Canterboli Tales

My mind is crammed with world literature, poetry, history of times and places past and exotic, filled with the arcane and the wondrous, intellectual delights and much too awful to recall without falling depressed into debilitation and sickness, weltschmertz, and loathing; but there is the swell of grand and elaborate hopes and dreams, visions of an impossible future of unfolding treasures and mad joys to indulge, of joke to retell. I have a full mind. But my Spanish is limited, and I slow down to a halt often enough, finding myself in a void of communication, searching for something I just do not have, i.e. the word that others will understand. And then, too, I find my English lowers to the simple, to the cliched, to the basic just above my Spanish. I speak the easy and the immediate. Gone are Bocaccio, Dante, Chaucer. 'I'm going to the tienda to buy soap.' This I say to travelers I meet, my tale, my contribution.

People I meet are often mysteries to me, as occult as stones. And when their secrets are reveled to me, when I hit on the right words and combinations thereof, I find often that they are going to the tienda to buy soap.

Few people traveling (those I meet) are on a pilgrimage to some holy site of universal power, they chattering away the days telling tales of the high and low to wile away the hours and the days as they move slowly toward the magnificent, telling tales of eternal delight. Nor are they driven from their homes by plagues, public or private, in search of anything much more than moving along from here to there in search of another mile and tea at a cafe in the sun, a stroll down the market highstreet to browse among local handicrafts for some thing or other to take back home when the traveling is done. Some might stop on the sidewalk briefly to admire the old statuary atop a church facade, or they might stop for ice-cream to eat under the shelter of a tree in the park. The tale of the day is cosmically interesting insofar as it is possible. The day of travel is as simple as buying soap. The great literature of the world rests idly in my mind, and I long to chat with simple girls, clean and smiling, their tales of sweet smells and smooth skin and warm water, tales of soap and bath.

19/21

I've gone about as far as I can in my search for the Nineteenth Century, and here in southern Bolivia where shops are filled with 16 speed Oster blenders and see-through nylon panties and a hundred varieties of Chinese radios and toys that cause moments of psychic storms, I come as close as possible in my time to that lost time I long for-- to a place where a band of haggard men play old beaten brass

horns to the beat of cracked drums as they return from a funeral, previously solemn, now up-beat, the Twentieth Century all around them in their mourning, resignation tempered with belief in the good of eternity. The small group of men carrying a make-shift shrine of plastic flowers and a doll like Jesus half hidden in a polyester blanket, these men trudge up the street in old plastic sandals and ragged cotton jeans, slowly, slowly, to the annoyance of the family caught behind them on a narrow stone lane, the father tapping impatiently on the steering wheel of his shiny silver-grey Hummer, plump and clean well-dressed children in the back seat gawking at the men in procession ahead.

Electricity obliterates any illusion I might hope to wish for that this is the last vestige of the Nineteenth Century. The metal frames holding up the plastic tarp roof of a sidewalk vendor selling medicinal herbs and witchcraft charms from a stack of boxes printed in China defeats my hopes. But pregnancy gives my spirits a lift in this time, a scene of vitality the Nineteenth Century lacked, pregnancy being a delight and a fulfillment today that was a potential death sentence then, now a promise of good, a curse to others in the Modern world of the Twenty-first Century so many Modernists claim to despise, the latter ignorantly longing for a time closer to that of the hunter-gatherer era of starvation, rampant disease, total ignorance of the night, and the love of the darkness of the mind that is pre-Modernity.

In this land of relative simplicity of work, family, and death I startled those in the courtyard of my hotel when, leaving the shower, I suddenly crouched stark naked behind a stone column, reaching pointlessly for my non-existent pistol, trying to point it at the sound of distant fire-crackers exploding harmlessly elsewhere. This is not the Nineteenth Century. This is not the war. As much as my despised fellows in other lands I fall far short of living in the age of my time.

