AnneDalke's blog

"Rhetoric is the attempt of the will to do the work of the imagination." (W.B. Yeats, via James Tiptree....)

We have been spending the past few days in "Hotel Paris," in a barrio in Santiago known as "Paris Londres." It is a lovely area, filled with winding cobble-stoned streets and cafes. After our jaunt into rural areas far to the south, it is wonderful to start each morning with fresh squeezed raspberry juice, real coffee, and a newspaper. I am very much enjoying being back in a cosmopolitan part of the world.

This is the end of my travel blog. I have been thinking a lot, of course, about what I learned during this semester spent in Guatemala, Costa Rica and Chile, in particular about what I accomplished by writing about my experiences in this public forum. One friend observed a kind of tension in these posts: as if I were trying to will what I said to be true. That may be what this has been about: trying to shape what seemed without shape, trying to make sense of the senseless, by putting it into words. Trying to use the will, in other words, to do the work of the imagination.

"You can understand why a system would seek information -- but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?" (James Tiptree, Jr.)

For most of the past four months, in order to afford this sabbatical, we have been traveling on the low end of the spectrum: living in homestays and staying in hostels. This has meant sharing common spaces, and bathrooms, and water, and hot water...It has also meant falling into unexpected conversations, at all times of day and night, with all sorts of people from all sorts of places and walks of life...

For the past two weeks, though, as we have been moving throughout the length and breadth (okay, so it is not so broad...) of Chile, we have been staying in hotels. This has meant private bathrooms, and hot water, and no untoward conversations. On the one hand, that´s been a relief (I haven´t had to come up with the preterito before breakfast). On the other, it´s been, well...

less interesting. My thoughts about this very human tension between living in a place that is known and comfortable, and reaching out into a space that is new and different, have been abetted by my most recent reading, a collection of science stories by James Tiptree, Jr., Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, and the new biography by Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. What both Tiptree´s stories and the wild story of her life make clear is the degree to which the very xenophilia and sense of wonder that fuel the science fiction enterprise become negative forces leading to the destruction of human culture (and the destruction of the species)....

How to balance this need for what is known, with this desire for what is new and not-known?

"Cien veces la miraste, ninguna vez la viste."
(Gabriela Mistral)

During this four-month sabbatical, spent traveling through the Americas, we have followed a certain pattern, settling into a single city for three or four weeks (Antigua, then Xela, Guatemala; Monteverde, then San Jose, Costa Rica; then Valparaíso Chile). We have enrolled in a language school in each city, and spent three or four hours each morning in class, and one or two hours each evening in study.

We were learning Spanish, but our ongoing relationship with our teachers meant that we could also bring them all our questions about our experiences, about culture and politics, about religion and economics. When we noticed that Chileans seemed somber, or that they were disinclined to say "sorry," our teachers could tell us about some of the resonances remaining here from the Pinochet regieme. When we noticed that the houses highest in the hills of Valparaíso were the poorest ones, our teachers also helped us see that those were the sites that had the best view -- the largest, broadest vista -- of the harbor and the New Year´s eve fireworks display.

For the last two weeks of our trip, however, we have ceased being students in those fairly conventional arrangements, and have instead become full-fledged tourists. We are traveling as far south as we can get (we are now on the Grand Isle of Chiloé). We take local buses, arrive in a new town every day or two, wander the streets until we find a hotel we like that also has room for us--and then going exploring.

Following this method, we´ve seen lots that´s new and different and interesting to us: the beautiful wooden churches throughout Chiloé, the small towns nestled into each of the bays, the astonishing repeat vistas of fjords, and the string of snow-covered volcanoes which keep re-appearing across the water. But we also seem very much to be skimming the surface and--this is important--to be doing so under the instruction of our (not very good) guidebook.

