Time and the Elements Earth, Fire, and Water in «Años y leguas»
Roberta Johnson
Años y leguas (1928), the third volume in the «Sigüenza» trilogy and the last of Miró's works to be published in his lifetime, represents his densest writing1. It synthesizes and refines all the thematic concerns, images and stylistic tendencies of his earlier works: the nature of perception and its expression in words, time and space in perception, memory, and history, classical motifs and imagery, biblical motifs and imagery2, and it adds on antological dimension to the figure of Sigüenza3. Miró wrote the pages of Años y leguas during the summer months of 1921 and 1922, while he vacationed in his native Alicante (away from his bureaucratic post in Madrid), and in it he engages in what Gaston Bachelard calls a «topo analysis... [a] systematic study of the sites of our intimate lives»
4. Twenty years after his creation in Del vivir (1904), Sigüenza here explores the nature of being in time and space and the possibility of temporal and spatial self-knowledge through renewed contact with a geographical place of his youth.
Although Años y leguas was first published as a series of journal articles between 1923 and 1925, Miró conceived and wrote it as a unit5. In a letter of 1920 to the Duke of Maura, he prophesied, «me apartaré en una vieja casa mediterránea, con parral y todo, y allí me llamaré, me buscaré a mí mismo, y todavía he de encontrarme»
6, and in 1922 he indicated to Prudencio Rovira, secretary to Maura's father, that these plans were being fulfilled: «Mis libros comenzados, otros recién nacidos, y esos otros recónditos en nuestra sangre, que nos llaman, que nos golpean de sien a sien, esperan que yo me encuentre a mí mismo»
7. The structure of the book is episodic. Sigüenza travels about the Levantine countryside engaging in conversations with the local inhabitants and experiencing a variety of reactions to different aspects of the landscape. But there is an underlying unity to the work. Part of the complexity as well as the unity of Años y leguas derives from the juxtaposition within the perceiving consciousness of Sigüenza of immediate sensory perception and the perspective of memory. Through this experience he attempts to define himself, and he discovers that he is «himself and his circumstance», to borrow Ortega's famous phrase.
While the ontological preoccupation is a motivating force that propells the book along, as Sigüenza's encounters multiply, his relationship to the rest of humanity is concurrently revealed, primarily through biblical associations. The search for self is related to the quest for the Promised Land:
Se cumple en Sigüenza lo que siempre necesitó al internarse en las contemplaciones y en el extasismo del paisaje y de los pueblos: sentir su raíz emocional, su propia tradición, su antigüedad con la raíz de su tierra: in montes patrios et ad incunabula nostra. Necesidad biológica y estética de haber sido y ser siempre allí, con un sentimiento étnico y exclusivista de sangre de Israel8. |
As Sigüenza progresses through his Levantine encounters in Años y leguas, he revives and beholds the story of Genesis: the creation (eternal time in the perennial garden) followed by the fall into time and toil. Personal history («promesa de provincia, es decir, de infancia») fuses with social history («Ya cruza la prisa del novecientos por la carretera, enhebrando y juntando el instante lugareño. Comienzan a sentirse otros años y leguas»
[p. 1195]), and finally the two dissolve into universal human history. Like concentric circles generated by the impact of a pebble on the surface of a still body of water, Sigüenza's search for his identity in a specific time and place reverberates in the eternal cycle of man in nature.
The means by which Miró welds the epistemological, ontological, historical, and biblical material in Años y leguas is to rely for much of his imagery on the four basic elements of classical and medieval chemistry: earth, air, fire, and water. Miró seems to believe, like Bachelard, that the four elements are fundamental to perception and the creative imagination9; they are readily evoked in the Alicantine landscape and seascape of Sigüenza's perceptions, and they are powerful allies to the biblical motifs. For example, Miró once likened the chemistry of water to the attraction of one's native land, a kind of Promised Land:
Así en la tierra prometida y así en mi tierra natal los hombres antiguos de mi comarca, como los hombres antiguos de Israel, eran exclusivistas, confinados en sus riberas y montes; los de ahora esparcidos por Argelia, por Francia, por la emigración su raíz tirante, hincada en su pueblo, como siente el judío desde todos los términos del mundo su raíz hundida en Sion, la sienten, como el israelita, pero sin sionismo ni mesianismo, es decir, sin afanes históricos ni políticos, sin ansiedad étnica. El afán de ellos es biológico y sensual, afán físico de su espacio, químico del agua de sus manantiales...10 |
The elements are experienced perceptually: water is tasted, the earth is seen, touched, and smelled, fire manifests itself to the eyes in the sun and to the touch in its warmth, and the air is perceived by all the senses. The elements represent man's life cycle on earth, his use of the raw natural ingredients to make food, and they reflect man's relationship to God in the story of Creation. Water is associated with creation and eternity, earth symbolizes man's fall into time and history, his dependence on the seasons and agriculture11. Fire is a positive and a negative force: life-generating and life-destroying, and air is an ethereal, eternal presence.
