I have no pictures from the time I spent in Costa Rica. It is as though the images of my experiences have faded like my proficiency in the Spanish I was studying there. I only remember flashes, all tethered to memory and emotion, therefore distorted, stretched, and full of holes that my psyche somehow fills in. I lived in a town called Heredia, only about a half-hour by car from the capital of San Jose.
Those distorted memories are rich ones. I turned 20 on a beach called Ponte Uva on the Caribbean side of the country, waking up to a blue horizon, a Cuban cigar, and a case of Imperial beer that my friends and I had buried in the sand the night before to keep cool. I rafted the Rio Pacuare, floated in a hot spring at the base of Volcan Arenal, and completed an assortment of other tourist brochure wonders.
I am not sure why I think of Heredia now, but I do, especially one day in particular when the town was about to play its rival at soccer. The entire town had a festival atmosphere. People were in the streets. The week before, brazen, the rival's fans drove up and down the main street cheering and thrusting a large red devil's head into the air. It was totally bat-shit crazy.
The citizens of Heredia would shout back, screaming, angry, and I was surprised that in a town where I would go onto observe many acts of violence (including a man hit in the head with a brick and a car swerving drunkenly in a busy street hitting no less than 5 cars and barely missing people), that nothing major occurred during that frenzy of the week and its crescendo with the match. My personal end of that week was slamming a sequence of beers that would probably kill a smaller person. I remember singing. I remember eating cow's tongue. I wish I remembered more.
One thing about that week occurs to me: emotion in the town was completely physical. It was vocal, fully conscious, and out in the open. Perhaps the introvert, guarded aspects of my personality cause me to marvel at people who are capable of being absorbed by crowds to the point of ecstasy. I wish I understood it, but I have never been a joiner, and have always been more comfortable in keeping my distance from events like Mardi Gras and the like (though I have been to Mardi Gras, on the side-lines, again, marveling).
At this moment, the overall lack of physical, communal release is troubling. My mind (enclosed in the terrarium of my house and living primarily a disembodied cellular version of communication) might be going through a cold, contained equivalent of frenzy, that my mental state (focused as it is on limitless virtual stimuli but little physical stimuli) may be starting to advance its interior monologues into almost a modernist stream of disconnected symbols and outlandish connections.
Last year, during a year of rich reading, I finally read Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. I suspect I would have enjoyed the book when I was young, as it is a fever dream of drunken revelry, absurdity, and hi-jinks. It is also full of little erudite eggs that I probably would have thought were clever. No doubt, I would have bored someone to death talking about the book, zeroing in on a passage that I was the only one in the crowd to have read, therefore guaranteed of not being challenged People do this with James Joyce all the time. I am happy to have outlived this phase in my reading.
I happened to read Under the Volcano as I was turning 40, on the heels of a season of books that included Ovid's Metamorphosis, and heavy doses of Kipling, Kempowski, and Celan. I was in the mood for a book alive in its own genesis, written in the spirit of constant change and fluidity of plot and psychology, but I certainly was not in the mood for the unapologetic-ally comic or nihilistic. Nor was I in the mood for cultural triumphalism or any relishing in colonial progress. Turned out, Lowry was the ticket.
I spent most of the opening pages of Under the Volcano confused. Who was this about? Who was telling the story? Slowly, it is revealed that we are here on the occasion of the final destruction of Geoffery Firman, a British consul living in a town called Quanhnahuac (as indigenous name for Cuernavaca). The novel was published in 1947 but is set on a single day in 1938, the Day of the Dead, November 1st. Firman's estranged wife shows up, along with his brother, and they (sometimes together and other times apart) wander the town.
That's about as much sanity as I can offer in terms of the book's plot. The term "fever dream" is over used, but I can say that if I have ever encountered a fever dream in literature, this is it. The Day of the Dead offers a background of joy, revelry, poverty, pain and physical ecstasy in the face of death, while Firman (who is at the beginning of the book already deep into the process of unraveling) implodes, explodes, rots, corrodes, and every other adjective for decline you can think of, only internally.
Lowry speaks of Firman as a person whose metaphors no longer hold, that he has come to the conclusion that his previous ways of making sense of himself were impossible. He has certainly tried a great number of them, ranging from the astrological to the philosophical to the scientific. He makes his way through most methods for living, but none can overcome the heart of the matter. A British representative in Mexico, he carried the weight and the shame of one war and was on the precipice of another, a war he was too old and too drunk to fight. There was no way for him to proceed under those conditions and therefore his mind, his body, his everything, started to give, all against the backdrop of the Day of the Dead.
It's hard to describe but Under the Volcano reads with almost physical energy. We spend most of the time in Firman's mind, but as his thoughts become more fraught, I felt almost like I was in the energy of the world rather than in text, with the world's chaos, its apathy, and its massive swings in fortune in which we reside -- even be comforted and deluded that we have it contained -- until the truth comes to us violently and without mercy. At times reading it, I felt physically tired.
I think of that week in Heredia. Of its crazy build and its release and I have to admit, I crave it. I crave going into a massive crowd. I won't, but I do want it. Some part of me wishes that the virus was something that could be met in the street all at once, me against it. However, I suspect the toll will not only be physical death, but have other Firman-like implications.
The physical often plays out in wars, but it is the mind that judges a civilization's health. America, at the moment, is both physically and mentally ill. I feel like many of the things that were certain for me one, two, five, ten years ago, are of little comfort now. Most of my ways of making sense of the United States -- all of the pieties, all of the dreams, all of the promises -- no longer seem to make much sense to me right now. We are all too sick, too angry, too confused, too intent at blaming anyone and everyone. We are all working, working hard, but we are unsure about what. In private, we help each other: in public, we shout.
And the only relief from these thoughts seem to come from art, from thinking about how art that captures that difference between the unraveling of the physical, and its often quiet and unseen complement in the mind, between the details of history and the psychic aftermath that is hard to see and even harder to study. It is a perverse virtue of art that it allows you to conjure the crisis, look at it at a slant, and move on, proceeding to what is next in your life.
Under the Volcano is a fucking great book. And Heredia was a great time.