Sunset in a Cold Month

There wasn't a place to sit last I was here. There was bustle, congestion, the underlying hum of chatter across many conversations. Not unlike a hive of honeybees. 

Today is different. The setting sun throws flecks of radiant pastels--lavender, tulip yellow, pink carnation--down the fading blue canvas sky, down to this empty and deserted station, down to my singular figure upright in space. I slide onto a south-facing bench. The sky splashed in color, the jungle beneath cloaked in shadow. 

Withered leaves scrape the sturdy-as-ever cement in a cool autumn wind of impending night. I look out over the tracks, running far to the west, straight until the curvature of the Earth brings the parallel into one. The rumbling had stopped when the train crossed over that line of horizon. Like it fell of the edge, silently, gracefully. 

 

Last I was here the railroad cars reached far towards that western frontier. They were filled to the brim with the waving arms and jostling torsos and fidgeting steps of men in anticipation. Their laughs and calls could be heard down the line on this very platform, now eternally holding empty chairs and empty benches. 

 

Their energy seemed to rock the entire train. Maybe it did. I don't know. I was shaky in my starchy uniform, its sharp edges not yet creased to the angles of my body. 

 

I remember sitting on this very bench, too. I stared at the leafy tree-tops of the jungle ahead under a white sky, so bright it hurt the eyes and burned away the clouds. People kept kicking my feet because we were all equally unfamiliar with the heavy steel-toed boots. Clumsy and frantic, we all were. I sat on this bench with my bag between my ankles and I stared in stupor at the jungle line. 

 

I remember a man sat next to me. He sighed and heaped his body beside mine with forceful noise. He pulled out a picture of a farmhouse in a hilly field lined with mature sorghum. I hardly took a glance before returning my gaze to the bush. He went on chattering about the house he could not bare separation from, his wife and child, his dark airy soil. Eventually he got up and left. I didn't get to catch his face before he went away. 

I wondered where such a deep jungle could come from, so dense it blocked meeting of sky and land, lying just there across the tracks. It was as if the radiating sun above did not exist. This time, I notice, I wonder how the sky could possibly light up with brilliant hues, rich and vast, while the jungle beneath could stay in such impenetrable darkness. Where could it possibly end. 

Lost in thought, I feel, for a moment, the vibrations of an eastward-bound train rolling towards me. I sense it coming out of the enormous sun dipping behind the flat crescent valley. But when I look up, nothing. It's not coming this time. The station is empty, that is except for me.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,

One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of those great books that's really about everything. Incredible pain lives alongside ecstasy, the pendulum of fortune swings back and forth, there's war and obsession and family and faith. It appears at first as a fantastical tale, but somehow transforms into a monument capturing the breath of humanity in an odd, poetic way. 

 

At points the novel feels like a series of fables. Magic is part of it all (see last post); many of the situations described are so absurd they require a second take. 

 

The non-linear storyline follows the Buendía family, a cursed, larger-than-life, dysfunctional group where everyone shares the same few names and traits with their predecessors. The Aureliano's act one way, the José Arcadio's another, the Remedios' their own. It's hard to keep track of which character did what and where their spot on the family tree is (conveniently drawn on the first page). But it becomes clear that this confusion is intentional.

Gabriel García Márquez distorts time and its forward flow, showing beginnings and ends as not-so concrete, the barriers between past and present and future not so impenetrable. The memories of time gone slosh around in the muck of daily life. 

 

The world turns round and round in cycles. The characters tread the same paths their ancestors did because what are we if not combinations of those that came before. The way this vast, epic story is told is equally beautiful and scary and raw. 

The first sentence sets the tone. 

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

 

It's so famous because time is all jumbled up--as if what will happen is already known the same as what has happened before is. The sentence starts in the future, jumps to that present, then returns to the past in one fell swoop. This continues to happen throughout the rest of the powerful, devastating book. 

It isn't a disheartening tale, though. Wonder is far too central to it. I recently learned that demographers estimate more than 100 billion humans have lived on the planet--I get the same feeling from knowing that, trying to wrap my mind around it, as I do from One Hundred Years of Solitude. It makes me imagine myself in a much larger and intertwined system that fundamentally characterizes my life.

Time is fickle and strange in the world Márquez created, just like it is in the world he physically inhabited. A story like this gives perspective to how unfathomable and astonishing is life as we know it. 

A final thing. I came across a video of this Canadian dude singing from the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian. The passage he recites is about the olden times, the countless days before. The distant past when things began. 

 

To think that one of the first pieces of literature and music, ancient by our standards, pays homage to the immense amount of time that has passed is amazing. Time seems to have always been a mysterious shadow drawing our attention. The grand questions that pester us today have been asked and pondered for longer than we can possibly know.

Magical Reality

I read a feature on Kevin Durant in The New York Times Magazine by Sam Anderson (s/o a former housemate of mine with the same name) with a questionable title and many, many beautiful phrases describing the Slim Reaper, the former MVP, the enigma known as KD. 

Anderson's description of Durant as an esoteric-thinker, a stoic savant ("He has exactly the sort of transcendental galaxy brain that likes to rise up very high, and then slightly higher, to think about things like deep time and space rocks and the meaning of life") is awfully different from the public image Durant has with the many NBA fans as a petty, delusional, somehow insecure superstar. I'm obviously in no position to comment on his character given that I've never met the guy; what I liked most about the piece was the way Anderson wrote about KD's game.

"He moves with a pure, unforced economy of motion, a frictionless glide," "When Durant makes a shot, its swish seems extra pure — the ball hovers inside the net for a second, as if it lives there, as if it wants to take its time and really enjoy itself before it falls," "the tall ethereal phantom."

A master in his craft is at a spiritual level, Anderson is trying to say. Almost magical. 

This got me thinking about the ubiquitous place that idea, magic, has in regular life. The concept of the inexplicable, of irrational occurrences, of things beyond our sphere of knowledge, is everywhere people are, and it permeates quite deeply. 

Authors use magic all the time. It feels like every piece of fiction employs an element of the fantastical. And in a somewhat contradictory way, the role it plays in storytelling is to help tell the audience something about the material world, the world that is in many ways defined by not having magic on its list of possibilities. The world defined by scientific principles and reason and logic.

 

I'm reading One Hundred Years of Solitude; it embodies the genre of magical realism, which itself comes from ancient human traditions. Religion, through its priests and shamans, has been crossing the canyon between real and magic for thousands of years, bringing stories and signs and even supposed displays of the divine existence to our holy rituals for time immemorial. 

Our levels of skepticism on the subject vary widely, but even if you only recognize the widespread, nearly universal presence of the metaphor of magic, the idea of miracle and that some things in our lives elude rational explanation, you see that there's something deeply ingrained about magic in us. It seems to be everywhere, and humans seem to rely heavily on it to grapple with a strange and chaotic existence. 

Magic might be a rudimentary word. But I think it captures the scope of what I'm talking about--how we have an urge to explain what we don't understand, and there's a whole lot we don't understand, so we need a stand-in idea to fill the gaps and allow us to move on with the day. When faced with the subconscious, or the bizarre laws of physics, or the endless creativity and curiosity of the brain, or the skills Kevin Durant has on the hardwood, we recognize a perceptible form of magic, a mundane and grand reality we can't really explain, a world that demands the inclusion of the great beyond in all its aspects. 

What each person considers magic is different, but I think there comes a point for everyone where the only explanation left is an ultimately unexplainable one. That's why it comes out in the mediums in which we try to answer those big questions; art, human communication, spirituality, our passions. Facing, and reckoning, the unknown is another shared experience between all of us.