FORCING IT IN SANTIAGO
Climbing the Cerro San Cristóbal from street to summit takes less than an hour, but the path is steep and winding, the day is humid, and you’re not quite as spry as you used to be. At midmorning you encounter only a few joggers and stoned teenagers making their way back down. None offer greetings, and you offer none in return.
Near the hill’s peak you pass a locked-up food stall and the entrance to the funicular, currently not running. Continuing through this interim zone and up a brief flight of weathered stone steps, you finally arrive at the Sanctuary of the Immaculate Conception. Here, enshrouded in morning’s mist, the enormous statue of the Virgin Mary looms atop its pedestal in otherworldly whiteness, looking down upon Santiago.
You climb the amphitheatre steps to the virgin’s feet, where you take a picture, fiddling with filters and framing, maximizing the capabilities of your expensive new phone, hoping to capture something of the statue’s mesmeric aura. The only other visitor is a small woman in a leopard-print coat wearing huge pink Beats By Dre headphones, seated against the statue’s base with her hands in her lap, staring silently ahead.
You find a bench and take in the view of the city below, the ramshackle blocks stretching for miles, vapourizing into a foggy horizon. You breathe deeply of the cool air and wait in expectation for whatever’s to come next: an epiphany, a rhapsodic fit, a clap of thunder.
But after only a few minutes, you rise and begin making your way back down. The woman with the headphones remains, heedless of your coming and going.
■
You tell yourself you came to Santiago in search of inspiration. Perhaps inspiration isn’t quite the word. A rekindling of some inner fire, maybe. Rejuvenation against the slow-motion heartbreak of daily weariness, humdrum obligations, impotence in all its incarnations.
On the plane you’d thumbed through a battered copy of James Tate’s The Route as Briefed, his miscellany of interviews, essays, diaries—one of the three books you’ve brought along. Tate’s writing has always appealed to you for its peculiar affability, at once inscrutable and breezy. A feeling of effortlessness, even if the actual effort behind it was mighty.
“Leaving home at the age of seventeen was a turning point in my development as a writer,” Tate recounts. “I bought my first pencil. No, in all seriousness, I think this is what led to my first attempt to write anything at all: the need to escape the confines of home and the expectations and the limitations that surround you there. With everything possible, where did one begin?”
Once, you’d too known that rush of possibility. But it feels very distant now. For months you’ve been pecking away at a novel, with some progress made, albeit gruelingly and joylessly. Pointedly autobiographical, it’s your attempt at describing the perplexities of events now more than a decade gone; this, you’re finding, is far more difficult than expected. Like trying to tell a story at a party to a circle of strangers—the impulse to rush to the good parts, pushing through globs of unwieldy context, only to find none of it adds up to anything much. Plus: writing about yourself is boring, and being bored by one’s own writing means any project’s death knell. Self-fascination like this abrades everything you think you know, how humility and widened perspective, refined through thoughtful and sustained toil, are better thruways to greatness than mugging before a mirror. And yet here you are, doing just that.
■
In younger years you’d traveled widely and unbound, led only by sloppy impulse. Sleeping on floors, crisscrossing states via Greyhound, stumbling out of Eurail trains into unidentifiable plazas. Backpacking haphazardly through Spain and Morocco, you’d eaten up Bowles and Hemingway and Kapuściński, and in particular William T. Vollmann’s The Atlas, its crystalline episodes of pain and blight and wonder, and longed to write and think that way. Geography as both source and subject, the thought of place just as tragic as time.
Misadventure propelled your initial writing forays—mixed results, but rife with libidinal fire. Constant motion meant a perpetual jostling of perception, gulping from an endless spring of novelty’s nourishment.
Now that whole premise feels naïve, even silly, a defunct daydream: inspiration as something precious, conjured out of some fuzzy ether and cleaved from stark material reality. Travel itself is a scourge, as airliners spew petrol over the tides, Bubly-chugging tourists charter helicopters through hurricanes, entire cities of refugees sit debased at the whims of fascists and lunatics. Amid all this, to go seeking illumination in another time zone on little more than a notion seems hackneyed, even irresponsible.
And yet those old notions still persuade you, that Wordsworthian vision of motion and spirit by which “the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened”—that’s what you came here for.
Waiting for a taxi at Arturo Merino Benítez, you’d shared a quick exchange with an older Chilean man returning to his home in the suburbs. When you told him which area in the city you’d be staying, he’d shaken his head, lamenting the tumult of demonstrations that had broken out in the city’s core in recent months. Total mayhem, he’d scorned, ruefully licking his lips. Upon parting he’d wished you safety, but all you could think was: total mayhem, now that would be something to see.
