Pictures

Among the pictures below are:

-a view from our hotel balcony
-the edge of the mangrove forest
-our daily restaurant El Divino Niño and its mascot
-some hiding crabs
-a view of our beach (Southwest)
-some fisherman cleaning what was very possibly our lunch one day
-the entrance to the cemetery
-a hotel where we go swimming sometimes

If you click on the image it should expand enough that you can view everything in detail.

The one road for running

Since we’ve had the scooter and are kept from having to walk everywhere all day, I’ve started running again. There are a lot of hills here and it’s been a while, so I’ve had to use the trick where you focus on getting to a specific object in the road, then another object, and then another, and so on until you’re up the hill. Only here I realize that the markers I use are not the ones that I usually do. Instead of “Just get to the branch! Then just get to the mailbox!” now it’s “Just get to the crushed crab! Then the two horses near the mangoes!” It’s kind of a nice way to render the exotic totally and utterly mundane. Activities like that offer a good way into acclimation, allowing new content into familiar structure. Running’s an easy one: all you need are sneakers, shorts, and a road. And getting lost is an excellent way to learn your way around, though admittedly that’s already fairly easy when there’s only one road. But coming back along the beach and wading across the sand bridge in front of the mangrove forest is a nice way to find the particularity in the vista.

I am still doing my best to get used to the fruit. There are more tropical fruits that I’ve never heard of than I’ve ever encountered before. To my eyes, they are strange and exotic, and have a tendency to contain insides that are wildly different from what their outsides suggest. Of them, so far I think my favorite might be guanamana: spiky green skin with a white pulpy mess in the middle. There is also maracuya (you have to say it like maracuYA, not maraCUya, which is fun because it feels like you’re always really excited to talk about it); mango (that’s the easy one); granadilla, which has a hard orange skin that must be cracked first, revealing the seeds all contained within a kind of translucent pulp, which you then eat (but curiously, without chewing); anón; lulo; mamoncillo; and plenty more that I cannot remember.

When I’m running, I actually attract fewer strange looks than I would have expected. This may be partially due to the presence of the military base down (well, really up) the road from us. We see them running along the road fairly often. As locations for military bases go, this one seems unusual. It is—to put it lightly—rather calm here. But they’ve certainly got a nice locale for training at least.

When I reach Aguadulce, my favorite thing there is the colors of the houses and hotels. The area is fairly concentrated, by Providencia standards at least, and many of the structures here adhere to the same color palette. It’s a bright and vibrant one that’s all primary and secondary resonation. I remember noting them but not really understanding why everything was so color-blocked until I was sitting one day near the beach, and looked out at the water through a teal and orange and yellow railing. The colors, all of them, popped as never before, as their exuberance became obvious as being in camaraderie with the water. The water itself, from translucent to utterly electric, sets the tone, and everything else draws energy and strength from that. It’s like plugging into a supercharged outlet, anything less than a high wattage bulb would burn out in seconds.

If I go far enough, I get to the Fresh Water Cemetery. Like all the other cemeteries here, it is bounded by bright purple walls. I don’t know why. I have noticed that the rich purple of the cemeteries is not a color that appears elsewhere here. But to my eyes, it is such an unusual color to be used for that purpose that it’s one of the more striking things here.

It finally stopped raining(!), so I’ve been trying to take some more pictures, and with any luck they’ll be the next things that go up here.

Scuba Diving

Ten meters under, and chasing after yellow schools of fish, I wondered what everyone else I knew was doing. We went scuba diving on Tuesday, and explored a coral reef. There was huge school of bright yellow fish, other tiny electric blue fish, fish that were nearly translucent with huge black eyes, two stingrays, lobster, a flounder, a sea turtle, an eel, and a shark that refused to come out from under some coral. The day before, we learned how to use the equipment, and waded out on the shore to practice breathing and cleaning our masks in the water on the beach. The next day we took our instructor’s boat and went maybe ten minutes offshore to dive. We got suited up and jumped in the water, and with surprisingly little preamble, descended. Here, I feel like I have to confess: diving makes me nervous. I am generally a relatively calm and controlled person, and have participated in other somewhat risky sports without getting seriously worried. But the idea of being under thirty feet of water and running out of air freaks me out, so as we started to follow the anchor rope to the bottom, I definitely experienced several panicky moments. I came very close to just sucking up my pride and saying I couldn’t do it, but I just kept signaling to the instructor that I was okay and eventually I was. Once we were on the bottom, things got easier, and swimming around a coral reef with flippers and an oxygen tank is just really kind of awesome and otherworldly. The water is so clear that you can see fairly far even that far down, the variety of life is overwhelming, and for once I was on equal linguistic footing with the people around me. So all in all, for about an hour this past Tuesday morning, it was a reasonable bet that I was the coolest person I knew.

A few days before we went diving, we took our scooter (named Elvis, but you have to say it with a Colombian accent) around the island to check out some stores on the other side. It was our first full circuit under our own power, and it was fantastic. Aguamansa, the other side of the island, is less populated and has fewer beaches, but the water there is mesmerizing. The way to travel: coasting along at unknown speeds (our speedometer is broken, as is one brake and one rearview mirror), bounded by the scorched blue of the ocean and the sunset through the mountains, windblown but cool and exhilarated. You also feel like you’re going faster when you don’t have a windshield. We met a woman, very friendly (like most people here), who showed us around her house and the collages and artwork she had for sale, and regaled us at length with stories about the island. And she turns out to know someone in Silvia’s family. Small world.

The conversation proceeded in a mixture of Spanish and English, and I could follow the English (whew!) but as usual, only partially the Spanish. My studies have been proceeding intermittently, and at the moment I can still understand far more than I can say. I’m trying to practice speaking with Silvia, but the differences between French and Spanish keep tripping me up. One thing that I’m just not used to at all is that where the accent goes changes the meaning of the word. Consequently, there are a large number of words that sound extremely similar to me but mean entirely different things. My favorite so far has been when I tried to say “They listened” and ended up saying “Is big spoon.” These two things may seem wildly different in English, but they are a mere slip of the tongue away in Spanish. A demonstration:

“Escucharon.” = “They listened.”

“Es cucharón.” = “Is big spoon.”

and the last one

“Escucha, Ron!” = “Listen, Ron!”

That last one is admittedly not one often encountered, but to me they all sound very similar. Thankfully I think I now have that one under my belt, but there’s still a whole language to master.

Pictures to come soon, if it ever stops raining here.

The Providencia Treatment

Providencia, at first glance, is exactly what it seems: tropical, remote, lush and overgrown, hot, humid, and communal. Then, at second glance, it stays the same. The third look perhaps shades in some detail, but the portrait remains essentially unchanged. This is a place that grows in its acquaintance by the depth of its themes rather than their variety, a perhaps needed reminder that composition comes in myriad varieties.
From its start, the visuals echo the narrative: vistas of stunning beauty join run-down buildings of a sort that would be called “charming” by a particular sensibility in the same breath that it would turn around and look for a resort. If Providencia doesn’t distinguish itself from its stereotype, it’s because it has no need to. Why bother, when even the idea of an identity crisis here seems bizarre, and when ulterior motives of that kind would seem (to me at least) as foreign here as, well, me.

The breadth of the panorama here joins together abstraction and specificity. The oft returned-to water is glorious when seen as water, but when sitting and daydreaming it’s equally easy to lose reference points in the blue field. One scene at night had the horizon line vanish during dinner on the beach. The storm relegated the sky and water to the same monochromatic status, and beyond the shore and anchored boats, the dark could as easily have been a canvas positioned just past the light from the restaurant. Sounds are subject to the same principle: so many crabs scurry away at your approach that the accumulation of noise approaches the purity of its ideal, a sound effect of crabs rather than the crabs themselves.

Though a good portion of people here probably qualify as living below the poverty line, using the word “poor” has not yet crossed my mind. Superficially at least, none of the problems associated with poverty seem in evidence: crime, hunger, housing. It may be only because of the superficiality of the observation, but differences from the familiar here seem to stem from diverging in standards rather than failing to meet them. It’s a tricky judgment to make, and one that I would rather stay away from altogether, except that avoiding it falls into the reverse trap. Overcoming the fallacy of cultural solipsism means avoiding the avoidance of judgment as much as it means a relaxation of critical standards. When you encounter a new place, it seems to me that neither saying “Everything here is different, and thus wrong” nor “Everything here is different; but it’s okay, because they don’t know any better” is the right response. (Yes, it’s an exaggeration, but exaggerating renders point-making that much easier.)

