{"id":3134,"date":"2011-04-20T11:31:05","date_gmt":"2011-04-20T19:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=3134"},"modified":"2011-04-28T05:34:44","modified_gmt":"2011-04-28T13:34:44","slug":"lisbon-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/20\/lisbon-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Return to Lisbon, 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was in Lisbon alone for four or five days in 1994, I was in a surrealist movie, Manual of Evasion: LX94<\/em>, directed by Edgar P\u00c3\u00aara <\/a>and featuring some great Portuguese actors plus me, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. I wrote up my 1994 impressions of the trip in a piece \u201cThe Manual of Evasion<\/a>\u201d\u009d that I\u2019ve put online. (Originally it appeared in the old-school print version of Boing Boing<\/em>, and in my book of essays, Seek<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That first trip was a wild, happy time, and I\u2019ve always had fond memories of it, and had wanted to bring Sylvia to Lisbon so she could experience this city too. Today I\u2019ll blog about our trip, and post some of the photos I took, with a few of the photos by Sylvia. I have even more photos that I\u2019ll work into future blog posts. You can also see my Lisbon photos (in a largeri resolution) in my Flickr set, \u201c2011, Lisbon.\u201d\u009d<\/a><\/p>\n


\n[Edgar P\u00c3\u00aara]<\/p>\n

Before setting out, I got in touch with Edgar, and he was still in Lisbon making films, getting plenty of work, and he was happy we were coming.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We got to Lisbon on April 2nd. We stayed at a nice mid-range hotel called the York House, it\u2019s a small retrofitted convent in a residential neighborhood about two kilometers east of the main downtown. I picked it for sentimental reasons, remembering how much fun I had when I stayed there in 1994.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I loved the York House then, and I love it now. We ended up in cozy, quiet modern room with a view of a courtyard with a well and a hill of the city. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One of the closest buildings looked like a hippopotamus or maybe a monkey to me. Once I started seeing the face, I couldn\u2019t \u201cunsee\u201d\u009d it, but that was fine. The monkey was my friend, and every morning the sun would light him up. We\u2019d thought we might move to another town during out stay, but the room was pleasant, and moving seemed like too much trouble, so we stayed there eight nights in all.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At first I had a little trouble readjusting to Lisbon. It\u2019s always difficult\u2014and sometimes disappointing\u2014to revisit the places where you had good times in the past. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And coming back to Lisbon seventeen years after the last visit\u2014well, Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson are both dead, for one thing. Initially I felt wistfully haunted by their ghosts, and I missed them. Also, in Lisbon 1994, I was high on the local hashish much of the time Even though I\u2019ve now been clean for many years, I did feel, more than usual, the strain of living life just as it is.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Basically I had to discover Lisbon again, this time with Sylvia along, and without having Edgar ferrying me around from one happening to the next. But after a couple of days we were fully into it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We had a wonderful time looking at Lisbon\u2014touring Lisbon is more about just walking around than it is about seeing individual sights. Some days we\u2019d walk up to a nearby cathedral, Basilica da Estela, which happened to be a place where you can catch a tram into town.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Working our way up the long hill, we marveled at how many of the buildings are covered with beautiful tiles, called azulejos <\/em>in Portuguese. I love the tiles for many reasons. There\u2019s a rich mathematical element to tilings, with interesting patterns to contemplate. They come in bright and exciting colors. And, washed by the rain as they are, they\u2019re fairly shiny and clean. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The most common tilings are repeating patterns, but some artists assemble large images from sets of unique tiles\u2014murals constructed a bit like jigsaw puzzles, only the puzzle-pieces are squares 14 cm on a side. The 17th Century monastery S\u00c3\u00a3o Vicente de Fora was filled with Delft-blue tile murals.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It occurred to me at some point that one of my favorite artists, David Hockney, has used the assembled-grid trick in two different ways\u2014first in creating large images as collages of Polaroid photos, and, more recently, in making mural-sized paintings out of small modular canvases arranged in a columns and rows.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I got so into the tiles that I even visited the Museu Nacional do Azulejo<\/a>, the Museum of Tiles, a smallish building, a bit out of the way, but with a nice cafeteria. They had some great nineteenth century tile murals.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The first day, we hiked up the hill, eating some wonderful and unfamiliar pastries at a pasteleria<\/em>, saw a wedding at the cathedral, and hopped on the 28 tram, which is by way of being (among tourists) the favorite tram in Lisbon, as it rattles up and down the hills of Lisbon like a slalom rollercoaster, and passes by some of the best-known sights.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Lisbon trams are single cars, as in San Francisco, but more streamlined, painted a bright yellow, and a bit shorter than most tram-cars, like minisubs. In spots the tracks are set down in zigzag to slow the pace up and down hills, and on the the tighter turns, the wacky trams swoop across the tracks going in the other direction so as to make the curve. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One of the pleasures of the trams is that the windows open all the way, so that you can ride along fully immersed in the environment.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You\u2019re part of the 3D spectacle of Lisboa street-life with hundreds of little scenes playing as you trundle by\u2014not to mention the mini-dramas within the space of the tram itself.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When Sylvia I we were downtown, we usually wandered the zillion quaint narrow streets, drifting down into the old Alfama neighborhood.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On the hills, with the numerous arches and alleyways, the tiled walls, the staircases, the flapping laundry, and the perspectives above and below, the scenes take on the quality of Escher etchings, with the dimensions looping back on themselves and bending around corners to shake hands.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The patches of color fit together into wonderful abstract compositions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Another notable aspect of the street scenes is the very large amount of graffiti. In addition to the dull, standardized name tags, there\u2019s a lot of really large and Mediterranean-feeling splashes of color. There\u2019s also some nice stencil work as well.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For that matter, even the plaster is interesting.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At one point we managed to connect with a Portuguese writer, Rui Zink<\/a>, who took us along the street where he was born, in a neighborhood near the Rossio square, a bit livelier than the Alfama.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

