AnneDalke's blog

When I left on this sabbatical, friend of mine, who is generally more even-tempered than I am, gave me as a good-bye gift and traveling companion a small statue of Buddha, along with materials for setting up a small altar and incense. It hasn't done much good. My moods -- always variable -- have been extreme on this trip. I swing sharply from the conviction that I am living in an nightmare -- when will I ever have a hot shower, sleep in a comfortable bed, eat comforting food, talk comfortably with friends again? -- and the pleasures and poignant awarenesses that this is the adventure of a lifetime, going exploring into places I don't know.

How very far I am from what I know was brought home sharply to me yesterday morning, when I asked my teacher to tell me something about the students who study here @ Universal de Idiomas in San Jose, Costa Rica. She surprised me by saying that the majority of them are men from the United States who have come here to learn Spanish--in order to engage in traffic with the prostitutes who hang out @ the hotel and park on the corner nearby.

This got me to thinking about the possible relationships between tourism, sex tourism and sexual traffic (all on a sharp rise in Costa Rica during the past ten years) and language schools (ditto). How much of the study abroad experience is one of looking for an exchange with 'the other,' for a 'rite of passage' that involves some sort of encounter with someone who is exotically different? How much do the language schools, with their invitation into recreation and escape, facilitate those sorts of encounters? How much translation really happens, in such situations? What's involved, after all, in the process of translation?

One of my colleagues @ Bryn Mawr, Alison Cook-Sather, has written a book about education as a process of translation; in the liminal space she traces, every learner is both the translator and the subject of her own translation. Education, in Alison's book (and classes!) is not a fixed set of connections between ideas and individuals, but rather a process of continual and evolving change, of new relationships mediated by the process of learning and the learner.

How much of that can happen in language schools like those I've been attending in Central America? Alison arrived @ the argument of her book while learning German and living in Germany a few years ago. My own experience of living and studying Spanish in Guatemala and Costa Rica for three months now has led me to a slightly different conclusion, one I take from Margaret Peden, translator of the Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda:

...given sufficient words, anything spoken or written in one language can be explained in a second. I am less sanguine about the possibility that everything can be translated. I have myself talked and written about a contemporary Tower of Babel, one in which the inexactness of understanding is the continuing motive for conversation: it is because we don't precisely "get" one another that we must keep on talking. The goal here is less to say what we know than to invite others to explain what they are thinking/feeling/experiencing....knowing that the "translation" will always be inexact.

We have this experience every night in the hostel where we are staying in San Jose: our conversations (in halting-and-hilarious Spanish) with a Japanese economist and French journalist (to take just last night's example), range from comparative analyses of the production of sugar in the Phillipines and Costa Rica, to comparative pricing of tranquil hotels on the Pacific Coast. At this point in our language acquisition, we can always identify the theme of the oration; whether we ever get the punch line -- did he live or did he die -- is still an open question.

In one of my classes earlier this week, we were reviewing the use of idioms, including "caer bien" and "caer mal," that is, what pleases or displeases one). My teacher said, "Ana, digeme, ¿'Qué clase de personas te caen mal?" I said (well, tried to say, in Spanish) that I didn't like thinking in terms of types, and preferred not to answer a question that asked me to. Two other students in the class (young German women, whose mastery of Spanish grammar is quite remarkable) kept trying to help me out by translating the question for me: "She means 'types of people,' 'kinds of people.''" Of course I understood the question; what I was refusing was its terms. And of course it's precisely this sort of conversation that I find most difficult to negotiate in my haltingly-acquired second language.

On the other hand, each day is filled with wonderful "lapsus," made possible by the inexactness of translation. For instance, today, the query "¿Como estas?" misapprehended as "¿Como molestas?" ("how are you?" misheard as "what is bothering you?" with the inaccurate-but-nonetheless-present English residue of "what is 'molesting' you...)

It becomes clearer and clearer to me, the further I get into this experience, that the shaping of meaning belongs to me alone. For instance, I was disappointed in the Meeting for Worship we attended @ Friends' Center last Sunday morning; I was expecting (in my interior life, this means hoping for) an urban meeting, conducted in Spanish. But all the Latin American Quakers had gathered in Monteverde that morning, and we were reduced to one attender from Ohio, one visitor from England, and ourselves, two Philadelphia Quakers. It felt centerless...til I realized that a meeting is always centerless until one centers. If there was to be a center, it needed to come from us.

Jeff and I started the experiment, this past weekend, of speaking only Spanish to one another. So far, it's been a pretty good experience -- it helps keep the Spanish switch "on" in our minds, while we can take the time to listen and to correct and to understand one another, without feeling like we're imposing on the patience of others. It is also helping to turn what has been the great problem for me on this trip--my inability to speak quickly, without thinking, what's on my mind--into an opportunity: it forces me to think before I speak. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's turning our speaking into a kind of poetry, with lots of pauses around our words.

This image came to me because--in preparation for our departure for Chile this weekend--I've been reading the Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda. These are long thin poems, with lots of white space surrounding them on the page. One of them, "Oda al Hila/Ode to a Thread," begins

Esta es el hilo	This is the thread
de la poesía.	of poetry.
Los hechos como oveyas	Events, like sheep,
van cargados	wear wooly
de lana	coats of
negra	black
o blanca.	or white.
Llámalos y vendrán	Call, and wondrous
prodigiosos rebaños....	flocks will come,
Tienes a tu merced	You have at your call
una montaña....	a mountain....
No lo puedes hacer,	You can't do it that way.
tienes que hilarla,	You must spin it,
levanta un hila,	fly a thread
súbelo....	and climb it...

In another part of my brain/in another part of the afternoon, I've begun to work on editing a book project for the Working Group on Emergence @ Bryn Mawr. It's not so different, this process of drawing out a thread from the "wondrous flocks" of words produced by my colleagues, trying to find a line of thinking, a way of organizing the mountain....

"In the east there are not portraits because the cult of the personality is not fomented: the human individualism in front to the cosmic determinism is an European invention and its great contribution to the world. The east focuses its attention on the mysteries of the universe and not in the individual."

I celebrated Thanksgiving by wondering around an exhibit of self-portraits at the Museum of Costa Rican Art called "The other side of the mirror: Tribute to Rembrandt." As I caught sight of myself in the mirror cleverly placed @ the beginning of the collection, I thought about how caught up, how distraught I've been this fall, @ my faltering attempts to learn Spanish. This has been a very difficult trip for me, out of my element, away from what I do well, unable to flourish--even to function--in a culture so different from my own, in a place where "who I am" and all I have come to be have no meaning @ all. And a lot of that distress has had to do with my focus--which is the focus of the West--on the accomplishments of the individual.

These issues of self-esteem also seem all tied up with a concomitant need to "keep private" what I don't know. All of that has been much better for me this week, since we've been in San Jose. We've picked up Spanish lessons again @ Universal de Idiomas , where we have small group classes instead of the one-on-one tutoring we've had heretofore. There's more conversation, less pressure on individual performance....my mistakes seem less important.

I've also enjoyed being back in a city, with more to do, less need to rely on my own resources for entertainment. We've enjoyed the street scene (I've never been in a city where there are SO MANY people on the street); the public sculpture (including quite a few voluptuous women who please me a great deal!); a "unipersonal multidisciplinario" performance called "Despertar es un Sueño" (Waking is a Dream); a Russian movie, "The Return," with Spanish subtitles (quite do-able); and a night of different types of Costa Rican music where the star was an AMAZING singer named Guadulupe Urbina who had us all stomping and singing and clapping. We've also taken a jaunt into two adjacent river valleys, to see the shrine of "La Virgen de los Angeles" in the basilica at Cartago, and the beautiful Osori River Valley.

