Incidents of Travel in Latin America

by Lars Holger Holm

  Open a human skull and look inside. The brain is lodged in the cranium like a big cloud in the celestial sphere. As we see the thoughts and fleeting sensations of the giant brain in the sky, the old saying attributed to Hermes Trismegistus comes to mind, ‘As above, so below’. Bishop Berkeley’s question then imposes itself, ‘Would the universe exist if there were no one to perceive it?’ And the unavoidable answer is: ‘No’.

  The universe so far as we know it exists for us and for us only. We are at its centre because there is nobody to tell us otherwise. When the Aztecs sacrificed warriors and screaming babies to the rain god in the belief that this would appease him, there was nobody to tell them that what they did was morally wrong. Indeed, their experience told them it was the right thing to do, and they knew more about the workings of stars and planets than their conquerors, who ordered them to put an end to such barbarous practices. Similarly, whatever we do here on Earth, there is and will be nobody outside it to tell us if we are in error. Our solutions inevitably become the words of God, and we are obsessed with the idea that our existence must have some kind of meaning beyond evolution alone.

  The Hermetic proverb invites us to regard all things made by human beings as mirrors of a universe which we have projected onto the concept of space. There is the same immense loneliness inside us as there is in the universe we extrapolate from the cold expanses of intergalactic space. And there are the same fantastic forms and spiritual detours within us as there are out in projected space. Any thought or sensation is in itself a putative universe. When man tries to see beyond the stars, he peers into the dark recesses of his own mind, and just as he can see so little of himself beyond the reflection of his mental mirror, so it is as impossible for him to transcend his universe.

  And why should he? The demiurgic imperfections in it may be annoying and our mortality and our suffering appalling, but still, it is our world, the only one we will ever know, and the only one we are free to populate with our gods, angels and chimeras. If only we could open the gate to the realm of death as the divine watchmaker opens the safe of the universe by turning one after another the immense tumblers round the infinite lock, we would have no reason to believe ourselves inferior to the Demiurge in any way. So far the master has kept this enigma locked inside his immense construction, and has ensured that any attempt to break his code and enter the world which runs parallel to ours, the world of the dead, is of the utmost difficulty and danger.

  ‘Only a monster’, the austere Gnostic philosopher Emil Cioran said, ‘would be capable of seeing reality as it is.‘ One possible implication of this statement is that we are sheltered from the horrors of the universe by our own ineradicable will to illusion. So ingrained is this habit of mind that we will always replace one shattered illusion with another. It may even be that the ultimate illusion, as invincible as death itself, consists in the idea and incarnation of a contradiction in terms — in the man without desire, the Buddha of ultimate wisdom. Perhaps such an individual, attaining Nirvana, really has seen through the veil of Maya into the realm of death, and perhaps knows that even if he were to reveal to the uninitiated its secrets, they would understand him as little as a blind man would a verbal description of colours? Whatever the breadth of his knowledge and insight, so long as he breathes and is mortal, he remains subject to the illusion of being. And he should be. The sage is not here to show us the impossible, but to make the act of transition from here to the unknown a path for us to follow. It is not his task to disappear and liberate himself from the shackles of this world, but to reveal the Way as far as it goes. ‘Where we are death is not; where death is we are not’.

  I am myself still too much under the spell of fallible instinct not to be drawn to the primordial perversion of the human mind as manifested in the unlimited cruelty of great civilisations. Whenever I fly over the Earth at night, I see the city lights form strange and enigmatic patterns, whose original meaning and design go back to the dawn of civilisation, and perhaps beyond. At the same time I see galaxies and stars below me, as well as the tower which the Mesopotamians began, and left to us to continue.

  Over millennia the levels, departments and connections inside the tower have become like an architectural nightmare engraved by Piranesi. Nobody has the overall view; nobody sees the building plan; nobody knows where the whole thing is heading. Both beginning and end have vanished. The dimensions of the early ruins remain to serve as a reminder of the original impetus, but it is now possible to walk a lifetime through one room of one section of one of the many hundreds of levels, and still not see the nearest door.

