AnneDalke's blog

A number of years ago, when we were traveling in Spain, we were struck to find, in the main piazza in Madrid, what seemed to us a kind of stand-off between the cathedral and the palace: it looked to us like two heavy power-hitters facing off across an open space. In Antigua we see the remnants of this arrangement: on one side of Parque Centrale are the ruins of the Cathedral, on another the Palacio Capitanes (which now houses the tourist bureau).

But on one of our walks this week, exploring the fourth quadrant of the city, we found ourselves on a road out of town. And there we were surprised to happen upon, all in a row 1) a conference center, 2) an evangelical retreat center, and 3) Nestle’s headquarters. Basically the same line-up, this time away from the center of town-- which is seeming more and more to us like a constricted, controlled environment, one where tourists like ourselves are stumbling over the uneven sidewalks, outside those closed-off walls, thinking whatever thoughts we think, but really knowing nothing whatever of what is going on here (including where the real money and power lies).

And I’m realizing that this is all metaphoric. My current reading is not Guatemaletecan, but an up-to-date colloquial account of theoretical physics, Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality. Greene makes it very clear from the beginning that the current best candidate for a grand unifying theory of space and time—super-string theory, which requires 9 or 10 spacial dimensions and one time dimension—is telling us that our own experiences are but “glimpses of a meager slice of reality.” There may be other worlds, “nearby in the extra dimensions--of which we’ve so far been completely unaware.” We’re not seeing the tiniest bit of what is (nor can we ever expect to).

I just finished reading The Beggar’s Knife, a collection of troubling dream-like stories by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, in which inside and outside, reality and perception, constantly interpenetrate one another: dead men talk, those who find their bodies become them, their spirits inhabit the living. One of those characters muses that his

relationships with the world were uncertain…. He was never able to understand why others were not aware that the outside, what one could perceive of animals and objects, was a dream….He looked at the stars and thought: Perhaps they are holes, and their rays are ropes that other fishermen hold in their hands.

Yesterday, as I said good-bye to my teacher, I started to cry. I felt a little foolish—this was, after all, from the beginning, a temporary paid arrangement. So what was that all about? Well, we’d been sitting up close in that cubículo for four hours every morning, making conversation—albeit in VERY halting Spanish--about a wide range of topics, from government corruption to learning disabilities, from the history of machismo to word plays on “embarazaso/embarazada” (to be embarrassed/to be pregnant). I was doing there what I most like to do, what makes me feel most alive, most centered, most sure that my life makes some sense/is worth going through with: that is, being engaged with another, learning about how they understand the world, and trying out my perceptions on them in turn.

This language-learning has been a big struggle for me. On the one hand, I’m very very hungry to be able to talk—really talk—to the people I’m meeting. On the other hand, I’m loathe to give up the structure of the rest of what feeds me— reading books, watching movies, writing my reflections in my journal and my blog, to my friends and family, then thinking about and responding to their responses. Not to mention my deep-seated resistance to getting the language by learning its rules. Along with the concomitant notion that the way to learn to speak and understand is to speak and listen, to pick up Spanish the way children learn their native tongue, rather than memorizing its regulations….

I really hit a wall this week w/ the irregular reflective verbs: every sentence—and these were REALLY simple sentences, like “I get up”—means @ least four decisions: which pronoun for the subject? which pronoun for the reflective? which verb for the action? what conjugation goes with the pronoun? (and this is just the tip of the iceberg; I’m still speaking entirely in the present!). IT’S JUST TOO MUCH THINKING.

On the other hand, learning this language has been a delightful impetus to just the sort of thinking I most enjoy: my philosophizing about the varieties of ways different cultures have for making sense of (and making sensible sentences about) the world. Most striking to me, amid all these distinctions, is the awareness that (as Jeff keeps saying) “I can’t win the argument.” I might get a grudging acknowledgement from my teacher that yes, “the best conversations are reflexive,” but she’ll still insist (rightly!) that the verb form is not reflexive in Spanish. However much it might please me to write “nos conversamos” (we talk with ourselves), the correct form is the non-reflective “conversamos.”