Miró divided the book into forty-one sections, seventeen primary divisions and twenty-four secondary headings, but the imagistic and tonal clustering suggests two major movements of nearly equal length (sixty-one and sixty-four pages respectively in the Obras completas edition here cited) and a short coda of four pages. Although all four elements are present in each section, the first part12 is governed by water (springs, wells, streams, mills and the sea), coupled with the themes of creation and eternity. The second half is dominated by references to earth: specific geographical places, cultivation activities, spatial limitations, and chronological time. Fire and destruction are the themes of the epilogue or coda. Air (wind, movement of trees and ships) is present to an equal degree in all the sections. The composition of Años y leguas might be compared to a Chagall painting in which images whirl in space and repeat themselves in a seemingly chaotic fashion, but upon closer examination, one finds organization in subtle concentrations and movement of material.
In the opening passage, Sigüenza returning to his native countryside remembers a park in Madrid, where he occasionally takes refuge, thus introducing the sheltered garden motif. All four elements are mentioned in the description of Sigüenza's version of Paradise: «Un manso ruido de aire que aletea entre las mieses.... Pasó un labriego con su azada de sol... tendióse Sigüenza a beber de un manantial... Tierra de labranza»
(pp. 1068-1069). But almost immediately the water motif asserts itself, and, as is usual in the progression of Miró's imagery, the first experience of the element is through the senses; here the sense of taste. Sigüenza's ritual return to his native land is sanctified by the drinking of its waters:
| (p. 1068) | ||
Water is an economic necessity for the farmer, but for Sigüenza it facilitates his conscious grasp of the world; it brings to him, through its taste, a suggestion of his location, «el matiz de la naturaleza». Water has a «refocilo de creación» that is symbolic of the positive, creative prospect Sigüenza entertains for his self-discovery; water's creative properties are also reminiscent of the threshold of the world itself for a short time after God made it.
Sigüenza experiences the innocence and originality of creation in the opening passage when a workman utters the simple phrase: «¡A la sombra, a la sombra!»
(p. 1068). Like the word of God in Genesis the worker's word has «una frescura nueva, como si acabase de crearla»
(p. 1068). As the beetles go about their food gathering, «la creación contempla»
(p. 1074), and Sunday is different from other days because it has «más creación parada encima»
(p. 1110). According to the creation story God made water first, and it remains the primordial life force. Water and the creative process are consistently linked in the imagery of Años y leguas: «y el agua es creación y corazón que estremece lo creado, espejándolo y comprendiéndolo todo...»
(p. 1122).
Water also represents man's desire to create himself, to be aware of his own identity, his own personal life continuity: «Ser como el agua... el mismo cuerpo en cada gota y en las distancias, en su conjunto y multiplicadamente, sin perderse en su unidad»
(p. 1105). The water image is developed in the second subsection «Pueblo. Parral. Perfección» in an elaborated metaphor of the village as a shelf laden with water jugs: «El pueblo es un cantarero apretado de jarras que resudan, y en lo hondo duerme el frescor de una paz viejecita. Aprovechándose de la soledad viene una araña invisible por el azul y cuelga la tela de una nube blanca y delgada desde el cementerio a una asa del campanario»
(p. 1074). In the third section «Tocan a muerto», the landscape is drenched by life-producing rain: «Ahora el nublado se rebulta, se raja, y camina cayéndose; tiene costas y abismos, blancuras de candeal, bronces, gredas, paños. Se amontona un tránsito de apóstoles de barbas dobladas por el vuelo... De pronto, la tronada se desgaja encima de Sigüenza...»
