BLACK HOLE (OR/OF) GRIEF

My understanding of a black hole--which is a hazy, non-scientist understanding, so take it for what it's worth--is that they're an exponentially intensified version of a diamond. Take coal and add pressure you get a diamond. Now add more pressure to that diamond. Now add more pressure. Add so much pressure that atoms are condensed, gravity drawing all matter in squeezing the living daylights out of it all.

There is a theory that black holes create universes. They act as a forge, spinning at unimaginable speeds trapping and wrapping matter up into a tiny seed particle which explodes on the other side of the black hole as a new universe. (1)

Once I had my heart break, only it didn't feel like breaking. It felt as though it was being tightly squeezed, painfully so. 

I imagine grief as a black hole, beginning as the heart is squeezed in an invisible fist of the irreversible weight of an ending, causing the collapse of the heart and drawing everything within range into the swirling blackness. For a while you wear the event horizon around you like a painful crown, you watch as everything you treasured, hoped for, dreamed of, and once were spins, torn from their place in the heavens where they should be. Then you are left on the other side of a one way door in a new universe. What will it be? Are there no familiar constellations to guide your ship by? Are there no ships? Would it be better to not remember as you walked into this new world?

I read Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, because I saw this quote from it, "When we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all." I felt that painful heart squeeze for a person who was living and gone and for several people who were dead, whom I had felt die and then seen them picked out of the car and off the road and placed gently into the back of a pickup truck parked in the middle of a highway in Paraguay. It was for that I read Year of Magical Thinking. It was for the person who I was six years ago who couldn't stop seeing and feeling all those moments and aching painfully over the living and the dead. For that person who had no strength of will to go, to stretch, or to push herself. And for the girl she had been.

Grief is a beautiful awful thing.


(1) http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/02/140218-black-hole-blast-explains-big-bang/
(Another basic resource on black holes) http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/what-is-a-black-hole-k4.html

aplumb

Ascunión, Paraguay

Can I tell you something? Even if I may be repeating myself?

What scared me about the auto accident in Paraguay was how completely I fell apart. J, who was experiencing the same thing, had to take care of me. I couldn't stop crying until I fell asleep in the crazy van ride back to Asuncion. The next day I couldn't stop crying for hours. Sometimes I still cry now and I'm not sure why.

I wrote a paper for my English class about how I didn't know how to deal with this because it's so dramatic. I live for cinema but I don't want to be living grandiose cinematic moments. Life is absurdist, life is banal and I love every bit of that. It's all I want.

A few years ago a friend ask me to watch Elephant (2003). It's about a school shooting, but the shooting doesn't happen until the last 15 minutes of the film. The first hour just follows average high schoolers through their average day. S asked me to watch with him because I was the only person he knew that could be happy and find meaning if the whole film were nothing but quotidian. It's true. I just wanted to keep watching the kids in photo journalism developing their prints. I didn't ever want to get to the climactic moment.

This isn't to say I'm still a complete wreck. I no longer feel shaky like everything could dissolve at any moment to leave me floating in a lonely fog, I no longer hold my breath when I go over a bump in a car, I no longer stare dumbly at people when they ask me to tell them stories of Paraguay. I can even talk about the accident out loud now if I have to.

I just still don't know what to think. I just still feel vulnerable as h. I feel how much I need people which is a weird thing for a recluse like me. 

Can I also tell you how much I love you?

sincerely,
Marge

a million things at once.

There are times when you have to accept that some things in your life were just sweet and beautiful, they're over, and now moving on...


but...

there are other endeds from this summer but I can't photo everything.

despite the heat it'll be alright

On the night when I was coldest in Pedro Juan Caballero (Paraguay), I mentally willed myself to produce more body heat to fill up my sleeping bag and listened to The Lovin' Spoonful's Summer in the City on my ipod.


Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck gettin' dirty and gritty
Been down, isn't it a pitty
Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city...


I imagined that I was in a park with C dancing to this song. When John Sebastion says "Hot town" I would slap my knee and stamp my foot.


What a song.

listen to Summer in the City

Whenever I lie in this hammock I see hawks circling in the sky above. Around they go and I wonder what they're looking for. There are two or three of them. Silent, they never have to flap. I imagine what they're preying on or that they're kites. What a place for them to be.

You see, the hammock is just a hammock again. Except when I see its coarse colored canvas and I know that I am not the same Marge who started out the summer. I am not the same Marge who left for Paraguay.

I am not supposed to be.

I think about Paraguay a lot this week, we're editing our documentary right now. I spend all day, every day immersed in footage and harp music. We sometimes muse about going back, J and I. 

There was a group of girls from Ca'aguazu that called themselves Sonidos del Alma who sing and play guitar in such a way that you can hear what their hearts are made of. We listen to their songs over and over.

Today I watched Rodrigo ham for the camera. He danced and he laughed and Bruno acted too cool some more and Jose put on his best funny voice to say en ingles, "He-llo, how are you." Each syllable clipped. Then everyone would thumbs up and pose. Someone off screen says Rodrigo was singing earlier. We try, try, try to persuade Rodrigo to sing but the ham becomes a clam. Instead, a professor from Isla Pucu, who I now can't erase from my memory because he was on that one bus with us, sings traditional Paraguayan melodies for us. I watch everything unfold, laughing at everyone's antics, and think about how I'm now seeing things as the camera sees.

Do you ever think of this as you watch films? Maybe you shouldn't, maybe sometimes you should, but do you think about the screen being only part of the whole. how there are things happening outside of that frame, worlds and events that spread out for miles but still influence what's in the tiny scope of what you're watching?

I don't think I'm funny anymore. Have I been silly at all since I came back from Paraguay? Maybe it's just today.

on our last night together I took off my socks and the paraguayans discovered I have no blood

Nanderuvyveima.

^Guarani.

I have looked back at my Paraguay posts and have seen many typos and thought that maybe I should fix them. But I will not. Such was the state of my brain and fingers and the keyboards. The typos will remain a testament of something. Until this blog dissolves into straight-up zeros and ones.

In Pedro Juan Caballero there were a few hours of everyday that felt sloggy. It was hard to move or decide what to do. This usually took place from three to five in the afternoon, after we´d spent the morning reviewing footage, filming, and exploring Pedro/Ponta Pora; the coldness settled in too deep. It drank up our bones and we could no longer maintain motivation and usually ended up burried in our sleeping bags hoping that marrow would thaw.

Mostly, that week I did not get too down (only low enough to be considered human) because my curiosity is just too uncontainable. Who could stay in bed when the cold was a temporary inconvenience? We would not be in there forever.


Friday was too much, though. Winter had hit on Monday and had never left. There at our colegio in Pedro (a name for which I now roll my r´s) we were staying in a classroom where the windows and doors didn´t really close. After our first night the Pilarians taped newspaper over the open windows. The third night it started raining. The next night (at least I think I´m counting things right but one never knows with all of the travel and translation that has been going on) the wind started blowing. We fastened a deflated air mattress over one bank of windows. Over another, some plastic and a garment bag. We tied the door shut with a rope made out of plastic bags. This is the setting I woke up to Friday morning. Friday, the day when I started losing circulation in my fingers and my toes.


This circulation thing happens when I reach a certain point of coldness. Conditions were met, point was reached. As we were filming I had to keep switching the hand el microfono was in so I could massage and breathe life onto the the other one. After our usual morning/early afternoon routine, I choked on a bit of depression, got into my sleeping bag and wasn't sure if I´d ever agree to come out again. This was just too overwhelming and I was too under circulated. I took a little siesta and woke up completely disoriented. Where was I? What was I doing? What time was it? I stared at the women sitting in desks across the room from me until I remembered. And then I remained dejected in my sleeping bag unable to make another move.

Then the quietest mother paraguaya asked us if we would like some tea. Oh sweet angel! Yes! Yes, we would! This is manna! You are heaven sent!

Since this afternoon, upon recounting my miracle, people always ask me what kind of tea were they giving me. Magic tea, I tell them. That is all I know, for even if they had told me, I would not have understood.


With the first warm sip my heart started beating again and I smiled. With the second my toes revived and could wiggle. With the third normal brain activity was restored. I tried to explain to quiet Mother Paraguaya that her tea was magic but she looked at me strangely and said I could make myself tea anytime I wanted.


Muchas gracias, senora.

Muchas gracias, the words I said more than any others as I traveled through Paraguay.

whelmed

Last night the Mexico City Benito Juarez airport came back to me in my dreams. It felt foreign. Which is a word I’m still not sure I understand.

Anyway, I’m home now. Traveling is still so very appetizing and alluring to me. I don’t think I can stay away from it long.

But.

I have this feeling that I am not accustomed to. My general nature is to spend large quantities of time alone with space to do what I please. But now all I want is to see all of you. I feel how much I love you and need you.

May we set up a tent in that beautiful soft, grassy, non-allergenic field over there? A beautiful white pavilion tent and we will all lay out our soft mattresses and wrap ourselves in handmade quilts and down comforters as we look around and smile at ourselves and enjoy how great we all are together.

row high who

This is the eve of departure. Paraguay is almost over which is a sad thing for me. I wish I could skip the next couple of days of airports in Sao Paulo and Mexico City. This time I traverse the globe by myself.

I still haven't begun to tell you about how I ended up on a bus of young Paraguayans who congregated around J and I and coerced me into singing for them.

Nor have I told you the miracle of the magic tea.

And I must tell you of Nacho and Elieser. I will think about them over the next three days of travel in the hopes I can pen down their likenesses so you may understand how great they are. If I could take two people home with me...

safe. I assure you, safe.

I tell you this here, this thing that is not quite a public thing, because I don´t know how to tell you this in person because I don´t quite yet know what to say.



Yesterday the harp camp ended and we were put on a bus with one of the student orchestras to drive back to Asuncion. Halfway there our bus crashed. There was a thud and some wild driving and I flew up in the air a little and it all seemed to happen very slowly because I remember grabbing on to my arm rest and J and thinking ¨You´re not supposed ot have time to grab on to anything when you´re crashing¨ and I wondered if the bus would roll and if we would be a little crushed. I also remember thinking, ªI´m fine, I think I´m fine, am I fine(question mark)ª

And then the bus stopped with out any rolling or falling of luggage or crushings or much of anything at all. J and I poked our heads out the window to see what we could see. Part of the side of our bus had peeled away and was sticking out, but it seemed to be only a couple of feet of metal, no sweat. I was hoping we could maybe just bend it back and keep on driving. We can do that, right (question mark) It IS Paraguay after all.


My North Dakotan upbringing prepared me for hitting a boulder or a post or a deer. So when J and I couldn´t resist our documentary curiosity and opened the door to exit through the driver´s cab I was surprised to see the windshield was gone. Did it have one in the first place (question mark) Can he roll it down (question mark) Because it can´t really all be broken can it (question mark) And when I had to crawl over the twisted remains of the door and jump five feet down to the ground I just thought of it as part of the adventure.


I was surprised to see the front left corner of the bus reduced to knots of metal. The damage I was expecting to find were some mildly damaged harps.


Then we began walking back to the crash site. A man came walking in our direction. ªThree deadª I heard him say.


They can´t really be dead, I think, I mean, they can all be revived, right (question mark)


And then we saw the car. Or what had been a car and was no more knots of silver metal and then I realized that the thud thud thud was a group of men working to hack off the door of the car and there was--well, in the end, there were five dead and I saw them. I couldn´t film, I couldn´t do anything but silently cry and hold J´s hand as I watched their bodies that looked like they no longer had bones or muscles being carried and placed into the back of pick-up trucks.


I don´t know how long we watched everything. The directors of the orchestra found us and told us there was a van waiting to take us to Asuncion. J got our luggage from the bus as I stood imobile waiting for her. A man approached me and asked if I had been on the bus. I knew he was a reporter and I knew I didn´t want to answer his questions and I couldn´t understand how he didn´t just know that I couldn´t really speak spanish but my brain was working too slowly to get myself out of there.
So I answered him.
He asked me where we had been coming from.
Pedro Juan Caballero.


A professor we were traveling with saw me and took me away to wait for J by the van safe from the reporter.


We, ten, and our luggage and a harp rode three and a half more hours in a six passenger van listening to the strangest assortment of music. Electric organs and ironically a spanish version of that Last Kiss song. You know the one that Pearl Jam and that group in the fifties sang. About a car crash.


Thanks to some wonderful people we are now safe and warm and comfortable.


I love Paraguay and I want to tell you happy stories. They are yet to come. But I tell you this one first because it must be said and it must be processed. I don´t know what to think. I only know two things-- I must think differently about life otherwise I can´t handle it and I am ever so grateful for how much everyone has been doing for us this whole time in Paraguay. Do you ever feel you can´t ever repay the generosity shown to you (question mark) I feel that more and more every day of my life.






Love,
Marge

I love blogspot because at the top of the page when I sign in it lets me choose my language. I just spent five minutes looking for English in the list of idiomas and couldn~t believe thy had everything but English. Then I remembered I was looking for Ingles. Or something like that.

However, my spanish is improving a great deal and you could even say my Guarani is improving as well. I mean, to go from zero to three words is an improvement, right? Guarani is nothing like Spanish but they tell me it is very rare for anyone to speak pure Guarani. Last night a señor gave me many examples of how guarani is mixed with castellano.

In Pedro Juan Caballero we continue to be under the care of the mothers, fathers, and children of Pilar. We sleep on mattresses on the floor together, they correct my spanish and patiently help me communicate myself in what must be the most painful sounding spanish ever.

