eyelift

 

Ambling anonymously along the fourteen miles of La Rambla promenade, I look up to rows of sea-fog shrouded tenements as if in a dystopian abandoned city. Austere brutalist apartment blocks overlook a sun-kissed beach above a brown sea: brown from sediment brought down Rio de la Plata. This is just one version of  Montevideo, Uruguay. An unfair and unkind introduction. 

Write about what you know, they say.  In this case, what I know is from a “virtual” visit, while thinking of Borges’ 1946 story within a story (“On Exactitude In Science”),  of seventeenth century cartographers building a map to the scale of 1:1, apparently superimposed on the world. Today’s psychogeographers might wonder whether representation and reality are anyway indistinguishable. My real experience is from a random ephemeral photograph that reminds me of a cold summer holiday in Gorllewyn Cymru sixty years ago. In a town where the land ends I see others around the world, united by the sea and their austere beauty.

For some reason I am drawn to Latin America, but have never been. To varying degrees I am familiar with the musics, the stories, the peoples and the cuisines. I’ve learned about the dispossessed and the marginalised, and about the tensions between inspirational and dispiriting politics. Many of my contemporaries would have had a poster of Che Guevara on the walls of their humble student bedsits: places where they could relate to those who lived in reduced circumstances worldwide. The music is more than a casual acquaintance, ever since Linda gave me a Tango Nuevo CD,  a souvenir of her trip to Argentina. I was there in spirit.  Whether Tango, Bossa Nova, Merengue, Reggae or Cuban Salsa, there is something about the cross rhythms, the ostinato; even a meditative quality, that sways you from side to side even if you don't dance. “Latin” music makes me feel more alive, as I’m sure it does yet more poignantly for those who share its African roots.

Tango developed in Montevideo alongside Buenos Aires across the river. The music is bittersweet and, even without understanding many of the Spanish lyrics, it has the same yearning qualities of Portuguese Fado and of Hiraeth. There’s a strange comfort in the sadness and the acknowledgement of mortality; the same feeling evoked by many places “on the edge”. Whether I know them well or not, they exist between memory and imagination. Fairbourne (Gwynedd) has lodged there for sixty years. I still have a small crater in my ankle from a rusty nail encountered on the beach. I had tried to walk across a sea of deep mud at Morfa Mawddach, the experience partially responsible for a lifelong fear of boggy terrain.  Despite the threat from rising sea levels, the village continues to boast building development, a miniature railway, a couple of cafes and hotels/bars. But tellingly about today’s demographic, the Indian takeaway shuts at 5pm. 

The feelings in such places are stronger “out of season”, while some might say the British seaside has been out of season for decades. Others I know well include Dinas Dinlle (Gwynedd), Hayling Island (Hampshire), Silloth (Cumbria) and Portland (Dorset). Early memories of visiting Portland are of climbing its steep narrow roads by bus, passing terraces of houses seemingly teetering on the edge. It appeared to me that nothing lay behind them, their rear yards dropping away to nothingness. The end of the world. 

Does it matter that I have never been to South America? I’ve saved a small fortune on air-fares. The above photo is actually of Aberystwyth many years ago. 

LINKS

Psychogeography: Lila Tirando A Violeta in Montevideo - Ransom Note 
Why little-visited Uruguayan capital Montevideo is worth a look 
I will probably never visit Tasmania
psychogeography | The Place of Longing
Cartographic Time – Celluloid Wicker Man 
Spaces in between
oblivion in mid-atlantic
Vieux garçon de la plage