Dim Night

I was walking under the bridge of Santo Café where friends and acquaintances always seem to cross paths. A man in rags stands a little way off with his zither or whatever it is and his can of coins on the ground. Boys and girls a stone’s throw away invent themselves in loving play and companionship. They hold hands and whisper low and the legs of their jeans inadvertently brush against each other like two people sleeping in the same bed. We stare at each other and if her eyes were not so strong I would likely get lost in the weird adornments of nose ring and rust red leather jacket. The scene itself is inadvertent, untested, difficult to place in my mind. On top of the little stone bridge are café tables and bright orange lights and always a sense of lonely transit and of being suspended willingly in isolation like a pigeon perched on a gargoyle. You can see the whole world from up here. You can see a rip in a pair of jeans from a hundred feet and you can perceive the outline of a hand in a pocket, a little unintentional gnarled knuckle. Just the breeze, the lightest suggestion of wind up there, could tear a frozen skullcap off a snowman. The bridge’s stone arc insinuates permanence and leaping lightness in the world. It reflects in a cornea’s gray striations like some kind of first motherly caress crossing one’s consciousness. Not a hair’s breadth separates your atomized stare from its cold rock body. All the summer fairs have danced its span in plain steps and it remains outstretched. Winter passes like a dream in which you must carry rocks up a hill.

Even if you have no faith in anything you can still be persuaded by the motion of passing days and the unexpected moment that comes at you gambling. Once again you have that executive look in your eyes that undoes all your usual simple expressions and makes you seem incredible, as if you might become a bird. Your metamorphic rise into the trees is a regular vision at breakfast, church bell sound and coffee tongue. I think while wandering in a certain garden I saw you joined up there by a whole flock of the spiritually reversed.

Notes from Café Tal

...that humbling moment comes along when you remember how much you are like the guy at the next table scribbling into his notebook.

Lately I have fallen into an oubliette of the mind where one casually interprets tremors from the outside world. Then I ordered a Hurricane tea at Café Tal and found myself staring at the mesh tea ball, thinking about last night...

Hugo and I ate the sugarcane I'd brought from a recent Posada. He showed me how to strip off the outer layer of cane with my teeth, the kind of delicate tearing movements that make a chimp look preternaturally clever. Chomping on the inside cane until it's just a lump of dry fiber in your mouth, then spitting that out and tearing into the next piece. We agreed that sugar taken in this way gives you an unlikely instant rush, something that clarifies whatever strength you have in your body and induces kid mentality for a few happy seconds. As a shared experience it outpaces even the most frantic game of tag.

Quince de diciembre

Wicho throws a chopping knife at the stool and smiles his almost menacing country boy smile with the sweetness of his brown eyes and the crooked front teeth. Now we know what happened to the other knife with the bent tip, the one we had to throw away. Wicho plays with knives.

Something was bothering him this morning. His hair which is normally combed back into like rolling hillsides of gelled black bungees had a conspicuous horn in the back, a fucked cactus sticking out of the confused region of his head. I think he lacked sleep; he works too hard.

It seemed that I had done something to offend him. But it was like he couldn’t find the words to tell me what was wrong. Perhaps a single word was lacking, the one that fits this gesture. He threw the knife onto the stool and it stuck in there and he looked at me with all the misunderstanding laid bare. Then he pulled the knife out of the stool and continued chopping the vegetables for the quesadillas.

G-L-O-R-I-A!

Is the Virgin of Guadalupe the same as the Virgin Mary? It depends who you ask. Mexican Catholic hagiography is, in any event, a cloudburst of fiestas. Here in Guanajuato the water runs down the cajellones towards el centro. Suds slipstream through the cobblestones after a good scrubbing on some bodega’s grungy patio at the end of the day.

The people defy gravity going up. Today they ascend the Calzada de Guadalupe offering their baskets of tangerines, eggs, carrots, radishes, and baby Manzano bananas to the Virgin. They find her ensconced in an altar of flowers in the peach-painted church at the crown of the road. The women wear white blouses embroidered with flowers and long skirts arrayed with rich pigments. The little boys dress like Juan Diego, the neatly pressed peasant garb and straw sombrero and a painted-on mustache. Babies with bandanas resemble cute pirates, little laughing Zorros.