Yesterday J and I discovered some amazing things. After our first night where J froze to death and I slept happily on in my sleeping bag we determined that our first order of business was to buy her some blankets in town. We found a shop that just happened to be a combination of a toy store and a bedding shop. We inspected every shelf (while being followed by an eager shop keeper) and found to our great delight fleecy pillows that have a boy and girl and strange cat embroidered on it and say in bright orange letters "Me haces muy feliz." (You make me very happy.) I want to buy a pillow for each of you and I could probably afford to but I~m sorry I~m not trucking them all over the world. Even though you all do make me very happy.

Tambien, our job is to listen to beautiful music all day long. You do realize this don~t you? And yesterday we happened upon a group of young girls who call themselves Sonidos del alma (sounds of the soul) all playing guitar and singing rancheras. We are all sitting down and learning rancheras when I get back, let me tell you. Rancheras are the best thing to hit this planet. And we filmed it! We~ve got beautiful rancheras on film to treasure forever!

Pedro Juan is not quite as optically charming as Pilar. It is on the border of Brazil, you cross a street here and enter Punta Pura. Yes, yesterday I just popped over to Brazil because I could. Pedro Juan is every bit a poor border town, streeted by red dirt and most buildings look like they are decaying (though decaying buildilngs here become very colorful and intriguing). I wasn~t quite expecting that, maybe because even though I have the intelligence to understand I~m making a documentary, I~m not IN the movies, I still can~t get my head out of the clouds. Punta Pura (and I sure hope I~ve finally got that right) is more what I was expecting. Paved streets lined with booths and city-like buildings.

However, we~ve still been finding very welcoming people. Sometimes too welcoming, I wish people would ask for our email or if we have msn messenger after knowing us for five minutes, it illicites a certain reticance on my part to ever talk to anyone new. There~s a restaurant we~ve been frequenting for drinks and an occasional empinada (i just had a battered and fried hard boiled egg yesterday?!? I~m trying the food, I really want to do this). The family that runs it has taken an interest in us and is concerned about our wellbeing. We must be cold over at that school they tell us. Well, un poco. The Pilar families we are staying with offer us coffee and tea, I drink the tea and wish I could soak my feet in some hot coffee.

More later, hopefully. Apparently the internet frequently cuts out in the entire city. I want to confess, I treasure these moments with the internet so so much. I feel bad like I should be entirely swept away in bliss to be having this wild adventure but I am terribly human and am accustomed to having a lot of alone time and I hope it is not terrible and very american of me to love the internet so much right now. You should love it to and write me sweet morsels of life and home and I will try to impart some jewels of Paraguay. And you should read these magical stories my friend Christopher writes. I hope that~s ok I just told the whole world they should read your stories, Christopher. That~s all, I must go back to Paraguay and drink some yummy chocolate milk that has creepy clowns on the box.

heaven makes me tired

We are in trouble.
For not eating enough.
The locals don{t like it.

This "{" happens becuase I can{t find the apostrophe here in Pilar.

Pilar is paradise by the way. When we showed up in Paraguay we discovered we weren{t necessarily needed. At least, we didn{t feel needed. We sat down with N our Sonidos contact and were discussing our shooting schedule and we found out we couldn{t go to the luteria recyclados, the workshop where they make instruments from recycled garbage, because there is another documentary team here filming. And we don{t have a driver because Favio drives the other filmmakers. What? I{ve contemplated not telling you, my dearest ones, because I worry that you will worry and worrying makes the world spin counter clockwise. Sometimes. A veces. But the truth is that while Asuncion was wonderful and started my head spinning and reminded me of Minneapolis, partly because I have a theory that Paraguay is the midwest of South America, Camilo, the other foreigner (from Uruguay), looked out for us the most.

At first I didn{t think too much about it. My thoughts take a long time to process into emotions to translate back into coherant thoughts that then influence how I react and now there is a wrench thrown into the works with Spanish. It is a lot of work focusing on understanding this other language. It wasn{t until I was on a bus half way to Pilar that I looked outside the window and thought, "hey, this bus ride would be a lot cooler if it wasn{t night and I could see the paysage outside the window." Then I realized that J and I were on a bus to a place we know nothing about to be picked up by a man named Walter. What on earth was happening?!? I felt so frustrated I wanted to cry.

