LIVERPOOL 2026. THE ANGLICAN CATHEDRAL

The Anglican cathedral makes you feel like a tourist that must say: Wow! How impressive is this. "This", what? A building dedicated to God, the Christian God in its Anglican version. It took a time for the Anglican Church to introduce some of the tenets of the Reformation and always with an ambiguous mood, rather than conviction. At the core of the high church was always Catholicism, the desire to remain Catholic in spite of the Puritanical and iconoclastic tendencies of the lower church. This impressive cathedral took 74 years to be built, from 1904 until 1978. Even though when we approach this overwhelming building it looks like a medieval construction, however it's a modern church serving modern spiritual needs, and these needs are very different in this contemporaneous era than five hundred years ago.

The first impression for this tourist who already inhabits the Artificial Intelligence revolution, who has experienced Protestantism in his hometown as a Plymouth Brethren's believer within a small, self-enclosed community, living among the hardships of a strong National-Catholicism's atmosphere or the dry and militant atheism of a leftist or even liberal political reaction to that monopoly of Catholicism; to this tourist who also went through the tough materialism of the Spanish left; dogmatic and maximalist to the core, at least in appearance, perhaps as a reaction to the Catholic church they left with resentment and a fragile conviction in spite of being the same church the one which spawn the working class movements in their parishes centers for the youth and adults as well. Most of these people in later years became members of the Communist party or turned out being the seedbed of new extreme radical leftist parties or sects.

This tourist entered the cathedral with awe and intense respect. Anytime he visits a town or city in any country in the world he always searches for the spiritual sites, the temples, the churches. He sits on the benches or cushions or stands up withdrawn in silence because there must be a space apart, removed from the busy life, the noise, the prosaic life of work, chronological time and instrumental space, an space dedicated to the unsolved mystery of our world and our existence.

Our entrance to the cathedral should force us to exit our world of virtual reality in which we now live through the mobile. Perhaps we no longer know how to differentiate the real from virtuality. The origin from the copy. The mystery from an already given representation of that mystery. The space in this Anglican cathedral is immense and overwhelming. My Plymouth Brethren's chapel was a small an intimate place where we all knew each other within those iconoclastic and literalists’ walls. Ours was the God of the Holy Scriptures, the reading and spoken words, the spiritual force of those hymns of victory and resurrection. God was the community reading, singing, praying and the symbolism of the holy supper. The world was mainly an immoral place to avoid, a challenge to our peregrination to the real Kingdom of God beyond history. In this cathedral the huge space made you lift your head and mind to discover it was the empty space of a modern hidden God, a space impossible to be filled by our simplicity of imagination, worse still by the scientific and technological world in which we now live; even less by the new theological modalities and variations of the chameleonic Anglican church.

I was present in some of those high ceremonials of the High Church with all its pompous liturgy, their female bishops or gay pastors breaking away from the essence of what those rituals meant in their day. Nothing to object. Within Protestantism every church is free to interpret the Scriptures and the world at will. But the feeling of that modern architecture trying to imitate the old medieval spirituality gave a creepy feeling. No innovation, whatsoever innovation, seems to be able to fill the empty

space of that cathedral. I sat, I watched the altarpiece, the statues never supposed to be represent anything but art. I observed the nave and its central aisle, the vaults, the choir area, the stained-glass windows. I tried to find a living God instead of an abstraction or a figment of imagination or a hidden projection understood in psychoanalyst terms or class-struggle ideology; perhaps in a clinical neurological terminology. Where's the Christian God nowadays? It's a hidden God? Has God incarnated in history? Is God "the other" in misery and suffering and that's all? It sounds all very pious, charitable and humanist, even revolutionary; but also hypocritical and sheer political opportunism. Perhaps even revolutionary. But that space is still empty. It's like a vacuum never possible to be filled with thoughts and words. I guess in the winter they have to heat it with powerful heater systems so the bodies, the human bodies, remain warm waiting for the always instant resurrection of our virtual, never original reality. Living the endless copies of the almost infinite possibilities of informing and interpreting a world which no longer is real, because as soon as all get "incorporated" into the universal application of Artificial Intelligence, then perhaps, we'll be raised into God, or the Hegelian Absolute Spirit, or hell knows what mixture of biological tissues and biotechnology our new heaven and hell could be.

LIVERPOOL 2026. THE PHILARMONIC DINING ROOMS

(Thanks to Chat Gpt for such a good illustration)

The Philarmonic Dining Rooms is an unusual place to eat when you are in Liverpool. It's in Hope street and once you see the building whether you just go past by or just getting lost or perhaps starting a new life in Liverpool; or searching for that unique person you always wanted to find but without success, and perhaps Liverpool will open its secrets for you to enjoy and enrich that boring life of yours. So you find the Philarmonic Dining Rooms building and you say: ¡wow! What a beautiful building to look at, to contemplate, to explore as a work of art. And suddenly you smell the scent of good cooking coming from inside the building and it reminds you of your grandmother cooking those delicious dishes when you were a child in that unnamed city of yours. Wow! you exclaimed again and a primitive desire for food pulls you inside the building, drags you there into the hall and then into the counter and you don't know whether you are in a museum or inside a kind of weird restaurant, its walls covered by wood carvings with a Victorian artistic design which somehow reflects the freedom of imagination at its best when your spirit haven't suffered the simplification of an abstract world devoid of mystery. Here there are plenty of motifs to turn you into a traditional nineteenth century English person still thinking that the world's deepest structure consist of well-established morals and decency and decor. All of this, in spite of the thousands working like dogs in the docks and making a bare living to survive, just to survive with their families.

