A Poet in Chile (and Argentina)

Note: My wife and I participated in a Go Ahead Tours group excursion to Chile and Argentina from January 3 to January 17, 2019. What follows is my account of this journey. It consists of external and internal observations; mind is like a Möbius strip, a configuration in which the outer and inner aspects are one and the same. In other words, what I see often begins a process of thinking and feeling that sometimes leads to a culmination of that process, a poem. Nine poems are interwoven into this inner/outer travelogue.

We left a day before the tour started. After an uneventful flight to Santiago de Chile, the country’s capital, we took the convenient ground transportation to our hotel, located in a high-end section of the city. The location was good, near a large park; the disadvantage is that most of the points of interest are located about a half-hour’s taxi ride from the hotel. We made a rather bad choice for our first visit, a starred attraction in our guide book: The Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center. We thought it contained a museum, but it only offered a few exhibits of folk art. It is situated by the Catholic University of Chile, an important center of higher education. The cultural center offers many theatrical performances, one of which we were interested in attending, a performance of (Asian) Indian classical music and dance, but the logistics of getting there and back proved to be too difficult. We had a nice lunch, though; vegetarian empanadas. While we ate, we watched teenagers perform what is apparently the latest local dance craze. It consists of very rapid angular movements to popular music. Like line dancing, it is not danced with a partner; it is, as it were, a spot dance, since everyone basically remains in the same spot. It is a street-artsy form of exercise; most of the kids were really good.

We had a much better time the next day when we visited an unstarred attraction in our guidebook: El Museo Chileno de Arte Precolumbino, which contains an exhibit of artworks from Mexico to Patagonia during the long pre-conquistador period. What a different view of the world stared back at us from the many statues we saw! Their expressions seem half human, and half completely other.These beings were thought to control human destiny, to which they seem to be, sometimes, as concerned for human welfare as a supernova. They represent dangerous forces that were sometimes brutally cruel while at the same time assuming the very beautiful forms the prehistoric artists gave them. The only way to survive, it was thought, in a very precarious world where death, illness and suffering were frequent unwelcome guests, was to try to propitiate them.  After a visit to this museum one begins to understand the existential anxiety which propelled the Aztecs’ obsession for human sacrifice.

After lunch, we began a guided tour of the city, a superficial and hurried one, but for tourists like Nirmala and me, who know very little about Chile, enjoyable nevertheless. We climbed the Saint Lucia Hill, the site where Santiago was founded in 1541 by Pedro de Valdivia. The top afforded a nice mirador of the city. We attempted to look at the view with sixteenth-century eyes; however, only the twenty-first century stared back. Santiago is full of high-rise commercial buildings. The “eyes” of the buildings, the glistening office windows, reminded me of some of the indifferent stares of the pre-columbian gods. Scary, but much less scary, since one can look beyond them; they can be ignored.

The next day we were off to Valparaiso, a port city about a hundred kilometers to the west of Santiago. It is smaller and hilly; it has seen better days. Once a thriving port, the creation of the Panama Canal in 1914, obviating the need for a port many kilometers to the south, was a devastating blow.We ascended by funicular to a quaint area that is a Unesco Heritage site. Brightly colored two story-houses were everywhere on the hilly streets; many of the walls covered with interesting murals:

There were also many stray dogs. It reminded me of the many stray dogs we’ve encountered in Chennai, (Madras), India, during our many visit there over the years. On one of the streets in Valparaiso, I witnessed something that impressed me. A homeless woman turned a corner and presented a scrap of food to one of the stray dogs. I got the impression that the dog and the dogged were well acquainted. Her expression, before encountering the dog, was blank. Suddenly she was looking at the dog with an expression of great affection. She was obviously mentally ill; I imagine that she would like human contact, as we all do, but her illness and low status precluded the enjoyment of human society. Her clothes, now quite raggedy and dirty, gave a hint of a well-to-do yet lost social status. I imagined that somehow she had a relationship with a stray dog in India as well; on the bus ride back to Santiago I wrote the following haiku:

One in Chennai, another stray

dog in Valparaiso,

Chile. I’m making friends—at last!

A coincidence: on the way back to the funicular, I saw this:

                                    "I'd rather be a dog"          

It reminded me of what a friend, shocked by human brutality and delighted by canine affection for humans, told me long ago: “The dog is the perfect human being”.  He had a point, maybe; I am still, however, delighted that blind fate has fashioned me into a human being.

Day four of our trip began early; we had to leave around 2 a.m. to catch a flight to Punta Arenas, the southernmost major urban area in Chile. The airport was chaotic; we were traveling during peak season. Our guide, Jorge, however, had everything under control and we reached our destination without difficulty.

