45. I see Lima

I See Lima

I visit Bad Vibe Central, the dungeons of the Inquisition—now livened up with wax museum effigies of torturers and their victims. The museum guard is a misshapen man who seems to actually enjoy his job! The local chapter of the Masons donated some of the torture tools that are on display here. I don’t know how THEY ended up with them! Nearby is an old church, which houses the library of the Venerable Third Order of Franciscans. I’ll bet there is some fascinating reading in there!

Pizarro’s dried-up body is on display in a glass coffin in the National Cathedral. I pay my dime, go in and stand in a dark corner watching some aloha-shirted overweight gringo tourists do their thing.


PIZARRO

So, this is the machine that carried you, old horse.

I see they’ve wired your jawbone to your eye sockets—good thinking!
And some dried brown skin is holding on, drumhead tough.
But the hero’s lion on that touristy coffin looks damned heavy.
Was it all worth it?


“I’m bigger than he was!” Gloats the porky man in the pink shirt.

But it ain’t the machine, Bub, though you’d better stick to taxis.

It’s the driver!

...

44. Lima, Peru

44.

Lima, Peru:

There are three and a half million people in this ghastly town. Most of them seem dedicated to self-extermination.

Apparently there are no anti-pollution regulations and trucks and busses make the air blue with poison carbon monoxide gas. I breathe in shallow gasps. The common people seem to survive on a diet of coffee and bread, morning, noon and night and since I am living like the common people, I subsist on their fare. After a few days my energy level descends to new, undreamed-of lows. As always in big cities, prices are high and quality is low. Why do people choose to live in big cities? For the work? For the cultural advantages? For the thrills and excitement?

Maybe Lima should be demolished and started all over again. I really don’t see any other way to change the disastrous trending of this city. To me it seems that only the dead can live in Lima.

At its apogee of power, Lima must have been a delight of Baroque architecture, statuary, silver and gold; now it is a super-bummer! The people need to go in a better direction fast. They are killing themselves—and me!

...

43. Aqua Verde, Peru

43.

Aqua Verde, Peru:

A miserable assortment of cheap concrete-block buildings and wooden shacks.

Since I have no ticket OUT of Peru, I expect to have trouble with the border police-- but they pass me through with the greatest of ease.

A taxi from the border drops me at the wrong end of town, so I hike a mile in the noonday sun, and am not in the best of moods when I reach the bus terminal.

I have a “thru ticket” to Lima, but the station people claim there will be no seat available on a bus until next week.

I raise hell until they put me on a Lima-bound bus late in the afternoon—but good grief, what a seat they put me in! They sure do get their revenge! I am next to the toilet in the back of the bus and sitting in the seat beside me are a fat lady and her three children.

As soon as the bus starts moving, the toilet starts overflowing and people keep coming back to be sick in it. Every time the bus takes a curve the lady squashes me against the toilet door.

There is no fresh air—the windows have been sealed shut and the bus is jammed with women and crying infants.

Twenty-plus hours of this torture and the bus rolls into Lima. I fool them all and stumble off the bus alive!

...

42. Follow the Flow

42.

Follow the flow
Wherever I go
Sunshine or snow
High times or low
Follow the flow
High times or low
Sunshine or snow
Wherever I go
Follow the flow

At sunset the bus pulls out of Quito—another city that looks better from a distance.

Between snowy peaks there’s a pink sunset and a silver moon. A baby cries behind me. The fat man beside me crowds, but I don’t give an inch of space--I’m learning.

I sleep soundly and wake riding through a desert with a few dried trees wearing Spanish moss. The houses we pass are made of faded clapboards and I have a stiff neck.

I’ve reached another frontier.

...

41 Poemitos and Quito

41.

Riding in a bus toward Quito in Ecuador I write this poemito:

A blue Indian sat next to me,
Wooly cloak from neck to knee,
In brown hands a bag of mystery—
His black eyes, what could they see
When they met mine
What could they see?

Well, the man WAS dressed in blue and I like to imagine that there was something more interesting than a few bananas for lunch in that bag!

