25 march

so usually i send an email on the 24th of march, or try to, each year, and i guess this year is a 'try to'. in addition to being the 28th anniversary of the coup in argentina (thus commencing the 'dirty war' as i understand it) and being the birthday of mauricio and vida luna and vero (for which we threw a huge party) and the despedida of denali back to stanford to finish his thesis (whose presence i will sorely miss), the 24th of the march is the anniversary of the assassination of arnulfo oscar (or oscar arnulfo) romero, archbishop of el salvador, liberational theologion, and warrior for the landless poor.
	as i remember it, there were only species of tshirts in el salvador -- the ones with pictures of che and the ones with pictures of romero. che ive seen everywhere, from communist hilltowns in kerela to palestinian refugee camps in lebanon to boutiques in manhattan. sadly, ive never been to berlin.
	but romero. read his homilies watch the movie hear john giuliano speak. the man -- mortal, of course -- was a hero. is a hero.

but enough, you've read this before, i imagine.

what's new is i've moved (again), forty kilometers south to the east end of lake epuyen, as caretaker of a little building in the middle of nowhere, a cross between a fishbowl and a ski lodge on the edge of a truly divine lake. i bathe in the coldness of its water, watch the growing moon (is it the same phase up north? are there muslims down south? que sera, sera) in its reflection, wash away my bloody feet and minor sins in its bays.

[
goodbye momma and papa
goodbye jack and jill
the grass aint greener, the wine aint sweeter
on the far side of the hill
]

i came here to live deliberately. no, really, i came here for a bit of solitude, to give myself an opportunity to write and to try experiments with serving food (its a good space to hold restaurant type events) and fermentation and conversing with la naturaleza.
	it's half of what i'd imagined for brazil -- a community center run in a totally co-operative way, with all the art on the walls and table and chairs and cups and spoons and handles of the shelves made by local artesans. it's missing erik uzureau et al and a good stereo, but i think it's a good transition from the last six weeks of conscious learning (teach me how to make candles, shelves, etc.) to putting some of the ideas in practice, starting a compost from scratch etc.
	i'm not quite alone here, yet, its still the tourist season (winding down, easter is the end) and i get to serve coffee and empanadas (which the nearest neighbor, dona victora, makes). there's also meetings of the community this week to decide whether i can officially stay, but im feeling pretty confident it will fly. and there's this crazy uruguayan dude who's camping here, and we spend a lot of time chilling and chamushandose and all that.
	this guy is my age and has spent the last five years travelling all around southamerica. he speaks portuguese well enough to teach me the important stuff (preciso un copo de vino), he is an artesan of little metal jewelry stuff, and some sort of weird transient sage. today we hiked out to a place called the chalet (pronounced as if it were spanish, with the 't') which some swiss dude built a dozen years ago but never lived in.
	it's a ruined house in a beautiful secluded meadow without a riff of wind, tucked just behind a wall of trees and mosceta, which separates it from a beautiful pebbly beach, where we took our siesta. a siesta of chappatis (which i made from salvado (wheat germ? bran? the outside of the wheat berry), which i bought 5 kilos of thinking it was flour. oops.) and dulce de leche (oh god, oh god) and apples.
	apples we harvested naked from the one apple tree on the swiss dudes land, climbing up past the encircling spiny mosceta to throw them down. and the swiss guy? he boated in the cement to build his chalet so it would last the years, finished it and went north (buenos aires?) to bring his family down. and got hit by a bus and never came back. i'm not sure what the lessson is, but it's there, to be mined. something to do with natural building, i think.

[freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose]

	so nestor asks if i've ever been to jail and i say no (truthfully) and he tells me his two jail stories, 24 hours each for being young and suspicious in the north of argentina. how much he appreciates liberty and the open air -- we're lying on a beach in plain blue skies staring up at the andes and eating dulce de leche -- and how much his appreciation has grown since that day, those two days. how he was in a cell for no reason for 24 hours and in one there was a little window but they covered it from the outside so the sun couldn't get in. and he said something about rehabiliation.
	what a joke. im sure foucault or someone wrote something about this, but as i recall prisons as an idea, an industry, started as a holding place for people on trial, and this whole bullshit about prisons preparing people for society was cooked up ex post facto. i came from an environment so built and disconnected from the naturaleza (even in sequim) and i cant imagine how denying somehow sunlight is going to contribute to rehabiliation.
	so there i was thinking about this and how to deal with crime and gandhi talking about how to treat a theif (its in a little pamphet called _hind swaraj_ or _indian home rule_, probably on line, read it or at least the theif part, its great and very very different) in his home and how it seems like -- to me -- the best thing to do would be to put them in an environment where theft was ridiculous. a natural park or some place drowning in abundance. like where we were. it would make a mockery of the whole thing.
	and over the course of the next hour, while i thought and wrote and thought and gazed, nestor said two things.
	1) that he would never think of stealing -- even a yoghurt from a convenience store -- due to fear of having his liberty suspended again.
		even though it had happened totally arbitrarily the first time -- throug the injustice he understood the deterrent effect of jail and it scared him. which i thought was pretty interesting, like maybe i would have concluded the opposite.	
	2) that when he was 10 years old he would go to a friend of his grandmother's house or whatever and they had a huge thing of (you guessed it) dulce to leche in the fridge and he would covertly eat (steal) a bunch of it until one day the Don of the house wisened up and sat him down before young Nestor got to the kitchen and was like -- dude, here is a jar of dulce de leche, do you want some?
		and homeboy is like 'sure, for me'. and the happy old man lets/encourages/makes him eat the jar and Nestor gets halfway and pukes and never stole from that family again...

	again unsure of how it relates to gandhi or the amazing book i read by somedude parenti (_lockdown america_, amazing book about the prison system. a hit. a bestseller. a must read) but it might have something to do with natural building, strawclay, etc.

	So Yes. here i am spending my days developing the cultural center and thinking about writing and living on the frontier, the border region. between argentina and chile and north and south and all kinds of different philosophies and systems. i realized this again while hiking down to the beach, looking at deadwood and driftwood.
	yesterday i needed a towel rack in the bathroom. what i might call the typical american(tm) (which is not to be cute but actually to note its a mentality and may have little to do with location at this point -- middle class india is more american(tm) than you are, likely) response would be to buy a towel rack. maybe some margin of society would have somebody buy and install it, but whatever. the more indigenous culture(tm) response (im def generalizing and maybe even projecting here) would be to wait for the towel rack to present itself, to be available to it and to let it happen. to welcome but not to pressure.
	so here i am coming from the former and experimenting with the latter but its tough to really flow with your intuition, never to fret about money -- nestor has 20 pesos to his name and bought 5 pesos of dulce to leche today and its no big deal to him, at all, thats clear -- and its a border region, interesting like the coastline of england or anything else. my solution is go outside and look around for a piece of wood i could make a towel rack out of. i find one and get the little hand-drill-bit thing and make some holes and rig it up and its great. looks beautiful, i peeled and cleaned and even sanded the little stick and everything. 50 bucks at pottery barn or what have you.
	but really i should just go for a walk and let the Right stick, the wannabe towel rack, jump out at me. I think. What I really want to do, of course, is building some sort of database that has all the things i might need built on one side -- shelves and hangers and pictureaffixingdevices -- and all these found objects inventoried on the other, wood and metal and cloth fragments. so i enter the shit in and the algorithms finds the perfect match or something. see, the border regions. does this make sense to anyone? is anybody out there?

	anyhow, i found some quotes from gandhi that i took from the museum in ahmedabad exactly two months ago (in the gregorian calendar) and im going to type that up pretty soon. so thats exciting. and i picked some mosceta (rose hip) and bought some 96% ethyl alcohol and am going to make some liqueur tomorrow. so that's exciting. and take another bath in the lake if the sun is out. that's really exciting.

okay, love, 
ankur

and please continue writing to me at:
	ankur shah
	lista del correo
	cp 8430
	el bolson
	rio negro
	argentina

thanks.