Here at the End of the World

"Very slowly, standing there by that icy window with the condensation forming on it, eyes eagerly scrutinizing the peaceful stretch of road where perhaps danger yet lurked, ears alert for the sound of innumerable fine rain drops falling in unison, while the town beyond pullulated with a thousand sounds and lights, Besson felt a strange sense of intoxication surge up within him. He was alive, then, in his body, contained in his own skin, face to face with the world. Sensations ran together in his various organs, established a curious foothold there, jostled one another for place, struck up music... [...] It mounted straight towards the sky, dominated unknown space, plumbed the abysses of mystery and emptiness. The void, the enormous void, a living, breathing entity, was always there, eternally present behind each individual object. It dug out chambers beneath the earths crust, it forced its way through the stiff metal uprights of the street lamps, light was carried on it in tiny eddying vibrations, the void was present in glass and bronze and concrete. It had its own colour and shape. And what, finally, enabled you to see the void was nothing other than this sense of intoxication, which went growing without anything to support it. Like a bouquet, like some joyous explosion of giant flowers. Gleams of light all fusing together in a single mystical efflorescence, life traced its pattern on the face of the night. No ordinary ray of light could ever, ever make you forget the shadows. There had to be this irresistable feeling of intoxication, this joyful sense of being really there for one to comprehend the full reality of the void: to shiver at its chill contact, to perceieve the transparence of it, to hear the terrible, heavy roaring sound of silence, bare skeletal silence with its multiple voices, its tones that surge and swell and carry you up till you could put out your hand and touch it...to intone with it that agonizing song of the years going by you, the actions you perform, the song of all that is, thats triumphantly alive, that embodies life with an undying ephermeral glory in such immensity that when you have been dead and rotten for centuries it will still not have reached the first moment of its advent."*

                I wonder what else I´ve inherited from my parents other than my dad´s large nose and my mom´s slender wrists. My father´s restlessness and constant agitation? My mom´s tendency when talking to strangers to touch them, lightly, on the elbow? Their great affection for a cold beer at the end of a hot day, all of us, when we were still all of us, sitting on the deck of the sailboat listening to some echoing country song, drifting over a muddy river somewhere, enjoying the fading heat of afternoon and welcoming evening together, quietly. 

                I don´t think my mom believes in god because we never went to church, but we spent a lot of time out in the woods, by the beach or in the mountains of her north carolina home, and she always seemed to be really happy there, saying out in the middle of nowhere is where she felt at peace, and in tune with something else, something larger than herself. I learned that from her, the ability to sit still somewhere and to let myself feel insignifgant, and now I finally understand the word ascetic from a book I read on the plane to Argentina. I knew the word, but now it makes sense, why mom sailed around the world and spent so much time away from people, in the middle of nowhere. A ascetic finds peace in sacred places, not just empty marble churches but deserts, open oceans, small places on tops of mountains. I understand now that I know many people like this, and certaintly have dated a few of them. It ties in my answer for people when they ask me what I´m doing in Buenos Aires, alone, wandering around this melancholy city. 

               Nature is a place I´ve never felt lonely, but there is a loneliness in large cities that is unattainable for me anywhere else. I realized at nineteen walking around Madrid, Sevilla, Barcelona...I felt contained in my own body, alone but quiet calm, and enjoying that loneliness when compared to the world there, around me. Buenos Aires feels the same. In any country where I don´t speak the language fluently I´m forced to think what I want to say through, all the way down to each syllable. I have to clear my head and focus on what I really want or need to say. I have to listen with an intensity I am not capable of at home. The parks and giant, impossible bright green trees are beautiful. I enjoyed the sunset in Uruguay, but its the buildings and the rush of traffic and people that are truly what I´m here to see:

               Women on the subway, passing by me on the street. Each with her own perfume, a whole world of perfumes here at the end of the world. Flowers falling out of balconies, windows open leaking songs and shouts, fights and whistles and declarations about the weather. Open doorways spilling air conditioning, the smells of cleaning products, fresh and soft and welcoming. People buying grocieries to cook dinners I won´t eat, kissing people on the street corners, hurrying onto buses. Antique books I can´t read, the smell of dust and leather and fur in every store, in the market, like the smell of my grandmother´s closet in a house I´ll never see again. The ummistakable smells of summer, of diesel fuel and rotting paper and meat, raw and cooking and overcooked. I could never be an ascetic, it´s places like here where I feel alive, where I unpack my thoughts fully and place them, tightly rolled, back inside for the trip home. 

"That was Buenos Aires...a delta of cities embraced by one single city, a myriad of tiny, thin cities within this obese unique majesty that allows Madrid style avenues and Catalan cafes next to Neapolitan avaries and Doric bandstands and Rive Droit mansions, beyond all of which, however, the evening dew, the open plain, and also a melancholy that comes from nowhere except here, from the end of the earth feeling you get when you look at maps and see how alone Buenos Aires is, how very out of the way."**

                

*J.M.G Le Clezio, The Flood

**Tomas Eloy Martinez, The Tango Singer

The Sudden Feeling

"I'm really intrigued: these disasters, these decisions that are wrong from the start, these dead ends that constitute the story of my life, are repeated over and over again. A passionate vocation for happiness, always betrayed and misdirected, ends in a need for total defeat, it is completely foreign to what, in my heart of hearts, I've always known could be mine if it weren't for this constant desire to fail. Who can understand it? We're about to reenter the green tunnel of the menacing, watchful jungle. The stink of wretchedness, of a miserable, indifferent grave, is already in my nostrils."*

             I'm almost twenty seven years old and I have to force myself to clean my room. My car sits dead in the drive way. My scooter has a flat tire. My space heater broke the week it finally got down into the 40s at night. Records are missing sleeves. Emails go unanswered. I made my bed today for the first time in weeks (it does look amazing, highly recommend, filed under simple steps to make you feel better about yourself). I don't know why it's so difficult for me to undergo these easy, little things that are a part of being an adult. That part of my life, the physical part, being a mess doesn't really make me lose sleep at night. It's the avoidance of everything else that's the problem. I've been afraid to make decisions, since I've lost faith in myself over the summer, and I haven't been writing, because I'm afraid to get too close to what's been just below the surface for awhile now. 

"I know where these tortured musings on the irremediable can lead. There's a dryness inside us we shouldn't get too close to. It's better not to know how much of our soul it occupies."*

             I've been looking back on the past few years and realized I waited much too long to do some things and rushed in or completely fucked up most of the others. Anyone that's ever swung out over a river on a rope swing knows that too much hesitation is never a good thing. I've always let go in the last second, before smashing into the black water of the Santa Fe river, but that seems to be the only time I have any guts. This past year I failed to get into grad school and I was too chicken shit to apply to any others. I took it way too personally and now I'm staring down another academic year without credentials. I'm not saying you have to be in school to be somebody, absolutely the fucking contrary. I work in a bar where MFA students repeatedly don't tip me, and personally I think they look way too clean to be actual poets. Most of them, I'm sure, have never seen a rope swing in real life.

            The other thing that deserves a lot of personal literary attention on my part is my total failure of having a healthy relationship. I don't mean that the relationship was a failure, but more to the point that I failed at it. I thought that by this point in my life I would have shut that door and been moving on to the next part of my life, but here I am, back at square one, and it's really no one's fault. I wanted to write an epic tale of woe, all about the miseries of summer and lost love and all of the stuff that's pretty easy to write about honestly, but I didn't. Looking back I'm glad I didn't. I've mostly just felt really confused, about everything. Drinking served its purpose of numbing out a lot of those feelings, and I've been on quite a roll of forgetting and evading, and might still be. I finally came to terms with the fact that it's hard to write when you're afraid of what you might unsettle in yourself. I've crossed that boundary at least. I'll still gladly check out mentally with my friends, because it's fun to be miserable together, even though we call it a party, even though it feels good, but I can wake up in the morning and sit down and deal with it finally. 

 

"I felt the gradual return of my old loyalties to life, to the world that holds endless surprises, to the three or four beings whose voices reach me despite time and my incurable wanderlust."*

           The weather changing has everything to do with everything. Summer's long misery is behind us! Everyone feels something new in the air, and it's both real and imagined. A lot of people, it seems, are ready to do something new. The next step. I feel comforted in the fact that by this time next year, I will be in a new place, doing something mostly different than what I'm doing now. Al Burian writes a lot about fall, and I've been flipping through a lot of Burn Collector lately. It's not a coincidence. Fall has a loneliness that summer doesn't, summer has a melancholy but fall is the time for remembering. The voices that reach me are the voices that I've always looked to my whole life, books I read before I had any friends, and books I bring with me when I travel, and books that will keep me company through our sunny, beautiful winter. 

        This book that I'm reading now (see below) has already effected me more than anything I've read this year. I did finish the Dark Tower series, and fell in love with the characters and story, but I consumed it, I devoured it so fast and just wanted to continue the story. In Mutis' book every sentence is a pleasure. The story is amusing and also at times strangely dark, and the main characters and the often doomed characters around him have insights into true melancholy. Reading it has reminded me of unidentifiable aches, weird pains, and the language of nostalgia. Travel, dreaming, and failure. The articulated, tangible feelings I've been searching for since summer ended. 

*The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, Alvaro Mutis.