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 siren call of the question mark

"Just as the shape of natural objects like rainbows, snowflakes, crystals and blossoming flowers derives from the symmetrical way that quarks arrange themselves in the atom- a remnant of the universe's lost state of perfect symmetry- so he is convinced that the unhappy state of affairs regarding love can be traces right back to the subatomic. If you read up on strings, you will learn that there are two different types, closed and open-ended. The closed strings are O-shaped loops that float about like angels, insouciant of spacetime's demands and playing no part in our reality. It is the open-ended strings, the forlorn, incomplete U-shaped strings, whose desperate ends cling to the sticky stuff of the universe; it is they that become reality's building blocks, its particles, its exchanges of energy, the teeming producers of all that complication. Our universe, one could almost say, is actually built out of loneliness; and that foundational loneliness persists upwards to haunt every one of its residents."*

I think I owe the Internet an explanation about my absence, but it would be so trite I don't think I could actually bring myself to write it out. I did go to Texas, I am in Europe now, and I guess I could talk about the late nights at work couldn't I? What's the point. Spring stretched out for me like a neglected lawn, punctuated only by reading some fantasy books, which I won't get into here but I think it had the effect of a big pile of sand for my head (i.e. I'm the proverbial ostrich). I think I had sort of given up, accepted the loneliness but also the fact that I couldn't be of any use helping anyone else with their hurts and wants. Although, on a night recently I helped Adrien clean the blood off his hands and face, sat him down with a fizzy water and told him to tell me all about it. So cuts and scraps I can handle, but the big existential problems I'd put on the back burner, at least until after my Great Rambling Adventure in Europe.

"Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over again I made the same mistake, hurt other people and hurt myself into the bargain. Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed- maybe they were part of my very make-up, an inescapable part of my being."**

I read that on the train from Berlin to Prague and it articulated exactly how I felt around the end of May. I felt happy to see my friends, happy to jump into the springs, even happy to wake up with a hangover. Yet I felt like I'd given up on trying to actually be happy. I thought if I just kept my head up, tried not to get involved with anyone, and worked hard, that I'd end up on the other side of my self-loathing.

Of course, thankfully, the world isn't that simple. I ended up kissing someone I've wanted to kiss for a long time, and the rug not only got pulled out from under my feet but suddenly pop songs on the radio started making sense too. I've never felt so utterly insane for someone. But, this isn't a blog about happiness, or musings on romance, so suffice to say that while something rather fundamental in my life up to this point has changed, the big questions remain.

I've spent my time here walking around, endlessly, climbing everything I see, and drinking an incredible amount of coffee. People keep asking me what I'm up to, why I'm here, alone, etc. I feel somewhat sheepish answering, "oh you know, just looking around." I did read One Hundred Years of Solitude again, which still makes me cry, and am rounding book 5 now that I've reached Budapest (I've picked up whatever I could get my hands on at used book stores, which has been surprisingly fruitful). In Vitezslav Nezval's book Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, which I read in Prague, he dedicated the book to, "those who, like myself, gladly pause at times over the secrets of certain old courtyards, vaults, summer houses and those mental loops which gyrate around the mysterious." So I walk a few kilometers (cultural note!) and then stop to stare at the view or a statue or just to smoke a cigarette in silence. I wrote Ryan and told him how I felt like a big key was in my head winding everything up the right way, like all the little gears are tuned correctly now, and when I come home I'll be lighter, clearer, dare I say it, happier. Maybe it's enough just to have my eyes open, and to have some time to think.

There's a true feedback story about exactly everything I've just written called don't give up on nihilism, and goddamn, I can't wait to get home to Gainesville to listen to it.

*Paul Murray, Skippy Dies, pg. 300
**Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun, pg. 42