Quito, Ecuador:

Walking through this lonely town
I was feeling kind of down,

But in a tiny café, sure,
I found myself the sovereign cure:

In a bowl of green and white
Some soup of chili made it right!

Now when I feel my spirits droop,
I have myself some chili soup—

Made with rabbit, cat or game,
Down here its chili all the same,

And eaten with a fresh-baked roll,
It makes my body hale and whole.

Let others see the doc for shots,
Just give me chili soup—and lots!

...

40. Communicating With The Future

40.

Communicate with the Future?

Polly tells me that the people she sees living here in the high Andes are similar to those she saw in East Nepal, near Tibet. Both groups of mountain dwellers have thick, straight black hair and glowing bronze complexions. The women wear their hair braided and wear mostly woolen clothes of somber colors. She says both peoples exude a wholesome aura and that neither locality has cars, advertisements or glass in the windows of their houses.

After four years of exploration, Polly lists her four “best places”: Kabul, Afghanistan, Ben Nevis mountain in Scotland, the island of Bali and Katmandu, Nepal. Ben Nevis is the best, she says. If we ever meet again it will be there.

Partly hidden behind an old statue in the little town church is a portrait print labeled in Latin: “A true likeness of Jesus Christ from the Holy Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican City, Rome”. The countenance in this picture resembles the face on the famous “Shroud of Turin”—the same long nose, forked beard, receding hairline and solemn expression, for example. It is so difficult to locate reliable artifacts from the past about this or any other person—and what is available is almost impossible to interpret. This face probably is the nearest we will ever come to a portrait of the “historic” Jesus, if indeed He ever existed.

Indeed, I wonder if any of the most famous people living today will leave the slightest trace for people living in 2000 years to admire, that is if any people at all are left to admire anything.

If I should return in 2000 years, what relic might I find of this previous me? Would anything of my present understanding be worth communicating to that future person? Or if I had lived in some past life on this planet, as some believe, what would I do to communicate with my present life? Build pyramids in Mexico? Sculpt big stone heads in Columbia?

...

39. From Polly's Diary

39.

From Polly's Diary

Polly allows me to copy from her diary:

“It is best, of course, that I go it alone, for life’s sake alone and for other lesser sakes which I can’t congeal into thoughts, patterns or sentences. I MUST go on. There is nothing else for me anywhere right now; anything else would be escapism if I give up now.

England is too easy for me now. I like to think of it as the reward—the pot of gold at the end of my rainbow.

I am not halfway over my rainbow yet. There are all shades of the spectrum: the blues of sad times, the indigos of times when all is beyond me —my endurance, my comprehension, greens of calmer, earthy times, yellows of golden, mellow contented times, oranges of effervescent times and reds of the times of the heights of excitement of intensity, yet to be lived out.

Sure, these variants are going to be in England or my chosen land, or my life after traveling, but I need South America or Africa so I can KNOW these good and bad times, can acknowledge them as they rise, can accept and appreciate them. In a sane, sedate organized environ I could not do so. I would be a victim of past conditioning of societies opinions and of its conscience dictatorship.

I can only GET TO KNOW MYSELF by living out these experiences in a strange, unpredictable environment. I can only learn what my limit of endurance or powers of comprehension can be when put to the test. I can only realize the depression of sadness to its deepest extent—then only can I realize the extremity of its opposite emotions.

I can practice the calmness, acceptance appreciation of earthy times HERE more. I can know the pleasure of unplanned surprise times of relaxation, of golden mellowness, of content HERE more—because HERE only it can be unexpected, unroutined. I can be childlike and uninhibited in happy, fun and effervescent times HERE, not restricted by “proper” behavior patterns. I can seek; maybe find, my capacity for joy, for passion, for supreme emotion, supreme experience HERE more honestly, more poignantly than THERE.

I must try to continue crawling the length, the full arch of my rainbow. I must try to BECOME a rainbow. If I succeed, if I become the personification of all the variants—when I AM a rainbow, then maybe I will find the pot of gold at the end. Maybe I will BECOME the pot of gold too. That would be “enlightenment”—“liberation”."

...