Morals inside and long working hours outside. Oh! City of Liverpool, we love you nonetheless.

Now you feel starving. You sit in one of those marvelous tables still puzzled by the dark wood paneled walls and asking yourself if this is your place or you are out of place or perhaps that's the luxury you always deserved after all. Why not? So you look at the menu and wonder what dish is going to be. You choose a Lightly Dusted Calamari, an 8oz Chargrilled Sirloin Steak and a bottle of Schofferhofer Grapefruit Radler grapefruit wheat beer. You're alone in the table, but being alone in such a situation makes you like a ghost haunting a past it doesn't belong to you. Suddenly, a lady

approaches you with due respect, and she asks if you were the person she was dreaming about in her last dream. Of course, you said yes. Yes, yes, I am. At that precise moment you realize you were falling again into one of those vivid daydreams they never come true. You got up and went to the counter to order your dishes and your drink. Your table has a number and the waiter will bring you the food. But, wait a minute! Isn't that lady coming now to your table your workmate from the office you're actually working with in you far away country? What on earth is she doing here, by the way? Yes, she is, but she's holding hands with a handsome and corpulent Englishman. She shouts "Jacques, what are you doing here? My God this world is really small!" Kisses, introductions and bla, bla, bla... They ended up sitting upstairs searching for discretion.

Time to eat. The waiter serves the food and the beer. Before he'd want to visit the loo and wash his hands. Once inside the toilets that is luxury at its best. Marble walls covering the urinals, well textured tiles, golden taps... oh, my God! It's the best piss you've ever experienced. You shot the best piss ever.

LIVERPOOL 2026. PENNY LANE AND STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER

The red brick Victorian mansions are expecting a Dracula to inhabit them. We can see many of them today divided into apartments. Some half abandoned, but still being haunted by restless ghosts finding an impossible place to rest.

We saw Penny Lane in the Mossley Hill after a fifteen minutes drive in a cab. When we experience a myth in its real sites, it's like renewing a childhood it never came true but now, somehow, it's here, present. We recreate our own John, Paul, George, and Ringo's characters through songs that keep resounding and vibrating in our souls forever.

Myths have a sacramental force, in the sense that real, down to earth empirical and practical reality, fade out into shadows giving way to something new and unexpected. Joyce called it epiphany, religion calls it sacramental transformation. We can't normally live under such an unexplainable spell, but it comes and goes throughout our lives under different symbols and myths.

We walked Penny Lane, we visited Strawberry Fields, we saw Saint Andrew's church and the interior court where Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison played very young for their teenage audience. We began making Liverpool our personal city by walking the same neighborhoods our Four Fab idols used to walked.

It's all a dreamy resurrection of memories that don't want to die, we know. But bless any deep feelings that come to rescue you from the dangerous realities of everyday life. The Saint Andrew's cemetery display its graves not far from where the first Beatles, the Quarrymen, used to play sixty-five years ago.Time goes by carrying with it the mythical sounds of songs like Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever, Yesterday, A Day in a Life, Let it Be; carrying with it our bodies and souls but, can time also take with it the quality of our eternal truths as told by music and myths?

We went back to downtown Liverpool, back to a city with its energy and pride very well alive.

LIVERPOOL 2026. THE BEATLES

At first I thought they were just another mindless band made up of troublesome teddy boys. I stayed away from their music even when some of my friends were already fans and began to grow their hair outrageously long for my conventional taste. One day when I was 15 years old a cousin of mine had brought one of their records from New York when staying in our house. It's title was "A Hard Day's Night".

He played it day after day, and somehow I felt the beat and the melodies displacing my conventional rutines and expectations to opening new feelings of youthful rebellion. From then on I became addicted to The Beatles's music. My hair started growing long, my ideas loosened up into a more imaginative turn.The world was turning magic and life liquified into many unexpected streams of hope and possibilities.

A new era of highly creative music and a powerful sensitivity, was inaugurated by The Beatles. We grew up with them, but the world was also moved by these Fab Four from Liverpool, England, the city we're visiting now.

LONDON 2026. ENGLAND

Empire among other empires in the world. Has there been any empire in the world whose goals and ideals have been grounded in universal peace rejecting violence and inviting other nations to form part of such an idyllic holy empire? The English empire wasn't such an empire. But neither the Roman, the Spanish, the Russian, the Japanese, the Muslim, etc. The British empire abolished slavery in 1805, meanwhile the Spanish empire put an end to it in 1886. Who is the first to throw the first rock?

LONDON 2026. THE FOX

When walking by South Audley street we saw this fox on the loose searching for food in one of the most elegant districts in London. S/he wasnt scared. S/he kept walking freely mindless of the people surprised by the irruption of a wild animal in such a civilized urban environment. It took time to realize a fox was there crossing the street whereabouts unknown. Where did s/he come from? Perhaps from the nearest park, or perhaps from Eden itself announcing the redemption of the world...  

LONDON 2026. TIME SWALLOWS EVERYTHING

TIME SWALLOWS EVERYTHING

A building is a container of human flows doing things in time, meanwhile both the building layout (walls, floors and the roof), and the humans who have inhabited it, or still breath within its walls, rust together with the pass of time. Whether time is objective or subjective, or both simultaneously; that doesn't change its impervious flow from the unknown to the mystery of the beyond.

LONDON 2026. BOOKS

So many books. Five stories of stocks with books to be sold. New writers, new analysts, new political theorists, new philosophies, new theologies. More witted scientists introducing the almost unspeakable.

And, suddenly, after buying three more books to add to my private library, I realized wisdom is not only in the books I read from others, but intuition is our hidden treasure...