Next weekend we leave Central America for the last third of our trip, which we'll spend in Chile. In preparation, I've been reading Chilean fiction: a collection called What Is Secret: Stories by Chilean Women, Ariel Dorman's Death and the Maiden, and Antonio Skármeta's The Postman. The first suggested to me that "Having another language is having another soul" (I've some distance to go on this one). The second raised all sorts of questions about what truth gets us (not to mention how we get to the truth). The third is taking me into all sorts of spectulations about how "the whole world is a metaphor for something." More on this later...

We have spent the last two weeks with our brother-and sister-in-law, who are avid birders. We have seen some amazing birds and enjoyed some astonishing walks through cloud forests, rain forests, and other reserves (though I maintain that birding, like golfing, is a sure way to ruin a good walk: there are too many pauses for someone as impatient as I am!). We've enjoyed one another's company, sharing of new experiences, and laughing over old stories. We've also talked about our different ways of approaching the world, and came up with four different kinds of understanding (with each of us representing a different angle on the spectrum): there are those who "just live"; those who "admire and adore"; those who have to "find expression for their experiences"; and those who "ask questions about them." Birding is an act of recognition and admiration. Although I can appreciate how family members take great satisfaction and pleasure in seeing things in nature they never noticed before, that doesn't go very far for me. I approach life a little differently: I have always had a compulsion to do something with what I see, to connect it to larger patterns or questions or understandings. So I'm ready now to head back to the city (we arrived this afternoon in San Jose, where we will be living in Casa de Amigos and take up Spanish lessons again, as well as exploring the metropolis).

Our trip from Pacific Coast back up into the highlands entailed a 40-km. stretch of dirt road pockmarked with potholes (it took 3 1/2 hours), then another hour of paved road, driven @ breakneck speed in the rain - it was harrowing (though if I were that bus driver, after 3 1/2 hours on such a terrible road, I'd speed too, when I hit the pavement). Our next trip, out of the highlands and back into the cloud forest, across the "Cerro de Muerte" (Mountain of Death), was equally harrowing, though my sister-in-law, an inveterate optimist, noted that there was more leg room on the bus than there is on airplanes these days: "this is like traveling first class."

I've been thinking a lot about the contrast between her optimism and my skepticism, which I think is linked to my incessant questioning of what is, my imagining that things might be otherwise. In Spanish, "esperar" means both "to wait" and "to hope"; I suppose waiting always entails an expectation of change. But I've also been thinking about possible differences between hopefulness and speculation. Since leaving the Quaker settlement in Monteverde, we've stayed @ three different lodgings, the first two owned by ex-patriots -- Finca Amanecer and Talari Mountain Lodge -- and the last run by a Tico family who has long lived in the area: Paraiso del Quetzal.

The first was a spice farm, the second two birders' havens. There's certainly a sharp division between those who, in farming, change the landscape; and those who are trying to preserve the habitat, and offering guided tours to what is already there. At our last stay, the patriarch of the family had made the transition from logger, to farmer, to naturalist. When he had cut down a quarter of the trees on his property, he began to wonder what he'd do when they were all gone. So he started dairy farming. When the prices for milk and cheese crashed, and a Canadian friend suggested he could make money showing tourists the quetzals that frequented the farm, he turned his attention to preserving, and showcasing, the birds and their habitat. His sons and grandsons have followed him in this calling.

As I consider these varieties of ways of making sense--and making use--of the world, I've also been trying to get my head around the varieties of ex-patriot experiences and experiments here in Costa Rica. We've seen lots of ill-kept lots-along with lots of signs advertising "Paradise." We've seen lots of development--and lots more speculation. And I've actually begun speculating myself, about sponsoring a semester @ the Monteverde Institute, one whose overarching theme could be "Biodiversity all the Way Down," or "What is a Sustainable Life?" It would include a range of related courses:

• biodiversity
• diversity of sexual and gender identity/expression
• linguistic diversity (=conversational Spanish!)
• the human dimensions of sustainability (including both the history of the Quakers' "ethnic enclave" there, and field work w/ the three women's cooperatives in the area, including "Ecobamboo," which focuses on sustainable building materials)
• sustainable education (w/ work in the five schools there-- three private, two public, two bilingual, two English-immersion; all sorts of class and accessibility issues...)

