The continuous quiet of living

I have yet to meet (and I hope it stays so) anyone who was an adult at the time who isn't to this day angry and disgusted by the Philosophy professor, Abimal Guzman, founder and leader of the Sendero Luminoso, the pseudo-Maoist terrorist organisation that ripped Peru's social fabric in the '70's through the 90s. This country is still recovering from the damage that maniac murderer did, and people are still pretty angry over it, him, and them, the Senderos now turning their hands to cocaine smuggling in the jungle. Peru is as stable as it is, and it's not at all perfect, because in the past decade or so it has embraced a free market economy and deregulation to a large extent. It's a nice place for me and for many Peruanos, most of whom are happy people in a fairly happy county. I compare it to America, my home and my heart, all said and done, that is nasty, ugly, and increasingly disgusting to me. We suffer from fools who elected utter fools, and in time I suspect this will be seen as a time as bad for us as the times of Guzman in Peru. But regardless, life will go on.
In Peru there was a time when Tupac Amaru was featured as a figure worthy of coinage. I would love to have one of those coins, but they aren't readily available, and so far I have seen only one, losing the photo of it somehow. The lack of such coins tells me that people here are happy to have faceless coins that say nothing much about things in general. There is the anonymous fact of money, no political posturing involved. Money is money, and it is good. In America we celebrate our founding fathers for the most part, but in recent times we see the icon of Obama disgracing our nation. There is some going back, I think. A return to neutrality would be a good start.

I had a chance to post a vivid picture of a Red Star on a wall, over which another graffiti artist had added "Ratta." I opt now to show Peru without politics.

Life goes on, and the less we find of megalomaniacs murdering or attempting to control, the better.
The long-faced llama, the short-faced alpaca.


Life does go on, and it has little to do with imaginary figures like Tupac Amaru. Life is stuff that grows, like children. Like freedom.

Medical-Dental Living at its best.

Somewhere P.J. O'Rourke writes that for those who deny the concept of Progress he has two words: Dental Care.

Dental care is pretty useless to those who can't afford it. I can, thanks to being in Peru where I recently lost a tooth in a slip on a washed-out section of a mountain path. And I am going for the best that the world can offer.

someone recently questioned the state of the medical system here in Peru. I have no idea about the details of that, but looking at this picture tells me the Peruvians have a good sense of organisation. Here we see the emergency hospital on one side of the street, and on the other a row of funeral parlours. I mean, yes, who goes to a hospital but sick people. And why waste time dicking around all over town for a place to bury those sick people who die. It makes good sense to have this near one-stop-shopping.
[Click on photo for details]

And they call this a backward country!

If I should die in the dental process, it's all taken care of. If I survive, then expect to see my smiling face around Christmas.

Dead in Peru

I was out for a walk to the local university in Arequipa, Peru recently, when I saw out of the corner of my eye a huge edifice with an inscription, "The Family of ..." in a cemetery. I don't often see families together in life, let alone in death, so I found a gate and entered in just to satisfy my morbid curiosity about whatever the hell I was thinking about. Not surprisingly, I found a range of post-life experiences, some of which surprised me. Take, for example, Julia Bueno, d. 1928, who died almost a hundred years ago, and who still has at least one person leaving flowers. Why? Who would care?

Others are lined up in galleries row upon row, and galleries abound in this cemetery. So too do the family crypts. I had some family somewhere, most of whom, those I know, are dead, and I don't give them more than passing thought. I don't care about the dead, and it might say something as well that I don't have any children. One might wonder if the galleries and the family crypts are actually about individuals at all or if they are simply about place-holder people. I don't have any answers here.

I did see the dead respected for whatever reasons. Those reasons are beyond me. I see that some do not survive the time. One might wish to be a good person and so to be remembered by those who couldn't possibly recall the living being. But life is not fair, and one cannot say of another that he or she did not deserve to be loved in death. sometimes people just get buried and left, and sometimes they get buried and rooted out. For me, living still, there is a wonder that I can't satisfy. I will never know if I am forgotten and buried or forgotten and burned or just forgotten. But in this life I can look at others and live with their experience because others cared at least a little bit and left some of that for me to think on.

