Field Study
A Prose Poem
I have no visual documentation of those five months, no photographs of the capital city, its avenues, fountains, facades and rotundas, bookshops, cafes and parks.
None of the Rio de la Plata or Andean switchbacks, the brawling dogs of Tigre, the incandescent walls of Colonia, the painted hills of Valparaiso.
Of that time I have only an internal picture book, synaptically arranged and delicate as lace.
A baby, safe and quiet, nestled between her mother and father on a twenty-four hour bus ride across the continent. Rainwater leaking through broken windows; desert, farmland, vineyard.
A pot of black bean soup left on the stovetop long enough for the air in the three-room apartment to become polluted, thickly, with the stench of putrefaction.
A darkroom in which I could not read the words of all the books I had gone there to study, and the tall, unsteady stool upon which I sat slouched over and silently waiting.
A plate of melon sliced into slender crescents. A cocktail glass on a bedside table. A train yard, shelters made of boxcars. A square white table, a typewriter, a full-length mirror.
Ribbons of sensory data floating along the tributaries of my fluid body.
Stomachaches: berries, wine, Cuban rum, large bottles of Quilmes, undercooked favas, heaps of fresh pasta, hot sugared mate, boats of curry and rice, chocolate-covered espresso beans, quarts of mint chocolate chip ice cream, small cups of dense coffee.
The roaring burn of a urinary tract infection.
But the magnificence of jacaranda trees in bloom—no external record.
No photographs of Puerto Madero, Palermo, or San Telmo. None of the plazas, the cemeteries, the monuments to those who were taken and never given back, never found, never laid to rest.
My statement of purpose: an intensive multidisciplinary exploration of literature, memory, and place, undertaken through focused textual analysis and experiential research.
The country’s great literary tradition, and the dictatorship, and the war.
Trauma, state violence, and the collective unconscious.
The country’s devotion to psychoanalysis, and the relationship between psychological and political repression.
The simultaneity of language’s revelations and evasions.
How all that is not said is still, somehow, inscribed. How history is held in silences and absences, in sites of secret remembrance and of official erasure.
I drifted. I squandered. I failed. I misspent my time in that grand and haunted place. I was not alone there—this was a mistake that has expanded into a regret. There with me was someone who could herein be named, and is not; who could appear in these psychic images, and does not. A blur at the edge of the frame, a phantom and a thief.
Reading Recommendation: Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick