a mountainous moment

There are some things, if you see 'em, make you smile. You can't help it. Like, yesterday I saw a couple of Quechuas leading a donkey heavily laden with straw along a dusty, rocky road. We're talking grass piled up almost as high as the donkey is tall. Not smiling yet? Well, the man is wearing a brown striped poncho, like you saw in the movie "the three amigos", a pair of faded pants, and a floppy black hat that casts a masking shadow over his eyes in the afternoon sun. He uses a staff and looks world weary and wrinkled, yet quietly dignified. Behind him trudges his wife, decked out in about five skirts "the more, the wealthier" of brightly colored designs and a plain white blouse. On her back is a bundle of sticks, presumably firewood. They walk along, this man, woman and donkey, up hill towards the hulking mass of Huascaran, the highest, snowiest mountain in Peru.

None of this is really smiling material, I know. But here's the kicker. Perched on top of all that herbiage is a tiny little boy in a bright blue vneck sweater. His dirty, weatherchapped face beams as he bounces along. You can't see his legs, of course, as they're buried deep in grass. Utter bliss.

Tell me you're not smiling.

olé

Snip, snap – badaBOOM! and it´s all over. This is it, folks, the next to last hurrah. I abandoned the children whom I´ve been teaching to draw what they see and to question authority. I´ve finished with the orphans whom the authorities have declined to let us take home, no questions asked. One more week here in the none-too-deepest and not-so-darkest Amazon and then I will – in the words of Ernest Hemingway (if he ever thought to say them) – bow to the crowd and fade.

First, though, I´ll transition myself by taking my lovely wife on the backs of burros to the lovely mountains to take many photographs of the quaint little natives in their quaint little flea-ridden adobe cottages. We´ll eat grilled mountain corn and feel impetuous to the strains of the pan flute and charanga as they pluck and blow that age-old Simon and Garfunkel classic, El Condor Pasa. You know the words… I´d rather be an American than a third-world person, yes I would – if I only could… sing along!

Cynicism is so unbecoming in a child of the Truth, which I aim to be. Let me sidestep for a moment that raging bull and wave a flag for beauty, love and Peruvian cuisine. Hurrah! I harangue, of course, to sideslip with a flourish the malevolent, hornéd truth – that I am sad to leave again a way of being that feels so natural since it is so deeply woven into the fabric of my memories. This – here – is pieces of how I was. As easy as it has been to slide, heels together, into a posture of proper belonging, the fact is that I am not home here. Or there, or anywhere. In truth, I feel less like the matador and more like the bull – bewildered, instinctive and mis-placed.

There is, however, no escaping your part. Something must die, bull or man – the crowd demands it – so I will draw my sword. We murder to dissect, they say, so I have written this and murdered the sadness, smothering it under an avalanche of roses. Adieu, Peru.

a dolphin to end it

It was hot. The human body is a fragile little flower, with only a few degrees on each side of surviveable. It seemed that day we were reaching the upper limits, and we had been playing volleyball. It was muggy as all getout, as is usual in the Amazon basin, so a few of my friends and I decided to escape to the tepid brown waters of Lake Yarina before the sun dropped too low and sent our chronically worried mothers into conniptions.
We swam and splashed and squealed away the sweat, filling our mouths with contaminated water and blowing it out between pressed lips, like whales. The city of Pucallpa dumps its sewage directly into the Ucayali river, which connects to our lake. We figured hygiene was someone else’s problem (which is why our mothers always worried).
Suddenly a dolphin shot out of the water, not fifteen feet away. Then another, and another. They began to torpedo roll under the surface, jump, breech and play. We counted as many as twelve at one time. There had been no warning. We were twenty feet off shore in chest deep water, and suddenly found ourselves engulfed in the beautiful, four-foot mammals. It was an incredible, euphoric experience and we stood there in mute awe, hoping it would never end. Then, suddenly, it did. As if on signal, the dolphins were gone. Five minutes later we saw the pod a good ways up the lake, swimming off into the distance.
A realist would say the dolphins were curious, or thought our squealing sounded like a wounded dolphin, or figured the water we were spuming sounded like the air which passed through the blowholes of their own kind. But I say no. Such a thing had never happened before and, try as we might, never again. It was magic, plain and simple.
Why do I tell you this? Because the magic is there, and even if you´ve never swum with the dolphins, it´s real. So don´t give up on it.

And to finish, a few quotes from the wise.