Wicho and Cris make a burlesque of our trek up the Calzada, lighting little cuetes with their sulfur afterstink and exploding confetti-filled ice cream cone bombs on the sweaty head of this silly guero. I buy a bag of steamed garbanzo beans with chili and lime, partly just to amuse this unrivaled duo from el campo. Watch the guero struggle to free the bean from the pod and nearly spit the macerated green mush onto his shoe. Òrale!

The familiar sewer whiff, a ten foot passage, and the intestinal smell of carnitas frying in their own fat.

Me: Do you really believe in the story of Guadalupe with the flowers?
Wicho: [undecided, looks at Cris] Tú?
Cris: No mucho.

By ten o’clock the Calzada is emptying, one can enter the church without so much as brushing shoulders with another. I look closely at Juan Diego’s face and he looks like Jesus. A handsome man dumbstruck by a shimmering woman in green robes. A cherub holds her aloft. Next to me a woman prays, and next to her a boy eats three hotdogs. The loud band outside is doing ‘Gloria’ for the boys and girls with spackled black hair.

I descend via the Russian Baths.

Our Lady of Guadalupe

Just went for a walk up to the Iglesia of Guadalupe where they are already starting to celebrate the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe two days in advance. The cobbled road that rises to the church is bannered with red and white and green flags that hang down like Mexican crocodile teeth and intersect and crisscross with strings of glowing light bulbs.

Outside the church people were gathered around vendors of the traditional foods: tripe tacos, tamales, pozole, ponche. The ponche (punch) from a styrofoam cup was hot and sweet with flavors of guayaba, orange, hibiscus, tamarind, sugarcane, cinnamon, and apple.

Mass was being given to a full congregation inside the church, the holy electric light pouring out over the steps and me peering in just as the priest raised a white disk of bread symbolizing the body of Christ and intoned sacred Spanish words into a microphone. They normally leave the church doors open here, so passing by an evening service is not unlike passing a theater where a film is showing. A woman in front of me was kneeling on the stone, the best seat she could get.

On my roundabout return I bought a copy of Juan Rulfo’s “Predro Páramo” for sixty pesos and later wandered into the little video arcade off the Jardín that I have passed a hundred times. Teenage girls with streaks of pink in their dark punk hair huddle on the steps smoking cigarettes and sharing a secret joke that goes round and round.

Inside the arcade I came face to face with Chun-Li, the coquettish Chinese character in Capcom's "Street Fighter."

The mysterious hole in the wall, part I

The Embajadoras market in Guanajuato springs up on Sundays. It's a big market in my view; I imagine that square-feet-wise it might rival a Wal-Mart, though the disorientation one feels wandering through its arterial passages is more satisfying than the false order of a big box store. The closest thing Guanajuato has to a Wal-Mart is a place called Pozuelos, which comprises a "Mega" chain grocery/retail store, a movie theater, and a mall that would be considered small by American standards. I walked there today, passing through a long tunnel on the way where I encountered the preceding hole in the wall.


The Embajadoras market was enjoyable for me. I dug into piles of jeans that I think must have been sitting in warehouses for years. They were new but not in particularly good condition and freak sizes were common, like a 40-inch waist and 30-inch inseam. Brands like "Macho" that I've never heard of, another world of jeans I didn't know existed! It satisfied a vague longing to be among so many man-made things and among so many people choosing among them. I didn't really go there to buy, I went shopping for the whole experience. A Nike Air Max 360 hanging on a wall with a hundred other right-footed shoes sucked me in for a closer look at its red and white curvature and its gratuitous Velcro strap wagging there like a dog's shiny tongue. It was the joy of description to muck around in so much finished product.

Visions and Revisions (El Pípila)

Well, it's time for some visions. I've been here for almost a week now and have wandered through Guanajuato every day except yesterday, when I was laid up with problemas de la digestión. This morning I drank mango flavored water through a straw from a plastic bag.

Perhaps the most visited, and certainly the most visible, tourist spot here is a 25 foot tall statue of a man, called "El Pípila," that overlooks the city from one of the surrounding little mountains. Historically, El Pípila played a key role in the Mexican liberation movement emanating from this region. He is hewn from rough reddish stone with the thick features of one of Picasso's women. For me, the corpulent legs and huge feet stand out especially, suggesting that if El Pípila were to come to life he could stomp some serious ass. First, he'd have to jump down into "el centro," the city center, from the big stone terrace where tourists snap his photo before turning around to take in the view below. This drop of a couple hundred feet over the scrabbly hillside would pose little challenge, I imagine. At that point he could use the stony torch he weilds to wreak havoc on the unjust -- though finding many of them might prove difficult these days, when the Spanish haciendas - Mexican versions of the old American plantations - have been rid of their vassals and converted into charming B&B's, like the one I'm staying at.

