Gaudí, on the scaffolding of doubt
These days Antoni Gaudí is celebrating. June 13th is Saint Anthony of Padua. Patron of bricklayers, master builders, constructors, of armchair psychoanalysts and mortar. You can find Gaudí at the very top of his friend Jesus's tower. Celebrating on life's scaffolding. Having an oily herring sandwich, a cold beer, and the dessert of an eternal roll. Do you see him?
“We will never forget him, however many years we live, and we hope Catalonia will not either, however many centuries pass,” writes Francesc Pujols, a bricklayer of “the Catalan religion”. The philosopher first saw proto Saint Gaudí in an instant between 1906 and 1907. In the chiaroscuro of the apse of the Sagrada Família temple. Light and shadow were made. Gaudí is Star Wars before Star Wars. He is “the great architect of the universe”. For the mystery of the coming seasons of existence, it remains to be known how the chapter will be resolved: God is inspired by Gaudí; or Gaudí by God?
of Aeschylus. The doubts of the Gothic temples of modern tragedy of the Oresteia. The doubts of the Gothic temples of the modern tragedy of Shakespeare's Hamlet Shakespeare. Hamlet is nothing but a Gothic Orestes. Orestes is nothing but a Greek Hamlet. Nothing is ever new. Gaudí ties it all together.
He, his work, his country, the world and beyond. Allioli trencadís. Macedònia of recapte cake. Salad of doubts. The Sagrada Família is a router. Catalonia is a wifi. Heaven and earth are a network. Gaudí undoes doubt like a cat unraveling the ball of life. A bomb defuser puzzle: the red, green, yellow wires… “Our dead architect is one of the most forceful arguments that the Catalan land can present in favor of its current and future capacity, although Gaudí said that the fact that Catalonia had done nothing in modern times, which was what those who denied our land a glorious future opposed him with, is what Gaudí had blind faith in, it was positive proof of what it can do, because it is what he always said with great reason: those who are going to do things are precisely those who have done nothing,” confirms Pujols.
Catalonia is an argument for the world. Neither Greeks, nor Goths, nor Indians, nor Hebrews, nor poets, nor architects, nor religion, nor science… It is not surprising that Gaudí, the Sagrada Família, the stone, the oily herring sandwich, the cold beer and the eternal bread roll want to nationalize-Spanish-ize them. A pseudo Catholic, political, linguistic taxidermy. A stuffed fox Gaudí. An embalmed Sagrada Família. A mummified Catalonia. The problem is that Gaudí, the Sagrada Família, Barcelona, Catalonia is where truth lives. That is why they want it all. This battle of 2026 is won, but like the temple, the work, it is not finished. When they want to kidnap Gaudí, with this pornography, delinquency, existential nihilism, it means we are already at the very top of the tragedy's scaffolding. Waiting for the final lightning bolt to see where it falls.