■
You drink coffee in Santa Lucía Park with another of the books you’ve brought, Michael Ondaatje’s The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. In it, Murch, a Hollywood veteran boasting a resume of many classics and more than a few stinkers, offers his thoughts, technical and philosophical, on the film editor’s craft. Murch identifies his “three fathers” as Edison, Beethoven, and Flaubert: Edison representing mechanical innovation, Beethoven the possibilities of dynamic expression, and Flaubert the powers of concentrated narrative technique. Of the nineteenth century’s realists, Murch says, Flaubert was “the most conscious of what he was doing, and agonized it about it the most.” The potency of realistic fiction—and, analogously, of film—came, or so it went, from this rigour of detail, the workmanlike act of sensory apprehension, processing, and relay.
“Flaubert will spend a whole page evoking tiny sounds and motes of dust in an empty room because he’s getting at something,” Murch tells Ondaatje. “He’s saying there’s meaning to be got out of the very closely observed events of ordinary reality.”
So you spend most of the day wandering, seeking out specific granular details, hoping that sheer Flaubertian observation might rouse some insight, some meaning. You take photos of Bellavista’s graffiti-splashed garages, the greyish waters of the Mapocho, the couples in expensive leisure wear sipping wine on Lastarria patios. Young men rushing deliveries in and out of the markets at La Vega Central, the downcast queues waiting for Banco Estado to open. Elements of a city: food stalls and print shops, hourly-rate psychics, clogged traffic, Starbucks.
But none of this hyperawareness comes naturally to you. Unlike Flaubert, unlike Murch, your perception has become hopelessly dulled, and any illumination feels counterfeit. Mostly you notice only your own growling stomach, your bum ankle acting up, your tendency to walk in oblivious circles, even with the aid of Google Maps.
After hours of this, you pause at a diner off the Plaza Des Armas, back with Tate. “I can remember the occasion, I can remember the feeling. Each word put to paper took on a significance that was nearly frightening: accents, tones, juxtapositions, layers of meaning, opportunities of syntax—a whole new world opened right then. I was discovering myself as something other than a natural extension of my family, attempting to discover the world or a little bit of a sense of my place in it.”
Tate launched his project of self-definition by going away, just as you once did. But whereas his writing career, by his account, was launched almost by accident, a poetic awakening in college and a smooth ascent into acclaim, your own moves have been clumsy and overcalculated from the outset: write furiously, get published, dominate the universe. A plan that hasn’t unfolded quite as imagined.
Even your reading feels overly weighted with intention—mercenary, acquisitive, purpose-driven. None of Flaubert’s incisive eye, none of Tate’s easy absurdism. You lean back in your booth, blowing your nose into a serviette, and stare out at the city’s churn, distinguishing everything and nothing.
■
Blanchot links inspiration to desire by way of Orpheus: “His gaze is thus the extreme moment of liberty, the moment when he frees himself from himself and, still more important, frees the work from his concern, frees the sacred contained in the work, gives the sacred to itself, to the freedom of its essence, to its essence which is freedom.” But does anyone ever consciously register this supposed freeing while it’s actually happening? Or is it accessible only in hindsight, mediated through retroactive deliberation, as another authorial invention? Must it happen on its own, or can it be generated, synthesized, summoned into being?
The third book you’ve brought is the Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, translated by Ursula K. LeGuin—imagining, however superficially, you might apprehend something of Chile from it. You read and reread “El suplicio,” or “Torture,” taken from 1922’s Desolación: “I’ve borne deep in my flesh for twenty years/a burning blade/an enormous verse, a poem/crested like high tide.” Whether the poem here is an actual poem or a manifestation of some other agony, you can’t be sure; whatever it is, it’s undoubtedly something corporeal, gnawing. At first the complaint strikes you as facetious: would any sane working writer sincerely gripe of too much urgency, too much of that “terrible gift”? And yet from Mistral, the lament resonates as sincere. Unlike Tate’s wisecracking and restless twisting of expectations, her poetry reads like a leap into a scald of pure feeling. And in that leap, in her longings and distillations, she perhaps finds that acquaintance with the sacred Blanchot describes. LeGuin says: “Her passions and self-contradictions are like those of her native landscape—immense, volcanic, absolute.” These brief lines, by turns ecstatically gusty and mournful, read like an act of devotion, her writing like a heartsick dance; yours, by comparison, is an extended pratfall, a wipeout.
The Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral on La Alameda has gone through several incarnations since its founding in the seventies, initially as a trade center, later a military headquarters, today a sprawling multilevel arts complex. On your visit, the main exhibit is “Palimpsesto. Muros del Estallido,” a collection of street art arising from the citizen protests that began in late 2019 and eventually galvanized urban Chile. The dense arrays of collages, tags, and murals documented here, most adapted from the Plaza Baquedano just a few blocks away, form an unofficial record of the uprising. While much of the content is lost on you, the impact is not: the gallery walls scream with raw, yet often exultant, outrage. You consult your trusty translation app, typing in “sólo la lucha nos dará didnidad,” which the algorithm deciphers as only the fight will give us nothingness. For a moment you’re stunned, parsing this sentiment. Nothingness as outrage’s fuel, the void as ideological aim. Then you realize you’ve mistyped; it’s actually “dignidad”: dignity.