I was also reflecting earlier on the interesting differences between the two Spanish forms of “to be”: “ser” (which indicates states that are permanent) and “estar” (which is used for what is temporary). Turns out that there are “similarly different” forms of “to learn”: “saber” (used when you know something abstract or intellectual, like an idea) and “conocer” (when you know something concrete, like a person. The great example my teacher gave me was “Maria conoce á Luis, pero no save dondé vive el--Maria knows Luis, but she doesn’t know how to live w/ him”!) I’ve often told my students that intellectual work means moving back and forth between the concrete and the abstract: making detailed observations, then generalizing from them. So I find it quite handy now to have two words for the two ends of this spectrum….

Two other relevant examples, of different ways of divvying things up. When I asked my teacher for translations of the books I’ve been reading, she used the same phrase, “más allá,” for both Beyond (the Mexique Bay) and Over the Top (Of the World). Again: makes sense: beyond and over the top. Same idea. Same word.

I expect that most travelers quickly notice the different ways that different cultures have of making sense of the world. Seeing these differences gives us a sharp sense of the constructedness of our own ways of dividing up the world, and leads us (or at least it leads me) to question our own logics.

For instance, in Antigua is laid out on a grid, w/ avenues going north/south and streets going east/west. They are both numbered sequentially (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.) and labeled w/ geographical directions (norde, sud, oriente, poinete). East, easy. BUT—all the streets have a second (& third, maybe even a fourth) name, and these are the labels used on the street corners. These secondary/tertiary names refer to the important sites in the area; usually they are the names of a nearby church (there are over 30 churches in Antigua). And—far as we can figure—four streets in the neighborhood might well be called, say, “Santa Lucia.” As you might imagine, this has given us conniption fits, as we have tried to figure out how to negotiate the streets (trying find the p.o. or a restaurant w/ an address that doesn’t correspond either to your map or to the street you’re standing on…) And yet: it makes a lot of sense, yes? Since any street named Santa Lucia is going to lead you to Santa Lucia (okay, okay, this is only handy if it’s the church you’re looking for, but I assume that, @ one point in time, this was the case…!)

Just down the street from our school, Jeff and I have found a “bistro cinema.” The viewing rooms are set up w/ old car seats; the movies are terrible old prints, displayed on t.v. screens. But we usually have the place to ourselves, and beer is served. On the somewhat inchoate and unsteady theory that the more we hear Spanish, the better able we’ll be to understand it, we’ve been seeking out only Spanish-language films. This means that we’ve mostly been watching very sad movies about the recent civil war, such as La Hija del Pumá and El Norte. I’m also just finishing a troubling collection of short stories by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, which give a strong sense of being dreamed--and that are surely also metaphors for the terror and oppression of mid-20th-century Guatemala.

Excruciating--and very hard both to learn from and make sense of—-are the stories I’m learning from these books and films, but also from newspapers and talking w/ the teachers here, about the horrific mistakes that constitute the history of this country: the invasion of the conquistadors, their enslaving the indigenous population, the many struggles for independence, from colonialism both within and without--taking the form, most recently of a 36-year-long civil war in which 1000s disappeared, a million were made homeless, and some 200,000 Guatemalans were killed. Add to that, more recently, the stripping of the landscape in ways that contribute to unspeakable floods and landslides (for only one account—not only of personal suffering, but of a huge cultural loss--see the story of what happened to an artist, Raúl Vásquez, whose museum we tried (unsuccessfully) to visit in Panajachel last weekend.

What’s been most interesting for me, amid all this, has been to recognize the ancient pattern of “la mexcla” (mixing) in this country. For instance: those gorgeous textiles woven by the Maya? The Spanish first assigned them the task of weaving, and supplied their thread; they also gave different designs to weavers in different villages, so they could tell the groups apart—and many of the designs they used were European in origin. (So: what’s authentic? I don’t think it’s possible to say…) The other day, we encountered the ultimate in “mixing”: the cult figure of Maximon (aka St. Simon).

