Vigil

"Don't get your hopes up:
power changes hands but rarely hesitates"
Joan Fuster

When this evening, in all corners of the Catalan Countries, the fire of the Flame of Canigó arrives, the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands will still be under the governmental binomials of PP and Vox, the xenophobic arsonists will be accumulating firewood in the Principality with the intention of lighting it soon and in North Catalonia, months ago the far-right – from Perpignan to Elna – imposed themselves in the first round. Their uncontrolled fires – where everything burns, from language to country, from biodiversity to the future – are not ours. But surrounded by the global far-right wave, perhaps from up there – the walls of the monastery of Cuixà, let's say – they will be able to tell us in perspective that if we get right what needs to be done, we have come out of worse situations, when they have seen it all. For example, that only 50 years ago we still lived under a dictatorship, there was no trace of democratic elections and death sentences were signed. Perhaps they will remind us that everything goes very fast when it comes to dismantling what has been built and everything goes exasperatingly slow when it comes to moving forward. In form and substance, no news. Not a single one. That some things mutate rapidly and others never change. That the bank wins and the State wins. Almost always.Last Saturday, Marc Castellnou, from the GRAF of the Generalitat Firefighters, said that fires are very good teachers but very bad students. For decades he has also told us that fires are extinguished in winter and that our ecosystem concentrates the fourteen possible types of fires – that is, all existing options. And that after years of turning a deaf ear, we are now beginning to pay attention to what has not been done and what still remains to be done. It is quite eloquent to apply the three fire-fighting maxims of the firefighters to the accelerated devaluation of democracy in the era of global fires. Which range from the Strait of Hormuz to a nihilistic billionaire in Colombia, from a shooting on Balmes street to the mass eviction of a building in La Mina this week, from devastated Gaza to German and Japanese rearmament, from Infantino's corrupt World Cup to Musk's tweet about Belfast – or Albiol's in Badalona. Fires provoked everywhere by the scorched earth profiteers. However, it was not they who left the land barren and the undergrowth neglected. Three maxims: that we do not learn, that what needed to be done has not been done, and that anything can happen on the ultra-revell that ignites the world.

The heatwave, however, is multiple and not just climatic. Today's vigil, an annual ritual when rituals are more necessary than ever to conjure and to conjure ourselves, can serve as an early crack to start thinking about how we would like the vigil to come. Not only to know what we will throw into the bonfire today, but to think about which forest fire we do not want to arrive – even though it is already here – and, if it expands disastrously, how on earth we intend to extinguish it before it is too late. In a year's time, 2027 is just around the corner, we will have a new Catalan municipalist map, a new social scrutiny, and the state elections will probably have already been held. We shall see – even though climate models predict what they predict. A year is a lot in politics and little at the same time, but in any case, there is no worse defeat than defeat by non-appearance. Otherwise, "it is all the time we have at hand to make a future," Casaldàliga would say. Mirror of time, it is summer, but it is no longer 1993 and the indispensable ecofeminist Yayo Herrero reminds us of the depth of the concept of solastalgia. The nostalgia caused by the fact that the place where you lived no longer exists, is unrecognizable and will not return – the same place in a completely different landscape. And the emptiness, uncertainty, and strangeness – without romanticizing any past – that this causes with all the string of discomforts it generates. Good old Yayo says more: that this is the void that the far-right exploits by choosing scapegoats in the absence of a Martian left, lacking perspective, that does not call things by their name or point out the structural causes and that has reduced everything to the battle for the narrative and media dispute. In any case, we do know that nothing will be rebuilt from TikTok and that libraries, at least, are also a climate refuge. And they are collectively publicly owned – and not by four technofeudal magnates. In the unequal digital battle that must also be fought, we must not, absurdly with ten thousand self-inflicted wounds, oppose empty libraries. Even less so in the country of atheneums, where workers have read in the darkness of the dictatorship, in the corner of the factory or in the holes of prison.

Especially when, at the gates of summer, the temperature will also rise again in all the peripheries. 30% of Catalan society, imperturbable and unshakeable for too long, will not be able to afford a single week of vacation away from home – real tourists versus non-tourists who will flee through the screen in immobile movement–. We will live in a structurally unequal country, between the Catalonia of swimming pools – and I'm not talking about the municipal ones –, mass tourism in monoculture and macro-festivals for others. Meanwhile, ragged and silent migration, a target of so many, will keep the Catalan semi-economic miracle running, which explains the low flight of the Phoenix: from the collection of sweet fruit to the slaughterhouses, from asphalt works on roads and in the city to the care of grandparents, from the stoves of all the hospitality to the pedaling that enriches Glovo – investigated by the Milan Public Prosecutor's Office for labor exploitation and for paying 81.62% less than the convention fixes –. Summer again – we already knew that – when there is nothing that divides humanity more abysmally than whether the condition of tourist welcomes you or the condition of migrant expels you. From North to South and with money, no problem and all the facilities. In the opposite direction, all the labyrinths and all the headaches.

And, despite everything, yes and against reefs and thieves, it is the day of the Catalan Countries on both shores of the Mediterranean. And this makes us equal. And people meet again. And Mireia Calafell writes with a rice water extinguisher: "It is urgent to know who we are, who puts chlorine in the pool and who is in the water. Who controls entry and who wants to enter. Where they want to enter. We must know soon or it will be too late and irreversible: we will no longer be able to do anything, nor change anything, nor say anything, nor write anything, nor demand anything if one day we discover, naively, that all this blood is from our hands from which, drop by drop, it falls". Let the air flow. Happy solstice.