“Your burden was a country, sick and lost, sharing the human storm in which we wince. Aged, you chose the imperiled common road to die among the crowds, renewing our spark of god.”

                               
                      -from the poem “Machado, Poet of Spain” by Ray Smith

Lost Suitcase

An expert on television suggested the base of a temple could not have been built by the Phoenicians and was therefore a landing pad for alien spacecraft.  Archaeology has become the archaeology of aliens, as people of antiquity were evidently too stupid to understand the cosmos or build elaborate temples.  I find it much more interesting to note that Christopher Columbus had to rely on the navigation of birds, where the indigenous people he would soon enslave followed the stars.

I no longer care about spectacular ruins, just tiny historical conundrums.  Like the story about the Spanish poet Machado having to abandon a suitcase containing ten years of poems, as he was fleeing from Franco’s fascists to Paris.  Evidently, he insisted on being the last to board an ambulance truck bound for the French seaside village of Collioure.  When he saw there was no more room, he picked up his ailing mother and boarded the truck without the suitcase.

Machado never made it to Paris because he died at Collioure, hacia la mar.  He drowned not from it but pneumonic fluid.  Instead of alien landing pads television should air documentaries about the search for Machado’s suitcase, surely one of the most significant lost treasures in the world.