I find myself preaching the gospel of Portland. In foreign lands, to the people of all corners, I am preaching the gospel of Portland. Portland is an ideal. Portland is a process and an experience. Portland is a reality. I am an unabashed idealist, in the both the philosophical and contemporary senses, and Portland is my chosen place. Portland is the unfolding embodiment of an archetype. Portland is giving birth and being birthed. It is the collective self-birthing of something new. A new way of experiencing our relation to reality and society and our fellow humans. A way that knows that lucre itself is just a tool, a means of obtaining other necessary tools. But that joy is an intrinsic experience, generated and felt through interaction with other human beings, the world at large, and the self. It is the underlying impulse and the achieved experience. It cannot be forced to appear. It cannot be manipulated. It can not be bought. It is the freely given and received gift of something unknown, a power that can only be understood and experienced in contemplation of what it has given rise to. I can go no further in arguing the existence of what is commonly called God. There is no God. God is all powerful. All praise to God. The motive power and the complete fulfillment, the source of sources, the archetype of all archetypes, and the perfect unfolding of these in the processes and laws of manifested reality. And in that unfolding there arise beings of self-reflective consciousness, able to discern and experience a selfhood and a field of choice in living and acting. Moral choices, choices in the process of experiencing life. Choices in the processes of love. Love and Joy: the final motive power and end of experience. Reality in its naked truth. And at a certain point, as such a being, you find yourself faced with a consciously recognized choice to live and experience your life how you damn well most please to. And you realize that joy and love are freely given and can be freely received, in convivial interaction with other individuals. And if there are enough people at the same time having this realization, if this is in fact a shared and collective phenomenon, then in their interaction as social-biological beings, these people will begin to congregate with those of like mind, to concretely realize their perception of life as joy through convivial, free interaction. With money useful only insofar as it is a wisely used tool in the lubrication of human interaction and material life. Life is material. I am a materialist, in both the philosophical and contemporary senses. But material is the tool. Freedom and love are the underlying power and the living result.
And naturally as they congregate, people of this mind will create a living community which is the collective evolution and embodiment of this idea as a society. Societies exist. They are born, live, and die. Many have come and gone before. There has been a predominant one for several hundred years. It has come to rule us in ways we can scarcely plumb. You know. You know what you are joyously reacting to. The usurper. The interloping bully and machine, who imagine they can improve on 50,000 years of prior human experience. This society: this society is reaching the end of its vitality and its life. It is in a feverish shaking final spasm before, like an overheated engine, it siezes and stops. But people will still be living their lives. They always are. And by this time (which is now) there will be a new society, running in parallel, ensconsed within but evolving its own rules, expressions, and poetics. And this society, now living and viable, represents an alternative for those who have been failed and abandoned by the older society. And so the new society grows, a burbling infant. And in places it has reached such a density and creative vitality that it becomes a model, an archetype, and attractor. A growing sphere of influence whose gravity now affects the wider world and the new society as a whole. It is not one program. It is not one pathway or institution or group or clique or philosophy or band or bike-gang or choice of beer. It is all these things collectively. It is their gleeful, ecstatic manifestation through creative interaction. It is Portland. It is our Portland. The one WE are creating, not as a "thing" to create but as the natural expression of our conviviality, as the product of simple daily choices, and (whether we intend it or not) as a model and an example of what simply happens to be a new society. This is Portland. The Portland we choose to create and live in. A new City on the Hill? Perhaps. Someone has to build it. Let it be us.
Soapbox Alert: I go off on a long tangent in this one. But it is also my last dispatch from this journey, so perhaps you will indulge me. As some of you probably know, I have fun indulging in observation-based ramblings. I may start a regular series of them.
