Postcards

March 2003: After two months exploring the other Americas, I board a plane for New York in Buenos Aires. I had quit my miserable desk job before Christmas, just after turning 24. I was saddled with hefty academic debt and had little idea what I would do with myself next. I had no gig lined up, no connections, no money. I didn't care. Somewhere in South America I had a revelation that hit me like a Buick: I had never known freedom before. For all my pretense in those days at having a better take on things than most, as if, as Bukowski puts it, I really had an angle on life, I knew it was true as soon as it was revealed to me. I'd never known the high luxury of truly, and I mean epochally unstructured time--time that was more a labyrinthine gift and mystery than the linear, carceral banality of when will life begin? that had run through all my earlier years. Nor, having emerged from the bosom of continent conquered, gridded, mechanized and plundered, had I known the unbounded texture of the lands and spaces man is meant to live in. Of course, I had known well enough how I did not want to live, but on that trip I glimpsed, for the first time, an alternative. A different way, one that I could affirm whole cloth. I drank deeply from the cup of freedom then, skittering back and forth across the gullied spine of the cordilleras as I dreamed of erasing myself from the plotted map hell-bent on mechanizing my life. The best part of the trip was a foray made into the Peruvian jungle. Buses through bandit country, jungle ferries aswing with a hundred hammocks for the passengers, dugout canoes drifting into the trackless territories that electrify the imagination in the work of a Tobias Schneebaum or a Werner Herzog. As luck would have it, the jungle was where I picked up a double case of dysentery, bacterial and amoebic, leading to an altogether less pleasant and less controllable sort of skittering. To this day, I suspect aguajina of being the culprit. Sweet, delightful, two-faced, altogether ravishing aguajina. I guess you could say the trip's highlight was also its undoing. In the wake of the trip I made vows to drink nothing but alcohol when visiting poor places. The fact, though, is that the dysentery could easily have been treated in situ. There was the matter of money of course. And yet I often wondered afterward, and sometimes still do, what might have happened if I'd stayed. My Spanish had become serviceable, and I was enjoying the warmth and passion of the Latin Americans. Here, I sensed, was a way of life closer to my own nature. But I left anyway, almost in the very moment I'd glimpsed that freedom--for New York, the world's great citadel of carceral time and gridded space. It is relatively easy to leave the mechanized grid, but things get more complicated when it comes to getting the grid out of your head.

I am not offering up South America as any kind of generally redemptive bromide here. Far from it. But the other Americas are more complicated than the narrow vastness of the norther part. They retain pre-Colombian elements, and the Andean countries in particular have not erred so far down the road of development and destruction. There are remnants of what came before in the people as well, of course. Oddly enough, many of them have chosen to resist where history would take them. I liked that then, and I like it now.

But I don't want these vignettes to trail too far into anthropological or political credos. The task I have set myself is to go back in time and catch myself in the act of leaving the various countries and regions I have known and left behind over the course of this decade, some with relief, others with difficulty. I envision it as a series of postcards forming a half-breezy, half-melancholy inventory of the places I have seen over the last seven years. A sampling of departures suggested itself as a good way, not only of saving time, but also of communicating how sadly brief and incomplete even the best of times can be. In the end, I may make the occasional sally or rejoinder that is not strictly inventory-related. Postcards do have margins, and even the best correspondents sometimes spill into the space reserved for the postal authority. I imagine the postcards will also be of clinical interest. What has driven me so far afield? What have I wanted to find? What have I wanted to flee? Have I found my home in Greece? Before going on, there is something I should clarify for those of you who read this modest blog regularly, and who may have felt sympathetic to the comments made earlier by Mr. Muss: I do not fancy myself having any sort of special angle or take on life. I am nothing but another pilgrim following my own road to our common end.

Anyway, to resume: My intention on leaving Latin America was to make a home in New York. It never quite happened that way; life never quite began there, you might say. I always found reasons to escape it, or was found by them.

Viz...