There is apparently a universal feeling of dread that accompanies the crashing of computers. The experience is certainly not universal, in as much as some peoples' digital life can be retained, some cannot. You lose the accumulation of your whole digital life, wiped away as though it is simply drops of water on glass. So it was with me, my digital life wiped away with a short clunk. I had been paging through photos on the internet, when the computer froze. I restarted it to nothing. Macs have this lovely little feature of the folder with a blinking question mark on it. It signifies the loss of connection to the drive, the loss of startup instructions. In my case it was definitive.
Losing my digital life has been hard. With each hour I tally yet more that had gotten onto that little platter and nowhere else. I have learned a wicked lesson in multiple sources of data, of backing up my data. Eased by thoughts of not having a dissertation on that disk, of no pressing deadlines, of having gotten two of four field guides off to others before the end. Counting small victories in the face of overwhelming loss. I imagine what the last speaker of a rare indigenous language feels. Only it is not a matter of life and death for me, nor my heritage, it is a hiccup at best, a long drawn out reconstruction. In the language of my life, it is the most personal restoration I've ever engaged in.
Our minds store so much information, yet they too have this fickle recall capacity, so unlike the computer with its tidy folders and exacting replication. I struggle with facts of disappearing field guides, of lost designs, photos, music, endless files of organized research, and all my writings from the last two years. It was as simple as snapping your fingers and it was over. The process of compiling the vestiges of our lives, of bringing our knowledge into a single drive, into a single location. As though the process of bringing all that knowledge brought it all to a vanishing point.
Part of me feels like I am grieving at the loss, part of me is just mad at my stupid complacency. Macs are as fallible as any other machine. No matter how much we humans engineer our machines, they fail. Like plane crashes and dam breaks, unfortunately they tend to fail catastrophically. It is the idea of failure that has captivated me in the last two weeks. Where I work at home, in our little back office I look out on my garden, and specifically the little nursery where I am continually trying to grow plant starts. When my computer first failed, my reaction was one of such shock that I ultimately came home after doing all I could to get it on the road to being fixed and could do nothing. All I found that I could do was endlessly fill two by two inch pots for seed starts. I ultimately filled eight trays before I snapped out of it. My computer failing had brought me back to the ground and to my seeds.
A few days later, sitting under the falling leaves of my hackberry trees, I slowly put seeds into every one of those pots. I planted grasses, jojoba, chard, broccoli raab, beets, agave, sotol, and even kale. As I did, I began to think about knowledge, mainly about all the knowledge that I had lost. It was certainly in my head to a degree, but it was not a replicable knowledge. Sitting under the trees that grew from seeds, the thought of the knowledge that was in each of the seeds in my hands was suddenly real and speaking to me. When you compare the knowledge that is encoded in a seed, to germinate and grow and provide seed and food, it really changes the way you see knowledge. Human knowledge is like us, fleeting. Seeds are enduring and ancient. I planted another row of grass seed as I thought about my loss. In the broader scheme of things, it is meaningless. In my life it is devastating, but temporary, fleeting. Data is not always knowledge.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Sunday, May 11, 2008
The earth always surprises.
Steam rose delicately from the summit of Popocatepetl, the smoking mountain, Don Goyo. The snow level from the afternoon's thunderstorms had pushed all the way down to the treeline, about 3500m and the whole top of the mountain up to the 5452m summit. Lightning flashes across the sky to the south, the deep gray clouds streaked in cracked lightning. The clouds rumble. The steam from the top of Popo curls down, pushed by the downdrafts into the cloud rimmed summit. Curtains of gray, alternating shades of rain falling, drift in to obscure the summit.
Mountains have a serenity about them, a measure of silence, patience. The way clouds move about their distant heights, slowly, deliberately. But the puff of steam rising from Popo changes quickly, mounded one instant, pushing back into the sky against the clouds in the next. From the top of the apartment building in Cholula, surrounded by the impatience and clutter of civilization, of dogs barking, cars roaring by, families laughing in apartments, the hum of the city. In the distance to the north and east, the rim of clouds ended and further in the distance the thunderheads climbed high into the reddening sky of sunset and at that distance motion began to cease.
The earth is in as much constant motion as us humans in our ant-like cities. Plates are moving, subducting, building up pressure, forcing up magma. Images from Chaiten in Chile this week remind me of the immediate fury, and looking at the silent Popo I know it will change. All around me in this city of angles, of rooflines, treelines, water tanks, doors slamming, horns blaring, tvs squawking all would cease and turn to flight if Popo truly came alive. I study the mountain for a quiet moment, the church in the foreground coming alive with light as night falls. The city begins to settle into night rhythms, but there quiet in the distance stands Popo, smoking in the dying light.
The earth always seems to surprise us. Earthquakes spring from only general assessments of threats and hazards of the plates moving, as only volcanic eruptions rise from swarms of earthquakes, subducting plates, and building lava domes. There are those surprises, like Mount Saint Helens in 1980, or Paricutin in Michoacan in 1943. Paricutin began as a fissure in a farmer's corn field that grew over nine years into a 424 m cinder cone. The farmer was said to have kept plowing his field as the rift widened and grew worse on the 20th of February. Mount Saint Helens had only the old man Harry Truman left at Spirit Lake by the time it blew, but when it did, it blew. Where were you when the mountain blew, ran the line on the t-shirt I got visiting my grandparents in Portland that summer.
The earth always surprises us. I read today in the LA Times an editorial by Bill McKibben, quoting James Hansen the climate scientist "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." The feedback loops the climate scientists said existed, do. McKibben quotes Hansen again, "if there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." Silent, there stands the mountain, the snow creeping slowly up the slopes until the snow and the water that sustains this valley are gone. Will it be the rapid thunder of the earth's fire, or the slow build up of our ignorance?
A few errant raindrops scatter across the roof. More lightning runs through the underside of the clouds in the south, toward Atlixco. Popo stands silent as the gray rain clouds drift across the ghostly white slopes. I look at the church that rises in the night framed against Popo, built on the aspirations of religious feeling for the assumption of a better world. Built to worship all that is around and in us. In the darkness outside the window as I write, I hear the sounds of singing, of a congregation in worship. There in the night with the sound of crickets, the voices of a people united in song. The wind ruffles the trees, but the mountain is silent. Fast or slow, the world is changing.
Mountains have a serenity about them, a measure of silence, patience. The way clouds move about their distant heights, slowly, deliberately. But the puff of steam rising from Popo changes quickly, mounded one instant, pushing back into the sky against the clouds in the next. From the top of the apartment building in Cholula, surrounded by the impatience and clutter of civilization, of dogs barking, cars roaring by, families laughing in apartments, the hum of the city. In the distance to the north and east, the rim of clouds ended and further in the distance the thunderheads climbed high into the reddening sky of sunset and at that distance motion began to cease.
The earth is in as much constant motion as us humans in our ant-like cities. Plates are moving, subducting, building up pressure, forcing up magma. Images from Chaiten in Chile this week remind me of the immediate fury, and looking at the silent Popo I know it will change. All around me in this city of angles, of rooflines, treelines, water tanks, doors slamming, horns blaring, tvs squawking all would cease and turn to flight if Popo truly came alive. I study the mountain for a quiet moment, the church in the foreground coming alive with light as night falls. The city begins to settle into night rhythms, but there quiet in the distance stands Popo, smoking in the dying light.
The earth always seems to surprise us. Earthquakes spring from only general assessments of threats and hazards of the plates moving, as only volcanic eruptions rise from swarms of earthquakes, subducting plates, and building lava domes. There are those surprises, like Mount Saint Helens in 1980, or Paricutin in Michoacan in 1943. Paricutin began as a fissure in a farmer's corn field that grew over nine years into a 424 m cinder cone. The farmer was said to have kept plowing his field as the rift widened and grew worse on the 20th of February. Mount Saint Helens had only the old man Harry Truman left at Spirit Lake by the time it blew, but when it did, it blew. Where were you when the mountain blew, ran the line on the t-shirt I got visiting my grandparents in Portland that summer.