The Grand Tour (of Guanajuato)

Here are some pictures from the first few days. I will post more later with more substance, when I'm not feeling so chistoso.




A photo from my third full day in Guanajuato. I came upon something mysterious. Is this a karaoke joint posing as a "bar" or something far more sinister?



This picture speaks for itself, if you are a Queen or a Magician. Clare, Kristen, I'm thinking of you.



That shoe really can fly anywhere!

“Man in Chair with Beer” by Duane Hanson, 1973

That other voice calls
From your fiberglass throat,
Look-alike in wifebeater.

Or it comes from your forehead
Telepathic, like an alien
Just home from work.

And this here is no voice
But rather a picture of you
Rising from polyester.

And I think that I’m really you
Approximately, as your endless
End of the day approximates me.

But did you crack open that beer
Just before I got here?

I will do
The listening, beautiful,
Tired statue.

Farmhouse Model T

I'd talk about old movies
I liked when you nodded off.
When I said silent era
You'd start snoring and I'd notice
A ragged cobweb blowing like hair
On the offbeats of your breath.
It would cling to the pincushion
Headliner of the old Model T
Where we had arranged ourselves
In the backseat.

Knowing that it couldn't happen anywhere
But the farm on this day
With the sun freezing to the snow
And the freeze seeping into the shed,
I'd finally be silent myself,
With your head on my shoulder
And my head on your head.

On Valentine's Day

To Drudgery

Why must you wait with me,
Drudgery, while other noses are out
Smelling roses? Do I solicit you
With a promise of lightness and air?
Do you imagine yourself – unloved, an invalid –
To be fair?

Truth be told, I think you suffer
Behind your one-tooth grin, having bitten
Too often into that old wooden apple.
Would you be willing – if I treat you
With sweet vapors and brush your long, steely hair –
To go away, just for today?

Dream Poems

Two nights ago I dreamt about two dangerous guys with death in their eyes.
They would have killed me if I hadn’t manifested blind rage.
Last night my parents didn’t love me and I raged again.
I met a younger woman whose name I immediately forgot
And we got drunk on a mixture of water and rock salt. Water
Rained through the ceiling and spilled over the rims of our too-small vessels
And I kissed her mouth and found it thin and real.

A Détournement

I took a bus up to Boston this weekend, and in the seat behind me was a teenage girl having a loud and annoying conversation on her cell phone. I gave her a sour glance but she didn't seem to notice. I thought it would be funny if I had a microphone to hold up to her, so she would understand what it's like to be trapped in someone else's absurd notion of time well spent. Then I remembered that I did have my camera, so I took the following picture of her by holding it up over my head and shooting blindly behind me. The social ethics here are fuzzy -- I won't pretend to go into it, except to say that I felt guilty about being such a dick and I'm not sure I would have done the same thing if she had been a 200 lb. dude. Her expression (she's on the right): someone waking in a dark room to the buzz of a mosquito:

Art Brut

I have recently been exposed to some modern art movements through my reading, and to actual pieces of contemporary art and design in magazines that I was scanning for a guy. The guy is not immediately important. I'll say that the art movement I'm most interested in is Art Brut, a term coined by the French artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s. He heralded the art made by mental patients and the criminally insane that was first treated extensively in Dr. Walter Morgenthaler's 1921 book "Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler" (A Psychiatric Patient as Artist). Art Brut does away with tradition in place of the erratic, ecstatic, and primitively constructed works of untrained, sometimes disturbed people who are inspired to create art in much the same way a child is inspired to play with his food. One of my favorite Art Brut artists was Ferdianad Cheval, a French postman in the 19th-century who spent 33 years building his "Palais idéal." It actually looks like it might be made of expertly molded mashed potatoes (purée de pommes de terre):



Dubuffet himself had enough talent to sustain an artistic career, a term he probably would have rejected for himself. Here's a beautiful collage of his from 1977, "Les Vicissitudes":



This reminds me of a time in about 6th grade when I made a collage of cut-out pictures of supermodels and anonymous lingerie models. I cannot provide an image of this piece because it has been lost.