(pp. 1076-1077).
Other sections of the first part, «Doña Elisa y la eternidad», «Gitanos», «El señor Vicario y Manihuel», stress eternity, life over death, and the continued production of fruit and plenty. Doña Elisa will soon die, but her property will pass to her heirs, who will continue to cultivate her lands, the gypsies need straw to bed a woman who is giving birth -creating new life, and after Manihuel dies: «Todo se quedó callado. La parva daba un olor bueno, como si el amo viviese»
(p. 1094). The Mediterranean pervades «Benidorm. Un extranjero. Callosa». One is ever aware of the eternal vastness of the sea in the towns of the Levante; the combined power of the land-seascape overcomes even the academic ardor of a British scholar, who is caught napping in the midday sun. The only place Sigüenza finds time immobilized upon returning to Levante after twenty years is in the water: «El agua de la fuente del pueblo donde está Sigüenza, el suyo, el mismo que recogió Sigüenza en otros años, que era el mismo de siempre; el aliento de aquel lugar desde su principio. Allí en esa eternidad y fugacidad del agua se queda el tiempo inmóvil y solo»
(p. 1123).
Eternal abundance is an important part of the garden-like setting to which Sigüenza comes to comprehend his being-in-the-world and his being-in-time. In the opening scene «olivos y almendros» abound, along with «arboledas recónditas junto a los casales; el árbol de olor del Paraíso, un ciprés y la vid en el portal; piteras, girasoles, geranios cerrando la redondez de la noria; escalones de vía; felpas de pinares...»
(p. 1069). In fact the entire first sixty pages are saturated with plenitude: the grapes are ripe, and a fat pig is slaughtered in «Pueblo. Parral. Perfección». Even a visit to the cementery, significantly titled «Huerto de cruces», emphasizes life more than death. In the graveyard, Sigüenza's attention is drawn to the crows gorging themselves on ripe figs, and a requiem ceremony degenerates into a picnic. The grave-tender complains that no one thinks about death, that no one comes to the cemetery. Human disappointment and failure are minimized, and satisfaction and happiness are achieved by mere contemplation of the natural surroundings: «Día bueno; un día de felicidad para Sigüenza, sin que haya sido necesario el motivo que la origine. Felicidad que no le exalta ni le mejora; felicidad clara, sin dejo, como el agua más pura que no tiene sabor. Leve en el día, sin soltarse de sí mismo. Ningún propósito le hace enfilar el corazón hacia un deseo del mundo»
(p. 1104).
«Sábado de luna» repeats the Cain and Abel myth, dramatized by a donkey that kills the pretty, favorite pet lamb in a fit of jealousy. But positive abundance overwhelms the grotesqueness of the event: «pero sus cerezas, sus albaricoques, sus cidras, sus manzanas; la fruta, es casi obra de sus manos, es su complacencia, su vanagloria, su arte, y esto lo da, pero no lo vende»
(p. 1106). The donkey hypothetically defends himself in terms of a flowering fruit tree: «¡Mis orejas parecían dos ramas de ciruelo en flor! ¡Yo no me acordaba de lo que era, porque yo estaba, amo mío, yo estaba también muy jovencito y guapo de luna!»
(p. 1108). In the next to the last section of what I call the first part, Sigüenza reads excerpts from a book of official correspondence. He is particularly fascinated by references to historical figures executed for alchemy -man's futile attempt to reproduce basic chemical elements- perhaps included here as a contrast to the success of nature in fusing earth, air, fire, and water in the production of the earthly fruits.
