Preface to Other Sides

Preface to

Other Sides:  A Journey With Maps

"What then is writing of quality?  Well, what it has always been:  knowing to stick one's head into the dark, knowing to jump into the void, knowing that literature is basically a dangerous occupation."  Roberto Bolano

The news from Mexico now is all about drugs, especially the wars along the border, those closest to home.  In the spring of 2003, even though it was already old news, the Zapatistas were still getting most of the attention, and there was then and is now the persistent issue of the hundreds of murdered and mutilated young women in the border towns, especially Juarez, about which Roberto Bolano wrote what I consider a masterpiece of fiction, 2666. 

And those are just the headlines, the major events that seep across the border because news editors think we might find them relevant to our lives up here in the promised land, where most things, relatively speaking, work pretty well and reliably, and where, although we are not by any means at the top of the class in low rates of crime or violence, at least, as far as I know, no one has ever rolled the heads of their victims across a dance floor, nor do sheriffs and police chiefs count on being murdered a few days after taking office.



Which does not mean that we have to live in an ivory tower on this side of the border.  Unlike Mexico the USA is an extremely practical country, even in its arts and letters.  Everything must be useful to be of value.  We even think of pleasure as useful, which usually means that art, if it is to have any value at all, must have some political relevance.  There’s a recognition that art has its place, but it’s a relatively humble one, even for works that fit the political criterion.  Everyone knows that, it's not controversial, but I want to make it clear that I’m an extreme contrarian to that way of looking at things.  For example, I don’t think the currency or the extreme horror of the Juarez murders has any bearing on the value of or my interest in Bolano’s masterpiece.  In fact I’m tempted to say that I prefer The Savage Detectives, if for no other reason than that it’s all about poets and their place in the world.  The best part I thought was that Bolano took for granted the value of poets and how they lived, regardless of how good or bad, famous or obscure.  The poetic life is the subject of that novel, and as such it becomes a long and elegant manifesto of his famous remark at an awards presentation in Venezuela that writing is a dangerous occupation.  Each section of the novel suggests that there are many types of danger for writers, not just political, more than you could ever shake a stick at, and it is the job of each writer to find his own and then work its ore for all it’s worth, as his talent allows.

Greene's main concern as a Catholic convert, his trip at least partly financed by the church, was godless socialism.  The battle between church and state was by far the main headline in Mexico at the time, and conditions were most extreme in the state of Tabasco where all the churches were closed, many were burned, and the clergy had a choice between exile or execution, the basic plot device of The Power and the Glory.  Clearly then Greene had a topical political agenda, as he makes clear from the start, and in Tabasco he felt the need to keep his real purpose for being there a secret from the authorities.  He was in danger, or at least assumed he was, and as we know, he often stuck his neck out in crisis countries, if not for what he wrote, then for just being there in the first place.  Greene was always political, but what interests me in this book is how he countered the socialist argument in Mexico.  Later in life he called himself an “agnostic Catholic,” but when he visited Mexico in the spring of 1938 he was a devout convert.   At the time, and he says this explicitly in the text, he believed that there could be no authenticity without God, which I took as a corollary to St. Augustine’s dictum, to paraphrase, that what is not in the City of God is in the City of Satan, or to put a less arch moral spin on it, not worth our time.  No meaning.  No reason to live.  Evil in the sense of despair, of wanting to die, a topic that remains current, and probably always will, even as specific battles between church and state come and go.  What is the meaning of life without God?  Can there be one?  Greene saw that eternal question clearly and devotes considerable time to it in his text.      

I’ve always been interested in authenticity.  At its most simple, the topic can be about no more than how a pie baked from scratch at home is more authentic than a frozen pie from the supermarket.  Even that though is not really simple.  What we mean is that the homemade pie is the ideal, what a pie ought to be, but that may get us into an endless controversy about the ideal.  What kind of flour?  Oil or Crisco?  What kind of apples or pecans or blueberries, etc, and can they be bought at a store or should they be hand-picked?  How crispy should the crust be?  I could go on forever, but you get the idea. 

The next step, and one way to end the controversy, is to identify the source.  My mother, let’s say.  If we can say, “This pie tastes exactly like my mother’s,” and if everyone who should know agrees, the case is closed.  We have an authentic pie.

