Thoughts on Solitude and Real Freedom

     Every culture has its laws of the jungle,,,often defined by economics.... but not always. There are surprises once in a while that will stagger. When I was 16 years old and on a juvenile spree in New York City some friends and I were robbed at knifepoint of all that we had. Suburbanites just vivibly sweat invitations. It was 3 in the morning with no way to pay the subway and train back to the safety of our manicured communities. After the incident we were running down the street happy just to be alive when a roly-poly gentleman who was entereing his brownstone stopped turned and said, "what's the matter boys"? I don't know how he knew we had a problem but then again suburbanites visibly sweat invitations. We explained what occurred. He listened then pulled a roll of bills from his pocket peeled off a few and gave it to us saying, "Go home boys". That was a surprise concoction of coincidence and kindness that I will never forget. Country people are definitely different. They, on the other hand are always inviting you into their house for cookies, jam, and dilly beans or tamales, mole, and a cahuama depending in which landscape you dwell.    

     In the world now trends are like barnacles that attach themselves to people's consciousness. "The Attached" are so engrossed in the vapid narrative that they don't even realize that the boat is slowing down. 

     I climbed up to Santo Desierto and the Carmelite Monastery via pie de monte. It was july and there was a mini marathon from the center of Tenancingo to the top over the highway. I climbed the shorter but much steeper back way while the participants ran up the  road. They beat me. I went around back of the monastery to visit El Balcon de Diablo. It is a cliff with an incredible view of the valley below. There, where the trail turned down towards Pachuquilla, I encountered two teachers walking up from the valley floor after their teaching day was done. Imagine teachers in the U.S. walking up a mountain for an hour and a half to go home after work? These two were very energetic about their profession. Young, full of zest, and dedicated to their work,,,,,yet who knows what will chip away at their desire over the years, a 6 year mortgage on a car perhaps. 

     I got up at what I thought was 6:30 and it turned out to be 5:30. I wondered why it was darker than a crow's asshole on the road this morning in my bicycle. There was no moon to speak of and there wasn't a car to light the way even for a few instants. I couldn't see the road at all. Riding blind I could have hit the carcass of a dead dog or a person. I tried to steer for the center but where was that? Riding blind,,like in a drunken haze,,,forward, but with medium control. Truth is like that. You know it or some part exists but when you are riding blind you are more likely to encounter it.

     The hours I have been keeping,,,,,,,,from the dark mornings in bicycle to here, the hotel, staying here until 8:30 at night have me a lttle exhausted,,,yet it is the kind of exhaustion that does not paralyse the mind,,,,just presents some bodily aches and pains,,,,,all I want is to go see a good cock-fight. Death is a cure for the tribulations of life. I have lived my life through books because I am vicarious,,,,,, yet I have a need to buy a motorcycle. When you feel a little down or a little restricted what is the cure but school or a motorcycle! One of Circe's cousins is organizing a trip from Mexico to the Panama Canal a year from October. Imagine that!  Dodging dilapidated trucks, and latter day bandits on the pacific highway. Mi sobre mi moto, solo mi en la tierra nueva. I just might continue to Ecuador, pull up on the beach put up some plastic to keep out the rain, and like Mersault said in A Happy Death by Albert Camus,  "I'd  buy myself a cabin on the beach, put some glue in my navel, stick a flag in there and see which way the wind blows".  I'd like to be like everyone else in Central America for whom the past and the future are non existant physics. I would be devoid of false promises and lacking responsibilidad to anyone. It might make the premise of a good, not great novel,,,,,,that person who chucks it all for a life of isolation on the beach,,,,,no no not the beach it is too cliched,,,but a small forgotten Pueblo in Equador, where nobody speaks English and you need to travel 60 miles to buy an elastic band. I haven't got the balls to do that. 

      However I see a novel with this fictional guy in the fogotten fictional pueblo in Ecuador who by chance comes across the collected stories of William Faulkner in English left by the last foreigner in town, a german student looking for another Troy on this continent to discover. For even though our fictional hero has made some friends in the Pueblo he knows that their conversation revolves about the specifics of their immediate families. Gossip is their tool of unification. Gossip is a social tool most often used in the present tense.They and their ancestors may have lived in this place for thousands of years but gossip about what happened yesterday and today is all that matters. He realises that the sum total of his own past is useless to him here. What good is your knowing Babe Ruth, Paul Robeson, Hank Williams, and the atomic bomb in this place. They would be met with blank stares.  He, out of sensual deprivation, far from his homeland reads Faulkner over and over and over again because there is nothing else. He begins to see affinities with the author and himself and comes to know Faulkner as he would the defects on his own skin,,,,,and yet somehow like magic there are always new relations to make between what he is encountering now and what he has brought with him from the past, but all prompted by the readings of the same book ,,,over and over. Dilsey and Sam Fathers and Icamatubi,and Colone Sartoris become his alter reality.  He finds in the characters of Faulkner a link with his past and a tool to deal with his present. His life, past and present become the verbal ghost of Faulkner's heart., and he is satisfied. He has metamorphosed from an alien to the easy going guero who can be often seen resting on his hoe when planting beans. He makes a spiritual life from his repetitions like a latter day buddhist,,,,,but sated with the chemistry of his past and armed with the world of Faulkner he needs no lover, no other routine........What do you think? Stupid no?