But almost as if to compensate, the narrative offers opportunities for learning: language, motorbikes, different kinds of fish. Learning of the specific sort, not principles but skills, offers a concrete point of access. Getting a handle on riding a scooter is pretty much the same no matter where you do it, and language acquisition, though lengthy and trying, can be incredibly rewarding both in terms of convenience and genuine understanding: linguistic revelations often lead to other kinds of the same. Learning offers a chance to both take and expand, to preserve and focus inward by opening up to the world around you. Learning can offer immense satisfaction too, both in smaller doses and grander ones, when you’re done and have a new skill in your arsenal.

With learning under our belts, we tackle the slow process that is acclimation (and here, acclimatization too). When all is said and done, there’s no real climax or chase scene—there rarely is—just the slow and quiet revelation of what was already known. With this location in particular, it’s the truth that your first impression was right, but insufficient. It comes in the feeling that underlies the action, in the reasons learned and invented for courses already taken. The initial beauty is still almost as beautiful (and the color of the water in particular comes to mind), but now the stunned beauty of first contact joins with a small, warm feeling of possession and ownership to gain depth, and if not permanence, then at least durability. The narrative is no longer abstract (though it still might be just a little fictitious), but concrete. There will be a homecoming, and then all of a sudden, this particular story, without further obfuscation or philosophy from on high, will end.

In Harry Potter's Defence

For me, the most miraculous aspect of the Harry Potter series is how wonderfully and richly it grows. On the joy of its fantasy it is worth reading the first book alone, but as it develops, it proves its worth as something more than a purely imaginative object. Rowling is not one of the great English authors: let’s state that to begin, and furthermore let’s clarify the obvious superfluity of that fact. Harry Potter does not pretend to canonical status, so let’s not waste time detailing the ways in which Rowling is not, in fact, Henry James. These books are at heart a children’s series; they have the simple joys and ease of access that define them as such. Even as their world deepens and darkens, they retain to the end their ethos of youth, and I mean that as a compliment.

Rowling matures as a writer in time to make her characters mature as well, and the somewhat surprising result is that over the course of seven books, her characters grow as believably and as thrillingly as could reasonably be hoped, even exceeding that expectation to become genuinely surprising. Her world increases its complexities to provide the room for that growth, and it is a testament to the scope of her vision that it happens naturally, with grace and pride. It does not achieve the security of inevitability but strives for something else instead, blossoming into a myriad of possible routes, revealing both the tenuousness and the tenacity of that individual choice.

Harold Bloom seems to find in Harry Potter a lack of imagination, originality, quality writing and effective satire. On that last count, he is indisputably, incontrovertibly accurate: the series almost entirely forsakes the dark undercurrent of the societal psyche, and consequently fails utterly as a satire. The series chooses other roads of appeal instead, and other routes towards imaginative flight. The initial thrill of the first book is one of vicarious fantasy, a thoroughly imagined and enchanting fantasy. It is not wholly original, if we define original to mean without precedent. It does, to a certain extent, rest on cliché. But synthesis is a form of originality as well, and if done with skill and joy can be as much a success in its own way as the fabrication of something wholly novel. There is more than one kind of creative act, and Rowling’s imbues the clarity of familiar, straightforward ideas with a richness and depth that render the cliché immediate and the stereotype utterly believable.

Her writing has been disparaged. It is not flawless; as was stated before, her hypothetical status in the literary canon is self-evidently suspect. But she is clever, and genuinely funny; she is inventive in small, memorable ways, and her writing endearingly mirrors her subjects. It is not high English, with a capital E and an imperious voice, but keep in mind that these are children’s books, and after all, lord knows, when you’re a kid, what you really hunger for more than anything isn’t imagination or liberation but the ability to distinguish between finely nuanced layers of prose styles. This is not to say that children’s books should not be written well; they should. But there are different kinds of standards, and Bloom’s is not the one to which Harry Potter adheres. Difficulty certainly has its worth, but the value represented by difficulty can manifest itself in other ways as well. Not everything rests definitively on the apparatus of its presentation.

