Catalonia throughout His-story

Processing a visit at the Museu d'Història de Catalunya...

I finally shook myself up after two strange days of energetic and emotional tumult (more on this in another post), to take myself to one of the museums I had intended to visit during my week in Barcelona.
It has been a most unsettled kind of week through which I have learned A LOT.  But I'd like to attempts not to disgress into the personnal sphere quite yet and focus my writing on the experience I just had at the museum.
Of course, it is all related.  We call it Life.

We call it History.  Mainly indeed: his-story.  Words upon words, artifacts and media of all sorts, exhibitions to trace the line of a place.
I wanted to see this particular museum because I don't know anything about Catalonian nationalism and its roots and aspirations.  There is a conception, an assumption, of a connection between Quebec and Catalonia.  It´s true, we are minority languages (and thus cultures) with long standing struggles for recognition and independence.
But I think it's actually much more complicated and nuanced than that.  Nothing can be isolated or singled-out so easily anymore.  We have learned that much.

This was yet another journey down the ages... (How many museums have I visited in the past three months?) This one starts in the lower paleolithic era.  Fossils from some long gone homo erectus ancestors were unearthed around here.  Four hundred fifty thousand years that is. 450,000 years - most of which were not conceived on a Roman calendar.
So I'm walking around trying to imagine that concept, trying to imagine the most primitive conditions and technologies, the most ancient modes of human lifestyles.  Nomads.  Cave dwellers.  Very small carbon footprint.  Yet so many other short-comings I'm sure.

It's precisely that phenomenon that blows my mind.  I cannot help myself, I look at everything through utopian lenses!  I'm there, studying, reading, pondering images and objects, while some part of my consciousness is always searching for connections, for clues if not examples, of "good" living.
Meanwhile another part of my brains smiles like a buddha, asking gently and humbly: "what is good?  justice?  what is justice?"  The Buddha would have more than evidence from this exhibition: life is suffering.

O such [beautiful] complexity!  Complexity of power structures, of misery and labor, of blood and soil and migrations and multiculturalism, and occupations and wars and political and religious systems, and technological discoveries and developments, and social classes, and power structures.... and power structures.
Another part of my mind is gathering information with what appears to be a attempt to situation myself and find answers to my current quest.  What is my role in society, at this time, in this body, with this conditioned reality?

I'm a young woman, from a middle class family.  One of my grand-fathers worked in a paper mill, the other one on his family farm.  My parents moved to the city as soon as they could; they bought a freshly-built house in a pleasant suburb.  Quebec has [only] been colonized for 400 hundred years.  What did my ancestors do, back in Normandy and Brittany?  What social class did they belong too?  I'm a global citizen, fruit of a cultural globalization movement that began... well... over 450,000 years ago.  I'm educated, out of touch with industrial and agricultural means of production.  I'm a mind, a spirit, a body, a heart.  I'm a philosopher, a spiritual being, a political thinker, an artist.  All these used to be the domain of men.  All these, used to be (and to some extent, they still very much are) valued, and as such they were sponsored by those with money, with ranks, with land.

I want land.  I think I'd be able to learn how to keep it alive.  But I'm a lazy-ass generation Y kid (why!?), living off the historical struggles of peasants and syndicalists, who toiled and fought with their lives for some minimal changes in labor conditions.
And I'm here, in Barcelona, typing on a macbook Air in an Irish Pub, pondering the state of the planet and the next steps to take in order to... in order to what?
To fight for Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality?  It's such a relatively recent concept, though we can obviously trace it back to Jesus Christ, (and most likely, to other people before him.)  But they killed Jesus!  And they still have the power and the weapons and the capacity to blow it all up if they feel like it!  They still have the power to kill anyone they choose, to occupy the land.  Do they know how to make food grow?  I'm not sure.  But they have gunpowder, and satellites.
So what's the point if there's no spiritual realm in which to find redemption?  I'm not talking about another life in the Kingdom of Heaven.  I'm only thinking dignity, in promoting love and wholeness, and dying when the time comes, even if it's at their hands.

History is a strange and wonderful thing.  Wholeness, for instance, takes a whole new meaning in today's world!  Wholeness is a scientific fact!  We can see it on one of the greatest photos ever taken: Earth Rise.

NASA, Apollo 8. December 24, 1968.

The world is one.  No denying.  Physically at least, so economically too.  For eco-logy is eco-nomy is oikos: home.
I wouldn't mind a peaceful home where I can age with some kind of security, within a community, which to me, is Spirit.

Wow.  Who said museums were boring?
;)

Oh.  I remember now... Catalonia.  Well I learned it's a national identity that emerged out of several many a lot of geopolitical dynamics and fluctuations.  But what's new with that?  It's always the case.  In the case of Catalonia, we're talking NorthEastern part of today's Spain, which was inhabited by Iberian people prior to conquests and settlements by Greeks, Carthaginians, and then Romans.  (A pattern very similar to that of most of the Mediterranean coast).  Here the Visigoth kingdom then took over and briefly ruled until the Moorish empire spread its Al-Andalus territory (8th cent.) to include the Iberian Peninsula.  The Franks coming from the North eventually made their presence known, and somehow in 795 Charlemagne created a buffer zone - called Marca Hispanica - between his empire and that of Al-Andalus.
I think this buffer zone thing is very interesting.  I don't know enough of the details and the history, but it looks like that zone included those parts of country where nations would later demand cultural recognition and autonomy.  It's the Pyrennes; and it's the Basques and the Catalans, etc.

Anyway.  The catalans became stuck between the French (Franks) and Spanish (Aragon) kingdoms at some point.  It was ruled by a bunch of counts who ended up not buying into French nor Spanish feudalism.  They had a different system, a more democratic, decentralized one.  They worked some sort of consensus organization between the different ruling groups (priests, counts, merchants? Don't remember.  But certainly no peasants nor women!)

Then it was the maritime age of commerce, and cities popped up and the plague came through and the peasants rebelled against tyrannical kings and the Americas were conquered and Catholic authorities came in and then brought the Inquisition, and more commerce happened and soon the first phase of industrialization with its capitalism and the formation of new social classes and the ebullient anarchist-syndicalist movement and a civil war and a bloody dictatorship...

And today.  A neoliberal, global economical crisis is affecting Spain quite badly, with about 24% unemployment.  Cell phones, immigrants, political apathy and young adults spraying graffitis...

It has changed so much and it is so much the same.