Thursday, April 23, 2009

Chile

It’s been quite a while now since I got back from Chile, so I thought before I get any farther I ought to write about how that went.

We got Thursday and Friday off for holy week and as a result we decided to go a little farther away then we could on a normal long weekend (and by we I mean my friend Sam decided and I last minute elected to go with him). The logic was that we’d never be able to go to Chile again and this is probably true so I’m glad we went.

The downside to this is that the knowledge that “we’re never going to be here again” alters the mood of the trip a little bit. I noticed right away that taking a weekend trip is very different from the study abroad program. Here in Buenos Aires I don’t feel as though I have to go out and see things every day, because after all, I have a year. There’s no rush. I can spend the night in and read a book, I can study for my classes, I can wander around and explore whenever I feel like it. When we arrived in Santiago we had no idea what we were going to do there. When we finally got to the Hostel and set our stuff down we picked up a map and started to look around for places to go and things to do. Sam marked up the map with places that

It was just the three of us Sam, a friend of mine from the program, Dylan, a friend of his who I didn’t know nearly as well, and I. Still it was often hard to make decisions and we would often encounter situations like “well I don’t have any preference about what we do, I just want to see as much as we can since we’re only going to be here two days.”

But although that aspect of the trip was stressful we still managed to find some interesting things to do. On our second day (our one full day in Santiago) we climbed a cerro (like a hill) that had at its peak a sanctuary dedicated to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (my word processor just capitalized that phrase automatically so apparently it’s a pretty important dogma). Although I don’t in the slightest believe in the notion of asexual human reproduction in the time before in vitro I found the place to be very moving. First of all I like the idea of shrines on top of mountains—it’s something that’s very common in Japan that really appealed to me there as well. There they have Shinto shrines all over the place but they’re always in really remote old places on top of mountains with woods surrounding them. Even if down below is a relatively urban area the fact that the shrine is up in the mountains lends a more tranquil air to them than you would get in a church situated on a major street in a city. Also there is something to be said about the trouble of reaching the shrine. Hiking or even just driving up forever, makes arriving at the shrine that much more meaningful and important. And it makes them more important as places.

Unlike Shinto, which you can only practice in Japan because of the place-specificity of these shrines, Christianity is a very universal religion that you can practice just about anywhere—just bring your rosary and your bible. Mountains are purely optional. This was the approach my dad took to his Catholicism, practicing it wherever was convenient, going to whatever church he happened to be in the same country as he was. As for me, I’ve always been really attached to places, and I stopped being Catholic the day we stopped going to the same church every Sunday and started this business of migrating, going to whatever church fit our schedule just to fulfill the obligation. That completely killed it for me. I like my places to have meaning particularly my holy ones. Thus the notion of having shrines up on mountains, the “this is our lady of Cerro San Cristobal because that’s where she is” notion appeals to me quite a bit.

They had cremations up there too, next to a trio of statues of Jesus on the cross and Mary and someone else (probably the other Mary) looking on. I liked that. If you’re going to cry about something while staring at a statue, that statue ought to be a depiction of a situation at least as wretched as what you’re crying about. Plus I know dad would love to spend the rest of his life up on the top of a mountain, so the notion of keeping cremation boxes up there sat well with me as well.

The other highlight of Santiago, for me anyway was going to see Pablo Neruda’s house. Pablo Neruda actually had three houses (we saw two of them in Chile!) one on Isla Negra, one in Valparaiso and one in Santiago. They’ve all been kept up and turned into Museums by the Fundación Pablo Neruda, and our last day in Santiago we got to visit his house there. What was probably most impressive was the amount of art he had in there! It helps that he was friends with a lot of artists, among them Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera, some of whom made pieces specifically for him. He had one piece made for him that depicted his then-mistress-later-wife Mathilde with two faces, with the face of Neruda hidden in her hair. This was supposed to represent the double life that Mathilde was living as her lover Neruda was married at the time. Nice gift.

Places were pretty important to Neruda as well, and he designed the house (or rather had it designed for him) with the idea of it resembling the interior of a boat, since the sea had always fascinated him. This too was interesting to see in the architecture of the place, which I’m sure would have interested my brother and aspiring architect Marco.