The earth always surprises us. I read today in the LA Times an editorial by Bill McKibben, quoting James Hansen the climate scientist "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." The feedback loops the climate scientists said existed, do. McKibben quotes Hansen again, "if there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." Silent, there stands the mountain, the snow creeping slowly up the slopes until the snow and the water that sustains this valley are gone. Will it be the rapid thunder of the earth's fire, or the slow build up of our ignorance?
A few errant raindrops scatter across the roof. More lightning runs through the underside of the clouds in the south, toward Atlixco. Popo stands silent as the gray rain clouds drift across the ghostly white slopes. I look at the church that rises in the night framed against Popo, built on the aspirations of religious feeling for the assumption of a better world. Built to worship all that is around and in us. In the darkness outside the window as I write, I hear the sounds of singing, of a congregation in worship. There in the night with the sound of crickets, the voices of a people united in song. The wind ruffles the trees, but the mountain is silent. Fast or slow, the world is changing.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Patzcuaro haze.
Like the swallows that twist and float around our house every evening, I feel like I’m still looking for something elusive. Like everyone who travels, it is partly something inside us that keeps us out, looking for something beautiful, remarkable, or meaningful. The tasty morsel of the small fly that the swallow snatches out of the air, but like the swallow I’m still out looking even with all I see. The struggle I have is being the tourist, the one with money, amidst so much poverty and genuine struggle. It is difficult to be the tourist, the consumer of cultures and places, when the cultures and the places are in such clear danger of being used up; and what then when they are?
For a bit of context, we have moved on out of DF and are now in a town called Patzcuaro, in the state of Michoacan. Patzcuaro is known for its day of the dead celebrations at the beginning of November every year. It is a town that reminds me of Flagstaff in many ways, not the least of which are the pine trees and the seven fires burning around the city. Fires here are under radically different set of conditions: they have not been wholly interrupted by the fear of fire, so there is not an accumulation of a hundred year fuel load. Instead they are lit on purpose in most cases and they burn slowly and deliberately across huge areas of the landscape. Those areas recently burned are obvious when the rains start because they are the first to green up, the vivid green bunchgrasses against the burnt landscape. The smoke that fills the town and hazes the sky into a golden light still burns my throat.
Patzcuaro is also known for the massive Lago de Patzcuaro about 3km north of the town. The lake is a massive shallow lake that is known for the island of Janitzio, the town crowed by the 40m statue to the independence hero Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon. It is an odd middle-class Mexican retreat in the early summer. Ferries take you out to the island for 35 pesos, and the 50 person launch putters along across the oddly brown water. On a clear day the landscape of dozens of cinder cones that ring the lake must be stunning with the green mountains and red clay-tiled roofs of every town. But not today, as the haze from the smoke all but keeps your attention on the egrets that are balanced and strikingly white in the shallows of the brown water. A mariachi combo cracks out some Norteño tunes for the tourists from Sonora who ride over to the island with us, the drummer is clearly annoyed at me, the gringo who plugs his ear right next to the drum. They play a few songs and then pass the hat.
As we near the island the famous butterfly fisherman (known for their huge butterfly nets) paddle out in their canoes and sort of do a performance, showing off their nets and how they would fish if it were not for the lack of fish in the lake. Two of the men paddle up and hang on to the boat to ask for tips. Everyone obliges. Part of the show, part of the cost. It is especially sad given that the famous whitefish that the butterfly fisherman have perfected their skills on are now endangered, further threatening to make their display into more of an act. Given the number of boats that are beside the water as we circle the island, small flat bottom canoes in dozens of bright colors, the reality of overfishing is not much of a stretch. The island is covered in dingy brick and concrete houses built into every conceivable angle on the slopes of the island. Several young girls play in front of an empty restaurant.
Once we dock on the far side of the island from the little girls, the climb to the top of the island can begin. The streets are a narrow jumble of haphazard buildings built on top of and over each other, with the twisting and turning stairs leading in multiple directions at once, but always upward to the monument. The crafts are cheap and not authentic by any stretch. Their repetition draws us to conclude an Asian origin, the trinkets of mass production with only the name of the town different on them. It is the second sad display of our day. We venture that some racket must control the trade, as the trinkets do not change as we get higher and higher on the island. The paintings are the same, the keychains, the cheap boats of wood and colored string. All the same to the very top of the island. The monument at the top costs 6 pesos to even enter the gates, and is a statue of Morelos y Pavon, right arm raised, surrounded by more stands with more of the same trinkets. Given the line to enter the statue, we pass on climbing up to peer out of the narrow windows at the top of his fist.
On a clear day, the view of Patzcuaro must be stunning. The pine-covered hills ring the lake, rising in every direction to the rolling tops of mountains all around. Through the haze I count seven fires. The largest is to the southwest of Patzcuaro and looks to be making its way down toward the lake. The others are small and dot the landscape. There may be more, but they are not visible with the haze. Disappointed by the whole experience, we wind our way back down through the town, passing restaurants and bars and trinket stands in their endless repetition of the same. At times the dress of the women and the small fried fish and the man we pass knitting a real fishing net suggest a deeper authenticity of the town. The man’s hands dart around and back, around and back, knowingly knitting the net at a speed that remind us of a deeper unseen cultural memory. Besides, who am I to comment on the presence or absence of that which I’ve never seen?
On the boat ride back I wonder about the island, the center of the day of the dead for Mexico. After having seen so much beautiful and remarkable folk art in Patzcuaro it was a challenge to see so little on Janitzio. Was it simply the case that the classes were represented so clearly? The rich having province over Patzcuaro with its ornate artistry, the middle classes having only the cheap replications of that ornate quality? To be a tourist in a foreign land does confer a measure of objectivity, but it also does not always allow for intimacy except in rare cases. At the end of the day, I could see the cheapness of the popular art, the cheapness of the Asian replications of what in Patzxuaro had finally come to be so genuine. Was it simply a function of the conditions forced on Mexico, to be as Porfirio Diaz said, “so far from God, so near the United States”? To be now struggling with the free market as it cheapened and degraded what was once magical quality, with the very basic reality of survival at stake.
The challenge of Mexico seems so clearly to be its humanity. From the perspective of the United States we are apt to be grossly racist, or blame it on corrupt politics, or simply on our ignorance. The Mexico I am discovering is one that smiles even when begging on the street, who clearly appreciates being treated like a human, even if the act is as simply as saying, no gracias señora. The humanity of Mexico is in the artistry and beauty of its people, its culture, and land. For me, the struggle of being a tourist and of having so much amid so many who do not have anything, is in not objectifying. I am an outsider and will forever be outside the magical history of Mexico, but as I learn more about this country and its history I cannot but feel a sense of kinship. No longer do I feel we are so far apart. But I am careful not to suggest this in a paternalistic fashion, for paternalism has brought all the great problems to Mexico. Instead it is in the humanism of concern for a people I wish well, that I wish a good life to—in that is the first step toward a kinship and a recognition we are not so far apart.
For a bit of context, we have moved on out of DF and are now in a town called Patzcuaro, in the state of Michoacan. Patzcuaro is known for its day of the dead celebrations at the beginning of November every year. It is a town that reminds me of Flagstaff in many ways, not the least of which are the pine trees and the seven fires burning around the city. Fires here are under radically different set of conditions: they have not been wholly interrupted by the fear of fire, so there is not an accumulation of a hundred year fuel load. Instead they are lit on purpose in most cases and they burn slowly and deliberately across huge areas of the landscape. Those areas recently burned are obvious when the rains start because they are the first to green up, the vivid green bunchgrasses against the burnt landscape. The smoke that fills the town and hazes the sky into a golden light still burns my throat.
Patzcuaro is also known for the massive Lago de Patzcuaro about 3km north of the town. The lake is a massive shallow lake that is known for the island of Janitzio, the town crowed by the 40m statue to the independence hero Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon. It is an odd middle-class Mexican retreat in the early summer. Ferries take you out to the island for 35 pesos, and the 50 person launch putters along across the oddly brown water. On a clear day the landscape of dozens of cinder cones that ring the lake must be stunning with the green mountains and red clay-tiled roofs of every town. But not today, as the haze from the smoke all but keeps your attention on the egrets that are balanced and strikingly white in the shallows of the brown water. A mariachi combo cracks out some Norteño tunes for the tourists from Sonora who ride over to the island with us, the drummer is clearly annoyed at me, the gringo who plugs his ear right next to the drum. They play a few songs and then pass the hat.
As we near the island the famous butterfly fisherman (known for their huge butterfly nets) paddle out in their canoes and sort of do a performance, showing off their nets and how they would fish if it were not for the lack of fish in the lake. Two of the men paddle up and hang on to the boat to ask for tips. Everyone obliges. Part of the show, part of the cost. It is especially sad given that the famous whitefish that the butterfly fisherman have perfected their skills on are now endangered, further threatening to make their display into more of an act. Given the number of boats that are beside the water as we circle the island, small flat bottom canoes in dozens of bright colors, the reality of overfishing is not much of a stretch. The island is covered in dingy brick and concrete houses built into every conceivable angle on the slopes of the island. Several young girls play in front of an empty restaurant.
Once we dock on the far side of the island from the little girls, the climb to the top of the island can begin. The streets are a narrow jumble of haphazard buildings built on top of and over each other, with the twisting and turning stairs leading in multiple directions at once, but always upward to the monument. The crafts are cheap and not authentic by any stretch. Their repetition draws us to conclude an Asian origin, the trinkets of mass production with only the name of the town different on them. It is the second sad display of our day. We venture that some racket must control the trade, as the trinkets do not change as we get higher and higher on the island. The paintings are the same, the keychains, the cheap boats of wood and colored string. All the same to the very top of the island. The monument at the top costs 6 pesos to even enter the gates, and is a statue of Morelos y Pavon, right arm raised, surrounded by more stands with more of the same trinkets. Given the line to enter the statue, we pass on climbing up to peer out of the narrow windows at the top of his fist.
On a clear day, the view of Patzcuaro must be stunning. The pine-covered hills ring the lake, rising in every direction to the rolling tops of mountains all around. Through the haze I count seven fires. The largest is to the southwest of Patzcuaro and looks to be making its way down toward the lake. The others are small and dot the landscape. There may be more, but they are not visible with the haze. Disappointed by the whole experience, we wind our way back down through the town, passing restaurants and bars and trinket stands in their endless repetition of the same. At times the dress of the women and the small fried fish and the man we pass knitting a real fishing net suggest a deeper authenticity of the town. The man’s hands dart around and back, around and back, knowingly knitting the net at a speed that remind us of a deeper unseen cultural memory. Besides, who am I to comment on the presence or absence of that which I’ve never seen?
On the boat ride back I wonder about the island, the center of the day of the dead for Mexico. After having seen so much beautiful and remarkable folk art in Patzcuaro it was a challenge to see so little on Janitzio. Was it simply the case that the classes were represented so clearly? The rich having province over Patzcuaro with its ornate artistry, the middle classes having only the cheap replications of that ornate quality? To be a tourist in a foreign land does confer a measure of objectivity, but it also does not always allow for intimacy except in rare cases. At the end of the day, I could see the cheapness of the popular art, the cheapness of the Asian replications of what in Patzxuaro had finally come to be so genuine. Was it simply a function of the conditions forced on Mexico, to be as Porfirio Diaz said, “so far from God, so near the United States”? To be now struggling with the free market as it cheapened and degraded what was once magical quality, with the very basic reality of survival at stake.
The challenge of Mexico seems so clearly to be its humanity. From the perspective of the United States we are apt to be grossly racist, or blame it on corrupt politics, or simply on our ignorance. The Mexico I am discovering is one that smiles even when begging on the street, who clearly appreciates being treated like a human, even if the act is as simply as saying, no gracias señora. The humanity of Mexico is in the artistry and beauty of its people, its culture, and land. For me, the struggle of being a tourist and of having so much amid so many who do not have anything, is in not objectifying. I am an outsider and will forever be outside the magical history of Mexico, but as I learn more about this country and its history I cannot but feel a sense of kinship. No longer do I feel we are so far apart. But I am careful not to suggest this in a paternalistic fashion, for paternalism has brought all the great problems to Mexico. Instead it is in the humanism of concern for a people I wish well, that I wish a good life to—in that is the first step toward a kinship and a recognition we are not so far apart.
Teasing Mayahuel.
I was the lone customer in the bar, the sound of the rain that had driven me in still pounding at the door. The walls of the Bar Reforma were covered in the paraphernalia of a life spent gathering Coke and Pepsi advertising, beer posters, Marilyn Monroe and Pancho Villa posters, posters promoting tours to Grecia, and still more Marilyn Monroe posters. From the ceiling hung an array of plastic hibiscus flowers in every color, oddly faded in the fluorescent light. The rain kept up at the door as the sound of passing cars and trucks whizzed and splashed by.
“Hola, buenas tardes.”
The bartender paused in his cleaning ashtrays to acknowledge me. I order a glass of mexcal, Milagro de San Diego. The object of my search, of my fruitless journey to Atlixco, to my getting soaked and to my eventual return to the only bar I knew carried it. The bartender and I talked with my stilted Spanish, he correcting my bad pronunciation of every Nahuatl town name I tried to spit out. “No one I know sells it here.” “Sorry, but we get it directly from the producer.” “This is the last bottle we have, or I’d sell you one.”
“Quien sabes?” Who knows. He’s right, who knows.
With the pace of the world, with the fact that I can hop on a computer and call my family anytime, it seemed such an anomaly that I couldn’t find a bottle of Milagro de San Diego anywhere in Mexico. With the globalization of everything, it seemed odd to have every liquor store owner look at me with such an uncomprehending look, with a “what the hell is this gringo talking about” written on their face. Still, nothing worked and nobody had it. Eventually, I chased the company down on the internet, trolling Google until I finally cross referenced it to a small town about an hour from Cholula, site of the Bar Reforma and where I was staying. On Google Earth it was easy, a short 30km bus ride to Atlixco, then out to Tochimiltzingo. Easy.
The bartender leaves me with orange slices and chili-salt along with a small bowl of peanuts. He moves off to continue cleaning ashtrays. The owner of the bar, obviously the father of the current bartender sits behind me at a table writing letters long hand with a black marker on lined paper. We sit in utter silence. The rain falls outside. The mexcal is smooth, so unlike any other mexcal I’ve had. It finishes with nutty overtones, the scent of smoke, not the raw burst of most mexcals, but delicate. I am alone in a bar in Mexico staring at the bottle of mexcal I cannot have and cannot find.
Part of me wanted desperately to see the farm, the neat rows of agave lined out with the stacked stone walls, to see the fields in some recognizable pattern of pastoral perfection. Part of me was calculating in wanting to talk with the farmers, the distillers, to know their secrets and then divulge them to an audience, so that in my own greed to keep on traveling through Mexico I could share this beautiful mexcal. But when I got on the bus finally in Puebla, after already sitting on a bus for an hour to go from Cholula to Puebla, then rode another hour to Atlixco, my prospects were dimming with the sunlight. As we dropped into Atlixco, the reality of 80,000 people, of an unknown city began dawning.
Why do we get attached to things, memories, or mexcals? They linger on and give some measure of meaning, but they also serve as touchstones, points in time when we experienced life to some greater degree. To a degree outside the bounds of normality, outside of our habits, the usual measure of days. I took another sip, savoring its burning warmth and the twitch that went right to my head. I smiled at the pleasure of Mayahuel, the goddess of the Maguey, the mexcal.
It is unquestionably odd to step off a bus in a totally foreign town, totally alone: the odd sensation of being a lone gringo. Atlixco is a busy, dirty town with narrow streets and crowded narrow sidewalks. I emerged from central bus station, quickly assessing my location by memorizing the cross streets: Independencia and Avila Camacho. I turn and walk quickly up Independencia toward the zocalo in the distance. There is an unnerving amount of police, especially as a loaded truck of police is followed down the street by a Humvee filled with army soldiers, replete with machine gun on top. I look away into a store filled with plastic crap, it interests me all of a sudden. The low rumble of the diesel engine passes on, I walk toward the zocalo.
Try awkward: sitting in a bar in Mexico alone. No one will talk to you, especially once you whip out the pen to write. I finish the short glass as the bartender puts on soft piano music that collides with the rain. The bass of an errant vehicle rattles the bar. I am alone and staring at my empty glass. I ask for another glass but the bartender laughs. He pours me a third of a glass. I have finished the bottle. He leaves me the bottle to study what might have been.
School as just let out in Atlixco and I am moving back and forth among the swarms of kids in the array of school uniforms. I step to the edge of the zocalo and pause, there are several more soldiers, these ones now recruiters. The banners extol service to La Patria, the fatherland. No one is anywhere near the tent except the army. Near the soldiers is another gaggle of police dressed in their black fatigues. Their automatic weapons always creep me out. I cross the street and walk on into the square and don’t stop until I have found a seat, so discomfiting is it to have all eyes on the güero. From my seat in the zocalo, I get my bearings before starting out to find a collectivo (small bus) that might take me to Tochimiltzingo.
I turn the bottle in my hands, happy even to examine it. It seems utterly silly to have come to covet a bottle of something. United Agave Producers of Tochimiltzingo. More than 200 years of tradition, this is a completely organic mexcal. It is glass and a pretty label, just like all of the twenty or thirty other brands of mescal or tequila on the glass shelves. But like the ancient cash register that dominates the center of the bar, stuck on 9 pesos 40 centavos, it is from another age. An age when you couldn’t order it on-line or find it in every store, or any store for that matter. Pride in artesianal production.
Each of the four directions I went from the zocalo proved fruitless. There were small combis (even smaller buses) and even a few collectivos, but nothing to Tochimiltzingo. I was stuck in Atlixco. I began to go in and out of every liquor store, asking for Milagro de San Diego. In every store my ability ask got better and the story elaborated. Still, no one had heard of it. I began to loop back around toward the bus station. Looking, looking, into one store, sent to another, sent back. Then on to the next, the next. No one had heard of the brand, the makers and yet there fifteen kilometers away it was, unknown.
I finish the last sip, cluttered amid the remnants of peanut flavor. The bar mirrors and neon and lights are reflected in the last sip. All the moments of my day distilled down to this multi-layered reality, all the pieces the feelings, memories, ideas, here. Now. Message in a Bottle comes on the stereo. I laugh as I pack up my bags, the rain now stopped. “I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle.” Mayahuel toys with me, teasing.
“Hola, buenas tardes.”
The bartender paused in his cleaning ashtrays to acknowledge me. I order a glass of mexcal, Milagro de San Diego. The object of my search, of my fruitless journey to Atlixco, to my getting soaked and to my eventual return to the only bar I knew carried it. The bartender and I talked with my stilted Spanish, he correcting my bad pronunciation of every Nahuatl town name I tried to spit out. “No one I know sells it here.” “Sorry, but we get it directly from the producer.” “This is the last bottle we have, or I’d sell you one.”
“Quien sabes?” Who knows. He’s right, who knows.
With the pace of the world, with the fact that I can hop on a computer and call my family anytime, it seemed such an anomaly that I couldn’t find a bottle of Milagro de San Diego anywhere in Mexico. With the globalization of everything, it seemed odd to have every liquor store owner look at me with such an uncomprehending look, with a “what the hell is this gringo talking about” written on their face. Still, nothing worked and nobody had it. Eventually, I chased the company down on the internet, trolling Google until I finally cross referenced it to a small town about an hour from Cholula, site of the Bar Reforma and where I was staying. On Google Earth it was easy, a short 30km bus ride to Atlixco, then out to Tochimiltzingo. Easy.
The bartender leaves me with orange slices and chili-salt along with a small bowl of peanuts. He moves off to continue cleaning ashtrays. The owner of the bar, obviously the father of the current bartender sits behind me at a table writing letters long hand with a black marker on lined paper. We sit in utter silence. The rain falls outside. The mexcal is smooth, so unlike any other mexcal I’ve had. It finishes with nutty overtones, the scent of smoke, not the raw burst of most mexcals, but delicate. I am alone in a bar in Mexico staring at the bottle of mexcal I cannot have and cannot find.
Part of me wanted desperately to see the farm, the neat rows of agave lined out with the stacked stone walls, to see the fields in some recognizable pattern of pastoral perfection. Part of me was calculating in wanting to talk with the farmers, the distillers, to know their secrets and then divulge them to an audience, so that in my own greed to keep on traveling through Mexico I could share this beautiful mexcal. But when I got on the bus finally in Puebla, after already sitting on a bus for an hour to go from Cholula to Puebla, then rode another hour to Atlixco, my prospects were dimming with the sunlight. As we dropped into Atlixco, the reality of 80,000 people, of an unknown city began dawning.
Why do we get attached to things, memories, or mexcals? They linger on and give some measure of meaning, but they also serve as touchstones, points in time when we experienced life to some greater degree. To a degree outside the bounds of normality, outside of our habits, the usual measure of days. I took another sip, savoring its burning warmth and the twitch that went right to my head. I smiled at the pleasure of Mayahuel, the goddess of the Maguey, the mexcal.
It is unquestionably odd to step off a bus in a totally foreign town, totally alone: the odd sensation of being a lone gringo. Atlixco is a busy, dirty town with narrow streets and crowded narrow sidewalks. I emerged from central bus station, quickly assessing my location by memorizing the cross streets: Independencia and Avila Camacho. I turn and walk quickly up Independencia toward the zocalo in the distance. There is an unnerving amount of police, especially as a loaded truck of police is followed down the street by a Humvee filled with army soldiers, replete with machine gun on top. I look away into a store filled with plastic crap, it interests me all of a sudden. The low rumble of the diesel engine passes on, I walk toward the zocalo.
Try awkward: sitting in a bar in Mexico alone. No one will talk to you, especially once you whip out the pen to write. I finish the short glass as the bartender puts on soft piano music that collides with the rain. The bass of an errant vehicle rattles the bar. I am alone and staring at my empty glass. I ask for another glass but the bartender laughs. He pours me a third of a glass. I have finished the bottle. He leaves me the bottle to study what might have been.
School as just let out in Atlixco and I am moving back and forth among the swarms of kids in the array of school uniforms. I step to the edge of the zocalo and pause, there are several more soldiers, these ones now recruiters. The banners extol service to La Patria, the fatherland. No one is anywhere near the tent except the army. Near the soldiers is another gaggle of police dressed in their black fatigues. Their automatic weapons always creep me out. I cross the street and walk on into the square and don’t stop until I have found a seat, so discomfiting is it to have all eyes on the güero. From my seat in the zocalo, I get my bearings before starting out to find a collectivo (small bus) that might take me to Tochimiltzingo.
I turn the bottle in my hands, happy even to examine it. It seems utterly silly to have come to covet a bottle of something. United Agave Producers of Tochimiltzingo. More than 200 years of tradition, this is a completely organic mexcal. It is glass and a pretty label, just like all of the twenty or thirty other brands of mescal or tequila on the glass shelves. But like the ancient cash register that dominates the center of the bar, stuck on 9 pesos 40 centavos, it is from another age. An age when you couldn’t order it on-line or find it in every store, or any store for that matter. Pride in artesianal production.
Each of the four directions I went from the zocalo proved fruitless. There were small combis (even smaller buses) and even a few collectivos, but nothing to Tochimiltzingo. I was stuck in Atlixco. I began to go in and out of every liquor store, asking for Milagro de San Diego. In every store my ability ask got better and the story elaborated. Still, no one had heard of it. I began to loop back around toward the bus station. Looking, looking, into one store, sent to another, sent back. Then on to the next, the next. No one had heard of the brand, the makers and yet there fifteen kilometers away it was, unknown.
I finish the last sip, cluttered amid the remnants of peanut flavor. The bar mirrors and neon and lights are reflected in the last sip. All the moments of my day distilled down to this multi-layered reality, all the pieces the feelings, memories, ideas, here. Now. Message in a Bottle comes on the stereo. I laugh as I pack up my bags, the rain now stopped. “I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle.” Mayahuel toys with me, teasing.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Trotsky and the Hummer.
The two small finches seemed out of place hopping around on the lawn. Especially with their red crowns and rumps, it seemed almost too scripted. Less than ten meters away from the small concrete monument where Leon Trotsky’s ashes lie, it seemed a bit peculiar that these two red house finches were picking around on the lawn. I recalled a line from Thoreau when he was talking about being a two hundred year old dead tree, “here stands Henry David Thoreau”, and the thought of finches was unavoidably cliché: here hops Leon Trotsky. One stopped to twist its head at me, uncertain of my sitting there lost in thought and alone in Trotsky’s garden.
Beyond the brick wall to the north the roar of capitalist domination was a bit much to ignore, the thousands of cars a minute on the Rio Churubusco. But here were these two inexplicable red finches, not a single other one like them among the dozen or so in the garden. Inexplicable too was the scarlet red bougainvillea in bloom behind the concrete monument adorned with the hammer and sickle and the red flag of the Soviet Union fluttering gently behind it. Here was Trotsky’s last stand, his last home, the chicken cages from which he drew so much peace and pleasure in those last days.
The story told here is one of unrelenting persecution by Stalin. First to Kazakhstan, then Turkey, France, Norway, until finally the Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas agreed to political asylum and his last days. Virtually the entire Trotsky family were eventually killed by Stalin and his cronies. The windows facing Morelos, the street to the east of the Casa Trotsky, were bricked halfway up while the portico to the south no longer existed behind the bricks. These fortifications came after the first attack on Trotsky’s life in May of 1940. Where there once was a door leading to the garden from the Trotsky’s room there is now only a small window and three doors of massive reinforced steel. Lazaro Cardenas ordered the bunker quality steel installed after the first attempt on Trotsky’s life.
The irony of the massive road to the north of Casa Trotsky, with all its constant rushing vehicles is like much of the irony in modern life. Here is this massive figure in the intellectual struggle that defined the twentieth century, and the most emblematic fruits of capitalism rush by in a constant stream and roar. What more could we do to punish the legacy of Trotsky and any lingering hope of a worker’s revolution? Build a McDonald’s next door, complete with a Trotsky slide? A maquila that produces cheap Trotsky t-shirts and boxer shorts? Or maybe just a Hummer dealership?
While Casa Trotsky was fortified like a bunker, Frida Kahlo’s nearby Casa Azul is its diametric opposite. Open, airy, light, the sound of water in the fountain whose bottom is tiled with the images of two frogs. Delicate white orchids and rough volcanic stone set off by a soft coolness of the strikingly blue walls. Amid the massive collection of sketches, books, photographs, and Aztec codex’s her house exudes her aura with both color and contemplativeness. Just as you can stare at the brushes she used, still twisted around together in their glass jars, the small paint jars, the huge mortar and pestle sitting on Diego Rivera’s own desk that sits beside hers. Every window opens to the outside, for a fluidity in the space that does not exist at Casa Trotsky, it is as if she just stepped out.
Are these the twin fates of the revolutionary and the artist? One persecuted until he built his own prison, the other imprisoned inside her painful body? And yet both created legacies that linger on in these two monuments to their lives, in bodies of work that live on. While Trotsky’s image and work have not been fetishized so completely as Frida’s have been, we still have this fetishism of their work and their lives that is so integral to capitalism and its commodification of both people and things. It is the very essence of capitalism that we now sell access to their homes. For a small price we can take home a t-shirt or two and steal a moment to wander through their houses so that we can understand who they were and how they lived.
The Soviet flag flutters delicately in the garden. The monument to Trotsky stands silent while the traffic roars. From the little bench I sit on I can see the trees and the house and the two red finches hopping about looking for bugs in the grass. But in my immediate memory and against the tide of the traffic, having just walked from Casa Azul to Casa Trotsky, all I can hear in my heart is the sound of blue water in a fountain of two frogs.
Beyond the brick wall to the north the roar of capitalist domination was a bit much to ignore, the thousands of cars a minute on the Rio Churubusco. But here were these two inexplicable red finches, not a single other one like them among the dozen or so in the garden. Inexplicable too was the scarlet red bougainvillea in bloom behind the concrete monument adorned with the hammer and sickle and the red flag of the Soviet Union fluttering gently behind it. Here was Trotsky’s last stand, his last home, the chicken cages from which he drew so much peace and pleasure in those last days.
The story told here is one of unrelenting persecution by Stalin. First to Kazakhstan, then Turkey, France, Norway, until finally the Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas agreed to political asylum and his last days. Virtually the entire Trotsky family were eventually killed by Stalin and his cronies. The windows facing Morelos, the street to the east of the Casa Trotsky, were bricked halfway up while the portico to the south no longer existed behind the bricks. These fortifications came after the first attack on Trotsky’s life in May of 1940. Where there once was a door leading to the garden from the Trotsky’s room there is now only a small window and three doors of massive reinforced steel. Lazaro Cardenas ordered the bunker quality steel installed after the first attempt on Trotsky’s life.
The irony of the massive road to the north of Casa Trotsky, with all its constant rushing vehicles is like much of the irony in modern life. Here is this massive figure in the intellectual struggle that defined the twentieth century, and the most emblematic fruits of capitalism rush by in a constant stream and roar. What more could we do to punish the legacy of Trotsky and any lingering hope of a worker’s revolution? Build a McDonald’s next door, complete with a Trotsky slide? A maquila that produces cheap Trotsky t-shirts and boxer shorts? Or maybe just a Hummer dealership?
While Casa Trotsky was fortified like a bunker, Frida Kahlo’s nearby Casa Azul is its diametric opposite. Open, airy, light, the sound of water in the fountain whose bottom is tiled with the images of two frogs. Delicate white orchids and rough volcanic stone set off by a soft coolness of the strikingly blue walls. Amid the massive collection of sketches, books, photographs, and Aztec codex’s her house exudes her aura with both color and contemplativeness. Just as you can stare at the brushes she used, still twisted around together in their glass jars, the small paint jars, the huge mortar and pestle sitting on Diego Rivera’s own desk that sits beside hers. Every window opens to the outside, for a fluidity in the space that does not exist at Casa Trotsky, it is as if she just stepped out.
Are these the twin fates of the revolutionary and the artist? One persecuted until he built his own prison, the other imprisoned inside her painful body? And yet both created legacies that linger on in these two monuments to their lives, in bodies of work that live on. While Trotsky’s image and work have not been fetishized so completely as Frida’s have been, we still have this fetishism of their work and their lives that is so integral to capitalism and its commodification of both people and things. It is the very essence of capitalism that we now sell access to their homes. For a small price we can take home a t-shirt or two and steal a moment to wander through their houses so that we can understand who they were and how they lived.
The Soviet flag flutters delicately in the garden. The monument to Trotsky stands silent while the traffic roars. From the little bench I sit on I can see the trees and the house and the two red finches hopping about looking for bugs in the grass. But in my immediate memory and against the tide of the traffic, having just walked from Casa Azul to Casa Trotsky, all I can hear in my heart is the sound of blue water in a fountain of two frogs.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Looking at walls.
And then, after all of the massing clouds and the lost sun, it began to rain. Just as in the desert at home the rain brought immediate relief, as the coolness of rain from the clouds washed over the city with the wind that slowly made its way through the trees. The trees that line the street we live on in Coyoacan are magnificent and huge. They catch the slightest wind that makes its way through the city, rustling with a gentle and inviting softness that is infrequent here amid the sharpness and exclusion of all the walls. The walls which in many ways dominate and explain this city and its divisions. Walls that for the insider delineate and create the comfortable space of home, walls that for the outsider exclude at all costs. Lightning flashes across the gray sky of Coyoacan, followed by thunder. The rain drizzles fitfully as the light of the setting sun cuts across the city and throws the shadow of one wall on another.
To say that walls explain this city and its divisions is overly simplistic, but it does go some distance to understanding the development of its architecture amid the wars and the desire to keep what one has obtained. From the richer suburbs of Coyoacan and San Angel you see the walls and gates come right to the edge of the sidewalks. From there the walls rise to glass topped concrete, or multiple pointed spears of steel, or wooden slats, or creeper vines woven through steel fences, or chain-link, or massive concrete constructions topped by electified fences. The cat burglar instincts must have been perfected here in DF, as fifteen to twenty feet is normal and common. Some houses like my own, are built to fit between the other walls on either side. To one side the wall drops from our terrace to the car parked below, behind a blue steel door. To the other to our own carport and then to yet another wall and our neighbor's peach tree. The stone facade of our neighbor complements the wood of our own door and the steel of the other neighbor.
Many of the wealthier parts of the city have considerable tree cover even with the walls that reach the roads. Even so, still in other areas like the Centro Historico you have lonely trees struggling to survive among the vastly more urbanized landscape, which rise from shops at street level immediately to residential blocks above, all more European in style and design. In areas like Coyoacan, once a suburb of the city, massive trees rise fifteen to twenty meters from root systems that have generated undulating sidewalks of shifting surfaces. It is never wise to look away from where you are walking in those parts of the city with trees. But behind those walls, often hidden like our neighbor's peach tree are the trees. Walking along one particularly large wall in San Angel, the massive trees above formed a complete canopy above, with only the hint of the massive house behind. In the long sixty feet of the wall the only thing carved into it was a niche for the Virgen de Guadalupe near one end.
Tasha pointed out the other day that the development of walls had some correlation to the development of warfare and the desire of the few to keep out the many. Unlike the large lawn and the social bearing of landscaping in the US, there is none of that here in the city. To have a few small potted plants on the balcony is a luxury, to have a wall or a fence is protection. Whether glass or electrical wire, the walls here mean business. But even so, peeking over most every wall is a tree. Beyond the line of erect Italian cypress trees in the convent, the drape of bouganvilla over the high wall of a massive blue house, or the tree off Avenida Mexico that forms the pinnacle of the wall itself. Some walls are plain, dirty and dingy from the soot of the city. Others are pure white, others vivid colors, still others tiled like the interior of a shower. Walls everywhere.
Through the heat of yet another Mexico city day, the clouds are building, but there is no respite yet. The air is still. The anticipation of another storm brings its own blend of relief. I stare at the wall of the neighbor and at a line of bamboo that appears to be dying two houses down. Reading the news today I came across the picture of the wall being built along the border, so far from here, so near my home. Are we desperate enough about losing what we have, that all we can do is build a wall?
To say that walls explain this city and its divisions is overly simplistic, but it does go some distance to understanding the development of its architecture amid the wars and the desire to keep what one has obtained. From the richer suburbs of Coyoacan and San Angel you see the walls and gates come right to the edge of the sidewalks. From there the walls rise to glass topped concrete, or multiple pointed spears of steel, or wooden slats, or creeper vines woven through steel fences, or chain-link, or massive concrete constructions topped by electified fences. The cat burglar instincts must have been perfected here in DF, as fifteen to twenty feet is normal and common. Some houses like my own, are built to fit between the other walls on either side. To one side the wall drops from our terrace to the car parked below, behind a blue steel door. To the other to our own carport and then to yet another wall and our neighbor's peach tree. The stone facade of our neighbor complements the wood of our own door and the steel of the other neighbor.
Many of the wealthier parts of the city have considerable tree cover even with the walls that reach the roads. Even so, still in other areas like the Centro Historico you have lonely trees struggling to survive among the vastly more urbanized landscape, which rise from shops at street level immediately to residential blocks above, all more European in style and design. In areas like Coyoacan, once a suburb of the city, massive trees rise fifteen to twenty meters from root systems that have generated undulating sidewalks of shifting surfaces. It is never wise to look away from where you are walking in those parts of the city with trees. But behind those walls, often hidden like our neighbor's peach tree are the trees. Walking along one particularly large wall in San Angel, the massive trees above formed a complete canopy above, with only the hint of the massive house behind. In the long sixty feet of the wall the only thing carved into it was a niche for the Virgen de Guadalupe near one end.
Tasha pointed out the other day that the development of walls had some correlation to the development of warfare and the desire of the few to keep out the many. Unlike the large lawn and the social bearing of landscaping in the US, there is none of that here in the city. To have a few small potted plants on the balcony is a luxury, to have a wall or a fence is protection. Whether glass or electrical wire, the walls here mean business. But even so, peeking over most every wall is a tree. Beyond the line of erect Italian cypress trees in the convent, the drape of bouganvilla over the high wall of a massive blue house, or the tree off Avenida Mexico that forms the pinnacle of the wall itself. Some walls are plain, dirty and dingy from the soot of the city. Others are pure white, others vivid colors, still others tiled like the interior of a shower. Walls everywhere.
Through the heat of yet another Mexico city day, the clouds are building, but there is no respite yet. The air is still. The anticipation of another storm brings its own blend of relief. I stare at the wall of the neighbor and at a line of bamboo that appears to be dying two houses down. Reading the news today I came across the picture of the wall being built along the border, so far from here, so near my home. Are we desperate enough about losing what we have, that all we can do is build a wall?
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Postscript to the Butterfly
Sunday afternoon we went to the National Orchestra for an Homage to Octavio Paz at Belles Artes. Belles Artes is the massive Palace of Fine Arts, whose interior recalls a finer time of the last century. Singing and commissioned symphonic works proved difficult to sit through on five hours of sleep. Not to mention that our seats on the second balcony were in the front row and lacked all but enough space for our legs. The opera star, the forty person choir, the black tied orchestra, all trappings of the immense cultural life that Mexico sustains. We left at the intermission unable to enjoy it because we were so tired.
On my way to Belles Artes I had noticed people in PRD yellow (the main leftist opposition party) massing everywhere, streaming toward the Zocalo. As we came out of Belles Artes thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people were streaming past. We started toward the Zocalo but were stopped by the sight of the road filled with tens of thousands of people walking. The eight blocks you could see back to the Zocalo were totally filled with people. The movement in defense of Petroleum and the PRD had massed 200,000+ people in the Zocalo against Calderon's plan to privatize PEMEX.
On my way to Belles Artes I had noticed people in PRD yellow (the main leftist opposition party) massing everywhere, streaming toward the Zocalo. As we came out of Belles Artes thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people were streaming past. We started toward the Zocalo but were stopped by the sight of the road filled with tens of thousands of people walking. The eight blocks you could see back to the Zocalo were totally filled with people. The movement in defense of Petroleum and the PRD had massed 200,000+ people in the Zocalo against Calderon's plan to privatize PEMEX.
Monday, April 14, 2008
The Butterfly and the Luchador.
In that place at that time, I assumed I was there to see something subtle, unexpected. I stood on the edge of Balderas, a four lane avenida that runs south from the Alameda Central, a huge park next to Belles Artes. The light turned green up the street and the rise of the traffic roar made me think of a drag race. Taxis whipped by first, then the stream of five lanes of traffic in four lanes. Collectivos, taxis, jettas, scooters, all roaring, then came a break. A little boy was wailing for his mother, standing alone, lost in his own sorrow. He would cock his finger and shoot me as we walked by several minutes hence. But my back was tired from standing on the edge of the road and I squatted down to stretch. Another rush of traffic flashed past. Something fluttering beneath the green canopy that hung over the road caught my eye. An almost painful yellow swallowtail bounced along above the road. The road remained quiet.
Mexico is an array of this duality. While you have the madness and the roar of the road you have the quiet flutter of the butterfly. With the wildly rich, you have the absurdly poor. The indigenous woman in her eighties sitting on the steps coming out of the Metro station, wrapped in a fraying shawl against the rain, getting stepped over by the young man in the crisp suit carrying a leather briefcase on his way somewhere else. The shopping mall in Coyoacan looks out past its massive windows and pure white marble floors onto the dingy city across Avenida Universidad. These contrasts are nothing new, Octavio Paz wrote the book on duality with Conjunctions and Disjunctions. Writers of all stripes in Mexico and from abroad have considered the question. The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes writes about the dilemma in his novel The Death of Artemio Cruz, "We have allowed ourselves to be divided and controlled by the ruthless, the ambitious, and the mediocre. Those who wanted a true revolution, radical and uncompromising, are unfortunately ignorant and bloody men. And the literate element want only a half-revolution, compatible with what interests them, their only interest, getting on in the world, living well, replacing Don Porfirio's elite. There you have Mexico's drama." So it plays out.
That night we take a cab to Arena Mexico, in the Roma district, for a Lucha Libre match. Think WWF with masks. We step out of the cab into a dizzying spin of lights and stands of Luchador paraphernalia, replete with plastic square foot rings and action figures. A woman stops me immediately, "Bolletos, Senor?" No, I don't need tickets, I reply. We find our friends and step through the madness to the Ticketmaster sponsored window, a narrow one-way mirror rectangle with a two inch slit at the bottom. Tickets in hand we start in to the match with the famous Misterio but are directed to the other side of the arena. The long walk through the endless Luchador bazaar, the masks, hats, jackets, shirts, action figures, taco stands, helados, junk food, and finally we reach the gate. After being frisked, we show our tickets to one guy in a suit who scans the ticket, who directs you to the next guy who takes the actual stub. The accelerating music of a rock-star entrance is coming from the arena as we enter up the dingy stairwell, up and up.
The world of the Luchador is the world of fantasy. A slap across the chest resounds up to our seats in the second balcony, the other fighter wildly jerks his head in apparent struggle against the blow. Another, another. Taking his head, he leads him toward the center where he is swung toward the springy ropes, one ducks the other thrusts, they bounce off opposite ropes in a coregraphed ballet of giants. Finally the blow is landed and one of them flips over and slams down on the ground. The crowd is lethargic in their applause. Several moves later, including a leaping, spinning wrap of legs around one guys neck off the top rope, the Luchador is out of ring and struggling to stay upright. The other fighter rears back for a dash, the crowd rises in anticipation and there is a massive body soaring out of the ring. The crowd erupts as the one man in flight clobbers the other in the first real smash of bodies. Both men lie struggling on the ground for several seconds as the others fight on. There always is another fight in the Lucha Libre.
Like so many other aspects of life in Mexico, the classes are divided. Not so different than anywhere else in the world where expensive tickets get the better seats, but here in the Arena Mexico the divisions are enforced by fences. Throughout the arena it is easy to see where each new ticket price begins and ends, marked by chain-link. So we watch the Luchador's battle it out from inside a cage of our own. The crowd erupts as another muscle-bound guy flys through the air. The battle royale ensues, the bad guys have all entered the ring and are ganging up on a poor jerk who is about the lose his mask. It is the mask that seems so challenging, what face will we see? Will it be the face of the poor or the rich? Will it matter? The crowd roars its approval as the mask is flung into the air. The Blue Panther is unmasked, but he clutches at his face to remain anonymous. The next day we are in a bar and see the match on television. Even the camera shied away from revealing the identity of the Blue Panther so that the fantasy could remain.
Fantasy is not an option for most of the population, the vast majority struggles to make 60 pesos, or about 6 bucks a day. But fantasy persists in the advertising and the mirage of the global market-come, become part of the world by drinking this Coke, or using that makeup. Fantasy persists in the excitement of the Lucha Libre and the screaming woman who gets in the face of one of the Luchador's. The camera cues in on her, her anger is real, the visceral hatred for the Luchador who now yells right back. How is it that the anger of being left out, of being ruled by the mediocre and the cunning has not led us all to fighting back, instead of fighting amongst ourselves for the crumbs? They are both restrained and the match resumes. The lights flutter and the scantily clad women come out to announce the final match of the night.
The pleasure of the Luchador is in the realization of the fantasy. Of letting go into the slap on the chest as though it were a righteous slug to the jaw, of the flip and the crash of a huge wrestler onto another outside the ring. As though this were all real. What of life here is real? Not the well-dressed women who parade through the expensive parts of town, who emerge from BMWs and go into the expensive laser hair removal salons. The crushing poverty is real, like the little baby lying under the stairs in the shade beside the six lane road while his mother and four siblings sell popsicles among the stopped traffic. The man in the dirty shirt who rushes into traffic to wash a window, for pesos, centavos, anything. The victorious Luchadors raise their arms, the crowd roars and the night is over.
I do not have the capacity to understand or decipher the duality of the Mexican character. But the duality of daily life here, of the collectivos packed full of people stopped in traffic beside the Range Rover with chrome rims and a single driver, that I can see and understand. The wealth and the poverty at one and the same time, both Mexico and Mexican. In those short hours in the Arena Mexico, I saw that the line between the duality is at times transparent. We could still see out of our cage and into the arena that erupted in cheers. The crowd cheering together, we recognized in some small measure the tenuousness of reality. There on the side of Balderas was the same tenuousness, the delicate beauty of the swallowtail amid the roar of the traffic. Alive for less than a month and wandering the concrete canyons searching out flowers and nectar. Fuentes was right in that we are all looking for how to get on in the world.
Mexico is an array of this duality. While you have the madness and the roar of the road you have the quiet flutter of the butterfly. With the wildly rich, you have the absurdly poor. The indigenous woman in her eighties sitting on the steps coming out of the Metro station, wrapped in a fraying shawl against the rain, getting stepped over by the young man in the crisp suit carrying a leather briefcase on his way somewhere else. The shopping mall in Coyoacan looks out past its massive windows and pure white marble floors onto the dingy city across Avenida Universidad. These contrasts are nothing new, Octavio Paz wrote the book on duality with Conjunctions and Disjunctions. Writers of all stripes in Mexico and from abroad have considered the question. The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes writes about the dilemma in his novel The Death of Artemio Cruz, "We have allowed ourselves to be divided and controlled by the ruthless, the ambitious, and the mediocre. Those who wanted a true revolution, radical and uncompromising, are unfortunately ignorant and bloody men. And the literate element want only a half-revolution, compatible with what interests them, their only interest, getting on in the world, living well, replacing Don Porfirio's elite. There you have Mexico's drama." So it plays out.
That night we take a cab to Arena Mexico, in the Roma district, for a Lucha Libre match. Think WWF with masks. We step out of the cab into a dizzying spin of lights and stands of Luchador paraphernalia, replete with plastic square foot rings and action figures. A woman stops me immediately, "Bolletos, Senor?" No, I don't need tickets, I reply. We find our friends and step through the madness to the Ticketmaster sponsored window, a narrow one-way mirror rectangle with a two inch slit at the bottom. Tickets in hand we start in to the match with the famous Misterio but are directed to the other side of the arena. The long walk through the endless Luchador bazaar, the masks, hats, jackets, shirts, action figures, taco stands, helados, junk food, and finally we reach the gate. After being frisked, we show our tickets to one guy in a suit who scans the ticket, who directs you to the next guy who takes the actual stub. The accelerating music of a rock-star entrance is coming from the arena as we enter up the dingy stairwell, up and up.
The world of the Luchador is the world of fantasy. A slap across the chest resounds up to our seats in the second balcony, the other fighter wildly jerks his head in apparent struggle against the blow. Another, another. Taking his head, he leads him toward the center where he is swung toward the springy ropes, one ducks the other thrusts, they bounce off opposite ropes in a coregraphed ballet of giants. Finally the blow is landed and one of them flips over and slams down on the ground. The crowd is lethargic in their applause. Several moves later, including a leaping, spinning wrap of legs around one guys neck off the top rope, the Luchador is out of ring and struggling to stay upright. The other fighter rears back for a dash, the crowd rises in anticipation and there is a massive body soaring out of the ring. The crowd erupts as the one man in flight clobbers the other in the first real smash of bodies. Both men lie struggling on the ground for several seconds as the others fight on. There always is another fight in the Lucha Libre.
Like so many other aspects of life in Mexico, the classes are divided. Not so different than anywhere else in the world where expensive tickets get the better seats, but here in the Arena Mexico the divisions are enforced by fences. Throughout the arena it is easy to see where each new ticket price begins and ends, marked by chain-link. So we watch the Luchador's battle it out from inside a cage of our own. The crowd erupts as another muscle-bound guy flys through the air. The battle royale ensues, the bad guys have all entered the ring and are ganging up on a poor jerk who is about the lose his mask. It is the mask that seems so challenging, what face will we see? Will it be the face of the poor or the rich? Will it matter? The crowd roars its approval as the mask is flung into the air. The Blue Panther is unmasked, but he clutches at his face to remain anonymous. The next day we are in a bar and see the match on television. Even the camera shied away from revealing the identity of the Blue Panther so that the fantasy could remain.
Fantasy is not an option for most of the population, the vast majority struggles to make 60 pesos, or about 6 bucks a day. But fantasy persists in the advertising and the mirage of the global market-come, become part of the world by drinking this Coke, or using that makeup. Fantasy persists in the excitement of the Lucha Libre and the screaming woman who gets in the face of one of the Luchador's. The camera cues in on her, her anger is real, the visceral hatred for the Luchador who now yells right back. How is it that the anger of being left out, of being ruled by the mediocre and the cunning has not led us all to fighting back, instead of fighting amongst ourselves for the crumbs? They are both restrained and the match resumes. The lights flutter and the scantily clad women come out to announce the final match of the night.
