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.

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?

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.

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.

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.       

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.