In Granada, the plazas where we went to buy ice cream for our daughter are the same ones used for the condemnation and burning of innocent men and women a half a millennium ago. In our beloved Albayzín, there are two streets named after prisons, the Carcel Alta and the Carcel Baja: the upper and lower prisons. And just down our street in the barrio, there is a Plaza de la Cruz Verde: the Plaza of the Green Cross. The green cross is the symbol of the Holy Inquisition. Upon the side of the Cathedral of Granada, you will find, even today, a chiseled name—the only citizen to be so honored on the entire face of the cathedral: José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falangist Party of Spain. And down in the commercial district of Granada, you will find a monument dedicated to the same man. He is the principal martyr of the fascists. In 1934, he urged the military to revolt against the government, writing to senior military commanders that they were “the only historic instrument to achieve the destiny of a people.” He went on: “This will be the decisive moment: either the sound or the silence of your machine guns will determine whether Spain is to continue languishing or will be able to open its soul to the hope of dominion.” In 1935, speaking privately to a core of fascist leaders, he urged that they should “prepare to revolt, counting, if possible, on the military, and, if not, on ourselves alone. Our duty is, consequently, and with all its consequences, to move toward civil war.” And Jose Antonio was the man who stated clearly enough in the same year:
We regard Italian Fascism as the most outstanding political development of our time, from which we seek to draw principles and policies adapted to our own country … Fascism has established the universal basis of all the political movements of our time. The central idea of Fascism, that of the unity of the people in the totalitarian state, is the same as that of the Falange Española.
It is a measure of the complexities of recent Spanish history, its vainglorious alliances and its adulation of power, that such a name should figure upon the side of a cathedral dedicated to the worship of the Prince of Peace. It is the central Christian monument in one of the most famous cities in Europe. It is not far from the enormous statue honoring Isabel. I passed these monumental tributes almost every day, but with an anguish informed by the history of Spain, by the joy of our life in the Albayzín, and by our unreserved love for our adopted country: its music, its poetry, its people. Talking to a Spanish friend one day, after looking through a book of historical photographs of the country, at one point he put the book down and looked off into the distance. “We must write another book,” he said. “Here in my country, these last centuries we have written the encyclopedia of suffering.”
With the founding of a new European democracy after the death of Franco in 1975, Spain turned away from such darkness. Its democracy, in the view of this one American, is troubled, complex, disputatious, detached occasionally from facts, sometimes timid and sometimes bold, sometimes brilliant and sometimes corrupt. That is, it’s just like every other democracy. It belongs to the people of Spain, and may every blessing and beauty come to their aid as they move forward together.
We have been one family living in one neighborhood in Granada. Nothing could have led us to think that the Albayzín would course so vividly with the currents of history. It speaks of jasmine and disaster. And nothing could have prepared us for the goodwill and loving-kindness of our neighbors, their helpfulness and the sweetness of their natures, as we struggled to make our way in a country not our own. If they are the future, then Spain will one day be first among nations.
A Few Notions of Geometry and Revelation
FROM THAT LONG-AGO night of rain, when we walked with dog and baby to our rubble-strewn house, after the months of construction as our life took form here, we came to live with books and conversation, red wine and ebullient company, the music of Spain and mood of the Albayzín, languorous and celebratory at once. And we lived with a castle in the sky before us, the Alhambra. It floated there as improbably as a fortress in one of the fantastical tales we read to Gabriella every night. The terrace off our torreón looked straight toward the castle, and each night, it seemed a conjuration. I was never sure, when we went to bed, if it was still going to be there in the morning.
As a hive holds cells of honey, so does the Sabika hill, rising before us across the canyon of the Darro, have a history of holding constructions of the most intricate beauty. After looking into the history of our neighborhood, we were hardly surprised to find that the Alhambra has one of the city’s most bizarre stories. In 1492, after Granada was starved into surrender, Ferdinand and Isabel used it as their own, with Isabel swishing around in gorgeous Arab robes. Then, after their departure, the palace began to disintegrate all through the early 1500s, even though the despised Moriscos were forced to pay tribute to maintain it. As the Inquisition and ethnic cleansing lay waste to the Morisco community, the tribute began to fail, and in 1571, Philip II decided to direct some of his income from sugar cane works near Seville to pay for repairs. Still, in 1590, part of the palace burned down, and as the years rolled on, the governors of the barrio and the palace cast about, rather wildly it seems, for ideas to use the space. So, noting the beautifully tiled chamber where ambassadors to the court of Granada were once received, they decided that it would make an superb ammunition dump.
