Winning And Losing

For the loser now will be later to win / For the times they are a-changin' BOB DYLAN

If we look around it isn't hard to see that we're obsessed with ranking people into winners and losers. Consider the recent parliamentary election debates on TV: all the media's interested in is who 'won' each debate, who came second, and who was the 'loser' - like a political version of The X Factor or The Wheel Of Fortune.

Consider education: what is it but a constant comparing of who's ahead and who's behind in the league table of learning? (My little Ptolemy is so bright, would you believe it, he polished off his SATs even before he could digest proper food, and as for algebraic equations, well, he was doing those in the womb!)

Consider jobs and professions: who's the boss's favourite, who's performing best in the 'office politics' stakes, who's in, who's out, who's won 'The Most Obsequious Toadying Award Of The Year', who's won the ignominious, foot-in-your-face scramble to the top of the greasiest pole in capitalist win-lose 'culture', who's getting the sack, who's getting into the sack with the secretary?

Consider ourselves, the poor foolish ones, the relentlessly competitive denizens of this petty petit-bourgeois society: status-haunted, we twitch the curtains, anxiously checking out the neighbours to see if they're gaining or losing points in the futile, robotic dance of suburban one-upmanship. Is their car better, faster, more expensive than ours, does its almost sensuous, plastic-metallic sheen have a more attractive and lustrous glow? Is their lawn greener, are their weeds less prolific, does their picket fence stand somehow more proud and erect than ours, are their children more wholesome-looking, their wives more decorous, their husbands more tanned and handsome (or do they look just plain worn-out?) Jealousy and despair set in - we're slipping behind! We'd better invite them double-quick to a dinner party, a little ménage à quatre, where we can impress them with our nouvelle mock-Gothic Heston Blumenthal cuisine and our faux-intellectual banter. Otherwise we might fall even further behind in the winning and losing game!

Well, I want no part of it. I have no part in it. I've haven't had a part in it for years. Yes, count me out. It's such a relief to be counted out. You don't have to wait to be excluded. You can simply exclude yourself. Just like that. We can then take on 'the awesome responsibility of embracing our own freedom', as Fireweed said recently in a memorable comment on one of my Turnstone posts. For I have no interest in simplistically dividing up the world into black and white, into good and bad, into winners and losers like a child's superhero comic. Real life, true life, moral life, soul life is not a question of winning or losing at any price in our supposedly evolved consciousness. We could say we have now reached a post-Darwinian, post-evolutionary New Age consciousness - if only we would realise it. We are rather more than mere creatures jockeying for position in the pecking order - or we could be. I want the powerful to admit their weaknesses, the lame to embrace their strengths, the hidden talents in the shyest wallflowers to shine. For comparisons can be odious. And we are all both winners and losers; and we are all neither winners nor losers at all.

Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. KING JAMES BIBLE Luke 12:27

When crows find a dying snake, / They behave as if they were eagles. / When I see myself as a victim, / I am hurt by trifling failures. SHANTIDEVA

(The oil painting reproduced above is Francisco de Goya's The Greasy Pole)

The Visions Of Goya

Francisco de Goya was the greatest painter of 18th century Spain. However his genius developed late. Until his 40s he was more a painter of convention - designing tapestries and covering up the 'rude bits' of nude figures in religious paintings (he was officially known as the 'Reviser of Indecent Paintings'). Then, in the early 1790s, everything changed. A mysterious illness (whether this was syphilis, a nervous breakdown or caused by lead poisoning from the use of white paint no one seems sure) left him temporarily paralysed, partially blind and permanently deaf. At the same time his art took a huge leap forward. He began to paint with such a freedom of line and expression that, even today, his later paintings reveal to the viewer a striking and disturbing modernity. The eroticism of this 1797 painting The Naked Maja landed him in big trouble with the Spanish Inquisition:

As you see, he'd come a long way since being employed as the 'Reviser of Indecent Paintings'. As well as exposing the voluptuous flesh of the maja, Goya also exposed the vindictive cruelty of the French occupying forces towards the Madrid insurrectionists in The Third of May 1808:

On a personal level things didn't get any easier for Goya. The horrors of the Napoleonic Wars depressed him profoundly. And his gloom deepened when his wife died in 1812. To crown it all, in 1819 another serious illness nearly killed him off. But all these setbacks only served to fuel his desire to create more and more works of edgy brilliance and stunning originality. He covered the walls of his house with nightmarish paintings (now called the 'Black Paintings') portraying the darker side of human nature - such as this one, Saturn Devouring One of His Sons:

And he produced the 4 large series of engravings I saw on my Camino walk in The Goya Museum at Castres: The Caprices (fantastical caricatures of contemporary life); The Tauromamaquia (a series on bullfighting); the Disasters of War (which show the devastating effects of war - no heroes or glory, only death and degradation); and The Proverbs (visual parables of human folly). These are shocking prints - hellish visions of the satanic, the destructive, and the just plain foolish aspects to humanity.

Castres

It was only 15 km from Boissezon to the old textile town of Castres, which I reached at 1 pm on Sunday 21 September. It was one of the biggest towns I'd been to for a while. And it was yet another very hot day. I walked by the important pilgrim church of Saint-Jacques-de-Villegoudou (Villa of the Goths). It was locked, so I couldn't seek out the many representations of Saint James (paintings, stained glass windows, a polychrome statue) inside, as I'd wanted to. I took this picture of the church exterior instead:

But, after leaving my rucksack in the very helpful Office de Tourisme, I was able to enter the Cathedral of Saint-Benoît, The Bishop's Palace and the Jean Jaurès Museum. (Jean Jaurès was a great French socialist thinker, social democrat, anti-militarist politician, party leader and reformer - born in Castres in 1859, and tragically assassinated in 1914 at the outbreak of WW1.)

Castres is a fascinating place. This photo shows some restored medieval houses of tanners, weavers and dyers on the bank of the Agoût river:

And this was taken from one of the windows in the Bishop's Palace:

I was surprised to find, inside the Bishop's Palace, the Goya Museum - the most important collection of Spanish paintings in France. The astonishing highlight of this unique collection was a dimly-lit room dedicated to displaying 4 series of extraordinary engravings by Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), one of the greatest Spanish painters. But more of Goya later...

When I returned to to the tourist office at 5 pm, the girl there had managed to find me some cheap lodgings for the night with Daniel Sidot, who'd converted one room of his terraced house into a pilgrim dormitory. He was a keen pilgrim himself, and had previously walked to Compostela as I had. He kindly walked with me through the suburbs of Castres the next morning and put me on the right road. This is a photo of Daniel: