The photos below

All the photos below, which I took, are from my Latin American years. The late 70's. I will post these from time to time. I realize there is no actual order to these posts. No narrative line. Not a story. There is a randomness. But I think of the Navajos for whom past, present and future all exist together in time. This is how it feels to me with my life on the road. As my father said when he turned eighty, "My whole life lives inside of me." I wish it was all a straight line, but it isn't and so I will do these posts as they come to me. Right now as I write this, I am dreaming of the future. Where I will go next. I am considering a nomadic existence. Selling everything and moving to Spain. That probably won't happen, but I feel a restlessness settling in. Perhaps that is why, for now, I am writing about the past. Because it feels like the present.

At the Honduran border

From the Guatemala highlands, I traveled on to Tikal, then back to Guatemala City where I got a bus to Honduras. There were ruins I wanted to see and I wanted to visit the Bay Islands. The war in Nicaragua was going on as well as Salvador.

At the bus station in Guatemala City the ticket seller refused to sell me a ticket to Salvador. "There's trouble there," he said. So I went to Honduras. My friend, Epigmenio, joined me.

Somewhere along the way a father and his retarded daughter got on. Later soldiers searched the bus. People got on and off. Then we heard the crying. The bus driver stopped and walked all over the bus. The father had abandoned his retarded daughter.

People next to me said this happens all the time. The father had just walked off the bus. We traveled all day, then got dropped off somewhere near the border, a village where we slept on straw mats and ate a chicken someone killed for us. At five in the morning a pick up truck appeared and we rode in the back across the border.

Once in Honduras we walked around and found these cows. I took this picture of Epigmenio with the cows. It was the first moment of peace after a long, difficult ride.

Men at prayer - Chichicastenango, 1979

That day when we were in Chichi, these men were on a pilgrmage. Normally I would not take this kind of shot (part shyness, part respect), but it was outdoors and very smoky. I always found this image haunting. There was something very pure about the moment.

Chichicastenango, Guatemala - 1979

We heard there was trouble in Huehuetenango so we didn't go farther north. Instead we stayed near Panajachel. I'd gone down to Guatemala from Mexico with only a name on a slip of paper, Jack Flax, and a rendez-vous date with three friends.

Jack Flax, it turned out, coincidentally knew my Uncle Sidney and he let me stay in his guest house. It was a cozy cabin in a garden. Jack had left his wife behind in Minnesota so he could live here. My other friends showed up one at a time at the Blue Bird as we'd arranged.

A few days later we all took the bus to Chichi, as it was called. I was doing a lot of photography then and I took these pictures of the women in the market place. This was thirty years ago. A whole cruel civil war would follow. But already we heard the rumblings. A week later from the highlands I would head to Tikal. In Tikal there was a huge rainstorm and fish were swimming in the street. A few days later I was on a bus, heading into Honduras.

I have not been back since and I have no idea if anything still looks as it did then.

Because some of you have asked...

People have asked me if the paintings and photos that appear on this blog are mine. The answer is yes. I will from time to time be using other people's images, but unless otherwise indicated they are mine. For decades photography and watercolors have been a part of my process as a writer and wanderer. I have found, and have encouraged my students to find as well, that the visual can be an important component to language and at times words just aren't enough.

Henry Miller was one of the writers from whom I drew, and still draw, inspiration. He wrote every morning and painted at the end of his day's work. It was an important part of Miller's process as well. These images of mine, such as the one below (entitled "Woman") have lain for decades in drawers and old portfolios. There was a brief moment when I contemplated being a photojournalist, but then something terrible happened.

A friend wanted to do an exhibit of my best photos and I put together a slide sheet that contained my favorite images from Tibet, Latin America, Siberia, and so on. My daughter was an infant and my life was chaotic and somehow, I still don't know and probably never will, that slide sheet (perhaps tucked into newspapers being recycled) was lost. I searched for them for years. I couldn't believe they were lost. In some sense I still keep thinking they will show up. Along the way I gave up the idea of sharing any of these images, especially black and whites from Mexico, with the world.

The heart went out of it for me. Writing seemed easier to hold on to. The visual felt more transitory. I could hold an indea in my head. But not a picture. Still I had the pictures and also had begun the drawings. I had no idea what to do with them. Then a year ago, during my sabbatical, that a friend suggested I find a way to preserve and combine the visual work I do with my writing. It was also around that time that I shared with my daughter some of my photos she had never seen from the late 70's. She also encouraged me to digitalize this work.

So for the past several months, I have been going to a copy shop and having various images that appear in this blog scanned. Then this past weekend my husband, who knew I had many things I left that I wanted to preserve, bought me a scanner and it has become a new toy. But more than that it has given me a way to archive, and remember, some of the work from decades ago. I spent a lot of time this weekend, going through portfolios of photographs, slides, drawings, some from thirty years ago.

It makes me remember my father. When he turned eighty, he called me, and said that he didn't know how he got to be so old. He told me that he'd had a dream the night before. He dreamt that he was a little boy and that it was the night before he moved with his family to Nashville where my grandfather took over a dry goods store which would, as with all my grandfather's other endeavors, fail.