Unless, that is, we think too much about Henry James.  Just as appearances can deceive, so might the taste of food.  Leaving aside at least for now a change in perception over time, young and old palates, there might be clever substitutes for making a pie taste like Mom’s.  It would still be a fake, of course.  A very good one let's say, maybe even so perfect that not even the most discerning palate could tell, but it wouldn’t be authentic.  It would be just like authentic, and in the food world as opposed to the art world (or gold coins or horses) that might be good enough for most people.  Recipes, like art, may be immortal, but the food itself isn’t.  We can always try again later.

But Greene in The Lawless Roads has no interest in authenticity of the secular type, not in food and not in art, except when he looks down his nose at both the guidebook tourists and the expatriates he calls “hopeless romantics.”  In his view the tourists who stick to the guidebooks isolate themselves from wherever they visit, ugly reality in particular, and the expatriates are hopeless, and just as bad, because they value above all else whatever pleasure they take from experiencing the country, ugly or not, only for the sake of the experience itself.  In either case God is not a factor, except perhaps as a curiosity, yet another exotic artifact for study, which makes the "hopeless romantic" nothing more than a complex form of tourist. 

My effort here may be considered a chronicle of my struggle with the value and morality of having always been in the "hopeless romantic" camp.  Getting off the beaten track, seeing the seamy side, experiencing the culture through the people, rich and poor, has always been my added complexity, what set me apart from the guidebook tourist, and writing about the experience has always been my fallback justification for traveling in the first place.  But even that is selfish, especially when the product is intended for the like-minded, an ambiguous goal at best since I am not a journalist or reformer or systematic seeker of knowledge.

Speaking of whom, those do-gooders and scholars, the ones with enviably clear goals, where do they fit into this problem I'm proposing for myself, the issue of authenticity and my struggle with it?  Why can't I just be one of them?  There are many opportunities in those fields, even if most are volunteer, which is not a concern for me at the moment.  Let me answer that on a personal level.  I’m not a good team player, and I know I’d get infuriated by what I would see as, at best, well-intentioned meddling.  I do recognize reform initiatives that seem worthwhile, mostly those confined to the basics such as good water.  I also find the micro-loan programs intriguing and may yet get involved in some way with that.  Beyond that, however, I become oddly reactionary.  I say oddly because I’ve been an unapologetic liberal Democrat my whole life.  Basically I think that governments through taxes have a duty to provide for the general welfare, a fair chance at a good life, which includes tough regulation of and either total support or generous subsidies to public health, transportation and education, whatever works best.  Okay, all fine and good, but a streak of western individualism, a libertarian strain in my native Texan bones, won’t let me forget that what a good life is varies almost infinitely around the world.  Indoor plumbing might for example be an absurd “improvement” in many cultures.  Unnecessary.  Unwanted.  Unused.

Which brings us to where Greene and I have our most profound meeting of the minds.  For both of us the real enemy is materialism in any form.  Socialist or capitalist, doesn’t matter.  In Greene’s Mexico socialism was the main threat; in mine it is capitalism, primarily imported from the USA.  For Greene materialism of either kind undermined piety; for me it undermines authenticity, even though, as I’ve said, I now have deep reservations about the value I put on experience for its own sake, which for me has always been a search for secular authenticity.

My working answer to those troubling reservations is to focus on beauty in its broadest sense and make something more of it than I ever have before.  Aesthetics, if you will.  Art in the very broadest sense.  I see now that I worship art in the same way Greene at the time worshiped God, although with a decidedly more protestant leaning, a more fluid and self-defined standard for what gives meaning and ensures immortality.  In sum, art is God.  It feels basic, the foundation, the source of all sources, a worthwhile thing in itself that I worship without shame, no matter how it treats me or others. The fountainhead of joy and misery, sickness and health, love and hate, life and death.  And it can be found, if we know how to look, everywhere. 

Not a wildly dangerous position to take you might think, lest we forget Bolano.  Storm troopers won't be knocking on my door to confiscate my papers, beat the crap out of me and toss me in jail, at least not for this.  More like weird maybe?  Unpopular or unfashionable? Insignificant?  Beside the point?  Could be.  Could be any or all of the above, but I don' think so.  I’m now convinced that my devotion to art, the obsessed intensity of it, has always been the key to my danger as a writer, whether potential or realized, and therefore to why I’m here. 