  Not all of us yet understand how grand and monstrous the edifice of the human spirit is. In the past century literary mystics like Kafka and Borges were able to hint at it; Kafka in his unfinished novels and horrifying short stories; Borges in his description of metaphysical space, as for instance, in his The Library of Babel. And in The Aleph, of course, the mystical point at which all the lines of the universe meet, time and space are annihilated and everything, past, present and future, converges.

  I had begun to wonder if that fan in my hotel room was actually such an aleph. One possibility for its being so was that the philosopher’s stone, according to alchemical lore, reveals itself only in the most unlikely, unexpected and commonly disregarded of places. The Aleph, or the philosopher’s stone, is actually the disregarded thing itself. And there it was. The hypothetically immobile centre of the fan in my room allowed me to see worlds come and go. The progression from the achievements of Neolithic man to modern technological miracles was inscribed in fugitive patterns in the sand, faithfully recorded by the concentric movements of the fan. The rhythm of the sea still bore witness to an era when the continents had not yet emerged from Earth’s primeval oceans. The sound of the sea’s endless swell was sometimes heightened to a roar in lunatic nights and by furious hurricanes, and if sometimes it quietened to a distant murmur, it was nevertheless always there, always and immutably there. Cosmic history was written and erased again with every succeeding wave coming to rest on the miles and miles of the fine white sand spread before an unbroken line of palm trees, brooded over by the distant Sierra Madre.

  The ocean was another and even more tumultuous madre, breeding monsters in her enormous belly. Unfathomable as the universe itself, she could be perceived and interpreted in the turn of each wave, yet she would always remain essentially unknown. Jerry obviously saw her as peaceful, and said that he wouldn’t mind being out there, just floating. ‘I wouldn’t be able to swim for long’, he said, ‘But I could just float for a couple of hours’. ‘And then?’ I asked. But he didn’t answer, thinking that I would understand anyway. As I made no sign of understanding, he put an end to speculation by saying, ‘You know, I think I have come here to die.’

  I looked at him. His face expressed no particular sadness or resignation. It wasn’t that he was expecting to die the next day — it was just bound to happen sometime. I realised that he, who had been living at sea most of his life, was longing to become at one with her amniotic waters again. I looked up into the starry night and out over the sea, and remarked that he could have chosen a worse place to do it in. He laughed and nodded in agreement. We then changed the subject, I believe.

  *

  The following day was the last day of the year, and I was determined to make it memorable. After having spent most of the day in and out of the sea, I pulled myself together towards late afternoon and began to build in the sand what was to be a far larger castle than the one I had made before. This time I planned on a grand scale. I began by ramming a huge and heavy palm trunk vertically into the ground, and poured sand from a bucket over it. Moving in a circle I made an artificial depression around this fixed point. This time my sandcastle was not in the shape of a ziggurat but was a kind of truncated pyramid — though it turned out to be impossible (for me, anyway) to make really good sharp edges in a sand construction of this size. The whole th
ing became circular instead of square at each level. There were seven of these levels, one for each planetary sphere (in accordance with ancient cosmology).

  The construction stood about two metres high and four in diametre when completed. I looked upon my work with some contentment then threw myself into the sea to wash away the sweat and sand sticking to me. I didn’t let the pyramid out of my sight for more than seconds at a time, but still, as I walked out of the water and up to it I saw that someone had been able to sneak up on its rearward-facing side and to destroy part of its fragile terracing. Realising that I could not leave my construction unattended without risking its prompt demolition, I bribed with Coca-Cola one of the younger and more docile-seeming boys to look after my creation while I showered and dressed. That worked. The boy obviously took pride in his new office as guardian of the temple. I was happy to give him his Coca-Cola and took the next watch myself. I now saw, with some surprise, that some of the Mexican children — not local children but those who were on vacation with their parents — had, under the supervision of one of the women, an architect by profession, begun building, not a copy of my sandcastle but a replica of the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque — I was later able to confirm the accuracy of their ‘imitation’ when I saw the temple in its jungle setting.

