El Rio Paraná Gets Seen

Darwin would have been pleased
to walk with me out of the jungle
back into the town of San Ignacio,
seeing one little boy in a tree
and then another in church on his knees.



The day I left San Ignacio for Córdoba on a night bus, I went for a walk into the semi-jungle just to the west of the town. Here are some pictures. The river you will see is el Rio Paraná, which is the natural border between Argentina and Paraguay. This area also serves as a certain kind of natural reserve, with settlements of Guaraní, the tribe native to this area, set about. I ended up going through one of them and it seemed quite poor, but the people were friendly enough to me. For example, I was apparently walking in completely the wrong direction into the middle of the jungle, if this man hadn´t stopped to ask me if I wanted a ride, well then who knows where I would have ended up!

It was a good five hour walk, though in a strange circuit because of the river and the lack of paths. I found one path, however, and for a short time felt that fear that must have plagued those famouse adventurers, like Indiana Jones.

The Sysiphus of San Ignacio

The Ruins of San Ignacio Miní

What you didn´t learn from the Jesuits

was how to coil the thread through the slits

and ignite my own face in your mirror

to better describe the lesson I´d hear

a pauper in the present, but tomorrow freer

in your smiling doctrine sound to our peers

but rotten and hollow to the new but past ears.

There are ruins now: the classrooms

the church now closer to nothing

the aula where the native kids still sing silence

the dead field cemetary blurred

by the Big Green´s encroachment

the small kitchen no longer in use

the empty plaza space where the noose was

laid around your padre neck,

but now you´re gone and still there

is all that memory´s wreck.

Some stupid how emits from the stones;

commands and comments, the seeds you´ve sown

and what wings have flown to call a mate,

my daring darling heart years less to satiate.

Who is Horacio Quiroga?

Slightly out of the town of San Ignacio Miní towards el Río Paraná, the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga decided to build a house.

He did this at the turn of the century, when it seemed much of this state, Misiones, was still a heavily forested, subtropical region. The houses you see at the tourist place: a replica of the first one he built, used in a film as described on this plaque;

and then his second house, made of stone, the statement of this fact implying that a) the first was wooden and b) that it´s difficult to build a stone house in the jungle.

The houses apparently meant a lot to him and stand as an example of his literary aesthetic. Like Conrad and Chekov, who he cites as his own heroes of the short story, Quiroga seems to be fascinated with the nineteenth century character exposed up against the hard reality of the natural world. And he naturally contributes to the larger reaction against the Romantic vision of the natural world that dominated the popular fiction of the early part of the century.

I´m unfamiliar with his work (I hadn´t even heard of him), but there was a graphic version of one of his stories displayed where a number of dimmed out young kids tear a happy sunny little girl to pieces; he´s known for his morbidity. The butterfly, beetle and flying insect collections are a testiment to his interest in the fragile boundary between the safe and the dangerous.

Beyond the details of his house, a small museum on the grounds had a plaque of his Ten Rules for Writing a Short Story.

Only drawing on my own experience, I think these make a lot of sense as advise to a writer. Or that they reflect certain conclusions that I´ve found.

The other fact that struck me about this man - his love life. He taught at a high school in Buenos Aires. One of his students became a lover. Despite objections from her parents and the public at large, he married her. She was only twenty years old, thirty years his junior. After she bore their first child, the relationship began to deteriorate. Quiroga was diagnosed in the 30s with prostrate cancer. After a short treatment in Posadas, the capitol of the state, he returned to the jungle retreat in his ´stone house´.

Whatever happened there in his illness forced the woman and the daughter to leave for Buenos Aires without him. The writer was left there in his jungle world, called ´Iviraomi´, or ´country of the little trees´, to die alone.

All of this brings up something I had mentioned to Ciça: wouldn´t it be better if we could always get to know the artist before seeing their work? The instance in this case was Joao´s short film, something I had heard about for five years, but had only seen last week. I got to know him first. This also applied to Ciça´s friend Cristian, who has made a number of films and I only have recently seen them. It´s likely to be pointless to ask if it this makes art better, but it certainly changes how you enjoy it. And maybe, for me especially, it´s because it cuts out a lot of the distortion I feel comes in when I am looking for the character living in the work. And that´s only when I can´t seem to just let myself enjoy it.

What is Bossa Nova?

Chris White´s Amusement Trip #1

This is Ciça and João, my very very kind hosts here in Brazil. Now's not enough to explain how amazing a time they have shown me, but at least this is a nice picture of them.



Curious about the everyday people? Well, this what Brazilian builders look like. There was a problem in Ciça's new flat where the gas pipe for the next door flat was actually in the wall here. The men cut this and so cut the neighbors off from their gas (they are the two older people to left). As a side note, this couple is from Croatia and have lived in Chile and Brazil for thirty years. The husband wasn't happy - he didn't want to eat cold food. The lady, however, was nice.



Shift back to the night before I left London: my room mates Bas and Yohanna playing a fair well melody now gone to wherever songs unrecorded go.

A few days later, I am in Port de la Selva, just north of Barcelona in Spain, with Laura. This, then, is an introduction to Laura. She is happy because she just delivered a great theory on the relationship between the show Columbo and the 12th century morality plays from York. She's "chuffed", as she would say.

Here is Laura on the beach.

Now I am out of Europe and in Brazil again, as in the beginning, or, at least, for your beginning. For my part, this is from three weeks prior to the first photos in Ciça's flat. This is in the town of Araguari, in the state of Minas Gerais. João is from here and the Latino Dude Man is actually Luke Singer, who is a very good friend of Ciça's in London. We all travelled together to MG and then on to Brasilia, the capitol.

Here is the entrance to that modernist swallowing world that is Brasilia. On the side of the super highway that makes up the main street, this man was selling a likely combination of wares for commuters: safes and barbeque grills.

Dona Regina and Melho, below, are João's mother and sister. He has two others, but I haven't met them, though I saw their photos - this is where João, more or less, grew up. Dona Regina was, again, really kind and made me feel completely at home. The house was unlike any I've been in and entertained certain fantasies regarding it´s broad open layout and the obscure satellite hidden in the back among fruit and vegetable plants growing out in the sun's arid stare.

João's father is a farmer. He rents some of his land out to a factory that makes fuel out of sugar cane, known as 'alcoól'. He took us on a tour of the plant and we saw raw sugar go in one end and come out completely viable gas for cars the other.

This is a wood carving from a the imperial library in Rio de Janeiro of one of the 'bandieros', the Portuguese who colonised Brazil. When the Portuguese court was moved to Rio to avoid Napoleon, they transformed the city into an imperial capitol. Antonio Machado de Assis studied here. (Imagine a link to Wikipedia here - he's very good.)

Horse-drawn carts are common in Araguari and other less urban areas.

Me above the Glory. Though, I do look worried, I don't think I was at all, so don't you worry.

A fair approximation to the Tepid Mind, but in reality the cable car that takes tourists up to Sugar Loaf Mountain. It was a lot of fun.