The university might teach things of this nature, but I missed that part.

I might have learned something in a walk through the grave yard. It'll pass.

Limited Space, Limited Choices

The things I don't have but will probably someday kick myself for not getting. I have a backpack that is jammed tight with stuff that I really could do without, like a sweater and extra socks and shorts and toilet stuff, and I mean, I am never going to use that stuff, so why, I wonder, did I pass up such cool stuff at the market where I had a chance at the occult and witchcraft stall to do myself some real favours for later?

I am probably going to kick myself for passing on dead llama babies pre-dried out and decorated with ribbons. Man, I think sometimes I just don't get it.

I don't have any dried llama babies, and I don't know anyone who can lend me some if I need them. Let this be a lesson to you, dear reader, to take what you can when you can. You will tell you children about the poor fool Dag who, when the only thing that could save him was dead llama babies, and he didn't have any. A lesson in life, friend. Even though it probably reflects badly on me, I think it important that others learn from my idiot mistakes.

Get them llama babies while you can.

To Lake Titicaca in fine style safe and sound.

Life on the road can be sometimes a tad scary, especially when the local papers have screaming headlines every week announcing "Many Dead, More Horrible Mutilated in Bus Crash on the same road Dag is taking today to a new town he knows nothing about." And there I was, your humble narrator, sitting right up front with a great view through the plain, untempered glass without any of that plastic shatter proofing I am so used to, looking at the vehicles our driver was passing every chance he got. Not that I worry.

Nice view of the highway and sights along the way. Many of those were of gas trucks. I like it. Nice and close view of a gas tanker right in front of me. I call this experiencing other cultures so I can expand my tiny mind and see how valid it is to live in other cultures and therefore give up my evil xenophobic ways. I py good money for this kind of thing, and I hope and expect it makes me a better person for it. More sharing and caring and less an imperialistic arsehole. The bus last week, well, 8 dead, 48 injured.

That's an education, if you ask me.

I've witnessed a couple of bad bus accidents, and I was in a bus that went part way over a cliff, saved by the driver's cousin who swung himself out the window and climbed along the roof to help a bunch of others hook chains to the axle to pull us back onto the pathway that wound its way through the jungle. A couple of others I met weren't so lucky. But this is life, and it beats the alternative greatly. Dangerous up close and personal, but one must live.

I like it, if only because so far I survive it.
Surviving is the important part for me. Close is cool.


I have a friend whom I tell that should I die in a fiery car crash he should do certain things with the stuff he keeps for me, like sell it off and retire in comfort, given that I won't need it any longer. He always laughs uncomfortably and says I'll be fine. He is a good friend.
I mean, what could happen?

The truth is that the bus trip was uneventful for me. I got through the thunder, lightning and rain storm just fine, the only problem being that just as night fell we were a bit back of the truck that flipped over and had to be shovelled off the road by a guy with a front-end loader. No fire, no flames, and thus no photo, given that it was pitch black. Just a mangled truck and stuff strewn all over the road for a long stretch. No danger for me at all.

Philadephia in Peru.

The modernist world has gone to Hell and nothing is getting better there as time goes on. It's about time to re-evaluate the meaning of our place and see if we aren't so rich in terms of cash that we have bought with our money a second-rate dictatorship.

I look back at my miserable years in Canada and other Western hell-holes, and I thank the gods that I now live in real peace and freedom in, for now, Peru. I hope never to return to the Velvet Fascism of Canada or Western Europe. I truly and deeply hate most of the Modern world as it is today, and one can see why in the daily life of Peruvians, those people who should be shining examples of possible freedom in our world.

