The end of Burnt Norton by T.S.Eliot

Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness. Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, Not that only, but the co-existence, Or say that the end precedes the beginning, And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end. And all is always now. Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. Shrieking voices Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering, Always assail them. The Word in the desert Is most attacked by voices of temptation, The crying shadow in the funeral dance, The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.
The detail of the pattern is movement, As in the figure of the ten stairs. Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being. Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always—Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.

Miraflores

Miraflores is the affluent section of Lima, framed on three sides by less wealthy neighborhoods crumbling under the salty sweep of the wind, and to the west the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes I have to remind myself that as I walk down Jose Pardo Avenue, one of the main drags of Miraflores, I'm walking down Peru's answer to Fifth Avenue. I pass a young, wealthy couple pushing a designer stroller with wheels more appropriate for the Inca Trail, with a baby inside making the flat-lipped, bubbly face of a born gurgler. To my left is the Brazilian Embassy, a forbidding affair of well-manicured but empty palm gardens behind an insurmountable fence, the building itself more a bomb shelter than anything else. To my left, the offices of Taca Airlines, of 'Alive' fame, seemingly trying to glitz the passerby out of any recollection of the past. People walk across intersections fast here, as there isn't much time. To cross busy streets without stoplights, one must simply plunge ahead and hope in the reflexes of the drivers coming at you.
All of the major airlines have their offices on Pardo. There is a grocery store that's alot like some of the high-end organic grocers in America, Vivanda, with inviting open spaces, fresh and clean produce, and a delicious selection of prepared foods - though the resmblance is only skin deep, with nothing organic available on the shelves. Here at any given time of day one can find what I would estimate to be twenty percent of the gringos in the city, avidly scanning the aisles for brands they recognize. I myself can be seen there at least once a day, trying to find things-lowfat.
Other than these embellishments, the avenue is not unlike many avenues throughout the rest of the sub-city, with apartment buildings, hair salons, restaurants, and inestimable numbers of travel agencies and copy stores. There are still armed guards with bullet-proof vests at the entrances to all the banks, hard mouths begging for toothpicks to break with practiced tension. Old men with battered bean cans still scrape popsickle sticks along them tunelessly, mumbling misfortunes, the rattle gaining effect with each coin tossed in. The air is just as dirty, smog suddenly enveloping the walker and making it truly difficult to breath. The difference is not in what is not here, so much as it is about what is here; the location of the primary facets of affluence make this part of town the wealthy part, draw the joggers and four-wheel-drive strollers and glamorous women in darkly tinted cars, but it doesn't edge out what the rest of Lima is like, the crumble and grit of the wider city of eight million souls. There is stark contrast on the streets of Miraflores, like a medieval morality tale playing itself out with accidental actors, observed piecemeal by people glancing out of planes for moments as they enter and leave the distant airport. The richness of the city is here, but it hasn't managed to overshadow the poverty of the city itself.

[As once the winged energy of delight]

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.
To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions...For the god
wants to know himself in you.

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Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the greathollow half-treetrunk, which for generationshas been a trough, renewing in itselfan inch or two of rain, I satisfymy thirst: taking the water's pristine coolnessinto my whole body through my wrists.Drinking would be too powerful, too clear;but this unhurried gesture of restraintfills my whole consciousness with shining water.Thus, if you came, I could be satisfiedto let my hand rest lightly, for a moment,lightly, upon your shoulder or your breast

a trip to the hospital

I just returned from a stop at one of the local hospitals. After struggling to get over all of the small illnesses that plagued me from the boat, I spent much of last night with intense pain in my abdomen and back. I rose and coughed up a bunch of stuff, and then spent alot of the day hunched in the same kind of pain. I remembered having similar pain once in Tibet, which was the last time I went more than a few days without a shower - though I'm not sure that has anything to do with it.
So instead of boarding the sixteen hour bus ride I had booked for Arequipa, I went to the doctor, with not a little prodding from some of the women in my life - thanks mom and Megan! That would have been rough.
The doctor himself was a nice man, unlike the ultrasound guy or the needle dude. He made light conversation about the origins of the word gringo, saying that green was meant to signify the opposite of Russian red, and go was where the Mexicans under Pancho Villa wanted the Americans to Vamos.
In the hospital I was treated to a chest x-ray that showed healthy lungs, followed by an ultrasound, jelly and all. I learned I've got a gallstone blocking my gallbladder and that it was causing the throbbing ache in my torso, knowledge disseminated by a doctor who relished scaring me with exclamations of surprise in me having one so young, and descriptions of how the surgery would go should it have to be removed. He made graphic drawings and laughed at my facial expressions. I thought about hitting him a couple of times.
At least it wasn't legionairre's disease. So I got a needle full of something to ease the pain, applied none too gently by a man who did not seem to like me, and then some pills to take for the next few days. And now I'm on a low fat diet - which has me a bit confounded in this country of animal products.

