All Opposed

I grew up among in a part of the country where racism and religious fundamentalism were considered normal, and this experience taught me that there are temperaments that do not care about facts, scientific research, logical argument, fair play, and toleration for difference of opinion. It's the nature of this temperament to believe what it believes because it believes it, and the rest of us be damned. I see the same kind of implacability evidenced among right-wing opponents to National Health Care. They are impervious to reason and logical argument. The following comments, even if brought up to them, wouldn’t make the least difference in their views. If I express them, I do so for myself, to discharge the anger and gloom stirred up by what I hear on national media, Limbaugh, Beck, man-in-street interviews, as well as legal initiatives being launched against National Health in several red states. Here goes.

“National Health is Socialism.” If you believe that social programs instituted and administered by Federal and local governments are wrong, you should also devote your energy to repealing Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment benefits. You should also lobby to dismantle free public education. Educating children, in your ideology, should be the financial and personal responsibility of each parent, who should let various privately run schools compete in a free enterprise system, so as to get the best possible deal for you. Come to think of it, law should not compel you to educate your children if you don’t want them to be educated. Big government should not interfere in private life. Furthermore, free school-buses is socialistic, raises taxes, and ought to be abolished. Each family should have the responsibility for transporting its own children to school. Some of us, quite a few of us, do not have children. We are supporting yours by paying tax that goes for education and buses.  And pay up quite cheerfully, because we believe the electorate in a democratic country should be well educated. But it has become clear to us, confronted with so much ignorance, that the schools we support aren't managing to educate the populace--just to judge by the level of discourse we hear, and incidents such as health-care opponents' spitting on African-American legislators.

Furthermore, shouldn’t you also oppose the Pure Food and Drug Administration? Instead of letting Big Government regulate those issues, let free enterprise decide which purveyors of food and drugs are the best, as will soon become apparent as soon as clients either thrive or fall sick and die. Meanwhile, I guess you want to dismantle the Police and Fire departments of your community. Like, let individuals hire bodyguards for their personal protection and arrange for volunteers to put out fires, that is, when the volunteers aren’t out of town or incapacitated by the last fire they were unable to put out.



“I’m in very good health, and I don’t want to be forced by Big Government to buy insurance that I don’t need.” Do you have a car? Then you were forced by government to insure it for liability. Why didn’t you protest when that law went into effect? OK, you don’t have health insurance because you're not sick, I understand that. But, uninsured as you are, is your savings account big enough to pay medical costs that will result when you are injured by (1) hurricane (2) tornado (3) earthquake (4) tsunami (5) a flood (6) a lightning storm (7) a fall downstairs, off a bicycle, or off a mountain trail (8) a hit-and-run accident (9) a sports-related injury (10) when you suddenly without warning develop leukemia and are turned down for insurance as having a pre-existing condition (11) when you are bitten by a poisonous snake or spider or scorpion or infected tick (12) when you get trapped in a snowstorm and suffer severe frostbite (13) when a gas leak in your house results in an explosion and you suffer third-degree burns (14) when you sever a limb with your chainsaw? It might be useful for you to consult statistics about unforeseen accidents in this country, and the people affected by them.



“This bill allows for the murder of babies.” No, it supports termination of pregnancies resulting from incest, rape, or those that threaten the life of the mother. Furthermore, a small piece of tissue with no central nervous system is not a baby, no more than an acorn is an oak tree. Meanwhile, if it is wrong to murder, why must those who don't have the funds for medical insurance or medical treatment be forced to die, when they could be saved? They have fully developed brains and they know what is happening to them, as do their family members and friends. Too bad? Is that what you’re saying? I hope my fate never rests in your hands. You’re aware that the Constitution guarantees separation of church and state. So you are free to follow your religious beliefs, but not to impose them on others who believe differently. And any sect that engages in political lobbying should lose its tax-exempt status, and thereby lower my tax burden. I’m forced to pay more tax because an institution I don’t believe in doesn’t pay up, and, moreover, is promoting policies I abhor.



“This bill is going to raise my taxes. It’s just more Welfare, and I don’t even believe in the Welfare we already have.” But I suppose you are proud to be a United States citizen, right? What exactly is the U.S.A.? Is it the real estate? Is it the GNP? Is it the money in our banks? No, surely the U.S.A. is the collectivity of its people. Proud as you are to be a citizen, you feel no obligation at all to any citizen outside the circle of family and friends, is that it? As far as you’re concerned, if people are ill or dying and don’t have the money to get medical assistance, that’s their little red wagon. You’re just going to take care of number one. You couldn’t care less about saving other lives (except for fetuses’). Your U.S.A. is yourself and the people you know. As far as you’re concerned, the others can just go ahead and croak; because you don't want your taxes raised by so much as one percent. Your U.S.A. is a cruel and heartless country, concerned above all else with self-interest, I see that. Well, it’s not my U.S.A. And by the way some of those people who can’t afford medical care are your coreligionists. I guess your sect doesn’t teach you all to take care of each other. What is it then, just a means of getting a good seat in the afterlife?



“Look at the bill, it’s 2500 pages long!” Yes. In an effort to be bipartisan and accommodate free-enterprise ideologues, the current Administration dropped any hope of having a National Health system in which the Federal government is the insurer, as in advanced European nations. Congress allowed private insurance corporations to continue on in that role. It also had to allot part of the insuring burden to business, even small businesses, because legislators ranted about deficit spending. Inevitably, these extra provisions involve a complex regulatory apparatus, so that burden-sharing is fair. Hence the 2500 pages. As soon as private insurers are removed from the picture, and health care is nationalized, regulation will be vastly simplified. But I know you and your fellow right-wingers will never let that happen. The 2500 pages are likely to grow. As for small businesses, you don't seem to know they are now allowed to opt out of insuring employees and pay a fine, which will cost them much less than insuring does. Their employees hope they won’t do this, naturally. And research suggests in any case that insurance costs for small businesses in most cases will decrease.



“My insurance premiums are going to rise.” You know that for a fact? Where is your proof? Even supposing they did, is it not worth a small rise to have the security of knowing that, in the event you lose the insurance you currently have, no new insurer could deny coverage to you because you already suffer from diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, cancer, or heart disease.



“Democrats expand government and spend us into huge deficits, and this health care thing is the latest example of that.” Actually, during the Clinton Administration, we had a budget surplus, have you already forgotten? When the Bush Administration appropriated $750 billion to bail out collapsing financial institutions, it was Big Government interfering with free enterprise. Don’t you believe that the market, not the Bush Administration, should have decided which banks were viable and which not? Are you being inconsistent? Meanwhile, the unprovoked invasion of Iraq insisted on by President Bush has drained our reserves of staggering amounts of capital, more than was spent by any Democratic war president during the last century. Iraq, since 2001 has cost about $713 billion, and there’s no end in sight. I will not mention the cost for Iraq because I know you don’t care what happens to other countries. Nor, out of respect for the dead, will I quote (in this sordid context) the figures for military and civilian casualties on both sides. All this for a threat that never existed. True, it did make corporations like Haliburton and Bechtel (to which the GOP had financial ties) prosper; but it plunged our country into enormous debt and is still doing so. Why didn’t you protest deficit spending during the Bush Administration? In any case, I suppose you’ve decided to ignore the provisions outlined in this new bill for deficit reduction, provisions developed and passed by a Democratic Congress in a Democratic Administration. Though you have no proof, you’re absolutely certain they won’t work because you know they won’t. You are an expert, you don't need to hear the facts and figures. Good bye. I don’t want to know anything more about you, and I certainly don't want to listen to your mean-spirited and mindless ravings any longer.



*



Wasted breath. Well, not really. I know they’re not listening, but at least I feel better.

The Poet Ai, 1947-2010

Two days ago, my friend the poet Ai died in Stillwater, Oklahoma, of breast cancer. I hadn’t seen Ai since 2002, during the year I taught at Oklahoma State, but we spoke by telephone and exchanged email posts since then, and I would also sometimes get news of her from mutual friends. The last time we exchanged messages was in early January, when she made no mention at all of poor health. She was a very private person, lived alone, didn’t see many people, just taught her classes, gave occasional readings, and wrote her poems. I’m saddened to hear this news and again reminded that breast cancer is a national health problem that seems to be getting more and more serious. I’m not sure enough is being done to promote awareness of it and to fund research. It’s something that has affected the lives of many people close to me, beginning with my mother (legally, my stepmother), whose illness I wrote about in a poem titled “Stepson Elegy” (in Present). But much more to the point are the courageous poems by Marilyn Hacker and Mary Cappello, written from a first-hand perspective.




I met Ai in Tulsa in 2001, when she attended a reading Robert Pinsky gave there at a literary festival sponsored by the English Department at Oklahoma State. Robert introduced us and we exchanged contact information. I was teaching that year at the University of Tulsa and decided not to go back East for the Christmas holiday. Hearing that, Ai invited me to Christmas dinner at her place in Stillwater. I remember an apartment absolutely filled with things, especially wicker furniture, which Ai had a special liking for. As I was to learn the following year, going out to comb the thrift stores was one of her favorite occupations. Ai always had stylish clothes, designer dresses and jackets combined with thrift-store items she had a flair for discovering. I remember once she was contemplating spending a lot of money on a beautiful turquoise and silver necklace, either Zuni or Hopi, I’m not sure. I egged her on because she looked gorgeous in it and because I knew she was proud of her Indian ancestry. Buy it she did, and even now I can see it ornamenting one of her great ensembles. I think she was also pleased to have African ancestry and, besides that, a Japanese father, whose name (Ogawa) she used on official documents, but not when she signed her poems and books. Still, because she grew up in a Native American community, that heritage seemed to be foremost in her consciousness.