But instead of embracing the mixing, there’s been an long and arduous attempt, on both sides, to preserve (an illusion of?) purity. Even Rigoberta Minchú, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for the work she did for indigenous rights, said in her autobiography that “White men are like their bread, they are not wholesome. The blood of our most noble ancestors was mixed with the blood of white men. They are a mixture just like their food.” And in one of the stories by Arturio Arias, an Inquisitor appears who is “a mix of Spanish and Indian which he himself could scarcely endure. The two bad smells. The two envies…the Inquisitor purified himself completely….”

About a month ago, I wrote a review of Rebecca Goldstein’s intellectual biography about Betraying Spinoza,, which points out that the impossibility of establishing "purity of blood" (since the conversation of the Jews to Christianity had been taking place over so long a period of time) fed the racist anxiety of the Inquisition. In that context, Spinoza made a radical countermove, arguing for philosophical objectivity, a “near-estrangement from one's own self.”

I wonder if that works as a description of the exercise I’m engaged in here: estranging myself from my located, particular (what Spinoza calls "accidental") identity. So much of what I’ve written about so far on this trip has been about what’s been going on on the outside—the amazingness of living in a new-to-me culture, one with a long and complicated history and a deep and complicated present that I’m trying very hard to make sense of. What I haven’t been talking much about in this public space is all the complexities of what goes on on the inside, when one does what I am doing: strips away a good deal of what one normally does (normally “is”): on sabbatical from work, from housekeeping, from in-person interactions w/ family, friends, colleagues--

What’s left? Who am I (besides a Spanish-learning machine?). One thing I continue to have, as always, are deep and vivid dreams. I dream of all I’ve left behind in the physical world (see above: work, housekeeping, family, friends, colleagues—if you’re reading this blog, I’ve probably had a dream about you in the past month). The dreams color the days: I wake from a sad visit to one of you, or emerge from an intense meeting, a langorous conversation, and wonder…

Where am I? Who am I? What am I doing here? Where is here? I woke from a powerful dream this morning, for instance, in which I was visiting a cousin and close friend. She was turning over her oriental carpets, looking for the troubling messages hidden by the weavers on the underside. She felt she had to interpret them (that is: I feel I have to interpret them). And having interpreted them, what will I know?

For the past five years or so, I’ve been encouraging my students to make mistakes publicly, where they can be corrected, --a great method for learning new things.

Learning a new language here is a daily, concrete (and to me often excruciating—I do like being right!) application of this principle of the need to be—and usefulness of being--publicly, and repeatedly, wrong. I’m very slowly getting the hang of just saying what I know (always so limited, so inadequate for what I want to be saying…). I get great pleasure from taking the time to write out long stories (in fairly simple sentences!) about my experiences of visiting Lake Atitlan or climbing the Hill of the Cross; what’s far harder is engaging in on-the-spot dialogue, the give-and-take of wanting to say/not having the words to speak. One thing I’ve learned is how very much can be said without words; so much of our exchanges w/ one another can be conveyed by gestures, or involve the expected (“do you want a bag for that?”) that it doesn’t really matter @ all what is being said.

But then what is the point of all the words? (Here’s an amazing line from the Asturias collection of stories: “Words. Few. Very few. Inch worms across vast silences. After all that had happened.”)

In the Popul Vuh, one reason the gods keep trying out (and throwing out!) new versions of human beings is that they have a “desire for articulate human speech.…Not only that, but they want to hear their own names and praises.” So an early version of humans, which can only hum and rustle, is replaced by a later one, capable only of moans and cries. Eventually the gods are able to generate beings who can worship them. Is that what we are looking for, as we emerge into language? A means of praising/exchanging praise for one another?

I participated for several years in a Working Group on Language @ Bryn Mawr, and one of the key ideas I learned there was the notion that we use language, not to convey information, but to solicit feedback from others; not to tell them what we know, but to learn what we don’t. This notion evolves from the analysis of linguists that what we say is never heard transparently, but rather always as a poor translation of what we mean. The stages of transmission are many: from what we feel, to what we think, to what we say; from what we say, to what we are heard to be saying; from what is heard, to what is thought, to what is felt by the one w/ whom we are speaking….

So, in many ways, my writing exercises and speaking lessons here are metaphors for the larger process of our telling one another stories of our experiences, and never-never-never quite getting it….

