This Blog Is Dead - Weep Ye Not

The writer of this blog is happily passed away at the age of 33 years and some very few days.

The imperative is to outlive him.

Where Cats are King & Memory is Life in Death

I raced here on a motorbike, the palms worn thin on my gloves. From riding about this city.

I find the gates locked, it’s half past six and the souls sleep at six – or wake up – or maybe there aren’t even any there – maybe it’s just that the gatekeeper clocks off at six to get home and live life, meet friends, or family – or nobody – maybe just to watch TV and eat something simple – cold meats and a round of bread with sharp edged wine that doesn’t make him wince because he’s used to it.

And so the gates are closed. There are three of them. The central and largest one, flanked on either side by two equally imposing, slightly less large, subordinate gates.

None is open. All three are chained and padlocked – the chain languishing loosely about the uprights – no one will force it – no one will question its authority.

For who wants to enter a cemetery before time? Who wants to be among the dead while the living are warm about us?

Not I it is true – for I am not finished living in this city of Barcelona, or any other for that matter – but I have been imperceptibly drawn here to squeeze between the chinks in the gate, to seep in like smoke or morning mist, or a wish – a desire to get through, get on.

The locks and chains restrain the physical life in us. They cannot restrain the other.

I am through now and up the hill past the monumental tombs that house the remains of the great and good and the great and bad, indiscriminately. We cannot tell them apart from this distance, for the engravings fade beautifully into stones that embrace their bevelled lettering like so much wording in sand. Some are renewed, embellished and give life to death, for a few more years until someone forgets, or remembers.

On up the hill through the streets of the dead who once occupied our city called Barcelona – so many bars, cafes, churches, squares, shops and so many lives. They lie on dead streets now, streets strewn with leaves when the sun punishes the trees rooted in the dry earth.

Cats lope here, hold the fort and look out across the port where cruise liners jostle with cargo ships all giving forth cargos that will spend money, cost money or make money. Money that will dictate the size of the tombs that will encase us when we die. The rich remain rich in death, in Barcelona.

Architects design palatial tombs for rich families just as they design palaces that decorate the city and catch our eye or block out the sun for us.

And here I find myself among the dead but I am as if alive. My memories are of the most irrelevant kind. The trivial, throw away moments that life is full of. The details overlooked by so much awareness of tomorrow and getting on and plans for this and plans for that.

My memories hang in time like balloons that the wind could easily swish away – but there is no wind here among the dead. And no tomorrow to build on today – to fill up my mind with new irrelevancies, new joys and simplicities which come to mind now that I have left them behind; the way the door jammed sometimes in the winter when the air was humid. The way the bus held us captive as if on a wave that was due to break, when it breaked.

Goodbye Barcelona that is alive – goodbye to beauty and to ugliness. Here I will stay squeezed in a niche on this hill above you. Where I can look down like the cats upon the living – and I wish that I were there with a pen, in a bar, with a glass of wine and a sensation of warmth and it being time to go home – or time for dinner, or time to live – or time to live.