dispatch the first

I’m writing this from the comedor of my apartment in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico. It’s a lovely spot. I’m two flights below Calle Acacias which means there’s less street noise. On the other hand, there are perros and gallos, whom I have not seen yet, but who started waking me around 4:30 this morning.

I will be here a while. Not permanently, but six months or so. Living the life of an expat writer, in a city with a long history of expats. My digs were arranged by my friends at Cilac Freire, a school of Spanish language and Mexican culture that is about a block away. (“Block” is an interesting concept in Cuernavaca, which is a topic for another time, so let’s say an American block away.) I’ll be volunteering there, or at least I’ve offered to volunteer there, for whatever they need. I’ll clean the pool if that’s what they need. They’re wonderful people and if you want to learn Spanish you should contact them first.

I’m here to finish the book about theater that you’ve been reading chapters of, if you’ve been following along, and a play I’ve been struggling with, and maybe to get back to a novel that’s been sitting in a drawer for a couple decades. I’m here to give myself time and space. To make writing my job now. I’m not sure one has to go to Mexico to make it one’s job, but on the other hand, given the opportunity, why wouldn’t you?

But in addition to that, to get back to posting other things here more regularly, about art and culture and life, and how we make meaning. And other random stuff. And observations about Mexico from a USian, and about the United States from some distance, and about this experience. To do the best I can - to borrow a notion from the cartoonist Jim Borgman, who offered it at my graduation - to follow in the footsteps of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran and Frederic Church, who brought back their enormous canvases of the American West and the Andes, in an era when the mass of people had no access to travel there themselves, nor even to see photographs.

So: a series of Dispatches, from time to time, to convey life here, and views of life there, and the experience. A note of caution: Bierstadt and Moran weren’t in the business of painting exactly what they saw, you know. I assume I won’t be, either.

Here is Dispatch the First.

I was last in Cuernavaca in February. I don’t remember if the idea of a sort of sabbatical in Mexico had occurred to me yet; I’ve been talking about it for a while. It was a strange time to leave the country. The new president had started wreaking havoc early. The dissolution of USAID had started on Day 1. Talk of buying or otherwise seizing Greenland had started even earlier. In Spanish class, I spoke to Maestra Ita about what I was doing in Mexico. I had decided to unplug from the United States, that my role in la lucha for that week was to learn Spanish. “Be here now” became the motto of our trip.

It’s again a strange time to be in Mexico. I texted friends a few days ago, the morning after Francisco Maduro was seized: “A hell of a week to be traveling to Latin America.” Melissa texted back, “Prepare for questions.”

“Questions I can handle,” I replied. Doubtfully.

So why am I here now? Well, as noted, to write. To observe and send dispatches back. To write a book about theater that may or may not matter, and then a play that may or may not ever see the elliptical light of a stage, and maybe a novel. To practice Spanish, I know not to what end. To use the Spanish word, finalidad.

The first time I was in Mexico, in Cuernavaca - “Cuerna,” they say here - Maestra Augustina was explaining the different uses of por and para, a source of eternal confusion for non-native speakers. Para, she explained, para se usa para expresar finalidad. Dumb English-speakers that we were, we - or at least I, but given the way the discussion went, I think my classmate Audrey as well - heard “finality” - the last action. This was never really resolved, for me anyway.

Until my second trip to Cuerna, several years later. We were riding the Pullman Morelos bus from Mexico City, watching at intervals the scenery and the bus’s entertainment, a biopic about Muhammad Ali. Maybe the one with Will Smith, I don’t really remember. All I remember is, as we descended the long switchbacks on the Sierra de Ajusco-Chichinauhtzin between Mexico City and Cuernavaca, seeing in the subtitles the word finalidad and hearing an actor say the word “purpose.” A lightbulb with the intensity of a Fresnel flipped on in my head.

Spanish will do that to you, you know; it’s full of amigos falsos that sneak up and trip you. You think you’re telling someone that your arm is not broken, quickly calculate how to slap a Spanish ending on a French verb, and tell him that it’s not married. It either becomes a barrier to understanding or an opportunity to share laughter.

So: Cual es mi finalidad, in these six months? I don’t know. Escape. Trying the writing life. Finishing projects I don’t have time for while holding down a job. Making friends, deepening friendships. Becoming fluent. Practicing retirement, not the golfing kind but the kind with purpose, and seeing if I want to do the real thing someplace other than a United States increasingly bent on being terrible (again). Experiencing, sitting with the feeling of, being the representation of increasingly terrible estadounidenses.

Complicating this question is the way that, in the last two months or so, with this trip impending, I’ve been feeling love for New York City more than I ever have. I might say I feel like a New Yorker for the first time, although that’s kind of a spectrum. It felt hard to leave. Partly that’s due to the bliss of the Mamdani dawn, the sense that New York can be both a model for how to do city and a redoubt against tyrants and plutocrats. It’s a hell of a time to be traveling from there. But the city also feels like my home for the first time in, maybe, ever. I can’t explain that one, what the change has been. Only that it has been calming to know that I’ll be going back before too long. Even as, having alighted here among the kindest people you will ever meet, and the bougainvilleas, it’s impossible to imagine ever wanting to leave.

Yesterday, or maybe the day before, I had the thought that this sojourn feels like the kind of thing people talk about doing and never do. Or that I would talk about and never do. And yet, I’m doing it. Perhaps that alone is finalidad enough.