We in the West have lost too much of our freedom, and we pay for that loss with our own money. Image, for example, that one has graduated from an art college in Canada and is now selling pottery in an upscale market where most of ones money goes for rent and taxes. One might sell some replica version of pre-Columbian pottery to those living in an up-scale neighbourhood, people who fancy themselves collectors of fine crafts. One would not dare fall asleep in the sun, leaving ones wares open on the sidewalk. If it didn't get stolen, it might be damaged. More than likely, the police would issue a citation for selling on the sidewalk in the first place. There is no rest.


In Peru, where the lady above is asleep at her post, there is no college grant to study the making of pre-Columbian pottery. She and her family make pots because she never had a chance to go to school to learn anything else. She doesn't think of herself as an "artist" making pottery. She and her family make pottery because they don't know how to make money doing anything better. She is a very pleasant lady when one has a chance to speak with her.

Much of what goes on in poor countries is hidden from public view. This isn't because there is some deep love of privacy, it's mostly because one cannot trust ones neighbours not to see and envy and steal. So, things are hidden away.


Often it's not pretty at all. It's dirty and broken and ramshackle. But it is ones own. There are no health inspectors or building inspectors or inspection inspectors inspecting. One is on ones own, for better or worse. One cannot "make do" in most of the modern world. The neighbours would call the police if one tried. All things must be regulated because the social world would suffer if one person, doing something on his own, made a mess of it for every one else.
You cannot have a thatched wall. What if it caught fire? Everyone would be in danger. So, one calls the police.

Much of western Peru is desert. There are in Arequipa, Peru's second largest city, a couple of smallish rivers, one of which is dry this Spring. But not to worry, there is an artesian well that stepped farmers, like their Incan ancestors, have created to graze cattle. It's brilliant, lovely, and stinking. The steppe is right close to unregulated produce sellers who work and live and live pretty well by selling fruit and vegetables fresh from home. In America, land of the free? Maybe not so much.
Almost everything in Peru today would be illegal in the most Modern of nations today. It would violate "regulations" of any number of sorts. But Peruvians get on just fine with freedom, whereas the regulated nations, Bolivia, for example, do not. Peru, unregulated, is a better place to live for the free man than any place that comes to mind in America today. Not rich, not cutting edge clever and inventive, not booming and futuristic; Peru and such other free places on earth are just good to live in if one can live at all. It's not easy here. One must struggle and work hard to live at all. That's the price of freedom.

How bad is life in Peru? I took an hour to talk to locals at the Plaze de Armas in Arequipa on a Sunday afternoon recently. We were swarmed by pigeons. This tells me that, unlike Canada, no one is eating them because their welfare cheques didn't show up on time. Here, people work, have families, and go to the park on Sunday after church. I've been to a number of places other than Canada where there are few pigeons, and that is because pigeons get eaten. Not here. There is lots of food, and people grow it and sell it and consume it freely. Flies? Yes. Filth? No. Health inspectors? What?

I met a fat bus-driver and his dumpy and not very bright wife who live on a street beside a park in an area with about zero crime. They live near a million dollar house similar to the one I fell in love with, its adobe walls and unfinished siding being typical of the haphazard way things don't get done here. This beautiful house might well belong to some guy who has a dull and unskilled job. It's pretty typical of houses in Arequipa, affordable because one begins with whatever money one has, and as one gets more, one eventually finishes the building, maybe.
Building inspectors? What? It's the man's home. Who asked the government for an opinion about how to build a mud brick house in an earthquake zone?