  The children kept diligently at their work, and were able to finish their construction before sunset. The temple was very neatly done, not very big, perhaps, but perfectly shaped and precise in all its detail. For a while we all stood in contemplation of its formal perfection, and I went so far as to suggest that, if my temple was dedicated to the sun, theirs should be to the Moon. There was no time for abstract inaugurations, however, for before the sun had fully set, the children threw themselves on their pyramid and rejoiced in its utter destruction. I stopped them from doing the same with mine because I wanted to draw a line along the very last shadow cast by the tree trunk before sunset all the way to my point of observation under the canopy.

  This I did, and later that evening I drew the line of the shadow cast by the pole, which was clearly discernible by the light of the setting Moon. In this way I recorded the bearings for the sun and the Moon on New Year’s Eve. I thereafter decided that the tower had served its cultural and astronomical purposes and could now be abandoned to the natural elements, e.g. curious dogs and wilful children.

  I no longer had any intention of preserving my ephemeral creation, and remained in my chair for a long time, enjoying the view of the ocean and of the towering shadow below the darkening vault, revolving under the window of the pole star. A sense of being privy to the primitive beginnings of a civilisation haunted me.

  Soon I even began to feel that I was being watched. In itself this was not surprising. Jerry had already warned me that no matter where I moved about in Playa Azul, I would at any given time have at least one pair of eyes fastened to the back of my neck. The presence I had sensed, however, was not a real person. It was more like a wraith, an insubstantial entity flitting silently and in an instant from one end of the beach to the other. When I heard sudden shrill laughter right behind me I spun round, panic-stricken.

  There was nobody there, but I had the impression that the shadow, faster than a flash of lightning, had moved again. Although I had no wish to remain under its spell, I made myself stay seated. The figment of my paranoia was no doubt a significant epiphenomenon of the psychic energies I had invested in my tower, and I reminded myself that to have the courage to confront my fear was the only way to make contact with the demon. The apparition was not alien, it was an integral part of myself. I knew it, but could not avoid feelings of discomfort and fear. So I stayed where I was, and forced myself not to keep looking over my shoulder. The one apparently constant feature of this mysterious being was that he was discernible only at the outer edge of my field of vision, in this way marking the unsubstantial frontier between the realms of the dimly seen and the altogether unseen.

  The apparition had its existence at the edge of the shadow of night, which continually sweeps over the planetary sphere as the Earth spins around its axis. It lived on that indefinable line that separates the known and the unknown. It was an inhabitant of the twilight zone, and its primal trait was that maddening laughter, audible and recognisable only to those who were themselves on the verge of possession, or even madness itself.

  I interpreted it as the original demon of creation, the primordial fear of the void which so haunts the human mind that it would rather face mortal danger in a concrete form than succumb to this horrifying ambiguity — eerie laughter that tears the veil of illusion and leaves nothing behind. Perhaps it is this laughter that animals are deaf to, and only we human beings are fated ever to hear. We can never dominate it, never become its masters. It is the eternal companion of loneliness, the Doppelgänger, the madman. It has no reason to exist and needs no reason to exist. It is the heart of darkness in the midst of the light.

  The fanatic anchorites of the Egyptian desert seem to have been familiar with this demon. It was known in the Greek vernacular as acedia, the demon of midday, bringer of mortal lethargy to some, of mysterious panic to others. It was sometimes seen as an approaching figure which seemed never to arrive, until, suddenly, it was there, right next to the hermit in his cell.

  My demon had not appeared at noon, however, but at its opposite pole, midnight. True, my paranoid tendencies are sometimes extraordinarily reinforced by weed. One might consequently be justified in interpreting the psychological oddity accompanying my night-time session on the beach in strictly biochemical terms, leaving the demon out of the equation for at least as long as he remains superfluous to the correct assessment of my mental profligacy. Very well, but I still feel compelled, though, to ask myself why I seek out singular incidents such as these, and the drugs to go with them, if the outcome is no more than a gratuitous paranoia?