Some Rumi from Zenda:


Listen to your essential self, the Friend.
"When you feel longing, be patient,
and also prudent, moderate with eating and drinking.
Be like a mountain in the wind.
Do you notice how little it moves?
There are sweet illusions that arrive
to lure you away. Make some excuse to them...
I have indigestion, or I need to meet my cousin.
You fish, the baited hook may be fifty
or even sixty gold pieces, but is it really worth
your freedom in the ocean?
When traveling, stay close to your bag.
I am the bag that holds what you love.
You can be separated from me.
Live carefully in the joy of this friendship.
Don't think, 'But those others love me so.'
Some invitations sound like the fowler's whistle
to the quail, friendly,
but not quite how you remember
the call of your soul's Friend."
--Rumi

‘All memory is present.’ -Novalis

‘We are, all of us, pilgrims who struggle along different paths toward the same destination.’
-Anthony de Saint-Exupery

“To tune the spirit when someone is trampling it is called control.” -Don Juan

‘…but to traverse the world for years on end of his own free will, in order to get to know it, to plumb it, to understand it? And then, later, to put all his findings into words? Such people have always been uncommon.’ -Ryszard Kapuscinski

‘The past does not exist. There are only infinite renderings of it.’ -Ryszard Kapuscinski

The rest of the voyage was harrowing, to be pithy. Let me set the scene. A river boat with three hundred Peruvians of the jungle and myself, the amorphous gringo. Three decks, the first for cargo, including fresh-cut hardwoods from the Amazon, livestock, a motocarro destined for a circuitous route in a town with no roads leading out. The second two decks for passengers, long, open-air spaces where each person hangs a hammock, like rows of eyelash specimens in every combination of color. Eyes that never stopped looking, observing, checking. Voices that whispered and shouted and laughed and cried. The sinks and showers pumped brown river water which cooled after it was allowed to run for a few minutes. Showers and toilets in the same rooms, four of them per deck, about three feet by four feet each, with poor drainage so that at any given time in the day four inches of brown water, mixed with unimaginable substances and dead and dying insects, stood stagnant on the bottom of each stall. The metal housing of the boat made it boil in the daytime sun and freeze at night. I befriended everyone I could, which amounted to about twenty people, mostly men my age and elderly folk. Thieves walked around regularly, as the boat stopped at small river towns and villages where a few thatched roofs hovered over the wall of foliage on the banks of the Ucayali, snaking things from unwary passengers and disembarking in the night. Stops were frequent, at all hours. When the boat stopped in a larger town, scores of indigenous women and children would board the boat vending tapioca, manioc, yucca, gelatino, water, soda, pre-made meals, cigarettes, chiclets, lollipops, fruits, and fried fish. The few men who were in the groups of vendors where the only ones who sold cigarettes, something I assigned to the ever-present machismo. It was better not to look at the toenails - though sometimes I did, drawn by a terrible fascination. Every ten minutes of continuous propulsion the boat, which roared when it was at ease, would pick up volume, the engine chattering the metal casings of the entire ship into a rising crescendo that sounded as if a jet was hovering overhead. This happened throughout the night, framed by the continuous and incredibly loud music the night captain played each night, emphasizing his favorite points with wild shouts at the Southern Cross. The boat woke at five, and it was impossible to stay asleep afterwards. The food - cooked by a gay man who seemed incredibly unhappy and who only left his cabin to make the food, returning immediately after he’d served it - was at times not so bad, but other days it was truly inedible. I blamed those days on the whistles and catcalls the poor man got from some of the younger men when he would walk to the shower in the evenings - his only other venture outside. The problem with those days is that the inedible food would be served for all three meals. I sweated buckets. The Paiche I was served on the boat, with more salt than it seems possible for a creature to have in its body, belonged to the inedible variety of food, though with my sweat flowing freely I was glad for the electrolytes and ate what I could swallow.
I ran out of water a couple of times, and then the boat ran out of water, and everyone was drinking soda. For most of the day people lined the sides of the boat or hung in their hammocks and simply stared, when they were not collected in an appraisal of me and my things, my behaviors and my concern for hygiene, which was uniquely comical to them. Often one would be sent towards me like a projectile from a group to ask why I tip-toed into the bathrooms.