I think I’ve always thought that way, but what a relief it is to finally see it clearly and accept it without reservation.  I took it for granted in my youth but was hardly even conscious of doing so, and then only when I had to fight the moralists and materialists, including many insufferable hard-line aesthetes, most notably those who infest universities like cockroaches.  There are still many complications to resolve, always will be, nooks and crannies, highways and byways, deadends to explore.  Creeds should always be flexible and words are slippery little devils, but I know for certain now that I’m looking for experiences that fulfill me in a way that I think--and deeply feel--come closest to how things ought to be, whatever they are, things that conform to an ideal of beauty that replaces without excluding God, romanticism and even political reform as the truly authentic. 

*****
I had no such clear goal or vision when I began my trip in 2003.  I just love Mexico and Greene, so it seemed like a good idea to re-trace his steps 65 years later.  I had a few self-imposed rules and guidelines, but mostly I would let the cards fall wherever.  I did know he was more of a moralist than me, but that’s still a philosophical point.  What I want to do now is explain a few similarities and differences in our physical routes.

Greene started in San Antonio.  He crossed the border at Nuevo Laredo and took the train down the center of the country, first to Monterrey, then San Luis Potosi and Mexico City, and then another train east to Orizaba and Vera Cruz.  From Vera Cruz he took a boat south across the Gulf of Mexico to Frontera and Villahermosa in Tabasco, then a mail plane to Salto del Agua near Palenque, and finally a mule into San Cristobal in Chiapas, arriving there just in time for Semana Santa.  On the way back he visited Puebla and while waiting for passage home in Mexico City, he took short excursions to Cuernavaca and Taxco. 

I went to Palenque but not Salto de Agua, and the order in which I visited the towns and cities was very near but not exactly the same as Greene’s.  Salto de Agua is not on a main highway, and I could find out nothing about accommodations.  There had also been recent Zapatista trouble nearby, but I don’t like to think that would have stopped me if getting there had been easier.  The problem was that I would have needed to take a local bus or hired a taxi, perhaps for a whole day, depending upon what I found once I got there.  Forty years earlier I’d have hopped on a bus and taken my chances.  In 2003 a taxi or hired car seemed a better idea, but I’d already done that in Tabasco and no longer felt that extravagant.  It's not really cheap to hire a car for a day, even in Mexico.  Later I learned that Allen Ginsberg had spent some time in Salto de Agua, which added to my regret that I missed it. 

As to the differences in route, I had a friend with me part of the way, a Mexican who persuaded me to go to Cuernavaca and Taxco directly from Mexico City before heading back east to Vera Cruz.  He has family in Taxco, and I saw no harm in the change.  That made it more practical to also visit Puebla on the way down rather than on the way back.  And finally, I had my brother with me from Villahermosa on, and we spent our last night in Oaxaca, and of course I took a bus back up to Laredo, not a boat to England from Vera Cruz.

First class buses in Mexico are excellent by any standard.  Frequent, cheap, reliable and comfortable.  As here passenger trains hardly exist anymore, and if they do you probably don’t want to take one unless it’s one of the tourist trains, as in the Copper Canyon.  But my mode of transportation, if you accept the notion that a bus is close enough to a train in this instance, was very similar to Greene’s.  The exceptions to that, the major differences in how we travelled, are these:  the boats between Vera Cruz and Villahermosa no longer run;  there was no need to take a single engine plane from Villahermosa to Palenque; and I thought about but never seriously considered riding a mule from Palenque to San Cristobal.  I spent a morning on a horse when we visited a village near San Cristobal, and judging from that experience, I shudder to think what a day or two on a mule would have done to me.

But back for a moment to danger and Bolano.  I freely admit to avoiding mortal danger in the form of direct confrontations with Zapatistas and mules.  I also avoided hardship and discomfort whenever possible, as did Greene.  His point was not to punish himself without purpose or recklessly court physical danger.  Nor was mine.  As to the result, my experience and its rendering, it is now up to the reader to decide if I am able to shed light on my brand of authenticity, reveal it, by engaging sufficiently with my own peculiar form of danger.