nothing gets lost

I’m on Lanzarote with my grandma. It’s my first time here, her third. She’s 87 years old, and she explicitly asked me to spend the week with her. Of course I said yes, because she’s my grandma and I genuinely like her; but also because I could never afford a vacation here and was curious what she wanted to show me. I didn’t quite know what to expect.

Today is the second day here, and since I’ve arrived I’ve had this strange feeling I couldn’t quite place. A slight pressure in my chest, a weird mixture of a dull ache and an immense joy at once. Something between yearning and melancholy. In German, there is a word for this feeling: Weltschmerz, pain of the world. Of being in the world, of longing for it. I’ve felt Weltschmerz before, but never this sudden and for a period that lasts longer than thirty minutes.

I’ve been feeling in between. Between the raw, volcanic landscape that’s otherworldly enough for ESA to use it to simulate life on Mars, and the white, artificial hotel landscape with turquoise pools next to the ocean. This morning, I sat on the balcony, looking out at the sea and the rising sun, and below me an elderly, overweight man sat on his shiny, motorised walker scrolling on his phone. It was strangely disturbing.

I am not writing this to judge all the tourists who come here and spend their days driving from one Tourist Center to the next; I am one of them, after all. In fact, visiting the Tourist Centers has been truly inspiring to me. They are locations designed by the Lanzarote artist César Manrique. Manrique was not only a painter and visual artist, he was also an architect. His work integrates natural landscapes with contemporary design. Living rooms in volcanic caves, bars integrated into mountain faces, lava stone that flows into the room rather than staying outside the window.

Something about his work moved me deeply, because it captures exactly that feeling I have been feeling since the moment I arrived. Nature and modern Western culture; somewhat of a contradiction, yet somehow connected in Manrique’s work. I read an article by someone who argued that his work is cinematographic: it creates scenes that visitors enter and participate in, without even being aware of doing so. Taking the time to drive across the island from one scene to the next means participating in Manrique’s movie, in the narrative he envisioned for his home.

I’m not an art critic and I probably wouldn’t hang any of Manrique’s paintings in my living room, but being part of his own personal movie moved me (literally almost 100 km a day), because it speaks of a world that embraces its contradictions and evolves with them. Manrique was a fierce advocate for the protection of natural habitats and Lanzarote’s landscape. His calls to protect the island still echo today with the local inhabitants. He strongly opposed unregulated mass tourism, even though his work–deliberately–encouraged visitors to come here in the first place. He somehow lived in the in-between: deeply connected with nature and the people around him with their (economic) needs at once.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading a bit of The Artist’s Way. The author, Julia Cameron, argues that it’s essential to take your “inner artist” on an artist date once a week. Just you and them, no one else. It can be anything, from visiting a museum or a fleamarket to taking a long walk in nature or spending too much money for an hour in a trampoline gym.

Essentially, it’s about actively participating in life; to “fill your well,” as Cameron calls it. And it makes sense: for there to be creative output you need to have a source to draw from and that source, that well, needs regular refilling.

My time on this strange island has been one big artist date so far. Being immersed in this world of stark, but integrated contradiction speaks to me. If artist dates are about participating in life, this is all I do here. It’s spending the time with my grandma, being fully present with her and listening to her tell me stories of her youth and family. It’s driving her across that island and seeing her happy when I am as excited as she is about whatever it is she wanted to show me. Maybe it’s also the thought that this is our first and possibly last big trip together, at least abroad. It’s all at once: the joy, the sadness, the being present and being pulled away.

We don’t have wifi in our hotel, because that would cost extra, and for the first time in ages, I don’t have my laptop with me; only my e-ink tablet. Before I came here, I hadn’t realised how often I acted on impulse. As soon as a (creative) idea crossed my mind, I would take out my laptop and start working on it and end up with lots of unfinished projects. Now, I don’t have that option. I have to let thoughts fade and see what sticks. In a way, I am letting myself be guided; it’s like I am taking the train that arrives at my platform at a convenient time, instead of running over to the other side of the station to reach one that is about to leave.

I know all of this might sound somewhat cheesy; after all I’ve only been here for a couple of days (by this paragraph, three to be exact). But this feeling I’m talking about actually already started on the plane. Usually, I would’ve spent those hours typing, working on some idea that briefly crossed my mind (I am not a patient person, as you might’ve guessed). This time, I just sat there and looked out the window. Read a short story. Took time to reflect on it. Ironically, without planning to do so I wrote a poem and drew a little during those hours. Of course I knew that my phone was distracting me, but I hand’t realised how much my laptop was as well. Not because I endlessly scroll on it, but because I use it to impulsively give in to the first-best creative impulse. For weeks now, I’ve been trying to figure out a system to keep track of my various projects and their progress. I was constantly stuck between being trapped and overstructured and feeling lost in where I was going. But I think maybe the solution I’ve been looking for is time. Time and trust that things will stick; that what matters will stick.

The one thing this trip has showed me so far more than any other vacation I have been on is the importance of embracing the in between. And to do so without needing to fix it. Manrique did so by amplifying the beauty of his home and inviting people to visit, and at the same time standing up against mass tourism and ecological collapse. He was a true hedonist and an activist at once. His work is fully anchored in reality, in the landscape, and imagines what could be at the same time. All this didn’t come to him because he thought his way through it. It came to him amidst all the grey, the contradictions, the messiness.

Nothing gets lost. Whatever needs creating will make it through.