A cat sounds like its dying outside my window. Several cats, in fact, are being murdered horribly. Dinner was a local specialty: beans, bones and bits of fat in a gelatinous stew. Yuuuum. Then humiliated myself by not having enough money to pay (!) and had to temporarily surrender my iPhone (quelle horreur!) while I went searching for a cajero automatico. But Cordoba itself is pleasant: a university city that unbelievably is as big as Melbourne, population-wise. Everyone you look at is under twenty-five. But that’s a noticeable feature of Argentina anyway: people are just younger than in Australia. No ageing population problem here. Like BA, it’s a hub of creativity and culture: the so-called ‘cultural mile’ in the city centre is a strip of one art gallery, theatre, museum after another – well, nearly. But to tell the truth it’s a little lost on me right now. For some reason all the hostels are close to empty – everyone is commenting on it – and I sorely miss some English-speaking company. I’m the ancient mariner in a sea of Latinos: people, people everywhere and not a one to talk to…
Though the Spanish bug is in my system now. Bug, I said, not fly! Such assistance would be entirely superfluous, trust me, in this the land of the fierce-eyed beauty – and I haven’t even seen Rio yet! I had a conversation in Spanish with the receptionist this morning – talking of the fierce-eyed beauty – and she couldn’t believe I only started learning a month ago and never took a class. Hehe. I do enjoy being a smart arse sometimes. I kind of hate it though that I have the bug. In fact it’s the reason I didn’t learn any Spanish earlier. I know what I’m like. Once it takes hold it won’t let go. I’m condemned to countless hours, days, months of work. I’ll be translating every thought in my head into Spanish in the shower. Goddammit. Just when I kind of finished with German.
May I also say: fuck the Spanish verb. The Spanish verb is a bastardo that should be run through pronto with a conquistador’s rapier. German grammar is a torturous turd of a thing too, until you get used to it – worse than Spanish on the whole – but the verbs have nothing on Spanish verbs. That’s because German is rather impoverished in its expression of tense. Whereas the Spanish managed to squeeze in a whole new tense between the present and the imperfect, probably just to torture victims of the inquisition:
“Conjugation or the Algerian hook?”
“Tough one, but … I’ll take the hook...”
Enough though on Spanish and languages. Tomorrow paragliding. The next day trekking. That should keep you all spared of any melancholy reflections about strangers on buses.
Oh and one more thing: the Argentinian beer of choice, Quilmes, is vile poison. They were probably extracting it with a catheter from those cats I heard before.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Sketches of the journey, and beginner's mind
I'm hoping to capture something more on this trip than just some happy snaps and a few travelogue entries. That's by way of explanation for the rather drastically different tone of my last entry. Travel - especially travel alone - throws up so many unique moments where the strangeness of one's external circumstances intersects with a particular coloration of subjectivity, and I want to try to capture some of this, this inner journey. On my couch surfing profile (I'm couch surfing at least part of the time in Germany), I put down my 'mission' as 'chasing my tale'. I'm after stories to tell. Not traveller's war stories, though that's always nice, but stories that illuminate the inner world as much as the outer. Stories for the writer. In that sense I hope to make this blog a sort of sketch pad from which I can later work up more complete portraits. I'm not aiming for perfect, polished pieces. I could of course keep them to myself and work them up into something a little more professional and publish them properly. That would be less risky and less potentially exposing, but I rather like the idea of doing it this way, going out on a limb a bit. It's a fun creative challenge and part of the pleasure of blogging not to be too concerned with perfection.
I had a very enjoyable conversation in the main square of Cordoba with a guy from Peru who had come to study in Cordoba - a city with no less than seven universities. It turned out he spoke reasonably decent German as well as English and Spanish, and in the end we had a conversation that moved spontaneously between the three languages. My German is good enough that I can forget I'm speaking it, so half the time I was in a strangely pleasant meta-linguistic plane, the conversation bouncing like a skipping stone over the surface of language, in flight in those moments when the form was forgotten, touching down when we had to reflect on the underlying language. Of course I can't forget I'm speaking or listening to Spanish, but part of the enjoyment was our incompetencies and failures as much as our fluency, getting the stone skipping again with a bit of help when it splashed in the water, and learning something in the process.
At one point he clarified for me the correct form of 'to be' in the sentence 'I'm just a beginner'. Spanish has a verb for intrinsic being ('ser') and another for temporary or 'state' being ('estar'). I wasn't sure if my beginner status was intrinsic or temporary. It's intrinsic, at least in Spanish grammar: 'Solo soy (ser) un principiante'. It made me reflect on being a beginner, and on the value of it. As I've said before, I initially hated the feeling of incompetency which my rudimentary Spanish gave me in my first few days. I'd be in a shop trying to buy a SIM card - everything about the situation was familiar, in all visual respects almost identical to a situation I might encounter in Australia, but here I'm linguistically disabled, I'm reliant on the kindness and patience of multiple people to guide me here and there, to make gestures of explanation, to speak to me like I was a child or an idiot. I stumble about from one counter to another, making a fool of myself at every point of interaction.
Appalling. But appalling to whom? To the adult who is ensconced in his armour of competence and assurance and mastery, who wants to ride along safely inside the shell of his habits and perfected skills, like a man in a Mercedes on cruise control. But think of a child, whose life is learning, who is constantly confronted by a world which is beyond him or her. Children cannot afford to despise the experience of being a beginner, because it is their very intrinsic condition. Ser not estar.
Neither should we, as adults, because we too are intrinsic beginners. Will always be. It's just that we end up staying as much as possible within the sphere of our established competencies. We hate nothing more than looking a fool. But consider the gifts of embracing our beginner-ness, our beginning-ness. When we begin we are being born, and we all know what Bob Dylan said about those no longer busy being born. There's an immense liberation in being comfortable with being bad at stuff, with failing, falling on one's face, with screwing up, with being utterly crap. And yesterday's beginner is today's journeyman, tomorrow's master. The breadth of what we will be in the end all comes down to what we are prepared to be bad at today.
And finally, it's the precondition of creativity. Because as soon as you're a master of your art, as soon as you've 'got it down', you're finished. When nothing is being born any more, all that remains is the dying.
I had a very enjoyable conversation in the main square of Cordoba with a guy from Peru who had come to study in Cordoba - a city with no less than seven universities. It turned out he spoke reasonably decent German as well as English and Spanish, and in the end we had a conversation that moved spontaneously between the three languages. My German is good enough that I can forget I'm speaking it, so half the time I was in a strangely pleasant meta-linguistic plane, the conversation bouncing like a skipping stone over the surface of language, in flight in those moments when the form was forgotten, touching down when we had to reflect on the underlying language. Of course I can't forget I'm speaking or listening to Spanish, but part of the enjoyment was our incompetencies and failures as much as our fluency, getting the stone skipping again with a bit of help when it splashed in the water, and learning something in the process.
At one point he clarified for me the correct form of 'to be' in the sentence 'I'm just a beginner'. Spanish has a verb for intrinsic being ('ser') and another for temporary or 'state' being ('estar'). I wasn't sure if my beginner status was intrinsic or temporary. It's intrinsic, at least in Spanish grammar: 'Solo soy (ser) un principiante'. It made me reflect on being a beginner, and on the value of it. As I've said before, I initially hated the feeling of incompetency which my rudimentary Spanish gave me in my first few days. I'd be in a shop trying to buy a SIM card - everything about the situation was familiar, in all visual respects almost identical to a situation I might encounter in Australia, but here I'm linguistically disabled, I'm reliant on the kindness and patience of multiple people to guide me here and there, to make gestures of explanation, to speak to me like I was a child or an idiot. I stumble about from one counter to another, making a fool of myself at every point of interaction.
Appalling. But appalling to whom? To the adult who is ensconced in his armour of competence and assurance and mastery, who wants to ride along safely inside the shell of his habits and perfected skills, like a man in a Mercedes on cruise control. But think of a child, whose life is learning, who is constantly confronted by a world which is beyond him or her. Children cannot afford to despise the experience of being a beginner, because it is their very intrinsic condition. Ser not estar.
Neither should we, as adults, because we too are intrinsic beginners. Will always be. It's just that we end up staying as much as possible within the sphere of our established competencies. We hate nothing more than looking a fool. But consider the gifts of embracing our beginner-ness, our beginning-ness. When we begin we are being born, and we all know what Bob Dylan said about those no longer busy being born. There's an immense liberation in being comfortable with being bad at stuff, with failing, falling on one's face, with screwing up, with being utterly crap. And yesterday's beginner is today's journeyman, tomorrow's master. The breadth of what we will be in the end all comes down to what we are prepared to be bad at today.
And finally, it's the precondition of creativity. Because as soon as you're a master of your art, as soon as you've 'got it down', you're finished. When nothing is being born any more, all that remains is the dying.
Stolen
Somewhere between Buenos Aires and Cordoba I wake. Early morning fog hides the fields of Argentina. The girl next to me has turned to face me in her sleep and I hold my breath and watch her. The bones in her pale shoulder where the blanket has fallen from it.
I heard her earlier, half-whispering down her phone in Spanish with a smile in her voice. My foolish envy when I heard the deep voice speaking back. Her phone glowed in the dark of the bus. The phone her light to him, the light his voice. Happy, she folded it into her hand, shut the light with a click. She let her seat back. The bus rocked us in time.
And I thought:
Of the miles behind me
Of the child who misses me
Of the love you don’t get back
Of the greatness of the world,
Buenos Aires’ fourteen million lights
spread on the dark behind us
Of my childhood, deep and wide as a river, already half forgotten
Of her family, somewhere, waiting
Of our ignorance, the darkness so much vaster than the light of our intersection
Of us all
Of us all
Of us all.
I wake and her face is a foot from mine, young and beautiful, and I steal for just one moment into the room we call intimacy. I steal into the place of her quiet, sleeping breaths. A thief, tender and ashamed, lingering there in that carelessly open doorway. I stay just long enough to steal this from her, this beauty she will never know was taken. Then I quietly close her door. I roll over to the window and watch dawn fill the pane with light.
I heard her earlier, half-whispering down her phone in Spanish with a smile in her voice. My foolish envy when I heard the deep voice speaking back. Her phone glowed in the dark of the bus. The phone her light to him, the light his voice. Happy, she folded it into her hand, shut the light with a click. She let her seat back. The bus rocked us in time.
And I thought:
Of the miles behind me
Of the child who misses me
Of the love you don’t get back
Of the greatness of the world,
Buenos Aires’ fourteen million lights
spread on the dark behind us
Of my childhood, deep and wide as a river, already half forgotten
Of her family, somewhere, waiting
Of our ignorance, the darkness so much vaster than the light of our intersection
Of us all
Of us all
Of us all.
I wake and her face is a foot from mine, young and beautiful, and I steal for just one moment into the room we call intimacy. I steal into the place of her quiet, sleeping breaths. A thief, tender and ashamed, lingering there in that carelessly open doorway. I stay just long enough to steal this from her, this beauty she will never know was taken. Then I quietly close her door. I roll over to the window and watch dawn fill the pane with light.
Monday, November 8, 2010
The Russian is trying to keep his eyes open because he paid good money for the show but has been sampling the nightlife rather heavily. The Israeli is knocking back wine by the gallon and trying to pick up the Brasilian. The Englishman is complaining that he ordered his steak well done but it's just about mooing still. I haven't done this before - the full tourist deal: tango show with 'free' tango lesson included, dinner, the works. It's all ultra-slick, the busload of tourist cattle herded from point to point with efficiency and charm by young, handsome, smiling Buenos Aireans in black fedoras. The tango lesson is a mixed experience. Whether the move I can only term the 'legover' at the end of the twenty-second routine we get taught is hot or just plain wrong depends on whether your partner is a lithe, black-eyed Brasilian or a sixty-five-year-old housewife from Kansas City with arthritis. My conclusions from the lesson and the show? Firstly, that the learning of tango presents a major testicular hazard. Secondly, that tango is hotter than swing (the style of dance I've been learning in Oz). Yes, even hotter than belboa.
The dancers descend with intent into the aisles. Uh-oh. I am, however, comfortable in the knowledge that, despite my astonishing record for being singled out for public humiliation at every show I attend, the Russian is between me and danger. The Russian was between me and danger. The dancer is coming our way and I never saw a sleepy Russian move so fast. In a flash he's on the other side of the table and the dancer is raising her spangly finger... Nooooooo!! Yep, there's no escaping it. I join the damned in the aisle. I do my brave best to hold my own with the professional tango dancer. Then suddenly - baddaboom baddabang! - the other victims are returned to their seats while I'm abducted by three black-clad Argentinians, 'disappeared', then returned with fedora on head to be swept back down the aisle in the arms of the hottest of the tango dancers. Lights. Applause. Then the sweet anonymity of my seat. What was all that about? The biggest question though is: Why me? Why always me?
Ah well, that was my little touristy indulgence. Not exactly my thing, but kinda fun nevertheless, and the tango was spectacular. I think the Israeli got the girl too.
So I'm leaving Buenos Aires tonight for Cordoba, and I wish I could linger. My impressions of this city have changed a lot from my first post. Yes, it's dirty and grandiose and noisy. But it's not nearly as third world as I first thought. There are some very salubrious districts, you can get pretty much anything (except, it seems, a SIM card that works properly in my iPhone 4), and the lifestyle is modern and with-it. It's seductive and exciting and bursting with artists and musicians. I love this place, and I can fully understand the westerners I've met who've decided to live here, or 'commute' between their life in Australia or wherever and their life here. If only I had six months and I was twenty-five and fancy-free again. I'd hit the Spanish lessons hard and... (sigh).
I spent the day in the Recoleta district yesterday, wandering the famous cemetery where Eva Perron, among other Argentinian luminaries, is buried. It's spooky and atmospheric and a piece of walk-in art. Photos don't show it of course, but here's one anyway:
On the Spanish front, I'm improving. I woke up the other morning and stuff had sunk in somehow. I could say things. I can now read about 80% of what I see. Perhaps 'read' is the wrong word. 'Decipher' maybe. I can make sentences that amazingly have the desired effect upon their recipients. Ooh look! I say magic words, he does things! I just can't understand anyone. I swear these Argentinians can't speak proper Spanish! The consonants sometimes change for mysterious reasons, and my ability to interpret the word as I learned it is tenuous enough. It's hopeless...
OK, time to go find some lunch.
The dancers descend with intent into the aisles. Uh-oh. I am, however, comfortable in the knowledge that, despite my astonishing record for being singled out for public humiliation at every show I attend, the Russian is between me and danger. The Russian was between me and danger. The dancer is coming our way and I never saw a sleepy Russian move so fast. In a flash he's on the other side of the table and the dancer is raising her spangly finger... Nooooooo!! Yep, there's no escaping it. I join the damned in the aisle. I do my brave best to hold my own with the professional tango dancer. Then suddenly - baddaboom baddabang! - the other victims are returned to their seats while I'm abducted by three black-clad Argentinians, 'disappeared', then returned with fedora on head to be swept back down the aisle in the arms of the hottest of the tango dancers. Lights. Applause. Then the sweet anonymity of my seat. What was all that about? The biggest question though is: Why me? Why always me?
Ah well, that was my little touristy indulgence. Not exactly my thing, but kinda fun nevertheless, and the tango was spectacular. I think the Israeli got the girl too.
So I'm leaving Buenos Aires tonight for Cordoba, and I wish I could linger. My impressions of this city have changed a lot from my first post. Yes, it's dirty and grandiose and noisy. But it's not nearly as third world as I first thought. There are some very salubrious districts, you can get pretty much anything (except, it seems, a SIM card that works properly in my iPhone 4), and the lifestyle is modern and with-it. It's seductive and exciting and bursting with artists and musicians. I love this place, and I can fully understand the westerners I've met who've decided to live here, or 'commute' between their life in Australia or wherever and their life here. If only I had six months and I was twenty-five and fancy-free again. I'd hit the Spanish lessons hard and... (sigh).
I spent the day in the Recoleta district yesterday, wandering the famous cemetery where Eva Perron, among other Argentinian luminaries, is buried. It's spooky and atmospheric and a piece of walk-in art. Photos don't show it of course, but here's one anyway:
On the Spanish front, I'm improving. I woke up the other morning and stuff had sunk in somehow. I could say things. I can now read about 80% of what I see. Perhaps 'read' is the wrong word. 'Decipher' maybe. I can make sentences that amazingly have the desired effect upon their recipients. Ooh look! I say magic words, he does things! I just can't understand anyone. I swear these Argentinians can't speak proper Spanish! The consonants sometimes change for mysterious reasons, and my ability to interpret the word as I learned it is tenuous enough. It's hopeless...
OK, time to go find some lunch.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Day two
I'm warming to this city. I sat today in the Plaza de Majo in the microcentro, the centre of town, and made a video postcard for my son Jude. There were marchers there - I was able to make out that they were protesting about and memorialising the killing of activist students by the previous government. I was shocked - and ashamed of my ignorance - that Argentina's history of repression was so recent. I could translate with a few guesses the headline of their leaflet: "When we asked for work they murdered us. When we demanded a life of dignity they imprisoned us."
