The Streets of Buenos Aires

I avoid them of late. The Streets. The throngs outside my doors. The mass of human motion everywhere.

But when I walk, I walk. Then the huge city, porous and ridden with its indecipherable riddles, seems to expand and contract all in the same moment, in size. As vast as it seemingly appears it also suddenly is shrunk and intimate. There are magnificent nooks. Magical corners. Secret doors, if you can find them. I wander aimlessly. I have never mapped the city in my mind really. I betray my native compass I possess everywhere else in the world, but here. I never seem to grasp its true dimensions. Then suddenly I know everywhere and how to get there. The entire thing a conundrum.

The obelisk has saved me in that regard. It is central and from here all of Buenos Aires' streets emanate and expand.

I am now re-learning the new/old neighborhood, which was, for a few short days, my home in the second hotel. The endless parade of shops, cafés, bookstores, leather craftsmen and merchants hawking wares and passing leaflets. I wandered these streets at the start of my journey. But when one really lives anywhere, a streetcorner, a neighborhood, different aspects reveal themselves than one could see before.

Microcentro. This is the dazzling, shining beacon of the city. The jugular. The heart-wrenching, comical, friendly and raucous heart of Buenos Aires. The Great Obelisk. 9 de Julio, the world's widest boulevard. The winds coming in from the river.

But now, more than two months later, I cannot quite put my finger on it, I find that there is something dark alongside the cacophony of carnival atmosphere. An undeniable shadowy desperateness. The scars of bad times and hard luck visible everywhere. Litter is wantonly scattered everywhere. It feels of abandonment. There has been a surrender of sorts even among the great heave of continual revolution and cries for social reform. Everyone is a survivor of the downfall. But they are still dragging the pain of the loss inside along with their courage and endurance. As if exhausted of all the fought-for ideas, ideals and hopes. Some have survived physically but not the psychic price of the struggles within. A part of their spirit is broken and missing. A sadness, A melancholy, again and again we're reminded.

Because of this then there is a grey pallor, even on the brightest most spectacular afternoon of sun and beauty across the long wide avenues and boulevards, the narrow streets.

I walk among them. More often than not, alone. Me and The Porteño Millions. The scattered souls, ant-like, marching on hurriedly to their illusorily important destinantions punctuated by street lights, the constant honking of cars and buses and ambulances. pauses, yet affixed to the spiderweb, crawling and conniving, moving with the drone millions.

Unlike other Capitals where people meet your eye, here most everyone maintains a forward gaze uncommiitted, detached. They peek more than stare. Unless someone is trying to hustle you. Then they smile, wide as a sail at full mast and follow you and cajole you and invite you to decadence and the sordid pleasure houses of the quarter.

The new neighborhood is just that. A fair. A carnival. A dream and a nightmare. A pleasure and a dread. Like the country, a battlefield of contradictions. Beautiful, magnificent, sad and broken.

If in pairs or a group of friends, long known, then you see copious laughter and camaraderie and jostling. And of course the constant noise of chatter and banter among we Latin people who lack not for words nor the desire to out shout our neighbors. But to the stranger, the irreverently cursory eye, there is no other imminent sense of relation to the person passing you than that of the mere business of endurance and moving forward.

Sometimes, not even New York seems so callously indifferent. At times, I dare say it, not even a Londoners - which is another way of underscoring the distance and control in the native character of the Porteño. Like Tango, you are entwined, enmeshed and yet at just such a distance to keep the tension alive the hands the only real connection when

My friend Maggie says that after 40 no one really sees you anymre, literally does not see you physically in a space. You cease to exist. A kind of palpable absence at best. I have felt that way here in many ways. But it might be me, it might be what has happened to my way of seeing in the world. The fruits of my dream. It is a world, this Buenos Aires, that maybe it is I who have failed in opening myself to properly.

Originially, I came on a mission of intro-spection into one of the most curious places in the world. I came to do a job and to find inner strength. In my time here, my best friends have proven to be the cinema and the silence of this last home. The sense that I have a small portion invested here. A part of me has already found its peculiar niche. It has been work. I have held my own.

But I ever think of home. The U.S. and all the turned corners that might not be so easy for our society to recover from. The upcoming demoralized and frighteningly polarized elections, again. The long-term effects of what has transpired for us as a nation that were never fully considered. These are the spoils of bragadoccio and impulsive and random use of force majeure. Rah! Rah! We Are No. 1#! Rah! Rah! We are royally......

