Reflections on Lima and Cusco

I don’t really know what to think about any of this so far – these are simple preliminary stupid reactions (I say this with loving forgiveness) – not a clear reflection of experience but a dim warped partial projection. My poetry is ridiculous rambling wordiness because I feel like the efficient sentence structure is inadequate because experience moves outside of language, in shifting clouds, geysers and storms of content before and beyond form. Forgive these momentary romantic clusters that I pretend might be comprehensible or useful.

OK I’ll do the assignment now…. Lima and Cusco, through three lenses…

Sensory
Lima is a condensed bubbling swarm of expansion and acceleration, a sustained bombardment of motion and noise. Horns and motors, voices and footsteps, crowds and commerce and conflict and coping: energy burning, people touching and breathing, the air wet, thick, grey forever.

In many ways this description of Lima could fit any city, including Cusco. There are several notable differences: blue sky and fluffy clouds floating by, SUN on skin and frigid downstairs bedrooms, clear dry thin air and a faint coca-soaked head on edge. In the day, the city is red-brown cobblestones and every-colored plants and bodies on display in the market sprawl and human architecture (construction noise crashing through my roof…) forming a network of paths that interlace; at night, lights dot the hillsides, a mirror reflection of the stars above, while a gleaming white Jesus greets the bright lonesome moon.

Symbolic
Lima is the whole world pressed in on itself, diverse histories copulating in the city’s contours, producing the same new vectors of action and purpose. I am in awe of its self-destructive creativity. Excess amid scarcity; struggle and passion and hopeless hope at the end of the world. It’s a dense endless mystery I skimmed over with a gasp and a sigh.

Cusco is a nebulous slice of that world, but different and deep in its own unique rhythms and spaces. I’m not yet prepared to totalize its symbolic content in vague poetic form as I did for Lima above, but I can say this: I sense a similar representative responsibility here (statues, spray paint coating walls with politics and confessions of love and dirty jokes) but more open social spaces (parks, plazas, playgrounds) and less overtly shiny new developments: the newer buildings around the Plaza de Armas are coated with a veneer of homely antiquity. Like Miraflores, it’s a haven for tourists, but with a different face/façade.

Social
Hotel life in Miraflores now feels a bit absurd: constant uneasy social contact inevitably formed shifting groups of new fast friends, solemn tours and discussions about remembering (whose history?) followed by laughter and plans and forgetting or strange intense discussions about everything and nothing, so many slices of individual history congealed into flavors of personality thrown at each other in a foreign but (for us at least) easy passing context. It was a powerful, fun, profoundly strange experience; I loved it (the discovery, connections, exploration) and hated it (the tourism, indulgence, appropriations). I avoided the blog and did most of the readings but I mainly wanted to live rather than mediate/objectify/transform my experience.

The family dynamic in Cusco is equally absurd, uneasy, endearing, intimate, contradictory, intense, fun and a bunch of other words I know. I have way more privacy, time to process and explore and relax; also plenty of room for overly self-conscious awkward interactions with my “family” as well as improvement, pretending and occasional inability to communicate. The people in Cusco seem to move slower, more quietly and reserved maybe; they also seem more interested in my position as a wealthy tourist.