But I didn{t, becuase I don{t, much, and I luckily ended up having an aisle passanger sit on the back of my seat. This was luck, for let me explain. There were probably ten people who had to stand in the aisles the full six hours from A to P, so I was lucky in my seat. This isn{t one of the super crazy bus rides you hear about where there are people packed in tight holding live chickens and things like that. My guess is that since you don{t fly from place to place inside Paraguay and since it is more of a luxury to drive a car all over the place, the bus has become a middle class thing to do. We at least were on a sort of charter bus. My seat wouldn{t stay reclined, so until I had my aisle man I couldn{t lean back and relax like the rest of the seated peoples. I was so grateful for his rear end that it didn{t bother me at all to have it so close to my head and I blissfully went to sleep.

When we arrived in Pilar Walter, who we find is a world traveler ("Did you know Walter lived in Japan?" "I think Walter is from Argentina" "Walter lived in the States for a while, you know."), welcomes us and takes us to our hotel. He speaks a little English in a Midwest kind of way. His year in the states was in St. Paul, Minnesota, which made me happy. Our hotel is pretty nice and the internet here is free although we rarely have much time or energy to spare for it. Becuase we love Pilar. It is a small town, I want to tell you it is tranquilo becuase that is why we keep telling people we like it so much. I think there are about 30,000 people here, I think that is what they told me. The streets are quieter and more colorful and I think by the time we leave tomorrow night everyone in town will know who we are because we find the streets so alluring we must walk around with our cameras and take pictures of everything and becuase the people at the Music school here are so friendly and welcoming that it is exhausting to understand all that is going on. And a newspaper reporter interviewed us (aka J, since I am not much use for interviewing). If I remember correctly I filmed us being interviewed. We{re so happy in Pilar I{ve contemplated moving here. However, there is too much Guarani, I don{t understand that at all, and people get worried about how much we eat. In fact, J and I are kind of worried about how much we eat. We{ve been traveling so much and doing so much that a Cliff bar has become a filling meal for us. This afternoon they gave us a long time for our lunch and siesta and told us to eat eat eat eat eat eat eat. So we went downstairs to the restaurant which only serves carne and ordered some rice and some salad and worked really hard to eat something resembling a meal. Really, I just want some Tillamook yogurt. I think this is all so much work for my failing stomach. Eat some for me, will you, please?

We were told that the next morning after we arrived N called to make sure we were safe and sound. I don{t want you to think that N isn{t kind to us, we{re just a bit confused right now.

Anyway, the weather has been muy perfecto because they{re having a warm winter and someday I{ll tell you about the tropical rainstorm and about filming a violin symphony in a plaza and interviewing thirty vionlin players. And the happy harpist who is going to Pedro Juan Caballero with us who is such a character. And going birdwatching in the Pilar countryside.

I have been getting all your emails and have been eating them up like sweet morsels. Thank you so much, I love every tender word of them.

please enjoy your stady

Well, I couldn´t resist you.

About a quarter of the way into our twentyfour hour long jounrey, J and I decided we both needed the interent terribly. We´re addicted. If you take Internet away from me, there goes half of my world.

So lucky you get to hear of our travels.

In the last week I have been on five different planes. The last three were Spanish as a first language and the last one was full of Portuguese advertisements. Customs have been a breeze (thank heavens), I´ve got a stamp in my passport, I´m staying in a nice german evangelical hostel, I´m talking to people in Franglish (That´s French/English/Spanish) (If I dropped the French I would stop confusing people), the weather is lovely, customs people can´t translate, just looking at airplane food made me lose my appetite, it gets dark here early, I´m reading the Jorge Luis Borges poetry book that B gave me--it´s got the original spanish and then the english translation next to it. I´m learning lot´s of useful words like "alma" "marmol" and other poesia words like that. (Soul and marble etc etc.) I´m sure they will come in handy. I was going to have a great poetical, philosophical post about this travel to and arrival in Paraguay but I keep getting destracted by my internet bill going up. And this keyboard is difficult. ñññññññññ Everything is all messed up. My fingers are even more english than the rest of me.


Something better to come later.

goodbye al gore

This is it.

Tomorrow I leave for Paraguay sufficiently relaxed by sun, sand, ocean, and having nothing to do but make faces at small children and read books.

I leave finally feeling excited and starting to realize just how bad my spanish skills are.

And I miss you and you are all getting bear hugs upon my return. And I am going to hunt down some Tillamook yogurt.

I love my documentary filmmaking career so so so so so so so so so so so much.

!

(My throat hurts from ocean water and reading books instead of sleeping)

je vous remercie

You see, I'm going to Paraguay with my friend Jenica for two weeks to film a documentary.

We got a grant.

We'll be making a short piece about Sonidos de la Tierra a program started by Luis Szarán. You can watch a PBS Frontline piece about it here.

I am so grateful and so excited.

This is a really worthwhile project. What a pleasing prospect.