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COLD WATER II
Part of the problem was Valparaiso. It’s such a beautiful city - parts of it designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. I like the castellano name more, though: Patrimonio Cultural de la Humanidad. Humanity …
The problem with it is that it’s right next to Viña del Mar. When I come to Valparaiso I feel the same vibe, the undercurrent of vitality, that I felt since coming to Lima. The visceral, beautiful and terrible emotions and realities of South America are tangible, in the streets and the buildings and looks and roar of a lunch-time market-place in La Paz, and the tilt of a condor’s wings in the Andes, and the two miles of Amazon that disappear each day, in the soccer games on dirt pitches with Chinese balls and the stray bitch with fleas and mange that comes up to you smiling and wagging once more, even though the last people kicked her. It’s that and more, but it’s real. It’s passion.
South America is passion because it’s people living in this land of destitute richness, and struggle, and triumph, and turmoil. The exquisite zeal for life is in the tangoes, the smiles, the gestures … just as the perpetual tragedy of Life is shown when another Indian migrant worker is attacked and beaten to death in Buenos Aires or Santiago and another egg is crushed when the tree it’s in is slashed and burned.
Well, “shown” isn’t quite right. It’s not shown, it’s lived. That’s the point of it all (Not ‘it’ all - all this). The joy and tragedy of ‘it all’ is in everything.
That’s why I come to Valparaiso.
Because Viña del Mar is not South America. It’s apartments and beaches and parks and a mall. It’s the summer resort for the Chile affluent, and the rest of the year it’s a normal functional, affluent town. And none of this is bad. It’s just that it’s not - anything.
At first I thought it was culture shock, the result of coming through the wild of Andean South America to a gridded, orderly town. I didn’t go to Valparaiso for the first two weeks I was here … but when I went I was suddenly back in the same South America I thought I’d left.
Part of what’s going on is that I am changing, fundamentally. What Izzy and I experienced, and then I experienced alone - I’m not sure if it’s the catalyst or the cause, but I know when I see friends and family again I will not be the same person.
The next part I have only talked about with very close friends and family, and I had intended it to stay that way. They helped me re-orient myself and give me words to express the feelings I am having, because I have nothing in my life to give me a base for dealing with these emotions.
And I want to tell you because it seems like I’ve been having amazing adventures and experiences. And I have, and more. But the Passion I talked about earlier has brought with it some things that are very, very difficult to deal with. This has not just been magic and awe - it’s been un-balancing, terrifying, and intensely lonely.
I obviously will not explain everything here, even if I could. This has been a process.
*
Most of my life I’ve been very happy. I’m a very lucky person. I have so much love in my life, for and from people, actions, places, moments. Of course it’s been hard and ugly and sad at points, but that’s because it’s LIFE and it’s meant to be that way in all things great and small (thanks James Herriot). That’s part of why we know of love and beauty…
But the period after Izzy left La Paz until a week or so ago was the hardest of my life. I was alone for the first time - not even within a continent of anyone I loved, or who loved me. As I mentioned in Part I, I had no concept of being able to deal with it … my experiences and values failed me. Since I’m neither American nor Belgian or English or Japanese or Chilean, the one true and constant thing that I can base my life in relation to (my identity) is my family.
But suddenly everything was gone.
Being sick was a part of it, surely. I couldn’t even do things I loved …
And so, in Viña - emotionless and comfortable - I stayed complacent, unable or unwilling to comprehend what had happened.
But each time I went to Valparaiso, I felt that tug, that nudge of Passion reminding me, like a patient guru, about my responsibilities …
So Easter weekend I left. It’s not important where, that’s not the point. I took a night-train 10 hours south and stared out the window and thought. All day Sunday, with stores closed and people out and happy and chatting, I walked. Then the next morning I got back on the train and stared out at the deep-earth Chilean forests and rivers and vineyards and mountains, and thought some more.
‘Thought’ is maybe too strong. I wasn’t actively deducing that whole time. I was more just conscious, walking round, seeing things and being aware of them.
Of course scenes from my childhood were really strong because of Easter, when I was five and my sister eight and we went to the Tangham forest in Woodbridge, England, and ran around in the leaves and crocuses looking for Easter eggs, screaming and so happy, such a happy time in our lives…
I realized that my family is much more than my blood relations, and that those blood relations are even stronger than I thought.
I realized that breathing and being is a gift.
I saw that my cowardice in fleeing the States was not because it was bad, just that it was harder to see the beautiful - and that coloured my perception …
Although I’m not sure I was quite at “realized” yet. It was more awareness. Only very recently have I “realized.”
In the fall of 2004 a battery of awful events took place. I had thought it was the hardest time in my life - and it remains as one of them. But I’m realizing that then I could draw on every lesson and value and strength I had gained over the years and persevere, and I (rather, I and humanity) did.
But here none of it seemed to apply. In between Europe and North America I had tried to live by values and experiences that applied, fit in. They were things like living simply, dedication, love, kindness. Appreciating the moment.
But - what did that mean here? I realized that, with the same set of material goods and lifestyle, I could just as easily have been politically conservative and into grunge rock and pickups (those are not casual choices - I used to be all those). Why was I me?
Sometimes, at night, I go down to the beach and get in the water and stand there with my eyes closed and feel the currents pulling me back and forth and the pebbles ricocheting off my feet.. the water is on direct express from Antarctica and cold enough to stop your heart, but I just breathe …
(The side-story to that is one night after doing yoga I got in the water and was enjoying feeling the water’s rush … and then I felt something wrong and opened my eyes in time to see a rogue wave, a metre over my head, body-slam me into the sand. May have been a Half-Nelson. Not sure - my world had turned into a centrifuge washing-machine.
So maybe “doing yoga with your eyes closed in big ocean” will get demoted from the “Universally Good Things” list).
I got a haircut when I first got to Viña and saw that my hair-line had now receded into an un-deniable bear market, a hope-less, margin-traded recession (thank you, architecture studio…). It put me in a funk for a while: fussing with my hair, worrying about it, trying to catch glimpses in the mirror whenever I was round one to see if it had perchance sprung back into place since the last reflective store-window 20ft back, like a person trying to wake up from a bad dream and pinching isn’t working…
In my life I have been able to develop values about life being wonderful and egalitarian and etc, and I have as I said been very happy and see the world that way- but would I have developed those ideals if I didn’t have enough to eat every day, a house to live in, plumbing and hot water, a healthy body, leisure time, intellect, … and more importantly, if those things were taken away,
would I still see life as wonderful, would I live to appreciate the moment if I had a hemotoma in my gums like Wilson in Quinua or AIDS or was Indian in a rich white Santiago suburb?
My angst about my hair - one thing I’m guilty of having been vain about - went contrary to all of my supposed “values,” that physical appearance doesn’t matter or that feeling sorry for one’s self was pointless and should be illegal, or that I should even value what people/strangers cared about my hair. It’s a small instance but it pretty profoundly affected me - if something as stupid, natural, and insignificant as a bigger fore-head was disturbing me this much, would I still be able to be happy and have zeal for life in a wheel-chair? Blind? Terminally ill? Without Belgian chocolate? I mean, I don’t even have any allergies! Jesus Christ, Patrick, get over yourself…!
I thought, living amidst the opulent wealth of Boulder, that frugality, simplicity, and 'poverty´ were the right ways to live - for me, at least. Last summer I took a job that paid $1.300 and not $13.000, like I could have earned working construction.
But there is nothing romantic about poverty. It is cruel, miserable, and desperate, every day. Even the life I live in Boulder is so unimaginably privileged, wasteful, opulent, luxurious, lavish, ugh…
I am rich. I am rich materially and in friends and experiences. I wrote earlier in my Voyage
how I would “never want to be wealthy.” Well, I was wrong. ´Wealthy´ is living
on more than $2 a day, which is how 50%!o(MISSING)f the people of this world do not yet live. I would never want NOT to be wealthy ...