Andean Corn God

I took a bus through the Andes from Sucre to Tarija, and I can easily believe in God now that I have crested these high Andean plateaus and seen with my own eyes thereon miles and miles of crops growing on otherwise desolate plains at the very top to the world, these majestic mesas producing for the first time in history food enough for the people of a nation. If every man on earth today were to pile up dirt and stone, at the end of a lifetime they might altogether rival the being of one mountain here among the thousands standing silently and without celebration, these marvels of nature, mute and unremarkable in their glory. And yet it is only a few scattered families working who outstrip nature in a season by growing corn on these mountain tops so high they leave most men breathless and sick. Corn grows here enough to feed a million men for a year. And there are more mountains yet to please us.

These giant bulks of stone and a scattering of soil would leave most expecting to find hovels housing the semi-starving peasants, as has been the history of man for most of history and beyond; but here and now, in the mountains, just barely a reach from the sky, one finds Japanese-made 4X4 pick-up trucks pared in a glow of electric lights cast from farm houses fit for kings, houses filled with healthy children watching satellite television or playing video games on personal computers while parents prepare dinner to satisfy the hungriest traveler who might knock at their door, the children eating and sleeping in peace and security of a loving household after a day's pleasant life, awakening to a hot shower provided by solar panels, washed fresh with soap that smells of heavenly gardens, breakfasting on mixed mangoes and milk made smooth in a 16 speed Austrian-made blender, fresh eggs and bread and butter. If life is better for a Malibu multi-millionaire, it might be only marginally moreso, if at all, all the surface of California glitter being worth not one family member's day away from home. A farm at the top of the world, and a family cashing life under the skies, all of it looks down at the earth's abundance made real by man acting for man. There was a man named Norman, but there are others, unknown to all but family who made and maintain this paradise of food and family, people as unknown to the world as the mountains of southern Bolivia, giants all of them.

In the night I travel across the mountains, down steep valleys and up again over passes the rise into the clouds, moonlight shining through puff-ball blue clouds drifting across the sky, purposeless in their existence but proof of the further road ahead of me as I ride over the roads made my man to fulfill his destiny as living thing content in a bountiful world.

Mountains so high one is sick to travel across them, and there is food there and there are families who make it all flourish. I know all this because man has made roads, and I travel over them. These roads ar the paths to the future of mankind, higher than any mountain, grander than any peak, all of it pointing to a wonder one might see as God in his perfection.

The Moved Unmover

My grandfather was born before the Wright Brothers first flew at Kittyhawk, North Carolina. My father was born the day the stock market crashed in '29. I was born and lived a long time before my mother, working full-time while she wasted away dying from cancer to the point her co-workers couldn't stand the sight of her sickness and had her moved to an isolated room out of their view, had spent enough at the supermarket to amass books full of Green Stamps coupons that we licked and pasted into books that she redeemed to buy, in her final days, both a colour television and a microwave oven, our house being the first in the area to have such luxuries, the wonder of the neighbourhood, drawing gawkers to look on at such modern marvels. Today, in my hotel room in Sucre, Bolivia, I have a colour television with a connection that brings in a hundred channels or more, and I have a microwave oven to cook my dinner. No wonder. I have much that few would have dreamed of not so long ago, including a laptop computer in my backpack. I can communicate now with the universe in an instant, free for nothing, from a past that used to charge significant amounts of money for making a dial-up phone call across town. I am rich beyond the dreams of any man of my youth.

Since I was last on the road in the Third World I now see a change created by the unloosing of the Chinese economy and a nation of people dedicated to producing an ocean of consumer goods for the world. I could not have dreamed yesterday of such things as I see for sale on Sucre sidewalks today. I know the world without such stuff. I know a world with. I know the difference.

Ten years ago the Chinese had not flooded the world with consumer goods. Today, the world is flooded everywhere with Chinese things. If the Chinese quit their efforts today there will still be enough to last the world a hundred years. Chances are the Chinese will continue pouring stuff into the world for a hundred years beyond a hundred years. What I see in Bolivia today is for me a frame from a movie reel projected at 24 frames per second, if such a reference makes sense to the average reader any longer. No matter what I see today it is not what will be tomorrow's Bolivian reality. Tomorrow Bolivia will be a foreign country, not only for me but for Bolivianos.