Evanston, November 10, 1989

An art student's journal entry

The following text was composed from notes written almost exactly 32 years ago to the day, when I was an art student in Chicago, recently arrived from Mexico. The text is part of a video on view now in the exhibition A Journal of the Year of the Pharmacy, at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center in New York.

Evanston, November 10, 1989

They say that travel opens our eyes and opens our minds. What they don’t say is that displacement, after the tourist aura dissipates and turns into  yearning, makes us see the absence of home into all things.

When we close our eyes to see only our memories, do we close instead our eyes to ourselves? Are memories only a form of tourism we practice getting away from the present?

Many times we don’t understand the meaning of that displacement. Based on this person that I am observing me being in that past, I don’t understand it at that moment. I only sense it.

I think I am lost right now, walking around these streets, on November 10, 1989. The light is bright, but I feel in the dark. I see the world, as my brother would say, like from the eyes of a dog, in a metaphorical silence. I hear the noises, I see images, but I don’t comprehend them.

It is getting cold. It is a November day in Chicago, with the crisp leaves floating around.  I am still fascinated and alienated by the American urban landscape.  I feel I still don’t know what it all is about.

I have a wrinkled map in my hand, but I can’t find the streets I am on. I feel if I continue straight, I will finally arrive to a recognizable avenue.

I miss my friends. I have a great desire to create new friendships here, but it doesn’t come easily. My English is too defective, and I am unable to understand body languages, any subtle references.

I ask myself if I have made a mistake. Perhaps I do not belong in an art school. I want to learn philosophy, humanities. I don’t want to get my hands dirty with oil paint. I do not want to smell like turpentine every day.

I feel as if painting is a defective medium, a poor vessel of ideas.

I am poor, but I don’t think much about it. I often talk about it with my friend Johnny, who is poorer than me. He can only afford to buy a large bag of rice each month and some eggs, stealing condiments from the student cafeteria.

I often close the eyes under the winter heating lamps of the L train waiting booths and my imagining that I am sitting at the fountain of the school with the bright and warm 2pm sun. In Mexico, I used to read XIXth century romantic novels, and place myself in remote environments: in Wuthering Heights, in the middle ages, in Egypt.  Now I am in a remote location, and I instead want to be in Mexico.

Sometimes, however, in my desire to being in a place that feels both familiar and foreign, I want to be in Spain, which up to that moment I have not yet visited. Spain to me is another fictional land, picturesque environments depicted in novels, operas and plays like Don Quijote, Carmen and don Juan Tenorio, which I obsessively recite from the heart.

I often think of my smelling the chimney smoke of the church next door and my observing the light within its windows, and wanting it to be a portal to Spain. I think of a song from el cancionero de Upsala, a book of XVIth century Spanish music discovered in Sweden.

As the night is dark
And the road so short,
Why don’t you come, my friend?

I find myself helpless,
I carry a great passion within me.
O why don’t you come, my friend?

I smell the kimchi of the Korean restaurant next door, on Lincoln avenue.

I see the green and red light of the vacancy sign of the Apache motel next to it.

I smell the barbeque that reminds me of Salomón Nader’s huge house, and the parties he used to organize. Everyone would play soccer but me. Why do I miss something where I was excluded?

I wait for the 49B bus on that day. I buy the Chicago Tribune in the corner, using the newspaper dispenser, 25 cents.

I learn that way that the Berlin Wall has fallen.

I am fascinated by the events of those days. A momentous shift in our history, representing the end of a world order.

But I am not there, where the important events are happening. I am in Western avenue, in West Rodgers Park. I feel like I am outside of placeness.

I desperately try to find something, but I don’t know what I am looking for.

Look at me. There I am. I am walking around the campus of Northwestern university campus. I seem to believe that by walking around there, by sitting in the student lounge, I will have the feeling that I am a student. As if wanting to being someone, as if performing that role, I might be that character. That by performing that way, I will somehow understand Existentialist philosophy, or the works of Bishop Berkeley, or Henri Bergson, and engage with contemporary thinking and the present. I am performing desires of knowledge. But I can’t do it. I do not become it. I am like a small child unable to reach on the top counter where the cookie jar is located.