Later, you learn from LeGuin’s introduction how Mistral, once launched into international recognition at twenty-four, left Chile and would never live there again. She was a wanderer, ever restless, and by all accounts thrived that way. She too had to go away to become who she was.
■
Yes, a trip like yours drips with cliché: the tortured aspirant, praying a change of scenery might resuscitate washed-out talents, finding only a descent into self-consciousness, stultification, drunkenness—anything but writing. At home you inwardly whine about too many distractions: the domestic grind, the day job, the countless chores stealing your meagre energies. Being here, freed of those constraints, forces you to stare unfiltered into the blaze of your own limits. And this, of course, is excruciating. Instead of working, you simply walk for hours on end. In the Barrio Italia you float among the antiques vendors and eat your millionth empanada, watching passersby, waiting for a signal, a riot, a cataclysmic convergence of the Nazca and South American tectonic plates—anything to jangle your listless thoughts. Total mayhem. But everyone here, like everyone everywhere, is just shopping.
■
At a medium-upscale restaurant you order tiradito and corvina al horno and kumquat, trying not to think about exchange rates. Hearing you ordering in what couldn’t even at the most charitable be considered Spanish, a couple at the next table introduce themselves. Bev and Don are from Melbourne, now a month into their South American getaway. They ask: have you been to any wineries? Just the city, you say, sipping your Perrier, adding: I’m supposed to be working. This requires you to inelegantly explain you’re a writer, and you try and leave it at that. Bev is a sculptor, she says, just coming from an artists’ retreat in Córdoba. Astonishing experience, she says. I’m still processing. Don chimes in: she goes to these things and comes back so inspired. Whereas me, he says, I’m an industrial engineer, not really the creative type. To this, you can only think: who is?
■
On the bus to Valparaíso you try to bliss out and enjoy the passing scenery, but the guilt of not working still hums dully, persistently. It isn’t an inability to get words on a page that nags, but rather an overabundance of possibility and the incontrovertibility of making anything worthwhile out of it. You envy how Mistral, via LeGuin, commands authority in each line, even while delineating the anguish of doing so. For you, writing about your own life only unleashes a deluge of doubt and uncertainty. Each sentence rings insincere and lifeless, as if performing for an audience callously indifferent to your flails and pleas—the charade is blatant, the failings, as Mistral says, of a “poor, lying mouth.”
After far too long navigating Valparaíso’s coiling lanes and climbing frighteningly steep concrete ramps, you arrive at your hotel frazzled and sweaty; seeing you, the young clerk at the desk expresses polite concern for your health. The view from your room looks out over the town and the seaport, Viña del Mar in the distance, the hazy ocean beyond. Another stirring view—but what’s really being stirred, who can say. You poke at your laptop all afternoon, rearranging paragraphs and cleaning up notes, but these efforts prove mostly futile. The dread of what looms ahead, the slog of typing and marking up pages, wearies you before you even start.
Instead, you read more Tate: “When I was young I had the idea that if I was going to make a go of it as a poet I had better get out there in the world and have some big adventures so that I had something to write about. And I did go out there and seek big adventures and found them aplenty. Sad to report not one of them ever found its way into a poem, not even a little bit. And so, too, today, a certain bird is more likely to find its way into a poem of mine than a train wreck I witnessed.”
Yes, James. But birds, however lovely, don’t really do much, do they. And thinking about them isn’t much use in reviving a doomed novel. Tate can write about clothespins and blue boobies and it feels revelatory and vital and true; but really, you’d rather have the train wreck. Still, as Vollmann says in The Atlas, “In hitchhiking, as in so many other departments, the surest way not to get something is to need it.” Hope as you may for this temporary relocation to work some magic, you can’t make it happen. You can’t force it.
■
On the trip home to Toronto you face a long layover in Miami, with numerous delays. Eventually you say fuck this and flee the airport’s miseries, hopping a Metrobus down to South Beach. There, brisk winds assail the beachside, summer drawing to its close. Yet ambitious young partyers still crowd the terraces along Ocean Drive, gawking and posing, downing cocktails to relentless house and soca: inspiration in abundance, or at least the will to continue.
On the beach, you slump into a lounge chair and gaze out at the ocean, luxuriating as best you can in this vacuum of in-between time. After the day’s exasperations, the beach is a dream. Fluffy sand and cobalt-blue water, toddlers dodging incoming waves, gulls power-diving into overstuffed trash cans. A crew of guys in matching Under Armour trunks lugging a cooler filled with Monster Energy tallboys. Overhead, an airplane dragging a banner: Shoot Machine Guns @ Lock & Load Miami. Ordinary reality, essences: motes of dust in a room.
A teenager with enormous ear gauges and a pencil-thin moustache approaches, informing you these lounge chairs are by reservation only. Unless you’ve reserved one in advance, he says, you’ll have to move on. Please, you plead with him, just a minute. You’re just waiting for something. And as soon as it comes, you promise him, you’ll be gone.