Wendell Berry was hitting stride while delivering the 41st annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities at Kennedy Center last night. The great agrarian poet was calling out the excesses of corporate America, technology, capitalism and our rampant disregard for nature. Our wanderlust has destroyed our rootedness, our sense of place.
It suddenly dawned on me that his overly simplified assessment of 21st century life really wasn’t all that original. Blue Öyster Cult beat him to it.
History shows again and again How nature points out the folly of men
Berry was just one umlaut short of tearing those high-tension wires down …
It’s hard to believe the concrete chaos of Mexico City was once a large system of lakes and canals. At Xochimilco, it’s possible to get a taste of what things once were. Trajineras, boats reminiscent of Venetian gondolas, line the docks, waiting to take tourists out to see the floating gardens that lounge throughout the canal system.
Lara, Anita, Emma and I arrived too late to get a daylight view of the gardens, but we did have time to wander around and watch tourist-packed trajineras drift in to the embarcaderos (docks). We were there for something slightly different.
Performance artist Klaudia Vidal had arranged to take two of the trajineras out for a nighttime performance commemorating Dia de Los Muertos. We listened to the musicians play Son Jarocho music dockside for a while and then boarded a pair of trajineras that had been lashed together. Klaudia and the band took up most of one boat while the audience watched from the other.
The boatman used a long pole to propel us through the blackness while Klaudia and the musicians gave a frenzied performance. ¡Qué increíble! My Spanish sucks (i.e. I’m limited to present and present-progressive tenses and have a vocabulary of a few hundred words), but I was able to glean that La Muerta was warning us life is short and to make sure we enjoy it while we can. It was a wonderful mix of music, poetry and performance art.