Better Yet...Of Beauty

¨It is not news, that we live in a world where beauty is inexplicable and suddenly ruined and has its own routines.¨

I am a quote searcher. While I never mark my books, I carry in my head a sort of serpeant-eye, a third pupil that focuses on, implants in memory quotes from literature and life. I beleive I will recall them always and always. Then, in living life, I forget at once.

What new beauties await? I am on a flight, traveling to Uruguay at the moment. We will land in Buenos Aires and then take a ferry to Colonia del Sacramento--a quiet, maybe quaint town. On Wednesday, when Julie leaves, I will go to Montevideo and fall in love with a new capital, new city, a manifestation of my unspoken (these days written out) urbanity. There are so many ways to write out life here, to lay heavy, sweet, a creamy snapshot (thick, soft, somewhat opaque).

Yesterday, again, I found myself in a trance of walking, winding through the sicamore trees. There were trees everywhere in Mendoza, tall and of a less-than-lucious green. There were fallen leaves that had yellowed in death, their cerulean spirits drained by descent, drought, the footsteps of children and their smallest desires. Almost everything was closed and while this meant, perhaps, that the deepest of the city had faded, I could hear my breadth with every step. The Plaza de Independecia remained full, however, lovers intertwined as always, excitedly shameless, so far from the shadows of the trees. The wooden, marked stalls were mostly empty, but still of bright circus colors: arranged as a cradle around the lovers and the trunks.

I wanted to write but could not settle my feet anywhere. I wanted to run, to flee, to fall forward into the air, to be even on top of a red dust mountain where real fear could drain my everyday, somewhat indulgent fear. I wanted to be at my grandmother´s bedside, above the carpet the color of those disappointing trees, in my Berlin apartment with a line of real crossoints at my fingertips, in a Buenos Aires cafe with this same red pen, but not, not, not in Mendoza. Mendoza: I tried so hard to love, to like, to understand but it left me emptier than fasting, it was itself a sort of fasting of my world.

My only consolation, in those pattering moments, my short clicking heals that with every effort (banging, abandoning, dancing) could not take me home, was the trip that had brought us through: the Andean Cordillera where I tried, even in exhaustion, to keep my eyes wide open, to click them shut for short moments of memorizing. I recalled entering the minibus, rickety and small; the silver-toothed man who sat behind, tried to convert with pamphlets, asked if I was single and poked my shoulder without remorse; the wild-haired Chilean woman all done up in lime green; a young man, almost handsome, alive in cerulean (before the death of trees), who held us up at immigration. What with all the shades of green? I wonder if the Argentines and Chileans try to pull close the towering trees, get at them before they are fallen, marmelade leaves, sucked dry or slick, sick from easy rain; kiss them corpseless, on both sides, taught children all grown up. I thought of the old couple in front of us, the man covering his wife with his jacket, pulling her close; and the Ecuadorian man who gave me a emerald shirt when I shivered in my core, perhaps from cold.

Maybe it is not only places but journeys that mean to me, the hope of somewhere else, even titilating disappointment. And so I will go to Uruguay, a place I know pathetically little of. And then I will speak of it wistfully, my urban amante, sooon to push it aside with other wanderings, but love, love, love it from my same cold core.

I write because I want others to feel, not see or understand, what I experience. I want the words to wash them in real melancholy (a little Mendozan boy dirtied to his elbows, crooked- toothed, not begging but selling stolen valentines); relief (my final descent, this height-fearing girl, from the mountain, holding-a child moment-Rodrigo´s hand so tight that he whimpered); anger; satisfaction; joy; love (it´s all about love...); but most of all, beauty. How else can beauty be felt, pulsed, prickle from afar if not through sentences pondered, poured over and finally penned. It is not news that we live in a world where beauty is unexplicable and suddenly ruined and has its own routines...

Could I then say (I will dare it) that my goal is to grasp that beauty in its fluidity with words, to translate, transcribe before its ruin.

We are landing now and I can iterate with my whole heart outstretched (if murmuring) that I am relieved. I am home enough now, far from those weeping trees that made me too want to weep, the corpoes of their fraudulent flowers not buried or burned but bent into the Mendozan streets. I am home enough in Buenos Aires--afar from those premature skeletons. Such good air it is to breathe, still green but not goblin green, rather alive, alight, of the limelight...the green of birth or better yet, of beauty