The pleasure of the Luchador is in the realization of the fantasy. Of letting go into the slap on the chest as though it were a righteous slug to the jaw, of the flip and the crash of a huge wrestler onto another outside the ring. As though this were all real. What of life here is real? Not the well-dressed women who parade through the expensive parts of town, who emerge from BMWs and go into the expensive laser hair removal salons. The crushing poverty is real, like the little baby lying under the stairs in the shade beside the six lane road while his mother and four siblings sell popsicles among the stopped traffic. The man in the dirty shirt who rushes into traffic to wash a window, for pesos, centavos, anything. The victorious Luchadors raise their arms, the crowd roars and the night is over.
I do not have the capacity to understand or decipher the duality of the Mexican character. But the duality of daily life here, of the collectivos packed full of people stopped in traffic beside the Range Rover with chrome rims and a single driver, that I can see and understand. The wealth and the poverty at one and the same time, both Mexico and Mexican. In those short hours in the Arena Mexico, I saw that the line between the duality is at times transparent. We could still see out of our cage and into the arena that erupted in cheers. The crowd cheering together, we recognized in some small measure the tenuousness of reality. There on the side of Balderas was the same tenuousness, the delicate beauty of the swallowtail amid the roar of the traffic. Alive for less than a month and wandering the concrete canyons searching out flowers and nectar. Fuentes was right in that we are all looking for how to get on in the world.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
On the ecology of letting go.
It is no secret. I hate flying. Bump. Up, down, oh god. Was that my stomach I just left behind? My mother would be proud that in those moments I inevitably call on the Virgen; oh please, not yet. But through the heavy brown haze I could actually see the Bascilia de La Virgen. It was then the full impact of being back in DF hit me, and my life in the States just left me. The plane jostled around a few more times as we bucked around in the rough air above the city, DF, the Federal District. I forgot entirely about my fear of imminent death long enough to scan out over the city, the endless city of brown built upon itself generations on generations, centuries on centuries. Scrolling under my momentary tube of death are the glass spires of Polanco, Roma and the financial districts, the long drag of roads in every direction, the endless scramble of roads and traffic, the haze that ends the city long before humans building it have. Dropping out of the sky it occurred to me that beyond those few areas of the city I have visited, this massive city of over 25 million was totally unknown. At a point, you just have to let go of ever knowing much.
For those who have never been here, it is a rare sight to look at a city that is packed together like this. Quite unlike cities in the States, there is no space that has not been used. There are no quarter mile wide freeways, there is no expansive lawn between suburban houses, there is not the order of the grid. It is a city that has grown inside out, just as all the houses grow from the inside out: from the intricate potted gardens to the non-descript wall and locked gates that face the streets topped in shards of glass and razor wire. Describing a city in the States as a machine is far more appropriate than calling DF a machine, it is far too organic, chaotic, and unpredictable to achieve an even remotely similar status. From the predictable motion of a traffic light change and the patient but slow shudder of morning rush hour traffic on a freeway in Phoenix, I am falling into chaos. The shudder and roar of the aluminum tube slams me back to earth and DF.
Airports are strange bubbles, prone to the global shopping mall aesthetic, utterly unlike what's actually across the street in this case. Those last few seconds of flight coming down you whip over building after building after building, laundry fluttering, a pack of dogs, a man painting the railing off a second story, an open window, stickers on windows of parked cars- then suddenly over the wall into the massive lawn and its asphalt runways. Off the plane on the moving walkway you'd never know you were in Mexico, with Beckham and his Motorola Razr staring at you from the lighted ads. Then out through the shopping mall of Duty Free booze and perfume, down the stairs and through the first round of customs. Luggage in hand, the final step is pushing the red button that tells you whether you get searched. I get the green light.
It is a simple process to leave the airport: find a cab that won't kidnap you. Authorized taxis cost a lot more than the ubiquitous green VW bugs, but you know you'll get to where you're going. "Senor? Taxi?" Everyone's a taxi driver, but you pay the tax and into the little sedan you go. Money makes the world move faster and in a few minutes I am on the go. Strange that I find it less fearful to ride in a cab in DF without a belt than I do riding in an airplane, perhaps it is mad belief in the chaos of all these drivers weaving in and out of traffic, of the strange etiquette that emerges on the roads, or the notable lack of horns and stop signs. Maybe it is a fear of heights and falling, not the the sixty kilometer an hour rush along the Avenida. Irrational we are. I sit back in the cab, roll down the window to the rush of air, and let go.
Later, I am sitting on the roof of my new home for the next few weeks, a jet takes off and I play back the afternoon. The disorientation of being in two places at once takes hold and I consider the jacaranda trees I'd asked the cab driver about. In the spaces between my fear I had noticed these splotches of purple while I flew over the city. Across the street, under a street light yet another bundle of purple jacaranda glows. These trees bloom only around Semana Santa, or Holy Week, my cab driver told me. In fact, they are in the trumpet creeper family and all around the world they herald spring. In DF, they bloom everywhere, across the street, next door, directly behind our house to the south in the garden of Frida Kahlo's old house. The sidewalks are littered in purple flowers, struck there by the wind, by the fitful rain, by their perfect temporary nature. I see my fear from the afternoon. I struggle with the drop of the plane in the temporary stillness of the air followed by the momentary stability. It is all temporary, all this struggle and wishing for more, like the city grasping out further and further into the mountains. Temporary permanance.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
A note of Introduction
Reading this as the first line, you wonder what I mean by Dreams of Turtle Island? The concept of Turtle Island is indigenous, a native name for the continent of North America. By the same note it seems fitting to me to consider this little running commentary a dream, as I've always seen writing as the odd combination of trying to draw words from the void and connect them up in some pattern that is meaningful-dreamlike. Whether it be from experience, or from the folds of my mind, this is nothing but the play of neurons, energy, and perception. So dreams as an amalgamation of my experiences as I travel over the coming months seems fitting, whether they be at home in Los Estados Unidos, or in Mexico. As we all stand on the shoulders of giants, as the cliche goes, so I stand with Gary Snyder and his perception of the Turtle Island concept, found in his Pulitzer Prize winning book of poetry by the same name.
"Turtle Island-the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millenia, and reapplied by some of them to "North America" in recent years. Also, an idea found world-wide, of the earth, or cosmos even, sustained by a great turtle or serpent-of-eternity."
I sit at home in Tucson today, a final quiet Sunday morning in the beautiful, blooming Sonoran Desert; as I pack and slowly accumulate those few possessions and clothes that will accompany me on my journey. A measure of anxiety builds, I feel it in my fingers as I type, in my stomach. I miss Tasha now and know I will miss the rest of my family in the coming months. All these possessions I have surrounded myself with will drop away and will be consolidated to a backpack measured in cubic inches, not square feet. Still, I am seeking a measurement of sorts for where I am and where I going. Perhaps it is simply a touchstone that I seek to compensate for the unmoored feeling that I get as I board airplanes. Paul Bowles recalled Kafka when he wrote, "From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached." To cross into the steel tube and emerge in a marginally familiar place like DF (Distrito Federal, or Mexico City) in hours, not days or weeks or months, is infinitely disorienting. It is that point I am reaching, the point of driving to see Dave and Shan and the kids, to taking the ride to the airport. To leaving the madness of the United States behind for the madness that is Mexico.
We inevitably wake from dreams. That crossing point for me, from one world to the other is notable. It strikes me as fascinating that I am reversing the flow of migration that the world has never seen, this crossing into El Norte. I have hovered along this border for so long, I have walked to the very line itself, and it is nothing but steel and barbed wire. The water continues to flow north out of Mexico. So we are building walls and reaching points at which we cannot turn back, whether they be climatic and ecological or social and political. That is my dream, I guess. Last night I was listening to Martin Luther King's Beyond Vietnam speech, given on April 4th, 1967. Exactly a year before his death, he came to what for me is a truly earthly goal, "A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must be ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies."
Perhaps this is the turning point, perhaps we are bound not for some measure of extinction but some larger dream of Turtle Island. So it begins for me.
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