Punta Arenas has a population close to 130,000; it began, like Georgia in what was to become the United States, as a penal colony. It is an important base for Chilean access to Antarctica. The wind-swept town reminded me of ones we had visited in Alaska. From our hotel, we could see the Straits of Magellan, which is the many kilometers long connection between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Named after the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, the Straits and the connecting oceans moderate the climate of the town: in winter the temperature hovers around freezing, while in the summer, the season during which we visited, the temperature highs are in the 50s.

One of the highlights of our trip occurred here, a visit to the Isla Magdalena Penguin colony. The island is accessible by a small boat. The tourist-friendly hostess told me that I looked sexy in my life jacket. (Pour la première fois de ma vie, I said to myself.  She was, of course, being ironic—Hopefully not too ironic).

As we approached the island, it looked so desolate that I imagined myself as a passenger on the little boat heading for The Isle of The Dead in the famous painting by Arnold Böcklin. The island, however, is very much full of avian life: hundreds of nesting Magellan penguins, along with some nesting cormorants, were everywhere. The penguins were protected from too close contact with the most dangerous species in the world; we circumvented the island, separated from their strange stares by a small fence. It was an unforgettable experience. The Magellan penguins, a mid-sized example of the species, grow to about two and half feet and weigh about 15 lbs or so. Their nesting season begins around September; they lay their eggs in October, which hatch in December. Penguins mate for life; they re-hook up with each other after a year or so of fending for themselves. Both male and female share incubation duties and subsequent shared duties in raising their chicks. They are among the most unmusical birds on the planet. They are able, however, to identify the call of their mates, so each call has to be distinct. It is hard for us to imagine a female being attracted to the cacophonous calls of her mate; one could as easily imagine her falling in love with a foghorn. It reminds me of James Thurber’s response to a critic who asked him why his cartoon women were so unattractive. They’re attractive to my cartoon men, he replied. Nature knows what she’s doing.

The life of penguins is not easy. They make a little burrow where the female lays two eggs. After they hatch, the parents take turns on a journey for food; a journey from which they might not return. In the meantime, the stay-at-home parent stands guard by the nest. The penguins have many predators. Life is very precarious in nature, no doubt about that. I stared into the eyes of many fledglings. Their expressions were different form the ones depicted on statues of pre-columbian gods. There was no cruelty here; also no source of grandeur; no sense of self. The little stones that were their eyes seemed to be there simply to relay to their little brain whether the curious eyes belonging to me posed any threat. Nature is red in tooth and claw, as Tennyson so beautifully put it. All her creatures, however, are perfectly contained in her; it is only we humans who are able to ascend to the angels and descend to the devils. (Is climate change affecting the survival of these birds? Yes, indeed).

Tennyson was right

How irreverent are soles!

What once was an ant suddenly

is not. Tennis shoes aren’t Jains.

If I would step between their hills,

would doodlebugs be grateful? Ha!

Eat what falls into your jaws;

to a green pinhead of God

lift a beetle between fasts,

beautiful praying mantis!

A bug moving across a chyron

cannot grasp the latest carnage;

it crawls on. I brush it aside.

The next day, January 10, we were off on a bus ride to our next  destination. On the way, we stopped at an estancia, a ranch on which sheep are raised. We witnessed a sheep-shearing; it was interesting, but things were hardly as bucolic as depicted in the sheep-shearing festival in the third act of Shakespeare’s Tempest. After the poor thing was sheared, it reminded me of an enlarged photo of a newborn hamster. At least they didn’t kill it!—which, by the way, they more than sometimes do.

A few hours later, we reached Puerto Natalis, a rather unimpressive little town whose claim to fame is its proximity to the Torres del Paine National Park, which we visited in the afternoon.

Visiting the park was another unforgettable experience. Its large area contains many lakes, each a different color depending on the source of the water and the type of algae present. Wildlife was fairly abundant. The central attraction of the park is the towering peaks of Los Cuernos del Paine. Its base is ancient, but the peak is only about 12 million years old, barely out of the toddler stage of a mountain’s lifespan. (The Andes are 80 million years old). The huge granite slabs, carved by glaciers into their present form, reminded me of Titan-sized versions of the stone tablets of the Decalogue.

I stood in awe before them. Standing before this majestic scene, one is aware of what Longinus had in mind when he wrote his famous treatise over two thousand years ago: the only appropriate word for such experiences is, indeed, sublime.

After I “came down” from the heights, I thought, curiously, of Saint Bernard—at least I think it was Saint Bernard. I remember reading about a saint who had to be led across the Alps by an assistant. He kept his eyes closed—he didn’t want the grandeur of the outer world to challenge the grandeur of his inner world, the world of God. Odd. My Möbius mind informed me that the inner and outer must be kept wisely in balance, since they are actually one and the same. Love of the world, properly understood, not only doesn’t distract us from love of fellow human beings, it increases our resolve to do better.