There is inherent and inextricable value to entertainment, value that justifies itself. Belittling Harry Potter for taking entertainment and enjoyment as one of its core values seems plain curmudgeonly. Looking at the series retrospectively and contextually undoubtedly has worth, but it misses out on the thrill of that first contact high and the exhilaration of discovery. Children’s books can sometimes be read intellectually, but doing so only helps to chart the architecture that lends the narrative its fundamental appeal. To read it on a critical level alone refuses to acknowledge the point; it seems only fair to do the series the favor of at least trying to enjoy it. For me, the books grow in value as the series progresses and its world grows richer, more expansive, and more real. Why subscribe to an economy of narrative when you can revel in magic and adventure instead? These books perhaps do not work to justify their existence as the sole arbiter of taste and intelligence, but they do not intend to. Few things exist in a vacuum, and partaking in one type of enjoyment does not preclude experiencing others as well.

And this, to me, seems to be at the core of Bloom’s critique: the Harry Potter books do not align with his particular conception of quality literature. It is at heart a top-down critique whose varied aspects can all be traced back to the notion of the Right Way to Do Things. Having only read part the preface to Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (because that’s what’s available on Google Books), this is a mode of thought that underwrites his thinking there as well: singularity joined to pervasiveness, and a unitary judgment from which all things can be derived. There, it is poetic influence (this is admittedly a hasty judgment to make, but I’m all about making grand inferences from small amounts of information), while here, it is what literature should be. This is a notion that gets under my skin, because the consequent worldview renders everything a variation on a theme. There are compositions based on different themes as well, and ones that turn their back on a thematic world entirely.

The Harry Potter books are fundamentally and wonderfully good-hearted. Like the books themselves, their characters are flawed, but good. Redemption is offered, but it is realistic, not operatic. They are underwritten with a deep sense of belief in love and friendship, an honest faith that is not maudlin in any way, and that, to me, seems good. Unlike Twilight (and that’s a whole another article right there), their fantasy carries no insidious subtext. For all its whimsy and fantasticality, the series is deeply and warmly human. Reading them does not involve any temporary relaxing of standards or demeaning of morals, demanding instead that each hold steady to their beliefs, as it itself does with pride. Rowling’s narrative is no weaker because her characters are sometimes dislikable or irritating, even for long stretches at a time: I find it admirable that she is unafraid to present temporary abrasiveness because the overall arc is rendered that much more compelling.

Why read Harry Potter? Because it’s fun. Because as it grows and matures and reveals its almost incidental master plan, the extent to which it becomes affecting takes you by surprise. Perhaps it is not universally appealing (though book sales would seem to suggest that it is), and like many children’s books, it probably takes a particular kind childishness to enjoy fully. I like fantasy generally, and as in much fantasy, the success of Harry Potter’s particular brand depends as much on its ability to be extended in the imagination of reader as in the mind of the author. The world is fully realized on the page, but more importantly, off it as well. The series’ greater literary merit or endurance or sophistication or whatever may be up for debate, but I enjoyed every minute of those books.

The Special Center for Children God Bird

We finally have transportation! I just drove to use the Internet now instead of walking half an hour! It was awesome! On Friday we took the bike to Aguadulce (where we get Internet) and back twice without any problems, so by island standards we’re good to go. It was the first time we went out on the main road, I was driving and Silvia was on back. And of course, because we have a very odd kind of luck on this island, on that first ride I had to navigate both a torrential downpour and a herd of cattle. (It was the first time we’ve ever seen cows on this stretch of road. There were maybe 20 of them and we just kind of honked and poked our way through). I feel fairly confident in our ability to deal with unexpected situations at this point, automotive or otherwise.

Also, I was bit by a fish the other day. It was like a marine blitzkrieg, it just made a beeline for my finger out of nowhere, attacked, and then darted away. It really wasn’t serious at all, there’s not even a mark, but it was off-putting all the same.

