albionspeak: a draught of language
Note from Rhiannon: this is an email Duncan sent off to family and friends. At the time, it was a belated travel log of the trip to Sicily, Malta, Morocco, and Spain my parents took in spring of '25. Now, it forms part of his documentation of what would turn out to be his fatal illness. He asked me to upload it here.
June 7, 2025
My apologies for delaying this final email; I just couldn’t get it off. But after seeing [my brother] at poker—and he asked if the family had, indeed, visited el Caminito del Rey—I realized that finally somewhere in the universe I had at least one reader/fan/audience of my travel blog who actually wanted more, which is something I’ve never experienced before. You see, I always write to share—nothing once I write it remains private—but I have no expectation that anyone cares to read my noise. I’m not sure why I bother, except personally, through my acts of writing, I commit all these events to permanent memory. And it’s vitally important souls choose the right memories, reinforcing them until they’re part of us. Just as it’s important to forget the memories that hinder us.
So, yes, we did hit el Caminito del Rey, or rather, in retrospect, it seemed to hit us. We woke up around 4:30 AM, met our taxi, and greeted the empty streets of Sevilla in nighttime darkness. (Spain is one time zone “off”: It should be on Greenwich time, but Franco kept it with the rest of Europe. Thus dinner @10 PM.) Got rerouted around a freeway fatality, which [my wife] saw too much of… then had a difficult couple of hours driving due to poor Spanish lighting. That is, the freeway has lighting, but only from the sides and center median, no reflection on the road itself. Often I had a hard time seeing the lane lines, and I had to use my bright lights much of the way, as did on-coming traffic. The point being that this early wake-up marked the moment when both [my wife] & I became dissociated. It’s like our caffeine never kicked in…for the next 3-4 weeks!
The caminito itself, I’m afraid, was a bit of a bust. Yes, it displays a fantastic gorge from a track that follows the horizontal middle of giant sandstone cliffs. The scenery is amazing. But there were way too many people, despite the number being “limited.” Climbing the Giralda Tower in Sevilla was wall-to-wall humanity for 34 storeys. This felt the same for about five miles. I’ve never quite felt this way outdoors before, except in Yellowstone and at the Grand Canyon rim, experiences I didn’t enjoy.
One last night in Granada: Had a wonderful gourmet dinner at a tiny Italian restaurant, where the owner/master chef was also our waiter and gave us the sourcing of his unique ingredients (particularly [my wife]’s & Rhiannon’s black truffle fungi & homemade pasta: This was Rhiannon’s best meal since Kep, Cambodia, 2019, which I also remember well.) Total cost = 81 euros. A fitting end to a trip full of great cuisine.
One final important task: Before our Granada morning departure (to drop off the rental car in Madrid by 4 PM) [my wife] & I had our one & only chance to visit the [Archives], where Rhiannon researches & works on her dissertation. While we’d spent five other nights in Granada, it had been closed during the city’s Feria de las Cruzes. We saw Rhiannon’s work desk, smack in the middle of a modern no-walls work space, the outside walls lined with primary source volumes. Most important, [my wife] & I met [J--], who runs the [Archives], along with his two assistants, all dedicated intellectuals whom Rhiannon sees regularly. They were nice people, allies of a greater cause, and somehow our meeting proved a great capstone.
La Mancha: I remember January 2, 1971, driving from Granada to Madrid through the land of Don Quixote: snow-covered desolation on a two-lane road. Borges reminds us that in Cervantes’s time La Mancha was about as idyllic as Kansas City. So it was in 1971: No agriculture, no trees to speak of; just the giant black bull billboard silhouettes on every horizon—much fewer in number today, but still common enough, lacking any explanation. I told Rhiannon these all were once ads for Vetrano (?), which named a liqueur or hard alcohol brand back under fascism. Now with no sponsor, someone still maintains these bovine monoliths as part of Spanish identity.
La Mancha is transformed now, much as the eastern Washington scablands and Kansas prairies have been physically reformed. Most of la Mancha is pristine olive orchards; nearly all of it is farmed. In 1971 Spain was poor; now it’s rich.
We dropped off the rental car at the airport with about fifteen minutes to spare, no damage. Getting home that next forever-day westward May 13th went smoothly, all the logistics, gates, & baggage; the plane flights went fast. All good.
But then we never recovered. [My wife] had her own drawn out difficulties, while I just seem to lose days & weeks. The first week I could claim/blame jet lag for my inertia. I couldn’t wake up, didn’t want to walk, felt weak, and I found my very voice leaving me ever wispier. I picked up my grandsons’ cough, not too awful, but it got into my lungs, where it still sits like a third rail next to my pneumonia PTSD. I have my oximeter.
But there’s more wrong with me physically than lungs alone, starting with deadness in my right hand specifically. I mentioned I had a hard time signing a bill in Siracusa; regularly I find it hard to cut my food with a fork or turn a mailbox key. At poker I found I can’t for-the-life-of-me shuffle a deck of cards right now, an easy act normally. This is not right.
Unfortunately I can’t get a doctor to check me out since I’m not bleeding. My own primary care physician retired without warning in December, and my main network option is not accepting new patients at this time. If I call every morning at 7 AM for the next month, I should be able to see someone, I’ve been told, by October.
