Southern Land, Known) in David Fausett's English translation. I spent much time thinking and writing fervently on a draft that provided an important foundation for future writing. It felt already then like an intellectual turning-point, and this feeling has since been proven correct. 

But this sidewalk table was also the spot for other types of reading, and other types of thinking. It was a busy spring, and I was also preparing a conference presentation to be held in Rome in a month's time, as well as a speech to be held in a fortnight's time in my home village. Looking back, this table was the nexus of my effort to be a man of the world yet remain a village boy at one and the same time, two roles that I try to connect through my intellectual work. It was also a place where I enjoyed the verses of my friend Raquel Lanseros, one of my all-time favourite poets, whose words have given me so much to be thankful for in this life. 

In short, this was a reading-spot, a writing-spot, and a thinking-spot where much happened, at least in my brain and on paper. It is a place I will always treasure.   

A ritual for fishing

 

Earlier this month, I went with my parents to set out fishing nets in a lake. This is an old practice, and a way by which we have harvested food for generations. There is a lot of skill involved, and as I am quite rusty I need to practice so that the mechanics of the various steps become engrained into my muscle memory. Several things can go wrong. For instance, it is important to start near land where the water is shallow, so that the fish is less likely to swim behind the end of the net. For the same reason, when the rower is moving the boat away from the shore, it is important to let the net slip off the hook swiftly and without too much tugging, lest the stone that weighs down the net in the shoremost end is dragged further away from land. 

Setting out fish nets is a practice that goes far back down the earlier generations, and this kind of continuity is part of what grounds me deeper in my native village. There is a timelessness to it, even though the nets we use today, as well as the boat, are both of a type that is decidedly modern, made with modern technology and from modern materials. In other words, fishing with nets is one of those things that remind us that we are always closer to the ways of the past than we are to the ways of an imagined, high-technological, techno-utopian future. 

We had five nets to set, and my father set the first one in a spot of his choosing. He stood in the aft end of the boat while my mother rowed, and he let the net slip off the hook with practiced ease. As the hook itself was the last part remaining, my father spat on it before sending it into the water. This is an old superstition meant to bring good luck, and people also do this with the fishing hook before casting it into a river or a lake.   

The next four nets were set by me while my mother rowed the boat straight ahead. As I am out of practice, I focused intensely on making sure that I didn't drag the net or the net didn't get caught in itself, as it sometimes does when it is a net that is old and frayed. But as the first of my four nets was about to leave my hand, I also leant forward and spat drily and unpreparedly on the hook before releasing it. I did the same with the other nets, and each time I felt an odd satisfaction. This is a ritual, a marking of a transition from one stage to the next, the releasing of the hook a liminal state, a threshold. As so many things in the current historical epoch is entangled in emptiness and destructive fantasies, this kind of ritual felt deeply satisfying, indeed wholesome, as it was an odd but harmless way to mark an important shift in the labour of the evening. I do not believe in such superstitions, but I do believe in the importance of rituals for human beings, however constructed they are. Some rituals are good to have, to retain, to construct, to invent, because these rituals are brief moments that ground us in reality and make us come closer to the interconnectedness of it all. 

I do not believe in such superstition. But the net that my father set was the one that caught the greatest haul.