Inhabitants of dolmens’ land: from emotional space to the construction of public space

Abstract

Irish Nobel Prize awarded Seamus Heaney narrated that when he was a child, he enjoyed observing adults collecting water with a bucket from a well in the middle of the countryside. He always watched with tension and mystery the song repeated by the old pulley while spinning slowly, meanwhile the rope was descending into the dark, and then pulled up, until the bucket appeared dancing gently in the air, and spilling-around water drops. That well was on a hill that sloped down to the village, where dolmens and ancient stones were erected, archaeological remains that were only a fraction of what was hidden on the meadow; He always thought that this water was offered by their ancestors, soul and memory balsam from the beginning of time.

Over the years he learned and heard in the University for the first time the Greek word omphalos, meaning navel, and its sound, spelled slowly and spaced, over and over, took him to the sound of the spinning pulley and bucket pulling up from the rock bowels and the being of his people.

Om-pha-los, om-pha-los, om-pha-los ... Navel, water that connects us through his course, dark and bright at once, with our collective existence. The inhabitants of dolmens’ land live intimately linked to the course of memory that runs underground, in terms of original matter; stone, metals, coral, water flowing from the deep to nourish us and fill our present with meaning and emotion.

There we have the astonishment, the excitement. Excitement activates our ability to find ourselves and to organize the common task of protecting and defending something as valuable as our dreams. That has been our experience in Valencina-Guzman territory. We live in today’s world the contradiction between the universal call to participate in the public space and the fragmentation of interests and discourses, the coexistence in every level of daily life of processes that bind and separate us, in addition to the entrenchment of differences that seem insurmountable. Public space is the sphere in which we organize our collective experience, where society members produce a common reality, as full citizens, beyond their role as consumers, voters, believers, experts, and where integration is tested, a recognition in terms of compatibility that allows defend our belongings, and generate proposals to improve daily life while widening the possibilities of their material and emotional environment.