The city looks much less third world here: impressive old European buildings, edifices on a grandiose scale, but decaying, graffiti-ridden, their pretensions to national slendour belied by the dirt and the squalor of the sprawling city all around. I wandered down the long avenue towards the city's famous obelisk, another vast monument to vaulting ambitions unrealised. Echoes of Albert Speer's Berlin, almost... Lots of shops for the wealthy here, ritzy opulence cheek-by-jowl with your typical third-world vendor: some guy in a three by three metre alcove flogging cheap soap, cigarettes, Pepsi.
I manage a conversation in part Spanish, part English with a hawker from Chile who is in Argetina studying architecture at university - so he tells me - but he looks like a near beggar. Education is free here, he explains. He's almost as new to Buenos Aires as me - it's his first week. He smiles wistfully about the differences between his little village and this mega-metropolis. The Spanish is different, he complains. Not "vos" for "you", but "tu". And the food. He looks sad. I take pity and buy one of his pendants, probably for way too much. I don't even haggle. That westerner-in-a-developing-country conflict:I'm a mug. No, it's the least I can do. I'm being generous. No, I'm a mug, but I don't care. Of course if any Argentinian heard me call it a developing country they'd probably flip. But this kid... it's India again. And the two beggars on the subway, a boy maybe ten chanting his cry for alms, a hoarse, cawing sound, and his sister or brother - hard to tell - probably three or four and filthy from head to foot. The boy holds her and talks to her because she's crying. I can make out the word word "baño". Bathroom. He's ten and he's the adult.
None of this is or should be shocking to me. But there's still the sadness. Maybe the difference from India is that I didn't have a child myself back then. It shocked me then because it was new and I was privileged and naive. It saddens me now because I look at that filthy, bare-footed kid and think, "that's Jude." Might as well be but for the accidents of fate.
May I say once again how it pains me to be so linguistically incompetent? I should perhaps add that I have some natural prowess with languages, and my Chilean friend was most impressed when I said I only started learning Spanish a month ago. (On the other hand, he asked me where I learned Spanish - "It's very funny". I laughed and said, "In Australia". I wasn't going into the iPhone thing again!) But quick learner or not, a month is a month. It's atrocious.
The daily minor humiliations kill me. Example:
Waiter comes to take my order. I want to say "I'm still deciding", but the grammatical complexities of that are beyond me in the moment. I can barely conjugate the two forms of "to be" on the spot. I come up with "I decide..." The waiter looks at me blankly, and finallyI get out the word "still". "Decido .... todavia." My expression (of pain? fear? insanity?) causes him to back away with raised palms as if I had produced a pistol instead of a dodgy Spanish utterance. "No problem, take your time," he says in perfect English. After he's gone I drag up some kind of grammatical insight. "Estoy decidiendo todavia". That would have worked quite well. The problem is when you put it all together properly, people talk actual Spanish to you, which is naturally hopeless.
Example two: I catch taxi, explain I want to go to "Estacion plaza Italia". He nods and off we go. Great. I relax. Then he starts up. Yippity blabbity blabbity blab. I trot out the usual line - my Spanish is very bad. I'm a beginner. He tries again. Yippity yoppity yappity yop. "Perdon, no entiendo". Sorry, I don't understand. No problemo: plaza Italia! Si, plaza Italia! (Phew). I get to said train station, hop out, run across to the subway entrance and ... it's locked up. Ah. So that's what yippity yappity blabbity blab means. Thank God he's left so I don't have to crawl back into the same taxi for the rest of the journey home. In the new taxi I make polite conversation about the size of Buenos Aires, the difficulties of learning Spanish etc. More yippity. Understand? he asks in English. "Si, entiendo" I say. I just can't bear to say no again, even though I in fact haven't a clue. I try to fool myself into believing I got away with it. I didn't.
The food tastes of Buenos Aires. I don't know how they do it. It looks just like an Australian vege lasagne, but it tastes like Buenos Aires. Not bad exactly. Just somehow Argentinian.
Slept like a flea-ridden dog last night. Body doesn't believe the relative position of earth and sun. Day of the zombie awaits...
The city looks much less third world here: impressive old European buildings, edifices on a grandiose scale, but decaying, graffiti-ridden, their pretensions to national slendour belied by the dirt and the squalor of the sprawling city all around. I wandered down the long avenue towards the city's famous obelisk, another vast monument to vaulting ambitions unrealised. Echoes of Albert Speer's Berlin, almost... Lots of shops for the wealthy here, ritzy opulence cheek-by-jowl with your typical third-world vendor: some guy in a three by three metre alcove flogging cheap soap, cigarettes, Pepsi.