On the second day, we ran aground in the middle of the river. Another boat passed us and the captain, fresh on the scene and feeling cocksure and invincible, did the same thing a bit further in. Eventually we pulled our boat out of it and found the narrow channel of flow on the far side, leaving the ready captain of the other boat still churning the waters browner. A father with his child next to my hammock played throughout the day, and the child was struck by my presence, my book, my skin, the uniformity of early consciousness holding the world within, beholding a new piece to add to itself. A woman boarded on the third day with a monkey on a leash, dressed up like a hairy little girl in shades of pink, replete with the mannerisms of an effete, timid senorita. The eyes were constant, always on the banks and myself. I tried to imagine it all through their eyes, the great trip upriver, the lone gringo reading and writing in his hammock, always wet with sweat. An ancient woman who looked like a shaman, with vestiges of red dye rosing her face, boarded on the fourth day and simply looked at me the rest of the trip, expressionless.
Some of the friends I’d made played a card game they called casino, much like the game tunk in America. One young man simply sat at the back of the boat all day reading the bible in the sun, sweating like me though I believe from a different ailment. Amidst laughter over my forced use of the toilet, I was told “Peruvians have the kitchen in the bathroom!” Along the banks the slivers of shadows between all that green tangle invited my mind to fill them with its own shadow-beings.
I remembered the split, and saw it between the innocent world-ego of children and the enculturation that gradually follows with age: how the complexity of culture incrementally distances us from the original oneness, the rejoicing and acceptance of newness-as-beauty. The culture driven complication regards the new and other as dangerous and, forced to operate over the love of the new-as-beautiful slowly edges this original perspective out; thus leading those revelations and recognitions of new-as-beautiful to make themselves increasingly less possible with their own mechanism. Without interruption or informed effort, culture takes over the complexification of humans from our inherent love of newness, co-opting the drive to seek newness and replacing its targets-abroad with a homely placebo - the paleness of cultural advancement. Culture can be seen, in this way, as fear of other that grows over love of other, through the subversion of our tendency towards awe for some mysterious ulterior motive - though perhaps that is a very limited view.
The journey.
Every day the rain, every night the lightening on the horizon. Once the rain came so quickly it sent us all scurrying for cover. Reaching in my pocket I found the stinger of a bee. He had been searching for cover as well, and did not seem keen on sharing my pocket with my hand. The variations of light on the water of the river and the vapor of the clouds kept me fascinated for hours at the beginnings and ends of the days. Clouds opened upwards at night like a hand’s fingers uncurling in offering. Then the stars erupted, the lights of the boat fired up, and thousands of insects were called to them, dancing tethered by their love of the brilliance. We floated south.
The pirates came late in the night on the fifth day, armed with shotguns and intent on plunder. They motored up in a tiny dinghy and fired twice. When the men of the river boat fired back with shotguns of their own, a brief exchange occurred, clamorous, frightening. The dinghy sped away, someone in it screaming.
Other nights, between the roar of the engines and before the night captain put on his soundtrack, the cries of birds sounded like a squeegee being raked on wet glass. I saw that butterflies live at constant right angles, and felt the approach of the other in everything my senses perceived. Sounds, objects, tastes, smells, textures all had their own being. By dividing all of it into a progressive infinity of levels of being, I was able to see that it all has to come together as well. I was at the boundary of my awareness, and I was learning from what was ahead. It was an incredible trip.
Disembarking from the four day turned seven day voyage, I evaded a group of men who were planning on robbing me by feinting and striking out in a different direction, using a crowd to block me and jumping in a motocarro.
My infirmities included a cold, congestion, a mangled toe, multiple bites, a sore ear from something unknown, diarrhea, jock itch, dehydration sickness, chafed nose, and general hunger and fatigue. But the journey inspired me, and let me look into a different world, and seeing made me live it.
I took a flight to Lima for eighty dollars, reducing the past five weeks journey to an hour in the air for the price of a day’s labor in my country, and it was a revelation of difference. There was even coffee on the plane.
And now, I’m recovering.