I must say I am sad to be leaving Guatemala. It has been amazing. I know that I will have to come back to Latin America. There's a lot more of it yet to see. But I am also very glad to be getting back to my country, my culture. Being down here has been such an education in cultural/societal comparison and contrast. Every time I think I've got it figured out, I encounter something that is just simply confounding. This guy grabbing my backpack from my back and running toward the bus: is he trying to steal my pack or helping me onto the bus I need to catch? Turns out to be the latter. But it is also not the best bus for me to have taken, it will only get me partway there and then I'll have to change to another, but the guy is the bus "ayudante"/assistant and is trying to cram as many people on as possible so they can make more money.) There really is a certain "never the twain shall meet" quality to any comparison between Northern EuroAmerican and Latin American culture. I love diversity, it is a big part of why I travel. But what many liberal Americans might not pause to think about is that the very premise of diversity, if it is real and worthwhile (and I believe it is) is difference. Let me repeat that. The premise of diversity is difference. There is a sense in which Latin America is ineluctably, unfathomably (to a Nordic like me) different than Anglo America. I love this experience of immersing myself in a foreign culture, but I will also always be foreign in it. When the whole school in some little village in the Cuchumatanes runs outside to the edge of the trash-strewn roadside to delightedly scream "Gringo! Gringo!" as I walk past, you know there is both a human commonality and a cultural gap, all in one piece.
Speaking of litter. Guatemalans (and I'm guessing people in the rest of Latin America and the "third world" generally) are simply blind to what we see as litter. They apparently don't notice it any more than we would fallen leaves. There is an honesty to their approach though, I admit. Not hiding their trash away in distant landfills. North Americans actually generate much more of it. Still, for it to be laying all over the place, to me is simply grotesque. I don't say this as a moral judgement, just a visceral reaction. If there is a single reason why I might decide not to return to Latin America, that is it: the sheer trashiness and squalor. It is everything a properly conditioned Northerner might imagine and fear. I saw a litter-free home and yard in a village once, in an area otherwise particularly trashy. It astonished me. I wanted to take a picture. The most litter free area I encountered was high in a remote and basically roadless part of the Cuchumatanes Mountains. Roads bring trash. Roads bring civilization and modernity and consumer goods. And that means plastic, and that means trash. What is trash? The inorganic, non-decomposable "bi-product" of a petroleum based consumer society. Earlier societies had trash heaps, but everything was made of organic material or clay. There's a difference. In the last century we became a society preoccupied with the wanton production of stuff, disconnected from any organic process of material and energetic recycling. Or at least any process which is meaningful in human terms. The production of disposable plastic containers and wrappers is essentially the production of new (and ugly) geologic objects. The creation, distribution, and use of which pollutes the air and litters the landscape.
And there is no divorcing this detritus from the rest of the petroleum society. It is all of a piece. Oil
burning vehicles, roads for the vehicles, products to ship on the roads (using the vehicles), to sell to make money to buy more products that someone is making to sell to make money to make more products... and there goes the neighborhood, and the countryside, and the atmosphere, and the glaciers, and the alpine tundra, and Florida. Okay, so there's mitigating factors, but you get my point. And here I am flying home on a plane. How many miles of bicycling will it take to offset that? A few thousand I suppose. But hey: the oil really will run out someday, or more precisely become scarce enough to cause fundamental changes in how our economy and society operates: what it makes and how it makes it; what it grows and where it ships the produce, and how, using what source of energy, and at what cost. The implacable logic of the market will actually take care of most of this. I believe in the market: in other words I believe in the free exchange of goods and services and ideas.
