When I write I try to do three things: be simple, be honest and celebrate some great truth of being human. I mean otherwise what’s the point of the exercise?
So when this was posted by a friend on Facebook recently it inspired me. It’s from Eduardo Galeano, an Uruguayan writer upon his receiving the Stig Dagerman Award in 2010. And it goes suchly:
“May we be worthy of desperate hope.
I wish we could have the courage to stand alone and the courage to risk being together, because a tooth out of the mouth is no use, nor a finger out of the hand.
I wish we could be disobedient, whenever we receive orders that humiliate our conscience or violate our common sense.
I wish we could be so forgiving to continue believing, against all evidence, that the human condition is worth it, because we have been wrongly done, but we are not finished.
I wish we could be able to keep walking the paths of the wind, despite the falls and betrayals and defeats, because history goes on, beyond us, and when she says goodbye, she's saying, see you later.
Hopefully we can keep alive the certainty that it is possible to be compatriot and contemporary of everyone who lives animated by the will of justice and the will of beauty, born where born and lives when alive, because the maps of the soul and time have no borders.”
Eduardo Galeano was a left wing radical (to use a general term) and writer in the seventies back in Uruguay. Someone who believed in equality and personal liberty. Hey wait that doesn’t sound very radical.
The seventies were a time of coups led or inspired by the American CIA. Pinoche in Chile - 1973. Videla in Argentina - 1976. Both turned out to be vicious tyrants. Neither of those coups made the countries fundamentally better than they were before. We should learn something from history. That stuff could happen here.
From Wikipedia:
“In 1973, a military coup took power in Uruguay; Galeano was imprisoned and later was forced to flee, going into exile in Argentina where he founded the magazine Crisis. His 1971 book Open Veins of Latin America was banned by the right-wing military government, not only in Uruguay, but also in Chile and Argentina. In 1976 he married for the third time to Helena Villagra; however, in the same year, the Videla regime took power in Argentina in a bloody military coup and his name was added to the list of those condemned by the death squads. He fled again, this time to Spain, where he wrote his famous trilogy, Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire), described as "the most powerful literary indictment of colonialism in the Americas."
I’m not a political revolutionary but I do believe we need a revolution, something like what Galeano talked about in his acceptance speech.
“I wish we could be able to keep walking the paths of the wind, despite the falls and betrayals and defeats, because history goes on, beyond us, and when she says goodbye, she's saying, see you later.”
The generation that my parents were from could almost remember the camp meetings that swept thru the country back in the 19th century. It was the spirit of revival! Turning away from their wicked ways and such. People were very emotional.
I’m not that far from revivalism, hereditarily speaking. My father was a Baptist preacher and he did carry forth every Sunday morning from the pulpit. I have been accused (unfairly) of being a proselytizer.
I’m not religious at all, nor am I hung up on any particular version of morality, sinning and stuff, but something like that, a revolution or a revival, would be nice just about now. Something for being human. Just for bloody being human. Just for being who we actually are. Just to be in our own rhythm. Don’t you think so? Just to be loved and to love like nobody’s business. A revolution to end all revolutions because it’s not a revolution it’s a returning. It’s becoming human. We need to become human.
And what does that mean?
Once when I was traveling thru Mexico I found myself in this town - Catemaco - supposed to be the place of the wizards, there in the narrow part of Mexico. It’s just 120 miles from the Caribbean to the Pacific.
Anyways, there were mango trees everywhere. It must have been spring because the ground was littered with ripe mangoes that had fallen out of the trees. I stopped to check it out.
One of the locals introduced me to an old retired professor who lived in a big house on an estate with a wall around it and lots of mango trees (which are huge by the way). I guess he thought I should meet him for some reason. His daughter was purportedly insane and wandered the grounds in search of . . . I don’t know what. I never got to meet her.
So, anyways, the old professor and I became conversant and I remember him telling me, while sitting under the mango tree in his courtyard, that the only way to eat mangos, which were lying around everywhere, was naked in a bathtub.
I considered that. Having coming from someone who, no doubt, had experienced it for themselves, it felt true and real, respectable. I have never eaten mangoes naked in a bathtub to this day but the image endures. Catemaco is the place of wizards after all.
Primal joy, I think, is what he was talking about. Unbridled indulgence in joy. Being loved and sustained by Mother Nature and her bountiful gifts. A feeling of bliss.
This is exactly what the revolution needs to be about. Just changing the politics is not going to do anything. People are still driven by their own personal agendas and their blind desires not by a feeling of completeness and contentment. Not from a vision of clarity and a feeling of inner peace. Let’s have a revolution for inner peace. At least put it on the program.
Writers, like Eduardo Galeano and many many others, from Thoreau to James Baldwin Flaubert, have written about it. Put human beings first. Catch a clue from the biosphere, as Merlin Sheldrake has done in his lovely book Entangled Life that I’m reading at the moment; it’s all about collaboration, symbiosis. From the tiniest microbes to forests full of trees, it all operates on symbiosis. Why don’t we ever talk about this? We are part of the biosphere too.
And here’s my best revolutionary music I could find. From Envision 2020: Under the Mango Tree @The Momentom Collective Theme Camp. A transcendental night of dancing in the Costa Rican jungle under a massive beautiful mango tree. The whole 2 hour journey is recorded below.
Thank you to Depois que o Ilê Passar - Virginia Rodrigues (Kurup edit) and Momentom Collective.
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under the mango tree