A section entitled «Agua de pueblo» closes the sixty-one pages in which the biblical creation motif is developed and water imagery is prominent. The relation of water to the other elements is here recapitulated: «Esta es el agua urbana; y el agua es creación y corazón que estremece lo creado, espejándolo y comprendiéndolo todo; tierra, firmamento, aire, soledades»
(p. 1122), and a dissonant tone emerges that presages the fall from Paradise. Sigüenza believes the townspeople are urging him to drink from their well, but in a poignant scene he learns that they are outraged at his trespassing on their water supply. This is no longer the water of eternal creation, but specific water defined in space and time by the people who claim it: «Se queda escuchando el agua de los hontanares, el agua glacial y ajena. Ajena porque él es un extraño, y el agua tan gozosamente poseída por su sensibilidad, el agua no era allí agua de la Creación ni siquiera agua del pueblo, sino concretamente agua 'del' pueblo»
(p. 1129). As an incantatory refrain Sigüenza repeats the biblical phrase he uttered at the beginning of «Agua del pueblo»: «¿Quién recogió el agua entre sus brazos como una vestidura?»
(pp. 1121, 1129), but man has twisted God's intentions: «Dios. Ya lo sabe Sigüenza. Y, además de Dios, cada pueblo cuya fuente, cada pueblo que no sólo recoge, sino que se la tuerce y se la ciñe a sus riñones»
(p. 1129).
In the next sixty-four pages earth images and motifs emerge in the sections «Caminos y lugares», «El lugar hallado», «Una familia de luto», «Bardells y la familia de luto», «Agustina y Tabalet», and «Imágenes de Aitana» (except for the last subsection of «Imágenes» in which fire-dominates). The water, which has been harnessed by man to his own purposes in «Agua de pueblo», cedes to the earth imagistically: «Olor íntimo del agua que toca las raíces profundas en la tierra tan tierna como un fruto descortezado; olor del agua desde el tiempo»
(p. 1123). Thus man's fall into space and time is introduced with images of water in its role as co-author with the earth of its fruits, signaling the emphasis in this part on geographical locations, tilling, and cultivation.
Sigüenza takes to the road and visits places in «Caminos y lugares». He has left the garden of plenty without toil: «La carretera es ente y arrabal, aunque esté solitaria. La carretera ya no es distancia, sino la medida de las distancias. Suprime un concepto de silencio, de clausura, de pureza que tenía cada roca, cada instante del campo, siendo como era, guardado en sí mismo»
(p. 1129). He is still near the sea, but he excludes sea imagery almost entirely to focus on fields, mountains, and rocks:
| (pp. 1162, 1163) | ||
The sea is present in the light and the air, which touch the upper parts of the trees, but the trees' roots, from whence they draw their sustenance, are firmly planted in the soil: «Árboles pastosos lujuriantes, con las raíces hundidas en tierra gruesa, y la popa en la lumbre mediterránea»
(p. 1132).
The names of the places, pronounced by the native folk, incorporate the earth and its fruit: «Y estos nombres rurales en boca de sus gentes dejan un sabor de fruta que emite la de todo el árbol con sus raíces y su pellón de tierra, y el aire, y el sol y el agua lo tocan y calan; fruta que aunque la lleven otros terrenos, no es como la del frutal propio»
(p. 1134). All the elements converge to produce the harvest, but now earth is the first and fundamental.
According to Genesis man was expelled from his earthly Paradise to suffer the toils of earning his own living, the evils of inter-human competition, and finally corporeal death. Consequently, the themes of cultivation, shepherding, and food gathering and processing emerge in the second half of the book. Sigüenza encounters a variety of men and women who work the land and extract a living from it. For example, in the section «Después del Paraíso», Sigüenza meets «un rogle de primeros hombres: leñadores, labradores y el molinero»
(p. 1186). Sigüenza even observes the ants as they purvey a beetle to their hill to store it for winter food, echoing Proverbs 6:6-8 («Go to the ant thou sluggard;/ Which having no guide, overseer, or aruler;/ Provideth her meat in the summer,/ And gathereth her food in the harvest»)
.
The same abundance and plenty that characterized the first part are present here, but the emphasis is on man's role in the production of the fruits of the earth:
| (p. 1151) | ||
Tárbena is a «mujer pueblo, mujer hacendosa, firme»
(p. 1131), whose produce is reduced by man to preserving jars and tins. Sigüenza delights in the exuberance of country life, tied to the soil: «los elementos clásicos de la alegría del campo: anchura de tierras, onduladas y graciosas»
(p. 1149) «...Aquí vuelve Sigüenza a días agrícolas en cierne. Un motivo pueril de gozo»
(p. 1187). The song of a bird in the forest causes him to become more enamored of the earth (p. 1189).
