Under The Volcano
Earthquake. Just a very strong shake for a few seconds. But after the 1.000s dead from Fuego’s recent eruption — you get a little jumpy…
“He was safe here; this was the place he loved — sanctuary, the paradise of his despair.” — Malcolm Lowry, Under The Volcano
Earthquake. Just a very strong shake for a few seconds. But after the 1.000s dead from Fuego’s recent eruption — you get a little jumpy. You don’t roll with it as well.
I live in Antigua, Guatemala. Surrounded by 3 volcanoes and constant shaking, weekly tremors. I love living in the presence and vivid reality of nature — a nature that doesn’t give a damn about us “flotsam”, small, minuscule, insignificant hominids.
It is not easy to really stay alive, be alive in this world, this flat unnoticed treadmill we move forward on. The world is too much — life is always ahead of you. In kindergarten, you can’t wait for Grade 1. Then they prepare you for middle school. Then high school. Then college. Then a job. Then a higher position, bigger sales numbers. Then you are pooped out. You haven’t lived at all, you’ve been somewhere ahead of yourself in a mirage that doesn’t even exist.
Before nature, on the altar of the cutthroat, we don’t care about you damn humans, nature — you are alive. I look up daily at the volcanoes, I pay homage like a native would or did. I’m humbled and live gracefully filled with my own infinitesimal immensity. Storms rage through town, I shake but it energizes me. I’m alive. I live alive.
Satre once quipped (and it is true of so many war vets) how he never felt so happy and alive as when the German’s were bombing Paris (read his novel — The Flies). We need this outside threat or must create it — to really be aware and live. Otherwise, we are devoid of necessity and live in a hollow dream world of “not now”.
I think the man of real courage is one who puts himself in situations and places where he might truly exist and feel alive. Electrically, sensually, viscerally, mentally. It is a challenge to wake yourself up and put yourself there and be — right here, right now.
Covid 19 was a wake up call — a tremor and a puffing volcano for many. It woke us up and reminded us that we are alive, we should feel alive, we need to work at being alive. Not sleepwalk through life from paycheck to the produce aisle.
Often I look up at the sky, the great globs of light and stars. I’m at a loss for words. It is at moments like that when I’m most replenished with words — brought alive again. There is nothing better for a poet than to live in danger, under threat, pressured, stressed to be “in this world”. When you are young, poor, inexperienced — that is easy. The world seems a monster ready to eat you up every day. A youthful ego keeps you alive. But as you age, it isn’t as easy to do. So I prefer the big volcanoes looming every overhead, blowing off steam. Or the earth shaking under you and reminding you, you are but an insignificant flea on the back of a monster we know not.
Fuego erupted 3 years ago. 1,000s died. The ash is all gone here in Antigua. Washed away by time’s hard falling afternoon and nightly rains …..
That’s time the destroyer at work. She heals all things but also harms all things, in time. Her own sweet time.
I look out each day at the 3 volcanoes in the distance. Agua, the beautiful one, conic and colossal. Motherly. Acotenango, camel humped, silently fuming like a teenage boy. Fuego, puffing, ejaculating and fiery, the older brother always in trouble. Resentful of something we’ll never know.
All nature is an allegory for our own life, lives. One who knows nature, knows a lot about life and human “nature”. Violent storms teach us about our fears and the hidden forces lurking in all matter. Fields of flowers tell us about the beauty of our lives and also their temporality. A view, like the view of these volcanoes I look out upon — tells me about the immensity of life, of that which is alive and that we are wrong to see just the “human” in this world as primary and all-important.
We are but a fleck of dust on the shoulder of what scientists call matter or space. A fleck of dust that can be blown away, annihilated by destroyer time, at any time.
This is not to say we aren’t important. I prefer to see eternity in even a grain of volcanic ash and to see each and every “thing” in space and time as very necessary. All mathematical truth and scientific equations must be beautiful — didn’t say that huckster, beautiful huckster Einstein when he was here? In the same vein, every little thing must be necessary for this world to exist, all and everything has a purpose and place. A job to do. Or nothing would exist. Death, smiles, hot dogs, thoughts, pincushions, volcanic eruptions …. they are all necessary for the world to exist in time and space.
And me, this tiny fleck of dust ushered from an eruption of love and desire? My job is as Norman Mailer said, “to bring home the bacon”. To bear children and sweet juice for the world to taste in the form of the word and idea.
I’ve now started. My pen has been raised. I’ve always been starting and will forever be starting. Until, time the destroyer decides on another form of “every hair in its place” and I’m expunged, forgotten and sent where even the Plato’s, Shakespeare’s and Baudelaire’s suffer. The annals of the forgotten, relics left as memories in time’s forgotten basement.