This weekend, Jeff and I took a jaunt to Atitlan, and had our breath taken away by “the most beautiful lake in the world.” We also had our brains twisted around by the realization that

• the archeologists who have excavated pottery from the lake bottom have turned up a series of the most surreal, laugh-out-loud items (see right and below...)
• this tremendous lake was formed by a huge volcanic eruption 85,000 years ago, one that sent ash as far away as Florida; and
• geologists only figured this out in 1980 (why does this please me so? –-as evidence of the ever-evolving nature of knowledge and story-telling; the guy whose theory was overturned said that he was glad there were young whippersnappers to prove him wrong!)

And what do I make of these juxtapositions? Not only that that ancient Mayans had a sense of humor, but that their world, like our own, is a place of cataclysm and chance.And that the absurd connections that humor makes may well be an index to the deeply quirky, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable nature of the real.

So—turns out I wasn’t taking the decided turn in my reading I expected, this weekend, when I went from the graphic political work of Rigoberta Minchú to the magical realism of Guatemala’s Nobel laureate, Miguel Angel Asturias. Asturias’ work mixes socialist realism and magical realism, the mythically universal and the particularly Guatemaletecan. It’s been described as a sort of “science fiction in reverse.” The collection I started with, The Mirror of Lida Sal: Tales Based on Mayan Myths & Guatemalan Legends, opens with a particularly evocative “Portico,” that draws the reader into the stories as into a Mayan ruin buried deep in the jungle: “Between the kernel of corn and the sovereign sun seethes the carbonized reality of the dream.”

As Asturias describes it, the nature of this “carbonized reality” is that of a communal dream, and the waking lives of individuals are merely stolen representations of what lies beyond:

“To create is to steal….All works of art are foreign and belong to those who borrow them from the interior of themselves; not how much we say that they are ours, they belong to the secret echoes, even though…we may let them shine as our own….” In the college seminar I’ve been co-teaching @ Bryn Mawr for the past five years, we use a NYTimes Magazine article by Lisa Belkin called ”The Odds of That,” which argues that—as pattern-making creatures, who now (thanks to the Internet) have an enormous wealth of information easily available—we humans need to beware our tendency to see patterns where there are none. On quite the other hand, Asturias suggests that such patterns are real: people sum up the most disparate events which are related to one another…by who knows what fatality….In nature, things happen. A lie buried in one place will pop up someplace else. It was all like a bad dream. Asturio even makes the evolution of life-forms on earth into a dream-like narrative. This is a very different (and intoxicating?!) way of describing tthe story of evolution that biologists have traced, as more complicated forms of life evolve from the mixing of simpler ones: Fermented rain. Drunkenness of the earth. The inebriated rivers zigzag. The trees are staggering drunk. The intoxication of the mineral is the vegetable. Minerals are drunk on vegetables. The drunkenness of the vegetable is the animal. The animals are hallucinating, delirious vegetables…

Put that in your pipe and smoke it: we are both “carbonized reality” and “hallucinating vegetables…”

I have all my life been subject to strong mood swings: from the happiness & hopefulness that besets me most mornings, to an often not-so-much later crash into sadness & hopelessness….

So it’s been quite an experience for me to find myself living in a country where the weather is as changeable as my moods. Most mornings here in the highlands of Guatemala are gloriously clear and sunny, full of flowers, birdsong, possibility…

…and most afternoons (now, @ the end of the rainy seasons) are weighed down, contrarywise, with drenching rains, preceded by overcast skies, a sense of oppressiveness, of (not to put too fine a point upon it) an inescapable weight, a sense of doom…

What I want to try and write about this afternoon--in part in order to lift that sense of the oppressive--is the space in between internal mood swings (which seem to respond to something unknown and uncontrollable, surges of hormones, whatever) and the variable weather of Central America. What is changeable in that inbetween space, where humans relate to one another…?

I have found @ least one clear answer in the narrative I’ve just finished, Rigoberto Minchú’s autobiography, which is quite striking to me in the move it makes from the intractable conservatism of traditional Mayan ways of doing things (“You mustn’t change the way you dress, because you’re the same person and you’re not going to change from now on”) to the revolutionary work of Mayans who decided that “on this earth we have a right to what we need.”