Our experience puts me in mind of Walker Percy´s 1954 essay, "The Loss of the Creature," which uses the tourist as a metaphor for what the student should NOT be: someone who follows the expert´s instructions on what to look for. This means not just what churches to see in Chile, but how to read a sonnet, or dissect a dogfish. (Percy actually advocates the unexpected appearance of dogfishes in English classes, and of sonnets in dissecting labs; he´s encouraging less mediated, more direct encounters than those that school usually provides).

What this experience is showing me is how little most of my trip has followed protocal (despite the "schooling" that structured it all). I wasn´t studying what I´ve been trained to study. I wasn´t pursuing my speciality, but allowing myself to go wandering, to see what I could find.

I was being a student. Not a tourist.

I´ve always had ambivalent feelings about holidays: on the one hand, I love nothing more than a houseful of the people I care for most, eating food I´ve made, and singing together the songs we all know ... on the other, decades of being the goose who lays the golden egg (that is, the mother who prepares the feast and tries to make sure everyone is happy) have taken their toll. So...

this very different Christmas, spent this year in Chile, has been predictably ambivalent for me. On the one hand, I enjoyed the peace of not fussing with any preparations. On the other hand, there were spots of emptiness and loneliness, spaces of sadness and despair. But they arose only when I thought, "Oh, it´s Christmas." If I didn´t try to mark the day, it was fine…

So what I want to think out loud about right now is this act of marking off, this setting apart of the sacred. I´m familiar with some of the classic texts on this distinction (am thinking especially right now of Emile Durkheim´s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) and Mircea Eliade´s The Sacred & The Profane (1957). The first argues that the primary characteristic of religion is that it divides the world into two domains, two separate worlds, of sacred and profane. The second defines this major differentiation of space as being between cosmos and chaos, and that´s the idea I want to work with here for a bit.

Now, I´m also familiar with most of the contemporary feminist theological work that critiques this division and, as a Quaker, have long had a religious practice that refuses such a distinction. We all have "that of god within" us, all is (at least potentially) sacred... but I´ve been realizing, on this trip (where I´ve learned so much about myself, much of which hasn´t been especially pleasant to learn...) that I do find the differentiation useful, and find myself drawn to those "sacred" spaces, those spaces apart where there´s a concentration, an intensity (maybe a purity?)-- and with it a possibility for change. I´m thinking here of classes (1 1/2 hour periods when, if everything´s working, everyone´s present and focused), of rich conversations with close friends, of challenging discussions among colleagues, of good dinner parties...

So it´s been disconcerting for me to celebrate this holiday in a country which makes very little distinction between secular and profane, where the streets and markets stayed busy through the holidays, where the communion mass (which we attended in Vicuña) was distributed to the tune of "Jingle Bells," with dogs and children running up and down the aisles, while we sang "Happy Birthday" to Jesus....

And now we´re deep into the week of El Carnaval Cultural in Valparaíso (for Philadelphians, this is a southern hemisphere version of the Fringe Festival in combination with the Mummer´s Parade). Celebrations end tonight with the world´s largest fireworks display over the bay. Wandering through all the art exhibits, in and out of street parades and park concerts, back and forth from movies and puppet shows, from dances to poetry set to music, I´ve had a deep experience, this week, of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the "carnivalesque," that multiplicity of subjects, voices, and views of the world that will always be incomplete....

Because what´s been most striking, to me, about this carneval is the way it has been integrated into the regular work life of the city. Standing in the Plaza Sotomayor, watching the Victor Jara Sinfonico perform, I´m surrounded by huge cranes, moving cargo from ships to tractor trailer beds. I can´t hear the music on stage, because the vendor standing next to me is trying out all his his pipes...The performance of a duet between ships' horns and church bells is drowned out by police whistles and bus horns. There is no separation, no "sacred space" of culture set apart from the daily life of the city.

According to a 19th century Argentine visitor, Valparaíso was “the Europe that had just landed and thrown herself disheveled onto the beach.” According to a contemporary writer, Valparaíso will always border on “magic realism.” You only get there “with dream logic.”

