Certainly the world is going through a terrible moment. Janine Marchessault, a brilliant writer and Marshall McLuhan expert, explains the paradox of the electronic environment as revealed in McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy:
In "The Gutenberg Galaxy" electric culture emerges from the literate world as a mutation transforming everyday attitudes and institutions into those grotesque gargoyles... Gargoyles represent the grotesque imagination, which is capable of illuminating the present and accessing the unconscious of a culture. Hence all the 'talk', Internet chatting, cellphones, email communication, is precisely this 'outering' of inner thoughts. Indeed 'illumination' and 'anxiety' are the key effects of this new age. Because all that is hidden is shared, illumination begets 'Anxiety'.
("Marshall McLuhan", by Jane Marchessault, p. 149-- Sage Publications, 2005)
I'm enjoying majestic Barcelona, the city of tapas and Gaudi artwork. I catch nothing of the conversation on the street and watch no TV. Still I hear the world's and America's incessant pain and clamor. Our gargoyle have been unleashed, just like the figures atop Norte Dame. McLuhan, the convert to Catholicism, made much of the invention of the printing press in 1450. He tells us of the psychic toll created by books and the rise of literacy in the Western world. McLuhan warns the digital age creates a similar trauma-- and we are in the midst of it. The gargoyles have been unleashed.
But back to Gaudi and La Sagrada Familia, his magnificent ode to nature built in stone and light, a work motivated by his Catholic religious faith and passion for art, creativity and architecture. La Sagrada Familia has the grandeur of a Middle Ages edifice but it is a 20th century product! We can only explain Gaudi's genius as other-worlds. The spindly spires enchant from the outside somehow more graceful, flexible, thin and kinetic than tall columns into the sky can normally achieve. I heard somebody say "it's like a forest inside." I could not imagine what they meant.
The magic of La Sagrada Familia continues as one enters the basilica. Not sure "basilica" is correct term? We are inside the massive church. Gaudi conveys nature inside by crating columns like towering tree limbs reaching to the top of the building. Like trees, the interior columns show knobs, are guide Josep called them "knots." Gaudi used extremely strong material and ingeniously figured the greatest load-bearing positions in the columns. The building rises upward without the need for buttresses, no signs of flying butress support structure like Notre Dame. This allow the feeling of a natural, organic world and the flood of colored light passing through stain glass window completes the effect.
Perhaps, as McLuhan states, the artist provides us a bridge into the future. Gaudi, a 20th century master, brings us to our tactile future, full of sensory richness, the crazy world of social media and open, sometimes frightening expression? Gaudi's playful, improvisatory houses and apartment buildings are known for their whimsy and fun. With La Sagrada Familia he chooses a normally sober setting and depicts the life of Jesus Christ while offering the life energy of his other works.
La Sagrada Familia was our first stop in Barcelona. You might want to the same. The gargoyles of modern life, racing across the social network, fade into the background as Antoni Gaudi takes you to higher ground.
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