So my next post is going to be a bit odd. A little while ago somebody commented on one of my posts, referencing the literary critic Harold Bloom. It’s a name that I’ve heard before but didn’t really know anything about, so I went and googled him to see what popped up. I tried reading a few pages from one of his books, but more to the point, I came across a review he wrote in the Wall Street Journal about Harry Potter back in 2000. You can read it for yourself here, but the gist of it is that the Harry Potter series sucks. I happen to really enjoy the whole series and consequently was really irritated by his review, so I ended up jotting down some thoughts while reading it and then putting them together into a defense. (Hey, I’m on a remote tropical island and have plenty of time on my hands. And it’s a good activity while watching Futurama in Spanish, which I can only follow because I’ve seen them all before anyway.)

I’m going to post that review as its own post, but in case you really just came here to read about Providencia (very understandable), I decided to do a parallel post. Since I was already writing one review, I figured I’d do another, this one of something related to Providencia. It’s a bit of an odd idea, but it’s for a blog, so why not? Call it a review/treatment of a hypothetical movie. They should both be up in the next day or two (assuming our Internet connection isn’t interrupted by a thunderstorm or passing bird or something).

And now, for your viewing pleasure, some pictures. I haven’t taken a huge amount yet, as we’re going to be here for a while and I was going to wait until we had transportation and could get around more easily, but here's a small sampling nonetheless:

San Andres from the air


Front view from the shack


Back view from the shack


The shack

Bathroom area

Road to the beach

And a small narrative:
Look at the children playing and having fun!


Whoops.
(He was fine, but the game was over)

And in case you were wondering about the title of the post, it’s what’s written in huge letters on the side of one of the school buses here. It doesn’t really have to do with anything else, I just thought it was funny.

The Character of Places

Random movie observation of the day: the face-grabbing gesture that John Travolta’s family makes in Face/Off to indicate affection is extremely odd. There’s obviously some symbolism intended, but it gets totally lost behind how weird that motion is.

Unfortunately we haven’t managed to get a hold of a scooter yet. It keeps raining, which prevents us from learning how to drive because the field where we’re learning is too muddy to do anything in. And the guy who’s teaching us wants us to drive a few more times around the field before we go out on the roads (irritating to us because we have to wait, but in principle I can’t really argue with him). In the meantime we’re hoping for a stretch of dry weather…

The other night Silvia and I went for a walk on the beach. It was close to a full moon, and although the clouds obscured it most of the time, water was still startlingly lucid and clear in what light there was. Shadows on the sand turned into clusters of crabs and scurried away at our approach. We waded across the entrance to the mangrove forest (? swamp? whatever it’s called) to the bar of a guy who had been accosting us to come have a drink for days now. We sat there on the beach, sipping our “coco-locos” (less good than they sound), almost entirely alone except for the lights and the reggae music from the bar. It was a Saturday night, and although we were told the party had dispersed only because of the rain earlier, imagining the solitude of the moment as all-encompassing was effortless. It’s a common theme for me here so far, so posit living here and the life that would be. (Oh wait, I am living here. But in truth it’s still temporary.)

I love trying to discern the character of different places. It’s easiest with cities, particularly big ones, both because they come loaded with myth and preconceptions, and the sheer intensity of the experience makes its personality that much easier to ascertain. It’s also interesting that it’s a character that exists in conjunction with but not necessarily because of the people who live there. Such a character can be complex and difficult to articulate, and is perhaps as much my creation than anything intrinsic to the place itself. But whether arising from the perceiver or the object itself, it’s a personality that reveals itself quickly but deepens and grows richer the longer I spend there. New York is full, diverse, and rich; Berlin is young, vital and determined; Paris is French.

So what is Providencia? It’s remote, a bit run-down, friendly, and idyllic, but even together those seem to miss the pulse of life here. With only two weeks on the island it’s hard to pin it down exactly, and its diffuseness makes it that much harder. But that in itself is striking, that there’s no imposition on my sense of rhythm, just a suggestion and a strong inclination towards moving a little bit slower and lazier. Except for getting used to different accommodations, transportation, etc. (although that was a bit more of a transition than I anticipated), I feel comfortable sticking to my own objectives to a surprising degree. Moving anywhere new and doing your best to truly live there rather than just be a tourist always involves a negotiation between individuality and adaptation; residents of a place always remain independent to a certain degree, nonchalance being a necessary component of cosmopolitanism. But when you grow up in a place you can almost always choose to breathe its rhythms, and going somewhere new requires a conscious acknowledgement of what otherwise is near-instinct.