Corporate Covidization

     Someone told me once there are 32 churches in Tenancingo. Los mexicanos son creyentes.Tenancinguenses are ardent "believers". The evidence is everywhere. However less now than in the past. Future storms most likely will further erode the religious fervor that has been a hallmark of this place. After more than a year with the covid crisis, Tenancingo, has dramatically changed. In Mexico, life is wedded to a calendar that marks time in historical, and religious ceremonies. Covid stole the sounds and colors of ceremony not only from Tenancingo but from all of Mexico. Gaiety, exhuberance and much of its meaningful crafts have suffered or been relegated to the background leaving a washed out apprehension in its place. Its schools have been empty for more than a year and weeds are reclaiming the spaces. I am not a fan of formal education but the present alternative where so many children languish at home in virtual limbo is unacceptable. Then there are those that do not have access to computers and basically run truant and unsupervised. 

     The usually spirited mexican air has been emptied of its passion. Parades, processions, and the vitality of the marketplace have all been corroded by this disease and the decisions not made to manage it, especially in the US. The Trump government was padded with a tribe of non scientific baboons who did not engage the crisis. In fact they worsened it. They pushed bleach and ignored the reports on Ivermectin, allowed for shortages of medical equipment, poo-poohed masks, while tipping their hat to big pharma. Corporate criminals were unleashed, given wads of government money to develop a vaccine that would solve it all. The crisis became a windfall for the corporate way. What remained of mainstreet has disappeared most likely forever.    

     The U.S. economy unfortunately dominates Mexico, in fact all of Latin America. If the US gets a cold we get pneumonia. The interruption of confidence and the flow of money has squeezed the working class here. Artisans exist in desperation. There is just so much versatility one can muster to cushion their life's work. One cannot replace an industry such as the elaboration of rebozos by masks made from the same cloth. The effect of this microscopic  invader is inversely porportional to the social havoc that it and the response to it has wreaked. Just a few of the losses: Independence Day, first communions, epiphany, candelaria, The Virgen de Guadalupe, pilgrimages, dances, songs, indigenous gatherings, day of the dead, Dia de La Revolution, quince años, la charreria, posadas, Semana Santa, Domingo de Los Ramos, barrio fairs and their fiery castillos, La Señora del Carmen and her pilgramages, even baptisms, weddings, and funeral processions. As well as a big R.I.P. to the arts.

     

     Mexico has always been an in person place. We hug and kiss on the street. The street was as much our home as our actual home if not more so. Sadly there is no public touching anymore. Masks camoflage emotions and everyone looks like a bankrobber. Vaccines, such as the MRNA type, which may actually comprimise future immunity are not panacea. They don't even work. I was vaccinated not because I was looking for protection but in fear of the dreaded vaccine passport whose subtitle is "keep out". The vaccine may even become an opportunity to separate us further from each other if it becomes a requirement for travel. The irony is I received the chinese Sinovac which along with the Sputnik has been politicized by not being recognized by the West as viable. Sinovac and Sputnik are made the old fashioned way by grinding up dead virus and introducing it into the body so as to create antibodies. The polio vaccine is a similar fix. If you look hard, weeding out the overgrown politicized reviews Sinovac comes off pretty well and costs almost 4 times less than Phizer. Ivermectin, the drug that saved my mother-in-law and sister-in-law from covid 19 has been orphaned by the CDC, WHO and even by its developer Merck. (the patent has run out on Ivermectin and Merck  has developed their own vaccine). What could have saved millions and offered a cheap prophylactic in the third world was put out to a far off pasture even though there was evidence almost from the start that it was effective against covid. This might be the biggest crime of the century no one will recognize. It turns out the best medicine is to have had covid. 

