Letter #70: on the road in México

The only criticism that sticks is self-criticism.  Not that criticism from others does not matter; it often does.  Nevertheless, one has to open himself to at least the possibility of that external criticism’s validity.  At that point, the mere ‘mulling over’ of the criticism, if short of outright admission, appropriates it into one’s conscience.  Then the salutary effect of self-criticism begins its drill.  A colleague of mine chastised me recently for having no sense of Mexican culture.

Now, my personality is one sensitive to slights with a propensity to fights.  That leaves little room for an open mind, unless that person who makes that criticism does something to prove his character (i.e., something beneficial to me that shows the ability of the other to rise above a contest of wills).  No need for details here as it became clear, on even cursory examination, that my colleague was on-the-mark.  Her good-will not only displayed her enlightenment, it inspired a little more in me.

Hopefully, and God-willing (given my lazy ass), I will take better advantage of what Mexico has to offer in the time remaining to me here.  This week-end, I got off to a marvelous start.  There are seven volunteers in my class whom I have admired greatly.  They really are worth my emulation, not of behavior (for that is Emersonian suicide), but of refinement, conscience and vision.  I had wanted to visit all seven. 

This week-end, I visited numbers four and five in Puebla.  The two out west I will never get to, and what regret I have for rationalizing my leaden posterior.  To be sure, they were quite open and even suggestive of a week-end visit.  Simply said, I lost an opportunity of a life-time; perhaps not a critical opportunity, but one that shall not come my way again.  The bus ride from Puebla is four hours long, often a deterrent in itself.  The week-end was charmed right from the bus ride.

It is two weeks since Día de Muertos here in México.  It is, as I wrote recently, a holy day not to be summarily dismissed as a pleasant uniqueness worth chatting about when discussing Frida Kahlo or the symbology of the Grateful Dead to prove my sophistication (even though I am thirty years late in these inferences).  It goes far deeper than my worldly images within, and the other-worldly images around, me that are made all the more so by a profusion of colors lighting up scattered skulls.  Well, that haunting image of the verdancy and verity of death in our everyday life did not happen on the bus ride.

What did happen is that the sun set, not in the opalescent sky of Fitzgerald (which I have yet to see on any of the five continents in which I have travelled).  The sky was cloudy, hinting of a rain yet but never to come.  It was melancholy, to which I am more accustomed as it splits the middle of the Mexican life-and-death paradox.  The colors blended various shades of sulfur and grey into a sublime, subdued majesty.  I was listening to music that was heavy 'moog' but not heavy 'boge' (for once); it, too, had a certain sweet sadness. 

The skyline, sinking into night and losing itself on the high peaks of the central highlands, swished by, displaying the silhouettes of the squat trees of Mexico atop some hill, with slopes of nopales (cactuses that look like a Kalderesque agglomeration of green, prickly basset hound ears), emptying into harvested fields, that looked wasted by drought, with the refuse swept into witches’ broom bottoms.  It was not hard to get that there was something silently extraordinary about this random collision of sight and sound.  I had last seen it more than thirty years before driving in the early winter back to Washington after a week-end in Pittsburgh with parents who loved me so. 

The trees, in the grey, almost nocturnal, February sky, bereft of life as they had been for months, still reached into high, whispering something I could not quite hear.  In truth, I felt it first shortly after arriving to high school, when I crept desperately alone into the least popular place on campus (i.e., the chapel) to read and later sing privately, hymn 507 (1940 Hymnal).  Ten years later – after the death of my erstwhile sweet-heart, the suicide of two close friends and many opportunities already forfeited – I had decided that life goes on and it was time to fill in and pave over the piss-puddle and move on.  That felt like the right thing to do.

Only now, thirty years after making that decision, on a bus in the middle of Mexico, was I willing to open that door again; or, more properly said, was I given the chance to open that door again.  This time, I had some reference of time and a preference of place.  Mexico’s forever mystical culture girded me on that bus.  Beyond, the simple matter of my own mortality, I began to feel a deeper presence of God, one that I had not felt for thirty years, save for the death of my parents, my uncle and my brother-in-law’s father.  Those came out of necessity of blood-ties severed and the departure of a great man whom I’d like to be. 

