Before I post properly on the Barcelonan archives, here are some random musings, make of them what you will…
Believe me, I really wanted to enjoy walking around Barcelona – but perhaps I’m too much of an Early Modern kind of guy, because for all my efforts, I just couldn’t get into the town’s whole Gothic Modernist thing. For all the feverish & fluid imagination in Gaudí’s works, for all his epic & enigmatic symbolism, I instead walked away with an overwhelming impression of hallucinatory parochialism, as if I had somehow seen Leo Lionni’s “Parallel Botany” (or the Codex Seraphinianus, for that matter) writ large in stone and in shattered tiles.
I even took along a copy of “The Gaudí Key” (a recent novel based around hidden messages supposedly left by Gaudí in his buildings, and according to which novelistic conceit the architect’s 1926 death in a tram accident was engineered by a Satanic conspiracy etc etc) to read. But that left me cold too.
Sitting on the plane home, what struck me was a eery sense of how Gaudí’s mesmeric farmboy Catholicism echoed Joseph Smith Jr’s theophanic farmboy Methodism – and an uneasy feeling of how Gaudí’s death (in 1926) segued into Opus Dei’s founding (in 1928). Perhaps the brashly naïve self-confidence required to found a religion is something denied to big-city dwellers: and hence “humble origins” are not a handicap in this respect so much as a significant asset.
To my eyes, Barcelona comes across as a sprawling temple to its own unique brand of modernity, whose underlying religion / subtext is neither Progressive Science (think of the Italian Futurists for that) nor even Commerce (think of the City of London for that), but something else entirely – Pragmatic Nostalgia, perhaps? I don’t know.