Sorry Blog! I´ve been living in Sucre for over two weeks now, leading treks for a non-profit organization and pasting poems to the expansive blank walls of the room I´m renting. How do I fit it all into a post? How the labyrinth of whitewashed city streets blurrs with the labyrinth of my mind? How I´ve fallen in love with ancient Greek philosophy, and learned that cows with red tassel earrings are protected by the devil? For some reason I´m at more of a loss than usual, so I think I´ll copy down an entry from my journal. I tried to express two sets of parallel experiences... I don´t know if it makes sense or exactly how it matters, but I felt a weird resonance in these moments, like they were charged with meaning.
12.14.11
Happy Valentine's Day, self. I was thinking while I was hiking today, and, for some reason I started grouping imagines, like I could categorize this strange montage I call "my life." Below I will record some results of this thought experiment:
#1
(a) I´m listening to the only three songs on Master-G, my MP3 player, again and again on a bus ride in Northern Argentina. For some reason, the swirls of the bus driver´s smoke seem more beautiful than most things, like they are spelling out secrets in a language I can't understand.
(b) I´m experiencing wind and vertigo at the top of a wrinkled Andean cliff. I feel like the rushing brown river has turned to green falling numbers like in the Matrix. Like the number/water whispers Truth.
#2
(a) I´m laying alone in the shady grass after lunch during one of the treks. My body feels like part of the earth as I waft in and out of dreams... "This is what contentment tastes like," I think.
(b) I'm painting my toenails a perposterous shade of day-glo orange in my freshly-decorated room. It´s Valentine´s day, and I´m listening to Bob Dylan and thinking about love.
I don´t know... All these moments happen and you have to order them, draw analogies, build your narrative. But sometimes it´s so overwhelming. What do I do when an old woman in the Bolivian foothills holds my white hand and looks up at me in wonder through a face that mirrors mountains? When I climb out of a crater at sunrise at place my palm in the fossilized footprint of a Tyrranosaurus Rex? I make strange parallels, I guess, and grasp at poems.
12.14.11
Happy Valentine's Day, self. I was thinking while I was hiking today, and, for some reason I started grouping imagines, like I could categorize this strange montage I call "my life." Below I will record some results of this thought experiment:
#1
(a) I´m listening to the only three songs on Master-G, my MP3 player, again and again on a bus ride in Northern Argentina. For some reason, the swirls of the bus driver´s smoke seem more beautiful than most things, like they are spelling out secrets in a language I can't understand.
(b) I´m experiencing wind and vertigo at the top of a wrinkled Andean cliff. I feel like the rushing brown river has turned to green falling numbers like in the Matrix. Like the number/water whispers Truth.
#2
(a) I´m laying alone in the shady grass after lunch during one of the treks. My body feels like part of the earth as I waft in and out of dreams... "This is what contentment tastes like," I think.
(b) I'm painting my toenails a perposterous shade of day-glo orange in my freshly-decorated room. It´s Valentine´s day, and I´m listening to Bob Dylan and thinking about love.
I don´t know... All these moments happen and you have to order them, draw analogies, build your narrative. But sometimes it´s so overwhelming. What do I do when an old woman in the Bolivian foothills holds my white hand and looks up at me in wonder through a face that mirrors mountains? When I climb out of a crater at sunrise at place my palm in the fossilized footprint of a Tyrranosaurus Rex? I make strange parallels, I guess, and grasp at poems.
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