But this can take place with or without the relatively recent historic development of capitalism or industrialism, an outgrowth of the energetic mercantilism of the early modern era (and other factors.) More broadly I believe in freedom. The freedom to exchange goods and services is a subset of the larger sphere of human freedom. There is no single thing that defines it. "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" comes close. So does the neo-pagan and libertarian slogan "do what you will, that it harms none." The blindness of Americans has been to the fact that capitalism, in its historical reality, can be and often has been, deadly to freedom, both in the free market and larger senses. The blindness of the Left, on the other hand, has been to the fact that the market as such is not the problem, and that the abolition of markets is more deadly to freedom than their misuse is. The grand program of the modern Left was to artificially replace and replicate the functions of the market with some kind of enlightened bureaucratic technocracy. But this is no more possible than the creation of artificial life or intelligence. To even attempt it is a kind of abomination, although an understandable one considering the montstrosities perpetrated in the modern marketplace. But where does that leave us? If both approaches to societal perfection are collosal failures at meeting the real needs (both material and spiritual) of real humans in real communities? I think it leaves us just where we
are, which is actually a very good place: discovering (or rediscovering) and enacting humane ways of living. Rediscovering the reality of individual fulfillment through meaningful participation in community. A recognition of the deepest truths of tradition combined with an open minded ability to adapt and modify those traditions in ways appropriate to our current material and spiritual conditions. As such, this approach is both radical (literally, getting at the root of things) and profoundly conservative. It constitutes an acknowledgement that there really are bedrock truths to the human condition, and that finding and expressing them in our unique contemporary context is the most meaningful thing we can do in life. This does not have to be complicated. It might for example be as simple as the willingness to utilize an intelligent advance in humane technology: for example adopting the latest techniques and improved methods of natural building. Or growing your own strawberries and throwing a shortcake party. If you want to be mathematical about it, what strikes the best balance between energy expended and result? While at the same time most conserving and enhancing our deepest spiritual values? What is simplest? Or here's the best measure: what is most fun? There's a lot of particular ways these things can play out. Maybe as many as there are localities. Despite their apparent trashiness and squalor, that is what the traditional communities and cultures of a place like
Guatemala can teach us. This is not trivial. There is something astoundingly strong and enduring about the indigenous cultures of Guatemala.
Look at the Guatemalan civil war. Inspite of killing 250,000 people, the government never really managed to subjugate or defeat the highlanders. They are a people unto themselves. Poor, deprived of capital, but independent in a way that is far deeper than the merely material. A Mayan village today is not fundamentally different than a Mayan village 500 years ago. There is a kind of unbelievable, unconquerable conservatism to such a culture. Spain is long gone. Armies have come and scorched the earth, and ebbed away again. Why do they even bother to come? What were they truly trying to accomplish? They'd talk about defeating communism. Communism! Yes, various rebel
groups had a communistic philosophy. The 20th century only allowed thought to fall into certain categories given by certain influential European philosophers of the preceding centuries. But Mayan highlanders? They are not intellectuals in that sense, and they threatened nothing but the idea of total subjugation of all non-ruling groups. There they were, in some lingering sense unconquered after all these centuries. Catholic, yes (and now evangelical too), often unpropertied, usually economically dependent, but fundamentally different. Fundamentally non-European. To a ruling class long fossilized into a caricature of socially inbred pseudo-European aristocracy, such a thing cannot stand. It must be erased, or at least controlled like a dog on a choke-chain. So there is a
kind of long stalemate. The continuing oil-fueled boom of the world economy has of course now reached into all corners. But when it is all past (sooner or later) there will still be Mayan villages. Their high civilzation outran its resource capacity a thousand years ago, leaving awesome stone cities lost in the lowland jungle, and a people who retreated to the highlands to live more modestly. There was no grand design to it, just as there is no grand design to a campesino's trek to the Northlands to work picking lettuce or washing dishes. But things add up, and civilizations change. Fall. Reconstitute in ways unimaginable. But village life endures. It has unceasingly for 8,000 years. It is the kernel that is conserved in the droughts, inflagrations, inundations, wars, madnesses, and fads. Places that have conserved this pan-human core will endure inspite of and through every crazy change that comes along. The local dress may grow brighter with the addition of new dyes. But
when the dye factories stop, they'll go back to crushed insects. When there are no more gringo tourists to buy their handicrafts, they'll just produce for their own use, same as ever, and keep on growing corn and potatoes. I'm not romanticizing. Their life is not ideal by our standards. Women have no opportunities outside of the household. There is no intellectual life as we conceive of it. There are no summer concerts in the park, weekends at the coast, or recreational bike rides. But they do have their own stories, festivals, rituals, celebrations, the occasions and enactments that enliven the round of the year. Every community everywhere does. Theirs are different than ours, and vice versa. But each society can perhaps recognize that the other has a valid contribution to the fund of knowledge of "what works" and what is worth emulating or adapting to local circumstance. This is vital, because all the solutions are ultimately local, but no locale has a monoloply of wisdom and knowledge. We can all benefit from someone else's experience. And whatever else may be true, America is finally one big place. There are no separate solutions to the various problems facing Northern and Latin America. Poverty and prosperity, indigenous and "old world", brown and white, oppression and justice, ecology and population, migration from the south and immigration into the north. There is no magic latitudinal line above which the solutions are "American" and below which... below which there are no solutions. America is America. God Bless it.
