"Yet modernity also gives us the self-questioning and self-doubting consciousness that permits us to understand that we lose something in its attainment." - Alastair Bonnett
“There’s a place I go
to, where no one knows me,
It’s not lonely; it’s
a necessary thing.
It’s a place I made up,
to find out what I’m made of […]
Take me on to the
place where one reviews life’s mystery.” – Matt Simmons
I’m drinking hot water with leaves torn and steeped for the alkaloid they
secrete, trying to keep myself from vomiting. To prevent my brain from
pulsating, my eyes from racking to blur. I’m drinking this because I’m higher
than I’ve ever been. 11,150 feet above
sea level, and throw in an extra 15 because the tea and I are on a second-floor
balcony looking out on the Plaza de Armas, watching the peddlers of Cusco
approach tourists with leather portfolios of bad paintings, or baby lambs in
their costumed arms, coaxing the white faces first for photographs and then soles.
In truth, the mate de coca
is overkill. At this point I’m on my third day of acetazolamide, a
drug usually reserved for epileptics, but that currently is helping me prevent altitude
sickness, both a literal and symbolic measurement of how dramatic a change
being here is. Seven hours after landing in South America, I’m grounded but unmoored.
Back in my familiar if not quite comfortable enclave away from time constraints, deadlines, unwanted appointments. Separated from the forced diplomacy of everyday life. With the drugs in my body, vomiting isn't a dominant worry, but there's a mental cloudiness mirroring the Peruvian sky I'm so close to that's gauzing up my brain. It could derive from the elevation change, or my only sleep coming during a red-eye flight, or just the shock of finally being here and the early stages of disconnect that that entails.
On this trip I go even further away from everyday routine than normal. Whether a response to how stressful my work life has become or to prove an ideal to myself, I’ve decided to go totally dark on social media during my trip. And aside from a small handful of necessary emails to loved ones, I’m entirely off-the-grid. I don’t check the news and the only headlines I see are the shouting Spanish print of tabloids I walk by on the city's narrow sidewalks. A life simpler and just as fulfilling as ours existed before the one of wifi hotspots and status as measured by Instagram likes that we know now and I want to experience it, if only for a week. Visit it for the fleeting solace it offers, experience a destination by totally immersing within it and cutting the safety cords of Facetime and iMessage to the world that I departed from. And prove to myself the lack of repercussions this choice actually has.
The same rejection of modernity includes credit cards. I withdraw as many soles as I can from an ATM in the Plazeta San Blas and carry in my pocket the crumpled browns and greens and blues, learn to differentiate between the 2 soles and 5 soles coins just by feel. Like always, I'm confused by the tourists around me clinging to spending American dollars, running their sterile credit cards at every opportunity. Money exists only as an artifice, so why rob oneself of the sole experience of living on this exotic currency? Why sacrifice honest contact for the hollow pursuit of convenience?
There's a clear pattern of isolation in these thoughts, a bizarre focus on the negative to accentuate the inverse. And the contributing factors may be the elevation, the sleep deprivation, or the released alkaloids taking hold in my body. But the musings are faithful to my experience of South America, a land shaped for me by Gabriel García Márquez, and his intertwined triumvirate of life's experience: solitude, melancholy, and nostalgia. The inexorable emotional themes that will weave throughout our lives, if not telling the main narrative, then filling in the gaps of subplots told through whispers. The quieter times unseen and barely'spoken that belong by definition to us alone, though they are universally experienced. For so much of its history, this stretching continent has been a land removed, populated by a people in isolation. And its solitude has spawned an intrinsic tendency to internalize this experience. To at times seek company, but also to savor the role of detachment, to view it as therapeutic. Not all discontent is unhappiness. Some of it is introspection.
And my current meditation, with these cups of steeped coca leaves, is that we're likely witnessing the death of something irreplaceable. That perspective is becoming a casualty in the modern world.
We are the fulcrum generation. The aging Rubicon of humanity that remembers a life before technology devoured us in the name of convenience, but now reliant upon smartphones and social media and forms of communication so easy that constant participation in them seems requisite. I’m a contrarian, and a hypocritical one at that. I have no problem using my DSLR camera, its seemingly infinite capacity, shooting on memory cards, perhaps cheapening the photos as individual frames. But I’ve also held negatives down in trays of developer and stop bath, a dim red light above me, breathing the chemicals that rose up. I bring you these thoughts via technology, and you’re seeing these words on a screen, a compound of LED and RAM or LTE on your smartphone, but they were birthed longhand with pen onto paper. The words mean something to me, the scratchouts between these faint blue lines that you'll never see tell a story far more comprehensive and honest than the backspace button pushing thoughts back into the ether.
And something of that earlier life and its nuance must remain if we're to retain our perspective. Shortcuts can exist as long as we retain the comprehensive maps of what's being glossed over. What rigors we've chosen to circumvent. And we must reserve the freedom to sometimes take those scenic routes, the longhand essays, the paper money with which we relearn to count and multiply with each change in borders and currency, the ability to unplug and then breathe deeply, and to do so with an air of melancholy. For the love of nostalgia.
Beyond Garcia Marquez's influence, there's additional precedent for focusing on the inverse. One native to not merely South America, but specifically Peru. Seven centuries ago, the Incas worshiped the sun, and patterned their geography and their lives around the precise movement of the heavens. On what they were able to see when the gauziness above pulled away. They mapped constellations, but not by assuming a connection between stars like their unknown contemporaries in the north or in Europe, tying light to light to create a fragile'framed bull or ram. Instead the Incas processed the darkness. They sought the void among the illumination in the night sky, creating fully formed bodies of its sacred animals with the massive gaps between stars. A llama, a fox, a snake not born of starlight, but birthed by the lack thereof.
