Cherimoya
Marraqueta (crisp baguette)
Tiny jar of homemade whole milk yogurt
Fig + kiwi homemade jam
Hard cheese
Coffee, and more coffee
Soft boiled egg
Butter
Italian & German & French spoken with some awkward Spanish at the Hostal Río Amazonas — I’m high on the forward momentum and very little sleep, and everything is so good.
Easy shared ride to airport, lots of wait time but good watching of all kinds. Now on plane to Calama, full of what I’m guessing is 97 percent men, all of whom seem to know each other. I’m not unobvious in this setting. Are they miners? A partially educated best guess as we are heading to the copper and lithium rich desert of northern Chile. I scan the ground for evidence of the decapitated mountains and draining salt flats that are laid waste in these processes, but there’s little to see yet.
Found the article on dark constellations that I had feared was lost on yesterday’s flight so I’m working on being calm and letting go of attachments in the wake of relief. Everything in the world seems very far away.
Last night I got spontaneous and bought a ticket for a dance performance entitled Háptico (directed by Ana Carvajal) at the Centro Gabriela Mistral in my neighborhood, formerly Pinochet’s headquarters and now a stunning and vibrant democratic civic space for galleries, music, dance, classes, shops, kiosks of antiques and a children’s book festival on this particular weekend. The program I picked up aptly calls it a “centro de las artes, la culture y las personas.” Completely surprised and thoroughly thought-provoked by the performance. The work began with dancers lying on the floor covered by what appeared to be big, thick custom-shaped wool blanket costume and a tape-marked floor (dotted lines of different lengths, straight lines that formed shapes, curved lines, different colors). One dancer stared the movement by rolling up in the blanket and sticking hands out of the top, moving to touch and activate the others. This chain reaction was a central theme of the choreography: feet following the tape, each dancer taking a pose or shape, the next dancer feeling their way to recreate the form that the one before them had struck, all closed eyes all the time. My favorite sequence was the encounter/exchange where one dancer touched another, and the second dancer responded to the touch with a particular and unique gesture depending on the part of the body touched: a face touched = a cheek soft slapped, a hand touched = jumping and holding hands to make a seesaw movement, a torso grazed = a massive full body shudder, etc. I like this translation — it’s another language that I feel both connected to and distant from. This bears exploring.
Kept myself from falling asleep, sort of, and it appeared everyone knew either there too. Even one of the exquisite male stems tango dancers from Lastarria shoed up. I only imagine that it’s not unlie, my world — with the subgroup of dancers and their families and friends making a small community.
Now over mountains heading North. It looks like life below — small valley populations seem everywhere. And green and squares and rows of green. Show on the South facing slopes. So close to the Ocean. Little water.
Mountains have changed throughout the trip: tall + jagged/snowcapped to drier and redder, now different still, almost like burl wood, curly and softer, broad stretch out to ocean. Green has shocks of aqua.
Angularity of road thru what looks like a dry river bed. Now open pit mines. Heading more to east. And what looks like a slaty lake, dried at the edges and white deep aqua colored only at one concentrated point.
Observing self and what’s happening with letting go — writing down the miles, self-narrating.
