"The faculty of establishing relations and of synthesizing them is the
daughter of the maturity of the thought" Francesc Pujols
Eleven years after combining rhapsodies in Catalan all over the
world, I landed for the first time at the Horiginal on the street Ferlandina
of Barcelona. An earthling where they understand what I moan.
It was pleasant to swim among angles, posts, squares, artists, and humans of
all colours, and in the inside of the precinct with the presence of several
poets, like Pau Riba and Enric Cassases who only I knew from mediatic
illusions and books of counter currents.
The autumn tour at end of October was an emotional success, which
made deep feelings crushed and caught up with reality since the childhood of
our short democratic culture. As a matter of fact, I understand it as a
"happening" spaced out and without direction, but guided by the interaction
of feelings and vibrations between the exiled public and the emigrant
Catalan artist.
However the new Catalans embraced us at the end of the concerts,
after devoting a song to the bored boys who "beat up emigrants on the public
transports, when they work". The authentic ones......were infuriated,
turning their necks to one or the other side, because when they are partying
nobody should annoy them with the social and personal deficiencies of the
country.
On the Barcelona streets Catalan language is like the "Nou Camp"
(Barcelona's football stadium), a tourist relic. In fact, the
perplexed face of the municipal policeman, when he noticed that the
musicians who were expelled from the Rambles of Barcelona in the afternoon
because they were playing illegally sang in Catalan, sharply betrays the
regression of our popular culture, the eternal diminishment of our
subsistence?
The failure as a popular culture is always parallel to the beginning
of an economic crisis. As a matter of fact the signs already wave among us.
The price of products of first need have risen horribly, at the time that
the levels of education in Catalonia are the lowest of the Spanish state and
from Europe.
Consequently, it is far from surprising that in a society of minor
freedoms, those that can (like the rulers of the country), send their sons
to foreign schools. Is it strange that the Catalan culture is a minority in
her own territory?
This current situation is a product of the voluntary blindness of
the Catalans, to preserve the "society of well-being (welfare society?)." A
virtual, consumerist and fake paradise, where the social problems are
stories diluted in the personal enjoyment. We are so blind that we
do not realise that our culture is in peril of extinction. The signs are
evident: in ten kiosks of localities from the Valles County and Barcelona. I
could not buy a single Catalan book. Only copies of the Da Vinci code
translated into Catalan, indeed, a great classic of English literature!
From the economic point of view Catalonia is hauled down by the
emigrants, although feudalized by a crust|scab of civil servants families.
The Catalans live in a unique lost conception of the world. The mediatic
mirrors, paid with our taxes, show the new social model, the most advanced
in the world, not based on the realism or in the surrealism, but in the
ZOOREALISM!
Xavier Panadès, Catalan rhapsode living in Bristol (England)
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