Strange as it might seem to many living in the Modern world, I have not yet met anyone working for the government or an NGO in Peru on the strength of a degree in Wymins Studies who expects to live in a nice house like the one above. OK, I haven't met any Peruanos who have goof-degrees. Most people who live in nice places do so because they work for a living doing something, and sometimes strange things indeed, that make other people happy to give them money to finance nice houses that could well fall down in an earth quake. Some people sell fruit and vegetables, or pots, or maybe brooms. Who cares?
Yes, there is the matter of reaching ones full potential, and selling brooms on a side street isn't likely to qualify. But to work and make money and have a nice place, that might compensate for not being ones artistic genius in the world. The Modern world could really use a lot of sweeping today, mostly of idiots who think they're too good to work at boring jobs that make money. It's freedom here that we miss in the Modern world, and the self-respect that comes from self-sufficiency. The only thing that would impel me to return to my home is some deep personal failure that shows me incapable of living like a man in the world, me needing a baby-sitter all of my life. I hope I die free instead. But, and I have my doubts, maybe we will come to our senses and recreate the Modernity we used to have in the Modern world before we threw it all away for the corruption of the German Revolution. Me? I don't need it. I want freedom. I hope to live like a Peruvian.

I don't need others to ensure that my life and world is perfect. I can make do with less so long as it's the best I can do. Maybe some day America will come home again, and then so will I. I don't wait for perfection, just for the nation we used to have.

Till such a day, hello from Peru.

Leaving ones print

I come from a family of printers, perhaps so far back as Caxton, but certainly so far back as my grandfather and my father. That my alcoholic father had a severe case of lead poisoning from working with the hot lead type of his profession might prejudice me against some aspects of printing, i.e. actual printers, doesn't diminish my love of the actual printing process, i.e. the machines, the type, the fonts, the paper, the ink, the readers themselves. I love printing presses. I love Gutenberg and Caxton, and I love Luther and Tynedale. I love the Internet. I love the freedom one can attain because of reading, and the machines, even the men who make it all possible.

In a short walk to the bakery to pick up a slice of chocolate cake for dessert I poked my head into a small space in a doorway and saw, to my surprise, a working print shop.

[Print Shop, Arequipa, Peru.]

I can't identify the press itself. I would guess it to be some Heisenberg press, but another could say more and better than I. I like it just as it is, regardless, because it brings information, i.e. freedom, to the masses, for good or ill.

Men such as my family, and me too, we had California Job Cases full of lead bits, of types of various fonts, of slugs, and so on, and from those cases and into boxes went words, all backward, images, backward too, and then on to the bed and under the press to print.

[California Job Case.]

I have endless evil memories of lead poisoned lunatic alcoholics, but that is a personal story, and the story of printing, of literacy, of thinking, of learning and exploring, much of it is universal and available to all of us if only we care to sit down for a bit, to let the world rotate in its natural course, and we can read and maybe gain a bit more from life thanks to the efforts of others who might not, like my family, have any respect whatsoever for the product itself.

[Old man sitting in the sun, reading, Arequipa, Peru, 2011.]

Printing. Oh, I sometimes just laugh out loud when I realise how fortunate I am to live is such a world as this.

The sweet smell of success

I can't pass up a good sewer. I live a homeless life in Peru these days, not at all settled, not a legitimate resident, but not a tourist either. I'm a long-term independent traveller, as I like to call myself, a man without a real home or even a nation to belong to in any but the most tenuous legal sense. I'm just one man with a passport, and one man out of 350 million people entitled to the same passport and rights. A leaf of a certain colour and shape, I am sort of part of a tree of a kind of forest. I'm detached now, and floating on a breeze downward. No home but somewhere today in Peru. I like it here very much, and not least because I like its sewers.

Peru, from what I have seen so far from Lima to Cuzco to Arequipa, doesn't stink. I haven't encountered dead babies everywhere I turn, dead from sewage in the water. I eat vegetables here, brush my teeth with tap water, and even, if I can't find a cup of coffee, drink the tap water itself. I can do this because of sewers. This is not the cleanest place I've been to, but it is good enough to keep its people from mass death due to shit in the water. I've been there too, and I remember. I love sewers.

It takes some concern to make a sewer cover into something more than an iron covered concrete plate to cover a hole in the street. It takes some artistic skill to design something for the world, even if hardly anyone but a strange old man traveling would care to notice, if I may judge by the looks of those who looked at me taking a picture of a sewer cover. Yes, I have seen prettier covers. But this, like so much of Peru, is beauty itself. Someone cared enough to make it so. And others cared enough to make the cover come to reality, paid the money to make this cover for everyone to walk on and walk over and not notice.