I have an address for two used bookstores, and the map with the streets of Evanston.

The first bookstore is Bookman’s alley, on Sherman avenue.

I had been to that bookstore once, with my dad, on the same day we had been to the movies to see a Woody Allen film.

The owner, Roger Carlson, sits at the entrance, always talking to a visitor. His desk is surrounded by mountains of books.

The bookstore looks like a mix between a giant, sprawling living room, an elaborate set for a theatrical production, and the house of one of my relatives. Each room appears to have different  decorations, none of them really relating to the categories of books on display. One of the rooms seems like a patriotic collection of Americana. Another has native American textiles and objects.

I gravitate toward the back of the bookstore where there is the poetry and philosophy section. I find TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, the thin gray book edition. I see the essays of Elia by Charles Lamb. ­I remember Borges writing admiringly about Lamb’s work.

I think of my uncle Eduardo, the poet, and our visits to his house. Like the house of most Mexican intellectuals, it was overflooded with books. It felt like some kind of paradise to me. This bookstore reminds me of those kinds of places. I even notice the distant smell of cigar smoke. There is a chessboard lying there. The music playing in the background is probably Billie Holliday. The lamps give everything a warm, yellowing glow. I am still lost, but I kind of feel I am at home. The present is here.

Or is that how I feel?

I can’t explain how I feel. If pressed, I would probably say that I no longer have a home. I would like to be the prodigal son. But a classmate the other day had told me “you will never return”.

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

I forcefully reject that idea. Of course, I will return, I will be back home.

This is only a dream, and I will return to the original smells, the original textures, the fabric of where I have come from. I will awaken.

But I am not convinced of what I am saying. The truth is that I don’t know anything. The truth is that I am scared. I am scared of Heavy Metal; I am scared of the night. I am scared of the American English language. I was mugged on my first day of school in Chicago. They had sensed my fear.

 I feel I need to be at the center of things, but I am instead in a non-place. I go to see beautiful university gardens to see if I can be at the center of knowledge. I go to the bookstore to see if I can be at the center of a conversation. But instead, I see yellowed pages of books that no one reads anymore. Instead, I am in conversation with the ghost of my grandfather. My grandfather, who by the way, was a businessman. My grandfather who, by the way, thought he was a writer. My grandfather who wrote novels that he self-published and that no one ever read. Novels that my uncle used to keep the fireplace going decades later, until they were all gone.

I asked myself if I might one day end up that way, as that yellowed book, as a painting thrown into the fireplace by uninterested grandchildren. It is possible.

And then I say to myself, this is why art is made. We make it to preserve things from dying, to capture time. Even the unimportant moments. The most unimportant things. We are there to prevent the extinction of objects.  We are here to commemorate them. And this is what I want to do. I want to preserve that light and that smell. I want them to become real. I want to turn that projected shadow in that building into a permanently commemorated event. I want to turn the Saturday morning  Spring rain into a permanent  medieval garden, I want that warm light to permanently be the embrace of youth.

Roger Carlson, Eduardo, chess players, Billie Holliday, Charles Lamb, my grandfather, TS Eliot, Heavy Metal, kimchi, Upsala, the Berlin Wall, those dry leaves. Everyone and nowhere. Sherman Avenue, you will never return. The Berlin Wall.  Borges, Sor Juana, Charles Lamb, Woody Allen, Chicago Tribune, Western Avenue, 49B bus. The novels burned in the fireplace.

I am waiting for the bus. These days it already gets dark by 4pm. I go home with three books under my arm. One has the ideas of an existential philosopher who I fear has been forgotten, but who I hope is still being debated in Parisian cafés. The other is a Renaissance play that I am imagining is being performed somewhere in the world at this moment. And the other is a dog-eared book of poetry by a poet that I want to be the only one who has read.

I could be wrong, and I am surprised to think this, but I wish I was that book, laying in a bookshelf of a used bookstore, waiting to be read and discovered  and shared with others on a sunny, bright morning.