My dreams on this trip have been intense and very very wild, a mixture of our explorations and my fears, our experiences in real life and in the movies, the conversations I´m having and the books I´m reading, the present-day and all sorts of past memories. Yesterday, for instance, I woke from a dream that I was one of the many stray dogs on the streets of Valparaíso, dreaming (in Spanish) the poem the dog was dreaming. This morning I was dreaming that I needed to order an item (in Spanish) in five dimensions—and I only knew three!

I wake up each morning, in other words, feeling as though I am climbing out of a vortex, a swirl of chaos, and I that I have to try and re-build the world, to create some sort of order or box to make sense of things again. The storytelling I do on this blog is one form that creation takes. My need to “write to everyone” (including the author of the Lonely Planet Guide to Chile, about all the mistakes in the book) is another. The intensity with which I engage my teachers is another.

In my first venture onto Serendip (and the web), some six years ago, I wrote in a forum of College Seminar teachers about the weird sort of language that is poetry: aiming less to communicate than to evoke, less to instruct than to raise questions, less to have the "final word" than to continue a conversation about the complexity of the world.

I´ve been thinking a lot about that conversation during the past few weeks, since Arturo Morales, one of our teachers here in Valparaíso, is a poet. We´ve spent a number of classes attending intensely to poetry (his, Neruda´s, and some others) and many others talking about the work that poetry does, how it differs (for instance), from the edicts of Pinochet. How much power do words have, really, to change the reality of the world? Pinochet´s edicts worked in the double way that some of George Bush´s pronouncements about terrorism work: an attempt, on the one hand, to mystify, and on the other, to make something seem true by declaring it so.

The papers have of course been full over the past week with all sorts of retrospectives on Pinochet. Working my way through them, I came upon one of Pinochet´s most infamous quotes: “muerte la perra, se acaba la leva” (or, if you kill the bitch,you kill the pack of males who surround her, wanting to reproduce—or, as our teacher said, “if you kill the Marxists, you can erase the problem”). This quote put me in mind of a similar saying by Rios Montt´s that fueled the war in Guatemala: "To kill the fish, you must take out the water"(that is, to destroy the guerillas, you must wipe out the villages which support them).

Pinochet advocated the destruction of the core, in order to destroy all that depends on it. Montt advocated the destruction of the supportive environment, in order to destroy the core. Although each (dreadful) phrase begins @ a different point, each is an act of simplification, of reduction, an expression that a complex web of supportive and interactive relationships might easily be destroyed by removing one of them. And both sayings, in their simplified description of a means of “correction,” are very far indeed from poetic expression, which invites multiplicity instead.

I was deep in this sort of multiplicity last week, as I was finishing José Donoso´s great novel, The Obscene Bird of Night. Donoso takes his title from a letter Henry James Sr. wrote to his two oldest sons, in which he said that "the natural inheritance of any one who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters." It´s an apt title for the book, in which memory is annihilated by imagination, in which a single narrator drifts through a succession of personae, and multiple characters are responsible for single actions. As Donoso said in an interview, “all men carry inside them a lot of other men, a lot of possibilities.” (Hm…also an apt description of my own nightmares!)

Figuring out what to do with all this wealth of possibility in which we swim, and which is available for our use, is another matter. This past weekend, as we made our way into the Andes, I was put in mind of something Emerson said in his 1836 essay on “Nature”: “We are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.¨ We had stopped first in a town in the foothills called Los Andes. When I asked @ the hotel where I could see “the vista,” the clerk looked puzzled. “Well,….you could rent a room on the third floor.” We did--and the next day we went on to Portillo, a renowned resort where a number of the Olympic ski teams practice. But this was the off-season, and all that was there to greet us was those mountains. My God, what mountains! I´ve never encountered anything like them before: the immensity silenced us --and all other human activity. And so I thought of this passage from Emerson, which suggests that we have all the power of the world at our disposal--and we fritter it away, using it for small activities, for silly things.