Such darkness serves as a map. Not as a construct of the unknown or the negative, but of the forgotten. The antiquated way of doing things that still holds charm to those unafraid to stare into it and seek its patterns. Rediscover its mysteries when we manage to resurrect perspective.
On this trip I go even further away from everyday routine than normal. Whether a response to how stressful my work life has become or to prove an ideal to myself, I’ve decided to go totally dark on social media during my trip. And aside from a small handful of necessary emails to loved ones, I’m entirely off-the-grid. I don’t check the news and the only headlines I see are the shouting Spanish print of tabloids I walk by on the city's narrow sidewalks. A life simpler and just as fulfilling as ours existed before the one of wifi hotspots and status as measured by Instagram likes that we know now and I want to experience it, if only for a week. Visit it for the fleeting solace it offers, experience a destination by totally immersing within it and cutting the safety cords of Facetime and iMessage to the world that I departed from. And prove to myself the lack of repercussions this choice actually has.
The same rejection of modernity includes credit cards. I withdraw as many soles as I can from an ATM in the Plazeta San Blas and carry in my pocket the crumpled browns and greens and blues, learn to differentiate between the 2 soles and 5 soles coins just by feel. Like always, I'm confused by the tourists around me clinging to spending American dollars, running their sterile credit cards at every opportunity. Money exists only as an artifice, so why rob oneself of the sole experience of living on this exotic currency? Why sacrifice honest contact for the hollow pursuit of convenience?
There's a clear pattern of isolation in these thoughts, a bizarre focus on the negative to accentuate the inverse. And the contributing factors may be the elevation, the sleep deprivation, or the released alkaloids taking hold in my body. But the musings are faithful to my experience of South America, a land shaped for me by Gabriel García Márquez, and his intertwined triumvirate of life's experience: solitude, melancholy, and nostalgia. The inexorable emotional themes that will weave throughout our lives, if not telling the main narrative, then filling in the gaps of subplots told through whispers. The quieter times unseen and barely'spoken that belong by definition to us alone, though they are universally experienced. For so much of its history, this stretching continent has been a land removed, populated by a people in isolation. And its solitude has spawned an intrinsic tendency to internalize this experience. To at times seek company, but also to savor the role of detachment, to view it as therapeutic. Not all discontent is unhappiness. Some of it is introspection.
And my current meditation, with these cups of steeped coca leaves, is that we're likely witnessing the death of something irreplaceable. That perspective is becoming a casualty in the modern world.
We are the fulcrum generation. The aging Rubicon of humanity that remembers a life before technology devoured us in the name of convenience, but now reliant upon smartphones and social media and forms of communication so easy that constant participation in them seems requisite. I’m a contrarian, and a hypocritical one at that. I have no problem using my DSLR camera, its seemingly infinite capacity, shooting on memory cards, perhaps cheapening the photos as individual frames. But I’ve also held negatives down in trays of developer and stop bath, a dim red light above me, breathing the chemicals that rose up. I bring you these thoughts via technology, and you’re seeing these words on a screen, a compound of LED and RAM or LTE on your smartphone, but they were birthed longhand with pen onto paper. The words mean something to me, the scratchouts between these faint blue lines that you'll never see tell a story far more comprehensive and honest than the backspace button pushing thoughts back into the ether.
And something of that earlier life and its nuance must remain if we're to retain our perspective. Shortcuts can exist as long as we retain the comprehensive maps of what's being glossed over. What rigors we've chosen to circumvent. And we must reserve the freedom to sometimes take those scenic routes, the longhand essays, the paper money with which we relearn to count and multiply with each change in borders and currency, the ability to unplug and then breathe deeply, and to do so with an air of melancholy. For the love of nostalgia.
Beyond Garcia Marquez's influence, there's additional precedent for focusing on the inverse. One native to not merely South America, but specifically Peru. Seven centuries ago, the Incas worshiped the sun, and patterned their geography and their lives around the precise movement of the heavens. On what they were able to see when the gauziness above pulled away. They mapped constellations, but not by assuming a connection between stars like their unknown contemporaries in the north or in Europe, tying light to light to create a fragile'framed bull or ram. Instead the Incas processed the darkness. They sought the void among the illumination in the night sky, creating fully formed bodies of its sacred animals with the massive gaps between stars. A llama, a fox, a snake not born of starlight, but birthed by the lack thereof.
Such darkness serves as a map. Not as a construct of the unknown or the negative, but of the forgotten. The antiquated way of doing things that still holds charm to those unafraid to stare into it and seek its patterns. Rediscover its mysteries when we manage to resurrect perspective.
Five mornings after landing back in New York, my return to sea level and what that entails, I was up early vomiting. My head throbbing with a hangover, vision blurred by the accompanying tears. The immediate cause was the combination of too many drinks with not enough food the night before. My motivation for consuming them stemming from a near'week of frustration; my uneasy return back to the machinations of the modern world. It was over in 45 seconds, but for the first time in these 5 days, I felt like I was fully back mentally. Re-ingratiated into the world I'd temporarily but successfully stepped away from. And in its own way, it was reassuring to know that my deepest sickness comes not from immersion in the unknown and authentic, not the climb to lofty altitudes, but in the inevitable descent that follows.
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