So it remained for decades, until in the early 1700s a new Philip, this time the Fifth, decided that the palace and its royal district no longer needed its own governor, with his noisy band of servants. So he dismissed him. This governor, a duke who liked the palace and the servants, wanted to depart with a flamboyant gesture, so he burned down his fabulous residence.
A good deal of the royal barrio lay now in ruins, but one group with canny temperament and a good eye for real estate moved in: the gypsies. So, a bit more than two hundred years after the conquest of Granada, a gypsy encampment thrived in the palace of the sultans and of Ferdinand and Isabel. Visitors, of course, thought it picturesque to have donkeys and guitar-strumming gypsies wandering with them through an august and crumbling ruin.
But the dedicated administration of Spain and Granada were not done exploring how they might use the palace and its grounds. As the 1700s went their way, the palace looked like an ideal place for a military hospital—it was dirty, but it had big rooms and nice views. Then the governor of Granada, musing perhaps on the fine time his predecessor once had, decided that he, too, would move right in and sport about in the ruins. The palace still being full of incomparable woodwork set into geometrical patterns as complex as the tile work, the new resident governor began to rip it out and use it for firewood. Wanting to have his milk and meat close at hand, he also set his farm animals to roam throughout the complex, adding another complement of animal droppings to the already rich mix. And even then, the ingenuity of city officials had not exhausted itself, for the rooms where dwelt once the wives of the sultan were selected as the ideal venue for the salting of fish.
In other words, the palace complex came to look rather like the Albayzín of the same period: a ruin full of gypsies. Through the monument, animals wandered, and moss found a foothold among the trash and weeds. Virtually no one thought that the extraordinary Albayzín would survive, and by all accounts, the legendary palace of the Alhambra was turning into rubble and dust.
As the centuries wore on, the reputation of the Alhambra, as though by strange radiance, came to penetrate most of Europe, because of the fictional flights and visits of the English, Americans, and French. They used the palace as a basis for fantasy, with full doses of sexual intrigue, genies, tragedy, and frothy romance. Let us roam over a few centuries and look at the names of some of the writers and composers who treated us to fantastic stories of the place: in 1672, the English poet John Dryden wrote a play about the conquest of Granada; in 1739, the French composer Joseph Pancrace Royer wrote a famous ballet about the sultan’s amorous wife, who met her lover for secret couplings in the rose hedges. Not to be left out, in 1829, Victor Hugo published a long, over-the-top poem on
the same subject, called “Les Orientales,” full of genies and exclamation marks, and in the late 1800s, Claude Debussy wrote two moody pieces about Granada and the gates of the Alhambra. All these writers and composers over several centuries had one astonishing thing in common: not a single one of them had ever been to the Alhambra, nor to Granada, or even anywhere nearby. Even the twentieth-century Spanish composer Manual de Falla, who eventually lived near the Alhambra, went right ahead and wrote music about the gardens there, well before he ever visited them.
Fortunately, other writers, scholars, and composers did visit, and it is partly to their work that we owe the unlikely preservation of the Alhambra. In 1840, the 19-year-old French poet-to-be Theophile Gautier sauntered straight in to the Patio de los Leones, cooled his wine in the fountain, and bedded down for the night. But two other nineteenth-century visitors changed the history of the whole palace: in 1829, the American diplomat Washington Irving, and in 1832, the Welsh scholar Owen Jones. Irving’s writings, The Tales of the Alhambra, is still in print and sold all over Granada today. Jones’s masterwork, Plans, Sections, Elevations, and Details of the Alhambra, a book to which he gave his life and his fortune, was scientific, accurate, and magnificent. Published in the years 1842–45, it contains reproductions of most of the Alhambra’s ornamental tile and plaster work. Even to produce the books, Jones had to work a revolution in the art of color printing, until then poorly developed. The books are unprecedented in the history of design, and they gave the Alhambra to the world irrevocably.