I was invited to come teach at Oklahoma State for the following year during Ai’s sabbatical and was pleased to accept. I got to know English Department faculty there very well, in fact, it was one of the friendliest I’d ever worked with. Because we were both single, Ai and I saw each other many times, going out to dinner or making raids on the thrifts, where I found stuff to spruce up my temporary apartment in Stillwater. Like many poets, she didn’t know how to drive, and I was perfectly willing to be the chauffeur. It’s said that some people found her personally difficult, but I never did. We seemed to have the same kind of humor, and she knew I valued her and her work. To her poetry she brought keen novelistic skills and a dramatic instinct that didn’t flinch when faced with the inhuman behavior that characterizes so much of human existence. I read her and think of the great Japanese filmmaker Kurosawa’s statement to the effect that, “The artist does not avert his eyes.”



And yet. For some reason Ai averted her eyes from her own illness and didn’t have a check-up when symptoms appeared. I don’t understand this, and, in my confusion, am posting these reflections in the hope that someone who knew her better than I did can explain what happened. When there is a loss, we try to extract from it something besides sadness. Perhaps that may happen in this case, too. Meanwhile, I will reread Ai’s poems, inevitably from an altered perspective. I asked Ai if she’d adopted her name from the classical Greek, the word that is usually translated as “alas!” or “woe!” She said, “No. In Japanese, “ai” means ‘love.’”

After Argentina

Maybe now that I’ve left Argentina, I’ll have time to say a little more about my stay.




There were many high spots during my six weeks in Buenos Aires, but a good place to begin is a joint reading with Sam Hamill, a poetry evening arranged by his Argentinian translator Esteban Moore. Esteban is a poet of Irish descent who has published several volumes and is well known in Latin America. The second week in February he invited friends and fellow poets to a bar called La Poesia in San Telmo, the oldest part of the city. We arrived early, so I had time to walk two streets over to the former Biblioteca Nacional, which from 1955 to 1972 had as its director Jorge Luis Borges. It’s now the National Center for Music and Dance, a fact fully evident when you noticed students congregating on the steps outside. A guard allowed me to have a look at the former Reading Room, quite similar to its counterpart in the British Museum in the era when the British Library was housed there: a very high, octagonal room capped by a dome and lined with bookshelves. Remember the opening of Borges’s “The Library of Babel”? “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.” Borges said he conceived of Heaven as a library and cited his father’s library in the family home on calle Serrano as the central, determining fact about his childhood. Borges was an heroic reader, in the same way we say Achilles was an heroic fighter, and he had an Achilles heel as well: the eye defect he inherited from his father, which eventually left them both blind. The convergence of those two facts, directorship of the National Library and his blindness, led to the writing of one of his best-known poems, the “Poem of the Gifts,” pervaded with a calmly tragic sense of humor. Borges fame arose around his fiction writing, but as time has passed I’ve come to prefer his poetry to his short stories, brilliant and original as those are.



Meanwhile, this was to be an evening of the, so to speak, “talking book,” and I made my way back to Bar La Poesia to see if it was time to go on. It was a bilingual evening, given that most of the audience was hispanophone. I read my poems in both languages (using translations made by others or myself, plus two poems that I actually wrote in Spanish first, and later translated into English). Sam read his poems in English, pausing between each so that Esteban could read his very accurate and graceful versions. The picture shown above was taken during the evening, myself on the left and Sam on the right. It was the first time we’d ever read together, and the significance of the occasion wasn’t lost on me.



The person who took the photograph is my friend Mong-Lan, whom I met about ten years ago in Switzerland, during a month’s residency at the Château de Lavigny, in a small village near Lausanne. Even in those days Lan was passionate about tango; in the past decade she has become sufficiently expert to give tango lessons herself. And she recently published a book of poems dealing with the topic, the verses accompanied by her ink-brush drawings. She sees tango as a kind of pain-killer for the underclass of Buenos Aires, a way to forget for a few hours that their lives have strict economic limits and few attractive prospects. Not for most of its dancers a prelude to real physical intimacy, tango is a kind of abstraction of sexuality, allowing equal expression for both genders, though it seems to me that women dancers have a wider repertory of gestures, particularly with the voleos, or whip-lashings of the leg.