I manage a conversation in part Spanish, part English with a hawker from Chile who is in Argetina studying architecture at university - so he tells me - but he looks like a near beggar. Education is free here, he explains. He's almost as new to Buenos Aires as me - it's his first week. He smiles wistfully about the differences between his little village and this mega-metropolis. The Spanish is different, he complains. Not "vos" for "you", but "tu". And the food. He looks sad. I take pity and buy one of his pendants, probably for way too much. I don't even haggle. That westerner-in-a-developing-country conflict:I'm a mug. No, it's the least I can do. I'm being generous. No, I'm a mug, but I don't care. Of course if any Argentinian heard me call it a developing country they'd probably flip. But this kid... it's India again. And the two beggars on the subway, a boy maybe ten chanting his cry for alms, a hoarse, cawing sound, and his sister or brother - hard to tell - probably three or four and filthy from head to foot. The boy holds her and talks to her because she's crying. I can make out the word word "baño". Bathroom. He's ten and he's the adult.
None of this is or should be shocking to me. But there's still the sadness. Maybe the difference from India is that I didn't have a child myself back then. It shocked me then because it was new and I was privileged and naive. It saddens me now because I look at that filthy, bare-footed kid and think, "that's Jude." Might as well be but for the accidents of fate.
May I say once again how it pains me to be so linguistically incompetent? I should perhaps add that I have some natural prowess with languages, and my Chilean friend was most impressed when I said I only started learning Spanish a month ago. (On the other hand, he asked me where I learned Spanish - "It's very funny". I laughed and said, "In Australia". I wasn't going into the iPhone thing again!) But quick learner or not, a month is a month. It's atrocious.
The daily minor humiliations kill me. Example:
Waiter comes to take my order. I want to say "I'm still deciding", but the grammatical complexities of that are beyond me in the moment. I can barely conjugate the two forms of "to be" on the spot. I come up with "I decide..." The waiter looks at me blankly, and finallyI get out the word "still". "Decido .... todavia." My expression (of pain? fear? insanity?) causes him to back away with raised palms as if I had produced a pistol instead of a dodgy Spanish utterance. "No problem, take your time," he says in perfect English. After he's gone I drag up some kind of grammatical insight. "Estoy decidiendo todavia". That would have worked quite well. The problem is when you put it all together properly, people talk actual Spanish to you, which is naturally hopeless.
Example two: I catch taxi, explain I want to go to "Estacion plaza Italia". He nods and off we go. Great. I relax. Then he starts up. Yippity blabbity blabbity blab. I trot out the usual line - my Spanish is very bad. I'm a beginner. He tries again. Yippity yoppity yappity yop. "Perdon, no entiendo". Sorry, I don't understand. No problemo: plaza Italia! Si, plaza Italia! (Phew). I get to said train station, hop out, run across to the subway entrance and ... it's locked up. Ah. So that's what yippity yappity blabbity blab means. Thank God he's left so I don't have to crawl back into the same taxi for the rest of the journey home. In the new taxi I make polite conversation about the size of Buenos Aires, the difficulties of learning Spanish etc. More yippity. Understand? he asks in English. "Si, entiendo" I say. I just can't bear to say no again, even though I in fact haven't a clue. I try to fool myself into believing I got away with it. I didn't.
The food tastes of Buenos Aires. I don't know how they do it. It looks just like an Australian vege lasagne, but it tastes like Buenos Aires. Not bad exactly. Just somehow Argentinian.
Slept like a flea-ridden dog last night. Body doesn't believe the relative position of earth and sun. Day of the zombie awaits...
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Hola, Buenos Aires
A city is like a lover - smell is everything. I remember on my first trip to India, when Mumbai was still Bombay, how I was struck by the city's pervasive perfume. A sweetish smell, like a spice, but freighted with complexity. A smell of rosewater and shit and betelnut and grimy human living. Even the fruit juice I drank tasted of it, as if it were some kind of obligatory local condiment. It scared me, as a twenty-one year old venturing for the first time into the third world, because of its complete alien-ness, its suggestion of layers upon layers of ingrained life. Coming from my sanitised Australian suburb, the floral-fecal smell of Bombay challenged my white, middle-class squeamishness, my unconscious rejection of the physicality of existence.
