AnneDalke's blog

I'm doing this hard thing this semester, living in a country where I know neither the language or anyone here. Such an arrangement leaves plenty of space for interior reflection--and has little provision for reality checks, for the balance of the social that has always kept me this side of sanity.

I've just finished reading a Paul Bowles novel, Up Above the World, where one Central American visitor has made for himself “an eternally empty schedule in which he would enjoy the maximum liberty to make sudden decisions,” and where several others say they “just move around where we please, when we please. It’s the only way to do it.…The whole point is to be free. Not to have to make reservations ahead of time...” Making no reservations ahead of time—not deliberately anticipating my own wants and needs, much less holding myself responsible to the needs or wants of others—is for me both the draw and the draw-back of this semester’s experiment. I’ve been thinking today largely about the latter, about the social dimensions of mental health—that is, about the role that being a meaningful participant in some communal project has in my own well-being.

Bowles’ novel is a version of Heart of Darkness, set in Central America; it is filled with accounts of characters “trapped in the solitary chambers of existence,” “clinging mollusk-like to the underside of consciousness until someone comes and touches” them. This “inner world of torment” finds its Conradian compliment in the “monstrous hairy darkness” of the Central American jungle: “the possibility of being seized and paralyzed” by one’s “own nightmare that clicked and pulsed out there from its black insect heart.” Like Conrad, Bowles uses the less settled regions of the world as symbols for the dark interior of the “civilized mind.” The gringo encounters, in Africa, in Central America, “the obscene reality of self”:

"The purpose of the fiesta came to her. It was not meant to celebrate the glory of God...Instead, it was a night of collective fear, when everyone agreed to be frightened." I’ve been watching quite a fiesta myself lately. Today is September 15, the anniversary of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua’s achieving independence from Spain in 1821. It’s made a sharp contrast, for me, to last week’s musings in the U.S. about September 11.The celebration here has been a wild one: the streets have been full since yesterday afternoon with an astonishing variety of expressive forms, from very precise marching bands--one of them playing “The Marine Hymn”(?!)--to groups of young men running through the streets w/ torches. (I keep waiting for a collision between the marchers and the runners, the rule-followers and the rule-breakers…) The festivities picked up again @ 6 this morning, with fireworks and music and much shouting….

On a nearby site on Serendip, one of those reflecting on the ramifications of 9/11, Mark Lord has just called for a serious effort to imagine better: “we are very, very poorly equipped to imagine worlds that are even slightly different than the ones we create for ourselves.” I have a slightly different take on this: that the U.S. government has done a pretty good (=awfully successful) job of fanning the flames of our worse imaginings, the fears which make us most vulnerable.

Remember Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”? Reading over Mark’s posting, it occurs to me that the U.S. has a government now that not only does not try to minimize the fear we feel, but actually has worked quite hard to augment it—and that we have ourselves not only allowed, but encouraged, the fanning of those passions. Adous Huxley argued decades ago that it exhilarates us to have these feelings: “we cannot preserve our soul’s health without occasional orgasms of hatred, self-love, and group-frenzy….”

Watching the frenzy here, remembering the frenzy @ home, I wonder—mightn’t we find other ways to make meaning (and make common cause) in our lives, than trying to escape from our (inter)dependence by declaring our independence from one another?

I’m grateful to have friends who listen to my musings, and muse back again….quite striking to me yesterday was the juxtaposition of Ann’s comment about the “parochial nature of life”—> that is, the necessity (given the limits of space and time) to attend to what is deeply personal to us, and Shaye’s interest in hearing me “speak from my heart,” along her concomitant disinterest in quotations from others....

And yet. And yet.

Though I’m very much enjoying the experiment, I haven’t quite figured out how best to use this blog. I do think it’s got to be something “more” than a personal journal, something that reaches beyond the private and idiosyncratic to something larger. Par exemplar:

Last night I dreamt that I was one of many Mayan women, lined up to have our bags of corn weighed by the conquistadores. Because I wanted to know how much my baby weighed, I hid her in my bag, thinking that the difference between the amount of corn I’d harvested and the amount showing on the scale would tell me if my baby was growing properly.

That dream is surely about something personal and psychological (though I’m not quite sure what!). But it also surely references something larger and far more interesting, something I’d picked up earlier that evening: the great irony of how the Mayans used the alphabetic writing taught them by the missionaries. They transcribed Christian prayers and sermons, as instructed; they also preserved and masked their own ancient texts (as, in my dream, I “masked” my own search for information in the weighing being conducted by the masters).

The city where I’m living for these three weeks is “old,” or Antigua, Guatemala, originally the capital of the country, abandoned to ruin after a late 18th century earthquake, now somewhat erratically preserved. Walking around the city this first week, I’ve stumbled repeatedly upon a palimpsest of multiple eras of human experiences, in architecture as well as in an astonishing mixture of food, clothing and activity. At first I found it disconcerting to see a Burger King housed in an ancient building, or to watch a woman, dressed in rich layers of traditional clothing, balancing precariously on high heels, making her away across cobblestone streets to climb onto a chicken bus. It was confusing to me to hear a Simon & Garfunkel recording of “The Sounds of Silence” playing in one of the old churches, or to listen to one of the marching bands in the Independence Day parade play The Marine Hymn. But I’m slowly beginning to appreciate this living, ever-revisable account of experimentation and evolution. And I’ve just discovered that, in this part of the world, such a recognition has very ancient roots.