At the heart of the gift given were faithful renderings of a sacred art unknown in the West: the art of ceramic tiles with complex geometric designs. In the Alhambra, such tiles cover wall after wall. In our years in Granada, these tiles have been our companions and our teachers. In them we find an example of how the beauty of another culture may be a mentor to understanding and a map that leads onward to the most surprising joy.
I can remember, when in college, seeing for the first time a photo of one of the tiled walls of the Alhambra. Though I had the most complete ignorance about their nature, I was spellbound by the fierce, lovely complexity of form and wondered what on earth could be the basis of it. But it was not until we moved to the Albayzín that I had the time, because of our many visits to the monument, to study in peace the tile work. They offered an undiscovered country. I had long hoped to visit and learn there, though it was a place so beautiful I did not know if I could return with my story.
So let us begin. It is a story that begins two millennia ago, though we can tell it in a few pages. Just as our garden had an ancestor in a garden of the sixth century BC, so do the tiles of the Alhambra have an ancestry in southern Italy, in the same century, in the teachings of Pythagoras, a figure so important that almost nothing is known about him. We know he was born on a Greek island, traveled through the Near East, and settled in southern Italy. There, he did something rare: he wrote nothing but lived so as to exercise an extraordinary influence on mathematics and philosophy. Many tales are told about him, including two wonderful declarations: that he could be in two places at once, and that rivers spoke with him.
What is important for us is that Pythagoras thought that the world offered a beautiful order, and to learn that order, we had to study number and proportion. If we did so, then we had a chance to come into possession of a key to learning our place on earth, and the real purposes of life. This core idea, that numbers have both a practical and a spiritual use, goes along with another idea of Pythagoras: that the soul is immortal and may dwell in another world with forms of goodness that are permanent. Recall that Homer consigns the soul after death to Hades, a dismal world of regret and lamentation, which Tiresias the prophet calls “a joyless place” and which even Achilles trashes unforgettably, saying that he “would rather be above ground still and laboring for some poor portionless man, than be lord over all the lifeless dead.” Compared to such a destination, the notion of Pythagoras held a lustrous promise.
Though his central idea has undergone strange adventures through the centuries, it is simple: that beyond doctrine, belief, and ritual, beyond habit and appearance, there exists a durable world, an objective reality we can understand. One of the primary means to such understanding is number. That is to say, numbers are not only essential to our life on earth, they also are our introduction to another world of understanding, one based on an order deep within us and natural to our experience. So, for example, we have in our lives the sun, the moon, the stars, each of them with its own movement through our day and night. Yet this movement is not random, but harmonious and comprehensible, and susceptible to description with numerical formulas. Similarly, with the playing of music. For instance, musical order created by vibrating strings turns out to be related directly to numbers. This discovery, attributed by tradition to Pythagoras, provided a foundation for the making of musical harmony. It works like this: if you take a string of given length and pluck it, the sound produced is called a unison, or fundamental pitch. Now, if you divide the string into two equal parts and pluck it, you hear a higher note: exactly one octave higher. If you divide the string into two parts, in a ratio of 2:3, the sound produced is called a perfect fifth; if the ratio is 3:4, then the sound produced is called a perfect fourth. So these orderly sets of sounds are precisely related to ratios among the first four whole numbers.
Music and number have a natural, powerful relation. In the legend of Pythagoras, this relation led to one of his most durable ideas, that of the música mundana, or the Music of the Spheres. The whole notion of numerical harmony is extended into the sky. Just as the movement of a certain length of a string produces a given musical tone, so the movement of the each of the planets produces, according to its distance from earth, a extraordinary musical tone. And taken together, the movement of the planets makes a music so beautiful that it is present everywhere and always, and so powerful that it governs the rhythms of nature. It is a harmony within life, the very music of creation. It is said to be the music heard by Moses when he took up the tablets on Mount Sinai. It is said to be the music we hear as we die, a prelude to our entry into a world beyond time. We may, as we live, hear this music ourselves, and make a life in concord with it, but we may do so only by uncommon learning.