One evening Lan and I went to a milonga, a dance hall where people meet to tango. Participants don’t usually arrive as a couple. Instead, men invite women they catch sight of there to dance a number or two, always interspersed with an interval of conversation. That means a dance can be a fleeting encounter or develop into something longer term, depending on circumstances and mutual attraction. The milonga Lan and I went to for some reason is called “Canning” and opens its doors near Palermo Soho around eleven every evening. I have to report I don’t know how to tango and was a fairly resigned wallflower (wallvine?) for the whole evening. But it was impressive to see how well Lan performed, the best dancer on the floor that evening, unmistakably. It was also touching to see older couples dancing, not athletically but slowly and sensitively, some of them upwards of seventy. Granted, the smart youth of Buenos Aires much prefer rock and disco to tango; but it is an old porteño (the adjective used to describe citizens of Buenos Aires) tradition that also draws adepts from all over the world, the poet and painter Mong-Lan included.



During my stay I strolled through the neighborhoods that are most often visited in Buenos Aires—the Palermos (Soho, Chico, and Hollwood), the Centro, La Boca, San Telmo, Recoleta, Retiro, and Belgrano. I visted most of the museums, had good meals in the restaurants, saw my Australian friends Lee Tulloch and Tony Amos at their hotel (the Alvear Palace) and in Palermo, before they went on their cruise to the Malvinas/Falklands, Patagonia, and Chile. Yet it would have been unadventurous to stay in the city for the full six weeks and never visit the other nearby national capital when it is in so easily reached. To get to Montevideo, you either take a ferry there directly or else to Colonia del Sacramento (a shorter ride) and go by bus for the remainder of the trip. I chose the latter route, thinking it would incidentally give me an overland view of the countryside in Argentina’s smaller neighbor to the north. Fairly flat terrain greets you as you leave Colonia, dotted with small houses on a single level, grazing cattle, eucalyptus groves and the occasional palm tree. You see less harvesting machinery than you would in comparable farmlands in the U.S.A., but also a certain appealing simplicity and modesty of aims. Uruguay is the twenty-fourth sovereign nation I’ve visited (twenty-seventh, if you count San Marino, Andorra, and Vatican City). I’ll go on record, too, as having seen all fifty states of the Union, and all but one of its large cities, lest anyone suppose I’m insufficiently interested in my home country.

Montevideo has its own special ambiance, as all national capitals do. Smaller and slower-moving than Buenos Aires, it has only one high-rise building, the Palacio Salvo, but on the other hand that was Latin America’s first such building when it was completed in 1928. It overlooks the Plaza Independencia, which is dominated by the equestrian statue of José Artigas, Uruguay’s liberator and a man with very forward-looking social ideas for his day, ideas that included universal suffrage, not excluding the indigenous peoples and women. The square is at the edge of the Old City, which, though dilapidated in some streets, is now having many of its old buildings renovated and may well end up being an equivalent to Buenos Aires’s Palermo Soho in a few years. I was impressed by the variety of architectural styles (from the 18th,, 19th, and 20th centuries) gathered in this old quarter, as well as by the unhurried and companionable life of the people I saw in the streets.

I also had dinner with a writer friend whom I hadn’t seen since the 1970s. This is Roberto Echavarren, one of the leading poets, novelists, and critics in Uruguay, often a guest at literary festivals throughout Latin America. We met in New York through mutual friends John Ashbery and David Kalstone and then unaccountably fell out of touch, though Roberto taught Comp Lit and Latin American literature for many years at NYU. Anyway, it was a pleasant reunion at his house in Pocitos, where I met his Indonesian-born partner Yudi Yudoyoko, who is a visual artist. We three had a pleasant meal together and caught up a bit. Roberto is often classed with the Neo-barocco poets of Latin America, a description that may or may not apply. He has published a volume of translations of Ashbery’s poetry and could be said to be influenced by that oeuvre, too; though perhaps it makes more sense to say that Ashbery nowadays is a kind of climate of opinion or aesthetics, with an impact on nearly every contemporary poet, as was true with Eliot in the 1920s and Auden in the 1930s. Roberto gave me several of his books, including a theoretical work on the androgyne in literature, which is a timely topic, certainly. I was glad to see Roberto again, and, besides, it always changes the face of an unknown city when you interact with someone who actually lives there.

Next morning I had a meeting with the poet Chip Livingston, whom I know from New York, and his Argentinian partner Gabriel Padilha. They had been living in the attractive Pocitos neighborhood of Montevideo since December but will be returning to the States shortly. We decided to find the monument to Gay Liberation that was set up in Montevideo five years ago—the first in Latin America, but a counterpart to others in New York, Amsterdam, and Germany. It was right at the edge of the Old City, in a little traveled byway called the Pasaje de la Vieja Policia. An upbeat way to conclude my stay in Montevideo.