Inbetween Minchú offers at least two striking reflections on the role that an attitude toward the world might play in revising the world: She says that, for Mayans, “bad things are like spirits, which exist only in our imagination.” That is (I think?) we can make the world, shape it after our own imaginings (cf. Hamlet 2:2: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison”). Minchú also reports on the opposite side of the coin, the positive effects that positive thinking can have: Her mother ““always dreamed about nature. I think it was just her own imagination working. But when someone believes, things that you imagine often happen.”

What I find most striking in Minchú’s narrative is the account it gives of the change in thinking—and with it the change in agency and action—that occurs. The story begins with a strong emphasis on the necessity of accepting life’s suffering. At the age of ten, all Mayan children are told, as Rigoberto’s parents told her, that “I would want many things that I couldn’t have…that, whatever my ambitions, I’d no way of achieving them. That’s how life is…” A few years later, a few years older, such children engage in a marriage ceremony that includes a promise, made by both parties, that they will suffer; a number of their children will die young, but they will bear it and go on…

On the one hand, this attitude involves an open acceptance of what is; there is no judgment of failure, but simply an acknowledgement of difference that anticipates by decades contemporary Northamerican arguments about the value of diversity:

Our people don’t differentiate between people who are homosexual and people who aren’t….We don’t have the rejection of homosexuality the ladinos do; they really cannot stand it. What’s good about our way of life is that everything is considered part of nature. So an animal which didn’t turn out right is part of nature, so is a harvest that didn’t give a good yield. On the other hand, such an attitude had meant, for centuries, that Mayans accepted the constrictions of a life defined by the suffering of poverty, the loss of children, the curtailment of ambition: “We say you shouldn’t ask for more than you can receive,” Minchú explains. “That’s what the ladinos brought with them. It’s a phenomenon which arrived with the foreigners.”

In the course of her narrative, however, Minchú learns to disentangle acceptance from resignation, to give her life over to ending oppression: “Our situation had nothing to do with fate but was something which had been imposed on us”; Mayans “had to defend themselves against it…”

Such a reorientation seems to have @ least some of its roots in the worldview traced by Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life, which has opened up to me a range of other ways of thinking about the world. For instance, the 260-day divinatory calendar of the Maya is based on human and earthly—rather than astronomical—calculations. That opens up all sorts of thinking about the basis for the patterns we make of our days, and of our lives:

The foundation of Mayan timekeeping, and that of Mesoamerican timekeeping in general, is a divinatory calendar of 260 days…Contemporary daykeepers often call this sequence of days “the calendar of the earth,” thus setting it apart from astronomical intervals such as the solar year…[some insist] that the period of human pregnancy is the basis for its length…260 days is indeed close to the average figure for the interval between first missed menses (the earliest definitive sign of pregnancy) and birth. It should also be noted that the growth cycle of one of the varieties of corn planted in highland Guatemala is such that it is ideally harvested 260 days after planting. (“The Mayan Calendar,” in “notes and Comments to Dennis Tedlock’s translation of Popol Vuh ) So: what is the most productive—the most life-giving—frame of reference within which we can operate? An internal calibration? An interpersonal one? A global one? One that’s astronomical?

Shaye commented that "the mind has to be let go of. Words and thinking will never get to truth. Expansion of mind and expansion of consciousness are not the same thing." Could you say more about that...that mind is much more than consciousness, you mean, and that to get anywhere--really anywhere--we (I mean I!) have to stop thinking so much....?

I've been told by many people over the years that I think too much, and I certainly think that I'm thinking too much to profit as much as I mind from my current course of Spanish language study....

...but sometimes (I really do think that!) thinking really can move mountains.

Probably because I grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, amid a large extended family that made me feel quite safe, I have always found it comforting to be in the mountains. Being there gives me a sense of steadiness, of groundedness (even when the mountain in question is an unstable one, like the volcanos in Iceland or here in Guatemala. And I did learn, years ago, that the Biblical phrase, “I look up to the hills, from which cometh my help” might well/probably is better punctuated as, “I look up to the hills. From whence cometh my help? It cometh from the Lord….” (not, in other words, either from the mountains or from the spirits that inhabit them, but rather from the God who is beyond them all).