That’s one of the things that’s been the hardest, one of the biggest 180 flips I’ve had - I used to criticize modern societies, and especially the American one, for living in a hyper-reality. In The Republic, Plato wrote about a shadow-wall: imagine people chained in a cave their entire lives, with images of the world outside being cast onto an opposite wall - complete with sounds and smells. For them, that wall is reality. We in wealthy countries live several stages into the “shadow world.” I used to think that was bad - but for people who live the Passion of struggling between life and death every day … how they would love to live in a world that was safe and comfortable and healthy and
predictable. Talking to people in the shanty-towns that ring Viña del Mar (the worst in Chile around the richest city), well, they would like nothing more than to one day move down to Viña, with its grids and plumbing and little gardens and super-markets and modern apartment buildings.
Rich societies have created such lives because to live face-to-face with Reality is terrifying. It rips open our sediment-layers of complacency and comfort and Passionless-ness, and wrenches out our most primal emotions.
*
I knew that I was a new person, with nothing to hold on to, and that I was going to have to re-construct my Self from zero.
And as such, step back and objectively evaluate all the things in my life, like Who am I, Why I am I, Why am I a Happy Person, Why do those things make my happy, What is Good …
I am trying to find truths. Universal truths, independent of time and place or situation.
Some dude called Hemingway said the Hardest Thing in the world is to write something True. Oh, man, is he right.
So this new process is going to take years. Good. For now I’m just enjoying the awareness.
I’m “happy” to report that most things from before are true things: love, simplicity, passion, dedication, awareness … Some things are empirically good and true. However, another reason I’m appreciative to have gone through this is because in the open, naked state of introspection I was in, I opened some doors that were hard to look into … It shames me to have seen those things but it of course was a rare and invaluable glimpse at my true and entire Self.
I used to do things because I thought that by doing them they would keep me on the path of the essence of life. As if by completing the action it was one step further towards that end. Now it’s more realizing that it’s in the action of the thing that lies the essence… it’s a subtle, almost semantic difference, but profound.
For instance, I still swim in cold water. I used to swim because it would make me feel more alive, vibrant, after I got out. Now I swim in it and feel the water and ice-grip that would take the warmth from my body forever if I stayed in long enough and am intensely aware of the moment of
being in cold water.
There is a word in Spanish and French that doesn’t have the same meaning in english: to realize. The Romantic version of the word is “to make real” … by swimming in cold water or walking or smiling or breathing I am realizing life.
My friend Andy Neumann once told me about how surfing was not about catching a wave. I was learning at the time and thought it was all very well for him to say, because he’s one of the best surfers in between San Fran and LA and I had yet to properly catch a wave, so I found it slightly silly.
But now I think I understand it more.
That’s all. Or - that’s all I’m going to say for now. I’m able to write this because I talked last night with my friend Roddy Beall… he’s a year older and studied abroad in 2005. We took almost exactly the same trip, with him ending up in Buenos Aires. Besides us being physical clones, we are also very similar in character, I am proud to be able to say. Though if we’re keeping score he’s a few enlightenment levels above me.
Anyways, whenever I talked with Family or friends, it literally felt like speaking through a wall, a third party. We are/were in different worlds and no one could understand. Fortunately for me, Roddy already went through the same thing, on his own, and so could talk with me about it.
In Viña I’ve of course been communicating with a lot of people, but that’s partly due to my frustrations at being so alone. I felt like I’d been passing notes through a fence … or speaking on a prison phone (as an apart from this analogy, if you have had the mis-fortune to have done so, then you know it’s a sickening, de-humanizing experience that can never, ever be forgotten) - we’re just worlds apart.
It’s not like I’m going to come back with a “thousand-yard stare” or anything. I am not the first to go through this (“growing up”, I believe it’s called), and I don’t mean to self-aggrandize or exaggerate my situation. On the contrary, I am lucky to have seen these things. Roddy expressed it beautifully: “te digo algo--- cuidado, tenes que ser el dueño de todos los sentidos que experimentaban antes, que te hacían triste y desesperado. No los dejes al lado, pensando que eran solamente fantasmas de una mente confundida. Son ideas y percepciones muy reales y legitimas. La verdad es que el mundo es difícil, no
es solamente felicidad y alegría, y que la soledad y la tristeza también son partes integrales de el.” (
I’ll tell you something - careful, you have to be master of all those feelings you went through before, that made you sad and despair. Don’t toss them aside, thinking that they were only phantasms of a confused mind. They are ideas and perceptions very real and legitimate. The truth is that the world is difficult, it’s not just happiness and lightness, and that loneliness and sadness are also integral parts of it"). I’m actually now Happier than I’ve been in a long time: the primal Passion I drank in, soaked in, and when I was too full of cried out - it’s there, it’s conscious. And thusly I take great joy in every moment, every action, every gesture, and breath. I’m ALIVE!!
