Trip to Buenos Aires - 1
If it were so easy to write about this...
It is not.
Years ago, sitting in Buenos Aires, at Sunderland's famous (now regrettably extinct milonga) with an academician from the Emory University, I asked her - if you are abroad, away from home, what would be the music that would bring you memories of your homeland, the music that would make you drop a tear? She thought for long but couldn't come up with an answer. Mine, as wound any "porteño's", was instant, indubitable: a tango. I've been there. Sitting in a Hungarian restaurant in Transylvania, I was asked to translate into English some lines from a famous tango. I could, for a while. After some time, emotion took over. I realized HOW far away from home I am, I realized that I was trying to translate not just words but experiences, a whole culture, a whole city. I had to excuse myself - my voice was overtaken by emotion, tears clouded my eyes.
Tango is not a kind of music, or not "just" a kind of music. Is the living expression of a whole nation, or tribe if you wish. In that regard, Porteños are similar to Jews, in that the center of their world view is not only a philosophy (or a theology), but a place - Israel for the Jews, Buenos Aires for the Porteños.
And here I am, with my father fading into mental incapacity and feebleness, travelling across the world to meet him once again before his faculties abandon him, going back to the city of my birth and my upbringing, a city so full of past (my own, and the revered past of generations before me, generations that revered past as a form of a cult of sadness), that one would wonder at the thought of anything present ever happening. I am travelling to the source of the very core of my sensibility. Yet I am travelling to a chaotic, dysfunctional place, from which I consciously fled 15 years ago, one that treated me unfairly, that crushed my every attempt at taking off, personally and career-wise. A place committed to autophagy. A place I swore I would never again live in.
Talk about contradictory feelings.
But there I go, yet again. This time. alone. I won't have the buffering effect of the presence of my children on the impact the Big City is going to have on me this time. I cannot adopt "daddy mode" and move on ignoring my own feelings.
Tango, again, is the answer.
Vuelvo al Sur, by Piazzolla, in Roberto Goyeneche's immortal performance.
https://youtu.be/MDpgHNoWASM
If it were so easy to write about this...
It is not.
Years ago, sitting in Buenos Aires, at Sunderland's famous (now regrettably extinct milonga) with an academician from the Emory University, I asked her - if you are abroad, away from home, what would be the music that would bring you memories of your homeland, the music that would make you drop a tear? She thought for long but couldn't come up with an answer. Mine, as wound any "porteño's", was instant, indubitable: a tango. I've been there. Sitting in a Hungarian restaurant in Transylvania, I was asked to translate into English some lines from a famous tango. I could, for a while. After some time, emotion took over. I realized HOW far away from home I am, I realized that I was trying to translate not just words but experiences, a whole culture, a whole city. I had to excuse myself - my voice was overtaken by emotion, tears clouded my eyes.
Tango is not a kind of music, or not "just" a kind of music. Is the living expression of a whole nation, or tribe if you wish. In that regard, Porteños are similar to Jews, in that the center of their world view is not only a philosophy (or a theology), but a place - Israel for the Jews, Buenos Aires for the Porteños.
And here I am, with my father fading into mental incapacity and feebleness, travelling across the world to meet him once again before his faculties abandon him, going back to the city of my birth and my upbringing, a city so full of past (my own, and the revered past of generations before me, generations that revered past as a form of a cult of sadness), that one would wonder at the thought of anything present ever happening. I am travelling to the source of the very core of my sensibility. Yet I am travelling to a chaotic, dysfunctional place, from which I consciously fled 15 years ago, one that treated me unfairly, that crushed my every attempt at taking off, personally and career-wise. A place committed to autophagy. A place I swore I would never again live in.
Talk about contradictory feelings.
But there I go, yet again. This time. alone. I won't have the buffering effect of the presence of my children on the impact the Big City is going to have on me this time. I cannot adopt "daddy mode" and move on ignoring my own feelings.
Tango, again, is the answer.
Vuelvo al Sur, by Piazzolla, in Roberto Goyeneche's immortal performance.
https://youtu.be/MDpgHNoWASM
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