What Work Is

Most people who know me are aware that I am a swing dancer. Since I started in college it´s given me a lot--my friends, my taste in music, my volunteer position as a college radio programmer, and my only college girlfriend. Over the past few months (it still amazes me that I can use that word in the plural) I´ve been slowly inserting myself into the local swing scene. Part of me thinks that I should take advantage of all the things Buenos Aires has to offer that I couldn´t get at home. But I can´t really put down swing dancing for a year, and it would be a shame to let all that time I spent learning it go to waste.

There are something like four swing dance companies in Buenos Aires, all of which have either nonexistent or infrequently-updated websites, which explains in part why it took me so long to figure out where these events were held. One week I went with a friend hoping to make it to a beginner´s lesson (I was attempting to introduce her to swing here) and arrived at the address on the website where we found ourselves at a kiosco, one of those ubiquitous corner-store type places that sell cigarettes and candy and sandwiches if you´re lucky. Unsure as to whether this was the right place we asked (somewhat ackwardly) if this was the place where they had swing dancing. To our amazement they said ¨oh yeah yeah¨ it´s downstairs. It turned out that they had dance floors in the basement of this place, where they held dance classes. Unfortunately the class we were looking for had left as of at least a year and no one had bothered to update the website.

The same swing company runs a weekly lesson and practice on Fridays a few blocks away from my house; unlike the kiosco gig this one´s still running. It´s held at a local community center where in addition to a dance room they have soccer fields and lifting machines. And, importantly a bar where the owners use soccer´s tendency to make people hungry and thirsty to sell beer and pizza. One night after the practice ended I went downstairs to have beer and empanadas with some people in lieu of the usual Burger King run we make at the nearby Shopping Center. While there, Charles, a Brazilian jazz enthusiast who´s been hanging out in Buenos Aires since the end of the Lindy Hop Argentina International Festival (LHAIF pronounced like ¨Life¨) back in January, invited me to a birthday/blues party at a friend´s apartment.

I was hestitant as I didn´t know anyone besides Charles (who I don´t really know that well either) but in the end I went. We got there around two in the morning and I stayed there until the end at around six, when Gaston, the host, brought his mattress back out and kicked out the last of us. I met a lot of people, most of them foreigners who´d come to Buenos Aires for one reason or another; a couple students like m; a woman my mother´s age who was working with a tango instructor to teach with him and translate his classes into English and a German film student studying at the FUC, the university of film in Buenos Aires.

One of the most eye-opening conversations I had was with an Irish freelance journalist, who´s here writing about the environment and human rights issues. She´s spent the past three years here in Buenos Aires but she also lived in Guatemala for a couple of years. In Guatemala she worked for an international organization of journalists whose job it was to basically follow around people that were doing things that powerful vested interests didn´t want done so that they didn´t get killed. She followed a guy, I think he was a lawyer, who worked to allow peasants to use legal loopholes that they wouldn´t otherwise have known about to reclaim some of the unused land owned by the local landed oligarchy. It´s not hard to see why certain people would want him dead, but it´s incredible how real a possibility that was without the threat of international repurcussions. Basically--if this man dies, the world will know about it.

In addition she was always just telling me a little about how the country is today, how dangerous it is and how corrupt the system is. To some extent I already knew these things, I remember how angry everyone in my family was when my great-aunt Rosa was robbed, not once but several times by some gang bangers who were shacking up in a nearby abandoned house and I remember how my cousin Jeffrey quit his job with the government complaining of the corruption. And he was just working in computers, probably not the very worst in that sense. So it wasn't as though hearing these things about Guatemala was particularly new to me.

What was new was the reality that she had been living and working there in a way that I've thought about one day doing. And rather than feeling like we had something in common and could be friends, it actually made it harder for me to relate to her on a certain level. It made her seem much older than me in a way, above and beyond the actual years she had on me. Thinking about this later I was reminded of a poem by Philip Levine called What Work Is (I've recently been listening to podcasts from The Poetry Foundation and discovered Philip Levine through the podcasts).

That last line is a little puzzling isn't it? You can't express your love for your brother because you don't know what work is? And anyway Levine said that "You know what work is" at the very beginning right? After all if you've been sitting outside in the rain all morning looking for it, how can you not know what it is?

My one and only experience with doing legitimate, taxable work for pay was working at the recycling plant at my University. This was a really important experience for me in getting a handle on what it meant to have a job, and the discovery that one could come back home and not have to worry about doing homework of any kind, that you could leave work at work, was an exhilarating one. But of course, it wasn't the job that I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Like many of my generation, especially among study abroad students, I want to do work that "makes a difference" (although most of us aren't quite sure what that means). For me more and more that desire has been directed towards Guatemala, towards living and working in that country and doing something to improve life there. It's the reason that I came here to Buenos Aires really. Admitting that now sounds odd, a bit like Columbus who meant to make it to India and instead ended up thousands of miles away. But it's true. I wanted to study abroad in a Latin American country because I wanted to go to Guatemala and the system didn't have a way for me to do that.

The exact reason why is not always clear to me. I wanted to improve my spanish, which I took up in the first place because I wanted to be able to communicate better with dad's side of the family. Perhaps because we went back there enough when I was younger that it was sufficiently impressed upon me that I needed to learn Spanish. Now it's just one of those things, you invest in something for one reason, and the investment itself becomes a reason to keep doing it, like people who study piano as a kid and just keep on doing it because they've put so much time into it already.

But I think it's more than that. Dad never taught me Spanish, he just gave me, without really trying to, a reason to study it. And he won't hold my hand now either, I've got to figure things out on my own, without him. This was the sense that I felt so powerfully on the day of his wake just days before I left to come here, as if he was telling me, as he often did while he was alive, "I'm not always gonna be here to do things for you. You have to figure things out on your own."

And so, armed with this highly idealistic "quest" sort of mentality, being confronted with the reality of my father's country from a foreigner who has spent time working there, in what must be said a highly idealistic sort of pursuit, was eye-opening. It was just a few days later that the world received this unhappy news about current events in Guatemala. Like Levine's subject who is waiting in the rain hoping to get a job, and that the fickle foreman won't turn him away, I have no real sense of what that work would actually entail if and when I get it. It's an odd paradox, to finally know what you want and yet not really know what that is. And to be confronted with someone who does know a thing or two about that dangerous world for which you've been arming yourself--with tales of chivalry, an old nag and a rusty sword no doubt--makes you stop and think for a minute. Not to deter you, but perhaps to make you think more seriously about what you're doing. At the very least it makes you feel, as Levine's subject, ackward about interaction with the people that have inhabited that uncertain future.

And yet...perhaps we need a certain blindness towards that future, a certain willingness to forget doubt and remember our stories. We have to tell ourselves stories, even if they're fantastic, in order to stir our emotions, in order to inspire us to action. A completely sober view on life would just remind us that we're all just dead in the end, but that's not the sort of thinking that gets you up in the morning when life is hard. As Thoreau wrote in Cape Cod "nothing remarkable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood". So I've started writing poetry. Wish me luck.