Plato, Euclid, and many of the astronomers and scientists of classical antiquity incorporated these ideas and added a host of others in the flowering of mathematics that began in classical Greece and continued through the Hellenic period, building a significant body of knowledge that lay in manuscripts and practices throughout the Mediterranean, but especially in the libraries of Alexandria and the Middle East. With the sacking of Rome in 410 and the beginning of the Middle Ages in Europe, these writings fell into disuse, and their collection and study would wait until the eighth century, after Islam had carried its faith throughout the Mediterranean. As it formed stable governments and centers of study, its scholars took up the scientific and philosophical heritage of antiquity and enriched it with their own labors and discoveries. The center of these efforts, in Baghdad during the reign of Haroun Al-Rashid, was called the House of Wisdom.
Among these workers were an anonymous and brilliant group of writers known as the Brethren of Purity, whom we have met when we visited the translation school of Alphonso the Wise. The Brethren, in their labors, helpfully decided to summarize all knowledge in a single book. The book has fifty-two chapters, and the first three take up, respectively, number, geometry, and astronomy. As to the necessity of number in our efforts to find the truth of things, the Brethren say boldly: “the science of numbers is the root of the other sciences, the fount of wisdom, the starting point of all knowledge, and the origin of all concepts.” In geometry, according to the clear propositions of the group, we can relate number and form and create figures that exist in our minds, which gives us a way to begin to understand a durable, intelligible world beyond our senses. In this way, they claim, we can begin to build for ourselves a life in concord with a freely offered and
permanent order within the world. As to astronomy, the Brethren, who revered Pythagoras, wrote of the wondrous harmonies of the Music of the Spheres, which by their account resounded according to measure and melody, ringing now like struck brass, then playing like some celestial lute. This is the music that is perfect, which we might imitate on earth, so as to be able to hear and remember in our own music the very order that informs all the visible world. In this way, sensual experience leads naturally and inevitably to stability and luminosity of mind.
There are other fascinations in the writings of the Brethren, not least their intense focus on the heavens as they relate to the ascent of our souls toward the divine. They wrote of the several spheres of the heavens, corresponding to the seven visible planets. And, as though they were giving patient instruction to Dante when, more than three hundred years later, the poet worked out his plan for the Paradiso, they detailed the way the soul must pass through each of the spheres to reach its destined fulfillment.
These ideas we have sketched—from Pythagoras through Plato and the scientists and translators of newly emergent Islam, culminating in the summaries of the Brethren of Purity—these ideas form the context we need in order to understand the beauty and meaning of the tiles that grace the walls of the Alhambra. The craftsmen who made them were working in a culture in which many of the distinctions we take as given—between science and art, sense and spirit, quantity and quality—were not rigidly established. And so we have in the tile work of the Alhambra, and the tile work throughout the Middle East, an example of an art based on geometry. It is an elaborately sensual creation with spiritual meaning and a work of precise quantities that we are meant to use, as we gaze, to refine the quality of our perception.
We have been voyaging through the centuries, just to do a simple thing: to stand together before a wall of tiles and say of what we see in them. Before we do so, we have to talk a bit more about number: specifically how, in the current of reasoning we have been following, the first few whole numbers relate to the earth, to the heavens, and to the sacred. We need to try to see the force field of associations bound up with these numbers. We need to see, beyond quantity, what they mean when we relate them to our experience on earth. To take up this subject means to venture into domains of thinking and experience that some might call mystical. But it is, in fact, a plain and practical endeavor, neither remote nor fanciful. It is based upon the simple proposition that to approach the sacred, we do not need religious institutions, a system of belief, doctrines, training, ritual, dogma, theology, or faith. What we need is love, study, and understanding. What we are trying to understand are the workings of beauty in tile work meant as a delight to the eye and as an embodiment of the sacred.
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