I'm making the shift now from reading accounts of Guatemala written by gringo visitors like Huxley and Bowles to reading indigenous stories. I decided to begin in the beginning, with Popul Vuh, The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings, which existed originally in the form of hieroglyphics. According to the "definitive edition" which I'm using (first translated by Dennis Tedlock in 1985), the lords of a kingdom called Quiché, in the highlands of Guatemala, used this book as a "seeing instrument" or "place to see"; it was for them a means for overcoming their own nearsightedness, the limits of space and time. (It occurs to me that I've always used books this way: to expand my own experiences, my own vision of things; as above, I’m finding my way to using the internet in similar ways.)

What struck me immediately about this "Council Book" (and I do think this is profound) is that the "makers" and "modelers" in this creation story are quite explicitly conducting "an experiment with the human design":

They made a body, but it didn't look good to them....So then they dismantled....'There is yet to find, yet to discover how we are to...construct a person again’....so they fell, just an experiment and just a cutout for humankind...Again there came...demolition....The people were...destroyed and crushed....it used to be said that the monkeys in the forest today...were left as a sign...of a previous human... design--mere manikins, mere woodcarvings.... Here's a creation story that anticipates, by at least a thousand years, the Darwinian description of evolution as an experiment in repeatedly trying out new designs, getting them, each time, somewhat less wrong, if never quite “right." Popol Vuh seems to me a prescient offering, a bridge between contemporary religious and scientific ways of understanding the world, perhaps too between personal, idiosyncratic and larger, more general angles of vision?

I certainly need to revise the story I wrote early yesterday (a spin off from Huxley's perceptions, as they intersected with my first-day's impressions) of Antigua as a place preserved in time. Our walk later yesterday afternoon took us through a lively portion of the city, filled w/ chicken buses coming and going (to Guatemala City, Xela and other locations), stopping frequently for people to hop out of the back or into the front, grabbing suitcases and packages from the roof. We saw/heard/smelled all the evidence of throbbing city life: streets and sidewalks filled w/ people of all ages and many ethic groups, going in an out of small corner stores, huge open-air markets, overwhelming supermarkets, parks and churches (so many churches!), medical centers, car repair shops, bars, cafes, and multiple banks (all with armed guards; many of the stores are similarly guarded).

I also find myself questioning Huxley's explanation for the wierdly homogenous and strangely anachronistic architecture of this city. He said that

Antigua is a place of earthquakes. Every few years...facades got cracked and called for extensive repairs; there must have been frequent excuses for bringing old-fashioned details up to date...In their attempts to build something that would withstand the constant tremors, the local architects evolved an almost Saxon style...of queer anti-seismic architecture....At Antigua...architects retreated...towards the massive artificial caverns of their barbarian predecessors. From Huxley's perspective, in which progress is the opposite of stagnation, these massive structures may indeed have seemed "barbarous." They strike me rather as calm, stable, certain, comforting, secure. Not unlike, and very appropriately an expression of, what strikes me now as the centeredness, friendliness and open-heartedness of the people I encounter....

What I've been musing about further today is my means of communication, both with people here and with those of you I am talking to-and-with on the 'net. As I begin experimenting w/ this pretty-new-to-me format of blogging, I also find myself wondering how and what changes it rings on the traditional format of journal writing. There was a marvelous selection of passages from Susan Sontag's journals in last week's New York Times Magazine; among many other things, she describes the effect, on one's self-development, of keeping a journal. It is "superficial," she claims,

to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one's private, secret thoughts. like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather--in many cases--offers an alternative to it. What changes might be rung on that process, when one begins keeping a journal in the open, as in the form of a blog that the whole world could read? I am attempting to record here portions of my experience that may have general application and interest--not only to those who know me, and so may have a particular interest in my reflections; not only to those who may also have some experience of the places I am traveling, and want to compare their own reflections; but also to anyone who may happen upon these thoughts-in-the open, about the comparativist thinking that traveling may engender.

For instance: I spoke (albeit haltingly!) with my tutor this morning, about the impact and meaning of September 11, for her, her family, neighbors and countrypeople. What I heard in response was a a profound sense of sadness, of the tragedy of the loss of life of people (from Guatemala, from Latin America, from all countries of the world)--but no sense of political ramifications of the bombing of the Trade Center, no sense of a challenge to a certain way of life, or a call to re-thinking any particular way of being in the world (or listening to the stories of others in it). Her response gave me a sense of how parochial my own distraught reaction to the collapse of the towers was, and continues to be. There are many people in the world--including, I am learning, those of the central highlands of Guatemala---for whom September 11 seems to have little direct application, little direct or indirect to teach.

