Writing and Walking

This must be brief, as I am on the clock. In Larrasoaña, Spain, battling with the small bits of Spanish I can pinch together for life living, and the bits of just about every ohter language I know a bit of (Italian, French, English) to converse with other pilgrims as we march up and down the mountains of the Pyrenees.

And I was thinking a lot about the poet as one who writes within the sprint. The short jolts, the electricity of it, the jumps and leaps. But here, trail after trail winding up and down, the lines in my head are long and wandering, the leaps less disconnected and the narrative more solidly present. I feel that it is natural for me to go at my own pace, slowly, inching towards the next village, the sprint and dash far in another mindspace.

It is a long trek, and as the body tries to hold itself together up and down, not slip, the mind wanders forward and back but always linked in a very solid way to the path around and beofre it, thus the narrative, without leaps, the trail chased round the next bend and up over the next peak. Here, I am about to go to Pamplona, the city which for me elicits Hemingway and Picasso, the paintings and sketches of bulls, the book Death in the Afternoon. Red scarves and women with equally bright lipstick.