This blog entry should also conclude, so I will sign off with the observation that my spoken Spanish improved while I was in Argentina, that being one of my reasons for going. Considering that the U.S.A. has a vast Spanish-speaking population, and the role that Spanish-speaking peoples have had in U.S. history, it seems only right that citizens should know Spanish, just as Canadians are expected to speak French even when their mother tongue is English. Besides, knowledge of the language opens the door to a culture and literature of extraordinary richness, as well as to one European country and some two dozen in the Western Hemisphere, where it is the official language.

Borges, Citizen of Buenos Aires

Though I didn’t make a special effort to find a rental there, I am now living in a stretch of calle Serrano (Serrano Street) that was, a number of years ago, renamed calle Jorge Luis Borges, in the old Buenos Aires barrio of Palermo. Borges was born on calle Serrano in 1899, but his childhood home was evenutally demolished (a disappearance that wouldn’t, I think, have surprised him). This part of Palermo, again, was renamed at some point Palermo Soho, either in honor of London or New York or both. Another part is called Palermo Chico, another, Palermo Viejo, and still another Palermo Hollywood. Actually, New Yorkers might conclude that P. Soho resembled Greenwich Village, an inexpensive neighborhood that became fashionable over time partly because it contained some interesting old architecture and partly because low rents enabled artists and bohemians to live there. (This feature of Palermor Soho has now been brushed aside.) The busy center of it all is Plazoleta Cortàzar (formerly Plaza Serrano), renamed in honor of the experimental Argentine novelist, who, along with Borges, ushered in the “boom” for Latin American fiction that began in the 1960s.



One of the main reasons I wanted to come to Buenos Aires was to see the environment that fostered one of the 20th century’s greatest writers. Because of his many travels and the multinational references in his writing, we think of Borges as a supremely cosmopolitan author. He is, yes, but it must be remembered that JLB over and again affirmed his nationality and, even more, his home city. His first book of poems was titled Fervor de Buenos Aires (Passion/Fervor of/for Buenos Aires), which, besides several poems with Palermo settings, contains the lines “siempre estaba (y estaré) a Buenos Aires.” (“I always was and always will be in Buenos Aires.”) The poem opening the volume is titled “La Recoleta” and describes the city’s most famous necropolis, situated in Recoleta, where rich porteños (citizens of Buenos Aires) have lived since the 19th century. The poem’s final line describes it as “el luego de mi ceniza,” “the site of my ashes.” In the event, it didn’t turn out to be that because Borges is buried in a cemetery in Geneva, where he lived the last two years of his life.



I went to see the cemetery, which is enclosed by a wall, with an entrance bearing the motto REQUIESCANT IN PACE. The sentiment can’t be entirely true, considering how many visitors flock here, the great majority anxious, I suppose, to see the tomb of Eva Perón. What they don’t bargain for is the labyrinthine acreage of marble, granite and onyx they must pass through before finding her in the Duarte family vault--mausoleum after elaborate mausoleum, dating from the early 19th century up until the mid-20th. This must be the most resolute necropolis in the world, with no exposed earth and no grass, just a few arbor vitae trees planted in one or two places along the central avenue. In addition to the main grid of fairly wide streets, there are other diagonals cutting through the right angles, and it's easy to get lost, even with a map in hand. I was struck by the duplication of names on the mausoleums and the street names of Buenos Aires: Rivadavia, Saenz Peña, Sarmiento, Figueroa, Saavedra, etc. But I also wondered whether many visitors had the remotest idea who those figures were. As for the others, not eminent enough to have streets named after them, the bid for immortality was hopeless. Stone funereal monuments, designed to serve as a reminder to the living of the dead, all too soon become essentially anonymous once the descendants of the commemorated person themselves die.

I found the Casares family vault, where I believe Adolfo Bioy Casares is buried. He was of course Borges’s closest writer friend and indeed collaborator in several works published under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq. As for Borges’s poem “La Recoleta,” it must finally be read figuratively; first poem in his first volume, it implies that the book itself is a kind of necropolis, each poem a tomb inscription, recording some important moment of feeling that has now ceased to live and breathe. In fact, the topic of two of the poems is a tomb inscription, and there is an elegy for his grandfather, plus a poem titled “Remordimiento por cualquier muerto” (“Remorse for an unknown dead man.”) Wordsworth stated a similar view of the, should we call it, mortuary relationship between poems and the occasions that inspired them in his “Essay on Epitaphs.” “Emotion recollected in tranquillity” is, truth to tell, emotion only in a secondary sense. Written with the lofty despair characteristic of twenty-somethings, Borges’s first book is filled with late afternoons and sunsets, with elegies, goodbyes, and terminations. There are a few wrenching poems about the end of a love affair about which we’re given no details. I sense the mystery of Borges’s personality but don’t know where to begin in trying to understand it. There are doors that close with complete finality, some of these being mausoleum doors.

