Love in the Stars

The Chilean desert is one of the best places in the world to view the stars. From there you can see not only the rings of Saturn (using a good telescope), but also Andromeda - the galaxy closest to the Milky Way. This is only possible in the Southern Hemisphere.
    Viewing these spaces, you contemplate the hundreds of billions of stars that make up each galaxy, and our infinitesimal place within the universe. ‘Really, we are nothing’ said my guide to the local landscape the Lunar Valley, ‘Maybe as a whole, as the human race we are something; but as individuals we do not amount to much.’
    His comments related both to the stars and to the hundreds of millions of years it took to forge the grand rock formations that were the subject of his tour. Everything about this region suggests a scale that surpasses human understanding. ‘To the Andean people who lived here before the Spaniards came, this landscape was not very important, it was just where they lived.’ Here too is scale.
    Five centuries have passed and while the unique cunza language of the former locals has gone (all but a few words, and no understanding of the grammar), a few forms of non-spoken language have persisted. The grandparents still perform rituals that have been going on for centuries. At the beginning of spring, at Pachamama festival, they and their children direct their energies to mother earth so that the earth will work with them for a good harvest (yes there are crops in the region). Yes, from a scientific perspective it is pointless, but from a human perspective it is not without worth - it honors a continuity with their ancestors, and it renews the relationship which each of us has with the ground beneath our feet.
    My guide was complaining that the next generation were watching the same cartoons as everyone else in the world (when I visited the supposedly isolated village of Iruya in Northwest Argentina, a cafe was showing the Simpsons). The rituals were appearing in their textbooks and they showed little interest in keeping with them. The past was becoming another story like the one I have been telling you.
    (TV and the internet are far more stimulating. Why are you reading this?)
    Tourists like myself come away with a different story - did you know that southern Bolivia, northwest Argentina, the Atacama desert are rich with a concentrated diversity of fabulous landscapes? Our eyes feast on the light of the sun as it shimmers across the rainbow-colored mountains, salt lakes, subtropical forests, sand dunes, etc, etc. We want to have our cake and eat it - see the place but also hope that the locals retain their traditions. We embody the millennia-old tension between continuity and advancement.
    Is it an advance that so many people appreciate this landscape in a way the locals did not notice? In New Zealand I was told by many - you get used to it and you don’t notice the beauty anymore. New Zealand is working hard to restore the ecology of its fjord lands and its mountain peaks (a sign on Ben Lomond asked visitors to forcibly tear out any wilding trees that they saw shooting up - they’re a European invader) and also selling jet-fuelled adventures up glaciers (‘It’ll be the highlight of your trip.’) Everywhere, everywhere I travelled I saw this contradiction.
    What you really learn from traveling through five continents in five weeks is:
    a) There’s always more to see.
    b) You’re a tiny fleck in the vast sea of humanity.

But a) and b) are hard to reconcile. The children want more Simpsons, more Spongebob, the elders and the nostalgist visitors want to retain the uniqueness of different locales on our planet. ‘They’re destroying what makes people want to come to their region in the first place’ (one fellow traveller told me about south-east Asia). One traveller to another: ’Did you get to Lombok? I didn’t like Bali either - too crowded with tourists - but Lombok was really something.’ Me, overhearing: ‘Isn’t this happening the world over? The place that was good to visit becomes overrun, like gentrification in the cities’ ‘Yes, and trip advisor is making it worse’ ‘It’s accelerating.’
    Unlike the stars which retain their distance, and are governed by unchangeable laws, we are constantly changing our path, following the feedback loop left by guides and other tourists to improve our experience, and rewriting our story to make it better. We tend to think of our selves as the epicenter of our universe with the lives of others appearing as a constellation around our own.
    For many of us, changes to this constellation are an inherent feature of modern life. Long gone are the days when we lived in a persistent community living out the same rituals and habits year after year, under the same stars.  Instead we tend to anchor our lives in love - the aspiration to form a binary star with another person whose mutual orbit with one’s self will become the stable centre of a family. This will in turn become the basis of future generations.    
    Thus, through love, we become a little bit more than nothing; we become a little bit closer to the permanence of the stars.

It’s important that future generations keep an eye on the stars - that the word does not just degenerate to associations with celebrities and ratings. Though we no longer navigate by the stars, they help us gain perspective on our little place in the universe.