Saint Bernard

He dealt in mirages, metaphors,

imaginary things, miracles;

his mind painted faces on stones.

He ignored what was under his nose,

so he crossed the Alps with his eyes closed.

Otherwise he’d be distracted; otherwise, he’d see.

(Coirón, crabgrass, dandelions,

vetches, clover and a yellow rose)

Wherever we look, whatever we see,

(their spirit full fills me, not his)

inside and outside encompasses all—

(Mind’s eyebrows are cirrus clouds;

mind’s cheeks are giant red stars)—

Why do we suffer? Why are we here?

God passes God nectar and laughs.

The next day consisted mainly of a very long bus ride to El Carafate, a town in Argentina. As we passed the Argentine border, we stopped at a shrine of an Argentine (sort-of) saint, El Gauchito Gil. He was apparently an Argentine Robin Hood, a champion of the common folk, for which he was executed. Miracles allegedly followed, and still follow. Jorge gave each one of us a card with a drawing of Gil on one side, and a request for intercession on the back. Here is the prayer on the back of the glossy, wallet-sized card:

¡OH! GAUCHITO GIL

Te ruego humildemente

se cumpla por intermedio

ante Dios, el milagro

que te pido; y te prometa

que cumpliré mi promessa,

brindándote mi fiel

agradecimiento y

demostación de Fe,

en Dios y en vos,

GAUCHITO GIL

Amén

The offerings at the shrine consisted mainly of  cans of beer, apparently typical offerings for this folksy saint.

I like to watch news in Spanish when I am in Baltimore. The half hour Noticias is followed by a silly telenovela entitled La Rosa de Guadalupe. It depicts young people who get themselves into desperate circumstances—usually, you guessed it, through inappropriate sexual encounters. When all hope is apparently lost, a white rose descends, accompanied by a  tinsely shower and tinsely music. Thus begins the intervention of the diva ex machina, the Virgin of Guadalupe, who will resolve whatever mess the hapless young folk have gotten themselves into, all in time for the final commercial. Why not make an offshoot of this nonsense, a telenovela called La Cerveza de Gauchito Gil? Instead of a rose, cans of beer would fall into the hands of the afflicted. And if Gauchito Gil failed to deliver, at least they’d be able to drown out their sorrows before the final commercial.

OK, let’s get serious. While riding on the bus, I stared at the endless fields of coirón, the pale yellow grass of the Patagonian steppe; breaking the monotony of the grass were many carafate bushes. I was spotting wildlife—guanacos, flamingos, condors and, of course, sheep. I saw in the distance some creature or other and turned to my wife, who, as I discovered, was asleep on the seat beside me. Her mouth was half-open and her eyes, eerily, were slightly open as well. For a moment she seemed to be dead, thus anticipating the most traumatic event of my life, if I’m not lucky enough to go first. (The major theme of poets is said to be love and death, which I have found out to be quite true).

For my dear and mortal wife

I don’t mind dying (O yes you do)

but hers—I couldn’t bear it!

(True)--Why am I soft as a doughnut?

Why is faith thin as a robin egg’s shell?

Not that I envy a  boulder’s palm

whose handshake I’ll feel soon enough.

Pale-yellow grass on an Argentine pampa

I’d be; beneath the surface of Enceladus,

frozen slush I’d be without her—Once

the marriage bed is empty, what cover

shall warm me this side of cremation,

what melts metaphorical snow?

What melts metaphorical snow? Figuring this out is one of the major problems of life, no? Well, Nirmala awoke and I was back in the middle of life. As we rode along, another poem came to me, a Buddhist poem. Contrary to what people think, Buddha didn’t recommend that one should eliminate all desires, just egotistic desire, cravings characterized by the three impediments to wisdom, namely, greed, hate and delusion. It is folly not to accept life as it is; to demand from it more than it is able to give. Even worse is the folly of demanding that we be something which we are not.  This is the subject of the following little poem. (Note “Nothing” refers to “Sunyatta” the void in which pure consciousness abides, the source of wisdom and peace).

“Enough isn’t enough”—this is desire.

I must be enough—desire again.

Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!

Enough--the fulfillment of Zen.

A bit tired from the bus trip, we finally arrived at El Carafate. Of the three towns we visited in Patagonia, this one is the most lively, largely due to tourism. We had a good vegetarian meal at a restaurant called Pura Vida.

