Lantern on the Stern

My ideal for a work site

            I am so pleased to report that the never-ending novel has resumed its endless course. My stranded protagonist has progressed from a street corner near the Giralda Tower in Seville (see post of 1 July 2016) to the midst of the Atlantic Ocean. He, in a group that includes both a family member and childhood friends, is enjoying a thus far uneventful sail in one of the two last ships in the Nicolás de Ovando expedition to Española in 1502. (Well, not entirely uneventful, since the records show that there were three stragglers, and one was lost off the Canaries. But my characters may not know about that, as vessels on the Atlantic crossing often lost sight of each other in the course of the 7 to 8 week journey.)

            I think he's going to get through some seven years in a couple of chapters during the next couple of weeks! If I don't get bogged down again researching facts that I probably don't need to worry about and  just stick to the bloody story. But tales seem to have their own ideas of where they want to go--or maybe mining them just opens previously undiscovered veins in the imagination's tunnels.

            Going back over the previous chapters, I was struck by a whole section where the protagonist goes off on a tangent on his way home from the occupation of Granada. I certainly didn't intend for the Jewish expulsion from Spain to take up a chapter or two; the idea was to note the historic event as a backdrop to the protagonist catching a wagon to the coast so he could find a ship home. But the realities of the expulsion had a logic of their own, so there wouldn't have been space on a ship available going to an Atlantic port from the Mediterranean, and my guy isn't likely to just sit around taverns waiting until those under the expulsion order are all carried away and the ships returned

            A caveat here: it's entirely possible that these scenes may disappear if I ever finish and get to rework and polish this tome, but at the time, they insisted on being written so for the moment, they're part of the story.

            Rereading them as we embark on a new year, is a return to the start of the year just ended because the context of when they were written is inescapable. It was early 2016 and the European refugee crisis was at its publicized height. As spring gave way to summer, a huge sign hung on a downtown building in Madrid welcoming refugees, even as Hungary and other eastern European nations were closing borders. Britain was debating Brexit, in part because of whipped up emotions about foreigners (dangerous terrorists, taking jobs from Brits, destroying culture... the charges are familiar because they were repeated in the U.S.  Presidential campaign).

In Parque del Buen Retiro

            In Madrid during June, in the Parque del Buen Retiro, there was a powerful exhibition of photographs depicting the plight of Syrian refugees mounted in the open air along a walkway. Few seemed to take notice of it. Another photo exhibit hung in Madrid's Matadero complex--a  slaughterhouse repurposed into a cultural center--starkly illustrated the dangers of the Mediterranean raft people trying to get to Greek or Turkish territory. The numbers represented by mountains of orange life vests stacked on the beaches where boats came ashore are staggering.

            Back home last August, at a performance of Fiddler on the Roof, I watched while the audience empathized with displaced early 20th century Russian Jews as they trudged their weary way into exile at the end of the play.  I wondered how many saw the reflection of today's Syrians, Iraqis, Sudanese and Somalis--sadly, not an exhaustive list--in those bowed figures. Since then, the presidential election and the apparent resurrection of the right, with the concurrent trends of isolationism and nationalism, have pushed the refugees, as such, from the headlines.

            But they still exist. They still try to survive and find a safe place to settle, to go about the ordinary business of living a life. As did the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, and the Muslims, expelled from Spain in 1502. Today, people flee from war, and sometimes from tyranny, and sometimes from fear. They aren't expelled, not from their homes, not from their homelands, native or adopted. Are they?

            Samuel Taylor Coleridge once observed: " "If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind." Spain suffered from its expulsions, though it took time for the full impact to take hold. Lands that welcomed the expelled benefited from their knowledge and experience. It's a sobering lesson. I hope we might have learned from it. I hope we will hang the lantern forward, where it can illuminates the channel markers and shoals ahead.