In 1578, twenty-four-year-old King Sebastião marched into Morocco with an army and failed to bring either it or himself home.
Doubts about his remains gave Portugal room to negotiate with the facts. The king, it was decided, was merely delayed. One morning he would emerge from the fog and rescue the nation.
Within twenty years, four men walked out of the fog claiming to be him: one at Penamacor, one at Ericeira, a pastry cook from Madrigal who was hanged for it, and a Calabrian who tried it on in Venice. Quite why anyone should hanker after a man who thought it was completely fine to march into Morocco and get a generation of Portuguese nobility killed or captured in the space of a few hours remains a mystery.
Four centuries on, people here still invoke him whenever someone is waiting for a saviour who clearly isn’t coming. They call it Sebastianismo – Sebastianism. It began as a real messianic belief, the conviction that the lost king would return in Portugal’s hour of need. What remains is the notion that rescue will eventually arrive.
How I wish my younger, more creative, less judgemental self would one day emerge from the fog. The young writer who didn’t fear the blank page. The absorbed child who painted with reckless, unselfconscious abandon, and the photographer who thought 90% of the multiple-exposure images produced were pretty damned spectacular simply because the camera had done something clever.
Where did it go? The happy fearlessness? I have spoken often enough about the importance of ‘play’; but it is not that that is missing. I definitely still spend time playing; moving things about, turning them upside down and inside out in the spirit of ‘what if?’. Judgment, I think; that is what gets in the way. It arrives earlier now; sometimes before I have even properly begun. That thing where you look at a photograph and immediately see the “mistake” rather than the image.
Most of the images back then were not in the least bit spectacular. The enjoyment was memorable even if the results didn’t hold up. You’d think that having dutifully clocked up the ten thousand hours, some confidence would have turned up by now yet every new thing I learn reveals three more I don’t know..
There have been plenty of imposters over the years, walking into my life like the pastry cook from Madrigal. The little-known apps tempting me with a promise of a new way forward; the fish-eye lens that promised great things and never quite delivered; the travel to exotic locations in search of discovery.
How much of it has to do with the burdens and responsibilities of being an adult, I wonder? It is convenient to draw on the fact that the six-year-old didn’t much worry about tax returns or insurance claims. However, the 50-year-old had to shoulder those burdens and still managed to capture some childlike wonder in the process of learning about what a camera can do in bright mode.
I exist in a creative fog much of the time, convinced that one of these days the mist will lift.
On the Silver Coast, the fog comes in off the sea, damp and salty, and stays all day. The horizon is no longer where we left it, and the air is cold and white and kind of wet in a way that has nothing to do with rain. A mad, bad hair day is a given, and I spend my time wiping the weather off my glasses as the mist does to my vision the exact thing I have been trying to fake with a camera for years
The temptation is to round this up with a neat ending.
That Sebastião’s defect was the absence of judgement while my complaint is the presence of it. Or that the saviours we are waiting for were a bit of a liability all along.
That’s too convenient. I’m still waiting. The fog has been here all day. Sebastião, nowhere to be seen.