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| Self-portrait with Jesus Walking On Water and Blessing me, Madrid, January, 2010 |
Doctor Johnson, the one of literary fame not my current Doc, wrote once that, "the use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are." It's not too much of a leap to see things in one's life as they are and not as we may think they are. But Doctor Johnson was a clever guy and had a lot of good things to say.
I know that my travels, as limited as they have been, have always provided me with a sense of lives lived by people struggling for survival in many times extreme situations, like the Indians that live in the Altiplano in the Andes like the village of Caspana. But also, those people that live on the outskirts of towns like the impoverished slums of Rio that I saw in 1971, the shanty towns on the way into Madrid, or the poor living in homemade housing using pallets placed on end and covered with cardboard to break the intense Altiplano wind that comes at the end of each day near San Pedro de Atacama. They are all hoping for something better than what they have and usually when that hope becomes politicized enough they elect some figure or creature as a godhead behind which they perform all sorts of festivals, sacrifices, and ritualized pageantry or political insurrection that secures for them a place in the cosmos, and thus is the march of civilization large and small. It's a normal human trait to organize and herd together behind an idea or a belief. And more power to us for that, because without that, I wouldn't have had a modest career in the arts studying the artifacts of those beliefs, either Christian, Buddhist, or some less well-developed peoples somewhere in the world. And, it is around that hope that many acquaintances now express many well meaning thoughts for my health as the latest speed bump has thrown me in the Eazypass lane toward the vacant lot at the end of the street. My hope relies mostly in the fact that I have a firm grip on what's taking place, not that I am not fucking pissed about it because having an illness is quite an inconvenience, but hey, I am at a point where medical science might be able to squash this little outposts of mutants in my body.