We went in search of the nightmare and now we have found that the nightmare is us.

And here we are - where we are - and we cannot go forward nor can we turn back either. We have wedged ourselves into a most determined and dogged corner of hell. And we must find a good manner of ending this insanity the world cried against in the hundreds of millions - we all knew the world was going to be changed forever. And here I am. And there we are.

I am now only a member of the audience. A watcher. Not the performer. Not the determined and strategized soldier. Rather the one who rarely turns on his television, listens to the satellite. I am the guy who keeps all windows and shutters closed. I have made a cave of this place and I keep it dark as a vampire's lair. Only my office, the large desk, the large window receive a great whiteness of light. I sleepwalk the calendar away. A kind of hybernating creature awating the next, the one true spring. I chide myself.

Here on the streets of Buenos Aires, even speaking their tongue, I am but a tourist, a stranger, not to be confused with one of their real countrymen. Even after almost three months, I have yet to really arrive and yet here I am. Thus, once more we contradict ourselves and laugh in spite of it. I go to gatherings. I go to museums. I go to the movies. I go to parks. I walk, walk, walk. Alone. The beautiful, broken, magical, beautiful streets of Buenos Aires.

The Script

Back in the apartment on the table beside the computer is the diary. It lays there as it has lain for over ten years now in various mausoleums. Shut and packed and shunned and darkened. In warehouses, in a box, under a desk, in a crawl space, in a firey attic. Closed. A dead story, buried and silenced. I return to it. I read through it. Read the journal. Scan the reports from the mundane and practical to the absolutely stark, absurd, raving visions and sad emotional currents.

The story about the promise. The story about the walk. The story about the stories.

I return to it in the afternoons. Evenings. During the long insomniac's hour. Read the hand-writ pages; the one after the other, a rich kaleidoscope of terrific madness and foot wrought journeying. A testimony of boundless illusory surrealism of being. A kind of record of a subjective "I Am The Center of All Creation and the Unverse". One human being, a self-proclaimed sovereign intergalactic presence of Being. Crazy. Almost like being God.

Which she would consider profane being of such archaic and devout rituals. Everything in her religiosity was ritual and form, unseen connections. Repetitions. There were the endless self-batisms in the names of all the slaughtered in all the wars and ways that people murder one another.

I don't think many human beings have undergone such a long, arduous and lonely journey of self-discovery and self-abnegation. Much less a woman. Alone. An emptying of all the weight of her identity. Escaping the confines of the body and mind and entering into a psycho-tropic state of pure hallucination and freedom of perspective. It isn't L.S.D. - It's schizophrenia or Bi-Polar Disorder in the extreme. in the mind of a genial poet.

A ghastly and intense experience to read and to know I am born of this woman. Of this consciousness. Thwarted, yet gleaning the full magnificent import of all history, all the connected tissues of time. A genius who can compose the most sublime sonnets and a raving lunatic who can lose all composure and reasoning in a moment.

The journal is rife with stories. Her recounting of locations and experiences is immediate, palpable. The look of things. Her maps and pens. The weather, the environment, the people who approach.

When she incurs a loss of perspective and place she is rescued - awash in harmony with desire and a wandering poet's hope for the love between two brothers who are an Old Testament Cain and Abel tale of eternal discord and detachment. My brother and I. As she walked and fasted and prayed. For our love. Our eternal misalocation, connection

Then there are the other characters. The other locations. The demons attacking her mind. Vociferous interlopers. The world we live in.

The script began and moved forward and leapt and then was abandoned for the wedding and the guest that came from New York for a stay. And now I have returned to it and go on with it.

There are yet about 180 pages of journal to read. The previously researched are all tabbed, in colored indicators for important facts, places, encounters. Move the story along now kid. No one wants to dabble. No one wants to sit still. Keep it alive. Back to work. Back to work.

You get the picture. Today is one of those bay days here. It reminds me of San Francisco. Cool breezes coming in off the river. There is water in the air and the sky is a field of fast-moving clouds. It seems the last whispers of this winter. Rain is due. Will soften the blow. Cool nights. Warm days mixed.

I am ensconced. I am alone. I am writing. I am.