     The shock is still fresh. So many have had their lives disrupted and are still becoming accustomed to the fact that their work may not return, that  main street is emptying, and rosaries and masses are attended by telephone. In december 2020 a young family member died of covid alone in the hospital without the comfort of family. No visits, no funerals are allowed. Family members just unceremoniously receive a box of ashes. Then to honor her a mass was said, and a novenario was conducted both via Zoom. I thought to myself this just may be the future,,,,

shrinking by Zoomification. It is already becoming accepted social practice. The fact that the cohesion offered by socialization and the religious calendar is breaking and the bonds it creates in society are dissolving. Will the artisans just fall into other less creative endeavors in order to survive disappearing as they fade into economic limbo? Will we all live our culture through a  2x2 inch screen? 

    

Mixed Mexican Media

     I have been here 18 years,,,and I think I still know nothing. However, what I do know is my love of new experiences,,,not extreme experiences like bungee jumping or mountain biking on 60 degree slopes with foot deep ruts. I like "two feet on the ground" foreign to my cultural comfort zone experiences,,, in essence thoroughly human interactions. For example eating mojarra in a tiny semidesert town called Mogote on the edge of a deep canyon. The sparsely vegetated hills are the color of toast, the air parched as the landscape, lurid and heavy even in the later afternoon. Mogote is a town with a heavy female demographic because long ago most of the men left for the States because there is nothing in the town except great expanses of short spiney sporadic acacias about which amble boney cattle. The women hold down the fort best they can waiting for a check or for the small percentage of husbands that may just return home. My experience there isn't wild or life threatening, just a place to stop for a real mexican meal along a man made pond abruptly outlined in planted palms. However the parched landscape, the eagles and buzzards bathing in the late afternoon thermals above the deep canyon, and the idiom are all foreign to me. Nerve endings are a little more sensitized in places like this, a rugged volcanic surging of rock and dry weed that is partly mine now.

Canyon in Mogote

A mural in the restaurant 200 kilometers inland

Palm lined presa

A second mural.

   Lately I have been looking at Betty Boop cartoons on youtube. Once you see one the screen becomes infected by the algorithym. After seeing Max Fleisher's version of Snow White in which Betty Boop is Snow White dressed in her iconic skimpy black dress, I began to watch with interest the social interactions of my mexican family here. Have people ever turned into a cartoon right before your eyes? I do not imply that Mexicans seated about the crucible of the dinner table can appear like Betty Boop, aka Snow White, frozen in a block of ice or Koko the clown dancing like Cab Calloway as he sings St. James Infirmary blues in what appears to be a psychedelic underground. It's just that human interaction wherever it may be can at any given moment be viewed as something cobbled together out of spare parts. There's a storyline  in there somewhere but it is obscured by the discursive path taken by the participants. Substitute, Italians, English, Muslims, Danes, Chinese, Japanese for what I was seeing and the view is the same. I knew a japanese lady who told me her father examined his bowel movements each morning then at the breakfast table he spoke of reading their form as you would tea leaves. When she told me this I thought of peculiar Stygian witches called the Graeae who shared one eye and one tooth. or dogs who use rectums as identification papers.

   
Apes have remained in our culture as great comedic counterparts. Some may remember The Dave Garroway News Show and his chimp sidekick, J. Fred Muggs who was a prime example of how animals so close genetically to humans can steal the show. There has always been some comedian who has discovered that he can use a "monkey" to do the heavy work and get the laughs while he passes the hat. His act is tied to an ape. Just think of an orangutan in a fedora with suspendors and a cigar working the crowd at Caesar's Palace. All the while the crowd is laughing at the parody of an ape not conscious that he is apeing them. It's funny really, a chimpanzee turning his lips inside out grabbing David Letterman's pen, drawing attention to human behavior for a moment. And all the while, down deep we don't see it as a parody, just funny for some reason. You know apes are part of our family tree but from a branch that we don't completely recognize as part of our own. We hide the reality of behaviors because we think we are superior with our chocolate covered ants, and flush


