Transmissions

My time spent in Ecuador affected me in a deeply profound way. One might ask (and people have): why is it that this thesis has largely strayed from talk of my actual experiences? There is truly very little in the form of a travel-style narrative.

The largest reason, I believe, is that my time this past summer was so profound that it affected my ability to retell on such a profound level. My friend Matthew mentioned that this change could be related to state-dependent learning. That is, because life in Ecuador was so radically different from life in Arizona, not even my field notes would suffice to help me remember the lessons I learned there.

Even still, what I can remember from Ecuador remains as a chaotic, nonlinear narrative rather than the type that is easily exposed in airline magazines. I feel awkward quoting my journal, and it shows in my fumbling syntax surrounding the quotes in earlier entries. To compensate, I’m going to include here some “source material” – poems written in Ecuador.

Out/In Nature

“The poets are writing of the campos from their cars -

they don’t know.”

Frailty’s arterial disconnect

skeleton romantics

implanting the film fraught with mirage

doubled back and self-contained

horror smears to impossible tears

reinforce steely psychic palms

erring amidst wavy stamens and

smoothing, repeating undone seams -

mold drawn lucid from alabaster

annals of neurons and television

a tree’s eye breached

rethought contracts unknown

direct to the untraceable growth

seeming firm and mason-placed

centering in, fades to density,

is left to camels’ loaned corneas.

Finding themselves grouped and gripping

against maladies

dissonant

soon gooze and flounder when weaving

reaches become othered aspirations

nestled in proceeding wilderness,

their echoes not yet yielded to, they

scrape at the soggy moss and

claim ascension of mass –

disseminating roughly

through papers bought the

curious inquiries now inform to neglect

pariahs, pointing to masked

replicas. Hence snifters.

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