What say ye to these speculations?

We have moved down the mountain to the coast of Costa Rica, leaving behind not only the comfortable weather of Monteverde, but the strange, metallic song of the black-faced solitaire. However, we continue to hear, each morning, the astonishing thrumming made by the wings of the hummingbirds. And this morning I joined my daughter, and the owner of the spice farm where she has been working this month, in welcoming the morning with a polyeurhythmic dance. Listening to the birds, entering myself into this dance, I am aware of the rhythmic nature of the world.

Last summer, I met a man who practiced transcendental meditation many hours each day, who said that he was sometimes able to "hear the vibration of the universe." Greene's book on The Fabric of the Cosmos (which I finally finished this morning) has a similar description:

According to string theory, there is only one fundamental ingredient -- the string -- and . . . different vibrational patterns correspond to different kinds of particles. . . .At the ultramicroscopic level, the universe would be akin to a string symphony vibrating matter into existence. And yet, how very little we know, or are aware, of this vibration, of these deeper levels. Much of nature hides itself from us. Greene's got another great quip in this book: "'Black holes have no hair,' meaning that they lack the kinds of detailed features that allow for individuality." This funny description works, not just for black holes, but for all that we experience. In line with the shadows in Plato's cave, our three-dimensional perceptions are, in contemporary physics, merely our reduced glimpses of the more richly structured, higher-dimensional entities/other worlds surrounding the "brane" in which we live, and of which we are aware. There's so much we don't see!

Shaye (whose thinking is always interesting always edging me beyond what I think I understand) wrote a while ago about the idea that we all always take with us what we already understand: "Wherever you go, there you are." She had other questions about "who is humble and who is ambitious," about what ensures "when a culture rich in ambition meets a culture rich in humility."

It's been fascinating for me to get just a bit beneath the surface of the story of the Quaker migration to Monteverde, to the establishment of a "pura vida," of what some term an "ethnic enclave"-- not so different, say, from the "Chinatowns" of Philadelphia, New York and San Francisco. A great deal of hubris must be involved, in setting out to establish an outpost in a new country -- a belief that one's own beliefs are "right," however others might believe, that one's own way of living is "right," however others might live.... OTOH, how much humility must be involved, in the decision to live the life that one's ancestors lived, not to expect change, or to think that it's possible to act in order to enact change?

I had a wonderful meeting yesterday afternoon with the Executive Director of the Monteverde Institute; we were brainstorming possible collaborations between all the work the Institute does for a sustainable future with multiple programs @ Bryn Mawr -- in Biology, Cultural Studies, Education, Environmental Studies, Gender and Sexuality, International Studies. What IS a sustainable life? (it's a moving target...think about what seemed necessary ten years ago, and what seems necessary now). In the symbotic life of the forest, the answer to this question is pretty clear. But what are the human dimensions of sustainability? Do they take the form of co-operatives? Or...?

Ann observed that, to ease my transition to Costa Rica, my reading list stayed "behind" -- that is, in Guatemala; she asked why I don't/didn't read "ahead." Simple practicalities-I had a ton of Guatemalean literature (more than I could read during our six weeks there) and only the thinnest selection from Costa Rica (which I finished off during our first week here). As she said, the difference may well be an expression of the "loaf of spacetime," and my inability to live w/out "to-ing and fro-ing" within it. It may also have to do with Guatemalean overload of (tragic, tragic) stories, and the Costa Rican absence of them (@ least translated into English, and so accessible to me....)

I've complained to my teachers about this absence, and they've tried to fill the gap with Costa Rican legends-about "La Negrita" (the patron saint of Costa Rica, the Virgin of Los Angeles--another Virgin!--who is a black woman); "El Diablo de Puente de Piedra" (about tricking the devil, and an index to certain qualities of "the Tico character": "listo, perspicaz, mentiroso, divertido" (quick, acute, lying, humorous). Our teachers have also told us many stories about their own family histories (and their resentment of the Quakers, who "bought up everything here,” so "own everything here"-the class difference is quite marked). They've also explained that the nickname Costa Ricans use to describe themselves--"Ticos"-comes from their persistent use of diminutives. But there many more stories I'm not getting, because my Spanish comprehension is so limited.