Last Friday was La Festividad de la Inmaculada Concepción . It was a national holiday. The road to Santiago (the capital city), from Valparaiso (where we are staying) was closed for the day, because Lo Vásquez, which is dedicated to the Virgin, and is one of the major pilgrimage sites in this area, was on that highway. Jeff and I joined some 600,000 faithful in a pilgrimage to Lo Vásquez. Many of them crawled into the church on their knees. We were in the group walking in standing up—until Jeff realized that we were probably in line for communion, and got out fast.

What was by far most interesting in this excursion was the tight relationship between the secular and the sacred. There were permanent signs to the “bazaar in the sanctuary," where you could buy icons. For this festival, across the street from the church, an immense marketplace had also been set up on the highway, stretched out for as far as you could see (or walk). It was filled with all kinds of imaginable objects. This seemed to be the main reason the highway had shut down. Once the Catholic church embedded the spiritual in the material, and began to sell the material as a way to the spiritual….

(this Quaker thinks), the marketplace was in the church. What happened outside was simply an extension.

These thoughts about the relationship between the material and the spiritual received further elaboration on Saturday, when we visited Pablo Neruda´s house in Isla Negra, and again on Sunday, when we visited another of his houses, La Sebastiana, in Valparaíso.

As advertised, both these houses were magical places, filled with all sorts of whimsical objects. Neruda collected figureheads and shells, masks and ships in bottles (also something else I´d never seen before: crucifixes in bottles), butterflies and vases and plates and glass in all sorts of wonderful colors. Both houses had wonderful, wonderful views of the sea,out of many large windows (I came upon a fragment from a lovely poem about this, by Neruda, called “Una Casa en la Arena”):

El Oceano Pacífico	The Pacific Ocean;
se saliá del mapa!	was running off the map!
No había dondé ponerlo.	There was no place to put it.
Era tan grande,	It was so large,
desordenado y azul	disordered and blue
que no cabiá en ninguna parte.	that it would not fit anywhere.
Pore so lo dejaron frete a mi ventana.	This is why they left it in front of my window.

But as I wandered my way, astonished, in front of these windows, and bemused, through this catalogue of objects (thinking about the possible neurosis involved in such an extensive collection) I found myself wondering about where the ideas were in such things. Many of Neruda´s poems (which are very Whitman-like) are lists: there are celebrated odes to stews and other dishes, to all sorts of material objects (there´s even an "Ode to Things"). But where was the move beyond list-making and cataloguing, where the newness in unique combinations of things that had never before been juxtaposed?

The other very striking similarity between these two houses was their boat-like character. They are filled with tight passageways, arched ceilings, portholes. And yet the windows @ Isla Negra don´t open. They are portals to astonishing vistas. But there´s no sound of the sea. No smell of the sea. No touch of the wind of the sea.

The very strong sense of closure in both houses suggested something profoundly human to me. I myself am a person of many fears and many hopes, of many anxieties and many expectations. I was wondering through the houses of Neruda, so expansive in their vistas of the sea, so NOT open to the other sensory experiences that would come with exploring that open space. And I felt as though I was in an archetypal dream space: longing for openness, but closed off from it, drawn to the expanse, but deeply afraid of exploring it.

The hill where we´re living in Valparaiso was in a black out (for much-needed electrical repairs) from noon til 6 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, so we didn´t actually hear about Pinochet´s death (or all the celebrations going on in the plain below) til the following morning — but we sure heard about it then. The newspaper had a good 40pp. of coverage, two days running (down to 8 pp/day now). Our teachers — one of whom spent twenty years living in exile in Denmark -- could talk of nothing else (so much for interactive pedagogy!) on Monday morning. What I´ve picked up from these experiences, so far, are three things:

• This is a society deeply invested in the cult of personality. There are large men here: Neruda was one, Pinochet another. For me, all the focus on the death of this old man (who committed many crimes against humanity) indicates a disinclination of Chileans to look @ the reasons their society accepted a dictatorship for so many years. There is something here (as in Guatemala) that wants a leader.
• This is also a society still very deeply divided. Whether you find yourself in the midst of mourners or celebrators depends on what neighborhood you live in.
• There are still huge silences here; although politics are discussed intensely among friends, there is a hesitation — which oftimes reaches the level of a refusal — to talk about one´s political opinions with people one doesn´t know well (like visiting noramericanos). Our teachers tell us that they still feel a fear when appearing in public spaces. So far, in other words, Chile has failed to develop the habit—so necessary to democracy--of discussing difference openly.

