Street muralin the Barranco neighborhood of Lima, Perú
Earlier this month, I traveled to Lima, Perú. I wrote about it in last week’s newsletter on unity through difference:
At midweek, we were fortunate to go on a tour of Lima’s Historic Centre with workshop participants. We walked through the expansive plaza at the heart of Lima while looking at the beautiful colonial-era buildings surrounding it and the Andean foothills beyond. When we entered Lima’s stunning cathedral, I was handed a little card with a short prayer of unity on it. As I read it something immediately felt wrong. Classical music was gently playing in the background of this nearly 500-year-old cathedral and I sat down on a pew to take it all in. After a while I realized that I didn’t like how the prayer advocated for unity through “sameness” or “oneness.” If we somehow were to achieve unity through “sameness,” life would be reduced to something far less that it actually is. It reminded me of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk on the dangers of a single story, where she encourages us to see the multiple layers of people and cultures, and to fight powers that would seek to silence them. Some would argue that the silencing is already taking place. It’s why I’m appreciative of people like Kendrick Lamar, who publicly give voice to a counter narrative, both directly and symbolically. If we’re ever going to get to a place of unity, we have to do so through accepting and embracing “difference.”
This week, I started reading Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. In the book, Solnit calls for continuous hope and action. And she makes an important point about the past—be it good or horrible—and how it relates to hope:
We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope.
I’m encouraged by this—to be fueled by hope as I lean forward into action. In my newsletter, I wrote about other “untold” or, perhaps, “forgotten” histories of Perú that you can read about here.
In my newsletter last week, I wrote about Peruvian public speaking in anticipation for my work trip to Lima, Perú:
To learn more about Perú ahead of my trip, I’ve been listening to episodes from their Perú playlist. One of Radio Ambulante’s co-founders is Peruvian-American journalist Daniel Alarcón, who has an excellent short story collection about Perú called War by Candlelight, which I’ve also been digging into. A few years ago, Alarcón did a video for Pop-Up Magazine in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month called “Peruvian Tips for Public Speaking.” In the video, he talks about a cherished little book he bought from a street vendor in Lima, Perú. The pirated book contains inspirational and oftentimes hilarious advice on public speaking, yet it also ends up revealing a profound truth about Latin America and the complexities associated with its diverse cultural makeup. Language is power, and in Perú, the language of the majority is Spanish. But minority languages, like Quechua and Aymara, are still widely spoken today among Perú’s vast indigenous populations. You can see historical traces of these languages and cultures—present long before Spanish imperialism took hold—in the names of streets and cities. It reminds me of Wisconsin’s indigenous languages, which are still present in the names of many of its cities and lakes. Alarcón’s comments address language as a means of access. Spanish speakers hold power in Peruvian society and the public speaking book is meant to extend that access to indigenous groups.
Alarcón’s story about his Peruvian public speaking book—with its direct and hilariously exaggerated speeches and toasts—appeared as part of a series of videos put out by Pop-Up Magazine‘s “Stories for Hispanic Heritage Month.” In the video, Alarcón recites several toasts from the book. Here are two of my favorites:
“Eulogy of a drowned fisherman”
We’ll no longer find Juan sitting on the shore. We’ll no longer hear him tell stories of fishermen. He’ll never throw a line into the water again. And though his fishing nets are empty today, our eyes are filled… with tears.
“Words offered by a member of an institution on the occasion of the inauguration of a radio receiver”
These modern times have arrived to offer us this receiving machine, now installed in the social hall of the Club, from where it will not only capture information from all over the world, but offer the same back to the people, so that they may participate in the news that travels atop the ethereal waves directly to our ears, all those events taking place throughout this diverse and fractured globe where we earthlings reside.
Alarcón summarizes the toasts by saying, “It’s not poetry, not exactly, but it’s not not poetry, you know?”
He goes on to say that Perú is a country divided by language. There are 15 different language families found in Perú, the most popular indigenous one being Quechua—spoken by around 5 million Peruvians and an official language of the country since 1975.
But Alarcón points out that Spanish is the language of power, and that how you talk and look in Peruvian society determines how you will be perceived. Spanish is the language of access and Alarcón concludes that the public speaking book is intended to serve as a bridge between the in-group Spanish-speaking majority and the out-group minorities who speak other languages.
Alarcón calls the public speaking book “an attempt to heal a national wound,” and without even cracking a smile, he finishes the story in typical Peruvian fashion, pointing out this subtle and underlying purpose:
There’s no speech addressing this, there’s no soothing discourse on the bifurcated identity of a country fractured by its own complicated and troubling history. There’s no tribute to the possibility of creating a hole from disparate, often warring, cultural tribes that constitute, for now, a purely imaginary nation. There’s no homage to the Quixotic 200-year-old attempt to hide the fault lines intrinsic to this national project, from our very first, very flawed moment. None of those speeches are in this magical little book. I know, because I looked.
You can watch the full video below and read the rest of my newsletter here. Enjoy!