I’m not even so much looking for meaning either; it’s never been “to be or not to be.”
I’m glad to just … be.
The last thing I’ll leave you with today is a poem by Pablo Neruda. I know, I know - it seems like since I’m now in his stomping grounds I’m being all cultured by reading him and trying to put my self off as sophisticated by being able to quote Neruda - but my hands led to this poem as I was flipping through a book of his. It could have been on the back of Capitano Crujiente (that’s how they call Captain Crunch here - not really) for all I care - I felt like he had written it from a sky-box in my brain.
Pensando, enredando sombras en la profunda soledad.
Tú también estás lejos, ¡ah! más lejos que nadie.
Pensando, soltando pájaros, desvaneciendo imágenes,
enterrando lámparas.
.
Campanario de brumas, ¡qué lejos, allá arriba¡
Ahogando lamentos, moliendo esperanzas sombrías,
molinero taciturno,
se te viene de bruces la noche, lejos de la ciudad.
.
Tu presencia es ajena, extraña a mí como una cosa.
Pienso, camino largamente, mi vida antes de ti.
Mí vida antes de nadie, mi áspera vida.
El grito frente al mar, entre las piedras,
corriendo libre,, loco, en el vaho del mar.
Desbocado, violento, estirado hacia el cielo.
.
Tú mujer, ¿qué eras allí, qué rayo, qué varilla
de ese abanico inmenso? Estabas lejos como ahora.
¡Incendio en el bosque' Arde en cruces azules.
Arde, arde, llamea, chispea en árboles de luz.
Se derrumba, crepita. Incendio. Incendio.
Y mi alma baila herida de virutas de fuego...
¿Quién llama? ¿Qué silencio poblado de ecos?
Hora de la nostalgia, hora de la alegría, hora de la soledad,
.
¡hora mía entre todas!
Bocina en que el viento pasa cantando.
Tanta pasión de llanto anudada a mi cuerpo.
Sacudida de todas las raíces,
¡asalto de todas las olas!
Rodaba, alegre, triste, interminable, mi alma.
Pensando, enterrando lámparas en la profunda soledad.
.
¿Quién eres tú, quién eres?
Thinking, Tangling Shadows
Thinking, tangling shadows in the deep solitude.
You are far away too, oh farther than anyone.
Thinking, freeing birds, dissolving images,
burying lamps.
Belfry of fogs, how far away, up there!
Stifling laments, milling shadowy hopes,
taciturn miller,
night falls on your face downward, far from the city.
Your presence is foreign, as strange to me as a thing.
I think, I explore great tracts of my life before you.
My life before anyone, my harsh life.
The shout facing the sea, among the rocks,
running free, mad, in the sea-spray.
The sad rage, the shout, the solitude of the sea.
Headlong, violent, stretched towards the sky.
You, woman, what were you there, what ray, what vane
of that immense fan? You were as far as you are now.
Fire in the forest! Burn in blue crosses.
Burn, burn, flame up, sparkle in trees of light.
It collapses, crackling. Fire. Fire.
And my soul dances, seared with curls of fire.
Who calls? What silence peopled with echoes?
Hour of nostalgia, hour of happiness, hour of solitude,
hour that is mine from among them all!
Hunting horn through which the wind passes singing.
Such a passion of weeping tied to my body.
Shaking of all the roots,
attack of all the waves!
My soul wandered, happy, sad, unending.
Thinking, burying lamps in the deep solitude.
Who are you, who are you?
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Pedro
non-member comment
hi
fantastic blog. I live in santiago, and i am very agree in many points about life, and i think that is the concious what make the diference, and when you get it, i think, is hapiness and freedom, and peace.