As a footnote, I’ll mention coming upon—an event that doesn’t strike me as in any way inevitable—the granite final hermitage of someone named Alfred Cornu. I’d been noticing that the local custom here was for friends or institutions to attach bronze plaques to the tombs of the deceased person. Cornu’s had one saying: Querido Alfredito, vives en los corazones de tus amigos. ("Dear Alf, You live in the hearts of your friends.") Let’s hope the equivalent will be said when time comes (perhaps twenty years from now?) to say goodbye to "fervor for Planet Earth," even if the sentiments don’t get recorded in bronze.

The View from Down Here

A paradox about setting down experience in a diary or a blog is that during periods filled with events worth noting, you don’t have a lot of leisure to record what you are doing and seeing. Instead of constructing a carefully worked-out argument, here are just a few thoughts I’ve had during my first month in Buenos Aires.




Weather: I expected warm temperatures but nothing prepared me for the hottest January the city has experienced in the past half century. I made up my mind not to be bothered by it and have mostly managed. The light is strong and white, a danger to anyone not using sunblock. Since arriving I’ve seen that the concentration of skin melanin has intensified enough to make it possible for me to go out in relative safety. Buenos Aires is situated on the 34th Parallel South, equivalents in the Northern Hemisphere including Rabat, Morocco, and Los Angeles, U.S.A. I arrived less than a month after the Southern Hemisphere’s summer solstice. But of course other factors besides distance from the Equator and the seasons shape climate. Other spots on this parallel are hotter and still others colder. I was curious to have proved or disproved the old claim that water spinning down a drain in the Southern Hemisphere makes a counter-clockwise vortex as opposed to the Northern Hemisphere’s clockwise counterpart. More than half the time it seems to do so, though sometimes changing direction during the process. Again, other factors can affect what happens.



I also wanted to see the constellations down here, the most famous of these, the Southern Cross. That one, I definitely have seen, but others have been harder to locate because of competing urban nighttime illumination, as well as my unfamiliarity with the connect-the-dot patterns. Staring upward at the rearranged light sources, I imagined I could intuit sensations the early European explorers must have felt once they left behind the familiar zodiac and the fixed beacon of the North Star. What had always in the Northern Hemisphere seemed permanent simply dipped out of sight below the horizon, an event that can only have been deeply unsettling. I speculate, too, that our brains have some low-level grasp of the magnetic fields circling the planet. Anyway, on arriving here, I found that my usually infallible sense of direction deserted me. I have had to memorize where north is; I no longer sense the direction unconsciously. (A situation not helped by the reversal of north-south representation on some of the maps I’ve seen here.) North, when I locate it, no longer feels “up” to me; it feels “down.” Make of that what you will.



When I’ve visited Latin countries in the past, I’ve always been struck by the great social weight of Catholicism, a palpable force in the unfolding of each day and each year. In Mexico, bells ringing at the moment of consecration in the mass begin early in the day and conclude late. In Buenos Aires I haven’t, during the past month, heard a single bell. In the neighborhood where I am staying, I’ve come across only one church. The Church here doesn’t seem to have the overwhelming influence experienced elsewhere. It is taken more lightly. Just possibly there is (aside from historical forces particular to Argentina) a geographical/seasonal explanation for the prevailing secularism. The Catholic church calendar was devised in the Northern Hemisphere. In the depths of winter darkness a Holy Child appears, bringing light, his Epiphany revealed at the moment when the sun begins to climb on the horizon and days begin to lengthen again. There follows a long series of months (accompanied in earlier centuries by a shortage of food) that just somehow have to be slogged through, a time when discipline is urged on all the congregants. And then the dramatic finale in which the god is slain and green returns to the earth, along with spring flowers. After several months of heavenly weather and a bright sun ascending to its zenith in the sky, the season turns again and autumnal thoughts of darkness and eventual death return, as the cycle begins anew. All right: but down here, the cycle is reversed. Christmas falls in high summer, when you don’t need the birth of new light in order to continue to hope. Then Lent stretches through a couple of warm, abundant months until Eastertide, which arrives with autumn cold and the withering of foliage. Psychologically, these seasonal changes clash with the archetypal patterns established in the traditional calendar, the inevitable result being that its impact is much weakened. This strikes me as so apparent I’m surprised no one ever seems to have discussed it. I experienced the whole question in epitomized form one day shortly after arrival. In a public square they still hadn’t taken down a big artificial Christmas tree. A fake evergreen with golden tinsel decoration, it was absolutely broiling in the bright sunlight and looked as out of place as a Lapland reindeer in the Mojave desert.



I’ve begun with general geographic and climate considerations and will go one from here to talk about Argentinian history and culture, with a special focus on the “Ciudad Autónoma,” the capital of Buenos Aires.  Stay tuned.