Buenos Aires has a particular smell too. A very different one from Bombay circa 1989, but a particular aroma that, once you register it consciously, makes you think, what is that? It also makes you wonder, as a lover's smell can, are you and I going to get along? Or are we too chemically different, will we react to one another like incompatible transplants? Because smell is a city's chemistry, and I'm convinced it works on and with our chemistry too, that there's a reaction. Perhaps that reaction somehow becomes the fate we experience in that city - whether it breaks or steals our heart, makes us king or robs us blind...
I am holed up now in a guest house somewhat further from the city centre than the internet ad promised, and I have actually lost track of how long I haven't slept for. I think it's about 28-odd hours now, so if my prose is lacking, I trust you'll cut me some slack. In fact, I'm just now starting to become delirious, and my eyelids keep spontaneously closing, so I'll keep it short. ish.
First impressions of BA: it looks like a third world city, it smells like a third world city, it functions like a third world city, but it costs like a first world city. Strange. What's more everyone speaks in Spanish all the time. Curiouser and curiouser. Now I never flattered myself that my Spanish was anything but dreadful, but, well it's even dreadfuller than that. I did have something resembling a Spanish conversation with the taxi driver who ripped me off from the airport. A conversation in which it took me about thirty seconds to remember the word for 'twelve'. Absurd. I had to actually count up to it in my head to get it. In fact -I'll admit it - I never did get it. I remembered the word for 'fourteen' and used that instead because it was close enough for the purpose (how many hours was the flight?). It was pure stage fright of course - my first actual conversation in actual Spanish in actual Argentina.
I was relieved that the receptionist at the guesthouse spoke English very well. He asked if I spoke any Spanish and I replied (in nice Espanol) that I was learning, but had only been doing so for a month. Any class in particular, he asked. I continued to explain in Spanish that I'd learnt it from an iPhone app. That seemed to amuse him for some reason. Later he wrote the word 'hoy' on a map and then, after explaining it meant 'today', said, with just a touch of irony, 'But you probably know that from your iPhone program.'
I said, 'It's a good program.'
And he said, 'Sure. You made a whole, properly formed Spanish sentence before and everything.'
Could it be there are limits to the iPhone's power?? My world, my world is crumbling!
Moving right along... I wandered down to San Telmo, the old, cobble-paved district where they sell lots of pricey antiques. After browsing for a while I thought I'd buy a certain young someone a present of a big old Argentinian coin, only it turned out to cost 750 pesos (divide by three-ish). But they do have the most fabulous old junk, including swords and daggers that were obviously real antique weapons, still sharp. Try buying one of those in the nanny state! (OK, I believe in our weapons laws, but still... there's something so charming and liberating about unregulated countries.)
Another thing I failed to fully appreciate about Buenos Aires ... it's eff'n big. Fourteen million people according to the taxi driver (unless my Spanish betrayed me again). It's eff'n big and it's eff'n noisy and Buenos Aires? Good airs? No. No, these are not good airs at all. Time to follow in Mumbai's footsteps and get a new name. Malos Olors, I suggest. Catchy.
Buenos Aires has a particular smell too. A very different one from Bombay circa 1989, but a particular aroma that, once you register it consciously, makes you think, what is that? It also makes you wonder, as a lover's smell can, are you and I going to get along? Or are we too chemically different, will we react to one another like incompatible transplants? Because smell is a city's chemistry, and I'm convinced it works on and with our chemistry too, that there's a reaction. Perhaps that reaction somehow becomes the fate we experience in that city - whether it breaks or steals our heart, makes us king or robs us blind...
I am holed up now in a guest house somewhat further from the city centre than the internet ad promised, and I have actually lost track of how long I haven't slept for. I think it's about 28-odd hours now, so if my prose is lacking, I trust you'll cut me some slack. In fact, I'm just now starting to become delirious, and my eyelids keep spontaneously closing, so I'll keep it short. ish.
First impressions of BA: it looks like a third world city, it smells like a third world city, it functions like a third world city, but it costs like a first world city. Strange. What's more everyone speaks in Spanish all the time. Curiouser and curiouser. Now I never flattered myself that my Spanish was anything but dreadful, but, well it's even dreadfuller than that. I did have something resembling a Spanish conversation with the taxi driver who ripped me off from the airport. A conversation in which it took me about thirty seconds to remember the word for 'twelve'. Absurd. I had to actually count up to it in my head to get it. In fact -I'll admit it - I never did get it. I remembered the word for 'fourteen' and used that instead because it was close enough for the purpose (how many hours was the flight?). It was pure stage fright of course - my first actual conversation in actual Spanish in actual Argentina.
