Remembering to Stop and Listen

Well it was warm here for that one glorious week and then it got rainy and cold, and the temperature kept dropping, just to let us know that winter wasn’t quite done with us, just so we didn’t forget.

It’s perhaps ironic then, that this new cause for pulling out the multi-layered outerwear of winter should be accompanied by my going out a lot more than I have in months. I spent an entire week before spending a night in bed by two in the morning. One day I wandered the streets of downtown Buenos Aires with a church group I’d been invited to by a friend from the Catholic University the previous semester, giving soup, sandwiches and lattés to people living on the street. The next day a woman I’d met through a mutual friend invited me to La Catedral, an old factory warehouse turned artsy (and highly atypical) tango dance hall. Wednesday evening I spent enjoying subsidized theatre tickets to see Marat Sade at the Teatro San Martin. Thursday and Friday nights were spent with Luis, the Peruvian student from the Monday night church group, enjoying live music and entirely too much two-for-one beer at a Peña (a folk music jam night tradition imported from the Northern Provinces) and seeing a musical tribute to his uncle in a local community center (who was an Argentine classical violinist) that reminded me in some ways of the many tributes to my father that I’d attended in Guatemala.

After dinner (which was spent with members of the Argentine branch of Luis’ family) I made the last-minute decision to accompany my friend to a party at the house of a number of French exchange students. There I met and conversed at length with a German student, whose mother is Argentine and who quit studying architecture to go back to school to study Latin America and later to come to Buenos Aires to continue her studies.

In the interest of time and my reader’s patience I won’t go into great detail of all the events described above, only to say that many of these experiences made me think quite a bit and all of which I’d be happy to write about at babbling nauseating length if prompted (through you’re welcome to make specific requests for such details in the comments section!).

I also brought this up to bring me to Sunday night, where I want back to La Catedral for their folklore night with Laura, the German student and a few of her countrywomen. They had a folkloric dance lesson (which I missed) and a couple of live bands, including a girl who I’d managed to see play on the subway platform some weeks prior.

It wasn’t until I got back later that Sunday night that I had the feeling that I had broken a kind of spell. For the past several weeks (or months I suppose) I’ve been calling my family (mother really) every Sunday night. Anyone who reads this blog is probably aware that I’m not very good at keeping up with people by phone. I decide I want to speak to my friends at a time when it probably isn’t convenient for them to do so, perhaps send them a message suggesting that we do so, and generally don’t follow through. And this is an improvement! But the Sunday night thing had become a kind of comfortable routine. I had imagined continuing this tradition after getting my own place in Cleveland—to visit on Sundays to have dinner and perhaps go to church with my Grandmother.

The Hebrews millennia ago had it right when they suggested that even God had needed a day of rest. It something lacking from most of American culture and it’s even mostly lacking in Porteño culture, despite the reputation of Latin Americans for siestas. Buenos Aires is too fast-paced to too heavily honor the siesta tradition, too secular to honor a holy days, and don’t sleep much generally so that at most the equivalent of a Sabbath lies in a sort of sleepy “detox” that happens on Sunday or Monday (when/if you go out on Mondays you’ll find almost everyone is a foreigner). No, it’s something that just happens in the provinces.

I spent a Sunday in Salta, the capital city of one of the Northernmost provinces of Argentina and for some reason the spirit struck me to attend a mass, the first I’d attended since the dreadful one that was my father’s funeral. I sat apart from the pews partly out of a distaste for the “sit. stand. kneel.” of mass and partly in deference to my disbelief in most everything catholic as anything more than poetic metaphor (Christ as god, as dying for our sins, the notion of a monolithic (trilithic?) anthropomorphic deity…). Instead I sat on the side, on steps beneath one of the many saint sanctuaries, delighting in the very pagan nature of such saint worship and thinking back on all the previous Sunday mornings I’d spent in churches with my dad. About the first times I was able to attend a full mass instead of going to Sunday school, how much an adult I felt back then sitting next to my dad and looking up the page numbers of the readings all by myself. How quiet he was; in his silent rejection of forcing belief on anyone he let me think all kinds of heretical thoughts there in the pews about things that didn’t make sense about the faith, and about the things that made too much sense. I wonder now how much he shared those thoughts.

Walking through the streets of Salta afterwards while the Church bells tolled, a kind of peace had descended upon the city. Kids played soccer on side streets and I watched them in silence. I turned off my ipod like an Orthodox Jew respecting the prohibition against work on holy days and just walked in the streets where for once ordinary sounds stuck out—friends hailing each other from bikes, the clink of beer bottles of men sitting on stoops making crude jokes about women—instead of becoming part of the vague urban noise we try to filter out.

There’s a benefit of having some time for silence a time to allow a certain kind of contemplation, the sorts of things that are absent from just going from one activity to another from having all the open spots filled on your calendar. It helps to have a sort of weekly ritual, like I’ve had with my mother, and it helps to intentional make time to clear out distractions. It’s the only way I’m able to write this blog, when, despite the fact that I have perhaps better things to do, I make the deliberate effort that this time will be left open just for writing, that this time will be left empty.

It reminds me a bit of something I overheard from a conversation in my friend Nico’s Kiosco. I was sitting chatting with him while he was closing up and a musician friend of his stopped by to chat for a while. I just listened and didn’t chime in too much, content to just hear what the guy had to say. I don’t remember much, but one of the things he said struck me and has stuck with me in a powerful way. He was talking about how to learn to play the guitar and he said “you just gotta find some music that you like that’s not to hard, find out the chord changes and just mess around for a while. The word “mess” isn’t really the most accurate translation of what he said. He used the very Argentine word “boludeando” the gerund form of the famous slang-word “boludo”, which is hard to translate but means something like “egghead” (“balls” head really). So to make a verb of it is something like “messing around” but a little more vulgar (“fucking” around perhaps). But the important thing is that you’re not doing it out of some kind of deliberate attempt to make the first step at something great, without any presumptions of what you’re doing.

This is important and surprisingly radical. We tend to think of the proper way of learning things is to find some expert to teach us, a music teacher, a schoolteacher, a professor and, in a very top-down kind of way, deliver us the knowledge, like manna from god. We turn to them because they have the answers and for a price they can deliver it to us.

But much knowledge, if not all, does not come delivered from on high, but grows deep out of the body, through a series of tiny experiments, lots of tiny failures and a few big successes.

But isn’t that at odds with ritual and deliberation if, after all, you just learn by accident? Maybe there are some things we learn when we’re trying to do something else (my skills at Sudoku or FreeCell come to mind though they’re not things I’m proud of). But usually you’ve got to set out and look for those empty places, where you can make a mess of your guitar playing, where you can dance with out worrying about treading on your partner’s toes, where you can pray without the noise of the street…

Within the Society of Friends’ tradition (popularly known as “Quakers”) there is a belief that God, the ultimate authority, ultimate teacher, does not deliver his will from on high through elaborate hierarchies and intermediaries, but directly through individual, ordinary people, from listening to the holy spirit speak to them, from listening to the silence.