Haiti Then and Now

Like most of us, I've been saddened by the aftermath of Haiti's earthquake, as recorded in pictures on TV and the online New York Times, yet still trying to avoid the pitfalls Susan Sontag  analyzes in Regarding the Pain of Others.  Casting around for consoling perspectives (none of which quite work), I thought of Hurricane Katrina. Terrible as it was, the disaster at least served as a wake-up call to that part of the U.S. public ignorant of the difficulties faced by citizens living below the poverty line.  Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Not, as Bible-thumping Pat Robertson believes, because it has a "pact with the devil."  The legacy of colonialism, including a crippling indemnity imposed by France after Toussaint L'Ouverture won independence for this population of former slaves; U.S. military occupation from around 1914 to the mid-30s; and a succession of dictators concerned with lining their pockets at the expense of the people. These, impoverished, resorted to cutting down trees to make charcoal, the only source of fuel available; and so the country became deforested, its soil eroded, and the acreage of arable land reduced. Which only deepened the problem.


When international aid came to Haiti, corrupt officials raked off the better part of it to enrich themselves. Efforts weren't coordinated between competing organizations, and the potential benefit seriously hindered. Just possibly the disaster will be the stimulus that unites Haiti and the international community in a really effective array of programs to put this extraordinary country back on its feet.

I spent January of 1970 in Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien.  Forty years ago Haiti was in a little better shape than it is now.  It had for some time been a destination for world travelers. One of Graham Greene's novels, The Comedians, was set there. Though not his best, it was even so made into a film of some interest.  During our time in Port-au-Prince, Ann and I stayed in the Hotel Oloffson, mainly because Greene's novel had made it famous, an attractive old place with lacy Caribbean Gothic ornament that reminded me of New Orleans.  We instantly became enthusiasts of the city and its inhabitants. The Haitian people, intelligent and energetic as few nations are, combine cultural influences from Africa, France, and Latin America. Haitian visual art, as made by untrained painters, is world famous, vibrant, brilliant in color, arresting in design, and a potent depiction of the life of the Kreol populace.  The religion, which incorporates elements of West African polytheism and Roman Catholicism, is probably the main sustaining force in a land where purely material comforts are scarce.  Anywhere you go in the African diaspora the music is amazing, and Haiti is no exception. Also, it had at that time the best cooking to be found in the Caribbean, a combination of French and African taste and inventiveness. 

While we were there, a regime change occurred. "Papa Doc" Duvalier had died, and so his son, often called "Baby Doc" assumed the dynastic title of "President for Life."  (Do I need to say that the Duvalier regime enjoyed the protection and support of the U.S.? Anything to prevent intervention from Moscow.)  To mark the event, there was a celebratory parade, passing near the National Palace, which looked like a big white wedding cake.  One element of the parade was a flatbed truck bearing the privileged youth of the capital, who appeared to have only a small part of Haiti's African genetic heritage; in fact, most of the kids had curly blond hair and green eyes.  Following international youth fashions of the day, they were dressed in torn jeans and berets, played rock music, and held up posters bearing the image of Che Guevara. This in a celebration of Haiti's incoming dictator/exploiter. The mind reels.  (I was also stunned yesterday when I saw the National Palace a crumpled ruin in the aftermath of the quake.)

I had read Haitian history, so I wanted to go north to Cap Haitien and see the fort that was Toussaint L'Ouverture's stronghold--La Ferroniere, they called it, because it was shaped like an antique flatiron.  Northern Haiti has a pleasanter climate than Port-au-Prince's, but Cap Haitien is quite isolated. There were no usable roads, so we flew north seated on metal benches in a commercial prop plane.  Once there, getting to the top of the mountain where the fort stands was no easy task, involving several hours on the back of a donkey, which quickly became unbearable.  I walked more than half the distance beside my pleasantly surprised beast of burden. And then it began to rain, so the fort was only partly visible, lost in clouds and mist.  It was an eerie experience, standing in the lush tropical vegetation, gazing up at the old stone structure where an unrecorded number of Haitian freedom-fighters died.  In fact, it made so strong an impression that I later on worked out a Haitian setting for several chapters of a novel I wrote in the early 70s.  It was never published, but I think there is a copy of it somewhere, I'll have to look.

Port-au-Prince must be rebuilt. And the whole country must be put on a sound footing, a concerted relief effort that eradicates the poverty that has for two centuries made life difficult for Haitians, and yet meanwhile never destroyed them or undermined their creative energy. Vive l'Haiti et le peuple haitien.

