THE LOOK

Each of us have a look. I am not referring to what others see in someone’s face, in his eyes as he looks. I mean how we see the world.

The look is evident in everything: what I believe to be, what other’s think I am like, what I think of life. The look is expressed in everything: in dressing, in walking, in speaking, in being. The look of someone is perhaps what best defines that person.

The poet has a look, as does the murderer, or the lover, or the fearful. There are looks for everything, and everyone has got their own.

This Sunday, walking along the road nearhome, a group of broom shone in the setting sun. Seeing them reminded me of the song “Mediterráneo” [Mediterranean] by Serrat. Perhaps my favorite song, because in it the the poet singer sums up the soul of this land blessed by the sea and shaded by pines and broom. And thanks to Joan Manuel’s eyes, while capturing the yellow flowers with the camera, the song sounded again and again inside of me, and I sang. [Free and unofficial translation]

Perhaps because my childhood

Continues playing on your beach,

And hidden behind the canes

My first love sleeps,

I wear your light and your smell

Wherever I go,

And piled on your sand

I keep love,plays and sorrows.

I, that in my skin have

The bitter flavour of the eternal crying,

Which a hundred peoples have shed into you

From Algeciras to Istanbul,

So that you can paint in blue

Their long nights of Winter.

Because of misadventures,

Your soul is deep and dark.

My eyes got used to

Your red dusks

Like the bend to the truck…

I am a singer, I am a liar,

I like gambling and wine,

I have the soul of a sailor…

What can I do?

I was born in the Mediterranean.

And you approach, and you leave

After kissing my small village.

Playing with the tide

You go away, thinking of returning.

You are like a woman

Scented with tar

Who is missed and loved,

Who is known and feared.

Oh…! If the death comes

In search of me an unhappy day.

Push my boat to the sea

With an autumnal east wind

And allow the storm

To strip its white wings.

And bury me without mourning

Between the beach and the sky…

In the hillside of a mountain,

Higher than the horizon.

I want to have a good view.

My body will be way,

I will give green to the pines

And yellow to the broom…

Near the sea. Because I was born

in the Mediterranean.

And I missed the sea, I was a bit far away, and the smell of tar, and feeling the sand between my toes and the cool breeze on a hot July afternoon. And the broom took me to the sea, along with the memory of the song that the poet of the lucid and beautiful look wrote. And we were united by a look, and a memory, and a land, but all born of a look, as it does unite us who look at these letters.

Because the look created songs and ideas, paradigms and poems, sense and nonsense, paradoxes and uncertainties, riddles and mysteries, and shows and demonstrations, meetings and encounters, visions and hopes.

Tell me about your look, what you like looking at, contemplating. Tell me about it, and show me other ways to capture the world, please.

Kisses, hugs,

Álex