It was also fitting because I was on that bus out of a choice to visit two of the best Peace Corps volunteers, both bird watchers (explanation forthcoming in the next essay).  As I listened to that synthetic melancholy paired with the sublime sadness of the dying horizon, I realized that paving over the cesspool perhaps had not been meet and right so to do.  Nonetheless, I could not – and still can not – imagine what would happen were I surrender my life to wandering between slices of the past ricocheting through my future while standing arrested in the present, undoing, enveloped by the chaos so truly at the core of our universe.  Life is better left to others to figure out. 

That Mexican culture of death in life brings to focus the strength of her mysticism: the necessity of focusing on fun today, on children today, on celebrating the quiet ascendancy of indigenous beliefs to bring Catholicism back to life.  There is a humility in this alien culture that may defeat its becoming another Silicon Valley of innovation, as I so often argue, as this country's destiny.  Yet that grand vision, as well and intellectually argued it may or may not be, implies that Silicon Valley is something to which all BRICS and TMIMBIs alike ought properly to aspire to.  Mexican culture, often so backward to my untrained and culturally vacuous eye, offers so much more. 

In actuality, I still do not know what that 'more' is, but I keep trying to find out, one day at a time.  Truth is, I will know that gold standard when first I see its gleam.  Hopefully, I will get more into the deep-water swing of things Mexican to pass along better information.

Letter-68: another ridiculous exercise in self-importance

Now that the election is thankfully over, I have a confession to make before I return to normal. After watching, from afar, the performance of President Obama during Hurricane Sandy, I have come to believe that I would have voted for him, changing over from voting for Governor Romney on election day. As it is, I was content with my third-party vote because I sense that many of the things percolating through these ‘fringe’ elements today will be the mainstay of our discourse tomorrow. And we need fresh discourse.

There are other reasons, besides being a Pisces, why I would have so brazenly undecided my way into the Democrats. (Get a clue, Ned, no one cares.) As a conservative and as a Republican, two elements of this election were offensive to me. And they came from my own party. First, I cannot recall an election in my lifetime, at least one that I followed, where an anti-democratic élite tried so brazenly to finance an outcome. It made me shudder.

This second ‘doozie’ may have occurred at some other time and I was simply too out-to-lunch to get it. Nevertheless, I found the concerted effort to intimidate and disenfranchise minorities to be, well, disgusting. It was something beneath the dignity of our people. What perhaps frightened me the most was how quickly I acclimated myself to this racism.

For example, in the third debate (during the one intemperate moment that I recall the President displaying through months of grueling work and astounding pressure), I found myself thinking, “Well aren’t you uppity?” Trust me when I say that, had Vice President Biden or Governor Romney or Representative Ryan said the same, I might have been irate but not thinking he was uppity. Strange thing is that I do not recall feeling that ever in 2008.

Race was an issue, at least for me, I regret to admit.

Since his election the first time, President Obama has impressed me as among the best America can produce. His policies? Way, way different story. You all know well that I am unsure of many things and often insecure these days. Yet President Obama – unimaginative and dangerous as some of his policies are – remains one of the finest people we have elected to the Presidency.

As I said to a Peace Corp bud, President Obama – from my Republican view – is a great, great man with terrible policies. Unfortunately, though I felt sorry for the savagery of political attacks against him since many seemed to be based on his being very wealthy, Governor Romney lost my vote for certain things he said or did that led me question his fitness for the oval office.

First and by far foremost, he politicized the Libya murders and the protests in Cairo from Day-1. Governor Romney and Representative Ryan showed two unsavory elements of their personalities. Namely, these guys were willing to say anything or disregard the grievous loss of anybody to get elected. They vastly under-estimated the common sense of the people they had asked to vote for them. Most Americans instinctively knew that, frustrating and outrageous as this terror attack was, it was unfair to blame the president for it.