  My answer is that the sense of being haunted in this way is only one side of the coin. The exciting side of paranoia is that it encourages me to place myself at the centre of the universe and to identify with a divine purpose. To be psychologically more precise, I magnify my intentions to a point at which they lose their familiar connotations, and assume the significance of a cosmic adventure. This is what the positive side of paranoia is all about for me, and I have so far been willing to accept its negative aspects because of the intensity it adds to my perception of self. Then, the purport of the ‘opiate’ is to diffuse logic and reason, to dissolve the whole of life into a waking dream.

  Who am I? If the climate is cold, I am obliged to admit that I am here and am doing what I must in order not to freeze to death, and until I am dead that is no dream but stark reality. (One of the most important disciplinary exercises practised by Tibetan Buddhist monks is to learn to endure excessive cold.) If the climate gives me a perfect sense of balance between outside and inside, I can more easily identify myself with all that I see and sense around me, and look upon my actual self as an emanation of a nebulous macrocosmic being of which I am, along with a thousand other microcosms, an integral part. The philosophical conclusion that this particular state of mind adduces is that individuality is an illusion: everything is in the Prana, the universal breath of life.

  The temperature of Playa Azul’s air and water was such that it allowed me the perfect illusion of being at one with the cosmos. There was, after all, no one behind me except my fear of myself, and as this particular fear seemed as old as Methuselah, there was no more reason to worry about it today than there was yesterday or would be tomorrow.

  The conclusion thus presented itself: there is a profound unity in the cosmos, from microcosm to macrocosm, and there is endless variety also. Within the overall monotonal universe, inconceivable as an entity any way, all kinds of heavenly bodies are imaginable, even if in reality they do not exist. In fact, the universe, my universe, is nothing but endless possibility. The human mind is identical with this universe, because the thin
gs it cannot experience will never be revealed to it. This does not prevent them from being possible, just as a mad and utterly alien idea is still possible, even though inapplicable to any known and existing order.

  But then again, I believe that there is just as much order as there is chaos in the cosmos, and that the depressing symmetry and regulation of atoms, as revealed by the electron microscope, conceal another infinity of chaos, in which all is possible and all indefinite. Einsteinian physics has taught us that ‘matter’ and ‘energy’ are interchangeable terms, and that there is in theory nothing to prevent worlds from coming and going in and out of different states of aggregation: gas, solid, super-solid, or spiritual. Perhaps the visible universe is in the last instance no more than that part of the universe which resonates on our mental wavelength. That the visible universe represents but a very limited part of the whole spectrum of existing physical wavelengths is already a known fact.

  The only thing not possible is that our cities, religions, arts and sciences differ from the universe — in the particular way, that is, that it reveals itself to us. The universe we see when we look into the sky is the same as the one we see when we look into ourselves. The two are interdependent, and a city can be compared to a galaxy just as a galaxy can be interpreted as a city, or a hurricane, in space. The galaxy may be a million other things as well, but we will never know, so long as we have to look upon the world as human beings look upon the world. In other words, our human universe is a perfect blueprint of the universe in the particular way that it is accessible to us.

  As I write this I feel a sudden shiver along my spine. It all sounds so assured and rational, as if we were confident that of course we do understand ourselves and each other, and are not simply, as it were, fumbling for the light switch in the dark. But perhaps you and I, dear reader, in spite of all our mutual goodwill, are metaphorically light-years apart, and my words will never in a lifetime reach you? Perhaps we really are as far apart from each other as the stars? Perhaps, although we keep sending messages to one another, we know that they will never be received? And if, impossible though it is, they were received, they could never be opened. And if opened, which again is impossible, they could not be converted. And if converted, which is impossible, they could not be deciphered. And if deciphered, which is impossible, they could not be interpreted. And so on, for ever and ever…