I learned a new term this week: negative capability. Rebecca Solnit talks about it in her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
She writes that in December 1817, the English poet John Keats penned a letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, in which he described negative capability (from Selected Letters):
I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Keats is speaking here of creative pursuits, in particular those of writing and literature. While fact and reason are important matters indeed, much of life is not so easily defined. There is a real skill and perspective in being able to accept those things that are unresolved and yet-to-be worked out—things like learning to do something new, adapting to a different culture, dealing with the unexpected, and putting in the effort to grow a relationship. Negative capability is something I embrace. I knew how it felt before knowing the name Keats ascribed to it.
The term got me thinking a lot about what it means to use the word “negative.” In mathematics, of course, “positive” means addition and “negative” means subtraction. In the case of negative capability, the answers are subtracted, or taken away, and one is left in the space that exists before arriving at an answer.
Negative might also imply that something is nonexistent, as in the negative space surrounding an object in art. Sungi Mlengeya (via kottke.org) is a Tanzanian artist who deftly uses negative space to create beautiful paintings of dark faces and bodies. In perhaps less-striking, yet no less profound fashion, Charles Schulz’s drawing of Charlie Brown and his sister, Sally (at the top of this post), uses negative space to reveal the two characters as they look out into the black night sky.
Pencil drawing by Charles Brown (not to be confused with Charlie Brown) of his close friend John Keats, 1819 (via The Examined Life)
The negative, by nature, removes the nonessential, leaving space for a minimalist perspective to shine through. It can be said that the Peanuts comic strip was minimalist in this regard. I recently read Nicole Rudick’s article, “How ‘Peanuts’ Created a Space for Thinking” in The New Yorker. Quoting David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography throughout, Rudick writes of Charles Schulz:
To draw the readers’ eye, Schulz opted for the less-is-more approach, aiming to ‘fight back’ with white space to echo what he once called the strip’s ‘very slight incidents.’ The usefulness of that simplicity became clear as Schulz’s writing deepened. ‘The more they developed complex powers and appetites while staying faithful to their cut-out, shadow-play simplicity,’ Michaelis writes of the strip’s characters, ‘the easier it would be for Schulz to declare the hard things he was set on saying.’ Had Schulz filled his panels with visual distractions, the business of examining interior problems might have proved less successful.
It’s no secret that modern life is filled with distractions. If negative capability describes a person’s ability to experience peace in the midst of discomfort and contentment in the absence of answers, then negative space, perhaps, can be said to remove those distractions that are obscuring what’s important, bringing life’s profound truths more clearly into focus.
Negative as the removal of something to reveal something else—it reminded me of Nazca lines. I just read about the discovery of over 300 new ones. Nazca lines are geoglyphs—drawings on the ground that were made by removing rocks and earth to create a negative image. They were created by the Nazca people in the desserts of southern Peru between 500 BC and 500 AD (you can see more of them here). The dessert rock is a deep rust color due to oxidization and weathering, and when removed, a lighter sand color is exposed, creating a high contrast that reveals the drawings when viewed from high above (via National Geographic).
There are theories, but it remains largely a mystery as to why these drawings were created. Nor is it known exactly how the Nazca people were able to create them with such precision, given their magnitude and the lack of a means to view them from above. Some have speculated that the lines were pathways, tread upon by the people.
There’s an ancient Tibetan proverb that goes like this:
Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves.
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Solnit unpacks the proverb by describing the deep meaning behind “shul,” the Tibetan word for “track.” She writes that shul is:
a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by—a footprint, for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. All of these are shul: the impression in the ground left by the regular tread of feet, which has kept it clear of obstructions and maintained it for the use of others. As a shul, emptiness can be compared to the impression of something that used to be there. In this case, such an impression is formed by the indentations, hollows, marks, and scars left by the turbulence of selfish craving.
Negative describes the removal of earth to reveal the Nazca images, just as it describes the removal of those barriers that hold us back from becoming centered. “Centered” here does not mean whole or complete, because these states are unattainable as imperfect human beings. According to the proverb, however, becoming centered is within one’s grasp, if only there exists a willingness to let go. The experience of suffering—both the self-inflicted kind and the living-in-this-world kind—is something that knocks us off balance. It’s at the moment of letting it go that we become aware of the emptiness filling the impression of its absence. That emptiness, existing in all of the impressions made by things that used to trouble us, is what reveals the path, or shul, upon which we can become centered.
Solnit also likens it to purposefully getting lost in order to be fully present. She contemplates the words of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin by writing:
In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.
This too is negative capability and is something that’s achievable only through intentional physical and mental movement.
Negative capability is a valuable skill to cultivate—especially because while some things resolve over time and with effort, there are a great many things that don’t. The messiness of life is unavoidable, and oftentimes the only means left to overcome it is through acceptance.
through Peanuts, Schulz wanted to tell hard truths about, as he said, ‘intelligent things.’ But the main truth he tells is that there are no answers to the big questions.
There’s a Peanuts comic strip mid-article that, to me, perfectly highlights the acceptance that comes with negative capability:
Yes, there are solutions for Snoopy’s predicament and he actively seeks them out. But in the end, Snoopy accepts that he will have to weather the storm, just like so many of us. Can we accept it?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Wenninger is an educator and writer. He teaches language and culture and writes about his thoughts and experiences here.