My alternative fantasy (to being shut out/not getting into this culture) is of literally being eaten up by the tropics. I have various intestinal complications, a yeast infection (in the usual place), and a fungus infection (between my fingers). But the other night, when our host mother served us soup, I was reminded again how foreign this place is to me. This soup was a cacophony of vegetables, each one entirely new to us, foreign both in taste and in texture ('twas the textures that made for the difficulty in swallowing): carne, cayote, ayote, yucca y plátano.

In their history book, the Quakers describe the many substitutions they found for familiar foods (aricache and chamol for potatoes, guayabas and cayotes for apples) and for toiletries (salt for toothpaste). I'm reminded that, when my daughters became vegetarians, they did not want to be served substitutes for meat or cheese, but pleasing alternatives. 'Tis the way I'm feeling now, too.

From what I’ve been able to gather from reading about -- and a couple of good conversations with -- the Quakers, they actually were NOT looking for substitutes, in the larger scheme of life. They wanted the real thing, the pure thing (“la pura vida”). They left the empire of the U.S., not to widen their horizons, but rather to narrow them: to find a place where, uninterrupted, they could live the life they felt called to live. This morning after Meeting, Wolf Guindon told me that, when he was first approached by George Powell (the biologist who initiated the idea of a cloudforest reserve), he thought, “Go to hell.” “Hmm,” I said. “Not a very Quakerly thing to say.” Wolf replied, “Oh, I didn’t actually say that. But I did tell him to go to Brazil. Why approach me about conservation? I was a farmer, developing the land.” From what I’ve been able to gather, the Quaker contribution to the reserve was a marriage of convenience with the biologists, a way to preserve the watershed they needed for their community (and now, as landowners well aware of property values) they are chafing @ the resulting restrictions….

That’s an awfully big step, not looking for a substitution for what one already knows, being open, instead, to real alternatives: not a translated version of the way you are, but a different way of being. And of course these sorts of questions apply directly to the exercises of teaching and learning, both outside the classroom and within it. Last week we took two guided tours (to the Frog Pond and Butterfly Garden) and one unguided one (a rough four-hour hike through the Santa Elena Cloud Reserve). We learned a ton from the naturalists @ the first two sites, and saw much less when we were on our own. There's certainly something to be said for seeing what you can see by yourself, learning to look directly. And something equally to be said for listening, really listening, to what others can teach you…

A friend (who read about ”the trampoline thing”) remembered, from her own childhood experiences that you have to stay loose at least somewhat, let your limbs relax. Keeping stiff endangers you since the body impact and bounce are not always predictable. What a great metaphor for being open to the newness of travel! But (going further, with the help of another friend) is the world a place to jump and jump--or to take in? Maybe I'm just “jumping” too damn much? Michelle observed that, when she's going through the most transitions, it actually might mean she's running from something. I expect the same is true for me: (a sense of) perpetual transition might well mean my refusal to settle into...

something. Judie also called attention to

the irony of my ambivalence (about not knowing how I'm "supposed" to act/ think in a new culture), juxtaposed against the Guatemalan political system (which seemed to accept "given" knowledge of how to act/ think) and my own need for a secure base (the attuned caregiver who also structures safety). It occurs to me that irony is just another word for seeing the underside of any situation, for acknowledging that there are always (at least!) two ways to read what’s going on. For instance, one of the great pleasures of this Spanish-learning trip is the explosion in my vocabulary—along with all the fun I’ve been having trying to figure out the history that lies behind many of my new words. One of the more pleasing flowers here (where there are MANY pleasing flowers!) is something called, alternately, “pacifiers” and “Napoleon’s buttons.” I’ve amused myself trying to decide if these two names express fundamentally different ideas—say, cultural imperialism and family nurturance—or essentially the same concept--something having to do with a false show, being a “dummy”? Depends (as much else!) on your point of view…

Speaking of which…

My teacher, Ana, gave me the exercise this week of translating The Giving Tree into Spanish. It was a good exercise--right @ my level--and it led to an interesting multi-leveled discussion between us about the ideal of self-sacrifice; about the cultural expectations that women--mothers especially---should sacrifice themselves for their children; about the ways the Catholic church, in encouraging its followers to believe that “all life is suffering,” encourages women to tolerate domestic abuse (Ana’s grandmother, a victim of such abuse, had a saying, "La iglesia se cagó en todo"--translate that @ your own risk!).