Meanwhile, the real news, my hand weakness has no affect on my piano playing. I sat down the day after coming home and immediately knew I was playing—really playing—for the first time, with fluidity, even with ease. My month-long malaise makes me feel lazy & pathetic. In stark contrast, my piano (finally, after a quarter-century) feels natural, instinctive, & direct. I won’t say I can play in general, but my Italian Concerto specifically sounds pretty good now; I’m almost up to speed even with the presto (which is rather amazing just as a set of sequenced physical tasks). A real music threshold has been crossed, and furthermore a new teaching relationship has opened up between me & my music meme “Bach”: My instruction begins. All good.
Now’s where, by prior precedent, I’m required to sum up our big trip, highlighting the odds & ends that missed the realtime blog paragraphs. To this end I begin with a rare, sharp visual memory from Granada: Late afternoon we’re at a multi-lane intersection near the busy river park, having just scampered across the street as the lights change. I turn to see the protected crosswalk corridor explode with a lethal concussion of cars, trucks, and buses, but also among them one motorized scooter cruising in the flow, taking its full lane. On it, standing squarely in her bare feet, a shapely young woman rounds the bended corner dressed in full floral Andalusian festival garb, carnation in her no-helmet hair-bun, doing at least 40 kph, eyes on the horizon. Beautiful.…
Or I recall the fishing boats returning to Essaouira, rounding the harbor jetty, each vessel completely engulfed by a hundred seagulls or more, each one looking like the nucleus of some bloated uranium atom swarming with satellites.
Or I see orange dust across vast Saharan distances, monochrome rust, with Hollywood casbah resorts & construction cranes rising out of the sand like Vegas, like Oz: casinos, fountains, golf courses, armed police at every roundabout—Morocco’s great hope for the future.
When I close my eyes, I am not upset to see, like wallpaper spanning my field of vision, Muslim tiling a la la Alhambra—tessellations in principle, in implication, & in dreamweight, but only the Platonic forms, not in practice any actual details. Colors are juxtaposed abstractly, the idea of colours, but never inserted into any grid or framework, for the binding math, which governs 2-d tessellations, remains virtual. A summer task?
Somewhere along the way—in northern Morocco, I think—I tallied up “the biggest trips of my life,” and found, to my surprise, that this western Mediterranean odyssey, which qualifies both in scale & effort as “big,” did not even rank among my Top Ten: no higher, in fact, than thirteenth on my list (which, objectively, is a pretty amazing datum.) My 1970-71 trip to Spain surely is my Number 1, while my family’s eastern Med trip in 2002, to Greece, Turkey, & Egypt, gets #2, the greatest gift I gave my own children. That is, while in life I have achieved neither wealth nor recognition, I have truly traveled, and I’ve been blessed, beyond reasonable hope, to share these most valuable adventures with those I most love. What a life!
Having said that, I now confide that I feel I paid dearly, personally for this latest epic. I do want to challenge myself, but not by physically hurting myself. I hurt most of this trip, and I was sick for at least half of it. No way to sugar-coat that.
And the trip cost money, too; but not enough for me to miss. [My wife] & I could take a similar trip every year for the rest of our lives without much impact on our finances. That’s nice. Therefore, the true cost of our trip came from time & energy. I worked really hard on it, including all the research & bookings. We had to arrange for house-sitters, turn our lives upside-down. I could have spent my months instead doing…what?
It’s true I have gained many new memories & understandings from this latest trip; I value these and am grateful. But nothing I did altered my life, as other trips most certainly have. Is that the goal then? To disrupt myself? My knowledge of Sicily, Morocco, and Andalucia has greatly increased, which is pure fun; but fun is not the telos of my travels. While, in this case, I see no harm in knowing more than I did a year ago, I don’t see an intrinsic value to the mere acquisition of knowledge; more is not better. I feel like an AI who has reread every word on the internet a billion times already before finally ending its search. A billion-plus-one iterations will probably not alter any further calculations or projections. I’ve been to 57 countries. Do I need still one more to make myself whole? Do I need to read all books once? Or should I read a few books many times? Recently I finished reading all of the Divine Comedy aloud—not once, but three times through. (I read three cantos each day, but only one for the first time; the others I repeated after studying the notes.) This practice worked so well I’m now reading The Canterbury Tales aloud (in modern verse), though twice through only, as study is not needed.
It’s virtually certain that I have played Bach’s Italian Concerto far more times than Bach himself ever did over his full life.
It’s pure luxury that I indulge myself so fucking self-aware; it is the sickness of the retired rich, yes, but in my case it represents a satisfied life: The most important task of my life was to raise two beautiful girls to independence; I did my job well; it’s over. What now?
The future will not look like the past. All my whimsy comes during this brief smug calm before the storm. Trump will die soon, but the die is cast now nonetheless. I do not know the form of our coming crash, but I don’t expect to feel retired much longer. [N--], my third grandson, arrives in mid-July. Will he know a normal childhood?
Let me accept graciously, then, as a gift my full & successful trip to the western Mediterranean. The time was ripe; it will not come again. I seized an opportunity, when, best of all, we shared quality time with Rhiannon, our talented, independent daughter. Incidentally, early in our travels together it became clear [my wife] & I will not be visiting Rhiannon again next year as originally planned. Northern Spain must wait a bit. The world is uncertain. What is certain is next year Rhiannon must defend her thesis and will have no time for us. (She leaves in a week to study Catalan in Barcelona, then for a conference in Weimar & fun in Berlin.) I don’t pretend to see further than a year out at this time.
It’s Sunday, and [my grandsons] will be here any minute now…
God I love my home in [my town].
love,
Duncan
June 15, 2025