     Mexican families are tight. They are social units unto themselves. They stay in one place, even live together for life out of need and efficiency. They don't often disperse like the other families up north. They are little closed circuit tribes. This makes them a prime target for study yet I have never read of one. They sometimes hunt together, sometimes fight, sometimes kill one another, for short periods go in for ostracism, drink to excess making noise all night, yet suddenly they will shed all negative behavior and can be found grooming one another like apes do for parasite control. They are a group in a country where everything is close to the bone,, and many say the meat is sweeter in that place.
     I began to see my former gringo life as a mere monkey story. Yes people people possess the miracle of speech, have the capacity to figure things out, to see themselves in contrast to others,,,more so, it seems, than a tribe of baboons with puffy red asses running around threatening each other with their incisors, yet does our "look" and manner of acting mean we actually "employ" higher powers? Empathy is a higher power and it is in short supply. Intellect, described by F. Scott Fitzgerald as being able to hold two disparate thoughts in your head at the same time,,,, of course without choosing sides, is even more scarce these days.
I have heard my mexican family here spend countless hours in "chisme" (gossip). It is their pass time. Much of the prattle is about family members and others of the Tenancingo community. you know, a human being with a table, a chair, and a basket of fruit make a complex forum. Because the relationship between family members is in always in flux the gossip changes with the changing alliances. They will cast one out from time to time, but when a need arises the castaway is once again taken into the fold, which I believe is a method for tribal cohesion.....to preserve "the us" surmounts any and all rivalries.
I am comfortable in one sense in that I am, and will always be "outside" the genetic loop. I am not a threat to anyone,,economically or emotionally,,,,,I am free, like a latter day Jane Goddall to observe the tribe in their habitat. I have seen that much of the energy that fuels the changing social familial currents comes from economic sources or emotional choices that might threaten the social unit.
     Mexicans are big on genetics. For example. adoption is considered a taboo. "They are not really from our genetic pool we can never feel truly comfortable with them". Ironically there isn't one recent child from the family I would want to adopt,,,and given a moment of reflection most of the adults in the family wouldn't want to adopt them either,,,,, but they would take them in if push comes to shove. There are four refuges for a Mexican, The church, a trade union, a political party, or the extended family, each shelter acting like a whole life insurance plan paid in full.
      Interestingly, speaking of genetics, it is often impossible in Mexico to percieve a physical resemblance between children, their parents, and the rest of the family. Probobly in precolumbian times resemblances were more evident. In that era, the gene pool was like a single grand bowl of bronzed M&M's. Since the delivery of the euro-spanish-arabic-negro gene after 300,000 years of earthly separation the three children of two seemingly alike parents come out with three different faces. It is a result of the evolutionary chasm between the genetic codes. You end up with a dark one with indian features, a light one with a germanic bent, another with kinky hair,,,or chinese eyes, or at times russian squareish heads. Are they siblings??,,,,yes. How can you visually tell they are from one family???I don't know but my family will be spending countless hours parsing the body parts saying this one has the nose of her father or that one has the face of his paternal great-grandfather,,,,they are more like pieces thrown together from a junkyard to make a truck. Ironically if you switched them at birth no one would know the difference and yet the comparisons would continue,,,probobly to bolster the perceived genetic purity of "our little cosa nostra".
     Look I know these absurdities are carried on by all families,,,it is the family burden. With Mexicans their closeness makes for tightly closed social systems. After the interactions, mexican families go home, which is just down the hall or just down the street. One can say that they do love one another,,,because of their eternal interest in one another. This is the way humans operate and live together. This is how they form social bonds. It is at times an ugly system but it works,,,,,it comes from millions of years of real genetic social engineering. Hominids figured out a way to bond, live in close quarters, cooperate, and prosper. In the USA they still prosper but only see one another at Thanksgiving.
     It is a fascination,,if one has the luxury of distance,,,to see all the plotting, pooh-poohing, ever changing alliances,,,,and ever present inquisitions. Yet the mexican family is a bond like a nucleus with its protons, nuetrons, and electrons. I could never say that any one of my family members from the states,,,with the sole exception of my dear grandparents, would have ever helped me like Mexicans do with each other. They would stand and watch me sink into the quick sand without the offer of a hand,,,,,plotting how this would improve their position.
Conversation brings us into existence,,,like adding flame to a paper written upon with lemon juice and magically the words appear,,,,,or like the Chesire Cat. We speak some words and paint ourselves into existence. Certainly conversation puts down tracks we can follow. It uses others as our echo and helps us materialize in a certain way,,for a certain time. Of course while in a conversation some will be zealously selecting and judging the weight of each word. There are those that evaluate the moment and form strategies, those that judge instantaneously and instinctively,,and then there are the naive. The former two look out for themselves but there will always be those that just enjoy the ride.
     I suppose I must ask why we choose certain collections of words,,certain expressions. I have no faith in purity. All but the naive calculate. For a million years we have known that to "withold" or to "offer" gets us things. The inside world is part of this external human structure and it is partially detached,,,it bumps about more freely,,,no? More freely,,,,that which defines life by degrees,,,,, and always there,,,, they hover,,,, the myriads of choices presented each second filtered by million year old baleen.


"I have always known that I would take this road. I did not know yesterday that it would be today!" 11th century Japanese poet.