Second, both Governor Romney and Representative Ryan never answered questions transparently asked on how they could balance the budget and cut tax-rates when eliminated deductions could not close the budget-breach likely to ensue. To re-name that old rock song from the Chicago Transit Authority (‘25 or 6 to 4’), this was 59 or five to zero.

Third, Governor Romney’s incessant opposition to defense cuts under sequestration and to ObamaCare indicated to me that he would rather sustain an over-extended military force on a war-time procurement footing than strive to secure the right to at least minimal health care. The latter is a thorny question and I dislike health-care reform as it currently stands because I do not think we can afford it. Nevertheless, when intelligent analysis demonstrates that the mandatory defense cuts under sequestration amount to levels seen in past post-war demobilizations, this rhetoric displays a deeply ingrained preference of guns over butter.

http://www.csbaonline.org/publications/2012/08/analysis-of-the-fy2013-defense-budget-and-sequestration/  

So, much as I prefer not to see Republicans lose, there are reasons why I am happy with the vote a week ago for proving, at least for now, the following precarious principles:

1. An election can not be bought.
2. Poor voters can not be disenfranchised or intimidated.
3. Fear and anger need not dominate the national discourse.
4. A political party can not undermine a President and get away with it..

We do not need to attack Iran or anybody else.
I am sure I will have my problems with the President over the next four years (like anybody really cares) but these things I have mentioned were attacks on values that mean a lot to me. The Republicans are defending other important values, as I have written. Sadly, I was so focussed on finding things wrong with President Obama that I overlooked equally corrosive, if not more subversive, thinking from my side.

Día de Muertos; Night and day

Well, I have voted for Governor Gary Johnson and the Libertarians while President Obama is headed toward re-election by six to twelve percentage points; that is to say that I am done with politics for now. To be sure, if I were given a dinner to dine with the President, I would step back and let Representative Ron Paul to take my place and talk some sense to a good man about why the Constitution matters. Representative Paul is brave enough to say what needs to be said, and the President is big enough to listen.

In any case, other parts of life are important besides politics. One of those is sometimes cluing into the Mexican culture. November the 2nd is the day to do it. El Día de Muertos is an important holiday, likely the second or third most important of the festival calendar that Mexico follows. In Mexico, you see, it is about process, about the journey. In some ways this idea may reach back not only to Spain but to the Muslim influence of a wandering worship, never quite settled anywhere.

Halloween is the closest day – both in spirit and in imagination – that we Americans have got to Día de Muertos. And it is not so close. For most of us up North, Halloween is that one night when otherwise demure women dress in tight-fitting witch’s outfits. For this one night, at least, these women get to flout everything that keeps them proper. The men are no better, running around in tights trying to entice the witches in rhe same way they already find themselves seduced.

With this frame of reference, I assumed that my Mexican counterparts, far more elaborate with the make-up, were after something else than the chill of an autumn’s breath that so often brought the moistened lips together, together enough to cover up the moon the for others in the back-seat. All this is to say, I qualify as an unashamed cultural dunderhead, becoming curious as to what the Mexicans actually do with all of this ‘dead’ stuff anyway.

So what do dunderheads do on the afternoon of this obviously important day? They go out to check out the Día de Muertos to find where their alienated minds can dissolve, at least momentarily, into the muffled, rumbling energy of the trickling crowd. This they cannot do alone as foreigners, since such heavy-tipping guttural beings would not last in the activities, extended beyond normal times through soft gaits and averted eyes. So they get a guide, usually a local friend, who understands dead people.

At the suggestion of a dear and dearly Mexican friend, I went into Querétaro this evening. This city, where I serve in the Peace Corps, is steeped in history; over-packed with legend; teeming with old-looking churches that create a sense of proper Catholic gloom. As I approached the chore, I recalled some forgotten elements of the past to right-size this mysterious dimension that remains so very confusing to me.

