In 1937, Alexander Calder created a mercury fountain. A single, standing pipe releases a narrow stream of liquid mercury into a series of curving aluminum runnels. The liquid seems instantly to expand. It quivers along, and is momentarily dammed by slots that further animate the flow of the stream of quicksilver. In the middle of its descent, the mercury swirls in a petal-shaped basin before resuming its gravity-impelled flow. As it falls, splintering and shivering, into a circular pool, the stream strikes a mobile paddle with a tall thin rod. Its movement perturbs another thin rod, suspended above the whole elegant contraption, with a pendant red iron bullseye at one end, whose sway causes an iron pendant at the other end, spelling out the letters A L A M A D É N, to gently flutter. The work is typical of Calder, modest in scale, almost childlike in its simplicity. It is at once straightforward and transparent, and witchily brilliant, illuminated with sheer, unmatched intelligence. It fascinates.

The more so now, since mercury is handled with a sense of respect and awe magnitudes greater than when I was a child and my father showed us mercury from his dental lab. He encouraged us to play with it, watching with delight as we let it ball and flutter, cupping magic in our bare hands. It was only later, from pictures in our Life magazine that we learned what industry, abetted by governments, at first ignored, and later tried to suppress, that mercury in our environment, in the case of the Japanese fisher-children of Minamata, born neurologically impaired and malformed, has a horrible power. [See this video about recent research at the University of Calgary that demonstrates the destructive neurochemical processes that occur in the presence of mercury molecules]. For over thirty years, toxic mercury, a waste product of industrial processes, flowed with the wastewater from a chemical plant into Minamata Bay, where it bioaccumulated in the shellfish and fish eaten by the people living around the bay and the Shiranui Sea. Mercury is one of the most toxic substances on the planet. Even the simple handling of mercury from improperly disposed mercury thermometers and fluorescent light bulbs can cause the skin to turn red, and peel in layers. Calder’s fountain, inside the entry of the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, once openly approachable, is shielded by a glass shell.

Calder made his fountain as a gesture of solidarity with the Spanish mercury miners at Almadén, whose insurrection was suppressed by Franco’s forces in 1934. When a power vacuum was created by the economic collapse of the late 1920s, and the subsequent fall of the military dictator Primo de Rivera and abdication of the King, the Spanish Republic was formed. By the early thirties, the Republican government proved to be unable to ameliorate worsening economic conditions, driving workers and the rural poor to violence that threatened the vestiges of stability of the urban middle classes. Ultimately, the Republican government responded to the unrest as harshly as previous dictatorships and monarchies. Rightists were gaining power, and the entry into Parliament, in 1933, of the Church-backed political organization, the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas) catalyzed a Socialist call for insurrection:

“Confronted with threatened aggression by the reactionaries, and a government incapable of Republican defense, the Left had no choice but to take the defense of the Republic into its hands, making known to the government and the country that it would not tolerate a Monarchist or Fascist coup d’etat cloaked in a fictitious parliamentary proceeding…if power were handed to the right, the Socialist Party would start a revolution…“ [the leading Socialist, J. Alvarez del Vayo, describing the call for insurrection published in January, 1934].

With the call ¡a la calle! (“into the street!”), the mercury miners stormed and occupied the barracks of the Guardia Civil, and took over the administration of local affairs. The revolt lasted two weeks, until the arrival of troops commanded by Generalissimo Franco, fresh from counter-insurgency warfare in colonial Morocco. Severe repression followed, and within two more years, Spain fell into civil war [mikeely.wordpress.com].

Since the sixteenth century, mercury had been used in the extraction of gold and silver from ores, and slave, and, later, convict labor was used at Almadén to obtain the quantities needed to refine ores plundered from the Americas. Some say that there is more mercury at Almadén than anywhere else in the world. The Alamadén mines are ancient. The Romans mined cinnabar there, the mineral from which mercury is extracted. They used it to create beautiful vermilion (red) pigment. The name Almadén derives from the Arabic word meaning “mine,” The Moors used mercury for medicines and in alchemy. The element Mercury is named for the fleet-footed Roman messenger god. The Romans gave this name to the slivery-bright planet closest to the Sun, to denote its  swift rotation. Alchemists associated mercury with the mythical qualities of that planet and called mercury quicksilver. An eighth-century Arabic alchemical text stated that mercury and sulfur were the two principle “qualities” from which all matter is formed. Alchemically shifting the balance of these two qualities would result in “curing” base metals of their impurities, transforming them into the noble metals silver or gold, and likewise cure the base condition of illness, transforming it into health [Alchemy in Europe and the Middle East].

In 936, Caliph Abd ar-Rahman the Third ordered the construction of a vast palace and administrative complex, seven kilometers northwest of Córdoba. With its shining, white buildings arrayed over three ascending terraces built into the hillside at the base of the Sierra Morena, with the Caliph’s palace at the city’s summit, it presented a commanding view from miles distant. Medinat al-Zahra was to be a new city, created from the ground up, the only such project known in Western Europe, and it was meant to dazzle the visitor with its wealth and brilliance. Its name honored the Prophet Mohammad’s daughter, Fatima, the wife of Ali and spiritual mother of all Shi’a imams, and herself revered as a scholar given the title al-Zahra, “the shining,” “the brilliant.”

Brilliant, and provocative, the dazzling city was an expression of the ambitions of the Caliph, who proclaimed himself heir of the Umayyad dynasty, the true Prince of Believers, and declared al-Andaluz, Moorish Spain, utterly independent of the powerful, rival Fatimid Shi’a dynasty of North Africa. Abd ar-Rahman’s son, Al-Hakam the Second, enjoyed a stable reign, but at his death, his young son, Hisham the Second, was in effect deposed, virtually imprisoned in the palace, by Al-Hakam’s vizier, Ibn Abi Amir, known as al-Mansur, “the Victor,” who greatly expanded the power and prosperity of the Umayyid Caliphate. When the vizier’s son acceded to power, he made the strategic error of forcing Hisham to appoint him as legitimate successor. This act of overt disrespect plunged the Caliphate into civil war. Medinat al-Zahra was sacked and burned to the ground. It had dazzled for less than a century. It disappeared and its grandeur fell out of memory for a thousand years.

At its height, Medinat al-Zahra stretched over two kilometers. Ten thousand workers were employed in its building, over twenty-five years, and it supported 20,000 inhabitants. It contained a zoo, an aviary, four fish ponds (where 12,000 loaves of bread were daily fed to the fish), 300 baths and 400 houses, together with weapons factories and barracks.

Two fantastic ministerial chambers (described in a chronicle of the time which praises the beauties of the city as a stimulant to virtue by reflecting the pleasures to be enjoyed by the faithful in paradise), express the significance of light and brilliance to the alchemical imagination of mystical Islam. One contained pure crystals, creating evanescent rainbows when touched by the sun. The other, Kasr-al-Kholaifa, the Hall of the Caliphs, was built of marble and gold, ivory, ebony and precious stones, a fit setting for its central feature, a massive fountain filled with liquid mercury from the mines of Almadén. Its quicksilver could be set in motion at pleasure, with the brush of a hand. And, at night, the faintest moonbeams were reflected a thousand fold in its quivering surface.

Ruinas de Medina Azahara by Nicolás Pérez Rodriguez