All of this led me to try and explain to Ana about the philosophy which has always seemed most compatible to me--that of existentialism. Lots of fun trying to tell her that, unlike a knife, which is defined by its sharpness (“sin filo no es un cuchillo; la razón de la vida del cuchilloses estar afilado”), a human is defined by not being pre-defined. We make the meaning of our lives, for ourselves, rather than having it laid out for us ahead of time.

Before the week was over, I had an absurd, concrete experience in this realm. Back in mid-July, as we were beginning to make our plans for spending four months out of the country, I called the Bureau of Elections @ the courthouse in Media, Pennsylvania, to request that our absentee ballots be sent to us in time for us to vote. At 6 p.m. last night (Friday, November 3), they were delivered to us--along w/ a notice that they needed to be received in Media by 5 p.m. the same day.

This morning, we voted, and paid $20 to have our signed ballots returned to the U.S. pronto. The main satisfaction here was our ability to negotiate this in Spanish with the disbelieving postmaster. (Why pay all this money for something that won’t matter when it gets there?) During our long wait for these ballots, we nourished a couple of paranoid notions about the political process discouraging the votes of left-leaning intellectuals who have dropped out of the country for a semester--especially once we learned that service people abroad can now vote by e-mail (we also began to speculate that business people working abroad don't find the process a difficult one, either). Multiple instructions and caveats on the form encouraged this sort of thinking--although they also gave rise to notions of bureaucracy clearly run amok. Anyhow, if Santorum or Weldon win by two votes, expect an outcry from Central America.

I expect that what the postmater gleaned from this experience was another story about crazy Americans, spending lots of money to speed home ballots that won't be counted. From his perspective, our act was absurd--as (from the perspective of existentialism) everything is absurd, without intrinsic meaning. From our perspective, though, the act was a symbolic one, with lots of meaning for us, if only as a gesture @ our continued commitment to the American political process....

Which brings me back to these Monteverde Quakers, whose symbolic gestures, and there VERY concrete results, continue to interest me deeply. I've just about completed the Monteverde Jubilee Family Album, and--predictably---the story's gotten more complicated, as the layers of other years and other perspectives have been added. Perhaps the most striking of those new angles of vision appears in Mildred Mendenhall’s essay about of "The Cheese Plant":

Today, however, we have to question the effects of our locating in a quiet, isolated rural community. We had desired to see the local people enjoy more comfortable lives, while being reluctant ourselves to adopt their level of subsistence living. By helping to improve the local economy and living standards, had we contributed to a form of materialism we had come to Costa Rica to avoid? Has the area been well served by the relative prosperity we observe there today? Perhaps the tentacles of growing global consumerism would have reached eventually into this isolated area anyway. A useful adjustment to yesterday’s hero-making--though I don’t buy the binary of "materialism vs. anti-materialism": surely the two poles exist on a spectrum where the first two question might well be "what's sustainable?" and "what's necessary for life to flourish?" A question asked by my teacher last week--"Is the problem poverty, or is it ambition?"-- now takes on existential ramifications...

I have for many years used, as a keystone in a first-year writing course I co-designed and co-teach @ Bryn Mawr, a phrase from Scene 8 of Bertold Brecht’s play Galileo: “blest be the land that needs no hero!” Galileo says this, when his friends express their disappointment that he has not held out against the Inquisition (to the right is a performance this scene for a Summer Institute for K-12 teachers). “Blest be the land that needs no hero” is a phrase that my students need some time understanding, much less accepting. We generally arrive at an agreement that Brecht is warning against looking to others as ideals, as models or representations of the good. Rather than blaming others for their cowardice or failure to live up to our ideals, to fulfill our needs, we should look to ourselves.

