The Senses of the Street

Cusco, Perú

July 2003

Yesterday was a day of errands.  But errands with a sensuality that is at once new and old.  It is not that of home and has not yet become so omnipresent as to pass into the background, uncommented and unnoticed.  

Doctor

Cusco, Peru
July 2003

This morning the news seethes with concern about the resurgence of the Shining Path guerrilla movement.  In the eighties and nineties it created a civil war that led to more than thirty thousand dead, although to be sure the government was probably responsible for most of the dead.  

The Sharp Sun

July 2003    
This morning the sun is sharp.  It slices through the shadows and flattens people's faces like a scalpel removing excess.  Though it is early, the light cuts through shadows and the dust of night in broad rays with a quality only found at high altitude where the atmosphere is thinner and the air dry.  I always forget how the sun pierces at this altitude, until I return.  When the sun is out the temperature rises, when shadows prevail the air is around freezing.  You live the constant contrast of light and shadow, hot and cold, but not in the abstract. Instead, like the sharp sun, they are felt viscerally.

More Writing

Since last I wrote on this blog, much has happened.  I shall detail it briefly, but more I just want to recognize the chunk of my life and writing that the posts before this represent.  It is much later and the blog, thanks to Google, still lives and--to my surprise--attracts readers, so I shall add to it.

Tourism, Travel, Life

Back in La Paz, I sit in my favorite Alexander’s cafe. For a little over a month, I have not been here. But it is like home. The staff greeted me and asked where I had been.

Where have I been? The question is not only relevant for them but also for this blog. I disappeared from both for a month, although the timing was a little different. Where have I been? And, why?

On The Voice

“Let’s be the voice”--shouts the man at the microphone. His voice fills the air of Cusco’s plaza on this, the third day, of Catholic school children marching around the plaza in mass, representing their schools and hence the Church, while claiming a civic right.

Memory in a Vibrating String

The night is like a plucked string. It just recently came on stage and now it vibrates. Copacabana’s main square almost lacks room for all the people who are there to hear the night’s sound.