The train is Catalonia

Rafael Campalans, which isn't a street name, saw polymorphic lights and heard crashes and whispers. He called them "signs." There was a time when Catalonia was absolutely extraterrestrial. To be earthly, one must be Martian. And those Selenites were.

Enric Prat de la Riba (right-wing, conservative, blah, blah, blah), first president of the Commonwealth of Catalonia (1914-1925), commissioned the engineer Rafael Campalans (of the PSOE, who later created the Socialist Union of Catalonia because they said you couldn't be both socialist and Catalan) to build public works. Translated: roads, telephones, railways, irrigation, drinking water, wells… To make a country from north to south and from east to west. Integral, total, holistic, organic. A country where everyone can live. A country where everyone can live. Respect is the first infrastructure of existence made community planet. See above.

Those aliens invested 36% of the annual budget in public works. Faced with a "devastated" Catalonia, the Commonwealth is the cornerstone of the Catalan state, and welfare state, since 1714. Everything remains standing. Everything. Faced with the The self-sufficiency of the Spanish state, Catalan self-sufficiency. Against everything, we in favor. Why?

All those Catalans—and I mean all, left-wing, right-wing, pygmies, colorblind people, tightrope walkers, steering wheel drivers, aviators… All of them, as Campalans said, saw and heard "the signs of things, of their time." They called it "tomorrow." They did everything for the future. And if we're talking about trains, they whistled this. In 1920, compared to other countries, Catalonia had a much lower number of kilometers of railway track: 1,533. The Netherlands had 3,399; Switzerland, 5,112; and Belgium, 8,814. That's why they do the math. Catalan engineers then considered that Catalonia should have 3,200 kilometers of railways. Bam! And bam-bam! In 2026 we have up-down… 1,794 kilometers of rails. I'm sorry. This has been said, edited, and written many times: we haven't left the dead-end roundabout.

Now the "signs" point to the coitus interruptus of a country that is only seen, felt, thought, and built from a disconnected, illiterate Barcelona and a junkie, vacuum-sucking Spain. What has been happening for a long time is happening now, and what will happen even more voraciously is happening now. It's happening like that newspaper headline from a bygone British Empire announced decades ago, one day when there was fog over the English Channel: "Fog over the Channel, the continent is cut off." Now, Barcelona is truly cut off from the Catalan continent. The trains are the little lights of the "signs" of the times. The borders, the trenches, the bleeding tracks, the blood infrastructures of tomorrow. They aren't commuter trains: they are distant ones. This is the existential Sesame Street: near, far; up, down… We don't learn.

If the future was built a century ago, how is it that the past and tomorrow are now being destroyed? If life was created a century ago, why is death now being nurtured and subsidized? If we learned to learn a century ago, why are we now teaching the pedagogy of unlearning? The real Catalonia does not want to be a lethal Catalonia. The Catalonia of "signals" cannot be a Catalonia without a signal. We cannot. We do not want to. We are not commuter rail, we are not territory. We are not a fiction. Without Catalonia, Barcelona falls. Without Catalonia, no one will go anywhere. Catalonia is the train.