Bilbao: the pillars of the Earth

It rains in Bilbao. It is an annoying rain for outdoor photography, but not for that immanently interior space where the spirit dwells.

The place we are heading to, a metaphorical island where we take refuge for some time, is a well of unexpected surprises.

The medieval Alhóndiga and Gothic origins, its interior is now possessed by the spirit of modernity, in a vademecum of sensory visions, when not surrealistic, destined to seriously attract the attention of the viewer.

Exhibitions, shops, a modern library where some young people are provided with a no less metaphorical change of underwear to counteract the effects of that horrible seven-headed hydra that is Selectivity, contrast with the evolution of water and swimming lovers, whose evolutions are graciously appreciated through the glass pool that rises above our heads.

As lighthouses, they capture our attention, we barely put our feet inside a building, whose artificial light, together with the mortuary and stormy clarity that seeps from the outside through the windows, which gives it a certainly intriguing, mysterious aspect, ideal to get carried away by the magic of a thousand and one esoterisms.

They are, as you have already been able to verify, the columns. Dozens of pillars, endowed with their own lives, of which the symbolists would say that connect the sky with the earth.

It does not matter, if they were ever trees, strips of missing fragas, swallowed by the unharmed and eternal ambition, because man, in his dementia, will always need to resort to them, because not in vain, he also carries them in his spine .

Nor is it difficult to get carried away by the imagination, to see in them that hybrid branch, of evolutionary tendencies even showing on their marble or granite skin the signals of their ancient genes, the descendants of that first couple, of those first Adam and Eve , that being called Jakin and Boaz - curious names, which surprisingly remember the language of Euskalerría - seem to have evolved throughout a world, in whose history imagination has not always been left over.

And seeing them, it is difficult not to think, getting carried away by reverie, that although the maternal trunk seems common, paternity, however, is a macho decline that fades into the trunk of memories.

There is no equal. All are completely different. Individually, they proudly show their own idiosyncrasy, their own magic, their own values.

It seems as if, after all, each and every one of them, in their own way, responded, mimetically, to make us understand that the variety is the taste; that the different is complemented; that the personality does not diminish even being a drop of water among the crowd.

Perhaps, the idea of its projection is, after all, a metaphor for humanity. A beautiful metaphor of the different peoples, of the different races, of the different beliefs aimed at making us understand, in this crazy world, that everything and everyone is part of the ancestral trunk that, whether we like it or not, is called Human Being.

And as such, we are all columns. We are the Pillars of the Earth.

Practical data: Azkuna Center (Azkuna Zentroa), Arrikibar Square, 4. Bilbao