Years ago, I went to a Halloween Party where the men were dressed for success and women to excess. Before going to what I suspected might just be a wild party, I pulled down from the book-shelf a heavily hi-lited and disgustingly dog-eared Golden Bough by Malcolm Fraser (I think his name was) and tried to track down the family roots of Halloween. As usual, the day or night had been a pagan ritual in Europe, complete with bonfires, which the Roman Church had integrated into its body of belief. I read on. The witch’s and ugly monster costumes were worn to scare off the real witches, goblins and evil spirits.

In other parts of Europe, others dressed up in the clothes reminiscent of certain dearly departed relatives to try to reach back and invite their ghosts back to the home for just one more family dinner…like Eurydice’s humid whisper and then be gone. Still other Europeans dressed like people of whom they knew and from whom they needed help from beyond. That one doesn’t work; that I know. For several years I went as Jimmy Hoffa and my pension is still underwater.

My friend and I visited three altars before dinner. She explained to me what the Día de Muertos meant. I figured it was all about what Fraser said so long ago, but properly British anthropology for once was only tangentially related. The costumes, I think, represent the dead coming back, not by posing as a ‘fabric’-ated invitation for the departed, but to act in the stead of the dead themselves. Funny, it’s the Muertos who are desperate to return, if only for a moment – at least on that night (though, again like Islam or Judaism, after sun-down of All Saints Day).

During the day itself, much time is spent at the cemetery praising the family and openly mourning the dust-to-dust crowd. Happily, I have witnessed these truly moving rituals – which represent, after all, a wise and lovely integration of death into the continuity of life. Little brat that I was in college, I still marvel at the accidental wisdom of one of my favorite lines from those days: you have to understand death to live life.  Yet, the darker, questioning and hissy-fit side of me wonders how few of my loved ones will show up at my grave, ever.

We did see three altars. The native art, for which I have little abiding fondness (I am a Luddite in process), is amazingly precise. On a temporary mural, there were many ‘concheros’ (native dancers with percussion shells wrapped around the lower legs to make a lot of rhythm) and other 'indígenas' hunting, dancing and maybe even looking for an Oxxo (i.e., the Mexican equivalent of a 7-11). The interesting thing was none of these otherwise admirably painted figures had eyes. 

My friend, a sweet Mexican lady, felt a little creeped out by the no-eyes thing.  Always the Prince Charmless, I pointed out that they had no eyes because the mural went up in a day and did not permit time for a detailed and time consuming task like painting eyes. Her big Mexican eyes, brown like the soil that gives her kin life, took one hell of a long time, in her case, to go around in a fool circle. Wupps…soy norteamericano; I know, I know…presumed ugly until proven dead.

The other side of the altar had elaborate flower arrangements, two shaped like doves. I wondered if these ‘florid’ displays were patches of Heaven. Then it also occurred to me that the Muslim influence was at work again.  Mexican women I know remind very much of the women I have met across Arabia; that is, exquisite, sombrously sensual, quick and hinting of something else…too refined for my more mundane or simply secular tastes. 

Of course, this was not an altar, nor a garden in the human sense, not even Heaven, or at least as I might bother to conceive it.  This altar broings to life those riveting descriptions of the gardens of Eden in The Holy Qur’an, flowing with colors, drenched in fruit, served by the dark, mysterious women who excite ideas and intuitions of things eternal and divine, even in the dullest of dullards. No wonder I fall in love every week.

We went to the altar in the government building. It had more of a traditional Mexican feel with its ponderous, if colorful, geometry. As we walked around that altar, each of the four sides celebrated the life of a Queretanos worthy of respect, worthy of a visit this one night through a historically simulated, town-sponsored memory that beckons emulation by lesser mortals (e.g., me).

One was a British lady who had emigrated to Mexico at an advanced age as a botanist who always had preferred planting to bantering. She lived until the age of ninety, being recognized by her gracious hosts, not only as one with Queretaro but one for Queretaro, too.  The others featured were social activists in education, fighting poverty and journalism. Queretaro is rather political in its down-time.