Escaping the Cemetery

The grave's a fine and private place

But none I think do there embrace.

                                                    -Marvell

Recoleta cemetery is a captivating yet strange place. This is partly why it's one of Buenos Aires's major sites. As a tour guide said earlier today, the cemetery encapsulates a certain aspect of the city - its mixture of elegance and shabbiness, arrogance and humility; its death-defying extravagence and vulgar populism; at times, its shifty psychology.

Not that it's the only cemetary with highly crafted mausoleums, but it seems to represent a particular irony. The irony is the uncanny gap between the grave's intention (to commemorate a person) and its effect. Like most tourists, I forget almost all the names within seconds of having seen each tomb; what lasts is an aesthetic impression that tells little about a person, or suggests a very different impression than was intended. The generals' tombs seemed particularly overblown and suggestive of an overly egotistical character, not of the careful judgement that characterises an effective general.

And these are not the only ghostly figures haunting the city. For example, there are still a number of monuments to Peron and Evita - two theatrical figures who used the political stage to enchant the masses and suppress dissent. To some extent, Evita brought 'social justice' to enhance her own ego - with some very positive effects (women's liberation; nurses; more universal education) and some very negative consequences. Any good student of the twentieth century should understand that the term 'social justice' has often been manipulated to enforce aggressive top-down control over society in the name of the people. The uncritical stance towards Evita suggests something very worrying and oppressive about the way the name of Peron is still used to manipulate and distract voters from deeper problems.

For me, another set of ghosts hover over the city. In 1905/6 my great-grandparents fled the pogroms and SDP movement in Russia and joined the Jewish Colony in Argentina, where my great-grandfather became a law lecturer. My grandfather was born on the road to Buenos Aires (he tells the story of 'how the crocodiles attended his birth' vividly in a book he wrote on his early life). Within a few years, my family would leave for Israel. But I can't help but think it was a propitious time to see Argentina - near the peak of its glory years, when its growth rivalled the US. Over a century later, that dream has faded into the nightmare of prolonged economic instability. My family at that time saw Argentina at close to its greatest success.

Then there is the ghostliness of being a tourist. I've felt this most acutely in the past few days due to having far fewer companions than in Turkey, Japan or New Zealand. While many people have about as much English as I have Spanish (very basic), it's rare to find a fluent speaker or someone more comfortable in English than Spanish. Consequently I´ve felt more lonely in a place which thrives on company (hence the poem quotation above; another profound line that I think of is W.S. Graham: "this is always a record of me in you." 

'Record' suggesting not a direct communication, but a copy of a past inscription by me to you. The line comes from a lonely, remote place.)

After all, border control make it a condition of entering a country that your stay is temporary. Your existence as a tourist is supplementary to the ordinary inhabitants of that place. You are an observer who can take part to a limited extent but no more than is allowed by the length of your visa or your ability to adapt to the native approach to life. There is the pleasure of imagining the possibility of living in that country without the burden of having to adjust to that particular society's demands. It's very fun and I deeply appreciate the privilege of the experience. But in all the pleasure I also confront the fact that most of my activities have been done by thousands of tourists before me. I record in me my own version of other people's experiences. I can then relate that to someone else, such as you the reader. In a very different way to Graham, it is a record of me in you.

Buenos Aires is a strange place. For example, Palermo Viejo is a very funky area full of cafes, restaurants and bars, music and literature, drink and laughter. But in its clean, vibrant fun, it seems somehow hermetically sealed from the more down-at-heel side of Buenos Aires, the city of 13 million where many struggle to make a living. Like most tourists my main concern is profiting from the fun.

I find another line of poetry ringing:

I have learned not to look down

So much upon the damned.

Evita and Peron let in Adolf Eichmann, a man whose role in the intellectual life of the twentieth century encapsulates some of the deep paradoxes at the heart of Argentina. They let us Jews in too. Everybody´s welcome as long as they bring the dollar* and leave when we tell them to. No terrorists please.







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*Dollars are one of the shiftiest aspects of Argentina. The official rate is 9.09 pesos to the dollar; the blue dollar rate is 15 pesos to the dollar. Everyone recognises that the official rate is a convenient fudge that prevents economic chaos but it really makes one think about what money is and what makes it worth x rather than y. Just like many things in Buenos Aires, the value of the peso is not what it seems. Our guide today said: don't trust Argentinians, including me.