I can make out, with my failing eye-sight, Medieval symbols of royalty and vibrant scenes of power and law. Some bureaucrat cared about this, and others made it happen, through agreement, finance, and labour. It is, this simple covering, a statement of benign concern for all.

I found a modern version of the man-hole cover, the city emblem. Most cities have such romantic emblems to promote themselves and their glorious pasts. Arequipa, Peru is no different. What is also true of other cities and this is that the city put their emblem on a sewer cover. This is a sign for those who care that cities value the work they do, no matter how insignificant it might seem to others, even those who directly benefit from it in the form of, for example, sewerage. One can be-- and I am, among others-- proud of sewers, and I (and we)) are proud to see city emblems on such master-works as manhole covers.

Even as an old guy drifting from some strange cold land through this land of warm wonder and equal strangeness I am blessed here by seeing on man-hole covers such concern for details and this expression of care for all, citizens or not, who pass by Sucre Street and who might, perhaps, look down for a second and smile at the work of those who did this for us all.

The Man Makes the Hat

I find it easy to miss the effort and labour and thought that goes into so much of the Human world, the sheer work that people do to make things good for me and the rest of us, being all of us. Sometimes something odd strikes me and I do look, and I do go out of my way to inquire and see for myself the detail of the maker, i.e. I go into someone's home or workplace where I interrupt the worker and demand answers to whatever questions I might have. “Who are you? What are you doing? Do people love you for your work, or are you anonymous and forgotten as soon as they leave with your work in hand?”

Work, as much as family, is the meaning of life. For some, work is sewing beads onto fabric in elaborate patterns so others can parade in public in wonderful grandeur. In Latin America, such people who sew such things are Bardados. I've met three such people now in Peru, and others in different nations, all of them mad as hatters. I would guess that is co-incidence.

When I see parades and look at the costumes and banners people have, I think of the men and women who sit for uninterrupted hours and days stitching and sewing and gluing bits of stuff to fabric, to sheets and shoes and wood and plastic, who must go blind early, who seem to go strange in the mind from so much solitude. But, assuming others value the work if not the maker, such things will last for a long time, longer, I would guess, than the makers themselves.

I'm a hat guy, myself, mostly because I use a hat to keep the weather off my head so I don't go baked and loony. But beyond that I think of hats as making the man into a public figure among men, a man wearing his identity for all to see in wearing a hat of a certain style.

None of us dress simply for the sake of weather. We all dress because we want to say something about ourselves to others. This is not a hat for me, but for those who do wear them, and who say to me that they care about themselves and their community, I thank those who lose so much to give so much to us all. We're all passing through, of course, and few of us will leave any mark at all. Maybe just a hat. Good enough.

See also: http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2007/12/hat-makes-man.html

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html

Andean Walker, cover graphic

I keep private notes that I expect to use at some later date to compile a new book of travel tales, the working title being Andean Walker. The following photo I hope to use as the cover graphic, taken from the unpublished piece, “The Bodega of the Last Gasp Mannequins.”

If anyone comes across this picture, please include my photo credit.

D.W. Walker,

Author of

An Occasional Walker

and up-coming

Andean Walker

And

As Pacific Walker.

Lost?

My best gal will be an old woman now, this being her birthday, she being ageless and timeless to me. She is long gone for a long time, and yet it seems like yesterday she left for better. I lost her.

My gal found another man, a better man, a stable man who provided her with the life I could not. She looked long and hard for a man who could do for her the things a woman needs from a husband, and she found him. She was married to him for a long period, stable and happy.

But things are not static in our world, and she lost him. He was well-to-do, and the economy changed all that for him. He had some idea that stability was his right and that providing wealth was his duty to his family. He lost all that. He went into the garage and shot himself in the head.

There's always music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOKI_tIBWVI