The next day we visited the largest national park of Argentina, El Parque Nacional de los Glacieres. The park contains two large lakes, Lake Argentino and Lake Lake Viedma. We stopped at Lake Argentino, surrounded by subpolar forests, mountains and inhabited by an abundance of wildlife. A bit later we arrived at the southern face of Lake Argentino, which affords spectacular views of the Perito Moreno Glacier. The height of the glacier is much less than the height of the glaciers we saw in Alaska: it rises only about 200 ft, and, we were told, extends about 500 ft below the surface of the lake. What really impresses is the size of the glacier; seen from above, it extends to the horizon as far as the eye can see,

Suddenly, my mind’s eye saw rows of the terracotta soldiers which compose the posthumous army of the third century B.C.E. Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. Looking down from a balcony from the Xian museum which houses the sculptures, one is impressed by long rows of this clay army, which extends into the distance in much the same way as the glacier, albeit on a much smaller scale. Perhaps the icy irregularities at the top of the glacier reminded me of the soldiers’ helmets. I soon wrote the following haiku:

The Perito Moreno Glacier

Frozen in attention,

white-capped Xian solders—One faints;

distant sounds of thunder

Soon we were on a plane again, this time to Buenas Aires, a fascinating  city, where we spent two nights. After that, many in our group flew back home. Not us: Nirmala and I, along with several others, booked an extension to Iguazú Falls, which proved to be a wise choice. On the two hour flight to Iguazú Falls, which is located near the borders of Brazil and of Paraguay, we experienced some turbulence, which led me to write the following poem:

Turbulence

We gallop through clouds—Suddenly,

Pegasus bucks—We rise, we fall;

no getting off this obstreperous steed

until we reach Iguazú Falls.

Whoa, Bronco, whoa! Coward’s no cowboy;

panic has no reins to quiet giddy hooves—

Buck on. Doubt turned green professes still-

things unseen: Faith still believes in Ground!

Ground did indeed arrive an hour later. We were now in a subtropical time zone; it was humid, it was hot. Shortly after our arrival, we took a little walking tour through some jungle, which proved to be an excellent way to muddy up our shoes.

The Falls, which we visited the following day provided yet another unforgettable experience. Yes, it was sublime, but it was also cosmic: I think that there are few spots on Earth where one comes into such close contact with the raw power of nature. 

We took a little train ride to the beginning of a suspended walkway which led to the falls. The panoramic views from the walkway were nothing short of astounding. As we approached the  falls, we all became Keats’s Cortez, as it were, “silent before a peak in Darien”.

Nature can be very small. For instance, there are about  1 x 10²³

molecules in a teaspoon of water. How many trillions more in the human body, a large proportion of which consists of water! The amount of water molecules in the churning mass before us—a truly unfathomable amount!

I felt as if I had been surrounded by unearthly forces of truly cosmic proportion. The people on the walkway became, as it were, tiny (relatively speaking) stars trying to assert themselves in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy many light-years away from Earth.

The majestic Falls, however, became the source of the silliest poem I wrote on the journey, a poem of comic exaggeration:

Iguazú Falls

Pace, Lewis Carroll

If seven drunks with seven jugs

swigged for seven years,

ya think they’d ever drink it up?

They would if it were beer

The Falls gave rise to one of my more serious poems as well. At the site of a churning immensity called The Devil’s Throat—we were just a few feet away from the gurgling abyss—our local guide, Chino, informed us that if anyone leaped into the water at this point, there would be no chance of survival. I asked him how often this occurs—A few times a year, he told me.

How sad. Suicide visited my family on one occasion; I know more than a bit about its devastating impact on the living.  As a physician, I also came into contact with several desperate patients during my long career. A healthy life, as mentioned previously, is a balance between the mind and what the mind sees. When one is locked in an inner world full of demons, the psychic pain can be almost unbearable.

The healthy way to transcend the cravings of the ego is through acts of loving kindness and insight into the interconnectedness of all things. I thought of the lines by the Tang-dynasty poet, Li Po: We sit together, the mountain and me,/Until only the mountain remains.

The path of love and wisdom, as everyone of us knows, isn’t easy. Suicide, which is most often impulsive, is the easy—tragically easy-- way to leave the cravings of the ego behind—(No criticism of those who commit suicide implied! Mental illness is a disease, not a fault).

So many words to introduce a haiku I wrote after experiencing The Iguazú Falls!

Suicide, Iguazú Falls

What an easy way to

become one with the entire world!

My way is harder

We have thus come to an end of this inward-outward journey through Chile and Argentina. Comments welcome!

Thanks to Go Ahead Tours for arranging this trip; thanks to Jorge Monferini, our excellent cicerone; thanks goes to our fellow travelers and to all readers of this account as well!

Dorsett is a retired pediatrician and a widely published poet.