He was proud that the most famous of the Portuguese fado singers, Amalia Rodrigues, had been born in his neighborhood. Like many Portuguese authors, Rui has few books out in English\u2014his but see his children\u2019s book, The Boy Who Did Not Like Television.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sometimes Sylvia and I would sit in a cafe people-watching, with great characters walking by: intense Portuguese, Euro-hipsters, Africans, old people and people with babies, everyone quite mellow and tolerant with each other.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We also got together with my old director, Edgar P\u00c3\u00aara. One day he met us at the hotel and escorted us to the art museum down the block, the Museu Nacional de Arte Antigua<\/a>\u2014it\u2019s the biggest art museum in Portugal.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As this was Monday, the museum was closed, but Edgar\u2019s production company had gotten permission to film there. He took me to Hieronymus Bosch\u2019s Temptation of St. Anthony triptych\u2014where a film-crew of six awaited, with lights set up, ready to film me with the Bosch masterpiece in high-def video. Now that’s the kind of welcome I like at a museum!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Edgar asked me a few leading questions, and I ended up talking about the painting for about forty-five minutes. The reason we\u2019d set up this shoot is that, a couple of years ago, I thought a lot about this particular Bosch triptych. It appears in my novel Hylozoic<\/em>, where my main character Jayjay is working as an assistant to Hieronymus Bosch himself, and Bosch is in fact working on the the St. Anthony triptych. I see St. Anthony as Bosch\u2019s transreal representation of himself. You can find some of my research notes on Bosch in my Writing Notes for Hylozoic<\/em>, which is downloadable as a free PDF at my Hylozoic <\/em>web page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In conversation, both Edgar and Rui Zink were fairly critical of Spain. It\u2019s taken considerable determination and individualization for Portugal to stay independent of Spain all these years. Speaking of the Spanish language, a Portuguese might say, for instance, \u201cThey use flat, simple, vowels, all the same. That\u2019s why they can\u2019t learn Portuguese.\u201d\u009d Note that the Portuguese language has a lot of vowel sounds with a slide in the middle or at the end, also it has many sibilant sounds. It\u2019s often remarked that spoken Portuguese sounds a little like Russian. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sylvia and I had a number of memorable meals\u2014maybe the best was a lunch in a hole in the wall in the Gra\u00c3\u00a7a neighborhood above Alfama. It was all locals there, very casual, with fresh-caught fish. Near the end of our meal, a guy came by to spray the street.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A dog lay sleeping in a window, now and then glancing over at us.<\/p>\n