New York to Buenos Aires

I spent the last week of 2009 in New York, mainly seeing friends--Paula Deitz, to begin with, who suggested meeting at the Met Museum on a late Saturday afternoon. I got to know Paula in the late 1970s, not long after she and Fred Morgan married and began sharing editorial tasks for The Hudson Review, which Fred founded with Joseph Bennett in the 1940s. In the summer of 1980, during a month spent in the town of Brooklin, Maine, I remember coming to dinner with Paula and Fred at their handsomely sited house outside Blue Hill. Over the decades since, there have been many occasions to meet, often at HR events, including a day at Princeton a couple of years ago, when the Princeton Library acquired the Hudson Review archive. Fred has since died, and for some time now Paula has edited the magazine alone, which she does very well. I admire Paula, among other reasons, for her quick intelligence and readiness to engage in the demanding work of editorship, while managing to do her own writing at the same time. There's the fact, too, that she and I both did graduate work at Columbia in French literature, one of our shared passions. In fact, my current assignment for the magazine is to write a review essay about a new book surveying the history of Paris in painting.

     Obviously our meeting-place was no accident, and it seemed natural, after our tea and cakes, to have a look at the special exhibition of Japanese works from the Packard collection. Paula told me she at one point made a study of the significance of the plum blossom in Japanese culture, which differs in several respects from the cherry blossom theme. For one thing, plum blossoms last longer, so the aspect of transience isn’t foregrounded as in so many Japanese poems about the “loveliest of trees” (Housman’s description of it). For me any hour with Japanese art is well spent, a chance to discern visual expressions of Buddhist philosophy/religion. I won’t attempt to catalogue all the tranquil and profound works we saw; but let me mention at least one large screen, depicting a bent and gnarled plum tree starred with perhaps two dozen of the emblematic blossoms, all this against a soft gold background. (Is there something to be made of the fact that early Italian Renaissance painting used a similar fondo d’oro for its religious icons and even the occasional cityscape?) Anyway, my view of the plum is from now on forever altered.
       I saw two films that week, one, Up in the Air (based on my friend Walter Kirn's tragicomic novel), the other, Tom Ford’s cinematic debut as director of A Single Man. I’ve always liked Isherwood in general and this novel in particular, despite its reliance on a standard feature for gay fiction, i.e., that the main character dies at the end or at least comes to no good. Still, the characters are credible, and we don’t get the expected panoply of bar flies, transvestites, sadists, serial killers, convicted felons, furtive married men, or bitchily affected snobs that the popular imagination seems to regard as typical of contemporary gay experience. True, there is a student seduction of his teacher (the “single man” of the title), which doesn’t appeal to the ethicist in us, no matter how warmly depicted. But the flashback scenes in which the protagonist recalls his life with his late partner were unmelodramatic and touching. (Novelists and film-makers, take note.) It’s a problem that every “minority” faces, and I well understand African-Americans’ dislike of unvarying depictions of their experience in the guise of maids, stepinfetchits, thugs, prostitutes, addicts, convicted felons, hammed-up clowns, homewreckers and what not.
      A blog post here back in October mentioned an evening spent with a group of young New York poets called “the Wilde Boys.” Since then I’ve begun to know several of the participants, including Alex Dimitrov and Zach Pace, both now completing their MFA’s at Sarah Lawrence, and Adam Fitzgerald doing the same at Columbia. Alex came by for coffee one afternoon during the week, I had lunch with Zach in the East Village, and then there was an invitation from Adam to attend his birthday party at the Café Loup. The party turned out to do double duty as a celebration of a new magazine Adam and two friends have launched. Maggy, it's called, and Adam had the inaugural issue in hand at the long table where he and friends were making birthday toasts. I met his co-editors, the poets Alison Power and Alina Gregorian, and several other friends. The history of poetry since the late 19th century is closely associated with little magazines;  this one seems to be well on its way to becoming a bright light on the scene.



     The change in title and URL of my blog makes for a real or only apparent coincidence with the arrival of the new year and my first trip to the Southern Hemisphere. I’m writing this in Buenos Aires, in high summer. I’ll be here for seven weeks, staying in the old neighborhood called Palermo, where Jorge Luis Borges spent part of his childhood and youth. Apart from the fact that I revere Borges, the idea of making the trip probably originated when Sam Hamill told me a while back that he’d begun coming down every year. He says that what he saves on heating costs for his house in Port Townsend, Washington, subsidizes the annual trip to relatively inexpensive Argentina. And, needless to say, avoiding cold weather is a health boost for anyone over sixty-five. He and Gray were waiting for me when I arrived, both looking well and content, Gray’s hair cut shorter now than the way she used to wear it, and attractive in her summer cottons. There have been several leisurely meals together, and it’s a stroke of luck that these friendly guides can make suggestions and issue words of caution about a city entirely new to me. In the coming days I’ll begin to talk about the sights and sounds I encounter, and thoughts about Argentine literature and art, or about “la vida de los porteños” [the life of the people of Buenos Aires].