This ringing phrase, and the discussions it has engendered over the past five years, have come back to haunt me this week. We came to Monteverde less for its famous cloudforest reserve, than because of the history of the Quakers in this area: four draft resistors, all young dairy farmers, were told by an Alabama judge in 1949, “If you like this country you should obey the laws of this country, and if you don’t like it, you ought to move out…” Thirty-some other family members and friends agreed with them that the U.S. economy had become “so involved with military effort throughout the world that a person can hardly make a living without being a part of that system. Even the price of milk depends upon it.” Wanting to live without contributing to that system, and also seeking a less materialistic place to raise their children, this group moved to Monteverde. Theirs is a story filled with much hardship and difficulty (oh, the stories!); by their own account, they were “heretics” (=in the late Latin meaning of “able to choose,” or dissenters). The community they created in Monteverde still exists, complete with Meetinghouse, bilingual school, cooperative creamery and lots of good fellowship—if still @ some distance from the poorer Ticos in this area.

Far as we’ve been able tell, so far, there are three groups here, which intersect but don’t really interact much socially: the Ticos, the tourists, and the ex-pats. The economic gap between the Ticos and the tourists they service is huge. Yesterday morning, my host mother (who works as a cook in a restaurant serving “Nueva Latina” food) was describing to me some of the details of her hard life. Until 20 years ago, there was no electricity and no water in the houses here. She had six children (in as many years): three @ home, and three in the hospital. The ride to the hospital, in each case, was seven hours long--on horseback—in labor.

When our conversation ended, I went for a walk across the road, and up the hill—into the grounds of one of the huge Swiss-like hotels here: there were whirlpool baths beside each cabin, a massage parlor, beautiful (and very expensive) tables on a spacious patio….another world. Another planet.

And yet the existence of the Quakers here makes me think that it is possible to bridge such a distance. I’m deep into the Monteverde Jubilee Family Album--a wonderful collection they put together for their 50th anniversary, one that honors differing stories, including those of Ticos, rather than selecting individual versions. One of these accounts, by Juan Leitón Villalobos ( who was six when the Quakers arrive) reports that

“Everyone was saying ‘los machos’ were coming. I couldn’t imagine what the ‘machos’ would be like. When they arrived, they seemed so strange. They might as well have been from another planet as far as we were concerned. You couldn’t even talk with them or understand them. It took us quite awhile to start to get to know them….It was through soccer that we really got to know them…We eventually realized that the ‘machos’ are people like us.” Perhaps you can see why it’s so hard—despite my long-time acquaintance Galileo’s life and example--not to lionize such people. I’ve also found another, native, hero, José Figueres Ferrer, a three-time Costa Rican president (well-born, well-educated and remarkably independent), who –- having led a rebel army to overthrow the current government—abolished the army here, as a precaution against the militarism that has perennially thwarted the establishment of democracy in Central America. Figueres said he was inspired to disarm Costa Rica by H.G. Wells’ Outline of History: "The future of mankind cannot include armed forces. Police, yes, because people are imperfect.” The absence of an army was, of course, one reason why the Quakers selected Costa Rica as their new home-- along with the relative political and economic stability in this region, and its year-round growing season.

Blest is this land that has some heroes...