\n[The bridge across the Teja resembles the San Francisco Golden Gate.]<\/p>\n

We had another awesome lunch in a tiny village called Porto Brand\u00c3\u00a3o which we reached by riding a cheap ferry from Belem across the Teja river that marks Lisbon\u2019s northern edge.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At this place\u2014it\u2019s Mare Viva, the big but not imposing restaurant facing the water\u2014we had a lobster stew, unwisely ordering a portion for two, which included the meat four spiny lobsters. The portions in Portugal tend towards the huge.<\/p>\n


\n[Dig the space-warped look of that street-lamp shadow. And the wall itself!]<\/p>\n

As in Spain, going out to dinner in Portugal takes patience, as you can\u2019t really go into a restaurant before 9 pm. If you break down and go at 8, you\u2019ll either be completely alone or at the mercy of chatty American tourists. We had a lot of cod, some octopus, sole, olives with everything, and, worth mentioning again, the amazing pastries.<\/p>\n


\n[The sign means \u201cI Think But I Don\u2019t Exist\u201d\u009d. I think.]<\/p>\n

The fanciest dinner we had was with Edgar P\u00c3\u00aara and his friend Joana Amaral Dias<\/a>. They drove us to a place on a hill overlook Lisbon and the Castelo de S\u00c3\u00a3o Jorge. A big celebrity was eating at the next table, the now-retired Portuguese soccer great, Eusebio, who played for the Benfica team.<\/p>\n

Joana is a very interesting person, beautiful and witty, a sometime member of the Portuguese parliament, and the author of a best-selling 2010 Portuguese book, Man\u00c3\u00adacos de Qualidade<\/a><\/em>, (Maniacs of Quality) describing eight odd-ball characters in Portuguese history.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sylvia were impressed to actually see Joana on TV the next day, debating the merits of the proposed 80 billion Euro bailout of the Portuguese economy by the EU. We had no way of understanding a word, but she had good presentation, speaking intensely, then ending with a smile. I hope some English-language publisher picks up her book.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One day Sylvia and I took the train to Sintra, a village about forty minutes from the city center.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We climbed the insanely long rampart wall of a 9th century Moorish castle. It was a rough trek for us oldsters, with uneven footing, but we made it to the top.<\/p>\n


\n[Click to see larger image<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n

And then we walked around a folly of a Romanticist castle nearby, the Palacio da Pena built on the ruins of a monastery around 1850.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Love the snaky stone vortex amid the orderly tesselation.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The place was quite hallucinatory.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Another big site we saw was the Monasterio de Jer\u00c3\u00b3nimos in B\u00c3\u00a9lem, a few kilometers east of town. This place was built in the early 1500s when Manuel I was riding high off the money the Portuguese were bringing in from Vasco da Gama\u2019s newly-discovered route to India. The ceiling in the chapel is just outrageous.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As were the arcades.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Some locals were putting on a funny medieval play about people trying to get into heaven, Gil Vincente’s “Auto Da Barca Do Inferno.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And a tile mural apparently depicts a Bible scene when locals ask Joseph of Egypt why the hell he can\u2019t start wearing pants?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We visited a lot of churches, at least a dozen, maybe twenty, starting with the pink one down the street from the York House. If nothing else, a church is always a shady spot where you can comfortably sit down.<\/p>\n