In this context, I greatly amused, last night, to come across Augusto Monterrose’s “Faith and Mountains,” in The Black Sheep and Other Fables (1969):

In the beginning, Faith only moved mountains when this was absolutely necessary, as a result of which the scenery remained the same for millennia at a time.

But when Faith started spreading and people began to be amused by the idea of moving mountains, these did nothing but change place, and it became more and more difficult to find them in the spot where they had been left the night before, which of course created more difficulties than it resolved.

From this point on, decent people chose to abandon Faith, and now for the most part mountains stay put.

Whenever there is a landslide on the roads and a number of passengers die beneath the rocks, this means that someone, nearby or faraway, has had a glimmer of Faith.

It occurs to me that now it is industry, buttressed by science, that has the power “to move mountains” (=drill tunnels through them, dig into them). Given such capacity: who needs faith any more? And for what purpose?

My tutor told me this morning that I was a philosopher. This was not a compliment.

It arose in the midst of her explaining to me the multiple uses of “ser” (as opposed to those of “estar”). I was (of course) questioning the distinctions, the possibility of any action or state—any—being “permanente.” This was followed by an intense discussion of the verb “haber” (used to “indica existencia,” as in “there is/there are”). It all ended in my giving myself a homework assignment in which I used various forms of “ser,” in an attempt to demonstrate the impermanence of all states of being.

It was beyond my capacity, in this essay, to explore the other matter which interests me: the suggestion, when we use the passive voice, that we are not agents (for example, to say that “there is no cheese in the refrigerator” doesn’t indicate which one of us has forgotten to do the shopping). I was thinking, on the one hand, of how I’m always urging first-year students @ Bryn Mawr to use the active voice, because it’s so clear and direct in indicating who is responsible for an idea. In contrast, Quaker minutes cultivate what the secular world would call a passive voice (“it was the sense of the meeting that…”). This is actually, in this context, a strong way of indicating that the action is coming from beyond the individual, is led rather from or by the world of the Spirit.

You know, of the nice things about learning Spanish (and trying it out in bits and pieces on my English-speaking friends and family) is that I get some back again, on e-mail and in other forms. One my correspondents (who also happens to be one of my children) sent this advice earlier this week: "Tú acuerdas, el mundo es un pañuel." I was having a lot of trouble w/ this (“the world is a handkerchief??), but my teacher gave me a hand up. First she pulled out a visual aide: she took a napkin, folded it in halves, then in quarters, then on the diagonal.Then she it crunched up, and said, "El mundo es un pañuela significa el mundo es pequéno, y cambia, ye tiene muchas formas, y muchas interpretacionés"—which is to say that the meaning of “the world is a handkerchief” is that the world is

• small,
• changing (and changeable),
• can take many different forms, and
• is open to many interpretations.

Wow. Not so far different from what I noticed Rigoberta Minchú saying, in my reading of last night: that for the Mayans, “bad things are like spirits, which exist only in our imagination.”

I’ve decided to make this my motto for this semester’s travels. Think about it: “The world is a handkerchief.” (And thinking makes it so?)

Another insistent line of questions that are bedeviling me in this new place has to do, of course, with the matter of language learning. It’s not coming easily. Given enough time, a dictionary, and consultation with my tutor, a native speaker, I can write passable Spanish sentences. Having written out a range of practice sentences, I can also purchase a paper, writing materials, books, groceries, a meal in a restaurant, or an evening @ the movies. I have also been able to request that my my bed be made, my laundry be done, my broken drinking glass replaced.

Where it gets hard, of course, is in any move beyond the pragmatic. Last spring, the Working Group on Emergence @ Bryn Mawr explored the question of why irregular verbs, in all languages, tend to be the most commonly used ones. This question, which not so long ago interested me on an abstract level, has taken on a strikingly concrete application in the course of my first week’s language study, where learning a few mas importantes verbosos irregulares has taken precedent over the memorizing of dozens and dozens of regular ones….