In the section «La besana» (a Catalan word for furrow), Sigüenza cannot resist the urge to take the plow into his own hands: «Arranque de alegría en Sigüenza. Le pide la mancera al jornalero y se pone a labrar»
(p. 1169). This intimate contact with the life-giving soil penetrates the depths of his being: «Dentro de sus dedos se le queda un tembloroso ruido de sangre subterránea y de rosa de brisas; volumen y espacio; estremecida oscura de germinaciones de la tierra y latido fresco de las aves del cielo. Mano de criador y de artesano de la faz de la labranza»
(p. 1170). But Sigüenza finds that he tires quickly at the plow and soon returns it to the farmer. As in his earlier experience with water, his relationship to the earth is perceptual, not practical. For him the soil is a part of the world that aids him in his quest for the meaning of existence.
What Sigüenza eventually learns from his contact with the earth, especially earthly places, is the nature of his self in time. In the second part, time is juxtaposed to eternity. Man is tied to the cycle of the seasons and their effect on the earth upon which he depends for a living. Man's expulsion from Paradise signaled not only his dependence on the soil, time, and work, but it introduces him to pain and suffering. Miró includes in this part, extended sections on the travails of two different families. The familia de luto has suffered the death of one daughter and the long terminal illness of another. They await the arrival of a third daughter from Africa, who is to lighten their sorrow with exotic tales of her African adventures, but they receive word that she died of a fever just before embarking for Spain. Significantly, the family in mourning no longer cultivates its lands. A son was to tend the fields, but he is physically unsuited: «en seguida viene con un cansancio que se le oye el corazón»
(p. 1141).
The other tale of suffering involves Agustina and Tabalet. Agustina's brutish husband beat her until she became deaf, and Tabalet, her only son to survive the rigors of peasant life (an adopted son at that) has been missing for many years. The old woman bears her lot in life by repeating over and over in the incantatory fashion of the biblical Proverbs: «-¡Ay qué agonía, padre San Francisco, ay qué agonía!»
(p. 1162). Sigüenza meets Agustina muttering this phrase immediately after he has witnessed the felling of a tree -an olive tree like the tree of Gethsemane (p. 1161).
Años y leguas begins during the most intense growing season and ends as the harvest is taking place. Sigüenza, like the men who till the soil, lives in and experiences temporal movement, rather than analyzing it intellectually. At the outset the month is designated as June, not just a calendar month, but the culmination of the annual growing cycle: «Un manso ruido de aire que aletea entre las mieses ya grandes. Una respiración del verano, de árboles tiernos que están juntos a las aguas vivas... Mañana de junio, alta, grande, precisa hasta en los confines»
(pp. 1068-1072). As the summer progresses, Sigüenza intuitively grasps the minute changes in the landscape that finally reveal fall and the harvest season. We are first warned that the productive, fertile period is ending when Sigüenza discovers that, although the warmth and sunlight of summer persist, the tourists have gone: «Mar que desde la orilla tiene ya un liento de navegación; mar sin bullicio democrático de verano. Calpe todo de lumbre ancha de verano sin jovialidad, en una íntima clausura. Cantonadas y callejones con calma de portal en un atardecer de invierno...»
(p. 1155).
When September arrives and the harvest begins («Septiembre se levanta palpitando de un aire dulce de cosechas: cosecha de algarrobas afiladas y retorcidas como cuernos de carnero; cosechas de almendras de color de canela»
[p. 1159]), the sense of time is more acute; the harvested fruits are projected as the manufactured products they will become («pronto irán trocándose en panales de Navidad»
[p. 1159]). Man's relation to time is expressed in a variety of ways in this second section of Años y leguas. Sigüenza witnesses the planting activities of an old man who will not be alive to harvest the fruit of his trees, nor does he have any heirs to continue or enjoy his labors when he is gone. Man's work on earth is in a sense a necessary futility; only God's creation is eternal:
| (pp. 1195-1196) | ||
Air, more than any of the other elements, is related to the ethereal and the eternal aspects of time and the world. As a part of the practical world in which man lives, it is essential to the food-making process: «Rodean el molino tantos conceptos de sencillez, de inocencia, de abundancia, que en seguida se nos embeben y nos creemos felices. Soportal donde los maquileros y trajinantes descargan las acémilas y hermanan su pan y companaje y su aire y olor de caminos»
(p. 1172). And it is often a bridge between the other elements; it circulates and touches the earth and the sea, bearing and combining with the life-giving sun. In the section «La tarde», which introduces the fall harvest season, the life-forming elements are summarized: the land and the sea, earth and water, provide the material and stimulus to growth, while at the perceptual level the sea breezes bring a sensation of sea-side space to the rural landscape:
| (pp. 1162-1163) | ||
And air unites the rock Ifach with its mainland, its spatial and temporal continuum: «En el aire de Calpe se transparenta la gloria del Ifach como una sangre antigua. Pueblo callado»
(p. 1155).