In his dream he was sleeping between his very fat aunt and his very skinny uncle under a heavy cover. He told me how that whole night he was hot and couldn't breathe. And he thought the night would never end. Then in the morning his parents gathered them all together and they moved away. On the phone he began to cry. Then he said, "My whole life lives inside of me. I'm 80 years old and I remember everything."

Yesterday it seemed as if I was remembering everything too - all the journeys I've taken, the friends I've met, the stories I've heard. The people who have shared a part of themselves along the way. So I am sharing, and will be sharing more of them, here...

DELAYED BY FROG: speaking in tongues

People often ask me why I travel where I do. Mainly to Europe and Latin America. The answer is really quite simple. I go where I do because I speak the language. Though I cursed it at the time, it helped that I had to take five language exams for my would-be doctorate in comparative literature. French, Italian, Spanish, a smattering of German. At one time I tried to learn Hebrew.

And, a while ago, I could get by in Russian. I can't explain why I have bothered to learn so many languages except to say that I like to talk to people and I've found that when I'm on the road it is easier to talk with others if you speak their language, rather than expecting them to speak yours.

At times I worry that I am like that schizophrenic Louis Wolfson whom Paul Auster discusses in his brilliant essay, "New York Babel." Wolfson spoke many many languages, but he could not bear the sound of English which was his mother tongue and did everything he could to avoid it. I believe he actually wrote or spoke several languages simultanously but not English. However I think my case is more benign. Since I can remember I've loved languages. I love to hear them, read them, speak them. I'd have to say that one of my greatest pleasures is to see a work of mine translated into another language.

For example this blog is now in fifteen languages. I find that utterly amazing. I have to thank my mother at least in part for this. She had a deep, and frustrated, desire to see the world, and she was adamant when I was in grade school that foreign languages be available in the public schools in Illinois where we lived. And while she waged her battle, which she eventually won, I was sent to study French with Monsieur la Tarte.

Monsieur La Tarte was an old French man who for some reason lived alone in a house apartment in Highland Park where I grew up. He seemed sad to me so I always felt rather badly when I didn't study. I tried my best. I used to go to his house once a week on my way home from school. I'd sit at a wooden table across from this old man who also suffered from numerous facial ticks, saying over and over again, "Je suis une jeune fille." "Je veux un verre d"eau." And so on.

Monsieur La Tarte's poor head twitching back and forth as I tried to follow along. A few years later my mother scooped me up after school and drove me to the passport office in downtown Chicago.

As we waited for our passports, a woman, dressed like a gestapo officer, marched up and down the room, shouting orders. Though I was terrified, my mother found this very funny. Years later I understand that it was her thirst for travel and the world, and her sense of humor, that enabled her to laugh at this moment. She had decided that we were going on the grand tour of Europe. Me and my mother along with her friend, Marion Moses and her daughter Linda. Linda and I were reluctant travelers.

I had other things I wanted to do that summer and Linda was in love with George and all she did was write him letters and wait for his at each hotel. But, the point of all of this is to say that I spoke French in France. I was fifteen years old and found myself negotiating taxis and tables in restaurants. One doorman referred to me as Miss America. But I greeted him with proper bonjours, and, as we were leaving, au revoir.

I didn't think much about my love or proficiency in language until my senior year in high school when we were giving numerous aptitude tests in math, English, and languages. The language exam we took was in Kurdish. I never was sure why it was in Kurdish but I think it was not a single word in Kurdish seems to correspond to a similar word in English. At any rate we were given a sheet of Kurdish grammar and vocabulary and given a time to study it. Then we took the exam. I didn't do particularly well in the other aptitude tests, but my language scores were off the charts and my guidance teacher, who until that moment had dismayed at my ever doing anything useful with my life told me to go to school and become an interpreter (something I did consider briefly before I went into comparative literature). She also wanted to have me retested because apparently people who do well in languages should also do well in music and math and math I can definitely say was not a strong point on my SATs.

I seem to be rambling, babeling away here, something I've tried not to do in this blog before, but the fact is that I have over the years studied many languages (At Columbia I took romance philology with poor Mr. Ferguson who was a kind of genius in the dipthonization in Sardo Logudorese and other esoteric romance languages and dialects) and I have traveled to many places.

When people ask me where I learned Spanish, I tell them the truth. I learned on the streets. In the marketplaces and chatting with kids and neighbors. Same more or less with Italian. I think the real secret of learning a language is not to be afraid of making mistakes. I know my tenses are wrong and I probably get the masculine/feminine wrong all the time, but, unless I say something outrageous, I don't really care.

Last year an Italian friend was coming to stay with us, but she was going to be late. She sent me an email whose headline was DELAYED BY FROG. After I recovered from picturing a giant reptile in the middle of the Fiumacino runway, I knew that she had made a language error. But she was a good sport and we laughed about it over some very good red wine. And her English is very very good! I rest my case.

On feeling lost...

An Italian friend writes..."My father used to bring me around town when I was a kid, with his bike he used to bring me to new places that, even if they were close to home, seemed to be so far away that I always felt scared and wanted to go back home. But he kept going, he never brought me home when I asked him to, and right now, at the age of 27, I think this way of forcing me to see beyond my limits helped me and taught me not to be scared of new places."

I liked this and thought I'd share it.