\n[This dome is in the National Pantheon, not really a church.]<\/p>\n

And then you can stare up at the great, high vault, and study the quirky religious art. It\u2019s odd how much energy people have put into obsessively depicting the same little constellation of possibly mythical events.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One of the more striking churches was the Igreja de S\u00c3\u00a3o Roque <\/a>in Bairro Alto, one of the higher areas that surround the low Baixa downtown. It had side chapels with sculptures and haut-reliefs encrusting their walls and ceilings. Two or three of the chapels were infested with angel babies, teeming, pullulating, like meal worms in flour, like maggots in decaying flesh, like thousand-headed litters of rats. Really kind of disturbing.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And in the center of one of these chapels was a statue of\u2014the Virgin, with a heap of angel-babies accumulating in mounds beneath the hem of her robe. Why don\u2019t the call Mary the Mother <\/em>instead of the Virgin<\/em>? That would make a lot more sense. Why try and separate the basic reality of sex from reproduction? Christianity is hella strange. But, of course, all religions are. The really weird doctrines serve as hooks that make the faiths stick in your mind.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At one point we saw a funeral go by with a brass band, the horns long-winded and melancholy, in a gorgeous way. They played that funeral march that you hear in old-school cartoons: DAH-DAH-dah-DAAH-DINH-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-DAAAAH<\/em>. Across the street, two old ladies in a window prayed over the cortege.<\/p>\n


\n[Genuine \u201cwitch broom\u201d\u009d spotted in the Cemetery of Pleasures.]<\/p>\n

Another day we visited an old graveyard, the Cemit\u00c3\u00a9rio dos Prazeres, or Cemetery of Pleasure, which struck us as depressing. When we were younger, graveyards seemed funky and fun, but we\u2019re realizing that we\u2019ve reached the point where we\u2019d rather not spend any time in them at all. We\u2019ll be there for good soon enough. This said, the place was very scenic, with rows of marble mausoleums amid cypresses, graveyard cats slicking around, and icons of winged hourglasses. \u201cTime flies! What the f*ck am I doing in a graveyard? Outta here.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Seeing so many babies and old people, not to mention that wedding and a couple of funerals, and all the tombs in the churches, I started thinking about the wheel of life, and how things change. Walking along I\u2019d sometimes ask myself: Am I deliriously happy? Why not? I\u2019m on a great vacation! But of course my legs were increasingly tired. And I had that slight, nagging desire to get high<\/em>.<\/p>\n


\n[Statue like a strand of DNA, with a drinker lounging at its base.]<\/p>\n

Thinking this through having a mug of tea at a place called \u201cpois, caf\u00c3\u00a9\u201d\u009d (pois <\/em>means \u201cyes\u201d\u009d) near the S\u00c3\u00a9 (cathedral) one afternoon, I remember that I can in fact be high <\/em>in the now-moment. Preachy word-mongering or profound truth?<\/p>\n


\n[Shadow of a tile roof on a pink wall, with the ubiquitous cobblestone sidewalk.]<\/em><\/p>\n

I look at the chairs and tables, just so. The light on their surfaces. The azulejo tile logo on the truck outside, loving the sensory impact of the colors. Tiles on the facing wall across the narrow street. I\u2019m high.<\/p>\n

After all, what did getting high really do for me in the old days? It detached me from my worried, got me to see the world as shapes and colors, and put me into the now. But, aha<\/em>, I can do all of that without taking anything!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019m relieved at being seated, with every part of my body awake, sweaty, throbbing from my wanderings around town. I take off my shoes and savor the coolness of the rough, ancient stones haphazardly assembled to floor this high-ceilinged room\u2014might have been a workshop or a stable once.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Writing helps me center, helps me be high. And isn\u2019t it great to be without a cellphone, off the grid, beyond telephonic intervention, where whatever I\u2019m up to is, like, \u201cIt is what it is.\u201d\u009d <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I learned that catch-phrase in 1988 from our then-new friend Faustin from Mill Valley. At first hearing, it struck me as mystically profound, like the first hearing of \u201cAll if One,\u201d\u009d or \u201cBe Here Now,\u201d\u009d or \u201cLet it come down.\u201d\u009d It\u2019s all about turning off the gerbil-wheel of carking, swinking care. \u201cPut it all down, only go straight.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The next day I was resting on a park bench with Sylvia, wearing my floppy blue wool beret against the intense southern sun, and I took of my shoes again. A woman gave me a look. Oh, oh! I was a Beat Barefoot Bum in a Beret!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was in Lisbon alone for four or five days in 1994, I was in a surrealist movie, Manual of Evasion: LX94, directed by Edgar P\u00c3\u00aara and featuring some great Portuguese actors plus me, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. I wrote up my 1994 impressions of the trip in a piece \u201cThe Manual of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3134"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3136,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3134\/revisions\/3136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}