The first days of the river

Went down the Port Musasa to catch a boat to Pucallpa. Found one that was departing at five thirty in the evening, bought my ticket, and strung my hammock. I was swinging comfortably as the day gave way to darkness, the shadows overlapping and finally consuming the last vestiges of light over the port, the rich reds of the sunset fading first to purple, then to grey. The laborers of the harbor where loading large trucks full of wood into the hold of the boat as I ate the sandwiches I’d bought earlier, listening to the hectic, flamboyant music of Peru. These men loaded all the boards before moving on to the saw dust, stored in seventy pound bags which they carried two at a time on their backs, arms splayed behind them. They wrapped their shirts around their heads, the torso part draped down their backs, to avoid the inevitable detritus each trip left on their bodies.
The largest man on the boat, Moses, with the word ‘boxer’ tattooed on his right arm, decided to befriend me. He, like a famous boxer from America, had an incredibly high-pitched voice. As I passed him on the lower deck at one point he quickly pulled a chair up next to him and motioned for me to sit. Sitting, I was suddenly engaged in an exploration of the very music I’d been listening to minutes before. With each song the large man exclaimed something incomprehensible in slurred Spanish, the high notes of his words causing me to smile, though their meaning was quite inscrutable to me. It was a test of that particular ability one gains when traveling, an obtuse, uncertain agreement. It could be called the head-nodding skill, though there is often much more to it. I nodded and laughed on cue, hoping I was responding in an appropriate fashion, not wanting to disregard his words though it was impossible for me to understand them.
We began a conversation about love, and somehow made ourselves understood to each other. Both of us missed someone far away, and since this was the theme of every song on the D.V.D. of music videos he was sitting inches away from, we came to a kind of brotherly camaraderie. After the music ended I returned to the upper deck where my hammock was calling, followed by his enthusiastic squeaks.
Over the course of the next seven days I learned that he was a rather simple man, the butt of all the other boatmen’s jokes, ever assigned the dirtiest jobs the lancha had to offer; he performed these with an constant joy that was inspiring. I’ll write his story.
After a few minutes in my hammock I began to wonder why we hadn’t left yet. It had been dark for a few hours, I knew, and despite the usual vagaries of tiempo peruana, I figured I should ask before getting comfortable again. It was at this point that I was informed that due to some kind of paperwork jamb, we would be leaving the following day. I began to get irritated, wondering what I was doing on a boat that would sit in the harbor all night. Before the feeling overwhelmed me I realized that this was exactly why I was here.
The rain came again, with thunder and lightening, and I sat in my hammock enjoying the chance that always brings us what we really want, whether we have the wisdom to realize it our not.

From ‘Travels with Herodotus’:
‘..Was not the monumentality of past epochs created by that which is negative and evil in man? And yet, does not that monumentality owe its existence to some conviction that what is negative and weak in man can be vanquished only by beauty, only through the effort and will of his creation? And that the only thing that never changes is beauty itself, and the need for it that dwells within us?’ 153

‘…one knew one’s fellow not only as one who would help them gather food and defend against the enemy, but also as someone unique and irreplaceable, one who could interpret the world and guide his fellows through it.’ 179

‘…a writer is a man for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others.’ Thomas Mann

‘…until that awakening I had been searching for spectacular imagery, laboring under the idea that it was compelling, observable tableaux that somehow justified my presence, absolving me of the responsibility to understand the events at hand. It was the fallacy that one can interpret the world only by means of what it chooses to show us in the hours of its convulsions…’ 225