Some telegraphed observations on my final 2 weeks in Guatemala:
The realization that Antigua is not a city but a collection of church ruins and spanish-colonial buildings turned into hotels and restaurants.
There were very few publicly visible disabled people in Xela or anywhere else I went in Guatemala. Arriving in Antigua, the feeling that they have in fact all come here, to beg on the sidewalk from tourists. Just an observation, but I think perhaps close to the truth, in a country that has absolutely no visible provisions for alternate mobility.
Vocano Pacaya: the sheer wonder of encountering streams of red hot flowing lava. If you come to Antigua and do one thing (and are up to a somewhat rugged hike) do Pacaya.
Many gringos come to Central America and sort of lose and/or find themselves, for example:
Adam the Paranoid Canadian Messianic Jew on his all-organic evangelical quest. Tony the conspiracy theorist lyric-poet coffee and chocolate roaster. His roasted cocoa beans (at his shop on 7 Avenida and 7 Calle in Antigua) are the holy grail of chocolate. His journalism can be found on Indymedia (search Tony Ryals.) Marcos the swedish hippie who wants to open a hotel in El Salvador.
And others.
Bus ride to Flores: 9 hours from Guatemala City, down from the highlands to semi-desert and then into erstwhile jungle now largely ravaged and burned for a combination of small plot agriculture and large ranching.
Flores: another quaint but very touristy place, a town on a small island in a large lake, connected to the mainland town of Santa Elena by a causeway. Santa Elena is larger, and dirty, smelly, and noisy.
Tikal. Amazing Mayan ruins in the jungle. 200,000 people lived here before something went fundamentally wrong with their economy, resource base, and society. Monkeys swinging through the trees! Reinforcement (for me) of the sadness of zoos in comparison to animals being able to do what they do in their natural space. If you come here, I recommend staying at Tikal at one of the places there, even if a bit more expensive. That way you can be there for the very early morning and later evening, when the monkeys and birds are most active. Seriously, if (like me) you've never before seen monkeys doing their thing in the wild, it is so cool.
Sane Canadians.
Bus from Santa Elena to Rio Dulce. Intended to take boat from there downriver to Livingston, a town reachable only by boat. But they have jacked the boat price up to 100 Quetzales per person, and no bargaining. So I and three others took a microbus to Puerto Barrios (Guatemala's Carribean banana port) and an outboard from there to Livingston, for 50Q in total each. Livingston is a hybrid of Ladino Guatemalan and Afro-Carribean. It has Guatemala's one black/African descended community, the Garifuna, who came as escaped slaves way way back. Aside from catering to tourists, they fish there. That's about it. Having no roads in or out from the rest of the world, it feels and functions like an island.
At Puerto Barrios, huge Del Monte and Chiquita container ships stacked high with containers of bananas. This is where your bananas come from.
Lesson from the bus ride from Puerto Barrios back to Guatemala City: don`t bother paying the extra 30 Quetzales for the highest class of bus, you are only buying the pleasure of being bombarded by horrible B-movies at high volume, and fed a crappy baloney sandwich.
Guatemala City: a city. Not as bad as some make it out to be, but no paradise.