So what does all this say about Providencia? Just that since most of my traveling has been to cities, I expected to be struck over the head. Instead, I am finding that acclimation here means dialing back rather than ramping up, relaxing into new rhythms instead of trying to force myself into lockstep. It’s odd also, because I am largely isolated from people I know. In a way it’s wonderful to have the freedom and time for pretty much anything, but you also are reminded just how much other people factor into the idea of motivation in the first place. So that to me, living here for several months, as I am, seems feasible and enjoyable, and I am excited at the prospect. But really living here? I still have to figure out exactly what that would mean.

Water Pics

Here are some pictures to give you an idea of what I mean when I say I can't get over the color of the water:

Observations

Thankfully, we’re more or less settled in now. We’re set to start lessons on the bike this afternoon, so hopefully that’ll go well and shortly we will have wheels, freedom, and the wind in our hair. It’s a bit of a pain to get around exclusively by taxi, and both of us are looking forward to an easier commute to a functioning internet.

And now here, in no particular order, are a series of observations I have made of life in Providencia:

1. The instructions on gmail have now switched into Spanish without my guidance. I now know that “Acceder” means “Sign In.”
2. The seafood here is (unsurprisingly) fantastic. So far on menus I’ve only seen various kinds of seafood and then chicken, so it’s clearly the primary food on the island. At the place we go for lunch every day (a restaurant on the beach called El Divino Niño with a pink statue of a baby Jesus in front), we often see people carrying handfuls of fresh lobster or fish from a little boat to the kitchen, so it’s obviously fresh. If we order the mixed plate for two, we get: two whole fish; a lobster; calamari; crab; coconut rice; tomatoes; and patacon (smashed, fried plantains). It’s pretty fantastic. We could also get shrimp or conch. And Silvia particularly enjoys the vinegar garlic-chili sauce we use to flavor everything.
3. I had never seen crab roadkill until we got here. It’s understandable, seeing as there are crabs everywhere. When you walk along the side of the road, you here tens of them scurrying away as you approach, especially at night or after it rains. Unfortunately we missed the crab migration season, when they close the roads and thousands of them migrate from the mountains to the sea to lay their eggs, but there seem to be a lot as is.
4. There are a lot of mosquitoes and other insects. You learn that “itchy” is really just a state of mind. I recognize that I itch, but I choose not to be “itchy.” It’s all in how you think about it.
5. Heavy rainstorms blow up out of nowhere, last forty seconds, and then disappear.
6. My sense of time and urgency is much reduced from before.
7. It’s an interesting experience, being this disconnected. We still check the internet once a day, but we only really use it for essential stuff, and I know that for most of the day I am utterly inaccessible, and even more important, that it doesn’t really matter. It takes some getting used to, but it’s kind of wonderful. Not quite life-changing, but enjoyable all the same.
8. In the same vein, I am fascinated by what it would be like to live here, and particularly to grow up here, with a worldview that is unfettered and uncluttered. The primary pastime here seems to draw a fine line between hanging out and doing nothing. People sit on the side of the road, talk, listen to reggae, dance, and maybe play dominoes. How different is it from seeing movies in theaters, taking the subway to friends, and going to concerts? I’m not sure; sophistication (in its many meanings), maybe? Perhaps its just because I’m here for such clearly defined objectives, but I have a hard time imagining not moving towards something.
9. I can’t get over how beautiful the water is. Crystal clear and brilliant, multifaceted blue.
10. It’s hot. And humid. Thankfully it’s easy to go swimming.
11. Following that, the showers are only cool, because the main source of water is rainwater (and who has a heater on this island?), but it’s really great. It would be counterproductive to have a really hot shower here.
12. The people are very friendly and helpful.
13. There’s something nice about not being able to choose the movies you watch. You get an interesting assortment of films you wouldn’t see otherwise.
14. Pola ran away again last night, but we found her. Cats run away a lot.
15. Because everybody uses motorcycles to get around here, you get a really odd cross-section of people you wouldn’t expect to see on them. The oddest one yet was the two preteens coming back from school, followed by two women driving next to each other so they could gossip between motorcycles.
16. Life here is nice.

Silvia's Blog

Silvia is just getting her own blog started. You can check it out at sjmantillaortiz.blogspot.com, I'll put a link to it over on the side.