Air symbolizes the aspects of life that are not tied absolutely to the soil, and man's (perhaps useless) attempt to transcend his earthly dwelling. Air lifts Sigüenza's thoughts from the mundane to the ethereal: «Pero vino una brisa generosa que le levantó los pensamientos»
(p. 1071). The wind imagistically conveys Sigüenza's past to him: «Las frondas reciben y se envían a la circulación de los aires de ruidos marineros de espumas, y huelen a pueblo, a reposo de hace veinte años. Se le acerca el pasado a Sigüenza respirando en la exactitud de su conciencia de ahora. Otra vez»
(p. 1190). And air is a transparent reminder of lost innocence and an ideal world that God's domain on earth was intended to be: «El aire se cuaja de un perfume de novia, muy bueno, pero tanto que la novia se multiplica en un palomar de doncellas que no ahoga de suavidad... Se le precipitó la disnea de beber ese olor sensual de castidad»
(p. 1137).
The auto-confrontation and self-search are much more intense in the earth section than in the first part. The fall into time coincides with man's need to understand his existence. Sigüenza's renewed contact with specific places was conceived for that purpose. He struggles with the seemingly impossible desire to experience himself in time, especially before Aitana and at the Peñón de Ifach. Twenty years ago Aitana was a virgin perception «primitiva, virginal para sus ojos, para su respiración, para su tacto»
(p. 1182), but now he must contend with the present vision and the memory: «Ahora se acuesta y se distiende en la huella del recuerdo espacial, tibia de sí mismo»
(p. 1182). This dual aspect of the visual experience suggests to him the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of achieving a sense of a continuous self:
| (p. 1182) | ||
Sigüenza's final failure to recapture himself in time and space is represented in visits to two geographical locations: el lugar hallado and the Peñón de Ifach. In «El lugar hallado» Sigüenza believes he is having a pristine experience, that he has never been in that particular place before, but the groundskeeper arrives to remind him of his visit there twenty years earlier. Memory has utterly failed him; his own consciousness has not persisted in time. At Ifach he understands that in order to be himself, he must abandon himself to the moment. Only by relinquishing the past can he possess this great rock as a part of himself, as an experience: «Sigüenza siendo de verdad todo Sigüenza y de Sigüenza, sin ayo emocional. Ojos primitivos y conciencia vieja; es decir, actual. Abandonarse. Así pudo poseer Ifach: abandonándose con toda inclinación de sentimientos...»
(p. 1158). These discoveries are repeated in the penultimate section, «Sigüenza y otros», which marks the end of the earth dominated portion: «Sentirse claramente a sí mismo, ¿era sentirse a lo lejos o en su actualidad? Pero sentirse en su actualidad, ¿no era sentirse a costa de entonces, de entonces, que iba cegado por el instante?»
(p. 1190).
Biblical references, especially Paradise -the favored place, symbolic of the perdurable self- resurface with the intensification of the ontological quest. In «Sigüenza y el Paraíso» Paradise is a kind of tree, el árbol del Paraíso; one of these trees died outside the door of Bonhom's daughter, presaging the daughter's own death. And Sigüenza attempts to discover the precise location of the earthly Paradise of the first parents by reading every article and book he can find on the subject. Thus the notion of Paradise, the eternal garden, has been reduced to a perishable tree and a topic for scholarly investigation.
