Garden Jacaranda (i)

The Royal Alcázars of Seville, commonly known as the Alcázar of Seville, is a royal palace built
for king Peter of Castile. Famed for its tiled interior, the gardens continue in equal splendour,
out towards the Guadalquivir.

A mosaic of wave and stalactite line. Arid shrubbery forms into coordinate and route and round
– this geometry is organic, or at least pulsing as such. You could walk here to escape thought,
with endless choice, movement requires little of the mover.

So you walk, fingers arcing the tile, rising and falling in a pattern of breath. Staring at the tiled
exterior of his garden is a surrender of constellation, end and beginning as immediate as the eye
unable to find the foothold that asymmetry provides. The marvel of repetition is, after all,
its uncanny nature, a coiled whisper in the thick, slow heat.

Watching a ceiling like this disorientates, walking within it bizarres altogether. It’s true that
gardening a landscape resigns it to familiarity – you know the terrain of your mouth with
reference to your teeth. But this garden is an abstraction, the imprint of tile across fleshy
topography. The fauna, cobbles and fountains are, whilst intricate and quite beautiful, linear.

Your starting point on any path is not such, only emerging within a separate location of the
repeating cycle. This path stretches outwards but never darts, no ugly bend or slipping hand.
Turning, sweeping neatly into an artery, another broad trail in lilac bloom, why the rush of water
nearby? There is no river, no crooked lip to spill over into sea, only the wall. No, your path
is the motion of blood; moving, pushing, always returning.

Following this garden for life, what does a mind experience? Thought caught between endless
motion and its concrete linearity. For those crooked, wild thoughts that escape the fêted bushes
and fated ceramic, you can only forward or backward here. To a death then, what can we assign?
To me, a sweet line, rising and falling like a heartbeat, an ultimatum as true as the mouth of a tile.