“What we value today as tolerance is really apathy. Tolerance means I understand you. I disagree with you. And here´s why. Instead, we´ve become apathetic - we seek to avoid conflict with friends and others, and in so doing turn a blind eye to what is happening.”
Joanne Pepper

“I wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we´ve dressed him up, or is it dressed him down He´s a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar crystal and saccharine when he isn´t making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshipper absolutely needs.”
Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451

“When belief in God becomes difficult, the tenancy is to turn away from him but in heaven´s name to what! My problem is with life is not that it is rational, nor that it is irrational but that it is almost rational.”
GK Chesterton

“Outside of a dog a book is a man´s best friend. Inside of a dog a book is too hard to read.”
Marlin Brando.

my soul for a buck?

Holding onto the past is a corrosive stance. When I finish a painting, it becomes the past. Ergo, I believe I’ll go ahead and stop holding onto them. If I have a painting you want and you make me an offer that will allow me to continue to eat AND paint, I’ll send you your painting. Heck, I’ll even throw in six cups of vicissitude, without even bothering to look up the definition. I must warn you, though, that my craft is expensive to uphold.

If you know me well enough to trust my impeccable good character, toss me a line and I’ll grab it. We’ll pull close in a spirit of good old-fashioned camaraderie and trade or barter as friends. If not, I’ll figure out some sort of Paypal thing online and we’ll do business like the soulless capitalists we are. If two people want the same painting and both offer me enough paper rectangles for my material gladness, then I suppose we’ll just have to make an essay contest out of it. You’ll be forced to write three paragraphs (a paragraph, by definition of my high school English teacher, must have at least five sentences) on the topic of why my painting will look best on your wall.

Here, then, is my email: jlbarkey@hotmail.com

post script. if you are interested in a painting, please inquire as to details such as size. They range from hugemongous (three feet by four feet) to teensy weensy (seven inches by nine inches).

Also, I won’t be in a position to mail most of them until after Christmas.

that is, sorry

I haven’t yet met everybody and had a good chat to confirm this, but I think everyone has times when they get inexplicably anxious. For me, these occur at night when I start thinking about trying to sleep. The day is done and I’m not tired enough to knock off, so I twist and turn and eventually give up and go watch a movie. Or write. Or something. Writing helps because I can through it try to give body to the shapeless fears and unresolved conflicts that flit around my brain with the bats.

There’s one that has been bothering me – that I sort of kind of called Americans bloodthirsty. Um, sorry about that. Sweeping generalizations about large groups of people are basically racism. The truth? While I’m saddened by abuses of power, I’m also aware of inestimable good and beauty of so many American people and so much of its infrastructure. I’m tired of my own cynicism and the way I’m fond of pointing fingers. I think I’d rather spend my life finding good things and affirming them, not the opposite. Habits become character, though, and it’s a hard one to break.

I’ll start small. There’s a mangy puppy that hangs around outside the door where we live. The first time Anya gave it some food it was just lying there, ridiculously thin and pitiful. Now it runs up wagging its whole body and enthusiastically gyrates around, jumping fully into the air and licking anywhere it can. Puppies are good things. Go adopt one.

the brothers

I have a piece of dirty linen to pull out of my closet. It’s been scrunched in there next to the skeletons – covered in dust and reeking of mousiness. Here it is: I’m not a very original chap. Often the things I write are clipped (consciously or no) from whatever book I happen to be reading at the time. And even when they aren’t, I usually spend at least half the writing trying to make them sound as though they were. But wait! There’s another even more dastardly confession: plenty of times when I’ve been unable to think of something clever, I have gone back and pillaged one of my old journals to rake up whatever muck I could find. Twice unoriginal thus am I.

The reason I’ve felt like exposing my soiled linen in this manner is that I just finished reading “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, reputed to be the greatest novel by one of the greatest novelists ever. While I was reading it this nattering little demon sat on my shoulder, prattling on about all the wonderful things I could clip from it and how intelligent they’d make me (sound). When all is read and done, though, I don’t feel up to it. First, because the book’s so cram-packed with heavy thought I’m loathe to Joshuafize it for you. Second, because it treats on the awkward, awful nature of humanity, which is prideful and contradictory and selfish and only occasionally inspired to loftiness. This has forced me to think more seriously about my own weaknesses and depravities (the real ones, not the comfortable easy ones), so I can only end by asking you to please read “The Brother’s Karamazov” slowly and with much self-reflection.