Or maybe that's an index to the parochial nature of life in more secluded spaces? What space is secluded, in today's world, from the common concerns of us all? What place can be--and @ what cost?

Here's a possible analogy. Jeff and I are attacking this learning of a new language in quite disparate ways: he's breaking it down into the smallest possible units: the sounds of letters and words. I'm impatient w/ that approach, and w/ the next step up the ladder of abstraction as well: the memorization of lists of words. What seems to work best (to stick most quickly and for longer time periods) for me is learning @ the sentence level: if a word has a context that gives it meaning ("Nosotras estudiamos español juntas") I can catch it sooner and retain it better. Mightn't we all attempt something of the same gesture, with regard to our actions in the world? Thinking of them in larger contexts than our own local neighborhoods....?

In Jane Bowles' short story, "A Guatemalean Idyll," a tourist, discontented in Antigua, asks, "What is the point of traveling?" Maybe, living in Antigua for the next three weeks, I'll find a few answers to this question...?

On this anniversary, rather than looking back to look forward, I'm traveling in Central America with my daughter Marian and my husband Jeff. Marian has lived in Mexico, and is fluent in Spanish. Jeff and I have no experience either living or speaking in this part of the world.

When we touched down in Guatemala City yesterday afternoon, the whole plane load of people burst into applause.

Marian: "This expresses our gratitude to the pilot."

Anne: "Perhaps this suggests an uncertainty that we would be landing safely?"

Jeff:"Are we one or two hours behind time?"

Marian: "Parentals: There is one thing you need to know while living in a new country. You are not going to understand everything. Why people clap. What time it is."

Anne: "Inquiring minds want to know."

Marian: "Your mind wants to know. Your mind needs to change."

At this point, all the old women around us pull their suitcases down from the overhead bins, place them on their heads, and walk free-handed off the plane. Somewhat bewildered (how can they do this, without holding on?), we follow.

The drive from Guatamala City to Antigua is an adventure. There are many cars, quite a few of them stopped in the middle of traffic. The road is winding, mountainous and under repair. The traffic is heavy; quite a few of the cars are stopped, w/ engine trouble or flat tires, in the middle of the road. There are many riders in the open backs of pick-up trucks.

But Antigua (when we finally arrive) is a place stopped-in-time, a beautifully preserved (for tourists?) place: all flowers and ruins, bright and beautiful colors (of buildings and flora and people's clothing), all surrounded by three tall volcanos: Agua, Fuerte y Acatenago (water, fire, and ....?) It feels out-of-time, preserved under glass, not real. I hear echoes of my college years spent in Williamsburg, Virginia. And--in our casita--there's a musty smell, just like the cottage that is Dalke's Rivercliff. We've come very far to experience the smell of home.

I'm larding my experiences here with those of others who have traveled and lived in this place. I've begun by reading both Jane and Paul Bowles, as well as Aldous Huxley, who published Beyond the Mexique Bay: A Traveller's Journal, in 1934. This journal includes several chapters on Antigua, including some commentary I find prescient and accurate:

The Antigua of actuality is all baroque and colonial rococo...one of the most romantic towns in the world...there is much that is charming; much that is surprising and queer; much--indeed everyting--that is picturesque and romantic in the most extravagantly eighteenth-century style....Wherever one looks fantastic ruins fill the foreground and behind them rise...gigantic volcanoes...What splendid musings [Childe Harold and Chateaubriand]...would have sent home from Antigua! Musings on the transitoriness of human glory, on the grandeurs and eternity of nature; musings on tyrants; musings on liberty; musings on volcanoes and the cochineal insect; musings on the beauties of Christianity or the baseness of popish superstition....There would have been a cataract of pensive eloquent. To-day it is too late. On all these incredibly romantic ruins the Time-Spirit has posted his warning notice: NO MUSING, BY ORDER...Guiltily, we put away our fountain pens and our notebooks, and address ourselves to the more contemporary business of taking snapshots. Soon I'll add some snapshots to this public journal. But I doubt I'll be able to forgo the musing, however belated it may be. Part of what interests me about this place is how far away it seems (for instance) from the events of September 11, both what happened 5 years ago and all the current re-assessment going on now @ home. What difference did September 11 make in Antigua, Guatemala? Perhaps the whole notion of that sort of "progress," of a kind of difference that makes a difference, is out of place here? Hear Huxley, again: In our sort of world, [the belief that each of us is the happy exception to the rule] is, no doubt, a necessary delusion; if most people did not have it, things would never get done, or at any rate would only get done very slowly. Certainly nothing much gets done in societies in which taboos are unquestioninngly accepted and nobody even dreams that he can escape from the operations of any rule whatsoever. It may be that, if there is to be progress, or at any rate rapid change, the delusion of individual exceptionalness is indispensable. In a society rationally planned on equitable principles this delusion would be discouraged....This owould certainly make for social stability. But whether social stability may not in its turn make for the return to the mental stagnation of the primitve stable society remains to be seen. To be seen? To be continued, @ any rate...