I spent a tranquil Sunday after Christmas wandering the quiet end-of-holiday streets of central Santiago, before getting a plane back to NYC that evening. In the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombiana I came across a magnificent quipu, a complicated mass of threads and knots used by the Incas to store information about the empire – census data, weather conditions, the location of villages etc. It was fanned out in a dramatic circle for the purpose of the exhibit. Here’s what they look like. The precise meanings of those knots has yet to be deciphered, their significance lost along with the Incas themselves.
That quipu, the multicoloured Inca cloths called cumbi, and the huge geometrically designed weavings that C and I saw today at a MOMA exhibition on Bahaus, reminded me how I’m intrigued by thread as a material. In weavings, in clothes, in tapestries in quipu, wherever. One of the labels at the Bauhaus exhibition mentioned that the “inherent quality of materials” was central to the movement. What are the inherent qualities of thread? Ancient and practical come to mind…but then compared with wood and stone it’s not ancient at all. Human. Story-telling. Strong.
*******************************************
Earlier that day in Santiago I’d seen two kids playing by a fountain outside La Moneda. Children give us hope…I thought momentarily…and then they become adults. But determined not to succumb to cynicism I carried the thought through. Ok they become adults. But as children, they enable adults to see through a child’s mind again, which is no bad thing. Probably the key to sanity. And concern for their children’s future makes adults act far better than they would otherwise.
*******************************************
Back in Lima again after 10 years away. Last time I was there as a free-wheeling inquisitive 22 year-old. This time I was walking down the same streets as a 32-year-old soon-to-be-mother, acutely aware of the passing of time, how things change and don’t change. I decided to see if the woman whose house I lived in back in 1999 was still there (A, the mother of the poet Antonio Cisneros). We had lost touch several years ago. I passed the small Amnesty office where I used to work, crossed over to the familiar street, not remembering the exact house number but knowing I’d recognize it. A couple of blocks along I saw a huge new housing development, one of hundreds that are springing up all over Miraflores…that’s it, oh well, I thought, the house has gone. Then there it was, teetering on the edge of the new development. I peered through the window and everything was exactly the same. Dark wooden polished floors. A gold-rimmed mirror on one wall. Carefully-placed photographs of family members in frames on old furniture. One of AC’s grandchildren answered the doorbell when I rang and she brought AC to the door. She was older, so much older. Her memory was hazy and she only partly remembered me. But the wonderful thing was that she was there. Another thing that I found was still there was a small plate that I’d given to my friend AL’s mum before leaving. “Mira,” she said, and showed me the plate propped up in a display cabinet. Both those mothers seem to emanate security and keeping things in place. Eeek, can I have that in me?!
*******************************************
I was spoilt over Christmas, joining M and D on a boat around Cape Horn. On board we watched a feature documentary on Shackleton's second mission to the Antarctic. The mission failed in that he never accomplished his goal of crossing the continent. It succeeded in that he achieved his revised goal of keeping all his men alive. That was after the most staggering feats of endurance(which ironically is the name of the ship they’d had to abandon when it got trapped in the ice). Aside from wondering whether the equivalent group of people today could have survived what those men did, it made me think that human resilience to the cruelty of nature is so much stronger than our resilience to the cruelty of humans. What a strange, self-destructive species we are. What other species would conceive of things like concentration camps, gulags and torture?
*******************************************
What was going to be a very simple wedding – a quick trip to City Hall – has somewhat grown. We still want to keep it smallish and personal though. The first couple of evenings I was back C and I went hunting for a venue. There was the Foundry – a converted metal foundry that I’d thought could be a cool, wow-factor industrial space. It was dingy and disappointing. It felt like somewhere that is presented as a cool, wow-factor industrial space and has the prices to match but falls far short of actually being it. There was the Waters Edge, a restaurant on East River. It has impressive views of Manhattan but felt a bit like a wedding-factory and too tackily glitzy. And then there was the fabulous Seaman’s Church Institute near South Street Seaport, with its calm modern chapel, its gallery full of model ships and the “top deck” space for the party with glass walls overlooking Brooklyn Bridge. Venue found. Six weeks or so to fix everything else…nothing like a deadline.
No comments:
Post a Comment