Julieta Pinto, “The Blue Fish,” (from Costa Rica: The Traveler’s Literary Companion: The last minutes before falling asleep and the first on awakening are … intermediate steps from light to shadow in which the ability to see is lost and confusion reigns. Little by little, familiar shapes stand out, and the mind, distressed at leaving mysteriously attractive and unknown areas, begins to calm itself and, by means of relationships, locates itself in space. This is what I do, generally: calm myself by means of relationships, find connections that allow me to locate and ground myself in strange situations. And this is what I did, specifically, this past weekend, when we went to see “Symbiosis,” a brand new dance expressing life in the cloudforest. It was designed by a fusion performance group called Capacitor, which is based in San Francisco; the image to the right is from their web page. (As far as I can tell, “capacitors” are used in electrical circuits as energy-storage devices.) These artists collaborate with members of the scientific community to create performances which (according to their web site) “encourage contact with scientific concepts in ways which allow audiences to see patterns and relationships inherent in nature and the cosmos. Through performance, Capacitor personalizes large, abstract concepts and…widens the scope of basic human experience.” I’ve long been interested in these sorts of intersections between science and art—in particular how science functions as a rich source for metaphors used in artistic representations, as well as the reverse--the different ways that art can illustrate/illuminate/sometimes even alter and stretch scientific ways of knowing (for a prime example of this, see a site in progress:The Art and Science of Ava Blitz. What I found particularly striking, in this particular performance by Capacitor, was the possibility that the form of representation —more than what is being represented --itself determined the representation (here’s the original, and fuller version, of these reflections, in Spanish).

What do I mean by this? Well, we’d spent four hours, the day before, walking in the cloud forest. As I reported then, it was a magical time: filled with silence, with stillness, with what the Ticos call “obscurity.” It also seemed a place throbbing with life—with many layers of life, symbiotic on other layers—but our experience was only of our motion (our own disruptive stumblings along the uneven paths) and occasional brief flutterings of a bird or butterfly.

However, what Capictor depicted—in their very dramatic, very strong performance—was unceasing movement: large figures, all in black, prowling like cats, flying like birds, eating like insects, grooming like monkeys, having sex like all of the above. It was a very sensual, very sexual, very exciting (and somewhat disturbing) performance—well worth seeing. We very much enjoyed being there. But the dance did not at all represent the experience we ourselves had just had, in the same environment which the dance claimed to represent.

So-- four possibilities here (@ least):

(1) The dancers got to layers we weren’t able to perceive. We only saw the surface, and didn’t really experience what there was to experience in the reserve. The blinders of a lawyer and a literary critic were too strong for us to see the reality of the biological world.

(2) Or--maybe the experience of the dancers wasn't either "deeper" or "more authentic." Perhaps, like us, they didn't get very "far," and they filled the “vacio” with their own preconceptions about the hidden, throbbing, symbiotic life of the forest—or with their ideas about what constitutes a good dance. The cloudforest really is not “dramatic” in any easily performable way, and they wanted to make a dance that was dramatic. They certainly made a dance using all sorts of sounds (the music they used was quite dramatic, and quite familiar). And they made a dance using all sorts of movements—a whole cluster of them was East Indian—which seemed to us not to arise from the forest, but rather—perhaps--to be drawn out of the repertoire of movements and sounds they brought with them.

(3) Or maybe we and the dancers had different experiences, which require different representations. Our representation would have been set in green, in obscurity, with only brief glimpses of light. There would have been a lot of stillness, a lot of silence, with only the briefest, and the smallest, gestures of movement possible. Never a whole body; only fingers and toes, occasionally a hand. It would have been a representation that requires lots of patience, a willingness to wait, a willingness to be satisfied with “nothing much” happening.

(4) All these possibilities exist, all of them are true. There’s nothing “beyond” what can be represented. I draw again here on Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, my current referent point for what’s happening in this world, and its thorough explication of how “the act of measurement is deeply enmeshed in creating the very reality it is measuring.” So, too, is the act of representation deeply enmeshed in creating the reality it represents. The next question then becomes whether this is a statement about wht we can know, or about reality itself. To Niels Bohr (as Greene explains),

“This issue was on par with a Zen koan. Physics addressed only things we can measure. From the standpoint of physics, that is reality. Trying to use physics to analyze a ‘deeper’ reality, one beyond what we can know through measurement, is like asking physics to analyze the sound of one hand clapping.” Does this apply as well to art? Is what it represents, from the standpoint of art, reality? And is my trying to use it to explicate a ‘deeper’ reality…

Like a Zen koan? Unanswerable? A question that stops the process of questioning?