I was relieved that the receptionist at the guesthouse spoke English very well. He asked if I spoke any Spanish and I replied (in nice Espanol) that I was learning, but had only been doing so for a month. Any class in particular, he asked. I continued to explain in Spanish that I'd learnt it from an iPhone app. That seemed to amuse him for some reason. Later he wrote the word 'hoy' on a map and then, after explaining it meant 'today', said, with just a touch of irony, 'But you probably know that from your iPhone program.'
I said, 'It's a good program.'
And he said, 'Sure. You made a whole, properly formed Spanish sentence before and everything.'
Could it be there are limits to the iPhone's power?? My world, my world is crumbling!
Moving right along... I wandered down to San Telmo, the old, cobble-paved district where they sell lots of pricey antiques. After browsing for a while I thought I'd buy a certain young someone a present of a big old Argentinian coin, only it turned out to cost 750 pesos (divide by three-ish). But they do have the most fabulous old junk, including swords and daggers that were obviously real antique weapons, still sharp. Try buying one of those in the nanny state! (OK, I believe in our weapons laws, but still... there's something so charming and liberating about unregulated countries.)
Another thing I failed to fully appreciate about Buenos Aires ... it's eff'n big. Fourteen million people according to the taxi driver (unless my Spanish betrayed me again). It's eff'n big and it's eff'n noisy and Buenos Aires? Good airs? No. No, these are not good airs at all. Time to follow in Mumbai's footsteps and get a new name. Malos Olors, I suggest. Catchy.
Friday, September 3, 2010
(The following is cross-posted from the Kill Your Darlings blog - KYD asked me to write a post which would speak to my story 'Shock' which appeared in KYD volume II.)
When I wrote the story ‘Shock’, what was foremost in my mind was the idea of vulnerability and exploitation. It’s a story about age exploiting youth, white exploiting black, male exploiting female. It’s a theme that’s been on my mind again recently because of two non-fiction books I’ve just finished reading: Jonathon Safran-Foer’s Eating Animals — an expose of factory farming and a plea for vegetarianism — and Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, an account of the extraordinary cupidity and stupidity which led to the Global Financial Crisis.
KFC and GFC. Although ostensibly about two quite different phenomena, I had the feeling I was reading about two ends of the same exploitative economic machine. On the one hand, the giant, toxic cesspits next to factory-style hog-farms in the US that poison rivers and cause health problems for miles around; on the other mortgage-backed bonds comprised of worthless, toxic loans built on the back of the American poor. The millions of dollars creamed off the top of the economy by bankers and traders on Wall Street are in a sense the final, abstracted product of the same exploitative system that, at its other end, produces cesspits so poisonous that to fall into one is to die.
Both books reminded me that we cannot really escape the systems we inhabit. The interchangeability of money means that, in a sense, exploitative economic practices such as factory farming, clear-felling and greed-driven money markets taint every dollar in the economy - we are always ‘buying in’ to the ethics of the system as a whole.
In ‘Shock’, Smithy - a white male approaching middle age - exploits and deceives a young African American girl who mistakes him for her internet date. It’s the type of interpersonal exploitation that occurs all the time, even if the premise of the story exaggerates the element of deception often involved in sexual seduction. There are internet sites that elaborate complex psychological strategies for the seduction of young women, and to engage in such behaviour (to be a ‘player’) seems to have at least as much dubious macho kudos about it as ethical stigma. And there can be no doubt that much of the widely viewed and circulated pornography on the internet is based on an exploitation that as viewers we can hardly be unaware of, yet choose to overlook.
It’s a scary thing, but the more I look for it, the more exploitation I find. It has become normalised in so many areas. But what drives it? In ‘Shock’, Smithy is driven by a ravenous emotional hunger that turns him into an opportunistic sexual predator. It’s no doubt a gross simplification, but I wonder if such hunger isn’t the driver behind most exploitation: this sense of lack and emptiness, a black hole of desire that both feeds and is fed by the messages we tell ourselves and are told by advertisers and the media.
About a quarter of the way through, I wanted to stop reading Eating Animals. Not because the descriptions of horrific animal suffering disturbed me (though they did), but because I recognised that the ethical argument against meat was irresistible, and it wasn’t a message I wanted to hear. It’s one thing to enjoy the pleasure of moral outrage, another to give up roast chicken forever!
And yet, as of two weeks ago, I’m a reluctant vegetarian. Thanks a lot Jonathon Safran-Foer!
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