The final section, dominated by fire imagery, «Sigüenza, incendio y término» concludes the destruction of Sigüenza's hopes for a continuous, perdurable self. Sigüenza accidentally sets a brush fire with his cigarette, a cathartic experience and an atonement for his egotistical desire to be something concrete and eternal, to persist in time. Even here, his first wish is to have it known that he set the fire, but a guard informs him that the smoke he sees on the hillside is not from his own fire, which had extinguished itself, but from the stacks of the charcoal burners. Neither his self-identity nor his deeds will withstand time. Throughout the book, fire, especially that of the sun, has been a positive element, combining with the others in the chemistry of creation and growing (e. g., «Huerto luminoso y caliente», or «Los montones de la fruta eran como colonias de sol»). The sun's fire combines with the other elements in images of life-producing energy; «Nos sentimos pasar dentro de la hermosura del agua tan eterna. La copa que derramamos antes de probarla, la jarra que alcanzamos con lentitud, llenas y frías, talladas en lumbre de la tarde, glorifican nuestra vida...»
(p. 1127).
But fire, unlike the other elements, has two sides: a creative aspect and a destructive potential. «Among all phenomena», says Bachelard, «it [fire] is the only one to which there can be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil. It shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell»
13. Even before the final section, the sun/fire takes on its destructive dimension: «Los viejos pinares de Aitana van perdiendo sus techos; les entra más el sol, el sol crudo de los derribos»
(p. 1189). Fire imagery is prominent as well in the Ifach scene, a crucial one for Sigüenza's discovery of the nature of the self: «Ifach es... de bronces ardientes... rocas encendidas»
(p. 1153). However, even though the fire imagery is dazzling at Ifach, all the elements that have aided Sigüenza to arrive at the insights he achieves there are present: «Monte, mar. A la redonda, el azul. Viento de navegación, y en los pies el tacto de la tierra labradora»
(p. 1154). Perhaps reflecting God's employ of time (for example, he created water, earth, and life in six days, but destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah by fire in a few minutes), Miró dedicates the lengthiest sections of Años y leguas to water and earth, and significantly places the very reign of fire, at least as a destructive force, at the end.
Thus Miró juxtaposes time and eternity through personal experiences that echo biblical and universal ones, all welded by the powerful imagery of the four basic elements. First we have Sigüenza's sensory perceptions of his surroundings, his seeing, touching, tasting, hearing, and smelling the elements that compose his world. Those elements are both eternal and fleeting: «El [agua] de la fuente del pueblo donde está Sigüenza, el suyo, el mismo que recogió Sigüenza en otros años, que era el mismo de siempre; el aliento de aquel lugar desde su principio. Allí en esa eternidad y fugacidad del agua se quedaba el tiempo inmóvil y solo»
(p. 1123). Equally elusive is his quest to achieve a sense of self in time and space.
The elements water, earth, fire, and air combined with the biblical material subtly move us through Sigüenza's early hope for self-discovery, his confrontations with disappointment, failure, hostility, and finally to his acceptance of his own transient reality. The section immediately preceding the destruction by fire, «Sigüenza y otros», summarizes the elements that have carried us imagistically along Sigüenza's literal and symbolic route through the promised land. Two sequential paragraphs begin with sentences containing only a noun: «El mar... La montaña»
(p. 1191). These have been fundamental in Sigüenza's search, and they afford him his best clues to the nature of time: «Ya el tiempo se remonta hacia detrás, hacia después de nosotros»
(p. 1191). Finally, there is a tone reminiscent of Ecclesiastes about the ending of Años y leguas, a consolation in an eternal creation that survives the fraility of human life, a sense that indeed «One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever»
(Ecclesiastes 1:4):
| (p. 1170) | ||
If Sigüenza has not found himself in time, he has experienced himself in space and time through the elements earth, air, fire and water, and that endows Años y leguas with its most important quality -a recreation in words of perceptual cognition. The «Dedicatoria» prefacing the book, could only have been written after these experiences had taken place: «Sigüenza se ve como espectáculo de sus ojos, siempre a la misma distancia siendo él. Está visualmente rodeado de las cosas y comprendido en ellas»
(p. 1066). His conclusion about the nature of his being is that it is his consciousness of the world, his dialectical perceptual relationship to the things that surround him.