I also enjoyed the place because it reminded me of a contradiction of mine—how much I liked Neruda and how little of his poetry I had read. This is to say, that I know a lot about him, his life, his politics, when he wrote most of the books that he wrote, I’ve written literature papers about him in Spanish and yet I’ve read relatively few of his poems. When you consider he’s written several dozen books and I own one and am really familiar with only about a half dozen of his poems, I find that sort of shameful. I suppose that this is not so uncommon—there are many poets who are very well known but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s read all of the poems of well-known poets like Borges, Hughes, Eliot and Whitman (poets whose poems—the couple I have read—I have liked).

It’s a bit like the ipod culture we’ve created around music. We download that one famous Stones song we like, along with the half dozen Beatles songs we’re fond of and that tune we just heard on the radio that we buy on itunes and throw onto our “gym mix”. We don’t listen to albums anymore, we rarely sit down and listen through the album that a group of musicians put together and read through the liner notes and try to decipher the lyrics. A lot of that has to do with the time we have available to listen to music. A lot of it’s a matter of convenience or a function of the amount of music we’re able to store at one time on the devices on which we listen to music. But I think we miss something there.

Thinking some of these things while walking around the museum, I resolved to pick up a small book of Neruda’s poetry. Not three books that I’d never finish (a common tendency of mine) but just one that was digestible, something I could pick up, page through and finish reading in a few days, and then go back to my favorites, or after looking up some key words. I wanted to read a book of his poetry the way he’d originally put it together, the way it was originally published. So I bought Odas Elementales (“Elemental” or “basic” odes) a little of poems he wrote about simple things, written to such things his socks, artichoke, onion, the city of Valparaiso and the poet Cesar Vallejo.

That was another thing you could tell about his house, he really liked things—art, photos, old postcards, statues, glass bottles, playing cards—and clearly used them as inspiration. This is something else I dig about him as a poet, and it’s something that resonates with me. I wear my dad’s watch every day even though its battery is dead, not to keep time, but to remember times. I carry my little brother’s Swiss army knife for security not because it’s going to be remotely useful in defending myself (it wasn’t—more on that later) but because of the way it makes me feel. Under my futon at home I still keep the box I’ve had since high school, that’s full of little things that have meaning for me.

Neruda’s other house was in Valparaiso and as it so happened, we went there too (we managed to hit two of his houses in one trip). Valparaiso is very different from Santiago and I liked it. It was different in a very obvious and visual way—altitude. The whole city, or at least the residential part, was built on the hills that descended down to the ocean and as a result the whole city was very vertical. Climbing up to our hostel, dragging my luggage whose wheels were useless on the stairs that crisscrossed the city, this difference was apparent right away. But despite the difficulties, I loved it.

In place of barrios (“neighborhoods”) as they’re called in Buenos Aires and Santiago, Valparaiso’s neighborhoods are called cerros (literally “hills”). As in “yeah my friend lives over on San Tomas hill and my girlfriend lives down on hill Los Heroes”. And it’s beautiful. The hills force the architecture to be much more creative as houses are built up and down the hills and there are stairs that go down to the houses in between hills, and stairs that go between hills so that nothing is uniform and boring and routes to get places are vastly different for a car and a pedestrian. And there’s art everywhere. Besides the natural art of things growing in between the hills and parts of streets being totally abandoned to nature, there are murals on so many of the walls and the vertical nature of the city means that many of the walls that house these murals are enormous. Then there are art galleries all over the place particularly in the area around all the hostels (a tactical decision to be sure). I kept thinking of Marco there and how he’d like it.

The last day we spent most of our day in Viña del Mar, the neighboring town of Valparaiso with magnificent beaches on the Pacific Ocean. I don’t think I’ve ever swam in the sea before and I say this because I don’t recall ever experiencing the surprise of the salt content in the water I’d just gulped up accidentally. I loved it, it was a beautiful day, the sun was shining the water was refreshing (by which I mean freezing). It was a warm day, but around sunset it started to get chilly, which is why some of those pictures I have up on facebook show me with a sweater on—it was not like this most of the day, but I did find it sort of funny to think that here I was sitting on the beach and I was wearing a sweater.

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