The neat part was that these four were honoured under the view of the founding fathers – and mother – painted larger than life on a permanent mural as if to remind all of us that these people, not so famous as those who fought for the Independencia, were worthy of the same veneration, at least this one day, this 2nd day of November.

The last altar was a makeshift remembrance of the great crime of our time, as the altar would have it, of some 85,000 people killed by the narco-violence. For every sign that called out President Calderon (whom I admire deeply) as a mass-murderer for trying to restore a rule of law, there were others reminding people that the soon to be inaugurated president, , would be dishonest dictator, a madman, a homicidal homosexual, or matinee idol in beach movies.

Worst of all, this President Peña-Nieto would be a mere political plaything for, and puppet of a former President from the 1990s who, amazingly, remains a power-player notwithstanding his small problem of bankrupting the country as he vied for the Presidency of the W.T.O. That number of 85,000 right above the Guy Fawkes mask (like the one from the movie ‘V’) shows that, while the many children who died were unknown, unnamed, unimportant, ‘Anonymous’ was anything but and was not about to let that any shroud of cold indifference snuff out their tragically truncated relevance.

The evening closed with a pleasant dinner at an inexpensive but yummy family restaurant. We talked about the Day of the Dead and what it meant. Then my friend remembered how a plant she had from her ex-boyfriend had died when he had left her. She had put the plant aside to keep it out of her sight because it reminded her of him; nonetheless, she was diligent in taking care of the plant. Yet it died.

My friend went on to say she felt like she had withdrawn her affection from the plant and that is what it made it die. And every day she waters that plant, trying to talk to it, coax it back to life; alas, to no effect. Then and there I realized that, once again, God has blessed me with special friends, not because they think I am great but because I know how great they are.

We went onto talk about the Dead who return on this November 2nd. I was curious, as a typically flabby-assed agnostic (one class of Zumba-hasta-la-Tumba, notwithstanding). So do they come back because we miss them or they miss us or both? Particularly, those who were and are important to us. Do these people return to mend us so we can put one-foot-in-front-of-the-other? In this day of defiance and death, are we celebrating that quality of life that is even unhindered by death? Of course, I do not know.

Well one thing led to another and, with our clothes still on, we started talking about angels and guardian angels that just flutter around happily, far out of the very limited world of my mind, though some 70% of Americans surveyed believe in angels; I think they are idiots who confuse drones with angels. That begged the question about the after-life.

Mexicans love talking about the after-life, in general because this is a naturally mystical people.  They also do it with me more to probe the depth of my faith or the degree of apostasy. My standard answer is, “Is there an after-life? I will be sure to sne da post-card when I get there…” My friend, a devout Catholic, turned serious about this. So my question to her is my question to you this day of the dead.

If we are created in God’s image and we evolve to His perfection upon our death, how do we ever hook-up with anyone in Heaven? It is our imperfections that make us different from (and place us firmly below) God, at least in this vale of tears. Flaws make us different from each other; hell, they make us distinctive so we recognize each other as separate. Once we get to heaven, and the dark sides of our loved ones are now removed as they participate in the pure light of God’s love, how can we hope to distinguish one from another?

That being of pure light – yes that one over there – that might be dad; shoot, turns out to be Mr Waverly, the prick who cut me from the track team. Hmmm. Since I am stuck here, I really no longer have to worry about the customary scorn of the politically correct when I say, “Jeez, which one is dad? You all look the same to me….”

My friend, however, had an even-tempered response, beyond, “Oh, you gringos…” to reflect that maybe it did not matter. After all, would we be selfish enough to desire the pain of our loved ones of being separated from perfection so that we could recognize them? Well my dad still owes me twenty bucks from when I was a kid.

Perhaps that was the lesson of the Día de Muertos for me today: that bereavement of knowing that I may never be able to make the apologies owed to certain friends died young for things I did or failed to say. With grief taken to such an unchanging, eternal level, perhaps a day dedicated to these ‘honoured dead’ can be that critical half-measure that makes us closer to whole….