THE YEAR OF THE TOAD. (I contemplate a Romanesque capital)

Anthony Parra

Letterwounded and terrified by the smile of the batrachian (a toad that chases me with a fat voice and flat feet, a Chinese face and a gypsy complexion) I have resorted to the didascalia of Romanesque art to put myself in charge of the enemy and ecstasy in the porticoes of glory and in the storied capitals, corbels and ambulatory of the churches of my country, lives of Christ, his miracles, and also gargoyles with open jaws where the dragon that lurks these days is very significant. I have sat on the back of the miseries where the animal and plant world is explained, to the relief of my tired buttocks, I am tired of speculating. Virtues and vices, the angel and the beast, shake hands in those powerful statuary friezes that are sermons in stone. Triumphal paranetics of silent art of the twelfth century.

Master Mateo was an itinerant theologian who explained the evangeliaries with a chisel and a gouge to a people who did not know how to read. Let us enter, for example, the liturgical garden of San Vicente el diacono, a hermitage in my solitary town, where I turn on the cassette and the hymnody of a recording of an Orthodox mass begins to play and it is as if the stone flowers were putting out leaves again. vegetables. The Mozarabic rite was much more similar, thanks to its exuberance and wonderful hymnody, to the Greek than to the Roman.

 Few Muzarabic temples remain below the mountains, the only rare one being that of Melque in Toledo. They were destroyed by the Almohad Moors who did not behave in their iconoclastic zeal in a tolerant manner, unlike the Christians who we transformed into Catholic altars and consecrated the old mosques – now they want to recover the one in Córdoba in an apparently friendly gesture, but I see in that claim a desire for revenge little in keeping with the dialogue of civilizations and their predicates- and this one in Segovia was erected by baptized people who came from Jaén in the terms of an ancient Thebaid fleeing from the persecution of the caliphs. I spread out over these solitudes and spring fields that I stepped on as a child.

 There is the Tetramofros, for example, effigies of a lion, an eagle, a man, an ox, the four elements or the four cardinal points or, if you like, the four paths of mythical asceticism (purifying, illative, amative, unitive) and the four arms of virtue for union. with God: tribulation, abnegation, humility and presence of Xto. in the history. I drown in the ghostly colloquy of these carvings so eloquent within their silence. It's a new year and we will have to change our lives, return to virtue, hang vices. Here are the essences, presences and powers of illuminative karma. It is convenient to keep these considerations in mind because the world today is a bit decrepit. The statues of the porch of glory of my town speak to me in paremias. Everything is symbols and aphorisms under the vaulted arch rising to the peak of a mitre. I see the thuriferous archangels with papered wings. The scribes write their annals.

 There is surely a martyr St. Catherine who appears with her breasts exposed and another blessed who walks carrying his head in her hands. These semblances are like analects or literary fragments that the monks studied before Compline or before the great silence when in the Cistercian monasteries – the building is what remains of an old Bernard monastery – it was forbidden to speak a word, let man be silent and let God speak to the soul- to learn the science of the liberal arts and botany with its therapeutic properties. Thus, for example, Atermidoro recommended taking precautions against grainy and dark lentils, the root of all evils. Serpol or thyme was used against snake bites and garlic was a shield against curses. Fennel stimulates the blood.

 Lettuce is recommended by the fathers of the Church to keep chastity. The plantain is good for a headache and the lily that stays fresh or turns wither the moment a woman touches it is good to know if she is a girl or not a maiden. The tympanums of Chartres Cathedral are a treatise on botany. There the ivy, the vine, the rosebush, the laurel, the oak or the acanthus are used to express concepts of the hermetic philosophy. Each plant has a healing power or corresponds to a Christian virtue. Thus the fern with humility. The poisonous mandrake with man. The gourd with pride and fertility. The sycamore is identified with the disbelief of the chosen people.

 The thistle and the nettle with vanity and strength respectively. The rosehip or helebore shapes envy. That must be why this hedge flourishes so much in the form of a false bramble in so many corners of the fields of Spain.

 The lichen is loneliness and endive is fasting. The reseda or retama innocence and the triumphant rose martyrdom. Mugwort was used throughout the Middle Ages.