So—how to develop such a habit? How to work oneself, one´s neighbors, one´s countrypeople, and one´s interactions with people from the rest of the world, into a space where open discussion of differences is exercised and valued? I don´t know. Valparaiso, which has been a port for many years, is really not a very cosmopolitan town; it seems pretty parochial (little in the way of bilingual bookstores, for instance). There´s also much that is gray here, much that is somber, much that lingers from an earlier troubled time. A lot of poverty. And yet --

the hills of this city are filled with Victorian mansions in uncanny tonalities. As Manuel Pena Munoz, the author of Dreaming Valparaiso, says, ¨they manage to create a feeling of magic and expectation amidst a world amazingly recupterated by the miracle of color.¨ In a place with such an extraordinary palette, a place where "all colors are possible" -- a place which is chaotic and dis-ordered in design (none of the gridwork of most Spanish and Spanish American cities), a place where there is always a vista of the sea--I have to believe that it is possible that all points of view might also be expressed.

When we flew into Chile, over those Andes, I felt as though I had finally arrived SOMEwhere. The trip out of the Santiago airport was like nothing I´ve ever experienced before: the snow-capped mountains appeared above the clouds in such a way that we couldn´t tell what was cloud, what was snow, what was mountain, what was sky. Even more incredible was the appearance, halfway into the drive, of another very dark bank—of mountains? Turns out: it was the smog of Santiago, which soon blocked everything else from view, including those snow-capped mountains.

The next day (feeling quite proud of our Spanish) we took the metro, then the bus, to Valparaiso. Our arrival in the plain of the city (which was dirty and crowded) was a disappointment, but then we began to climb...

into Cerro Concepcion, one of the 40-some hills that make up the barrios of Valparaiso. We landed in Residencia en el Cerro, a grand old early 20th century house with ceilings that must be at least 14 feet high. Our room (with windows at least 8 feet tall) looks out on the harbor, where there is a light like nothing I´ve ever seen (what comes closest is that late night/early morning light in Iceland in summertime: the luminous way the full moon strikes the water at night is particularly spectacular. I feel as though I am Una, in Ahab´s Wife, who looked out and -- looking out -- saw how large the sphere was within. After months of living a hobbit-like life, I have a VISTA.

This house is not only large but very busy; I could surely write a novel about all the comings and goings (not to mention my imaginings about what motivates each of them). There´s the couple who runs the place; a grandmother who spends the days sitting in the light-filled patio in the center of things; six or eight men who come to be served lunch and supper every day; several dormitorios (filled with bunkbeds for young travelers who pass through quickly); and several other doubles and singles for those of us here for longer stays. You never know who you might run into in the bathroom (or elsewhere). I asked our hostess how she managed all the activity, she said that, after raising 5 children, she preferred a busy house. If you can´t travel the world, have the world come to you.

This is a good thing, since we arrived in Chile with two broken computers. With the loss of easy web-access, I feel as though I have lost my window on the world. Our hostess asked a friend of hers, who is a computer tech, to come consult with us. When he started quoting Neruda, I knew we were in trouble. He walked in, looked at our machines, and said,
¨But these are Macs.
Why do you have Macs?
No one in Chile supports Macs.
As Pablo Neruda said in his famous poem #20, ´Y el verso cae al alma como pasto el rocio´--that is, ´poetry falls on the soul like dew on the grass.´
In other words, there´s no saying why things work, or why they fail to work. Things happen.¨

This may be our guide to Chile.