contratiempo caracol | danzantes digitalis

“but if on its way to the sacred hill
it shed thick tears
and should no evil omen of a man
with dropsy cross its path
it was a sign that very soon
there would be storm over México.”
—Homero Aridjis, “Storm Over México,” Eyes to See Otherwise

“Ante mí se presentaban solo dos alternativas: o me convertía como los otros en un asesino de sueños, o me encerraba en mi mente transformándola en fortaleza. Opté por lo segundo.”
—Alejandro Jodorowsky, La danza de la realidad

“If a man could pass thro’ Paradise in a Dream, & have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, & found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Aye? and what then?”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge



1.
In Baja, Men in Black have been kidnapping and robbing tourists, white American homeowners along the Baja coast, and other wealthy people. The Men in Black dress and arm themselves like the Mexican Federal Police Force—black uniforms, black helmets, black boots, long black semi-automatic rifles. There are rumors that these fake police are either tied to organized crime and the Tijuana police force, or actually are the Tijuana police force.

So, the Mexican government has sent in the “real” Federal Police Force to clean up corruption in the local police force and fight the fake Men in Black police. Which means everywhere you go in Baja, now, the roads are filled with military vehicles, and traffic backs up behind military checkpoints on the highways as men in black uniforms, black helmets, black boots, and long black semi-automatic rifles, stand guard, waving cars through with red flags, or stopping cars and searching them.

The Federal Men in Black are really boys in black. At one point, we are driving through Tijuana traffic, and a line of military trucks moves alongside of us in the next lane, and on one truck, we can see a couple of soldiers sitting in a row of about six other soldiers with their backs to another row of soldiers behind them, and one of the pair of soldiers is holding up his cellular telephone to show the other, both of them grinning and laughing, teens, and I wonder if they have just come from Oaxaca, I wonder how many people they will kill when this whole place busts wide open with revolution and civil war, I wonder if they realize that their presence has nothing to do with police corruption, and everything to do with a pre-emptive militarization of civilian life, a quietly maneuvered police state apparatus quietly (and not so quietly) maneuvering itself into position along with the tent city immigration detention centers across the border in Texas, and the new U.S. federal provisions for collecting DNA samples from all arrestees—a provision which will disproportionately affect apprehended illegal immigrants—and motion detectors, Minutemen, mass workplace ICE raids.

Right now, these young soldiers bounce along next to us, grinning and joking with each other, cell phones in hand, automatic rifles strapped to their backs.

Meanwhile: Prisoners detained in Oaxaca—beaten, tortured, terrorized, raped.

Further down the coast along the old highway, a dark pirate ship just offshore, Foxploration film studios, sunset backdrop, a velvet Magritte.

And all the way down the coast, fancy new condominiums and housing developments sprouting overnight for Americans gobbling up the land here. Resort hotels, gated communities.

(We slow at another checkpoint, another soldier waves us through, at the side of the road, a truck with Baja plates opened up wide, its family standing around it as soldiers poke inside, papa in a ranchero hat, the soldier waves us through.)

At a rundown, beat-up old restaurant bar in La Salina: A crowd of rundown, beat-up old white Americans. Endless Clapton, Santana, and Eagles on the jukebox, all night long. The same exact Clapton, Santana, and Eagles songs on the jukebox, all night long.

The new face of piracy. The new revolution.


2.
It is not simple. Nothing is simple. This is the beauty of things. It is messy and weird and all tangled up. The straight line of a blade is simple. The smooth glass surface of a mirrored skyscraper is simple. Our bodies, our scents, our hormones, our thoughts, our emotions—maybe when we are dead, these retreat to a kind of simplicity, but even then there is an infinitely complicated process of entropy and regeneration involved, decay, energy exchange and transformation/mutation, all of this complex, multilayered, thick with a multitude of realities and nonrealities.

How clunky and poorly designed we really are. How awkwardly all of our parts fit together. The shapes, the angles, the fluids, the bulges, the identities, ideologies, the hair, the emotions, the differences in perspective, experience, memory. Curves, odors, pores, tastes. Vocabularies, reading lists, favorite films, uses of space.

There is nothing simple in any of this. It is infinitely complex and messy, or it is not alive. It is ugly and beautiful, it is joyous and completely fucked up, it is absolutely certain and hopelessly unsure, or it is all a lie, subterfuge, distraction, a bad dream, the flickering tail of a finished movie reel spinning empty images on a vacant wall, an army of pixels assembled on a tiny screen, the glow of illusory communication lighting up the palm of your hand, and if I could bring it for a moment to my lips, my teeth, if I could whisper into it, a different kind of ephemeral text, a breath—

“...in the middle of the night, your dreams unmask you and you say things that you might regret, might not, the naked expression of emotion, the donning of another mask, half asleep/awake, but this is still ephemeral, all of it is ephemeral, the emotions are real/unreal but no matter what they do not last, just like us, we do not last, this is the most important part, they must come and go, they must pass, they must take us by storm and then leave us, or they/we are useless, fake, a waste...”

DISTRACTED. DISINTERESTED. DISTANT. DETACHED.

(…signs of deep, enduring trauma…digital imagination…patient exhibits an unwillingness/inability to engage in the present…)

This is an aesthetics of abbreviation, acronym, alienation, ache. LOL. BRB. Half asleep, or half awake?

No response. No response. Are we listening? Are we fake?

We carry our fortress with us, everywhere we go. “Fuck That Shit!” my friend says. “Wade across the moat!”

Ah, well, you know, thanks but no thanks? I am tired of treading water? delicately?

Those who are naked with eyes wide open, those who are ready to swim and sink.

An ocean, a river, a stream, a lake. An open body of water moving, a body of water, moving:

…asleep…awake…awake…awake…



...................................................................................................
~for the Butoh dancer streaming hundreds of strands of taut, colored yarn from his mouth and torso—climbing up and out from the stage, into and over the audience, back into our deepest rememberances, illusions, dreams.

~for the gitana bellísima who stole our hearts, drunk on red wine, drunk on that thing you did with the hem of your blouse, front back front back, drunk on a caracol of contratiempo, gypsy voces, communal clapping, la danza de la surrealidad, spiraling outward and up into the night, drunk on the perpetual, drunk on the infinite.

~for the prophet dancing in the metro station, singing, shuffling in circles in step to his song, booming voice filling this dark cavern with vision, love, loss, light, echoing off under the hills, into the city, into the night.

~for my Uncle Andrew who sat in the closet all his life, destroyed himself, drank himself to death, departed us finally late last week in Aztec, NM, you know my mom still spoke of you in the present tense today, and it broke my heart, not because it was like you hadn’t yet left for her, but because it was like you were already gone a long time ago, disappeared into a void of perpetual present/absence—may you rest in peace next to my grandma Pauline, may you paint your dreams, may you dance with the ancestors, and be who this world would never let you be (Andrew Martin García Frank, 1951—2007).