But I’ve also found that grammar instruction offers surprising entrances into deeper questions. For instance, in Spanish (as all beginning learners come to know quite quickly), there are two forms of “to be”: “estar” y “ser.” The first indicates a temporary state, the second a permanent one. This distinction has some marvelous ramifications. For instance, when applied to the adjective “listo” (to be ready), “Elle es lista” means “she is ready” (as in, the student is prepared for her lesson). But “Ella está lista” means she is permanently prepared, as in “she is clever; she is intelligent.” Do you see where this distinction might take us? To a meditation on what constitutes intelligence: a permanent state of “readiness”?

How much is hidden behind these walls in Antigua?

We have begun to buy newspapers regularly (makes for lots of hilarity on the street corner, since our Spanish is quite terrible). This week we read in the newspaper that Antigua was hosting a conference for indigenous delegates from the governments of 23 countries. The next day, the delegates published a proclamation in the newspaper. But we had seen no evidence of their activity anywhere in the city, in the streets ….

Of course a good portion of our sense that we are shut out from most of what is happening here is because we are shut out—by virtue of nationality, and by our lack of facility in the language, and by our recent arrival in the country. But I am also beginning to get a sense that we have stepped into a culture of secrecy.

For instance: we went yesterday on a wild all-day excursion with our daughter Marian’s extended host family. There were 11 people in one van, of 3 different generations, 3 different languages, 5 different nationalities. What a complicated mix we were: a driver who was doing his best to negotiate the deep ruts in the road—and arrange future jaunts with some of us; a Guatemalean teenager who wasn’t much interested in talking w/ any of us; two little boys who were speaking Spanish with their Australian father, and English with their Guatemalean mother; two East Europeans—one from the Czech Republic, one from Germany—who spoke German with one another. Then there was Marian, who was switching effortlessly from English to Spanish; and Jeff and me, who took in what we could, while putting out very little….

Eventually (after many wrong turns; the signage here is nearly non-existent) we arrived @ our goal: Mixco Viejo, a re-constructed post-classic Poqomam Mayan ruin. On the one hand, it was wonderful to get out of the walled city of Antigua, to feel the largeness that comes of standing atop the world. On the other hand, Mixco Viejo was itself a fortified city, surrounded by rock walls, hidden deep between crevasses (there’s only one way in and one way out, which is why it took so long for the Spanish to hunt ‘em out…)

At the end of that exhausting day, I felt that there was nowhere & no way, in this country, to get away from walls: the walls that line the streets of Antigua, as well as the fortresses of the Mayans; the walled silences of an unhappy teenager, of a Ladino working woman, of Mayans who maintain an intense reserve in public spaces. (I’m reading, this week, I, Rigoberto Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, which has, as a leit-motif, the insistent keeping of cultural secrets, as a means of self-protection).

So: what role might I play in such a place? (I doubt it will be the ferreting-out of secrets….) Ann asked what Guatemalans need from me: Is my role to be a consumer of their culture, contributing my dollars to their economy? Can I offer something more interactive? Switching from Ann’s questions to my own (which hers provoked): might my attempts @ interactive dialogue serve only my needs, while obstructing the needs of those who live here?

Marian began working this week with an organization called Project Safe Passage (Camina Seguro), which offers support and education to the street children of Guatemala City. The packet of information they’ve prepared for their volunteers concludes with the caution that an experience “which enriches you may rob another." It also asks the question, “If you want a home away from home, why travel?”

Why indeed?

And why travel in particular to a country where the generative text, Popol Vuh, proclaims

“We have always lived here: we have the right to go on living where we are happy and where we want to die. Only here can we feel whole: nowhere else would we ever feel complete and our pain would be eternal.” In such fastnesses, in such sacred mountain spaces, what place is there for a foreigner who seeks to know and understand the different ways of others?

Indeed, what role does such a traveler play in more settled places, those that have actually evolved to serve the needs of tourists? Par examplar: the school where we’re studying this month, San Jose en Viejo, offers the option of having a new teacher each week. Marian (always the good question-asker) observed that my own decision to switch to a new teacher was “like prostitution”: “You get to say, ‘I like you; I want you again,” or “I don’t like you; I want to try someone different next week.’” Is that the role I’m playing here, as consumer of a performance—not a sexual, but a linguistic one? Am I looking for what will most entertain, most enlighten, most enrich me? At what cost? To whom?