Pure beauty, ambiguous beauty (communing with the ancestors)

I am flicking through our recent photos, deleting some, adjusting others - we generate a lot of pictures between the two of us, three thousand plus over the past six weeks. Most are mundane, ordinary shots outnumbering good by a factor of ten, but they are memory joggers, visual notes that help sometimes when writing the blog. Occasionally one pops up that stops me in my tracks recalling a moment of absolute beauty, like this one.

I am not saying this in itself is a beautiful photo, indeed it is somewhat cliched. What I mean is that it captures something that seems absolutely beautiful to me irrespective of whether I had photographed it or not. In this case the fleeting translucent blue you get as twilight gathers, between the vestiges of sunset on the horizon and darkness at the zenith. I am always bewitched by it.

Something else that affects me similarly are muddy estuaries. I wrote a poem about my predilection a few years ago; it concludes:

Mud flats shine
Beyond the beech trees’ yellow leaves,
the mud flats shine;
duped by beauty, I seek some sign,
a reason why my mind perceives
as lovely, these empty estuaries
where mud flats shine.

It's one of the few things I've written that readers have overtly objected to - the word 'duped'. It seems to cross some unacknowledged line - it's ok. to be 'taken over' by the beautiful but heresy to suggest we are 'taken in'. But we are. The moment we 'suspend disbelief' we embrace the irrational. Not that I think we should shy from it, none of us are entirely rational, I just happen to think we need to to  aware, as much as we are able, as to when we are seeing things rationally and when we respond imaginatively.

Often the two are entwined and we switch from one mode of thinking to the other intuitively; as the the change of perspective dawns on us we are momentarily disorientated, slightly wrong-footed. Such  moments are beautiful too, but it is not the pure, overwhelming sense of beauty I mentioned earlier, but a more ambiguous beauty of unexpected contradictions, startling juxtapositions, the uncanny or slightly surreal. This afternoon happened like that.

Looking east from the area around Malaga beach the area is densely populated, but mainly residential. The view to the west is dominated by a nearby cement works which overshadows the small fishing community of La Araña.

The MA-24 dual carriageway dominates the narrow strip of flat land between the beach and a line of low limestone cliffs. A rusty wire mesh fence separates the busy road from the cycle track that runs alongside it.

The cliffs are covered in cave openings. I noticed on Google maps they were marked as 'Yacimientos Arqueológicos de la Araña'. A small 'interpretation centre' is located in the nearby village. I began to suspect these were not any old caves and suggested to Gill that we walk along the track to La Arana to see what the small museum had to offer.

Last Christmas Gill bought me Cyprien Broodbank's 'The Middle Sea'. It traces the development of Mediterranean human culture from the first incursions of palaeolithic people up until Early Classical times. The book is a monumental work that calls into question all kinds of assumptions concerning human progress by bringing to bear the latest research in archaeology and DNA analysis to challenge more conventional narratives based largely on texts. It highlights some startling facts, not least that our own branch of humankind - Homo Sapiens reached Australia from Africa before the they reached Iberia. Europe was a Neanderthal enclave up until the arrival of Homo Sapiens around 45,000 years ago. The distribution and interaction of both groups was determined by the fluctuations in climate associated with the last ice age.  Few parts of the continent  remained habitable throughout the period, a mere handful of places in Europe can claim uninterrupted human settlement over the past 50,000 years. Cyprien Broodbank mentions two of them, both slivers of south facing Mediterranean coast, one in Dalmatia, the other running along shore from Gibraltar to Almeria with sites concentrated around Malaga. In other words right here, next to the dual carriageway about 200 metres from where we were parked.

Whereas most of Europe during the last ice age consisted of a cold savannah interspersed with glaciers, these south facing shores were covered in spruce forests with a considerably milder climate. Broodbank called the section in his book about the period 'Neanderthals in the Sun' The painting on the door of the interpretation centre captures the ancient landscape perfectly. The human figures are less convincing, Neandethals could not sew, no bone needles have been found from that era, they may have used animal skins as blankets or ponchos, but not for prehistoric Ugg boots or skirts.

The painting on the door was as far as we got so far as the interpretation centre was concerned. It was closed. Subsequently we discovered that the place is not permanently staffed and you have to book tours in advance which includes both a visit to the caves and the museum. Perhaps we might do that when we return in January.

The museum is housed in a tawdry concrete structure on top of a small hill topped by a watch tower. As we climbed towards it, past graffiti sprayed walls and half ruined old houses the contradictions of our surroundings became inescapable. Across the broad bay you could see all the way to the hills beyond Torremilinos; the contrast between the soft greens of the shrubby hill-side and the slate grey sea and sky was very beautiful. Directly below us the dun coloured sands of Playa Peñon del Cuervo were almost deserted, just two tiny figures walking across them. Two specks of humanity that gave scale and perspective to the wide horizons. It was not the seascape that dominated the view; the scene was overshadowed by the steel towers, concrete silos and conveyor belts of the cement works. Man made structures predominated, just as the sound of the sea was drowned by the rumble of traffic on the coastal highway.

We spent a while taking photos and peering through the metal security grill of the closed museum trying to work out the opening times. By the time were heading back the couple on the beach had drawn a little closer. The woman had stripped off for a swim and was splashing through the shallows. Her companion crouched down a few metres distant, taking pictures of her I presume. There was something elemental about the entire scene. The area has been settled by humans for 400,000 years, first by Homo heidelbergensis, supplanted around 200,000 years ago by Neanderthal hunter gatherers,who in turn disappeared 25,000 years ago as our own species, homo sapiens predominated. The surroundings - the cement works, the motorway, the distant urban sprawl of Malaga - all boasted of our technological ingenuity. The bather on the beach told a different story about our frailty, the biological human rather than the technological. At that moment, for me, her slight figure  stood for all 16000 generations of humans who have dwelt here previously, the sprawl posing the question - how many more generations can the earth sustain if we persist in devouring its resources thoughtlessly. It was a powerful moment, beautifully ambiguous.